Australians at War Film Archive

Harry Cullen (Copp) - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 9th December 2003

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1344

Tape 1

00:36 Okay Doug, we’ll make a start now. So if we could start with an introduction to your, your life story, just a summary beginning with where you were born and grew up.

Well I was born on the 24th of November, 1918 at Corowa, New South Wales. I think the doctor

01:00 who was in charge of my birth was Dr Barnard. And I was born in the Corowa Private Hospital, and the sister in charge there, was Sister Thompson. And I know that because I’ve met her since. And then I went back to, on the other side of the river to Wahgunyah where we lived, and I grew up there

01:30 on a farm with wheat, growing wheat, sheep and some cattle. Then in, I finished school in, in what, 1933, I think at the age of 15, having got my Intermediate Certificate. And went out to

02:00 be an apprentice winemaker with my uncle who had three vineyards at Rutherglen. The one I went to was called Fairfield, and I stayed there with the manager, boarded with the manager’s wife and worked in the vineyard and in the cellar. So I more or less did my apprenticeship, as a winemaker. Then when, well

02:30 before, about 193-, ’36 I think, I joined the 8th Light Horse Regiment, which was a militia regiment, and it had been commanded by an uncle of mine, Colonel Archie McClorin, who died in Tripoli, Syria in 1918, at the end, just towards the end of the war. Anyway, I rose to the

03:00 rank of lance corporal after three years battling and doing my best. And, and that’s, I did a couple of camps, one at Seymour and one at Benalla. I remember very well the Benalla one. I was the… The brigadier in charge of our regiment, was, he was Colonel Blamey,

03:30 in those days, later General Blamey. And I was to be his orderly, so I had to ride beside him with a lance on a pole. And when we got off to inspect troops or anything like that, I had to walk beside him with this lance, and lead his horse. On one occasion, I can remember, I stuck the lance in the ground, because I had three horses to hold, and a puff of wind came and

04:00 blew the lance over, and it was about an 18 foot long lance, with a spike on the end, and it fell right on Colonel Blamey’s head. I didn’t get full marks for that one, I tell you. Well that was about the end of my experiences with the Light Horse. In 19-, it must have been 1938,

04:30 they called for volunteers to join the new force which was being formed called the Darwin Mobile Force. And I went down to Melbourne to be selected, I think we were out at Victoria Barracks, about 400 of us from various walks of life, all went down to be selected. And we had to march around and around in a circle, and oh, someone in charge said, “Right-o, you fall out, you fall out,” and

05:00 so on, and someone picked me, and I fell out. I can remember that very well. And so I was picked to go to Darwin. Well we, what would happen, we would get on the train and go to Sydney, went out to Liverpool Camp, and then the rest of the recruits who were joining the Darwin Mobile Force, we were there for about three months doing what we called, our

05:30 rookie training. And after our three months there, around about Christmas time 193-, 1938, we marched down to the wharves in Sydney, got onto the old Montoro, which was a, an old Burns Philp boat, which incidentally had been commandeered from, it was the Kaiser’s yacht before the war.

06:00 And as part of the reparations, it was given to the Allies after the war. Australia got the Marella, which was renamed the Marella. Anyway. No, I’m sorry, not the Marella, the Montoro. We got on the Montoro with all our gear, and sailed to Darwin. We took with us our beds for the, which were all steel beds, that were

06:30 for the army, but we had no cabins on the Montoro. So we all put these, had to sleep on the deck. We put the beds up, put them all along the deck on both sides, and slept in the steel beds on the deck of the Montoro until we got to Darwin. And when we got to Darwin of course, we were marched from the wharf there out to Vestie’s Meatworks, which was to be our barracks. Vestie’s Meatworks which was closed down in about 1918, I think.

07:00 But the, the buildings were still there in a very dilapidated condition too. So that’s how I started off. And do you want me to carry on from there?

Yes I do actually, its wonderful.

Well, after being there about twelve months, we were mainly, we didn’t do much training, military training there, we were mainly building roads and making maps. We built the road to

07:30 East Point, which is now a main road going from Darwin to East Point, but in those days it was just a muddy track. So we built that road, we also built the road out to Rapid Creek, and other roads around Darwin, all by hand with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows. And then the war was declared of course in September 19-, what was, 1939, I think.

08:00 And that was when we were down doing some exercises at Adelaide River, when war broke out. So we got in trucks and drove back to Darwin. And our job in Darwin as the mobile force, was to train recruits, because they called for recruits to join the AIF [Australian Imperial Force], and a lot of people in Darwin and from down in the country, as far as Tennant Creek, came up to Darwin to join the AIF. And they were given

08:30 DX numbers. People from New South Wales got NX numbers, Victorians got VX numbers, and so on. All those who enlisted in Darwin had DX numbers. So we, we trained these fellows in marching mainly, left return, right turn and all that sort of thing. And I can remember one of the fellows who joined up, was a fairly old bloke, a lot of old fellows joined up, some didn’t last

09:00 the distance, they were ordered out of the battalion and we got new ones came in, and they went to what we called ‘olds and bolds’. So the oldest olds and bolds, they took base jobs later on. Anyway, this particular fellow named, was named Nobby Hyde, and he, he came from Tennant Creek, he was a miner down there. And I trained, I was one of those who trained him in Darwin.

09:30 I met him later on during the war, which I’ll tell you about later, or would like me to carry on and tell you now about it.

Oh well we’ll go back through everything in much more detail, so keep going the way you are.

Anyway, seeing all these fellows were being trained by us in Darwin, and being sent down to, down south to join the AIF, we had a lot of applications from the mobile force to join the AIF. And our CO [Commanding Officer] was Colonel

10:00 Andy McDonald. He was a well-known fellow from the, actually, First World War, but he became our Commanding Officer, later to command the jungle training unit at, down at Canungra. Any rate, Andy called us, called a parade, battalion parade, and he said, “Right, no more

10:30 applications from you fellows to join the AIF, I won’t have you fellows joining this mob of sightseers going overseas, you’ve got to stay, you’ve got to stay here at home.” So at that stage, another fellow named Tinsley, and myself, we were talking about it, and we decided we’d, we’d go on and buy our own tickets to go down to Melbourne by plane, and join the AIF under assumed names, which we did. We went into Darwin and bought a

11:00 ticket, it cost us eighteen pounds something, to go to Adelaide in those days. And any rate, the plane left at about, oh four or five o’clock in the morning from Darwin. And Tinsley and I took our ports on our shoulders, marched out to the, to the aerodrome, which was the old aerodrome at Parap in those days. And when we got out there, there was a sergeant of police there, named

11:30 McCaffery. And Sergeant McCaffery came up to us, he said, “Are you fellows going on, on leave?” And we said, “Yes, we are.” He said, “I wonder if you’d mind posting this official mail for me when you get to Adelaide.” And we said, “Oh no, we’ll post it.” So he gave us a bundle of letters and things to post, and he did that because in those days, all the mail that went from Darwin, went by sea around to Sydney. So it would have taken about three weeks probably for a

12:00 letter to get to Sydney. By us taking it down and posting it in Adelaide, it would get to Melbourne or wherever it was going, in about two days. So that’s what we did, and he thanked us very much and we got on the plane. And we posted his mail when we got to Adelaide. But on the way down to Adelaide, we stopped at Alice Springs for lunch. And in those days, Alice Springs was just an

12:30 aerodrome out in the wilds, with no, no trees or anything around it. And we got out of the plane and stood in the shade under the wing of the plane, and a utility came out with lunch for us. I can remember the lunch was, I think it was egg, egg sandwiches plus a tin of jam. And the bloke who bought it out, had an old hand tin opener, and he opened the tin with the tin opener, and the flies were that bad,

13:00 that they all centred on the jam, we couldn’t get into the tin for the flies. So, not many of us had bread and jam. The egg sandwiches were all right, but not the bread and jam. Anyway, we got to Adelaide, we got on a train there and went across to, to Melbourne. We paid our way of course. And we got to Melbourne and we walked from, 13:30 well we were still in uniform. We didn’t get out of uniform because we knew if we got out of uniform, we could be charged with desertion. So we stayed in uniform all the time. Everyone asked us what we were doing, and we said we were on leave, and all they said oh good, you know, blah, blah. And that was that. Anyway, we walked across Princess Bridge to the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association], which in those days was just across Princess Bridge, we booked in there for the night. And then the next day, we got into

14:00 our civvies, and marched across Princes Bridge to, to the station, Flinders Street Station. And they, the army had taken over one of the ticket boxes as a recruiting office. And there was a corporal there signing people up. And he’d say name, and you’d give your name, and I said, “Doug Copp,” so he wrote Doug Copp. Religion, I said, I said

14:30 “C of E [Church of England],” but the bloke behind me was coming along, and he said to him “What’s your religion?” and he said, “Christian.” He said, “What’s your bloody religion?” He said, “Christian.” He said, “Oh there’s nothing, there’s no such thing. I’ll put you down as C of E.” So he did that. Anyway, we went out to, to be passed for the AIF, out to, I think it was, out to ah Victoria Barracks again. And we were all x-rayed in front of a

15:00 machine, which is about chest height. And the fellow in front of me, he went through and he was, he was knocked back. He had to go back and have his chest x-ray done again. And he said, “Oh cripes” he said, “I don’t like this, I might have TB [tuberculosis].” I said, “I’ll do it for you.” So when his name was called out to be x-rayed, I said, “Yes,” and I went up, stood up in front of the x-ray machine and he passed. Well he thanked me very much of course, and he got into the army,

15:30 he got into the AIF. I’ve never heard of, or saw him again, so I don’t know what happened to him, he probably died of TB. Anyway, we went out to the showgrounds from there, in trucks. And we were split up into, oh we were issued with a, with a uniform, or part of a uniform anyway. And a blanket, and pillow.

16:00 And we went out and slept in the cow yards or somewhere, the horse stalls or somewhere like that, wherever it was. And there were AIC fellows, it’s Australian Instruction Corps, WO2 [Warrant Officer Class 2], they were training us out there, they were marching us up and down, left right, left right, left turn, right turn, and all this sort of thing. Which we did very well, we’d known, we’d been doing it for years. So there was an old colonel.

16:30 Oh no, we were doing this and they said, “Oh you fellows have done this before,” and we said, “Yes.” He said, “Oh you take over the squad.” So they split the squad into about, it might have been about fifty fellows and they split them into about three and we had one each, about twelve or eighteen fellows, marching up and down, left right, left right, right turn, left turn. And there was an old colonel on the sidewalk, standing there. And when it was over, he came over to us and he said,

17:00 “You two fellows, you’ve done a bit of training before.” And we said, “Yes, we’ve done a lot of it.” “Oh,” he said, “I can see you’ve done a lot of it. I’m Colonel… My name is Colonel McCormack, and I’m forming a unit to go to the Middle East as a training unit.” He said, “I want two training instructors.” He said, “I’ll make you sergeants, if you’ll come with me. Would you like to go?” And we said, “Oh yes.” So he made us sergeants on the spot,

17:30 we went out to Caulfield, slept in the grandstands out there, and waited till the boat was ready to go. And when we were ready to go, I think it was the 5th of May 1940, we marched down with other reinforcements to the Middle East, they were reinforcements to the 2/5th, 2/6th and 2/7th battalions, and us from overseas base. And we went down there, and got on the HMTX5, which was the Empress of

18:00 Canada. She was a boat of about 26,000 tons. And away we went, sailing for the Middle East. Well that was all right, we didn’t do any training on board, we just did some PT [Physical Training], you know, running on the spot and that sort of thing, there wasn’t much room on the boat. And half way across the Indian Ocean, the Italians came into the war. So we received a message that the Italians had come into the war, do not proceed, proceed to Cape Town. So we turned around, and went back to Cape

18:30 Town, the whole convoy. There was the Andes, the Mauritania, oh about seven, seven or eight big ships, the Queen Mary amongst them too. And we went back to, to Cape Town and anchored in a bay there. And, and eventually, oh while we were there, the, our crew was Chinese, mainly Chinese from Hong Kong, and they’d been signed on for Pacific waters only.

19:00 So they wouldn’t sail the ship into the Atlantic. So they all grabbed their bags and walked down the gangway off the ship, no trouble at all. They’d signed on for Pacific Waters, so they were quite entitled to go. So the old, the 2IC [Second in Command], the first officer on the ship called for any people who’d had any seagoing experience to parade on the boat deck. So Tinsley and I both went up there.

19:30 He, I think his, his father or his uncle or someone had a yacht on Sydney Harbour, and I’d had a tin boat on the Murray River, flat bottomed, about ten foot tin boat, so I put my hand up. So we went up, and we’re interviewed by the first officer, and those who had any experience got a ship. I got a job as in charge of the officers’ mess. But this bloke, old Nobby Hyde, who was a DX, he was going over as a reinforcement to the

20:00 Second 3rd Field Regiment, I think. And the first officer came along to him and he said, “Yes, what have you done, my man?” And he said, “Oh most things.” And he said, “Yeah, well what have you got anything to say of what you’ve done.” “Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve got my master’s certificate in both steam and sail.” “Oh God,” said the, said the first officer, “you’re, you’re better qualified than the captain of the ship here. You’d better come and meet him.” So,

20:30 so he was taken up to the bridge to the meet the captain, and he got a job for the rest of the trip to England, I think, as a quartermaster or something. But he, he was a qualified captain, better qualified than the captain of the ship, but he’d been a miner at Alice Springs. Anyway, that was the story of old Nobby Hyde. So he knew all about me, because I’d trained him in Darwin, you know, left right, left right, this sort of thing.

21:00 But we didn’t, he didn’t say a thing to me, to anyone about me, he didn’t spill the beans, in other words. At any rate, we then sailed up the west coast of Africa, to, to Sierra Leone, Freetown, Sierra Leone, pulled in there to re-coal. And we didn’t get ashore there, but we were there for about a day and a half, I

21:30 think. And then we, we set sail for England. Of course no-one told us where we were going, but we’d all guessed it was England. And when we got out of the harbour, we were picked up by an old aircraft carrier, the Albatross. Now she was an aircraft carrier from the First World War, so she didn’t have any catapults or anything like that, she had to, to, she had old sea planes on board, and they were, they went over the side,

22:00 into the water, and then they took off in the water. When they came back, they landed next to the ship, and they were pulled on board again. So she was a pretty old sort of, she was our escort to England. We got there of course. But on, after we left Sierra Leone, Tinsley and I decided we’d better put in a confession of fraud, fraudulent enlistment. So we wrote it all out, of course, what we were, where we came from, and we asked to be paraded to the OC [Officer Commanding] ship.

22:30 Now the OC ship was a colonel, I think from the First World War, I think he was ASC [Army Service Corps], but. He was an old First World War bloke, anyway. So we asked to be marched into him, to be seen in camera, which he agreed to. The ship’s sirus [?] then marched us in and closed the door, and he. This old colonel

23:00 said to the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major], “Right-o, march outside, major.” So he about-turned and marched out of the cabin, shut the door behind him. And then this old CO said, this old colonel said, “What do you want to see us for, see me for?” he said. We put our hands in our pockets both together, pulled out our confessions of fraudulent enlistment which we’d written out. And he looked at it, he said, “Oh,” he said, “this is a bit too hard for me.” He said, “I can’t try you

23:30 fellows. I’m not qualified to try you here.” He said, “I can put you in the brig until we get to England, you’ll be tried there, or I can tear this up. What would you like me to do?” We said, “Tear it up, sir.” So he got the confessions, tore them in half, put them in the rubbish bin, he said, “March out.” And we marched out of his cabin. So he wouldn’t take our confessions from us, so we got to England, and we landed at Gourack in Scotland, on the Clyde. Went by train down to Tidworth

24:00 on the Salisbury Plain. And formed the battalion there. And we were known as the 72nd Battalion, we were all formed up. A lot of people have said to me, “Why the 72nd Battalion?” Well the reason was that, we were over in England, and I had no idea what, when they were forming these three battalions, what to

24:30 call us. Because they didn’t know, had no immediate contact with the ah, Pansing [?] in Australia. So they carried on from the second, from the First World War. The last battalion in the First World War was the 69th Battalion. So they called us the 70th, 72nd and 73rd Battalion, so that’s, that’s how we, that’s what we were named. We were that for about three, three or four weeks, and then they got word from, back from Australia,

25:00 and we became the Second 33rd, 9th Division, which we never went to. Because eventually we got to the Middle East and the 9th Division were already there, and they had enough units already. So they, we were transferred to the 7th Division. That was in the, see in the early days there was only three battalions in a brigade. Then they formed four

25:30 battalions to a brigade, that’s when we came in. Anyway, do you want me to go on?

Yeah, again, again Doug, just a brief tour of, I guess your time in Syria and then coming back to Australia and New Guinea, and then we’ll go back and go through everything in a lot more detail. But you’re doing wonderfully.

Well, we landed at, well when we came back from England, around the Cape, we didn’t go to

26:00 Cape Town, we went to Durban that time. And we stayed there for a couple of days, and most of us went ashore, had a couple of days, had a, you know, had a few beers ashore, and then got back on the boat and went up to the Suez Canal. We went up the Suez Canal and landed at El Kantara. And went by train from there up to, up into Palestine to Gaza. And one of the

26:30 companies had been allocated to the Second 33rd, and they were at Gaza and they’d formed the camp. So they were already for us when we marched in. We went there and did a bit of training at Gaza, we were only there for a few weeks. And we were shunted back by train through Egypt to Mersa Matruh. And while we were there, the Germans at this stage under Rommel were coming down through Tobruk. And they’d,

27:00 they’d bypassed Tobruk, and they were heading for Cairo. Well our job was to stop them of course, which we did. We had dugouts in a line of defence out from Mersa Matruh south into the desert. And we were there for some weeks. Anyway, I can remember, all I can remember about that was the, the water problem. The big problem was water.

27:30 And every morning there’d be a water truck come out from Mersa Matruh, and everyone had to take their water bottle and fill it up with water. So your water bottle, which held about three or four pints, I suppose, it had to do every man for the day to wash, clean his teeth, drink, everything, one water bottle a day. Any rate, we were there for some weeks, it was all right,

28:00 we got by. But I very well remember the, the Polish brigade took over from us, and we were to go back in through Palestine, up into Syria. And I think the Polish brigade was called the Carpathian Brigade. Anyway, these fellows marched into the camp. And I can never forget the, the astonishment of all the troops when they saw these fellows came in. They marched

28:30 in, in a long line. A couple of officers in front, and behind them was their batmen, I suppose, carrying tin baths on their shoulders. And all immaculately dressed in caps and uniforms and all the rest, and they marched into camp and took over the dugout positions we had. And in these dugout positions, we had stored emergency rations which were not to be used in case the, the Germans attacked us.

29:00 And they were bully beef and biscuits mainly, stored away. Any rate, the, the Carpathian Brigade came in and took over our positions, and within five minutes they’d found the stores and were eating them. They ate the bully beef and biscuits in about two second flat. And then we marched out and left them, so what happened to them, I don’t know. But they were there for a while, and then I think they went to Italy

29:30 later on. Any rate, we went up to Syria. Where was it? Oh I’ve forgotten the name of the place we went to, but anyway, just south of the border between Lebanon and Palestine. We were camped there, El, El Pina, I think it was called, or Los Pina, Los Pina [Rosh Pina]. We were there for

30:00 two or three days not very long, and then we marched into Syria. And I remember, we had a young Jewish bloke who let us, showed us how to get into Syria, and he later became the, the, what do you call the, the Prime Minister or something of Syria, I’ve forgotten his name now, but he was very well known bloke. But he, in those days, he knew all the tracks into Syria.

30:30 So our particular battalion did a circuitous route, we went about fifteen miles into Syria, out up through the mountains and came out a place called Hebri. And we weren’t attacked by the French, because we got in behind them. And we were supposed to go to this place Hebri, which we had two days’ rations with us, and we were supposed to be, we’d be there

31:00 for about a day, and the battalion would come up and meet us there. The battalion never got there. None of the Australians got there, till the end of the war. So we were there for about, oh, over a week, we had no rations, but we used to go down, there was the, the Lebanese had some little patch of irrigation below their

31:30 village, where they grew watermelons and pumpkins and things like that. So we used to go down there and steal their, steal their produce, take it back up the hill to where we were. That’s how we existed. The French, of course, were probing our positions all the times, but on one particular occasion, there was about a company of them came in trucks and all unloaded, and spread out across the road

32:00 and attacked our position, my position, which is 11 Platoon B Company. And we were on a rocky little knoll. We could see them unloading and they could see us too. And they advanced on our position in the, you know, the general style of things that the open side and the high port, they were marching along in a long line. And my fellows were taking a pot or two at them. And I said, “Hold your

32:30 fire, don’t fire at them at all, let them come.” So when they got about, oh, 300 yards from us, I said, “Right-o, withdraw, all go back behind these rocks.” So we went back about a hundred yards, and they could see us going back, and when we got back there, behind this little knoll, I said, “Right-o, down on your hands and knees and we’ll crawl back to our old positions,” which we did, but we were under cover. By the time we got back there, the French were still advancing at the height port, you know.

33:00 regular army fashion. And when they got about a hundred yards away, I says, “Right-o, open fire, left to right.” So we were only a platoon of eight, but there were about, we were about fifty yards wide when we were in this position around this little knoll, and the, all the French troops are advancing at the high port, you know. And they just went down like nine pins, so the rest of them, about, we would,

33:30 they’d have been about a company of them, and I’d say half of them were shot, in the first, the first five minutes. So, the rest all went to ground, and then they got up and withdrew. But that was our attack on, the first attack. Then later on, oh the next day I think it was. There was a, a soldier on horseback came into our lines, see, came in from the north. 34:00 And he, a Caucasian, I think, with a headdress and flowing robes. So he came riding straight into our platoon position. And I said to the boys, “Don’t fire at him, don’t fire at him. Let him come, let him come. He’ll see us and he’ll surrender.” Anyway, he came right in amongst us, oh about ten yards from me, and he didn’t look like he was surrendering or anything. So I was there, and I

34:30 shot his horse, I always carried a rifle. So I shot his horse, and down went his horse, and he jumped off his horse, still with his rifle. And one of our fellows named Bluey Marshall, corporal, he was in front and I, he had the rifle pointed at this bloke, and I said, “Don’t shoot him, Bluey, don’t shoot him. He’ll give up when he sees us all here.” Any rate he came straight at us with this, with the rifle, he wouldn’t give up. So he got within two yards of Bluey, and I said, “Shoot him, Bluey.”

35:00 So Bluey shot him, shot him dead. And down he went. But if he hadn’t, he’d have shot Bluey, because he was just, he was just coming, and he knew we were all there, we were all around him, he took no notice of us. So that was the end of him. And that night we pulled out altogether. We got out of there, we got down from Ferntees [?], across a valley and marched back towards the, we could see our, hear our

35:30 guns firing, the 2/6th Field Regiment were firing at the enemy, from way back near the barrack, so we just marched towards our guns. And guns were firing, ‘boom, boom’, every now and again. And then they’d stop, and a couple more would fire, and so it went on all night. So we just marched, we didn’t strike a Frenchman all the way down, just marched down this valley back towards the guns, and there we were. When we got to the guns, someone came out, and he said, “What are you

36:00 blokes doing out here?” And they didn’t fire at us, they called us to halt, which we did. “What are you fellows doing?” “Oh, we’ve just been for a walk.” “Oh.” So we hadn’t eaten for about three days, so took us in and they cooked up some bully beef or something for us, and we had a meal and then we went back to join the rest of the battalion at Fort Khayyam. But they were still there. They never got, never, even right till the end of the war,

36:30 they never got as far as we went first day. So that was that. Then we were there for, at Khayyam for, a little while, and there was a fort behind the French lines called Fort Christophini, which was an old

37:00 fort that was built by the, might have been built by the Romans even, but was taken over by the Crusaders, an old Crusader fort, say Fort Khayyam was the same. And this Fort Christophini was on top of a hill, about another twenty miles in, further inland. So that was when the CO said to my Company Commander Gordon Bennett, he said, “Right-o, you will take your company and capture

37:30 Fort Christophini.” And Gordon looked at him rather amazed, and said, “Oh yes sir, right-o.” So away we marched, had to go through the French lines to get to this place. So we went right back to Hebri where we were before, stayed overnight there, and that’s were the funny incident occurred. There was, we were all in a sheep, sort of a pen, not a sheep pen, a goat pen built of stone,

38:00 stone wall was about four feet high. We got behind these stone walls, because the, the French were up to us, and they were firing at us. Any rate, an argument developed between two of my corporals, a fellow named Jackman, Corporal Jackman and Corporal Rattray. And they were having an argument about some stupid thing, I don’t know what it was, but any rate, Rattray took his teeth out, he had false teeth, and he put them up on the wall. And

38:30 they started a fight, you know, fisticuffs. Anyway, we were all egging them on, “Come on, hit him on the chin,” and all this sort of thing. Any rate in the meantime, the French up the hill, they started pot- shotting, and they fired a few shots. Didn’t hit one of our blokes, but they, one shot hit the false teeth, and they went into about a thousand pieces, so Rattray never got his, his teeth back. Any rate, the, the next morning,

39:00 we camped in this sort of sheep yard overnight, and then we had to attack Fort Christophini next day. And my platoon, as always, we were the advanced platoon. And Bennett said to us, “Right-o, you will capture Fort Christophini. You take your platoon and climb the wall and capture it.” We didn’t, there was supposed to be a squadron of cavalry in there. Any rate, we got up to this Fort Christophini.

Actually Doug, I’m just going to pause you there because we’re going to have to change tapes,

39:30 and I don’t want to interrupt you halfway through that story.

Okay.

39:34 – tape ends

Tape 2

00:33 Doug, please continue.

Anyway, anyway, when we got to Fort Christophini, a couple of fellows got up over the wall and looked in, there was nothing there. There were some horses there, and I went round to the gate, and opened the gate, walked in, it wasn’t locked. And there was an old chap, an old, an old Frenchman, and I said, “What are you going here?” And he said, “Oh, I’m in charge of the horses.” And I said, “Where

01:00 are the rest of them?” “Oh, gone down on patrol, or something.” So there was no-one in the fort at all, so we captured. And then at that stage, the artillery started, there was a, there was a pre-arranged signal that the artillery would fire on the fort at a certain time. So just as we were getting over the wall, the artillery started to fire at us. So the shells bursting all around. So we had to get a signal back pretty quick smart, for the artillery to stop firing. Any rate, after we

01:30 captured the fort, shall we say, which was no-one in it, we decided we’d better walk back towards Mermeric [?], where we were stationed. So we walked back over the hill, past Ferdeece [?] where we were, and we could hear some shots coming from a place called Rocha, Rocha el Focca [?], which was a town up on a rise on a hill. So we went up, we knew there must be something doing up there, because there were shots being fired.

02:00 So we marched towards this, and when we got up over a rise, we saw a squadron of cavalry, French cavalry with horse holders, fellows, the same as we used to do in the Light Horse. You’d have about, a section of horsemen and there’d be about four would get off your horses, and hold your horse to the horse holder. He would be there, he’d have his own horse and four others, which he’d hold and you’d take off on foot, you see. Any rate, we saw

02:30 this going on, we saw, we thought they must be attacking some of our people, although we didn’t know who it was. So we came in on the flank, and our CO, Gordon Bennett, said, “Right-o, two platoons forward, one in reserve, and we’ll attack them from the flank.” So they’re going up this valley, off their horses, and we just came in on the side, and we slaughtered them, because, they were all marching up this valley,

03:00 and we were on the high ground on the side, and we, they were … an open slather. So we just, we went ‘ping, ping, ping’ and half of them fell over, and the other half tried to run back towards their horses, and some of them did, and we captured sixty horses there. So when we rode, got back to Mermeric, we had sixty horses, French horses, and they were beautiful horses, they, we rode back, a lot of us rode back on horses.

