Australians at War Film Archive

I was born at Sister, oh, anyhow it was a nursing home in Waverley. My parents lived in Matraville and my early childhood I remember quite clearly because

my father died when I was three and I can very much remember the day because he died out on the sand hills delivering pamphlets for a school fete and I can still remember the house being so quiet, all that day and that night. And I can also remember my father playing cricket with our next neighbour and I went to the soldiers ….

We didn’t live in the soldier’s settlement at Matraville, we lived just out of it but I went to the soldier settler’s kindergarten. There was two ladies, Miss Ayrd and Miss McLaren, and they were wonderful ladies, and I was very, very happy at the kindergarten. And then when it came to go into third class we had to go to Maroubra Junction Public School

and we were almost treated as outsiders because we didn’t go to the Maroubra Junction Kindergarten, we were all kind of treated as aliens, but no, that was because we were strangers probably. And I think my third class teacher was inclined to be, in those days they tried to make you write with the fingers straight and even put elastic bands

around your finger and this lady used to walk around the class with an eighteen inch rule and if you had a bent finger, you copped it on the finger. But I was not a great scholar and I went to year eight in Maroubra, and then for year nine, the intermediate year, you went

to the Ultimo Technical College at Ultimo and that of course was in about 1930-36 and jobs were not readily available. I was apprenticed or I started an apprenticeship with fitting and turning until the apprenticeship board turned up and the firm had too many journeymen [those finished apprenticeship working for daily wages] for the number

of apprentices, so two of us had to go. But I still stopped with that firm for a short time working in the foundry for four days in the week and the fifth day in the week I was allowed to go up and work in the machine shop. It got very, winter weather and very overcast and the foundry was a brass foundry and I know this

particular time I went home and I said, almost green came out of my nose and green came out of everywhere, and Mum said that was no good to your health, so I left and I went along to an advertisement. I decided to then try carpentry out and you just didn’t walk into an apprenticeship of carpentry. There was a, ICI advertised

for boys for a box factory and I thought, “Well that’s playing with wood,” so I put in for that and there was about thirty boys turned up and a chappie came out and spoke to everybody, one at a time, and then he took two of us into the office, with the result that I got the job. Well one out of thirty, I went home as pleased as punch, but

anyhow I worked in the box factory for about twelve months and Concrete Constructions were doing a big job at ICI at the time and I used to have a yarn to the foreman and I worried hell out of him until he asked one of the managers and I did start an apprenticeship, or they promised me an apprenticeship and I started with them and then I joined up and

that’s kind of history now. After the war I did go on and complete carpentry and joinery and I did a Higher Trade Certificate and then I did the Clerk of Works Building Foreman Certificate. I also did the Builder’s Elementary Book-keeping and Elementary Surveying, which more or less gives you an idea of what goes on. It doesn’t make you a survey by any means,

but it gives you an idea how these things operate which is part of the job, when you’re running a job.

December 1940. As soon as I turned eighteen I put my name down and went in and the navy didn’t want men at that time because they didn’t have anywhere to put them in large numbers. They

were just building these new blocks in Flinders Naval Depot, so that’s why they were a bit slow. In at that time if you wanted to join the army you went into Martin Place one door and you’re out the other and you’re in.

Yes.

Well you started at Rushcutters Bay which was called HMAS Rushcutter and you’re

there for about five or six weeks and then you went to Flinders Naval Depot and you did your basic training. Then I came back to Garden Island. There is parts that we’ve left out as we’re growing up. As I said my Dad died in September

1925 and about 1929 my mother heard of Legacy and my two sisters and myself joined Sydney Legacy as juniors and we went to gym classes in the old Queen Victoria building and then later on into Nock and Kirby’s Building and

I stopped and my sister Katie, we both left. I joined the Sea Cadets and Katie joined the Girl Guides but my sister Connie she stopped right through until she was married, after the war, so that was my first initiation into Legacy. Then after the war I did have a, I thought it was a wonderful organisation and I wanted to be part of it

and it wasn’t until I came to Wagga that I had the opportunity and I joined Wagga Legacy in 1959 and I’m still a very active member. There’s very few of World War II Legatees still fully active. I’m Public Officer on the Finance Committee and I’m on the Board of Management and

I’ve done everything, all the jobs right through. Some of them I’ve done two or three times and it has been part of my life actually.

I joined the Perth on the 1st of October

1941 and the Perth was still under refit at that time so they got rid of us by sending about two hundred of us up to Liverpool Army Camp and we did an unarmed combat course. We were there for three weeks and while we were there there was a fire onboard

Perth. We believe it was sabotage of some kind, and it didn’t do any actual damage to the ship itself but accept it burnt out some wiring in the canteen area it was and anyhow when the refit was finished we then went on several short cruises, what we call a shakedown cruise

and then we started convoy work. And the first Americans to come to Australia, they came in January, and we picked them off Hawaii and brought them to Brisbane. And the very same soldiers that we brought through on that period we later met in Java as prisoners of war.

They went from Brisbane to Darwin, and Darwin they went to Java. It was a small artillery unit. We were to go onto the, when we were eventually despatched to Java also we took the early detachment of soldiers to New Guinea. These

were the fellows that fought in Owen Stanley. We took them to Port Moresby also in about January. There was the Aquitania, and there was the Oleander and another three ships with soldiers on them and it was shortly after that that we were dispatched to, well we went to Melbourne

and I think the signal came through after while we were on the way to Melbourne and we did a dash from Melbourne to Fremantle in very quick time. I think we left Melbourne late on the Friday night and sailed into Perth on Sunday morning and then we eventually left Fremantle on the 13th of January. That was Black Friday. I don’t know if it was superstition or not but we didn’t slip until just

after midnight and we left with an oil tanker and two supply ships and after we were about abreast of Broome we had a signal and we turned around and brought the three ships back to Fremantle because it was too dangerous for them to proceed. Then we proceeded on and went to Tanjung Priok which is the port

of Batavia and the Hobart was there at the time, the HMAS Hobart and we were there for two days and then we were despatched down to Surabaya. In the meantime we had an air raid and it didn’t worry us a great deal but they did a bomb very, very close to the Hobart and she was oiling at the time. Anyhow she

broke away from the oiler and took off and she eventually came home but we were sent down to Surabaya and we joined the mixed squadron of Dutch, British, American and Australian ships, fourteen ships in all and we were under the command of a Dutch Admiral Doorman. Incidentally

Admiral Doorman’s wife was eventually in those flying boats that landed at Broome and were destroyed by, and she got very, very bitter about that but that’s another story. Anyhow we left on the 25th, 25th or 26th we left Surabaya looking for the

Japanese squadron that was reported to be in the area. It wasn’t until the afternoon of about, I think it was about three o’clock the following afternoon that we did find this Japanese squadron. We were about equal in strength but unfortunately we had three

different navies, two different languages, lack of signal co-ordination and it really was not a very, very good idea at all. And we did feel the Dutch admiral lacked the experience. I mean our own captain, Hector McDonald Halls-Waller, he received two DSOs for his

work in the Mediterranean, he’d had a lot of wartime experience in such a short time and we felt the Dutch admiral really lacked experience to run a full naval battle. And with the result by the end of the day there was only two ships left, they weren’t all sunk but they were eventually sunk the next day. The HMS [His Majesty’s Ship] Exeter

was hit and she left with the four American destroyers because they were very, very old, First World War four stackers, and once they fired their torpedoes they were a liability. So they went away with the Exeter and we lost the Dutch destroyer, we lost three British destroyers, so in the end there was only the

Perth and the USS [United States Ship] Houston left. Well we’ll say there was the Perth, Houston, and the [Dutch Ships] Java and the De Ruyter and then about midnight the Java and the De Ruyter were both sunk in a few minutes. It was strange where the torpedoes came from. The Japanese said they didn’t have submarines in the area but anyhow they were sunk and

one of the British destroyers was lost, probably through bad navigation or bad judgement on the part of the admiral himself, almost into a minefield, so one of the British destroyers hit a Dutch mine in that area. So we arrived at Tanjung Priok about just after midday on the 28th of March

we went right through a number of barges alongside the wharf looking for any spare ammunition that might be left behind. I know I spent about three hours looking for this, opening cases and they were all empty. We didn’t find anything because we had done about seven hours of shooting and our ammunition was very low and

we also took onboard twenty pilgrim rafts, which were to save nearly all of us and we were very thankful of those a few hours later. Evidently these pilgrim rafts were stacked on the wharf and they were used when the natives went back to Mecca, in certain

religious years and they generally went to these places in very shaky old ships and they used to put these pilgrim rafts on. So we took about twenty, twenty two of these onboard and when we left about eight o’clock, we left with the Houston. Hec Waller had taken command of the two ships

and the Houston followed us out and we signalled the Dutch destroyer, Everton[?], that she was to proceed with us and she said that she didn’t have steam up and that might have been so but any so it was just the Perth and the Houston. At eleven o’clock there was two Japanese destroyers sighted

and so the Battle of Sunda Straits began and in no time we realised that we were being engaged by thirteen destroyers and four cruisers and they only hit the Perth once in the first hour and that was a shell. It hit us near the forehead funnel and started a fire which the damage control party put out very quickly and we didn’t get

anything more until just after the midnight. We caught the first torpedo in the engine room and shortly after that it was followed by a second and that was when the captain gave “Abandon ship,” and at that time I was number two lookout on the lower bridge. And I didn’t leave the bridge straightaway but

I did leave and we just got about what we called the canteen flat, which is on the port side, and that’s when we got the third torpedo and there were about half a dozen of us there and we cut a Carley raft. They’re an oval copper tank covered with canvas, painted grey and got a wooden platform in the

bottom. We cut a Carley raft off the bulkhead, threw it over the side and we watched it float away because we didn’t want to leave the ship. Anyhow it was just after that that we caught the fourth torpedo and we decided it was time to leave. By that time we started to heel to port so it wasn’t that far into the water and I wasn’t in the water

long before we came across one of these pilgrim rafts. It was a matter of just hanging onto the ropes around the side and then people hanging onto you, behind you. And we had one chap that was wounded and we got him across the top of the raft but anyhow all night

we were looking at Topper’s Light, which was a light on an island in Sunda Straits and we were paddling this raft reckoning we’re getting closer to the island, but we really weren’t. We were just going around in a big circle because there’s a fourteen knot current runs around Java and so anyhow this went on all night and by this time we were

covered in fuel oil and when the sun got up in the morning your eyes started to burn it was very uncomfortable. Anyhow at this stage you could see the sandy shore of probably another island and I thought, “Well I can swim across there.” I got about fifty yards and down I went with this current

and I thought I nearly had it then but anyhow I did pop up and fortunately I popped up not far from another Carley raft which had an old friend of mine from Garden Island, Ernie Kinwin, was our chief plumber onboard, so I did have someone to talk to. And late in the afternoon a Japanese destroyer

turned up and ordered us onboard. Well we were probably in a way, although it meant capture, were quite thankful after being in the water about fourteen, fifteen hours. So when we went aboard the Japanese destroyer they made us take all our clothes off and throw them over the side, because naturally they were covered in fuel oil. They gave us a G string,

which is a piece of loin cloth, a piece of calico about ten inches wide and three feet long and a string around it and that was the sum of the clothing we had for the next eight weeks. And we spent that night on that Japanese destroyer and the next day we were transferred to, we were in a place called Banton Bay and that’s where the Japanese landed in Java and

as the Japanese left the troop ships they put us on the Sandon Maru [?] and the treatment at this stage wasn’t too bad. The Japanese, I think he was the officer of the watch, he came down the gangway when we were leaving for the Sandon Maru and he apologised for having to hand us over to the army.

But anyhow on the Sandon Maru we had half a herring and a bowl of rice twice a day, of course we thought that was pretty terrible but we had a lot to learn. We were on the Sandon Maru until the 8th of March when Java capitulated. They took us ashore and when we went ashore there was three machine guns lying down at the

ready and we thought we might have had it then because we’d heard stories about how they carried on. Anyhow they took us to a little village called Sarang and there was about two hundred and fifty went to the picture theatre and about another two hundred went to the, these were both Perth and Houston survivors, about another

two hundred went to the gaol. I went to the picture theatre and you sat down and another chap sat down between your legs, on a tiled floor and there was a machine floor just up behind you where they had a machine gun and they used to delight in pointing that all around the theatre and they had fourteen guards walking around all the time and you weren’t

allowed to talk to one another. If you did you got a belt with a rifle and we had no food for the first two days and then we got a little bread bun and then after that we got one dirty bowl of rice once a day. And we had to boil all the water we drank, so your water ration was, I managed to get hold of a cigarette

tin and that’s about a small glass and that was my water ration for the day. And our latrines were just holes dug in the ground, just outside the doors and in Java it rains every afternoon about five o’clock and a lot of these latrines were washing into bottom of the theatre by the second week.

Anyhow we were there for over six weeks and the guard changed and we could tell that the new guards were a lot more lenient than the ones we’d had, so we made signs to them that we wanted to have a bath and we knew that there a channel there but it was really a septic tank channel but that’s where all the natives washed their clothes anyhow.

Anyhow the guards said, “Monday, Monday,” and I can’t remember if it was Tuesday or Wednesday so we all sat down until Monday and they took us down to this channel and we had our first chance of having a bit of a bath and we realised later on that “Monday, Monday,” was Malay for “Bath,” and

evidently the Japs had learnt Malay or learnt catches of Malay and we could have had our bath a few days earlier.

We went to the army bicycle camp, which was an army barracks in Batavia and there we ran

into the 2/2nd Pioneers, the 2/3rdrd Machine Gunners and the 105 Transport and it was wonderful to get another bit of backup of Aussies again. There was also that American artillery unit I mentioned before. They were there and of course the Houston chappies came up from Sarang with us too and things improved quite

a bit in this camp. There was the Yanks had their own kitchen and there was three kitchens altogether. On the top part of the camp there was a senior officers’ compound. In there there was an RAF [Royal Air Force] air vice marshal, four group captains and that’s where Weary Dunlop was in that officers’ camp at that time.

Then we’d been there, it would be about the end of August, they tried to get us to sign a paper giving allegiance to the Emperor and all this sort of thing and we refused to sign it so they started, this is when things started getting quite nasty and they closed off our, our huts

all got barbed wire around them but the gates were open and you could wander through the camp. Well they closed all your compounds off and you couldn’t wander around the camp anymore and they started bashing for the slightest little thing. They were quite amusing really. They started this bashing and a slap across the face and it didn’t hurt but it was very

humiliating and then some of them started to use a fist instead of a hand. Some of it was quite amusing. There was a channel drain right down the main street of the camp and especially some of the Americans were much taller and they’d make them stand down in the drain so they could reach them.

We were there until October and then they said they were going to take us to some wonderful place and away we went and we left there in the first batch with what we called Colonel William’s force. He was a Lieutenant Colonel Williams, he was the OC [Officer in Charge] of the 2/2nd Pioneers and a wonderful man, terrific man

and down to the wharf we went and we were put on a ship called the Kinton Maru. As it had Japanese troops on it before it wasn’t a bad sort of a ship and away we went and we finished up in Singapore and we did have ideas of trying to take the ship over but anyhow they fizzed out.

We did find out where the wireless cabin was, where the ammunition was and we had a pretty good picture when they used to send the parties up aloft to get the rations for the crew, they’d send the chief ERA [Engine Room Artificer] and the chief yeoman [petty officer concerned with visual signalling], oh we didn’t have the chief yeoman, anyway one of telegraphists, different chappies that had expertise in these things

to find out where these things were but the idea fizzed out and nothing happened. Anyhow we went to big army barracks in Singapore and we were only there for two days and then we were shipped down to the wharf again and they put us on the Mombassi Maru

and this was a very primitive old ship. And we were right down in the bottom of the hold and I think the ship had carried lime before it carried us and it was very, very bad and there was only one canvas chute providing air and when you get on there you’re there still there in the harbour for nearly a day, a full day before you eventually move

and conditions were terribly trying. And you weren’t allowed up on deck unless you were going to the toilet and then it was strictly supervised and the idea of a Japanese toilet is just a wooden frame slung over the side of the ship. Away we went and I think it took about

fourteen days to travel to Rangoon and on Rangoon we were on one side of the river and we had to get to the other side of the river and they put us on this enormous barge that used to carry teak logs. You just stood up and went across the river and they put us on another smaller ship, the Armagata Maru and we went to

Moulmein. Well things had been so bad on the ship they put us in the gaol and they left us there for a fortnight because we weren’t, nobody was well enough. It was very, very bad at that time and the next thing we know we’re marched across to the, about half a mile to the

railway station and so we went to Thanbyuzayat and that was the beginning of the railway line in Burma. The railway line went from Moulmein to Thanbyuzayat and that’s as far as it ever went before then and so the railway line in Burma started at Thanbyuzayat. And later on it was about, that was in October

and it wasn’t until about March or April that the line started from the Thai end and then they were joined just about over the border between Thailand and Burma at about the, just past the, the 105 wasn’t, just past the 105 was the border where the two lines joined.

No, I was sent back to hospital camp at the 55. I was in hospital camp and then I was sent back to the working camp and my ulcer still wasn’t right, so Doctor Rowley Richards said, “It’s silly if you go out to work with that, you’re going to end up worse.” He said, “I’ll send you back to the 55.”

So he sent me back to the 55 and that’s where I was when the line finished and then they started taking chappies back into Thailand and I was sent back to a heavy camp at 35 again and we had, one doctor was Colonel Eady, and one hygiene fellow, one medical fellow to look after about three hundred

heavy sick. It was terrible. We were burying three a day in that camp and the Japanese was a Sergeant Major Timosho. He got on the war crimes trials he got twenty years.

We went from, eventually we went from there into Thailand to Tamarkan where all our other chappies were and that camp at Tamarkan is right where the popular known Bridge of the River Kwai is and the resort that I stopped at on the last trip to Thailand,

the resort we stopped at is almost on the same area as the camp was on. And I was with our fellows there and then about six or eight months later I was, they used to be making up parties all the time and they said, “You’re going back to the jungle to do maintenance on the line, you’re going to do this,” and I never tried to get on a party and I never tried to get off one.

If I was sent somewhere I went. I always believed in fate. Anyhow they sent a batch of us to Non Pladuk and they were mainly 2/10th Artillery chappies there, a Queensland unit, so we finished it and this Non Pladuk was a British camp and a few Australians there

and it was in Non Pladuk where we had a very nasty air raid on about the 6th of September it was. We had ninety nine killed and three hundred and twenty wounded in about half an hour. That camp was alongside, they actually made a siding which was a sixteen rail siding and engine workshops and in

between that and another camp was an ack-ack post with three Bofors in it and they were manned by Indians, who the Japanese talked into changing over and we were there until just after, it would be just after Christmas. We moved to Bangkok and

that was only part of what the move was and they kept us in Bangkok for about three weeks and we had several air raids in Bangkok. A few fellows were killed but not in big numbers anymore and it was while we were in Bangkok that we knew the war in Europe had finished. Anyhow then they sent us

from there up to Udon which was in central Thailand, supposedly we were building an airstrip which was a fighter strip but I believe it was a bit late to go because I believe they’d taken all their aeroplanes back to Japan to defend Japan so the next thing I know we’re digging holes across this air strip we started to built and everything was so.

Can I tell you my story? My mother was in the British Army Territorial Nursing Service and she had done her training at Nottingham General Hospital. She joined the British Army Territorial Nursing Service in 1916 and was posted to Netley

Military Hospital at Southampton. My father was in the AIF and he was wounded in France in 1917 and he finished up at Netley Military Hospital and that’s where he met my mother. They were married in Nottingham in February 1919 and came out to Australia towards the end of the year. And

my twin sisters were born in 1920 and two years later I was born in 1922. My grandfather came out in the 1880s and he was running the river boats on the Richmond River.

I’ve got his Harbour Master’s Certificate 1883, in the room there and my father he eventually had his harbour master’s ticket as well but after the war Dad couldn’t go back to the river because he had to be close to Randwick Hospital. So he was attending Randwick Hospital almost monthly and I think he had a wound in the hip that wouldn’t

mend but it didn’t stop Dad being active. He played cricket and he was a registered umpire and he was also on the committee of the Parents and Citizens of the little local school and so that’s what Dad was doing when he died. He was delivering pamphlets and he died on the sand hills between where we lived and the soldier settlement houses and

they didn’t find him for about thirty or forty hours. So then Mum brought us up.

Yeah.

