Enlistment
There was a war on, and I was young. And you knew that the young go to the war and enlist. The sooner you get into the army, and you'll get a head start on those who came later. And it was very true, you did. When Czechoslovakia and all that nonsense came and Chamberlain went over, everyone knew there was going to be a war, and I think that this would be 1938 or something.
They had a recruiting drive for the Army Reserve. And I went down to the drill hall, down the hill from Adelaide to the drill hall. I went to enlist and I went up them, right-hand staircase, and in there, and I said, "I came to enlist." Mind you, I was taller and heavier than I am now. He said, "How old are you, son?" And I said, "I'm 17." In fact, I was only 16, but perhaps I said I was 16. And he said, "Oh, go home to your mum and come back when you're 18."
Like, goodbye. So, to check that I went down the stairs, and that was one unit on that side, and I stood on the steps there, the entrance to this drill hall. I thought a lot of rude things, saying what they could do, and I went up the other stairs and opened the door and said, "I've come to enlist." "How old are you?" Then I said, "I'm 19." And the adjutant said, "What's going on there?" He was behind somebody in an office. This was a Sergeant. He said, round, I could hear what he was saying, "There's a young guy, wants to enlist." He said, "Oh, that's good." He said, "I can see something, though, he's a big boy," he said. "Yes," he said, "how old is this kid?" He says, "He says he's 19, but if he's 19 I'm the something something Duke of York." The adjutant said, "Well now, old and big enough, that's old enough, enlist the boy." So I was enlisted there and I would be hired.
And before war was declared I was sitting for what we call first appointment, that is, to become an officer because we work every weekend and we worked in this group. They had to get through. Then, of course, they had to produce a birth certificate to get a commission. And then I had to go and confess, and so, they made me a Sergeant Major and said "On your eighteenth birthday. We can't commission you till you're 18", and on, just the day after Anzac Day, in 19 whatever it was, I became the youngest officer in the Australian Army because they'd been waiting to push it through.
Colonel Hill
Colonel Hill. Ah, he was the epitome of a soldier. He was a schoolmaster, Deputy Head of St. Peter's College, and he was just the epitome of everything that I thought, what an officer should be. And nothing ever changed. And then, I'm seeing him under the shower. He was like a colander. He had bullet wounds everywhere, healed up, one on the side, I think it was. It was a dimple.
I can remember one day on parade. I was his adjutant in the end, and one day on parade, he saw them off, and he used to stand erect, and he used to hold his stick like this, there, and his eyes, blue eyes, flashing round, never missed a thing. Marched off into this, up the two steps. I followed him in, and he was flat on his back, out of it. He had just made himself, while everyone could see him ... the self-discipline of the man. He was then very sick, and I went off, to the war part. But he was, never was planning to go to the war. He was far too old, but you couldn't have a better role model. And the picture of him is a very good picture of him.
Darwin disorganisation
Well, you could only describe it as a bugger's muddle. You know, there's no other way of describing it. No one was ready for anything. And what happened afterwards, troops finished up one by one down in Melbourne and they were arrested as deserters. But all of them, they hadn't seen each other, they had the same story, that the word went round, "This is the end. Each man for himself." And they made, they got their way to Adelaide and some of them to Melbourne until they realized, but they hushed it up very much.
But the setup up there was quite hopeless. We went up Darwin Down. We were out from, on the rivers. The Commando unit went out on the Roper River, the Victoria River, and the Daly River, because there was an infiltration of some Japanese round there we were hunting for, but didn't find any. But they had been there. But not in hundreds, in twos and threes.
But the least said about the Darwin setup ... Somebody obviously must have said something, but I can remember a plane taking them out. It was like, a DC-3, or something like that, and people were on it and they just couldn't get ... any case, it landed in Catherine, to get more fuel and, of course, more people jumped on. And it just couldn't take off and it collapsed into the fence at the end of the runway and tipped up on its side and sort of everything, ambulances, and God knows, came out.
And now we're counting the people on the plane and, any case, one guy, somebody said, "Look, he was full as a tick and he went down to the loo when we were still on the ground. I remember." So they look for the bit that's got the back loo at the back of the DC and someone there opened the door. He said, "Are we at Alice Springs yet?" That was the sort of atmosphere it was.
Adelaide River to Darwin march
That was the first reports they had had in Melbourne, about what the 2/4th Company was doing. I said, "I should get back, somehow or other, and get back to my unit." Because you were very proud of your position. I was there, I was carted off, with osteomyelitis. Which, in those days, before the penicillin drugs, was quite serious. But for them to be over there, and me not to be with them, was almost a disgrace. There was a moral thing about it. My troops, who I'd trained, were over, behind the enemy lines. Their officer was lying in bed, enjoying life, and going to the Melbourne Cup, and to watch Colonus win in 1942. And, at any case, they said, "Well, that is very good.
