Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in a small village called Aston Ingham in Herefordshire in England, and my family came to Australia when I was two. I had my second birthday on the boat, so I’m an Australian. It’s now…how much?

When the family came to Australia we went initially up to Great Western, which is roughly about halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide on the western route and where my father was cutting wood for a living. We then moved down to town, down to Melbourne, into the suburbs. Dad had a job with people making steam rollers.

Dad was a blacksmith and the McDonalds were a famous manufacturer of steam rollers in those days, and Dad had a job with them. I don’t know what he was doing. He was working on, I think, case hardening and annealing gears, but Dad having been, it was a country village we came from, and Dad’s father who also was here was also a blacksmith,

and so they’d lived in the country and Dad didn’t really enjoy the suburbs, so he took a job managing a mixed dairy farm in Gippsland in Victoria for a couple of years, and he then leased a property, a small property, and went on his own. This was the Depression, of course, in Australia,

and we didn’t have any money, but we ate well. Well, ‘well’ by those standards. Today the anti-cholesterol people would probably be horrified, as if Dad killed a pig, we started eating it one end and ate till it was all gone, and Mum made our own butter and made our own bread. I think probably all we ever needed money for was salt

and sugar and flour and things like that, that you couldn’t produce. And like I say, dairy products, these days, are considered not good for you. But in those days everyone thought, I can remember my father would break…on a dairy farm you start early, before dawn…he’d come into breakfast at perhaps eight o’clock. And he’d break,

probably a quarter of a pound of butter he would melt in the pan, and he would break six eggs into this. And would eat them, and mop up all the butter with bread. And the food, it was plain, and it was monotonous, probably. Although I don’t remember it being monotonous. It must have been. And we ate well, and so we were there until…there are three children in the family.

I have two sisters, one of whom is now dead, but I was the youngest of the three. When the girls got to high school age, now the small school that where we were, there were only two rooms. One room had from grades one to four, and the other room had from five to eight. The primary schools, at that time, went to year eight,

not as they do now to year six. Certainly in the country anyway. Well, the girls having reached secondary school age, my mother had been a school teacher, and I’m sure it was Mum who pushed this. Dad probably didn’t see much cause for education because of his upbringing. But Mum would have been the prime mover in getting us to move to where there were high schools

where we could further our education. And in fairness to Dad, although I’m sure he didn’t want to do it, he went back to the suburbs. I’m sure that was much against his will but he did it anyway. And in 1936, we moved down to Melbourne and went to high school there. Well, I’d, I left school in 1938,

I’d completed Year 10, the equivalent now, which in those days was called the Intermediate Certificate, in Melbourne, in the Victorian Education System. And I hadn’t completed Year 10. I really didn’t like school. I don’t think I was dumb,

but I had an urge to get out and run my own life a bit, perhaps. But Mum would only let me leave then on the grounds that I would go back to night school and get my Intermediate Certificate. So I did. So I left school in 1938 and started work with the Railway Department in Victoria and went to night school

and acquired my Intermediate Certificate in 1939. I think that year with the railways then, it had a fairly strong effect on my military career in a way, because in those days, and perhaps still now, the railways had their own telephone system.

They didn’t use the PMG [Postmaster General] system and they had their own telegraphists. Morse Code was the method of sending telegrams in those days, and you were paid an extra sixpence a week if you learnt telegraphy. Now sixpence, well, the equivalence straight now is five cents, which really isn’t very much for a six-day week, but I think my wages were fourteen [shillings] and sixpence a week.

So it represented quite a significant amount. Anyway, the Railways Institute provided the training free, and so I did the course in the year and I’d…I mention this because it did have an effect on my military career in a sense, because when I enlisted and they were looking for people who had special skills

and asked is anybody a telegraphist, and I put up my hand, and contrary to the general opinion about the army’s insensitivity, they did try to fit people into where they already had skills, so that they didn’t have to be taught again.

I was in Melbourne, and the, the recruiting depot was at the…

well, I’ll go back a little bit before that. When they started recruiting the 6th Division in 1939, I was sixteen then, and I went along to enlist and got kicked out on the grounds that I didn’t look twenty-one. And I joined a CMF [Citizens Military Force] unit that was training down at the South Melbourne Drill Hall. We used to go down one night a week, I think,

and we were in uniform, so I just continued on at work, but this was just a part-time exercise, and then, at the time of Dunkirk, the 6th Division had been formed but hadn’t sailed at this time, and the decision was made to form a second, the 7th Division. And this was forming round about the middle of,

say, May 1940. So this was the time of Dunkirk, when perhaps the greatest number of enlistments took place because of the serious situation in Europe. And so I went along. Dad was in hospital at this time, He’d had an operation, and he’d, I don’t know what happened. Whether the doctors told him this, or whether it was a fact, anyway he believed it…that he had a blood clot in one leg as a result of the operation,

so I went to see him in hospital and I said, “I’m enlisting.” And he said…the doctors had told him, anyway…that the blood clot could move. The doctors said, “You must take a sedentary job. Don’t involve yourself in any violent exercise. If the clot moves it’ll go to your brain and you’ll have a stroke, or it’ll go to your heart and you’ll die.” So Dad said, “If I’m going to die, I might as well have another hit before.”

He served three years in the First [World] War. So I… somehow or other he must have forgotten this blood clot and stuff when he enlisted, because he mustn’t have told them about that, or they wouldn’t have let him in. He would have been the maximum age, I think, for enlistment…

in the upper limit age, which was forty-two I think. Dad was probably four years too old and I was four years too young, so we sort of compensated for each other there a bit. And anyway…

No, no…He was…no. In fact, our wartime paths didn’t cross, but we were often in the same country, we were in the same events,

but at opposite ends. But I enlisted at what used to be the booking office where the railway sold tickets, near the Princess Bridge. And we went in there, I think, from memory, probably ten of us at a time. They didn’t ask you. Just “What was your name?” and “How old are you?” You could say “Ned Kelly,” you could say anything. You didn’t have to produce any evidence that what you were saying was true.

And indeed, many people enlisted under false names. Not to dodge the system, but they’d be rejected at one recruiting depot and go to another recruiting depot under a different name. And…

Seventeen. And so they used to…they took us into the place, like ten at a time it I think. One doctor examined ten people at once, and we were lined up there with nothing on and we had to hop on one foot, and then hop on the other foot,

and they did chest measurement, with your chest relaxed and you chest expanded, and you had to have a certain amount of expansion in your chest to get in. There was minimum height, probably in those days it was five foot six. And if you had anything the matter with you, anything physically the matter with you,

they would say, well, we won’t take you but go and get it fixed up and then you can enlist. And even your teeth. If you had holes in your teeth, bad teeth, you were expected to go and get this done at your own expense and you would be accepted. In fact, the doctor said, “You,” when he looked at my throat, and he said, “You suffer a lot from sore throats,”

and I said, “No.” Apparently it’s a family characteristic, enlarged tonsils, and he said, “Well, you will when you get living out in the field.” And he said, “Go and get your tonsils out and then you can enlist.” And then he took pity on me I think, and he said, “Well, I’ll let you in on the condition that you have them, go to the hospital as soon as you get up to camp and get your tonsils out.”

Well, I still haven’t had my tonsils out. And I’ve been in some fairly rough places since then. So, that was the initial recruiting system there. We passed that initial medical, we then went on to the…we were marched around in our civilian clothes, around to the Melbourne Town Hall, which was only, perhaps, not even half a kilometre away, and that’s where we were sworn in,

and it’s interesting that swearing in, because I have a copy of the words that we used. Discussing this with some old soldiers a few years ago, and saying, “What were the words?” because in my memory they had quaint old-fashioned words in them. And I couldn’t, none of us could remember what the words were. This is an oath that was about putting our lives on the line, but none of us could remember what we’d sworn to do, so I rang the War Memorial

and they sent me out a copy of one of these things, and it’s the quaintness, “To resist His Majesty’s enemies, and cause His Majesty’s peace to be kept,” and these old-fashioned words which wouldn’t be tolerated these days, but I guess the point I make here is, we stood there, the ten of us, with the bible in our hands, and took an oath,

and none of us had the faintest idea what we were saying. It was just a part, another step, to get into the army. From there…

No, I went into a signals unit, because when they called, no, I didn’t join the 7th then. And the 7th Division was at Puckapunyal,

the main training camp. We got side-tracked off into a little old, what was called the ‘Old Seymour’ camp, which was a First World War camp. Indeed, the messing orders in the mess hut were dated 1917, and it was a primitive camp by any standards. We were under canvas and the only permanent buildings in the place were the mess hut and the QM [Quartermaster’s] store and the kitchen,

and perhaps there must have been a recreation hall, because we used to have concert parties there, and it was a most primitive camp. It was wintertime, or the winter was coming on. It was freezing cold, and we had boards, the tents were…oh, just to go into the metric equivalent, 3.6 - which is twelve feet square - or 3.6 metres square,

and there were four board sections, much like a pallet. So the whole floor area was in four separate sections. It was raised about 150 mm off the ground, and we slept on bags of straw, palliasses. And I think we had four blankets from memory, and the toilet facilities…

There were no showers or anything like that, the ablution block and the toilet were probably three hundred metres away from where the tent lines were and all that. You wouldn’t hear of them these days, but the old saying of a ‘furphy’ being a rumour

came from an iron water tank made by Furphy Brothers of Ballarat, and the water tank stood at the toilet facilities. So the rumours were, that’s traditional, the rumours were always spread in the toilets anyway, and that’s where ‘furphy’ got its name from. And that’s what we had. That was the water, and we washed and we shaved, and whatever we did, out in the open with the wind,

the freezing wind blowing and, indeed, we used to go home on leave every second weekend. That’s when we had a bath. Every second weekend because you’d die in the cold. And the colonel taking moral high ground, as colonels tend to, lectured us on this and said the standard of hygiene is terrible, which was true, and he said,

“I’m going to have compulsory bath parade, so that everybody is going to have it at least once a week, and so that it won’t interfere with the training, we’ll have them after tea.” And so what we did was probably ten up at the kitchen - at least they did have warm water. The two cooks boiled the coppers that they had and these galvanised iron tubs, which were about perhaps, five, let’s say less,

four hundred and fifty millimetres across and about one hundred and fifty deep, and there were ten of these lined up, and we paraded up there, after tea, with nothing on but our overcoats and our boots, and our towel and a cake of soap. And you’d stand in this galvanised iron tub, ten at a time. The rest of them stood in line waiting. They did change the water, I think,

for each new bloke. But the wind was freezing, and we’d stand in this tub, and as you got the water out, the wind would blow it dry on you before it…it nearly killed us. It was dark, there was an officer there with a hurricane lamp walking along watching us all wash ourselves in the dark. Anyway, that put half of them in hospital with pneumonia and all sorts of things…chest problems. Which was more detrimental to the training schedule than if we’d done something else.

Yes, I’m sorry.

We went over there as a Signals Unit, although we were with the 6th Division in North Africa, we sailed in October, 1940

and stopped at Colombo in Ceylon, or Sri Lanka, as it now is, and stopped there a few days. The Italians were bombing the Canal at that time from Eritrea, I guess, or Italian Somaliland, or whatever it was called. So we waited in Ceylon for a few days for the moon to go down on the Canal, and we went up the Canal to a place called El Kantara

and took a train from there up into where the training camps were, the Australian camps in Palestine, and we would have arrived there - I don’t know - probably in mid-November or something like that, and we were there until Christmas time, and then we went up the Western Desert with the 6th Division, and Bardia,

and Tobruk, Derna, Benghazi, and I was at a little village called Abyar Bardia [?]. I don’t know how the locals pronounced it. It’s about a hundred and twenty miles past Benghazi and the 17th Infantry Brigade was holding the place at that time. And this was the period when the German aircraft and tanks first started to appear. This was the forerunner of Rommel and his Afrika Korps.

We went back then. Churchill had reached some sort of an arrangement with Greece. I’ll just go back a bit in time there. The Greek Prime Minister Mataxas. Churchill had always had this obsession with what he called the ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe: “Don’t attack them across the Western Front, but come up from the back where they’re unarmed.” And he’d always wanted to put troops into Greece,

but Mataxas wouldn’t allow it - their Prime Minister. Now that Italians had attacked across through Albania and were attacking Greece…Mataxas died. I don’t know what he died of, perhaps he was old, but he died, and the new Prime Minister agreed to Churchill’s request to put troops into Greece. So the 6th Division went to Greece. We were relieved then.

We were pulled back from being strung out across North Africa, pulled back from Alexandria and the 9th Division took over then. And we went to Greece, as did, I think, the 2nd New Zealand Division.

Yes. Well, not to any great extent in the earlier places, but certainly when we got up to the other side of Benghazi, yes, at Abyar Badia.

So we came back and went to Greece, and we sailed on St Patrick’s Day, I think. On the 17th March, we left Alexandria and Greece, and the Crete campaign…we…very short. We were back out of Greece by the end of April, and we were out of Crete before the end of May. So they were very short campaigns. And back in Palestine then.

No. we came back, and that’s when my father came into the scene again then. We got back from Crete and I had a letter from Dad, who was in hospital at El Kantara on the Canal. He’d been wounded in North Africa and this same leg with the blood clot had been damaged, and from his letter, I thought he was…he sounded fairly not well.

So, I went to the CO [Commanding Officer] and I said, “Look.” I showed him the letter and said, “Can I get away for a couple of days?” He said, “Well, I’d like to let you go but we’re moving into Syria,” so we then went to Syria. Anyway, Dad recovered. So we got into Syria, not in the very early days, but before the fighting really finished,

and we were camped in the hills behind Beirut. And…I guess it’s not Syria these days, it’s called Lebanon. We called it all Syria then. The French controlled it all, and it was the Vichy French that we were fighting there. And…

The Free French were on our side. You might notice the different terminology.

Not fighting with them, rather, they weren’t against us. They tended to try to upstage themselves a little bit. Perhaps that’s uncharitable…anyway.

What…about, seven months. Six, seven months I suppose.

It must have been about January, we left to come home. That was when the Japanese came into the war in December 1941. But the purpose of our going to Syria, really, was that this was the time of Stalingrad, where the Germans were pushing down towards the oil fields down past Stalingrad, and our people,

I guess, saw that they would be aiming to come into the Middle East down through Turkey. So that was our function of being in Syria, and…but then, when the Japanese came into the war, we left. It must have been January, I suppose, when we left the Middle East and went back to,

we went down to Bombay, and Singapore fell a few days later. We left Bombay on Friday, 13th February, in 1942, and among much muttering from the crew about this bad luck of leaving port of Friday the 13th. And we sailed down along toward Singapore,

and Singapore fell, so they got out the maps of Java then. We put two battalions ashore at Java, a machine gun battalion and the pioneers, who promptly went into the prison camps. And we plodded on, on this ten-knot convoy, across the Indian Ocean, going south every day and all thinking, “Well, we’re off home this time.”

And there wasn’t anywhere else to go, anyway. The Japanese were moving faster than we were. And one night, it was…we, you know, ordinary people, you’re not much navigators, and…but we could see where the Southern Cross was getting higher in the sky. And this one particular night, they turned the convoy. The convoy zigzagged all the time to foil the submarines,

so we were used to course changes. And…but this time we were up on deck and the moon was shining brightly and we were all lying around talking. I think it might have been a piano, even, on the deck. It was an old freighter this thing…I think an old South American cattle boat that we were on called the Eastern Prince. Dirty old thing it was.

And anyway, the ship started to change course, and the shadow of the mast thrown by the moon, which lay across one side…as parts of the ship kept turning, you could see the shadow would lie on the other side of the deck. So we’d obviously gone through a hundred and eighty degrees. And no one said anything about this much at the time that I can remember. Everyone shut up and went to bed.

And first thing next morning when we got up, rushed up on deck to see where the sun was, and we were still going north. So we went back to Ceylon then. I understand that what happened was, Churchill - I found this out forty years later on - Churchill turned the convoy around. He was going to send us to Burma. And when we were in Ceylon. I don’t know.

Blamey was still in the Middle East - General Blamey. Their story was that somebody in Colombo contacted Blamey, who then got on to Curtin, the prime minister. And Curtin then spoke with Churchill. This is as far as I understand what happened. And then we came home. But Churchill would have put us into Burma otherwise. That’s not inconsistent with the Roosevelt/Churchill decision to beat Germany first.

Churchill’s view was that, well, the Japanese might take Australia, but they’d be beaten in the long run anyway, which wouldn’t have done much for the Australian people. But still, I can understand Churchill because of this undertaking. This concept of “beat Germany first.”

Didn’t know. That’s the beauty of it. You never know what’s going on.

You don’t ever know. Even when you’re in the front line fighting, you don’t know what’s happening ten yards away. And that’s the beauty of it.

No. No, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing. We went to Adelaide initially. And we were fifty-six days on that run, wandering around the Indian Ocean, looking for somewhere to go.

And interestingly enough, back on this leaving Bombay, on Friday the thirteenth - the thirteenth came on a Friday in March, too. And we were two days out of Fremantle and the engines on this ship we were on broke down, which caused the crew to mutter ever deeper about the bad luck of leaving port on Friday the thirteenth. And the convoy sailed on anyway and left us, and the escorting destroyer disappeared.

Signalled back “Good luck” on the lamp and left us out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and a ship without, that’s not underway in heavy seas, very uncomfortable thing, it goes up and down and sideways. Anyway, the crew were spurred on by this superstition and the danger of the situation, I guess. They really got going and got the engines going. They really weren’t going properly. Even an amateur could tell that,

but they poured the coal on this thing and we beat the convoy into Fremantle anyway, and we then went around to Adelaide. There wasn’t anywhere for us to go. All the camps in Australia were full, and we were billeted in Adelaide. Like, four of us to a house,

and I guess the people were paid. I don’t know what the arrangements were. And we were like that for a couple of weeks, and then they put up tents, in a park there, and we moved into tents. But we were there for, I can’t remember how long we were there, but it must have been some weeks, anyway, and then we went. They let us go home on leave then. We had a week’s leave at home

and went to Queensland where we formed the oft-disputed Brisbane Line that the government’s often been accused of going to being ‘abandoning the north of Australia down to the Brisbane Line’, and we…frankly, there wasn’t really anything else the government could have done. The only effective fighting force in Australia then was

this 7th Division in its entirety and two brigades of the 6th. Because one brigade had stayed behind in Ceylon, in case the Japanese attacked Ceylon, we only had…the only people that had all their guns and weapons were the two brigades of the 6th Division and the entire 7th Division. It wasn’t enough to stop anything.

And the vastness of the north of Australia was going to slow down any…if the Japanese had landed at Darwin, it’s a heck of a long way before they could get to do anything effective. We were there, and I had a job at Toowoomba. I was driving a truck. It was a very peaceful job which would have lasted the rest of the war, probably. And they came one morning and said, “The 7th division is leaving for New Guinea.

We want any volunteers,” and so I was probably a bit sick of what I was doing. I don’t remember now. Anyway, at one o’clock the same day we were gone and on the boats and up to New Guinea in August 1942.

The Kokoda Track, yeah. It wasn’t called the Kokoda Track, not for years after. That was only ever known as the Owen Stanley Campaign, after the mountain range. Yeah. We went up there in August

and came back again in September with indecent haste, and went back again then, and were back at Kokoda on the 2nd November, and then on down to the swamps on the north coast when the 25 Brigade went to Ghana, and I was with them at the time. And 16 Brigade of the 6th Division went to Sananander.

And 21 Brigade was still resting or recouping, they having borne the brunt of the fighting at Isurava in the rear guard action. So yeah, that’s when I joined the 7th. So that took us through to the end of January 1943,

and then in July of 1943, we went back there again to take Lae and up the Ramu Valley to Shaggy Ridge, and it was at Shaggy Ridge that I developed what we then called ‘Yellow Jaundice’, which is…I don’t know how I acquired it,

but you’re all right if you don’t eat, but as soon as you eat you’re sick and there’s a limit to how long you can go like that. So I had, I came back then and into hospital at Port Moresby where I was for quite a long time. I guess my whole system was probably suffering from the sick. I know I was the heaviest…when we went up in the middle of ’42, I weighed twelve and a half stone.

I’ve never ever been that heavy since. But when I come back I was only seven, so I lost a lot of weight in 1942, and although we put it back on again, we really weren’t well enough six months later to go back up there again, I don’t think. But we did. So whether that caused the Yellow Jaundice, I don’t know, but I really was fairly sick for a few months there

and came home from there. It must have been about August 1944 and I had some leave, and then back up to Queensland again, and then went over to Balikpapan in Borneo in…must have been June 1945,

and the war ended in August ’45, and we rounded up the Japs there and went over to Macassar in the Celebes to round them up over there. And that’s when they decided to form the British Commonwealth Occupation Force and I joined that and went to Japan at the end of 1945

and came back in February 1947 and was discharged. I’d discovered that I wasn’t a peacetime soldier, but anyway, that’s roughly my military…

I went back into the railways, initially,

but I…most of us struggled to settle down. See, from seventeen to twenty-four is quite an impressionable age of your life. To come back to civilian life was more shock than anything, and I don’t think any of us knew what we were going to do. So I went back there for a start, but then the bloke next door to me was a builder

and I went with him. I’m not a qualified journeyman, but I can guild a house, and I worked with him for a few years, as a carpenter, and then there was a recession in the building industry in 1951, I think, and we had one child and another child on the way, and I thought I’d better get something a bit more secure financially

so I joined the Commonwealth Public Service and that was where I worked until I retired.

In the Cold War period with the Russians, all the films and stuff, the baddies were always the Russians. Now, in between the two wars, the baddies were all German. Even if they spoke English, they spoke English which was supposed to be German, putting verbs in the wrong place: “I am to the house going.” This sort of thing. And so Germany was still the enemy to us young people whose fathers had fought in the First War.

Yes, Dad had been three years in the First War.

Though Dad did six years. You know. He was away three in the first and six…

Yes, yes.

Well, he was in North Africa and Syria, and as I said before, we probably…our paths crossed, as he moved up the Western Desert - we probably crossed on the road and didn’t know it.

No, he was with an engineer company, the 2/16th Field Company Engineers. So we were in the same country, but going different ways. When we got into Syria, we were near Beirut, Dad was at Baalbek, which is probably fifty kilometres away as the crow flies, but never got near him. I went up into the mountains in New Guinea, in the Owen Stanley’s, the Kokoda track.

Dad worked on building the road from the Bulldog River through to Wau.

Never used, never used. And so, Dad was there. He didn’t go back to New Guinea a second time. He was in Borneo and so was I. I was at Balikpapan in the south, he was Labulin [Labuan?] in the north. So we were in the same country, but in different parts of it.

Funnily enough, we didn’t.

