Australians at War Film Archive

Well Malaya was a great experience for a young man. You had this vast area of jungle allocated to you sometimes to patrol in and you had all the responsibility for your men. Helicopter evacuation was difficult and it was a great experience as a young man to lead a fine bunch of young men that we

had. I can only say that I don’t regret any of it.

Well, I had a couple of contacts with the enemy ….

Well as a platoon commander we had a couple of brushes with the enemy, one of which we attacked an enemy camp just when they were cooking monkey meat. One of them ran away and he was killed by three men and the other one got away, but it was a good opening experience for me and soon afterwards I was posted as OC [officer commanding]

of the tracking platoon. We called it a tracking team which was combining Borneo head-hunters with their visual tracking ability and tracker dogs. And this was held centrally in the battalion and we knew we had to make a success of that and the CO [commanding officer] was pushing it too because if we didn’t with our very first opportunity the company’s finding enemy sign

wouldn’t have used us anymore and we did get a chance on one occasion to do so.

Well my emergency was basically an Australian involvement helping the Malayans. They had just got their independence when 3RAR [Royal Australian Regiment] got there and we were involved in patrolling the jungle, ambushing and a lot of our time was involved in food denial and whooshing around villages helped by the

local police. They did a lot of the close work around the villages, police field force and we tended to patrol more the deeper jungle. And we’d go out in a platoon of about thirty men and they would divide up into small patrols, sometimes four or five men, sometimes seven or eight looking for enemy sign, trying to find an enemy base camp that we could then attack. That meant many hours of

very tedious patrolling. Often also you’d lay in ambush for seven days or so and it took a lot of discipline to lie still for that time and just perhaps being relieved for part of the day to be able to cook a meal further back where the enemy couldn’t smell you. So that took a lot of discipline and I think we refined a lot of our patrolling strengths for later in Borneo

and in Vietnam. I think the people who served in Malaya benefited greatly and when we went to Vietnam later we had that confidence in using small patrols that some of the other people didn’t have. I don’t think the Americans for example relied on small patrols as much as we did and I think we honed our patrolling abilities originally in Malaya and Borneo.

On one occasion one of these platoons of thirty men found tracks of the enemy and it was reported back and we were scrambled from our base camp. We were on five minutes notice and we had to move to them pretty quickly because it gets dark about six o’clock and that was running through my mind all the time we were doing this and they showed us the tracks they’d found and

we were then into it. The leading head-hunter that I had, I decided to use him rather than the dogs because the dogs could sometimes lead you into an ambush. They tended to be a little noisy and I thought that we had a very good chance here. There were tracks for about four or five enemy. So I used the visual tracker covered by his Australian cover man. We had, I had ten men altogether, four of them

were these head-hunters and one dog handler which I could have put on if the visual tracker lost the track. And after following for a distance, it was about a thousand yards on this occasion, suddenly we saw on a rocky hillside two tents or just the tops of the tent. We couldn’t see too much

movement of who they were, just the occasional movement and they were unfortunately in jungle greens which put a lot of hesitation in my mind. It would have been foolhardy to charge up there like we might have normally done because they had the advantage that they were up on some rocks and they would have just run away or at worst thrown a grenade down at us from these rocks or fired on us.

So time was pretty short because it was very close to dark so I put six men down under the corporal including the dog which worried the hell out of me because if anybody stepped on him we would have been history if he’d yelped. So I then moved with two Ibans [indigenous people] and two of the Australians around the left flank. I didn’t have time to do a wide hooking movement because

there was only about another three quarters of light left, and went around the side of the rocks and we went around the back of these people, still trying to get a good sighting of them and I was watching for a little while. One man, he was taking something out of his pack, I didn’t know what he was doing or whether he was taking a grenade out or whether he’d seen me. I couldn’t see his face and I could just see a gold watch on his arm and he was fairly tall

and it put some doubt in my mind whether they were enemy or own but the footprints seemed to indicate they were enemy. So I showed that I was pulling a grenade to the two men in sight nearest to me because the only thing I could do if this man moved and there were signs of about four or five and we could see their huts that they had prepared for the night. So the idea was

to throw the grenade and drive the enemy down to the stop group which I’d left at the bottom of the hill. Their natural inclination would be to run downhill I thought and as I did that, the enemy threw a grenade back and fired back on us and we all fired and charged into the camp. In the meantime the chaps at the bottom killed one bloke immediately who’d gone down for a wash, they’d been observing him

about ten metres away. They were taking it in turns having a wash while we were there but I didn’t know that because I was going around the back. And after a minute or so these other people in the camp ran down towards the stop group and were killed and one or two it seems got away, probably out the side and there was probably a silent sentry out the back where we were. He might have

just tootled off himself, I don’t know. On one occasion in Malaya, one of our platoons ….