I quite clearly remember the house was so

quiet for almost two days. You didn’t know but you knew there was something wrong and I also remember sitting on the fence watching Dad play cricket with my next door neighbour, just little things like that that stuck in my mind.

Yeah.

Oh well there was what’s called a soldier settlement. That was virtually over near where the tram lines went through, that’s where the soldier settlement was but we were in a War Service Home’s house outside the settlement, a matter of half a mile distance, that’s all.

Mum brought us up on the War Widow’s Pension.

Legacy was, the structure of Legacy at that time was that there was no such thing as a public appeal in those days. Legacy’s

public appeal didn’t start until during the war. Before that the money was just found by the Legatee’s themselves or small functions they had with friends, so it wasn’t a monetary thing. It was a matter of, the Legatee that was appointed to us, he was a very fine fellow but he was a judge of the court and

very English, very, very, English, not that that was, Mum was English too, Mum was English too, but the rolled umbrella and the pinstripe trousers and it wasn’t a good choice for our family in our books. That’s why since I’ve been

involved in Legacy myself, in the early days especially, I’ve tried to use this experience to make sure when Legatees were appointed to families that they were compatible with that family. But we had a friend, well there were three nursing sisters, my mother,

Auntie Belle, and Auntie Billy and they weren’t aunties and uncles but they were close friends and they all married Australian soldiers and Auntie Belle lived in Griffith and Auntie Billy lived in Chatswick[?]. And Uncle George was my godfather and also we looked on him as an uncle and Uncle George was in Sydney Legacy and I think he was wonderful to us.

Well it’s changed over the period. In the older days and the days when I joined first up there was a lot of children. You might have, well as a single man I got all the bad boys to look after.

I had two bad boys at one stage, three, but one of them you couldn’t do anything with but they were just boys with a big chip on their shoulder and one fellow used to buy things that he couldn’t pay for and all that sort of thing but

with the other people if you had children to look after, you visited them at least once a month in those days. But say you might have, a Legatee might have three widows with about six or seven children. Today I’ve got twenty widows and if you can call on them every three months,

we put out a little publication we call The Torch and we put that out every three months and that’s when you should visit your ladies on your list at least every three months and those that need more attention more often, more or less keeping an eye on them. A lot of our widows don’t need a lot of attention but they love to stop

and have a chat. Some ladies I’ve had on my list for over twenty years and if I don’t go and see them quite regularly they’ll ring up and think I’m crook.

Like I said he was a judge of the court and he eventually went back to London, before the Second World War started he went back to London and I mean if they’d given him a very academic family he probably would have shined.

Well it was just that it didn’t fit our position, put it that way, but that was more or less taken over by Uncle George who was a Legatee anyhow.

Oh well we used to go on picnics and we used to go to Manly quite often on picnics and I’ll never forget on one of those picnics was a thing that ended up, he used to curse me and fowled up my life. We had a picnic one day and the ants got into all our tucker and Uncle George took us down the course and we bought meat pies

and cakes and what have you and sometimes as a POW [prisoner of war] I used to dream about that pastry shop in the Corso in Manly. No, just Uncle George was a very fine bloke and that was it and I always looked up to him.

As I said Mother was a nursing sister and very highly experienced nursing sister. See Mum started nursing in 1908 and she qualified in 1912 and she had the experience in a big general hospital and then she had the, see Mum said later on she was sorry she joined the army because nearly all the

badly wounded chaps went to the general hospital, so she was a theatre sister at Nottingham, so she was very experienced. In those days we lived at Matraville and the nearest doctor was at Maroubra. Doctor Curtin was his name, a very nice bloke and there was little problems occurring and you wouldn’t dare take the risk these days

but with this insurance business that’s going on but Doctor Curtin gave Mum certain equipment and Mum used to do enemas and she did this no pay, just used to be voluntary. She’d carry out enemas, especially little babies and children, because the doctor couldn’t get there

and these people used to get in touch with my mother and she used to do that kind of thing. And as I say it was all voluntary as people didn’t have the money anyhow, but we used to go to, Anthony Horden’s was very good to servicemen’s families and if Mum

was buying us clothes she would ask for a discount but she’d never ask for a discount for herself, only when she was buying clothes for us. She had very strict little rules of her own and Mum could talk to a hall full of people and everybody would be hearing her but she wouldn’t be raising her voice.

She was a person that virtually gave you the feeling that she had command of what she was doing. She was very much involved with the church. She was in what they called the Mothers’ Union in those days. She was very active in that and she sang in the choir in our little church.

Yes, she was a wonderful mother.

Well see Mum made all our clothes and we sort of talked about having pies and pasties, well you didn’t get those kinds of things. A bought jam was a

treat but now you look on home made jam as a treat, so the world was so changed in those days. Everything you had was done at home, made at home. Eating out was not known.

Well Sunday we’d

have a Sunday joint, mainly roast beef in those days, lamb was considered dear, mainly roast beef. Sometimes you have a leg of lamb but mainly roast beef. Monday’s have it cold, Tuesday have it cold, Wednesday have it minced up or made into something else and probably the joint would last until about Wednesday.

Yes, we had good wholesome tucker. We never went short of tucker. It was all good, wholesome stuff, nothing fancy.

Beg your pardon?

Well there as a bit of a sand hill opposite

our place, or a very big sand in between the two, between the soldier settlement and us, there as a very big sand hill there and they used to have chappies shifting sand from one side to the other. There was nothing to use it on. There was no building going on but they used to shift this sand from one side to the other and then there was a lot of itinerant people walking around, knocking at the door.

Some fellow would knock on somebody’s door for something and because Mum was a widow they’d say, “You’d better go and see Mrs Woods, she’ll give you something”, because he was a serviceman. Yes, the Depression, we’ve had mini depressions in the last twenty years

but they were nothing like the Depression because in those days women didn’t go to work. Once a woman got married she didn’t go to work so when that Depression hit there was no second bite of the cherry at all, it was just the man lost his job and that was it. And those things were, people don’t realise how bad things were in

that 1929-30 to 33 Depression. It was just a shortage of everything and far worse than anything that’s happened in the last twenty, thirty years.

Well as I said Mum made all our clothes and sometimes your shoes might be get wore down a bit but we always had shoes. I know there was a lot of people didn’t have shoes but Mum made sure that we, not that we always wore them but we always had shoes and no we were kept warm.

Oh it was a, there was a girls school and a boys school and I think the fact that you weren’t there

at the original kindergarten that they had there, you came from another kindergarten, you were just looked at as an outsider I think and I think a lot of the teaching professions weren’t, when you’re Woods you’re W and you’re

right down the end of the list and the teacher would probably sit there with the roll in front of him and you never got asked to do anything so sometimes probably you said, “What’s the good of doing my homework, I’m never asked to do anything.” Whereas anybody up to A to about G, how they were on the roll, they were to ones that got asked to do something. And I think

it affected your learning quite a bit because you were down the bottom of the alphabet.

Well Mum was pretty strict. You didn’t miss a day and sometimes when you got into trouble at school you didn’t got home and tell Mum because you’d get into trouble again.

We had, the Deputy Headmaster he seemed to have a set on me and whenever anything happened I’d be the silly fool to get caught and you might.

Making, I don’t know, some of these schools where you’ve got the classroom and they’ve got these piano windows up the

top and he’d evidently left the room and there might have been about ten kids went the thumbs sign and I was the only silly bugger that got caught because he saw the shadows through one of these glass panes in the window and I copped six cuts for that. We used to play cockalorum. That’s

where they get, in the playground they get a team on each end and they’ve got to run and a team in the middle and the team in the middle has got to stop the others getting through. Anyhow I broke a fellow’s collarbone and I got the cane. I always seemed to be in trouble and I think that’s where you miss your father.

Well we had one chappie, the boy got the cane and he went home with thumb all swollen up and his father was there in about two ticks and he was going to put things right. Well if I got the cane I didn’t go home and tell Mum because it probably only worried her and sometimes I was in the wrong anyhow.

I knew when I was in the wrong but there was so many other blokes in the wrong at the same time and I was just the one that got picked on. I had a feeling that I was being targeted because I had no-one to stick up for me.

Yes.

Oh, I got on quite well with

my classmates but psychologically you were always on the defensive I think.

Not really, no.

I was a very ordinary youngster probably.

Oh well we were brought up in the age where children were to be seen and not heard, so yeah, that was the norm.

Oh no I got on quite well with my sisters, yeah. I was the baby brother I suppose but oh no, Katie was the tomboy of the family because I know that when I was at kindergarten there was two brothers there that bailed me up on the way home from school one day and Katie turned up and she, I don’t think she gave them a hiding

but she scared the daylights out of them. And Katie is still a tomboy. She’s eighty three and she’s talking about driving from Melbourne up to Dubbo and yeah.

Connie, they were totally opposite. Connie was the home girl, the needlework girl

and Katie was just the opposite.

Well we had to find our own entertainment. We had what we called our gang and come bonfire night we’d have enormous bonfires, because we lived in suburbs that had little scrubs, plenty of scrubland and

you could get trees and then so you’d have enormous bonfires and at one stage we built our own pushbike track. At the back of our place was Dyer’s Brickwork Quarry, a quarry where they got their clay from. Well we made a bike track out of clay, all by hand, shovels and pneumatics,

about six or seven kids. It was a circular track about thirty or forty foot across, laid down at an angle and we used to push our bikes around that. There was also the speedway at Maroubra at that time, a concrete track speedway and we used to push our bikes around there. My first bike came out of the tip and

then later on we started making gunpowder.

Oh we made little bombs, potassium chloride, charcoal and sulphur and we got fairly professional towards the end. My cousin at Griffith he blew the top of two fingers.

Made one in a glass tube, in a boiler tube, and the idea was to have tungsten wire in it and set it off with a battery and he was just putting the cap on and there must have been a little bit of powder on the top of the glass and with the last tap with the cap and the whole thing blew up and took the top off his two fingers.

Oh we did, but that’s, the thing I’m trying to say is you didn’t expect the Council or anybody to provide anything for you. You made your own, you might have got into a bit of mischief doing it but you didn’t hurt anybody. At the speedway at Maroubra we used to pinch a sheet of iron off the fence and take it home and make a canoe out of it.

We had a brick quarry near our place that was full of, after a lot of rain at one time it was full of water. It would be about thirty foot deep and about nearly a quarter of an acre and we used to sail our canoes in that and you’d wait for the summertime and you’d scrape some tar off the road to patch the holes in your canoe with. Everything was so primitive

and there was nothing fully made. It was just a matter of using what was available, even if you had to pinch it.

Down into the quarry.

Yeah, yeah, you wouldn’t take them down to the beach or anything. You couldn’t get them down there.

Yes, we used to go down to Maroubra beach and oh no, great surfing beach was Maroubra.

There was a lad lived two doors from us and he joined evidently and so I was eleven and I joined the Sea Cadets and

they used to have a parade night on Wednesday night and on Saturday’s we’d go and play with boats and we had the same as navy boats. We had whalers and gigs and this was at Snapper Island was our depot. And no, I got on well, I used to enjoy it very much

and when I joined the navy I was a petty officer in the Sea Cadet Corps and I did hope to advance but unfortunately I got to the Perth and that was the end of the section then.

Oh something different, something new and something you were interested in.

Oh tie knots, and how to use a boat and see I could sail a whaler in the end and I think it was probably the company of boys your own age.

Oh yes, I tried to get an apprenticeship in the merchant service. I’d seen a Captain Green and he was the Burns Philp Company and as a matter of fact I very nearly got a post as a cadet but one of their ship’s

officers got killed, fell down a hold or something and was killed and his boy got the post that I was lined up for. Oh yes, I’d had thoughts about that. As I said my grandfather and father were both worked in the river boats on the Richmond River.

Must have been there somewhere I suppose, yeah.

I think that, I had a little crystal set. You know what a crystal set is, the earphones on? And I used to listen to the Diggers Session every afternoon. That was a session that was run by the ABC I think and I’m talking about the late twenties,

early thirties and I used to listen to that every afternoon.

I’m trying to remember it, a lot of it was a lot of the humorous things that happened in, yes, they were recounting episodes of the First World

War.

Well when I was in the Sea Cadets of course we used to have, see Snapper Island is in the Parramatta River and our nearest township was Drummoyne and we used to have an Anzac Day, you know how the suburbs have their Anzac Day Service the Sunday before Anzac Day and

so we used to join in the, the Sea Cadets used to join, we had our band and I didn’t play in the band. I’m not musical but we had our own band, the bugle band and we used to join in the parade at Drummoyne every Anzac Sunday in the Drummoyne section. I used to wear Dad’s medal.

Yeah.

I believed in it very much, yes. I mean especially my mother being English.

Mum used to take us over to Kurnell every Australia Day and they used to have a function at Kurnell. One of those finished up very nicely one year. We used to go to La Perouse and catch a little ferry across to Kurnell and it was the year that the [HMS] Sussex, it was a British cruiser, it was

out from England. It would be about 35 I suppose, 34, 35, and anyhow the southerly got up and the ferry couldn’t take the people back to La Perouse, it was too dangerous and there was no road out of Kurnell in those days, so the Sussex took about sixty, eighty people around to Sydney and

that was great I thought.

English, Mum was born in Nottingham.

Yeah, very much so.

But she didn’t talk, she didn’t talk, she just talked good English. She didn’t have a brogue or anything like that. She just spoke good English.

No, not really. She still had her own friends that were all English of course.

That was St George’s Matraville and I used to have to go to church about three or four times on a Sunday because we had a blind

chappie who used to play the organ and I used to have to take Frank, Frank Foster was his name, and I used to take Frank to church and of course whenever he played the organ I had to take Frank to church. And I had to stand behind him and give him a tap on the shoulder when he reached the last verse of a hymn.

No, he just lived

down the road and that was a job, “You look after Frank,” and in those days if they said, “Look after Frank”, you looked after Frank.

I still, when Meg and I were married, I was Church of England, when Meg and I were married well Meg was Presbyterian, and so I’m Presbyterian. I don’t go to church a lot but I support my church.

Oh yes, there was a lot, far more than there is now.

Oh I think it was just quite evident.

Well the next door neighbours were Catholics and we were great friends, we were great friends and it never made any difference to us. No, I think when you were real friends it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Yes, a trade based school, yeah.

Well that’s where you were sent. It was a very rough school. There wasn’t a blade of grass anywhere, asphalt playground.

Say there was five hundred boys there, there was only room for about two hundred to sit down. It was horrible, absolutely horrible. When you compare that with some other schools with playgrounds, it was a terrible place. They were old wool stores.

That was just before, yeah.

Oh when Bob Menzies said, “We are at war”, I think it was, you

can’t tell me can you? Was it a Friday? I remember quite plainly but where I was at the time I don’t know because we didn’t have a wireless at that time at home. We didn’t acquire a wireless until sometime during the war. When I went away from home we didn’t have a wireless.

Oh yes, yes. See I followed this kind of thing. I still follow history and daily events and I get The Bulletin every week and I endeavour to read nearly everything I’m interested in

out of The Bulletin. I get the daily paper every day, yes, I try and keep quite interested in what’s happening around me.

Well I think it was just a transition and like everybody else you had to be in it.

No, I as I said when I joined up in December 1940 the navy didn’t want men at the time because they had nowhere to put them and they were building new barracks in Flinders Naval Depot at the time and I think of about

sixty that were lined up there was only about thirty that were excepted at that stage, so your medical was very strict. Yes, there was one friend of mine joined just after I did, Ross McDonald,

he joined just after I did. Yes, I just went down on my own and joined up.

Take you through, the eye tests were very stringent. That was the book with all the dots and things for colour blindness and

then there was the little lights and there was one light there I’ll never forget. It was the ordinary light, you say it’s white, it’s not, it’s yellow and then of course they put a light through a crystal and it was white. Yes, so they were very thorough. They went through two different doctors.

One doctor was interested in one part and another doctor was interested in something else and yeah.

Oh well I told Mum I was going to join but Mum said, see you can join the navy at seventeen and Mum said, “I’d rather you wait

until you’re eighteen,” so after I turned eighteen I said, “Well I’m going to join up,” and she said, “Alright,” and that’s it because we had talked about it for quite a while.

Well first up we went to Rushcutters and we did our just marching up and down job and

about the last two weeks we were in Rushcutters I was marching the chaps up and down myself and Warrant Officer Gilmore wanted me to stop at Rushcutters and help him put these new recruits through. I could have been made an acting leading seaman but I thought, I’d still have to go to Flinders eventually and I thought that might set me back a bit so I decided to

go to Flinders and get my basic training over to start with. So Flinders Naval Depot was at Crib Point. It’s about two and a half hours by train from Melbourne and a fairly isolated area. Being a naval depot from before the First World War so it’s well established

and we were in the first of the new blocks that were being built. They were all right but the thing that was wrong with them they were so far from the galley or the kitchen that by the time your cooks, different chappies are nominated to be the cook of the mess every

day or every week and they had to go to the galley to collect the food and by the time you got it to the dormitory you were getting fried eggs. You had to get a knife to prise them off the bottom of the tray because they’re stone cold and things like that. Later on they had mess halls which were right on the galley themselves so some of these

things were a matter of putting up with it until such time as they could get things in order. You were up at six thirty, yeah, and first thing up was double down to the parade ground for about a quarter of an hour of PT [physical training] and then you’re back, have your breakfast,

have your shower, and on parade by half past eight. And then you go through all the usual drills and what have you and then you’re divided into classes and then you go and do your gunnery section, then you do your torpedo section and you try and learn a little bit about everything so you know what to expect.

It was quite comfortable really because you got every second weekend off. Went down to Melbourne on Friday night and came back on Monday morning but I used to stop, about every second time I used to stop in depot and go to school.

I was trying to improve my English and Maths because I did have ideas of putting in for a naval reserve commission and also a lot of times I couldn’t afford to go up the lines for a weekend because although, one of my sister’s had been very sick and she wasn’t going to work and Mum was still on the pension

and I made a small allotment out of my four shillings a day, I made a small allotment to Mum to help her with that, so quite often I couldn’t go up the line anyway. I didn’t have any money there and I used to go to school on the Saturday. I would go to school which was conducted by one of the schoolmasters,

generally a lieutenant commander schoolmaster to picking up my maths and that’s another thing about education. When you went school and you were doing trigonometry all you were doing was developing an angle and it doesn’t sound very interesting but when you do trigonometry to find your way around the world

or to find the position of a building on a block, it makes it totally different, makes it far more interesting than just developing an angle.

Oh no, there’d be anything up to twenty odd doing the same thing.

Not really.

Well the best marks I got were in torpedo but evidently they wanted more people into gunnery and I got a third class gunnery rate as that’s where they wanted me evidently

but I got good marks in everything I did actually but I had the best mark I had in torpedoes.

Oh you did a little examination, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and they classified you VGI, VG, that’s Very Good Indeed, Very Good and

I don’t know what the other ones were because I only got to of those.

Yes, quite good discipline, the only thing was playing sport you had to be a, to get a game of cricket you just about had to be a [Sheffield] Shield player to get a game of cricket, so I played hockey instead.

No, no, totally different, no. I think I’d grown up a bit too.

Yes.

Well that’s where they had that old ferry that got sunk when the

submarine came into the harbour, Kuttabul, and you were virtually just waiting. You did little bit of work. Well I got a job in the chippie shop, that was the carpentry shop and that’s where I met my friend, Ernie Kinman, he was the plumber. He eventually came to the Perth too and became a chief plumber on the Perth,

so it was quite a comfortable little thing. We used to do a lot of little jobs and a lot of it was making boxes for the officers so when they went on draft they put all their gear in a big wooden box and the boxes were made so they could be collapsed and laid flat and oh we did little jobs. Then in the afternoon there was an old chief petty officer, I think

he’d been retired for years and the navy brought him back and he didn’t seem to have anything to do so in the afternoon I used to line him up and get him to teach me a lot of things about the navy in general and talk about things. I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t of been where I was, cause he was a friend of all these chappies

that I was working with.

Well I did have hopes of getting into what they called the officers’ training class, which was for naval reserve officers but when I got the Perth I was still going, it was in January

42 that I was allowed to go to classes onboard the ship, which were held on the flag deck every morning. There was about six or seven of us every morning but we called in the four noon watch, that was from eight to twelve and instead of working part of ship, we went to school and we had a school master on board, Tiger Lyons was our schoolmaster.

Well it was a big workshop really and a very old building. There was a rope loft, that’s how old it is when they used to have the sailing ships in and that’s where the chapel is now,

it’s in what was the old rope loft. And Garden Island when I first went there was an island and then they joined it up to the mainland with the dock.

