Graham Palmer
2111
2/6th Australian Infantry Battalion
6th Division

Tape 1

01:00:40:00

Q: I'm wondering first of all if we could find out a bit about where you were born, and where you grew up?

A: I was born in Brunswick in 1920, in Blyth Street, that's just off Sydney Road.

01:01:00:00
I was one of a family of three children, a younger sister, there was thirteen months difference, and then my youngest sister was ten years younger. I suppose you would describe my family as a working class family. Dad was a tradesman, there was a trade then that was known as sheet metal tradesman, in some of the old houses that you see,

01:01:30:00
you'll see metal ceilings sort of ornamented. So he was a sheet metal worker, and later became, when that was superseded by fibrous plaster, he became a fibrous plasterer, a very good tradesman. He served in the First World War as an infantry soldier in France, and suffered a great deal, he was wounded, badly wounded, he was shot in the neck, lucky to survive.

01:02:00:00
When the war was over he married my mother in I think 1919, and a year later I arrived scene - whether that pleased them or not, I wouldn't have the faintest idea, but never the less it happened. My Dad gradually built a little business for himself, and then along came the Depression, and that had a big effect.

01:02:30:00
I think history accords that one in three males was unemployed. Dad lost the little business that we had, so we started, as a family we started to feel the effects, as a lot of families did, of being acutely short of money. Where we were in the process of paying off a home, as I remember it, we couldn't keep up those

01:03:00:00
payments, we went into rented premises, and it was very tough for Mum and Dad. Dad was a fairly heavy smoker, he liked to back racehorses, God knows how he could afford to do these things?...Liked the odd glass of beer but was not a heavy drinker, but I think he was stuck with the memory of

01:03:30:00
his time in the trenches until the day he died, and when you see the old First World War films, you realise what a horrible war that First World War was. Thank God I never experienced anything like that. But, having said all that, my memories of growing up were quite happy ones.

01:04:00:00
In entertainment wise, things that we had, I had toys, they were all pretty simple stuff. I have no memory of being deprived of anything, although by today's standards, certainly. What can I add to that?

Q: That was great, you are giving us a good sense of what it was like with your family background as well, just staying with your father

01:04:30:00
for a little bit, did you learn much about his experiences as the child and young man, did he talk much about it?

A: I think as a young child I, you know they say there is such a thing as thought transference, one from the other - our Scottish background, although Dad never used to talk about it, he made me things that were oriented, he made me little lead soldiers

01:05:00:00
from moulds of one that I bought, and it was always a kilted soldier, so that was going on. He used to get me up on a Wednesday morning at half past seven before going to school, to listen to a programme sponsored by a men's outfitter in Melbourne, McKenzie Kirkwood, all Scottish music, all good stuff. So I suppose I was being indoctrinated, and I've always been terribly proud of my Scottish

01:05:30:00
heritage. Dad made most of the toys for us children, he made these little pedal car things, he made a First World War tank, a thing of about that size for me, he even, to my Mum's horror, created a little trench system underneath the clothes line, Mum was not happy about that

01:06:00:00
because she was continually putting her foot in the trenches, a lot more pleasant that in was in 1916. But I think that I really got close to Dad when I first came home from the Middle East, and I'd sort of grown up a bit, and we had something in common, although he didn't talk about the war, all of a sudden there appeared to be a bond

01:06:30:00
that I can't recall before that.

Q: He was obviously - there were things he wanted to express through the toys, and all of that?

A: Yeah, so when I first had my first contact with the army it was, I was fifteen, and we were visiting friends, and all adults, and it was all terribly boring stuff for a teenager.

01:07:00:00
The people we were visiting said, "Look, you're mad keen on soldiers, there is an army drill hall," as they were called then, 'close by', and that was in Percy Street, Brunswick, "Why don't you go down and have a look at the soldiers training?" Wonderful idea. It was in the next street, so I went down there, stood in the doorway, and a very loud voice bellowed out, "We are relying on that doorway for

01:07:30:00
fresh air, either come in, or go out." Now that was hardly an inducement, but I went in, and it came to pass, within an hour, I think it was one of the NCOs [non commissioned officer], a sergeant approached me and said, "Would you like to be in the cadets son?" "Mmm, I would," and I was a little squirt then of about five foot two, and he said, "We might have trouble finding a uniform for you." You're not supposed to join until you are sixteen, but they were desperate, so

01:08:00:00
I found myself going home and saying to Mum and Dad, "I joined the Regimental Cadets," and Dad said, "Yeah, O.K," and so that was at fifteen and a half, my army career of when I would call it such, and I was so dead keen on the army, it was quite ridiculous. It was my interest to go to the rifle range on a Saturday afternoon, it cost me

01:08:30:00
nothing, ammunition provided, rifle provided, rail warrant to get to Williamstown, I was intensely interested in the army from the day I joined, couldn't get enough. So I suppose that was the reason, yeah, by sixteen and a half I had two stripes, a corporal, and by the age of eighteen, which was just prior to the outbreak of the war,

01:09:00:00
I was then ready to join the big boys and learn what it was all about, but, I don't know that Dad was terribly thrilled at the thought of me being involved in a war, certainly not, and I remember him saying to me when I got my first two stripes, "Don't go, you won't go far in the army son because your family

01:09:30:00
are working class, that's it, probably a sergeant, but that's the best you'll do," and like most kids, I took not the slightest notice of my father, and it just went over my head, and pressed on. But my relationship with my Dad was good, but it improved when I came home the first time on leave. But Dad was a very hard working bloke, and

01:10:00:00
he was a good tradesman.

Q: So how - did he have his own business when the Depression hit?

A: Yeah, it was a small business, and he had a, he set up a little factory at the back of the house we had at North Coburg, it had quite a large back yard, and if you look around this room, you will see a cornice that joins the wall to the ceiling, well, Dad was making those for sale within the trade until the

01:10:30:00
Depression hit us. Would you like to elaborate on my growing up as a child?

A: We'd like to hear as much as you could -

A: I went to primary school at Moreland, I went to secondary school at Moreland Central, I think I was probably an average student at primary,

01:11:00:00
and I lost a lot of time at secondary time because I had three bone fractures, two of them were the result of falls from a push bike, and the other one was, I'd walked in front of a car outside of the school, and fractured my leg. So I lost a bit of time in the second year of high school, and that set me back,

01:11:30:00
I don't think I was a terribly good student, I couldn't see the point of such subjects as French, I couldn't see the point of trigonometry, I couldn't see the point of algebra, and I tended to put the shutters up a bit on them. School, as I remember teachers, they were

01:12:00:00
tough cookies, I've no fond memories of school in that direction, I think most of my teachers, I've got to be careful what I'm saying here, probably went into the SS [Schutzstaffel, German Security Squad] when the war started with Germany because they were pretty tough, I mean, to do the wrong thing involved physical punishment, the strap. Although in fairness,

01:12:30:00
I would say that whenever I got the strap I probably deserved it. But these days of course corporal punishment is not permitted, and I think corporal punishment then was, if it was carried out fairly without any suggestion of being sadistic, probably didn't do us any harm, but that's in retrospect.

01:13:00:00
So I left school in what would have been second year high school, and -

Q: What would you have needed to do to deserve the strap or the cuts?

A: Perhaps not done my homework to the satisfaction of the teacher, or perhaps being late for school, although I can't remember being late very often,

01:13:30:00
I can't remember, to use the expression, 'wagging it' from school, I can't remember doing that, there used to be people then who are known as Truancy Inspectors, who would ride 'round on their pushbikes looking for kids who should have been at school and obviously weren't. Now, if I had taken time off from school, I would probably have gone down to Merri Creek after, what do they call these things, not tadpoles,

01:14:00:00
they are like shrimps?