They want some more signallers up there, and they want this. You'll take them back with you, and they're short of two more officers." There were 60 of them, and they were ratbags! They were not properly trained, and to put them, at that stage, behind the enemy lines, where you need first-class discipline ... I got up there.
I only met them on the railway station, in Adelaide, as they were going through, up by train, up to, towards Alice Springs, and then by road. Then they suddenly said they want me up there too, when we got them up to Adelaide River, I went forward and reported to General Stevens, who was the commander of that area, and said "I cannot take these troops overseas. That they are not ready for it." Actually, I wasn't very fit myself. I'd been in the hospital. I hadn't, sort of, I wasn't fighting fit yet. But that didn't worry me. I knew I'd get fit. He said, "Well, I don't know." He said, "My orders are ..." I said, "Well I would like it recorded ... " There was a fellow with him. I said that it is wrong, and he said, "Alright." He said, "We'll have a chat in the morning about it, in any case, Lipman. Bye, bye, goodbye."
So, next morning, I arrived, and he said, "Well, what do you think you're going to do with these troops?" I said, "Well, sir, I would like to march them, with all their gear, from Adelaide River to Darwin." And I said, "If they can get up there, and keep up, and I'm only just recently out of hospital ... if they've got there, at least we'll see what they're like."
Twenty-four of them arrived with me, and I think the others are still out walking. I don't know whatever happened to them afterwards. And those 24 were pretty, they were fit, and it really did pick the eyes out of them, and some of them were very good soldiers. So that is the story of, they call it, they now ... I get letters from these old men: "The death march you took us on, from Adelaide River to Darwin, and things like that." And Stevens: "That's very good. No, no, no, that was, when did you think of that?" I said, "Well, if you want to know, I didn't get much sleep worrying about it at all, very well, in advance, but in retrospect ..." I said, "What my CO would say if I arrived with those people." Well, and we had four days in Adelaide River and they worked them hard and tried there, but they were really good people. The ratbags, as I said, I don't know what happened to them.
Timor
I was on a Dutch ship, called the Tjerk Hiddes. We got on it in Darwin. I was, I say, a bit scary. Two ships came and were both sunk before they got to Darwin. This was at the low ebb. Japan has now taken over the lot everywhere, at the beginning of '42. Or that, at the end of '41, beginning of '42, when they came in December, at the very beginning of '42, and this Dutch ship, Dutch destroyer, and that was ... It's not such a long trip. It's only about a 12-hour trip, because they scuttle along, get you and unload you, and off they go, quickly. Then they offload you offshore, and you go to the shore.
If you've got the time, and the sea is all right, and it was, they can rescue their boats back. But otherwise, they would be in rubber craft, how you would do it, and you'd have to bury those when you got …to leave no sign of them there. So that was quite uneventful, and we had the exchange of lights and got there. And the welcome party, we'll call it, was on the beach, and we headed off up to the hill where we are, at a place called Betano. It was a bit of a culture shock, and then, we had this group of about 120 of them, Japanese, came down and ... see, we were not there to kill them outright. For instance, if we could put in, on the northern side, a roadblock, and machine gun down, and get rid of 90 vehicles in a ... because there was a cliff next door, and the chances are they'd fall over off the cliff with their cars, and the build-up of it.
That was worthwhile, and then, we'd be gone. But to just do that there would be ... even if we kill two-thirds of them and lost 10 of our own, that wouldn't have been a good bargain. So, that this won't come in, the thing was is just to lie down in the long grass and make out we weren't there…there were no shelters there. They owned the whole place…I think were 204 of us there. So that our main plan is to get information back of what they were doing, all the time, and harass them. For instance, if we could get in, and put a big bomb under their ammunition…the magazine, where they hold all the supplies and bombs and mines, and things like that.
If you could get in and blow one of those up, that was really good. They were the sort of things that we would do, but we weren't out on a killing mission. If you got three people by themselves, going out on the reconnaissance, and there would be no sign at all of where you had been, and what you had been, all over, because you had to be careful. Because they would torture local people for knowledge, do you see? And we didn't want to, we loved those Timors so much, that we didn't ... we were certainly not sacrificing them…
Although they're not highly intelligent people. Very loyal, but not fighting. Absolutely dead frightened of fighting. They'd disappear, but they'd come back. Now that they're, now they're gone, and these were kids from 12 years old upwards. Some of them, only 11, but heart in the right place, and very loyal, and wonderful…Sometimes, we lived in their huts with them. And, of course, we had food and things that we'd go out and get. And we also paid them in silver. We had a lot of, the two-shilling pieces were silver in those days, and we would pay them, and that was all very good currency for them, but it was a very difficult situation there which you made the most of it.