Well see most of the, we didn’t have as many ships as they’ve got these days,

but the ships seldom came alongside. Most of them used to go to the buoys around the, see Number One Buoy was straight off the gardens, Number Six Buoy was round on the other side of the island and see when you came into harbour if you went to Number One Buoy you could say you were safely there for a few days but if you went to Number Six Buoy you knew you were going to go out almost the same day or the next day,

but we didn’t go alongside very often unless there was a refit on or something like that.

Oh customs, you’ve got me.

I don’t know. I don’t think there was many that I virtually disliked. I think I accepted, see being in the Sea Cadets for so long and we wore naval uniform and we tried to do the same things and I think a lot of the things that went on in the navy you kind of accepted them beforehand, because see

a couple of our officers in Sea Cadet Corps were also officers in the naval reserve before this, before the war, before the war started. They were in the naval reserve also, so you’ve virtually got naval customs drilled into you right from a little fellow and probably that’s why you accepted a lot of things.

I’d go home. See unfortunately I might

have gone home too often because I didn’t mingle with a lot of our fellows because you used to go home to get your washing done too. No, I think my home life meant a lot to me and that’s why even after I joined the Perth most times when we were in harbour,

we were in Sydney, so I never got round to having what we used to called an “Oppo”[?], you know how they used to talk about go to shore with their oppo because I used to go home.

Well we didn’t

have any training ships. The Government gave the Sea Cadets Corps the old Captain Cook pilot vessel but we only took it up the harbour once because the bottom of it was full of concrete. They were frightened it might sink and the Government don’t give anything away until it’s nearly had it.

No, you didn’t. They weren’t there to train on.

About two hours before I went onboard.

Mmh?

The Perth was alongside. See the Perth

had been in the Mediterranean and had been home about, it came home about August I think, August or September and it was alongside Garden Island but previous to that I did have an overseas draft to the Perth about before I left Flinders and that was cancelled because they must have known that the Perth was probably due to come home.

So I was probably tagged for Perth a long time before but I was the only one in our class that went to the Perth. About three quarters of the class I was in at Flinders went to the Sydney and they were lost of course, about three quarters of them.

Not a great deal because

in wartime there wasn’t much, not a lot of publicity so you didn’t know a great deal but the Perth had been really in thick of things, far more than the [HMAS] Sydney. You know the Sydney got a lot of publicity, the sinking of the Batolomeo Colleoni, well virtually that was overrated because it was done

as a morale booster for the Australian people because there was three ships sank the Batolomeo Colleoni and the Sydney was the one that was given the opportunity to go in and do the final thing but there was three ships involved in the sinking but Sydney got the big credit. And that led to a few amusing incidents,

because the Sydney was feted in Sydney and it seemed to give them a lot of atrophic heroes and anyhow our motor boat crew they used to go to Manawa [Man o’ War?] Steps to pick up the milk and the mail and the papers and sometimes if another ship was there they’d grab that ship’s stuff and take it to the ship.

And evidently our motor boat’s crew this morning had picked up the Sydney’s mail and milk and stuff and they hailed Sydney and just to tell them you’re coming alongside and the officer of the watch stuck his head over the side and said, “You’re talking to a fighting ship now, my man.” And the Perth had just come back from the Mediterranean after being in the thick of things, so they took their milk and post back to Manawa Steps and left it there.

Those were the nice little things that happened.

Rivalry?

Yeah, like everything else. Like the army and the air force and the navy and the army and only good humoured.

Oh yes she was in fairly good shape really. They’d had a couple of near misses. They’d had one bomb onboard and a few near misses but she was a good ship. Only trouble with the, that was the Leander class and the improved Leander class they were really not suited to the Australian station. They were virtually

very much more suited to the Mediterranean because they didn’t carry enough oil or ammunition, like the old [HMAS] Australia and the [HMAS] Canberra, they’re County Class cruisers and they carried, a matter of fact we oiled off the Canberra once, took some oil off the Canberra, so your range was not as good as it could be when you were

operating in waters like Australia where it’s long distances between places. After the Java Sea Battle we went back into Tanjung Priok, we wanted oil, they’d only give us so much oil. They used some excuse that there might be ships coming in after us but it was a pretty poor excuse because we

barely had enough oil to get, especially if we had to do high speed stuff, we would have hardly had enough oil to get back to Australia. So that’s why they’re not really suited to operating where long distances are required. They’re very much suited to the Mediterranean where you’d be backwards and forwards into short runs.

Well the six inch cruisers, they were built in about the, the Sydney, see the Hobart was the only, no I think they were all Royal Navy ships and we bought them. See the Perth was the Amphion and then she was renamed Perth when the Australian Government bought her and she was the second one

they bought. Sydney was the first and then the Perth and the Hobart and they’re all the same class of ship and oh no, they would be good for battle stations, good for convoy work and they could give a pretty good account of themselves. We had eight six inch guns, eight four inch guns,

and then there was some lighter anti-aircraft stuff. We had some pom-poms of the wing of the flag deck and then just before we left home they put twin point eight Oerlikons on top of B and X Turret and they were for anti-aircraft stuff and they weren’t a bad ship really.

You’ve got A and B Turret, they’re six inch where the guns are in the turret and then you’ve got the bridge and the nerves of the ship are in the bridge and then there’s the forehead funnel and then there’s the four inch gun deck with

eight four inch guns. They’re virtually anti-aircraft defence and they’re in, they’re not in a full turret, they’re in a shield and there’s twin, twin, twins, twins, that’s four on each side. They’re quite a good guy and yes, they were all right.

Then up aft you’ve got X and Y Turret. They’re six inch again and then on either side of those up aft was point five machine gun, multiple, a five barrel machine gun on each side of that and then as I said on the top of B and X Turret they had these wind cassion,[?] steel cassion, about three foot high and inside there was

a twin Oerlikon, point eight. And then up aft you’ve got the, then there’s the torpedo space with three torpedo tubes on each side and then further aft is the depth charge rack with depth charges in them. They’re like a, you get a forty gallon drum, they’re about a twenty gallon drum to look at and then

later on they became obsolete and they used to have a smaller one that they’d fire off and just about as lethal as the great big one they used to have before. The idea with the depth charge is the deeper a submarine gets the greater the pressure they’d got to have on the inside of their

case, well a depth charge very seldom hit a submarine but they can go off and say it’s twenty feet away, well they create a vacuum, their explosion hole creates a vacuum and that can lift the plates of the sub because of the pressure that’s inside the sub. All of a sudden no pressure on the outside and that’s how they can cause a very bad leak in the plates of a submarine and that probably does just as much damage

as if you hit one with a direct hit.

Oh as I say I think, I’m not sure but I think the bomb damage that was actually done to the upper part of the ship was repaired before it came home but there

still was some leakage down aft where they’d had some close misses and they were still working on that. Then they put some new gear in. They were always putting something new in. See those two pom-poms were, previously they’d been multiple machine guns and they’d replaced them with pom-poms on the flag deck.

Oh well just packed your gear and went.

Nobody, it was in a mess, dockyard workers working on it and it was a bit of an anti-climax really.

Well your notice said you were allocated to Number Six Mess in the fo’c’s’le and I did at least get a locker in the mess deck area. The people that joined me later were having lockers all over the place, lucky to get a locker but I did get a locker right next to my mess deck table.

Nobody, you find that out for yourself. I just said, well the locker was there, it was empty, so it was, you just take it.

Oh no, as I said about a few weeks later they sent about two hundred of us up over to Liverpool Army Camp to do an unarmed combat course.

They more or less do it to get us out of the way really but other than that they send us home but they didn’t do that.

About three weeks.

Oh worked around the place, doing little odd jobs.

I can’t remember now. They

make you keep busy.

I joined, see most of the chappies like me joining the ship join as ordinary seamen and I’d been made an acting able seaman about a few weeks before I joined the ship and when I joined the ship we had a lot

three badge ABs [Able Seaman], means they’ve been in about twelve years or more, we had two or three of these three badge ABs, and two badge ABs and they took it that I was ordinary seaman and they wanted me to run their messages for them but I soon told them I was an AB the same as them and I wasn’t going to run their messages for them.

Oh they didn’t take it real well but I stuck to my guns anyhow.

A little bit really but you’ve got to get over these things but they’d say, “Go and get me a packet of cigarettes, just go up the canteen and get them,” and I’d say, “Bugger, go up and get them yourself.” Wasn’t go and order me around.

Well when you’re taking the ship to sea you’ve got to look after the ropes and the springs or what have you and get them inboard or if you’re coming alongside to get them out and then of course you’ve

got a bit of scrubbing to do, you have to scrub the decks. The Perth still had wooden, although they’re steel there is wooden decks over the top of the steel, that used to have to be scrubbed and then we had to paint them later on. We painted them grey to make them less visible because when they were nice and white they used to shine almost white. They’d be well scrubbed and later on we painted them

a bluey grey to make them less visible. Yeah, what happens is every morning everybody is supposed to work what we call part of ship and that means doing a little pit of painting here or a bit of cleaning here or a bit of Brasso [brass cleaning liquid] somewhere else and oh yes, they make sure

they’re visible doing something.

We had our petty officer of our division was a chap by the name of Salmon so his nickname was “Fishcake Salmon,” and yes, old Fishcake and he wasn’t a bad bloke, pretty rough old bloke but he was all right. We got on all right with him.

Yeah.

The original action station was in the handling room off the magazine. That means the cordite came out of the magazine into the handling room and into a chute that take it up to the turret.

Then another one would be sending shells up the same way, the one that I was in they were taking the cordite up. Cordite was in tacks about three foot long and they ram home the shell and then the cordite behind it and then close the breech and they have a something that looks like a cartridge, about two inches long and that goes in

and at the bottom of the cordite tack was a silk thing with a little bit of powder so it can ignite the cordite and that goes whoom and away goes the shell.

No, not really, a lot of the chappies were in a pretty bad way,

nerve wise. Somebody would drop a hatch cover and it would go back and some of the poor blokes would go (demonstrates) because they’d been bombed and bombed and bombed in the Mediterranean. To get back to the Sydney again, the Sydney left the Mediterranean before the Germans arrived. They were dealing with the Italians. The Perth was in the Mediterranean when the Germans

were there in big numbers dive bombing and diving went on every day in the week for months and a lot of chaps that were on the Perth, that had been in the Med were quite nervous. With the big noise going on you had to be careful you didn’t drop a hatch as you might get a kick in the tail.

I think it’s a nervous, it’s only general, it’s only natural as they had a pretty harrowing time in the Med.

Nothing. This modern counselling I don’t believe in it. I think you’ve got to get on

and get over it yourself. I think it’s up to the person themself. I only said the same thing on Monday when they asked me a question about counselling. I think the person who is going to overcome it is yourself.

That was a bit of a come down for us as we went to Liverpool Army camp and there was an empty

hut and the next thing we had to line up and get a chaff bag and we had to go somewhere else and fill your chaff bag with straw. It was what you called a palliasse and we’ve got a blue uniform and then we got a palliasse full of blooming straw and the next thing you were always cleaning the straw off your blue uniform. Anyhow

we took with us some of our petty officers and our gunner’s mates came with us but we had these army sergeant majors putting us through some of these things. Oh we learnt a little bit but nowhere near as extensive as the commandoes went through, I can tell you but still we learnt a bit. One of the petty officers that went with us was a yeoman

of sigs and he was a wild man and he and the gunner’s mate were doing a bit of a parry with fixed bayonets and the yeoman nearly stabbed the gunner’s mate because he saw an opening but they were little incidents that happened. But no, it was more or less to get us out of the way

really but we spent about three weeks there.

Oh how you can toss a bloke over your head and how you can break a bloke’s arm, oh yes, all the nasty things to defend yourself.

Not really weapons training. A little bit on bayonet work but

I mean bayonet work, we’re not liable to run into bayonet work anyhow but mainly it was this how to toss a bloke over your head and how you break his arm and how you could twist his arm behind his back, the best way of doing it and that.

Oh they were,

see they were quite good to us because we were volunteers you see and these were old permanent army fellows and they didn’t have much time for their, this was when the first conscripts were going in and I don’t think they had much time for conscripts, so they, we were like a pleasant relief for them because we were volunteers.

There was a lot of PT attached to their stuff too. Well unarmed combat is more a type of PT done seriously.

Oh well we did a few, we did

what we call these shakedown cruises and that means going out and seeing how the engines are working and how the gunnery is working and they tow a target and have gunnery practise and that went on, and that had to go on as they’d had so much work done and everything had to be tried out and that went on for. Captain Waller wasn’t sent to us until

about the middle of December so before that we had an acting captain, so we only did a few, we only did a few more or less training runs really and then about the end of December we started convoy work around

the coast and that’s what I said before, we brought the first lot of Americans into Brisbane, met them off Hawaii. Strange thing that American cruiser that came with them, the Pensacola, that ended up as the Bartlo, you know the Argentine cruiser that was sunk in the Argentine war? Well that was the old Pensacola

that the Yanks had sold to the Argentines.

Oh well it’s just more or less, well in wartime when a ships at sea at wartime first up you pipe action stations every

morning at sunrise. It’s a sort of caution because that’s when the enemy can be over the sunrise and sometimes you’d send the pusser’s [slang for purser] duck up to have a look, that was a little aeroplane that we had, nicknamed the ‘pusser’s duck’ and they’d send that up to have a look over the horizon.

And that would be the first thing that happened daily, then all right we’re going to have a trial shoot and they send the tug out with a target, which is the tug’s towing this target which is a thing about fifty foot long and twenty foot high, like a board on top of

a barge. And you don’t shoot at it to knock it out because it costs money. You only shoot to show how, you shoot near it to show how accurate. We couldn’t afford to destroy things that wanted to be used again.

And then there was not many aircraft around and it sometimes used to tow a, what’s it called? A logue, a logue, what you tow behind an aeroplane? I think it’s a logue, [drogue] it’s just like a canvas chute, the plane tows a canvas chute and you chute off at the logue. Once again don’t

knock it out because it costs money, shoot near it.

On a catapult and we had an air force pilot. We had about six air force chappies on board. That was the pilot and the photographer and a couple of

airframe people to look after it and so it’s sitting up there on the catapult and they extend the catapult, like it takes up less room, they extend the catapult and then there’s a twenty pound cordite charge in a cylinder. The pilot gets up

there, starts his engine, gets his engine roaring and roaring and when it’s roaring enough, he gives the signal and they put the plunger and the twenty pound charge goes off and away he goes. And when you pick him up, we’ve got a special crane aboard. We had a big crane on Perth. That’s something they put on during the refit. They put a much bigger crane on. I think

the idea was that they might eventually be used to have special transports for troops and that’s why they put the bigger crane on, so they could put troops on these things and they could be towed ashore or wherever they were going but they were never used of course but I think that was the idea of putting the bigger crane on. So when you pick

him up the ship manoeuvred in to take in the lee, so the plane can land in calmer water and then they drop the crane and the fellow sits on top of the wing and it’s got this, the pusser duck’s got a pusher motor, not a forward motor, and he’s sitting on the wing and this boat was turning around here and when the cable comes down he grabs it and hooks

it on and lifts him up and bring him on board.

Yeah, but they’re not, see our, when we were in action in Java our pusser’s duck was damaged by gunfire,

our own gunfire from the four inch gun deck and they couldn’t use it.

Oh just the concussion, just the concussion of the guns damaged the plane.

Waller.

Oh first up he was very, very acceptable. Everybody loved him really. He had such a wonderful name in the service, that the kind of man you’d go to hell and back to do things for him and I think it made a lot of difference to the cohesion

in the ship. He was like a breath of fresh air to the ship really. I mean he came as our captain, whereas the other fellow was only acting captain, and not liable to be the captain anyhow, so you’ve got you’re real leader who’s turned up, sort of thing. The same as

what we’ve learnt that the captain they had in the Mediterranean, Captain Barry Smythe, the boys thought the world of him too. They thought he was a wonderful skipper. He was a Royal Navy fellow and they really thought the world of him and that’s the same way as we thought with Waller, we thought he was a wonderful bloke.

Well we had six hundred and eighty four and then you’ve got the, besides you’ve got the engine room people, you’ve got the torpedo people and then there’s the RDF [radio direction finding] people, that’s the radio, detects and finding, and then there’s

your signal people and your telegraphists and they’re all kind of specialists. Then there is the ordinary compliment and the ship is divided up into fo’c’s’le division, foretop, main top and quarterdeck divisions and that’s four divisions on the ship.

That’s how they kind of play there part and it’s not so much, it’s also where they live. The quarterdeck division don’t live in the quarterdeck but they live in another section of the ship about midships.

As a seaman, able seaman, yes.

Doing as I’m told.

Oh, there wasn’t many actual jobs other than keeping the ship clean and tidy and attending to the different duties that arose when you were leaving harbour or coming into harbour, like

securing the ship to a wharf or releasing it from the wharf, those kinds of jobs. And then, of course, you were divided into three watches. See you could have, like action stations everybody’s closed up, defence stations half the ship’s closed up, cruising stations a third

of the ship’s closed up so when you’re in defence watch, you have a port and starboard watch. With cruising stations, with three watches you have red, white and blue and I was port watch, white watch and I found I was on watch, I never got a forenoon watch.

I was always on either first watch, which was twelve to four or morning watch, four to eight or I was always on a night watch all the time, because I was in white watch, port watch. That had an advantage. I was generally the first watch piped ashore when we had leave,

just how the things broke up. It was the way of the organisation of the ship.

Nothing, nothing.

Didn’t go near them, we just picked them up on the way. Oh no I’d say we were

probably a hundred miles away from Hawaii when we met the convoy we were picking up. Same as we brought the Orcades, no it wasn’t the Orcades, it would be an American ship. We brought if from New Zealand to Sydney and it was an American cruise liner, still lighted up

and we weren’t supposed to be convoying but we were and so we didn’t even get to New Zealand. We just waited outside Wellington till it came out and then we shadowed it home. We used to watch them all night with binoculars watching them have parties and dancing and everything else.

Because they weren’t supposed to convoy a neutral ship, I should imagine.

We were generally in front as a rule. When we took the Aquitania and the Zealandia and that up to New Guinea we were in front most of the time, I think.

Not really, they were just what you thought would happen. Don’t recall anything that was outstanding. A couple of times we’d pick up

the ASDIC [Anti Submarine Detection Investigation Commission, sub detector] people would pick up a ping and sometimes, I don’t think we picked up a ping that was real but still a ping so you go to action stations and race around and drop a couple of depth charges, just to make sure. Sometimes even a whale

can give them a ping and also these were fairly good sets we had onboard but they were still in their early stages of development and I think they got far more accurate as time went on. Another time off, I forget where we were then, they would have a plot, they should know what ships

are in the area and if a ship’s in the area that’s not in the plot you go to action stations straight away and just circle around and make sure who he is and what he is before you let him go. That’s why our skipper was very careful of these kind of things, as you

know where the Sydney got caught and the Sydney should never have got caught like that really. When you sight these blokes you keep away from them until you find out who they are but that’s somebody else’s history.

As I said we had to come back and bring those three merchant ships back that were with us, which we would have badly needed what they were carrying but that wasn’t to be and the only other ship we passed on the way up was the Langley and that was an American seaplane tender.

Wasn’t an aircraft carrier, was a seaplane tender and that was sunk the day after we saw it. We also passed a couple of Dutch submarines and I think they were on the way away but we didn’t see anything later on, so that was the only shipping that we saw on the way up to Java.

Another thing which was very important which happened onboard Perth was the night we went from Tanjung Priok down to Surabaya to join the squadron, the skipper had all the petrol onboard diced over the side. See on the upper deck there’s about a two thousand gallon tank of petrol and another small

tank of petrol near the catapult which is aircraft fuel and the skipper had all that diced over the side. See the night we were sunk if we’d have had two thousand gallons of petrol on the upper deck and it caught alight it would make a mess and I personally think that’s what happened to Sydney. I think the

Sydney she had a full stage of ammunition, she wasn’t prepared, well she didn’t believe there would be any action and I think she caught on fire very badly and eventually blew up and you might recall when the USS Hood blew up there was three survivors off the Hood. It was quite common that a

smaller ship would have no survivors if she blew up.

No, it was what you normally carried to run motorboats with.

Yeah, where can you store petrol? If you store it above decks or below decks, below decks it’s probably worse isn’t it if anything should happen?

I don’t know. I don’t design ships.

They’re there, they’re built into the ship these tanks. They’re not just something portable, they’re built into the ship.

