Enlistment AMF EATS
When I turned eighteen in August 1936 I joined the Australian Militia Forces. A friend of my boss, was a captain in the artillery in the militia, so I went and joined there and for the three years or bit more I thought it was great. I became the gun sergeant on a 25 pounder gun. I thought I was top dog. I could hit an anthill over a hill, you know, at two or three thousand yards away.
So when war broke out I said to my mates 'I'm not staying down here. If I can do it anybody else can. I'm going up there.' So I volunteered for the air force but the funny thing about it was the first thing I went to do, I went to the recruiting office to do an adaptability test to see if I was suitable to be a wireless operator. I failed.
Meanwhile I put in for air crew and in May 1940 I was called up for the second course of the Empire Air Training Scheme. Alex Kerr was on the first course. So we all join up. Most of us were public school educated, everybody was reasonably so, and we were about 150 from Queensland, I imagine, and probably 200 from New South Wales.
We went to Grand Central station here and we were lined up and they said 'Well, there's pilots, navigators and wireless operators.' Everybody wanted to be a pilot, you know, everyone wants to be a pilot, and everybody passed the qualifications medically. So they just read a list of names out and said 'You're pilots.' Next list. 'You're navigators. You're wireless operator gunners.' And I was a wireless operator/gunner and I'd failed the adaptability test and you didn't think anything of it.
That's your play. You volunteer to fight for your country, I mean, King and country, it was a big thing. Empire Day was fantastic in those days, all the celebrations that used to go on. People ask me 'Why did you go?' You just went. It was part of your training and lifestyle. You just did these things. Well I was up in the air. A moving target. 'They won't get me.' They did.
Supplying the long range desert group
It was interesting work. Not that we flew on bombing missions but we used to fly in the back of Libya to where the long range desert group used to operate and we'd have predestined times to arrive at a certain landing ground and they wouldn't be there.
We'd land and they'd be up in the hills and we'd unload whatever provisions they'd asked for. They'd drive down and we'd load their little buggies and away they'd go and we'd come back. We did that from August, September, October to November, even after November they pushed on, we used to fly into those places.
We saw one Italian bomber in the distance and we ignored each other, you know, but we were hassled by ME109s but really, we didn't even think about that, you know. You're invincible. You're only kids, you know.
Shot down by Panzers
Actually that was on the 23 January, my friend and I, Tony Carter, we were spare crew and we were put into this aircraft to do this trip. Now what it was supposed to be, because the Germans were attacking, the British headquarters near this funny little town called Msus, needed to be evacuated and we were flying up spare pilots, and a doctor and medical equipment up but being things as they were the British intelligence was two days behind.
Now we used to fly in behind enemy lines but it wasn't as if we were in any danger at all, it was such a huge area you could drop in and do that but when you're flying at 3000 feet and you are over the mountain range, escarpment as they called it, we came down through the cloud bank at a thousand feet to come into this town, this little landing field at Msus and unbeknownst to us, of course, there's a section of the 15th Panzer Division coming up the escarpment to go to Benghazi and, of course, here we are at a thousand feet just lumbering at 112 mile an hour which was our average speed and here's 24 tanks coming up the hill like that and boof and away she went.
Well shrapnel killed my friend Tony. The first pilot lost his left leg, that's right. A pilot we were carrying in the back lost an arm and the second pilot didn't get a scratch. I got shrapnel, because I was protected by the transmitter radio, I got shrapnel up my legs, through my belly, up that arm, like that, and I would say it was ground fire but the second pilot, he absolutely, he said 'No. A tank shot us down. It was a tank that shot us down not ground fire.' So I got the reputation in prisoner camp as the only plane that was shot down by a tank. I can't say if that was right or wrong but I think it was ground fire myself.
We went down, the second pilot landed, we were in flames. I'll never forget it. I put my hand on the exit door, the door had been opened by the fitter and rigger, and it burnt so badly that I didn't even feel it. So I dropped down to the ground which was probably about 12 or 13 feet and I was bleeding, of course, and the second pilot called out 'Jack, can you help me with the first pilot?'
There's an escape hatch in the front and he had opened that and I stood there and he was lowering him down, of course, to catch him but I didn't realise how injured I was so I caught him and, of course, I fell to the ground and he landed on top of me but that was fine.