Q: Yabbies?

A: Yabbies, yes, catching yabbies, no I don't think I wagged too often, I wasn't as bad as all that, but, yeah for perhaps being what a teacher might think was being cheeky, because I can recall an occasion, my best friend, we shared a desk at school for almost all

01:14:30:00
our school years, by coincidence we sat at the same desk, and he used to have a habit of using pencils to play the drum on the desk top, used to drive the teacher to distraction, and she said to him on one occasion, "Douglas, don't do that or I shall take your pencils," and I said to him, "She can't do that, your Mum bought those pencils and they are your property," so he foolishly stuck with that advice,

01:15:00:00
and it brought him undone, so the teacher came, took the pencils, sent him down to the headmaster's who gave him three or four whacks on the hand, and it affected our friendship for a couple of weeks, but I don't know, that would have been called being a, 'bush lawyer,' I was dead wrong, so no, no happy memories of school. Sporting activities - you were

01:15:30:00
either in the school eleventh cricket, or the footy team of eighteen, and that was one of the reasons I think I took to playing soccer for a while because I couldn't get a game of footy at school. But one interesting aspect of school life was that those days - a picture show - it was common if you could manage to conjure up,

01:16:00:00
I think it was about thruppence, to go to a Saturday matinee, that was good stuff. There was - (UNCLEAR) - came round to the school if it was going to be a cowboy thing on at the show on Saturday, he would come around on a horse dressed as a cowboy or an Indian, very, very impressive stuff, and hand out these hand bells and things,

01:16:30:00
and whip up the enthusiasm of the kids to go to the pictures. The picture theatre that I used to patronise was the - is not there any more, but it was quite a common ploy for someone to go in and reserve a seat for you by saying, "Don't sit there, my mates coming in," and there were no pass outs in those days so

01:17:00:00
you could walk in provided you were brazen enough, and look the bloke in the eye on the door and head for the seat hoping no one else had taken it, and there was a sort of sequel to that, the man on the door was a fellow who looked about eighty-five at the time, but he was probably only in his early forties, he was a First World War man, his name was Bill Rock,

01:17:30:00
and everyone used to say, "Look out for old Rocky," because if he was coming in and you hadn't paid, you were in big trouble, and so it came to pass that in the early part of the war, when I was first posted to the AIF [Australian Imperial Force], and I had my commission as an officer, I walked into this building which was known as the orderly room, and there was a bloke sitting behind a table with three stripes, wearing First

01:18:00:00
World War ribbons, and I said to him, there was a little thing there that said Sergeant W. Rock, "Sergeant Rock, you wouldn't remember me would you?" And he stood to attention, sort of put his cap on and saluted and he said, "I'm afraid I don't," I said, "Well, it may come back to you," and I'm sorry now that I didn't tell him

01:18:30:00
who I was, I'm sure he would have appreciated the humour of it, he was, my God, he terrorised the kids, but that's how you see things as a child. Sorry, don't know that I can add much to my growing up time with my Dad, we played footy together, and we played cricket in the backyard and all that sort of stuff, but I'd say, repeating myself, it was when I came back from the Middle East Dad and

01:19:00:00
I became close.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your mother?

A: About Mum - Mum was artistic rather than housework oriented, Mum really was born to be married to a gentleman I feel, housework didn't appeal, she was a good cook, plain cooking, but the fact that I'm still alive and healthy

01:19:30:00
today is a witness to her cooking. Mum played the piano and played it rather well as I remember it. I don't know that Mum fully understood what Dad went through during the war years, I think that perhaps I shouldn't comment on this because I'm trying to see it through the

01:20:00:00
eyes of a child, we never lacked for anything. So who was the greatest influence on my life? Both of them I suppose, as I say, even in the Depression days, I can't remember going without a meal, I don't know that my Dad even went on what was called

01:20:30:00
'sussos' [sustenance payments] then, it's now called the dole, what the Yanks [Americans] call it, which required you to go and queue up, and get a hand out which was a small amount of money, I don't remember doing that. I don't remember ever being in a soup queue. I can remember as a teenager seeing a great queue outside of Coburg

01:21:00:00
Town Hall, and a lot of these blokes were wearing army great coats which appeared to have been dyed black. I didn't find out for years that these had been distributed by the government, just as a way of keeping warm. These blokes were lined up for soup, or they were lined up to get a voucher that would enable them to get a handout of food. I have read

01:21:30:00
since, that on one occasion at the Brunswick Town Hall they handed out all these coupons to people, and there was two hundred who missed out on the coupons, so God knows how they got on, but I know that Dad would never wear his, 'Returned from Active Service,' badge because he felt that, I used to put it in his lapel because I was very proud of him, but he would take it out, I said, "Dad, why

01:22:00:00
don't you wear your badge?" And I can recall him saying to me, "People will think I'm looking for sympathy." And he would never wear it, and Anzac Day, yeah, I marched with him as a little kid. To some extent I think I was sort of an insurance policy for Mum, if Dad had me with him he'd probably not head down to a gathering

01:22:30:00
with his mates and perhaps have a few too many, so I could have been an insurance policy. Mum was a good Mum, but I think that she was more interested in arty things, than the housework, I think the housework was just something that had to be done, and I can't blame her, there must be surely nothing more destroying than

01:23:00:00
washing clothes, and the horrible routine - I played right into Cathy's [interviewer] hands then.

Q: I understand, I've done the dishes once or twice. So other than the piano, were there any other sorts of pastimes?

A: I don't know, perhaps, yeah, there was a shortage of food, I, to me, a treat

01:23:30:00
was stale bread with very hot water poured over it, to make the bread soft, and a tiny little bit of milk, it's a dish, and you can read reference to it in any dictionary, but it has the most uninspiring name of sop, S O P. I thought that was good stuff then, well

01:24:00:00
to me, a sandwich after school consisting of dripping, genuine dripping, not the stuff you get from supermarkets, it was very tasty, with a little bit of pepper and salt on, that was good. No, Mum looked after us, but maybe the piano play, I dunno, it might have been a form of escapism you know, from the drudgery of bringing up three kids, I don't know, but she was good.

01:24:30:00

Q: Just on that subject of the First World War diggers, how much of a bearing, of an input, did they have on society during that period, the '20's and '30's, when they were in their 30's and 40's? I mean were they, you said you really, you obviously had a lot of pride in your father, how did they feel in general, that generation?

A: You mean, how did we see the First World War fellows?

01:25:00:00
I would think with a tremendous feeling of respect, it was normal then, after the First World War, to have honour rolls in the entrance foyer of various buildings like the AMP [Australian Mutual Provident Society], I'm only mentioning this incidentally as an example, the local town hall, the church, all those things, the names of the fellows who served, appeared there, somewhere.

01:25:30:00
It was not uncommon to have something on a shop window to indicate that this man had served. I think the expression used was, 'Late AIF,' and maybe his colour patch painted on the window, just a little thing about that size, but yeah, I think we say those First World War blokes and what they endured,

01:26:00:00
although we've seen much more since, through seeing footage of fellows in the trenches, I think there was a tremendous admiration for them. I know that when I joined the 2nd AIF I realised then that we had a very hard act to follow, whether we ever achieved that, I wouldn't know, but certainly they endured more than any person should be asked to put up with.

01:26:30:00

Q: Had your father remained in touch with his mates from - ?