Mmh.

Oh we went straight to Tan, that’s the port of Batavia and we were there for two days, I think it was and then we went down to Surabaya and joined that squadron, which was a mixed squadron of British, Dutch

and American.

No, no shore leave. Batavia was an open city and I don’t think they wanted us there anyway, in an open city.

Oh yes, everybody was preparing to get out. I’ve never seen so many Dornier flying boats in

all my life, as was gathered in both Batavia and Surabaya.

Well you didn’t see much there. See Tanjung Priok, cause about two miles out of Batavia, you don’t see much really. We had two air raids while we were there.

Didn’t do a lot of damage to us and we opened up on them of course.

Well there was twenty seven planes in the air raid and

we were alongside the wharf and the Hobart was about a quarter of a mile away on a buoy or she was probably just anchored and she was refuelling and they dropped a bomb about thirty or forty feet off their quarter, so they broke off from the oil tanker and left. They said later that they were scared there

was water got into their oil when they broke off from the tanker or the tanker broke off from them, I don’t know. They were frightened that water might have got into their oil tank but I don’t know much about that really except just a report but the air raid didn’t worry us a great deal except you never know.

The strange thing about it was the leading plane appeared to fire a cannon and when he fired his cannon they all dropped their bombs together.

Oh there was a few other ships but no more of ours.

There might have been a couple of Dutch vessels of some kind but, oh wait there, there might have been the [HMS] Dragon, one of the British anti-aircraft cruisers, the Dragon, I think might have been there but that eventually went to Colombo about the same day probably. That left as it evidently wasn’t suitable to send down

to Surabaya.

Very little.

Yes.

The Hobart opened up with their. I can’t remember any shore batteries opening up.

No, oh we think we got one.

None.

Well they didn’t seem to do any damage that day but when we came back after the Java Sea battle there was a raid one afternoon and they did set alight one of the oil depots, that was burning quite fiercely

but I don’t think the Japs intended to do that because that’s one of the things they wanted Java for was the oil and it was one of the big prizes of taking the East Indies was to get their oil.

Oh I think they came and went and didn’t do much damage, I think. As I said they didn’t seem to worry

us a great deal.

That’s right, yes.

Not really. I don’t think you worry about things until after you’ve got nothing to do. I think the first time I started to worry was when I was in the water

after we were sunk and the flares were coming down and we were covered in oil and that’s the first time I think I got scared, of the water catching alight as I’d read about that happening before. Oh I’d honestly say that was about the first time I, or it might be just before I left the ship I don’t mind

admitting I said little prayers to myself.

No, the Hobart didn’t go with us.

No, we just went down on our own to Surabaya.

We joined the mixed squadron. There was the Exeter, an eight inch cruiser, there was the Houston, an eight inch cruiser and she had her after turrets out of action because

they’d bounced a bomb off her and then there was the Perth, a six inch cruiser, two Dutch cruisers, five point nine, four British destroyers, the Jupiter, the Calendar[?], no three British destroyers, good destroyers, three of them, quite good, two Dutch destroyers and the four American destroyers,

the very old four stackers that were built for the First World War and they had quite a lot of torpedo tubes but after that they were almost defenceless. They weren’t a great deal of use in this type of battle so that was the squadron that left Surabaya the next morning to search for the Japanese fleet, which they understood was somewhere in the area.

They can’t tell you a great deal. They get on the Tannoy [public address system] sometime and say, “This is the Captain speaking,” but there’s not a lot he can tell you but “We’ve been informed there is a Japanese squadron in the area and we’re going looking for him.”

And also there was a convoy of troops with it and the idea was probably to get at the convoy if you could possibly get at them, that was the idea. It was reasonably well defended and the Japanese were one Japanese fleet where we were a mixture and we had no common signal code and we

had two languages and it didn’t arguer well for a cohesive sort of arrangement really.

Firstly the British, see even Britain and America had not operated together so say the British and Australian

navy did the same thing, so there is a different combination of flag signals that could mean an manoeuvre, and you hoist these things and that’s a manoeuvre and the skipper would say oh that’s finished , so you had a language barrier. I mean we’d never met a Dutchman before probably, so

you’ve got the language barrier. They put a Dutch officer on our ship and a Dutch officer on the American ship but, so we had to fight a naval battle using international code, that’s ordinary dit, dit, da, dit, dit, da, and it just

doesn’t work.

Yeah, and just using ordinary language virtually.

Oh yes, you’re confident all the time I think. You’re always to win. You’re not going to lose.

I mean if you went into something saying you’re going to lose, you’d never do much good would you? No, you’re always going to win.

Yeah.

Well we eventually found them about three o’clock

in the afternoon, well you can read all the accounts written by the different skippers afterwards and it appears that the Dutch admiral kept us out of range. We only had,

the fleets as we met were about equal, the number of guns and what have you. The Japanese might have had a little superiority in guns, but not much. They were about equal and the Japanese eight inch guns were firing and we had the Exeter with eight inch guns and we had the Houston with eight inch guns but her after turrets were out of action, so that dropped behind a bit.

But we were in range of the eight inch guns but we couldn’t fire our six inch guns because it would be a waste of ammunition. Our skipper thinks, what he wrote about it, he feels that to be effective we should have closed in much earlier. We might have been damaged, we might have been sunk the first day

but we would have probably done a lot more damage. But the whole thing was so useless. I mean Singapore had gone, Borneo had gone and Pearl Harbour, there was no American fleet in the Pacific

as they’d all been knocked out of Pearl Harbour so within ten hours steaming the Japs could put in aircraft carriers, battleships and the whole works, within a few hours steaming, so why, I don’t think the Dutch really intended to fight on land, so why sacrifice

all these sailors. I think it might have been one Dutch admiral ashore, Helrich, or very similar name anyway, I think it might have been his one idea of glory or something.

Oh yes, you went to action

stations. See we’d been virtually at action stations for nearly three days.

We were fed by, they make sandwiches. The galley would make sandwiches and they’d bring them around to you at action stations, your position there.

You weren’t supposed to sleep.

Well yeah, yes, it would be nearly three days without sleep really, yeah. You might have dozed a bit but not a matter of curling down.

Oh yes, well that was all right. You generally have to let someone know that you’re going.

No, it wasn’t. They’d

been through a pretty gruelling twelve or fourteen months. I don’t think I’ll go into that any further. I think it was the fact, a number of factors and but they’d been such a horror stretch for about fourteen months that I think it had played a big part

into the morale of the ship I think. I think there was one officer that was not well liked which was probably very important too.

No, I think that, I think after Captain Waller joined the ship there was a different atmosphere all together. I think a good captain makes a lot of difference to a ship and I think after Captain Waller joined the ship

it was a totally different atmosphere right through the ship.

I think he was a down to earth skipper. An example, we had a cat onboard. It was given to one of our chappies and

I know of the lady who actually gave the cat. She was only a little girl at the time and she gave the cat to one of our chappies and he took it on board and we hadn’t had the cat long before it got mixed up with a tin of red lead and that naturally became the cat’s name. It was Red Lead and one commander was very,

very strict and we knew that if he found the cat we wouldn’t have it so the cat was kept hidden. So after Captain Waller joined the ship he was up on the bridge one day or whether it was done on purpose but accidentally but Red Lead wandered across the bridge and the other commander was there too and the cat wandered up to the skipper and the skipper patted it on the head and gave

it a little cuddle and from that day on Red Lead had the walk of the ship and no-one was game to say boo.

It was looked after on one of the mess decks. I can’t remember who actually looked after it but Red Lead became our mascot anyway.

I don’t think so. I’ve never known anybody that did have a cat but I know in the old days they used to have monkeys in the old days sometimes, especially when they’d been for service in the East.

No, they hadn’t entered then.

They probably don’t let us into a lot of these secrets but I think you realise then that the war could be much closer to home but

some of the conceptions we had of the Japanese proved totally false. We were told, I don’t know who told us, I think probably more the press, I’m not talking about people officially telling you but what the press probably told us that these people couldn’t see properly and they wouldn’t be able to pilot a plane, and they couldn’t make planes but they gave us a terrible shock with the Zero.

It was a very, very advanced fighter plane and I think the, I’m not sure about, the air raids we had, as I said, were not, didn’t worry us but I think they were totally different to the people that raided Pearl Harbour, they were very well trained. So I think their

navy pilots had probably been the nucleus of their air force, or their air arm and I think they were very well trained. I think the Japanese Navy was very well trained. They don’t allow public opinion to

hinder them. We were, as I said, at Flinders Naval Depot every second weekend we could go up the lines for a weekend. In Japan they used to put them up to some training place hundreds of miles from anywhere and that’s where they stopped and they didn’t have the leave we had and I

think their training was far more rigorous than our own.

Oh I suppose when Pearl, though they claimed Pearl Harbour as an unscheduled attack it was still war. I mean

it shouldn’t have been as successful as it was. That’s like everything else, it was a Sunday, people don’t work at the weekends. Well when there’s a war on, even though the Yanks weren’t in the war, they must have it, I mean the Japanese were talking to them threatening war, at the very time it started.

They were still in, the Japanese Foreign Minister was still in America at the time, so even if it was Sunday, there should have been a bit more people on, not all of them but there should be a lot more people on duty.

That happened when we were on the way up the west coast, and yes, we got a shock that we’d lost Singapore, yeah. We

got just a big a shock when we lost [HMS] Prince of Wales and [HMS] Repulse too. See there’s another thing of what happens in war. The aircraft carrier, I think it was the Royal Oak, not the Royal Oak, that was a battleship, the [HMS] Ark Royal was supposed to come with the Prince of Wales and Repulse but she had engine trouble or something and couldn’t come. And to send two battleships down there without air cover,

they might as well left them at home but these are things done to try and boost morale and they lost them.

Oh it was, as you say, it was a big shock that we lost Singapore

and I don’t think we, I don’t know how to put this. I think we were confident that things were going to come good eventually. I think we were quite confident that things would come good eventually but when,

after the Java Sea battle I can remember some of the elder chappies onboard saying “We’ll be eating rice next week.” I mean the younger blokes didn’t think that way but some of the older fellows were thinking that way and unfortunately the bloke who said that, it was old Bungie Williams, he was killed in action but

I know some of the older chappies were beginning to think that way but the younger blokes we probably didn’t think that much I suppose.

As I said during the Java Sea action I was down in the handing room and we had quite a few near misses but we’d only know that by the noise and sometimes it just as if somebody stood off with a great big chain and lashed the ship with a great big chain. I

suppose the nearest to some of that would probably be fifty feet away. We had, we weren’t going to lose. You go in with that thing you’re going to win.

From the magazine we passed the cordite through into the handing room, which is a room about six foot square with a hoist in it and the cordite packs are about two to three foot long and they’re passed through from the magazine, which is was a flashlight scuttle. No flashlights can get through into the magazine. They take if from there and you put it into a chute and it goes into the turret,

and just one bag after the after.

I’d say we would do a bag about every twenty seconds, that’s when the guns

were really shooting. We did about seven hours shooting in the whole action and at some of those stages the guns would be going continuously for twenty minutes and in that time there’d be a bag about twenty seconds, going up the chute.

I don’t know, I don’t think you thought about it actually.

You get a bit of adrenalin when something gets a bit close, as long as you’ve got something to do it

helps.

Well I had to, I think the Number Two Lookout I think he’d been a bit crook during the battle and I had to go up and relieve him during the lull and I went on the upper deck and we had the

battle ensign, you know you’ve got the ensign? Well you’ve got a special ensign that we called the battle ensign that flashes from the top and that was standing out in the breeze and you look at it and you say, “Gee, that looks bloody good.”

Well there was not much happening. There’d been a break off in the action, a broke off until it was nearly midnight before things started happening again, so there was quite a break of about two or three hours.

Oh yes, the Exeter had been hit and she went away with the four American destroyers. The three British destroyers had been lost and a Dutch destroyer lost and then I went, I must have been back to my action station after that when the Java and

De Ruyter were lost. That was about midnight, that’s midnight on the 27th. After they were lost it was just the Perth and Houston left and we headed for the Tanjung Priok and we arrived about midday.

Alright, I think it was all right. As I said a couple of the

older blokes said, “You’ll be eating rice tomorrow,” or something like that but I don’t know, I think the young blokes were more optimistic than the older blokes.

Oh still up, yeah.

After we arrived there we went looking for any spare ammunition that might be left behind and I spent about three hours opening

boxes and cartons on a lighter but we found none at all and then we took onboard twenty two of those pilgrim rafts that I talked about before and they were to save most of our chappies when we were in the water because all our boats were shot away. We also took onboard

a little fire fighting machine for an aerodrome. I suppose we stole that off the Dutch but the place was being abandoned. The Dutch were, as I said once before I’d never seen so many Dornier flying boats in all my life and they were the ones that flew from there down to Broome

and the Japanese almost followed them down and sunk most of them in the harbour.

Oh we had, see we not only had lifeboats, we also had Carley rafts as well although there wouldn’t have been

enough lifeboats for, two cutters, two whalers, motorboat, motorboat wasn’t much good, yeah probably accommodate about two hundred and fifty in boats and about another three hundred in Carley rafts,

but that’s only guessing really.

Oh yes.

Everybody had a lifeboat station but when it came to the real thing there was no boats left. It comes totally different and also shells were still coming overboard and fortunately I was on the port

side where most of the rubbish was coming over the starboard side, so that’s when most of our people were killed, was after the second torpedo hit, when they started knocking bits off us everywhere then. We were down to practically stopped.

Oh they were a copper tank about six or eight foot long and about four foot wide and covered in timber and with ropes around the side.

Well Carley rafts were made for warships really.

They’re a copper tank in an oval about seven feet by about four feet and the copper tank would be about twelve inches round in an oval with a little bit of wooden bottom in it and rope around the side. A lot of those were damaged too around the ship.

We’d suffered no damage at all except some of the metal doors were off their hinges, just mainly through concussion.

Yes, other than that we’d suffered no direct hit, only one direct hit, no, we’d had no hits at all in the Java Sea battle, none at all. The skipper was a very skilful man in manoeuvring and.

Well

there was talk that we might have called at Chilacap and tried to pick up some Australians. Whether we went directly home or whether we went to Colombo, I think Colombo might have been the best bet because the Japanese were probably fairly strong down that bottom end. They’d occupied Borneo a few days before and now they’ve got Java and I think Colombo would have been the best

bet.

Sunda Strait?

I relieved Number Two Lookout right on, just about the moment it started. I went up at five to eleven to relieve the lookout at five to eleven and

the action started and most of the gunnery was directed over the starboard side although there had been a Japanese

destroyer on the port side as well. We reported him and he had his steaming lights on and that mean his port and starboard lights, see we were in complete darkness but he had his steaming lights on, port and starboard and mast head light, and as soon as he was reported and he was challenged he switched off everything and away he went. And the other one that they opened up on was on the starboard side and they’d

evidently been following us and then within, it was within a few minutes, we were amongst the whole invasion fleet of Java, which included the transports. The transports were already in Batan Bay and we were engaged by thirteen destroyers and four cruisers and during

that action, going on the Japanese report on that action, they fired about ninety torpedoes at the two ships in the hour.

No.

Well they sighted these two destroyers almost at the same time and whether they had just come up onto us or whether they’d been there a while I wouldn’t know but they were, we weren’t travelling at a very high speed because of the shortage of oil. We didn’t want

to be burning more oil than we had to, where they could have been travelling at higher speed.

Reported this one that was on the port side and they answered, you know you’ve got a buzzer and a voice pipe and they answered and said, “Yes, we have him”, that means they’ve sighted him too

and that was it. There wasn’t much more to do and I reported, see the Japanese torpedo is not like our own. It doesn’t leave a track like ours and they’re nearly on you before you see them. They’re more or less an electronic

system. See our torpedoes leave a bubble and I reported them but I gave up reporting them because they were that close before you reported them that it was just a waste of time. See the ones I reported they missed us by about forty or fifty feet and they were raking the lines, so

I didn’t reporting any more as they were that close that by the time you got your report off it wasn’t worth it. Then a Japanese destroyer passed us on the port side and I thought it was about a hundred yards, but it was about a half a mile, which is still pretty close and I thought that we, and I think our port pom-pom

was out of action by then and I know that when I abandoned ship the whole port pom-pom crew had been killed. Evidently the damage control party had laid them out on the, as I didn’t know they were killed and I went over to one fellow and I was going to see if he needed a hand and I realised he had nothing left below his torso. He’d had

his leg torn off. I think what, I’m only guessing but their ammunition locker must have blown up to cause something like that.

Well see there was

a lot of tracer bullets being fired. The Japanese seemed to use a lot more tracer than we did. I don’t know the percentage of what our tracer is but I know it would appear that a lot of the Japanese stuff, in their lighter armament I’d say about every fifth shell was a tracer, and that used to light the place up fairly well.

And then I think we turned a searchlight on at one stage and that’s when I saw all the transports. They were in by the coast and you could see all the glass, their being merchant ships I think they had glass portholes and what have you and you could see them shining in the thing and that light was only on for a few seconds. I don’t know how it came to go on

but it was on and, but other than that destroyer that was the only ship you could actually see in the action. You knew there was a ship there by the flashes and what have you coming but you couldn’t actually see the ships themselves.

Oh the first one was a big thud but the second one was the one that seemed to lift the ship out of the water. The second torpedo I seemed to realise more about that one than the first one. The skipper had just given an indication that he was going to break off the

engagement and make a run for it when we copped the first torpedo.

Oh I don’t know. It was just a matter that things weren’t good. I don’t whether it goes through your mind or not.

All I know is that after we had the second torpedo and I was about to leave the bridge I did say a little prayer to myself but that’s about it.

Oh more

or less two hours after I was in the water I think.

Well I was, the third torpedo hit when I was going down from the bridge to the canteen flat room, the third one and that’s when I said there was about six of us cut a Carley raft off the bulkhead

and threw it over the side and watched it float away because we thought the ship might be still floating in the morning and it was just about then that we copped the fourth torpedo and the ship then started to lean to the port side. Because I know when I went into the water it was only about six foot into the water instead of twenty odd,

so we decided it was time to leave then. Shortly after I got into the water I got around one of those pilgrim rafts.

No, wasn’t panic. As I said we stood around the Carley raft and cut if off and threw it over the side and watched it and then, so there wasn’t

panic. There was quite a few blokes were killed about this time because all the armament, the Japs were getting, the gunnery was getting better as we were almost down to full stop. At one stage the A and B targets almost got hit together and then they cleared the flag deck

and that’s where the gun deck and that’s when, and all that stuff was coming over the starboard side and no, I’d say there was no real actual panic.

Well I was on the lower bridge

and the speaker was about ten feet away from me.

I can’t remember what he actually said now.

Very little, because they were still dropping star shells so you’d only see something for fifty, sixty seconds and then it would be dark again. You could see about, I don’t know how many of these pilgrim rafts you could see but there’d be probably,

you could see within your own vision about half a dozen I suppose. Some of those would have been destroyed because most of the pilgrim rafts that were there were probably blown over the side.

Uh?

I don’t know who was with me.

You didn’t ask for names but I know that after I tried to, in the morning after I tried to swim to shore and I got down in a current and bobbed up again I was right next to another raft and a mate of mine, Ernie Kinman, who was the chief plumber and Ernie

was on that raft so we did have someone to talk to then.

Oh yeah, on the first one we had a chappie across the top of ours that had been wounded and I don’t think he’d been wounded flesh wise. I think he’d been close to one of the torpedoes and

his stomach was, he was wrecked inside and he died, he died on the raft there.

No fire, no. The first and only hit in the early stages that you got near the forehead funnel caused a little fire but it was put out very quickly

by the damage control parties.

About a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes. The first torpedo hit about five past twelve and the ship sank at twenty past or that’s when my watch stopped at twenty past twelve.

Well there was some people that went over near the aft end of the ship and they were very close to the ship when it finally went in and

it didn’t go that quickly but I believe some of them reckoned they were close and somebody must have been sucked in but the only other thing was with the rafts was on Toppers Island, there is a light and all night long we’d been paddling our rafts, paddling to get to Toppers Island. And in fact what had been happening all night was we’d been going around in a big circle

because of the current that runs around Java. This current runs about fourteen knots all the time so we weren’t getting any closer all the time. We were getting closer and then we were getting further away but anyhow it gave us something to do, didn’t it?

