Australians at War Film Archive

Do you want to know my name first?

My full name is James Edward Cooper. My father’s name was James and he always got Ern

for Ernest. My grandfather’s name was James, so I presume that’s why I got Edward or Eddie and now that’s just abbreviated down to Ed.

Mainly Eddie throughout the war years and before the war years, but more recently it’s been abbreviated to just Ed.

I was born in Rathdowne Street, North Carlton. 6 Rathdowne Street North Carlton. Rathdowne Street is a main street and when I was born there were cable trams running up the street. I spent the early years of my life there until I was 8 or 9 years old.

I went to school at Princes Hill State School but at that particular stage we moved out to Alphington. And I’ve spent most of my life living there. I grew up there until I left home

and after the war when I married I went back there again. I took over the responsibility of the house before my mother died. I lived there until I moved into here about 15 years ago.

No. I have two brothers.

Both now deceased and my own family…I only have the one daughter.

Yes, she did various jobs. My father died young and my stepfather who had

been to the First World War came back and did all sorts of jobs. Mainly he worked as a builder’s labourer and he also did other things. He was a process server for a while.

Not a great number, no.

Very badly. At one stage I was the only one who was working, if you could call it working. I was a jockey on a baker’s cart earning seven shillings a week, and that was the money that was coming into the house. My eldest brother Arthur went up into the country. He had been an apprentice to a builder, but when there was no longer any work to be done,

the firm closed down. When there was no work around Arthur went up to Tallangatta and worked on a farm up there until after the Depression. Then he came back and went on with his building trade.

Fourteen. I worked on the baker’s cart for a period of time. I had been working on it before I was 14, but as soon as a job became

available…and one did turn up through a friend who knew there would be a vacancy in a printing works, Jay Roy Stevens in Knox Place in the city. It was situated there at Swanston Street and Latrobe. Just in from that.

I worked there for two years. I was a bit fortunate in that they usually didn’t keep you there after 12 months in those Depression days. As soon as you were due for a rise in wages, they sacked you and got someone else at a lower wage. They put on someone to replace me, but they didn’t like him so they rescinded the notice I had been given and I stayed there for

another 12 months. After that I worked at J. W Handley’s which was a watch case maker. They imported the watches and they made the cases and bands. I did a number of jobs there. I worked on a foot

press for a period of time and I think illegally as I look back now. I was working on a big power press pumping out buckles for watchstraps. From there I did a bit of polishing which was a trade actually. Also a bit of jewellery work soldering the cases together, putting together the various components and then silver soldering them.

You would get the case red hot and then pop the silver solder on at the right stage. But then I went and managed to get a job at Prestige Hosiery. I worked as a despatch clerk there for a period of time. From the Despatch Department I went on to do the

programming of the work which had to be done there. I had to decide and make the decisions as to what hosiery could be produced on the machines that they had there, then allocate what colours they were to be dyed and from there

it all had to be tied in together. It was a scheme whereby you could only do so much of this and so much of that because of the presses that they had there. These were the shapes of the girls …it was a very big place in those days. It was a hosiery and lingerie mill. Very big, but it’s gone now.

In Brunswick.

It wasn’t easy to get to and from Alphington. I rode a pushbike for many years until I eventually bought a car. So for a couple of years that I was working there I was able to drive to work.

Oh it was a beauty. A Hudson Straight Eight. Very easy to drive.

It had 8 cylinders and you could crawl along in top gear without it cutting out on you and stalling.

Yes, 120 pound.

It was in those days, yes. Well, considering it was second hand.

But it was in top class condition. The folk I bought it from were motor mechanics and they needed extra money to set up a garage so they sold their pride and joy. I got it, and eventually I sold it to my best cobber who had ridden around in it and driven it on numerous occasions. He had it for years.

Yes. The only problem was when the war came and the rationing came. But even after the war, it was still on the road.

I went to the Salvation Army Training College. I had a period of training there and from there I was classified as a Minister of Religion, and

consequently sent out to what the Salvation Army call a Corps which the churches call a church.

Originally? I think they came around to the door and talked to my mother and they said, “Your family should be going to Sunday School.” and Mum agreed with them.

She said, “You can make your own choice.” I had a cobber who went to the Salvation Army Sunday school, so I decided I’d go to the Salvation Army. A month, or a couple of months later my brother decided, all right I’ll go too. So we both spent the rest of our lives as Salvationists. The brother who was away from

home a lot, didn’t join us.

Yes. At Sunday School you learn a lot of things and I wasn’t a very good person going to Sunday School. I was a bit disruptive I think. But that changed and

I became…I sought the Lord Jesus as my saviour, and my life changed entirely. I joined the band when I was about 15 and I’ve been playing in Salvation Army bands ever since. Most of my life I’ve been conducting them as the Band Master.

Ours was a very short session because it was 1940, the year the war was hotting up, and consequently we didn’t do the full session which would normally take about 12 months. Ours was cut down quite considerably. You studied the Bible. You studied the organization of the Salvation Army,

and you went out and did work in the field as one might say. You went out and conducted services throughout the week and again on Sunday.

I was 25 by then. In those days the Salvation Army only took their cadets up to age 25.

I just managed to scrape in.

Yes. You became…virtually you became a Minister of the Gospel. A Minister of Religion I think was the classification, and that classification gave you exemption from military service.

I went to Port Lincoln in South Australia and served there for a period of time. I was with another officer who was in command and I was the Second in Command there. Immediately when I got there he went and had holidays, so from the outset I was in charge for the three weeks

or month that I was there. Then I received a telegram saying that one of our Red Shield officers in the Wavell Recruitment Reception Depot had appendicitis and they had rushed him off to hospital, and they needed someone to replace him. So I was the replacement.

I packed up my things and left them in Port Lincoln because I was only to go over there as a temporary measure. Eventually I had them sent across on the boat, or the ship I should call it, because I never went back there until after the war had ended. I went in to the camp there and

it was a recruit reception depot and people were coming and going all the time. As a Red Shield Officer there I provided a hut there with writing materials and games material. They had a miniature bias bowls and the camp commandant got a concrete strip put down

so we could have something flat for the bowls. That was very popular at the time. I spent a while there until the gentleman got over his operation and came and replaced me. At that stage they said they have a Red Shield Officer at Woodside Camp, Woodside Training Camp, up in the hills out of Adelaide, “Who is

going away for 3 weeks…we want you to go up there and relieve up there.” So I went and relieved there. When he came back, they had shifted the gentleman from down at Warradale Camp. So I went to Warradale and looked after the camp there for quite some time. Then they said, “Well,

the job was more or less an old man’s job.” and a bloke like me should be doing something more, so I went back and did a couple more Ministries at a few of the churches or Corps before they recalled me back to Warradale again. I spent some months there and my Chief said, “Well, it’s a bit of a dead end job

Eddie, would you like to get overseas service?” I said, “Yes.” and he said, “I’ll see what I can do to get you over to Melbourne, and if you’re in Melbourne you’re under the eyes of the power’s to be.” Melbourne’s the centre, the territorial headquarters of the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army in Australia is divided into two groups, the Southern Territory and the Eastern

Territory. The Southern Territory takes in everything except New South Wales and Queensland which is the Eastern Territory, and it takes in the Northern Territory as well. I came back and managed Red Shield House which was two large buildings, one was set up as a

cafeteria and recreational centre, and the place next door was set up as overnight stay, with beds for people who were down on leave or people who were in transit and wanted a bed for the night very cheaply. The same with the meals at the other place.

I was in there as manager for a period of time. Following that the Chief Secretary of the Salvation Army called me into his office and asked me if I would like to replace Albert Moore who possibly is the best known of all Salvation Army Red Shield representatives. If you’ve seen the

photo of the Red Shield Officer in the Owen Stanley Ranges lighting a cigarette for a man, that’s Albert Moore. I’ve had a life long friendship with Albert. We not only served up in New Guinea together but later after the war was over we attended the same church. He played in my band.

Oh he played cornet. He was on second cornet which is an alto voice instrument. The instrument can do anything but the second part is the alto voice. So, I said “Yes, I’d be delighted to do that.” and so I got orders from the military to say I was to be moved to the 21st

Brigade who were at the time in New Guinea on the Kokoda Track.

No. I had a choice as to whether I would go or not, but not to where I would go. The appointment offered to me was the 21st Brigade and I was very happy to take that.

I had read books on it.

I read Gold Dust and Ashes which is one of the books which described some of the conditions up there when they were looking for gold and getting gold up there. So I set out. I left Melbourne and got on the train. I only just made it and they looked at my pass and said, “Hop on the train,

we’ll look after you.” They took the luggage. I was due to go through to Townsville, and I got to Sydney and the ticket only took me that far. At the time I had to make reservations each time. I got to Sydney and they said “They couldn’t get me on today’s train, we’ll put you on tomorrow’s train.” So I had to spend a little time in Sydney, a couple of days, or a day and a half.

The same thing happened when I got to Brisbane. I was in Brisbane for about 4 days. My trunk with all my clothes in it was up in Townsville. It had gone straight through, so I was scratching a bit for clothes. Eventually I caught up with it all and when I got to Townsville, the ship to take the reinforcements

for the 21st Brigade was sitting out in the Townville harbour waiting for an escort because the Japanese submarines were operative around that area. I got off the train and loaded onto a truck which took us out to the

racecourse which was being used as a staging camp. But at this stage, and this is 1942 they were still running races at the place and so the others who were with me were loaded off and they said, “Well, you’ll have to hang on for a while until the races are over and then we’ll bed you down for the night.” So after the races were over they swept

out the stalls where the horses had been, and they smelt quite strongly of manure, and said “Right, you’ll bunk down there.” There were vehicles going in to Townsville so I hopped on one of the vehicles and contacted the…we had a Red Shield depot up there. I contacted the folk there and they said,

“Oh no don’t stay in those conditions. Come on we’ll get your gear and we can keep in contact with the camp to find out when you’re going. Come into town and we can put you up.” I was there for about a week and the ship still hadn’t gone, and one of the officer’s there said to me…“Look, I’ve got a bit of pull with the Yanks, let’s go around to the Yanks and we’ll have a talk to them and see if we can you on a plane.”

Well we did get on a plane. We got on a Short Sunderland Flying Boat which took off with…I was the only Australian apart from the pilots. The Americans had hired this from the Australians and there were Australian crew on the plane. And it was a case of …

there were no seats around the place. You threw your kit bag which I’d packed at that stage and left the trunk with all the officer’s gear behind. The Salvation Army representatives were attached to the troops. They didn’t actually sign up into the Army. You weren’t paid by the Army. You were attached for discipline and rations.

But we did have officer status. I had an officer’s uniform which were all left behind. I wasn’t going to need that in New Guinea. I had khaki shorts and clothes and underclothes and things packed into my kit bag. We got on the plane and sat on that and rested our backs against

the body of the plane. We pulled into Cairns. Quite a lot of the Americans got off. Mareeba was then the centre for the American Air Force. Their headquarters was up in Mareeba which was on the Atherton Tablelands. When they got off…there were several generals and high ranking officers travelling

on the thing, they said, “We won’t be taking off for a couple of hours now. You can have a look around the town.” So I went in and contacted the Salvation Army officer who was in the place and he was able to show me around the town and get me back to the plane on time. When I got back on, an officer said to me, “You come up here with me.” I think there were four seats apart from the pilot

and the co pilot. There were about four passenger seats up at the front and because I was the only Aussie on the plane, I got one of these, and some of the other officers had to continue sitting up against the body of the plane. Well…we flew into Moresby to arrive there just at dusk because the Japanese were bombing the place and they didn’t like

you to make a good target for the Zeros when they came over, or the bombers. So you got in at dusk. I came in and reported to the Red Shield man. We had another Red Shield place in the town which was the main store and recreational centre. He got on and signalled through that I had arrived. Albert Moore who at that stage

was appointed in charge of all the Red Shield work up in New Guinea…he was at New Guinea Force Headquarters. He was out but he came down and the next day I travelled part of the way up into the mountains where I met Albert Moore. He took me the rest of the way and introduced me to Brigadier Potts, a very wonderful man

who got such a dirty deal from the power’s that be. There’s a lot to that story which we’ll come back to. I was then taken to the 2/14th Battalion with whom Albert had been living. I serviced both the 2/14th and the 2/16th Battalions. We had an arrangement with the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association]. No use

competing, we’ll split the brigade up. Two battalions and headquarters, and the other battalion. As I said, I serviced the 2/14th and 2/16th Battalions, and the YMCA did the 2/27th and Brigade Headquarters. So I moved in and at that stage men were coming

through who had been cut off for quite some time. They were finding their way back to the Unit. The Japanese at that stage were in retreat. They were withdrawing. We still had the hut going at Ower’s Corner.

Yes, on the Kokoda Track. And I had the oversight of that while Albert was at a place called

Illolo, which was next to McDonalds, which is well known. McDonald had a plantation there. It’s still there, but nothing like the days when he was there.

I contacted the troops to a certain degree. At the hut itself.

it was a case of setting up paper and writing material for folk to write home. There were games there which could be played. Unfortunately a lot of things couldn’t be used because a lack of supplies. At night time we would light up kerosene lamps and hang them up.

Then the bombers would come across, the air raid would go and you’d have to put all the lights out. The mantles were very fragile. I don’t know if you’ve had anything to do with camping and Tilley lamps. I had a chap there with me, my batman. He wasn’t very good at re-lighting them.

Unfortunately, he ruined a lot of mantles so we couldn’t always use all the lamps we had because the mantles were very hard to get hold of up there. Everything was hard to get hold of. It all had to come from Australia of course. In the Middle East the welfare officers could go and buy in the towns there,

but in New Guinea, Port Moresby was the only thing that looked like a town. Even today it doesn’t look so good. I’ve been back there twice. Once in 1998 and again last year.

I wouldn’t be able to say exactly.

Oh no. I’ve been there twice. The first time as I say, firstly at Koitake, an infamous name because of General Blamey’s speech to the folk. I don’t know if you know anything of that.

Yes. He spoke to us…we were all paraded one day, expecting that the chaps who had fought such a marvellous withdrawal and the Brigadier who had been responsible for it all would receive a great commendation. But instead of that they were told that they had faced an inferior enemy with inferior material which were blatant lies because

the odds at one stage there were six to one against the Australians. And that was so in the majority of the time. Although the Australians inflicted a colossal amount of casualties on the Japanese, the odds were still so great against them. It was a case of annihilation or withdrawal. And wisely

they withdrew each time to fight another battle a bit further back.

Yes. Folk like Stan Bisset had a brother. Stan had an officer brother in the battalion. One of the best liked men of the Battalion I’m told…Butch Bisset.

Butch was in the process of handing out more hand grenades to his men when he copped a burst from a machine gun across the body, and some of them wanted to rescue him and he said, “No, leave me here.” But they wouldn’t. They got him out from this awkward position and took him back and he lived for a few hours. The doctor said nothing could be done for him.

But Stan recounts how he came back in the night and he nursed his brother talking about old times. The two of them had been very close. Stan had a beautiful voice and he sung a few songs of his favourite…his brother’s favourite songs, and he died in his arms.

Butch was a brave man. There’s no doubt about that. And to stand on a parade and be told that your brother was more or less a coward, that they had run away. It just didn’t go down well with anybody. I’m afraid that nobody in the 21st Brigade from that parade anyway -

from any of the folk who were on that parade, nobody would ever be able to hold Blamey in high regard again. From Koitake, once they grouped a bit, and as I say I was there at that particular stage…once they grouped a bit they divided. The 2/14th went to Ilolo, the 2/16th went to Itiki. Both of these were rubber

plantations. I would go across to Itiki perhaps once or twice a week. Take over materials for them and call in and see the boys there. We had a lot of Salvationists. The 2/16th band was largely formed of

Salvationist bandsmen. They had been through the Middle East and what was left of them were back there.

In the band?

There were quite a few of the bandsmen, yes. More than half of the band, and I suppose there would have been 30 in the band.

I was up…then we went back knowing we would have to go to Gona, or that we would have to cross the ranges. At first it was considered that we would walk across, but the Japanese just fell back. They had had it and they were ordered to move back eventually. We didn’t know that then

of course. But they went back and the fresh troops that had come in just pushed them back. When they got to the coast they put up an enormous struggle and they were prepared to die for the Emperor, and a lot of them did, but they took a lot of our men’s lives in the meantime. We went down to Moresby because Kokoda had been freed and we thought possibly that we could fly into Kokoda,

but no, the Japanese didn’t try to hold Kokoda. They went on further down. Eventually we flew into Popondetta, and from Popondetta marched down to Gona which was a beach.

Firstly, let me go back to the plane trip across the Owen Stanleys. The pilot followed the Kokoda Track very closely. We crossed the Gap which had been…nobody knew much about New Guinea, or Papua as it was in those days. The Gap…as a matter of fact, one of the staff on the

American leaders, suggested blowing up the Gap. Something that was miles wide and just really a gap in the height of the rangers where you could get through without having to use oxygen. We flew across there and we were to land at Popondetta. We got to

Kokoda and looked through the side of the plane at the plantations and so forth and said, “That’s Kokoda.” because none of the folk had actually been to Kokoda. They had got as far as Isurava and organised the withdrawal from Isurava. That’s something we perhaps need to discuss after. Suddenly the door

opens and the pilot comes through and says, “Can any of you tell me where this Popondetta strip is?” He was the bloke who was taking us there. It gave us a great deal of confidence. Out came the aerial maps and whilst they were giving him directions, the co-pilot said, “All right I’ve found it.” Well, Popondetta was nothing but a

strip carved out of the kunai grass. It was a nice flat piece of land and the natives had chopped down the kunai grass with machetes. But it wasn’t a very wide landing strip. The wings of the plane went over the top of the grass on each side. But we landed there and

there was clearance where the plane could turn around. Consequently, we off loaded all the gear. The Salvation Army and others had been told they weren’t allowed to take anything with them. The Adjutant and the CO [Commanding Officer] had approached me and said, “We can’t take any

comforts with us. We have been told the only thing we can take are ammunition and food. We just can’t fit anything on. Now, we’ve got a solution for you. If you’d like to leave your batman behind we’ll put the weight of his gear and body on supplies.” I think it was about 250 pounds in weight.