Well Dad was, like I’d said earlier, Dad was a blacksmith, and his father was a blacksmith. And he didn’t really…I think the only way…

Mum was a school teacher and Mum lived in London, and Mum’s father was an artist. He made his living painting, and you see these paintings here on the wall, they’re his. And this big one behind me which you can’t see. But he was…Mum was…Mum’s parents were probably upper middle class perhaps, in London,

whereas Dad’s parents were sons of the toil. And they probably would never have met, but Mum had taken a job teaching in the village where Dad lived, and that’s how they met. But they were poles apart in that respect. That, as I mentioned…Mum was very…

probably very advanced for a woman of her era. Liberated, probably. Because after the war…they weren’t married during the war. They married after the war, and my father worked for his father and his father provided a house for them to live in,

but he didn’t pay Dad any money at all. He just paid for the food and Dad got no money. And Mum got onto Dad and said, “This isn’t any good. You’ve got to be paid.” And nobody, they couldn’t understand it, Dad’s family couldn’t understand it. “But you don’t need money. We buy everything you want.” But Mum had pushed this, and like young wives do,

they’ve got a fair bit of leverage, and so they were the two quite different sorts of people. And when they came to Australia, of course, Dad working in the bush, Dad was quite happy doing what he was doing. He could swing an axe all day, and no chainsaws in those days. Cutting wood, for instance, it was cross-cut saws. And I’ve hung on the end of a seven foot cross-cut saw more hours than I’d like to remember.

Whereas Mum, living like she did, in, you know, kerosene lamps and no running water and stuff that she’d grown up with all her life, I didn’t realise it till I got older, but it must have been a real culture shock for Mum, and…

Well, Dad’s younger brother

had come to Australia. He was too young for the First World War. He came to Australia, and Dad’s father had some chest condition or some condition that the doctor’s said to him, “You’ve got to get away from this humid, cold atmosphere. You’ve got to get to a dry climate, otherwise it will kill you.” And Dad’s father, my grandfather, was going to have to leave England anyway,

and it was either go to the western coast of Canada or to Australia. And because Dad’s younger brother was already in Australia, they decided to come to Australia and that’s what triggered it. And so the whole family came out.

Well, Dad always…I don’t know,

Dad always imagined himself as a farmer. But they weren’t farmers in England, certainly. And he didn’t realise, like a lot of English people coming to Australia didn’t realise, that farming in Australia is vastly different from England, with our low rainfall, and the soil here is, certainly the places we were in, the soil was pretty poor soil. And Dad,

the village where he came from was a country village. They had farms all around it, so I guess he saw himself as a farmer.

Well, milking cows and, we didn’t have spare time as children. We played, but there were things to be done all the time.

The blackberries had to be cut down and bracken cut down and fences had to be mended, and I was, I can say, I had a rifle from the time I was seven. I grew up with a rifle in my hand, like every kid in the bush did in those days. But we were taught safety. Rules were very, very strict and,

but we worked, we didn’t work as hard as a man, but we worked as long hours. And I don’t look back on this and say I was downtrodden or ill-used. I wasn’t. We had a good life, and…but I can remember, the one thing I do remember, in those days,

was Dad’s ‘philosophy’. Because he would promise me he’d take me fishing, you see. Say, “Well, we’ll do all this and then I’ll take you fishing.” And we’d do all this and it would come the day to go fishing and it would be raining, and I could never understand then how Dad was so philosophical about the rainy day. The fact is, he was saying, “Thank goodness, it’s raining. I don’t have to go. I can have a day off.”

But I’d be looking forward to this, you see, and then something would happen and it wouldn’t take place. But Dad and I, I guess we must have been together a lot. I don’t have any, that clear recollections of…no, nothing outstanding, it was just seven days a week.

He was in a place where the Americans are getting into so much trouble now. Iraq. It was called Mesopotamia in those days. He was fighting the Turks. In fact, he landed at Basra. And interestingly enough, I know more about Dad’s experiences of the First World War. We didn’t…I guess he told me when I was young. We didn’t discuss the Second World War much at all, I think.

Oh, funny you should put it that way. To put my finger on something that he, I do remember one thing him saying that stuck in my mind. The first fellow he’d ever seen killed, one of our people was shot through the head, and he said, “I don’t believe that anybody could bleed so much.”

But these are little…I was probably five or six when he told me, and I can remember odd little incidents like that, but it’s, I guess, a little vague now. But I don’t remember anything spectacular that really stands out in my memory of being young.

I guess we were, because we were largely isolated. Yeah, we got along well together. They were older than I was. And yes, probably most of our play time would have been as a family together.

Oh, we weren’t isolated by modern standards. But you’ve only got to be a half a mile away from somebody. The point is that you weren’t geographically so isolated, the point is that you came home from school and you didn’t go out again, partly because there were things to do. And we were all in the same boat, so our social life largely was

mixing with the kids at school, and it was a two-mile walk each way to and from school. And I guess we would have walked with other children. Not large numbers of us, but perhaps two or three, to and from school, but I don’t have any really marked recollection of that.

I never enjoyed school. Perhaps I wasn’t very bright.

Well, a young man…I was never a young man, except in the war, you see.

As a boy. Well, I liked fishing, I liked shooting.

I guess I was an outdoor sort of person. Because there wasn’t much in the way of sport available to us, except at school, where we had a football team I guess of sorts. But unlike the children today, we didn’t have access to sporting facilities. So my leisure time would have basically been shooting and fishing, I guess.

Mmmm.

No. No, it wasn’t among my generation of people. Bear in mind that the school-leaving age was fourteen in those days, and you could,

at that age, if you were going to be an apprentice to a trade, then you became an apprentice. Otherwise you went to work and you just worked at whatever. In the pickle factory or whatever it was. And it was…there were very, very few people would have ever gone to year 12 or high school.

And probably, even those going to year 10, there were very few high schools in Melbourne in those days. I can only remember four in the whole of the metropolitan area. And there wasn’t the need. Perhaps that’s not the way to put it, but higher education wasn’t anything like it is these days. There were lots of

very labour-intensive jobs, that when a road was being built, this was done with horses and scoops, and the horse-drawn drays that carried the metal and men stood with shovels, big shovels, all day, shovelling metal. Hundreds of them. Whereas now you’ve got one piece of machinery that does more work in half an hour than hundreds of men did in four days. It was the same on the wharves.

The wheat harvest, being sent overseas, was in bags and the watersiders [workers] picked up the bag one at a time, ran up a plank, up the side of a ship. So you had…people were like ants and running. It was a very high, labour-intensive part of the world’s history, I think, and so...

Well, it changed very substantially, because these…we had a lot more spare time, firstly because there were no more cows to milk and there was nothing of the other things that had occupied our time. We were growing older, of course, and, I guess, starting to grow up,

and there was more, much more social life because people lived next door to you. And as in all places you…birds of a feather flock together. You get together in a group that has similar views to your own. I got a pushbike when we came to Melbourne and so crowds of us used to go out on bikes.

And we weren’t that far from the beach, probably three or four kilometres from the beach. So we rode bikes around. We went down in the summer time and spent days on the beach.

Well, we were in Hampton, a place which is southeast of Melbourne,

and at that time, and it was, like I say, relatively close to the beach. I’d say, ten minutes on a bike would get us down to the beach, and well, there was school. Again, every one of my school reports - I have them still here - and every one of them ends up with, “Could do better if tried harder.”

Which was true. I didn’t enjoy school. Some people enjoy learning. I…mathematics in those days was divided into three separate subjects of arithmetic, geometry and algebra. And algebra, I don’t know what happened with algebra. I never understood it. I can still remember that a-b2 gives you a-2ab+b2.

But I haven’t got the faintest idea of how you arrive at that answer, or what possible use you could make of it. But I can still remember it. I learnt it like a parrot. And I passed my Intermediate Level Algebra. But I have no idea how I did it. Geometry I could understand. There was a need to be able to be able to work out how much fluid you could put in a can. There was a need to be able to work out how to make a square box.

These things made sense. But algebra never made sense to me.

Well, literature wasn’t a thing where English was the subject in those days. And I wasn’t really very good at parsing sentences and stuff like that. In fact, my boss, long after the war,

when, he said, to me once, “You know, your English is atrocious.” And I said, “I know it is. I didn’t ever properly learn the use of English.” And I had no interest in it. And I think this is what, as I said earlier, caused me to want to get away from school. I couldn’t see the benefit. I couldn’t see the value in learning these things which didn’t seem to be of any use.

No, probably less so. It wasn’t, Hampton was a - if one could use the word - a middle-class suburb. It wasn’t an industrial area.

And the…it was out, not very far past, well, Brighton then was sort of upper class, and Toorak and places like that the real rich people lived. It was not like the industrial parts of Melbourne, where lots of people were still out of work. In the country, we had a constant stream of swaggies,

I guess. We called them swaggies in those days. People carried their swags. All this looking for a bit of food. They didn’t want money, but they’d work around the place and sleep in the barn, and Dad would feed them and they’d go on. So we saw more of the people out of work and on the track in the country.

Of course, also by the time we come down, we were just starting to edge out of the Depression by then - ’37, ’37, and ’38. There were jobs coming a little more plentiful. And so I, I wasn’t that affected by the Depression in that sense. The people who were probably most affected were the people who then had young families and were trying to feed them and educate them.

I was an outside messenger sort of thing. Just carting bits of paper around from one place to another. It wasn’t a highly intellectual job. And funnily enough, an old bloke in the place there had, he’d been up on the Roper River the previous year, on his annual holiday, shooting crocodiles.

You were allowed to in those days, and I, having come down from the country and being dispossessed of firearms, which I’d grown up with, I bought a Boer War military rifle in a pawn shop for two and sixpence, because I was going up in, it was my intent, and the whole of my annual leave for the first time, it would have been 1939,

and I was going up with this fellow, shooting crocodiles on the Roper River in the Northern Territory. That’s why I bought the rifle, and we were sharing a house with a school teacher, a woman, at the time, to reduce the cost of the rent. And she reported this, me having this rifle, to the police. Now, in those days, you weren’t allowed to have a rifle under the age of eighteen.

I don’t know what the wording of the law was, I think it was “in possession of a rifle under the age of eighteen.” Anyway, she reported this to the police. And I can remember, the detectives came to the house and said to - Dad was home - and said to Dad, asked him about the rifle, and he said, “Yes, it’s here.” And they said to him,

they must have asked him several times. Looking back on it now, they said to him, “Is it yours or the boy’s?” And he said, “No, it’s the boy’s. He bought it with his own money. It’s his.” And they were, what the detectives were really doing to Dad was, “For crying out loud, say it’s yours and the whole thing, we can get back to work. You’re wasting our time.” But Dad wouldn’t, he was one of these terribly honourable people and he couldn’t tell a lie. And he just said, “No.”

Anyway, they took the rifle away and I was fined ten shillings for having it whilst being under the age of eighteen. The irony of it was that before I did reach the age of eighteen, they’d supplied me with a rifle and taught me how to use a machine gun and various other things. In fairness to them, or course, they didn’t know that they were breaking the law.

Yes.

I don’t know. It was just a thing you did. It was a great adventure. All of us young blokes, our fathers had been in the First War. We didn’t question it. If you walked into a paddock and there’s a hundred cows and a bull in the paddock,

the bull comes over to see what you’re doing there. And he doesn’t know why he’s doing it either. It’s the thing to do. See, these days, people sit down and say, “Is it a just war?” You know, we didn’t question that. And bear in mind, too, that Germany, even between the wars, Germany had been seen still by us as a baddie.

And the attitude probably was, “Well, we taught them a lesson in 1918 and they haven’t learnt it well enough. We’ll teach it to them again.” And there was a little bit, probably, too, of the dislike of a bully. The desire to stop a bully carrying on.

I think that, that had a bit of it in it, too. But largely it was a great adventure. It wasn’t ‘King and Country’.

Never. Would never have considered it. ‘Country’…in 1942, when Australia was at risk, there was a different feeling. But to go eight thousand miles to the Middle East, you know,

it wasn’t any great patriotic effort. It was just the thing to do, I guess.

Mum and Dad, probably like all migrants to a country, are still nostalgic

about where they’d come from, and they would have remained English until they died, I guess. I never, I never saw myself in…and strangely enough, my mate during the war, Dick Hill, a Western Australian. And Dick and I had spent countless hours together in the same hole,

and we knew each other’s views on every topic under the sun, and religion, politics, the whole box and dice, and we’d talk for hours, and it wasn’t until he died a few years ago, of cancer he died, that at the eulogy, I got a copy of the eulogy that was read at his funeral service, that I discovered that he was born in England too. So that was something we never, ever discussed.

So we didn’t, obviously, didn’t see it as a thing worth talking about.

Nothing. Very little I know now, too. But no, we weren’t interested in politics. You’ve got to bear in mind, at sixteen, the young people of sixteen now are learning this sort of thing at school. We didn’t.

Our schooling was restricted to the three ‘Rs’. Reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. We didn’t really, we didn’t get into this other stuff. We weren’t politically mentally active at all.

Well, at my age,

I had no interest in it at all. I guess, in school, in history at school, we probably would have been…certainly, we would have learning about the movement of nations then. Certainly, we were aware, I was aware from history that the Japanese were fortifying the Caroline Islands, which they’d

been given as a mandate under what then was the League of Nations. I was aware of that, from my history that I learnt. But most of our history in those days, we didn’t learn modern history. Our history was British history, basically. And we learnt about Australian explorers and stuff, but

schooling was very, very limited. We didn’t think ahead. We weren’t taught to think like the young people are today.

I don’t remember, really. I can remember hearing Menzies announce the outbreak of war.

In fact, tomorrow is the anniversary of it, the third of September. Interestingly enough, he said then, and I’ve often wondered since about the legality of this statement. He said that Britain had given Germany an ultimatum to get out of Belgium within a certain time,

or to undertake to do so, and that no such undertaking had been given, said Menzies. And as a result, Britain had declared war on Germany. And his next words rather intrigued me in later years, “And as a consequence,” he said, “Australia is also at war.” And that puzzled me. I’m not sure about the legal aspect of that, but we, the older people would have seen the war coming,

I think. But at sixteen you’re not really thinking that way. The people who’d been in the First War, with whom I was working, they could see it coming, I think. And they would have been much more affected than I was.

Well, we didn’t discuss it, I guess. He was in hospital and I said, “I’m enlisting,” and he said, “Well, I will too as soon as I get out of here.” And that was it. What does upset me a bit, in retrospect, was that neither of us, I don’t think either of us discussed it with Mum. There wasn’t, I’m sure…certainly I didn’t.

And he wouldn’t have, I don’t think Dad would have either. Mum would have just expected us to go. There wasn’t any family discussion for or against it.

I don’t remember. Being a mother, I’m sure she was concerned. She was, probably…I’d spent, of the seven years I was in the army, I was overseas for over five years. Dad was away for several years.

Although very often, you’re in complete safety. You’re at much greater risk crossing the road than a lot of the war you would be. But at home the people don’t know that. They imagine you’re in danger all the time. And Mum must have worried a bit. But my two sisters, who were grown up by this time,

they worked with the Air Raid Precaution people, they worked with the Red Cross, Mum worked with, she was working with the Red Cross. She also worked making camouflage nets. The army, or the government, supplied her with rope. The nets they put over gun positions and stuff like that. And Mum worked out how to do this,

the way a fisherman makes a net. She was making them. So they were busy during the war. The two girls, my sisters, worked in hospitals. They weren’t nurses, because they were working at work in those days. But they…every second weekend or something. So the whole family was involved in it.

I wasn’t with anyone. Do you mean did I go down on my own?

I went on my own, yeah.

Well, they were nine other people and me. None of us knew each other. We didn’t. None of us knew each other. There were some instances where groups, people who had been friends in civil life joined up together,

but, in the main, we were all just individuals. We didn’t know each other at all. It, looking back on it, I suppose it was quite a step to take, but I don’t remember feeling that at the time.

Well, yeah, we went to Caulfield initially, to the racecourse.

And that’s where we were issued with our uniforms and blankets and stuff. And we were in Caulfield probably two days, I suppose, before we went up to Seymour. I remember, I forget how far it was. Probably about, in kilometres, probably five or six kilometres, the march from the station to the camp we were in,

and I can remember all the way along, marching along the road through the other camps. There were other camps. All the people yelling out, “You’ll be sorry.” But the days sort of just drifted one into the other at that time.

I never had any trouble with army discipline at any stage. We’d been brought up to do what we were told. And I don’t mean that in a nasty way. We obeyed our parents, and army discipline wasn’t…I never found it restrictive, and obviously,

if you were wanting to do something that the army doesn’t want you to do, then you’re going to clash with it and you’re going to lose. But it didn’t ever worry me.

No. Not that I can remember of any significance, no. Our instructors were all First War men. They’d all been there.

And they weren’t, they weren’t despots. They were understanding people. I’m not trying to paint the picture too rosy, but in the whole course of the war I never served under a really objectionable officer or NCO [Non Commissioned Officer]. We didn’t, and I think perhaps one of the reasons for it,

was that we were all volunteers, and the number of good people vastly exceeded the numbers of bad people, and so there were too many good people around to stop the baddies being too bad. The army life, it’s interesting that in seven years I never saw a fight between sober men. Not one fight.

Now, here was thousands of men living together. And when they were drinking they used to fight, but they didn’t hurt each other much. But not one single blow struck in anger. And we seemed to get along pretty well together.

Oh, yes. All the time.

You do notice the, more the, yeah the cultural background, yes. There were people with whom you didn’t associate. Again, you’re back on this ‘birds of a feather’ thing. That you settled down very quickly into a group of people with whom you get along the best. And the heavy drinkers associated with the heavy drinkers,

and the ordinary people associated together, so that it sorts itself out very, very quickly. You avoid, you avoid the people that don’t suit the group that you belong to. It’s a sort of by mutual consent thing.

Oh, well, there’s one fellow who I still keep in touch with, but, no, I didn’t single out, until much later in the war, single out one single person to be a mate with.

It was, that was some years down the track before I started doing that. I was friends with everybody just about. But no one in particular.

I don’t know.

I don’t know. We, even in Japan, what - I was there for fifteen months or something - I didn’t have any particular. Although there is one fellow. I don’t know if he’s still alive now. He’d had three strokes last time I contacted him, but we used to go out together.

But, if you’re, I was a non-drinker, which…I think drinkers tend more to get together with just two people, or, no, looking back on it, I think, individual one-to-one, like a marriage situation,

type of thing, you know, apart from this one bloke from Western Australia, this Dick Hill, I don’t think I had that. I got along with all the people, but not one, anyone, as Kipling says in his poem, “If all men count with you, but none too much.” I think perhaps would describe me.

I’ve never excelled at anything in my life, when I look back on it. As a rifle shot, I was, I’d score like a hundred and thirty five out of a hundred and fifty, or something. I was never an excellent shot. I topped the battalion score with a Bren gun [light machine gun]. But that was probably a fluke.

I was, I was never an outstanding soldier. I did what had to be done. I was never found wanting, I think, when the call came. I volunteered where I thought it was appropriate. In action. But I didn’t ever excel. I was never an excellent soldier. I was just always there.

Well, where do you start? The Bren, the Bren, it was one of the best guns we had, I think. It was heavy. I really wasn’t heavy enough to be a Bren gunner. I wasn’t strong enough. The Bren weighed, I think, twenty-three pounds or something or other,

and with ten loaded magazines we carried…you take the Bren and the ten loaded magazines, you’re up to forty-eight pounds just in ammunition. Well, a couple of grenades and a bit of food, and your gear on, I really probably wasn’t strong enough to have handled it.

But the army didn’t seem to hand the heavy weapons to big people. But I had the old English gun that I had was, the fellow who’d had it before me, the pistol grip had been shot off. He’d lost the fingers off one hand, and it had been repaired, but it was an old gun and it was very, it was,

the Bren has two systems driving the thing, and one is gas, it’s a gas operated gun assisted by recoil, and you could control the amount of gas. There’s a hole that came down from the barrel through a block that pushed a piston back. As the bullet went out, out through the barrel, the expanding gas pushed the piston back through this…the gas would come through this little hole through the gas port,

and there was a block that you could adjust the amount of gas that came out of the barrel, and that governed the speed of the movement of the action of the gun, and it also governed whether or not it vibrated. And this old English Bren that I had, you could put it on number one, the smallest gas, and standing up with the gun, firing it like a rifle, from your shoulder,

so little gas came out, and it was such a well-made gun…that the bolt would move, and the bolt weighed six pounds in the Bren, and it would move backwards and forwards so gently, that it wouldn’t put your aim off, even holding it at the shoulder. Whereas if you put it onto the number four, the highest amount of gas release on the gun,

the gun vibrated and it shook. But they took that, my…they called in all the old guns. And this was the gun with which I topped the battalion score. They called in, just before we went away for the Borneo landing, the called them all in, all the old guns and issued us with guns that were made here in Australia. I don’t know what company was making them. Lysaght, the galvanised iron manufacturing people,

made the Owen gun [submachine gun]. I don’t know who made the Bren. But they were rough. Really not in the same class as this old gun had been. So much so that I appealed to the company commander. I said, “Can’t I keep this old gun.” They said, “No, they’ve got to go.” And I burnt the barrel out of that Australian gun in two nights and a day, I think. It wasn’t the same class.

I never, I had no affinity for it at all. But for this other old gun, I had a great feeling. I can even remember the number on it. It was A4643, and that’s a long time ago. But it was a good gun. I’d had several. I had a Boys anti-tank rifle in Greece. There a fifty-calibre thing. An awful weapon.

And I had a Thompson sub-machine gun, and I had to carry the Owen gun for a while, and then the Bren. And I had the Bren in the Middle East too, so I had a go at them all. But of them all, that old Bren, that was my favourite.

I don’t remember now. I didn’t carry it for that terribly long, actually.

But you become to a weapon…it’s interesting, with rifles, that on guard, I’m talking about back in the training camps, the guard’s rifle in the guard hut or tent, or whatever it is, the rifles are in a rack near the door, so if the guard gets called out, everybody who’s asleep leaps up and grabs their rifle.

And all the rifles came out of the one factory, but you could always feel you own…It always felt different. And that doesn’t make sense to me. It couldn’t have been different. But you would know if you picked up somebody else’s. And that doesn’t make sense, but it was so. They didn’t look any different, but something, something about, I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s like a wife. You’ve lived in such proximity to this thing for so long, that you get some sort of an innate feel for it. I was always interested in, like I said earlier, I’d had a rifle when I was seven, and I was always interested in fire arms. And the war gave me an opportunity that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

No. No. No, no, no. that goes back to the Boer War days, doesn’t it, with the ‘old Betsy’ and names like that. No.

Well, on the clothing side. It was interesting.

