Raises age to enlist
At the time, my parents both came from England, had a lot of relatives over there and when France surrendered, then Dunkirk and then Italy came into the war, I thought it time I went with so many relatives over there.
So that's why I enlisted. I had to put my age up twelve months to get in. They didn't want a birth certificate. As long as you were fit, well you're in.
Transported on the Queen Mary
Went over in the Queen Mary from Sydney, went down south around Tassie and picked up the Aquitania that picked up troops from New Zealand, I think, and then went across to Albany, pulled in there, put on stores and across the Indian Ocean to Port Tewfik up the Suez Canal.
Yeah, well my mate and I had a cabin, we were lucky, with a port hole, it was great, get up on the top deck of a nighttime up in the bow with the wind coming in. It was a great ship, yeah, really good, really good.
Night arrival in Tobruk
The next morning they took us down and put us on the American [sic] destroyer and we were told we were heading for Tobruk. Well we, on the way up, we had a submarine scare and the submarines around somewhere and you know the navy boys, they do wheelies in the sea.
That was a bit scary for a while. We pulled into Tobruk at about 11 o'clock at night I suppose and just got off and they marched us through to Tobruk. It was a bit of a shambles. You couldn't see much. It was very dark and we camped outside of Tobruk that night and the next day they took us out to the front line, out to the El Adem area, that's about the middle of the perimeter.
Anti-tank practice
A mate and I we put on a, we joined a gun crew, with an anti-tank gun. It was a captured Breda anti-tank gun. It fired a two pound armour piercing shell. Then two days after we were there, I'd never seen a gun before, you know, and I trained and they decided to take Jack and I back to the Blue Line, that's the reserve line and there they had another two pounder Breda anti-tank gun out on the firing range and the dummy tank was being pulled across, not towed across, winched across I think and we had five shots to see if we could hit this tank.
Well I hit that tank three times out of five which is pretty good shooting at 600 yards and the tank was moving at about 12 or 15 Ks, I suppose, and my mate he never hit it at all. He was a city boy. He didn't know anything about shooting.
But, you know what? About a week later I got news the army had given me one shilling a day pay rise. Yeah well on the farm, you know, country boys are used to shooting and I'd also joined the rifle range up in the Mallee. So I knew a bit about shooting a gun.
Night shelling
I suppose the most scary part of it was the shelling at night, the mortars, the shells sort of flying over and the ones you heard, just whizz bang and, you know, that was pretty close. Then sometimes you'd hear a thud and one had hit the ground and didn't go off.
Another thing, too, was a bit, the Germans had what they called machine guns on firing lines, fixed firing lines and up behind us about 300 or 400 yards away was the Northumberland Fusiliers, they were a British machine gun crew. So I think they were having a go at them but, you know, you had to be a bit careful because you never knew when they were going to [fire], and they seemed to be pretty close to us.
Teatime shelling
At nighttime, about teatime they always had this couple of hours of shelling and mortars. That was the worst part of it for me, yeah. It was pretty scary the first time.
Italian grenades
That's one thing I wanted to say, after the East End we came back to the Salient and one day Jack and I, pretty quiet where were on the reserve line, and we saw decided to go for a bit of a walkabout and, you know, you could pick up a lot of Italian grenades.
They were lying around everywhere. We used to delouse them, you could hold the pin down and just take the top off and get in, throw the explosive charge away, and if you knew how to do it, it was quite safe but if you didn't you could blow your hand off, I suppose, or burn your face.
The grenade was like two egg cups facing together. So, I brought some of those home, the egg cups, I had them at home, I had five or six. They were Just the size of a boiled egg.
Stuka attack
Another day we were there Jack and I decided we'd go for a walk and we come to this big wadi, wadis a dry river bed, and we were walking along this and we heard a plane behind us and looked round and there's a Stuka dive bomber.
He was flying very low under the radar and the next thing, you know, there's bullets around us and Jack and I, we headed for the bank. No trees or anything or rocks or you could shelter under. We broke the Stawell Gift record getting to the bank, I can tell you. When they dive they had a whistle or something going through something and created a lot of noise.
We got to the bank and he turned around and was just going past us about 70 yards away, I suppose, and about, might have been 300 foot in the air and he had to turn away to follow the wadi because he was under the radar. I thought he might come back but he didn't. We jumped out and, bang bang, after him.