So that’s what happened. We got across and the CO came up to me and said, “Put your pack on the jeep Eddie. You don’t need to carry your pack with you.” I said, “No I can carry it, no worries.” he said, “No you haven’t trained with us.” I had been hitch hiking and mainly hiking more than hitching back and forwards between the

2/16th and the 2/14th, and up to Ower’s Corner, and up and down that particular hill there. I think it was several hundred metres down to the Goldie River. It was quite a hike. But anyway, he said “I insist.” So I said, “Alright.”

So some of the folk had more than their share of gear to carry and some of them weren’t doing so well. But I think I ended up being loaded up as much as any of the folk. But I do know I never had the opportunity again of travelling light. We marched through to Soputa and we spent the night there, and early next morning the troops set off for

Gona. I stayed to await the arrival of my supplies. I had taken some of it with me and I was able to give out chewing gum. As they set off I stood on the track and handed out the chewy as they walked past. The stuff was very slow in coming through. I spent a few days there and got a bit hot under the collar about sitting there and waiting

for the supplies to come through so I thought I would go up to the front line and see what was going on. About eleven and a half miles I think it was from Soputa to Gona, and I set off. There were another group of folk going through but seeing I wasn’t carrying anything…at that stage I was an exceptionally good walker

I passed them and was well past them, but I came to a spot where I didn’t know where to go. One track led straight on and another track led off to the right. So I thought there’s only one thing to do…sit down and wait for them to catch up with me. It was just as well because if I had taken the track that went straight on I would have ended up in the Japanese area. I took the one to the right eventually and got through…

I noticed there were a couple of creeks flowing through and some of the Japs had actually made a road there. Patches in between where the jungle was thick and where the kunai had been was fairly easy going. But there were certain places which were just quagmires. You would put your foot down and you would go down to the knee.

If it had been dry for a little while you had a job pulling your leg out again. I considered whether I should set up a hut alongside…you had to have water of course to make coffee or tea, and I considered whether I might camp alongside one of these to catch the wounded going out. But eventually I got through and caught up with the battalion and I

found a very nice spot alongside the river. I said to the Doc, “What do you think Don? Is it worthwhile setting up further back?” He said “You’ll only be there a few days and you’ll be off to hospital with malaria.” I accepted what he said and said “I plan to set up here.” So after spending some time with them there, I

went back to Soputa. At one stage when I was at Soputa…I used to move backwards and forwards to pick up supplies. I sometimes quite frequently took a native train through with me. I would take them up to the front line and they didn’t have to have a guide to get home. At one stage while I was there we had an air raid. A pretty serious one in which

the Japanese sent 13 Zeros and dive bombers. Our camp was…the rear echelon… where they had only two

personnel there…but that was where the supplies came to and where the folk coming back reported in. It was situated between the American…what did they call there’s…the combat clearing station, and our field ambulance.

We were sort of quite close to the combat station, and not very far away from the field ambulance either. These 13 bombers came in and really did over the hospitals. They were all marked clearly. There could be no mistake and nobody could understand why they picked on the hospitals. There were quite a lot of casualties there.

2/4th Field Ambulance had 22 killed, 50 wounded and the 126th combat clearing station for the Americans, there were 6 killed and quite a number of them were wounded. We were fortunate in that we didn’t have any bombs dropped on us, although they weren’t very far away.

We were in between the two. When the first bomb dropped, I was sitting talking to someone with my back towards the approach of the Zeros, and when the first bomb went off I got down very quickly behind a log. One of the boys said after, “I thought you had been hit.” That’s how close the bombs were too us. We were close to the Americans and we talked to the

Americans when we went over and looked at some of the bomb craters. Some of the folk had suffered a direct hit. There was a boot with a part of the shinbone sticking out. It wasn’t a pretty sight at all. One of the Americans said, “The only slit trench I could find was the latrine.

I lay in it and I was happy!” He went down to the river later to cleanse his clothes and himself, but I believe he smelt for ages after.

No, not actually. They had the relief…the band worked as stretcher bearers.

They helped in the relief aid post. The bandsmen did that. That was part of their job. The hut that I had at Gona, everybody came through there because it was just on the way out, and Charlie Butler who I guess you have seen in the paper…you might not remember the name…but he had an eye patch on.

Charlie came out one morning and I was the first person to greet him as he came out from the front lines. They had to hold him there over night. He was wounded late in the day, and there wasn’t time to get him out in the light. They brought him out next morning and I said, “What have you been up to?” I read his card on the stretcher. When people came through past

the hut you always checked them out to make sure they didn’t have any stomach wounds. You couldn’t afford to give them coffee or eats if there was a stomach wound. Charlie had his head wrapped up and I wasn’t able to recognise him, so I looked at the card and he said, “I’m going to be a one eyed barracker of football from now on Eddie.” That was the spirit of the men. He spent

months in hospital. He was returned home because the bomb burst had not only taken out his eye but it had gone up through the jaw, and he was for months in hospital getting skin placed over his cheek and so forth. But he is still going. He tells the story of

how he was reported killed in action and so they’ve got his name on the Honour Board at the Melbourne Football Ground.

Yes. And the paper gets onto this and gives him a bit of publicity every once in a while.

Some months.

I didn’t keep dates. Some folk kept diaries. Now I was very conscious of the fact that diaries could give away facts which would be valuable to the enemy. There was lots of advertising around the place to say, be careful.

Something like “Sealed lips don’t sink ships” or something like that. The fact that a few would talk about things, the enemy could get hold of it. I knew from the time that we were in Moresby, we were getting back reports from Japanese diaries that had been

retrieved. We were getting reports on what was happening there. So in those early days I never kept a diary. Later in the war I was in Divisional Headquarters and there wasn’t much chance of the Japs getting everything. Then I kept a small short record although it wouldn’t have meant anything to the enemy.

I was always very conscious of security so I can’t tell you exactly when I was there. We came out in January after several months there. But Gona was a dreadful place. There had been a mission there.

The Japanese had prepared their defences very well. They had chopped down palm logs and put them over the top and covered it all in dirt. They had these defensive positions and some of them were dug in under the roots of trees. I remember one in particular

I went through. Shortly after the last pocket of the Japanese had been cleared out, there were three Japanese on top of each other in various states of decomposition. How they could fight like that? They were animals really. One of the greatest

upsets…one afternoon there was a report that the Japanese were wearing gas masks. Were they going to make a gas attack upon us? We didn’t have any gas masks. We were travelling light. You had half a towel rather than a full towel.

No change of clothing. Your packs were as light as possible to get the folk across the ranges in the plane. This gas mask business created a bit of havoc, a bit of panic around the place. But it turned out the only reason they were wearing them was because they couldn’t stand the stench themselves. When the thing was eventually cleared

it took…they brought up natives thinking they could get them to dig the graves, but they just couldn’t. They have a very strong stomach. Our folk buried 638 dead Japanese and it took them two days to do it. We would also have a bit of a grin when we would go along the beach

and there’d be a notice up saying 24 Japanese buried here, or 30 or whatever. They would put them into mass graves mainly. Then there was one little notice that stuck up that said, “One Jap.” It didn’t say buried here, it just said one Jap. There again, the fault of so many deaths

has to be laid against those sitting back in the position of the generals. I always imagined, and I don’t think it was too much imagination….that Blamey wanted the Australians to be the first ones to beat the Japanese in a defended position. The Japanese

had suffered a defeat at Milne Bay, but there they were attacking and they were driven back. But here they had their defensive position. Now there were three main centres of fighting. There was Gona. There was Sanananda, and Buna. And the Americans were assisting at Sanananda

and doing Buna. But eventually they bought in Australians in to help with Buna. The Australians had originally helped in the Sanananda fighting and continued to do so. At Gona they were ordered to make a frontal attack. Now, you have in-fire coming the whole area and the men have just got

to rush for cover knowing they’re just going to be mown down. The number of officers who were lost at Gona and non commissioned officers was just far, far too great. The commanding officers in the field should have been given discretion

of making the attacks. Finding the weaker spot of the enemy and attacking that rather than being ordered to make a frontal attack as they were.

Yes. Looking back over the years I’ve been bombed and I had a grenade that exploded and injured

one of the natives as he was standing at the hut. That was an interesting experience. When I heard the explosion I went outside to see what had happened. I found this native on the ground with a chest wound and the others blowing in his ears.

Apparently trying to bring him back to consciousness. I don’t know what it is. I said to them, “You fellers take this feller boy back to doctor.” They didn’t want to, so I promised to give them a swift kick if they didn’t get him onto a stretcher. I got the stretcher out and then we put him onto the stretcher.

I dressed him with a field dressing to stop the bleeding. I don’t know what happened to him. I was never able to find out if he lived or died. At one stage of the fighting we were standing around having a cup of coffee with some of the folk who had got wounded in the fighting at that particular stage, and the bullets came whizzing past, so we

decided to lie down by the Kunai grass. We thought the bullets would have been fairly well spent by that stage. That’s close enough. But daily I would always go around wherever possible and Albert Moore came up with some supplies, and he and I went around with the ration people.

We were told we couldn’t go any further because there was to be an attack on the last pocket of Japanese that were there. So we had to stand and watch the folk go and clean out the last lot of Japanese.

The battalion moved out in January…yes it was January, because we came home and had leave in February. But there were practically none

of them left. They rounded up everybody from the holding places where they were with malaria. At that stage, the final stage when the Japanese were cleared out from there…mind you it was still a very tricky spot because on the right hand side along the beach there was a chance that the

Japanese would break out from Sanananda and make their way up the beach. On the left hand side there were a great deal of Japanese congregated on the side of the Amboga River. So if the Japs had managed to get a couple of barges in or something like that, we wouldn’t have had a chance

of holding them there with the small group that was left. I think they had…you had to have a 104 degree temperature to go back to the holding camp with malaria. You still went on duty if you had 102. When you went back to the holding camp they put you on massive doses

of quinine for 6 days and then sent you back again. Later the treatment became 5 days Quinine, 5 days Atebrin, and I think it was then 2 or 4 days on another drug called Plasmoquin. I should remember because I had the treatment. There were 21 forward

troops and nearly all of those were from headquarters company. But there were 21 forward troops when we came out, and they went around to the CCS [Casualty Clearing Station] and other places and picked up our sick and took them with us. When we emplaned there were 57 out of the battalion. There were other folk back in Moresby

that had been hospitalised there and they had gone home on leave. It took us so long to get out of Gona. We marched back from Gona to Soputa. Spent a night at Soputa and then went on to Popondetta. By this time, there were a number of Popondetta strips…one two three four. And one day we would go

to Popondetta Number One hoping that the planes would land there. No, the pilots would say. It would be too risky and too muddy for them to take off again. They certainly couldn’t take off with a full load of troops. In the early days when they brought in supplies and took out wounded, the Americans wouldn’t load their planes very much at all.

But the Australian pilots were much better and they would take out a fairly good crowd. Eventually after marching from one place to another and being short of food, it was decided we’d go across to the American strip at Dobodura. Some of our officers, Stan Bisset who was one of them, went on ahead

as we made our way across there. He managed to get someone who provided some jeeps and they came back and saved us. In the last couple of miles we got a lift on the jeeps. When we got there the fighter planes were taking off three abreast. That was the difference in the strips. There was a very good strip there. We got back only to find

that the ship we were to come back to Australia on had left. So they took us up to a rest camp and we had Christmas dinner in January.

We came back and we were given leave. The men went on leave and I went on leave too.

I hadn’t been away for very long.

From September to January. Only a few months really.

But I hadn’t had any leave whilst I was at Bridgehill House or back in South Australia. I hadn’t had any leave with the military at all.

I went home to Melbourne.

Back to Mum. I came back to Melbourne and spent time down there.

We were quite a long time back in Australia but not on leave. I think it was about three or four weeks leave, then we assembled and went back up to the Atherton Tablelands where we had been previously, and did a period of

training before going back to New Guinea again.

I didn’t have to train with them. I kept myself fit. Back in Australia I had a vehicle to get around in and that helped a lot. I would pick them up on a route march somewhere and give them coffee and biscuits.

Yes we went back to New Guinea again. Back to Moresby and stayed around Moresby for some weeks before heading off to the Markham Valley. Whilst there they decided that the 9th Division would go up the coast

and the 7th Division would go up the valley. We prepared, and this time it wasn’t the 21st Brigade, the 25th Brigade were to do the job there. One of their companies was situated in a holding area

and a Liberator took off with a full bomb load and a full load of petrol. It didn’t manage to clear the trees at the end of the strip and landed in amongst all these trucks of men. They virtually lost a company of men. I went down…I was very friendly with a Roman Catholic Padre,

Charlie Cunningham and he and I heard the explosions from the camp and found out what was going on. We went up there to see if we could do anything but there was ammunition and it was exploding everywhere. Mortar bombs and everything and fires burning where the trucks were.

It was dreadful. It has since been played up in The Age. I think it was Australia’s greatest air disaster. So consequently we got movement orders much earlier than we would have had, and we went up to Nadzab. I was fortunate enough to go back to Nadzab

for the Popondetta memorial. They said the C120’s couldn’t land and take off at Popondetta so they took us up to Nadzab. The pilot said they could…everybody said they could, except the power’s that be in New Guinea. They flew us to Nadzab and there we took

a number of lighter planes which took us down to Popondetta to the dedication of the memorial down there. That was very interesting. We flew down mainly over the land, but when we got down there, the gentleman we had in charge of the party talked to the pilots and said, “These folk want to see where they were during the war. Not just here at

Popondetta which was just a point that you scattered from. Can you fly us straight out to the sea and then follow the sea around?” I couldn’t recognise Gona. I had two landmarks that I was looking for. There was a small creek and there was Gona Creek. Gona Mission used to be in between those two. There was a huge white cross

which survived everything. The Mission stood but the Mission Station burnt, or the Mission church burnt down but this cross remained there. Bill Russell in his book said, “Viewing that you thought there was some hope for the world.” But otherwise the scene of carnage which

was Gona left you in absolute despair.

Yes, I noticed the tap on the shoulder.

I spent a bit of time, not a great length of time there, but the Battle of Lae had taken place. The

7th Division had gone in and captured the city and the 9th Division came up the coast and shelled them out of it. Some of the Japanese escaped from there and they were anxious to stop them from rejoining other Japanese groups up in the Ramu Valley. The 16th Battalion was sent one way (I was living with the 16th at this stage).

The 2/14th went another way. I went to try and meet the 2/14th on their way back from the spot where they had been because they hadn’t managed to contact the Japs and they were returning. I took my gear up and left it up there because I was intending to go out and spend the night and have coffee for them

the next day when they came back, but word came through for the 16th to move. So I had made the trip but had to go back again and during the period I was down there, the Japanese sent planes across and dropped what they called Daisy Cutters which were anti personnel bombs and they had set fire to the kunai Grass and there was this huge patch…

huge fire burning. Now it didn’t burn with any rapidity. It was slow burning, and we had a black out. I was standing in the black out waiting for the jeep to turn up and of course he couldn’t do anything until the black out was over. When he eventually picked me up and we set out, I had to get out on quite a number of occasions and beat out the flames

so we could get the jeep through. We got through and the corporal I had went on and he did a great job. He provided coffee and biscuits for them all when they came through.

Well I hadn’t got into Ramu Valley.

The first day we arrived there I had my batman with me and we were busy trying to keep up with the troops. I said to Jack, “Don’t worry I’ll just toss a ground sheet

on the ground and that will do for tonight. Don’t worry too much about anything.” I got a stick to scrape some of the leaves and things away, and I noticed this little thing poking up there, and as I was scraping away I noticed there was a Death Adder sitting there. So we despatched the Adder and I decided I would do something better for a bed than just tossing

the sheet down.

Well, I set up a bit of a bed and made sure it was safe. Although the night before we moved they told me there was a huge supply of gun cotton right alongside us. We flew out the next morning to Kaiapit.

Kaiapit was a spot which according to the intelligence was to be the place where the Japanese who had escaped from Lae would make their way to, and also all the other folk would get together and establish a centre there in the Ramu Valley. The Independent Company had been there previously.

They had walked up the valley and made the attack on the Japanese at Kaiapit. They had run out of ammunition in the long run and had to fix bayonets and had to finish the Japanese off with fixed bayonets. It was a nice village with a very high hill behind it where the Japs had had their command post.

When we got there it was the same problem as Gona. Dead bodies and with the terrible stench that comes with it. These had to be buried and that wasn’t such a pleasant part of the job. Some of the troops had made their way up the valley and had made an attack on the Japanese

in a couple of the spots up there. They returned to Kaiapit expecting that there would be this attack. I had set up on the river…always you look for water so you can cope with making a lot of coffee. I set up on the river and I had two folk

with me. My batman and a corporal that they supplied. I spoke to the officer in charge of the thing and said, “Well now, I’m right on the spot and I think I’ll set up the hut here, is that OK?” He said “Yes. The 2/14th will be coming in this afternoon and they will be over the other side to you.” It got just about dark and

there was no sign of the 2/14th and I went back and said, “What’s the score? Where’s the 2/14th?” He said, “They weren’t able to get the planes through.” That was always the problem with the cloud cover, getting planes there. He said “The 2/14th hadn’t landed” and he said, “So you’re the front line tonight.” I said, “Well it’s a bit late for me to be moving things out.”

He said, “Just be careful, we’ve got a couple of tank attack guns lined up there loaded with canister – this is sort of nuts and bolts to spray all over the place.” So we settled down for the night and I said to the corporal who I had with me, “We’d better leave someone…we ought to take it in turns to stand

on watch.” He said, “Well, I don’t know about you but I won’t go to sleep at all!” We settled down and my batman settled down quite nicely and then we heard rustling through the kunai grass just across the river. I said to Snow, “Don’t fire unless you have too.

