Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
'Frightfully cold'
Oh, in Korea it was frightfully cold. I don't think Japan was even as cold as Korea. Korea had a wind factor. It would come down from Manchuria and all that up there and, I think, even the hills that were stripped by bombardments and that sort of thing, stripped of foliage, helped make it colder and in one incident we shifted camp and we had to dig a rubbish hole for the mess, for the cookhouse and so forth, and we had to pour petrol on the ground and light it before we could start digging and then when we'd dig down about an inch or two inches we'd pour more petrol in it, light it and then start digging again and we found that the ice went down, penetrated down to anything up to two feet, so that's how cold the ground was.
Trenches and artillery bombardments
We were all in underground foxholes, sort of thing, with a structure on the top and plenty of sandbags. The only thing it could withstand, pretty well everything except direct hits. Yes, there was plenty of incoming, in fact, when we first got into the front line it was, I didn't make the mistake, but one of my colleagues did and he said 'This is really the front line is it? Gee it's quiet isn't it?'
And couple of other blokes looked at one other that had been there awhile and they looked at their watches and I thought 'There's something going on here.' Then they got up and moved, so I thought, 'I'm moving with them' and sure enough at half past four in came the mortars and the shells, so they had it down to a fine art once you got there for a while you fell into the normal procedures of what to do and when to do it.
In fact, I always say that I got wounded in that first little episode, but the wound was on my backside and that was because I was horizontal in a dive into the trench. As the shell exploded a little bit of shrapnel just caught me in the backside as I was going over the top of it but I went to the RAP with it and they told me 'No, it wasn't a go homer. Go back to work'.
Flamethrower
When I was doing the job with the flame I had, the infantry sergeant had dug a hole into the top of the bunker and made me swear that I wouldn't get up and burn them out. We both knew that there was a sniper on the right flank even if he, when he finished getting through, slipped and made a mistake of standing upright and got hit in the chest even though he was wearing armour.
The bullet penetrated his chest and he was carried out on a stretcher so I took over after him and went up, dropped down on to the ground and lay over and fired a burst of flame down the hole but unfortunately he had dug at a bit of an angle whereas it required that I had to do another shot so I went back into my, went into the safe trench and told the people there that I would have to go up again, which I did do, got up and I went down and thought I would fool the sniper by shifting my position while out of sight, doing the job by flaming down, getting the flame down where it should have went and on getting up to my feet again to get out of it suddenly the lights went out and I came to some minutes later laying in the safe trench.
My sergeant being very concerned and wondering whether I'd got hit as there was no blood but soreness and swelling on the side of the head and on retrieving my slouch hat it was noted that there was a scorch mark down the side of the hat from nothing, tapering out with the bullet and tapering away to nothing at the other end which indicated that the bullet virtually bounced off but flattened me on the way through but apart from that I was not injured.
Orderly room burns down
By this time, I'm company signalmen so therefore I was established in the headquarters section and we were out on rest. Out of the line on rest, like, sort of thing. We were in marquees instead of underground and I had a stretcher, I had a nice stretcher, a fold up one but I unfold it and it was a very nice comfortable bed and I had my sleeping bag and I used to sleep in my underclothes but, and I had it practised, I had my set beside me so that if anything happened I could just grab the set, swing it out and unplug it by the swing and dive out under the tent.
Lo and behold one night the chuffer or the heating system that we had decided to blow up and it blew up and burnt the orderly room down with everybody's pay books in there but I got out and got underneath and went up to my sergeant-major and banged on his tent and he come out of his tent and he said to me 'What are you doing standing there in your underclothes with a 38 set in your hand? Don't tell me.' And I had to inform him that the orderly room was burning. Yes, it was quite a bit hilarious.
Patrolling
Suddenly one night they called me up and they said 'We've got a job for you. You are to go out on patrol with the pioneer patrol, the pioneer platoon, commanded by Captain Greville. He's taking a party out to do line repairs.' Fence repairs and so forth.
So, I went out with them but once we got out into the valley, communication was non-existent, we just couldn't get through. So, I came very close to killing two of our own men that night because the captain said to me 'Well if your sets not much good would you sit here and keep the flank.'
He said 'That direction is the enemy. Anything coming from there is the enemy.' He said, 'You'll hear noises behind you, that's the boys carrying gear up and down.'
I said, 'Fair enough'.
Sometime later there was movement ahead of me and out of the gloom comes one figure then another one appeared behind him and I thought 'Oh, what have we got here?' I've got my Owen gun, got to remove the safety slide, took the first pressure and thought 'How many more are there?'
There was no more, there was only two and I thought I could drop these two as easy as anything and I'm just about to pull this trigger for the second pressure and a voice says, 'Where the bloody Hell are we?'
So, I said 'Boo'. Well these two nearly died of fright.
They said, 'Where are you?' I said, 'Straight ahead of you, so take a pace to your right, walk straight ahead and keep going straight ahead and you will reach the fence.'
And they went past me and still didn't see me because I was well down in the bushes. But I was shaking like a leaf afterwards because I came so close to shooting them.
Capture of Captain Greville
Well we finished the job, packed up and went to go home. I still couldn't get through. The lance-corporal leading the patrol missed a turn and walked straight into the middle of an ambush.
The Chinese were so lined out that we walked straight into the end of their flank and they had to open fire on us otherwise we would have walked over them but they were waiting for us to cross the creek and go down the other side where they had us lined up like ten pins.
So, they opened fire. I was the third man in line the captain was in front of me of course and he turned around because I had my earphones on, and I couldn't hear a thing, but I could see all the fireflies. Fireflies of course turned out to be muzzle shots.
The captain grabbed me with both hands and lifted me off the ground and through me into the long grass. He said 'Get down. We're ambushed.' And then he carried on. The lance-corporal got wounded and he went in a heap and I just lay there but before I could do anything a Chinese soldier overrun and wanted to see if I was alive. So, I thought to myself 'As far as you're concerned mate, I'm not alive.'
So, he give me a bit of a nudge with his toe and I must have flinched. Of course, he put his burp gun into the middle of my stomach, but he didn't pull the trigger and just at that moment one of his colleagues yelled out in Chinese something and he jumped up in the air and jumped over me and run down to wherever they were so I sat up to have a look at what the excitement was and they had captured the captain and they were just going to take the captain off when one of the other diggers raced up and jumped on this Chinaman's shoulders and then another bloke came up and gave him a rifle butt to the back of the head and laid him out flat and carried him out and then they disappeared and we started to reform then. I was a little bit concerned that night on my one and only patrol so needless to say I was very pleased that I wasn't doing patrols after that.
