Army life
I had very little in basic training. I later on became a rangefinder. So, there's not much to it. I learnt the ordinary drills that a soldier learns. I learned how to use a pick by numbers. Pick by numbers, lift, strike, rake, and break. 1 2 3 4.
So I can use a pick. I had been no stranger to a pick, no stranger to a shovel but I was certainly strange to the ways of the army. But I enjoyed my army life. I'd put my hand up to join. I have no regrets.
Arrival in Palestine and making lifelong friends
It's all in the moment. It was the most extraordinary experience for a person who’d always lived in the outback, but I was in the most impressive convoy of some of the world's largest liners, Queen Mary. Queen Elizabeth, I think, I've forgotten their names now.
I went to the Middle East, landed at Suez and made my way up to Palestine and there, I did undergo some training there. After some life in Palestine, without a bath, I learned the ways of a soldier and I found good friends, and I still retain the friendship of those people, their widows, their sons and their daughters and their families to this day.
The Bridge of Jacob’s Seven Daughters
some couple of days we were stationed on a bridge called the Bridge of Jacob's Seven Daughters over the Jordan River between the Sea of Galilee and Lake Huleh. We arrived at that station in the middle of the night and took up gun positions on a very, very dark night.
In the machine guns business, you try to avoid having a blast from the front of the gun and so you try to clear the front area of the gun so that you don’t draw attention to yourself by creating a swirl of dust. We found in the morning that we were in a cemetery and our machine gun placement was over a grave, but we didn't fire a shot. That was a new experience for us, of course.
A Damascus moment
There was a range of hills outside Damascus, a mile or so, and a large number of troops were stationed there and they were mainly African troops and we were told that there was a trench surrounding that portion of Damascus down the road, about a mile, a mile and a half away.
And our truck with our crew, gun crew, that would have been the driver would have been five or six of us all together. We were told to go down this open road and see if the trench was occupied. So, we went down the road and nothing happened and the trench wasn't occupied.
But in the meantime, I had my Damascus moment because I didn't know what was going to happen and nothing did. And when the troops behind that branch of hills knew that everything was okay, they came swarming down towards Damascus. There was a lot of shooting that night in which we were not involved and the very next morning, Damascus surrendered.
Arriving at Java and becoming a prisoner of war
We had, before arriving at the Batavia the day after Singapore fell, I believe we arrived on the 16th of February, where Singapore fell on the 15th. We had come through the Sunda Straits at nighttime, and I felt that the Orcades was putting out a little bit of an extra spurt.
They get through there because it was a pretty tight place to be held up in. That was the site of the Battle of Sunda Straits later on when the Australian ship Perth, and a number of other ships were sunk when they intercepted the Japanese invasion force invading Java.
So my, let us say the surrender that controlled my affairs happened on the 8th of March, not on the 15th of February. That was the day when the entire Dutch East Indies was surrendered to the Japanese and I became a prisoner of war, together with most of my battalion and another Australian battalion.
The 2/2nd Pioneers, Colonel Dunlop’s, 2/2nd Casualty Clearing Station and between those three people, we became the principal defenders of Java and we were actively engaged in with the Japanese and lost quite a number of trips on Java prior to March the 8th when the surrender was called, and we were called upon to put down our arms. Not a very honourable day.
Humiliation and a lesson or two
Well, the very first step, of course, is the acknowledgement that we were prisoners of war. A very, very hollow feeling. It had more than an ordinary effect on me because I had previously, as I mentioned, been to the Middle East and when I had arrived in the Middle East, and transported up through Palestine to the camp … and I believe, I passed compounds of German and Italian prisoners of war and I held them in contempt because I was a young soldier.
I was 19, I suppose, and I just felt contempt for them, because I hadn't fired a shot, but I was on top of the world,and looking to conquer the world and I was completely dismissive of the soldiers. It was only a few months after that, that I was involved in the war in Syria, which we won.
So, I was riding high, with a sense of victory but very early, in the next year, on the 8th of March, I became a prisoner of war and I felt the humiliation of defeat. Following the humiliation of defeat, of course, was the contempt in which the enemy held me which was similar to the way I felt about the German and Italian prisoners of war. So, it was a payoff wasn't it? Was a payoff that stung for three and a half years and I learned what humiliation was and perhaps I learned a lesson or two, which did be no harm.
Arrival at the Thai-Burma railway site.
The day I arrived, we’ll call it Konyu because that’s where I did arrive and that was the starting place on the railway and I was on a Japanese truck. I had come from Java to Singapore, Singapore to Ban Pong and from Ban Pong, that was on the train, I got into some Japanese trucks. Actually they were allied trucks. What did they call them? What sort of wagons were they?
Oh, they were trucks. Standing up. I had a banana that day and that night we arrived at a place called Tarsao which was on the Kwae Noi River and we had our first experience of how primitive the sanitation was going to be. The next day, still on our trucks, I arrived at Konyu. We were on the spine of a range of hills and we had to, we got off our trucks and descended a very very steep descent.
I later found out it was five or six hundred feet of descent. It was very very hilly country and I did not know on that day that sometime later that year, this was in January of 1943, sometime later that year the path I took down that very steep hill was going to be traversed by a railway line. I had no idea but it did.
75 years makes a difference
That lesson in humility has been lessened to very great extent by the fact that in 2015, I became a guest of the Japanese Government where with a number of other former prisoners of war, I visited Japan and I was conducted on a tour of Japan by a number of Japanese ladies, not men, Japanese ladies.
They were the models of decorum, modesty, generosity, and grace and it was just wonderful to visit a place I had previously been held prisoner in the company of these people. So, 75 years can make a big difference. That's how it stands today.