There was,

the Japanese were very close to us at one time in a lifeboat looking for one of their own and we kind of “Ssh, keep quiet”, we didn’t want to be prisoners. If we’d actually thought there was going to be no hope but we weren’t going to deliberately become a prisoner, put it that way, so everyone went “Ssh, keep quiet”.

That’s the closest they went to running into them. Some of our chappies found a lifeboat that was a merchant lifeboat and the ones of our chappies that got ashore were mostly ones that had access to this lifeboat.

That’s right.

I saw the sandy shore of an

island, which I thought was about two or three hundred yards away and I decided I’d try and swim for it and I swam about fifty yards and down I went in the current. Fortunately when I popped up I was very close to another raft and on that raft was a friend of mine, Ernie Kinman, he was our chief plumber, so we really had something to talk about.

There was about six rafts that I could count. We saw the lifeboat in the distance, the boys that were on that. There wasn’t a lot of stuff floating about. There was a bit but not a great

deal.

I had my shorts and I still had my boots on, and shorts and a white top and when I went to take my boots off I realised I still had binoculars around my neck.

I don’t know how I still came to have them or not but they were there, so I just took my boots off and dropped the binoculars into the water.

Beg your pardon?

He was the only one that I actually knew by name. Some of them you knew later on after they got rid of the oil

off their faces but it was very hard to tell who was who.

It was ordinary oil, dark. It’s not all that dark when it’s in liquid form but after it’s been in the water a while it was reasonably dark on the face to look at.

It just got very hot and your eyes stung like hell.

Well only one destroyer turned up at about half past four or five o’clock in the afternoon. The Japanese destroyer turned up as if it had been sent around to

do that job I think.

Just kept paddling.

Well one time when I was working in the chippie shop it was my twin sisters twenty first birthdays were coming up and I made a key and we had it painted and I didn’t want it to be picked through the dockyard when you’re going ashore, so we had a job to get the paint to dry in a hurry. That was only little things like that and what we used to do in the chippie shop and things like that.

We used to walk around the island looking for stray bits of timber that we could use for different jobs that we picked up because there was no timber brought for it, for these jobs, making these boxes I was talking about. There was no timber actually brought for that. It was a matter of walking around the island sometimes and if somebody left a plank lying around that didn’t look as if they wanted we’d pick that up and take it in and cut it up

and put it through a finishing machine and use if for making these boxes.

That’s right, we talked about these kind of things.

I think at this stage we were lucky to be alive at all.

I think taking into consideration the situation we were in the morale was quite good actually.

After you’ve been in the water from midnight till five o’clock in the afternoon, I think you’d be glad to be picked up by anybody actually because we weren’t getting any closer to the shore after all that time, we weren’t getting any closer at all and

how long can you go on like that? We probably didn’t care who was going to pick us up as long as we were brought out of the water.

What whether they should be picked up or whether they shouldn’t?

Not really, no.

I believed that happened on the lifeboat but when you were on the raft it didn’t happen with the raft at all.

They ordered us aboard and they ordered, they also ordered the lifeboat to bring fellows in but the fellows that were originally in the lifeboat wanted to hang onto it so when they brought people in, they would just get them up the ladder

and take off again themselves. And then when this, about another half an hour after I went onboard I think they had a bit of a panic and they took off, as if they heard an ASDIC sound or something like that

and they decided to leave and the people with the lifeboat went on to get themselves ashore.

Oh just Japanese sailors that helped drag us over the side.

Their officers didn’t say much to us on the destroyer. The next day when we were leaving the officer of the watch apologised for having to hand us over to the army, that was about the only time the officers spoke.

They made signs that we had to take our oily clothes off and throw them away, which we probably would

have done anyhow because, and that’s when they gave us that G string as we called it and gave us a little packet of biscuits and a cup of water.

I can’t remember. I don’t think we were that thirsty. I’d

say we were thirsty, yeah.

Oh I’d say probably about eighty of us, yeah about eighty I suppose, at least.

No, our navigating officer was with us, Lieutenant Harper and he was very well thought of. He was not an Australian Navy, he was Royal Navy on loan to the Australian Navy and he was very well thought of by the crew and we looked up to Lieutenant Harper and he became our leader in that situation.

Well there was not much organisation to do really. I mean we were there and that was it. It was in a very small area and there was not much else you could do.

Oh yes. I think probably we were, in lots of respects we were quite dumfounded probably by the situation we found ourselves in and I wouldn’t say that people emotionally showed a great deal of emotion

immediately. I think that more happened a few weeks later when it really sank in. When you go over the whole situation it took quite a while to dawn on us really what really, really happened.

Nobody in particular, just anyone of us, anyone of our crew. There was nobody in particular that I was thinking of really.

I think probably we realised that a bit earlier, especially on the Sandon Maru, on the transport.

We just wondered how long it was going to last.

Well not much point in being angry, that’s

what fate had turned out to be. I think if you don’t accept these things, I think it’s the people that don’t accept these things were the ones that didn’t survive. They’re the people who probably lost faith in themselves and I think you had to have a faith of some kind that you were going to survive.

See the average age of six hundred and eighty chaps on the Perth, the average age was only about twenty four and that’s taking in that the chief petty officers were men in their late forties, the petty officers in their early forties,

late thirties, so you probably had about eighty fellows only eighteen, we probably had about another eighty, hundred that were nineteen and probably another hundred in their twenties, so it just shows you the average age

would have been about twenty four, where against the army their average ages would be closer to thirty.

Well all he did he came down the gangway and he just said,

I mean to look at him he could be a British or Australian officer, he had dark sunglasses on, their uniforms were exactly the same, the same stripes as our people have, spoke perfect English and not even an Eastern accent. He just, and that’s the only statement he made, apologised for handing us to the army and went back up and that was it.

Oh well we were just put in the hold of this Sandon Maru and they didn’t worry us a great deal, just made sure we stopped there. But when they took us ashore that’s when they were using us as

trophies of their victory, you can put it that way. The natives weren’t very kind to us either.

Some of the chappies that landed on Java

some of our chappies were killed by a native and another chap, Norm McCarthy, he had a great big wound on his shoulder where a native hit him with a parang and oh yes, there was a lot of hostility against us in certain areas. It wasn’t all the same but in certain areas there was and when we were marched through the streets to Surang, to the gaol and the picture theatre

they lined the street and hissed at us and almost demonstrated against us, sort of thing.

Oh well “Here we are”, marched you through the crowds and “This is what we got”, sort of thing.

Another thing a couple of Japs explained to us that we were paying for the sins of the previous white people who had been to Japan and treated the Japanese like as inferior people. Now they were the boss they were getting their own back, sort of thing,

and that was an attitude the Japanese had.

Oh the brutality started in the picture theatre. When you say brutality, the brutality is on our standard, but it’s not on Japanese standard.

In the Japanese army bashing people across the ear or the head or anywhere is common practise, it’s just part of the culture. They virtually, when you come to consider the ordinary Japanese soldier, I don’t

feel a great deal of malice against them because they were acting the way they always act. The people I do accuse is the hierarchy, the governing body or the top brass who put us into virgin jungle with inadequate food, inadequate medical supplies,

working on a virtually military project, which was against rules but the worst part was being put out into a virgin jungle with not enough food, not enough medical supplies and they’re the people who you quite remember as somebody that you’ll never forgive them for. The ordinary Japanese soldier I don’t bear them

any great malice. I believe they were only doing something they’d been doing all their lives.

It was probably a matter of the luck of the draw and we walked in and of course the first place you walked in, that was it.

Where I sat and about a hundred of us or more was about one step higher than the rest of it and as I said before you sat down and the other chap sat between your leg almost and that was all the room you had. And then there was a mezzanine floor behind you on which they had a machine gun and every time they changed the guard they used to point this around

the theatre to make sure they could cover everybody. But we used to take the mickey out of them quite a bit in as much as they used to count us about four times a day and they’d line us all up in a straight line so they could count

better and when they’d start to count that lot when they finished that a couple of blokes would change places and then they’d count it again and they’d get a different answer, so sometimes the counting would go on for about an hour. Other ways, you’ve heard we’ve got all sorts of nicknames for them, especially for the Koreans and one of the Korean guards was not a Korean. He was a great big Mongolian and anyway we nicknamed

him “Boofhead,” and he spoke a wee bit of English but not a lot. He couldn’t understand when words were put together evidently and he said to the sergeant one day, “Sergeant, all men speak me boofhead,” and the sergeant said, “Australia, number one, very good, all stupid big buggers like you we call them boofheads, yeah, number one”. And the next couple of times when somebody called him Nippon he said, “You speak me boofhead.”

Things like that were quite common, especially early in the railway line and also early in the railway line we used to get half a day off every ten days and the Koreans get to get a great big demijohn of boong whisky, so about nine or ten o’clock of a night they’d be pretty wound up. So they

did like some of the American catchy tunes so we taught them a little song, in relation to that song She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountains When She Comes and we taught them in English to sing “They’ll be dropping thousand pounders when they come, when they come they’ll be dropping thousand pounders when they come,” and you used to hear them about nine or ten o’clock at night singing this song at the top of their voices

and they didn’t know what they were singing. And within a couple of years of course they were coming around dropping the thousand pounders on them and then they’d come up and want to talk and they’d say, “Boom, boom, Sydney,” or “Boom, boom, Melbourne,” and you’d say, “What about Whoop-Whoop?” “Oh Whoop-Whoop boom, boom, boom.”

They were the things that kept you alive really.

I don’t know. I don’t think there was a great deal of room for expressing it to one another. I don’t think we did. I think it was something that was very personal. I think it was something that was very personal really. I don’t think we expressed it a great deal.

Well there was a lot of talk about that but we’re still convinced that the captain wanted to make sure that everybody was off the bridge before he was off because by that time they were having to go over the front of the bridge in a scrambling net and I don’t believe that the skipper was the type of fellow that would

would be liable to go down with his ship but he did want to be the last person to leave the bridge and unfortunately the four inch director got knocked and we believe that’s when the skipper was killed.

In the gaol, in the local gaol and of course the gaol evidently overlooked the river or whatever it was and I said it was like a septic tank channel and all the latrine was a hole in the floor and the latrine and excrement went straight

in the river, that type of native sewerage. Evidently the fellows that were in that particular cell some of the native women used to come up in their canoes and hand food up to them and evidently they’d been doing that not only to our prisoners but to any prisoners that had been in gaol for years. It was like a custom

that they used to hand food up through this grating in the cell that acted as a latrine. But I think that they were a little bit worse off in the gaol than we were in the theatre as far as cleanliness. The theatre was reasonably clean until I said the sewerage got washed into the bottom end of the theatre, but the gaol was filthy

and had been filthy for years. Anything that’s been in a native gaol for probably a hundred years wouldn’t be very clean.

We had nothing to eat for the first two days and then they gave us a little tiny bread roll and then they organised some natives that came in and cooked rice in the front room of the theatre, like a ticket officer or whatever it might be,

and they weren’t very clean natives and they used to boil up ball of rice once a day and that’s what we got, this ball of dirty rice once a day. That went on for six weeks and as I said when we went to Batavia things improved but when we went to Burma the food wasn’t too bad.

When I say too bad it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t too bad for about the first three months and then it got gradually worse and worse until it was very, very inadequate. See the Japanese never went short, they had these, you’ve seen these wooden barrels of ketchup? Well that’s where the vitamins were. The Japanese never went short of that. If we’d have had some of that

it would have saved a lot of people because all that stuff was full of vitamins. We just didn’t get vitamins and it caused all sorts of problems like beriberi was one of the big problems with lack of vitamins, pellagra and then other than that blokes were just generally run down and when we started getting ulcers they just spread like wildfire.

That’s when I said the new guard changed and the new guards were a lot better than the ones we’d had and they told us we were going to move shortly so we had only a few days notice and also they gave us a pair of Dutch shorts and a pair of Dutch shirts to put on so we knew there was something

going on and that was the first clothing we had. But I know the pair of Dutch shorts that I had after we’d been in, it was only six weeks but I suppose I lost three stone in six weeks and this pair of Dutch shorts I was given they fitted me and after I’d been in the bicycle camp for about six or eight weeks I couldn’t put them on, they wouldn’t fit me.

In a truck.

It wasn’t too bad. It was just on the back of like a six ton truck.

When we got there we were allocated Number Eight hut and the 2/2nd Pioneers and the 2/3rd Machine Gunners and 2/3rd Motor Transport and the 104 Transport they were all there plus the Americans that I said we brought over from Hawaii, the artillery crowd and then the Houston boys, so in all I suppose

there’d be about eighteen hundred to a couple of thousand in that camp, oh at least, at least a couple of thousand. And then the camp, there was virtually only a barbed wire fence between it and us, was the senior officers camp and there you had an RAF air vice marshal, four group captains, a major general and some of the high Dutch officers

and we used to do a few little jobs for them and get some of the stuff they didn’t eat and we did all sorts of things to get a bit of extra tucker.

It had been a Dutch army camp. It was known as the bicycle camp and evidently that was something to do with the Dutch army on bicycles, I’m not sure but that’s what it was called, the bicycle camp.

Oh they were reasonable for what it was. A couple of blokes that I palled up with we ended

up on like an open verandah which wouldn’t matter in that climate. The others were inside the cubicles and the cubicles were about oh twenty foot square. You wouldn’t say we were overcrowded. We weren’t, it wasn’t pristine in anyway but it was, you couldn’t complain about being overcrowded.

Well more Australians to talk about something you knew and something different to talk about.

I did pal up with one of the 2/2nd Pioneer chaps.

I still, up until I retired I still used to see Bill occasionally. He was living in Cootamundra. When I first ran into him in Cootamundra he was rather a derelict. He was married and had a little girl and when he came home his wife had gone and the girl had gone and I think she’d

married an American and Bill went to pieces evidently. He was a Victorian but he’d come up to Cootamundra. He’d been drinking very heavily and he was a bit of a wreck. He started living with a lass and they got married eventually and she’s been very good to him and he’s quite a good bloke today.

Oh we had a little tin smiths shop and I think there was three chaps from the army and Ernie Kinsman and myself, the plumber, and myself and we formed this little tinsmith shop and that’s how I got to know Bill from working in the tinsmith shop.

We were making tin mugs out of tins and any kind of little utensils we tried to make up out of scrap.

As I say this was all right until they started to get us to sign that paper and that’s when they closed everything down but up until this stage the food was not enormous but it was adequate and the freedom inside the camp area was reasonable. The working parties were more or less

down to the docks to unload something or what have you and that’s another case where we short changed the Nips. There was a go down on the wharf and it had hundreds and hundreds of one gallon cans of motor oil and one gallon cans of hydraulic brake fluid, and

I can’t remember what colour they were but the two labels were two different colours and being in that type of climate that everything gets so humid that you could peel these labels off quite cleanly so we’d swap these labels, the engine oil to hydraulic brake fluid and brake fluid to ordinary oil and put the cans back in the right row. And when

they were wanting some hydraulic fluid they’d get a can with say a red label on it or oil with a blue label on it, so it caused a bit of strife with some of their engines when they put hydraulic brake fluid in engine oil. They were little ways we tried to. I wasn’t at this other one but another one they were unloading a Japanese

ship and a lot of these very old boats still had steam power and the story goes they were unloading these trucks loaded with stuff and they’d get a truck about six foot off the ground and drop it the rest of the way and anyhow they used to put a little tin under the winch to catch hot water so they could make coffee with it. So they always had a little tin of hot water and this story goes that they dropped

a couple of trucks about six foot and a Nip came up going crook, so they said, “You have a go”, so he got a truck out on the derrick and while he wasn’t looking they diced a tin of water in under the brake lining and when he went to use the brakes they dropped the truck about twenty five feet, so they are the things that

happened.

Oh you mean in Batavia? They were down to the wharf or doing jobs like that, just shifting stuff about.

Very occasionally, I’ve just told that story of the unloading of a ship well there wasn’t a lot of that. That was probably a one off case and it was mainly moving stuff around in the wharf, in the big sheds in the wharf and things like that but it wasn’t onerous work really.

Your own cooks of course.

Everywhere you went you had your own cooks. Nobody else provided anything like that except in that first few weeks in Batavia, in Serang.

You mean the running of the camp? Oh yes, in Batavia the senior officer in our own camp was

Brigadier Blackburn. He was the 2/3rd Machine Gunners CO and he was a VC [Victoria Cross] winner from the First World War and they had their command. All the officers were still with us so it was run as near as possible as they could like running an ordinary army.

Well the real sickness, there was a little bit to start with and I’ll tell you a joke about that too in a tick but the real sickness didn’t start until we got to Burma. But what I’ll tell you about ours, I didn’t get tinea but a lot of blokes got tinea and got it very badly and they didn’t know what to treat it with and anyhow they made up a solution out of

anti-gas ointment and anti-gas oil and petrol and something and they had it in a bucket and fellows would go down to the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] in the afternoon and there was about a three inch paint brush and they’d drop their tweeds and they’d (demonstrates) with the paint brush and they’d run down the main street of the camp with their

trousers half down to cool everything off. It was pretty burning and fortunately I didn’t have to be treated with that. That caused quite a bit of amusement. Another amusement was when everybody cut their hair. The Nips made us cut our hair and I suppose that was a hygiene thing anyhow and Brigadier Blackburn was the first one to have

his hair cut right off, so that was setting an example and everybody went through and it was quite sensible really.

The treatment wasn’t too bad until as I say they wanted us to sign the paper and then it got worse and worse.

And prior to that we used to have a concert party and the Nip officers used to, there was a Nip officers camp across the road and these Nip officers, about eight or ten of them, would come to this concert every time it was on. You can’t switch that off for the moment, can you?

It’s right is it?

We used to have, in early stages in bicycle camp we had a concert party which was called the “Cow Whoa Concert Party,” and our bandsman onboard Perth, Jack Coffhead, they’d managed to kit him up with a violin

and when these senior Nip officers used to come into our concert party, Jack would get his violin playing so you could almost read the words, “Here come the little yellow bastards now,” and of course everybody would laugh and the Nips would think we were giving them a greeting. We had one Japanese officer,

Lieutenant Katagori, and he was an Olympic swimmer in the Berlin Olympic Games and he had a good command of English and I think he had an idea that there was something attached to this bit of music that Jack played and I think he told some of the officers that they’d better cut it out.

I wasn’t an actor, no.

Uh?

No, I wasn’t in it. Nobody asked me. No, I never had anything to do with the concert party.

Oh there was a stage, oh yeah there was a stage up high. It was quite a big room,

yeah, it probably was a theatre, now I look back, yeah. It probably was a theatre, part of the camp. Talking about doing, this goes back later on actually but after we came out of Burma into Thailand we had concert parties then when things eased off a bit and this Ernie Kinsman, the plumber friend of mine,

he made a suit of armour out of coffee tins, which was something between a tin and a zinc and a chap had a sword fight in this suit of armour and it was all beaten out as best they could and then hinged so he could put it on like a suit of armour and that was a play they put on in “Knights of old, when days were old

and knights were bold”, so some people did have some parts to play. And one chappie there was a tailor, an ex-tailor and he used to make dinner suits out of Hessian and when they were on stage they used to look first class.

I think the Japs enjoyed them just as much as we did. They’d turn up in force

even though they probably couldn’t understand the English they enjoyed it. But I think the concerts were, but the whole point of survival was Christmas came by, you were going to be home for Easter, Easter goes by you’re going to be home for the Melbourne Cup, you’re going to be home for the Melbourne Cup, you’ll be home for Easter or you’ll be home for Christmas.

If you didn’t think that way you’d probably stop there and didn’t go home. No matter how bad the food the saying was “The road home is in the bottom of your dixie [dish/pot].” In other words if you didn’t eat your tucker, doesn’t matter how bad it is, as long as you eat it you’ve got a chance. If you don’t eat it you’ve got no chance.

When we first went to Burma you could buy a, we got nine dollars a months, that was NCO’s [Non Commissioned Officer] pay, nine dollars fifty a month, and we used to put a dollar of that into a fund to take back to Thanbyuzayat where they had the heavy sick and you could buy a banana for a dollar, you could buy an egg for a dollar. Six

months later if you could buy a banana it would cost you fifteen dollars, if you could buy an egg it would cost you twenty dollars so your money wasn’t worth anything. You couldn’t even buy anything with it, so we’d play ins and outs and under and overs and two-up until half a dozen blokes ended up with the camp’s payroll, that was

just life. No, as things got worse and worse you just couldn’t get any so when we first went to Burma we went through in the best weather, we went through and you could buy a little bit of extra, whereas as the chappies that worked on the Thai side they didn’t start work until March. We started in October and they didn’t start until March so they went

straight through into the bad weather and the bad food and everything so they suffered more than we did. Ours were bad enough but they suffered more.

