Mick Rudkins - Buna

Transcript

As the war went on, we went up further. We had three corvettes and we picked up all these army jokers up one night. Where was it? I just forget.

All 2/9th Divvy, hadn't been long back from the Middle East and we were to land them at Oro, Buna not Burma, Buna that night to take it over and we found out later the Japs were doing the same thing on the other side of the island.

We snuck in there and these bloody planes come over and dropped flares all over the place and to tell you the truth me and this crew knew to this day whether they were Yank planes or Jap planes but all the crew were still on board luckily, so we up anchored, pissed off down to another island and stayed there all day and later that night we loaded them in there and they [were] successful.

They took that island from the Japs. A few weeks later we were in Moresby and we struck a couple of the jokers who were in hospital. They lost quite a few when taking the island and one joker there had half his arm gone and he was telling us there was about eight of them going over this embankment and the Japs just whizzed past and he was lucky he went down with them and just got hit in the arm. The Japs were tied to the coconut trees, up in the coconut trees.