03:30 And of course, when we got back, they took the horses from us. And they formed a, a reconnaissance battalion I think they called it, from the horses. And none of our fellows were put in charge. But there was a chap from the 8th Light Horse, which, who I knew before, he, he was the in the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion, and he was put in charge of this horse cavalry regiment. So he, they did, sort of spotters’ work,

04:00 finding out things. Anyway, we got back to battalion, took the horses back to battalion. And we got back there, and the battalion which was be, or the company that was being attacked, was C Company, the Second 33rd. And so they went back, we all got back to Khayyam, or near Khayyam and we were sent to a little place called Mermeric, which was a

04:30 stream running through the hills, and we took up position there. And it was there that we were fired upon by the French artillery, and air-burst ammunition. First time we’d struck air-burst ammunition, because normally all of our artillery had shells that went off and hit the ground, but these would go off about sixteen feet up in the air. And that was when I was hit in the shoulder, or not in the shoulder that was the second time, hit

05:00 in the back, back of the legs too. Still got some shot there, still got some shrapnel in my bum. Any rate, from there, oh that, had a pretty sad experience there. One of, one of, my runner, he wasn’t my runner, he was the company runner, but he was near me when, when I was hit, when these shells started bursting, and his name was Lenny

05:30 Monk, M-o-n-k. And I can remember him very well because he was an old Bar, Barnado boys, one of those that came out from England, because they didn’t have any relatives and they came out as young fellows to Australia. And he came out Lenny, and, any rate, he was hit in the head with a bit of shrapnel, and killed. So I can remember that pretty well, because everyone liked old Lenny, and he did exactly what he was told, and did it well, and didn’t, didn’t talk about it.

06:00 So he went back, he was taken back, he was, I don’t think he was buried there, he was taken back to be buried and I went back in the next, another truck back to Gaza, to the 2/2nd AGH [Australian General Hospital]. So that was the end of my experience in, in Syria. Then from there, after being about a week in the Second

06:30 2nd AGH, I was sent to a school, anti-malarial school, because people were getting malaria up there, and of course, we never, didn’t know anything about mosquito nets or anything like that in those days. So I was sent to this school, and I came back to the battalion as the expert on malaria.

Where was this school, Doug?

Ah, Latrun [?], I think it was Le Trun [?] in Palestine, Northern Palestine.

07:00 Anyway, got back to the battalion, so I got back as my old platoon, Eleven Platoon went back to that, and I was with them the all the rest of the time right till we got back to Australia. Any rate, after we’d been back in, we were back in, in Syria. Incidentally, when the French surrendered, they were given the option of

07:30 joining the Free French and us, or going, or being repatriated back to, not to, not to France, but they sent them back to Algeria, because you could go by boat across there. And most of them said no, we want to stay in the French Army, which they did, and they were put on a boat and sent back to Algeria. And most peculiar thing there. Nearly all the officers had their own motor cars, they were driving Peugeots, or Citroens, or something like that.

08:00 And they’d drive down to the wharf where the boat was going from, and get out of the car and take the keys out, and throw the keys to the nearest Australian soldier, “Here’s a car for you.” So that went on, and we had a car, my platoon had a car for the rest of the campaign. So instead of lugging our packs on our backs everywhere we went, we’d throw them in the back of the car. One of the fellows would drive it, and we, we took that car right back to

08:30 Palestine, right back to El Kantara, and left it there when we got our boats to go back to Australia. So when we got back to Port Tewfik actually, the CO said to me, “Right-o Cullen” – or Copp, “Right-o Copp, take your platoon down to the wharf

09:00 and report to the first officer on the Silver Maple.” So I went down and wondered what I was going to do, but anyway. You didn’t ask what was, why or anything in those days, you just... So I said to the platoon, “Right-o, follow me,” and away we go down to the wharf. So we marched down to the wharf, marched up the gangway to the first officer on the Silver Maple, and he said, “Oh, you’re the ships ack- ack party, are you?” I said, “I suppose we are. I was just told to report to you.” “Oh,” he said, “well, there’s a, a three-inch twenty hundredweight anti-aircraft gun,

09:30 there’s a five inch gun on the fantail, and there a whole lot of Oerlikons all round the place. You’re the ships ack-ack party.” I said, “Can you tell us anything about these guns?” He said, “No. Don’t you know anything about that?” I said, “None of us have ever seen one before in our lives.” They were all American guns, you see. And the, except the five inch gun on the stern, it had Vickers Armstrong in a big oval brass plate on it, Vickers Armstrong 1887,

10:00 written on it. So it had been through the Boer War, and we had it on the... So any rate I said to this, we were sailing, by this time, we were sailing down the, the Red Sea, no cabins of course, all on the deck. I said, “Where do we sleep?” “Oh,” he said, “anywhere you like.” So we just rolled out our swags on the, on the deck, and that’s how we went down the Red. Going down the Red Sea, I said to the first officer, “Have you got ammunition for that five-inch gun?” He said, “Oh yes, I’ve got a bit.” I said, “Can you send us some?

10:30 We’ll have a bit of practice.” “Oh yes,” he said, “I’ll send you up a few rounds.” So he sent up five rounds of ammunition about that long, took one man all his time to carry them, this five-inch gun ammunition. So we kicked a 44-gallon drum over the side, and let it float back, and we fired a shot at this drum, which was only a couple of hundred yards behind us, missed it by about a quarter of a mile.

11:00 We fired more shots and still missed it by a quarter of a mile. So we, so I said to the first officer, “Can you…” the next day, “Can you send us up some more ammunition for that gun?” He said, “No,” and I said, “Why not?” He said, “When we left Manchester, I was issued with twenty-five rounds of ammunition for that gun. You’ve used five of them. That only leaves me with twenty, and we won’t get any more.” So we went right across the

11:30 Indian Ocean to a place called Cochin, C-O-C-H-I-N, which was Portuguese West India. And the Portuguese had handed it back to the Indians at this stage, but we called in there to refuel. And here we are, all on the deck of this boat of course, call in there. And the thing that I can remember vividly about it, is the way they coaled the ship.

12:00 We were used to a big grab coming, or a crane taking the coal, and emptying it into the deck. But there they had about a hundred Indian fellows with little straw mats on their heads, and they’d put the coal in the straw mat and run up the gangway and tip it into the hold, and then run down another gangway. And they did that all day, that’s how they coaled the ship. Anyway, we were there for about three or four days, and then we set sail for, well we thought

12:30 we were going to Burma, or we set, when we set off from, we chiefly thought we were going to Burma, but when we got to the rest of the battalion, they were on other ships, they were in a convoy, and they were Trincomalee, off Ceylon. Any rate, by this time we decided we weren’t going to Burma, because the Japs had taken Burma and they were fighting for Java, so we thought oh, we’re on the way to Java.

13:00 And we were too, because some, some of the battalion, not the battalion, some of the division got to Burma, got to Java and they were landed and the Japs were there before them, and they were put in the bag straight away. ‘Weary’ Dunlop was one of them. Weary Dunlop wasn’t 8th Division, he was 7th Division, and he was an MO [Medical Officer] and his medical unit went with the first convoy into Java. So

13:30 we sailed out, we reloaded with coal, and we thought we were going to, back to Australia. So we sailed down south through the Indian Ocean, we got about half way down and we were chased by a submarine, by a Jap submarine. Luckily it was just on dark and we could see the submarine, and of course, we were on the ship with no lights, all the lights were out. And the old captain of the ship let it sail south, then suddenly changed and went west,

14:00 and we sailed right over to Mombasa, lost the submarine thank goodness, otherwise, we’d have been sunk. Anyway, we didn’t go into Mombasa, but we sailed down between Madagascar and Mombasa right down south, then we headed east again and went right across the Indian Ocean to Perth, Fremantle. We pulled in there, went ashore, they refuelled the ship,

14:30 And we went, I think we all got drunk, went and had a few beers anyway.

I don’t believe it.

And then next day, we got back and sailed to Port Adelaide. And the ship got into Port Adelaide, the rest of the battalion had reached there a few days before of course, and they were camped at,

15:00 out from the Adelaide Hills anyway, Woodside. So we went out to Woodside and joined the rest of the battalion. And it was from Woodside that we got some leave, we had a weeks’ leave, I think everyone alternatively to go on leave. That was where one of our, one of my fellows, a fellow named Rocky Kilmurray, he was going on leave, I said, so he came to get a leave pass from me, and I said, “Where are you going, Rocky?” He said, “Oh, home.” I said, “Where’s home?”

15:30 “Oh,” he said, “up on the north coast of New South Wales.” I knew he was a fisherman this bloke, and any rate he was one of these fellows that no-one in the whole platoon liked him, because he never had a wash, never had a shave, never cut his hair. He was a dirty, dirty little man. So when he was going on leave, I said, “Are you coming back, Rocky?” He

16:00 Said, “Oh, I might come back.” I said, “Well please yourself. You needn’t come back if you don’t want to.” He said, “I might do that.” Anyway he didn’t come back, we never saw him again, and everyone was very pleased too, because, he, as I said, he never had a wash, never changed his boots, never did anything. He was just, and complained all the time about everything, the food, you know, everything. So that was the end of

16:30 Rocky Kilmurray.

And was he Australian?

Yes, he was Australian, yes. No-one ever heard of him again.

That was the end of his army career?

Well, he might have joined, he might have joined up again under another name, you never know, I wouldn’t know what he did. Any rate from there, we got back after leave, and we were told we were going up north to the Brisbane line. Oh they were

17:00 forming a line across Brisbane, so the Japs could take Queensland, but they couldn’t take Brisbane. So we went first of all to Casino, and got off the train at Casino, and went out to a camp there on the, just out of Casino on the road north, what’s it called. Not, the, anyway, north of, north of Casino, there’s a town called

17:30 starts with ‘K’, I think. Anyway, we were about three or four miles out of Casino, and there was an old fellow across the road, on the other side of the road, from the camp. I don’t know his name, but I’ll never forget the time Kevin Power, who was the company commander of A Company, he and I used to go over and talk to him. And we said to this old fellow, “What do you do for a bit of fun around here?” “Oh,” he said, he said, “mostly fucking and fishing.”

18:00 And we’re forty miles from the sea. So, that was a bit of an eye opener to us. We’re forty miles from the sea, so he didn’t do much fishing. And yeah. Any rate, then we were there, we were only there in Casino only for about

18:30 a week, I suppose. And we were told we were going back to, going up north to defend the Brisbane Line. So we got on trucks and away we went, up through, went to Beenleigh. And I think at that stage, there was no bridge across the river at Beenleigh. So we went downstream a bit to another place, where there was a ferry across, and we went for a ferry,

19:00 went across on the ferry, truck after truck, you know, shuttled backwards and forwards. And then we, we did a battalion attack on Mount Cotton. So the whole battalion attacked Mount Cotton. A Company, or a couple of platoons were sent onto Mount Cotton to act as enemy, and they’d fire blanks at us, and anyway, we took Mount Cotton. And then all the, all

19:30 marched down again, got into the trucks, and ended up at Caboolture. So there we went into camp at Caboolture, and we were there then until we went to New Guinea. As a matter of fact we went from Caboolture to New Guinea, actually we got on the train at Caboolture, and went down to Brisbane. Got on a couple of ships, I’ve forgotten the names of the ships now, and ended up at Port Moresby. And when we got to Port Moresby,

20:00 we couldn’t get into the wharf, because the bay was too shallow for our ships, we had to stay out of the bay, and a couple, an Australian, oh what are they, not a cruiser, they were the next one down, a destroyer, no the next one down from the destroyer. Anyway, a small boat, a small naval boat came out,

20:30 took us off the ship and took us into the wharf, we got off and we went straight up to the Owen Stanleys. We went, got up onto the Sogeri Plateau. We were already to go straight into the, into the Owen Stanleys when they decided, we were the first battalion to be issued with green uniforms. So what they did, they had a couple of big boilers, big coppers with boiling water in it with dye, blue, green dye.

21:00 And you’d take your, what you’d do, is you’d walk past and take your shirt off, and your pants, and throw it in the copper. Walk on a bit further and they had a big pile of, of clothes that had been dyed. And you’d select the size, and get a shirt and a pair of pants out of it. Go on, put them on. If they fitted, you kept it, if they didn’t fit, you’d take them back and get a bigger pair. So that’s how, how we got our green uniforms. And then we went from there, straight up the,

21:30 to Imita Ridge, from there. Walked all the way. And that started then, the Owen Stanley campaign. Yes, great fun. Do you want me to carry on?

Yes, talk us, just in a summarised way about the Owen Stanleys, and then coming back to Australia, and then we’ll, we’ll go back, Doug.

Well now.

22:00 we were going up in more or less half hearted, not very organised fashion up through the Owen Stanleys, and we got as far as Iorabaiwa Ridge. And I was the, my section of my company was the right forward company, and there was a precipice going down from Iorabaiwa Ridge, it went down towards Naura [?]. And the Japs

22:30 were forcing their way through, and also there were, there were remnants of the 21st Brigade fellows were coming back, you know, dribbling back, some of them being carried on stretchers, some of them walking, other hobbling back. And we let them through and we waited for the Japs. Any rate, we were there for a day and that was when our first casualty was. We had two casualties there.

23:00 But the first one was an officer named Graham Barclay, who was a Tasmanian, and he was walking about in the middle of the night, and he was shot right through the head. By the, the Japanese had come up the hill after this precipice and they were trying to get over the top, we were along the precipice. Any rate he was shot dead, he was the first casualty in the battalion, in the Owen Stanleys. Any rate, we were there, sort of strung out, there was the Second 25th

23:30 Battalion there, and the 31st Battalion, they were all sort of stretched, strung out, not very well organised at all. And our brigadier, Ken Eather, he said, he said, “Right-o, we’re withdrawing. We’re withdrawing back to Imita Ridge.” So we all marched back and got into our respective positions, and stayed overnight,

24:00 had a meal and then we advanced as a brigade, we went forward. But several people started to criticize Ken Eather for withdrawing. But he withdrew so that he could consolidate the three battalions as a brigade, and move forward, which he did next day. We didn’t stop them, we went straight through. Of course the Japs were withdrawing too. They got as far up as Iorabaiwa, and they found that they’d run out of tucker and run out of ammunition,

24:30 and everything else, so they started to withdraw. So, although, although we were pushing them, they were withdrawing, and they put up little stands, you know, only a section or a platoon, sort of stand. And then we’d push them back and they’d go back to the next hill sort of thing, and do the same sort of thing, so they were doing withdrawal all the time as well as we were going forward.

25:00 So we went from there down to Naura, went into Naura with practically no opposition at all. And, and from Naura we crossed the, a river, I’ve forgotten what the river was called, I think it might have been the Brown River, and up unto Effogi on the other side and those places. So the first real Jap opposition we had, was at

25:30 Templeton’s Crossing. We got there, and they had a pretty defensive position there. Any rate, I did a patrol there, out, out on the right flank, came in on the Japs, surprised them really along the track, because they were on the track, along a ridge and we climbed up and nabbed them sort of thing. And I lost a few blokes there.

26:00 And that’s where I was recommended for a, recommended for a, oh I don’t know what. Anyway, from there we went on, and kept going all the way to Kokoda. And from Kokoda, we had a couple of days at Kokoda, the Japs were withdrawing all

26:30 the time. They put up a bit of a defence at Iori [Iorabaiwa] and Garara. And we came in from their right flank at Garara, and pushed them back. And then they went back across the Kumusi River. But they didn’t cross at the old Wairopi Bridge, they went downstream and swam across the river. That’s where they said General Hori, their commander lost his life, because he was drowned crossing the river, apparently he couldn’t swim.

27:00 Any rate, when we got to, to Wairopi, where the old wire rope bridge used to be, it’d been pulled down by the Japs, or pulled down by us to stop the Japs from coming across so easily. Anyway, when we got there, we decided we’d have to build a bridge. The Kumusi River was running fairly swiftly at this stage. And several of our fellows

27:30 were good swimmers, the Birrell Brothers, Rod and Doug, who was a, a commander, they swam across the river with sig [signal] wire, and they pulled the sig wire across behind them, they put ropes on it and pulled, pulled it, pulled the ropes across the river. And they built a swing bridge, put the ropes on the trees across, and stretch them across. And we would cut, we had to cut forked branches of trees, a branch with a fork in it, and

28:00 hook it over the top of a rope, and then bring the two bottoms together and tie them, and we put another log across between them. And in that book, there’s some, in the foot soldiers there’s a photograph of it. Any rate, the engineers came up then, they were going to build a, a pontoon bridge across there. But we’d already built our own bridge across. Any rate, they decided

28:30 they were going to build a pontoon bridge, and they sent messages back to Port Moresby that they wanted 44-gallon drums. So up came the 44-gallons in an aeroplane, they pushed them out of the door of the aeroplane. There was only one thing wrong. They’d filled them with, with petrol. So instead of an empty 44-gallon drums to build a pontoon, the 44-gallon drums came up, they pushed them with petrol, and they started a huge bushfire of course, petrol drums burst,

29:00 some of them caught fire, and that was the end of their bridge. So, the divisional engineers didn’t get, they got a raspberry over that one. Any rate, we all got across on the bridge. Can I show you that picture in the, of going across the river?

Okay sure, well, can we have a look at it after the tape?

Yes, all right.

29:30 And then we got across, went down, marched down to Jombora [?], and then we went to the left down to Gona, and some other units went to the right, to Buna. But we went to Gona. And it was, by this time, we were getting pretty low in numbers in the battalion, and, it was down there, that I was given command of

30:00 two companies, C and D Company. And a mate of mine, Kevin Power was given command of A and B Companies. That’s when we were taking, by this stage, there was only a hundred blokes all ranks, in the battalion, so there weren’t many left out of eight hundred, eight or nine hundred. So we were only there for about three days, when we were pulled out and sent back to

30:30 Port Moresby to regroup. And that was when, it was, at that stage it became a Captain Cook. Strange, strange term isn’t it. But I got malaria there, and I was sent back to the Casualty Clearing Station at Popendetta. And when I got back there, I was put in, put in a bed with a palliasse with two sticks through it, and a couple of forked sticks like that,

31:00 and that was the bed, and we all had those, mostly out in the open, but some under cover. And I was there for about three days, and all we got to eat was bully beef and biscuits. And I said to these mess orderly fellows that brought the tucker round, I said, “Haven’t you got anything else in the cookhouse?” “Oh yes, there’s a lot of stuff out there, but we don’t know how to cook it.” I said, “What’s there?” He said, “Oh, there’s bags of rice and bags of sugar, and bags of all sorts of stuff.”

31:30 He said, “We don’t know anything about it.” So this bloke Kevin Power, he’d gone back to, he’d been wounded, and, so we, by this stage we’d been there about three days and we were up out of bed and walking, sort of staggering around, and he said, “We’ll go and have a look at the cookhouse,” so out we went. And here were these blokes opening these tins of bully beef and biscuits, that’s all they were doing. So we said, “Oh we’ll take over. We’ll show you how to make bread.”

32:00 So you know the big oval dixies they have in the army? Well, we’d get one of those and we’d half fill it with flour, and stir in a bit of, a few raisins or something like that, baking powder and put it over a fire, put some water with it, mix it up, put it over a fire. And out would come a big horrible

32:30 looking, we’d call it bread, it was like a big dumpling or something. It’d come out, we handed it round to the blokes in bed, and they thought it was wonderful. “God,” he said to one of the fellows, “how, where are you getting all this stuff, where are you making this?” And they said, “Oh, we’ve got a couple of Captain Cooks out there.” So that’s how I became known as one of the Captain Cooks.

33:00 Anyway we did that for about, we showed them how to cook what they had, not that we were any good either, but we at least had a go. And we went back to the, by this time the battalion had been flown out to Moresby, and we went back to, plane the next day. So that was the end of the, the first Owen Stanley campaign.

But you didn’t go back. You didn’t go back to the Owen

33:30 Stanleys did you. After coming home? Did you return?

After coming home from where? The Owen Stanleys.

I didn’t go back a second time, no.

That was the end of the war for you?

Oh no, I went back to, we joined the Lae show, the Markham Valley show.

Right, but that was to fight the Japanese, wasn’t it?

That was time, I was wounded. And then I came back.

34:00 I was wounded at Edwards Plantation, outside, between Nadzab and Lae. And then I got back to, I went back to this, the hospital in, in Victoria, Heidelberg, Heidelberg Hospital. I was there for a while and eventually became, was posted as an instructor at LHQ [Land Headquarters] Technical School at Beenleigh, which was at the Beenleigh Showgrounds. And

34:30 at that stage, or a few weeks later, they decided to re-board all B-class personnel, who were B-classed in these out of the way jobs, because they thought a lot of them were bludging, you know, they were just back there doing nothing. So we were told we had to front up, there was an officer came, a medical officer came down from QLFC [?] [Queensland field command?] to re-board everyone at the attack school. So

35:00 a fellow who’d been wounded, had a bullet right through his stomach, took one of his kidneys out, and he was B-classed, he was an instructor down there, a fellow named Arch Barnett from the Second 25th Battalion. And Arch came out from this, where this officer was re-boarding everyone, with a big smile on his face, and he used to wear glasses too. And I said to Arch, I said, “What are you smiling for?” He said, “Oh, I’m A-Class.” And I said, “Oh, how did manage that?” He said, “Oh tell him anything

35:30 you like, but tell him, but don’t tell him what’s wrong with you.” I said, “What did you tell him?” He said, “I had crook eyes.” And he used to wear glasses all the time. So he said, “When I told him I had crook eyes, he said, ‘Can you read that against the wall?’” And he said, “A, B, C, whatever it was,” and he said, “Right-o, you’re A-class.” He said, “If you, if you want to be A-class, tell him anything, but don’t tell him what’s wrong with you.” So I went in, to this officer, and I can remember his name, Major McGregor from QLFC, he was a doctor.

36:00 And he said, “Oh yes Captain Cullen,” or, Captain Copp I was at that stage, I think. “What’s, what’s your trouble?” I said, “Bad eyes.” He said, “What’s wrong with your eyes?” I said, “Oh, they get very sore, and I’ve got to put Golden eye ointment in them,” which was true, I used to put Golden eye ointment in them. And he said, “Can you read that?” And I, “A, B, C,” or whatever it was and read the whole lot, he said, “You’re okay mate.” So I came out, A-class.

36:30 So Arch Barnett and myself both went back to the battalion, which was on the tablelands at this stage, ready to go to Borneo, or getting ready to go to Borneo. And any rate, went back on the same train actually. So I marched into the battalion, and our CO, old Tom Cotton said to me, “What are you doing back here?” And I said, “I’m A-Class.” He said, “Bullshit!” And I said, “Yes, A-class, here, look,

37:00 it says on the paperwork, A-Class.” “Oh,” he said, “are you? How did you manage that?” I said, “No, no, they just made me A-class.” He said, “Right-o, you’re going to be marched up to see that brigadier, up to division General Milford. So I marched up, and Arch Barnett, and I said, “Well, there you are, they’re my papers, I’m A-Class.” “Who made you A-class?”

37:30 I said, “There’s his name, Major McGregor.” So Major McGregor, I believe, I’ve never saw him since, but I believe he got the sack.

Did you stay in A-class?

No, I was sent back to B-class again. Yes, B-class again. So the next time I came back, I was B-class at this stage,

38:00 I was sent back to, oh yeah, to Brisbane somewhere probably, the showgrounds or somewhere like that, I was there for a while. And I got a posting to, to Canungra, a major, what did they call it?

Regimental major?

Pardon?

38:30 Regimental sergeant major.

No, no I was a major.

Major.

Yes. And I was posted to Canungra, as a, oh in charge of training, I forget what the position was. Any rate, when I got to Canungra, went out there, and who should be the CO at Canungra, but Bandy McDonald from, had been my CO in, in Darwin. So, at my

39:00 stint at the officers’ mess there, and I stopped to, old Bandy McDonald is standing there with his elbow on the bar and a whisky, a glass of whisky in his hand, because he drank whisky all the time. And so I stood in front of him, stood to attention and saluted. I said, “Major Cullen, sir, reporting for duty. I’m your new G2 [Intelligence Officer] training.” He looked at me, and he said, “Bullshit!”

39:30 And I said, “Yes, fair dinkum, sir.” I said, “Here’s my thing, I’m your new G2 training.” He said, “Pig’s arse!” So I must... Any rate, came out an application, nomination, they wanted someone to go to Singapore to form the First Australian War Crimes Section. So I got in touch with them and put in for that, and I was only at Canungra for about two days, and I got posted down to Sydney,

40:00 to take, to form the First Australian War Crimes Section. So thank goodness I got away from Bandy McDonald, and he was glad to get rid of me too, I think.

So Bandy had never forgiven you?

Oh no, he’d dead now, old Bandy, but.

Just for taking off.

Oh no, he wouldn’t, I’d done the wrong thing. Yeah. But fancy being posted as his G2 Training,

40:30 Second in Command actually.

When you went AWOL [AWL – Absent Without Leave] on him.

Yes, as a private. A gunner, a gunner who’d never fired a gun.

Yes, you can imagine his disdain. All right, we’d better switch tapes, Doug, we’ve run out of time.

40:54 – tape ends.

Tape 3

00:32 Now we’re ready to go.

Well, when I left the Canungra, and went down to Sydney. I was posted down to Melbourne to form the First Australian War Crimes Section. And went out to headquarters, army headquarters and to, to get my equipment table, see what I was allowed, so many trucks, and so many, and so

01:00 much of this and that and the other thing. And I was given carte blanche as what I could do. I could take whoever I wanted, but the main thing I wanted was court reporters. So I had to go round all the units down in Melbourne to see who could write shorthand, court reporters who could take shorthand, and a, I found them down there, they were in all sorts of units. And so I just, when I saw a bloke and I

01:30 wanted him, I just said, “You’re coming with me.” And went up to his officer, his officer commanding, and said, “I’ve got the pick of anyone to go to Singapore, so I’m taking this fellow from your unit.” “Oh,” they’d say. And when I went down to headquarters to get someone to go out to, I think it was out to,

02:00 North Fitzroy, I think, or somewhere out there, where they had people getting, you know, stores and that sort of thing. So I went to this unit and said I wanted a car and a driver to take me out, you know. They gave me a car and a driver. I had a nice Ford V8, I think it was,

02:30 with a driver. And this driver was very good, he drove around and did all the right things. When I got out there, I said, “How would you like to go to Singapore?” He said, “Oh, I’d love to go to Singapore.” He’d never been out of Australia. So I said, “Right-o, you’re my driver.” So he said, “Oh, but what about, you know, what about headquarters?” And I said, “I’ll get you from there.” So he became my driver, his name was Wolfenden. And so

03:00 he took me around everywhere. I had to collect trucks and stores of all sorts, tents, typewriters, all sorts of things, you see. So I had to get all these sort of things and form them all together out at Heidelberg, just past Heidelberg, I’ve forgotten the name of the place. And when we were all ready, I got them all down to Flinders Street, to Spencer Street Station,

03:30 and loaded the trucks and everything on board the train, on flattops, and away we went to South, to West Australia. Went right over to Western Australia and unloaded there. Went down and got on the Gorgon, which was the sister, the sister ship to the Centaur, and the Gorgon was going to Singapore. So I loaded all the trucks and typewriters and everything else on the Gorgon, and away we went. Called at Geraldton,

04:00 and all sorts of places on the way, the west coast of Australia, then, then there was Jakarta, not Jakarta, Batavia it was called in those days, and on to Singapore. And got there and unloaded, and I was surprised when we got there, because the Japanese were still unloading the ships. And here were the Japanese, little Japanese fellows running up and down the gangway carrying bags of spuds on their shoulders, and

04:30 one thing and another, and in charge of them is a Japanese corporal with his rifle and bayonet on it. And he’s saying, “Get a move on,” you know, and here were the Japanese unloading our ships, with their personnel and telling them what to do, and to hurry up, stop dawdling and all this sort of thing. Any rate, we went out from there, and we went up to, oh headquarters in Singapore, I forget where it was now. And

05:00 we went out to the Goodwood Park Hotel, and that was our headquarters in Singapore, the Goodwood Park Hotel, and we were there for the rest of the term. I was in charge of transport, administration and all that sort of thing, and when they were short of a, someone on the court, I’d be called in, I was only called in twice, I think to be a member of the court. But I was qualified

05:30 to do that. I can remember, I can well remember one member, when a Japanese fellow was condemned to death by hanging or being shot, shot at or whatever, a member of the court had to be there, to sign that he’d seen the job done. So I can remember, well remember General Harada, I think his name was, he was an ex-GOC [General Officer Commanding] Java, and he was

06:00 sentenced to be hanged, and I went out to Changi to see him hanged. And he said to me, “Please, please, please, can you shoot me? I do not want to be hanged.” I said, “Why don’t you want to be hanged?” He said, “Oh, it is a disgrace, it is a disgrace in my country to be hanged. It is quite all right to shoot people.” I said, “Oh well, we’ll shoot you.” So we took him down to Changi beach and shot him on the beach. So he got his wish, he wasn’t hanged.