Those tank attack guns which are up the path there, we’re in their line of fire.” There had been some firing taking place in amongst where the troops were bivouacked. So we listened and this rustling got closer and closer. The batman, Jack Nuckey started snoring

so we gave him a quick poke with the rifle and said, “Wake up Jack.” Jack wasn’t too keen to wake up. Anyway it got close enough that if it was the Japanese, as we assumed that it must be, they would have been able to see the outline of the hut and so forth. But they turned around and went back again.

But that was the scariest night that I ever spent. I slept at Gona outside of the perimeter of troops there on my own, and it was always a joke amongst the boys there that if the Japs broke through, I’d be the first one they would come across, and if they were able to read English, they’d see Salvation Army on the Red Shield, and they’d reckon they had an extra army to fight against.

On this occasion I had slept there peacefully by myself during that period I was at Gona. Originally when I set up there were troops around about me. But as the numbers got lower and people got moved, I was more on my own. But on this occasion it was the one time I didn’t want to be on my own. So I said to the

two folk that I had with me the next morning, “Well, it’s the last time we’re going to be the front line. In future we’ll go inside the perimeter each night, and cart our supplies with us so wild pigs and so forth don’t get it all.”

Yes I did carry a rifle up in the Ramu Valley.

We went up to a spot, I think it was called Johns’ Knoll, and I wanted to go back to Kumbarum where I had supplies. I told the folk that I would be going back and the CO said, “You’re not going back by yourself. I’ll get a party to travel with you.” So he gave me four men. As I said I’m a very good walker and

I felt sorry for them. They grizzled and griped a bit, but that was the prerogative of every soldier - to gripe. So we went down…I might say that to get from one spot to the other there were 16 river crossings and in some places the rivers flowed so rapidly

that we had to put a line across so we wouldn’t get swept away. I must tell you about the time that I got swept away back at Koitake. You’ll have to remind me about that. The next time I wanted to go we did the trip down and back in a day. The next time I wanted to go I thought I’m not going to

have four blokes grizzling and griping with me, so I went to the store and drew a rifle and ammunition and went down by myself. I carried that for quite a while. As a matter of fact I had a photo taken at Guy’s Post. There were four of us. The WO [Warrant Officer] Caterer,

John Corbett and two others, I think they were both cook’s staff. We were passing through Guy’s Post towards Shaggy Ridge there. The Official War Photographer took our photo because there were natives sitting around on the ground

nearby and we were carrying twice the load that the natives were allowed to carry and he sort of slung off and said we were the ‘white boongs’. Later we got a copy of it from a church magazine with a caption underneath it: “Our boys who protect us and who are now in New Guinea”. Well the four of us were really non-combatants.

So you can imagine what we got from the blokes who were in the rifle companies.

But, I got rid of the rifle once we were settled in. But while we were there, there was quite a possibility… at one stage I was visiting the 2/14th who were at another site.

During the night a party of Japanese, (just as the sun had gone down and it was dusk)…a party of Japanese came along and waved to the folk across the valley who were our troops. They dug in there and the next time we tried to get a party through to reinforce the troops up at the front, they started firing on them.

This was a very desperate situation because we were waiting on ammunition and supplies up at this Johns’ Knoll. It was just like watching the movies. Teddy Bear who was one of the highest decorated men in the battalion led an attack on them. He raced up the hill and was wounded.

I think he was wounded twice on this occasion. He still got into the trench with a bayonet. Some of the Japanese jumped over the side. The cliffs there are almost vertical. They almost jumped to their death rather than face him. As a matter of fact, quite some time after, one of the Japanese crawled out on

the path and was picked up by a Red Shield officer who had come up to visit me. But he was more dead than alive.

Well we were up in the Ramu Valley for quite some time. We moved around a bit because the 9th Division had struck so much trouble

up along the coast at places like Sattelberg and they didn’t make the rapid advance that the 7th had made. We didn’t strike a terrific amount of opposition, but we got so far up and then we were halted. Let me tell you this incident that happened. I was doing the rounds. As I say

I felt that my job was one of keeping up the morale of the troops, and to do this you visited them in their foxholes and so forth. One particular spot they had had a Jap attack and I think it was the night or a couple of nights before. There was a young man in the group that was at this place who had a mother and father both seriously

ill back at home, and he became what you call ‘troppo’. The strain was just too much for his mind. General Vasey was doing his rounds. He often did his rounds. As a matter of fact, his book called General Vasey’s War…that’s my photo on the dust cover.

I’ll show you later.

Yes, we frequently met. He would be wandering around visiting the troops and we would meet him on the track. He would stop and say, “How’s things going? Are you getting your comforts through all right for the boys?”

Anyway I was visiting this place and General Vasey was visiting also.

“How are you going?” He said to this young chap. The chap said, “General, could I talk to you? I’ve got an invention I would like to tell you about.” “Oh”, said the General. “Tell me all about it.” He said, “Well the kunai grass has a certain luminescence about it, so I think if you took it and broke it all and spread it along the sides of the roads

you’d be able to drive the jeeps through at night without their lights on.” “Oh that’s interesting”, said the General. “Is that so?” “Oh yes”, he said. “As a matter of fact I rub it along the side of my rifle and then I can line up a Jap in the dark.” “Well”, said the General. “I think this is too good…I think you need to tell other people about it. Now, you get your pack together and come along with me.

And we’ll go down and you can tell the doctor all about this. You can pass the information onto the doctor.” I thought, another General, and a lot of the Brigadiers and lesser ranks wouldn’t have shown such sympathy for the man. The boy loaded up his pack and off he went with the General.

He went back down and the doc talked to him and said, “Well, this needs to go back further. I’m going to send you back to the casualty clearing stage.” So he was moved back. I don’t know if he got home to Australia and saw his parents or not. But the General was just so good in everybody’s books. He was a wonderful man.

Absolute tragedy when he was lost.

Yes. But that was on the way up to Shaggy Ridge. There was a bit of a high there. But Shaggy Ridge was quite a long mountain really. It was named after a Lieutenant ‘Shaggy’

I think. The Japs had dug in well there and they were holding their position well. We cut the access to one of their tracks. The troops had cut the access to the track, but they weren’t going to give up Shaggy Ridge easily. We were now holding a number of outcrops or pimples on the

ridge and we were holding one and I went up to the folk and was talking to them there. They were saying, “The Japs are just there Eddie. We’ll cover you from here. If they stick their heads up we’ll soon fix that. Go out and have a listen to them.” So muggins of course would always take any challenge that was offered. So I went out and stood

against the precipice that was there and had a listen to the Japs yabbering away in their trench at the other side of the thing. The track was only about wide enough for one man really, and eventually the CO was away and the 2IC [Second In Charge] said, “No, we can take that. I’m sure we can do that.” So they attacked Shaggy Ridge

and they took this most important spot. It was a very fine piece of soldiering and the original attack over the top of the spot that I speak of was done by two men mainly. They got in and the others came up from almost impossible positions. I had a spot just down the track a little where they brought the wounded and

I had coffee there. I’ve got a very indistinct photo of all these white mugs where the folk were going up to the ridge to put in their attack. They had a bit of a hut there that they called ‘Do Drop In’, and at Christmas…the attack happened on Boxing Day or the day after,

Christmas Day I went up there and you never saw anything so well decorated. They had rolls of toilet paper and they had taken Atebrin tablets which were yellow and they had died the toilet paper. They had it stretched around the hut. The Yanks had been very good to us.

They had dropped canisters with Christmas presents in around the place.

They were distributed around the place.

Oh, food, cigarettes and sweets and chocolate and all that type of thing.

Shaggy Ridge was…

…whilst they were attacking Shaggy Ridge there was this Tiger Moth plane flying around and taking in the view. It was quite a well-coordinated attack with artillery and bombers and attack planes. But taking it all in was this little

Piper Tiger Moth with General Vasey in it. But apparently the powers that be were so enthralled by the fact that we had taken this very important part, and the Japs used to sing out “Only so far to Bogadjim”.

When they took that it was a very great part. That was the most important part of the whole ridge actually. Other parts still had to be cleared and other battalions did that. But we got sent back to Australia for another Leave.

Yes.

Just the usual leave. For some folk it was quite a long while because they spent a fortnight on the

train going to Western Australia, like a week. It would have been at least a week. They’d get down to Melbourne and we’d get off, but they still had all the trip from Melbourne to Perth. Yes, it was back for training and we were back on the Tablelands for quite a long while.

7th Division…there were 6th, 7th and 9th Divisions all up on the Tablelands at the one time, and they moved out to attack various places up in the area there. We were the last of the divisions to go. Consequently I was then the senior man on 7th Division headquarters for

the Salvation Army and I had the unenviable job of getting all the surplus equipment down to Townsville. The railways have tunnels there which aren’t very high. A lot of our vehicles I had to load onto flat tops, jack them up and take the wheels off and drop them down so they would get through the tunnels. And I still finished up

with some vehicles that couldn’t make that so I had to take a convoy down to Townsville. We drove these vehicles down and when we got to Townsville I said, “Gee, I don’t fancy this trip back on the train.” One of the officers who I was with said to me…

“Major Baker…Keith Baker is the Chaplain I think on the place. Let’s go and visit him.” So we went and visited him and he said, “I can get you back on the plane.” There was this brand new Beaufighter came in and the pilot said, “Yes, I’ll take them up to Cairns.” So

we got in and he said, “Now…the bomb bay doors were open”…he said, “Straddle across there until I close the doors and then you can stand on the bomb bay doors.”

Oh no. I stood behind the pilot and hung onto his seat and the other officer who I was with was further back in the plane. He was near the gunner.

We listened to the conversation. “Do you hear that?” “Yeah, it doesn’t sound too good does it”? “We had better get that looked at.”

Look, you were there to do a job and you did it.

So, we went back and we had taken over the responsibilities there. The Corps Headquarters had moved out and some of the folk were in the lockup…the Boob, and they were only allowed certain things, but when our folk took over they got a lot less punishment than what they were

supposed to get. We supplied them with stamps to send their letters away and allowed them to do as many letters as they wanted to. The other folk I know, one of chaps from the battalion was given the duty to look after these prisoners. He refused to go.

He was out on the playing field playing rugby, and they bowled out on the field and he said, “You can have my stripes back, I’m not going!”

Oh he didn’t go. The CO let him off. They were a great lot of blokes. So we eventually packed up and went down to Cairns.

Then we got away again. So we went to Morotai and on the way to Morotai we passed a floating mine. It was armed and the folk on board the ship that we were on…there was one gun on it. They went to the

Captain and asked for permission to blow the mine up. They put the first shell in the gun and fired it but it jammed. So the mine was still floating there and we had gone. But if we had been attacked the gun wouldn’t have been very much use at all, because their first attempt just didn’t work.

We went to Morotai and from Morotai…it was a nice little stay at Morotai.

What Morotai? No Morotai…they had fought and captured that, and they had American African

folk…probably descendants…and they weren’t a very brave lot I’m afraid. They were doing guarding. They used to send patrols further up the island. But they put us in trucks and drove us out past the front line of this Negro battalion and we went further up and camped on a beach which was very nice.

We could swim each day and go out to the coral reef and explore that. I think most of us managed to tip over enough rocks and get these very small shells and make beautiful necklaces to send home. The Air Force used to have this wire from out of their things that we could join the shells together with it.

I had a friend there…he was one of my brother’s friend. I went to visit him and he said, “Cup of tea?” And I said, “Yeah sure.” So he turned on…he had a little belly tank I suppose it was…an extra tank that they carried petrol with, with a pipe running down with a little U tube at the bottom. He turned on a tap

up the top and threw a match in the thing and before long we had a boiling cup of tea. I said “That’s a great idea. What do you call that?” He said, “It’s a choofer.” I understood why it was a choofer because the petrol that got down in the bend in the tube, the U tube, and the flame from underneath heated it there and vaporised it.

So it came out whoof, whoof, whoof. So I thought that type of thing would be excellent. So I went and found someone and we made a large scale model of it. I got two of them made up to fit into 44 gallon drums. When we landed on Borneo I found there were these drums of

100 octane petrol, so I loaded a few of those on and took them down and we connected this up. Folk coming off the ships were able to get an instant cup of coffee because we had this stuff going there.

I just set our rep up on the job. We had a representative

down there. One looked after Div troops. There was another one there who had been with the Corp troops who came under my command there. I had two Air Force officers there as well. I had quite a team there.

Well, VP Day…or VJ [Victory over Japan] Day whichever one you want to call it was a bit of a…you remember they dropped the first bomb. Well now we heard about that and realised that the Japs were in strife and they were probably going to…and there was a great deal of rejoicing at that stage when the second bomb dropped.

And when peace was actually declared it was a bit of an anti climax. In some places of course they went absolutely mad about it, but up there it was more of an anti climax than anything. There had been great rejoicing about the first one and the second one, but the peace didn’t mean very much. I know there was the hand over and there was the surrender

and we had Japs working for us then. We had a working party to come and clear up around the place. The actual surrender, they came to me. They couldn’t raise enough flags and I had a couple of flags which they took for the surrender on board. I think I had dinner with one of the naval units that night.

So then the peace was declared and it was a case of round up the Japanese. Those who had been in the Army a long while and had the points…they had a point system for sending them home…demobilisation. Some of them went up on the beach. They were a bit of a dead loss. They used to sit up there with

a pair of binoculars watching all the shipping come up the Strait. I think they had two parades in the time that they were there, and neither of them were formal. They set up a wonderful fish trap up there and I’m very partial to eating fish. I used to take the record player up there and

they would say, “We’ll do that Eddie. You go and have a swim or something.” I’d stop there perhaps over night sometimes with them and go back. The other crowd of course went across to Macassar. The ones who had joined later in 1942. They went across to Macassar

and the Japanese were rounded up and most of them were imprisoned at Pari Pari which is about a 100 mile up the coast. So that was the 2/14th up there and the 2/16th were spread around quite a bit. That makes interesting reading. The General

said it’s the first time he had to send men away to do a job for which they hadn’t been trained. The Communists were very active and wanted to get rid of the Dutch very much. The first time I went across I went across in a Catalina Flying Boat. I reported in and they said to me, “If you’re going around of a night

make sure you wear your slouch hat. The Aussie’s are popular, but the Dutch aren’t. You might finish up with a knife stuck in your ribs.” I brought home one of their knives which I’ve since got rid of. It was a jagged sort of thing. I would hate it to be sliding over my ribs. Apparently what they did with these punch knives…they had a handle instead of like a dagger.

It had a handle which came around at a right angle, and they punched it in. But generally the Indonesians would put it in a piece of meat and allow the meat to rot so that there were plenty of germs on it, so if the actual blow with the knife didn’t kill you the germs would.

I went across there twice. The second time I flew across in a DC3 and we went through a very violent thunder storm with lightening bouncing off the wings. When we got there, the airstrip was closed and there were natives with baskets of stones filling up the holes which had been made when the folk

had bombed it previously. But the pilot found a spot to land but he was told the airstrip was closed and he was most happy about that because it gave him some time to have a look over Macassar. If the airstrip was closed he couldn’t take off. Even though he had managed to land there.

I moved around. Fortunately at this stage of the war there was transport. In the jungles of New Guinea there was no transport so I had to walk

everywhere and I covered many miles. When we got to Balikpapan I had transport. As I say, when the war finished I went across to see how things were going over at Macassar, in the Celebes really. I managed to get around quite a bit. When Borneo…when Balikpapan

was first attacked I was sitting in an LST [Landing Ship Tank] waiting to embark with…unfortunately not with a fighting battalion at this stage but with Division Headquarters and so mine wasn’t such an early stepping off.

To watch the firepower of the ships with their rockets, you wouldn’t think anything would last…and not too much did of the town. There were only a couple of buildings there that didn’t suffer very badly. Fortunately I was able to get use of part of one of the buildings as a recreation hut and also as a store centre for the

various folk. I diverted back to our landing at Balikpapan rather than…I took the vehicle and followed up pretty closely these troops that were going, supplying them with the necessary gear, although they were kept well supplied.

I found that some of the Japanese dumps had bags of sugar. Sugar’s a very good thing to have in coffee or tea so when the bags of sugar were ever available I got hold of them and took them back. They weren’t the little 56 pound bags we used to get around Melbourne, but they were great big heavy bags

and very sticky. They had been left in the humidity. You needed a good shower when you finished carrying them. I had quite an interesting time there. My chief who was over in Morotai decided he would come and pay me a visit.

He said to me, “Well, I’ve been in the Red Shield work for a long time and I’ve never seen a shot fired in anger. What can you do for me?” So I said, “Hall is up in the situation on the highway there and I think if you go up there you’ll see something.” So I loaded him into the jeep and

we got part of the way along and there were two groups of mortars, one on either side of the road, and his attention was all taken up with the mortar on his side of the jeep and he didn’t notice them on the other side. He was talking away and all of a sudden they fired some mortar bombs

off and he nearly went through the roof of the jeep. I took him…he wanted to see each of the representatives so I took him around. We had one who was with one of the brigades which had gone up a river there, so we arranged with the headquarters and we boarded a Duck.

We rolled off the land and into the water and up this river quite some distance. Well the Duck was going further than what we wanted to go. So we saw the Rep and we decided to go back. There was a native canoe there and we got a lift back with them.

Yes. I had done a lot of canoeing as a boy.

We used to canoe on the Yarra in the good days, and of course we always worked from the back, the same as what the Indians did. But the natives up there seemed to paddle from the front of the canoe.

About 16 foot.

Timber and very primitive. Just a log type thing. A hollowed out log. We went down the river and the Duck picked us up and we were able to spend some time at the other spot. The battalion had been split up quite a bit, and there were companies spread around.

We passed a Japanese boat…one of their attack vessels that had been sunk on the side of the river there. We covered quite a lot of ground one way or another. It was

fascinating to go through some of the jungle there and have spider monkeys going across the road and up in the trees. I went up to…Balikpapan itself was the spot for the cracking plant which had been set up on the hill. The Japanese had dug ditches

from the oil tanks and part of their plan of defence was to flood these ditches with oil and set it alight to prevent the troops from crossing. The intelligence had got through and so the bombers went in and blasted the big tanks. There was lots of oil in the water.