When we first went into camp, the dress then, the military dress was probably the same as the military dress had been at the end of the First World War, in our tunics and trousers, which we called ‘battle’, it was called ‘battledress’. I don’t know why, but it was always called ‘battledress’.

And we didn’t have, in those early days, we didn’t have the cotton shirts and slacks that were issued after the first campaign in New Guinea, where we were in jungle greens. We didn’t have those sort of clothes. Our, we had the old short sleeve flannelette shirts and long underpants. Singlets. These short sleeved Jackie Howe shearers’ singlet things.

And long underpants. These long, grey, flannel underpants. And these things, we had them when we went to the Middle East. But we never ever had them thereafter. They were, they used to keep you warm, but they were pretty uncomfortable things to wear. And pretty hard to wash and get dry, too. But we had these, as I was saying before,

these ‘giggle suits’ as we called them. I think the army called them ‘fatigue dress’. They army had an obsession about people not having their hands in their pockets. And so they had this jacket and a pair of pants that had no pockets in them at all. So you couldn’t put your hands in your pockets, even if you tried. And they were colloquially called ‘giggle suits’. And these were the suits that we wore in our early training.

So we’d have these…the grey flannel underclothes were called then, colloquially, the ‘John Ls’, after John L Sullivan, who was long before your time, the last of the straight-backed fighters. With their hands in that style. And so this short-sleeved grey flannel singlet

and the long grey flannel pants were similar to the clothing that John L Sullivan wore, so they were always called ‘John Ls’. And like I say, we had them, probably, until Greece. We probably still had them in Greece, although I certainly wasn’t wearing them when we came out of Greece.

But the…our clothing was rough and functional. Didn’t look…it looked awful when I look back on it. It was most unattractive clothing, but they were functional. The pockets were big on our battle dress tunics. And that was done, they were gusseted pockets, they didn’t fit neatly so that you could put a whole lot of stuff,

you could put a great lot of stuff in your jacket pocket.

Yes. Steel helmet as they are more properly known as. Yes, yes. They were heavy, uncomfortable things. And in the whole war, I don’t think I ever saw a man’s life saved by a steel helmet. And yet, they were like an insurance policy.

If you ever had one, you were never ever game to let it go. And you felt naked without your steel helmet on, if something was happening. But a bullet would go through a steel helmet like it would go through a piece of paper. And there were more people, probably, more people injured as a result of having a steel helmet on then otherwise. I was in hospital with a bloke in Moresby, in ’44,

I think, who looked over a log, and a burst of machine gun fire hit the steel helmet, missed his head, but tore the steel helmet into fragments that filled him up with bits of steel from his neck down to his heels. But a bullet, even a pistol bullet, would go through them. I guess they would stop anything falling down from the sky on you,

or mortar shrapnel, stuff like that. But I never actually saw somebody who said, “You beauty,” and looked at this dent in his steel helmet.

No. They were hard, heavy, uncomfortable things. They really were. Especially in the tropics.

No. You could…they were good for digging. You could use them for digging, you could have a wash in them. They had many uses, but it’s psychological. The jungle, again, I was never under heavy shell fire. I don’t think any of us were in this war,

compared to what it was in the first war. And quite likely, with really heavy shell fire, the little bits of stuff falling down around the place, you probably would have been saved by them.

Mmmm. No, I can’t think of anything, except perhaps a thing that was at the basis of all of our training, and it applies in civilian life, for that matter, too, is “don’t panic if something suddenly happens.”

Your initial reaction to something is very often the wrong thing to do. If you’re under fire unexpectedly, suddenly you’re fired on, and everyone goes to ground, it’s a psychological thing. You look around and everyone else seems to be in a slight depression, except you. You seem to be on top of rise somewhere, and sticking out like a sore toe.

And you think, ‘As soon as the firing dies down, I can see a low spot across there. I’ll make a dive for it’. And you do. And you find that you really then are on the top of the ground, and where you left was actually more protected. It’s psychological, of course. But the ‘don’t’ panic’ think is important.

Don’t instantly do something, because very often it’s wrong. But I guess the whole thing, it was a broad education. It was an education given to us by people who’d been there. And we just accepted what they said. But nothing in particular.

Well, again you’re coming back to your fundamental training, is when you’re under fire you hit the ground straight away. The reason for that being, of course, that you present a smaller target. Nobody else in the world ever sees the ground and the little bugs that live in the ground

like the soldier who’s dug in somewhere, where the things only a few inches in front of your eyes. And digging in is a…because lying on top of the ground gives you some form of, makes you a smaller target, but it doesn’t give you any protection. But when you’re dug in, you feel a lot more secure. So the ground is such.

Here it varies of course. In the Middle East, in the Western Desert particularly, bullets and high explosive stuff, you can see these things hitting the ground, because they raise a little puff of dust. And being in the open like that, you’re able to see stuff going around you. In the jungle, you don’t. You don’t see anything in the jungle.

A bullet can pass very close, it can go into the ground very close to you. Even an explosive. It doesn’t kick up clouds of dust. It just disappears and is marginally less nerve wracking because you can’t see it.

I don’t know. There have been lots of reasons given for that. But the term ‘Digger’, I would think, goes back perhaps to the gold mining days. You know, it was an expression used in the gold mining era and carried over. That would be my thoughts. I’m sure some expert has gone into the background of it.

But it wasn’t given to them because they dug holes.

No. In the jungle, very often we were, in the early days, before we had proper shovels. We didn’t have any gear at all in the early days. And we used bayonets and steel helmets. The steel helmets, you could dig quite a big hole with a steel helmet.

Just by dragging it along the ground.

Well, that was all training. It was very, bayonets are a psychological weapon, largely, and I don’t, there weren’t very many people ever bayoneted anybody in their whole military career, I think.

Certainly, I didn’t. But they…bayonet training was supposed to inculcate a spirit of fierce aggression, and shoving bayonets into bags of straw, it uses a lot of energy,

and we were involved in attacks using the blades, but in the main, the other side gets out of the way before you arrive. There were instances. We had people bayoneted while they were lying in bed,

while they were asleep, and by a patrol who’d bumped, just bumped into the place in the night. It was…training is designed to outfit the soldier to do what he’s told and to behave in a way that the army expects him to behave. And all your training is taught,

the basis of it is to teach you to react in the way the army wants you to react. I don’t mean that in a nasty way against the army. This is how you survive. And so, after you’ve been, wherever you went in training, you carried your rifle, everywhere, so that you got to, you became accustomed to always having it in your hand.

You became accustomed to responding to things. So much so that responding to orders in a certain way. I remember once saying to my platoon commander, talking back on the Bren gun, and I, in all armies of the world, all automatic weapons, there’s an immediate action if the gun stops firing. This is in training. And the immediate action is pull back the cocking handle.

All armies do it. And so, on the…when we were training, the officer, he’d give you the instruction. He’d be down there, and he would say, “Guns firing, guns stops,” and instantly you pull back the cocking handle. And I said to him once, “You know, none of us does this, really. We trained like this, and we obey you telling us ‘Pull back the cocking handle,’

but none of us does it.” And he said, “Oh, they do.” And I said, “No. You put a dummy round in the magazine, next time we’re on the firing range, and see what happens.” Because I was a Bren gunner, and I said, “I’ve never known a bloke to pull back the cock. You whack the magazine off. That’s what you do when the gun stops firing.” And yet we were trained, always, to respond to this instruction.

“Guns firing, gun stops.” Mentally pull back the cocking handle. But nobody ever did it. The gun stopped firing, you took the magazine off straight away. So we trained at an automatic reaction but didn’t necessarily always carry it out, in…when I look back on it. But we did it in the same way,

like if there were thirty of you, or a hundred of you, everybody instantly knew what to do because you didn’t have to stop and think, and you didn’t run around in circles. You did what you’d been taught.

Yes.

No.

Well, a couple of things on the ship, I guess. None of us had ever been on a ship in our life before. And we sailed out from Melbourne

in a ship named the Nieuw Zeeland. Not ‘N-E-W’. ‘N-I-E-U’. I think it was a Dutch name, and the skipper was Dutch or he was Scandinavian, or something. And, but it was under, sailing under the British flag. And as soon as we got out through the Heads and headed across towards Western Australia,

and the sea was coming up from the south west, and it was rough, and we were all sick. And in all British troop ships, the first thing you did was life boat drill. And you stuck at this life boat drill until everybody had had a station to go to on the life boats, and when the alarm went you all headed for your station. Now, on the boat deck,

it was an old ship, and the only way the boats could be swung into the sea, they swung on the davits on the boat deck, they had these big crank handles running through gears that had either two or three men on the handle. And there was one at each end of the boat. And the handle, of course, fixed to the deck. And the idea was that the people who were to get into the boats, got into the boats at the boat deck,

and then the crews that had been detailed on the crank handles wound the handles and lowered the boat down into the water. And then they rowed the boat away. And so we were training at this, and I was with the crew on the winding the handles, you see. We had a corporal in charge of us, and we were being lectured about this, and the skipper came up, this Scandinavian skipper, an old bloke,

he was standing there, and the corporal, I remember him saying, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re up here on the deck lowering all these boats away, with everyone in them, and the boats are gone and we’re still here on the deck. What about us?” And I’ll never forget the skipper. The skipper looked at him for a few seconds and he said, “You will yump,” he said, “Yesus Christ will save you.” And I’ll never forget the look on the corporal’s face.

He really hadn’t led an exemplary life. And he had the appearance of a stunned mullet a bit. He really didn’t think that he had much hope of getting help from that direction, I don’t think. But that was the skipper. He just put his hands behind his back and walked away. But we got out in the Indian Ocean, halfway probably towards Ceylon,

and there, they were freighters. The troop ships were freighters. They had no accommodation. We were in hammocks, and the hammocks just tied onto hooks up on the ceiling, and when we got up in the morning we just pulled the hammocks down, and rolled them up and stuck them in a locker along the side of the ship. And it was hot as blazes, and there was no air down stairs, and it was terribly hot when we got up near the equator,

and so we slept on deck most of the time, and we had life jackets that were cotton filled up with kapok. And with these…we were lectured at great length about these things. That they were life jackets, and you didn’t use them as pillows. But they were good pillows, and we didn’t have pillows anyway. We used to sleep up on deck because it was too hot down below. And we lost a bloke overboard off that ship,

and he…the hatch covers where the cargo had been loaded into the ships, the hatch cover has usually got a wooden cover put over it and then a canvas over it, to stop water when the ship, when the ship’s in the heavy sea - to stop it running down into the ship. But in the tropics, they took the hatch covers off and they rigged up an awning over the top,

so that put shade on the thing, but it also…they had canvas so it would pick up some of the air and get some air down into the hatch. But most of us just learnt to sleep on the iron deck. And you can if you sleep forward, on the front part of your leg, instead of on your hip. You can sleep on an iron deck quite comfortably, with a kapok life jacket for a pillow.

But this bloke couldn’t sleep on the iron deck, and he rolled his gear up, up on the canvas awning, up over the cargo hold. And the roll call in the morning – at any rate, this bloke was missing, and all his gear. And nobody ever really knows what happened, but a storm had blown up through the night, and the probability is

that it got under the awning, and rolled him over the side. And I’ve often thought of it, if that’s what did happen, I’ve often wondered what you would do. He would have woken up when he hit the water, probably. Now he either would have gone down along the side and gone in beneath the screws and got killed straight away, or he would have been left to float in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Nobody knew he’d gone, he would have known nobody would have known where he was.

I often wondered what you would do in those circumstances. Would you try to swim after the ship? It’s all blacked out anyway. You probably wouldn’t have been able to see it by then. What would you do? Would you stay afloat until dawn and hope that somebody else would come along and pick you up. Not a chance in a million. And I often think of that fellow, and thought, “What would I have done? What would you do?

Would you struggle or would you just give it away?” I don’t know.

Yes.

It is.

Yes, it was just a part of, a couple of things that I remember on that trip across there. We got into Ceylon, and we were in battle dress which is heavy woollen clothes, and it was as hot as blazes.

We went ashore for a couple of days.

At Colombo. And we were actually, one day we went up, we got a bus trip up to Candi, up in the mountains. Up where the tree plantations are and ancient ruins and stuff. A lot of the blokes bought ebony,

they had elephants and all sorts of animals carved out of ebony. It’s a very heavy wood, and when we reached Palestine and they dropped us off the train and we had several miles to march to the camp, the whole track all the way from the railway siding into the camp was strewn with these elephants that had to be abandoned.

And the Arabs probably picked them up and sold them all back to us. But it, yeah, it’s a novelty being on a ship for the first time.

I don’t’ remember that. I don’t remember us having much of a sense of history in that sense.

We had a major with us in the Middle East who was keen on history, and he marched us all over that place. It was as hot as blazes and there was no shade, and he was collecting bits of pottery and the Australian army camps there were, there was Kilo 89, which I guess was named because it was eighty-nine kilometres from Jerusalem, I assume.

That was the name, the Australian. And Disonide [?], Beit Jirja, Kastina, there were only about five camps that Australians were in there. And that’s not terribly far from Gaza and we used to march around doing training around that area, and this major would be saying, “And this is where Richard III made his headquarters in the Third Crusade,” and we were, it was a hundred and ten [Fahrenheit] in the water bag and there was no shade,

and we couldn’t have cared less about Richard III and his crusades. But we used to go down. We swam on the beach at Ashqelon, which is where the biblical story of Samson. Samson came from Ashqelon and used to go up to Gaza to see Delilah. And when he found the lion with the bees coming out of its mouth.

And I think in the Old Testament, I think the words are there, “Out of the strength came forth sweetness.” I think. And there was a Samson brand jam made in the Middle East, and that was the label, that was on the label, Samson holding the lion’s mouth open and the bees coming out, and underneath the caption, “Out of the strength came forth sweetness.”

So these are, I guess, that’s some little thing that comes back.

Yes. I was, I was with a bloke who never went any further. He was probably too old. A fellow named Pat Calleen. He was a Catholic who, I remember saying to Pat, we went to Jerusalem on leave,

and one the girls who I’d known in Australia, I don’t know why, I wanted to send her something, and I said to Pat, “I don’t know what to get.” You know, I didn’t know anything about girls in those days, and he said to me, “Is she a Catholic?” And I said, “Yes, she is.” And he said, “Well, go down and buy this crucifix for her,” you see, “and get it blessed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

And that’ll make her feel ten feet tall. So I did that. But I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I did it anyway. We...

Yes. Yes. I never heard from her ever again I don’t think. But there is something. We went up to Bethlehem

and the olive trees are the same olive trees that were there two thousand years ago. And there’s a lot of history in the place. And the Muslims, of course, have their mosque of Omar. At Omar, the Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed ascended to heaven from. And it’s the, I guess,

the centre of some of the world’s major religions, isn’t it? But we were young. You know, when you’re seventeen and eighteen, really, you’re too young to appreciate what you’re seeing, aren’t you. You’re too blasé, to understand, to get the benefit of it. Crete is a very interesting place. Greece is, you know, historically,

to go and stand at the Parthenon, at the temple there, it’s like going to the Colosseum in Rome, you know. But when you’re eighteen it doesn’t mean anything to you. We were all too young to appreciate it. The poor old taxpayer was sending us all over the world and we weren’t...it’s like giving a donkey strawberries. We didn’t appreciate it.

Nothing. We didn’t know. Your question, “What did we know about what we were being trained for?” We didn’t know anything. It’s an interesting thing. When the first bullets go past, or the first shells explode, you aren’t initially that terribly frightened

because you’ve been conditioned to noise, and this is noise. And it’s only when it starts having an effect on the people around you that you suddenly become aware that this isn’t playing any more. Fear is a…I was probably forty-five before I realised

that people feel fear differently. We were critical, when we were young, critical of those who froze or ran away, or did something unusual, but it wasn’t until I was quite old that I realised that, that fear has an effect on people. It affects people differently.

Some people are able to cope with it, some people freeze, some people run away, and they don’t have any control over what they’re doing because some chemical system in their body does this to them. And when you say, “Well, I didn’t run away. I’m ten feet tall,” you’re kidding yourself. That’s something you were born with. And the bloke who, I’ve heard doctors say to fellows whose nerves have gone,

“Pull yourself together, lad,” you know. They didn’t have anything to pull with. That’s why their nerves have gone. But they can’t help it. It’s not that you’re a big bronzed ANZAC [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] who can put fear aside, and this bloke’s not. He’s got some chemical system in him that he can’t override it.

And it’s no credit to you that you can. It’s just something that you were born with. And so, the training that we had, I remember an officer in the very early days saying, “You’ve all got the wrong idea about the army. The army, or a war, is ninety percent boredom, and ten percent sheer fright.” And that’s about what it is.

Ninety per cent. You cart gear up onto a hill for a purpose and the purpose has gone away before you reached there, so you cart it all back again. And you’re like the grand old Duke of York, in that nursery rhyme, that he was famous for having marched his men up to the top of the hill and marched them down again. And the heavy machine gunners, the Vickers [machine gun] gunners, and stuff where the tripod weighed sixty-eight pounds,

and these blokes carted their weapons for hours up on to a hill to give covering fire to something that was going to happen, and the war had moved on before they got there. And they carted them all back down the hill. And there was so much of this to-ing and fro-ing, just going after, put a patrol out somewhere for three days, and all it did was walk for three days.

It established that there wasn’t anyone in that area, or probably wasn’t anybody else in the area, but it is, it’s ten percent sheer fright and ninety percent boredom…probably describes it very well.

Yeah. It has to be,

because physically you can be worn down. I was never, and very few Australians were, in this war anyway, under the continuous bombardments that the people of the first war put up with. When you read the stories of the First World War, towards the, in the early days not so much, but towards the finish, when the artillery got to be accurate, more accurate than it had been in the early days,

I read stories, now the front line trenches were eight feet deep. And there was a fire step that you climbed up on to look over the top. Or if they were going to charge, they got up on the fire step. But other than that, you were down on the floor, eight feet below the surface. And there were places where the front line, in the First World War, if you read the official history,

where the front line’s job, the first wave, was to take the enemy front line, and the second wave then passed through and took the next line. But when the first wave arrived, they couldn’t even find the front line trench. Now, that’s an eight foot deep trench a mile long. And they couldn’t even find it. The shell fire had been so heavy that the trench had disappeared. An eight-foot deep ditch. We never had that sort of shell fire,

I don’t think. Alamein was the closest Australians would ever have come. And the guns were on our side then. But a thousand guns. Montgomerys [tanks] wheel to wheel. A thousand guns. But we didn’t have that sort of shell fire. And the jungle, of course, was mortars and machine guns and the Japanese mountain gun. Which can be devastating, but it’s not the constant,

loud explosions, which I don’t think any human being could stand for very long. You would…something would crack. If it wasn’t your nerves, physically you’d collapse.

I don’t know. I don’t remember ever thinking about it. Sounds silly, doesn’t it. I don’t know.

I never ever thought that I would, no. I was confident that I would be able to do my job. But I could have been wrong. I’m sure the people, bear in mind these people whose nerves did go on them, the people who couldn’t stand it, they’d volunteered. They weren’t conscripted into it. They volunteered into it.

They thought they could handle it, too. And if you thought you were going to collapse, you wouldn’t have volunteered, would you?

Well, they didn’t know. You don’t know until it happens. You see, an analogy is, I guess, you might look at a family that have three perfectly children and a child born a mongoloid.

I’m not big enough to handle that, I don’t think. Perhaps I would be, I don’t know. But I look at the people who do handle it, and I think they’re ten feet tall. And I couldn’t. This sort of doubt in my mind

would never have occurred to me in the war. I never, ever thought that I couldn’t have coped with it. But like I say, those who couldn’t cope with it equally felt that secure. You don’t know, I guess. That’s the basis of it, isn’t it. You don’t know how. I don’t know how I would have handled it if we’d had a mongoloid child. My thoughts are, “I couldn’t have.”

But, no, I had no doubts. And I don’t mean that to be, sound in any way boasting. I don’t mean it to sound like that. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have been able to just carry on.

Well, an officer has a role,

and an NCO has a role which, which gives him, or should give him courage beyond that of the ordinary soldier. In the same sense that anybody, I believe, anybody who is a role model, a sportsman or whatever in life,

and I include the royal family in this category, has an absolute obligation to, not to have feet of clay. If people are looking up to you, you should have a strength which enables you to be an example to them. So the officer should have this quality,

otherwise he isn’t going to be a good officer. And we had good officers in the AIF.

You’re going back too far. I can’t remember that.

Abyar Bardia. I don’t know how it’s pronounced. I can’t remember the name of our officers in Japan, in ’46.

There are some who stood out, but I, well, our CO in Japan was Drover Dick Marsden of the 2/26th Battalion, but I can’t remember my company commander, even in Japan. Obviously I wasn’t impressed by them. My own officers from the battalion, of course, I tend to remember now. But...

I didn’t really have much to do with it. In those days, as I say, I was a signaller then. And I was in Greece. In…then in Greece I was with the 12th Greek Division. I wasn’t with the Australians at all.

So I, I wasn’t contributing. Interestingly enough on that, being a signaller, too, although my knowledge of telegraphy that got me into that field of endeavour in the early days, I never ever touched a Morse key in the whole of the war. And even my signalling thing was dragging telephone wires around and mending breaks and stuff like that.

So I just pottered along behind whatever was happening. That two months in North Africa was a relatively peaceful war. If you can call a war peaceful. For me, anyway. We didn’t really…

there weren’t that many casualties in that two months. Even in Greece, we had a lot of blokes taken prisoner, but there weren’t that many people killed in Greece, probably. Or Crete.

Well, I don’t, we were under machine gun fire but we weren’t pushing forward,

we were stationary at that time, and again, I don’t recall it as being anything very, very earth shattering, strangely enough.

Well, we’d come under fire. That was about what happened. Again, I’m not, I’m a signaller. I’m not out there doing patrols out in the no man’s land, at this stage of my career, and it was, you know, there’s shelling and stuff, but not directed at you,

personally, and it doesn’t become, the war doesn’t become personal until someone is actually shooting at you, I think. And you know that it’s you that he’s shooting at. But the rest of it is, is a general. If you’re being fired at, or being bombed or being strafed from the air,

it’s a general thing across a whole area. It’s not an individual thing. And I’m not again, I was scared as much as anybody else, and…but, but being under a general fire is not quite the same.

I remember a young bloke I had with me in Japan, from the 2/31st. He’d been shot at Gona. He was in New Guinea in ’42. and he was shot through the behind, the bullet went through the behind, and he fell. And when he fell, his steel helmet fell off his head and landed about eighteen inches in front of his head.

And the sniper could see the steel helmet. Pud O’Grady, this fellow. And Pud was lying there and watching the bullets go through his steel helmet, that the sniper was shooting at. Now, that’s what I’m talking about. That is personal then, when you get to that. The sniper could see his steel helmet, and obviously the bloke was only this far back behind it,

obviously the bloke couldn’t see his head. Now that’s fairly stressful.