On one occasion in Malaya, a platoon of thirty men found some tracks of enemy. They reported it was about four or five enemy. So I took ten men out to follow those tracks up. We were held centrally before then and we rushed to where they were

and followed these tracks up. Of those ten men I had four of them were Borneo head-hunters and I also had a tracking dog. We followed these people up. It was getting very close to dark. All of a sudden we saw sign of enemy on top of a side of a cliff, a rocky cliff where we could just make out they’d already

put their tents up for the night thinking it was too late for us to be about. I put six men down under a corporal and then went around the flank with the other four and the idea was to drive the enemy down into the stop group. I threw a grenade and there was some exchange of fire and then it did work. The enemy did go down into the stop group and the

stop group did their job.

The Ibans?

They were from Borneo …

Yes the Ibans were brought over from Borneo due to their great tracking skills of animals and they were allocated two per rifle platoon of thirty men and we held some centrally in this tracking team that I was commanding. There were four in there and we also had

dogs which had their own special attributes, the dogs because they could actually track at night time because they’re not relying on visual ability. It was the smell of the enemy that they could rely on, but they couldn’t track anything more than about twenty-four hours old and that’s where the head-hunters came in. Well the Australian battalions started being posted to

Malaya from 1955. The particular battalion I was with, the 3rd Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment was the second to go in 1957 and our role along with the New Zealanders and also British units and Ghurkha units was to assist the Malay government in combating Communist terrorism which had already started particularly in the area we were in, in Sungai Siput that’s where the Emergency started in 1948

when three planters had been murdered there. So in a way we were getting there towards the end of the Emergency when there were only the remnants of the terrorists left and they were very much harder to find which meant that we had to hone our patrolling skills and ambushing very much. It was of great benefit later on to have that experience before going to Borneo and Vietnam. One of the main things we had to do was to keep the

Communist terrorists away from the civilian population. The Communist terrorists had, well there were only about two hundred or three hundred left in our area altogether, they had about half a million supporters in Malaya and these people were particularly amongst the Chinese and Tamil population around the tin mines and the rubber estates and we had to keep the Communist terrorists away from these

people. The police did a lot of the close work and there was great use of special branch information, the sort of thing we didn’t have in Vietnam. So we would act quite often on that sort of information that was gleaned and we would do the distant patrolling in the deeper jungle which at that stage the police field force wasn’t quite as good at it as we were and the New Zealanders were and the Ghurkhas were and it was

a fine experience serving in a unit like that and also seeing something of the other Commonwealth units. When the 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment was posted to Perak State in northern Malaya the battalion had about eight hundred

men and they were spread out into three company bases. Now each company commander would have had broad directions in searching and would be responsible for a particular area and each company had three platoons and they would go in platoon strength, out on patrol for something like fourteen days at a time. The hard part was carrying that fourteen days

rations because we didn’t have much helicopter support. The advantage was that the helicopters weren’t a giveaway to the enemy. So people were carrying about, using eighty pounds in those days on their backs, machine gunners and signallers had even more weight to carry and we had, difficult to set up radio sets and it was quite a challenge to a young platoon commander to have this

fairly large area of patrol and it was your responsibility to get the job done. You had broad directions to look for enemy sign. Often you did days of patrolling and just found a few footprints here and there. Sometimes you had ambush tasks. You might sit on a track for a week or two at a time and it was very tedious of course, lying in mud,

lots of leeches, and never knowing when the enemy was going to come along. You would have some relief of course. You would change about in that fourteen day period but it was a very difficult honed skill to be silent in an ambush for that long. So I think people basically preferred to be on the move and patrolling, looking for enemy camps but your chances of finding something at that stage

of the emergency was very rare. When I was a platoon commander I was lucky that we did come across a camp of enemy on one occasion and one enemy was killed but in the whole context of the thing the battalion only killed nine or ten men. Later on I then moved to a tracking team, it was a new concept of combining Iban trackers from Borneo and

dogs and you would use whichever skill was better at the time because the dogs can only usually track a fresh scent. Sometimes it worked better if the enemy was really worried and he was giving off more scent if he was running but it was a difficult skill to get this team together of the Australian men that covered the Ibans while he was watching on the ground or the dog handler and we did get a chance once. One of the platoons

of thirty men found some tracks. The commanding officer told us to get out there as quickly as possible and we did, and it was quite exciting really because we were very short of time. It was getting very close to dark and we had about forty-five minutes of daylight. We came across the enemy; they were on top of a rocky cliff. All we could see was a couple of huts and some

movement of green men and it put a lot of doubt in my mind whether they were enemy or not at first.