Water rationing
The army had a, what do they call it? A water bottle on your side. That's all you had for one day. We were rationed with water. That had to do you, clean your teeth, have a shave if you want to, wash your face. We had a dugout, shared that with a lot of fleas, of course.
Propaganda leaflets
The British army decided to relieve Tobruk, and they got up as far as Bardia or something. Rommel met them there with these big 88-millimetre guns and the British Army had to retreat back to Alamein but a couple of days after a German plane flew over and dropped these leaflets. Well, you can guess what the boys did with those leaflets.
El Alamein artillery barrage
Exactly 20 minutes to 10, 1000 guns opened up on the German lines. 1000 guns and, of course, it wasn't long before the Germans retaliated, and the British Navy was also firing on the German position along the coast. It was certainly noisy for a while, yeah, just a continuous flash.
It's sort of all very interesting, I suppose, and a bit frightening but we were okay. I suppose I was lucky, I didn't get into, entry in the front line where the boys were. I wanted to, you know, you go where you're told and that was it.
Treating wounded German POWs
On that night we went in behind the tanks, the 23rd were in reserve that night and the boys had captured a position and we got there about an hour or so later and we got there and one of the boys found two Germans in a dug out and I walked over there and somehow I got left with them and the other blokes disappeared and they were pretty wounded some of them.
‘See you boys.' So I just laid my rifle down and bandaged them up. One of the boys said a first aid station had been set up so I took them over there and there was a long line of prisoners stretching back into the dark, a long line of Germans.
Sergeant Cook was getting his group together to go forward because some of the boys were in trouble forward and he's telling us, you know, ‘When I say go, you go. When I say down, you go down' and we were just about to move off and suddenly, Sergeant Peter Cook came along, the sergeant, and he wanted a crew to man an anti-tank gun ‘cause he knew I'd done well at training on it.
So he picked me out and a couple of other mates and put me in charge and said ‘Go and dig a spot and put the gun in' and that's what we did and there I stayed for the rest of El Alamein. They forgot about us I think. All we got was shelling.
That was when I, the first night, next morning I went out to check the gun, you know, there had been shelling, to see if it was alright. Standing over the gun just checking things and a bullet went through my legs and punctured a tyre, a stray bullet. That's where Jack and I and the other two boys stayed for the rest of Alamein. Apart from shelling, it was pretty, no, nothing. Not what we wanted, or I wanted but that's the way it was I suppose.
Kitchen and hospitality duty
Back from Palestine rather, on the New Amsterdam and the anti-tank group, we were put on kitchen duty, I suppose you call it. We had to set tables and peel bags of spuds and onions and all that on the way back and be waiters and then when we got home there, the lieutenant, Hughes, he wanted us to, we had the big march in Melbourne and the celebrations and he wanted us to, because we'd done such a good job on the boat coming home he wanted us to be waiters at the big celebrations in Melbourne, you know where all the Governor Generals and Foreign Ministers, Lord Mayors are having the big, after the march. I suppose he wanted us to be there to serve the tables and we, the group, anti-tank, said, “No way. You can go and jump in the lake we're going to march with the boys.”
Jungle v Desert
[They were] certainly altogether different because, you know, you could see a long way in the desert but the jungle, you couldn't see a place two yards away. There was only tracks in New Guinea you walk along whereas in the desert you had a front line of troops, you know, for half a mile either side of you but in the jungle it was just, I was a forward scout in New Guinea for my battalion so you're number one target for the Japs.
Japanese plane attacks destroyer
On the way up from Milne Bay where we went from Queensland, from Cairns we went to Milne Bay and on the way from Milne Bay we went on a destroyer, an American destroyer out to Buna and on the way, about 10 o'clock in the morning, I think, alarms went off and there was a Jap plane coming in low from the horizon out of the sun, sort of, and the radar hadn't picked him up, it was one of the boys with binoculars that picked him up I think and he kept coming and all the American gunners they were firing at him and I thought, he kept coming and coming and they never hit him and he was just about, he'd be about 11 o'clock and about five or six hundred feet up, I suppose.