Probably at Gona, I suppose, the end of ’42. I think. Yeah. It doesn’t very often, it doesn’t very often happen, I think. I think you’re a general.

If the taxpayer could see how much of his money is fired up in the ten thousand rounds that are fired for one bullet to hit somebody, he would really be horrified. Because it’s generally, that’s generally what the thing is. You just, in the jungle, particularly, where you can’t see, you just fire into the jungle

and keep firing. Very often, we had lots of blokes who were killed, wounded, been there for weeks, and never ever seen a Japanese. Never seen an enemy, because you don’t. So the personal thing. Perhaps I accent that a bit too much, but it never really happened to me, like this fellow Pud O’Grady I was talking about.

I never had somebody firing bullets into the steel helmet eighteen inches in front of my face.

Well, the daily drudge in any place, just about, was getting from one place to another. Which usually, well, in the desert we had trucks, but there was still a lot of walking to be done. And we, in training, we would probably go out on a field exercise, say, you’d do twenty miles a day,

carrying all your gear and heavy weapons, and then dig in at night, and fill the hole in the next morning. And so, this is just plain drudgery. Just walking along carrying your gear, and that’s, that’s what war is. Half of the time there’s nothing happening. Not half of the time, ninety percent of the time,

there’s nothing happening. Even if you go to the siege of Tobruk. I wasn’t in the siege, but although they were there for ten months, I think, they weren’t fighting continuously for ten months. So there’d be days and days and days going by when nothing happened. And you just might be improving the defensive position and doing the work, and you’ve got all these carrying,

there are…if you’re in action, you’ve got ammunition and supplies to be carried forward, wounded to be carried out. This is all just work. And as I might have said before, with the people left at home, wives and mothers, imagine that the men were constantly in danger. But you’re not.

And even with the enemy thirty yards away, you aren’t, unless one of you is attacking another, the bullets, and you’re in a hole, anything being fired is going to go over your head anyway. I’m not belittling it, I’m not trying to sound like a hero, but looking back on it, the actual moments of danger, of extreme danger, are quite short.

Well that’s what I, as I say, I was mostly dragging wire along to gun positions and observations posts, and stuff like that. And mending breaks in the wire and keeping…radio didn’t work well in those days, particularly in the jungle. The radio, you could talk from the top of one hill to another,

but if you went down into the valley, you couldn’t get any reception at all. So the only secure, certain way of communicating was by telephone wires. And these were, we carried the wire, and rolled it out, as the forward elements went forward, so that the leading commander

was always in touch with his superior further back. And again, this was just work. It was just carrying gear, day and night, because if the thing got broken due to enemy fire or some other reason, then you had to go and find the break and mend it. And so, like I say, my telegraphy knowledge was never used.

Well, the forward companies of the infantry battalions, they have an observation officer with them, normally, and he’s looking for a place

where he can get a view of the target that he intends to put the guns on to. And it’s, in a flat, featureless terrain, like a lot of North Africa is absolutely dead flat, and it was just a matter of keeping up, really, with what the forward movements were.

And because you don’t have an unlimited quantity of wire, you’ve got the other end of the scale, when you’re finished in this particular area, you’ve got to wind it up and take it with you. So it was just mundane, doing what you were told, literally. And in fact, even later on, when I was a Bren gunner,

again, you’re just told, “There’s your position and this is what you do.” And so you don’t really, you don’t have much opportunity to display initiative.

Oh, it was getting very close to the end of the war. Would have been 1944. but it...

Yes.

Oh, we’d, we’d carry three hundred yards, about, on top of all your own gear, weapon and equipment, you’d perhaps be carrying, what, a fifth of a mile, so that’d be,

what’s three kilometres to the mile. Probably not much, perhaps half a kilometre. It’d be less than that probably. I don’t know now.

Just a roll, over your shoulder. We didn’t have any gear. We had, we, particularly when we went into the mounts in New Guinea

we had absolutely nothing. Even the stuff that was dropped to us out of the air, we had no ability. It was just chucked out of the aircraft. It was already doing a hundred and fifty miles an hour, anyway, in the aeroplane. We hadn’t developed landing stuff in parachutes. We hadn’t, none of this stuff. It was all to come years later.

In the early days it was really primitive.

The Italians really didn’t have their heart in it. They, the Germans knew how to die, how to fight and die,

and our people did too, But the Italians knew how to live. They were much more interested in living than in dying, and they, they surrendered in droves. I think in that two months, we’d taken a hundred and twenty-five thousand prisoners. In two months. And it had got to the stage where an Italian battalion commander with a thousand men

would be coming in to surrender to a platoon commander who only had thirty men, and there were instances where the platoon commander would send the fellow back and say, “I can’t handle you today. You’ve got to come back tomorrow. I’ve got to get rid of all these people I’ve already got.” They were, they didn’t want a war.

And yet some of them were excellent soldiers. Rommel even had great regard for some of the Italian regiments. Interestingly enough, the Italians were the first frogmen, the men who swum under water and stuck limpet mines onto other people’s ships. It was the Italians who developed that. So, they weren’t cowards. They just didn’t have their heart in the war.

With great difficulty. Even to give them water to drink was impossible, almost. And there were miles of them. They were just six abreast for thirty miles. They were everywhere. A lot of them came out to Australia actually. I don’t know if they were from the desert, but a lot of Italian prisoners were in Australia, working.

I don’t know what happened to them when they got back, past where we were. The huge numbers were largely from Bardia and Tobruk. Once we got up as far as Derna and Benghazi, we weren’t taking prisoners then, because they were getting back onto their own bases. But that’s when we first saw the German aircraft

and tanks started to appear then. But the Italians, they were a fairly friendly people. Although the Abyssinians didn’t think so.

In our army? Very high. Very high. It was still high in Greece, and Crete. I think,

I don’t think our morale ever went down. Probably after, after the 1942 campaign in the Owen Stanley’s, and in the swamps around Gona, and Buna and Sanananda. I don’t think the blokes…I can’t remember them ever singing on the march after that.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know. The mood changed after then. I don’t know whether it was we’d lost a lot of the old hands. But the…and for some reason,

the new people we were getting didn’t seem to be the same. I don’t have any logical explanation for that, but the old soldiers tended to stick together, in groups. It was very, very difficult for the newcomers to join them. It was unkind in a way. It wasn’t done deliberately.

But the…having been in the early days when we were all being excited together, it never ever happened again. Particularly after that 1942 campaign, which was…left us all, I guess, fairly sick and run down, but it was a different atmosphere altogether from then on. There was still the dogged determination sort of thing was still there, but a bit of the light-hearted spirit had gone.

I don’t know if I can explain. It’s a bit like trying to define a rhinoceros. It’s very hard to define a rhinoceros, but you surely know one when you see one. And you, you know when a group of people

are light hearted, but it’s an indefinable difference. If I had to write it down on a piece of paper, I couldn’t, but like I say, you surely recognise it when you see it. And there was a, I don’t know what it was that occurred in ’42, but it left, it did make a real difference,

and I’ve thought of it often, but I can’t put my finger on any reason why it should have been. It was a particularly trying six months. And also, I suppose, a lot of them, not only the battle casualties, but the sickness people, a lot of them didn’t come back. I know they were still in the army,

but they didn’t come back to the same unit, and I guess it was, the other thing, probably, in the early days battalions were formed from specific geographical areas, and so the people in them had a commonality to start with.

But like the 2/14th was a Victorian battalion. After Syria, their sister battalion, the 2/16th, was Western Australian. And there were, after Syria, the reinforcements; there were too many for the Western Australian battalion and they were short of Victorians, so about a hundred and twenty of the Western Australians came to the Victorian battalion.

Interestingly enough, the Western Australians and the western Queenslanders probably were the two groups in Australia who stood head and shoulders above the rest of Australians. The Western Australians that come into a Victorian battalion, within twelve months probably of coming, were nearly all NCOs and many of them had decorations for bravery.

And there was something mystical about the Western Australians, and I’m not a Western Australian. But they were good soldiers, and so, they, that group came in after Syria.

Then after Kokoda and the Gona Campaigns, when the casualties had been fairly high, they were Queenslanders and New South Wales. So probably the majority, in numbers of the battalion at the end of the war, were Queensland and New South Wales people. So you lost this, this common ground, and they mucked the thing, in the early days of the war.

There were four battalions to a brigade when the brigade was formed. So 16 brigade was a NSW Brigade, it had the 2/3rd and 2/4th, but 17 Brigade was Victorian. They had the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th battalions. And these, it was decided fairly early in the war, to only have three battalions to a brigade, so they took the 4th Battalion off the 16

and the 8th they took off the 17th brigade and they took the 11th, and so the 4th, 8th and 11th became 19 Brigade, so the whole thing got split up in the early days. And, I don’t know, in the First War, I think they probably were able to avoid this, and kept the Victorians as Victorians.

But in our war, we were that mixed up at the finish, that, I don’t know, the esprit de corps, or call it what you like of being, we ended up like all the nations’ famous football teams. Now none of the players come from where they’re playing any longer, do they? They’ve all been brought from somewhere else. And we ended up that way.

Well, we were just starting to leave at the time. But the Germans were held in much higher esteem than the Italians. So, yeah, we were going out so it didn’t have the effect on us.

But the Germans were held in much higher esteem, and when the German attack, when they come across through Yugoslavia into Greece, they were held in even higher esteem.

Didn’t know anything. (interruption)

Well, when we got back to Alexandria, we knew we were going to Greece. But we were going there, ostensibly, to help the Greeks against the Italians, because at that stage, Germany hadn’t marched into Yugoslavia.

And yeah, I guess, we did know we were going to Greece, but that’s about all. The army doesn’t really tell you very much. I suppose, we didn’t, like even coming at the end of the war, when we went to Moratai Island, near the equator, for the Borneo Landing,

we didn’t know we were going to Borneo until we were on the ship going to Borneo. The army tended not to, I suppose for security reasons, tell you too much. And wherever, I was more than six months at sea, and I was a soldier, but I was more than six months at sea during the war going from one country to another.

And I don’t think we ever knew really. The army sees fit not to give you too much information.

It’s a poem, I think the title of it was Adolf Hitler’s Isle of Doom. Lord Haw Haw, he was a fellow, William Joyce. He was given the title Lord Haw Haw because he had one of those cultured British accents. His real name was William Joyce. They hanged him after the war, we did,

as a traitor to the cause. I think he was Irish by birth. He used to broadcast on the German propaganda broadcast to the allied forces. And we - the Australians, and the British, too, who have a very similar sense of humour to ours - we used to go out of our way to try and listen to this man and the continental people, the Poles and other people,

who were a bit more excitable, if they heard his voice, they used to spit on the ground and make all sorts of rude remarks in their own language. But we treated him as a joke, a bit, and so he coined this expression ‘The Isle of Doom’. Incidentally, he also coined the expression, ‘The Rats of Tobruk’, which a lot of people, perhaps, don’t know.

But he used to open his broadcast to the people at Tobruk, during the siege, that’s how he used to open it, “Good morning, rats.” So, a bit like the Old Contemptibles, in the First World War, the British Army, where the Kaiser had referred to them as the ‘Contemptible Little Army’. It’s a British characteristic, I think,

to take something like that and make it into a badge of honour. And so, like, hence the origin of the title the ‘Rats of Tobruk’ came from Lord Haw Haw. But this little poem starts off:

\n[Verse follows]\n ‘Twas just a month ago, not more,\n We sailed to Greece to win the war.\n

No, I’m sorry, I’ll go back. That comes in the middle of it. It starts:

\n[Verse follows]\n

Here I sit upon the island of Crete,\n

Bludging on my blistered feet,\n Little wonder I’ve got the blues,\n With feet encased in great canoes.\n Khaki shorts instead of slacks,\n Living like a tribe of blacks.\n Except the blacks don’t sit and brood\n and wail throughout the day for food.\n

‘Twas just a month ago, not more,\n We sailed to Greece to win the war.\n We marched and groaned beneath our load,\n While bombers bombed us off the road.\n

And while they dropped their bloody load of death,\n

We cursed the bloody RAF.\n The RAF was there in force,\n Though they left a few at home, of course.\n We saw the entire force one day,\n When a Spitfire spat the other way.\n

That’s a reference to a Hurricane that once strafed our forward elements. It was always said then that it was a German pilot flying this British Hurricane, but it may well have been a Hurricane pilot mistaking us for the enemy.

It wasn’t a Spitfire, although the poem uses the term ‘Spitfire’. A bit of poetic licence there. Which reminds me of the modern expression for that sort of shooting, which is called ‘friendly fire’. And to extend that a little bit, friendly fire isn’t. And so then he goes on in the poem:

\n[Verse follows]\n

And then we heard the wireless news,\n

When portly Winston gave his views.\n The RAF, he said, in Greece,\n Is fighting hard to bring us peace.\n Then we scratched our heads and thought\n This smells distinctly like a rort.\n For if in Greece the air force be\n Where the bloody hell are we.\n

The bullets whizzed, the big guns roared.\n We howled for ships to get aboard.\n At last they came and on we got\n And hurried from the cursed spot.\n And then they landed us on Crete,\n They marched us off our bleeding feet.\n

The food was light, the water crook\n

I got up fed up and slung my hook.\n Returned that night full up with wine\n And next day copped a fiver[five pounds] fine.\n When pay was called I said, “Oh well,\n They won’t pay me I’m sure of that.”\n But when they did I smelt a rat\n For next day when no rations\n I realised their wily game\n

For sooner than sit down and die,\n We spent our pay on food supply\n And now it looks like even bettin’,\n A man will soon become a Cretin.\n

And spend his days in darkest gloom\n

On Adolf Hitler’s Isle of Doom.\n

And that, I don’t know where that poem came from. I’ve got a lot of wartime poems written down. I wrote them down where and when I heard them. But I don’t know the authors, and I’ve never seen them in print, many of them. Many of them couldn’t go into print of course.

An interesting little thing happened to us in Greece...

It brings me back, well, in a sense, we were in, up near Mount Olympus, on Hitler’s birthday.

I think Hitler was born in, it was his fifty-fourth birthday, I think, and there was a whole flock of Junkers Stuka Ju-87 dive bombers and Me-109s, the fighters, were strafing us, and one of the fighters pulled up out of where most of them were circling round and diving on us, went up high and came down in a dive, emitting a great cloud of smoke.

Now, we’d been trained to be wary of gas, and so that’s what we thought it was…and the gas warnings in those days, we carried respirators all the time with us…was a wooden rattle like you might see in a football game. You swung it around your head. It was a distinctive sound,

and there are wooden rattles going off everywhere, and everyone’s grabbing for their respirators, which were full of spare socks and other things. Anyway, what this fellow did, the smoke suddenly cut off and he flew back up again, and there he was, he was doing some sign writing, putting Hitler’s birthday, whatever the year was. Like ’54, or whatever, I can’t remember the number.

But he wrote it in smoke in the sky up above us, while the rest were strafing us. So there was a loyal son of the Third Reich there. But we’d come down, we were getting a bit rattled at the finish. Weren’t getting any sleep, and continually on the move and continually being annoyed by the angry men, and we were going past a Greek cemetery where,

it didn’t have a fence around it, as I remember it, and we, they started strafing us on the road, and there was no cover anywhere, except to get into the cemetery where the headstones were, and so we got in there and there was, this thing went on for a while, and the aircraft went away,

and we went back onto the road to start going down again, and we moved through and we heard a voice coming out of the ground, saying, “Help,” or, I forget,…I think it was probably “Help.” A very muffled sounding voice, and you could have seen an ant. There was no cover anywhere. But the Greeks in that particular place, anyway, they didn’t bury people in the ground. They had a stone box about as big as a coffin

that was above the ground and had a big stone slab on it. Not fixed to it, just loosely put on the top. Anyway, our nerves were a bit shaken up with all the stress over the last few days, and we were about to head for the hills, with this strange voice coming out of the ground and no one in sight. Anyway, one of the cooler heads said, “I think I’ll go back and have a look. There must be someone there.”

We were saying, “Well, there can’t be anyone there, we’d see them.” Like I say, you could have seen an ant walking on the ground. And somebody noticed this slab on the top of this particular coffin thing was slightly askew. We pulled it aside, and there was an English transport driver, truck driver, in an English uniform, who was in there, and he was fairly unable to speak for quite a long time,

and we finally got the story out of him. What had happened, he, the Germans were the first in the world to mount a cannon firing explosive shells on their fighters, and they had the fixed guns in the wings, like all fighters did. I think four in each wing, with the bullets converging at the maximum optimum striking power,

some two hundred yards in front of the aircraft. But the Germans then put a 20mm cannon firing through the propeller box. The crank shaft had a hole bored through it, and the cannon went through the crank shaft. It was a very slow rate of fire, compared to the machine guns, which are very fast. Anyway, this thing fired a 20mm diameter explosive shell, which was somewhat alarming,

and this driver, when the shells started to explode on the ground around us, and the dust from the bullets were everywhere, and he’d pulled this slab aside on the grave, and got in with the bones, thinking that would give him some protection. And lying in there, with the slab off to one side, but still balanced on it, he looked up and there was a fighter, what appeared to be coming straight at him,

and he could see the sparks, where the guns were firing, and the stuff started to explode around him, and with superhuman strength got his arms underneath this slab and pushed it back over his face. But he could do it, but when his arms came back down here, because it was only a shallow box, he couldn’t get the leverage to lift the slab off again. He’d have been there still if we hadn’t gone back.

So he was a very fortunate man. But I, we were somewhat a bit alarmed at this voice coming out of the ground in a cemetery where you wouldn’t have gone back if it hadn’t have been for that cooler head. But, we got down and on the evacuation beaches. Interestingly, we were there Anzac Day. And a

British bloke was there, from one of the British regiments, and we had a bit of a service there, he had a bugle. A British bloke had a bugle. We had a bit of a service there on the beach on Anzac Day.

Well, I can’t really remember it much. Except that he played the Last Post and Reveille. I don’t know what else we did, but it was,

it was quite a bit of a thing. He volunteered this. We were talking about this, “This is a great old act, being here on Anzac Day,” and it was the Anzacs, too. Because the New Zealanders were with us. We had a New Zealand Division in Greece, too. And anyway, the convoys came in to pick up the troops and get them out. We were evacuating.

And this particular beach that we were on, fifty years later nearly, I read the official history and saw this story, which alarmed me somewhat. I’ll come to that in a minute. But they had some flat-bottomed boats, a bit like an assault. The type of assault craft we got later in the war. These things came into almost onto the beach.

They were a very shallow draft. And we got all the wounded blokes on first and got them out, and then we started putting the, taking loads of them out, but every time that we loaded the boat up, and it pulled away from the beach, it would only go a few yards and then it would hit a sandbar. And that’s where it would stick. So those of us who were on the beach,

all night long we’d been going out to our chest up in water, pushing these over the sandbar, and when the convoy had to be gone well before dark, to get out of what they called ‘Bomb Alley’, between Greece and Crete, before first light, before the bombers arrived. And the Australian…the convoy had gone, it was nearly dark…and the Australian crews of Perth stayed behind to pick up the rear guard,

and we rushed down to the beach and jumped on this assault craft, and it went “chug chug chug” and hit the sandbar. And there was no one left to push it off. And there was some reluctance of any of us to get off, because it was obvious that if you got off you weren’t going to get back on, or at least there was a good chance you weren’t. Because as soon as it cleared the bar, off it went. And anyway, an officer, I don’t know who he was, he was a commissioned officer,

an Australian, started ordering the blokes off the barge, and nobody moved, and he drew his revolver and he was somewhat excited, and he said, “I’ll shoot the first man that doesn’t get off the barge,” or words to that effect, and all around behind where he was standing, you could hear the rifle bolts open and close. That was a, it was a fairly tense little situation there for a minute.

I think the authors call it a pregnant silence. And anyway, in the middle of this silence, this little English midshipman, who was driving the barge, who was probably fifteen at least, quite a very childish voice, but in this very cultured English accent, said, “I think it might be a good idea, sir, if you were to get off first, and show the men an example.”

And that broke the spell. We jumped off and pushed the thing over the bar, and some of us got back on and some didn’t. And often wonder about that little midshipman. Whether he’s still alive and if he realises how significant his few words were.

It was, it was, I mean, looking back on it now, it was a nothing. But it seemed very appropriate, this child’s voice. I guess he probably wasn’t that much younger than most of us anyway, for that matter. But it was this cultured voice. “Show the men an example.”

I had an interesting thing there. We dumped all our gear. Drove the trucks over cliffs and smashed what weapons…I had a Boys anti-tank rifle then, which I chucked over the cliff. And I had an ordinary rifle as well. But we dumped all our clothes except what we were wearing. And I’d been carrying this pair of socks that Mum had knitted for me. Hand-knitted socks were everybody’s great joy in those days. Looking back on it now, compared to the modern socks they were awful.

But I put these socks on. They were new, I’d never worn them. We got on the Perth. And we’d been in the water all night, so we were sopping wet. And I hung them over a steam pipe when we went down below decks. Hung them over a pipe, and Crete was only like sixty miles away from Greece. It was very close. We were only a few hours on Perth and we were in Suda Bay on Crete.

And so I went to put these socks on, when we were going to get off the cruiser, and being hand-knitted things, I started pulling them on, and they got longer and longer and longer. They were still sopping wet, till I had them right up to my waist, nearly. I thought, “This isn’t any good.” So I got my bayonet out and went chop, chop. And about, up, just below my knee.

But then, they put us ashore and we marched up into the hills above the Malame Aerodrome behind Suda Bay, and the further we went and the hotter it got, the socks shrunk, and they only then, when they shrunk they only came half way along my foot. Didn’t even come around my heel. So I did all my time on Crete with half a pair of socks on. Your modern sock doesn’t do that.

Oh, I don’t know. I can’t remember. It was dark. I can’t remember. The thing gets a little vague over the years, but I don’t know how many it held even. It probably had fifty or sixty, if it was full. I don’t know. There’d probably been ten or a dozen, I don’t remember. But they would have gone further south. Down to Kalamata or one of the other evacuation beaches. Some would have subsequently have got off. Some would have become prisoners.

Because, the German tanks, you could hear the tracks, the tanks down the village street behind us, so they weren’t that far away.

It’s disconcerting. It’s disconcerting. Yeah. And you’re busy. You’ve got things to do.

The worst time, and I think perhaps anybody would say this to you. The worst time in a war is when you’ve got nothing to do. When you can’t do anything. When you’re active, it protects your nervous system somehow, if you have a job to do. One of the worst things in civil life, that an ordinary person would fear about

coming across a road accident, for instance, half a dozen people in various states of injury lying across the road, not being able to do anything because you can’t. You don’t know what to do. Whereas if you’re a doctor, you know what to do to help them. See, self-inflicted wounds didn’t occur in the middle of action. Self-inflicted wounds occurred when there was nothing happening.