Wounded and treatment
A little German officer, a medical boy, came over and he put a piece of sticking plaster over my stomach, my wounds, and he was scared, you could tell he was scared but then they put us on a truck, in a British ambulance that they'd captured and they took us to this little town Antelat where the field hospital was and we were all lined up, there were probably between 20 and 30 wounded.
There was one British bloke, actually, from Newcastle and he had just on a singlet and the whole of that muscle was taken clean out by a shell. Boom. Straight out. Didn't even bleed. It was self-sealed and we were laid out, obviously we're lying on the ground and the doctors came along and put us in teams of how badly wounded we were and there were two German pilots and myself and we were taken in, probably, I can't remember exactly but fourth or fifth or something like that in the queue and I was fortunate that the German doctor was actually a Harley Street abdominal specialist.
He had moved to England after the First World War as part of the reparations which you can understand. He married an English lass and had a couple of kids and he used to fly backwards and forwards to Germany for consultations whilst the Nazi people came into power and in August 39 he went back over and they wouldn't let him out and he said to me he said 'Jack, look I'm not trusted, I'll never be the boss. I'm second in charge. I'm a surgeon. All I'm going to do is operate. That's it.'
So after, maybe seven or eight days, he said 'Well I've got to hand you over to the Italians. The Germans don't take wounded prisoners back to Germany.' So I was handed over to the Italians and he gave me eight phials of morphine. They were about that long, soft plastic and there was a needle point that you broke off and jabbed in yourself and he said 'Now, I want you to take one in the morning and one at night time' and he said 'It'll deaden the pain. You won't feel anything.'
I had fourteen stitches in my abdominal wound and the one that they operated to get the shrapnel out which was sort of cut a like a jagged S and he put two overriding stitches on to hold it in. 'You're going to be in the back of a truck and it will be pretty tough.' So he jabbed me the first morning and away we went in this truck and there was, I don't know how many, four or six of us on the back of this truck.
There was no canopy or nothing it was just out in the sun. At night we pulled into an Italian base, a little field hospital. The boys that took me in and you've got to understand this, we were at war. They carried me in and just tipped me on to the hospital, it wasn't a bed, it was made out of bamboo. Well that really hurt and I realised what I've got to do is jab myself before I get off from then on.
Italian nurse's kindness
Four days we travelled to Tripoli and I don't remember anymore after that because I made sure I jabbed in the morning and jabbed before I got off and the first thing I remember is waking up in this hospital in Tripoli and an Italian nurse, middle-aged, she'd be fifty, something like that and she brought me a bowl of pasta to eat. Now I hadn't eaten, I'd been intravenously fed and I couldn't eat it. It was just terrible. So she went and boiled a couple of quinces for me to sweeten it and she said 'If you don't eat you'll starve to death. You must eat.
This flavour will probably help' and that's how I started to eat again and she dressed my wounds. Every stitch had gone, even the overriding stitches. It was just all a mess and muck and the doctor came in and said 'We'll let nature take its course.' In other words do nothing.
Well, she bandaged me up and I wasn't rebandaged until I got to Caserta which is outside Naples on February the 17th, that's right, we landed the next day, and a British doctor, Major Martin, I'll never forget him, is in charge of this little hospital for POWs. There was New Zealanders, South Africans, all sorts in it. He said 'Jack, I haven't got anything at all to help you.' He said 'All I can do is rebandage it.' He cleaned me up.
Well, the orderly cleaned me up and he just rebandaged me. Well that wound just, slowly just healed. If you can imagine a hole in your stomach about the size of a duck egg, like that, with the proud flesh just becoming [a] purple colour coming through. I was bent over because with the stitching gone I developed a stoop. Unfortunately, because not being sewn up properly, I ruptured over the wound and I couldn't physically do anything heavy, I couldn't lift anything heavy because I'd just rupture on the tummy.
Italian prisoner of war camps
Went to Parma hospital which is outside of Milan and there was an escape attempt made. I said 'Well I can't do much but I can sell my watch and try and buy some food.' So I asked an Italian orderly and showed him my watch, of course, it was a Swiss watch, a Siema but he didn't know it was full of sand and didn't keep good time but still it was my twenty-first birthday present so I kept it. So I swapped it for two bars of Italian chocolate. So I gave them to skipper. The attempt was foiled anyway.