The 4th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment was in Borneo in 1966. I was a company commander at first on a base just near the Indonesian border and later on I went as battalion second in command. Our operations at the time were

that we were still sending some cross border operations, very secretive at the time across into Indonesian territory. We were limited to about ten thousand metres. It was a very delicate time because at times we were hearing the Malaysians and the Indonesians were in a peace process and constantly the orders were changing and in the middle of it the Indonesians actually sent

people on our side of the border, they were particularly trying to contact the Chinese Communist organisation in the villages to our rear, and at one stage our battalion was very successful in cutting off some of these enemy in ambushes. But we did maintain from time to time cross border operations searching for enemy base camps. We were offensively trying to

control the border area and protect that part of Sarawak because the Australians at Bau had the most sensitive part of the border because that was the natural way for the Indonesians to try and do their incursions, but a way to stop them was offensive patrols on our side of the border but we had limitations put on us that we couldn’t actually attack their base camps.

Yes.

In a subsequent posting I was a company commander…

During Indonesia’s Confrontation with Malaysia when Australians were posted again to Sarawak in North Borneo in 1966 I was a company commander on a border camp about two thousand metres from the Indonesian border

and subsequently after about a month I went as battalion 2IC [second in command]. During that time the battalion was getting ready and subsequently launching patrols across the border to a range of about ten thousand metres to locate enemy base camps and offensively control that border. Because peace negotiations were starting to develop

our commanding officer wasn’t allowed to actually attack those camps, which we were very upset about in some ways. We’d trained for years to do it. Other battalions had been very successful in giving the Indonesians a very good clobbering and they were preventing the Indonesians attacking on a Malaysian side of the border. And this went on for quite a while. We’d stop launching these patrols

and then we’d hear that the negotiations were breaking down and we’d start them again with the utmost secrecy. Nobody in Australia knew about it. While I was on a patrol very early we got news of a VC [Victoria Cross] which had been awarded to a Ghurkha the previous year and even that citation was disguised so nobody would know

that we were across the border. We were not allowed to take any prisoners. We weren’t to leave anybody behind. The hardest thing for our people I think was if we had a casualty we weren’t even allowed to take a helicopter in to take them out. So we were operating under great difficulties. The terrain was very difficult. Across the border from where I was there was a lot of swamp there. I remember falling over one day and moving through this swamp and

not falling over but almost going down. The platoon commander with me you know laughed like hell that I was almost disappearing and so were some of the Ghurkha we were moving with in the advance party. You know it was terrible terrain to move in and the maps weren’t very good. Quite a large part of it wasn’t mapped at all in the beginning. At the same time the enemy were also

with their special forces coming across our side of the border. They were trying to reach Communist Chinese villages, or a lot of them were Communist and they were trying to stir up trouble. So we would get word from the local Iban trackers or they were Dayak [indigenous people] trackers in that part of Sarawak and they would pass the information to us and our battalion

was quite successful in cutting off some of those enemy that came in and we inflicted casualties on them and unfortunately we lost a couple of people too. One killed and one seriously wounded on one occasion. So even though the negotiations were going on and we were told that the confrontation was over, in fact they were coming across the border and inflicting casualties on us but I think we always got the better of them in the fire fights.

Memorabilia follows

I was a company commander in Vietnam. I went there on a day’s notice and I was very privileged to do that particularly at that time… I was commanding a company…

I was a company commander in Vietnam in 1969. Over half my company were national servicemen and I couldn’t distinguish them from my regulars. They were very good soldiers and they were generally speaking about one year older than the

regulars, but they melded together very well. When you think that they only had a few months training as a recruit and then some more in the battalion, and how well they performed in Vietnam. They gave an element of maturity. The thing I liked most about the national servicemen was that they had a questioning mind and it caused all of us I think to, right down to section commander level to explain our

orders better to them before we went on operations. Now obviously when you’re on an operation you do what you’re told and you can’t argue about things if there’s a contact with the enemy on, but the national servicemen made a very fine contribution. When you took casualties, quite often the national servicemen would get the lance corporal’s job or the corporal’s job because they were very good. They had a very good level of education.