06:30 So that’s, that’s the way the army did things in those days.

Anything to oblige.

So that was that. Then I was in Singapore then with War Crimes for about twelve months. And while I was there, I met a lot of people from the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation], who ran the British Far Eastern

07:00 Broadcasting Service. They had, they broadcast in nine different languages from Singapore, and well, I was quite friendly with them, and I said I think I’ll take my discharge, I’ve been in six years, or something in the army. And oh they said, “Why don’t you join us?” I said, “Yeah, what sort of a job will I get?” They said, “Oh, we’d make you administrative officer. You could run the, you know, look after the housing and food and all that sort of thing.”

07:30 I said, “Oh, I’ll be able to do that all right.” So I went, I took my discharge, went back to Australia, back to Victoria, was discharged at, oh, I’d say the showgrounds, but it wasn’t the showgrounds, it was something else out along Flemington Road, Royal Park, I think it was called. And I got a, a message from the

08:00 senior, the British Commissioner or something he was called, to come to Canberra. So I went up to Canberra, and when I got there, he said, “Here’s your ticket to Singapore. You fly out tomorrow morning from Rose Bay.” So I went up to Sydney, got on a plane and flew straight back to Singapore, on British Airways. Got back to Singapore, and took over administration over of

08:30 British Far Eastern Broadcasting Service, which was a good job. Any rate, my wife came up then, and we, they, I supplied the house of course. So we lived in, in oh at Singapore at, I’m trying to think of the road, I can’t even think of the road we were in, anyway, in a well known road in Singapore. And we were there for about

09:00 twelve months, and then a direction came through from the BBC that all personnel who’d been recruited in Singapore or outside of England, had to go back and do their time, twelve months at Shepherds Bush. So the boss in Singapore said to me, “All right, you’ve got to go back and do twelve months in Shepherds Bush, and you can come back after that, but everyone’s got to do time over there.” So I said to Barbara, my wife,

09:30 “What do you want to do, go back to, go over to England for a trip for twelve months, or go back to Australia?” She said, “Oh, go back to Australia.” So, so we went back to Australia on the old Marella.

And Doug, when were you and Barbara married?

We were married in, when, 19-, it must have been

10:00 1930, ’40, 1943 it must have been, ’44.

In between campaigns?

Yes. That’s right.

You were a busy boy.

I’d, actually the way I met Barbara, I had taken a friend of hers out, who was in the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] when I used to come up from Beenleigh to Brisbane. And, so I rang this girl up, 10:30 and said, “What about coming to the pictures with me? I’m coming up on the weekend.” She said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m going to, I’m sorry, I can’t go. But there’s a friend of mine might be able to go, so I’ll ask her.” So she asked Barbara, and Barbara said, “Oh yes.” So we met outside the GPO [General Post Office] at a certain time. And I think I told you the story, I used to see her every weekend, I’d come up and take her to the pictures or something like that, and on one occasion I said to her, “Barbara, let’s get married or something.”

11:00 And she said, “Let’s get married or nothing.” So we went out to, trying to think of the suburb, any rate, oh went, went out to Cannonbirch. It had a Church of England that we’re, on the road to the racecourse anyway.

11:30 And called in there on one Saturday afternoon and said, “We want to get married. Can you marry?” He said, “Oh, we’ve got to produce the bans and all sorts of things.” I said, “Can’t do that, I’m going on twenty-four days’ leave to Victoria and I want to take Barbara with me to meet my relations.” He said, “Oh, in that case we’ll be able to marry you straight away.” I said, this was on Saturday, I said, “What are you doing tomorrow?” He said, “Tomorrow’s Sunday,

12:00 you can’t marry people on Sundays.” I said, “Oh God, what are you doing the next day?” “Oh,” he said, so we were married on Monday morning. And down to Victoria on Tuesday on the train, I think it was. So that’s, that’s how we got married, I took her down with me, we stayed a couple of nights on Sydney, went on down to Corowa where I came from, and met my mother,

12:30 and sisters and all the family down there. And I remember my mother, Barbara being very taken aback because I said to my mother, “This is my wife, Barbara.” And you know what my mother said? “How do you do?” How do you do. Well, I’d married a Queensland girl, and Victorians didn’t marry Queensland girls in those days, they

13:00 were very bottom of the list.

Did they get on all right?

We got on all right. Any rate, that’s how we, she met my relations. But we got on quite well after that, no trouble at all.

Oh, that’s wonderful.

But my mother wasn’t too keen. I had been going, I had been engaged to a girl before I married Barbara,

13:30 and they had pots of money. And as a matter of fact, after we were married, this girl went to France to do a, to complete her education, or to Switzerland or somewhere, that’s how well off they were, they had too much money for me. Because when we were engaged and I can remember going into Melbourne on one occasion, and she’d see a bedroom

14:00 suite in the windows at Myers or something. “Oh,” she’ll say “I’ll have one of those, we’ll have one of those,” you know, about eight thousand dollars or something. Great big. I didn’t have eight thousand dollars to my name. So we didn’t continue with that relationship. So.

Doug if, if I can, I’d like to bring you right

14:30 back to the, to the start of your days just before the war, now. Because you’ve given us a wonderful introduction with lots of detail about where you were and what you got up to. But what I was, I was kind of interested whether in your early days as a boy or when you were growing up as a teenager, whether you had much knowledge of World War 1, did you know much about it at all?

Didn’t know much about it. I had

15:00 two uncles who were in World War 1, but I, I didn’t know much about it. My father fought in the Boer War. He was forty before he was married. So I always remember my father as an old man, I can’t remember enjoying life with him at all.

Did he, did he or your uncles share any war

15:30 stories with you, about?

No, no. No they didn’t, no.

So what was it that inspired you to join up with the militia originally?

Well everyone did in those days, and if you had a horse, and you supplied your own horse, of course. So if you had a horse and you lived in the country, and you had a section of Light Horse in the town, you joined up. So all sort of fellows in the bush, they joined the Light Horse.

16:00 Go to camp once a year, and so when you were at the camp you had an opportunity to get away from home. Go down to Seymour or somewhere like that for a week. So that was that. Something to do.

And you were mentioning to us in the break, that about, just about the 16:30 difference between the regular army and the AIF at the beginning of World War 11. There seemed a bit of tension between the AIF and regular army. Can you talk to us a bit about that?

Well, of course, there was no, there was no regular, there was no AIF until the outbreak of war, it was the militia, which I was in the 8th Light Horse, and the regular army, but there was no AIF until after September

17:00 ’39. And then they were special units, and they were mainly formed from people who were in the AIF, in the militia anyway, fellows from the 5th Battalion Victorian Regiment joined the AIF to be in the 5th Battalion, the 2/5th Battalion, and so on. Reinforcements came in, they might have come from anywhere. And they’d be, they’d be just drafted to, they might be asked where they’d like to go, but

17:30 normally they’d just be drafted. I can remember when they formed our battalion in England. The three battalion commanders had come, been in the Middle East, there was Colonel Strutt, Colonel Beerworth, I forget the other colonel, but the three battalions were being formed. And the way they formed them, they had all the reinforcements, there were reinforcements to the 18th Brigade, the Second 3rd Field Regiment, the all sorts of different overseas

18:00 base, which we were. And they formed them all up in a line, or in two lines. And the, the three officers went along, just went along the line and said, “You, form up over there, you, form up over there.” So that’s how they picked their battalions, they just went around and picked, they saw a likely looking bloke, they’d say him, “I’ll have him, I’ll have him.” Like picking a backyard cricket team.

18:30 Yet they didn’t know any of you to start with really.

No, no, no. They just went on what we, oh they might have, no they wouldn’t have known a thing about us at all, except the unit we were with, because we’d have had a coloured patch.

Had they marched you around the grounds before this?

No, we were just formed up, and these blokes. They might have asked us what we’d done where we come to us, but normally they’d

19:00 just look at a bloke and say, “Oh he looks like a likely character, I’ll have him.” So our, see I was, at this stage, I was a staff sergeant, but unattached to anywhere. But they knew I had been in the regular army. So when, when, the, the CO, our CO, Hamburger Bill, Lieutenant Colonel Beerworth came along, he looked at me and he said,

19:30 “Oh you were in the regular army, were you?” I said, “Yes, I was.” He said, “Oh you’d know a bit about something.” I said, “Oh yeah, a little bit.” He said, “How would you, do you know anything about the Q store [Quartermaster’s store]?” I said, “Oh yes, issuing rations and that sort of thing.” He said, “Right-o, you’re my quartermaster sergeant.” Regimental quartermaster. “Form up over there.” So that’s how I was picked as regimental quartermaster sergeant. And Tinsley, my mate, he was further down the line, he was picked.

20:00 They knew he’d been in the regular army too, and he said to Tinsley, he said, “What do you know?” “Oh, I’ve been in the, I’ve been in the coast artillery, I’ve been in this, that and the other thing and blah, blah blah.” He said, “Oh, you’d know about, a little bit about drill and regimentation and that sort of thing.” He said, “Oh yes, I know, know.” “Right-o, you’re RSM.” So he became RSM of the battalion that I was, and that’s how we were picked.

Now if these, if you were picked out, if they

20:30 knew you were in the regular army and you were pretty much on the run from the regular army, was that a concern, or did they question you about it?

Didn’t worry about that, too late to worry about that. I was over there, in England at this stage.

Oh that was in England right. That’s after your CO had torn up your confession.

They were mainly concerned that we joined the AIF, and they were AIF too, so they were worried about, you know, getting the right sort of blokes in the AIF.

21:00 Now what did the regular army fellows think of the AIF to start with, back in Australia?

Oh, most of them wanted to join. Most, but, not necessarily to join a battalion, to get overseas for a trip, go for a trip. Oh I think I told you before, they used to know us as the Cook’s Tourists, the AIF in the early days. Because the AIF were all going overseas, Cooks Tourists, lovely, going to

21:30 Egypt, and you know, see the Cairos, see the, see the pyramids at Cairo and all that sort of thing, wonderful.

So you think they were just a bit jealous?

I think so, yes, yes.

And was, did that go both ways, did the AIF have an opinion of the regular army and the way that it operated or ran?

No, I don’t think so, I never heard any,

22:00 anything about it, no. I think they, they looked up to the regular army, because they knew they’d been well trained, and they knew how to do drill and all this sort of thing. Knew how to behave, knew they had to be home by ten o’clock, and, and all that sort of thing, you know.

Did that change a bit when you joined the AIF?

No, no,

22:30 the regular army blokes were always regular army, they did as was expected of them.

Doug, do you remember, do you remember the actual outbreak of World War 11, where you were or how you heard the news?

Yes, we were down at Adelaide River doing a camp down there, just, just oh a week’s camp down there. And war broke out, and we all got into the trucks and had to drive back to Darwin. So went back there, when back into Vestie’s

23:00 Meatworks, which was our headquarters. And then we did our usual thing, which was, oh, the six o’clock parade and all that sort of thing, and march up and down, and, and we had to guard, we had guard duty then, we had to guard the oil tanks, and various, the wharf and this various things. So there, there were duties every day, you know, you’re on guard duty today, you’ll be going down to the oil tanks or somewhere

23:30 like that. Of course, they were guarded all the time, so there’d be a bloke walking around all the time with a rifle, and, in case someone tried to burn the oil tanks down, which could have happened, quite easily I suppose. There were a lot of Japanese in Darwin at this stage too. Of course, Japan, Japan hadn’t come into the war then, but they were expected to, at any time.

Even at that stage?

Yes,

24:00 they won’t let the Americans do what they want to do, they’ll stop them. Or try to.

Was the outbreak of war a surprise to you, or did you expect it?

Oh we expected it, I think, yeah.

What did you know about Hitler at that stage?

Well strangely enough we didn’t know much about, oh the paper, of course, was full of Hitler and what he was

24:30 doing. But while we were up in Darwin, a German plane landed in, the day before war broke out, a German plane landed at Darwin airport. A big swastika on the plane and on the wing, and on the tail. And he flew out just a few hours before war was declared, so he got away. Went back to Germany, I suppose, I don’t know what happened to him.

Fairly ominous sign, wasn’t it?

We were

25:00 guarding his plane to see that nothing happened to it.

Lucky he didn’t come down a few hours later.

That’s right.

Were there, up in Darwin at that, I mean, was there a real fear that, you know, of, of invasion, or that?

No, no, not at that stage at all.

25:30 No, the war was all concentrated on Europe. The Japanese, there was a thought that the Japs might come in, but no-one took much notice of it, they thought, “Oh…” There was a lot of Japanese in Darwin, of course, at that stage too. As a matter of fact, some photographs that I took were developed and printed by a Japanese firm in Darwin, I’ve forgotten his name now, but

26:00 Matsui or something, you know.

And Doug, when you buggered off down south with your mate, Tinsley, you went to Adelaide and Melbourne to sign up. Was Melbourne the first big city that you’d been into, growing up in the bush as you did?

Yes, yes, that was the nearest city, about 26:30 a hundred and eighty miles from home, from Corowa in those days. Sydney would have been about three hundred, I suppose, three or four hundred. So we naturally went there. We knew our way around Melbourne. And I can remember, people in those days in the country used to stay at the old Federal Hotel, that was the place to stay, or, if you were very high class,

27:00 you went to Menzies or, or somewhere like that. But most people stayed at the Federal. And when we went down there, we were in uniform of course, at this stage, and we, we booked into the Federal. And we met all sorts of blokes that we knew, you know, from Corowa and around, “Oh what,” “Oh yes, we joined up in the AIF.” “Oh, oh, good on you mate,” sort of thing. “Come and have a drink with us.” But oh no,

27:30 I think everyone was in those days, if you didn’t, you didn’t have a job you were tied down to, you were expected to join the AIF, anyway.

And you were saying in the break to us, that, I mean, that the reason a lot of fellows joined was because there weren’t that many jobs going around?

That’s right. Oh a lot of them didn’t have jobs, they’d join up, something to do, join the AIF, get a trip overseas, wonderful.

Was there

28:00 much talk amongst them all, of the possibility they might get shot at?

No, no-one thought about that. The main thing is, they thought they might be sunk at sea by a submarine. A lot of talk about that, because you had to go by ship, and submarines were about, of course.

28:30 Now you gave, you gave us a bit of a picture of your journey across to England before. But I’m just wondering Doug, you can talk us through your first impressions of England when you got there, and what that was like?

Impressions of England.

Yeah, your, your first impressions of England when you got there.

Well, when we got there, of course, the, the evacuation of Dunkirk had just, just happened. So there were a lot of troops around,

29:00 unattached. There were blokes walking about there, about London with no rifle, half a uniform, and they’d got, they’d got back on a ferry or something from across the other side, and they just didn’t know what was going on, and neither did we. And we expected the Germans to invade England, and land on the South Coast at Southampton or through their somewhere, and come up through England, but they never did.

29:30 And thank goodness they didn’t, because there was nothing to stop them. When I say there was nothing, we were there, half-armed, half-trained. The Pommies were there, they were half-armed and half- trained, too. So it wasn’t a, wasn’t a good situation, at all. So if the Germans had come, it would have been, someone to have fire a few shots at them on the beach, but after that, they’d have been able to

30:00 just run through England, and thank goodness they didn’t come, because they’d have had no problem. They’d have overrun England in no time.

Now did you know why you were in England at that stage? Were you, did you think you were there to protect her against Germany?

No, we knew we’d have to if anything happened, but we were just there

30:30 by the grace of God, you know, because the, the ship went there. The Italians came into the war, so we had to go round. And then of course we had to go right back round South Africa to get back to the Middle East, because you couldn’t go through the Mediterranean. So you know, it was a case of do what you have to do.

Where did you go when you first landed in England?

We landed at Gourack, which is on the, on the Clyde,

31:00 not far from Greenock, and we just landed there and got on a train and went straight down south, through Carlisle and places like that. Down, down through England to the Salisbury Plain, without stopping. We were in a little, little train, all sitting up one behind the other. Like troop trains everywhere, I suppose. Blokes sleeping up on the luggage racks, yeah.

31:30 What was it like being overseas for the first time?

Oh we loved it, it was something different, yes. We even bought a car. Tinsley and I bought a motor car.

How did you get hold of that? Well, in those days, petrol was rationed, of course, in England, and unless you had a special job, you couldn’t get petrol. So you put your car in the garage and left it here. And this particular woman, her husband was in the Middle East,

32:00 with, you know, in the army. And she lived at, just outside Tidworth. And an ad in the paper, local paper, ‘For Sale, Morris Special 6 Car, 50,000 kilometres on the clock’, or something, ‘as new, ten pounds’. So Tinsley and I decided we’d better go and have a look at this car. So we went around to this place and saw this

32:30 woman. She said, “Oh, yes, it’s in the garage, it’s been there for two years, or something, have a look at it.” So it was a lovely little motor car, a Morris 6. Almost unheard of in those days, a six cylinder Morris. Anyway, we got it out and went for a run and said, “Yes, we’ll buy it,” so we gave her the ten pounds and away we went. No such thing as, you know, transferring the registration or anything like that, we just gave her the ten pounds and drove away in the motor car.

33:00 Any rate, we’d been there for a while, and we decided we’d better go over to, I had an aunt and uncle who lived in Bristol. She went, she’d gone over in the First World War as a nurse, and she’d married this bloke, an Englishman. And they lived at Bristol, Portishead, just out of Bristol. Well, we’d better go over and see them. So we got in this car and we went, driving towards, driving towards Bristol, we got to Divisors,

33:30 which is the little town half way to Bristol. We were driving down the main street, and a big copper came out, hand up. “This car isn’t registered.” “Oh, isn’t it? Oh, we didn’t know.” “Where’s your licence?” “We haven’t got a licence.” Oh, took everything down in a book, and then he said … we got a notice in the mail, ‘You will appear at the Divisors

34:00 Assizes on such and such a date, to answer the charges of, all these charges’, you see, which we took no notice of, we just tore it up and threw it in the rubbish bin. So then we got another notice when we got to Colchester, saying, ‘You did not appear, what’s the reason?’ So we tore that up and threw that in the rubbish bin too. And then, when we left for the Middle East, our car, we left it on the parade ground, we just left it, someone would have picked it up and

34:30 driven it away. But any rate, when we got to the Middle East in, in Palestine somewhere, we got another notice. ‘You will appear at the Divisors Assizes at such and such a time to answer charges of this, that and the other thing.’ We never got another notice, thank goodness. So we had a car for about three months, paid ten pounds for it and left it there on the parade ground when we left.

35:00 You know how we got the petrol for it?

I was about to ask.

Well, when you, what we did with the car. You put, you got white paint and you put ‘WD’ and a number, 4065 or something, impressed vehicle on the back of it you see. So we did that, and then you’d, the ASC, the Army Service Corps took over petrol stations about every fifty miles

35:30 along all the main roads. So we’d drive into one of these service stations, and a corporal would come out and say, “Yes, sir,” and we’d say, “Fill it up, corporal, with petrol.” And he’d come out with a big book and he’d say “Sign here, sir,” so we’d sign there, put Tom Jones or something on it, and away we’d go. And we drove all over southern England like that, never got picked up once.

36:00 How wonderful.

So some funny things used to happen. I hope I’m not putting bad ideas into your head.

Too late.

So, then, oh when we were up in, we went up from Tidworth up to Colchester, after being in Tidworth for about three months,

36:30 we went to Colchester. And up in Colchester, we were in barracks, in Le Cateau, no Seton barracks, Colchester, which were built for the permanent army. And they were brick barracks, two storeys high, hot and cold water. In the camp at Tidworth we had no hot water. And every Saturday, whether you wanted it or not, you had to have a shower. So being the platoon commander, I used to say to my troops, “Right-o boys,

37:00 get your towels and your soap and follow me.” And away we’d go down to the shower recess, and there were shower cubicles, had about six showers in a tin hut, all cold of course. So I’d say, “Right-o, take your clothes off and hang them on the hooks all round the place. And bring your soap, and someone turn on all the showers.” And I’d start at one end and I’d race the showers, being the platoon commander I had to lead the platoon you see. Follow me in single file, move.

37:30 They’d all follow me through the shower, get to the other end, I’d say, “Right-o, soap up,” so they’d soap up, and, “Right-o back through the showers again,” cause we had to get the soap off. Cold showers, cold as ice. So, any rate, that was all right we had our shower once a week, whether we wanted it or not. But when we got to Colchester, they had hot water in there, and we had a shower, no trouble at all. 38:00 That’s what happened.

Doug, we’ll pause there, because we’re going to have to change tapes.

38:10 – tape ends.

Tape 4

00:32 Something that occurred to me, when you were staying at the meatworks in Darwin, was where did you sleep?

Well, I think I told you, we took our iron beds on the Montoro up to Darwin, they were on the deck, and we slept on the deck. When we got to Darwin, we undid the bed and they were carted out to the meatworks, and we put them up in the old cattle sheds or whatever they were, and we slept in there.

Yes.

On the same beds

01:00 that we took up.

I’m sorry, you did mention the iron beds. When you and Tinsley racked off from Darwin and went down to Victoria to enlist, were you scared of the plane, because to a lot of people in those days, flying was scary or risky?

No, we weren’t, we were happy to get on the plane without being… I told you about

01:30 the mail, didn’t I, the official mail.

Yes.

Yes, well we got on this plane, but the plane before us crashed, the day before, I’ve got pictures of it there. Crashed on the way south. And the plane, a Lockheed Electras, and they were the first, the first Lockheed planes to come out to Australia, before that they had old Gurney birds, and I don’t think a Gurney bird had come in actually, I don’t know what they had, an old DeHavilland something

02:00 or others. But the Lockheeds were American planes of course, they came in and took over. The one before, a couple of those before crashed on the way out. And strangely enough, it crashed at Berrima. Now Berrima then was just out of Darwin, now it’s a suburb of Darwin, houses all over it. But it crashed in amongst the trees, it crashed between two trees, and the wing, one of the wings was torn off but a tree, and it swung round,

02:30 and the tail was torn, torn off by a tree on this side, and all the people in the plane, just got up off their seats and walked out the back, cause there was no, no tail left on it. One bloke broke his thumb, that’s the only person who was hurt on the plane.

So that crash didn’t deter you?

Oh no, no.

When you were in England,

03:00 when you had arrived in England, were you aware of the devastation of the bombing that was occurring?

Well, well yes we were. The, the bombing hadn’t really started when we first landed, because they were just, still bombing the troops coming out of Dunkirk. But then they were flying over our camp to Southampton and Bristol and those places, bombing, and that’s when we,

03:30 one of our blokes shot at a, one of our own planes, there’s a story about it in the book. But, we had ack- ack posts set up around the, around the camp, there’d be a machine gun on a tripod, with sandbags around it and there’d be three of four of those around the camp. And when a plane flew over, they’d fire at it, you see. Well on this occasion, this particular occasion, a plane went over and ‘whoosh’ it was gone.

04:00 So the blokes, they’d missed it on the ack-ack post, but they heard another one coming, so they were already for him. And when he came over the hill, Snottington Hill it was called, they went ‘bang, bang, bang’ at it, and it was one of our blokes chasing the other one. So we had a letter from the, from the air force people up at Avon, Netheravon or somewhere which wasn’t far away, “Would you please desist from firing at our planes.”

04:30 Very nicely put.

How was your aunt’s reaction to seeing you and Tinsley down in Bristol?

Oh they welcomed us with open arms, and we had, we stayed there a couple of nights, and we went to the caves down there at, I’ve forgotten the name of the caves, well known caves at Colchester, or,

05:00 Chesham, Chesham Caves, we went there. And drove all around and then drove back to camp. No problem. Getting our petrol from the Royal Australian, Royal Australian Service, Service Corps petrol stations.

You reckon they would have cottoned onto you eventually?

Oh, they probably would of. But we weren’t there

05:30 that long, thank goodness.

What about girls there in England, you were there for six months, is that right?

Yes.

Did you meet any local village girls or meet any women?

Ah, on a trip to Bournemouth on one occasion, in our car that we more or less, stole. Picked up a girl down there and drove in to the town and she showed us round, she showed us round Bournemouth.

06:00 But that’s the only time. Didn’t see any local girls at Tidworth or anywhere around there, but there would have been girls around the place, but probably most of them in the services, in the army or in nursing, or something like that.

At that particular time when you were in England, is that when you were engaged to the lady back in Victoria, in Australia?

No, no it was after that. We came back.

And what about the local pubs,

06:30 did you frequent the pubs?

Oh yes, yes. Yes, they were good local pubs too, you’d go to a local pub and have a few beers. I had a, they didn’t have any Australian beer of course. They had, oh what kind of drink, Bass was the beer, B-A- S-S, it was a north, north England or Scottish beer, and it was dark in colour. And we used to call it Africa speaks,

07:00 Why?

Because it was dark, Africa speaks.

Sorry, I’m a bit slow. What about drinking warm beer though, was that weird?

Oh no, you got used to it. It wasn’t that warm, it was just not frozen like our, it would have just have a chill or just out of the tap, you know, it was pretty cold in England most of the time, so when it came up, it came up from the cellar down below, it was cool, but not,

07:30 not as cold as we normally have beer.

Did you write to your Mum and Dad?

Oh yes, yep, all the time.

And did they write to you?

Yes, yes.

Now you haven’t mentioned siblings, did you have any sisters or brothers?

Yes, I had, I had a brother, a younger brother who was still going to school when I left, and a younger sister too, who, she was at a school called Tintern

08:00 in Victoria, going to school, boarding school. And I never wrote to them, of course. But I wrote to Mum and Dad, sort of thing, just to tell them where we were, and how we were going. We weren’t allowed to say where we were, either. We used to have to say AIF, AIF Abroad. So if they wrote a letter to us, it would be Lieutenant HD Copp or whatever it was at that stage,

08:30 AIF Abroad, and, I suppose the letters would go to Sydney or Melbourne, and they’d say I wonder where the, they’d have the Battalion, Second 33rd Battalion, AIF Abroad. Oh they’re in England, we’ll post this over to England. So we’d get it in England. But otherwise we weren’t allowed to say where we were. So although we didn’t say where we were, everyone knew.

09:00 Did you get apprehended from your Father for taking off from Darwin and joining up with a false name?

He wasn’t very pleased about it. Wasn’t very pleased at all. But no, he was an old army bloke from the Boer War, so he knew a bit about the army. He said, “Oh,” he said, “if they catch you, they’ll shoot you.” 09:30 I said, “Oh no, they don’t do that these days.” He said, “Well they did in my day, if you went AWOL, they’d shoot you.” So that put us off a bit.

Is that why you decided to confess?

Oh no, we thought we better get back to our original names. And at any rate, we didn’t do much good by confessing as I told you, we were, the old OC ship said, “It’s too hard for me,” and threw it in the rubbish bin.

10:00 But then later on, I think it was after the, after the Owen Stanley show I confessed, and went through, and somewhere I’ve got a statement of it, you know, I got a reply from them, saying it’s okay, no action taken sort of thing.

Hang on one second. When you confessed after the

10:30 the Owen Stanleys, did the army just change your name to your Christian name, your proper name and then take no action?

Well I, somewhere I’ve got a copy of that confession. They just wrote to me, and said as from such a such a date, where the name WD Copp appears, will now be HD Cullen. GR so and so, you know, general routine orders came out, and that was that.

11:00 So everyone got a copy of that. And I, I just got out on parade one day, and called the troops on parade and said, “As from today, I’m no longer WD Copp, I’m HD Cullen,” and everyone said, “Hurrah!”

’Cause they all knew.

Yes, they all knew. So it went over pretty well.

What was your mate Tinsley’s real name?

His name was Tinsley.