Oh it all happened in one

day and then they put barbed wire across the, and closed our, each hut had it’s own entrance and they closed the entrances off and we weren’t allowed out of our own little compound whereas before we were allowed to wander up and down the main street of the camp and things like that. And they closed two kitchens so we only had one kitchen instead of three and the food got less and the bashings started again.

Oh they just said, “Sign the paper”, we said, “No,” and it was like a parade, yeah, and then we decided that one man from each unit would stand out and not sign the paper, which happened and they took them away and belted them up again and then Brigadier

Blackburn ordered them to sign it and he signed it himself and we proved a point that it was signed under duress.

I wouldn’t say he was actually beaten. I don’t think Brigadier Blackburn actually was beaten but other officers were beaten and some of our chaps were beaten too.

Later on in Burma, our CO, Colonel Williams was beaten and also made to stand outside the guard house for three days without water and food but he was a very fine fellow and that was because he was just sticking up for our own fellows.

Oh it didn’t mean anything. Oh

yeah, we signed it.

Yes, they didn’t improve no, still didn’t improve and then it was shortly after that that we were sent to Burma.

Oh a bash across the ear here and there, oh yeah, that was quite common. You didn’t have to do much not to get a bash. It didn’t hurt,

a slap across the face, it didn’t really hurt. It was just the fact that a bloody Nip hit you across the face, I mean, bugger them. See it’s the way they carry on in their own army. It’s just the way they’re brought up.

Oh yeah, I saw one Nip was beaten by an officer one day until he, not only beaten

but he was kicked. In Non Pladuk we had a Japanese top sergeant who was the quartermaster and had been stealing not only our rations but stealing army stuff and the Kempei-tai arrived at the front gate to arrest him and he put a 45 revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

That’s what the Kempei-tai were like. He’d rather kill himself than face their torture.

They were like a secret, oh yeah, the top military police, yeah.

In early October 42.

This is to go to Burma to start the railway line. All we knew was they promised to take us to some wonderful place and later on we got down to the wharf and put on this ship. It wasn’t a bad ship this one, the Kinton Maru and went to Singapore and we were in Singapore for two days and then we were put on the

very old, dirty ship that only carried lime before us and that was the Mombassi Maruo and we were put right down into the bottom of the hold onto the steel decking and there was one canvas chute to supply air and it took about fourteen to sixteen days to travel to Rangoon. And then we went on another boat, a smaller boat, from Rangoon to

Moulmein, where they put us in the gaol for a fortnight because no-one was fit enough to travel any further. Then we were marched down to the railway and got a train and went down to Thanbyuzayat where the railway started. And this Colonel Nagatamo was the senior Japanese officer in that area and he got up onto the table

and made a speech about working diligently and all this sort of caper, speaking in French. Evidently he couldn’t speak English. He could speak French, well he thought he could speak French better than English and when he bent down to get off the table he had two big patches in the seat of his pants, so we all laughed and he got back up on the table and bowed. He thought we were giving him a cheer.

Oh yes, “You’re going to go and you’re going to get all sorts of wonderful things”, oh yes.

Oh you’re going, they didn’t tell us “You’re going to Burma to build a railway,” put it that way. It was going to be a wonderful improvement.

It was going to be a wonderful place to go to.

We went to Burma in what was called “Colonel William’s party”. Colonel Williams was the CO of the 2/2nd Pioneers and it was mostly 2/2nd Pioneers and about three quarters of our own fellows went in that first party.

Kinton Maru.

That was quite good actually. There’d been Japanese troops travelling on it before us and then the second ship was the Mombassi Maru and it was very terrible.

Oh they had wooden platforms

built in about, you had about two foot six and then the next one above and I think they were about three tiers high and then some of us, I think I was down in a hold and even though you were down in a hold you couldn’t complain. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad

as what we were going to get on the next trip.

Toilets, typical Japanese toilet with a wooden frame slung over the side of the ship and you’ve got to get up there and crap and not fall in the ocean.

Oh no mess, no,

you sit and eat where you live. Oh nothing like that.

Oh they didn’t mix with us, didn’t come down anywhere near you but see you weren’t allowed up on the deck unless you were going to the toilet and then it was all under supervision “Hurry, hurry, hurry’ and all that sort of thing.

The food was, we ate some rotten Australian meat. It hadn’t been in a refrigerator but I think it left Sydney in 1938 I think. We scrubbed the green stuff off it but it was put into a stew

so it didn’t matter. If you didn’t like it you spat it out but all that counted, it was actually all right because it gives that bit of fat on top of the stew. It was going to get a lot worse later on. You’d get nothing. In the early stages on the railway line they were giving us some

cattle and I’ve seen two men carry three dressed cows on a bamboo pole, so there wasn’t much meat on them. They were just old cattle that were dying anyhow probably.

Oh we didn’t see much. When the truck took us, we went to the army camp, the big army camp that was the Australian

army camp before the war finished but on the way we stopped outside the Changi Gaol and it is a foreboding big place to look at. It looks like a gaol. We had some good food there because there was a lot of pre-army rations. The first time we’d seen

soup that’s made out of, they had bags and bags of this stuff that looks like wheatmeal and by the time it’s put in a cauldron and boiled up it’s got big lumps of meat in it that’s come out of this soup. That was quite good. Seeing that we started our POW life in the nudie, we had no clothes and we had no issue other than that one pair of shorts and

that that the Nips gave us before we left Serang. A lot of our chappies had, I don’t know what you’d call it, talked into some of the army lads into giving them some clothes but I didn’t do that. But I bought a pair of trousers off a Yank and that’s

another story really how you come to buy trousers but what happened, when we first went to Batavia camp, when the war finished in Java, the British and the Australians in good old fashioned went down and tipped all their money, all the Dutch money into the river, so the Nips wouldn’t use, not thinking that if the Nips wanted money, they’d just print it.

But the Yanks kept their money and in the early days at bicycle camp they started a canteen, so the Yanks didn’t have any canteen because all their canteen provisions went straight to their kitchen, so the Yanks were always coming around to the Aussies looking for. I’d sold my watch for ten dollars or something, ten guilders,

it wasn’t working anyhow but the chappie was going to use it for parts and so I bought a box of biscuits for five dollars, five guilders, so you sell them to the Yanks for seven fifty and that’s what was happening in Australia and that’s what happened in bicycle camp, Batavia. So you’d sell your box of biscuits for seven fifty and the

next canteen you come around and you get another box of biscuits and sell it for seven fifty and the next time a Yank came around and wanted a box of biscuits, he had no money and I said, “A pair of trousers”. That’s how I got hold of a pair of American trousers and they lasted me practically right through. I ended up making a pair of shorts out of them when the knees went out. The knees went out and the

bottom went out and then I used the bottom of the legs to patch the bottom and they lasted me almost the whole stretch of the time. That’s why you didn’t wear shorts or trousers out on the railway line when you’re working because there was no more where they came from. So you used to wear a G string working on the railway line.

I made a shirt once, I made a coat. I wish I had’ve kept it. It would have been in the war museum now but I don’t know anything about those army capes, those big rubberised capes. Anyhow they were being thrown away at this stage. No-one had any use for them and I got hold of two of those and I kept them in a drum of water for a long time

and then I could rub the rubber off and I ended up with two sheets of like canvas. I cut them out with a knife and I drew threads out of them to make cotton, pretty thick cotton and I used a pair of bent wire for a needle and I made this jacket with short sleeves in it and buttons and what have you.

I always had a belief that we, when we travelled from one camp, and I’m not talking about in Burma itself but when we were going out of Burma into Thailand, and Thailand to somewhere else I reckoned that we should try and act like Europeans and not act like boongs and I used to get cranky with blokes that,

they didn’t have to wear, like on a railway line we had to wear your g string or wear out all your clothes but I reckon when you were travelling where the natives were there to see you should try and act like a European but they were my thoughts and that’s why I made this jacket.

In the big army

barracks, yeah.

I think we knew by then we were going to Burma but we didn’t know what for but it probably wouldn’t take a big guess because we did know the Japanese were fighting up in Burma in the top on the Indian border.

I think

they were far better than what we’d been used to. See in this big camp they could go for weeks and never see a Nip. We were an unfortunate experience. We ran into a Nip everyday of the whole three and half years. I would have seen a Nip every day and that’s being in contact with your enemy everyday of the week every week of the year, for three and a half years.

Where a lot of the fellows in the big camp in Singapore they could go weeks and weeks and never see any of them unless they were out on working parties.

Mombassi Maru.

Oh very, very bad. We were put down in a hold which they had carried lime in it

and we sat on the steel plating right on the bottom of the ship and once again you sat down and the other bloke sat down in between your legs and all there was one canvas chute to supply air and when you get Singapore’s humid hundred and five degree weather, it was very unhealthy for a start.

The ship was there for a day before we sailed and you did get a, once you got a bit of movement you might get a little bit of air down this canvas chute but when you’re sitting in the harbour you get nothing.

No light at all. There was no lighting anywhere. In bicycle camp there was

electric light there but only about twenty five watt stuff but other than that there was no electric light anywhere.

Once you were in Burma you used to get hold of fire flies and they’re like a fly and when

their wings go, they light up and you’d get a couple of dozen of those in a little bottle and hang the bottles on the, up and down the hut. Didn’t happen all the way and then we used to steal oil and have little oil lamps and sometimes we used to steal oil and sell it to the officers so they could have their oil lamps.

They were the same toilets up on the deck with the timber thing hanging over the side of the ship. That’s the only method of toilets on those things.

Twice a day, just

a bit of greasy water and some rice.

Our own chappies? Oh very few people seemed to pick arguments. I think everybody treated one another with reasonable respect, yeah.

Went to Rangoon first yeah.

They put us on a big barge that was normally there for carrying timber and that only towed it across the river from one side of the river to the other. I think that might be the Irrawaddy, I’m not sure.

And then we boarded the Amagata Maru, it’s a smaller ship and that didn’t have far to go to take us down to Moulmein. And at Moulmein the people weren’t very fit after that trip in the Mombassi Maru so they put us in the gaol for a fortnight. From there we then

marched down to the railway and were put on the, when I say put on the train it had no carriages with electric light or anything. It was steel rice trucks, about forty inside each steel truck and then we were taken to Thanbyuzayat, that’s about, oh it takes about four hours by motor, about sixty miles,

fifty or sixty miles to Thanbyuzayat and that’s where the railway line started from, the new railway line from there to Thailand started at Thanbyuzayat.

Yeah, well I’d say a number of blokes died as a result of that trip?

I wouldn’t rightly now really. It wasn’t as if they had ulcers or anything like that, it was just malnutrition I suppose.

I don’t know.

You only take care of yourselves. We had our own doctors. There was no outside doctors or anything like that. What you couldn’t supply yourselves you went without. If there was no doctors there, that was it but more often or not there was a doctor or two with each party.

Probably

wondering what would happen if a torpedo landed through the hold because we were right down in the bowels of the boat. It was a very terrible trip.

The trip itself, the whole setup. The whole thing was just inhuman really. You wouldn’t put cattle down in the bottom of the hold like that.

Oh just hot, humid, smell

and four or five hundred bodies in a very confined space and nothing, nobody washing, doing any washing or anything like that. Some blokes had probably got diarrhoea and can’t control themselves and all this happens in this kind of conditions.

Not really, I mean conditions like that you just can’t. Anyone that tried to pacify somebody probably would get howled down, or would be considered a White Nip or something.

No, I was in a theatre.

Oh in the Moulmein gaol.

Well it was a typical gaol and this was the gaol that was made for natives and a lot of natives evidently over the years in that area had had leprosy and they had

these morgue tables, like a little building on it’s own, with a morgue table, a table like about seven or eight foot long, dipped in the middle and it had a collar thing where these fellows with leprosy they evidently laid them out on the table and put the collar thing on them so they couldn’t move and then they’d scrub their leprosy.

And they were pretty grim and then the natives on the wall, actually Burma had been a British protectorate, every hour when the guards changed “The time is twelve o’clock and all is well”, and that went on every hour, in English.

So we were quite amused at that really.

No, the bloke, the guard, one of the native guards. They weren’t guarding us. They were there all the time. They belonged to the gaol guards and they’d been there for years and what they did with all the natives that had been there I don’t know.

Might have let them out but when I went back to Burma in 98 we went up the hill to the Pagoda and the gaol’s half way up the hill and we wanted the coach driver to drive in and he said, “Oh no, it’s still a gaol.” He wouldn’t drive in.

No, none of us worried about it.

I think they’d gone a long way to curing it over there too.

Thanbyuzayat.

T H A N B U Y, I’ve got it.

The Nips had been there probably for a couple

of months and the first couple of big bridges there in that area, at the 14 Kilo there was one bridge a hundred and ten feet high, well that had been build by the natives under the Japanese and the Japanese. In our area we didn’t build many high bridges. We built quite a few anything up to twenty foot high but we didn’t build any of the real high ones, where in the Thai side

they built the high ones as well as lower ones. And just where the train finished that came from Moulmein, the Japs had a big yard there that was full of railway sleepers and all the equipment necessary for the railway and then it was the engineers hut. They were only bamboo and at-at huts and a bit further away

was our huts and they were about another four or five hundred yards away and was the huts for our people. We didn’t work from Thanbyuzayat. We went straight from there, we were only there a night out in the open and then we went to 35 Kilo was our first camp. See in Burma we knew them all by the number of kilos from the base camp,

because they weren’t villages, they were just points on the railway line.

Yes.

When we got out on the, oh well as soon as we got to Moulmein we knew we were going to work on the railway. They told it evidently it was going to be a railway we were going to build.

Well there was no reaction. I mean you can’t say, “No, we’re not going to build it,” can you?

We were digging dirt to make banks. At 35 Kilo the banks were about four or five foot high and take quite a bit of dirt when you’re

going quite a few kilos of it and then wherever there is a bridge there was woodwork into the bridge and the dirt filled into the woodwork. And we started at 1.9 metres per day per man and every month it seemed to go up to a bit more until it got up to about 3 metres a day which was almost impossible. It was 3 metres by 3 metres by 3 metres and it’s

a lot and I don’t think anybody ever achieved it really.

The digging and carrying it. In the early stages we managed to get hold of rice bags and bits of bamboo pole, we called them a tunker,

and you could put several shovelfuls of dirt on that and two men could carry it to the bank but later on all that stuff got worn out and all you had was native baskets and they’d take about three shovelfuls of dirt in a basket and it takes about a few thousand baskets to make a

metre of dirt.

Just digging it out adjacent to the line.

We were given mainly what they called a trunkle, which is like a hoe. It’s a bit wider than a hoe and there was shovels there but mainly it was these

trunkles that did the excavating work.

Well we probably, we were divided into parties of about fifty and we’d have one of our own officers would be a kimasho

and we had chappies from the New Zealand Navy as our kimasho and then about every three or four kimashoes was a hansho and he was generally a captain or a major equivalent and then they were there to stick up for us, put it that way and responsible, they could get into

trouble too. And then you’d have the guards that took you out onto the job and then from the guards that were on job there was also the engineers. They were just private soldiers, they weren’t engineers but they belonged to an engineer corps. They were very fit, very fit. They lived on the fat of the land those fellows because they were in one big depot and they got used to everything and they controlled a

hell of a lot. As an example the chappie that was an engineer in charge of all that area as far as the actual day to day work went was a warrant officer. We’d have a colonel. It was nothing uncommon to have a lance corporal in charge of a POW camp

with two thousand men in it. There were other officers around somewhere but you never saw them. They didn’t front and they didn’t mind handing responsibility out to the ranks and very seldom did you find a camp that had an officer in charge of it. One camp that we had that was had an officer in

charge of it when we were talking about shifting the pegs was run by Lieutenant Nido and he was one of the first Nips that woke up early in the piece that the Nips weren’t going to win the war and he used to live on whisky and fried onions and generally at about midnight he was as full as a bull.

And he’d get the Korean guards out of bed at midnight and have them tearing around the camp, protecting the camp from the British, that was his thing. He was full of whisky and by the time the guards got us out to work they used to go into the scrub and have a sleep and this gave us an advantage to shift the pegs. But this particular site we were filling in a river,

we’d had to dig the Cotter[?] River round and then we started filling in the river and they had the natives put two bamboo fences across the river and we poured all the dirt in between these two bamboo fences. And when the dirt got above the water then they had three elephants walking around and around on it and it would be like concrete by the time it was all finished. Anyway we’d been there about six weeks, about

three hundred odd and one day the civilian Nips turned up there. They’re in uniform but you know they’re civilians because they’ve got special tags. They turned up with an abacus. Anyhow they measured the hole and then they shifted the buttons on their abacus and then they worked out that we should have been about twice as much dirt shifted as there was.

So they lined all the Korean guards up and belted hell out of them because they start belting us afterwards but we had our satisfaction at that.

Generally the engineer would be there when you marked it out in the morning

and he’d check your measurements and then you’d drive a peg in the ground and sometimes there might be several of these and well this particular site I was talking about we made one shorter. There was one site that was fairly clear and we’d already thought about shifting this peg business and it would much easier to shift it if it was along one place. We talked him into using this one and

that’s what we did. We hammered pegs in every so often distance so when the whistle went up and you shifted your pegs you didn’t shift them more about four inches at a time. You do it every hour you eventually save a bit.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was if nobody was watching, yeah.

Most of the Koreans were used for guard duty. We first struck them in Batavia and early on I think they were just as bad at

bashing us but I think at the same time I think they were scared of us. I think the Nips had probably told them all sorts of stories and in that bicycle camp at Batavia there was a septic tank system and the latrines were just a long row of, they were tiled, a tiled trench and up the end was a tank shaped

like a wheelbarrow and there was bore water there, runs all the time, fairly warm and water would run there all time into this wheelbarrow shaped tank and when it reached a certain level it would tip over and tip the water down the channel and clean the channel out. Anyhow you get up to go to the toilet at night and the Korean guard might be there and he’d follow you around with his rifle and all of a sudden the tank would go bang, bang, bang and he’d be off.

But that was in the early stages.

Oh yeah. As I said we got the BB and the BBC,

Lubra Lips, Gold Tooth, these were common names and sometimes there’d be another BB in another camp but he was a different bloke but the same face. Then there was George, he was P George and I can’t tell you what the P is supposed to be but the Japanese can’t pronounce F.

Oh he was always pretending to be friendly and he did some funny things that were in our way and then at other times he’d be just as bad the other way but he wasn’t that bad. He was quite humorous. One day he came across some blokes trading with the boongs and we normally get bashed up with a lot of them

but George said, he could speak quite a bit of English this little fellow and he said, “Well somebody has got to be P punished”, so he kicked a cow in the guts. That’s the bullock cart cow, oxen and that’s the type of fellow he was.

Another time he was in charge of the Japanese in the Korean’s kitchen and one of our officers, Pusser Lowe, he was a lieutenant commander paymaster so they put him in charge of the kitchen and Pusser had a habit of, this was before things got real crook, of trying to save up some onions or something to turn on something special for Sunday.

Anyhow sure enough he’d try and save up a few onions and George would turn up and pinch them because he reckoned he didn’t need them, if you tried to save something you didn’t need it, so he could be just as bad at other times. We had another Korean that we called the Yank and he’d driven a taxi in Manilla and towards

the end of, see the Koreans woke up that the Nips weren’t going to win the war before the Nips did and the Koreans were slightly more intelligent than the Nips. Occasionally you’d strike a Korean that had been a schoolteacher and things like that and anyhow this group of blokes was working with the Yank, this fellow we called the Yank,

and somebody said something about “The bloody so and so Nip bastards,” and he said, “What’s wrong with you guys, I’ve got to live with them,” but six months before I think he was just as bad as the rest, but he could see the war was going against them, so he was kind of currying favour I think.

They were Koreans.

Oh they were real proper nasties. I mean one was the Boy Bastard and the Boy Bastard’s Cobber and yeah they were real nasties. They rounded most of them up as a matter of fact. See just toward the Japanese got rid of all the Korean guards, turned them lose into the Thai population,

but we had some of our fellows rounding them up in Bangkok and they rounded most of them up, cause the Thai’s didn’t want them anyhow.

Oh when they belted somebody they really belt them and kick them and real nasty.