Because when you’re in action, you’re too busy doing what you’re doing. And people who shot themselves through the foot didn’t do it while the fighting was on. Because, that’s why, in the British army, and probably all the armies of the world, I use the term British because the Australian army’s training,

whole system was modelled on the British army. And that’s why the army never leaves you in peace. When you’re resting you work twice as hard as when you’re fighting. You don’t rest when you’re resting. That’s bad for you, too, if you’re resting with nothing to do you sit down and you start thinking, and that worries you. So the army keeps you extremely busy when you’re resting.

I don’t think I could go back four days. I could perhaps go back twenty-four hours. We’d, we were, there was some regiments came out under their own officers. Some battalions marched out, you know, in their entirety. And marched on to the evacuation ships.

And came out as complete units. But those that had got mixed up were not under any direct command of anybody. It was largely a mutual consent thing. We, the truck drivers were by this time all exhausted, and you couldn’t move in the daytime

because you’d get shot up, so the travelling was nearly all done at night. And driving without lights at night. Even further up in Greece, coming across the mountain passes. You know, you went five thousand feet down onto the trees on one side and the same distance up the cliff on the other side. It was just a track cut around the side of the hill.

And we used to leave one man lying on the mudguard of the truck, on the fall-over-the-edge side, to watch, to try and see, because the driver couldn’t see in the dark. So the drivers were pretty well tired by this time, and we were on an ammunition truck. It was loaded with ammunition for the twenty-five pounder field guns. And the driver went to sleep, and this thing went off the road,

and ended up crashed into a ditch, and we were on the back, on all the shells, so we couldn’t get the truck out again, so we got back out on the road and started waiting to try and find another vehicle coming south, and we got into the, into a village near the, there’s a canal that cuts Greece across called the Corinth Canal.

And it’s a very, it has very steep sides, and in those days there was an iron bridge. That’s all that was over it. I think it was a railway bridge as well, but it was only a small bridge. And we’d stopped in a…the Germans had dropped paratroops on the canal, to seize the canal and stop any people getting further south, and we’d stopped at this village.

Well, we’d had one go at getting across the bridge without success, and we went back again and we were in the village. I don’t know why we were in a building. It was like a café, sort of thing. And we weren’t really contributing much to the war effort, I have to confess, and a British officer drove up in his staff car, with his batman,

or his driver, and he come in and said, “What are you men doing here?” in a very accusing tone and we explained we were a bit confused about what was happening and who owned the canal at that moment. And that we had this story about the paratroops had taken the canal, and he said, “Paratroops, what rot!” said this major, and he said to his driver, “Drive on,” whatever his name was,

and they drove across the bridge, so we followed them. And nobody was on the bridge at that time. Neither us nor the Germans. So we crossed the Corinth Canal that way and pottered on down to where the evacuation beaches were, further down, but it, like one day just sort of strung into another.

We just…I don’t have that clear a recollection of it. It’s only these odd little things, like this episode with this officer on the boat. That’s very clear in my memory. But it’s all a long time ago, I guess. But at Crete...

Ah, there were a couple of attempts to stand. One was at Thermopylae. Another was at the Serbia Pass. It was fortuitous that we got away, largely, I think. In the same way for that sense, that the British took all those three hundred thousand men off from Dunkirk. The Germans allowed us to do it.

No. I’d never fired it. But we did use them. On the boats, we used them for anti-aircraft. And we used to hook…they had an iron, one iron post. They were designed to fit on the back of Bren gun carriers. They weren’t meant to be carried by ordinary people on the road. And they had a kick like a mule.

And on the boats they used to hook them through the rigging. Where the rigging went up to the mast. The steel cables. Hook the feet through them, and then stand, the gunner stood there to fire the rifle, and two blokes stood behind him with their shoulder up against his back, and when the gun fired, the third bloke always sat on the deck. It had quite a punch in it.

But it wouldn’t have knocked out a motorcycle, hardly, I think. It had a piercing bullet, but it, I don’t think it was really very much good. It had an unusual action. Unusual for the British army. It was a bolt action repeater, but it had a mortar action. You didn’t have to lift the bolt to pull it back. You just pulled the bolt straight back. I don’t know how it ever locked itself in. I forget.

But it wasn’t ever meant to be carried by people. The bit of angle iron that went across the bottom of it had two holes in it, where you bolted it on to the Bren gun carrier.

Well, there were all sorts. We had all sorts of weapons. You took what you could get your hands on. There wasn’t any signalling to be done by then, except semaphore.

We didn’t have any gear. And in retreat, all you can do…we put in a certain amount of skilled effort in destroying the telephone system, the civilian Greek telephone system, as we came back. And other than that, we were just, we just used what we had.

I was with the Greek Division, the 12th Greek Division, on the Yugoslav border, looking down on Yugoslavia on the town, I think the name of the town is Monastir. And I can remember, there was a lot of shelling. The Germans were, started shelling,

and it would have been in the middle of the night, or sometime late at night, but no, I can’t remember, I can’t remember somebody saying, “We’ve got to get out of here.” I don’t remember how it happened. Obviously, there would have been some such instruction or we wouldn’t have gone, but no, I can’t remember. But I don’t remember any feeling of great dismay.

We still, we recognised that we were kicked out of Greece and Crete but we never, I don’t think we ever thought we were beaten. We were outnumbered and we didn’t have any air power.

I don’t know. There was a liaison party with them and I was in it.

I don’t remember these things. I know that’s where I was. It was an interesting thing there. Blamey, Blamey was up visiting the place. There was a wireless van at this place, anyway. So they had radio. It was probably the liaison party that had a radio,

because the Greeks, I don’t know if they came. Blamey was the senior officer. I don’t think he had a British general over him. I don’t know, now, but Freyberg, the New Zealand VC [Victoria Cross] winner. Freyberg, he was the commander of, I think it was the 2nd New Zealand Division, and Blamey came up to where I was,

and, I don’t remember, I have no idea why he was there anyway, but he was up there. He had some responsibility, I guess, and we had a Bren gun up on a hill. We were in a bit of a defile, a bit of a gully thing alongside the road, and the wireless van was in there, and I was up talking to the two blokes on the Bren,

and there was a flock of German aircraft came over and peeled off and started to attack, and they were Stukas and dive bombers and fighters, and I remember a bloke, a bloke who was up, further up, and he was counting these things as they came over. They were flying very low, close to the ground, and he was counting them as they came into view. And I can remember his voice. He was going, “Three, six, nine…” They must have been coming over in groups of three,

because he was counting in threes, and when he got up to twenty-seven, his voice was getting higher, and higher, and higher as the numbers went up, and he said, “I’m off,” and he started to run down, to try and get to some cover, and he ran past where the wireless van was,

and Blamey and some other officers were standing outside, and Blamey, when this bloke ran past, Blamey called out in the traditional military style, saying, “Stop running, that man.” This bloke, looking over his shoulder, and perhaps not recognising Blamey, he said, “Stop running, be buggered. There’s thousands of them.” And he kept going. Blamey only laughed, which I thought was a bit of a plus mark for him. But he blotted his copy book.

Blamey’s fall from grace started in Greece. I think. The rumour went, Blamey came out with the nurses. When they evacuated the nurses, a Short Sunderland flying boat came into Athens to pick up the nurses and get them out, before the Germans arrived. And Blamey, and I think Freyberg of New Zealand, also had been ordered not to be taken prisoner. To get out.

So Blamey left Greece in this Short Sunderland with the nurses. But not only did Blamey go. Blamey had a son in Greece who was a major, and he took his son with him. This was the rumour at the time, and we blamed Blamey for that. Not so much him, because he was under instructions. To be taking his son on this aircraft, we felt was wrong.

The official history records that indeed that did happen. That he did take his son out. Freyberg, who was also, we understand, ordered by his government not to be taken prisoner, Freyberg served on to the bitter end in Greece and subsequently took command of the defence in Crete. So Freyberg ignored the command and Blamey didn’t. Gordon Bennett, in Singapore,

was really chastised very severely, because although he was ordered to escape, he did escape, and his life was virtually destroyed by the criticism of him leaving his men.

Yes.

Well, he was visiting the Greek Division at the time. And I don’t know. It was just a coincidence. Things happen like that. If you read Rommel’s biography, Rommel had four or five officers shot alongside where he was standing, the German general was standing, he had several officers shot alongside him, and he wasn’t even wounded.

The…particularly in a retreat, people are mixed up, they’re everywhere. There are some organised units there, but a lot of it’s just disorganised rabble.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And the bombing. But little interesting things stick in your mind.

We weren’t actually on the road. We were on a hill up above the road, and in fact, my bloke who I still see occasionally, has always criticised me for losing my hearing in one of his ears, and I think that’s probably a bit unfair, but we were in a v-shaped slit trench and being strafed. Now, when the Germans bombed and strafed, you could count the rivets in the aircraft.

You could see the cap badge on the pilot. These people weren’t flying ten thousand feet up. They were just scraping the tops of the trees. So you could do something with light machine guns and rifles. Never seemed to be effective. If you had tracers, you could see the tracers pouring into the aircraft, but it just flew steadily on. In those days, and perhaps right through the war, anyway, our people,

the Americans and the British, had armour plate under the pilot’s seat, and up his back too. Up to his shoulders anyway. Had like a half inch of armour plate, so perhaps the bullets didn’t go through. But Norm always reckoned that I was, I was firing at this one aircraft that was coming round, and not thinking that he was around the corner of the slit trench, so I was concentrating

on drawing a bead on the front half of the aircraft, and when I fired the muzzle was just over the top of this bloke’s steel helmet, and his steel helmet was bits of burning cordite. And this didn’t amuse him at all, actually, Although as I keep pointing out I was carrying out my undertaking to oppose the King’s enemies. Which was what I was doing. He just should have kept his head out of the way.

So, yeah, in that one place I saw a New Zealand officer firing, in that particular place, firing with a .45 revolver at them. And I was probably standing looking at him with my mouth open with amazement that anyone would do it. He had a bit of a sheepish grin on his face when he looked at me, and he said, “Well, a man’s got to have a go. You can’t just stand there doing nothing.”

The bullets wouldn’t have got half way up to the aeroplane. But it’s good for your nervous system. And later on, when we, they started flying us around in Dakotas, in the windows of the Dakota they had a hole, they weren’t pressurised aircraft, there was a hole in them with a rubber grommet around, so that if the transport aircraft was attacked by fighters, you could put your rifle or your Bren gun out through this hole

and engage the enemy fighter. Not with much effect, I suggest, but in the early days of the war we, probably from the history of the First World War, we thought that it was a logical defence system on the ground, to engage enemy. Perhaps when they were made of wood and canvas and flew at a hundred foot.

And they had great difficulty to get a volunteer to be an aeroplane, because we’d be marching out along the road somewhere and just minding our own business, pottering along, and suddenly this bloke would come roaring out from the bushes going “zzzh, zzzh, zzzh,” with a wooden aeroplane on a stick and the officer then would say, “Aircraft right!”

and we’d bring up our rifles and he’d, “Load. Aim. Fire.” And we’d all fire at once, not with cartridges, but just be all “click, click, click,” everywhere. And then this bloke would rush across the other side of the road and come in, and it’d be “Aircraft left!” and then, this was a joke because you don’t that with real aeroplanes.

It was considered that we could, that troops on the ground could usefully combat aircraft in attack, by, it was literally by mass firing, that if everybody fired together, and that was why the orders were “Fire.” The instruction was given, “Fire,” so that everybody, this great storm of bullets went up in one lot, instead of just an individual bullet,

and so they had, somebody had devised this system of having a little wooden aeroplane on a stick that we could aim at, and somebody had to be found who would be the aeroplane and run around making this stupid noise and holding the aeroplane up, which was a bit embarrassing. I think one of the officer’s batmen eventually agreed to do it. And we’d be out on the road just marching along and tired

and not really thinking about anything and suddenly this bloke would come rushing out from behind the bushes, with an aeroplane on a stick, holding it up and going “zzzh, zzzzh, zzzh,” making a noise like an aeroplane, and the officer would then give the order, “Aircraft right,” or “left,” as the case may be. And we’d all draw a bead on this moving aeroplane and then he’d say,

“Fire!” and we’d all fire together. No ammunition, just using the rifle bolt. “Click, click, click,” everywhere, and the bloke would disappear over the other side of the road, and come rushing out once again. And it was, it would have been embarrassing, it wouldn’t have struck fear into the heart of the enemy. It wasn’t a practical thing to do.

In the First World War it might have been when an aircraft had only one machine gun, perhaps, anyway. But with these modern things, with eight guns on the aircraft, you wouldn’t have a hope in life of engaging them in that way. We did a lot of those things. They were real ‘Dad’s Army’ things, and even in training, we were in Seymour, which is sixty miles from Melbourne and yet we used to do trial packs.

Now, you know, to prepare us for an emergency, pack up to go somewhere. Where if we were going to go anywhere, we were going to go by boat and it was sixty miles down to the water from where we were. Why we had to do trial packs I can’t imagine, but the bugle would blow at four o’clock in the morning. It would be cold as charity, and we’d wake up, “Right, pack up ready to leave.”

So we’d get all our gear packed. Well, we had hurricane lamps. We didn’t have any light in the place, and all the bed boards that we had in the tents, they had to be taken outside and stacked up. All the palliasses had to be emptied of their straw and the straw burnt. We virtually evacuated the camp, and then they’d have scratched on the ground, on the parade ground,

was a railway station and a truck with carriages and doorways on it. And by the time it came first light, we’d have all our gear packed, everything was done, and we’d be lined up on this imaginary platform. And with all our gear. And the training officer would then blow a blast on his whistle, which was a signal to get on the train, and we had to put our rifles

with the bolt uppermost. We normally carried them, ah, with the butt uppermost. We normally carried them with the muzzle up, and they stuck up over your head. An experience had apparently shown that getting on to trains with glass windows, you were apt to break the windows if the muzzle was uppermost, and the butt only came level with your shoulders, so you didn’t break windows. So to get on this imaginary train, and we had to put our rifles with the butt uppermost, and we marched onto the train

and down the drawn passageways in it, to where the seats were, and put our packs under the seat, and here when the sun came up was the whole mob of us sitting there, in the middle of the parade ground on our imaginary train seats with our rifles between our knees. And the colonel would say, “That took too long.” And so we’d have to do it again. However, it must have paid out, because when we finally did leave,

although it wasn’t in an emergency situation, we didn’t break any windows on the train, I don’t think. And we did invasion training, in Cairns, before we did the beach landing in Balikpapan, and we didn’t have enough, there was one ship, the English ship, I think it was the Langyle [Glengyle?]. I think was the name of it.

It was a British Navy supply ship that had been outfitted as a troop carrier. And the concept on these things was that the assault craft, which carried thirty men each, the assault craft would be let down into the water and they circled the mother ship, and there were scrambling nets were dropped down the side, and you climbed down the scrambling net into the assault craft.

With all your gear on. Weapons, ammunition, and all your gear. Because there’d been a few blokes drowned with all the gear. You’re just falling in with fifty pounds of gear on, you went to the bottom, and we had a system of attaching our equipment, which I can’t remember now. We used a pull-through out of the rifle, which was a piece of string about a metre long so that you could have all your equipment fixed on you, but if you pulled the string, it was like a parachute,

it would release the thing. When you pulled this string, all your gear fell off. And this was to, if anybody, and some people did freeze on the nets, and couldn’t move. They were scared to move. Because it was, like, thirty feet up in the air. And you’d get down to the bottom of the net, and if there was a heavy sea running, the barge or the assault craft that you were going to get into,

would be up to your shoulder level one minute, and the next minute it was six feet below your feet. So you had to time your jumped from the net into this, and this was in the darkness, you had to time your jump so that you jumped as the boat was going down, not as it was coming up, because that doubled the shock of it hitting your feet. But we only had one ship and the whole brigade was down there. Three thousand of us doing this.

So we couldn’t all be on the ship at once. And those who weren’t on the ship, we had scrambling nets rigged up. Or the pioneers that built them. Just with posts in the ground, so that people could practice climbing down the scrambling nets. We didn’t have enough assault craft to do that either, so we, on the beach where the water came

just onto the sand, at the very high tide mark, or the tide mark, we had staked out with iron stakes and a rope around it, the shape of an assault craft. And I might say this is being done at a beach called Trinity Beach, which is about fifteen miles north of Cairns, I think. And it’s the…Cairns has got no beaches at all. Black mud, awful place.

But this was the first nice white sand beach that there was at Trinity Beach. So all the locals used to go up there at weekends and this was the swimming beach for people with their kids. Anyway, that’s where we were doing the invasion training. So we had these imitation boats drawn, or marked out in the sand, and then we, you sat, you held a platoon in the assault craft, and they were just like raised benches, running the full length, for and aft,

and the three sections of the platoons sat ten men, on each of these, one behind the other. The blokes down there, that section, and then the middle. And the officer was in the front. And the assault craft had an armour-plated bow on it to stop the bullets coming in. And when the assault craft hit the beach, the bow dropped down and you rushed up the beach and attacked, you see.

Well, we…the officer would be looking through the imaginary hole in the bows. With his field glasses. Watching the shore that we were approaching, and when you got to where the navy bloke, the man running the barge, assumed that the water was shallow enough to stand up in, we would be given the order.

‘Safe water’ was the meaning that you could stand in it safely. “Safe water, buckle your equipment and fix bayonets.” So this would be happening, and the officer in this imaginary barge, just a bit of string around some sticks, would be looking through his field glasses, and he would give the order, “Safe water, buckle your…” because we always left our gear unbuckled till we got off the boat, in case it got sunk, so you could get rid of your gear, “…and buckle your equipment and fix bayonets.”

So the imaginary front would drop down on the barge and we’d charge up the beach and attack this enemy. This is among all the people having their Sunday picnics, and it was somewhat embarrassing to have all these people gigging at us through this bit of white string, making an imaginary barge. But all those things, probably, well, they filled in the time.

Well, you bandage them all. We had vehicles mostly within a reasonable distance from where we were. In fact, very few people walked far in Greece, because the trucks were brought up and break contact in the middle of the night, and they’d be put on trucks and driven back to the next mountain range.

That applied until we got right down the south, and then a lot of it was walking. But the wounded would be bandaged up. We had ambulances running still. We had a hospital in Athens. When the whole thing broke down at the finish, most of the wounded got left behind, of course, and became prisoners. As they did on Crete. We had no way of getting them off.

To a second one, yes. that was, yeah, I wasn’t on Crete at the finish. I left, we came out on a Greek fishing boat. We went back to Alex [Alexandria] on a Greek fishing boat from Crete. And it took us five days to do, what is it, two hundred and seventy miles or something.

It was a very slow trip. There were some blokes came out of there in just little rowing boats. Finished up on the North African coast. It’s not that far across, the Med [Mediterranean Sea], at that place, really. It’s…I think the aircraft taking off from North Africa could see Italy by the time they got their altitude.

Not really terribly much. We were up in the hills up above the Malame Aerodrome. I didn’t really, I never went down to the other end, down Iraklion, was further down the island. We went then, across from,

across from where we’d been to Sfakia on the south coast. And that’s where the evacuation beaches were, on the south coast of Crete. I don’t know how far, we walked across there, but it’s about sixty miles or something. Crete’s, it’s a long island, but it’s not wide.

Well, different units got different orders there. I wasn’t, we were in a motley collection of people that have got stragglers, you know, virtually. And we had officers, and obeyed officers, too, but we were obviously, we weren’t going to hold Crete. That was obvious from the start, and any actions that were fought on Crete were only fought with the intention of allowing the evacuation to take place

in a somewhat orderly fashion. From the moment, from the first day, when the paratroops started landing, glider-borne troops, there was no way in the world, without air cover, we were going to hold Crete.

No, it was spectacular and, yeah, the paratroops were something.

They hadn’t learnt the game by then. They learnt a lot. They dropped them too high. In fact, Hitler, I understand, never allowed paratroops to be used again after Crete.

The all got clobbered before they reached the ground. They dropped them too high.

Not me personally, I wasn’t, no. I had a non-aggression pact with them at the time,

and they weren’t falling down on my head, and no, they did, but they did drop them from too high. Later on…the secret of parachute dropping is that you drop them so that the parachute opens just before the bloke’s feet hits the ground, and your timing’s got to be pretty good otherwise his feet hit the ground before the parachute opens.

You could see them coming down in large numbers.

Oh, yes. Yes. Well, most of them, there were a heck of a lot of them killed before they got to the ground. A lot of them never, once they got to the ground, were killed before they could get their gear off. See, the secret with it was that if

they bomb and strafe the place heavily before, they try to get rid of the anti-aircraft guns. They bomb and strafe the place heavily, but the bombers have got to go away before they start dropping the parachuters. And they drop them from very high up, so they were in the air, and they can shoot from in the air, with those short sub-machine guns that the German paratroops carried. The Schmeissers [German sub machine guns].

They could shoot, but not effectively, and they were in the air too long.

Well, I wasn’t within range of them at the time. They dropped them on the airfield. Not in the hills. They dropped them on the flat, and we were up in the hills at the time. It wasn’t out of any consideration or sympathy for them. I was not within range.

No, I don’t think so, Syria, I wasn’t that impressed, no, I think not. It was a place I lived for several months.

Well, it didn’t affect me in any way, I don’t think. It was probably. It was the first time I’d seen snow. I’d never lived in snow before.

And other than that, that’s interesting, isn’t it. I was just thinking. In all the stories that I’ve written about the war, I don’t think I wrote anything about Syria. That’s interesting, isn’t it.

It must be later than I thought.

Yes.

We used to get leave in Syria, but not, no, oh, when we came to North Africa, we had a couple of days’ leave in Athens, oh, in Alexandria at least. Alex was a…it’s the only place I’ve ever been in the world where a ship was held up in a dust storm.

We couldn’t sail from Alex because of the dust storm. You couldn’t see. But, no, we had a day, I think we had a day’s leave in Alexandria. I don’t think we ever had any leave in Palestine, when we came back from Crete. And we went to Syria. Syria, after the when the war was over, well, we must have gone on leave into Beirut. I can’t remember it.

The one thing that I do remember about Syria was, Yeah. That’s one thing that does come back to me. It was snow and freezing cold, and the drinkers used to go down to the local village and drink their arrack or booze, arrack it was, and they drank it like people drink beer, which you aren’t meant to do with those highly volatile spirits,

and they’d drink away and walk out into the freezing cold air and go clunk on their face. Well, there’d be a tattoo roll call at ten o’clock and there’d be two blokes missing. The rest of us had to get out of bed and go looking for these two that were missing. We’d go down the track towards where the Staminade [?] was and find them gone to sleep in the snow

somewhere under a tree, and you’d pick them up and they’d be cursing and swearing and abusing you, and end up being sick all over you, all over your overcoat and everything, and you’d get them back to camp and the cows wouldn’t even remember it in the morning. It was always us, the same people, who out looking for the same people because they were never there, they were. That’s one thing that does stick in my memory.