A: He marched on Anzac Day, he may have gone to battalion reunions but I can't answer that truthfully. He was not heavily involved with the RSL [Returned and Services League], and when he died, and he died on his way home from work, I contacted the

01:27:00:00
RSL and asked if they would conduct the RSL service, the traditional RSL service, they declined, the person I spoke to declined to do the service on the grounds that he was not a financial member of the RSL, which disappointed me a bit, but however that was the rules they worked to, they conducted the service for their members, and as he wasn't a member,

01:27:30:00
and that was that. I was touched by the fact that at the funeral service, there weren't a lot there, it was mainly family, and a man appeared, and I asked him, "Did you know my Dad?" He said, "Well I noticed in the paper that he served with the 38th Battalion, and I must have known him, so that's why I'm here." I thought,

01:28:00:00
"That was a wonderful spirit." Yeah, I think that those First World War blokes were rightly so, were looked up to. Because when Dad joined in 1916, that was at the time when the casualties were the heaviest, the casualties on the Somme were fearful. It is so hard to believe these days, you would think, "Why would a bloke want to join when things are at their

01:28:30:00
worst?" You can understand guys joining up at the outbreak of war before the penny drops, and you find out that, "Yes, there is a danger of lead poisoning here," so I admire him for joining up at the time when we were taking very, very heavy casualties. But anything to

01:29:00:00
do with the war, you would have to drag it out of him. I sometimes read about people saying, "Oh yes, my father never talked about the war, what can he talk about?" You are not going to sit your children down and say, "Let me tell you about those terrible days in France." No, you don't do that, and I think that he tended to tell the funny stories, and maybe that's not a good idea,

01:29:30:00
maybe that leads young people into thinking that there aren't people who suffer fearful wounds and are maimed, maybe kids ought to be told, "It's not fun and games," but I doubt whether they would get that, I can't speak for, say those who have served since the Second World War, but I think there would have been a reluctance

01:30:00:00
on the part First World War, and my generation, to talk about it to children - think we've changed over the years.

Q: It connects to what you were saying in the kitchen earlier about going off with that sense of adventure, I can't - .

A: Yes, I won't get ahead of myself, but later on, perhaps if you ask the question, "Why do blokes join up in the first place?" I think it could be interesting, but based

01:30:30:00
on my own impressions? They were a special breed the First World War fellows.

Q: You mentioned that you did march with your father on Anzac Day.

A: As a kid.

Q: What was it like then? How does it compare with what it is today?

A: Tremendous attendances, far more than now, if you made it known that you were, 'going to the march,' as people used to say,

01:31:00:00
I don't want to sound like Barry Humphries, but people would say, "Ah, you are going to the march," that would be it, like Moomba [annual festival in Melbourne] became. You had to be there early, the crowds would be, God knows how many deep, they would take along ladders, they would take along boxes to stand on, it was a novelty thing, it was the first big war we'd been involved in, South Africa was relatively small,

01:31:30:00
and so marching along beside Dad and holding his hand, I was tremendously proud, probably I didn't know what the heck I was being proud about, but just to be with the soldiers, and that's all pretty much a blur. As I remember, the march used to end, I think it used to start somewhere up where the brewery used

01:32:00:00
to be, and finished down around St Paul's Cathedral, because there was no Shrine of Remembrance then, that didn't come until the middle '30's, and it became the focal point, and it's very sad then, as I got older, and saw the numbers diminish with his battalion, a Victorian battalion, it diminished to the point of just

01:32:30:00
some boy scouts carrying a banner with the colour patch on it, and I just think, "Blimey, I can remember when there were hundreds behind that banner." So then, as I became older, and Dad stopped marching, because I think at the end of his life he was suffering from

01:33:00:00
arthritis, and even though he was still working hard, I don't think he was appreciating long marches any more, and I think that was one of the things that was not taken into account when the Shrine was built on the top, on a hill, and it's an artificial hill as I understand it. Marching on Anzac Day now, while the blokes can manage the

01:33:30:00
flat St Kilda Road, when it comes to the climb up to the Shrine, that's what knocks a lot of them, they find it very hard going, and so the First World War blokes must have found it the same, that parade up the hill.

Q: Do you remember the building, the construction of the Shrine, and the opening of that?

A: Vaguely, I recall that

01:34:00:00
all that stuff was, all the construction material was taken up there by horse drawn transport, and those marble columns were all shaped on the spot, that beautiful blackish marble - no, I don't remember much of the construction then. '30's, so I was only twelve, thirteen,

01:34:30:00
fourteen, it didn't make much of an impact on me. It didn't make much of an impact on me I would think until I took the step of joining the regimental cadets where we were trotted out, and we marched here and there, that's when it made its first impact on me I think, when I joined the cadets.

Q: Can you just give us a bit of

01:35:00:00
a description, you grew up in Brunswick, or Coburg, that area, Blyth Street, what it was like in those days?

A: What it was like? As I mentioned earlier, I was born in Brunswick, then we moved, we seemed to move a lot, and I think, I get the impression that in those years, we were the sort of one week ahead of the bloke that came around and collected the rent.

01:35:30:00
But, and the rent for the house that we moved to in Coburg which - in Barrow Street, it's quite a nice street, it was then and it is now, they were all sort of, I'd say, lower middle class, whatever. It was a comfortable house, reasonable size backyard we were right on the corner of the street, we were able to play cricket

01:36:00:00
across the road using a telegraph pole as a wicket, a good square cut could bring you four runs any time, but there wasn't the danger then of being run over to the same extent, if there was a car coming they were few and far between, and you had plenty of warning. Most of the kids, in fact all the kids I think walked to school. Shops were close by,

01:36:30:00
I can recall though, as a child, being sent to the butcher and my mother saying, "I want to get from this gentleman (Mr Warner), a leg of lamb, and I do not want you to pay more than two and sixpence, if it's more than that you can take it back." Sounds

01:37:00:00
ridiculous now, but it was what that small amount of money would buy in those days. I earned pocket money by taking newspapers to either the fruiter, or the butcher, and I got a penny, say a cent a pound, and they would use them to wrap up whatever merchandise they were selling. The highlight of the week was, as I mentioned earlier, the Saturday movie matinee.

01:37:30:00
Walking to school yeah, that was a lot of fun, I mean if it was raining heavily you could put little bits of wood in the gutter and watch them float down, and bet on which bit of wood would get to your own house earlier. It was simple, kids seemed to have hoops then too,

01:38:00:00
a motor tyre, why would you want to bowl?...and motor tyre up to school and bowl it home, it was something to do, and on reflection I think, because there was a lot of physical activity, obese kids were in the minority, they were an object of fun, I knew one overweight kid at the school I went to and he was known as 'Fatty.'

01:38:30:00
What that did for his self esteem, I wouldn't have the slightest idea, but I don't remember overweight kids, and I think it just because there was no conscious effort to it, you just did it. You know when I was in scouts, you walked to scouts, if you went to school or to the pictures, you walked to the pictures. From memory I think there were maybe six or seven picture theatres within walking distance of my home, spread along Sydney Road,

01:39:00:00
Brunswick, they don't exist there any more, and when it got to the stage that you bought a pushbike, you rode your bike to work, which I did in my first job, and my sister and I worked at the same place at one stage, and she used to sit on the bar while I rode the bike and took her to work, and home. To ride from Coburg across to the Essendon aerodrome was not considered any particular

01:39:30:00
feat of endurance, just did it, and I think that the Depression and all, maybe we were healthier then than young people are today. So what else can I tell you about - ?

