Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Tarakan and Balikpapan
Tarakan was very manual. Everybody shifted things manually. There might have been jeeps and trailers and they came ashore through the water too but Balikpapan was a different organisation.
It was highly mechanised and all the stores, supplies and ammunition and stuff was already pre-packed. It was loaded on to 64 trucks and 64 trucks crowded ashore all loaded up. They were dispersed very, very quickly.
The biggest difference apart from the devastation was the invasion bombing caused. It was a very heavy bombardment and we were sitting under the muzzles of a lot of American ships, the ships' guns which came through the ears and pumped the chest.
End of the war and Japanese prisoners
Somebody came past and said "Hey you blokes, the war's over" and that was the end of it. So we sort of sat there and said "Geez. Fancy that." you know, but within days things started to happen.
The units were looking after Japanese prisoners of war mostly. I was still in headquarters attachment so I didn't get close to them but the normal company strength they were out there chasing up Japanese because the Japanese were pretty dispersed and a lot of them didn't want to know about the ceasefire and they had to be winkled out and then looked after in the compound, feed them.
A pretty sorry lot, pretty disgruntled, pretty switched off. It was a terrible disgrace for them.