They were the cream of Australia’s youth and particularly the national service officers. They would have been in the top one or two percentile and I was actually involved in their training at Scheyville [officer training institution]. I think in Vietnam at various stages I had three of these national service officers and they performed extremely well. In August

1969 we were on patrol. We had just seen a lot of sign of enemy that morning and found a bunker system, we were reporting earlier that day of enemy. And we hadn’t had a chance to get any water that day which we always had to forage in the dry season as it was in Vietnam, and we were just getting some water from a creek, I was moving as the company commander with one of my platoons

of thirty men and all of a sudden, without notice, an American aircraft came over, and about one hundred and fifty metres ahead from where I was standing, but directly over some of the men filling their water bottles, and there were further sentries forward as well. This plane sprayed us with Agent Orange [herbicide]. Later on I looked at the tapes of the spraying

and it was about twelve thousand gallons that were spread on that run of Agent Orange. There was no doubt about the spraying took place. We of course got on with the job, but whilst we were posted there getting our water, and I was actually reporting this bunker system, the details I did have a chance to ask for the battalion doctor to see what we could do because the stuff was all

around us for a while, and he said there wasn’t much we could do. In fact the message came back from Task Force saying that it was not harmful to animals and I hoped they were right. The thing that I found a bit difficult fifteen years later I was called before a Royal Commission and a QC [queens Counsel - a barrister] had me in there for a day and a half telling me it didn’t happen. I found that a bit difficult. I mean the act was bad enough but then to try and

prove it to a QC, from a chemical company and he was allowed to go on for quite a while about it, and I found that a little difficult.

When I was a company commander in 1969, on the 22nd August I was moving with one of my platoons of thirty men. And we’d seen quite a lot of sign of the enemy that morning but we hadn’t had a chance to get water yet, which we were absolutely depending on. It was the dry season. And just as we were filling our water bottles, and we were

in single line but there were some sentries across the creek, an American plane came over and showered us, and the surrounding area with this white vapour. I only later learnt that it was Agent Orange of course, but I was a bit worried about it and I was stopped anyway to send messages back, details of a enemy bunker system that we’d found. So I used

the opportunity also to talk to the battalion doctor on another net to see if there was anything I could do. Could it be harmful? And a message came back, no, it wouldn’t be and of course I hoped they were right because there was nothing we could do about it. Water was short. We couldn’t wash it off and we went on with our job as everybody has to do. And it was only years later that when I thought about it again and

word was around that it could be harmful, I actually got hold of the records of the tapes of the spray missions from the Americans. They’re well recorded and it showed that day they spread twelve thousand gallons on two runs just where we were. Because I had got on the radio and it was the one case that was well recorded, there were conversations

about it and it was back on the task force net as well, the QC from Monsanto Chemical Company was very keen to disprove this and I was before the Royal Commission for a day and a half, and he kept asking me the same question in and out trying to prove that we weren’t there where the sprays were. I found that a bit hard to take.

Well the American tactics were different to ours, from my limited observation of the Americans. The Americans tended to move through an area with very large forces, lots of firepower, tremendous

reliance on air support. Because they had so many resources they tended to not pay so much attention to detail. They would sweep through an area, what they called search and destroy operations. And enemy would hear them and often melt away, or even get back behind them. They would not bother as far as I could make out to go back and search those areas in detail

like we did. My experience was that when we moved into an area sometimes you’d surprise the enemy and you’d have a contact straightaway with the enemy, but at other times you might have to be in an area for several days before you’d locate an enemy camp where you might ambush the enemy. In fact I would have liked to have had more time in a particular area to do more ambushes, but certainly the Americans didn’t seem to have that

sort of patience.

From my observations in Borneo as a company commander there I think the tactics used there

would have been very suitable for Vietnam. There in Borneo the Australians and other British Commonwealth units would try and locate an enemy base with great stealth and then attack it in their own time when they were absolutely ready. Now that takes enormous patience. You might have to work for a fortnight on it, go out perhaps for even a longer time, come back, prepare carefully,

look at air photographs and get all the intelligence you could and then assault it with all the advantages on your side, or ambush the tracks around it. I think that should have been used more in Vietnam and I don’t think the Americans would have certainly bothered with that sort of method. I think if the British had been there using their Ghurkhas in a method that I’ve just mentioned and other Commonwealth Units

I think they would have been more successful than the Americans because we have to remember it was a large commitment for the Americans of a half a million troops and the British Commonwealth and others wouldn’t want to be involved to such an extent, nor could they have the resources. So we mustn’t be too critical of the Americans because they had a huge task but in the detailed execution of that task