It might have been higher than that and I thought, ‘Gee, he's just about to dive on us and drop a bomb' and suddenly one of the shells hit him and it must have hit a bomb he was carrying because the plane just exploded and went up and out, you know, big red flames and smoke and of course the Yanks, they just left their guns and they're jumping around, dancing and hugging one another.
Zero attack
We travelled all night and we landed at Red Beach, the other side of Lae. It's about 60 mile or 80 mile behind Japanese lines I think it was. As we were coming in to land about 300 yards from the beach, three machine guns, Jap planes come over and machine gunned some of the boats but not the one I was on.
For some reason I was put on a different boat at Buna to the rest of my crew, my gun crew that I trained with in Mount Atherton so I was pretty lucky I suppose and the three Jap bombers came over. Zeros came over and they dropped bombs and they dropped a bomb, hit a direct hit on the LCI that was carrying quite a few of the 23rd.
Our CO was killed in the bomb blast. The ship's captain was killed. Captain Reid vanished. Nine killed including my mate. Every officer of my company, bar one, was injured and I was a couple of hundred yards away on this other boat, I suppose. How lucky are you?
Friendly fire anecdote
Another incident that happened on the way to Lae, we got into this little village and the commanding officer of Don's company called for two volunteers to go forward to see how far the Busu River was, to see how far away it was. So Snowy Richards, he was the forward scout and I was second scout.
So Snowy stuck up his hand and yeah, he'd go and I said ‘Yeah, I'll come with you.' So we went to see how far away the river was and we got on this track and headed down. I suppose we went a kilometre or more and we came to this big white tree, white trunk of a tree, the tallest tree around I suppose.
Snowy said he'll climb up and have a look. You could see the river was not far away with the sloping ground. He climbs up this tree and he's looking and there's a burst of machine gun fire. Well Snowy had said before ‘I reckon there's over a hundred Japs over there.'
In the jungle you couldn't see properly but there's a bit of movement. Then the machine gun opened up and they must have seen us somehow. Well Snowy came down out of that tree like a cat. I thought I'd have to help him down the last bit. He jumped down and he had his rifle and he raced off.
I turned to follow him and I tripped over a root and dropped my Bren gun, dropped my own gun rather, and a burst of machine gun fire and I took off after Snowy and anyway, caught up and decided then ‘What do we do?' We didn't know whether there were Japs on this side of the river or not.
Anyway, we better get back to the village and report to the officer that we thought there was a hundred Japs across the river and we'd been fired at. They sent us back to the same tree with an artillery spotter and we took him back there. All was quiet and he climbed up the tree and had a look and he said ‘Yeah, there's a lot of Japs over there. You see a lot of movement.' and then suddenly one of them moved down a couple of feet to the water, you see, and he said ‘Gee it mightn't be Japs.'
He wasn't sure but he already had the artillery lined up, you know, he was a spotter, artillery lined up to start a shoot. He said ‘No. It mightn't be Japs.' So he went back to the village and then we got a big fighting patrol of 80 or 90 of the boys and I was put on the tail end there to get back.
So we crossed the river and went up the other side of the bank and found it was the boys of the 7th Division. We asked them ‘Did any of you blighters fire a machine gun recently?' and they said ‘Yeah, we did.' They had a captured Japanese machine gun with plenty of bullets and they picked out that same damn tree as a target the exact moment that Snowy was up that tree.
Japanese suicide
The first time we met the Japs a couple of days after we were crossing this, the Busu River I think it was, ‘cause you know the Japanese marines were coming up the coast to meet the Aussies and a couple of the 23rd boys, they'd gone down earlier to sort of meet them and while they were sleeping at night a Jap patrol passed them and they waded out to sea and two of them, Corporal Schram and that were awarded medals.
When we were crossing this creek, we were supposed to cross the creek and go around behind the Japs along the coast. The Japs opened up and I was half way across this bloody river. You wade across it and they opened up on us and the bullets hitting the water.
I was a bit closer to the bank we'd just left so I turned around and ran on water almost and the other boys kept going and they went along the bank and crossed the creek and came back. Then we retired about three to four hundred yards, I suppose, and just waiting there.
Later on we got orders, the 48th Battalion passed through us and they met the Japs and we just followed just after them and there was one Jap, they didn't want to surrender and this Jap just put a grenade to his guts and blew himself up.