Q: You talked about Merri Creek - you'd get down there a bit too, would you?

A: Yeah,

01:40:00:00
Merri Creek was, I remember as only a trickle of water really, parts of it were quite big now, but the area that we went to was at the bottom of Moreland Road, where now there is a bridge across there, but prior to that bridge, there was a swing bridge there, and so if you rode your bike down the hill, hop off the bike, wheel it across the creek, to do that at night was -

01:40:30:00
I had a girlfriend who lived in Thornbury which seemed a million miles away, but to visit her at night, to visit her at home, it was quite spooky going across there, it was dark, the sound of frogs. We grew up with the - Chinese have got market gardens there, they have guns they load with saltpetre [potassium nitrate, fertilizer] you know, the hard stuff, watch out for them, they'll

01:41:00:00
get you. So that was the Merri Creek, and that was where we used to look for yabbies, and there was a tip close by, rubbish tip, evil smelling, but as kids we used to go down to the tip and collect stuff. Dad and Mum weren't terribly happy about this, but we built a motorcar in the back yard, made of bits of galvanised iron

01:41:30:00
and it was sort of James Bond before James Bond. Plume motor oil used to sell their motor oil in cylindrical cans, bit of stretch of imagination, they could look like machine guns, so you put those on the front of the car, and make up this car, and so, two of my mates and I after school every day would sit in that thing, with an atlas, and we'd go somewhere in the world, you know, your imagination -


Graham Palmer
2111
Tape 2

02:00:31:00

Q: OK, we're back on Graham, your James Bond car - ?

A: OK, so we had this atlas, so tonight we might be doing what we imagined, what India might be like, or Africa, and your imagination just ran riot. If you had an accident you'd just get out and give the car one kick, and bits would fly everywhere, and Dad would say, "Look, take that stuff back to the tip, it's horrible," but gradually we'd sort of sneak it back again.

02:01:00:00
That was our sort of entertainment, playing Cowboys and Indians in the backyard, sisters make very good Indians. Who wanted to be an Indian? They always got done.

Q: Yes, so you imagined you were in these far-flung corners of the globe?

02:01:30:00

A: It was tremendous stuff, and I think that was assisted by the comics we used to read then, they were all English comics, and they were all pretty harmless, there was no bad language, there was no sex, there was no drugs, the hero always won, particularly if he was British. So, based on what we were reading in comics, we translated that into some sort of action thing.

02:02:00:00
But it was sad about the Indians because I've only just realised that they had a pretty tough trot, and I've, but who wanted to be one? I know that to go to school, primary school, not secondary, if someone had run around the school calling out, "Who wants a game of Cowboys and Indian?" It was hard to recruit Indians. So once again, we were running around, pretending to shoot at each other, and they were keeping active in doing that,

02:02:30:00
and it was harmless, not if you were an Indian I suppose, it was pretty harmless stuff.

Q: That's what the movies were, weren't they, if you go to - ?

A: You know, people talk about violence today, we say people are indoctrinated, and then the question would be raised, "Didn't you play with guns when you were young?" Yes we did, but by virtue of the fact that we went to the pictures

02:03:00:00
only once a week if we were lucky, yeah, you did tend to come out of the pictures and sort of act out what you'd seen. I remember there was a serial and it was all about the invisible man, and he had this box on his chest which had little knobs, and when he did that, he disappeared, so I had a Weeties [breakfast cereal] box painted with silver paint,

02:03:30:00
and so if you were playing a game and I had that thing on, you can't see me. Had we been subjected to that all our waking hours virtually, it might have had an impact on us, but when I see some of the things kids are being exposed to, where does reality stop and this fantasy take over, I don't know? I'm not saying that

02:04:00:00
kids then were any better or any worse, but I think we were subject to different influences, and people tend to act out what they see, not everybody, but I think some do.

Q: What sort of ethnic minorities were there at that time, you mentioned the Chinese market gardeners, what was there, were there kids from other backgrounds?

A: Minority,

02:04:30:00
yeah there were, Chinese seemed to have little restaurants, or they were in the laundry business, Italians seemed to be into - and there weren't, I don't remember many of them, seemed to be into fruit, Greeks were something else, they used to have restaurants, but there weren't a lot of them. At that stage

02:05:00:00
Australia was, had the highest percentage of British people, because we were British subjects then, and I think we were ninety eight, yeah in the late '30's I think we were ninety-eight percent British stock. Even migrants from Britain, a lot came out in the '20's, Belle's father came out here in the '20's, on one of the various schemes to bring them out.

02:05:30:00

Q: Do you remember those kids - ?

A: But Yugoslavian, French or, I think that was one of my objections to learning French, I sort of worked it out, I wasn't terribly bright, but I worked it out that my chance of meeting a Frenchman wasn't all that great, so that was a sort of hangover from English school days. Minority groups, they played such a small part in our lives, minority groups at school,

02:06:00:00
there was very deep feeling existed between Catholics and Protestants, which was unfortunate, my mother would, if the front garden tap was left on, my mother was convinced it was the Catholic kids who did it, they may well have done, but we had no way of proving that, but there was very deep feeling existed between Catholics and Protestants.

02:06:30:00
It wasn't, I think until the war started and you found yourself in a hut or a tent with other people, and really, at that stage I don't think we knew or cared what their religion was, there were other priorities, we were all just mates, whether they were Jewish, or of Italian stock. For example, a photograph which I showed to Cath is, of one

02:07:00:00
Jim Capullano. Now Jim was of Italian origin, and played for Essendon as, I think, Jim died in New Guinea, he was killed, and the Capullano who has been playing for Essendon recently, I think is a grandson, because when Jim enlisted, he and I shared a cubicle at one stage,

02:07:30:00
in a hutted camp, and he had two children at that stage, so they were of Italian background, minority groups.

Q: Where there any Aboriginal families in the area?

A: No, I don't remember Aboriginal children at school, no I can't recall. Maybe if I had

02:08:00:00
gone to school in Northcote it would have been different, I don't know, I'm guessing, but I don't really think the average Melbournian had much to do with Aborigines, perhaps Fitzroy might have been an area where they were, very much a depressed area, and Aborigines tended to be at the bottom end of the socio-economic ladder. So, if other people saw them as a

02:08:30:00
minority, it made no impact on me.

Q: Just following up on the Protestant / Catholic divide if you like, did that filter down to even the kids during that era?

A: Yeah, well I think it, because they went to different schools, that first of all created the first barrier, they went to that school and we went to that one.

02:09:00:00
I think that the attitude of, I've got to be careful saying this, there was an attitude within the Catholic community that they were if you like, the chosen race, and they tended to look down on Protestants, so then it sort of became a sort of two way thing, you would shout out things like, "Catholic dogs jump like frogs," it was all meaningless,

02:09:30:00
silly, childish stuff, but nevertheless it did create a barrier, I think it wasn't made any easier by the Catholic Archbishop of that time who was, he was hardly a loyal subject of the Crown, he was from Ireland, Archbishop Mannix, he was probably very good for the Catholics, but I don't think he was very good for the Australian

02:10:00:00
community. I knew one Greek family, and I went to the home on many occasions, and I thought that they were a bit strange because they ate different food. The Mum was an Australian, but father was Greek, he was dark, and his English wasn't too flash as I remember it, so we knew them as being, they were different. But no, we didn't have diversity of cultures

02:10:30:00
that sure, we've got today.

Q: As you were saying, you were British subjects, but did you feel like British subjects or were you Australians first?

A: How did I feel when I was growing up?

