Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Just before Christmas the battalion was down to 40 men, the rest had all been invalided out of sickness. There was one very, very serious disease there called scrub typhus. It was transmitted by a small mite that lived on the animals and there were things like possums, tree kangaroos, rats and so on. This small mite lived on them but dropped off into the kunai grass patches and it got onto the soldiers. Congregated, tended to gather around the belt, the waistline or around the gaiters which were close fitting on your ankles. And it transmitted this disease called scrub typhus and there was no cure for it. It never affected the natives, they'd built up an immunity over thousands of years. But people died in as a little as five days.
One of those blokes had been on the Amboga patrol with me, Bruce McDonald, fittest bloke I've even seen. Said he was feeling a bit crook when he got back, so I sent him to the aid post. He came back with handful of aspirins, they said "stay on duty, your temperature's only 103," that's in the old Fahrenheit. Next day he was worse so I sent him back again and five or six days later he died back in [Port] Moresby in hospital.
But an Australian and an American doctor worked on this and they found a cure for it and it ceased to be a problem after a while. But there were many other diseases like fevers and jungle sores and malnutrition and just stress. When people have been living in the jungle, seeing their mates die around them, not getting a cup of tea, living on their nerves for weeks on end, and it started to catch up with them. But I never saw anyone actually throw in the towel. They wanted to stop and help their mates out.