I used to think, “This is a little bit unjust.”

No.

No. I, when I was a kid, I used to, like at sixteen and I first got some money, pay at work, I used to have a packet of cigarettes. But I never took up smoking when I went away,

and the only time, as I was just saying before, coming out of Greece, when were coming off the evacuation beaches, and I’d roll a cigarette, because a hand-made cigarette, you can’t just light it like a tailor-made cigarette. You’ve got to pull and suck on it to get it alight. And I’d roll a few for wounded blokes and you’ve got to suck them a few times and put them in their mouth, and I got the taste of tobacco. I very nearly took it up again then,

but didn’t. I don’t have any moral objection to smoking or drinking, or chasing wild women, for that matter.

A lot. But here again, I’ve said before, in the seven years I was in the AIF, I never saw a fight between sober men. I never saw sober men lined up at a brothel, either. And honestly,

the girls in those places left something to be desired, to be as polite as I can, in appearance. They weren’t really the best looking girls in town, and I think, unless you were fairly well drunk, they wouldn’t have appealed to you very much. So I suspect alcohol was the cause of most of that. Japan was bad for that.

The incidence of VD [Venereal Disease] in Japan was quite high, so high in fact that they sent a political inspection party or something…I forget what they were…to come up and make recommendations to find out what the cause of the trouble. I could have told them what the cause of the trouble was, that the officers might catch VD off the toilet seats,

but the other ranks get it the ordinary way. And they didn’t need to have an enquiry in to why the incidence of VD was high. Blind Freddy could see why it was high.

Yes, yes. Much more. One of the reasons being, of course, that there was more available. You can’t do much in your two months up in the Western Desert,

there aren’t that many girls around. There’s not much, many, you don’t have much free time, if you spend a month getting up to the Yugoslav border and then go running back to the coast in Greece, or Crete, there weren’t that many. So the availability wasn’t there. And in Japan, of course it was, and we were at a school house in Japan, at a place called Onomachi, on the inland sea,

and the town was out of bounds, but there was a little village place two miles from where we were, and the blokes used to, where there was grog and girls, and the blokes used to go down there of a night. This wasn’t permitted and so they used to sneak out, and when this was discovered by the orderly officer,

going around and doing his rounds, and looked in people’s bunks and found rolled up blankets and an overcoat under the thing, instead of the bloke, they started…decided they’d have a tattoo, or they’d have a roll call, they went around at night, too, but they’d have an early morning roll call. They’d suddenly swoop on the place and we’d have this, and there’d be,

there’d be half of the blokes would be missing, or a lot of them were. And I don’t know if you know, but Patterson wrote, Banjo Patterson wrote a poem. I think it’s called Little Boy Lost or something like that, but it starts off with the line, “He oughta be home said the old man, without there’s something amiss. He only went down to the two mile and he oughta be back by this.”

And somebody’s name would be called on this roll call in the morning, there’d be silence, be called again, silence again. And at back at the mob you’d hear a voice saying, “He only went down to the two mile, he oughta be back by this,” which was the first recollection I have of Patterson’s poem. But the cunning boys then,

the system tried to stop them. And they, then the blokes started, it was admittedly, it was the cold part of the year, and they, we had a football team, and they’d get in their shorts and stuff and they’d rush down. This is after the tattoo roll call at ten o’clock and lights out. They go down to the village, spend the night there, and before dawn they’d come running back to camp in their shorts and boots, and they’d been out for a training run, you see.

And at one stage of the game, after this political thing. There was quite a wrangle in the press here over it, apparently, and they, it must have been a politician thought of the idea. No intelligent military officer would ever have thought of it. They lined all us NCOs up and said,

“From now on, you NCOs are going to be responsible for anything your men do.” And that if one of your blokes catches VD, you’ll be held responsible. And I had an old shirt with the stripes not that well sewn on probably, and I just ripped the things off and threw them on the floor. I said, “You might as well take them now. I’m not going to be responsible for what the blokes do when on leave, that’s ludicrous.”

They, anyway they never persevered with that. But I think, statistically, the figures were something like one in three. But they, you know, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. The same blokes were going back three or four times because penicillin had been invented. And other than syphilis, penicillin would cure the other forms of VD.

It was, it was a bit of an eye opener for me, Japan. I discovered that I wasn’t a peace-time soldier.

Yes, it was.

None. We had not training at all for jungle. Our training was desert fighting, literally. We had no training. Later on they developed a jungle training school, at a place called Kanungrah in Queensland. But we had none, and we were still in khaki clothes, and our gear was not designed for the mountains at all,

and the jungle was a bit of a, initially, a somewhat disconcerting place because it’s stygian darkness, you cannot see anything at all, and you get lost in it. My mate, we were one night, we, the guards were always…if there was a track where we were stopped for the night,

where we were in the defensive position, the Brens were always on the tracks. Because that’s where, the only place people could come with any degree of silence or safety in the darkness. And we didn’t have any highfaluting alarm systems. The most that we could ever have raised up would be a string across the track with an empty can and a stone in it. Hopefully someone would rattle the stone and you’d hear it, but we were only,

Dick and I were probably, well, less than five metres away from the track, and it was my gun, the Bren, that was on the track, and anyway, we were woken up to go on guard this night, and Dick was a heavy smoker, and he said to me, “I’ve got to have a smoke. You go down and let the others get their head down, and I’ll have a smoke and I’ll come down.”

Now, to have a smoke in the front lines, in that intense darkness, even a cigarette butt glows like a neon light, and so the thing was, they’d put the ground sheet over the hole and, we had tins of wax matches. Now, when you scratch, it’s not like an ordinary match that just goes, one stroke on the thing. You’ve got to go like this on tin

(indicates rubbing backwards and forwards). And even like five metres away, you could hear it quite clearly. Scratch, scratch, scratch. And suddenly the thing would flare up, the match, and every tree would come out in relief around you. And every time he drew on the cigarette, you could see the outline of every tree as well. Just because it was so dark. Anyway, I went down and let the other two blokes go off,

to get their head down, and I was sitting there and the time was going by and I thought, “The dirty cow’s gone to sleep and left me here on my own.” And I was pretty irate at this, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t leave the track and go back and get him. I’m sitting there fuming at the injustice of it all. And I heard something moving, about, probably twenty metres in front of me in the scrub.

And it didn’t sound like an animal, it sounded more like a people, and it was moving across my front, this sound, and then started to move towards me, and I switched the Bren from safety onto automatic and put my two grenades out on the hole in front of me, and it started to move again and I thought, “It’s about time I did something about this,”

and I was just about to throw one of the grenades, and I hear this hoarse whisper saying, “Cookie, where the bloody hell are you?” He’d had his cigarette. This was probably fifteen, twenty minutes. And he only had five metres to go, and he’d gone right out into no man’s land, in again, and he didn’t have the faintest idea which way was up. And that’s a dangerous place to be in, in the night,

but it was so, it was so dark. You’re completely disoriented, and it causes people to shoot out their own people sometimes. A bloke will go to sleep facing that way, on the perimeter, and wake up having rolled over and not realising it, mentally still being faced that way, and hear movement,

thinking the movement’s outside the perimeter, not inside, and if he’s a bit nervous, fire at the movement. Whatever he fires at sees the flash and fires back at it, and you can get the whole front line wake up. And people get killed. It’s unavoidable.

Oh, yes.

Yes, I, myself at Gona,

when we were at Gona, they wanted to bring the heavy bombers in. We couldn’t get passed the, the Japanese bunkers there were, although we had twenty-five pounder guns firing on them, they were virtually impenetrable by the gear that we had. And they were going to bring in the American, the four-engined bombers with five-hundred-pound bombs, and bombing from a fair height, they’re not that terribly accurate,

so, and our lines in some places were only thirty metres apart, so we broke contact and pulled back to allow the bombers to come in at first light. I think the honourable man knew we’d done this, because I think as soon as we left he sneaked over and got in our holes and ate all our bully beef. But we pulled back about a thousand yards to let the bombers have a go at this thing, now we pulled back in the night,

dug in, in the grass. I came on guard, got woken up, I don’t know, perhaps two o’clock in the morning. And I was just sitting there, knowing that the Japanese were a mile away nearly, I was just sitting there with my rifle across my knees, and suddenly a bloke stood up in the grass. The grass was about, nearly six feet high. A bloke stood up in the grass. It was a bright moonlight night,

and started to walk towards me. And I slipped the safety catch off and I’d drawn a bead on the centre of his chest, and I wasn’t going to fire at him. I never believed in this shouting, calling out, you know, “Halt!” That sort of thing, because if you’re half asleep and somebody yells out at you, your mind tends to freeze.

And I used to wait until they’re almost on the muzzle and say, “Who’s that?” in a quiet voice, and the bloke’s not rattled then. I’d drawn a bead on this bloke. And our rifles, you had two pressures on the trigger. You took up the first pressure and then, I don’t know the reason for the two pressures, but you took up the first pressure against the spring, but then the next slight touch on the trigger fired it.

And so I’d drawn a bead in the middle of this bloke’s chest. And I can see him now. He, it was a bright moonlight night, and he had lank black hair like the Japanese. But he didn’t have a helmet on. And I was just about to shoot at this bloke. Or I was going to say, “Who’s that?” But he mightn’t have answered me, and I would have fired then, and I heard a cork pulled out of a water bottle. A homely sound.

You know, funny how, just a little sound like that. It didn’t sound as though it was baddies. Although they have water bottles, too. But it sounded comforting. And this bloke turned around and walked back again, anyway, and disappeared. And in the morning we found out they’d pulled another mob back and put them in front of us. Neither of us knew the other was there.

Now, that was, that was bad management, because had I fired at that bloke, patting myself on the back. But in the circumstances, there are probably some people who would have fired at him. That would have woken the whole line up and we would have been firing at each other for half an hour before we realised it, and it wouldn’t have been anybody’s fault. But those who were dead would have been just as dead. And that’s part of the tragedy of the system.

He was, he always said he was in the Light Horse. He was an old bloke. Like my father, he’d obviously put his age down to get in, and he always reckoned he was a shearers’ cook. But I think the shearers would have killed him: he was a hopeless cook. And he had one saying. I’ve never heard anybody else in my life ever use this saying.

He used to talk about food. He used to say, “Get it into youse and sleep on bags.” I don’t really know quite what the meant, but it was expressive. And Hurley his name was. Herbert George Hurley. And Hurley was a drunk and he had another saying too, when he produced this food, he’d say, “Well, if youse don’t eat it today, youse’ll eat it tomorrow.”

And we did because that’s all there was. Up in North Africa, the Italians, they should have been able to beat the world. They had thousands of gallons of cognac and spirits and stuff in wooden kegs everywhere and Hurley had one of these big wooden kegs of cognac in his, well, it wasn’t a kitchen. The cooking in North Africa, in those days,

was done in a pressured kerosene, like an overgrown primus stove thing, that had a pressure, but it had a big tank on it, and the flame went, not up in the air, it went parallel with the ground, and what you used to do was dig a trench about that deep (indicated six inches), and stand some iron bars over it, and the cooker was put at the end of it and used to pump it up by peddling with a pump. But it was a very temperamental thing

that used to blow out quite easily, and the wind in the desert seemed to blow all the time. And underneath the burner there’d be a great heap of dead matches, and Hurley’s language would ought to have set the thing on fire anyway. And kept it burning. But it kept blowing out. Hurley had this keg, with the top stove in on it, this keg of cognac, and an old jam tin or something with the lid folded back on the top of it,

and he, when he got the fire going he’d dip this thing in the cognac, and he’d drink half of it and chuck the rest of it on fire. And you’d see this great sheet of blue flame would come up. And anyway, we’d got in, on the way up, we’d got in on an English ration dump at Sollum which was at the bottom of Hellfire Pass [Halfaya Pass], and it didn’t have a fence around it, this ration dump, and the only guard on it was a guard who road around it on a motorbike,

which you could hear miles away, and we got in there and got a lot of canned fruit out of this ration dump, unbeknown to the authorities, and we got some cans of oatmeal out of this thing. And Hurley said, “Oh, I’ll make some burgoos [thick stew],” you see, and we had no water. What happened, petrol came up in those days in four gallon, like twenty-litre cans, and there were two of them in a wooden box,

and that’s how petrol was stored, in dumps. And anyway, this Hurley decided…what had happened, when the petrol was used, the cans used to be used to bring water up to us. And the water, of course, tasted of petrol,

but Hurley’s decided he’s going to make us this porridge, you see, with the oatmeal, and he didn’t have any water. So he used the cognac instead of water, with the oatmeal, and he must have cooked it in a copper pot. because it all went green and slimy, looked awful. There was a howling sandstorm blowing and we were at the Italian border,

Fort Capuzzo, and Hurley, we were in sangers [shelter against sand], a sanger where you put a stone wall, about a couple, like 600 mm high, with a hole at one end of it and with a ground sheet over the top to keep the sand out of the thing. This gave you some protection from the sand, and also from the things that went bump in the night.

And so, Hurley had made this awful brew of burgoo, and he came, it had been, he wore a balaclava helmet, and it had been that long since he’d had his balaclava off that his beard was growing through the wool on the balaclava. And Hurley arrived at…“scratch, scratch, scratch,” at the edge of these…we were all in the sangers to get out of this howling dust storm.

This horrible apparition would appear at the doorway. Hurley with his bloodshot eyes, and this balaclava with the beard growing through it, and he’d say, “Have some burgoo.” You’d say, “No thanks, Bert, we’re not hungry.” And he’d say, “Oh, go on take some.” And we’d say, “No thanks, Bert.” And he’d drag the pot along though, it was half sand anyway, and he had a ladle there, and he’d scoop this up, and go “clonk.”

He had this aluminium Dixie. And just to get rid of him we’d take some. And off would go Hurley, and as he backed out the doorway, I can hear his voice now above the desert wind howling, “Get it into youse, and sleep on bags.” They sent him to a cooking school at Sarafan in Palestine, when we were in Syria, and when he came back,

we said, “Well, how did you go Bert? What did you learn?” And he said, “Well, they taught me how to make pies and pasties, all that. Who’d eat it anyway?” So we went back to the black meat and onions, or whatever it was.

Sorry.

Sorry, I am.

You’ve got to keep pulling me up.

No. But I’d go on for three days like this.

No.

We were, well,

apart from the…mostly it was warm fortunately. Otherwise it would have been pretty terrible, because you were out in the rain all of the time. And food was fairly scarce. In the mountains themselves, insects weren’t any trouble. We were up too high for mosquitos. You get up six thousand feet there, in the gap, and it’s hard going in that country.

It’s carrying a heavy load in the mountains was quite hard, and tiring. And the Japanese, nobody could do anything in the darkness much, really. What fighting took place, took place in the day. There were a few blokes bayoneted at night

where the Japanese came on them, sort of, almost by accident, on the track. But you couldn’t move large numbers of men through the jungle in the dark, and the Japanese, they starved to death, but they had unlimited supplies of ammunition, which they used like drunken sailors. They fired huge amounts of stuff, and there…a lot of it ineffective, because you can’t see. You couldn’t see, like the length of this room away, you couldn’t see so far through the jungle. Probably,

it’s disconcerting to be in a place that you can’t see. I was going to use the word nerve-wracking, but that’s a little bit strong, probably. The stygian darkness is something that we aren’t used to operating in. You can, with your eyes wide open, you can go like that (indicates hand in front of eyes) and you can’t see any sign of movement at all.

And the Japanese had a…it was felt that they were supermen, I think, and, indeed, to a large extent, this has a somewhat bad effect on morale, if you think the other side has got some superior power over you.

They outnumbered us by, I don’t know, probably something like six to one, anyway. But they mucked it up. The Japanese should have won that. They dropped the ball very badly. Fortunately. But...

They were very glad. The 39th Battalion was very glad to see the arrival of the AIF. I don’t remember of the 39th Battalion, which had quite a good record actually, that nearly all the officers in the 39th were AIF men. See,

the…Ralph Honour was a bloke who’d been in North Africa and in Crete. Ralph Honour was their colonel. He took over after, what a memory…the name of the bloke, Owen. Owen at Kokoda. Colonel Owen. I don’t know what his record was, but Owen and quite a few of his more junior officers were ex-AIF blokes who’d seen action anyway.

But the 53rd Battalion, which was the other militia battalion up there at that time, were…Logan, their colonel, was killed on day one, I think. And his adjutant, I think. The two of them were. And the 53rd, perhaps unfairly, I don’t know…

Anyway Potsy, our brigadier, Potsy sent them out, which he should have. In retrospect, Potsy should have asked for any volunteers who wanted to stay behind. He shouldn’t have indiscriminately just sent the whole unit out, but he did. They were people who didn’t want to be there. And the 39th, I think, more or less volunteered, although they weren’t AIF.

I think they were volunteers to go to New Guinea, partly. And the battalion performed very well. The 53rd didn’t. And it was probably badly officered and were a group of unhappy people. Their…they didn’t have the sobering influence of a few older people.

They were a lot of very young, a lot of us were young, but at the other end of the scale we had fifty year olds that stabilised us.

Well, the 53rd, I saw nothing of the 53rd at all. The 39th,

I probably saw the 39th, not, we weren’t there when they were at Kokoda. The 39th had come back to, nearly to Isurava, which is, well, it’s not a day’s march from Kokoda, but it’s approaching that. So, the 39th were fairly,

they were a bit shaken up by then, and not without reason, because the Japs were, they were pretty fierce Japs, those ones in 1942. They’d been at war since 1936, some of them. In China. And they were ferocious people. We never ever saw Japanese like it ever again. They were the cream of the system, I think.

Well, the 14th was forward at, when it took over from the 39th at Isurava, and Deniki. Well, Isurava actually, Deniki had fallen by then. The 1st Company of the 2/16th had come forward,

went off down the right hand side, to a place called Ioribaiwa, on the other side of Eyorua Creek. But only one company went down there under Frank Sublet. Sublet subsequently became the CO of the battalion. The rest of the battalion was strung back along the track. The 2/27th, the third battalion of the brigade was right back, not far from Owers’ Corner at that time,

so the brigade was strung out, right across the whole track almost. And the 14th took the brunt, or the 2nd/14th, took the brunt of the Japanese attack at Isurava. The 16th got into a bit of a yike [fight] down Ioribaiwa across the Iora Creek. And subsequently fell back,

till the whole mob fell back then to Myola. And from there, there was no action fought at Myola. There was, the next action would have been, don’t know, Templeton’s Crossing. Up on the hill above Templeton’s Crossing. And the next one coming back then would have been on Brigade Hill. And . . . .

I was a signaller then.

No. I was with a brigade.

Myola, just forward of Myola probably. The dropping ground. What was subsequently the dropping ground. Yeah. And from there, I wasn’t involved in the Brigade Hill thing at all.

Which is where, I guess we lost most of our people there. I think there were round about a hundred killed, ninety seven or something on Brigade Hill. And then we fell back then, to Ower’s Corner. Or back to Imita [Ridge]. Or initially to Ioribaiwa Ridge, and then 25 Brigade came up then.

And Eather, the Brigadier of 25 Brigade, having looked at the situation, said, “I can’t hold them here,” and sought approval to retreat onto Imita Ridge, the next ridge back towards Port Moresby. Where I think, the first, it was approved. His request to withdraw was approved, but probably

the only time in Australian military history, I understand the order was given then that, “You can retire to Imita Ridge, but you will stand there, and you will die there, there will be no further retreat.” And it wasn’t the sort of instruction that Australians were used to hearing. And nor were we told. But I understand that that was the order to Eather.

That “if you withdraw to Imita, that’s it. You don’t.” Well, that’s a bit of a…if that order was given, then our senior officers saw fit not to tell us about it. For a good reason. Remember that the Japanese were accredited in those days with invincibility. They were unstoppable.

I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that, but it was, they had never been stopped before. That was one thing. But then the Germans had never been stopped before either, by the time they reached the Channel,

at the time of Dunkirk. Nobody ever thought that they were unbeatable. But the Japanese were, see we didn’t hate the…we’d fought the Italians, the Germans and the French. And we didn’t hate any of them. They just had a different uniform. But we hated the Japanese. And I’ve often pondered on this. Whether it was because they looked different to us.

We didn’t know at that time that they were going to tie the wounded to trees and bayonet them. We’d read of the atrocities in China, probably before the war. But reading about atrocities in another country isn’t…quite bring it as home as much as when it happens to your own people. So we didn’t, in those early days, have any other reason to hate them, or fear them, more than we would have feared anybody else, but we did.

And it was an interesting thing to me, that going back in 1992, that the hatred came back again. And I don’t have a reason for it. I don’t know what it is. But I didn’t…it isn’t an Anglo-Saxon characteristic, to hate.

And we didn’t hate, like I say, the people in the Middle East. They had a different uniform to us. And strangely enough, you can shoot at somebody and not dislike them even. I don’t understand the logic of that. But you can. You’re there to stop something happening, rather than to kill somebody who’s the father of a young child.

Once you start thinking what you’re doing, you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t bomb a city from forty thousand feet knowing that your bombs were going to kill hundreds of women and kids. You wouldn’t pull the lever, would you? So I don’t know. Was it because they looked different? I don’t know the answer, but we did, it was hatred. Seriously, I mean.

And that is not an Anglo-Saxon characteristic. I don’t know the answer. Was it fear? I don’t think we were afraid of them, in that sense. It wasn’t fear that caused it. So it must have been this, that they had slanted eyes and looked different. But they do. In the event, we were right. They were beasts as it turned out.

Bayoneted. Yeah. Well that would have been at Templeton’s Crossing on the way back.

Don’t know. I don’t know the story to it. They were 3rd Battalion blokes, I think. They were,

I guess by that time, too, we were starting to hear stories of the results after Singapore, too. And the 2/22nd on, was it Ambon Island. One of the islands up there. I don’t know now. I’m a bit confused on when this started. It is not within our character to be people who hate.

But we did. And so much so that there were probably instances of people shooting unarmed people, which they shouldn’t perhaps have done. I don’t know.

Yes, but racism is not hatred. That’s not hatred.

That’s…they only came down out of the trees last year. That’s, you might despise them, but there’s a difference between despising somebody…and hating them with a consuming hatred. We don’t. By and large the Anglo-Saxon peoples don’t hate. They despise, or look down their superior noses at some other race. But they don’t hate them. They might laugh at them. It’s not a characteristic that we have. Or wasn’t.