A: Generally, but specifically yourself, yes.

A: Well I grew up very much as a British subject because a passport then would have indicated that we were British subjects and Australian citizens.

02:11:00:00
So the Union Jack played a very prominent part in our life, I'm probably more conscious in the growing up years of the Union Jack than I am of the Australian flag, and we had two Australian flags then, the red one, and the blue one although the red one was only supposed to be used by merchant ships. But nevertheless our ties with Britain were very,

02:11:30:00
very strong. When people went to England, if they were lucky enough to be able to afford the thirty-eight pounds for the fare on the ship it would have been seen as going home. So, I'm a second generation Australian, Belle's father was a Londoner. If we waved flags, as I remember it,

02:12:00:00
it was always a Union Jack, we stood for the national anthem in a theatre, either at the start of the show, or at the end, and a photograph of the King would appear on the thing with the music, and that was all good stuff. No, I thought of myself as British if I thought of it at all. The little Monday morning service

02:12:30:00
'round the flagpole at school, yes, it made no great impact on me, it was - the flag was raised, we saluted the flag, but the thing that stuck out in my mind about the little service, we were, everyone was asked to produce a handkerchief, all waved their handkerchief to prove that you had one, and then all to blow your noses together. Now you can

02:13:00:00
imagine the noise, particularly the boys making a joke of the whole thing. That has stuck in my memory more than the flag.

Q: What was that supposed to symbolise, or mean?

A: I don't know, so you were in big trouble if you didn't have a handkerchief. Now whether you blew your nose on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday - the rest of the week didn't seem to matter, but it had to be there on Monday morning, "All blow."

02:13:30:00
Terrible, the noise would awaken the dead as they would say.

Q: How important was Empire Day back then?

A: Sorry?

Q: Empire Day?

A: Yes, I remember Empire Day, there were fireworks and all that sort of stuff, I remember Guy Fawkes Day, which a great deal was made of that, we had a Guy, and put him on the top of branches and anything you

02:14:00:00
could gather, and burned the Guy. I don't know that we all knew who Guy Fawkes was, but it seemed to be a good excuse to let off fireworks. Empire Day was pretty big, and we used to have little lapel badges that we wore. But it was rather interesting, the organisation that I work for now was formed in 1932, and all the members, a voluntary organisation, all the First

02:14:30:00
World War soldiers - and I have some footage of, I think sixteen-millimetre film, that was taken on a visit to the Dandenong's by some of our members, I think it was a picnic day, and I think we were taking, we, former members, were taking children of First World War soldiers, but the thing that stuck out in my mind was,

02:15:00:00
there is no sound to this film of course, the kids lining the route are all waving, this would be 1932, they were waving Union Jacks, not an Aussie flag to be seen anywhere, and I'm not sure when the Australian flag started to take over from the Union Jack, don't know.

Q: Have a think about that one.

A: Yeah, so it was

02:15:30:00
very much, we were very much part of the Empire in those days. I remember my father saying to me, "Look, if you ever go and live in another country, make sure it's one of those countries marked in red in the atlas, none of this wog business," although that word wasn't known then, but I took the point that if you went and it was part of the British Empire, good stuff.

Q: That's interesting, so you

02:16:00:00
were at school until about the age of fourteen?

A: I left school at fourteen, it was normal then, for as I say Depression years, to stop school for economic reasons, my parents couldn't have afforded to keep me going, I don't know where I would have had to have gone, I'd probably could have done another two years at the school I was at, but it was 'get a job and start

02:16:30:00
bringing some money in', and that was the norm, I didn't question it, I didn't feel like I was being deprived, so at fourteen I was in the workforce with no qualifications whatsoever. You took any job you could get, and mostly it was not easy to get. Because of the Depression it was not easy to get an apprenticeship, but it was relatively easy to get

02:17:00:00
jobs that would terminate once you reached the stage where you had to be paid the full award wage. So fifteen bob a week job, a dollar fifty, I found them comparatively easy to get, and I had a range of those jobs, I changed jobs more than my parents ever knew. Mum was sort of interested to the extent of the fifteen bob - that I paid ten bob board.

02:17:30:00
I had the other five to myself, so while that was coming in I would have to say, I don't really think Mum and Dad cared where I worked. So I had a variety of those fifteen bob a week jobs.

Q: Can you tell us about some of those different jobs you did?

02:18:00:00

A: The type of job?

Q: Hmm.

A: Well there used to be in Flinders Street, a monumental mason, they made headstones, things you put on graves, so I worked in the show room there, but I was sort of like the office boy. My job was to open the place up at half past eight, or eight o'clock, and dust off these tombstones. I found it creepy,

02:18:30:00
I didn't enjoy that one bit, and all these graves had names on them, and flowers, and to open that all up, at the age of fourteen that was definitely a spooky experience. When things - that the organisation that owned that monumental masons - so that was their showrooms. The making of the headstones was done out I

02:19:00:00
think at Fawkner, they owned probably the most prominent toy shop in Melbourne, Tim the Toyman it was called, and they were in Regent Place, really good, and I would help out there if they needed any jobs done. The one family on both, it's a strange thing a monumental mason and a toy shop.

02:19:30:00
I think I probably committed the first act of sexual harassment known to the civilised world. I was only about fifteen, and the cleaning lady was down on the floor scrubbing the floor of the showroom, and in all innocence I walked past and gave her a pat on the bottom, now I wouldn't have known that that was sexual harassment, but that brought me into great disfavour with

02:20:00:00
the manager of the place, she complained, I didn't know what the hell she was complaining about you know, she wasn't a young, as I took it she was quite an elderly woman, I just gave her a sort of friendly pat on the bottom, that would have brought me - I thought, "What are they on about?"

Q: Is that something you had a habit of doing, Graham?

A: I can recall going home one afternoon, and in the house wandering around, singing a very rude song that someone had been singing at school,

02:20:30:00
I got a clip across the ears for it, I didn't even know what I was saying that was rude, I've gone over the words of it since and I still don't understand it, but Dad was upset.

Q: Do you remember the - what was the song?

A: I'm not telling you. Look, it was sort of a schoolboy song that concerned one of the teachers that was not popular. No, I shouldn't have sang it at home. So why didn't Dad explain to me what the hell

02:21:00:00
I was singing about? I think it was 'round about that time that I got the first indication that, I remember being in a room full of relatives and they were talking about one of the younger lady members of the family, and they lowered their voice, which of course causes any child to prick up their ears, and they said, "She goes out with sailors," and I thought, "So why did they lower their voice?"

02:21:30:00
What was the implication there, I don't know, I was about forty before I realised what a name the navy had in those days, so I - that was - so we were talking about those -

Q: Yeah you were fourteen, fifteen, what other experiences were you having with the opposite sex?

A: So I went there, and that became very boring, I worked in a

02:22:00:00
warehouse in Flinders Lane, once again as a messenger boy, I worked with an optician, I can remember the names of these organisations but they are irrelevant now. When I got bored I changed my job, I still didn't improve on that fifteen bob, but the money kept coming in and provided me with enough income to buy my first watch, which I paid off at a shilling a week to the man who used

02:22:30:00
to come 'round the factory that I was working at, and he had all these watches, and you'd pay them off at a shilling a week, and when you'd finished, paid your nine shillings if it was an expensive one, you could pick up a good pocket watch at Coles for half a crown, they weren't exactly, they weren't high tech, but they went. I remember taking one back to Coles and saying,

02:23:00:00
"It doesn't work," and the bloke behind the counter tossed it in with the others and said, "Take another one," they were just in a big heap, they weren't gift wrapped, or packaged, or any of that sort of nonsense. So when I joined the army as a cadet, where I could see in civil life going from these boring dull jobs that were not going to end up as anything,

02:23:30:00
there started to be a glimmer of hope that maybe I had a little bit of talent, that I could be good at something, and the army proved to me, and I've always owed the army a debt of gratitude I feel, by encouraging me, and the promotion that I received, it boosted my confidence, it did a lot for my self esteem.