11:30 But he changed it to Mair, M-A-I-R. And the reason being that his Doctor Mair from Gunnedah, New South Wales was his uncle. And another Uncle, a Dr, Mr Copp was a dentist at Rockdale. So Copp and Mair, that’s how I got the name Copp. So I wrote to him and I told him I was assuming his name, did he have any objection, and if anything came from my, that I’d been shot or something,

12:00 would he pass the news onto my mother. And he wrote back and said no problem at all, I’ll do that. And I never even met him, never met him the whole time I was in the army, and I only wrote to him once.

Did you, did you meet him later?

Never met him, never met him at all.

So tell us about getting your orders to leave England?

Well we were in Colchester, and I don’t know what the orders would have come down to the

12:30 battalion, but we were just informed one day that we were leaving the next day, get ready, pack your bags sort of thing, you’ll be issued with a tin of bully beef and a packet of biscuits, to carry as emergency rations. And form up outside the barracks square on such and such a day, at such and such a time, on such and such a day, which we did. And we were all marched down to the railway station, company by company, got on the train, and went to, up to

13:00 Scotland, just like that, no problem at all.

Did you park the Morris at the train station?

Did I what?

Did you park the, the car, the Morris, at the train station?

No we left it on the parade ground at Colchester, just left it there. So whoever came in next would see a motor car on the parade ground, and they’d say, “That’s funny, there’s a motor car, there.” And if they had any brains, they’d just grab it and use it.

So this would have been towards,

13:30 early ’41, is that correct?

It would have been in 1940, we left there in ’41, yes, in February ’41, we’d have left.

So this was before all the people of England would go and sleep in the Tube [underground railway station], and?

Oh they were doing it at that stage. As a matter of fact we had a couple of days leave in London, while we were at, on, at, at Tidworth, and I went up, and Tinsley,

14:00 and we booked in at a hotel called the Regents Palace Hotel, Piccadilly. And any rate, of course, we were as full as googs [drunk], as always, we’d been to the pub and staggered back to the hotel about one in the morning and climbed into bed. And about four o’clock in the morning there was a knock on the door, hammering, hammering, and a bloke came in, and he said, “Wake up, wake up, wake up, the bomb’s dropped on the hotel.”

14:30 And we said, “What, what, what, where?” But he said, “The east wing’s been blown off.” So we got out of bed, got dressed and had a look and the east wing had gone. A bomb had been dropped on top of it during the night, we didn’t even hear it, we were staying in the hotel. Yeah.

You were lucky.

15:00 Yes, that’s right. Oh, we were lucky in lots of ways. We helped with clearing up, bombs were dropping in London all over the place, and there were streets, you know, rubble everywhere and we helped clean it up, drag people out of it, out from underneath, all sorts of things, during the three days leave we had in London. Then we went back, back to the, back to the battalion on the train.

Can you, before we, we go on the train and head off to the Middle East, can you tell us

15:30 what the feeling was in London at that particular time, was there a great deal of fear?

No, there wasn’t. It was, everyone took it as the normal thing, Germans bombing the place, why, of course they would. No one seemed to worry too much. Well they’d worry, I suppose, but no-one showed it, there was no panic, put it that way. People were very good indeed, the way they handled the situation.

16:00 Yes.

Do you remember the, the devastation in the streets, buildings,

Oh yes.

Bricks and things?

Yep. We’d have to throw up bricks and mortars and one thing and another to allow cars to come down the street, because it’d be bombed from both sides. And while that’s what we did, that’s how we spent our leave in London. I think we, we went out to dinner a

16:30 couple of times and that was about it, at a café that hadn’t been bombed.

That was good of you to help.

Oh well, everyone, you know, bucked in and did what they could, civilians and everyone, all helped.

Were many people killed, did you see many people that had been?

Oh yes. You didn’t see a lot of them.

17:00 A lot of people had been injured by flying debris and that sort of thing. But ambulances would come along and they’d load them on and away they’d go to hospitals or somewhere, I don’t know where they went.

Must have been a crazy new world for you, having been this boy from the bush,

Yes, yes.

Landing in London.

Oh we just took it, took it in our stride, no trouble at all. Someone said to me it must have been terrible thing going back to the Middle East,

17:30 and going out into the desert. It wasn’t, we went from the green fields of England to the deserts of North Africa, no trouble at all, there was just no green grass there, that’s all.

Well, there was plenty in the Owen Stanleys.

Yes, that’s right.

So, sorry. Now you were telling us that you got on the ... at Colchester you left the car, and then you jumped on the train down to?

Up to Greenock.

Up to Greenock.

18:00 And that’s when you boarded the ship.

Boarded the ship, and the ship we boarded was the Nea Hellas, N-E-A, H-E-L-L-A-S, which means, new. It was a Greek ship and I think ‘Nea Hellas’ means ‘new Greece’, or something like that.

What, how did that ship compare to, was it the Empress, or? Oh not nearly, it was only a little Greek Mediterranean passenger boat. It was only a

18:30 small ship, I think about 7000 tons. So, but she was quite a nice ship, we, we liked it. We went all the way round to Port Tewfik in it. Whereas the Empress of Canada was 27,000 tons. And we had, the convoy went over to England was called the big ships convoy, because it had big ships, it had the,

19:00 I’m trying to think of all the names of the boats. There was the Empress of Canada, the Empress of Britain, can I get that book, the name of them is in that book, yeah, big book. Yep.

19:30 So the big ship convoy, the, the reason behind all the ships going there, was to chaperone the soldiers,

20:00 was it?

Well, it was taking the biggest contingent of soldiers to the, to the Middle East. The Empress, The Queen Mary.

The Queen Mary.

The Queen Mary was the biggest, yes there she is there, the Queen Mary, she came from, from Sydney.

So were there troops from Commonwealth Dominions everywhere on these ships, or was it just primarily England

20:30 and Australia?

On the ships, they were, England and Australia and New Zealand.

How did you get on with the Pommy blokes?

Oh well. No problems there. We even spoke the same language.

21:00 A bit different when we got up to Syria.

Why’s that?

Well, they spoke Arabic up there, or some of them spoke French, but none of them spoke English, that was a foreign language. Of course, you know, before the war, French was the universal language all over the world, people spoke French, but didn’t.

21:30 But now, everyone speaks English, of course. Even in China and places like that, they speak English. But before the war, they spoke French.

That’s right. I remember my Mother me telling me that.

Yes.

So the, the trip over on the Nea Hellas was, how long, a couple of weeks?

On the Nea Hellas?

The Nea Hellas.

Oh, it would have taken us three weeks at least.

22:00 It would be in here, how long it went.

And were you issued with the staple bully beef, and?

Yeah, well. On the Nea Hellas it was a bit, bit different, we were quite well fed on the Nea Hellas, really.

And did you have a, a Greek shipping crew?

Ah, no. There might have been a couple of Greek people on board.

22:30 But mainly taken over by the, taken over I’d say by the English Government.

Doug, seeing all these ships going over to the Middle East, was that just an amazing sight?

Well, they all pulled out of different, they all met at sea. The only one to come from Melbourne was the Empress of Canada. The Queen Mary came from,

23:00 from Sydney. The Andes and the Empress of Britain came from New Zealand. They all came from different places. The Aquitania too, I don’t know, it came from somewhere, I don’t know where, but it, probably Tasmania or somewhere.

I think that came from Australia, that’s right. So did you know what you’d be getting into, what you’d be doing?

No, no. We were like mushrooms, kept in the dark, told nothing. 23:30 So what did you do to stop yourself getting bored on the ship going over there?

Oh well, we used to do PT, get on the deck and do left right, left right, left right and jump up and down sort of thing. There wasn’t much room to do any sport, of any sort. But we did exercises, running up and down that sort of thing, mostly running on the spot, we’d have an hour of that

24:00 each day, sort of thing, to keep going.

What about two-up?

Oh there’d be always a game of two-up going on somewhere.

And how were you with your money, with all that money you were making?

Two and six a day we were making. Well, I had, most of mine was allocated to a pension fund. In other words, when I left, when I

24:30 joined up, I allocated, it was two and six a day, and two bob a day was allocated to a, to a bank account at Wangaratta, so I only got six pence a day, sort of thing, which was just enough, after about a month, you’d have enough for a couple of beers. Oh no, we didn’t have much money.

It doesn’t sound that you, like you joined the AIF for the money, anyway.

25:00 Oh no, no.

So Tinsley was with you all the time?

Pardon?

Was Tinsley with you all the time?

No, he had his eye knocked out in an accident in Colchester, and I didn’t see him again, until oh, towards the end of the war. But he had his eye knocked out, and his jaw broken and he was pretty well knocked about when I saw him in hospital in Colchester. He came back to Australia,

25:30 had a glass eye put in, in Melbourne. Got on the train, went to Sydney, and joined up as a private again. And they said to him, said to him, “Read, read that ABC.” And he read it, put your hand over the other eye, and he put his hand over the same eye. He got in, and he rose to the rank of major in the ASC [Army Service Corps]. And he was on,

26:00 at the end of the war, his main job was taking stores from Mt Isa Train Terminal to Darwin. He was in command of what they called the 134 General Transport Company, and that’s what he did.

So he signed up with his real name the second time?

Yes.

So tell us about arriving in Syria?

We went up by train to, I think a place

26:30 called Rosh Pina, not far from the Syrian border. And we stayed there for a couple of days. And a Jewish fellow there, took us across the border, showed us where we got to, could go across where we wouldn’t be seen, and go up to, along the foothills of Mount Hermon to Hebri, where we went. Took us

27:00 us all day and all night to get there.

What, sorry for interrupting, Doug, but what was the terrain like. When you arrived in, in Palestine, what, what did it look like?

Well, Palestine is a variety of places. There’s desert there, there is, there are rocky outcrops, rocky hills, and the valleys mainly, are quite fertile, quite good. And they did the same sort of thing as we were doing in northern Victoria. They were growing wheat and olives, and

27:30 things like that. But instead of having a great big Sundercut Plough going along about twenty discs, they had one little fire plough with a bullock or a camel pulling it, so it was a much harder job. And of course to cut the grain, they didn’t have harvesters, they had a sickle. And they used to go around cutting, putting it all in a heap, and then they’d have two or three donkeys or camels or something,

28:00 walking over it, like this, round and round and round, walking over it till all the grain came out of it, and they’d get the, get the trash off the top and all the grain would be at the bottom. It was pretty hard work for little gain. And strangely enough, during the First World War, there was a bloke in the Australian Army named

28:30 Spinney. I don’t know what his other name was, but anyway Spinney was his name. And when we got over there, the main item on our menu, was Spinney Sausages. And this Australian bloke started up a butcher shop, a big butcher shop over there, and he made sausages. And even, even today they’re probably still sold over there, but Spinney Sausages were the things you’d get, Spinney Sausages and they were Australian sausages. Before that they didn’t know how to 29:00 make sausages, I don’t think, over there.

Isn’t that funny. After the First World War he decided to stay there and open up a butcher shop.

Yes.

It seems such a strange.

Spinney Sausages. And they were good sausages too. He made good sausages. God knows what he made them out of, camel and…

Better not to know. Now but you were marched from Palestine into Syria,

29:30 is that correct?

Yes.

And that, so you weren’t in Palestine very long?

No, we went straight up to the top of Palestine, Ross Pinner.

So you walked all that way?

Oh no, we went up by train and bus to Ross Pinner.

To Ross Pinner. And then you walked into?

Walked from there, across the border into Syria.

How was Syria different to Palestine, in terrain?

Much the same really, except more rocky.

30:00 More, bigger hills with Mount Herman on, on our left hand side, on our right hand side as we went in. And then, of course, the old German, the old Crusader Forts like Khayyam, Christophini, Balbeck, all those old places were still there. All built out of marble, beautiful places, you know, still there today.

And did you think, gee I’ve come all this way and,

30:30 to the ends of the earth, kind of thing. You had no idea what was in store for you?

No we didn’t know really, just had to find out as we went along.

But your orders, correct me if I’m wrong, were to train the men, is that right, in Syria?

Was what?

To train the men. Get them ready.

No, you see. Syria was occupied by the Vichy French,

31:00 and in collaboration, of course, with the Arabs who were there, the Lebanese. The Germans had plane bases, they used to land planes in Syria, and we thought they might land planes there, and come down through Palestine, attack us. So we got in first really, went up there, which was a good thing, I think.

31:30 Because when we got there, there was, there were, we didn’t see any Germans there at all, they’d all taken off, they went back through Turkey or someway.

So tell us about your first week or two there in Syria, what did you do?

Well, we, there was the 21st Brigade went up through Sidon, up the coast.

32:00 We were the central sector, which was from Fort Khayyam across to the, to Mount Herman. And then the English and the Free French went up on the other side, up to Damascus on the, shall we say, on the eastern side of Mount Herman. So we went up there, and we had to go up, I don’t know, it should be in here where we went.

32:30 (BREAK)

33:00 What were you orders at the time, Doug?

Well at the time, we were just do a fighting patrol up to Hebri, and wait for the rest of the battalion who’d come and join us there. Of course, they never got there.

33:30 (BREAK)

34:00 Doug, why didn’t the Australians get there?

Why didn’t what? Why didn’t the Australians get there?

Get where?

To meet you?

They were held up all, all the way along the road, I think. They got as far as Fort Khayyam, and they were held up there.

34:30 See we went, we went round on a circuitous route.

35:00 Just hold it up to the camera? Ah-hah.

So we went up here to, from Palestine into Lebanon, and up to Hasbaiya, which is there.

35:30 So we went up to Hasbaiya and took Hasbaiya and stayed there. And the battalion were coming up through Fort Khayyam, and they never got there, they were held up at Fort Khayyam, never even got to us, they were supposed to join us the same, the end of the same week. But…

But, sorry Doug.

But we were stuck there for about a week on our own, on a hill. That’s where we were attacked by the French cavalry.

What do you mean, they were held up?

They were held up by the French,

36:00 shooting at them.

I mean, I didn’t think they were shopping or anything. But I guess I didn’t know what happened to the other blokes. Were they mostly injured or killed?

Oh no, they had to capture a place called Fort Khayyam, which was a big fort with walls about twenty feet high, which they eventually did, but they were held up there for about a week. And, but we had

36:30 gone on a circuitous route, and we were about ten miles further on, behind them. And here we were, sitting on a hill, waiting for them to come, and they never came. And we had a tin of bully beef and a packet of biscuits between about six or us, for about a week. And if it hadn’t been for thieving things, we used to go down into the valley below, and the, the Arabs or the Lebanese were growing watermelons and cucumbers and things down there, and

37:00 we used to go down at night and thieve them. That’s how we existed.

Did they ever find you? I mean, catch you?

No, they didn’t catch us pinching them, but they could have very easily. They were pretty lax, the French in their, some of their, some of their outposts, the things they did. They put guards up. For instance, we’re on the knoll of a hill, a big hill, it would have been about a mile around, I suppose, base of it

37:30 and we were up on top of it. And they had, they had sentries all round the bottom of the hill. And the sentries were about a hundred yards apart, there’d be one there and one here and one there, sort of thing, all around the hill. And we’d go down and peer at them, and look at them, and they’d, they’d be standing there and they’d have a rifle with a star bayonet on it. And they’d look at their clock,

38:00 and at about ten minutes to go to the hour or something, they’d start and walk towards the sentry down there, and the sentry down there started walking up towards them. They’d meet in the middle and say g’day or good night or something, turn round and go back again. And while they were doing that, we’d be walking back through the lines, we’d be going down to fill our water bottles with water at the creek or something like that, they didn’t even see us. You’d only send one bloke down, we’d send one bloke from each section down with a whole lot of water bottles,

38:30 to fill. And he’d have to, he’d wait till he saw the sentry going that way, and he’d come up, cross his line and walk up to where we were on the hill.

That would have been rather frightening, to be given that duty.

Oh yes. Yes. And when we, when we left that position and went back to where the artillery were, at Bermerick [?], we had to get the whole company across, the whole, in my case, the whole

39:00 platoon. So what we did was, we went down to about, you know, about fifty yards from this sentry, and we’d watch him go up that way, and then I’d send a section across, “Right-o, you go across you fellows, meet us on the other side under that big tree you can see down there.” So they’d go across and we’d wait, the sentry would come back again, and he’d light a cigarette or look at his watch or something, and he’d go back the other way. When he went back the other way, we’d send another section across. And that went on all the time, they didn’t even know 39:30 we’d gone.

After lunch I’d like to talk about the conflict that you had there with the Vichy French. That was when you were waiting for the Australians, is that correct?

Yes.

That, now that would have been your first conflict, your

Yes.

Your first conflict as a, as a soldier.

That’s right. Except we were

40:00 potted at by the French as we walked towards Hasbaiya, that’s were a couple of our blokes were wounded. My platoon sergeant, Ted Oldham got a bullet through the soldier, as we were marching along. And he, he went back to Australia after that, but he kept with us, but he had a bullet through the shoulder, so he had his arm in a sling for about a week.

All right, well we’ll talk about

40:30 that conflict that you had on the top of the hill there, after lunch.

Tape 5

00:31 Okay Doug, I wanted to start after lunch with what, you in the Middle East. Just before we were talking about Khayyam and Syria. Just wondering if you could talk us through the first time you encountered enemy fire, the first time you were shot at?

Well we went to, we did this patrol that took us

01:00 about all day, and all day to do it from when we went into Syria to Hasbaiya. And the villagers at Hasbaiya welcomed us, and gave us some goat’s milk or something to drink, and then we went to Furdeece [?], which was up the valley. And as we were going to Furdeece, we were fired on by the French, they were up in the hills on both sides of the road really. And we were strung out along the road in single file,

01:30 with two, section by section. And that, that’s where Ted Oldham, my Sergeant was shot in the arm. And a couple of other fellows were shot there too. But they were walking wounded, they went with us. And then we went up to Furdeece, that’s, that’s where we were went, where we were headquartered, or where we were supposed to go. So we captured Furdeece, and went up on the hill above, and stayed there

02:00 for two or three days before, observing the French, and pot-shotting at them, and they were pot- shotting at us too. But that was, we were there for about a week.

Now, did you know much about the French, what did they tell you about the Vichy French before you got into conflict with them?

Oh nothing, they were, they didn’t tell us much about them at all. They said they were, they’d probably, as soon as we marched in, they’d probably throw their hands in the

02:30 air and give in, but they didn’t. By the same token, some of them were pretty good fighters, and others withdrew pretty quickly and got out of the road. Though a lot of them were Caucasians, they came from North Africa, Algeria a lot of them. And they really weren’t, oh they were,

03:00 they were good soldiers, but they, their heart wasn’t in it really.

How could you tell?

I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t tell you that.

I was wondering, before lunch you mentioned the artillery fire you came under at Bermerick. I was wondering if you could just

03:30 talk us through that whole conflict, step by step, just in terms of when you got there, and what you saw and what you experienced?

Well this is when we came back from Fort Christophini. We came back to Bermerick was a little town up on the hill, and we took up positions in a little, a little creek really, I think it was called Bermerick Creek, surrounded by big rocks and one thing and another, and that’s where we were down there.

04:00 And we could see the French, see some of the French up at Orzedmakaze [?], they were looking down at, obviously they were observing us from Orzedmakaze. And they were directing their artillery fire on us. And we were only a platoon there, you know, there weren’t, hardly warranted artillery fire really. But anyway, they had a go at us, they probably thought there were more there than there actually were. But the rest of the

04:30 battalion were, went back to Khayyam, which was a village and a fort.

Now were you expecting the French, the Vichy French to be there. Were your orders there to take Bermerick and hold your position?

No, we were, we went back there from Fort Christophini just for a rest really, and to, sort of keep an eye on things, on that left, on that right flank. But they saw us there, and probably thought we were a

05:00 fighting patrol or something like that.

It was a bit of a surprise.

Yes. Any rate, that’s where they had a go at us.

And so. Can you walk us through what, what you were doing at the time and what happened, what was the first shot fired?

At the time, we were sitting in this creek behind big rocks, just keeping out of the road, and waiting for instructions on what to do next.

05:30 But no-one gave us any instructions and we sat there. And when I say we sat there, we were behind rocks and one thing and another, in a defensive position. But we weren’t attack anyone or anything like that, we were just sitting there resting really. And they must have seen us there from Orzedmakaze and directed their artillery fire out of. And that’s the only time, or the

06:00 the only, the only time we ever came under air-burst artillery shrapnel from air burst. Normally it was high explosive they fired at us.

And did you know about air-burst artillery?

Oh I knew about it, because having been in the artillery, I’d heard about it, but never, never struck it before and never fired any air-burst artillery either. But they, it was quite an experience.

06:30 Can you describe for us what it’s , I mean I know what it is technically, but for someone who wasn’t there, can you tell us what you sort of see and hear.

Well the, we could hear these shells coming over, they were, like this, and they were up above us, and we were just thinking, “Oh, they’re firing above us.” But then all of a sudden, some of them started to burst above us and fire shrapnel down on us. But before that, they were going over the top of us. And it was,

07:00 it was, the French had Glen Martin bombers, and we had Glen Martin bombers. And the French insignia was a red, white and blue circle, the same as ours. Except, I forget what it was now, but one had red in the middle and the other had blue in the middle. So we had to look at these aeroplanes to see what they were, and we couldn’t tell anyway. But when the started to drop bombs on us, we knew then, they were French, or Vichy French.

07:30 But it was quite amazing to know that they were using the same sort of bombers as we had. They were American bombers, Glen Martin.

That would have made it all a bit more confusing.

Yes, very confusing.

Was it strange to be tackling the French, given that they’d been allies to us in the past?

Oh no, it didn’t worry us at all. We,

08:00 they wore the same sort of uniforms and everything else as the Free French, so you couldn’t tell the difference. Though anyone who had a French uniform on, or those little peaked caps that they wore, you fired at them. You knew they were enemy, otherwise they wouldn’t be on the other side of the line. Yes.

And what did you think to yourself, coming under fire for the first time, particularly with, I guess, the artillery shells.

08:30 Oh, we weren’t very pleased about it, but took it all in our stride, just some artillery shells, that’s all.

Was the bursting shrapnel a bit of a surprise amongst you then?

Well yes, that surprised us a bit. But I got used to that sort of thing. You just expected, expected anything could happen, you expected.

And I mean, I guess, was, I mean, obviously because you weren’t

09:00 expecting initially that kind of burst, were people, were some of the men wounded straight up? Oh, there were one or two wounded, but not, not badly from it. One chap was killed, Lenny Monk, I think I mentioned his name before, he was killed. But there were a couple of other blokes were wounded slightly, but nothing very, nothing very bad really.

Can you, I mean you mentioned Lenny Monk to us briefly before, but can you, you mentioned that we was

09:30 a kind of company runner. Can you tell us a little bit about, about him, and what he?

Well, he was an Englishmen and he came out to, I think he came out to Australia under the Barnado Boys Scheme, or something like that, before the war. And he had no relations here, and he had no relations back in England, as far as I knew either. And of course, he was killed, so that was the end of Lenny Monk. And we buried him on the spot, temporarily. We did a lot of temporary buryings, they’d come down and bury them properly

10:00 later on. But all we did was dig a bit of a hole, might be a foot deep, put the body in it, cover it over with stones, and that was it, leave him there.

Did anybody say any words?

Pardon?

Did anybody say anything for him?

You used to say... Oh, we had a bit of a, everyone had a, a prayer book which was issued to, issued to all the officers, and it had the,

10:30 the burial service in it, and you’d just read it out. I forget what it was now, I wouldn’t know. Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, If the Devil, if God don’t get you, the Devil must. That’s what we used to say. Yes, I didn’t know much about it at all.

Seems fair enough in the field. But he died

11:00 right next to you though, didn’t he?

Yes, yes, he was right next to me. Oh we were both lying down, hiding behind rocks, he just had his head in the wrong place.

Did you know when he got hit, or, was… Did you know the moment that he got hit, or did you only realise?

I think I did. I think he got hit before me. So,

11:30 I might have been hit just a bit later, I’ve forgotten really.

But you, fortunately you were facing in a different direction.

That’s right, yes, a little bit further away. Behind a bigger rock.

And you got hit in the bum.

Yes. I had my bum up in the air.

12:00 Was it painful?

Oh, I can’t remember if it was painful or not, it might have been a bit painful.

So.

But these sort of things, you don’t remember the pain or anything about it. I was wounded a couple of times and … as a matter of fact that time, when I had shrapnel up the backside, there’s still some there.

Even today.

Even today. I went in to have an operation on something,

12:30 they x-rayed me and they said, “Oh some, there’s a lump of metal in your, in your backside there.” I said, “Oh yes, that’d be from Syria.” “Do you want us to take it out?” I said, “No, it’s not doing any harm, leave it there.” They said, “Oh, you want to be careful if you go through the airport, airport to go overseas, they’ll, they’ll knock you back at the airport.” But they never did. It couldn’t have been big enough to

13:00 register.

You’re lucky. It would have been a hell of a search.

So that was that.

So what happened once you were wounded, you went, you were taken to an AGH?

Well, an ambulance came up, I think it was an ambulance, or it might have been a truck and took me back to battalion headquarters, and got an ambulance there and went back through Palestine to 2/2nd

13:30 AGH at Gaza. I was there for about, oh I think about a week or a fortnight, I suppose. I remember very well there was a bloke in bed next to me. He’s still up here, I know him very well, his name, he was a red-headed young fellow he was, Gordon Sandilands. And Gordon Sandilands is still up here, he lives at Tarragindi now. And he was in the bed next to me, he had long red hair, it was hanging down over his shoulder. And he’d been flown

14:00 in from, oh he’d gone to Baghdad and up the, with the Tank Attack Regiment, went up there somewhere. And they were bombed and he was hit with a bomb and had a, his shoulder, his arm was knocked off, he only had one arm. Any rate he was in the bed next to me, and the sister came along and said, “Oh, you’ve got a, you’ve got a pair of clippers in your bag.” And being a platoon commander, we always

14:30 carried a pair of clippers, or a pair of scissors and a comb. Because sometimes you’d say to a bloke, “Get your hair cut,” if they had long hair. And he’d say, “Oh can’t, got no money, or there’s no, there’s no hairdressers about,” or something, he’d have some excuse. You’d say, “Okay, you, you cut his hair. Here’s a pair of scissors and a comb.” And he’d have to put up with someone cutting his hair. So when I was in hospital,

15:00 the bloke next to me was Gordon Sandilands. And he had this long red hair over, hanging down over his collar. And the sister said to me, “Oh, you’ve got a pair of clippers and scissors in your bag,” and I said, “Oh yes.” “Oh, would you mind cutting this young fellow’s hair.” And I said, “No, I’ll cut his hair,” so I cut his hair in the bed next to me, he only had one arm, and I cut his hair. And I’ve known him ever since, he lives over at Tarragindi. He often brings it up, he says, “Remember

15:30 the time you cut my hair?” “Yeah.” He stayed on in the army, and he only got out, oh a few years ago, finished up as a colonel, I think.

What would happen with your platoon, given that you were platoon commander, and now you’re out of action?

Oh, the second, second in command would be the sergeant, platoon sergeant, he’d take over. And we weren’t in action,

16:00 we were just sort of, you know, reed out, you know, biding time, he took over. And then I think they went back to Fort Khayyam and joined the rest of the battalion. And the war was just about over then anyway. And by the time I got back to the battalion, the war had finished, and I went back and joined my old platoon, as platoon commander.

What was the 2/2nd AGH like?

Oh, good hospital. It was at Gaza,

16:30 all under tents.

Was it, was it big, was it?

Yes, it was the biggest hospital over there. The biggest Australian hospital anyway.

And what did you think of the nurses?

Oh good, they were all good. All the nurses were all good. And the doctors, they were all, you know, they, they’d all trained for their jobs, and they did it well.

Was it, was it good being in the care

17:00 of Australian nurses, having not, I guess, probably seen much of a fresh female face for a while, or Australian anyway?

Yes, oh well it was nice to be able to talk English and be understood. I think I mentioned before, before the war, the alternative language was usually French, you know if you went to the continent, you spoke French. Now if you go to the continent

17:30 you speak English, and they all understand you. But in those days, French was spoken everywhere, and.