When you went swimming…we had a little bucket of kerosene that you washed yourself down with before you took your shower. The actual oil wells were quite some distance away and it was piped through. We had a group of men up at one of these and I went up there.

They were living in fairly luxurious circumstances with the gas…natural gas laid on. They weren’t looking for a cup of coffee. They were able to make their own. That was quite a distance away. There was a pocket of them.

But they were out on their own well past what you would call the front line. Then when I went to Macassar, I was able to not only go to Macassar but visit the troops in various towns I past. What I started to say before was when all this bombardment went on, the bank was broken open and there was all this money from the bank, and

some of the early people on the scene managed to grab a lot of the bank notes. Eventually the intelligence section put it all out in baskets so you could take what you wanted as souvenirs. But some of the small ship people who had been with the troops in the early landing, got in and after the war was over and they went

to Macassar. The currency that was legal in Macassar was Japanese invasion money. So one of the chaps went and bought himself a mansion. The Dutch of course got onto that very smartly and complained to whoever was in charge of the place. He declared that the

Japanese currency was of no value. Well, nobody had anything else! So eventually he had to change that to I think, a hundred Jap guilders was the value of one Dutch guilder. I went to visit one of the company’s

in…I can’t remember the name now, but it was some distance away and it was way up in the hills. It was the holiday place up there. When I got up there, there was some delicious looking fruit and I said, “How much?” Trying to buy it in Jap guilders and they wouldn’t sell it to me. So fortunately I had a few Japanese guilders. I tried to buy it in Dutch originally.

But they accepted it. “Oh yes, yes. We’ll take that.” So they accepted the Jap money and I took the fruit. They had cockfights going there. It was amazing. A beautiful holiday place because you were pretty well right on the equator there. Consequently if you got up

into the hills, it was much cooler. So people used to go up there.

I came home on…I had to load all

of our surplus equipment onto shipping. No only the one ship but more, because there were vehicles and there was paper and envelopes and all sorts of things. The food stuff had been used up. A lot of the other equipment…we had sound systems,

and so many other things. Tables, chairs. I had to get all this and load them. A lot of the stuff I was able to put into some of the vehicles. But that all had to be crated up and loaded onboard the ships. Eventually when everything was done, I was able to put my name down and we came home on an

American ship…I can’t remember the name of that. I would have it down somewhere.

Alright. We got back to Aussie and a young lady whom I had met early in the piece on my way through there waved hello to me and provided me with transport.

I married her.

I was at a conference and she was a Red Shield officer with the WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force]. We were at a conference together and I suggested she might like to have lunch with me. We met a couple of times after that and we corresponded

and the story goes, she came from Sydney, I came from Melbourne, we met in Brisbane and we married in Adelaide. Now that’s Australian, isn’t it? All over. We didn’t have enough money to go and honeymoon in Perth.

When? It was 1943 I think.

1946.

Yes.

I imagined it yes. And I’m still married to her. Unfortunately I don’t get to live with her anymore. She’s in a nursing home.

Normally at this time of day I would be visiting her.

I go in every day really. So it doesn’t hurt to miss one day. Occasionally I have to miss a day. Sometimes a band appointment will take me away.

Melbourne. We came back to Melbourne and we’ve been here every since.

Well it was a bit of a change for me. I had to resign my officership in the Salvation Army in order to marry.

In the Salvation Army in those days…things are vastly different today.

In those days a woman, a wife had nearly as much to do as the man. Both needed to be qualified in order to do the job, and whilst they accepted folk who weren’t officers as Red Shield officers, they couldn’t become a Corps officer

or a social officer. So went back into the work force and …

No, no. She was discharged shortly after I was. I came back to Melbourne and had leave, then I handed in my resignation. During that period she came through and went over to her sister in Adelaide.

She had lost her parents many years before. She went to her sister in Adelaide and was working over there. I rang her up and said, “Will you marry me?” She said, “I’ll have to think about it.” I said, “Well, don’t take too long it’s only a 3 minute call.” She said “Yes.” So I went across to Adelaide. She gave up her job and we got married at Easter

in 1946 – the 20th of April. Seven years after she presented me with our one and only child, a daughter. Actually on the wedding anniversary day.

Yes. That saves my memory a bit. I know when it’s my daughter’s birthday it’s also my wedding anniversary.

Oh…I took a job processing engraving.

Well they…they were doing powder compacts. They were making ladies compacts. They had a pattern

on them. The pattern would be printed on them, but the printing wasn’t always a hundred percent and I would retouch with a little brush. I would paint up any parts of the pattern that were missing. Then it was dipped into acid and the acid ate away except where the paint was and made the pattern. The things were then polished and there you had your

case to put your powder puff in. I did that for a while, but I said to the folk, “This job’s not going to last.” They said, “Why?” I said “Well you’ve got outside competition now. What have you blokes been doing during the war?” They said, “They were doing special work for the war.”

When they took over this other thing, there were two of them and they would take all day to do what one of us finished up doing in a half a day. So it was easy to see that. I said to them, “Come on I’m not used to sitting around doing nothing.” They said, “Bring a book in and read it. Put it in the drawer

and if you hear footsteps coming along, shut it.” So I said, “That’s no good” and asked for a transfer and I got into plating. Silver plating and gold plating.

To see that the things were put into the proper acids.

They worked pretty well. I did the boss’ job too. He went off because there was someone experimenting with some electrical stuff and he was very interested in that. So he would go off in the morning and he would come back and say, “How’s it been?” And I would say, “It’s been all right.” There were other people in the department. It was a fairly reasonable department.

He’s said, “Well give me your time sheet. I know you’ve done enough work for the two of us.” He would copy off my hours and put it in…

Oh yes. They said, “They need a man up in the jewellery department.” and I think that was once again

soldering and so forth. I went up there and the foreman would come along and say, “We haven’t got much. Ease off or otherwise we won’t get our overtime tonight.”

I couldn’t. I read the paper and saw there was a job at the silk mill advertised, so

seeing I had experience at Prestige Hosiery I sent in my reference and I got the job there. I was working in the office as the Cost Accountant. At that particular stage of life, bonus systems had come into being in most of the jobs like that.

The secretary of the firm who was a very knowledgeable man, he would set the bonuses. The girls had a ball. On a couple of the machines, where they put the twist in the yarn, the girls did enough in three days to earn their week’s money with their bonuses.

They didn’t need to come in the other two days. So he said, “This is no good. We’ll have to time these things.” The unions said “No, you’ve set the cost. There has to be a change in the system before you can chance the bonus. You can’t alter it now.” So we worked on making some minor change and then getting a decent cost on

it. Where it was costing more, I would write to the firms that were selling the silk and say, “I’m sorry but we’ve got to put the cost of the thing up” and …I enjoyed it. I used to work on the bonus system. I used to work out everybody’s bonus. The new Australians girls would come up and say, “It is wrong, it is wrong!”

Even then you had to round off. You wouldn’t pay in half pence. But if you didn’t move the halfpenny up to a penny they’d be up the counter to complain that they were being paid short.

I spent a while there. A couple of years or more. My wife decided that she would go to work

so she read something in the paper about a local job. She went around and had an interview and said, “No, I think it’s a bit much for me, but my husband could do it.” So I got a very well paid job doing wages for a building firm. In those days there was a lot of cost plus work.

So there was a lot of money about. The boss thought I did the wages so well, he said I could do other things too. I finished up as Manager of the place. But he spent the money faster than I could make it. He would come in on a Monday and say, “You’d better get in some of those accounts Eddie. I’ve been out and bought my sister a house over the weekend.”

He was very generous to his relatives. A couple of ventures he wanted to go into, I looked into and said “No. You can’t make any money out of that. Don’t touch it.” He would say, “But they’re doing all right out of it. They’re making a good business out of it.” I said, “It shows up alright on the books but

no, it’s not a viable proposition.” Anyway, in the long rung I decided we would part and I bought a…well it wasn’t a cabinet making business when I bought it, but he had some woodwork and he was manufacturing toys and expanding trellis.

He advertised and I saw there were certain machines there so I bought the place…or I bought the machinery. I rented the factory. I set up and after a while I got into making sink cabinets. I spent the rest of my days doing that. I finished up with a reasonable sort of staff

and eventually sold the business to a young chap who I had had there as an apprentice. He had left me in the meantime and gone off and got experience elsewhere. He came to me for a reference. He was chasing a job and he came to me and asked if I would write him a reference. I said, “I’m looking for somebody to work here.”

We talked about a salary and he decided he would come back and work for me. He was a very good worker and we got on very well together. Eventually I decided to get out of the business and he decided he would like to buy it. So he bought it.

I don’t think so.

No really. I still had an adventurous spirit.

Let me say that they didn’t take too kindly about losing folk and when you undertook to become a Salvation Army officer, you did it for life. Quite a few

of course found that romance or something else came into the picture. In the years since, I still have many of the friends who I went through the College with, and I see them quite regularly. But I think I was able to do a great deal for the Salvation Army as a bandmaster in the Corps,

and exert a great deal of influence on people. And possibly I may not have had that opportunity if I had remained as an officer. I was bandmaster for twenty two and a half year, and also choir leader or songster leader as we term it in the Salvation Army.

I said to the Corps Officer, “I shouldn’t be doing both these jobs. They’re both important jobs and the regulations state that I may not hold commissions for both, so you had better find someone to take one of them over.” “Well”, he said, “What do you want to do?” So I said, “I don’t mind, whichever one you can’t find to relieve me of.”

So he found a bandmaster but he didn’t last very long. Just a few short years and he decided to give it away. He was a very good player but…I think if I’m allowed criticism I think I would say he didn’t have good people skills. And I think in any leader’s position you have to have people skills -

no matter how good your musical ability might be. If you can’t handle people you shouldn’t be in the leader’s position.

Oh yes. I played with a couple of military bands at various times.

I used to play the cornet for …you would have a Sunday night sing along and I would play the cornet then.

Whatever they wanted.

You had all the popular war songs in those days like The White Cliffs of Dover and

stuff that was sung by Gracie Fields, and we had Gracie to entertain us on a number of occasions. I always remember her turning up at Moresby on my second stint back there when they realised that mosquitos give you malaria, and after dark there’s lots of mosquitos around. So you didn’t get around in shorts and no shirt.

You had to have your shirt down to the wrists and long trousers on. Gracie came out showing more flesh than you can imagine.

Of those days? Well you had…Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye. Here I go…” I’m not too good with the words.

Yes. These days I’m Secretary of a Red Shield

Sub Branch of the RSL [returned and Services League] and every year we now put on what we call an Anzac Salute. It started being called Anzac Accolade but Accolade didn’t seem quite the right word to me, and when it diminished in popularity we started up the Anzac Salute which is doing reasonably well.

We had one on Anzac night with about 30 people there, and we sang some of those songs on that occasion.

Just recently? Well often they have songs like Lilli Marlene. I don’t go with that one very much. I don’t know if you know the history. That was a German

song about a prostitute, so being a good Salvo I don’t go along with that altogether. But most of them do. I mean, there’s nothing bad about the words of it. It’s worse these days to have the old First World War songs where you talk about It’s a long way to Tipperary which is the one that says, I’ve a Lucifer

to light my fag – because smoking is certainly not popular these days. During the war days we gave out a lot of tobacco and papers to folk, and some of them…my eldest brother said he didn’t start smoking until he was away in the Middle East.

He got cancer in the lung eventually. He gave up smoking in later life but it was too late then. He had cancer of the lung. They opened him up and took a lot of the lung out, but when they joined him up the bone, the nerves didn’t knit too well and he suffered a lot in his later days.

Oh yes. We had gramophones and records. Some of them are very famous, that they had in the Middle East. The Siege at Tobruk

had a gramophone and records which are now in the museum somewhere. It might be in Canberra. And my friend Albert Moore who I followed into the Battalion, he eventually presented his diaries and photos to the war memorial. Yes, he got special

permission from the battalion Commander to take photos with his camera. The 2/14th are fairly rich in the photos they’ve got of them going into the Kokoda Track. The Brigadier first stated that there was no way that the Salvation Army could go up the Kokoda Track, but he weakened a little bit and gave Albert permission to go.

Albert did get part way up there but the problem was of course, all the natives were really required to carry the ammunition and food.

As a kid I can remember a number of things. One was…just across the road from us there was a cycle shop. They had a big penny farthing cycle

tied to the post and occasionally the chap from the cycle shop would ride it up the street. The cable trams ran up the street and we would… my brother and I would get hold of shoe polish tins or lids off jars, punch a hole in them, put a bit of string through with a lump

of rag tied at the bottom of it. Usually we did that on Sunday because on Sunday the trams didn’t run until one o’clock. So you would go out and when they turned on the cables, we’d drop the tram chaser as we used to call it, down the track and the piece of rag on the bottom which would hook onto the cable and away she’d go. It would go for miles, and if there were trams

out as there sometimes was when we did this, it would only go as far as the tram and then it would jam up against the tram.

Oh no. We would just run along on the track there, but it would be good to see the thing shooting along. The cable of course travelled at one speed, and the trams travelled at one speed. When you got to certain places

like the corner or bends, the gripman would should, “Mind the curve” and he’d throw the thing and you would go around under speed, and then he would hook onto the cable around the corner. But I can remember in the summer time when it was terribly hot

we’d go for a trip down to the beach. The tram used to run from Rathdowne Street…and I’m not sure if it was South Melbourne, North Melbourne or St Kilda. But we would go down there. We wouldn’t go swimming, just pick up the night air on the trip on the Dummy.

That was the front…you know what a cable tram looks like?

You want to go…I don’t know where they’ve got it now. It used to be in Russell Street, outside the Museum there was one. It’s probably in the Museum now. But you’ve got a Dummy at the front where the Gripman had his controls. He sat in the middle of it. There were seats across the front. I think it would take two on either side, and there were seats on either side and across the back.

Then the car was dragged along behind that. You were covered in there…in the car.

I don’t know if it was 15 mile an hour. You could just about…if you were a good sprinter…the kids would…

when I went to Collingwood Tech [Technical School], the cable trams used to run up Johnston Street, up past the Tech, and the kids would whip on behind. They would run out and jump on the back of the car. There was a step there and they would stand on the step. The conductor would roam through the thing and if they saw him coming

they’d just jump off again. Some of the conductors were a bit nasty and they would drop off the car at the front and try and catch them before they could get off the back. Sometimes it was a case of running through the…if they saw that the conductor was going to get them they would run up the car and when the conductor chased them up through the car then they’d drop off before

he could get them. I didn’t do that. I wasn’t fleet enough of foot, I don’t think.

It was very little. A penny in those days was money.

Very few cars,

yes. Gordon would sometime yell at me, “Here comes a T-Model Ford”, and he would dash out to watch the T-Model Ford go up the street. Weekends, sometimes…there was a greengrocer just up the road and I remember one trip, we went with him on a Sunday. We sat on his flat tray thing and he had the horse in front. We went out

past Essendon there. The horse and cart was the thing.

Yes. I delivered the bread. I can’t have been too bad. The baker used to go into the pub of an afternoon and have his lunch while I took the horse and cart and did the deliveries. Then I would pick him up again

and go back.

Well, I didn’t expect it was going to be easy. And I was well prepared to do the walk across the Kokoda Track but I never got to do it.

The battalion came out and we expected to go back into action again because we thought the Japanese were strong enough to hold us up, but we realise now from information that’s been gathered since the war that they were in so much strife…they couldn’t reinforce them, so they told them to go back.

The fresh troops that came mainly just followed them across. There were a couple of spots where the Japs needed to have time to get their wounded…although many of them they just left alongside the track to die.

No.

I had met folk in Red Shield House. I had quite a bit of contact with folk who had come back from the Middle East. The Middle East of course was a far different picture. I had met Albert Moore previously and knew that the folk over in the Middle East had

a reasonable sort of time. They had transport. They had money. They could go and buy a block of cake or half a dozen blocks of cake to feed the men. Albert Moore was a remarkable man. He went the second mile with everything. When they were in Syria he couldn’t get his car up in the hills where the men were, he did whatever he could get supplies in.

He got a donkey from somewhere and took it into them.

Oh yes, but I think I was my own man and did my own job. But he was…yes. A lot of the folk didn’t want to tackle the jungle too much. They had tinea or some other thing. But yeah…

he and I spent a fair bit of time together. He was the only one that would come across and bring the supplies up to me. He spent a bit of time with me. Eventually we came out of there together. He brought up my replacement when I moved out of that particular hut that I had set up there. He was against me setting it up there in the first place. He said, “No, I don’t think this is the place for it. You should be back in one of these

creeks that go across the place, catching the wounded as they go back. They’re more in need of it there than what they are here”, but as it turned out, it was a winner where I set up and when I left there someone else moved in and took over for the other group…the Militia men that came in, and took over from us.

It was Ower’s.

Ower’s Corner.

Well a lot of them…well they were all mighty glad to be out of it. A lot of them weren’t able to say very much at all if they were on a stretcher. If they weren’t on a stretcher, they were looking for that cup of coffee to help them up the hill at

Ower’s Corner. It was very, very steep and slippery. We had the boss come up from Corps Headquarters. He wanted to see what the work was and Albert brought him up. The two of us went up with him and at that stage Ower’s Corner was just a grease patch. We, having done it a few times,

we were reasonably good on our feet, but the big boss he had got hold of the best of American clothes and we saw more of the soles of his feet than we did anything else. I think he slid most of the way down. He started following Albert and after a couple of spills he thought Moore’s leading me into this.

“I’m just falling into a trap”. He said, “Cooper’s worse than Moore is.” Ralph wasn’t too happy about that. But as I say, I have been back there a couple of times. I didn’t get to Ower’s Corner this time. Danna Vale [The Hon Danna Vale, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs] went up there but she didn’t take me.

The helicopter stopped there on the way back. It stopped there for her and we went straight back. It’s a different place altogether to what it was then. You may have seen photos of a zigzag track being cut? And mules going down the hill. They tried to build a road down Ower’s Corner because the area after Ower’s Corner was pretty good.

