Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Serious battles took place at Efogi, and again the Japanese attempted to encircle us. We got a chance to fire our mortar there, we got a good position there behind a bit of a ridge. And our officer who was doing the observation up front actually saw a mortar bomb. You could see the mortar bombs if you followed the flight from the barrel and he had a good pair of binoculars apparently, and the bomb landed on a Japanese officer's helmet.
We must have annoyed the Japanese because they got onto us with a mountain gun. They had this mountain gun, which [is a] small piece of artillery designed to be carried on mules, part broken into pieces and carried on mules. Up there of course they had no mules, they used natives and Korean slave labour to carry the mountain gun up the ranges.
They're very high velocity and accurate guns. We didn't know where they were but they knew where we were, so they landed the bombs fairly close to us. One bomb knocked the gun askew and Bruce Cooper, who's a tough Kalgoorlie miner, got a bit of shrapnel in his backside. So he said: "I carried your bloody mortar so far, Mr Schwind, some poor 'b' will have to carry me now!" So they made a stretcher and got him on it.
We got word the Japanese where starting to cut us off, again, surround us. We fired off all our ammunition and we threw our mortar over a cliff face. And we were told, ten of us I suppose, we were told to go down and take position up astride the Kokoda Track and hold the Japanese if they should come down the track in our vicinity. So we're standing behind trees, a finger on the trigger for an hour or more, no sound of any fighting and we suddenly started to wonder what's happening. Have we been forgotten? Fortunately a messenger came down and told us to move up the ridge, to the right, off the track. And after about a quarter of a mile a chap in front of us, a Wangaratta boy named Norm Wilkinson, dropped dead in front of me with a bullet through the heart. It was just a "twang". I don't know whether it was a stray bullet, someone suggested it might have been a sniper but I said a sniper would have shot the officer first, then the sergeant and me next. But anyway we took one of his identification tags off from around his neck and left his body there.