All the huts were very similar, bamboo and at-at, that’s bamboo slats to sleep on, which is bamboo flattened out into slats and an at-at roof. Sometimes you’d have a two sided platform with one lot

lot sleeping facing outside that way and facing out that way and then other times the hut would be enclosed with a patch down the middle, depends where you were, who built them. Bamboo is a very versatile thing. You can build your house with them, you can make your furniture of them, you can eat it, you can do all sorts of things with bamboo.

You can hide things in it, between the knots. See some of this bamboo is four inches round, that’s Elephant Bamboo, and a cut there, a cut there, break the piece out, hide something in it, put it back and put some dirt over it and you can hide all sorts of things in those things.

Well you weren’t allowed to have a knife, put it that way, but this is Japanese, how funny they are.

You weren’t allowed to have a knife, if they catch you with a knife, but when we had a half day off every ten days, about three quarters of the camp would be clean shaven the next morning and how did they get this shave? But if they caught you with a knife you get a hiding.

Wireless sets

for a start, that was a shooting job that. We had wireless sets working nearly all the time we were in Burma, practically all the time but in the end the news had to be confined to a very few people because blokes had a habit of telling the Nips what the news was and the Nips would go looking for a wireless then, so you couldn’t trust the ordinary

blokes with the news. It had to be confined to probably half a dozen blokes.

Oh if they were caught with a radio it was just about a shooting job. A knife they’d give you a belting.

Oh I suppose there was about, where we were in Burma I suppose there was about five blokes shot but they didn’t do it publicly in front of the whole crew but they always made sure that there was somebody there and the last chappie was one up

in Nubon and he was from the 2/2nd Pioneers and he wasn’t escaping, he was just outside the fence. See blokes used to go outside the fence to trade with the natives. When you were in Burma you had sixteen hundred miles of the worst jungle in the world to go to freedom and as far as we can work out there was only one fellow ever got through

and that was a Pommy major and he left with about five Indians and so out of the ninety odd that escaped we believe there is only one that ever got through and more than three quarters of them just died in the jungle. You could out, about the last three months of the war you could get

out but who was going to, you knew the war was getting close to coming to an end and you weren’t going to risk it then.

Probably the

day we were ballasting railway lines, this is the one that caused all the ulcers. The line was laid on the sleepers and then it came to putting the ballast under the sleepers and they’d come along and drop all this blue metal along the

railway track and you had to use a hammer headed pick and you’d have to sing in Japanese “Itsane afarmac,” and boom, down with your pick, trying to get everybody to do the same thing all the time and you’d be driving this blue metal under the sleeper to ballast it.

And this business “Itsane afarmac,” quite often we used to sing our little songs “Sarto is a bastard, a bastard, Sarto is a bastard,” and down went the pick, same tune, sort of thing. “We want a smoko, we want a smoko”, boom, but in that instant there’d be a chip fly off a bit of blue metal

from your pick and I didn’t get a very bad one but a little bit of blue metal hits that and two days later you’ve got an ulcer. That’s especially in the wet season, not so bad in the really dry season but when you’re getting to approach the wet season everything seems to turn to poison. So they had two hours daylight saving

when we were in Burma, so you’d get up in the dark and surprising in a country where it can get up to a hundred and well when I was in Thanbyuzayat in 98 it was up to forty six or forty seven in Thanbyuzayat, so getting onto the other temperature that’s about a hundred and twelve, a hundred and fourteen. But the

same country at five o’clock in the morning it could be fairly cool and you jump off a two foot six high platform onto the ground in bare feet sometimes you feel as if you’ve broken nearly every bone in your foot, it’s that cold. By ten o’clock in the morning it’s a hundred degrees. You’re up at five o’clock but because of daylight saving, you’re really up at seven but it’s five, so it’s

dark and we had watered rice and they used to give us a little bit of sugar early on, a native sugar called “trintigar”. Anyway we found a sarsaparilla root which gave it a little bit more flavour. When the Nips found that out they cut the sugar out all together and we had our sarsaparilla then.

Anyhow it was virtually plain rice for breakfast and they had blokes that were supposed to be on the sick list but they’d have to cart the lunch rice out which was rice in a bit of vegetable soup, which got less and less after a while but it still passed as vegetable soup.

Those fellows also boiled the water during the day for drinking water, so you might knock off at about half past twelve for lunch and about twenty minutes and they’d be onto it again. You had to do so much line

a day and you never knew how much it was supposed to be. That was at the whims of the engineer so you’d stop there until you completed that amount of line that they reckoned ought to be done that day. And it was similar to the laying of railway lines, all the

sleepers were pre-bored where the dog spikes were to go and used to be gangs of three, one chappie with a crow bar, one with a block of wood, and the other with the hammer and they were using ordinary sledge hammers to drive the dogs in. The idea was the bloke puts a wooden block down, the other fellow puts the crow bar under it to make a dolly for the sleeper and the other

bloke drives the dogs in. You had to lay so much line a day before you knocked off but nobody told you how much it was. It was just at the whim of the engineer that was on the job. Then there was another place and they kept us out and it was the last time we were at the 35 Kilo and

there was, we were building into a bridge head to fill up with dirt and we were moving camp the next morning. At four o’clock in the morning we were moving camp and it got to be dark and they had a couple of carbide lamps to provide light and that’s all they had and then they lit some fires to provide a bit more light and they’d had natives making baskets for about two months and so whenever we went

past a bunch of baskets we threw a few baskets in the fire. It got to the stage where instead of taking a tonner of dirt onto the bank we’d go up the bank and fill the tonner off the bank and walk backwards down the bank and tip it out, so there wasn’t as much in the bank at two o’clock in the morning when they knocked us off than there was

when we started. So that night, it was two o’clock in the morning when they knocked us off and we threw our shovels and things in the fire and there was hell to pay but the guards ended up getting copped for that as it was never reported to the engineers because, well never reported any further because they would have got into just as much

trouble as us. I suppose that night we burnt a hundred shovels and also with the, when we were doing that line and we had the sledge hammer and the crow bar and the block at that particular camp it was downhill all the way back to the camp

and they used to have these bogies that they used to bring the line up and they had to go back somewhere. It didn’t matter where they were because when the thing was empty they’d take them back so we’d put all our crow bars and hammers on one, there might be anything up to fifty or sixty crow bars and sledge hammers, so they’d weigh a bit. And those of us who were game we’d get on it and ride it back to camp and this particular day we were

just approaching our little crossing and there’s a boong yak cart right in the crossing, and we’re travelling at about sixty mile an hour because of all this stuff loaded onto it, so we just had to leave it. It hit the yak cart right in the middle but nobody got into trouble because the Nips couldn’t care less.

If you didn’t have a spoon you ate it with your fingers but most of us had a utensil of some kind. If we didn’t have one we made one. I had acquired a Dutch, a round Dutch dixie at this time, a Dutch army dixie. As a matter of

fact I still had it until about twelve years ago and I tossed it out. I shouldn’t have tossed it out but I did. It got in the way. And I had a set of army knife, spoon and fork in a little thing, with the little clip that held it altogether. I still had those for

a while. They were British Army issue ones at one time evidently.

Yeah, the chappie that were bringing it over, they’d be serving it.

The Australian camps were the cleanest camps in any area. The Australians had a lot more nonce, we put drains through our camp and kept our camps swept and clean and yes, the Australian camps were the cleanest camps on the line and the cleanest camps in Burma and Thailand were the Australian camps.

In most places we only had ordinary water, we didn’t have boiling water to wash them with. We just washed them with ordinary water but in most places we did have water somewhere. If it wasn’t pumped, hand held double sided pump,

normally there was bore water somewhere around somewhere. We didn’t have much chance to boil stuff or things like that but we did keep them clean.

Oh yeah.

Oh at the 60 Kilo we were struck with cholera.

The natives get it first and then you find at least one Nip will get it before a European will get. So at the 60 Kilo we came back to camp one afternoon late and they’d had some blokes digging little trenches all around, between our camp and the Nips camp and one of the Nips had got cholera and our blokes

had started about the same day. The Nip evidently had cholera before our blokes and when they get a panic they go overboard, so they dug a trench between the Nips camp and our camp and filled it with lime. Then in our camp we had to create a cholera, a little compound for all the chappies that had cholera. Those that had it very

badly they managed to rig up some saline drips as salt is what you need and the blokes that had it and weren’t too bad they had to try and drink about a gallon of salt water a day. We had about six fellows in the camp die of cholera in that cholera camp

and our English interpreter, he was a very fine fellow, Captain Drah, he had, whenever he had to interpret he did the right thing. He did all he could to get things right and get things improved, so the Nips had a down on him. They had a bit of an argument with him at this particular stage, so they put him in the cholera

camp hoping that he’d get cholera probably. He was brought up in Japan. His father was in the diplomatic corps and he only ran into one Japanese that could read and write more Japanese than he could, because evidently there is a lot of cast things about Japanese writing and reading and I believe there is documents that they put in front of a large portion of the population and they wouldn’t be

able to read them as there is something different about them. Yeah, so Captain Drah, he was a very fine bloke.

No, a mate of mine he was one of our first chappies to die on the railway line

and that was Chica Partridge. Chica was about twenty three, twenty four when he died and he was a married man with two kiddies and I think he was one of the chappies that gave away, gave in. I think he was worried about what was going to happen to his wife and children and

he just got, all he had was dengue fever and I sat with him, I’d come home from work and I’d sit with him for about three or four nights but he just didn’t want to live in the end, a shame really. There wasn’t many that really flung it in unless they were very, very bad but

you shouldn’t die of dengue fever, put it that way.

Well the Japanese didn’t care how many were sick or too sick to work. All they wanted was so many a day and if the doctors wouldn’t give them that they’d hold a

sick parade of their own, which they have done on many occasions and anything up to twenty men that the doctors reckoned were too sick to work, the Japanese would say, “No, they’re right, they’re going out,” and out they’d go.

I’ll tell you about the ulcer I had from beginning to end. I think it’s easier. I got my ulcer at the 6o Kilo

Camp when we were ballasting the railway line and I was one of the early ones to get an ulcer and I was sent back to the 35 Kilo Hospital Camp which was a Major Hobbs was in charge of that and Major Hobbs still had the original pannier that he brought up with Singapore with him, so he did have a little bit of gear but not a lot.

And the orderly that I had looking after my ulcer was an RAF medical orderly, so he knew what he was doing. He used to come and dress my leg in the morning and he’d have an enamel tray and proper crucibles and although we only had saline to do the work. And he’d dress my leg and you’d go away and he’d wash his tray and then come back and do the next chappie.

One time I was going to the toilet I think and I bumped my leg and the next morning it was black and Major Hobbs was a bit worried about it because he’d just amputated the first leg on the line actually in that camp. A chap by the name of Squizzy Taylor from the 2/2nd Pioneers and he said to Len, that was the medical orderly, “I wish

I had some of the iodine,” and Len said, “I’ve got a little drop left,” and it was that real old army iodine in a purple bottle so they came the next morning and they poured about a teaspoonful of iodine into my ulcer and I nearly chewed the blanket but it was very painful for about two days

and they didn’t open it for about a week and when they did open it there wasn’t a trace of pus or anything. It was clean right from top to bottom and you could see the bone and the ankle through in under that, so that the only treatment from then on was still back to the saline which was the only thing we had to treat ulcers with. It started getting better,

anyhow they decided to move a lot of people so they sent me back to the 105 Kilo where our chappies were working at that time. And when I went back to 105 Rowley Richards was the doctor there and my ulcer was still open and he said, “I can’t leave you here or they’ll have you back to work.” So he sent me back to the hospital camp at the 55

where all the large numbers of ulcers that had occurred since I got mine and there was probably two hundred and fifty chaps with ulcers and they were far worse than I ever had. So that meant that they didn’t have medical orderlies or the gear to treat so many, so they had to have volunteers. And their tray was made of bamboo and their crucibles to put their little bits of things in was bamboo and

they’d never been trained. All they do were volunteers doing the best they could in a very bad situation and it would appear that when they went and treated this chap and went next door and treated the other chap sometimes it was making it worse because they were transferring germs from one to the other. And that’s where Colonel Coates was in that camp and he was a marvellous doctor and he was

known to amputate up to six legs in a day but he was amputating an average of about two legs a day in that 55 Kilo Camp. At that stage there was no medical supplies what so ever so the gut for tying off the arteries was made by a Dutch chemist out of pig gut. Sometimes that gut was too soft and it would dissolve too quickly which would result in a haemorrhage

and the chappie would have to have his leg re-amputated to a new piece. Other times it might be too hard and it would cut the artery through and the fellow would have a haemorrhage so it just tells you. And Colonel Coates didn’t have proper surgical tools to cut off legs. He used a piece of steel hacksaw that was used for cutting railway lines

through, so there was all those difficulties to overcome. Very few of those chappies that had their legs amputated survived more twelve months after the war. There was some chappies that had both legs amputated and I met, there was three of them actually that had both legs amputated. And I met

them just after the war and the spirit of them was enormous. They were commonly known as “pineapples,” and they accepted that quite seriously, that they were pineapples because that’s just what they looked like. That was the story of ulcers. They were one of the biggest killers on the line actually, towards the end.

They made a spinal injection. That’s one that goes into the spine and in the early days they had some dentist, you know what you put in for your tooth, they had some of that and they used to be able

to use that as well but the spinal needle they had was like a three inch nail. It was quite painful just getting that on it’s own, without sometimes it didn’t work because the injection of whatever it was made of, it was just made up by this Dutch chemist we had. It wasn’t what you know at home as a surgical preparation.

He’d done the best he could.

Yeah, they were experiments, yeah. I never partook in any of that, no.

With mine?

It was just salt and water, salt and water and Eusol. Eusol was Edinburgh solution of lime, which is only just lime and water.

No, this was when the railway line was just finished and I was sent then to a heavy shift camp back to the 35.

As all the others started going out of Burma back into Thailand they kept the heavy shift back for a while before they sent us through and I was still on crutches at that time. I was helping to dig and we were losing about three men a day in that camp and I was going down to the cemetery

helping to dig graves and we could only dig them fairly shallow because we didn’t have the men or the people to do them.

Beriberi, that’s a swelling of the, just through lack of vitamins. The legs swell up, faces swell up and in very bad cases I had a chappie next to me in that 35 Kilo Camp that had beriberi

very badly and his legs used to drip probably a gallon of water a day, drip onto the ground, smells horrible. Could you switch that off a moment please?(TAPE STOPS)

Oh well, one of our lads, I shouldn’t mention names I don’t think, but when we were laying railway lines we were in a gang and there’d be several gangs and one of our chappies did something and the Nip went straight over the bank because he took a swipe at him and he ducked. And the Nip went over the bank and the bank at that stage was

about fourteen foot high and anyhow what used to happen when something like this happened was you’d clear out and go back to the end of the line and one the way somebody would give somebody a hat or a boong hat or somebody might give somebody a shirt so by the time they get to the other place they look different to what they started. So anyhow this particular time this

Nip must have really spotted this fellow and he gave him a proper thrashing and broke his jaw and that had to be treated and Keith got all right again but those things, in our area I can’t say I’ve seen

some blokes get some pretty decent hidings but none that’s left them, black eyes or things but nothing that you could say was a real medical problem except that one, the chappie with the broken jaw. But that fellow eventually got killed in Japan in an air raid so I think a lot of that, the bad

ones were in that Hellfire Pass in Thailand where they dug that rock out about ten to twelve feet wide to about twenty foot deep and about three quarters of a kilometre long. I think there was a lot of, that was all by hammer and tap, a fellow holding the tap and the fellow belting it with a big hammer. I think there was a lot of problems there

and also they worked in three shifts around the clock. And also that was getting towards the end where work had to be done “Get into it”, the Nips were really on their back.

Oh his mates.

Oh his mates would get that and they might probably give it to somebody but there was no organised, none of that was organised. I ended up with a full kit of gear, not because anybody gave it to me because

blokes threw it away and didn’t want to carry it. I ended up with full marching weathers, a beautiful pair of Indian army boots and a couple of haversacks and the Japanese were going to finish us off as soon as our

people landed on Malaya. I think we were due to land in Malaya about the 1st of September and the Japanese had been preparing to do us in for quite some time and in our camp at Nubon they’d had us building these little defence posts but they didn’t point out the camp, they pointed into the camp.

The thing was to try and keep as healthy as you could and we used to have a little group of us and we used to do physical culture inside the hut as the Nips wouldn’t like to see us doing it outside the hut so we did it inside the hut where they couldn’t see us. There was about, a little chappie from the 2/4th Machine Gunners was the one that he’d been a weight lifter and he’d been used to doing callathumpics

or callisthenics for quite some time and he used to put us through the hoops and that was about twenty odd of us were going flat out to get ourselves as fit as possible because we knew we might have to do something.

Oh their health, say they had these barrels of ketchup that had all the vitamins in the world in it and even if they had a lot of rice and not much else, they had these barrels of ketchup and they never seemed to be short of that. I mean if we’d had some of that stuff we wouldn’t have had the sickness we had, wouldn’t have had the beriberi and things like that.

Malaria was very bad especially. Before we got malaria the Japs the had tins of quinine and they gave us tins of quinine to start with but with that kind of climate it wouldn’t keep more than a month and then it would all go into water, then by the time malaria did strike there was none. We got none and all we could do, and

all you got for malaria was two days off and you had to have a temperature of a 103 before you got the day off. I probably had about six attacks of malaria and I think the last attack I had was probably about three months, two or three months before the war finished. I’ve never had a recurrence of it since.

Tamarkan.

Yeah, Tamarkan Camp is now what is, in that area is known as the Bridge of the River Kwai. There’s the bridge goes across there and Tamarkan Camp was there and now instead of our camp there’s a big resort there and that’s where

we stopped on the last trip to Thailand, we stopped in that resort. It’s almost where our camp was.

Oh we went through in rice trucks, these steel trucks and it took three days to travel, what

about a hundred and fifty miles, it took three days. Oh a hundred and fifty, say two hundred mile, two hundred miles it took three days and you stop and start everywhere. We stopped in one place, we stopped there all day and we just got over the hill

going down the Thailand way and our planes came over the top and they were, I think they were probably from a carrier I think because they were the Beaufighters and the first time we saw a rocket fired. And they had these rockets and they were virtually over the top of us when they let these rockets go into the railway station but whether something arrived at the railway after we left, we don’t know but

if they’d have gone there about two hours earlier we were there all day. So they did appear to travel at night.

These are the railway?

Yeah, they stopped several times on the way, yeah. That’s why we took three days to travel a couple of hundred miles.

Uh?

That’s where we were going out of Burma into Thailand. I suppose that’s where they sent us all.

Oh we had quite a, that’s where all our chappies that left earlier were there

too and that wasn’t a bad camp. Food had improved a little bit and we had some green vegetables that we hadn’t seen and as a matter of fact chappies started getting abscesses because the food was a bit richer. We went out on working parties but they weren’t like the

working parties we’d been used to, we were just patching a road here or patching a road somewhere else. It wasn’t, the hardest work was, right at the base of the camp there was a big, wasn’t a mountain, was a big hill and the Japanese had an opip [observation post] place up there for plane spotting and we used to have to carry their rations up every day, which

wasn’t heavy but you were climbing up like that and the first couple of times you did it you arrived on your hands and knees but you got used to it after a while. It wasn’t bad. Sometimes it was a chance to get a bit of extra tucker while you were on that job. That was called the “Hill party”, you’d get put on the hill party.

Oh we’d have our over before but they were that high they were either, probably mostly were Liberators. I don’t think there was Lancasters down there until after the European war but they were the

Flying Fortresses and they were up nearly thirty thousand feet. Except the Liberators they used to come down.

Oh

about the end of, early 44, yeah.

See they bombed us in Burma but I didn’t see them and they bombed somewhere near the Thanbyuzayat and the 14 Kilo and I didn’t see any of that and didn’t even know about it until afterwards but the other ones we did get involved in was after we

got into Thailand and we did see them then. And a lot of times we saw them and they didn’t do anything and they were going down to Bangkok and they did probably a lot of bombing around Bangkok at the time. I don’t know what their targets were. When we were in the go-downs in Bangkok waiting to go to another place one night three of these

Liberators bombed all night for about two hours and they wrecked one of the go-downs [warehouse] and all it had in it was turmeric powder and they probably thought there was something else in there because they were so keen in knocking it out but there was nothing there worthwhile, only this kitchen powder, turmeric.