And you could have run jeeps or even heavier vehicles along had you been able to get them down the hill. But you couldn’t get them down the hill. As fast as they cut a road there the hillside slid in on it.

Yes, yes.

Well you can imagine a chap coming up to you and saying …in Gona there was one who said to me, “The officers were being killed off and I’m one of the few left. I know it’s going to happen to me tomorrow, what do I do?” “There’s not much you can do but pray with them.” And he went on the day

he said.

Yes.

I think so, yes. Some of them would come and talk to you as the Pastor. But most of them were pretty happy go lucky about the whole show.

They weren’t seeking too much solace about it. They were prepared to take their lot.

Oh amazing. I spoke before about Charlie Butler. The man who suffered agony all night long and he came out the next day and said

“I’m going to be a one eyed football barracker now.” That was typical of the spirit of the men. I remember one young chap. The Japs had crossed the river during the night and made an attack, and he was caught in his mosquito net. They brought him out the next day. The Japs had given him two

bayonet thrusts and then sort of prodded him to see if he was alive or not. He said “I couldn’t get to my rifle so all I could do was just lie there.” But unfortunately I think he got gas gangrene and didn’t make the grade.

I found it hard to make so many friends in such a short time when I first joined the battalion and to lose them so quickly. Just a few days after they had gone into action, many of them were lost. And not too many of them came out of it.

The Commanding Officer of the 39th Battalion, Ralph Honner called it the Koitake Syndrome or something like that. After being told that they were cowards, they never turned their back on it again. They sacrificed their lives rather than be thought of as cowards.

Koitake Factor, not syndrome. So General Blamey had a lot to answer for. I felt for the senior officers who had to commit men to their death in many incidences.

No. No I think they realised they had a responsibility there to do.

No. No. They knew they had a responsibility. General Vasey writes about it in his book.

He said about Gona, It was a case of whether the Japs ran out of men first or whether the Australians did. The losses were roughly the same on both sides I think.

I think that every man to some degree is religious, but how sincere that religion is, is another matter. Possibly a lot of them were affected by the war in one way and some in another way. I don’t know whether Teddy Bear who was

a very decorated man…he didn’t get the Victoria Cross, that was Bruce Kingsbury. The fighting at Isurava. Teddy was first wounded by shrapnel, then took two bullets in the legs, then one through the hand and he then took the Bren gun

and fought on. The bullet might have been after he took the Bren gun. But he eventually had lost that much blood and was weakened and couldn’t carry on any further. So he handed the Bren gun over to Bruce Kingsbury who had come up to reinforce them because the Japs looked like breaking through the perimeter at that stage, and Bruce took the Bren gun

and advanced with it and mowed the Japs down. He sort of rallied the blokes to put in a counter attack and forced the Japanese back. But Bruce was killed by a sniper. But Bruce got the Victoria Cross and Teddy got a decoration there. As I said earlier he got another decoration later on.

But he became very religious afterwards. He’s gone to be with his Lord now but…

Yes.

I think

the conclusion would have to be…ok there were times that God stepped in…such as Dunkirk when …but in the main I think it was left to man to go the way he had depicted. The way he decided.

It’s a very difficult subject. You’ve got the Christian Germans fighting that Germany will be victorious. Then you’ve got the English doing the same thing. Fighting that the English will be victorious. God answers prayer, that’s true, but I would quantify that by saying that very often he says no.

And at other times he just says, “You wait awhile before I give you the answer.” And other times of course we get what we’ve paid for. There’s a very nice poem that sort of says that I prayed for this and God gave me that. I prayed for something else…and it goes down through quite a list of things.

Then it finishes up by saying that all the things I prayed for I didn’t get, but I’m a much better man because God gave me these other things.

Yes. Many of the things that we chose for ourselves aren’t the best. Man has

the power of choice. He can choose which way he goes, but those who trust in the Lord and try and do his will, there’s a certain divine providence I believe that looks after them and guides them. As I look over my own life, I wanted lots of things which I never got

but I reckon I’ve had a pretty good life.

Well, you’ve got to make your own choices.

I set up the hut at one spot and I was left with it. Whereas originally when we set up the place, I had some native boys with me and they were pretty wonderful. Two of the boys came from the Island of Buka in the Solomons and they were black as the ace of spades. One of them had great big eyes.

And the other one, Seebend. He was nice. A nice looking bloke. Nungarry was the one with great big eyes. I got them from the carrying lines when I left my batman behind. So I got these two boys and they worked with me. They were good.

I had difficulty getting the message across some times because my Pidgin didn’t always get across, but I managed to say what I wanted. And when the 39th Battalion left us there, the CO came to me and said, “I see you’ve got a couple of boys with you there, now we’ve got a couple that we’ve had with us for a long while. We’re going back to Sanananda now, and if we get them back there they’ll be put on the carrying lines and I’d rather

they stay with you.” So I took them on. One of them had been a houseboy for a doctor in (UNCLEAR) and he spoke perfect English. After then I didn’t get to learn Pidgin properly because I didn’t need it.

“You belong him.”

I got hold of Pidgin papers. New Guinea still publish in English and in Pidgin. There are so many dialects up there that Pidgin is the accepted thing. They teach English in the schools and many of them speak very good English. Pidgin English, well it is

English.

I don’t know. I never got to ask their ages. But they were young men, probably about 18. Brunis would have been older. They decided they didn’t want to stay in the hut

with me and that they would camp in amongst the trees by the creek. So they built their own little place down there and they would go down there of a night, and I would sleep by myself in the hut. I had a scare one night when I felt my mosquito net flat on my face and I could see that something was pushing…I had a bit of a petition there where I kept my stores and had a couple of beds in there.

Some of the correspondents might stay over night with me or photographers. But this mosquito net was down on my face and I thought someone is leaning up against the partition. So I turned around in the bed and tried in the dark to see what was going on. Not knowing whether it was Japanese or what, but it was Japanese all right. It was a Japanese horse.

He had found his way in and got his head wedged in the partition.

Oh no. I don’t think so. I chased him out. It didn’t last very long. The blokes were pretty trigger happy and when they heard this horse coming towards them they shot it. The horse got killed which I think might have been a happy release for it.

The Japanese didn’t treat them well. They were a scraggy looking lot and they roamed around in the kunai grass. You couldn’t tell what it was, whether there was someone on them or what. The kunai grass grows six foot high and more.

No. I know we had mules back on the Moresby

end, but no not up front. All the Japs were well equipped. They knew what they were doing long before they got there. They had pushbikes, and you’ve probably read how they used the pushbikes in Malaya. Those places you could manage with a pushbike I guess, but how they managed it in the mud I don’t know. Lots of patches were

without mud though. The area from Gona back to Soputa and back to Popondetta you could ride a bike there without much difficulty. But when you got up in the mountains, not a hope in the world. But of course it gave them mobility. They were able to travel quickly on pushbikes. They must have manufactured millions of them.

But they had the horses there as well for carrying stuff.

The native carriers were coming through all the time. Occasionally you would have a group of women coming through.

Oh yes. After dealing with the Japanese, they were very happy about the Australians.

Yes, they did work there. Usually there would be an overseer with them, like the story I’ll tell you about with the snake.

I was spending the night at Soputa having been down to pick up supplies and got the train back the following morning. I was spending the night there and talking to two people from the battalion who were looking after the echelon back there when we heard a scream. We came out of the tent to find out what was going on.

One of the troops who was looking after the natives, was shaking all over and pointing to the ground and saying, “Snake!” There was this very thick python and he was half under…we didn’t know he was half under. We thought it was just the head of him under the log that was across the side of track.

And it was about 8 foot of the snake that we could see. We got a torch and looked and found that there was about another 8 foot of the snake on the other side of the log. It was about 14 to 16 feet. So the officer, Dave Rainey said, “Get your Tommy gun Spike and we’ll shoot it.”

Well Spike got his Tommy gun but Spike couldn’t see too well and he was tripping over the body of the snake whilst he was looking for it. So Dave took the Tommy gun from him and fired a couple of bursts into the back and apparently broke its backbone. Then the boong basher as we called the native train

operators, went on his way and we went back to talking. A short while after a jeep came with its lights on and wanted to know if a Jap patrol had broken through somewhere. They had heard firing from the bursts of the Tommy gun, so we showed them the snake and told them the story. Well someone said, “That’s a male. The female’s usually bigger than the male

and they usually get around together.” Spike said, “I’m not sleeping in that tent by myself. I’m coming in with you Dave.” But we didn’t see it anymore. The next morning… they had gone back and reported in, and the next morning they came back and said “The General would like to see the snake, is it all right if we take it.” We said “By all means take it.

It’s only going to stink if we leave it here, otherwise we have to bury it.” So they took it and the next day…they used to have a newspaper that they published up there. The next newspaper that came we got this photo of this chap holding up the snake that he killed. I suppose he showed it to the General but then

he got his photo in the paper with the snake that he killed. I can’t remember the name of the paper, but they used to bring it around and we of course would get a copy and realised what a fraud this bloke was.

There were a lot of snakes up there really. I saw the smallest

one I’ve ever seen. It was just a tiny thing and it was wriggling across the heel print of a boot in the mud. And this python was the biggest I saw. I nearly slept on top of a Death Adder one night. It was a place for snakes.

Not that I know of.

I’ll tell you tomorrow about the flood that I got swept away in. One of the flooded streams and the story of snakes comes into that.

Could be.

No I didn’t strike any of them, but I know they were around. I enjoyed Christmas Dinner on a bit of wild pig with one of…with Major Geoff Mutton at the advanced dressing stations.

Pigs.

And a lot of the native…there were certain plants. With the Christmas Dinner I can tell you about, we had plants…it tasted a bit like spinach. It was just one of the plants there. The natives had gardens all around the place.

The patrols used to come back and very often bring me back a lemon or a banana. I know the day before we came out of the place they brought me a banana and it was as green as grass so I thought I would let it ripen up. But I believe now it was a cooking banana. After carting it for a while

I thought this is too heavy to cart so I cooked it. You know with a banana, very often you’ll find little tiny seeds. Seeds the size of passionfruit up at the end of it.

Yes, it was. I would have got a great feed out of it if it had been ripe.

Tucker wasn’t the best there.

Albert Moore sent me up some bread. Most of the stuff that came up came up in a little hessian bag and this little hessian bag had what had been a loaf of bread in it. When it got to me it was just a mass of crumbs so I tipped them out. Bread, we hadn’t seen bread

for a while. There was a flat piece there and I picked out all the weevils and rolled the crumbs into balls and ate them. Normally we existed on bully beef and biscuits and fortunately with the native boys we had got some Japanese rice that hadn’t gone off.

And that was quite good. Burnis was an expert at cooking up rice. It wasn’t claggy like the troops usually cooked. Fortunately with the hut we had milk so I lived on rice and milk for quite a while.

Very little. Very little.

Yes. With the Second World War I guess my daughter doesn’t know very much.

She would have seen various writings that perhaps I’ve done, but she hasn’t sat down and discussed what the war was like. It seemed to be the way of it. When you came back you just wanted to forget about it, and in my own case for the first seven years I didn’t attend

reunions or anything. And when I went on the seventh year I was that disgusted that I don’t know how many years it was before I went back again. Everybody wanted to pat me on the back and say good old Salvos. More than half of them were drunk of course. It wasn’t good, but as the years went on they

got better and the reunions these days are very good. Everybody wanted to forget about it. We had the oldest member of the group who went in 1998 on a pilgrimage to Isurava. Maurie Taafe said, “When we came back, we just didn’t want to talk about it, and we wouldn’t talk about it.”

I’ve found that there’s been a number of sons of people who served trying to find out about things. Their fathers are no longer with them. I shared a room with one such son who did the trip to find out what his father was involved in.

As Maurie said, at the time we thought it was the right thing to do. Just to forget all about it, but he saw now that what we should have done was let people know so that they understood something about what war was about.

Yes.

In the early stages you remember the hurts, but now that we’re that much older we can look back on it and so you don’t mind talking about it. But very early in the piece you weren’t too keen to. W.B. Russell, Bill Russell who wrote up the 2/14th Battalion history, glossed over the Blamey

incident because he didn’t want to hurt the relatives. The book was produced as the first war history of the Second World War. He said to me, he had specifically skipped over that because he thought it was too hurtful and he didn’t want the relatives to be upset about it.

We have a second book written on the 2/14th Battalion called Men of the 2/14th. So many people had said, “My dad was in the 18th Platoon and I don’t know what he did in the war”, so this book set out to name the people in the Platoons so that in reading the history

of the 2/14th or 18th Platoon or whatever it was, they could say then that “Possibly my dad was involved in that action.”

No, I don’t think so.

No, people didn’t ask you a great

deal about it. There were some who were interested. After my retirement when I settled in here, I did start to write up my war history but it got so far and then things got too busy and I never completed it.

Yes, everybody told me

that I must finish it. I have a niece at the moment who is very interested. She’s been a history teacher and at the moment she’s researching the family history. But she’s doing it a lot differently than most people. She’s trying to get hold of the different folk and write up their history, as well as doing

the family which just says this one’s your grandfather and he had these children.

No. Most people just don’t want to know anything about it.

Well it’s very difficult to say.

It could be a number of reasons but I think it’s because they live for today, and they’re not interested in the past and that unfortunately seems to be a trend amongst the young people of today. They think they know it all and I guess we did when we were young too. But they think they know it all

and that they can…but my idea is that the old people need the young people for their enthusiasm, and the young people should be learning from the old folk because they have experience and they can give guidance on a lot of things. But that’s not the way it works unfortunately,

and mort particularly in this day and age. Although there is a keenness amongst the younger folk today, and I see that the RSL for one thing, but more particularly the Battalion Associations are now being taken over by the kinfolk

…the sons of the fathers. I mean, after all we’re getting too old in the majority of cases to run it. We’ve all done many years and I suppose the time will come soon when…as far as our sub-branch goes I’ll be handing over to somebody else to look after the secretary

post which is the main job of the…you can always get a President. He hasn’t got much to do. But when it comes to the Secretary nobody wants to take on that job. I’ve been involved in the Red Shield Sub-Branch for many years. It started in 1964.

It was a bit late. The war was well over, but a lot of people like myself who went along to the RSL found it wasn’t quite their cup of tea. Being Salvos we don’t drink, we don’t smoke, so consequently when we went to the RSL group we found we didn’t fit into the

picture. So it was decided we would start one of our own and the RSL agreed that that was a good idea. About four years after it started I suppose, they managed to rope me into a position as Treasurer which I did for about six and a half years. Then they said, “We want you for President”, and I did three years.

Normally we would change the President every two years. Some of them hold their Presidents forever and a day, but we liked to give everybody a go and after two years normally we would appoint someone else. But I was asked to stay on for the extra year. I did three years and then remained on the Executive. Eventually

we had a Secretary who wasn’t too keen on the job and we lost our Treasurer. So I went back as the Treasurer and Arnold said to me, “Let’s swap jobs.” So I’ve been the Secretary for 16 years I suppose.

It’s great to get back with the folk. There is something about the fellowship. There’s something about it. The very fact that you belonged to that Battalion. I belong to the 2/14th in as much as I was on their role as an attached troop.

But I didn’t get to the Middle East and many of the folk who attend the reunion went to the Middle East but never went to New Guinea. But those folk will accept you, and there’s still that mateship there because of the fact that you had belonged to that group. Something of the same spirit is found in the Salvation Army.

You can go anywhere in the world and you meet up with another Salvationist, and you’re immediately accepted. And it’s the same with the 2/14th and the 2/16th. As I mentioned previously I was at 9th Div headquarters and then spent quite a long while at 7th Div headquarters. I’ve never attended any of their reunions. There was never the fellowship.

I had certain friends among them who I kept in touch with for quite some years, but it was different. I think if you share danger with other folk and your life depends upon them, that creates a bond which is unique.

Oh I think mates do things for each other all the time. I’ve told the story of Teddy Bear when he was wounded at Isurava, and he went to the

RAP [Regimental Aid Post] to have his wounds dressed and he was evacuated from there, but not before while he was lying on the stretcher at the RAP he got a bullet through the heel. He had considerable difficulty walking. With the Japanese so close he was told to start out back to Moresby.

He hadn’t got a great distance along and he was walking like a crab sideways and staggering about the place, and a chap by the name of Russ Fairbairn who had a bullet in the back near the spine came along and Russ stayed with him all the way. He cut a stick for him and they went along

for days, or it would have been a couple of weeks I suppose before they got back. He said that without Russ he would never have made it. He would have fallen off some of the cliffs into the creeks down below. But Russ looked after him when it got late in the afternoon. They would stop and Russ would try and get a meal for them.

That’s the sort of comradeship that carried on right throughout. John Metson is one which I used in a number of addresses which I’ve been called on to give. John was shot through the ankle and he was unable to walk but he refused to be carried on a stretcher.

He said “No, there’s too few of your blokes. You’ve got stretcher cases there already. I’ll get along on my own”, and for two weeks he bandaged up his hands and knees and crawled with the rest of the group until the came to a place. They had been cut off by the Japanese at Isurava. Eventually they came to a friendly native

village who said they could leave them there. One of the men from the relief aid post said he “Would stay with them so the others could press on and bring back help.” In the meantime, unfortunately before the help got there, the Japanese, or we now believe

it was a collaborator with the Japanese shot them all on their stretchers. But that was the sort of atmosphere that I went into when I first joined the Battalion. The officer who was in charge of that eventually sent out other folk to

try and make contact and get help back. But they hadn’t had any success so he pressed on with the balance of the fit men and then eventually said, “This is too slow, I’ll press on by myself.” He came through and I remember him walking into the mess. He had a beard equal to none. He’d been out for something like six weeks and he came in with this great beard.

The folk made a fuss of him and he went off immediately to…he had come through on a track which had been assigned to the Americans to look after. He was seconded to the American troops but not before he got a plane up and dropped supplies to the people at the village there.