02:24:00:00
I was saying, "Look, this is where my talent lies." But the opportunity to be a career soldier in those days was very limited. We had a small regular defence force, my good friend, whom I sat with at school, prior to the outbreak of war, we had plans to work our passage to England, and join the British Army because it had a bigger regular army,

02:24:30:00
and you could do that then, you could sign up as a junior boy, or a steward, or whatever, work your passage. That came unstuck because he was dead keen on artillery, mine was infantry, and we thought when we get there we are going to be separated, and so we dillied and dallied [procrastinated], and then along came

02:25:00:00
the war. That sort of completely transformed my life.

Q: Just before we get there, can you paint a picture of what you did with the cadets?

A: Well virtually we did everything that the over eighteens did, at one stage they used to be in the Australian Army, and kids were called

02:25:30:00
up, they were junior cadets, they were I think fourteen to sixteen, and then there was the sixteen to eighteen group, so in infantry we did everything that men did. You learned drill, you were issued with a uniform which of course it didn't cost you anything, you learned to fire a rifle and machine gun, you went to the rifle range, you went to camp, you received no pay,

02:26:00:00
that was the difference. In those days you were permitted to take - not permitted, you were issued with a rifle, and took it home, and that was it, and I can remember, it sounds quite ludicrous now, I can remember coming home from the Williamstown Rifle Range with a machine gun, with a Lewis light machine gun, which caused eyebrows to raise on the train carrying this thing, I was told then as a cadet, take

02:26:30:00
it home, you clean it, bring it along next Tuesday night to the depot all nice and clean. Now I'm not saying that was normal, but I did it on that one occasion, and so it tested my father's memory because he was a qualified light machine gunner during the war, where I was testing his knowledge. In those days you had to be able to name

02:27:00:00
all the parts, and be able to strip the thing and put it together blindfolded. It was interesting from that one point of view, but no, we did everything that the grown ups did if you like, so that when you turn eighteen, if you had a couple of stripes, you instantly lost them, and you'd start again. I can recall an occasion when the war was getting very, very close,

02:27:30:00
and we were all marched from the corner of Brunswick Road and Sydney Road to, I think it was, the Empire theatre to see a film, very patriotic stuff, and it was called Sally of the Regiment, or something like that, it was dead corny, anyway we were marched down there, I was very proud of the way I kept my rifle polished and all that sort of stuff, and Mum and Dad were going to watch me

02:28:00:00
march along Sydney Road, and one of the grown up soldiers came along without his rifle, he was a driver and he wasn't issued with one, I was made to hand mine over to this character and I've hated drivers ever since. To my embarrassment I was asked to carry the tail light, which was a red hurricane lantern at the rear of the column so we wouldn't run into a cable tram, or whatever.

02:28:30:00
Very, very embarrassing, I could hardly bring myself to look at Dad and Mum as we marched down Sydney Road. We did some, so the transition then from the cadets, into the militia as the army reserve was called then, was quite smooth.

Q: So what would you do on those camps, were they like bivouacs [temporary encampment without tents] were they, or - ?

A: Depends on where we went for a camp, when we went to Broadmeadows and the army didn't seem to have much in the way of transport then, we went

02:29:00:00
in, hired furniture vans like these big pantechnicon [furniture removal van] things, people use them to shift their furniture from one place to another, we went in those. So what did we do in camp? We did drill, more weapon training, what was known as minor tactics then, working with groups of say section size of six, or seven,

02:29:30:00
learning how to move across open country, and that would pretty much take up weekends, or a seven day stint. I think I did my first camp as a cadet at Seymour, and on parade one morning in Seymour camp

02:30:00:00
the CO [Commanding Officer], who was mounted on his horse, warned us against visiting a caravan which was located on one of the unmade roads at the back, we were not to visit that caravan. Now I didn't know what was in there, I didn't know if they were gypsies, and I said to one of the older men, "What's in the caravan?" And he said, "You are too young son, you'll find out one day," so I can only assume that it was

02:30:30:00
probably thought to not be good for our health if we went down there. Where those girls are now, they are all on pensions I suppose, "Beware of the caravan son." So it was a bit limited, when the war broke out we were training for the First World War, we were actually digging trench systems at Seymour, and every unit or sub unit would take it in

02:31:00:00
turns to spend a couple of days just digging these trenches, dugouts and all. Seymour soil is very, very hard, and if you are not used to it - So we were really training for the First World War all over again. They even dug a trench system down at Mt Martha. So you spent a couple of days doing that sort of thing. I think it was

02:31:30:00
probably heavily oriented to weapon training and drill.

Q: And you had an aptitude for - ?

A: - and as I said, minor tactics, lectures on the use of what's called gas masks, but they are really respirators, how to be able to distinguish one particular kind of poison gas from another, lectures on

02:32:00:00
all sorts. Depends on how junior you were, we were lectured on dress, turnouts, badges of rank, some military law but not an awful lot, "Do what you are told and you won't get into trouble," but to me, I never found it boring, it was always, I couldn't get enough of it. So that's how it affected me.

02:32:30:00
Where I liked my military service, a lot of blokes did not, for whatever reason, couldn't get out of it quick enough.

Q: So in your late teens, how conscious were you of what was happening in Europe, the hostility of war?

A: What was happening overseas? Well there used to be in the city,

02:33:00:00
places referred to as theatrettes, and for a small sum of money you could go to a theatrette, an hour show, they lasted one hour, news reels of what was going on in other parts of the world. Footy, test matches, you saw them of course well after the event, and you could come and go as you liked, go in there for about a shilling, you could go

02:33:30:00
to sleep if you wanted to, but who'd want to do that. So that's how you caught up with the news. Radio was good if you were lucky enough to have a set, a wireless set, through newspapers, I don't know whether my family regularly bought The Herald, or The Sun, so it was really from those newsreels that - although the papers were on sale

02:34:00:00
in the streets. That's how we found out what was going on in Germany, and in Britain. It became obvious, you would have had to have been quite stupid not to realise that things were becoming very desperate. We carried out, my militia unit carried out what was called a 'Trooping of the Colours', ceremony,

02:34:30:00
a ceremonial function at the Coburg Cricket Ground, and this was I think in 1939, and when we marched off the ground we were then asked the question, "If war breaks out or there is war next week, how many of you would be prepared to come onto full time duty immediately?" There was no hesitation in my mind,

02:35:00:00
"Be in it." I enjoyed it, loved it, not so much war, because I'd never experienced it, but army life. So that was really how I, war broke out on the Sunday night, I received a telegram on the Sunday night, "To report to the Moonee Ponds Depot," and so I was in the next morning, on Monday morning, on full time duty.

Q: Do you remember hearing that broadcast?

02:35:30:00

A: Oh yes I do, when Bob Menzies [Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies] said, "Consequently, we are at war with Germany," and that was it, and the telegram boy came around later on, some hours later, with this little thing, "Report to Moonee Ponds Depot." The neighbours, and family, came out to see me march off with my rifle, and my pack and everything, Mum was in tears. Terrible anticlimax,

02:36:00:00
they had no food for us, so we all came home for lunch. It was not quite the way that it had been planned, they all had memories of marching off to the First World War and, "We are never going to see our boy again," tear jerking stuff, "God, you're home, what happened?" "No tucker." So that was day one.