How did, how did the Australian boys get on with the locals? How did your mob get on with the locals when you were over in the Middle East?

Oh pretty good, yeah. Soon learnt a few words of Arabic.

Which ones?

Oh they were, well Arabic was spoken right from Egypt, right up through Palestine, into

18:00 Syria, it was all the same.

So were there any key Arabic words that came in handy? Ah yes. ‘Anamuskeen’, my fish for loose [?]. Because everywhere you went over there, there was someone trying to sell you something. And they were selling oranges or, you know, they would come up to you, and so you’d say, ‘anamuskeen’, which means I am poor, my fish for loose,

18:30 I have no money. ‘Anamuskeen’, my fish for loose, and they’d say “Oh,” they’d leave you alone.

And did they believe you, or did they keep trying to?

Oh, they half believe you, anyway. But I’ve said it here a few times. I’ve been, I was a member of the Maritime Museum in here in Southbank for oh, fifteen years I suppose. And occasionally we’d get some people come in from

19:00 Cairo or somewhere like that. And they’d be trying to talk to, they’d have a bit of English, and I’d say “anamuskeen,” my fish for loose, and they’d laugh like mad. Oh, they knew the score. When I, after I was wounded and went to, went down to Cairo to, to a rest camp down there, the House, the habbia, which,

19:30 the habbia is a boat, a house boat. We went through on a habbia on the Nile while we were recuperating. And Ghezira Gardens was just next door. And there was a little girl used to come down, when I say a little girl, she was about 23 or 24 I suppose. And she used to come down with a little kid about three to four. And she’d be walking though the gardens and we’d say

20:00 “hello” to her, usually in French, which I’ve forgotten now. But she would say to this little boy, “Say hello to the gentlemen in English,” and he would say, “How do you do?.” And anyway we got talking to this girl, she said, “He’s only four years old and he speaks eight languages.” And I said, “What do you mean, he speaks eight?” “Well his mother is English, his father is Italian, I am Egyptian, and

20:30 so he, they all got to speak to him in their own language.” So he finished up, he knew eight languages, and he was about four years old, four or five.

Incredible, isn’t it.

Amazing. Of course completely different, we can hardly speak our own language.

Now I’ve heard from a lot of fellows, that the Arabs were really good thieves.

Oh yes.

Did you have to, you know, deal with that in any way?

Oh well, on one occasion,

21:00 we, in Gaza, we had big, big tents, and up the middle was a pole. Around the pole we had a chain with a padlock. And you’d lean all your rifles against the pole, to put the chain around the trigger guards, and lock it so that all your rifles were locked on the chain. If you left them out, they’d be stolen. But on one occasion, some of the blokes woke up early in the morning, and they looked up and saw the stars.

21:30 What had happened, the Arabs had come in and pinched the tent. Pinched the tent, left the, left the pole there in the middle with all the, all the rifles strapped down, and all the beds round the outside.

They just wanted the tent.

That’s how they, that’s how good they were.

Nobody woke up.

No. They’d be able to pinch things without making a noise at all, just silently come in, pinch things and away they’d go, and they pinched the tent, you know.

22:00 And what about time off or leave, did you, what did you do to kind of let off steam?

Well, I’ve forgotten what, how many, how often we got leave, but we, I remember once we got, we got leave at Gaza to go to Jerusalem, you know, had a couple of days to go to Jerusalem. So what you’d do is, you’d go up on the bus usually. And so to, the

22:30 army canteens or someone had taken over the, oh, a big, a big hotel in Jerusalem, I’ve forgotten the name of it now. Any rate, they’d go up there and spend a couple of days, go round to the Wailing Wall and all these places you know, that you’d go to, and then go back home again. And nearly everyone, and go to Bethlehem. So, nearly everyone had a few days leave in,

23:00 in Jerusalem, one time or another.

Did any of the fellows visit any of ‘Blamey’s brothels’?

Blamey’s brothels. Well I don’t know about them. I think, I think they did probably. But I don’t know, I don’t know where Blamey’s, where was Blamey’s brothels?

There were some set up in Alexandria, and 23:30 apparently there were well, quite a few brothels in Bethlehem and a number of places, wherever there was a large force?

Well I didn’t strike any of them, but no doubt there would be, there were plenty of prostitutes around the place. In Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and all those places. There’d be girls would come

24:00 along to you and say, “Doing anything? You come too. You want to spend a pound?” Things like that, they’d say. But ah, they, oh they were doing a good job, they were looking after themselves, making a few bob.

And what would fellows get for a pound?

Go to bed for a couple of hours.

Did the, was the

24:30 general opinion that it was money well spent?

Well, they were nearly all Jewish girls. So they spoke English most of them. And they seemed to be on the job, you know. But I didn’t know much about them, some of the blokes knew all about them, you know.

And was that

25:00 Contra[ry] to a lot of what the army, the AIF was trying to do in terms of educate all the fellows in terms of safe sex and watching out for VD [venereal disease] and things like that?

Oh well, there were issues with condoms for a start. And strangely enough, we were issued with condoms in New Guinea, too. And everyone had, was given a box when we went to Port Moresby. A box of about, I don’t know how many condoms, about

25:30 ten in a box or something like that, I think. And you know what we used them for? Well it rained every day in New Guinea, start raining at about four o’clock in the afternoon and rain through till about eight at night, sometimes all night. Tea and sugar and all the food was put in the condoms and you’d tie the top, and they wouldn’t get wet.

That was handy.

Very handy.

26:00 And how about, just leadership in general, Doug, being a, you know, a platoon sergeant, or were you platoon commander?

platoon commander, I was a lieutenant at that stage.

How was it for you actually being in the Middle East and

26:30 actually leading a platoon of men?

Oh, no trouble at all, same as anywhere else. You just lead the blokes, tell them what to do, “We’re going to so-and-so and follow me, and whatever, you know, whatever you’re doing.” It was the famous saying, you know, “Follow me,” so you’d charge out into the wilderness and everyone would come behind you. Some of the blokes used to say, “You go ahead, and I’ll follow,” well they didn’t do to well. You had to say, “Follow me.”

27:00 And that, was that something unique that you ensured that you did as a platoon commander, that you always participated, and went first and everything?

Oh yes, yes, well I was trying to do that anyway. You know, army days. If you wanted to do something, you set an example, you did it first yourself. But there were some blokes who tried to do it the other way.

27:30 Didn’t do any good.

How would you keep them in line?

How do you mean in line?

Oh sorry, you were talking about other platoon commanders.

Yes.

What, how would they differ, what would they do?

Oh they’d probably say, “Well go on attack this hill, and I’ll stand here and watch you.” So no-one would attack the hill, they’d all stay there, and look at him.

28:00 This is what used to, this is what normally happened anyway. You, you didn’t strike that sort of thing, because the platoon commander, or an officer in charge of a company, whether a company or battalion you’d move first, go ahead, you’d make the first move. If you didn’t do that, you were lost, no good. So it was fairly soon

28:30 after your time at the AGH in Gaza, that you got word that you were heading back to Australia?

Oh, I’d left the AGH, gone back to the battalion, we went up to, up through Syria to, first of all to Tripoli. No first of all, first of all to Beirut, then we left Beirut, above Beirut, we camped by the sea there, we went up through the Checker Chunnel, Tunnel,

29:00 and up to Tripoli. And that’s where I went out, from Tripoli, I went out to the cemetery to have a look around, ’cause there were some soldiers’ graves from the First World War in the cemetery. That’s were I saw my uncle’s grave, Colonel McCloren [?]. And of course, in those days we weren’t allowed to have a camera, and I couldn’t take a photograph if I’d wanted to, because I didn’t have a camera anyway. But I’d have liked to photo, have a photograph of his

29:30 grave, but I never got one. Anyway, I saw it there, that was the main thing I suppose.

Yeah, that would have been quite amazing I’d imagine.

Yes. We were at Tripoli for about, oh we must have been there for about three months. We went out from Tripoli on to Torbul [?], Torbul Heights, which was a, a Mount Torbul, a mountain range out of Tripoli, that went back

30:00 towards Damascus. And we went out there, out there, and took up defensive positions in case the Turks came down, but they never did, or the Germans and the Turks. Of course, the Turks at that stage were allies of the Germans, and a lot of Germans in Turkey.

So did you run into any trouble at all,

No.

Through Tripoli, and

No.

up into the mountains.

30:30 No. We used to do trips across to Damascus, take the boys in a three ton truck and go across to, spend a night at Damascus and come back again. Through, trying to think of the, oh Balbeck was an old Crusader town which had beautiful buildings all of, built of marble,

31:00 white marble buildings at Balbeck. Of course a lot of them were knocked about by various wars that had been taking place. Some of them were there, you could see what, what originally they would have looked like, and they’re still there today, I think. Balbeck is a place to go to see in Syria.

Now given a lot of the fellows signed up for adventure and a bit of overseas travel and all that kind of thing, was there a lot of enthusiasm

31:30 amongst,

Oh yes.

to go out and see sights as much as they could?

Yep, oh yes, they all wanted to get away and go and see things, of course. I mean you wouldn’t stay in camp anyway if you had to, unless you had to. But oh no, there’d be a certain amount of, amount of fellows would be sent on leave each week or each night or whatever it was.

What sort of mischief would fellows get up to?

Oh, mainly

32:00 get drunk, go into a bar and get stuck into the grog. And of course, the beer, there was a beer made in there, made in Beirut, there was a big brewery. Maltese Brazier Beer of de Beirut, that was the brand, that was the, that was the one.

What was the brand, sorry?

Maltese Brazier Beer of de Beirut. Now Beer of de Beirut means Beirut Beer. But

32:30 Maltese Brazier, I don’t know what that means. Malt, malt something, brazier, I don’t know. Anyway, that was the name of it, the name of the beer. I can remember it to this day. Have a Maltese Brazier Beer of de Beirut.

It would become hard to pronounce as the wore, as the night went on.

Yes, that’s right.

And how, what did, how did it taste? Oh it tasted, just tasted like ordinary beer.

33:00 Slightly different, but no, perfectly well, perfectly.

Was it a stronger or weaker beer than, I guess the local brew?

Oh I’d say it was a bit weaker. Our beer in those days was about four point five per cent, I think. And that, theirs would have been about three and a half or something like that. Stronger than the beer you get here today. Stronger than that Gold.

33:30 But it was good beer. When we were in Paris after the war, you used to go to, if you went to a hotel and asked for a bottle of beer, they had bottles of beer in the same size as our bottles. And they’d be about five dollars a bottle or something like that. And you’d go down to the supermarket, and you’d be able to buy it over the counter at the supermarket for about two dollars a bottle, same beer.

34:00 Amazing. They had it in the pubs too. You know, in the, you’d go to a hotel and there’d be a, a little refrigerator in the room, and of course, there was always half a dozen bottles of beer in it. And if you took one, it’d cost you, you had to enter it and pay for it when you went, booked out, it cost you about five or eight dollars for a bottle. If you went down the street and bought one, it’d cost you, you could buy about two, about three bottles for the same price.

34:30 Yes.

Now did.

You had to be very careful what you did there.

Absolutely. Now did you, did you make any, sort of firm up any good mates in the Middle East?

Oh yes. Well a lot of them I still know today, there’s a couple of them up here, a couple in Sydney, a lot of them are dead. Died of old age and one thing and another.

35:00 But, no one lasts forever.

At least that’s something everybody knows.

That’s right, there’s a day of reckoning, yes.

And what about your platoon, Doug. Can you give us a bit of a, a picture on, on, I guess, the characters and personalities that formed your platoon,

35:30 for the boys that you had to look after.

Oh well I told you one bloke, about one bloke who had, who was going on leave and told him he needn’t come back again. But all the other blokes were good fellows who, you know, did their best. There was no-one who you’d pick on and say he was no good, I don’t want him any more, except this one bloke. But oh, there were fellows that,

36:00 they joined up early, and they knew what it was all about, and they just all pulled together, and that’s what used to happen.

Did you souvenir anything in the Middle East before you came back home?

See what?

Souvenir anything from the Middle East before you came back home, anything to bring home?

Ah, a few things.

36:30 I don’t know what they were, oh nothing much, a bit of this, a bit of that, you know. Mainly copper or something, you know, little receptacles or something like that, ashtrays and that sort of, that sort of thing.

Doug, what was perhaps, I mean being in the, in the Middle East in a very foreign country for the first time, what was perhaps one of the stranger sights that you ever saw,

37:00 something you weren’t very familiar with?

Oh I don’t know. Probably the strangest thing was out in the desert out from Cairo, you know, there was no water, I told you about the water bottles, get our water bottles. So

37:30 a lot of blokes didn’t have a wash. You know things like that stick in my mind. Other than that, no, much the same wherever you are anyway, you know, you do what you’ve got to do, and that’s that.

Did you have to watch out for any particular wildlife peculiar to the area, like lice or scorpions or bed bugs?

Oh scorpions, 38:00 and bed bugs. But they were only in places where you went to, dugouts and that sort of thing, where it’s been occupied by someone else over the years, there’d be bed bugs and scorpions and that type of thing. But bed bugs mainly. They were all through North Africa, bed bugs everywhere. But oh, you’d go into a place, and the thing was, if you went into a dugout, you’d have a good look around to see what was there before

38:30 you went in. Otherwise a lot of blokes would camp outside on the sand, don’t go into a dugout. But that was the sort of thing that used to happen, you had to be very careful.

Okay, we’ll, we’ll pause there Doug so we can switch tapes.

38:51 – tape ends.

Tape 6

00:31 Doug, are you, we were talking about the malaria course that you did. You did that after coming out of hospital, is that right?

Yes.

So you did that before you came back to Australia?

Oh yes, yes.

What did they teach you there?

I’ve forgotten what they taught me about two or three types of mosquitoes anopheles and various types of mosquitoes. But I’ve forgotten what they taught me. The main thing they taught me was, don’t

01:00 get bitten by mosquitoes. Go to bed and put your mosquito net over you, and that sort of thing. But there was a whole lot of stuff that they taught you, but I’ve forgotten what it was.

Why did they choose you to teach?

Because as I was down there, and they thought, “Oh he can tell the troops all about it when he comes back.” So I had to do lectures when I got back to the battalion about anti-mos…, anti-malarial

01:30 work, what to do to keep it away and all that sort of thing. Don’t go out after dark, and things like that.

Don’t talk to mosquitoes.

Yes.

But for you, was it a bit of a bludge?

Pardon?

Was it a bit of a bludge, I mean could you, could you…

Oh yes, it was. It was something,

02:00 you know, fill in a bit of time for me. So I wasn’t, didn’t haven’t go back to route marches, so they sent me to a school and I could learn about malaria and come back and tell the troops all about it, so, so I did a few lectures when I got back to the battalion. Everyone just sat, sat up there and listened to me and didn’t take any notice of me.

At that, that time, did the army have Chloroquine to give to the men?

No, they didn’t. We didn’t get Atebrin until we got back here to Australia went to New Guinea.

02:30 So we had nothing over there. They, all they said was to don’t get bitten by mosquitoes. In other words, wear a, a mosquito net after dark and that sort of thing. Because they, the anopholes mosquito, malaria carrying mosquito, operates in the dark, usually, not in the daytime. So you had to be very careful about that. But I’ve forgotten what I said now.

Well when you said the men

03:00 obviously ignored you, you mean that they all got malaria, when you went to New Guinea, they all got malaria?

No they didn’t.

They didn’t.

No, no. Very, very few of our people got malaria until they got to Burma, to Gona. Because there was no malaria up in the hills in the New Guinea, up in there Owen Stanleys, there was no malaria there. So we got off the boat at Moresby, there was a bit of malaria around Moresby, we didn’t stay there, we went straight up, into the highlands,

03:30 and up to Kokoda. And when we got to Kokoda, we went down to the coast again, and that’s where the malaria mosquitoes were, down there, Gona and Burma and those places.

Did the men take the Allapran, was it?

Atebrin.

Atebrin.

Little, you used to go yellow, turns your skin yellow. So you knew if a bloke was on Atebrin, because his skin was all yellow, and the whites of his eyes would be yellow.

04:00 Did you take it though?

Oh yes, yes.

Did you get malaria?

Ah I got malaria at Gona, at Gona, but not badly. And that’s when I made the bread, after … I was crook for about three days, I think, in bed, and then got up and started making bread.

That’s right, and you put the raisins in it.

Yes.

Which I thought was a nice touch, by the way.

04:30 Yes, there was all sort of other things we put in, but I’ve forgotten what they were. You know, baking powder and stuff like that which the, which the army cooks knew nothing about. They didn’t know anything about it, they’d never done it before, so there were bags of it stacked up at the back of the, the back of the cookhouse.

It’s amazing it didn’t have weevils in it?

It did too. Yes, oh it used to get weevils in it. As a matter of fact,

05:00 they used to get a, they used to have a wire netting, you know, a fly wire set like that. And pour the, the flour through that and give it a shake. And the weevils would stay in the bottom, and you’d empty them out, and put some more in and shake it.

Extra protein.

Well yes, missing out on it.

So how did you feel about leaving the Middle East, being told that you’d be going back to Australia?

05:30 Well, we weren’t told we were going back to Australia when we left the Middle East, we thought we were going to Burma. But of course Burma had fallen to the Japs, so we were sent to, to Ceylon, and in our case, up to Cochin. And we stayed there for about a week, and then we were told we were going to, be going to Sumatra or Java. And some of the troops went there, Weary Dunlop was one of them, he was a medical with the

06:00 2/6th AGH, or something, he got there. Of course, every, everyone thought Weary Dunlop was an 8th Division bloke, but he wasn’t. He was a 7th Division.

Why would they think he was an 8th Divvy, Division bloke?

Because everyone, every prisoner of war in Malaya was from the 8th Division.

That’s right. I did know that actually, I forgot. And, but he was with the 6th Division, did you say, the 7th.

The 7th Division.

Because he went to this…

06:30 Well, from Ceylon they sent a couple of boatloads to Java. They were too late to go to Singapore, because the Japs had taken Singapore, but they didn’t know the Japs were in Java. So they sent them to Java, they landed in Java and, of course, the Japs were there waiting for them. So as soon as they landed, they put them in the bag.

And what about you, you didn’t go to Java, so what happened there?

No, well I was on the ammunition ship, remember, the Silver Maple?

That’s right. Now that was when you were manning a gun, 07:00 but were a hopeless shot.

That’s right. Manning a gun we knew nothing about.

Well lucky you didn’t have to use it, did you.

Oh yes, very lucky, we wouldn’t have hit anything, I’m sure.

So now, that Silver Maple, that pulled into, where, Perth?

Oh, on the way back pulled into Fremantle, yes. We refuelled at Fremantle, and then sailed round to Adelaide.

07:30 We were only in Perth about, or Fremantle about a day, I think.

And what, what time of the year was this, this is end of ’41, was it?

This must have been about, I don’t know what time of the year it was.

Were you aware that the Japanese had entered the war?

Oh yes, at this stage we were, yes.

So were you part of the men being called back by Curtin, getting the Australians

Yes.

08:00 Back.

Yes, yep, definitely. And we went up to defend Brisbane, the Brisbane Line. Otherwise, the Japs would have taken.

Do you think that’s a load of baloney?

No, it was a fact. They formed this Brisbane Line, which was above Brisbane, went through Caboolture and out that way, and we were on that line. It only lasted for about six months, and then they, the Japs had landed

08:30 in New Guinea, and they decided to go up to New Guinea, and attack them there, which we did. But there was a definite Brisbane Line. See all the troops north of Brisbane were brought, brought back down to Brisbane, down to that line. Which went through Caboolture, from, where from Bribie, not Bribie, oh I forget, might have been Bribie Island out through Caboolture and out west, Kingaroy and those places.

09:00 How long was it until the Government realised that it’s not going to happen in Australia, it’s happening in New Guinea. Lets get all the men that we had up north, and stick them going to New Guinea?

Well we were back in Australia about, I suppose, four or five months before we went up to Port Moresby. And we only went

09:30 to Port Moresby because the Japs had landed at Buna and Gona and were pushing across the Owen Stanleys. They thought they, at that stage, they thought it was impossible for anyone to walk across the Owen Stanleys, they wouldn’t come that way they’d come round by sea, but they didn’t. They landed at Gona and Buna and went over the hill. They went down to Port Moresby, that was there. And they were only twenty fives miles from Port Moresby when they ran out of rations and ammunition and everything else, and turned and went back again. But they could have,

10:00 we were there, but we weren’t not to stop them if they’d have been fair dinkum. They could have pushed us out of the road no trouble at all, because there was only very few of us. Any rate, they went back and we followed them.

Hang on, before we go over to New Guinea. Did most people in Australia have a real fear that the Japanese would come to Australia and take over?

I think they did at that stage. At that stage they did, before that they didn’t,

10:30 they didn’t think they would, but. They would have too, there’s no doubt about that, they’d have. If they’d got Port Moresby, they’d just have just come down south, to Townsville and so forth, down south.

Do you think they would have had a good chance?

They would have, yes, I think they would have. There was no one at Port Moresby to stop them. There was a, there was a militia battalion there, and they were, as a matter of fact, they were there when we landed at Port Moresby, they helped unload the boat.

11:00 And all they did was to get the bayonet out and put it through the beer grates and go like that, and smash the, smash the bottles of beer inside and put the, the crate on its corner in a bucket, so that the beer would run into the bucket, they’d all have a drink. This was happening, this was true. So we got off the boat, marched through there and went straight up to the Owen Stanleys,

11:30 didn’t stop a night in Port Moresby.

Can I just ask you though about the training that you had back in Australia. I mean, you’d come from Palestine and Syria, which is what, predominantly rocky and desert, and then you were sent over to New Guinea, where it was jungle. So did the training prepare you for that?

Well we did, we, normal training, you know, applies to anything. The only thing in New Guinea that you went a lot in

12:00 single file. Whereas in the over in the Middle East in the desert, you spread out, you might have a two battalions in front and one in reserve, and you’d go through like that, a whole mob of you. Whereas in New Guinea, you were on one little track about three foot wide. So what you did, was to have three or four blokes go ahead, you know, forward scouts. And poor old Tom Blamey, we fixed him. After the Owen Stanleys, we did a training

12:30 course before going to Borneo, or before going to New Guinea the second time. We, up at Ravenshoe, we did a jungle training course. So we had these blokes training us to go along little trails through the bush, you see. And the idea was there’d be a little trail through the bush, through the trees, but you didn’t walk on the trail, you walk from tree to tree beside it, because the Japs would be up ahead of you, and they’d see you coming and

13:00 they’d ‘boom’, you’d be gone. So you didn’t go on the trail, you walked off the trail and from tree to tree. So Tom Blamey came up to inspect us, and he and, oh his cohorts I forget who they were, but they walked along the track. And we knew they would too. And we dug a, a hole about two foot deep and right across the track, covered with, with sticks and a bit of soil over the top. And old Tom came along, he plodded up the track and went straight into the hole, bang. And he said

13:30 “Who dug this bloody hole?” And of course, it was me. And I was in charge of the outfit, you see, and someone said, “Oh Doug Cullen did,” or, “Captain Cullen did.” And so I said, “Yes, of course, that was part of the training, that’s what the Japs do. You walk on the trail, and, and they’ll shoot you every time, so you dig a hole, so you train the fellows to walk off

14:00 the trail.” “Oh, is that the idea?” “Yes,” I said, “you walked on the trail, didn’t you? Fell down the hole. Serves you right.” “Oh.” So I was let off. Part of the training.

Did you do that for a particular reason?

Yes, to catch old Tom. Because he didn’t have a, very good reputation, Tom Blamey. So we did it to,

14:30 we definitely thought we’d catch him, we’d dig a hole in the trail. And the troops were all with it, they said, “Oh yes, we’ll do this,” and they got down there with their little shovels and dug the hole very quickly, and camouflaged it, so he wouldn’t see it. And down the trail he came, walking along and straight into the hole, bang.

Was that because of that very, for want of a better word, wrong and inappropriate speech he gave with MacArthur,

15:00 about the Australians in New Guinea?

Oh, well that was part of it, I suppose, yes, where he said they run like rabbits,

Yes.

Rabbits get shot.

Yes.

Because they run. So he said, “Run, rabbit, run.” Any rate, we didn’t run at all. But anyway.

No, of course not.

He didn’t get much kudos over that.

He ended up in a rabbit hole.

Yes, that’s right.

15:30 So you, when you did your training in Australia, well those couple of weeks, five months. No you did a couple of weeks in Casino, is that right?

Yes.

And then, and then you went up to the Brisbane Line.

Yep, up to Caboolture.

Up to Caboolture. And then after Caboolture, that’s when you went to the Owen Stanleys. Yes.

When you were in Caboolture, was it kind of boring, because you were doing the Line, but.

Oh no, no, we were, we were north of Caboolture on the Illanbare [?] Road,

16:00 on the old Northern Highway really. And we were across there, and as a matter of fact, that’s where Power, I mentioned Kev Power before, but Kev Power was, was an officer too, he was in the battalion. And he and I, we were pretty good mates. And we decided we’d walk, go in to Caboolture, which was about oh, two or three miles from where we were camped. And we had to go past brigade

16:30 headquarters. And brigade headquarters was near, the, the Beenleigh, not the Beenleigh, the showgrounds. What are we talking about?

Caboolture.

Caboolture Showgrounds. So brigade headquarters was there. So when we went past brigade headquarters, we looked in and we saw this, brigadier’s car outside his tent. And he was apparently waiting to go into town, or something. So Power and I said, “Oh, we’ll take his car.”

17:00 So we snuck in past his tent, jumped in the car, the keys were in it, started it and drove out through the gate. As we drove out through the gate, the sentry presented arms to us, ’cause we were in the brigadier’s car. We drove into Caboolture, had a few drinks and then came back home again. Drove straight in through the gate again, and of course, by, the guard was still there, and he still presented arms to the car, but they woke up.

17:30 We drove straight up to the brigadier’s tent, stopped the car there and we got out and we both ran into the bush. And of course, the brigadier came out and he said, “Ohhh, turn out the guard,” and all this sort of thing, and every guard turned out, and by this time we were in the bushes and we walked back to where the battalion was. So we had the brigadier’s car for the night. And he never found out, till years later, we were, I was at a function down in Sydney, and Ken Eather was there, by this time he was a general. And I said to him,

18:00 I said, “General, did you ever remember having your car stolen at Caboolture?” He said, “Yes, I remember, and I think I know who did it too.” “Yes, you’re dead right.”

Did he laugh?

Oh yes, he thought it was… So we had his car for the night. We didn’t damage it or anything like that, we returned it in good order.

18:30 I guess they didn’t have anything such as random breath testing then?

Oh no, no.

And what else did you do there, on the Brisbane Line?

We went out to a place called, from Caboolture, we went out to a place west of Caboolture, called Roxburgh. And there we set up a field firing range for the artillery. We cleared the scrub and

19:00 did all sorts of things there. And then it was from there we were sent to New Guinea, so we were only there for a little while. But we went up to, up to Caboolture, a fellow named Harry Graham Sutton and myself, went up there only a couple of years ago. We went out to Roxburgh to find this field firing range, and they knew all about it, the people who owned the property, said, “Oh yes, we remember, it was up there,” and blah, blah, blah. And there were some, they used it for

19:30 quite a while, for the artillery used to fire on this range. And some, quite a few spent shells landed in the bush, and we found a few of them, so they knew all about it. But we spent a lot of time there clearing this range and, you know, putting in targets and all that sort of thing.

So the artillery actually used it for quite a while?

Oh yes, it was used right through the war, I think as an artillery field firing range.

20:00 So were you given any certain immunisations before you went to New Guinea?

Ah, I don’t think so, I can’t remember being given anything, no.

And by the way, did you get to go home in the five months you were back in Australia?

Only when we first came back, when we were at Woodside, we had about three days at home, three or four days,

20:30 but we didn’t go back again, no.

And how was your father towards you then, considering that your name had changed?

Oh he, he was an old army bloke, he’d been to the Boer War. And as a matter of fact, he wasn’t married till he was 40 years old, so I always knew my father as an old man, he was pretty old when I first knew him. So he just, he just thought it was a bit funny, that’s all.

21:00 He didn’t say anything, he thought we were mad.