Yes, beards and skin and bones. Food wasn’t easy. I mean they carried their food in, and the Japanese had planned that they would overrun the Australians and take over their food supplies.

Instead of that, when they had to leave anything behind they destroyed it. If tins of bully beef were there then they were all punctured and allowed to remain in the sun so that if the other folk ate it they would suffer pretty badly from dysentery. The Japanese of course plundered the native village gardens.

The villagers were very good to that particular lot who moved through, but they wouldn’t move out of their own district. They would give guidance up to the next district and then say “Follow the track along there.” The tracks in the main were anything from 3 feet to 6 feet wide. But mainly about …just enough room for one man.

The main track was different. I’m sure the Japanese thought they would be able to ride their bikes across the Kokoda Track. You spoke about horses. General Horii was the Commander of the South Seas regiments and he had a white charger

which he rode up into the mountains. But he, I don’t know what happened to the horse, but he himself was drowned trying to cross the river when they were withdrawing. The rivers were very fast and quite dangerous. In the early stages of my being with the Battalion, I was moving between the 2/14th at Ilolo

and the 2/16th at Itiki, and there were a lot of Salvationist bandsman at Itiki and they said “What about bringing out some music for us? Get hold of some good Salvo marches and so forth.” I had no gramophone so I said to Albert Moore, “Look the boys at the 2/16th

are asking for some music. What about coming over one day and we’ll take your supply of stuff and play it to them?” So he picked me up. He came through from New Guinea Force Headquarters and picked me. He had the things on board his battle buggy that he had brought back from the Middle East and we started out. We hadn’t got very far and the rains came.

It rained every afternoon there so you expected it, but the amount of rain we got this day compelled us to stop. You just couldn’t see. If you were a weatherman I think you would call it a cloud burst. When it passed and we got going again, there was water running over the road everywhere.

We got through to the camp and the folk were quite some distance up from a creek or river which ran below. It was a rubber plantation there and there was this creek that ran through and had a bridge over it. And it joined the river further down, not very far at all.

We talked to them and we watched the creek. There were logs floating down the thing at quite some speed, and we were talking we noticed that the logs had started to come back up the creek. The amount of water in the river that it flowed into and poured out and went back.

This came up very quickly, so we said to the folk, “What are you going to do? It could come into your tents.” They said “Yes, I think we’ll move up to the buildings up there with the concrete floors.” They were much higher than where they were. By the time we had carried the first lot of their gear and got back, the water was knee deep in their tents, so it came up with quite a rush.

Now, with it came the snakes - alongside of the river there were all these snakes. One of the men of the 2/16th had been the manager on the Victoria River Downs which I think was the largest holdings up in the Northern Territory. He was taking the snakes by the tail and cracking them like a whip

to break their backs.

I don’t really know. They were all shapes…not all shapes, but sizes and various types. They were wriggling around at the side of the waters there. So we said “I think we had better skip the music today. We had better get back whilst the goings good.”

We started out and we met a truck and he said “You won’t get through there, the bridge is down.” It was a narrow road and we tried to turn around, and whilst we were trying to manipulate the turnaround, another truck came along and said, “I’ve just come through.” He said “The side of the bridge has gone but the bridge is still there.” So Albert said “Well I really need to get back to

headquarters for the morning, we’ll keep going.” So I said, “When you come to any part of the road that’s covered by water I’ll get out and you can judge how deep it is by how far up my legs the water comes up to.” We did this until we got to this bridge. And the water was flowing very rapidly and I suppose about 18 inches

across the thing. I said “What do you think?” He said, “Let’s give it a go.” So I said “I’ll stand at the part of the bridge that’s been washed away”, and that was the fastest part of the current. As the battle buggy came up it seemed to be sliding across and I’m leaning against it and pushing all I could so it didn’t get swept over.

When eventually he got past me, the force of water which had banked up against the side of the truck hit my leg and knocked my feet away from under me and I was in this raging river! So I immediately started to swim, (and having been a scout

leader for a number of years before I left home, and we had felt a responsibility to do a first aid course and a Royal Life Saving Society Course, so along with a number of others I got a Bronze Medallion and knew what to do.). So I didn’t fight across the current.

I eased my way across into the calmer water. I breast stroked across and got over to the side, then the thing that struck me was all these reeds, and I remembered the snakes from the other place. The amazing part about it was that I had my hat on.

I had no shirt, just a pair of shorts and military boots which aren’t the best to swim in. Albert Moore, who was driving the vehicle didn’t know if I could swim even. So he raced the car through as quickly as possible out of the water then came running back shouting out for me, and I’m crawling out through these reeds at the side of the river.

I still had my hat on with no chin strap! My head hadn’t gone under the water. I had been swept away.

I climbed out through the side of the thing and made my way up to the car. But water had somehow got into the lighting system. We went a few hundred yards and

the lights failed. So we were crawling along there and eventually we came to a camp and the folk had bright lights and we were coming out of the dark, and Albert walked into a slit trench. The folk came down and picked him out of it. They tried to do something with the car. They were a light aid detachment,

which meant they dealt with military vehicles. They tried to do something about the lights but didn’t get anywhere. So we took off in the dark again, and after a while what ever it was cleared itself and the lights came on as bright as ever. I think I got back to camp about half past two in the morning, and Albert still had to drive down to Moresby which would have been a good half hour’s drive or more.

It was a pretty adventurous day. I don’t think we ever got back there with the music for the men. I think we moved. We just didn’t have the opportunity to take it there.

Well you get men to perform.

Some of them you just couldn’t get the microphone away from them. The vocal renditions at times were pretty dreadful. When I was at Warradale camp (you were asking about that yesterday), the YMCA chap there was a very good singer. The YMCA used to run the

camp concert and the station would come there about once a month and broadcast it over Adelaide. As I said, Lewis came in one day and said “Come on, I need you. I haven’t got a second tenor”, and he put me out close to the microphone and not too many people realised that there was only one.

They said I came through fairly well. The other folk were further back because I was so close, and the strength of my voice carried through. He had a number of music students who were learning to singer. One of them got…on a number of occasions he would have to come in for me and say, “They need me.” I used to sing either the second tenor or first base.

He came in and said, “We’re in the final in the Adelaide Town Hall. I’ll get you someone to look after the hut for the night. I want you to come in and sing first base for us.” So I organised someone to look after the hut for the night and I went in with him. We sang at the Adelaide Town hall and I think we were about the first item up.

Lewis said to the photographer who had to go somewhere else, “Hey look, take our photo we’re going to win anyway.” And strangely enough it turned out that we did. So we got our photo in the Radio Call. I’ve got a copy there. I think it cost three pence in those days to get the Radio paper.

It would be nice if we could get one these days for that price.

We didn’t have too much opportunity to do anything there, but we did one or two.

There’s not much to tell. It was just a case that you found folk who could sing and you had community singing.

It was more back in Australia that you had the opportunity for that type of thing. When they were in training camps. Although up at Borneo at Balikpapan, it was possible to run them up there, particularly when the fighting finished. But you could get people who would do…

…they used to take off the race callers. There was quite a skit on that that somebody did.

“Oh, they’re lined up at the barrier. They’re racing, and Two Bob’s got away…” And then suddenly

you would get a voice that would break in and say, the chap would change his voice on the microphone… “They’re racing in Manangatang” (that’s a country place). Then they would go on back with the race, with all these peculiar names that they had for the horses.

There was always someone who wanted to do that. Some of the folk were quite good singers and you had other folk who might recite.

Things like…

what was the name of it? I can’t think of the name now.

Yes, poems. Nothing classical. Bill, somebody won the cricket. The story roughly goes that

two towns vied against each other and whoever won had to buy the drinks. No, whoever lost had to buy the drinks. The first town had a fairly good cricket team but the second team wasn’t so good, and they dragged some old farmer in who had never done much. He got a bit of paling and made a bat out of it.

He practiced up a bit. He had a dog and he got the dog to fetch the ball when he struck it. Anyway he was the last man in. They bowl up a ball to him and he hit it, and he said to the dog, “Fetch it!” Well the opposing team spent all the time chasing the dog.

You could run more than six apparently in their game. He ran to make the score up and then eventually told the dog to drop the ball. They had a great time at the pub that night with the other mob shouting the drinks.

Yes.

Some of them would take off ladies…taking off their girdle and their bra. You would very often get one of them up on the stage. You get enough to…

…and some of them would put on an act and they’d get together impromptu. We used to do that sort of thing in our scouting days. You would get someone to do the spruiking and the others just acting a part. You could ad lib anything. I remember back in our scouting

days we camped at Wonga Park one year and the people from the nearby…we camped on private ground, but there was a camp site nearby and the folk used to come through at night when we lit the fire and sit around and watch. We would do this act with Desperate Desmond and Handsome Harry or someone.

Then we had a horse which was two of the scouts with a blanket over the top of them. Handsome Harry galloped off from the thing but the horse lost his way and they went over the bank of the river and put poor Handsome Harry in the river. Instead of someone grabbing him and pulling him out because he wasn’t a strong swimmer.

They were all dashing around yelling for torches.

Well you had one man who was the spruiker and told the story and the others would act it out as he told it. It was usually pretty humorous because they hadn’t plasticised before and the actors just had to go along with what

was happening.

Well you didn’t have the facilities in the camps. They had a camp concert party attached to the military. There were several concert party units and then of course you had outside folk who came in. The Americans

had people from Hollywood. Bob Hope was one of the greatest entertainers that they had. There were various people. You just improvised with perhaps a blanket around you…wrapped around the waist to look like a skirt or something of that nature.

A couple of tennis balls in the jumper to give some reality. If you were doing anything then you usually had a lot of volunteers. When I first went to the 2/16th Battalion I would play music. I had a vehicle there with a

sound system and so forth. And I had the records there and the boys would come and say, “I’ll do that for you Eddie. You go and do something else. We’ll look after this. We’ll play the records.” Because of Blamey’s speech about the rabbit that runs. There was a popular song at that time which said Run rabbit Run.

‘Run rabbit run, rabbit run, run, run, run.

Here comes the man with the gun, gun, gun’.

It was quite a popular song and I found they were putting this on, and the CO said to me. “Eddie you know that that’s got implications”. I said, “Yes, I was on the parade when Blamey mentioned it, and I’ve heard stories of what happened when he went to the

2/9th AGH [Australian General Hospital]. He went into one of the wards where men from the 21st Brigade were and they all started singing Run Rabbit”. So he turned on his heel and walked out and when he got outside, the story goes that there were three men out there chewing grass on their hands and knees.

Yes. I believe he told the Matron he wanted their names, and I don’t know if he ever got them. The CO said to me, “It causes a lot of hurt. I think the folk had got to the stage where they treated it as a joke rather than taking it seriously.” However, I took the record and I broke it

so they couldn’t play it anymore.

I let the CO know I had got rid of it.

Oh yes. You had the hardship

for sure but times were good. You enjoyed yourself. We came home from Gona and the reception that we got when we went up onto the Tableland was amazing. There were people out on the stations where ever the trains stopped. Kuranda,

which is renowned for its beauty. It’s near the falls there and the ferns and plants that they’ve got on the station are absolutely gorgeous. When we got there, there were tables spread out with food and oh boy we lived it up. We hadn’t had much but we did live well on the boat coming home.

Prior to that we had been living mainly on bully beef and biscuits. So when we got home we were glad of this good food. We got up on the Tablelands and the townsfolk offered hospitality to the men for the weekends, when they had the weekends off. And I know Mick Palmer used to go

down to Atherton to the Bank Manager and spend the weekend at the bank manager’s place. It was quite good. It was virgin bush when we got up there. They had to make the camp sites. The padre whom I’ve spoken of, Charlie Cunningham lost the top of his finger rolling a tree. They were cutting down trees and rolling them to make a football

goal. He jammed the top of his finger in it and lost the top joint. It was there that the Brigadier said to me that he wanted me to move in. “You’re a Brigade Headquarters man, move into Brigade Headquarters.” I wasn’t very happy about that and I remember sitting in the tent one day which I had as my office. I had

the flaps up both ways and a wallaby hopped through whilst I was sitting there writing letters. I managed to persuade the Brigadier that it wasn’t a good idea for me to spend my time at Brigade Headquarters and so I moved across to the 2/16th Battalion and went through the next campaign with them.

Well the point was, back in Australia they were in reasonable distance and I had transport so it didn’t matter there, but my view point was that OK, soon or later we’re going back into action, and what actually happened was when we got up to Nadzab, the 2/14th went one way and the 2/16th went the other way. There was quite a long distance

between the two and there was no transport to get to them. If you live with a battalion then you move with them. If the other battalion was close enough then you hiked around which is what I did. Whereas if I had been at Brigade headquarters I would be probably last into the area and the battalions would have been gone and

there wouldn’t have been much opportunity to do a great deal for them.

Oh yes. Usually the officers back in Australia would serve the men on Christmas Day.

They would serve them up their Christmas Dinner. They would act as the waiters and what have you. At Gona, I’m afraid…I don’t know if they got some boiled lollies or something, but generally speaking the cooks did a great job. They got some meat and vegetables and a reasonable sort of a pie for the folk, but nothing worth mentioning.

Gona was a difficult place. Everything had to be dropped by plane. My Chief, Albert Moore had been hospitalised when he left me. He got malaria and when he got back they put him straight into hospital, and so he was there and wasn’t able to get these supplies out to the plane. There were times when I ran out of things and went to the military

for some tea. Christmas Day I thought - it’s impossible. “What can I do for the men? There’s nothing here very much, I’ll go back to Soputa and see if there’s any supplies there.” So I set out very early in the morning. It was still dark but I was able to see the track sufficiently.

I think I was griping and grizzling a bit about having to do this on Christmas Day. I turned around at one stage in the jungle…you went off the main track because it was thick mud and very hard walking, so when you got to those patches you went into the jungle and cut through there. Now there were myriad tracks in the jungle. I must have turned around. I got back a bit and I thought to myself

I think I’ve crossed this river before. So I went back to the next river and I thought I’ve crossed this before, so I put on my running shoes as it were and really hastened to get back. I got back to Soputa and there was some material there. They had some cocoa, although why on earth they sent cocoa I don’t know.

And Dad’s cookies which seemed to be very popular. They came from Sydney. I packed myself up with as much of this as I could carry and I set out again. I got back as far as the Advanced Dressing Station and the Major there, Major Geoff Mutton the

doctor, said “Stay and have Christmas Dinner with us, we’re just about to start.” Somehow or other they had managed to shoot a pig. I hope it wasn’t one of the native’s pet ones. The native pet pig was highly prized. It took pride of place. Some of the places the mosquitos were that bad…I had read about the Sepik River. They had baskets that they made

and the parents went in first, then the pig and then the children followed after, and these baskets were for them to sleep in at night. At one stage they had shot a pig and they had to make some recompense to the natives who had complained that one of their

prized pigs was there. I’ve seen a mother suckling a baby on one breast and a piglet on the other. That’s what they thought of their pigs. It was a bit of a tragedy if you shot one of their family pigs. But they had shot this pig. I believe it was a wild one and they had got some of the

growth around the place for vegetables. We used to get dehydrated potatoes up there. So it was quite a nice Christmas Dinner that I had. And then I had to put on the skates and get back to camp as quickly as possible. I put on cocoa and Dad’s cookies for the supper that night. But that was one Christmas.

The one up in the Ramu Valley was a different thing altogether. The Yanks had been very good to us, as I said, dropping canisters and so forth. We had all sorts of things. I made the rounds of all the platoons wherever they were, but this particular one they had gone to a lot of trouble. I don’t think the Doc was very pleased because they had used his Atebrin tablets

to dye the toilet paper. Probably the Quartermaster wasn’t too happy either with the fact that they were using so many rolls to make streamers. It was very good.

No. You travelled light. As I said, half a towel. Everything was cut down

to a minimum. Your clothes, you wore the clothes and then you went down the river one day and washed them out. Then you’d put them on again, but everything was as light as possible. Ramu Valley was supposed to be an airborne thing. Well we were airborne to Nadzab. We were airborne to Kaiapit and the rest of the way

we walked.

No. We measured it in miles in those days. But I still don’t know how many miles. I know that I’ve checked on a scale map to see how far it was from Soputa to Gona and that was about eleven, eleven and a half miles.

So that Christmas Day would have been about a 25 mile hike for me.

I suppose I did far greater than that at times. You had one battalion up in the ranges somewhere and the other one resting

in the valley, or up in the hills. The 2/14th were up in the hills. There were two lakes up in the hills and at one stage they had a regatta up there.

Oh they made boats and logs. That was

the name of the game. You had to be able to improvise. One place I was at was so far away from the water, so we put up this little hut in which we slept and lived, and we had bark gutters to run the water off from the roof into the drums that we had there.

You just had to do something. It was a long way down to the bottom. I told the story on a tape and which was shown on television of how in that particular place …it was a long way up the hill, and we were

there. One day one of the officers who was taking his platoon further up to another spot misread his map or something and he came up to this spot, and one of the men collapsed face down when he got to where we were, and if we hadn’t lifted him up I guess he would have suffocated because he fell face down in the

mud. We cleaned him up, gave him a cup of coffee and when they moved out again, after about a ten minute break, he shouldered his pack and went off with them. Bushells used to have post cards which they issued to the men saying “Tea revives you” and there was usually some sort of joke on the thing, and there was a bloke with a great wide Joey Brown mouth

and he says, “I’ll just have a mouthful thanks”. And the bloke dishing it out says, “You’ll be content with a mug full like everybody else”. Another one has this girl with all the curves and so forth coming up and

she says, “I’ve brought my sugar with me”.

Oh yes. You could write on these cards very quickly and send them home. Perhaps we should get onto some of the things I’ve done in recent years.

In recent years….I would just like to say a few words about my fortunate trip to PNG [Papua New Guinea]. The Commemorative 2002 Trip. Sixty years since 1942. Firstly they took a group up for the unveiling and

dedication of the Isurava Memorial. It’s a magnificent memorial, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I put my name down to go and I didn’t get a call. But then a little later in the year they decided they would unveil new memorials

at Popondetta and at Milne Bay, and I was fortunate enough to be selected for it. There were only 20 throughout the whole of Australia. They didn’t manage to get any from Tasmania but the other states were all represented. Two war widows amongst the 20 and the 18 all came from different units.