Malaria and dysentery
As we got through, we all had malaria, and when it came on, your temperature goes up to billio. You get the Joe Blakes, and we ran out of quinine there. And then, because none of the water is purified, in fact, no one told us about this ... we all had dysentery.
Some of us were lucky enough to have bacillary dysentery and amoebic dysentery. I never got rid of that till about 1948, because penicillin in about 1944, and that did get rid of it. We didn't get malaria. We didn't get rid of malaria until well after the war. We'd get malarial attacks, but then they had plasma, quinine, new drugs that came through, that we eventually got them, but you see, I can remember, I think, my last attack was in 1950.
Operations in Labuan
There was no real roads up between west of where we landed in Beaufort, going north to Papar, Jesselton, up that side. Remember that 24 Brigade were on the western side, that is Nine Div, that part, and the other part of Nine Div was on Balikpapan, on the other side. So I only know about the Labuan side, and there. Where our artillery fire and things, there was a lot of broken-down vehicles, trucks ... which, they had wheels, and no rubber tires on, all that, and if we put those on a jeep, we could adjust it on the railway line and if we put ballast in the jeep and put chocks under the screens, you could put, get more weight.
We had flat tops, and you could put a gun on a flat top, and some of the crew. It was amazing, two jeeps, lashed together, could pull. And so, my job was to set up the railway system and setting up a railway system, first of all, you've got the permaway what you call a permaway, that is the railway line, the permanent way, and so, and when you get torrential rains, you've got to have groups of people, big groups of people, to build up the ballast underneath, where they go, to keep it going. Then again, sometimes, you get a wash away, and you see the railway line dangling, with its sleepers underneath it, and nine feet before and you get all of that.
And we got all of the locals, with steel helmets, to say, start getting the stuff and building up the railway line. Then you have, it's a single line with passing, and the discipline, and you've got to learn from square one, whether you have it, what they call the tablet system ... and if I'm going, there's only one tablet, do you see? You put your hand in a place where they kick the tablet, which is a hunk of wood with it. And then, you go down on that, there, while they wait, the other side of that thing, for you to come down.
But then, in emergencies and things, "Aw, there's not another train coming down. We'll be safe," and of course, then, you can have a head on collision. You have to learn, and then, how important the discipline was, of keeping it, the way, the maintenance. And then, finding a quarry that we can get some of our bulldozers to break down, to get aggregate to go onto the railway line. And then, the pressure of the brakes and things, you've got to replace the shoes inside the thing of steel, to stop it wearing through the aggregate.
Then, every night, you had teams in the engineering workshop, for new wheels for it daily. So it became quite a thing. But it worked, and it was the only way they moved forward. I think they gave a bit of a candidate ... I think I put a cutting from the newspaper at the time, of how the advance was going.
Life education
Incredible education! Eight men to a tent, smaller than this room, a 12 by 14 tent, eight men to it, feet to feet there, four across. There, living there, permanently. They talked till two o'clock in the morning. All what they'd talk about, they're listening, listening, listening. You can't help learning a lot. The good guys and the sensible guys do educate the others.
Someone would take them aside and say, "Look, we're all in this together. We like having you there. Whether we like it or not, we've got you. We want you to have fun, yeah, but for God's sake, don't interrupt everybody when they start talking, or for God's sake, 'Try, and when you eat an orange at night, don't go, slush, slush, slush with it, because it's dry, go outside and do it if it's annoying the others. And, please, we've got to be here, let's make it ..."
The older guys would do that, and then, you'd get the, sort of the philosophy, this guy going down to get married and one of them, the old, I remember Tom Law said to him: "I'll tell ya one thing. If every time you have one the first year you're married, you put a pea in the bottle the rest of your life, you'll never empty the bottle. Just remember that." And he'd go, "This is the sort of roughshod philosophy that you learn from people."
I still remember so much of the conversation of these, and in the end, also learning to keep your mouth shut at the time. I can remember once, I answered the phone in the mess, and this woman, said, "Is Brigadier something there?" He'd gone to see his girlfriend in Tahbilk, down from Seymour. She said "Do you know where he's gone?" I said, "I think he's gone to Tahbilk or something."
The Major's looking at me that, and as soon as I hung up: "Outside, would you, we can't talk about this?" And it's. "I'll tell you, young man, if somebody wants the Brigadier, he is not in, and if they say, ‘Where's he gone?' ‘Of that, I could not be certain'. Now, say that after me. Now, you remember that if it's the last thing you do? I'm not telling anybody anything about today, see, but you are never going to ... And what do you say?" "The Brigadier is not in." "Where did he go?" "That he's gone, I can't presume." I mean, those sort of things, rules stick in your bloody mind, like bloody ...
