Enlistment and a lucky escape
Well, I joined up in the army. I was only nineteen at the time but I was twenty by the time they got me. He said, "Why don't you walk around the block?" So I come back and they signed me up and I was in the army. Well, I'm quite amazed, 95 or 96 now but I was only nineteen actually when I just about signed up. But I left it with them and they called me when the time was up, you see.
I went to Flinders Street station and he says, "How old are you?" "Nineteen". "Ah, no good. You've got to be twenty with your parents permission." He said, "You better go for a walk around the block, hadn't you?" So I did. I came back and he said, "How old are you now?" "Twenty". He said, "Well alright. We won't write you down but we'll put you down for a date to come in."
So they called me in about two or three weeks later and away we went…Alec Harrison was the Sergeant-Major and I was a corporal then and we got out and a went for walk all around the desert and had a good look at it and we were about a half a mile out I suppose from where the fort was and I said, "We've got a black spot in the sky" I said. They said, "Where is it?" "There it is there." You know, it was up behind us.
The plane had picked us up in there, see, and I said, "The best thing is to lay down in a line together. Cover your hands and your face and everything like that." And the plane flew straight over us because he was doing about 200 miles per hour, of course where we were in a little gully it was about a good quarter of a mile out from the edge of the fortress but we got away with it. The plane came straight over the top of us, flat out, he couldn't pick it up with the speed, you see, so we got away with that one.
Refusing a promotion
I did a six-weeks commando course up in Syria and when I come back, I was told to pick up my own company at a certain area and get in there and I did, I got in there. They wanted me to be a lieutenant. I refused it. I didn't, no way, you'd be out on the front, leader, and the enemy know that whoever they are.
The one that's out in front is the leader and if they can knock your leader off that was halfway there for them, you see. I never ever showed up but the boys used to let me do the thing but I didn't go for pips.
Attacking post No. 12
I got shot up in Tobruk and he said "Right, you've got to go out and attack post 12 tonight." So I said to the boys "Probably this'll be the last you see of me, I'll either be dead or a prisoner of war." And I got out there and a little bloke who had just come and he was sixteen and he was only about this high and he should never have been sent in and I had another adult fellow with me, 'cause he never kept up with us and we got to this twelve post number and they knew we were coming I suppose, knew we were outside and I could smell all the bullets going over my head. You could smell them.
I was right up against the dugout and they poured it out and they never said anything and we never said anything, but what it did he hadn't advised the fortress what he was doing so between him and the fortress was putting a heap of bullets in, the same thing and they probably killed the little bloke themselves, you see, he was out there on his own, he hadn't kept up.
Anyway I waited until they stopped firing out of twelve because they'll run out of ammunition soon because on the Spandau they had magazines, you see, and they just slipped them in, you see, and when they stopped firing, I had one grenade and I had a Tommy gun with fifty rounds in one magazine and twenty in another and when they stopped firing, you see, I put my fifty rounds into the dugout where they were and two grenades on top of them and they went real quiet and the other guys said, "Come on, let's go while they're thinking about it."
So I got out and there was only a roll of Dannert wire between us and we got over the Dannert wire and we happened to run into our own company headquarters, I could hear them digging, you see, and I had the twenty rounds still left and I thought if its Germans I'll give them a burst, you see and I got over and we heard Captain Joshua, a great old bloke too, and he said "Well boys you've just about got it right."
They were digging something, you see, and so I turned up and the next thing my mate turned up, Bert Cox from Australia he comes up and says, "Hello, hello, hello . They got you at last did they." 'Cause I had a bullet in the bum, you see, and blood all over the place but I was still going because when I first got hit, the first thing was to move your legs around to see if you're alright, see, but we lost the little bloke, that was the only thing, but that's some of the experience.
A stitched backside
So I had to go into hospital for awhile and I missed out there. I had to go down and see a doctor when we got out from the thing, had to go to the hospital for awhile and the healing, 'cause you've got a lot of muscles in your backside, you see, and they weren't healing up and he said "I might put a stitch in there. Do you reckon you could stand up by the wall? Would it be alright to stitch it?"
He said, "You can have a drink from my whisky bottle if you like." I said, "Nah, I'll be right." And I thought afterwards I should have grabbed it and drank half of it. I was trying to be big and brave, see, so he tightened up my backside and away I went. I was getting ready to go again.
"Not this time Bob"
The oldest, the 2IC he was a brave old bloke, old Joshua. He came, he used to be in the bank at Leongatha I think, no, no, no, it was one of the Australian banks but anyway he was pretty old-fashioned but he was a good bloke, a real good bloke, you know, and he'd, you know, they reckon he was a bit of a dag of a bloke but he wasn't, he was a brave bloke.