Oh yeah, we loved to see them. We’d almost cheer them on but we didn’t want them to drop on it on us. See when we had that very big raid in Non Pladuk we’d only been there a day and we had ninety nine killed and three hundred and twenty wounded, but we had no slit trenches. We hadn’t been allowed to build them so

that’s why we had the casualties were so high that night and a lot of the blokes that were killed were blokes that were running around like WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s with their heads cuts off, instead of going to ground and stopping down as close as you could to the ground, they were running around and that’s why the Australians seemed to take these things better than others. And the next time when we got our slit trenches dug

and what have you the Australians were allocated the worst corner of the camp because they knew that we wouldn’t be running around like WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s with our heads cut off.

Oh just to rebuild, one hut was knocked out and we had to rebuild that

but most of the chappies that were killed were Dutch and English because we only had about thirty Australians in this camp, thirty or forty and there was a little fellow lying there next to me and we were lying as flat to the ground as we could and he got a bit of shrapnel in his ankle.

I suppose the bomb would have landed about thirty feet away from us so it was nearly all anti-personnel stuff that they were dropping. The worst bomb landed right on top of a dug out and twenty nine Nips were in it and not one of them got hurt at all. It was an anti-personnel bomb where it would have made a hole three inches

deep. They carry a rod about two or three foot long on the front of the bomb and that hits the ground first and the bomb goes off first before it reaches the ground.

Oh yeah, we had a, the Poms really turned it on.

Marched and did the slow march and they were mostly Gordon and Southern Highlanders and they really turned on a drill parade. Although they were in rags, dressed in rags really, they really turned on a parade, with the slow march and what have you and made quite a job of it.

Yeah.

We had a Church of England padre and a Catholic padre in that camp. That was a British camp and they were British camp.

Well very seldom I don’t think. I don’t think there was any point them going out there really, what they

could do. See the first padre was, anyhow he got killed in action and then we had another padre who was on draft to the Hobart and never got to the Hobart and that was Keith Matthewson and he

was a padre right through and he died about, about ten or fifteen years after we came home he died but he was a very nice bloke and he did a lot for the boys, the men. He was a good man at talking to people.

They let us dig slit trenches then. We did one trench with a big P and another trench with an O and then we tried to form a W with just a few strokes of a line so they could see if from above. Right next door to the camp

there was a sixteen line siding and big Ashimoto workshops and then between that and another camp was an ak-ak post with three Bofors in it and they were manned by Indians who’d been conned into changing over, so it was a bit of a target. I don’t think the Bofors ever fired at our planes.

We had another one that occurred twenty days later. They mainly dropped incendiaries on that raid. Ten came in that way, ten came in that way and ten came the other way but we only had about twelve killed that night, that afternoon.

They couldn’t help it. They didn’t know we were there. They don’t know who’s there do they? I don’t think they had anybody in the area at that stage. Towards the end of the war you know we had an independent company in Thailand for about three months before the war finished? They were British, American and Thai Nationals but

they’d been taken out of Thailand, trained in England and brought back.

Went down to Bangkok and we lived in the go-downs on the wharf for a few weeks until they moved us up to Udon.

They’d bomb the go-downs we were in and one afternoon we had our latrines on the other side of the road and that afternoon for the first time we saw a Super Fortress and there was nine Super Fortresses, so there was a Super Fortress on each wing, so that’s fifty four

and the nine is sixty three and the first run was about the width of the road out and the bomb landed in the latrine and there was maggots all over the walls for miles around but they wouldn’t have paid for the petrol for one plane. Each row was, they did three runs and each run was the same distance out and did no damage at all.

There was great big piles alight and there was incendiaries lying all over the place but a lot of them landed in swampy ground and didn’t go off. Anyhow the Koreans were there and we were trying to put out this fire with buckets from the river

about two hundred yards and passing buckets from one bloke to the other, this was Japanese fashion and by the time the bucket got to the fire it was nearly empty. Anyhow one of our blokes, we used to collect these incendiaries and every so often when no-one was looking we’d bowl one into the fire. Anyway the Koreans caught us

and we thought, “Oh God, what now?” And they said, “Oh goodie, fetch”, so we were fetching these incendiaries for the Koreans and giving them to them and they were bowling them into the fire. Until the Nips caught them and took them away and gave them a hiding but there was no hope of putting this pile of fires out because they were hardwood and they’d been kicked off by a big basket of incendiaries that had dropped amongst them.

When the incendiaries leave a plane they’re in a big basket like that, all aluminium basket all standing up. I don’t know how many they have in a basket, probably about two hundred. They looked like an aluminium octagonal rod about that long and they’ve got all their magnesium or whatever it is in the guts of them and they

burn away quite well for about ten minutes and not only burn, they spit and that means they can spread their little bits of fire as well.

Not really. I think that,

no, they didn’t seem to blame us for them. Put it this way, they didn’t get any worse because of them. They took us even, which they didn’t do very often, because they didn’t like admitting that something had happened,

but they took us down to a place where the Japanese troops had been crossing the river and there was a railway line that went to the river and there’d never been a bridge on it and when the Thai’s were using it evidently been crossing the river anyway they could. Evidently there was a troop movement and the planes

had been bombing them all night and we heard the bombing and they must have caught the Nips crossing the river and they took us out there in the morning to help fill the holes in and there was legs and they just buried them. There was legs and things inside what we were filling in and you could smell the place, smelt terrible but normally they wouldn’t get you anywhere near where things

had happened because they didn’t like admitting that things had happened.

We were just shovelling dirty into the hole, getting dirt from wherever you could get dirt.

I had my

problems on the railway. I never had anything, I never had dysentery put it that way. Other than my ulcer I had pellagra. I never had beriberi. I didn’t have any of the bad things, put it that way.

Wasn’t too bad, yeah.

Quite good, yeah. Oh yes, morale right through was reasonably high considering where we were. Everybody was looking forward to getting home and everybody was sure that we were going to get home.

Oh we were in Bangkok when the European war finished. Actually we’d been working out in a refinery that day and there was about four truck loads of us and coming home we sang God Save The King and Rule Britannia and Advance Australia Fair. We sang all the patriotic songs we could think of and the

Thais were waving to us, all smiles and so and the Nips must have known as they didn’t do a thing.

They didn’t stop us singing any songs that

we were singing. We thought that they might object but they didn’t. They must have known what was going on.

When we arrived they had us trying to build an airstrip, a fighter strip and it only ran along like a road and it was very primitive.

They found that there was some, when we were kids we had it in Sydney, we called it “coconut”. It was like sand that had gone hard, a very light rock and it’s like a shale and anyhow we had go out with a piece of steel, about six or seven foot long and drive it down, very sandy there, and drive it down through the sand until we found some of this coconut we’ll call it and

so we’d shift all the sand and dig all this coconut up and they’d put it in yak carts. Well a yak cart is they are all made of wood, even the axle is made of wood, so they couldn’t carry about more than three pieces of this stuff and they’d take it out and they’d lay it down by hand on this runway. And then they’d have about

fifty of our fellows with sledge hammers and they’d be just breaking and just chopping it down equal until they got it about two foot deep and that was right along. Well then sometimes they’d run a roller over it, a steamroller over it. Anyhow

that went on for about, couldn’t have been too long, two months and then they decided that was no good so then we dug trenches across it so it couldn’t be used because I think they’d taken all their planes back to Japan to defend Japan with. Then they had us building all these defences around the aerodrome which were they would have been pretty hard to move if they ever used

them because they had about an eight inch pole down the centre and a four inch pole radiating off that and bamboo matting over that and about two foot of dirt over that and then they had peep holes and all those were manned with point five machines they’d taken out of bombers. See there was an aerodrome there and some of their old bombers had finished up there that were of no further use and they were taking these point five machines out

of the old bombers so they would have been quite formidable if they had of had to be moved because you would have had to have got a direct hit on them. So they were taking the dirt for these from under trees so the aircraft above couldn’t see what was going on. Anyway the Thai’s said to us one day, he said, “I speak my master, my master speak your master,” and he said, “Boom, boom”.

What he was saying he was keeping to telling our people what is going on here. So I was part of digging these holes to fill these things and the next thing we know there was, as you know a Japanese three star private treats a lance corporal like one of our blokes would treat a major. They learn these little phrases of introduction and what have you and

they bow and salute and bow and anyhow this little bunch of one star privates arrived, only kids, say about sixteen, anyhow they put them down with us and we could see them. They were going up to report to the three star privates their progress and the next thing we sat down and we had these poor little buggers doing all our work for

us. Because they weren’t game to go up and tell the other blokes that they couldn’t get us to work, so that was one of the little side things that just happened in these places. So were in Udon when the war finished and they kept us there for about a fortnight and then we moved down to Bangkok and we were in Bangkok for about another three or four weeks before

we got moved down to Singapore and then we were in tents on the beach in Singapore until we got a ship to bring us home.

We got it off the Thais. We’d been in touch with the Thais out in working parties and one of the Thais that was in touch became a cabinet minister in first

Thai Government after the war. He had a nickname of the “Red Hen”. That was his undercover name, Red Hen, and while we were about, two days after the war finished there was Colonel Smiley and about eight or ten others, Americans and British and Thais that had been in Thailand for about

three months and came into the camp and gave the Japs instructions on what was to happen and what wasn’t to happen and said they were going to be in the vicinity all the time. But we had to be very careful because there was twelve thousand Nips only about twenty mile away. They were troops so you couldn’t get too, we didn’t

know quite everything but we knew later on that the Emperor said we weren’t to be touched but we didn’t know about that. So we still had to be careful and we eventually got down to Bangkok, and then to Singapore and then to home.

Well as I said

we had to be careful because those troops were so close to us and then again I think that the main thing that we wanted to do was to get home. Also a lot of people speak very loosely but I think when it comes down to tin tacks

I don’t think that anybody really wanted to harm another person. I think the main thing was we wanted to go home.

Three years and four months.

The Japanese?

Oh it was, you knew that you were on the way home. That was the big thing. You were still in tents and you didn’t have any of the luxuries that you’d been missing except probably the food was better but other little luxuries you still were

missing and you weren’t going to get those until you got home.

Oh, I think we still had rice and soup actually but it was some soup with some guts in it, really good stuff. Didn’t have any t bone steaks or things like that. I’ll never forget when the war first ended and we were in Udon and

we went for a walk up the road out of the camp and I bought a grilled chicken that was splayed out flat on two pieces of bamboo and that’s how they baked it, and probably marinated very well and you hold it up and go (demonstrates) eat it off the thing and that was the nicest piece of chicken you’ve ever tasted.

You, I suppose there was times when your tummy felt it was going in. It was like a balloon let down. You couldn’t actually say it was pain but it was next door, like a very dull, light

pain.

No, I don’t think so. I think that’s only as much as you want to let it make you. I think those things, you’ve got to put them behind you.

Other than dreaming about it there wasn’t much more you could do about it.

They told us that we couldn’t do this and we couldn’t do that and we got into a little racket in Bangkok of pinching petrol and selling it to the Thais.

It only happened once because we didn’t get into a racket until it was nearly worn out but we did sell one load of petrol and we went into Bangkok into a restaurant and we had a real tuck in feed and it didn’t hurt anybody.

We came home, I think it was one of the

Bay Lines, I think it was the Large Bay and officially we’d only been paid, they gave us some money to help us on our way home and I don’t know where some of the blokes got the money but there was always somebody running a little racket and there was one chappie that was the type of bloke who runs the Crown and Anchor and any of those

games. And this chappie started this one and he had a groundsheet, about three foot square and he’d painted boxes around the side, one to twenty five and a circle in the middle and you know like a merchant ship there’s always plenty of cockroaches around, he gathered a few cockroaches and he put a cockroach under a cup in the middle and then the idea was you put your money on the side. If you put your money in number ten and somebody is on number fifteen and

somebody in twenty and he gets as many set along the side as he can and then when he thinks he’s got enough money lying around the place he lifts the cup and the cockroach wanders around. If he wanders into number ten everybody in number ten gets paid ten to one. If he wanders into number one they only get paid even money. And sometimes there’d be anything up to two or three hundred pound on that sheet.

Another humorous one on the sidelines, I don’t know whether the fact that we were sailors that we were any better sailors than the army or not but I think there was a lot of psychology in it but we were more or less fed on stews because they feed a lot of people with stews. Anyhow we’d go down into the mess room and have our stew but a lot

of the soldiers wouldn’t even go down below. They’d live up top so we’d take a plate full of stew up and say, “Here, this is good,” and “Oh leave me alone”. They reckoned that the food would make them sick.

Well we called at Fremantle first of course. We were only there for a few hours and we were next in Sydney

and my brother-in-law was on the motor boats in the flying boat base at Rose Bay and he was out in the harbour in the boat with a (demonstrates), with my name on it and sailing into Sydney Harbour was one of the most beautiful things that ever happened really.

It was terrific and my mother and one of my sisters, one sister was in the army up in Queensland so my mother and my sister were down at the wharf to meet me and just after we got home Katie did arrive home from Queensland. Yeah, it was, it was a wonderful homecoming.

And then of course Mum reckoned, when we were discharged they gave us a bottle of Vegemite about that big and I had Vegemite until I looked like it. Wherever I went I eventually got Mum to cut it down a bit

but I would at least have to have one biscuit with Vegemite on it even two years later.

No, as I said I wasn’t too bad was I really? I might have been a little bit thinner but I don’t think I was any thinner actually. I looked thinner but not much.

Oh visited people and I had a phobia about getting into trams and things. I felt, after living in the open air for

a couple of years, I’d rather walk a couple of miles than hop in a bus or tram. I didn’t like to have a roof over my head. That’s only a little phobia really I think but that’s how I felt. Then my sister got engaged while I was away and she was waiting for me to come home and I went to Grace Brothers and I bought the first dinner suit out of

Grace Brothers cupboard since the war. They had to go and get a key from somewhere to unlock the cupboard to get one out. I got home on the 1st of November and my sister was married on the 4th of January and then I did spend, my other sister was in the army and she had to go back

to Warwick and I had a friend that was in the 2/10th Machine Gunners that lived in Brisbane and anyway I went up and stopped with Allan and his mother and father for a week and I just saw a bit more of Katie then doing that.

I think it was just wonderful being home.

I was very crooked on my sister Katie too because she gave my pushbike away. Before I’d left home I’d tied

it up on the roof of the garage and I went down to the garage and I looked up at the roof and my bike wasn’t there and anyhow when I tackled her about it she reckoned she did it for Mum’s sake. She reckoned that every time Mum went down to the garage and she saw my bike she would worry about me but I still don’t think she should have sold my bike or given it away or whatever. She didn’t sell it, she gave it away.

She gave, I had a blue suit that I wore quite a bit and she gave that away too. See little things like that upset me quite a bit actually. I think I’ve got over them but at the time it upset me very much.

Oh yes, people were warned not to ask us to much which most people, although there was a chappie two doors from me who was a POW

and he was a pain in the neck. He was an actor before the war and he was inclined to epilepsy too and they used to have a lot of people calling at his place and they were always talking about it but Freddie didn’t leave the big army camp in Singapore.

The one I said where they might see a Nip [Nipponese, i.e Japanese] every couple of months and that would be about all he’d see. Freddie used to go down the garden and pull a garden stake and wave it round his head like a Samurai sword and that’s crap really. Freddie was always attending some meeting or another and Annie his wife would ring me up and say, “Oh John could you go to such and such a meeting with Freddie?” Because he had to have someone with

him, so it meant if I didn’t go, she’d have to go and she couldn’t do much with him. Anyhow I’d go along and sure enough before he came home he’d throw a mickey and if you know what happens you’ve got to get them down and sit on their chest and we used to put a cigarette case in his mouth to stop him swallowing his tongue. They could choke

on their tongue and he would stink like hell and that’s only because of the froth and bubbles and so on. Anyhow Freddie used to live down at repat and really and truly his epilepsy or whatever it was I think he was born with it and he used to live at repat until he got a TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated] pension and then he left his family and went down the south coast

to live. Didn’t hear much more but he did die eventually but I think those kind of blokes talk themselves into dying.

I started at Claude Neon the day after I was discharged as a maintenance carpenter. I did that for about eight months until my CRTS [Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme] course

came through and then I went in and did six months full time CRTS course and that gave you, the six months gave you the first year and then I went to tech and I did the lower trades until third year and then did two more years of higher trades and then two more years for my work certificate.

Uh?

No, not after where I’d been.

No, I don’t think it was a

regret. It might have been a disappointment of some kind but it was something you put behind you I think. It was like starting all over again.

Nothing except I was probably born with good genes in me, somehow or other. I started, of course this was

only after I came to Wagga, I started doing civil engineering by correspondence. I did nearly all the maths papers, I did three geology papers and I had a bit of a hold up with hydraulics. No-one in Wagga, see the TAFE college in Wagga was only doing shorthand and typing I think. That was all the TAFE

college was doing here at the time and schoolteachers couldn’t teach hydraulics. They didn’t know much about hydraulics and the old engineer, the water engineer, you know the one that talked me into helping those buildings? He’d forgotten all the hydraulics he’d ever learnt. He was a man in his sixties then I think

and then I got married and I had started with two children, two step-children, and I just didn’t have time and I started with an old house that I wanted to do some renovations with and I forgot about it. I handed the papers back but we’ve done all right.

I think it gave you a great understanding of human nature. I think with my dealings with people I don’t make many mistakes. I don’t make immediate, I don’t

believe you say, “I don’t like him,” and you might think to yourself, “I’ve got to watch him,” but I don’t think given your short life space in time I don’t think you make too many mistakes in people that you make friends of.

I don’t know. I just believe that what you’ve got to do, you’ve got to do. If you’ve got to go to work you’ve got to work and if you’re going to rest, you rest.

I’ve quite enjoyed my life. The last forty years with the family has been wonderful and they’re still a wonderful family.

Our chappies, our Perth chappies that live in Sydney they get together on the second Thursday of every month. There’s only about four or five still on their feet and when I go to Sydney I try

and get there on the second Thursday but if it’s not possible and I get there on an alternate day and I get there and ring Gavin up and the next thing Gavin will ring around and we’ll meet just the same as if it was the second Thursday and I think that’s lovely.

Oh dear you ask some awkward questions.

I think coming home, it can’t be anything else, coming up Sydney Harbour.

It’s not only the most beautiful harbour in the world, it’s the most beautiful country in the world and fortunately I’ve had a chance to, I’ve had three trips to England and Europe and we’ve been back to Thailand and Burma twice and how people can go there for a holiday I just can’t understand it, dirty, stinking places they are.

Oh no, Australia is a wonderful place.

Didn’t think much?

I think that one about five or six years ago, what do they

call it? Australia Remembers and I think that was the turning point in a lot of people starting to talk about what happened and what didn’t happened. I don’t think it was encouraged years ago. See that Proud Echo

was one of very few books that was written in the early stages and you compare the number of books that’s come out in the last few years. I don’t think even the Government encouraged and I think there’s a lot of money attached to this, I don’t think the Government encouraged too many books to be written. Some of the books that have come out lately I’m terribly enthused

about because a lot of blokes could say what they liked as all their mates are dead anyhow. And also some fellows, very ordinary blokes write books and you’d think they had the ear of the Prime Minister and the top generals. That’s why Proud Echo was just an ordinary little book but

it was just what we thought, the same as we’re doing today. Nobody is laying down thick guidelines about how to run a war or how not to run a war.

People

ring up now. When I had that interview on Monday. That came out of the blue. The ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] rang me and when they did that one, the kiddies at Wagga High School, they rang me. I didn’t get in touch with them.

I think this has been brought about by Remembrance Day because my children, my step-children or my daughter they didn’t show a lot of interest in this but my grandchildren,

yes, very much so. They take Proud Echo along to school and where my name is, because they’re grown up now. My grandson has got a photo of the Perth up on his wall.

Not really. I don’t think we’re going to remake history. You have a war every couple of years since war began and who’s going to rewrite history. We don’t know in the future, the earth might

be defending itself against an alien body.

Ten years ago I was dangerously ill and Doctor Fernan here diagnosed cancer of the anfullia[?] and he referred

me to Professor Ross Smith in Royal North Shore Hospital and I had a procedure and something went wrong there and ten days later I had pancreatitis and I lost eighty percent of my pancreas and they told the family

they didn’t expect me to live through the night and then about a fortnight after that I had a massive haemorrhage and I was on the operating table for nine hours. Once again they told the family they didn’t expect me live through the night but I’m still here. That’s why I mentioned

I think I inherited good genes. I come through that and it took me a couple of years to get over it but I did and I try and live as normal. As a matter of fact only ten days ago I came home after a sixteen days coach tour of Queensland and there was a lot of walking I had to do and I just

keep with it sort of thing.