Your younger sister and your younger brother, were they too young to join up?

Yes, yes. The younger brother, he’s quite a bit younger than I was, and he went to Kelly and Lewis and was apprenticed as a boilermaker. And

21:30 he then went to Darwin with the Darwin workforce, whatever they called themselves, building roads and things up there. And it was up there he was sent by his contractor employer, in a boat to go round to, oh an air force base in the north west of Australia, forgot the name of it now,

22:00 but to collect some machinery to bring back to Darwin, this was after the war. And part of the machinery was 44-gallon drums of petrol, which had been sent to Truscott Drome, was sent up to Truscott Drome in 44-gallon drums. And they’d been lying there at Truscott Drome, for probably for a couple of years, and they’d rusted out, or some of them had. Any rate they loaded them on this barge to bring back to Darwin. And the, apparently the barge blew up, caught fire and blew up,

22:30 none of them were ever heard of again. The barge or any of them, including my brother, ‘boom’, up they went in smoke. So that was the end of him. My sister

What, what year was that, Doug?

It would have been, when did the war end, ’40

5.

‘45, it would have been the end of ’45 or early ’46. And my sister, she finished school and took up nursing.

23:00 She used to nurse at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, and then she was a, a nurse at Corryong Public Hospital or whatever they called it. And there she met her husband to be, Mark Waters, and they’re still married, they live up there, they’ve got a farm up at, oh Tintaldra.

23:30 Where’s that?

Tintaldra. You don’t know any of these good places.

This is Victoria, isn’t it.

No, Tintaldra’s in New South Wales [actually Victoria].

Oh, I’m from New South Wales, I don’t even know that.

Yes well you know where Jingellic is.

Vaguely.

Oh it’s up the river about thirty miles from Jingellic.

So, it’s west.

Up towards Corryong.

Okay. And are you close to your sister now?

Am I what?

Do you keep in touch with your sister?

Oh yes,

24:00 yes. They, they were down. As a matter of fact, we went down, they came up to Byron Bay, not to Byron Bay, Nambucca Heads for a holiday at a house up there for a couple of weeks, three weeks or something, and we went down and spent a week with them, only a couple of months ago.

That would have been nice.

Yes. Nice at Nambucca Heads. Where do you come from in New South Wales?

Sydney.

From Sydney. Oh they’ve got a bridge down there, haven’t they? That’s

24:30 the only thing they’ve got there.

And a couple of kilometres of water. So tell us about going over to the Owen Stanleys, how did you go over there? What was the name of the ship?

The Cremer. The Cremer.

C-R-E-M-E-R. She was sunk later on, off the coast of Australia, off the coast of Queensland. She was a Dutch boat.

25:00 And she came down and took us up to Moresby, the Cremer.

How did you feel about taking off again, leaving Australia again?

Oh, didn’t think anything about it at all. No trouble, going for another trip.

Mersa Matruh, Tobruk, Syria, Melbourne, New Guinea.

And then when we came back, we got a few trips too. I went over

25:30 to America, so I was with the Ford Motor Company and the Ford Motor Company sent me to America, to a school, so I went to Dearborn, then came back. And then, when I retired, Barbara and I did a cruise up to Japan, through Noumea to Japan, across on the Trans Siberian Railway to Moscow and up through Finland, across to Turku and across the Baltic Sea to Stockholm. Across Denmark,

26:00 and across to England, Warwickshire, Warwickshire in England. And so, we, we bought ourselves a Volkswagen camper van there, and travelled around England for, we did six thousand miles on the camper van, and then came back to Australia. And when we came back to Australia, we went to Australia House, yes went to Australia House to book a passage, because we booked,

26:30 going over, we just booked a passage one way. So we went to Australia House, and said, “Now what’s the cheapest way to get back to Australia?” “Oh if you go back by plane, it’ll cost you so much and blah, blah, blah.” And this girl said, “If you want to get back at the right price, go out and see this girl at…” out at, oh I forget the name of the place, out somewhere in the suburbs anyway, “and she’ll tell you how to get there at the right price.” So we went out and saw her, and she was an Australian girl, but she was working, in a

27:00 in an air force, not air force, an airways office out there somewhere. And she said, “Oh, you want to get back? I can get you back. I can get you back for four hundred dollars each, back to Australia by air.” “How can you do that?” She said, “Well you’ve got to do it this way, you have to fly Olympic Airways to Athens, I can get you on there, then you fly some other airline to Dubai, and,

27:30 and Bangladesh Airways to somewhere else, and then I can get you on another plane to get to Singapore, and then you’ll have to get on British Airways to get from Singapore back to Brisbane.” So we said, “How much will it cost?” “It’ll be forty dollars each.”

Forty?

Forty dollars. Oh, four hundred, wasn’t it? Four hundred.

Four hundred dollars.

Four hundred dollars. So we did that. So we got back for four hundred dollars. If we’d

28:00 gone, if we’d gone to British Airways or somewhere and just booked from London, it would have cost us about a thousand dollars each to get back.

So you, you liked that plan?

And we did, we did, all of these places we went to, Dubai and those places, we had a bit of time at them, and we looked around and caught the next plane. And they, this girl said to us, “You might get to Dubai and find you’ve got to stay overnight before you get the next plane to Delhi or somewhere.” So we said, “Oh, we don’t mind that.”

28:30 So we did exactly the same thing. And when we got to Bangladesh, Dhaka, we landed there and we were taken into a big, a big hallway with a mesh, steel mesh all around it. And outside they were little kids with their hands through the window, begging for money or food or something. And we were in there having a great feed of, you know, all sorts of things supplied by the airways. And the kids outside are all starving.

29:00 So someone inside, “Don’t feed them, don’t give them anything, you’ll never get, get rid of them.” So we didn’t give them anything, but we felt for them, yeah, these little kids with hardly any clothes on, skinny little kids all with their hands through the, hands through the netting, wanting a little bit of tucker. I’ll never forget it. So.

Can I ask you, was it in Queensland there before you went to the Owen Stanleys, that you met Barbara?

29:30 No, after I came back.

After you came back from New Guinea. Oh, okay. We’ll talk,

I was the instructor at the BHQ [Battalion Headquarters] LHQ [Land Headquarters] Tax School at Beenleigh, and I used to come up once and a week, and I asked her to go to the pictures with me, and she said yes, and I met her outside the GPO. It was the meeting place in those days, if you didn’t know anything about Brisbane, say, you know, “I’ll meet you outside the GPO.”

But that’s the same in Sydney, you’d meet on the stairs at the town hall.

That’s right, yes.

30:00 At Town Hall Station, you’d meet on the stairs on George Street.

That’s right.

Let me ask you about the trip over though to New Guinea. Was it relatively short?

The what?

The trip over on the Cremer to…

Oh a couple of days I think. We called at Townsville and went in there and just got some food, I think on board and away we went. A couple of days, that’s all.

Now you were with the same blokes that fought alongside you

30:30 in the Middle East?

Yes, the same platoon.

And obviously you’d lost Lenny and a few others, had got -

Oh yes, we were always losing blokes. And a lot of the, a lot of the fellows who joined the army early in the war were older fellows. They might have been 40, 45, 50 years old. And they probably didn’t have a job or something, and they thought oh, it’s a chance to join the AIF. So we used to call them the ‘olds and bolds’. So,

31:00 of course we had to get rid of them, because they couldn’t stand walking up over the Owen Stanleys, and we, they’d be sent back to a battalion, wharf battalion or something like that, loading ships or doing something, and we’d get the young fellows in as reinforcements.

So now that you’ve got your full platoon, and you landed at Port Moresby, what happened then?

We got off, off the boat at Port Moresby, straight into trucks and straight up to Hon

31:30 Don Bluff [?], straight up to the beginning of the Owen Stanleys.

And what were you told, what were you briefed by the army, about the conflict in New Guinea before you got there?

I don’t think we were told much. The Japs had been, had landed at Buna and Gona and coming across the Owen Stanleys, but that’s about all we were told. We just went up there, and the first thing we did of course, was I was saying before was, we were the first people to get into

32:00 green uniforms. And when we went up onto the McDonalds Plantation, at the beginning of the Owen Stanleys, there was a couple of big coppers boiling there with, with blue dye, green dye in them. And what you did, you walked past these coppers, took your shirt off and your pants, and you threw them in the copper which was boiling away. And you went a bit further and they’d taken some out of the others, and they had them all laid, laid out on army

32:30 tables, some of them were still hot. So you looked at, at them, and saw the size they had inside the back, size 20 or whatever it was, and you knew your size, so you’d take a pair of those and put them on, still wet some of them. So we had out green, green uniforms to go over the Owen Stanleys.

But did some of them not work out, you know, when sometimes when you dye things, you get streaks?

Oh no, they were all pretty good, from what I remember, there might have been streaks,

33:00 but we didn’t notice, we didn’t take much notice of that.

I suppose fashion wise, it would have gone with the jungle,

Yes.

wearing green.

Exactly.

Now when you, when you arrived in New Guinea, were you, did you notice the difference in temperature?

Oh yes, you noticed the difference, but we were used to temperatures going up and down, no, it was more or less all right, didn’t take any notice. Got into trucks and went straight up to Hon Don Bluff, up to

33:30 up to the beginning of the Owen Stanleys. Got out of the trucks and went straight, got into these green uniforms and went straight up the track.

Did you feel there was a difference this time in going to fight the war in New Guinea, because it was closer to home. Was there more, not passion, but more enthusiasm, not even enthusiasm, do you know what I mean? Did you care more because it was closer to home?

I think

34:00 we probably did, I can’t remember it, but I’d say probably, yes.

So tell us about the first couple of nights there then, at the camp. You set up camp there?

Oh well, we didn’t, we went straight up the track.

Didn’t have any sleep at all?

No. Issued with our uniforms and away we went up to Imita Ridge. Over Imita Ridge, and we got as

34:30 far as Iorobaiwa, Mount Iorobaiwa, or Iorobaiwa Range. And we were spread out you know, there was a company here and a section there and doing patrols. And that’s where old Ken Eather pulled us back, he said, “Right-o, pull you all back to Imita Ridge and we’ll reform,” which he did. And the whole battalion, or the whole brigade went back there, and we were formed up as a brigade and went forward. So we went forward in force instead of in ones and twos,

35:00 and sections and that sort of thing, which was a lot better of course.

And when did you start encountering conflict with the Japanese there?

At Ioribaiwa Ridge. They were coming up from Naura, and we were going forward. And that’s where we first struck them, and then we pulled back, when Brigadier Eather pulled us back to, to Imita Ridge.

35:30 And of course, a lot of people were against that, they said, “Oh he’s pulled back, has he?” you know. He didn’t pull us back because the Japs were there, he pulled us back to consolidate us. So we’d go up forward as a body, instead of stragglers, which was the right thing to do.

Did that work that strategy?

Yes, definitely. Went straight forward, didn’t stop until we got to Templeton’s Crossing. A little, little outburst with the Japanese along the road,

36:00 but nothing big till we got to Templeton’s Crossing, when we had our first big stoush. And then on, down then to Kokoda.

Now before you got to Templeton’s Crossing, were any of the men from your platoon wounded?

Oh there might have been a couple wounded, but I’ve forgotten really. There would have been some of them wounded.

And when you said, you had these conflicts with the

36:30 Japanese, just small conflicts, did, were they ambushes set up by the Japanese?

Well, they were coming through in dribs and drabs from the north, and we were going up in dribs and drabs. That’s when, that’s when Brigadier Eather pulled us back and we got into one big force and went forward as a, as a brigade, and that’s when the Japs saw us coming, and they didn’t put up much resistance at all then, because they, we had so many of us then,

37:00 on the track, on both sides, and all over the place, and they, they just pulled back. They did a bit of fighting, but not much. We went right through to Effogi, through Naura, up through Effogi before we struck any trouble from them again, real trouble.

So the trouble that you had at Templeton’s Crossing, that’s at, where, where was that?

About the middle of New Guinea.

And that was, was that your real, first

37:30 real conflict with the Japanese in the Owen Stanleys?

Real big one, yes.

At Templeton’s Crossing.

Yes.

What did you know about the Japanese before you - Well at Templeton’s Crossing too that made things worse. Was we had three inch mortars. And the three inch mortars were carried at, you’d know what three inch mortars are, Chris, they’re pretty heavy, and there’d be a bloke carrying the barrel and another two carrying the base plate, and so forth. Any rate, when we got to Templeton’s Crossing, we set up these mortars and the ammunition was flown in,

38:00 and dropped for them. So they set up the mortars to bombard the Japanese. But what they didn’t know, when they dropped the mortars, they armed themselves, and if they dropped them on their bottoms, they would automatically arm them. So they’d go off when you fired them. So they’d put them down the barrel of the three inch mortar, and they’d go ‘bang’, blow the mortar up and everything,

38:30 and the crew. So we lost about three crews there, before they woke up to what had happened. They’d been dropping the mortar bombs from the air, and they’d been arming themselves when they hit the ground.

That’s terrible.

We killed our, more of our own blokes at Templeton’s Crossing with the three inch mortar, than we did the Japanese.

Gee, that’s a story. I didn’t know that, that’s horrible. Did you see it happen?

Yep.

39:00 You saw it happen.

Well, we were back a bit, but the mortars were there. They were in a cleared spot, because you have, had to have a cleared spot to fire the mortars because they go up in the air, you have to be clear of branches of trees and that sort of thing. So we watched them, we saw the mortars blow up. Any rate, we soon found out what caused it. Didn’t have any more mortar bombs dropped.

39:30 I’ll get Chris to ask you more about Templeton’s Crossing on the next tape.

39:36 – tape ends.

Tape 7

00:36 All righty Doug. You were just telling us about the three inch mortars, that

That blew up at Templeton’s Crossing.

Yeah. Can you, can you walk us through, I guess, the action at Templeton’s Crossing, and what you experienced?

Ah, no I can’t ’cause there’s all about it in that book, The Foot Soldiers. But

01:00 I can remember I wasn’t concerned with the three inch mortars, because they were the headquarters company, three-inch mortars, and I was in a rival company.

Oh yeah, no, no, not so much about the three inch mortars. But just what, what happened from where you were, and what you experienced.

Well, we crossed, pushed across the bridge, the Japs were on the other side.

01:30 We fired at them with two inch mortars, and the three inch of course, that blew up. And then with rifles. And they withdrew from across the bridge, and we went over and continued down the road to Isurava. We had a few short bursts of action with them, but only small ones, there’d be a section across the track, holding us up, they’d fire a few shots,

02:00 and we’d attack them, and they’d pull back. And that, that went on all the way down to Kokoda. So, there was, there wasn’t very much action really at all. Got down to Kokoda, when we got to Kokoda, we bivouacked there for a couple of days, and the Japs were on the other side of the river there. And so we

02:30 decided to push on towards, towards the Wairopi River, or Kumusi River, Wairopi Bridge. And then we struck them at, at Oivy [?] in Heraree [?], they put up a bit of stiff resistance there. The 16th Brigade attacked them there, we came in from the south, and struck them at Heraree, we lost a couple of blokes

03:00 there. And then they pulled back, across the Kumusi River, and that’s where General Horii was supposed to have lost his horse and got drowned. But we didn’t go, that was further downstream. But we went to the old crossing at Wairopi. And we, we resurrected the old wire bridge that was there, by swimming across with, with sig wire. Ron Dark and the Birrell Brothers,

03:30 who were life savers from the Gold Coast. They went across, dragged a rope across, attached to a tree, and they, we put fork sticks on the rope, tied them at the bottom and made a, more or less, suspension bridge which the whole battalion used to go across. Got across to the other side, and went down towards Gona and Buna from there.

And Doug, were the, your

04:00 encounters, your fights with the Japanese, were they what you expected, given the training that you’d, you know, the little bit of training you’d got before you’d gone up to the island?

Well they were pretty good. They used to stick there. Of course, we used to having slit trenches, which we’d dig in the ground, and they’d be connected with sort of little trenches. But they didn’t dig those, they used to dig a straight hole down in the ground, they, they used to call them a spider holes. And a Japanese

04:30 would get in, like a post hole, just his head poking out the top, no connection with anyone else, and he’d sit there, and he’d either die there or he’d shoot somewhere else, if you tried to attack him. That was the sort of holes they used to make. And we gradually pushed them back till we went into, into Kokoda. But at the, at the Kumusi River, I think I told you before, about the, the petrol drums being sent up

05:00 full of petrol. And they were dropped by the air force, and by the transport planes, and of course, they burst on reaching the ground. So the engineers never got their bridge across the river. We all went across on the bridge that we built ourselves from the sig wire and rope and bits and pieces.

Now were you ever, at any stage during your, your tussles with the

05:30 Japanese, were you trying to get prisoners at all?

Ah, we didn’t, the Japanese wouldn’t, they wouldn’t sit in the one spot to be taken prisoner, so we’d get very few. But on the road from Kokoda to the Kumusi River we, going along the road, and here’s a little Jap beside the road with a telephone. And he’s talking on the telephone, and when we came along he came out with the telephone,

06:00 put his hands out and offered us the telephone. So we took the telephone, but obviously he’d been talking to his mates back along the track and telling them that there were some people coming, you know, some soldiers coming down the track, and probably how many there were, and all the rest of it. So he was the only Japanese I can remember taking prisoner. We took him prisoner and sent him back to brigade headquarters with a couple of soldiers, they took him back. And apparently they interrogated him there,

06:30 and got some information from him. But he wasn’t hurt by our blokes, and, but I think he expected to be shot, you could tell by the way we went on.

In what way, what would he do?

Oh well, he’d hand us the telephone and he stood there and said, you know, “Here I am. Shoot me.” No, no-one take any notice of him, took him by the arm and took him back to brigade, he was quite pleased I think.

07:00 Now had you heard anything Doug at this stage, about atrocities committed by the Japanese, or any bad business, at all?

Yes, well. No, we didn’t strike much of it, but the 25th Battalion who went in through Keiri [?], they struck a bit of it. Some of the 16th Brigade blokes, or the militia brigade fellows had been shot and killed on the track, and they’d cut bits out of their thigh, obviously to eat.

07:30 There was no doubt about it, they were starving. The Japanese didn’t have enough food. And when, when they came to a village, a little native village, the first thing they’d do was strip all the trees of food, you know, all the paw paws, there was never any paw paws or bananas or anything like that, because they’d stripped. Not only the fruit, but they’d strip all the leaves as well, and eat them.

The what, sorry?

The leaves, anything they could get, bark off the tree.

08:00 So, so they were obviously under nourished. And as we got further back, I think at Isurava we struck a big Japanese dump, there were biscuits and all sorts of things in it, it had been brought up and dumped there, but they hadn’t had time to issue them out to the troops in the forward area.

Did you come across any ill-treatment to the locals that the Japanese had done?

No, no the locals I think, were pretty wary of them, and if they come

08:30 in near, they’d piss off into the bush, and I don’t blame them either. So they’d stay in the bush. When they, when we got into a town, I can remember at, at, I’m trying to think of the town, Naura, there wasn’t a sign of a native anywhere. And all the trees were stripped of food, there was nothing there at all. And after we’d been there for a couple of hours, they started to drift back into town.

09:00 And there were, you know, girls coming back, native girls with their little babies, walking back into town and of course, we fed them, we gave them some bully beef and biscuits. Which they hadn’t had for a long time.

That’s very kind of you all. Was there, did you hear, I mean, I guess any stories from the

09:30 battalions, was it the 53rd and the 39th, that you passed on your way in originally?

Oh well, they were coming back, you see, particularly the 39th Battalion blokes, very few of them left, but they had horror stories to tell. And they used to say, “Oh, you know, don’t, don’t, watch out for them, they’ll, they’ll shoot you and eat you,” and all this sort of thing. And we used to say, “Oh yeah, well go on, away you get, get back, and we’ll take over,”

10:00 sort of thing. It didn’t worry us much, we had, heard all these stories about what they’d do, and they probably would, too, you know.

Well they did do that in some cases.

Oh, they did, they cut blokes, bits off blokes, bottoms and all that sort of thing.

And what about, I guess, just general brutality. I mean, I’ve heard, like, a number of stories of fellows who were just, you know, tied to trees and beheaded and things like that.

Yes.

10:30 Well, I think that, they did that mostly with civilians though. You see, the soldiers didn’t, they didn’t have the opportunity to do that sort of things to soldiers. Because they either killed themselves, or they killed the soldiers. But civilians, they grabbed them and tried them up to trees, and, you know, tortured them and all this sort of thing. Even the women. Church women, too, you know.

11:00 They sort of, churches are outposts.

Missionaries?

Missionary posts. They’d grab the women and torture them. Tie them up, chop their heads off, whatever. I think I told you about when I was in Singapore with, did I tell you about old General Horii.

11:30 He was sentenced to be hanged,

Yes, and he wanted to be shot.

He said, “Please,” he put his finger, hands together, “please do not shoot me. Can you…? Don’t hang me. Can you shoot me, please?” We said, “Why?” He said, “Oh it is terrible thing to be hanged. It is an honour to be shot.” So, we said, “Oh yes, we can shoot you.” So we took him down to Changi beach and shot him. Oh, happened to be the bloke had a, see a member of the

12:00 court had to be present, when a fellow was hanged or shot, and so I was the bloke, I was a member of the court, so I was down there to, to witness the shooting. And they had about, oh, about ten blokes lined up with their rifles, and only one bloke with a, with a true bullet, all the other had blanks, so you wouldn’t know who shot him, see. So they all fire at the bloke’s heart or whatever, pull the trigger, ‘bang, bang’ everything would go ‘bang’, and he’d fall over

12:30 and no-one would know who shot him. There was one, one bullet with the right one, the others were all blank.

But they’d have to kill him with one bullet?

Oh yes, yes.

What if, what if the prisoner didn’t die on the, with the one shot?

Well if he didn’t, if he didn’t die, they’d, they, they were all pretty good shots,

13:00 they wouldn’t miss, you know. They’d, you know definitely shoot him. Take this over here.

Doug, what kind of, I guess, what kind of a tactics did the Japanese use against you, in the Owen Stanleys, in terms of, as fighters?

Well they used to try and, if they didn’t attack on us, they’d try and demoralise us by all yelling and screaming at the

13:30 same time. So they’d come up through the trees, and you’d hear them saying, “Ow-ow-ow,” calling to each other and yelling out and this sort of thing to try and, I suppose to try and demoralise us, because our blokes would just sit there behind a tree or something, and wait for them to come, and then shoot them one by one. But they obviously did it, hoping we’d get up and run. We never did.

Did it strike you as

14:00 a little bit odd as from an Australian point of view, that they were yelling and screaming and in a way, giving away their position?

Oh yes, yep. We thought it most peculiar, but still, we got used to it, used to their ways of doing things. And what about things like, I guess, booby traps and things like, were they…

Yeah, well they used to do that. They had a, they’d tie a, well, of course we did the same sort of thing, tie a string

14:30 on a grenade, and, with the pin half way out, so that you’ve tripped it, and you’d pull the pin and the grenade would go off, we’d do the same sort of thing. So they had the same sort of tactics that we had really, except they probably used them more often.

Was there a, I guess, a hatred towards the Japanese in the local troops, given the sort of bad business that they got up to, in terms of ill treatment?

15:00 Oh well, we, we didn’t notice it, but there would have been I’d say. But we didn’t see much of the locals really, at all.

I mean amongst the Australians troops. Did they.

Oh well, the word went around, don’t get caught, otherwise you might have your fingers chopped off, or something, so everyone was aware of that. So they just stuck on there and did what they had to do,

15:30 as quickly as possible.

Do you think that kind of, made the Australian force a sharper fighting force, given that, you know, they’d actually made everybody pull together a lot better?

Oh, probably did.

Because of the way the Japanese were fighting?

Probably did, I’d say. There’s no doubt, although I think the Australian troops always, didn’t matter where they were, always pulled together,

16:00 stuck up for each other and supported each other, you know. If a bloke went out ahead, points captain, there’d always be someone behind him, covering him, all this sort of thing, happened all the time.

Was there anything Doug, that the training that you got before you ended up in the islands, didn’t prepare you for, that you had to kind of, learn on the way, or stuff you did pick up on the way?

Oh the jungle training was a little bit different, but otherwise the

16:30 principle was the same, you know. Going from tree to tree and not on the track, and that sort of thing, which you, which we soon learned. Not spread out, cause we couldn’t spread out anyway because of the track, about three feet wide through the jungle. So you could get to the side of it, but you couldn’t get right off it, or not far off it anyway.

But did the Japanese come to know that this is what the Australians did?

17:00 Oh well, they’d be doing the same thing. Yeah, they’d be doing the same thing exactly. They used to send a bloke up, there’d be a fellow behind a tree with his rifle, down the track, and if you walked on the track, you’d be shot for sure. But even when no-one walked on the track, they’d walk off the track, ‘bang’, would go the rifle, and they’d know there was a bloke behind that tree up in front. Although he probably didn’t hit anyone.

17:30 But they’d soon go round the tree, and both sides, and probably grab him, and shoot him. So there are ways of getting round all that sort of thing.

Did you find the jungle fighting tougher than the fight you had over in

18:00 Syria with the, the Vichy French, or…

Oh well, it was the same sort of thing, but the jungle fighting was a bit more difficult of course, because you didn’t know, you couldn’t see anything, you couldn’t see very far in front of you, and you had to take a lot for granted, but.

Excuse me Doug, we’ll just pause. Okay, sorry.

So the, the principles were the same, it was a bit more difficult in the jungle of course.

18:30 Mainly because you couldn’t see anything, you couldn’t see where your friends were or, or the enemy. So you just, you’ll be in a track, you’d advance in a northerly direction and whatever, and you’d just keep going until you strike someone, struck someone. Otherwise, you might, mightn’t strike anyone and go right through to the other side, but you wouldn’t know.

All of a sudden you could be in front of them, and they’re behind you, and you wouldn’t necessarily know about it.

That’s right, 19:00 yep.

Were there any fellows, who, I guess, found that kind of walk, a bit hard to take, that?

One or two did. There was one bloke, I can, in particular I can remember, who hung onto a sapling, a thin sapling that was probably about twenty feet high or more. And he was shaking so much that he’d hang onto the sapling, and the whole tree was shaking, so the Japs

19:30 who were up ahead, could see, could see the thing shaking. So any rate, that fellow was sent back, he was, you know, he was, he, what do they call it, shell shocked. And he couldn’t help it, he just hung onto the tree and shook like that, and shook everything. So he gave our position away. So we had to unlatch him from the tree and send him back.

Was that hard to do, was he, he wasn’t going to let go.

20:00 Oh it was a bit hard to do, but he was, he thought he was, oh he thought he was going to stay there and, and fight, but he, he couldn’t. You couldn’t leave him there.

He actually wanted to stay and fight?

Oh yes, he wanted to stay. But he, he didn’t realise that he was drawing a crowd all the time.

Poor fellow.

He wouldn’t give up, had to be taken back, two blokes had to march him back

20:30 The CO, the MO saw him and sent him back smartly. That was the only bloke I saw who really cracked up.

Did, from, with what you saw, did anything in particular set him off, or was it just…

Oh the Japanese and not knowing where they were, and they were firing from the front into our troops. And he, he just couldn’t take it, you know.

21:00 And what about the rain, you mentioned that it would rain regularly, like clockwork from like about four till eight every day. How, I mean, how would you cope with that, just in a practical sense?

Well there was no way of covering, you used to, used to get soaking, sopping wet, and we only had a groundsheet which you’d put over yourself. And eventually of course, when it got dark, you’d want to go to sleep, or some of you would. So usually what you did, was to, two blokes would share a groundsheet,

21:30 you’d lie on one half and put the other half over the top of you. And you’d stay there shivering all night because you’d be wet through, and it gets pretty cold at night. Even though people say it’s the jungle, oh it’s warm. But it’s not, not up in the hills, it’s quite cold. That took a bit of getting used to.

I don’t know how you’d ever get used to it.

Oh, you just kept going,

22:00 that’s all.

But what about leeches, I mean, weren’t they.