Well the next lot he took out he got 30 lumps of shrapnel in him and he still wouldn't retire, he kept going, and one day they were out somewhere and the boys wee hiding behind bushes and rocks and everything and the Germans had armoured vehicles and that and were giving the boys a hard time, you see, and Bob was there with them, Bob Joshua, and Bob says, pulls out his 45 and says, "Come on boys, we'll take them on."
You see, and the boys said, "Not this time Bob, we're not moving." They weren't going to get killed for nothing, kicking up with armoured cars, you know what I mean. Even in the dangerous times, it was funny.
A cup of petrol
I'm staggering to my dugout with it and there's some blokes playing cards, you see, you wouldn't believe it, bullets flying around and there's blokes playing cards in their dugout, you see, and they had a Jerry can at the top, see, and I felt it and it was cold, beautiful and cold, "Oh water, cold water" you see, but it wasn't, it was bloody petrol, and I says "Toss us up a mug" and a mug comes up from the dugout and I caught it and put it under the tap, poured half of it down me neck and it was bloody petrol.
Capturing a German and surrender
I dug myself a bit of a trench to hide in case things got a bit hot and I tossed a bit of dirt up in front of it. Anyway, I was going round yelling, "Hände hoch" and I come across this curtain moving on one…there . I says,"Hände hoch. Hände hoch." and anyway, I pulled the curtain back and he'd had his foot nearly blown off, you see, so I pulled him out and I said to Frosty, I said, "I've got to do something with him."
And he said, "Well, whatever you think." So I pulled him out and I put him on, piggy-back, you see, "Get on my back." So we went up toward the hospital they'd built and I'd only got halfway up and a bloody big tank missile went past me over my head and I went, "Shit, that was close." I fell over on top of him and I thought "Oh the poor bugger", you know, with his crook foot, "Come on, get on my back."
I got him on my back again and got up to the hospital and it had a big tarp around the back of it, around the side of it and the bloke inside was going like this to me, he could just see me, sort of just cool off a bit, you see, 'cause I was armed up.
I had a couple of lugers on my hip and I was Cowboy Bill for a minute or two and I left him there and I got down, I got back to me dugout again and I just got into it and got down under cover, sort of thing, below the sight line and they fired a burst of machine gun fire at it letting me know, "Get back in your dugout and stay there", you know, sort of thing, and then, the lieutenant was there looking after us, I said to Frosty, I said, "You better look out" I said "they're on the move. It won't be long before they're on top of us", you see, and I said, "You want to make up your mind what you're going to do." I said, "You might have to surrender because we've got no tanks in here all we've got is rifles" and I said, "We're not going to beat them with rifles." So we had to surrender.
Captured
They put us in a circle outside the place and they kept us there all day, well, half a day, nothing to eat and drink and that's part of the business of wearing you down, you see, and they come in that night with a truck and they put us into the truck and all the blokes are talking to one another, you know. "Have you seen Bill?", "Did Keith turn up?" and all the rest of it and I said to them "You stupid buggers" I said, "they're just trying to get the words out of your mouth." Because they'd have a stooge in there listening to the whole lot. I said, "You've got a bloke in here listening to all you're talking about."
That was part of the deal, you see, and they put them all in front to get their army numbers and names but they didn't put me in, they let me off, 'cause when I walked back from delivering to the hospital, there wasn't a shot was fired at me and I walked back 300 yards to me dugout so they paid me back for what I did before, yeah, so there's always something, even in war.
I didn't do it because of bravery, I did it because he needed it, that bloke. It would have been nice if I could have gone into the German tent and shook hands with him sort of thing.
Italian prison camp PG 57
We were in an Italian prison camp, PG 57 and they tried to more or less starve us to death, that's what they tried to do, and they finished up, Calcattera was his name, was in charge of it, and they finished up, they hung him at the finish for the treatment he handed out to prisoners because you'd be lined up in the morning and he'd come along and count and he'd just point the finger at you, "You, come."
And put you in gaol with bread and water for 28 days for nothing, for just nothing and they were just rat shit as far as I know. They were just terrible people. And the Germans woke up, that if they that if did they did that they were going to get no prisoner prize after the war because we'd be doing the same thing to them whatever they did to us and they know that and that's why they shifted us into this prisoner camp in Austria.
Making do
It's a funny thing really. Fellas come towards you after a while if you're not showing too much panic or anything, you know what I mean. Some blokes just, they go to pieces, but I was never like that, I don't know why, I was never disturbed when we got out of the prisoner camps, we slept on the road and everything, no blankets, no overcoats, just straight uniforms. We used to go into a house and try and get some bread off them.