Q: What was the name of the Regiment, the Militia Unit you joined?

A: Well I was a cadet with the 59th Infantry

02:36:30:00
Battalion, and they later became during my cadet service, they became a country battalion, with companies at places like Euroa, and Seymour, and so on. I then became a member of the 58th Battalion, which was the Coburg, Moonee Ponds, Essendon Regiment, and the badge had to change, and there was

02:37:00:00
great gnashing of teeth, nobody likes changing their badges, it's like saying to a member of a footy team, "As from next week, you are not going to wear that footy guernsey mate, you are going to wear something else," and that's how it happened, so when war broke out, I was a member of 58th Battalion.

Q: Do you recall your father having anything to say when war broke out, as

02:37:30:00
you were heading off?

A: Well, at that stage the 2nd AIF had not been formed, it took a little while to start recruiting for the 2nd AIF as an expeditionary force. The militia battalions could not be sent as they were overseas, because we enlisted for service in Australia or the Mandated Territories, which would

02:38:00:00
restrict us to New Guinea. So it was necessary then to raise an expeditionary force, and that force consisted of blokes who'd never been in the services ever, there were those who had served in the First World War, there were people who had been in the militia as I was serving, and under twenty one it was necessary to have your parents consent, and my father and mother wouldn't give theirs.

02:38:30:00
Dad, with very vivid memories of very young blokes in the trenches and what it did not only to young blokes, but what it did to everybody, and he said to me then, "This won't be over in five minutes, you've got plenty of time, I'm sorry, you can go on serving, but I won't sign the papers for you to join the AIF." So that was very frustrating for me,

02:39:00:00
so I just put up with that until I did officer school and was commissioned, and then, God forgive me, I told Mum and Dad that I didn't need their permission, and from then on I then had to seek an appointment as a reinforcement officer to go to an AIF Battalion. It took me until early 1941 to

02:39:30:00
do that, in the mean time I was training blokes here in Australia.

Q: So you would have had friends who were a bit older perhaps, who did join the AIF before - ?

A: Well I was twenty before I went into the AIF, and as I say, I qualified for a commission in 1940, I was actually commissioned in August '40

02:40:00:00
when I was nineteen, so all my hard work had paid off. So I think that, I don't know, I didn't at that stage - things were a bit shaky at home between Mum and Dad, the marriage really had fallen apart and I really didn't see a lot of Dad in the early days, Dad moved out so I was living at home with Mum,

02:40:30:00
but I don't think that Mum was excited at the prospect of my going away, what Mum wouldn't?


Graham Palmer
2111
Tape 3

03:00:31:00

A: - Available, take a post for it, so I did that, but it was a bit sort of Dad's Army-ish, [home guard, usually men too old for active service] then, so report to the Moonee Ponds Drill Hall, the old Moonee Ponds Drill Hall has been pulled down, and

03:01:00:00
there is a nice big brick one there, not nearly as practical as the old one, but never the less, it's there, and it was a case of, "OK, what are they going to do with us?" So, we were sent first to what was known as the Essendon Aerodrome, bear in mind this is September, it was horribly cold, and why go to the Essendon Aerodrome? In the middle of the aerodrome

03:01:30:00
there was a great big reservoir of water, big expanse of water, and the idea was to patrol that reservoir and make sure that it wasn't sabotaged. How anybody could sabotage it I wouldn't know, and what was the purpose of doing that? So it was a case of patrolling this thing, going part of the way around

03:02:00:00
to me, then, trying to remember what that thing looked like, it was huge, the water, it was built up from the ground, quite high. That became very, very boring, and then we were informed that, "Look would you like to volunteer for something a little bit more interesting, whatever?" "Yes, anything to get away from Essendon," the fog you know, in the morning. So we were then

03:02:30:00
shifted down, we made our headquarters at the Williamstown Rifle Range and there used to be a pipeline that ran from the big oil tanks down there to the ships, the ships brought the oil to Australia, it went to the tanks, and from there they went to service stations, and I would say it was fairly important that those pipelines weren't

03:03:00:00
sabotaged, so the job then was to patrol, equally boring, but nevertheless we hoped it was all part of the war effort. The only casualty was the shooting of a goat which belonged to one of the people who lived close by, somebody a bit trigger happy saw this thing moving in the long grass

03:03:30:00
on a pipeline, and called upon it to halt, which of course it didn't do, so they shot it. We were doing things like, there would be a sentry outside that road, I think that's the Kororoit Creek Road, stop vehicles going along it, we must have been a proper pain in the neck because we were stopping milkmen who were delivering milk, and challenging, and calling, "Halt, who goes there?" And there was -

03:04:00:00
no, we weren't looked upon with any favour at all and we would stop taxi drivers, there weren't many taxi drivers in those days, and we took the game very, very seriously. So that went on for a time, and then there was the first call up of, today they are called national servicemen, but then they were called, as I recall, compulsory trainees, these were people who were called up to go into camp and do three months.

03:04:30:00
So I was recalled to my battalion to then go to this camp where we trained the call-ups. So, those blokes did their three months.

Q: Did you do any training yourself during that period, before you were training the call-ups?

A: Well see, so what - all my qualifications

03:05:00:00
to do this were simply my service in the militia from 1935 up to the time the war broke out, so it was no great effort then to train these blokes in weapon training, and drill, and field craft, and that sort of thing. It was quite simple, it was a natural progression, they were just different people.

Q: How extensive had your weapon

03:05:30:00
training been?

A: Oh, quite extensive, everyone was required to qualify with a rifle, be able to shoot straight, with both a rifle, or light machine gun, and people also had to know how to throw grenades, and how to prime them, you know, how to put the little thingy in the grenade. All those things were part of

03:06:00:00
normal training, so you all of a sudden get a batch of hundreds of blokes from straight out of their civvie [civilian] jobs, it was no big problem, you were just training men, so these were all eighteen year olds.

Q: So, just going back a little bit, I'd just like to find out a bit more about your training, that sets you up, you had five years experience, or four

03:06:30:00
years experience before that, could you give me a bit more detail about your training, for example your weapons training, what you covered?

A: All right, well, let's go back then to as I explained earlier about my experience in the cadets, the regimental cadets, as opposed to school cadets.

03:07:00:00
The regimental cadets were taught exactly the same things as the over eighteens, how to fire a rifle, how to understand all the safety precautions involved, how to fire a light machine gun, how to carry out drill, how to move in the field, and to use the terrain for what you want to use it for, night training, group marches, all that stuff was

03:07:30:00
pretty much the normal for infantry. Now if I had been in artillery, or the motor service core with some sort of vehicles, I would have been taught how to drive, I would have been taught how to fire a field gun [movable artillery used by armies in the field], or a Howitzer [cannon], or whatever. Or, had I gone into the Light Horse [mounted armed regiment] I'd have had to learn probably how to ride a horse, and how to fight whilst mounted.