Yes, leeches everywhere, yes. Oh you just pull your legs up like this, pull your trousers up and push the leeches off, and pull your pants down again. But leeches used to, you know, they love bare skin. And you never wore anything white. If you had a white shirt, they’d be all over your white shirt. But no-one ever wore a

22:30 white shirt anyway, or very few did, but even if you did, leeches would be all over it. Or a white singlet.

Now were they normal sized little leeches, or were they…

Oh some of them were big fellows about that long, about two inches long, the big ones. And of course they’d suck all the blood out and they’d be fat, fat as your thumb, filled with blood.

And, but if you were just brushing them off your leg, I mean.

They wouldn’t brush

23:00 off, they’d stick there, they’d hung on. The only way to get them off was to get your cigarette, and, and burn their bottom, and they’d let go. That’s why, I think that’s why everyone smokes.

But you’d, you’d keep bleeding for a little while.

Oh yes, yes. They, you bleed badly if you pull them off. But the thing was to let them get, come off themselves,

23:30 you wouldn’t bleed too badly. Would you wake up in the morning, like would they attack you during the night, and would you have to do a leech check every morning?

Oh yes, well, you’d always find a couple of leeches on your legs or somewhere like that, or your hands. They used to go for bare skin, so they’d be on your hands or your legs.

24:00 What about other, what other insects and, and pests like ticks or ants, and…

Oh, there were ticks everywhere, ticks, there’d be a lot of, that’s where scrub typhus came in. But mainly down in these, you know, the low lands these ticks. Up in the Highlands, it’s a bit cold for them. From Kokoda to the sea, there were plenty of ticks.

24:30 They didn’t worry us much, I don’t think we had time to worry about ticks. Except when, every now and again someone would die of scrub typhus and that was caused by ticks.

What would you notice, I guess, in terms of their symptoms, for something like scrub typhus?

I don’t know, they used to get drowsy and very

25:00 lethargic and not want to do anything, and more or less want to go to sleep. I never got it myself, so I don’t know. But I saw blokes with it. Usually they didn’t last too long.

Doesn’t make it any easier, does it.

No, no, yes.

25:30 When, Doug what you can tell us about, I guess, just working with the natives, were they giving you a bit of help with the operation that you were doing?

Well, the trouble was with the natives, we used to strike them every now and again, but they couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t speak Moto [?]. So there we were, you, you’d be pointing and going like this but you wouldn’t know what they were talking

26:00 about, and we didn’t know what they were talking about. Except every now and again, you’d strike one who’d been a police officer or something like that, and he had, and he’d be able to cotton on. But oh no, they were, they used to do what they could to help us, there’s no doubt about that. Of course, when the Japanese came in, when they first landed there, they told all the natives that we were the bad fellows, and have nothing to do with us, we’ll look after you,

26:30 which they never did, of course.

Luckily they worked that one out.

Yes.

I mean, as a soldier what was your opinion of the Japanese as, as fighters?

Oh, they were good fighters, yep, they were good fighters and they stuck in, and they hung on pretty well.

27:00 I had a lot of time for them. I don’t think they supported each other as well as we did, our fellows would support each other, the Japanese were more individualistic, they’d rush out, one bloke would rush out to attack a battalion, you know, with his rifle, sort of thing. And he’d be shot down in five seconds flat. Whereas our blokes, if they went out to

27:30 attack, they’d all get together in a section would go out, or something like that. Whereas the Japs were a bit more haphazard in their approach to things. But they were good fighters, no doubt about that.

I’m curious about the fellow, the trenches that you were telling me about, that the Japanese, the pole trenches that the Japanese dug?

Yes.

It seems kind of strange that the, it’s a very

28:00 narrow trench and there’s only room for one fellow and his head. I mean how would he manage with his rifle, would that sit above ground

Yes.

Constantly.

That’s right, yes.

And, I mean. But he

Probably behind a log or something like that, be over the top, yep.

So would he have anything in front of his whole, like to protect his head, so he could actually get a bit of a look around? Oh, they’re pretty good at camouflage, they’d put the dirt up, like behind a log or something,

28:30 they’d look over the top of it. Oh no, they didn’t give much away, they were pretty good in their holes, and once they got into a hole, of course, they couldn’t get out, they’d stay there. But they’d either keep you away, or they’d get killed themselves.

So you had to, yeah.

Yeah.

So, so the, the main aim as soon as you saw one of them, is to kill them.

That’s right, oh, you had to.

Put them out of action.

Yes.

And what about snipers in the trees, did you encounter much of them?

29:00 Yes. We struck them first at Iorabaiwa Ridge, they were up in the trees. And they filed back along the track. Of course, first of all, we didn’t know where the firing was coming from, ’cause they’d be up in the trees, more or less out of sight. And when we did find out where they were, of course, we’d shoot them, they’d fall down out of the tree. But, they were pretty cagey, and they’d get up, they wouldn’t come down

29:30 once you got them up there, they were there, they stayed there until they were shot down.

What would you do with your wounded and dead along the track and trail, once you got into a bit of a fight, and you know, had some casualties?

Well, what you’d do is, everyone had a shell dressing, which they carried. If you’re wounded in the

30:00 leg or the arm or somewhere where you could get at, you’d put a dressing on yourself. Or if you couldn’t do it yourself, some, some of your mates would come along and put it on for you. Now if you couldn’t walk, or stagger along the track, you’d just have to sit down beside a tree and stay there until someone came along. But normally you had to follow down the track yourself, back towards headquarters. There were no such thing as stretcher,

30:30 well there were stretcher bearers in the battalion, but they were never there of course, they were fighting most of them, anyway.

Why would you say the stretcher bearers would get caught up in the action?

That’s right.

Now am I right to say that you carried a pistol over a rifle?

No, I carried a rifle.

Yeah, no.

Always carried a rifle. Most of the officers in a

31:00 infantry battalion did, because a pistol was no use. I mean, with a rifle, you could see someone down the track and fire at him, but with a pistol, you may as well throw it at him. A pistol’s all right if you’re right up close to someone. Oh, excuse me, that’s that ginger beer.

Absolutely.

31:30 Oh, sorry, just going back to what I was asking before. What, what would you, I guess, what was the thing to do with, with your dead after a conflict, or even during, well probably not during a conflict but after a show was over, how?

The dead.

Yeah.

Well along the track if anyone, anyone, ever was shot, we used to, those coming along would dig a hole beside the track, a trench only about so deep, put him in,

32:00 cover it over, and put a few rocks on the top, and they usually, usually a couple of sticks in the shape of a cross, and put his, one of his beat tickets over the cross, so that, in, he’d be, the people coming along behind would get his beat tickets and send back, and would bury, send him back for burial. Or leave, or usually he was left there,

32:30 where he was buried, and after the war, War Graves people would come along and collect them and take them back to Moresby or wherever the War Cemetery was, and bury them there.

Which by that stage there wouldn’t be too much left, apart from a skeleton. No. We buried a lot of Japs along the road too, we’d shoot Japs and they’d be, they might have been shot, some of them were dead for, you know, three weeks, someone else had shot them, you know, when they were pushing forward. And they’d leave their, their

33:00 dead just lying each side of the track. So when we came to them, we’d do the same with them, we’d dig a hole and stick them in, and they had similar beat tickets to like we had, hang them on a stick beside the, beside the grave.

The Japanese would never bury their own dead?

Sometimes they did, but in the Owen Stanleys they didn’t. They didn’t seem to have time or something, they just left them there where they fell, they didn’t bury them at all.

33:30 I think they did back in the, you know, back in Buna and Gona and places like that, where they were in force, a lot of them, they buried their dead. But not, not up along the track they didn’t.

The smell must have been a bit rich at times?

Oh yes, terrible.

34:00 There was one of our blokes in our battalion, and he used to go along and he had a little, oh he had a mallet or a hammer or something. And the Japs would be lying dead alongside the track with their mouths open. And they all had what we thought was gold teeth, and this bloke, he’d have a little hammer and he’d knock the gold fillings out of the teeth, and he’d put them in a little bag which he carried in his pocket, you see. And when he got back after the war, he took these,

34:30 he went to our, we had a dentist, named, name was Col Smith, our dentist, and he took this little bag of gold teeth to the dentist, and he said, “Col, would you be interested in buying some gold teeth fillings?” “Oh yes,” he said, “I’d love some, I’ll be able to make some,” so he got them and he said, “They’re not gold at all, they’re only brass.” So this bloke had been knocking the brass fillings out of the Jap’s tooth, thinking they were gold, putting them in a

35:00 little bag and taking them all the way back to Moresby, only to find he couldn’t sell them.

Oh, incredible. I heard, heard a story of an American who was actually collecting ears off Japanese dead.

Ears?

Yes, because his, some crazy relative back home offered to give him five dollars for every ear that he sent back home. So,

35:30 crazy things.

Well, what would he do with ears when he got them?

He, he just used to put them up in a bag and send them back home, and his relative would give him, his uncle or something, would give him five dollars for every one that he sent back.

Oh, God!

Awful. Now was it was once you got down to Kokoda,

36:00 Koitake, that was where Blamey came,

Koitake.

Koitake. Was this, this after your trek down there that you got, you got there and where General Blamey came to?

I think that was after the Owen Stanley show,

Yes.

We got back to Port Moresby.

Right.

Yes. And yes, I wasn’t there,

Right.

I heard about it, heard all about it.

36:30 What did, what did your fellows say?

Oh well apparently, apparently he was inspecting the troops and he got up and he said, “Of course, the blokes…” Something about they run like rabbits, or something. And, “Those that run like rabbits, get killed like rabbits, and they shouldn’t run.” Any rate, no one had run like rabbits at all, certainly. I think it was the 21st Brigade blokes he said it to, and they were up in arms 37:00 about that. They told him to get stuffed or something.

He wouldn’t have been too popular after that at all, would he.

Oh no, no, he wasn’t too popular at all, old Blamey. At any time really.

What was the general chat about him, I guess, what was the general opinion?

Well he used to wander around, skulk about like this, you know, inspecting troops and one thing and another, but he never did anything. He was, sort of, in an old safari suit he wore, he

37:30 had jammed on top of his head, he never said anything, you know. Or if he did say anything, it was something derogatory. Yes, he wasn’t too well liked, by anyone.

But did, even though he wasn’t well liked, did people think that he was a good general in terms of how he was strategising?

I think he was. I think he handled the situation pretty well.

38:00 Of course, he was up against MacArthur, and MacArthur told him what to do all the time.

And the fellows on the ground know that, or talk about that much?

Oh I think they did, yeah.

What did everyone think of MacArthur?

They didn’t think much of him either. Yeah. He had a, the Yanks came into, they were going to take Buna, no, yes Buna.

38:30 And of course they sent in, oh a whole regiment of Yanks to take Buna, and they, they didn’t take it all, they were knocked back. And the Australians had to go in and take it in the finish. But the, the bloke who was in charge of the Yanks at Buna, was a named, a fellow named Eichelberger, General Eichelberger. And he lined all the troops up before Buna, and he said,

39:00 “I mightn’t be much of a general, but I’m a bloody good platoon commander.” That never did him much good, either.

No I can’t imagine it. Okay , well we’ll stop there Doug,

Right-o.

we’ve got to switch tapes again.

39:26 – tape ends.

Tape 8

00:30 Doug, something that I didn’t, that Chris and I didn’t talk to you about before, when you were in the Owen Stanleys, apparently you had some difficulty carrying water, is that correct?

Yes.

Or getting water. What, what was the problem?

Well, in the Owen Stanleys, there was plenty of water but it was usually running in a creek about a hundred yards down the hill. So we’d be walking around on the track, and we’d run out of water,

01:00 and we’d say, “Right-o,” have a stop of about ten minutes to the hour, so we’d say, “Right-o, one man from each section, collect the water bottles and go down to the creek,” which you can hear running away down there somewhere, “and fill the water bottles.” So he’d take off down to the creek, on his own usually, or perhaps two of them would go, take all the water bottles from the section, fill them up at the creek, and then bring them back again, hand them out. Sometimes this creek would be half

01:30 a mile down, down the hill, a bloody great steep hill like this. And you know, took a bit of getting. Other times of course, you could hear the water running and it’d only be down about a hundred yards. So we’d go down, no trouble at all. But there was always plenty of water around in the Owen Stanleys, there was water in little creeks and rivulets going everywhere, thing was to be able to get down to them. So you had to walk down through, you know,

02:00 scrub and one thing and another, stumble down the hill somehow to get to the, to get to the creek. But we, we got to them, got to them all right. We managed to get to water no trouble at all. Or not a lot of trouble, anyway.

So how long were you there in the Owen Stanleys before you came home? Oh, good question. I can’t

02:30 remember, but we went straight up through the Owen Stanleys, it took us about, I’d say about a month to get to Kokoda, downhill, I’d say about, we’d be there about two months before we got home again, to Moresby.

Now was that, with the contact that you had in Gona, or was that later, after?

No, contact at Gona, after we were pulled out, we were relieved at Gona, we were down to, the whole

03:00 battalion was down to about a hundred ranks at Gona, and then we were pulled out and relieved by the, oh another brigade, 2/5th or 2/6th. 18th Brigade, it might have been 18th Brigade. And then we flew back to Moresby. Then from there, we flew, or got on a ship and went back to Townsville.

03:30 I think, I can’t remember whether we went to Townsville or back to Cairns, but anyhow, but one of the two places.

Okay, can I talk to you a little bit about Gona?

Yep.

Now what were your orders about Gona, what were you told that you had to do?

Well, we knew that the Japanese were in command of Gona, they’d taken over the mission station there, and a little bit of the town that was there.

04:00 And there was a little creek going down into the sea, just to the, to the western side of Gona which was called Gona Creek. And we went down, that was on our left hand side, and on the right hand side was the track going into Gona. So, there was, by this stage, there was, I was in charge of two companies, C and Don Company, and Power, who was a friend of mine,

04:30 he was in charge of A and B Companies. And he was on the, on the side of the track going into Gona, and I was, my left hand side was on the creek. And incidentally, on the other side of the creek, was Haddy’s Post. Now have you heard of Haddy? He was killed by the Japanese there under the … he had an outpost under a house, and he and his section of fellows stayed under

05:00 the house and kept an eye on the Japanese on the other side of the creek. The Japanese eventually found he was there, and they attacked him, and there was only himself and about three other blokes under the house, so he stayed there and he shot about six of them. And they were all round the house when they actually found him, and Haddy had been killed too. So Haddy was there, surrounded by about six dead Japs. He was a, Haddy was a corporal I think, from the Second 16th Battalion, West Australian.

05:30 So this had all taken place obviously before you’d got there, and…

No, no, he went with us to, towards Gona. We didn’t take Gona, we were pulled out before. I was sent back to the RAP [Regimental Aid Post], to the Casualty Clearing Station, that’s where I became a Captain Cook. And so there was no-one, my two companies were commanded then by Ron Dark,

06:00 who was a platoon commander, but at that stage, he, he got out after Gona, and completed his medical degree, he was a doctor, he was a doctor in the city here, at Kingaroy, and then to Stanthorpe, he was a doctor at Stanthorpe for many years, Doctor Dark. Oh, I went to his funeral about, oh about twelve months ago. And he was in

06:30 charge when Power and I left; he was in charge of the whole, whole Battalion, really.

But now, you had a lot of casualties there though, is that correct?

Oh yes. Well there, we were down to about, I don’t know how many casualties we had, I had, but the battalion had about, casualties would have been down, it was a hundred, it was less than a hundred all told, out of a normal battalion of about nine hundred. So, and the only two officers were,

07:00 in the battalion were Captain Cotton who, who became CO, Colonel Cotton later on. And, and Ron Dark, who was one of my platoon commanders.

Now you were Mentioned in Despatches here, and you received the Military Medal, is that correct?

Ah no, I was Mentioned in Dispatches because we served the Military Cross.

Military Cross.

But I didn’t

07:30 get the Military Cross until the Lae, the Lae show, down the Marchavelli [?], Nadzab to Lae. That was the next campaign, twelve months later.

And in between Gona, and what happened in Lae, you went home to Australia, didn’t you? Yes.

So the conflict in Gona, was that probably the hairiest conflict that you had had?

I think it was, yes. Because we couldn’t see where we were, long grass about six foot high,

08:00 and we couldn’t see Gona, but we knew the Japs were there, you could see the tops of some houses, you could hear the sea on the other side. But we didn’t, we weren’t strong enough to take it. Didn’t have enough people.

Now why were you mentioned in dispatches for your work in Gona?

No it wasn’t at Gona, it was before that at Templeton’s Crossing.

Oh Templeton’s Crossing, oh okay.

Oh because a

08:30 patrol I did out round onto the right hand flank, and I attacked the enemy, you know, uphill, further round, lost a few blokes there. But got back with them, all right. But that was at Templeton’s Crossing, or the other side of Templeton’s Crossing, really.

And the Military Medal then was later in Lae.

Yes, Military Cross.

Military Cross, sorry.

Was later at Lae, on the, on the Nadzab-Lae Road,

09:00 at Edwards Plantation.

Can you tell us about that, then?

I can’t tell you much about it, except we were going down the track, and, and we knew the Japanese were up on the hill, on the Aertza [?] Range, on our left. And they were firing at us. So I turned my company to, into the left, and attacked them. And we got up to about

09:30 Oh, a hundred yards from them, and the grass was about six foot high, kunai grass. And I could see them, up in the hills above us, but the boys couldn’t fire their rifles, because they couldn’t see over the tops of this long grass. So what I did was I called for one of the Bren guns to be brought up, and I put it on the head of, tin hat of a chap in front of me, I’ve forgotten his name. Anyway, put the

10:00 tripod on his tin hat and I could fire up to the Japs, in the, up on the hills. And that’s where I was shot, I was shot through the arm. But then, my 2IC then, was a fellow named Hec Davies, who was killed in Borneo. But Hec came up, and I said, “it’s all yours, Hec,” and I went and, went back to the CCS [Casualty Clearing Station], with a bullet through the shoulder. And that was the end of my

10:30 sojourn with the battalion. I went back then, and went back to Heidelberg, then from Heidelberg I went up to become the, one of the instructors at the LHQ Tax School at Beenleigh, and that’s when I was re- boarded, and made A-class again. Went back to the battalion, and yes.

I’ll just bring you back to Gona for a second, Doug. Now you mentioned the numbers

11:00 were very low and there were a lot of casualties.

Yep.

Did any of your close mates get killed there in Gona?

Oh a few of them, but I just can’t remember who they were now, but there were, but they weren’t exactly mates, they were, you know, members of my platoon, or my company. Mostly on patrols, they’d go out on patrol, of course, and the Japs would be waiting for them, and ‘boom, boom’, get them.

11:30 And we couldn’t see what was going on in Gona, because of this high grass, too. Kunai grass about six foot high, we were in it. Except for the track going up the middle of the, through the kunai grass to Gona, we didn’t know what was going on. And of course, if you got on the track, you were gone, because they, they were firing down the track. So if you got on the track, they’d open up with machine guns, straight down the track. So we were groping in the dark, as it were.

12:00 Yes, it doesn’t sound very pleasant, at all.

No.

How did you manage to get through, when there was just devastation all around you?

Get through, where to?

Get through at all, did you have a drink at night? No, no drink, of course not. All the drinks were back at Moresby.

12:30 Oh no, we just kept, kept going, just edging forward, doing what we could, sending patrols in mainly. And of course, patrols didn’t get very far either, because they got shot at as soon as they got out of sight. And Haddy of course, had his patrol on the other side of the creek, and he was wiped out.

Did you know him?

I’d met him, because he was attached to me. Till he went across the creek, he came down. He was a West Australian from the Second 16th Battalion, I think.

13:00 They’d been more or less wiped out, back at Isurava when they were pushed back across the Owen Stanleys. But he came back again, as a sergeant and was attached to the Second 33rd, as a patrolling officer, or patrolling sergeant, he was. Anyway, we never

13:30 got into Gona, because at that stage, we were down to under a hundred people, all told. And there was only about two officers left in the battalion. So, I was back at CCS at this stage, and they were pulled out and replaced by the, what the, 21st Brigade, I think, came in.

Who made the decision to pull back?

Oh the, it would have been George Vasey, General Vasey, he was there

14:00 at the time.

And what about in this kunai grass, was it difficult to find places to bury the men?

Oh no, no, you’d soon, soon find a hole in the, you know, it was all wet too. Everything was wet, there was water lying everywhere. I’ve got pictures of some of the blokes there in, in this book.

That’s okay, well I’ll have a look at it later, Doug.

Will you?

Yeah, yeah,

14:30 I’ll have a look later. I was just going to ask you, that time in Gona when you couldn’t have a drink at night to cool off or anything like that, did you find a lot of men having troubles with their nerves, or did you have troubles with your nerves?

No, but I, well by that stage all the blokes who had bad nerves, had gone, anyway. And the blokes that were there, were the old timers who were pretty steady, they didn’t have anything to drink, of course, but they had muddy water off the ground.

15:00 Dig a slit trench and then fill up with water, so you’d drink that, very good. There was no fresh water. Where would you get fresh water from? It rained every day, every afternoon, every night, so when it lay on the ground in a little hole, you’d scoop it up in your water bottle.

I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like a tourist destination?

No, no, I don’t think it is, even today.

15:30 So now, you went back to Australia, and then you came back and did the Lae campaign?

That’s right.

Now, when you went back to Australia, that’s when you met Barbara this time, wasn’t it?

Ah, no, I didn’t meet her till after the Lae show.

Okay, so how long did you have in Australia before you were flown back to New, New Guinea?

I can’t recall, but I’d say two or three months, or something like that. Did a bit more training, and building

16:00 up of reinforcements on the table and Ravenshoe, and then back to New Guinea. And there’s a book came out recently called the, book put out by the army, Australian Records Office or someone, I’ve got a copy of it here somewhere. Any rate, they’ve got a photograph of the plane, supposedly of the survivors of the plane crash.

16:30 And it’s not that at all. I know where it was taken. It was taken at Imita Ridge, when we came back from the, when we went up to the Owen Stanleys the first time. But all the fellows there, including me, in the photograph, but we were having a rest. Remember I said the brigadier came and pulled us all back to Imita Ridge?

Yes.

It was taken then, before we went back, regrouped and went back again.

And what did this new book say? They said it was the remnants of the plane crash.

17:00 The plane crash was at, before we went to. We were going into, into the New Guinea, into the Markham River show. And we were getting into aircraft to take us to Nadzab. But the, as we were waiting at the end of the drome in trucks, you know, one truck behind another with about thirty blokes in a truck, this

17:30 American air force plane came over, and crashed right on top of us, killed a hundred fellows, and burnt all the trucks and everything up. And then, I was in that, but luckily I, when we pulled up nose to tail in the trucks, I wondered what we were pulled up for. So I got out of the truck and I walked up to the head of the line to see what the hold-up was. And when I was up there, I went up and I found that the ASC had pulled us all up, and they were putting a tin of,

18:00 packet of, tin of biscuits and a case of bully beef in every truck, so that when we went to Nadzab, now, we’d have as a sort of rations. So I walked back to the, to my truck, which was in line. Instead of getting into it, I sat on the running board, and the plane crashed, and this propeller of the plane went right through the top of the roof and speared the driver, killed him. Propeller went through him, and I was knocked from the

18:30 running board where I was sitting, down the hill. So I watched the flames go over, over the top and put my head like this. They receded and I got up and walked back to the truck, and the, half the crew were dead. And bombs all over the place and stuff like that. So when the battalion moved, and flew into Silisili were they staged, I was left behind, and, ’cause nearly all my company

19:00 were killed anyway. And I got them all together, got the reinforce…, the left-over battle personnel, got them together and flew up the next day as reinforcements. So we then we marched down the road towards Lae. And that was when I was hit the second time.

Now I know your religion is C of E…

CM what?

But did you ever think someone was looking after

19:30 you?

No.

You had a lucky few shaves there, didn’t you.

Yes, very lucky, at times. No, I didn’t, I didn’t even think about it.

Okay, I’m sorry, I, I interrupted you. Can you tell me about the conflict then, that you encountered in Lae?

Oh well, when?

When you came back from Australia.

20:00 Yes, well when we came back, from Lae.

No, you came back for a couple of months and then you went back to New Guinea the last time, and that was when you were wounded, wasn’t it?

Yes, that’s right, that was there, on the road to Lae from Nadzab.

That’s right.

At Edwards Plantation.

That’s right.

And any rate, that was all got over with pretty quickly, I was wounded, so I went back to the CCS, and eventually ended up right back at, in Victoria at Heidelberg Hospital. And,

20:30 the rest of the battalion moved straight down into Lae. And there was a great discussion at the time, the 9th Division had landed just north of Lae by sea, and we’d come in from the land from Nadzab. And there was a great sort of rival between the two divisions, to see who’d get to Lae first, and we beat the 9th Division by about three hours. So our, our battalion marched into Lae the

21:00 first, the first of the 7th Division to get to Lae.

But can, you said with what happened on the road, half your company was knocked out. Were they the company, the new recruits that you got when you arrived back in New Guinea?

Half my company, I was, what with, with the air show?

21:30 Yes. Yes.

Some of them were, some of them were old blokes. It’s all about it in that book there, that’s why I want you to have a look at it. Even the names of them all. I was left behind to rally the remnants of the. See there wasn’t only my company, there was other companies too, Don Company was practically wiped out. So I was left behind to get them together and get them on the plane.

22:00 And they said, someone came up, some bloke from Division, and he said, “Oh you’d better come back to camp and go up tomorrow.” And I think our CO said, “No, we’re going on now, we’re not stopping, we’re not stopping anywhere, we’re going.” So even though half the battalion was wiped out, they still flew out to Nadzab, to Silisili. Just as well they did, too. They, you know, they forgot all about it then, they were doing something else.

22:30 If they’d gone back to camp, they’d have been thinking about the plane crash all the time, and thinking oh, this is bad, and, you know, we might crash again, or something.

Were you glad, well not glad, but happy to be taken away and be put into hospital, to escape all this conflict?

No, no, it didn’t affect me like that. I was disappointed,

23:00 ’cause I’d gone out of action, so I was no longer a company commander, and handed over to my 2IC which was Hec Davies. Incidentally Hec Davies was killed in Borneo, so he didn’t last much longer anyway.

And that could have been you?

Yep, if I’d gone to Borneo.

Now tell us about coming back to Australia then. You came back, you flew back.

23:30 Ah yes. Now, I, first of all, I went to the 2/6th AGH in Port Moresby. And I was there for two or three days. And there was a certain bloke there, who’d been badly burnt in the plane crash, he’d been burnt all over his body, and he had his arms in, everything in plaster, his legs and everything, and he was in a wheelchair, sitting in a wheelchair. And they said to me at the hospital, “Right-o, you’re in charge of him, you take him back to Australia.” So,

24:00 I was all right, except one, this arm was up in, what they call an aeroplane splint, up here like that. So, I could put him in a wheelchair, and wheeled him down to the wharf at Moresby, and we went back, and we came back by plane to Townsville. And we caught the train at Townsville, and I was in charge of him all the way down through New South Wales to Victoria, to the Second 3rd, 2/2nd AGH, I think it was, Second 3rd

24:30 AGH at Heidelberg.

Did he live?

Yes, yes. He’s dead now, but he lived, he was all right, badly burnt. I had to sort of massage him and look after him, all the way down on the train. And we had to sit up in the bloody train, all the way from Townsville down to Melbourne, sitting up in a train, and he was burnt all over.

25:00 Anyway.

Couldn’t they have found a bed for him?

No, there were no beds on the train, I don’t think. Not the train we were on, anyway. So, we got down there, and I, and that’s where we got into trouble down there, because there was a, at Heidelberg, we were in both in Ward 2, I think it was, which was an officers’ ward. And Ian Buttrose

25:30 and I decided we’d go down the town, have a beer. So he was still in his wheelchair, so I had one arm, so I wheeled him all the way from Heidelberg Hospital, down the hill to Ivanhoe, to the Ivanhoe Hotel. And we got in there and had a few beers. By the time we’d had a few beers, we thought we couldn’t, I couldn’t, wouldn’t be able to push the wheelchair back up the hill to the hospital. So it was a folding wheelchair, so we folded it up and put it in the water trough. And the water trough had George

26:00 and Annie Bills, donated by George and Annie Bills. There were a lot of troughs all round Victoria which they donated for the Horse Society or something or other. And anyway, when we got back. Oh no, before, on the way back, we said to the taxi driver, “Pull up here at the café.” So we pulled up at the café, and we went in there, and I said, all very smart looking café, I said, “two of those crayfish,” lovely big crayfish from Tasmania. “Two of those, and so many

26:30 muffins,” not muffins, what are those other round things. Any rate, whatever they were, you put butter on them and eat them, you know.