The little orderly was sent to the Russian front and I was sent to Gravina, which was a punishment camp [in the] south of Italy near Bari, for two weeks punishment. Unfortunately it was a starvation camp. There were six people dying a week in it. They dwindled down from 3000 to 1200 by the time I got from Gravina to Tripoli, these poor people. The weekend ration. I got six cabbages and six broccoli for 600 men for two days. That was the ration, no meat, but we had a bit of pasta, a bit of rice and tomato paste, so the cook just boiled it and we ate it as a gruel.
And water was only on for two hours. You didn't have showers. There was no such thing as showers in this camp and you had to make sure you had a Dixie of water so you had enough water to drink and wash with.
After that they sent me up to a little place called Udine, Grupignano, Italian prisoner camp, and there were nearly 3500 Australians and New Zealand prisoners of war, a few Gurkhas, some boys from Cyprus, Indians, but mostly it was a colony or as they called it, a dominion prison camp. Probably, I would imagine, by the time that we were transferred to Germany, there might have been sixty air force in it, that's about all, might have been a bit more but it wasn't many.
Food shortages
We had our own wireless. It was built in the camp in PG57 and it was monitored closely and by 1943 we knew, well, I never lost faith in that we wouldn't win the war. This German surgeon said to me, I said 'Who do you think will win the war?' Well, he said 'You know very well who will win. Which sides got the most food, they'll win.'
And that's right. You can make armaments but you've got to feed the people, you've got to have food. The German people really were suffering very badly. In the country, fine, but in the cities there was a severe lack of food.
When the Russians broke through and they had three armies surround an army, I mean, that was the end of the war. You could tell there was no possible chance of them ever recovering. Food was always short, there's no doubt about that. Our caloric value was 2000 calories a day. The living standard was 2250 but they starved you in that way and occasionally we would get Red Cross parcels and I mean occasionally.
Sometimes you'd get one parcel to six men and sometimes a parcel each, then go six weeks with nothing. It was a way of keeping you hungry. People like me, being small, we coped reasonably well. If you didn't eat your sauerkraut, well I ate it, but the big men suffered very badly. It was tough for them.
Russian liberation and freedom
The day of the 22nd of April the German's told our men in confidence that they would be evacuated from the camp that night, the 22nd, and we could hear the gunfire, the shell bursts in the distance. Obviously the Russians were advancing and they moved out that night but the Russians got most of them and killed them immediately and the Russians rode into our camp.
The colonel arrived on a little pony, riding with his troops behind him. Some were riding bicycles. Some were marching. Some had little motorbikes, little DKWs and they just rode into the camp and said 'We will look after you. You will remain here and we will release you, send you back to Britain.'
Well the Russian prisoners were told 'You will treat the Germans exactly as they have treated you' and there was no transport 'You will walk your way back to Moscow.' Now we could tell that we had been recaptured because we were so restricted and our food ration was cut down.
Now the food parcels in the big hut, that it was kept in, but they wouldn't issue them. They issued one parcel and that was it. We walked around and we grabbed out of a sack, what you got in your hand, that was your food for the day. Well five of us realised that this wasn't going to work, we're off. So we decided that we would leave the camp.
We were marched to a little town called Riesa as a place of holding and five of us just walked out and the funny thing is the actual troops, the Russian front line troops were just like us and they got on a truck and they'd drive to wherever they were going and we'd hop off.
As long as we kept heading west we knew we would hit the Elbe. The Elbe moved around the country. And we came to the river up near Halle there was a big American master sergeant with ribbons all over him and he said 'Come. Come' and we walked across this plank because the bridge was bombed out, about that wide, and the five of us got in there and the first thing they did, which was wrong, they gave us American rations for a day.
Well, we were as sick as dogs. It went straight through us but they flew us, the next day, they flew us to Brussels and the first piece of, I'll never forget this, the Red Cross met us at Brussels, at the airport and they offered us fresh white bread and it was fantastic. It was just like cake. I hadn't had white bread for five years, four years, five years, I forget exactly. And so they offered us butter and we said 'No. Just the bread.' And we ate the bread.