I represented the 2/14th Battalion. It was a magnificent effort on the part of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. The organization you couldn’t fault. There were changes that had to be made, but it was very friendly right from the start.

I had a car call to pick me up at the door and take me out to the aerodrome. When I got to Tullamarine, there was someone from DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] waiting to give me the ticket and get me onto the plane with a number of others. There were about four of us I think who came from Victoria. This man was out there and looked after us and made sure we got on the plane alright.

We flew through to Brisbane where we were again picked up by the DVA with a car. We were picked up and taken to the hotel. A magnificent dinner with oysters and everything. A five star hotel and we stayed there for the night. We went out for the evening meal. There was a dinner put on at the miliary barracks there. There were a number of other folk

including Matt Power who was…but finished his term a few days ago, he was there and he had been to the Isurava memorial and we had dinner there together. It was all a very friendly thing. The Minister, Danna Vale said, “Just call me Danna.”

So we called her Danna and we were all introduced to her. She is a character. I don’t know if you’ve had anything to do with her, but you will enjoy her if you do. When my name was called…they started at the bottom I think and got back to the top of the alphabet. When my name was called I went out and they said,

“The Honourable Danna Vale and Ed Cooper.” I put my arm around her shoulder and gave her a peck on the cheek and she said, (someone had mentioned that I was Salvation Army), she said, “I always knew that the Salvos gave out coffee and cookies, but I didn’t know they specialised in cuddles and kisses”.

The General who was in charge of the party, we just called him by his Christian name. It was that atmosphere right throughout the whole show. Everybody was involved. Apart from the early morning rising. It was very good. Meals were provided there

and some meals we had to have on the plane with those four o’clock risings. When we went to the memorials, there would be some people who would be selected to place the wreath at the memorial. Somebody would be selected to do the Ode. So consequently

everybody got to do something.

I was blown away with the one at Isurava. I had been back to Isurava…I had only flown over it previously. Stan Bisset organised what he called the Last Parade and we

went to Moresby on an Air Force plane and across the range to Kokoda and then we had helicopters which flew us into Isurava. A party had gone ahead whilst we did a bit of sightseeing.

Ower’s Corner, and I went to one of the very nice parks that they have there. That was supplied by the local RSL. Then we went across and they had this ceremony there which was very effective. Stan had

rung me and said “Would I like to take a part?” I said “Yes, definitely. I don’t mind at all.” So I got the job of doing all the praying over the weekend. It wasn’t a weekend, it was mid week I think. I did the prayers at the ceremonies and the Grace at the meals.

The attitude of the men who had fought there actually. They were glad to come back to a place where at the time they had had to leave mates. They buried what they could but there were those who were just lost and as they moved out they had to leave them there.

It was really touch and go, from what I’ve read the histories of the three battalions that were involved in that. There’s a book called Blood and Iron which deals with the Australian view point

taken from the battalion’s various histories and so forth. The air force who were supposed to have strafed and bombed the Japanese. We didn’t see anything of them up in the Kokoda Trail. They did their job further back at Gona, and then there was also the Japanese account.

They had got hold of the Japanese account of the war and that makes fascinating reading. As I said it was touch and go. The 39th Battalion – I’ve been to ceremonies where I’ve mixed with the 39th, and folk have said that if the 2/14th hadn’t arrived at the moment they did we would have been annihilated. And that’s a fact.

And if they hadn’t withdrawn when they did they would have been annihilated because the Japanese had the strength of numbers. You can do a certain amount, and they did. It was a wonderful effort to be able to stop every now and then and set up ambushes on the track and when they had suitable ground

to set up a place to fight a battle there for several days which not only caused a lot of casualties, and a lot were killed…a lot of the Japanese and a lot of our own folk were lost. But it did set them back in the planning and also

as we had had difficulties in the early stages of keeping up the food and ammunition, the Japanese had that same problem. But they had horses to get the things a certain distance and they brought carriers from Rabaul. They bought them from Buka. As I say two of the boys worked with me. One of the most moving things…I’m not a man who’s

very emotional as far as things go. I was when I was a child and I had that knocked out of me.

No, no. At home. They used to laugh at me so much. If I listened to a sad story, my tear ducts were a bit too close. I’ve steeled myself against that.

I said goodbye to these boys and watched the tears roll down their faces. I hated to leave them. I must admit that the old throat welled up a bit.

Yes these were the ones who were allotted to me to help. They sort of

replaced my batman. They would look after the fires. They managed to know which was the kerosene tree…the green tree that had a sap which burnt very well. They were most useful.

No. I’ve often wished I could have talked to them and really get their details and find out what

happened to them. But you seemed to be that busy at the time. They were wonderful boys. On one occasion I sent them down…I had been up along the beach and one of the platoons was stationed at a spot where they had to dig for water.

They were too far away from the creek to get fresh water. They dug a pit and it was brackish. It wasn’t good so each day I would make a drum of coffee and we would go down…hike across the mouth of the…we would put it on a pole. That was the usual way of carrying things. You had

a pole there with somebody in front of you and one would go with me. We would take this down and give it to them for their lunch. I had been up and someone wanted writing paper and envelopes and other things. We had socks and so forth, and chewing gum. Socks were always very good because walking through the mud

your socks didn’t last very well. I made up a box of stuff and I said to these boys, “Can you find your way up there?” They said, “Yes, they’d be alright.” They knew because they had been up there with me. They set off and that was the day the Wirraway which normally came up and gave a report on

the situation of the Japanese. He would fly up below the tree tops at times and just cruise along and wave to the troops. This day he came out of the lower altitude up above the trees, and lo and behold there was a Japanese Zero

coming straight for him. So he fired a burst and away he went. The Japanese Zero crashed into the water. Not before it had fired and these two boys who had this box of stuff stood behind a trunk of a tree while the little aerial

battle was going on, and then picked up their box and carried on. I was so impressed. They were proud when they came back and were describing zoom, zoom, zoom with the bullets. They did a great job. The pilot refused to acknowledge the kill and said

“The Jap must have been in strife beforehand.” Anyway some of the troops swam out to the wreck and recovered the body and discovered it was a bullet from the Wirraway. You could tell from the calibre of the bullet. They notified him and they sent him the Japanese parachute.

The Japanese parachute?

Oh, he would send it home to his wife or sweetheart or somebody. Oh…silk parachutes! You could make beautiful clothing out of those.

Yes, they sent it to him

No. I never heard. Things happened too much. The Wirraways used to come in and do a bit of dive bombing

and the Japs defences were so good there that the bombs weren’t getting through. So they dropped some bombs with parachutes on them so they would land and then they would explode after. Hoping I think that the Japs would reckon that it wasn’t going to explode.

I don’t know what the strategy was really. But this day when they came in the parachute must have hooked up on the undercarriage and swung the bomb back and it blew the Wirraway to pieces in front of our eyes. A dreadful tragedy. But that’s war. You’ve got to have casualties. Much in all that you don’t want them.

I was saying that in more recent years there’s been a number of opportunities afforded me to do something worthwhile and dedicate various things. I did an honour board at Silvan. I did the dedication of plaques on the Kokoda Track on Ferntree Gully Park.

I did the dedication of a plaque commemorating the Airfield Construction Squadron down in the Shrine Grounds. For the Upwey Belgrave RSL I planted a lone pine tree

up in one of the parks there and they asked me to do the dedication of that. Apart from that I’ve had over the years numerous requests to do Anzac talks. I’ve been to Maryborough. So many different places.

Warrigal, I did a couple of talks down there. One for the RSL and one for the school. Two years running they asked me to take part in the Maryborough one. I went to Buninyong, Ballarat. The Shrine for the 39th Battalion.

Recently, this year, I’ve been to Ringwood. That was just a few weeks ago and they have a very large crowd there. It packs the place out. They couldn’t fit them all in on the chairs so they sat them on the floor around about. There have been other places too such as the Red Shield Sub Branch Salute and also

the Memorial Sunday, I’ve done addresses at that. Also out at Ferntree Gully and Dandenong. In addition to that I was asked to do a recording which was shown right throughout Australia in 1995.

We were trying to sell the Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal. That was television throughout Australia, and also I took part in a film called Padres of the Pacific. They specifically wanted me to take part in that, although I

pointed out I hadn’t been a Padre, I had only served as a Welfare Officer. They said no, they wanted that in the film. There were a number of us. There was a Roman Catholic Padre. A Church of England Padre and one of the well known actors was on the show as well. That was a bit of a disappointment

when they showed it. It came on before Anzac and I think it was about quarter to twelve at night. However, it was an honour to take part in these things and I appreciate the honour that was shown me. Of course I was invited to go up to Sydney for their football match

which was a big effort on the Kokoda Track. In addition to that…

Yes. The Football Club. They’ve had a number of their members and I think they get a number of their members each year who do the walk across the track. Most of the folk who organise

that sort of thing.

Yes, nowadays there is. In the past decade I suppose there have been several books which have been brought out in addition to the histories of the

battalions. It was my privilege while I was in the West to meet up with a couple of well known authors. The author of the book on Brigadier Potts and also I was staying at the hotel over there and they said the author of

Those Ragged Bloody Heroes [Peter Brune] was coming there and would like to talk with me. So I went to his room after I got home about eight o’clock at night and we sat and chatted to after midnight. He is a very interesting man.

Yes I would think so.

To some extent yes.

Now you’re making it difficult. Well I guess there was

the friendships that I made for one thing. As I said earlier, they were enduring friendships. People such as Frank Sublet, the CO of the 2/16th rang me and said his daughter had passed away and was looking for a Salvation Army person to do the burial. The funeral

service. And would I be good enough to do that for him. An old friend. I got someone to assist me in doing that, but I conducted the funeral. She was a person of quite some note.

Yes. After

I retired from work, and I was then about 70 years old. I was in my seventieth year when I retired. After I settled up a few things I decided to go back and have a look at some of the places where I had been. Also to go across to the West where I hadn’t been to, and to catch up with the folk over there.

So we made the trip across by car. I did the long way right down to Port Lincoln and up the coast there. Across the Nullarbor and down south. Once you cross the Nullarbor instead of going up through the Goldfields, down the coast and around the coast and up through the tall timbers in Western Australia. There’s so much to

see over there.

It was very good, yes. Some of them I hadn’t seen since the war. Many of them. But it was very good to be able to catch up with them again. Some I had exchanged Christmas cards and written to for quite a number of years, but after a while as time goes on that drops off a bit.

It was good to be able to meet up with so many of them.

Quite a lot. Folk would very often prefer that I censor their letters rather than their officer. So

that was quite a thing that I had to do.

Anything that would be of value to give away where they were. Anything that would be of value to Japanese intelligence. I know that so much got through. For example I know one of the air force men wrote

home to his wife that he was going to see the Wild Man. Well everybody knows about the Orangutan and the Wild Man from Borneo. He was going to Borneo. But the censor didn’t pick that up. People had different plans. I know of one nurse who used to write to her brother and he had a map,

and she had a map and she would poke a pin hole through, so when he got the letter he would take the pin hole and put it over his map and he’d know where she was.

Yes.

Oh yes. There were all sorts of things. Usually people though kept their mouths shut. Ok, I know my sister’s in such and such a place,

but I’m not going to tell anyone. But of course there was always the danger of that. One of the more difficult jobs I had to do was to go through the packs of the men who were killed in action. After the Kokoda Track the packs were sorted out and the military gear had to be segregated from

the personal gear and the personal gear was sent home. Now in lots of cases there were letters there, and it was suggested to me that not everybody had been as faithful to their wives as they should have been. And whilst some innocent things might have taken place, innocent friendship, it was just as well that the wife didn’t have to worry

about it at all. “So have a look through the letters before you send them home Eddie, so you’re not incriminating anybody.” That wasn’t an easy task, not by any means. You didn’t always get the expression of gratitude that you might have expected after sending things home. We had one mother who

wanted to know what happened to the gold watch she gave her son. It was a bit difficult to write home and say some Japanese private is probably running around with it on his wrist now.

Well it could be lots of things.

Anything that they would normally take with them that they didn’t want to take into the battle with them.

I don’t think so. That was just one of the jobs that I was called on to do. Normally the Chaplain would do that. But in this case

there was no Chaplain with the battalion so they asked me to do it.

I wouldn’t remember these days, and I didn’t really try to pry into their lives. It was a scan through the letter and if I found a letter with something like “Your loving

wife” on the bottom, I would normally just scan through without worrying about it. I don’t think I found any that were incriminating. But strange things happen. One of the men received a letter saying that

he had got a girl pregnant in Queensland and she was claiming on him for maintenance for the baby. He stoutly denied it but it had his serial number and his name. So he was flown home

to Australia to defend himself. And when the girl saw him she said, “I’ve never seen him in my life.” We feel that it must have been someone well known to him to have his serial number and name. So with that sort of happening you understand why I had to go through the letters and make sure.

I mean if he had been married and that type of letter had got home, it would have been an absolute tragedy. The military and the blokes in the military being what they are, christened him Pappy.

Oh yes. There was no greater morale booster than a letter from home I would say. Although that wasn’t all the time.

Well the Yanks were here in Australia, and the Yanks had lots of money and silk stockings and everything.

So sometimes the blokes lost their best girl.

Yes, they would get a Dear John letter [letter informing that a relationship is over].

I can’t

bring it readily to mind but I remember someone got a telegram. They had proposed when they were up in the Kokoda Track and they got this telegram saying “Yes!” That was a very memorable occasion for him because he didn’t immediately get the telegram. They were out on the track.

I think he was kept too occupied

to worry at that stage. The mail didn’t always get through.

Well no. He didn’t have the opportunity.

It would eventually get through but if they’re scattered all over the place

it’s hard in situations such as the Kokoda Track.

I can’t say that I saw that.

Oh yes. It was always good to get a …

there was always fruit cake. Even fruit cake will go mildew. Leather was very susceptible to the tropical climate. You really didn’t want any leather around the place. It went off pretty quickly.

Umpteen. I had lots of friends. Lots of girls amongst them. Just good friends and I always wrote home to Mum and an occasional letter to my Aunt.

Not really. As I said I was very security conscious and I made sure, whilst I perhaps described some of the things, I didn’t give any indication of where I was. If you gave any indication of where you were…I mean you would put your serial number and unit on the

letter so…if they could work out, alright the 2/14th Battalion is so and so then the 2/16th might be…That’s why the Japanese usually removed the dog tags which had your serial number on. If you were killed, very often they took your

tags and made it a bit difficult if you were there for any length of time to put a name to the body, because decomposition set in very quickly in the tropics.

Yeah.

Yes, I was on the beach at Gona when they started recovering the remains of the bodies. A lot of them were no more than skeletons because the fighting had been going on for so long that decomposition had been complete. It was a case

of remembering where Jack fell, and it wasn’t an easy job. Quite often they might have had their name in their steel helmet…

Yes.

I was asked to do a talk to the Korean Veterans at Melton at one stage. I didn’t know a great deal about the Korean War. I had lived through it but when it came to a lot of statistics, I didn’t have much idea. Not the Korean,

the Vietnam war. The Vietnam folk. Well I was amazed to find out how many were actually killed. When I considered the terrible casualties which we had had in Papua and to find that so few died and yet they were there ten years.

But of course there were other things than death, and many suffered from Agent Orange or whatever it was. So many of them had a pretty bad time after they got home.

That was bad,

that was very bad. They were compelled to go. There were volunteers of course but the majority came under the raffle or had their name pulled out of a barrel, and some went and some stayed and carried on as usual.

They weren’t to be blamed for the war.

Very good, eventually. We marched through Melbourne, and they did a march through Brisbane as well, but I had left them at that stage and gone up as a senior rep in 9th Div. The march through Melbourne

was fantastic with the crowds.

The march through Melbourne? No I can’t remember the date, but the year would be 1944. Because we were home on leave in February 1944. So it might have been March.

Oh they were always grateful for anything we gave them. Even if you gave them nothing and just went around to visit them, that was good. I remember talking to

Phil Rhoden and Stan Bisset. I was living with the 16th and I went to visit the 2/14th, and I was saying “It was so good of the CO and the Adjutant to be going around to all the fox holes to visit the troops” and they said, “It doesn’t have the same value as what your presence does.” I said, “Well, how do you make that out?

I’m a nobody really.” They said, “The point is you don’t have to be here whereas we do and that’s what makes it so good.” So yes I was able to boost the morale of the blokes. I remembered that and I tried as much as possible to get around to visit people.

Yes I think so.

Yes, they would often confide their problems.

Oh troubles at home and …

but generally speaking they carried the burden very well as far as the military side of things went. My summing up of the Australian soldier was when there was a fight to be had, let’s have it and get it done,

when it was over let’s get home and have some leave.

No. I think they were hidden pretty well. You would get the occasional one, but 95%…look they were soldiers and they were trained for a job.

And whilst they knew it could be the end of their life, nevertheless they did the job. If the order was given to attack, they attacked. If the lieutenant was killed in the attack, and the Japanese usually picked their men, whatever

people say about the Japanese, they were very good soldiers. Several writers have expressed in their books that the Japanese was a well trained soldier. My greatest gripe of course was the fact that we were so unprepared for it.

They sent the battalions up into the jungles in dress that was intended for the desert. Whilst many of our folk were wounded and came out without ever seeing a Japanese because they had camouflaged. Their clothes were camouflaged and on top of that they broke off branches and put them around their bodies to add

to the camouflage, while our folk stood out like a shag on a rock with the khaki in amongst the jungle. And the Japanese had had victories down through…they practiced in China and Manchuria. They had had all these

victories. It was a piece of cake for them. The Australian hierarchy sent one battalion to New Britain to take one of the best harbours in the South Pacific, the harbour of Rabaul. They sent a battalion to Timor and Ambon

and they didn’t have a hope. They didn’t even try to get them out of the place after the Japanese had taken over.