Bread rolls?

Oh, like a bread roll, except they were fried things. Any rate, we, we bought those and a lot of ice cream and, ice cream and all sorts of stuff. We put it in the taxi, we went back

27:00 to the ward. And we marched into the ward, which was 2, I think it was 2A. And the sister in charge of the ward, was Sister Hardcastle. And we said, “we bought the boys all some afternoon tea.” “Oh,” she said, “goody, goody, goody, clear the deck, clear this table, put it all out there, and we’ll sort it all out into bits,” you know, to take around to the ward, people in the ward. Any rate, we were chopping up the big crayfish and

27:30 all the rest of it, and in walks ‘Battleaxe’ McAllister. Now Battleaxe McAllister was the, was the matron in charge of the hospital. And she was an old World War 1 battleaxe. And she looked, she said, “what’s going on here?” We said, “Oh, we’re just preparing afternoon tea for the boys.” She said, “Afternoon tea, my foot.” She got her, she scooped the whole lot into the bin. Crayfish, crumpets,

28:00 everything went into the bin. And she said, “Now get back to bed.” So the poor sister in charge of the couple of little nurses who were helping us, they just did as they were told. We went back and got into our beds. And any rate, that was the end of it, that was the end of our afternoon tea. It all went down to the hopper, with all the slops and everything else, into the bin. So a couple of days later, Ian Buttrose, was transferred, he was a South Australian.

28:30 And he was transferred to South Australia Hospital, wherever it was, back in Adelaide somewhere. So he went on the train, and I was left there, I was there for a couple of days on my own, and I went out to Kerner [?], which is a repatriation sort of, rest home at South Yarra. It was the old home of Sir Norman Brooks, great tennis player before the war. Any rate, we went out there, and this is where I was

29:00 re-posted from there to a training show, and I was out there for a while. I kept out of trouble while I was there.

Why don’t I believe you?

Well you should, because I’m telling you the truth. Yes. We had some fun.

And then of course,

29:30 you had to, this is when they asked you about whether or not you’d be interested in going to Singapore, is that right?

Going where?

To Singapore, for the War Crimes?

Oh no, it was later on. I was sent from there to, to the LHQ Tax School at Beenleigh, where I met, where I was re-boarded A-class, which I shouldn’t have been, of course. But I told them I had sick, crook eyes, I didn’t tell them there was anything wrong with my arm. And so I arrived back at the battalion, A-Class. And old Tom Cotton,

30:00 our CO said, “How the hell did you get back in?” I said, “I’m A-class, sir, look at me papers.” And, so, I was sent up to division then, General Milford, and he asked me the same question. And I said, “Well here’s my paper book, sir. I’ve re-boarded A-class.” Major McAllister, no, Major McGregor from QLC [?] [QLFC?] came down, he was

30:30 a doctor. And he reported everyone who was B-class at Beenleigh, because they thought all those, you know, a lot of B-class personnel were, were sort of stacking it on. So Arch Barnett from the 2/5th Battalion got a bullet right through the stomach here, and out the back, took one of his kidneys. And he was B-class too, he was an instructor at Beenleigh. So we both were made A-class. And back we went to our battalion. Of course, when we got back there, we were immediately asked how we

31:00 managed this, and we said, “here it is, in our paper book.” So we went up to Division, and we were sent, both sent back to, back to QLFC, and I, that’s when I went back to Bandy McDonald at, at Canungra. Sent back as G2 training. I didn’t like it very much there, and came this job in Singapore, so I put in for that and got it. Had to go down to Melbourne and form the First Australian

31:30 War Crimes Section.

Now this was still before you met Barbara, is that right?

No, I’d met Barbara.

You’d met Barbara, and had you got married?

Ah, yes.

So you got married in this time after, after what happened at Lae,

Yes.

on the road to Lae. Came back, wounded in hospital

Yes.

then you met Barbara.

Yes.

And after six weeks, you decided And I told you what she said, didn’t I, yesterday?

32:00 Yes. And so then you got married.

Yes.

Then you got married in Melbourne.

No, we got married up here at St Augustine’s Church at Hamilton, because Barbara’s mother had been married there, so that’s why we went there. And that’s, that was on, I think I told you before, went out one Saturday afternoon and saw Canon Birch who was the minister out there, and said, “Can you manage us?” And he said, he said, “No, we’d have to publish the bans and all sort of things.”

32:30 And I said, “But I’m going down to Victoria on holidays on, next Wednesday or something, so Barbara’s got to come with me.” “Oh,” he said, “I’ll see what he can do.” I said, “Well, what are you doing tomorrow?” He said, “Oh, tomorrow’s Sunday, we don’t marry people on Sundays.” “Oh,” I said, “what about the next day?” He said, “Oh yes, I’ll be able to do it the next day.” So we got married on the Monday. And then

33:00 we, I think the next day, the Tuesday or the Wednesday we left for Victoria. And when we got to Corowa where I came from, my Mother was waiting to meet me at the station, and I introduced her, “This is my new wife, Barbara,” and Barbara, my mother was very mid-Victorian, I think. And she looked at Barbara and said, “How do you do?” How do you do. Which was a bit of shock.

33:30 Some people still talk like that, don’t they?

Oh I think so, yes, if you’re proper people they do. Very proper. “How do you do?”

Did Barbara manage to get a, a wedding dress for the wedding?

No, we were married in our uniforms. Both in uniform.

And where did you go on holidays, in Victoria?

Oh we didn’t go anywhere

34:00 much. We had a couple of days in Sydney on the way day. Went down to Corowa and stayed with, at home at my mother’s place. But, at this stage, my father had died, he wasn’t alive. So we stayed there for a couple of weeks, then came back. I had 24 days leave, I think.

And then, now did Barbara go with you to Singapore?

Yes. No, not with me. Not the first time. I came back when I was

34:30 discharged from British Rail, from, I was over there with the First Australian War Crimes Section. And I took my discharge in Singapore, came back here to be discharged in Melbourne. Reported to the Australia, reported to the British High Commissioner in Canberra, and I’d already arranged with British Far Eastern Broadcasting Service, that I’d join then. So he knew all about me, and he said, “Yes, I’ll put you on a plane, you go from Rose Bay tomorrow morning at nine

35:00 o’clock,” or something. So I got in a, in a big old Qantas jet, not jet, flying boat. Went to Brisbane, landed at, down there at not Raby Bay, some other bay. And then went to Townsville, landed there. Then across to Darwin, and up to Singapore. But Barbara,

35:30 Barbara didn’t come with me then, she came up by boat from Melbourne. While she was, at that stage, she was due to have her baby, our oldest daughter, Merian. So she took the baby in, by boat to, to Singapore, the baby was about three weeks old. So she waited then till she had the baby. Her uncle, she stayed with her uncle at the University in Melbourne,

36:00 her uncle was the Professor of Obstetrics at Melbourne University, and so she stopped with him. And she went up to Singapore.

Did he deliver the baby as well?

No, I don’t think so, no. She delivered out at, I’ve forgotten the name of the hospital, at East Melbourne anyway. The Mercy Hospital, I think it was called.

Now about the War Crimes

36:30 Court that was set up in Singapore. You were made head of administration, is that correct?

Yes. I formed it, I formed the unit and took it up to Singapore.

Was it a fascinating, fascinating job, Doug?

Yes it was. There was all sorts of people, you know. And I was in charge of all the administration and seeing what they did. And when they were short, if someone’s sick on the, on the board, I was, I was put on the, on the bench. To judge?

37:00 As a member of the court. But only occasion, it only, it only happened a couple of times. And I think I told you about General Harada. He was sentenced to be hanged, he was the GOC Java, where all the atrocities happened down there. And he said, he said to me, “Please, please can you shoot me.” Took me back a bit. I said, “Why?” He said, “Because it is a terrible thing to be

37:30 hanged in Japan, but it is all right to be shot.” So I said, “Oh yeah, we can arrange that.” So we took him down to Changi Beach, and shot him on the beach.

Was there anybody there that was tried incorrectly, or was accused and actually wasn’t guilty?

Oh, some, one or two I think, I don’t remember any, but there would have been some.

What were some of the cases you can remember from that time. Can you remember any cases?

Oh most of them, most of them were hanged.

38:00 You know, they’d been out at Changi, they’d been chopping blokes’ heads off and goodness knows what. Of course, we had blokes who knew they’d done this, and came up as, as witnesses, some of their own blokes. They were really funny, the Japanese. You know, if, if our blokes were asked a, a question, and they didn’t want to answer, they’d say, “Oh

38:30 I don’t know anything about it,” or “No, I didn’t do it,” or something like that. But if you asked the Japanese a question, he’d say yes or no. He wouldn’t say, you know, “someone else did it, not me.” If he chopped a bloke’s head off, “did you chop that fellow’s head off,” and he’d say “Yes, yes, I did it, very good, very good, very quick.” You know, they’d own up, own up every time.

Do you think there was some kind of pride attached to that?

I think

39:00 there probably was, I don’t know what, what it was, but the, they tell the truth, they all told the truth, the Japanese. Exactly what they thought.

Can I ask you Doug, if the courts were made public, could anybody come in and listen?

Ah yes, up in the gallery, in the back of the court, you could, you could listen. And the court was held in the Singapore Administrative Offices, I think it was called.

39:30 The main administrative offices in Singapore, a big building.

Could women and children come in?

I didn’t see any children there, but there could have been.

Do you remember women being in there?

Yep, yes women used to come in. Most of them were Japanese women, not Japanese, Chinese women. A lot of Chinese in Singapore. And their husbands had been tortured, or had their heads cut off, or something or other. And they came in to

40:00 listen to what was going on.

And was that most, the most common verdict, Doug, that the Japanese would be hung, that they weren’t put in prison for life, or anything like that?

No. They’d either get off, or they’d get so many, so much in jail, if they’ve just done something, done something stupid. But if they’d killed anyone, they were usually hanged, not hung, hanged.

Hanged.

40:30 End of tape

Tape 9

00:36 Doug, can you tell us how the actual War Crimes Court was run, just in terms of say, gathering evidence to start with, I mean?

The evidence was usually gathered by the War Graves [Commission] or someone like that, or someone who’d been in the 8th Division over there, and had seen these

01:00 atrocities and reported them. And then the, whoever it was, Colonel Hadashi or whatever his name was, would be found, and he would be brought before the court. He’d be put in jail up there in Singapore, which was quite a normal sort of a jail, but they were well-treated and well-fed, and they’d be brought before the court. Now the court would be, consist of a, usually a colonel, 01:30 who was the head of the court, War Crimes Court. And usually a major, or two majors, or a major and a captain, and they’d be members of the court. And they would listen to all the evidence, both for and against, and they would say guilty or not guilty. And then the president of the court would announce the verdict. Whether it be chop his head off, or you know,

02:00 jail for ten years, or whatever. That’s what happened. And of course, the papers would be there, the Straits Times newspaper, all covering it all down, and Australian newspapers too, and it would appear back here in the Courier Mail and The Australian, or whatever was going at the time. And, so it would all be recorded, and sent back to the various headquarters, whether it be England or Australia

02:30 or wherever.

Was, who was, I guess established in, as a defence for the prison?

Ah, they, they could establish their own defence. Lawyers from, you know Singapore or Japan or somewhere else.

03:00 Or they could appoint lawyers from Australia, who, to act on their, act in their defence. Most of them used to say, “I’d like to be defended by an Australian lawyer.” And so they would take up the case and defend them. Usually if they were charged, it was pretty good evidence that they had done whatever they were supposed to have done.

03:30 But there was always something that came up to, in due remittance, you know, to remit their sentence in some way. ’Cause they’d been good fellows and they offered someone a piece of cheese when they didn’t have any, and this sort of thing, you know.

Would that make much of a difference?

Well it wouldn’t have made much difference, but at least it was something, I suppose.

It’s, I mean, it’s

04:00 very curious that they had the option to take Australian counsel. Would that actually happen often?

Not very often, no.

And were the, were the prisoners ever, I guess, questioned or interrogated before they ended up in court?

Oh they might have been interrogated by someone in, in the jail or someone before they came in. But generally they were interrogated by someone who could speak their language. And some of them

04:30 of course, could speak English. And they would be interrogated in English. But mainly they’d be interrogated in Japanese, and they all seemed to understand that, and they acted accordingly.

What, Doug what was some of the, I guess, the more, I mean what’s the range of cases that were probably tried?

Oh well, usually by

05:00 taking a prisoner and flogging him, or attacking him with a stick or something like that. Or sometimes even killing a prisoner, you know. Running him through with a bayonet, or something. But usually it was because of, tied to a tree and flogged, or something like that, you know. And the prisoner would, may have died afterwards, it was all recorded by,

05:30 not only by the War Crimes Commission, but also by the unit that the man came from. He might have come from the 2/28th Battalion, or whatever it was. And the people in there would substantiate the evidence. Say yes, this actually happened, I saw it, whatever happened.

So what might be the outcome for somebody who’s getting tried for you know, floggings, floggings and just

06:00 beatings, as opposed to…

Oh well, he might…

What might they get?

Get so many years in jail in Singapore. Or if he was a bad case, he’d be hanged or shot. Sent back to Japan sometimes, under sentence of course.

To serve the term in Japan, in the Japanese jail.

I forget just what happened to them, but they, they were just

06:30 dispensed with somehow or other. Did the, did the fact that Japan weren’t a signatory on the Geneva Convention ever come up, in the court proceedings, in terms of, you know, I mean, they hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention, so, they weren’t…

I don’t know, but I thought they had.

07:00 Ah, I’ve been led to believe that they didn’t. But I could be wrong.

Ah, I think they probably did, because they were ROIs [?] then at that stage.

Okay. Well then that, yeah, I mean that would definitely make a lot more sense.

Yes.

Well, if they hadn’t, you’d thought that, they could actually be used in their favour, you know, if you know what I mean.

07:30 Did different, just in your observations, were different Japanese prisoners, or, given different treatment, depending on the severity of their crime?

Ah, no, there seemed to be. The Japanese before the war had colonised Korea, of course. And a lot of their

08:00 jailers, shall we call them, were people in there, who looked after prisoners, were Koreans. And the Koreans seemed to be particularly nasty in their attitude towards prisoners of war. I don’t know if they were or not, but as I said before, I wasn’t on the, I wasn’t actually on the War Crimes Court, I was on the administrative side, so I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened there, or why.

08:30 Just that I heard this happens, this to be so.

But when you would sit in on the court, if they didn’t have enough people there, what, what would be your function in the court?

Oh just a member of the court. There was usually a colonel in charge as the head of the court. And usually three majors,

09:00 or two majors and a captain, or something like that on the, on the court itself. And it was only when someone was ill or something like that, who couldn’t attend. Mainly they were solicitors from Sydney or Melbourne, or somewhere like that. I remember our, our CO, Colonel Jennings, was a solicitor from Sydney. And he was the head of the War Crimes Section.

09:30 I would only be called in, I was only called in a couple of times, I think, to sit on the court, but only because someone was sick or something like that. So all I had to do was sit there and listen, and agree with them or disagree, as the case may be.

But, so you weren’t actually, you weren’t in a position where you had to make a decision on a verdict?

No, no.

I guess this, in your observations,

10:00 either in the court or at an administrative level, where there any particular difficult cases that you were…

No, I can’t remember any, they were usually pretty clear cut. But as I said before, it’s a long time ago, and I just, I just don’t remember the details at all. I see my wife out there in the garden, picking weeds out of the garden.

10:30 Saving you from doing it.

Yes, I hope so.

And just in terms of, I guess, making a decision on a verdict, just in terms of the way the court was run, would, would there be a recess to, for that decision to be made, or would it be, sort of…

Oh yes, there would be.

11:00 I’ve forgotten just what it was. But a court would sit for so many, half an hour or three quarters of an hour, or an hour and a half or something like that, and there’d be a recess. They might discuss things, come back into the court, and be called to order. And they’d sit down and decide what was happening. But just what it was, I can’t recall at this stage.

And what are, I mean, just from an observer’s point, what do you, what do you reckon the Japanese actually made of

11:30 the whole war court, just in terms of, you know, they’d be doing their job?

Well, this was, this was the one in Singapore. There was also one in Hong Kong, and one in Japan, and one in Rabaul. So they all had the same sort of job to do. I think the, the Japanese, I don’t know what they thought, really. But I think they, I think they thought, it was a,

12:00 a normal course of events, things that had to happen. And I think they agreed with it.

I’m probably going to get his name wrong, even though you’ve told us a lot of times. But General Harashi.

Harada.

Harada, there you go. See I knew I would. But, was he clearly thankful to you, for

Oh yes, he appeared to be.

12:30 For taking him to.

Very grateful to be shot and not hanged. Yes.

And he expressed that to you.

And incidentally, I have, I have his sword. Have I still got it, I think it’s upstairs. I have his sword. And when I was in Japan, there was a, a guide taking us round, who had been a soldier,

13:00 a Japanese soldier during the war. I think he’d been in Singapore or Malaya or somewhere like that. And I said to him, “look, I’ve got this general’s sword, I’d like to give it back to the family, would that be possible.” He said, “Oh no, no, no, do not bring it up, very bad luck, do not, they would not want the sword, very bad, don’t, don’t go near them with it.” So I brought it back to Australia. They didn’t want the sword.

13:30 You know, an Australian bloke who’s sword, they’d say, “Oh, thank you for very much, yes, I’d like the sword back.” And this sword I had, was, it was made in 1622 or something like that, the date’s still on it. Made for the family, you know. So it’s a family sword.

And how did you come into possession of it?

Very good question, I can’t think now, but I forget, it was about

14:00 the War Crimes up there somehow, I got it. It was handed over to me. I think it might have been old General Harada’s sword, and I wanted to take it back and give it to him family, but they said no, don’t, don’t, very bad, very bad business to do that, they would not appreciate it at all. Very funny people, those Japanese.

Very different culture. Was there,

14:30 did you observe much of any ill-feeling from the Australians towards the Japanese after the war, for what had happened in New Guinea?

No, no. I’ve been to Japan a couple of times since then, and found the Japanese all very nice and hospitable and pleasant. They didn’t bring it up at all, didn’t say anything about it. I think their thoughts are if you’re condemned to be shot,

15:00 well you be shot, that’s that. You know. You’re going to die, you die. No ifs and buts about it.

But I guess, I was asking more in terms of, because of the, I guess, the atrocities that were committed in New Guinea, whether or…

Well of course, the Japanese say there were no atrocities, that none of their troops would commit atrocities anywhere, that was all talk, nothing.

15:30 Did you harbour any ill-feeling towards the Japanese straight after the war because of what you had seen.

No, I didn’t, no, no. Well any Japanese that I struck during the war were you know, they were either dead ones or prisoners, and they seemed to be all right, they were quite nice fellows, always bowed to you, and said, “konichiwa.”

16:00 You know what konichiwa means, don’t you.

Ah, you’ll have to?

In Australia, say, say to a bloke, “How you going? All right?” Same sort of thing, ‘konichiwa’.

Now Heather [interviewer] asked you before about whether you thought there were any innocents

16:30 that were charged as guilty in the tribunal.

I didn’t strike any. And any that I struck, who were charged with being, doing some atrocity, they all said, “Yes,” they did it. They didn’t say, “No I didn’t, nothing to do with me, I didn’t,” they all owned up and said, “Yes, I cut his head off, I cut his hand off.” No trouble at all. Very proud to tell us.

17:00 That was the way they went through things.

And I guess, you mentioned before, that the evidence that was gathered against anyone that was up for trial, was pretty thorough. There was, there was like a determined effort made.

Well, there was all sorts of people up there, but when, for instance, the 8th Division blokes were released, they were all asked if

17:30 any atrocities had been committed against them, or did they see any. And those that had, said, “Yes, I saw so-and-so and so-and-so.” They’d mention his name, cut a fellow’s head off or something, and so, that’s where they’d get it from. And this bloke would be, this evidence would be read out at the, at the court. But unless that happened, there was no evidence against anyone did anything wrong at all.

On the other side of the fence, do you think there was anyone that was

18:00 guilty, that actually got let off?

I don’t think so. They might of, but I don’t think so.

Now, I mean you had a fairly unique, I guess, end to the war in, in that you got to sort of go overseas and take jobs in Singapore, and all kinds of things. Did, did you have much of a, any trouble at all, settling into, sort of,

18:30 city life after the, after your service, after six years?

No, no, well the, when I was in Singapore with the British Far Eastern Broadcasting Service, I had quite a lot of conversations and one thing and another, with Americans from the International Harvester Company. And one of them up there, when I said I was going back to Australia, he said, “Oh,

19:00 why don’t you go and see Walter Killow,” who was the head of the International Harvester Company in Melbourne, and get a job with the International Harvester Company. And I said, “I might do that, what’s his address.” He said, “Oh, City Road, South Melbourne.” So when I got back to, I was discharged from the army, I got out, I went up to City Road, South Melbourne, and went in and asked to see Mr Killow. And a girl

19:30 at the front desk said, “Oh yes, and what do you want to see him about, have you an appointment?” And I said,, “No.” And she said, “How did you know his name was Mr Killow?” And I said, “Because I was asked by some people at International Harvester Company in Singapore to come and see him.” “Oh, is that so? All right. My name is Miss Dentry. I am his secretary.” So Miss Dentry took me in, and introduced me to Walter Killow. And I said,

20:00 “I’ve just come down from Singapore,” and told him what I’d done up there, “and I thought I’d come in and see if you had a job for me.” “Oh,” he said, “can you drive a truck?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Can you do this, do that?” And I said, “Oh yes, I can do all those things.” He said, “Oh, come in,” and he introduced me to a fellow named, forgotten his name, the manager for Victoria anyway.

20:30 And he said, he introduced me. And he said, “We’d like to invite you to come to dinner.” I said, “Oh yes, I’d like to come to dinner.” So we went out to this very posh pub and sat up and had dinner and sweets afterwards and a couple of drinks, and one thing and another. And I said to the Victorian manager,

21:00 I got the job, and I said to the Victorian Manager, what’s his name, he came up here as manager for Queensland later on. And any rate, I said to him, “What was that business? Why did I have to go and have lunch, or dinner, with him?” And he said, “Don’t you know?” And I said, “No.” He said, “To see how you held your knife and fork.” So there you are. That was true.

21:30 They wanted to see if I held my knife and fork the right way before they gave me the job, and apparently I did because I got the job.

Lucky you.

Yes.

Now, with the amount of wounds that you took during your service, did they ever give you much trouble after the war?

No. I get a stiff shoulder and one thing and another, and a few aches in it now and again, but no problems.

22:00 And did you, I guess, did you share any of your stories or your experiences with Barbara, given that she was ex-service as well?

Oh no, we didn’t talk much about it all. She said, “Oh, some poor army bloke,” you know. “Some silly looking army bloke.”

22:30 Of course, she was, she thought she had a plum job. She was keeping the Japanese aircraft away from Brisbane. How was she doing that?

She was, she was on the radar, she was a radar operator. And of course, I think they had, the only thing they ever got over the radar over Brisbane, was a couple of Yankee planes came over without notifying them they were coming. So she’d be in touch with the, with the guns from the radar room.

23:00 And say, “Right-o, open the guns on Victoria Park, on this plane that’s coming over,” or wherever they were. And luckily, no Japanese came over.

They would have copped it.

Oh yes, she would have shot them out of the air.

Did you, once you settled back in Australia, did you seek out mates that you had in the service?

23:30 I’ve been in touch with them all the time, yes, yes. Still in touch with them, I go down to Sydney occasionally, they put on a, a dinner down there every now and again. They’re more or less closing down now, I think, just about had it, same as up here. There’s only about three blokes left in Queensland from our battalion. So we’ve had it up here too.

And did you tell any

24:00 of your children or grandchildren about your experiences during your service time?

No, no unless they ask about something, I didn’t tell them much about it, no. It was just run of the mill stuff, you know. Do what you’re told to do, sort of thing, and don’t argue the point.

Well it’s funny, ’cause a lot of fellows I’ve spoken to have talked about how hard they found it settling back into civvy street, because, you know, in service, they

24:30 were getting told what to do all the time, and you know, you did it. Whereas in civvy street, you had to do that yourself.

Yes. Well I suppose that’s right, but. Most of the things that I did in the service, I did of my own volition. I mean, the divisional commander

25:00 might say, “Right-o, we’re going to take Lae,” or something, but then it was up to us to take it, he’d only just tell us to.

Yes, somebody’s got to put in the hard work.

That’s right.

And Doug, what does Anzac Day come to mean to you over the years?

Oh well, I usually go out on Anzac Day and lead our parade through Brisbane,

25:30 because I’m the senior bloke up here. But there’s only about half a dozen fellows turn up for it nowadays. And the, there’s a lot of women and kids come along behind, sort of thing, but I don’t know how long that will last.

The women and kids, you mean?

Oh well, the whole thing. You can’t just run an Anzac Day parade on a lot of women and kids, can you?

26:00 It’s women and grandchildren now too, probably great grandchildren.

But what does it actually, what does, what memories does it bring back for you, Anzac Day, the march itself, and…

Well to me it’s mainly means Gallipoli, you know, and the Western Front, not so much the last

26:30 war. Most of them, well nearly all of them are from the last war, or the Vietnam War, but I think it’s commemorating Gallipoli really, that’s where it started and that’s where it, what it’s all about, I think. In the Second World War, we were here there and everywhere, just doing as we were told, really.

27:00 you know. There was no great heroics about it.

And Doug, are you a fan of war films at all, do you, is there any war movies that you’ve seen that kind of captured anything of what you actually went through, do you think?

No, I haven’t seen them, no. I’ve seen a couple of war films from the First World War, but

27:30 I’ve seen nothing about the Second World War at all. I think the Yanks won that, didn’t they?

They would have us believe. Ah, you’re a cheek.

How do you reckon Doug,

28:00 I mean ’cause you’d done all the militia stuff before your service, and everything. How do you reckon your time across World War 11 and the six years of service that you served, how do you reckon that kind of affected you or changed you as a young man?

Oh, I think it enhanced my position a lot, because I would never have gone to Singapore. I was brought up in the country on a farm, and I would probably still be on the farm, milking

28:30 cows or counting sheep or something. But you know, going to the war, saw a bit of the country, saw a bit of the world, came back and I bought a single unit farm through the AIF, through war service. And got into that, sold it, made a profit on it, of course. Bought a house in town, eventually came up here with my wife, bought this,

29:00 oh bought the ... I told you, bought the, where the taxation building is down here.

What did you originally buy it for?

Well bought it because we were coming to Queensland. I said to Barbara, “You spend 25 years with me in Victoria, and I’ll come and spend the next 25 years with you in Queensland.” She said, “Oh good, right.” So that’s exactly what we did. After 25 years down there, I said, “Right-o, we’re going to Queensland.” So I put in for a job up here, and got it, and we came up. Put a trailer on

29:30 behind the car, put all our goods in the trailer and away we went. Came up here to Logan Road, and five acres for sale where the taxation building is now, and a house on Logan Road for four thousand, six hundred and eighty dollars, I think. “We’ll buy this” which we did. Lived in the house for three years,

30:00 and we had an offer of seventy eight thousand for it. So we said, “This is too good to miss,” so we sold it for seventy eight thousand, two years later the developer who bought it from us for seventy eight thousand, sold it to the Queensland Government for five million.

Two years.

Two years later, he sold it for five million. But we were happy, we got our seventy eight thousand, we thought we did well out of it.

30:30 You did do well.

But that’s what they paid for it, five million, with our five acres, and now they’ve got the taxation building and the bus depot.

Amazing isn’t it, like a lottery.

Yeah. Well you can go home now.

Okay. Well on that note, we’ll finish. Okay, thank you very much Doug.

Thank you Chris [interviewer].

It’s been a wonderful day.