I think they should have given more care to detail, less emphasis on firepower. If you rely on every time you come across enemy of just putting heaps of fire down, you can’t get around the back of the enemy and you have these fleeting contacts where you come across a bunker system where the enemy have got about this much overhead cover, sometimes even more because of the protection from B52’s bombings,

so you strike that enemy camp, you lose a couple of men of your own, they’re all some mother’s sons and the enemy lose a few but they get away and we’re not achieving surprise doing it that way. So I think that we needed to have been in the areas longer and done it more stealthily. And we had some good resources like the Special Air Service Regiment to locate things and our own

patrols were excellent at locating the enemy. That’s the great strength of the Australian Army, is the patrolling ability and the ability of junior leaders, corporals, platoon commanders and we had the ability to do it. In 1969

we saw some very devastating effects of Australian mines which had been moved from our barrier minefield. The 5th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment had two companies in the area of Dat Do and between Dat Do and the Long Hai Mountains. I had one of those companies and in a four week period we lost seven killed and forty three wounded in Operation

Esso. But there were other effects from mines to all units of course. But it was a devastating effect on the men. One of my platoons for example…

The enemy got very adept at lifting from mines from the Australian barrier minefield. They were very clever at using them. They could observe us from the Long Hai Mountains and they would put the mines wherever we were likely to move, where we might harbour a platoon of thirty men at night time, or where we might try and ambush the enemy to stop them coming into the Dat Do area or stop,

interfering in our land clearing operations. They wouldn’t just lay these mines one at a time. They’d lay them in two or threes, so it was a natural inclination for a soldier to rush to help another or two or three that had been wounded and then another mine would go off and there were great acts of heroism at times in these mine incidents. The one I’m telling you about now

the stretcher bearer, for example had a very serious injury of his own and he rushed to help his men, and this was over a prolonged period they were being evacuated. There was another combat engineer who lost a leg and on that occasion he still kept probing for these mines. The most devastating effect of the morale was on their general operations. Imagine yourself being a forward scout in Vietnam

you’re trying to pierce through the jungle to your front, and the same with the men behind trying to protect their flanks but then you’ve got this extra responsibility of looking for these dreaded three prongs which were often hidden anyway and camouflaged, so it put quite a dampening dimension on our operations. So that minefield which went for about eight kilometres was a dreadful legacy for us to have for

later battalions in 1969. Now I can see what went through the Task Force commander’s mind when he laid that minefield, because it’s a central tenet in counter insurgency warfare to separate the enemy from the population areas. You know, deny them food and information and recruits and intelligence, but finally in considering that

minefield he knew damn well that you have to protect it by fire or patrolling. Now he must have been given some assurances from the Vietnamese that they would do that. That’s the Vietnamese regular and popular forces, but I believe we all should have known that they were incapable of that task. In any event they weren’t reliable enough. They

all had relatives on the other side and it was a big ask for somebody to protect a minefield eight kilometres long and there are other ways of doing it. We could have, instead of that huge output of resources in laying those mines and wiring it, we could have used small patrols and ambushes

to cut off the approach routes to Dat Do and other places. After all that was successfully done in Malaya. And we had to of course later on, a later Task Force commander used up a lot of resources lifting them again. I mean it proved the fact that it wasn’t a good idea and I think that minefield, for us infantrymen, was probably the most controversial part of that war,

on the operational side of that war. On the 4th July, American Independence Day ’69, one of my platoons struck two mines just when they were moving into an ambush position. The enemy had obviously seen them from a distance and laid these mines in their way.

It was a terrible experience for the platoon because such a large proportion of them were wounded, particularly when the second mine went off. The platoon commander did a great job, although wounded himself, in controlling the situation and Australian helicopters came in late at night, long after people were normally being evacuated and flew them out under I

think quite heroic conditions. I went down to the hospital to visit these people the next day. The CO had kindly, the commanding officer had kindly given me his helicopter to visit them and I was quite shocked to see how many men had serious injuries of lost limbs and that sort of thing and I was with one bloke when he was actually dying. He had lost an eye and two limbs

and no complaints. They were very heroic people, and I still see some of these people at reunions and I think they have some after effects and some get over it easily. The thing to remember about those mine incidents once a platoon lost some key people and some friends in a mine incident like that it tore the heart out of the platoon. It needed very

careful leadership to rebuild those platoons again. And that’s when the national servicemen came into it because there were their chance of promotion and they did it so well when they got that responsibility at that time.