Escape
And when we got in there, they were some of the fellows that were caught in Greece and Crete, see, they were in there, but, they'd found out how to tip the lock over, see, so they said they can do anything they liked, willy-nilly, but the prison keepers didn't know anything about it, see, because when it came morning tea time and one bloke said he would come back now and then to have a cup of tea now and again, you see, but they didn't say why or how or anything else, you see, and we thought this is up for us so we managed to get hold of a map and a compass and of a Sunday you could walk to another camp, not far away and we got this map and everything and we used to have to go to.
The local girls used to hand out the stuff, where it was kept, Red Cross parcels and so to upset them all of us went down together because we were only supposed to go down together in twos, and of course they'd get a bit confused and we'd have the trousers in the sock and we're slipping them down out of the boxes into the trousers, see, and we'd get back up to the camp again and we'd say "Well, do you want that one or that one? We'll have that one."
See, and we'd have the stuff that would keep a fair while, see, that you didn't have to cook up and everybody would share it out, you see, and the first night was on good Friday, that was sort of an anniversary day for us and we did about 15 miles the first night and we got down on the Drava River and we finished up, I didn't want them to go in but they wanted to go into the weir in the water and I said "Nah, don't get in there."
I said, "That's the river "and they got in there and we lost all our food, the whole lot of it and we're in there and cooked up a bit of porridge or something and we stayed there the night and then we thought, coming daylight, we thought "Now we better get out of here", watched the train go past, you see, and of course they'd been cutting the trees down to get the engines, to keep the trains going and then we, see, we were lying down looking at the high bridge, we spent the day in a little lover's nest about a hundred feet up in the hills there and we kept down low so they couldn't see us.
We slept all day up in the top of hills, we got out at night and got in and we'd lost all our food and anyway we got up in the morning and got out early and there was some rough country, they'd been cutting down the trees to feed the engines, the railway line and that, and we stayed in that and we walked right around nearly to Switzerland following the ice ring around.
A close call
During this walk around there, it come dark on that first night and we're still in the cold, you see, snow on the ground and everything, and this ice belt right around the mountain and we're all looking at the ice wondering where we're going to sleep for the night, you see, we thought, "Oh, hello, there's something going on here tonight", you see, so anyway we run into this little shelter thing, a little hut, so we knocked the lock off it and got in and one of the blokes smoked a bit and he had matches so we got ourselves a little fire going, we got warm, and spent a beautiful nights sleep in that little hut but the next day we got out again, got going and came out to another cleared area and this beautiful ski slope coming straight into it and they had these things there where you could cook up a little fire or whatever it was, see, and there was nobody around, it was daylight, so we got into one of these, the three of us and we hadn't been in there long and here's a German officer coming along the ski slope with his skis on his shoulder and he walked straight past it and three of us in this little waiting to get caught, and we didn't, kept quiet and a sigh of relief and when he went past our little thingo, a little, like get a couple of people in it, something like that, you see, and then he went down a lane, down through this thick scrub, you see, it was about so wide, you see, you wouldn't drive a vehicle but you could march a bloke through it.
Anyway, we thought, we'll go down there when we get out because we thought we'll see what's at the end of it because curiosity is what kills the cat, so we got out and started walking down this and the next minute, it was getting dark and we heard clump, clump, clump, clump and a workforce coming back up this pathway, you see, so we got to one side and started laughing in German, "Ja, ja, ja, jawohl" and all this, you see, as they went past, so they would think we were some silly mugs who had been up there on the ice, and they never stopped, they kept going and we went the other way. We got down the end and there was a blue light on the thing and that meant a police station and a dog came out barking and one thing and another and we went for our lives as quick as we could to get out into the dark again.
With the partisans
It was pretty close to a little town that was there, I went looking for something to eat because we had nothing to eat and I'm going like this, patting my belly, told me to "Wait, stop there, stay, stay, stay there." And the two boys leading away they were getting a bit ahead of us and they came back and said, 'What's happening?" I said, "Not too good.
He told us to stay here." Anyway he came back later and here's two soldiers with rifles on their shoulders and they were out of their partisans, see, and they took us in front of an Austrian, he was, and he's at his desk and he took us inside and they took down the names of our parents and ourselves, all the details, age and everything and they said "If you are not who you say you are, you're going to be executed", see, they said ,"If you're not what we think you are telling us it's not true."
Because they must have tapped the keys and answered in London House because no doubt all the, any troops that had come in from other countries were recorded in London, I'd say that would be the thing. At any rate they tapped the keys and they said, "You're okay, you're with us." So we got with the partisans and that got us out really. They took us right out just about.