No, I don’t think. No, I don’t think so. It might have increased your determination a little bit. It caused people

to realise that there was no point in being taken prisoner of war. That would be one thing that was certain. And a person who knows that they’re going to die, becomes a very dangerous person. In instances where the Germans would have taken prisoners and you would have been actually better off to become a prisoner of war. You mightn’t have got fed well, but you weren’t going to be shot either.

And the Italians the same. But the Japanese, I don’t know. We were starting to win by then. And we never ever struck Japanese ever again like that crowd in 1942, never ever struck such a ferocious group of people. As I say to the kids, because I’ve done a couple of interviews with the children

on events in New Guinea, that I’d like to think that I didn’t bring up my children to hate the Japanese, as a race. I don’t think I did. I think the hatred had gone. Probably before I went to Japan.

Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered trying to get that diary and the flag back, would I?

Gona, yeah.

Gona, it was, we had them hemmed in against the sea at Gona, and it was, they couldn’t go anywhere.

And they were. We got diaries from them later on that showed that, really, their high command had written them off. But they kept telling them that they were going to reinforce them. And it was some place, that Gona. I’ve never been anywhere like it in my life.

Really, the swamps were crook, and they didn’t bury, well, neither side would bury their dead. And the Japs, outside their bunkers, they’d just thrown them into heaps. And they were, like, six or eight high, when we finally got through. And I can remember when we went, the burial parties went out,

and that girl I was writing to in Japan, you might have read in her letters, she’s saying how noble of us it was to bury their dead. But we had to do something to live in the place. It wasn’t nobility that caused us to be one the burial parties. We had to. And we, well, you see a stack of people, like six or eight high, just dumped in a heap,

and the Japanese burnt their dead, and it’s quite possible that their intent in heaping them up like that was that they would subsequently burn them. But events moved a bit fast for them, and we had a terrible two or three days there burying them. In fact, because all the mangrove swamp, roots and stuff, you can’t dig much in that country.

One afternoon, a lot of them were on the beach, dead on the beach, and we buried them in the sand, at what we thought was above the high tide mark, and the tide came in in the night and they were all back on the surface the next day. It’s not a pleasant job, burial parties. But they broke out.

The Japanese, the last night at Gona, they tried to break out. Those that were left alive. And there were perhaps a hundred, might have been more than a hundred of them. And they were going to break out along the beach and go down and join their colleagues down on Sanananda Point. And would have done so, probably, too, would have got away with it, except there was a violent electrical storm,

with great sheets of lightening, and a machine gunner, one of our blokes on the beach, saw these people, and recognised them in the lightening flashes. A Vickers gunner. It was one of those belt-fed guns that had two hundred and fifty round belts in them, and you could hook other belts on them. And he cleaned up lots of them. But that was the night, the instruction went out then,

“Everybody stay in their holes, nobody get out of the ground. Shoot anybody who’s above ground.” And there was, it was a bit of a wild night, actually.

Well, I was there at Gona. We were just south of the village, and there was a lot of firing, and probably some of it was firing at anteaters, but that was, that cleaned up Gona, just about.

But it was an awful place. And the disease, you know. Fever. We didn’t get fever in the mountains. We came down, as soon as we got down on the coastal plain, we started to get malaria and scrub typhus. And dysentery was ever rife. It was a good way to lose weight, actually.

It affected, probably, anyone who was there, would never forget it. Perhaps anyone who was at Stalingrad wouldn’t forget it either. But it was a one off thing for me. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.

It was just a, it, coming at the end, too. Bear in mind, it wasn’t on day one. It was, sort of, we’d been up there since August, and it was early December when Gona fell. On the 8th December. It was a…it was an experience that you wouldn’t want to relive, I don’t think. Probably did. I think we came out of it, we all came out of it older people.

And I think I might have said before, that after the end of 1942, I never ever heard people sing on the march, ever. After then. Which they had done up until then, in my memory, when we were training. Never ever heard it after then. I think it took the singing out of us. I don’t know. Perhaps we were just getting older.

But it was, Lae, and the Ramu Valley Campaign, the Shaggy Ridge. Stuff like that were nothing. The Japanese weren’t as bad. They weren’t this hand-picked crowd. Or was it that, or was it that we realised that they weren’t supermen. I don’t know. It could be a bit of both.

And indeed they weren’t. We never ever struck Japanese like it. In Borneo, we were cut off for three days and two nights. We killed more of them than we had of us, in this one little place. No way in the world would have survived if they’d been the Japanese we met in 1942. No way would we have survived that. We shouldn’t have ever have got out. They outnumbered us five to one, and in this one little place.

And we shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it. They were different, and, so I guess, their armies were like most armies. The cream, the highly trained cream of the army, when it disappeared there was very little back behind it.

Well, it was a shambles. There were dead everywhere. And it was a very small area. It wasn’t as though they were scattered over a square mile or something. It was just a few hundred yards, and they were actually outside the bunkers, as the Japs were being killed and they just threw them out into these heaps,

and you’ve got to, in that climate, a dead body, lying down, will blow up to, probably, well, half a metre, almost, high, with the gases that form inside the body.

And there were millions of great big green and black flies, like our blowfly, only about five times as big, and the smell was terrible, and even the smell of the swamps is bad enough without all the dead in it, and it was, and in places there’d be, where our blokes had fought their way into a position and been driven out, there’d be some dead Japs on the ground,

and a couple of our blokes, and then more dead Japs on the top of them. The place was just an absolute shambles. It was…it’s not a thing that you would ever forget. And we had great trouble, the burial parties even had trouble there. I remember looking at one heap of stuff, of people

and we didn’t know where to start on this heap. We were going to bury them in a shell hole, and one bloke with us said, “Well, we’re gotta start somewhere,” and he grabbed hold of this fellow’s boot, you know, to pull him out, and the leg came off in his hands, you know. And it was just little things like that, I guess, that stick in your mind.

And you’d roll somebody over to bury them, and their skin, the skin, a lot of them, because they’d been killed at sea, I think, and had no shirts on, and their skin would come off and stick to the sand. And, I don’t want to go into the awful details of the thing, but it really was a frightful place. I never saw anything like it anywhere else. And I guess

it’s indelibly etched on the minds of those who saw it, I’m quite sure. And this isn’t only me talking. I think anyone else who was at Gona would say the same. It was just, I don’t know. We captured a few people there,

but in the main, those who were wounded killed themselves, and this was done by, if they were unable to move, by, with their bare foot, with a rifle held under their chin, and their bare foot, with their big toe, pull the trigger. They were wild men, in those days.

But that was the cream of the Japanese army. We were never ever to see soldiers like them again. And they were big men. There weren’t…most of the Japanese were quite small, not big in stature, I mean. And fierce.

Yes, there is among…all soldiers of course take souvenirs. Soldiers are sentimental people, by and large.

That they hang on to things. But apart from that side of it, it’s a military requirement that you collect any official papers and stuff, and hand them in. Every unit has its own Intelligence Officer, and the Intelligence Officer goes through this stuff and decides what he should send back.

Partly, of course, this is a means of identifying the regiments that you’re up against. And so, as a matter of course, official documents and stuff generally were handed in. and I’d, one of the blokes we buried, I got out of his pack, I went through his pack he had on him, and I got a diary and a flag

out of his pack. And I handed those in, but the Intelligence Officer already was swamped with stuff anyway, and the flag he didn’t want anyway, and most people who got those flags hung on to them. I don’t know the full story of the flag, but we understood then, anyway, that the flag, it was just the Japanese flag,

the Rising Sun in the middle of a white silk square, about sixty centimetres square probably. And round the red circle in the middle was the, a lot of Japanese characters written on there, which we were told, anyway, were good luck charms. If they are, they don’t work, but that’s what we were told.

Well, the diary was just a small book, probably, I don’t know, probably about a hundred millimetres by a hundred and twenty or something like that. Quite a small book. Perhaps twenty-five millimetres thick. He’d, there was quite a lot of writing in it, which was of course Japanese, so I couldn’t read it,

but anyway, the intelligence people said to me, “Well, we’ve got enough information. We don’t need that.” And the flag I could have kept anyway. I took them home with me. I left New Guinea about the end of January 1943 and went home on leave. And I took them home and I left them there. They were just souvenirs. I guess that’s all I thought of them as,

and when we went to Japan, after the war was over, and I was…one of the places we guarded - and the army never tells you why you guard a place, they just say, “Well, you’re on guard here.” And one of the guard posts was the Yasukuni Shrine, which is the shrine where all the spirits of the Japanese killed in war go.

And all the attendants of the shrine were all old soldiers from way back. And not soldiers from our war, but from a lot earlier, because they were old men. And one of them could speak English, and in talking to him one day, I told him about this flag and the diary, and he said, ‘Oh, the Japanese would place great store in having those.

The relatives of the man would place store in having them in their possession.” And it hadn’t occurred to me before, that perhaps it was wrong of me to keep them. But I could see then that I ought to get them back. The, perhaps I, I don’t know, my very strong feelings against the Japanese were obviously starting to soften by now.

Anyway, I thought, “Well, I’ll get them.” What I should have done, in retrospect of course, was write home to Mum and say send them over to me, over here, while I was there. Although their records mightn’t have been functioning too well at that time, the Japanese, to enable them to do anything. But years later, I made an attempt,

when we come to Canberra from Melbourne, I was going past the Japanese Embassy, to and from work, and I thought, “Oh, blow it. I’ll take them into the Japanese Embassy.” And took the diary in, which they could have read, and they didn’t really want to know me. They were most unhelpful. I don’t know why. But they just sucked in their breath through their teeth, and they weren’t at all forthcoming in helping me.

So I let the thing drop again. And then we had, years later, had a girl from Thailand, a student living in Australia, was living with us. She was attending the ANU [Australian National University], the university here in Canberra, and she was learning Japanese as a part of the course she was doing, and her instructor was a Japanese national.

And she took the diary into him, and she was able to read it, of course, and ascertain the soldier’s name. Probably address as well. But that year was probably 1974/5. Somewhere about that time. Our prime minister, Malcolm Fraser was prime minister at the time, he was going to Japan, and some Japanese journalists

had been brought out to Australia to accompany him back and report on whatever journalists report on. And the Japanese instructor from the ANU brought them out to our home and we sat down and talked about the thing, and I was able to, well, I gave them all the information that I could,

and they left taking the flag and the diary with them. And I really didn’t think I’d hear from him, or the two articles, ever again. Because it seemed a pretty forlorn hope to find the family. But in the event, a bit later on I got a letter from the daughter-in-law of this soldier’s sister. That’s a bit complicated,

but she’d written and she wrote excellent. Very, very good letters that she wrote. And I can’t go into them in detail here, because they were too complex, but she was very grateful. Or the family was very grateful. And she told the story of this man’s sister who’d…she and her brother,

the one who’d been killed in New Guinea, had been orphaned when they were young and had a tough life, and then he went off to the war and didn’t come back. And the Japanese, with the ancestor worship concept, the Shinto religion is…they place great store on having something that belonged to the deceased people at the time of their religious ceremonies.

And so she and I wrote for quite a while to each other, and obviously, I couldn’t read Japanese. The letters she wrote me I sent into the instructor, the man at the ANU, who put them in English for me and did the same with the answers that I wrote…were taken in and he put them, translated them into Japanese.

So we corresponded for quite a while, and then, my wife and I were going to England and decided to go to Japan. Or I said to my wife, “We might go to Japan on the way because it’s a pretty place.” And it occurred to me then that perhaps we could look these people up, and I thought that probably mightn’t be a good idea. Because if it had been me that had been killed,

my sister wouldn’t really have welcomed a Japanese soldier into the house very much. And, but in the event anyway, I wrote and suggested this, and the girl I was writing wrote to back and very warmly accepted the idea and we arranged to meet. We decided then we’d go via Japan.

We flew Japan Airlines and go via Japan and we’d spend a few days there and we’d go down and see them. They lived in the mountains, not far from Hiroshima, and we arranged to meet. There was an Australian student at the time who was teaching the Australian language at a university in Hiroshima, and she was going to act as interpreter for us.

But when we got to Japan, there was a rail strike, and we couldn’t get down to Hiroshima. There was no way of doing it, and the couple came up. The girl that I’d been writing to, the girl and her husband came. We went to Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, and they came up to meet us there. So we saw them there. But the old lady, the soldier’s sister, was not fit enough to travel, and so we didn’t get to see her.

But I carried on a correspondence with the Japanese girl for a year or so and then it just dropped off, and I haven’t been in touch with her since, I don’t know, 1978, or something like that. So I don’t know what’s happened. She might…I don’t know. She had two sons then, and they’d be old men now.

I don’t know. I’d come to the conclusion in talking to this attendant at the Yasukuni Shrine that the right thing to do was get the things back to the family,

and I was fortunate to be able to do it. I have copies of pages out of the Japanese newspaper. It was quite…the story was quite well known right across Japan, when we were over there. It was written up in a lot of the papers, and so much so

that an attendant on one of the buses we were on, on a tour bus, I mentioned it to him, and, I don’t know how the subject came up, perhaps he mentioned it, and I said, “Yeah, well, that was me.” And at which he bowed with great reverence as I got off the bus. I guess they, the Japanese saw it

as a very noble thing to do, but I guess it didn’t seem that way to me. I didn’t place quite the same accent on it as they did. I didn’t see that I was doing anything marvellous, I think. But it was appropriate, I thought, to get them back.

About Forde? What the poem itself, you mean?

Well, Forde, Frank Forde, was the Minister for the army. At that time of the war. And he’d, I don’t think perhaps he even had a right to wear a scout uniform. He’d certainly never been in the armed forces, and he came up to New Guinea…

I don’t know why he came. It was probably September 1942, when the Japanese had got as close to Port Moresby as they were ever going to get, which was at Ioribaiwa Ridge, which was about fifty kilometres by air from Port Moresby. Very close. And indeed, if Horii, the Japanese General, wanted to make one last thrust at Port Moresby,

from Ioribaiwa Ridge, and his high command stopped him. The high command was in fear, this is information that’s come out since the war, they were in fear that there was going to be an air-borne/sea-borne landing on the north coast of New Guinea which would cut them off. So Horii was ordered to retreat from Ioribaiwa Ridge,

much against his wishes. But fortunately, because had he kept on pushing, he may well have broken through and taken Port Moresby, I think. But whatever it was, it was a fairly critical time in Australia’s history, I guess. Horii, the Japanese General who was subsequently drowned crossing the Kumusi River on the way back,

he probably would have succeeded in breaking through. But why Forde, the Minister for the Army in the federal government, I don’t know why Forde came up there. He was a civilian, and he wasn’t a very impressive figure, probably. But he came up to a place called Owers’ Corner, which was the start of the, what subsequently came to be called the Kokoda Track.

It was as far as vehicles could go, and Forde, Forde was, they tell the story of Forde there. He, talking to an engineer on the track…I’ll just tell this little story, because I don’t think it’s a true story, but it’s a humorous one anyway. And the engineer,

they were corduroying the track, that is, they were putting split logs over the mud holes, so the vehicles, only four-wheel drive vehicles, jeeps and stuff like that, could get over it. An ordinary vehicle wouldn’t have done. And the engineer was working, one of our engineers, working on the track, and he came up to him, and said, “What are you doing here?” and the engineer said, “Building a road of course. What does it look like?” And Forde said, “Are you in the AIF or the militia?”

And the engineer said, “AIF, or course,” and went on working. And Forde asked him some other question, and the engineer said, “Look mate, you mightn’t have got any work to do. I’m busy. Get on your way and stop asking me stupid questions.” And Forde said, “Do you know who you’re talking to?” And the engineer said, “No, mate. I’ve never seen you in my life before, and if I never see you again, that’ll be too soon.” Forde said, “I’m Forde, the Minister for the Army.”

At which the engineer straightened his back and he took off his hat, “Well, I’m sorry I spoke like that, Padre, because you blokes are doing a good job up here.” But they wrote a poem. The poem appeared in Smith’s Weekly. About Forde’s visit up to the start of what subsequently became known as the Kokoda Track. And I don’t know who wrote the poem, but it starts:

\n[Verse follows]\n

A bunch of the Japs were whooping it up down the old Kokoda Track,\n

And things are looking bad for us, with the boys all falling back.\n The call went out for a superman to halt the enemy hoard,\n And the message was flashed to Canberra, ‘Send Fearless Frankie Forde’.\n Fearless Frank flung down his pen, and he donned his old topee,\n And he jammed his briefcase full of reports, and up the trail strode he.\n

Up through the mud and rain and slush he strode on that fateful day,\n

Till he reached the point where the enemy were a short five miles away.\n And he stood on the track with his hat turned back, and he boldly shouted, “Shoo!”\n And all that stood twixt him and the foe was a fighting brigade or two.\n That was the end of things for the Japs, the men who fought there tell,\n For the infantry heard the sound of his voice, and each man muttered, “Hell.”\n And they closed with the sons of Nippon, and sent them reeling back\n In mad array, and sad dismay, up the old Kokoda Track.\n

“It was better to fight,” said the Infantry, “than to stick around there and be bored,\n

By a bunch of reports and a two-hour speech, from Fearless Frankie Forde.”\n

So that poem appeared in Smith’s Weekly. I don’t know if Smith’s Weekly’s still going, but they’re a very, very, a very, very staunch newspaper in the war the war. A very patriotic newspaper.

I did keep a diary. The last entry in my diary was the day that we contacted the Japanese at Gona. And that was the last, that was the last that I wrote in it. And I never ever picked it up again after that.

I don’t know. I don’t know. In fact, from memory I think it was the 19th of November, 1942. And that was the last entry in it. So if anybody ever comes across it, they’ll think I wasn’t here the next day.

But I kept a diary, when I went back there in 1992, on the fiftieth anniversary of the raising of the flag at Kokoda, I wrote, I kept a diary of my trip over there, and it was an interesting,

an interesting thing to go back over that same. And even at Myola, I picked up a few of our rifle cartridges, that…when we’d blown up the depot. We had quite a lot of supplies at Myola. It was the nearest dropping ground to the forward areas, at that time, and they didn’t, we didn’t have any jazz with parachutes and stuff.

The thing was just emptied out the side of the aircraft. And the aircraft, I guess the minimum speed on the Dakota was probably a hundred miles an hour. So everything hit the ground at a hundred miles an hour, plus thirty-two feet per second. Or whatever the falling rate is, which was fairly disastrous.

In fact, we had, we had quite a few people killed there with three-inch mortars. The three-inch mortars, they had a safety wire in the bomb that stopped, the bomb was activated when it hit the ground, by a ball and a spring. That the ball hit the firing pin which caused the bomb to detonate, and if the bomb fell going backwards, it hit the spring and bounced off the ball, it hit the spring, bounced off the ball and fired the bomb. Anyway,

the bombs were ten-pound bombs. They were…substantial punch in them. And, but what happened, they had a sheer wire in them that locked the ball in place, so that it couldn’t strike the firing pin accidentally while it’s in transit. But what they hadn’t realised was that, when you dropped this thing from the air, the shock of it hitting the ground broke the sheer wire.

The ball was then loose in the tube that it ran in, and the next shock it got, it went off. Because when the sheer wire broke, if the bomb fell forward, going as it would normally fly, the ball hit the firing pin and fired it. If it fell backwards, it hit the spring, bounced off the spring, and hit the firing pin. So whatever way, it fired.

The dropping of the bomb broke the sheer wire, so the next shock the bomb got…

So the thing was, the next shock the bomb got, which it did, when it was dropped in the barrel, and the charge fired, around the fins, the thing went off in the barrel and cleaned up the crew. We had a few crews killed there until they realised what had happened.

And it was in a very primitive stage, the dropping in those days. And interestingly enough, in 1992, when I was up there, I found one of these three-inch mortar bombs, in the lake bed at Myola. And, but the cartridges, I picked up these rifle cartridges. For some strange reason, the bullets were all missing.

Just the cartridge case was there. They hadn’t been fired. Now the bullets were lead, but they were coated with copper nickel coating on them. Which is a ‘rules of war’ thing: you don’t use soft lead bullets. And that mightn’t be the only reason. But they were clad with a harder metal than lead

to stop them expanding when they hit you. But these rifle cartridges. I’ve got a couple of them in there. The cordite still burns at the same rate that it would have burnt when they were brand new. And that’s fifty years later in that jungle. And you could scrape the packing out, the seal that went around, and the cordite still lights quite well. And I’ve no doubt the cap still works in them, although the brass is nearly all eaten away.

I don’t quite know how to answer that.

Don’t know. I couldn’t put a single event into it, I don’t think. I’d been, during the war many times, when I didn’t expect to be alive the next second,

but to put a, put a stature on it, or to say this was the worst, I wouldn’t like to put a figure on it, I don’t think. Like I was saying, perhaps earlier, that fear is a strange thing. I’ve been,

and this is perhaps tiredness as much as…incidentally, if you’re extremely tired, it dulls all sensations, even fear, if you’re tired enough. It doesn’t destroy the desire to live at all, I don’t think, but it must Tiredness must dull everything that you have, all your sensations.

So much so that if your life depended on it, you can’t stay awake. I’ve seen people put the tip of the bayonet under their chin, so that when their head goes down, the point sticks into their chin, because you just cannot stay awake. Your body won’t let you stay awake, it doesn’t matter what the results of going to sleep are.

I’ve seen it in several places.

I’ve seen it, certainly the most recent, probably, was when we’d taken the guns behind the Manggar Airstrip in Borneo. And we were cut off for seventy-two hours there, and we literally didn’t really sleep much in that time. But you just cannot stay awake. It doesn’t matter how hard you try.

Your body will not let you stay away, whatever depends on it, and tiredness is a thing over which you have no control. If you can, you can go, like the truck drivers on the interstate runs now, take Benzedrine, and these sort of things will keep you going for a bit longer. But your normal ability to stay awake is very limited.

It doesn’t matter what the results of going to sleep are. And you can…

Well, you sleep wherever you are. On Kokoda itself there was no battle, but in the mountains back from Kokoda,

some of the country is so steep that the only way you can sleep is by wrapping yourself around a tree. Otherwise you’d roll down the hill. It’s one thing in a weapon pit. In a weapon pit you’re dug in, and you just put your head down on the side of the weapon pit and hope to get some sleep. And it’s uncomfortable. But you can still sleep.

And we were young, I guess. I wouldn’t necessarily like to do it now.

Yes.

Well, we’d been, nearly all of us had fever, had malaria and dysentery and stuff up there,

and we’d lost a lot of weight, and I think I was home on leave, probably early February, and I was only home a week and I went into hospital in Melbourne with malaria, and on the way back to Queensland, perhaps a month later, I got another attack. And most of us did that - attacks. Probably in between the end of the January, and we came back from

January ’43, and in July ’43, well, that’s only six months. Most of us would have been in hospital three times in that six months, and the course malarial treatment was seventeen days. So in that six months, we were, nearly all of us, would have done two or three stints in hospital, of these seventeen-day periods, recovering from it.