Yes. In a lot of cases yes.

Oh yes.

They might have griped about the officers and so forth but they were good soldiers and did well. Most of the officers were darn good officers to. Strange how many training schools they could find to send the not so good officers to when they were going into action. Going to do a campaign.

No, they were always glad to get a “Homer”. A superficial wound which was bad enough to get them sent home and out of the battle area.

The odd one.

One shot himself through the foot cleaning his rifle.

Yes.

I didn’t see him do it. I saw him come through. I think he may have been charged. I don’t know. I know

his platoon leader thought it was self inflicted.

Oh badly. You never…you always felt that a man should face his responsibilities.

Yes, there were quite a lot of them.

The mind just gives out, and there were quite a lot of men who went that way because of the tropics and the conditions.

Some would have to be sent back for treatment. Yes, the Ramu Valley was probably one of the best campaigns that I had anything to do with.

And of course the Papuan Campaign was the worst I think that anybody had anything to do with. Not only the Kokoda Track but the sequel to that which were the beach heads. I think they took more causalities than the Kokoda track did actually. In looking at the history I see that in the three months

between September and January, the Australian casualties there were the highest of any theatre of war in the Second World War.

But the Ramu Valley, I suppose about every hour you would come across a place where you could get a cup of coffee. The YMCA and ourselves set up these things along all the tracks

and it made things every so much easier if you were going anywhere. Of course when the battalion moved I would get in touch with the CO and say “Can I meet you at such and such a spot with a cup of coffee? I won’t spend anytime there Eddie, but if you’ve got it ready.” It would all be steaming hot and they could help themselves. Then

they would get back on the march again.

Oh at those points yes. We had a senior representative who came up there. He had been in Malaya and managed to

get out on one of the last two ships which took the nurses out. The Vyner Brooke of course was the one that was sunk and on which Vivian Bullwinkle was the only one who escaped a massacre on a beach there. But Rob had been on the other one where they got to Batavia and got through

eventually to Australia. Now, he came up the Ramu Valley and he was a real store keeper. He had a nice tent there and he had all these supplies for those of his reps who were up there like me. But he went off sick and whilst he was off sick they called on me to take over as senior man, so I immediately sent signals out to everybody to come in and get your supplies.

When he got back the tent was empty. Everybody took what they could so he needed to build it up again.

Oh yes. In the Middle East it was cake I think. In some places at home it might have been cake, but biscuits were the thing

for us. You always had biscuits to go with the coffee. You hoped to anyway. As I say we had these biscuits which were called Dad’s Cookies and I think I get a mention in the 2/14th history as always having Dad’s Cookies to hand out.

They wrote me up as having picked up a blanket which was booby trapped with a grenade. I had nothing to do with it really. I had been to this spot they mentioned, but it was somebody else, and I never bothered to correct it. They haven’t done another edition.

A gentleman who I met recently who is the son of one of the 2/14th men has been searching for a copy of the history of the 2/14th Battalion and someone gave him the name of a book seller, and he got in touch with him and they said “Try on the internet” and he said, “That’s not my expertise.” He couldn’t manage the internet.

“Leave it with us and we’ll see what we can do.” Well they found a copy in London and they’re sending it out from London. It’s going to cost him a fortune. I mean, if you can get a copy around the book shops here I know they are bringing around $100. I’ve forgotten how many American dollars he said it was costing him with the postage.

Yes, well Gona was a very important thing. The battle was on to see who could defeat the Japanese in a position that they were holding and I think I might have mentioned previously that I felt

it was a case of Blamey and MacArthur vying against each other. But the correspondents would come up whenever there was a push to drive the Japanese out again. War correspondents and war photographers would come up. George Silk was one of those.

They would always stop at the hut and have a cup of coffee. I asked to George once, why he took such horrific pictures….maggots crawling out of the Japanese faces, and he said, “The people back in Australia don’t realise there’s a war going on. Everything’s normal back there. There’s dances every

night and people just don’t realise that there’s a war there and I’m trying to shock them into the fact that war is an horrific thing.” There is a book out now of the photographs of Damien Parer and George Silk and one of the photographs you will find in there is one that George took

of an Australian soldier carrying a wounded Japanese in his arms. So the man had a soft side to him as well to be able to take that type of thing. Yes, they would come up there and spend a while taking photographs and get whatever detail they had. But as I may have mentioned, they…

unlike today where you can see the actual thing happening on television, they had very little recourse to get their news back to Australia, and they would only write the headlines and the headlines would be sent back to the various papers and the editors of the paper or the journalists would write up the story with the headlines. So that quite frequently

it didn’t match up at all. But they came there. Did I mention that I had an English correspondent say late one afternoon, “Well, it’s a bit late for me to go. Have you got a bed in which I can stay the night?” I said, “Why aren’t you going back with the rest of them?”

He said, “I’m only seeking human interest stories”, and he said, “By the time my news gets to Britain the whole thing is over and it’s not worth while, so I look for human interest stories which can be published and be worthwhile at any time.” And he did mention that he had written up as part of an human interest story the fact that we

had this coffee post there. So he went back the next morning while the others immediately tore off once the battle was finished and raced off to send off their stories.

Just any

information that he might have got from the troops or…he may have written up something about the Australian showing tender loving care for his enemy, carrying him out the way he did.

No. The Japanese had the idea

that they must die for the Emperor, and die for the Emperor they did. The only prisoners we were ever able to take were people who were unable to defend themselves in any shape or form. We had those come through and they stopped and had a cup of coffee.

They were taken back to a prisoner of war camp.

They would be taken back and interviewed by the intelligence people to find out as much about them as they could. Because despite the fact that we killed off all that were at Gona, they were mighty close to us. We had them just across the river. I remember going up visiting them up at what we later called Haddy’s Village.

Haddy was one of the unsung heroes. We got reports every day of how many Japanese he killed and eventually stayed behind to let his men escape and he was overrun by the Japanese and his gun jammed and that was it. They found his body when they later retook the village. But they had a machine gun

set up in one of the huts there, and when I was up there they said, “Across the river there we’ll shoot a burst and you watch the Japs go to ground.” So they fired a short burst from the machine gun. The poor old machine gunners had to transport those heavy machine guns quite a long way and never got to fire them very often. They were

in a defence position there.

Only just briefly. I have a copy of his film as a matter of fact.

No, it don’t think

I thought of it that way. George was a real character.

Yes. Particularly Parer.

As you know he was out in front of the American troops walking backwards when the Japanese shot and killed him. He was taking a photo of them landing. That’s worse than the stories of the Red Shield blokes being there when the troops landed…being there with a cup of coffee.

No, he was a very brave man, and upset with the Australian government again. He would have rather been filming the Australians rather than the Americans. He just took the film but he was lucky if he could get it on air, or into the theatres as it was then.

Did I tell you I met three governors in the one year? I went across to the West and I was introduced to the Governor of Western Australia. I came back and I was invited to attend the opening of two new plaques which they have out at

Kangaroo Grounds. Governor Landy was present and we had lunch with him there. Following the dedication of the plaques we came back to Eltham whose city that was in, and then I got a letter from the Premier’s Department which I seem to get every year – to go to his dinner and I’m usually

the host of the table for over 80s. There’s no World War One people left now, so it’s now World War Two over 80s. But I got an invitation to attend the Governor-General’s first visit to Victoria and that was at Parliament House. They had a big ceremony at the front there in Spring Street before hand.

So we met the Governor General there. So these days I get a few privileges apparently. Not that I deserve them but somehow or other they come my way. You don’t knock them back.

There was a service yes. The military service. I remember one of my very good friends was killed up in the Ramu Valley. One of the most spectacular bombing things that I saw when they sent over all these bombers with their 500 pound bombs and

the amount of dirt and stuff that was flown up, you’d think there couldn’t be a Japanese alive after that. So, as I say they were very good soldiers and they went to a lot of work to prepare defensive positions. After the bombing was over and the attack went in, Des was killed. He was the only casualty for the day. I went down with Charlie Cunningham, the Roman Catholic Chaplain.

We recovered the body and dug a shallow grave and placed Des in the grave and Charlie did the honours with the service. There were no blankets there to wrap them up in or anything. It was just a case of you dug a grave and the Chaplain made a note of where the grave was so the Grave Commission could come at a later date and recover

the body and put it in the military cemetery.

No, I didn’t. We had the Chaplain there and that was his duty really. I tried not to go beyond the bounds of what I was supposed to do.

Some of the Chaplains objected when some of our folk had taken it upon themselves to conduct burial services. Mind you some of the Chaplains went beyond the bounds of their duties too. Some of them wanted to run the recreation huts. But generally we got on very well.

I never had any bother with any of them.

Yes, they were always sad if there was a circumstance where they weren’t able to bury the dead. And that remained with them over the years. During the pilgrimage back to Isurava they were saying

“At least they were able to hold a service there in honour of those who had died.” They had had to just leave them. A lot of them had been buried where they were able to but when they were under pressure and had to move out, there were others who were killed then who were left.

I don’t quite understand the question.

Oh no. No it’s not like you see of the air force, on the Battle for Britain or that sort of thing. No, once the burial was

…they remembered them. And they still do. So much of the Ode is carried out in actual fact. It’s easy enough to say the Ode…we will remember them, lest we forget.

You find that they still do. When I’ve been back to the cemetery on two occasions, we’ve looked for people that we knew. I’ve got a lovely photo of Stan Bisset kneeling at his brother’s tombstone placing a wreath of flowers which he had made especially for him.

Yes. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs were once again excellent. We were asked to supply a list of anybody’s grave which we would like to look up, and they gave us the map reference.

The number of the grave and they gave us a map showing where all the graves were. So it was quite easy to find the people whose grave we were looking for.

Well, I think anybody without

a Christian faith would have found it very difficult at times. The fact that you believed in a God that was all powerful, although you knew it may be that you may lose your life, because of your faith in a God in the Heaven, as far as I was concerned it didn’t worry me.

I wasn’t anxious about dying.

As far as possible yes.

Well you would have to have the opportunity presented to you. To be able to talk to them about it.

I mean you didn’t go round trying to convert everybody to Christianity. Some of the finest soldiers we had were some of the roughest of the men.

No, I can’t say that I do.

You never know. You sow the seed and it’s the work of God the Holy Spirit then to convince the person or do whatever is necessary to lead them into faith.

Oh yes. You had to have faith in your

mates. You needed to know that they were going to be alongside you and they wouldn’t desert you. That’s part of the great traditions of the Australian army I think. Mateship. And the fact that people will…you never desert your mate. Mateship is one of the four things that are on those

pillars at Isurava. The Four Pillars say “Courage, endurance, mateship and sacrifice.” And in the recent talk that I gave I said, “That to me is the spirit of Anzac which has been carried on throughout the

generations, which have followed those who fought on Gallipoli.”

It wasn’t. No, one day was much the same as any other day during the war. Christmas Day you tried to do something

different. Christmas Day at Gona I remember was a very apprehensive day because we felt that the Japanese might take advantage of that particular day to make an attack, thinking that the Australians would be off guard because they were celebrating Christmas.

No. Unfortunately.

We thought there was a huge celebration by the natives back at their camp at Christmas. We thought that the missionaries must have done a great job to convince all these natives until some one told us: “No, they were celebrating the beginning of the Big Wet. The Wet Season coming.”

Oh, noise.

No, I can’t say. Mainly I only saw them in passing except for those who lived with me.

They came from different backgrounds. One of the folk I had there wasn’t so friendly. It was just his nature I guess, but the other three were real gems. When we came out from Gona, Albert Moore came up with the

replacements and he said “He would like to take Burnis back to Moresby.” He sort of smuggled him onto the plane. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but when the roll was called for the people to get on, they sang out Private Burnis and he got on the plane. I don’t think he got the care and attention that I had given him when he got back to Moresby. After a while he went walk-about.

We didn’t see him anymore. So whether he endeavoured to get back home or just went into Moresby, I’ll never know.

Civilians perhaps. Soldiers, not too much. It was always too little, too late. We had the Minister for Defence. Was it Mr Ford? I think it might have been Mr Ford…came up there and went around

visiting the sick in the hospital, saying “I’m the Minister for Defence. Write home and tell your parents that I was up here visiting.” He got to one chap and gave him his spiel and the bloke was very sick and he said. “I’m Mr. Ford

the Minister.” The boy said, “How are you Padre?” Politicians…I don’t think you can have much faith in politicians. I think they’re all much of a muchness.

Let me put it…I was asked to give an interview on that just recently. My attitude was, I think they know more than what they’re telling us about these weapons of mass destruction. I remember 1939

when the British politician [Neville Chamberalin]…his name’s gone…went back waving a piece of paper…“Peace! Peace in our time!” And all the time they’re sitting back hoping for peace and Germany’s getting stronger and stronger

and when they wanted to they just walked into Poland. Then I think of the Owen Stanleys…the fact that we were so unprepared for that. The fact that these other places like

Timor, Rabaul, Ambon…no preparation there really. A token force not capable of really resisting a major army. You think back on all these things…the unpreparedness, and you say “Well, we don’t want to be unprepared.

We don’t want to wait until it happens – until this man releases his weapons of mass destruction which he is building up. War, nobody wants.” It was Clement Atlee I think, the British politician who said: “In war one may emerge the victor, but nobody

wins, everybody loses.” Now that’s true. But then again, situations such as what we were faced with, it wasn’t the case of saying; well it’s a choice between good and evil. It was the case between the evil which Hussein could have inflicted upon us or the evil

of going to war. You choose the lesser evil and I think that going to war was the lesser evil.

Yes. I’ve seen the countries which Japan took over.

I’ve seen something of the conditions when we moved in and brought freedom to these people, and I dread to think what would have happened to Australia had the Japanese been able to get here. Recent history claims that the Japanese didn’t want to take Australia, that they just wanted to immobilise

them by taking Moresby. But knowing their greed, I’m sure it would only have been a matter of time before they endeavoured to move into Australia and take it. Germany needed to be stopped. These dictators

you get, anywhere. I mean there’s no doubt it, our democratic system is a worthwhile thing, and we have to fight for it when necessary. I would be prepared to say that it was a good move that we moved in when we did. And it has proved to be fairly short, which is good.

We don’t want another world war. We don’t want a war of any sort, but OK if we’re going to have one, let’s get it over quickly and vanquish the other folk and set up a system. They did the wrong thing previously during the Gulf War in that they didn’t finish the job there and then.

How long have we got? US troops? Well some good.

They didn’t do much of a job on the beach fronts. For example one of the signallers reported that… the Australians had saved up 25 pounder shells (it was difficult to get stuff in. It had to be dropped by planes, but you couldn’t drop 25 pound shells. So they didn’t get many). So they saved them up

and bombarded this spot. They moved the Americans back a 1000 yards and they shelled the place, and then the Americans moved forward again. The conversation on the phone was, “How are you doing there?” “Oh great, we’ve moved forward 500 yards. We’ve gained 500 yards.” “Alright.” “Give me your map reference.” And when the map reference came through he

said, “Good God man, you’re 500 yards behind where you started.” Some of them…MacArthur changed his General who was looking after the fighting there and he wanted to see some results because he wasn’t getting any results. And the Australians were put in there to do the job,

along with the Americans. The same down at Buna. They brought the 18th Brigade up from Milne Bay to assist in taking Buna. The Battle of Gona was purely Australians. No Americans took part in that at all. The Yanks in Australia – they had the money, they had the clothes and they raised a lot of animosity by

taking the Australians girls out. So they weren’t popular. But in other fields… I’ve been able as a senior representative of the Salvos to go into the war room and see films that were taken. Well at some of those places the Yanks did a magnificent job.

Yes I think so. I think they reckon I did a good job.

We had some wounded, not seriously. We had one killed in an air accident.

I think he was on the same plane that General Vasey was. The plane crashed transporting them between towns in Queensland. The folk in the Middle East had some problems. Those at Tobruk. Although Albert Moore

had a shrapnel splinter in his back, but they got that out without any hospitalisation or anything. At Tobruk we lost a couple of Corporals there who were tending the hut. Fortunately the officer wasn’t in it at the time.

No.

I was very fortunate. I remember slipping on a log bridge and going down. How I didn’t break my leg I don’t know. My foot went down in between and I tipped over sideways. Perhaps it was that I was so skinny that I didn’t have enough weight to break it. A bit different now. That was up in the Ramu.

Crossing one of the rivers. They had two logs there and it was wet and I slipped down in between, and I lost my balance. I had a few narrow squeaks. I was on a truck on the road up to Ower’s Corner and I was off helping push when the …

…because the road was very slippery…even though they had laid logs along it. But still the mud seeped up through it and made it very slippery. At one stage I was riding on the running board of the truck and it slid across and I could see this root of a tree sticking out

and I flattened out as best I could up against the thing, but another couple of inches and it would have pierced through the side. I had a scratch across my back but nothing more serious than that.

Dreadful. Two people came out from Gona who hadn’t been hospitalised for

malaria. One was the CO and the other one was myself. We just hadn’t been put in to hospital for it. I got home to Australia and had some leave and went back. I was supposed to have had an operation for my tonsils which had given me quite some bother up there and created

high temperatures, but when they said, “You’re back from New Guinea, we’ve got to take a blood sample.” So they took a sample and I had malaria. So the tonsils eventually came out after the war was over. I went into the hospital there and they took them out under local anaesthetic. Which wasn’t real fun.

I was very fortunate that I didn’t pick up some of the diseases such as scrub typhus. I think I looked after myself pretty well. I tried to. Whereas most people didn’t carry a second set of clothes, I had a pair of pants which I could change into of a night, and a shirt. So I kept those as

pyjamas really. Although you had to be dressed in case something happened up in the front area. So I think I looked after myself reasonably well. I didn’t drink any of the impure water.

No, I don’t off hand. A good man…

Well they didn’t do that did they? There can’t have been any good men. No, the story has got out in more recent years. As I say there’s been a number of books produced on

the life of some of the men who were in the limelight. Arnold Potts. There were several of the boys who went through the Middle East and then into New Guinea, and the unsung hero.