We really weren’t well enough, when I look back on it. We weren’t well enough to go back in July. We shouldn’t have been sent back. And I don’t know why they did it. However…

Oh, sometimes they do. Oh, no, not in that sense. You volunteer to do what you’re told. There are instances, when something special is done,

and you, see, that was the section leader. I ended up a section leader, but the section leader’s job was to say, not “You two men go and do it.” It’s “I want two men to come with me.” It’s…that’s what you’re called, a section leader. A platoon sergeant says, “Do that.” An officer says, “Do that.”

But very often, in the infantry battalions particularly, the officer will lead the attach, or the platoon sergeant will lead the attack, but they’re not required to. But the type of people we had, most of our junior officers had been platoon sergeants before, and been selected and sent to officer’s training school and come back.

Very seldom brought them back to their own battalion. Mostly sent them to another battalion, for obvious reasons. Sergeants and above lived separately in camp. Lived separately to the men. The corporals lived with the men, in the same tent as them. So they were, sort of a,

I don’t know what you’d call them. They weren’t officers, but they lived with the men but they were still responsible for them.

I was still a private. I studiously, as did my mate, Dick Hill, studiously avoided promotion. It never appealed to me at all, and indeed, both Dick and I, our platoon commander had been killed,

the sergeant had been killed and two of the corporals, in Borneo. And the Company Commander called Dick and I in and said, “I’m going to put you in charge of 7 Section, and you in 9 Section,” make us corporals, you see. We said, “No, the war’s nearly over, if we split up our good luck is going to go with it. We’ll stay where we are.”

And I reminded Bob Thompson, the Company Commander, I reminded him of this in Sydney when I met him at that Sydney Swans thing last year, and he said, “Well, go away and think about it, because if you don’t take it I’ll bring in somebody else.” And he doesn’t recall this, but I have a recollection of him saying, “I’ll bring in Jackson from 16 Platoon. You’ll fight under him.” And Jackson was as silly as a wheel, and anyway,

we went out and talked about it, and said, “Oh, all right, we’ll take it.” So we did, but that was my exalted rank – ‘section leader’.

Well, we all were. We all were.

Yes, we were back there too soon, really, for our good, and it wasn’t, the Lae and the Ramu Valley Campaigns weren’t anything like as strenuous as it had been on the Kokoda Track.

Or in the swamps on the north coast. Lae, it was a different breed of Japanese. Their high class, first class troops had gone, and they weren’t the same soldiers at all. They were still fierce, but not as fierce. Perhaps we didn’t fear them as much. I don’t know.

No, I don’t know. No, no. They’d changed. They didn’t have the same gear. They didn’t have the same ferocity. They paid, no, in the early days, they had no regard to losses at all. They just didn’t bother about losses.

Well, probably, the battles that Isurava, in the first instance, when they attacked up from Kokoda, when the 39th was at Isurava, and 21 Brigade had come over with the 2nd/14th in front. At that stage of the game, they just tended to come over in waves,

regardless of the cost. And it’s an effective thing, if it works on day one. But if you keep doing it, you’re losing too many. (Interruption)

They tended to swarm up in large numbers, and had…it was an interesting thing, that when 21 Brigade went up there

initially, in August 1942, went up there, the senior officers of the brigade, wanted to take the Vickers machine guns, the water-cooled guns, up and they weren’t allowed to. They wouldn’t let them take the Vickers. I don’t know why that ever was so, but, because we certainly took the Vickers

when the 25th Brigade went back, on the way back after the retreat. We took the Vickers then. The Japanese had a gun which we called the ‘Woodpecker’, which was, it was called the Woodpecker. A very slow rate of fire. It was an air-cooled gun, but a 7.62 calibre. It was probably

about the same calibre as the .303, I think. But it was a heavy gun, and water cooled. And it had fired a strip, a brass strip that had thirty rounds in the strip. But it could fire continuously, and it did, whereas our Vickers gun belts were cloth and held two hundred and fifty rounds, I think.

We didn’t have, the Brens were like thirty rounds in the magazine. It’s not the same as having a gun that can just sit there and fire continuously. And they wouldn’t allow them to take the Vickers when 21 Brigade went up.

I was in the mountains at that time, with the brigade, back with the brigade at that time, yeah. I forget what I was saying.

Oh, the tactics, yeah. The tactics. Well, the Vickers would have put a real stop to that.

Yeah, somewhat disconcerting. It’s difficult to be up against an enemy who doesn’t appear to care whether he lives or dies. And that was the Japanese of those days. Yeah, it’s, yeah.

Mmmm. How to put it. I don’t quite know how to answer the question,

or how to deal with that. It’s alarming in a sense to think that somebody is so confident that they swarm over in a great mass like that. In fact, it’s counter-productive, very often, to the person who attacks in that way.

A thing that we never ever did. None of this rushing shoulder to shoulder stuff. It was a thing that we never did. From our earliest training it was, “You don’t ever do.” And indeed, the Japanese were, they were a people who, probably,

who didn’t care whether they lived or died. They certainly gave the impression of being so. It’s very difficult to combat somebody who behaves in that fashion.

You’re shooting at them, hopefully.

Yeah, yeah. Largely you are. This happens in jungle fighting. It’s not like in the desert, where you can see people half a mile away. This is like from complete concealment, twenty-five metres in front of you, suddenly leaping into the open. It’s a thing that happens and is over in seconds, almost.

It’s, it’s not a time to be coldly deliberate about your actions. Not a time that one uses sights too much. The tendency is rather to fire as much as you can and hope, but it happens so quickly. It’s not…the Japanese were noisy people.

They would blow bugles. And, I suspect they had cheerleaders. People who stood behind trees and urged them on. I say stood behind trees, because they seemed to be able to keep urging. And I don’t know if they were ‘professional urgers’ - for that express purpose - but they were a fanatical people, the Japanese.

Hmmm. Well, it’s bedlam. If people are firing around you, you…I don’t know.

Not a thing that your memory seizes on, obviously, because I’m having trouble answering the question.

Oh, they do make a noise, they yell out. As indeed, we were always told to - in an attack - to yell and shout and make noises and terrorise the other side.

I don’t know. I don’t speak Japanese. No, they were, they were…I don’t, it’s all, it happens fairly quickly, like I was saying to you. My recollection of that side of it is hazy. But an extreme amount of noise is one thing that you do get,

and it’s too...

Hmmm.

I don’t quite know how to answer that question. I guess, I don’t know. It’s a furious few seconds,

and I can’t really answer that question in an intelligible way, I don’t think. I’m sorry. I don’t find myself waking up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, thinking about it. I’ve never suffered from that recall of those situations. Perhaps it…I don’t know. I’d like to help you.

Yeah. I don’t know. If you asked a footballer how he was affected in a game at some particular time, he probably couldn’t answer you either.

Well, after it you might think. Twice in, and it was both nearly when the war was ended. Well, no. Once, the first time it happened to me, I’d had a lot of tropical ulcers on me, and the doctor had been scraping these things out, and I had an abscess under my left arm, I think it was,

and he cut this out without any anaesthetic, I think, and I remember my breathing muscles stopped working, and I was lying on my back, and I looked down and I could see my chest. And I could see the muscles moving. I could see the muscles moving here but I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe in.

Something, and whether this was from the shock, I don’t know, but after, when we’d been cut off in Borneo, not long before the war ended, for these three days nearly, and with very little sleep, and when they pulled us out for a rest, and I woke up this night with this same feeling of inability to breathe. That I’d want to breathe but the muscles didn’t allow me to breathe,

and I assume that this was, this was some form of shock thing. This… it’s quite an alarming experience, actually. I guess people who are asthmatic live with it their whole life.

Well, we, my battalion, or the whole brigade, the 21 Brigade, when we landed we turned right and went up the coast, 25 Brigade turned left and went down towards Balikpapan township.

Yeah, it was, actually. It was an interesting thing. The big ships, HMAS Hobart was there, a cruiser. It was an Australian cruiser with the American squadron that supported the landing. And the big ships were, I don’t know, on a smaller scale, like D-Day in Europe, you know, where there must have been thousands of ships,

but they seemed to be right across the horizon, and when we started to run into the landing. These warships, all firing on pre-determined targets inland, and the LCI, the Landing Craft Infantry, that they mounted rockets on, like the rockets the Russians used, called the Stalin Organs, which fired a bank of eight rockets or something, un-aimed.

They just fired the rocket and it landed and exploded. Had a warhead on it. And these things ran in between the landing craft, ran parallel with the beach, in between the landing craft, and deluged the beach with rockets. And the war ships were firing on road junctions and other things inland, presumably. When the assault craft started to run in for the beach, it was just breaking first light,

and one lone Japanese gun, probably about a 75mm gun, started firing at the landing craft. And you could see this great column of water go up in the middle of the landing craft, and we looked back at the ships out on the horizon, these war ships, and they all stop firing. You could see the flash of this gun from a hill behind Balikpapan township called Signal Hill.

You could see the flash of the gun when it fired. And all these ships, with guns pointing everywhere on, on different targets around the place, suddenly swung around on this one hill. And the whole hill disappeared in a cloud of dust and orange flame. I don’t know what happened to the Jap, but he didn’t fire again, so he either thought better of it, or else they cleaned him up.

But he was, we hit the beach there, and they lectured us about that. That was going to be a tragedy, that Borneo landing. There was a ditch that ran…the Japs had, I suppose the Japs had dug it…an anti-tank ditch. Just inland from the beach. And because it was flat ground, when the tide was in, the ditch was full of water, or contained a lot of water.

And according to the air reconnaissance, they had oil tanks all along this ditch, and their ploy was to wait till the first wave got ashore and got past the ditch in their attack, and then they were going to flood the ditch with the oil tanks and set it on fire, and cut the first wave off, behind this wall of fire. But that, the oil tanks had all had holes poked in them by their air force with their guns,

and there wasn’t any water in the tank ditch. But what we had to do, everybody coming off had to carry supplies for the heavy weapons. Mortar bombs and stuff like that. As you jumped off you grabbed a handful of this, so you had not only your own weapons and all your gear, but also carrying an armful of mortar bombs.

In fairness to the system, as soon as we got past the anti-tank ditch, we dropped them and went on. But the warnings, or the advice, that we got, the sand table things that we did on the boat, of the attack, proved hopelessly inaccurate. The, we, our job…

we had to cross a river and put in an attack across, and each man, each one of us carried a length of rope which had a loop in one end of it and a wooden toggle in the other end. And we had to cross this river under fire, and they’d hoped to get some Alligators [amphibious landing vehicles]. They were an armoured track vehicle that could also go in the water.

And they said, “Well, we hope to get some Alligators up, to get the first people across the river, otherwise you’ll have to get across as best you can.” And the concept of these ropes, with about a metre and a half of rope on them, was: the swimmers were going to get across the river, and then pull the non-swimmers across on this rope. That’s why we all carried this coil of rope.

And when we got across the river, which we were going to do under fire, and then we were going to use this feature, which didn’t sound very exciting, actually. And in the event, I don’t know how this ever came to be as bad as it was, but we stepped across the river. I don’t know when they could have photographed it to be a wide river that was going to be crossed, but we didn’t find a river at all. We stepped across this narrow channel.

We might have walked through it, but it wasn’t anything to stop us. And it was an interesting there that I saw, that morning when we landed, the 16th Battalion, our sister battalion, they had to take a feature on our left. They went inland, take a feature on our left to cover us, to take the feature we had to take. And we got ashore

and we were always under sort of fire from machine guns, a fair way away. And we dug in on the side of the hill, waiting for the 16th to do their job before we moved on, and MacArthur came ashore while we were there. The US general, MacArthur. He came ashore while we were there,

and he walked through where we were with a whole entourage of people with him, and he had his home-designed red hat on, his cap with a braid, which we understood he designed himself. It was quite an ornate hat. And he’s a big man MacArthur, over six feet, and he walked through us, and up on the top of the hill. And the bullets were kicking up the dust everywhere, and intelligent people were in their holes, or keeping down.

And Macarthur walked through where we were and up, and Ivan Docherty, our brigadier, was with him, with his VIP [Very Important Person] party, and MacArthur walked up onto the hill, on the side of where we were, and he had his field glasses hanging around his neck, and he had the, while the camera men were all around him he put the field glasses up to his eyes, and the jungle rose up like a solid green wall in front of him.

He couldn’t see anything with the field glasses. It was all for the cameras. But the bullets were kicking up the ground around him, and our brigadier, Ivan Dougherty, had hold of him by the leg of the pants, trying to get him off the hill, for fear he’d get shot while he was with the Australians. But all the old diggers were yelling out, “Sit down, ya mug, you’re drawing the crabs.”

And I saw something there that you see in western movies. Of a bloke trying to find out, to draw fire, by putting his hat around the corner. And there were same artillery blokes there who were trying to locate this machine gun that was firing. And one bloke had his hat on a stick. And his mate was lying down with field glasses, over at the edge of the brow of the hill,

and the bloke would, keeping under the brow of the hill, would come back with this stick with his felt hat on it, and he’d yell out to his mate, “Are you right?” and the bloke would say, “Yes!” and put up the glasses, and he’d poke this hat, on a stick, under the brow of the hill, and run along, just under the hill. The machine gunner, every time, opened up on this thing, on this hat. And we were there for quite a while, and these two were carrying on this act. And the machine gunner must have thought there was millions of them coming ashore.

All these hats bobbing along the hill. But anyway, when we left there, there wasn’t any bullet holes in the hat, so…but the gun was firing from perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps a thousand metres away. You know, it wasn’t accurately aimed fire, but it would have killed you just the same. And MacArthur, his act might have impressed the Americans very much. It didn’t impress the Australians terribly much.

I don’t know. I don’t remember thinking about it. It seemed to be a forlorn hope, in a way. Perhaps to answer that question I might tell you that we didn’t have a dentist in our battalion. Before we left Australia. But there was a dentist in, 27th Battalion had a dentist, and they were a half a mile away through the scrub,

and if we wanted to see the dentist, we’d report sick, go on the sick parade, see the doctor, and the doctor would say, “What’s wrong with you, lad?” “Well, nothing, Sir, but I want to see the dentist. I’ve got a hole in my tooth.” So the doctor would then refer you to the dentist. So me and my section leader then, Laurie Gibson, another Western Australian, and Gibby and I were going to see the dentist. And we were walking across, we were all packed up ready to leave, and walking across

through the scrub to the 2/27th Battalion, and hands in our pockets and deep in thought. We both had been in the Middle East and been through two campaigns in New Guinea, and I said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Gibby?” And he said, “I think I might be. What are you thinking?” And I said, “I’m thinking we’ll go and get that dentist with his pedal drill to bore holes in our teeth, and in a week we might be dead. Let’s wait until after the landing, and then if we’re still alive, then we’ll go to the dentist.”

And that’s what we did. We sat down under a tree for an hour or so and then went back, neither of us going to the dentist. And that moment of that lack of intestinal fortitude has probably caused me to lose the only tooth that I’ve lost from my lower jaw. By the time I got to see the dentist, it was beyond the pale. So it doesn’t pay you to be a coward.

Well, with the dentist, I still am.

We’d taken…we were held up. There’s an air strip just past the Manggar River in Borneo. The Indonesian word for small is ‘Kecil’.

and their word for big is ‘besar’. B-E-S-A-R, not ‘bizarre’ in the way we use the word. And just past the Manggar Besar River, the big river, was an air strip, and this was one of our tasks, was to take the Manggar strip, and...

Yeah. After the landing, and we, there was,

they had some heavy guns, some navy guns, naval guns, six-inch guns that the Japanese had put in bunkers up above the air strip. And the navy had been shelling these guns without success, and the air force had dropped countless heaps of bombs on them without success, and they brought up, we were going to attack them. It was decided then that what we’d do,

we carried a thing called a twenty-five pound pack charge, which contained a high-explosive pick right, and it was a haversack that had, you had a fuse on the thing, and the idea of this thing. It had eight three-pound sticks of pick right in it, the object of it was, we carried them for tunnels. Where the Japs would get in tunnels and fire from the tunnel mouth,

and then retire back to avoid the retaliation. And the thing was that you put the machine guns onto the mouth of the tunnel to keep the honourable man in his tunnel, while somebody sneaked up the side with one of the pack charges and lit the fuse and grabbed it by the sling and threw it in the tunnel. And then ran like a hairy goat then to get away,

and these…it would bring down the side of a mountain, nearly, this thing, and block the tunnel. So we put a patrol out, a night-time patrol, and Gibby, my section leader, took the patrol out. I remember Gerry O’Day, our company commander, was a wild man and our platoon commander, he said, “I want to get a patrol into those guns tonight,”

and I remember my platoon commander saying to the section leader, he said, “Gibby, on no account are you to try to get into those guns. Go out there and come back and say you couldn’t find them.” And so it was a forlorn hope anyway, but the patrol got in fairly close to the guns, and then came back again, and the next day it was decided to have a go at the guns

by putting a fighting patrol out, and with these twenty-five pound pack charges, to blow the guns with them. Anyway, in the event, the patrol, under cover of an air attack, surprised the honourable men, who, although they were in well dug in positions, bailed out. And the pack charges weren’t used, at all.

So we occupied that position and (interruption)

Now, we…big guns like this are fairly attractive and valuable things to the people who own them, and we expected an immediate counter attack because it was a surprise, it was the element of surprise that caused them to bail out.

And we thought that they’d come back at us straight away. Now the Japanese were pretty noisy in attack. They blew bugles and cheer leaders urged them on, and it was quiet and these were the sounds we expected. The bugles and the whistles and the shouting, followed by a storm of fire, and then the attack, and that’s what we expected.

So we were down there, just taking up positions wherever we could, and there was silence. The last few odd shots were died away, and there was silence over the battlefield. And suddenly, I don’t know how far in front of us. It could have been a hundred metres, I don’t know, but it was quite a way away.

This one voice, this Japanese voice calling a three-syllable word. And he, it was eerie, in the silence, to hear this voice. So much so that it would make your hair stand up on the back of your neck. And he, the caller, was coming towards us and periodically calling, this one,

same three-syllable word. And I looked up at the fellow on my right, Jack Sullivan from Western Victoria, and as this voice was getting closer and closer, and he was a bit higher up the hill than me, and I said, “What’s going on, Sully, What’s happening.” And I remember him, he took off his steel helmet so his head wouldn’t show so much, and he said, “I don’t know what’s happening. But I’ll get this bloke if he comes any closer…”

And he settled down over his rifle, because the bloke by this time was perhaps fifteen metres away from us. And he kept calling and he stopped then, he stopped in a place and he called several times, and then we didn’t hear him any more. And talking about it after, we reckon, in the attack, this was somebody’s name he was calling.

Somebody had got shot and he was coming back looking for his mate. And if we were right, and I think we were, that was a bold thing to do. He knew we were still there. He knew, he didn’t know exactly where we were, but he would have known we were still on the position, and to come back that close looking for a mate is a bold thing to do.

And I hope he got back to Japan. I guess, it’s not usual to have these feelings about an enemy, but if it had been one of our own blokes, you would have said he was ten feet tall. But we got hit that night.

They attacked us after dark, and we were just, we were standing to. Actually, it was an extraordinary event, because two of them came up, and it was light enough to see them, and both with fixed bayonets, and at the ‘high port’ position, up like this, and they came towards us and then stopped and turned around and walked away.

And my section leader, Gibby, yelled out, “Hey.” They turned around, they stopped and turned around, and looked, and he said, “You’re going the wrong way.” We all thought they were two of our blokes. “You’re going the wrong way,” said Gibby, and somebody just up on my right, somebody said, “It’s the honourable man, let him have it.”

Which, he opened fire straight away and so did I, and they were all over us. They got in among us, we didn’t know who was who. By this time it was dark and there were people everywhere, and it was a shambles. And it wasn’t really until, I don’t know, we must have had, in the bunker, our platoon commander was in there with an artillery officer, and -

who must have had a radio I guess, because they, the ships out at sea fired some star shells over us that lit the whole scene up like midday - and we could see to get the thing sorted out. Who was on which side. And it was a bit of a wild few minutes trying to decide who was who.

It was a bit…In fact, that’s where my mate, Dick Hill, got his DCM [Distinguished Conduct Medal] there.

Funnily enough, the Japanese there had - whatever motivated them to do it - they were using spears. They didn’t throw them. They used them like a lance. But we found their rifles and bayonets leaning up against trees the next morning. And whatever possessed the stupid fools to swap them. I’ve got one of the spears, hence, still, that I kept.

And they rushed at Dick. Dick was on the track. He was a Tommy gunner [Thompson submachine gun], but the Bren gunner, from 16 Platoon, and he was sharing the weapon pit on the track. He, three of them rushed him. By this time it’s pitch dark and pouring with rain, and they, Dick, shot two of them, and the third bloke,

Dick had his magazines on the…he was firing, fighting from the shell hole. The shell hole was full of water, and the Japs in their rush, kicked these, the magazines were empty, and kicked these magazines down into the hole, not on purpose but in the struggle, and the spear went through the skin on the side of Dick’s neck, and the Jap, instead of shortening his stroke and running him through with the thing, which he should have done -

he probably was mad on sake or something - but he started hitting Dick on the head with the handle of the spear and knocked his steel helmet off. Dick had these big bumps on his head the next morning where he was hitting him with a stick. And Dick had a hold on him with the front of his shirt, with his left hand, and he’s fossicking around in the mud in the bottom of the shell hole, to get a magazine, and it was a fairly tense moment for him, and he let out this great yell at the Jap, “Get back, you silly bastard,” he yelled out.

We could all hear him. You could have heard him a mile away, and the noise of his shout was so great that it caused the Jap to stagger back a bit, and Dick got a magazine on the gun and cleaned him up. It was a hectic few minutes. But that’s how things, they occur quickly. And then when you try to reconstruct it after, you don’t have a real ability.

Well, war is an awful way of settling things, and the tragedy of humanity is that we can’t live together in peace, and if only human beings weren’t human beings,

Christianity would have worked, Communism would have worked, idealism would have worked. Except that we’re human beings. And there comes a time when you either have to knuckle down under the heel of a tyrant or stand up and fight. And even the wild animals defend their young, and we should be at least as good.

We have an absolute obligation to defend our way of life, and if that means going to war, then you go to war. I didn’t invent the system. I’m just trying to live in it. Had I invented the system, I would have built people differently. But that’s the way we are, and while ever there are people who stand over other people, then you’re going to have to have war.

The police force keeping peace in the country are at war, in the same way that we were. They’re there to stop the criminal element from preying on the peaceful people. That’s a war. No different to any other war. And it’s a tragedy, but it’s a fact of life. And the war to me was a great experience.