03:08:00:00
So then, what militia training consisted of, was a minimum of one night per week, and you'd go along to your local drill hall, or training depot, and you'd do those things which you could do indoors, so you could carry out shooting on what was called the miniature range, so instead using a service rifle with a ammunition of

03:08:30:00
.303 calibre which is the stuff you'd use in war, you used .22 which is a little thing like that, and you had targets in the hall, and they'd be fixed to the wall but behind them there was sawdust so you could fire these things and all you do is annoy the neighbours firing these things, 'till ten o'clock at night. You'd do, you could practice bayonet fighting, and learning to

03:09:00:00
either kill someone with a bayonet, or remove the bayonet and rifle from the other bloke and so make him harmless, how to be able to give fire orders, so if you are running along and you are shot at, you can drop onto the ground and fire back, how you teach people to identify a target and shoot at it, that was pretty standard stuff for within the drill hall,

03:09:30:00
and a lot of it was drill, learning how to march, and so on. But you only had two hours in the night, and from time to time you'd go off for a weekend at camp, and you'd do things that were more applicable to outdoors, and then a fourteen day camp when you built up to some degree of efficiency, as a soldier working as part of a team.

03:10:00:00
So as I say that, when the - had there not been people like ourselves in the militia pre-war, calling up people for training would have been very, very difficult, because our regular army was so small. We had a few people in engineers, and we had a few people in what was then called garrison artillery and they were located at places like Queenscliff, but they weren't there

03:10:30:00
to train large numbers of call-ups. There was also what was known as the Australian Instructional Corps, and these were people who, their sole job was instructing other people, and they were invariably warrant officers, sergeant majors, and there would usually be two or three of them per

03:11:00:00
unit, so they were there full time, they were at the depot all day, five days a week. One might be the quartermaster, and his job was issuing clothing and equipment, and the other person might be the regimental sergeant major, and he was responsible for drill and discipline within the battalion, so without that pre war

03:11:30:00
militia really, the AIF would never have got under way, and neither would the call up. Militia units then were not large in numbers, where a battalion should have been about eight hundred strong; the average militia unit would have been closer to two hundred. Soldiering in peacetime is not all that popular.

03:12:00:00
You wouldn't be induced to serve, because of the pay, it was merely something you were either interested in, or you weren't. So the numbers were well down, there would be several units that were well up in numbers, and if you like those that had an image, that might have appealed to some people rather than just an ordinary infantry battalion -

03:12:30:00
the Victorian Scottish Regiment was one that I served with, post war. We would always keep our numbers up because there was a little bit of glamour about the Scottish, wearing the kilt, and so on. The Royal Melbourne Regiment, they found it easier to get recruits than what we did in Coburg/Moonee Ponds, and there are others too who had trouble in getting away from their job to go to camp for a fortnight, a lot of employers weren't terribly cooperative.

03:13:00:00
I think girlfriends used to resent the time their boyfriends were away at camp, and being up at the drill hall when they could have been visiting them, or going out to a picture show. So there were problems, and the numbers weren't great, but nevertheless they formed the foundation on which the Australian Army developed once the war broke out, but we were horribly lacking in preparation.

03:13:30:00

Q: That's a really interesting point, but within a day, your involvement in the services changed from the militia in the part time service, to the full time, so how did you feel for that, you know, the announcement that war was actually happening, and that you would more than likely go to fight?

03:14:00:00

A: Well, first of all we were mentally conditioned to the fact that it was probably inevitable, and to me, it was as well, as I mentioned to Colin [interviewer], as well as liking the army, because it was giving me self confidence, I had a feeling that I was going to be useful somehow, whereas all my jobs I had as a teenager were definitely dead end. I welcomed it, I thought

03:14:30:00
that, "This is great stuff, I'm going to be soldiering," that's what I wanted to do, and from that moment onwards, my life completely changed. How did I communicate with my employer to tell him I wouldn't be back? I can't recall, because I would have been expected at work on Monday morning, and I wasn't there was I, I was over at Moonee Ponds getting uniform on.

03:15:00:00
I didn't have a, our family didn't have a telephone then, nor did many people I knew, I don't know anybody who had a telephone then, so I must have written a note or something, to say I won't be back. So that was a complete transformation of my life.

Q: Now your first duties were guarding the

03:15:30:00
Essendon Aerodrome, is that right?

A: Yes.

Q: How soon did that happen once you'd been called up?

A: You mean how soon did we get underway?

Q: Yes.

A: Well initially it wasn't the whole regiment because not everybody felt they were in the position to go into full time service, there were married blokes who had family responsibilities, there were a lot

03:16:00:00
of men older than me and jobs where they had responsibilities they couldn't throw them out the window, and nobody knew at that stage that the war was going to go on for six years, so the only ones who turned up at the depot on the Monday were people like myself who said, "Yes, I'm in the position to be in it." We had no family responsibilities, I was paying

03:16:30:00
board to my mother which I continued to do for the whole of the war years because she needed that money. So how many would have turned up on that morning? It may not have been any more than about thirty or forty - and we are going out to Essendon to do this job.

Q: I'm curious about that, what did they tell you

03:17:00:00
about Essendon, about why it might be a part of it - what did they say to you?

A: You mean that big reservoir?

Q: Yes.

A: I don't know if anything was explained to us, I mean, in those days if someone said, "Do that," you did that, it was only a matter of how quickly you did it, they said, "Your job is to patrol that thing," you march around the thing with your rifle over your shoulder and make sure that nobody sabotaged it. Now I'm not sure how

03:17:30:00
they would do it, if they were going to drill a hole in the side or whatever, so we did it, and kept people away from it who had no business to be there, and it was dead boring, in a foggy night in the middle of winter. But however, "You joined up son, it was what you wanted to do." So when the time to came to go to my trip down on the pipeline, that seemed to make more sense.

03:18:00:00

Q: What did that conjure up for you, you obviously took your duty very seriously when you had to guard the reservoir, what did you expect might happen, until you realised that it was probably not - (UNCLEAR)?

A: I saw it as some sort of stopgap, between doing that job, and doing real

03:18:30:00
soldiering. In other words, going to war and fighting people, after all, that's why I joined up, to be used in that capacity if I was needed. I don't know that at the age of eighteen, kids have got a lot of imagination, if they did, maybe they wouldn't join up. But,

03:19:00:00
I don't know, I think I was just looking forward to the time when I could do a real job of soldiering. See, the fellows who joined these militia units all joined up with the assumption that if a war came, we'd all go away together and be used, probably same as they were in France in the First World War, where we had nothing else to base our thinking on.

03:19:30:00
But that didn't happen, and as I said, when the RAF [Royal Air Force, he means AIF; Australian Imperial Force] had to be formed because no troops could be sent to the Middle East, or to Europe, unless they had volunteered specifically for that task. So it was a case then of forming an expeditionary force, and that's not a five minute job, you get all these people, and you've got to train them, those who were officers continued to do their jobs as officers, those who had been sergeants and

03:20:00:00
corporals continued to do that job, but all of a sudden you've got thousands of blokes who have never had any experience at all, they had to be trained to work as a team of blokes, trained to be efficient soldiers, and that takes months. Injections and all that sort of thing, fitness - can't fight if you are not fit, so they had to build that up with

03:20:30:00
physical training, and route marches, which was probably one of the most effective ways of making people fit.

Q: Just on Williamstown, the pipeline, were there many Australian Navy vessels down there using the docks?

A: We were only concerned with where the tankers came to, our responsibility ended, each end of

03:21:00:00
our responsibility with tankers at one end, and the oil tanks at the other, and then between them was this great long fuel lines. They are still there, probably. So all these blokes sort of hoped that because they knew each other as a battalion, that when they were needed they

03:21:30:00
would go away together, and it didn't work, and the whole thing was handled very, very badly, and I - when they formed an expeditionary force, the blokes in the expeditionary force saw themselves as the real soldiers, "After all, we are going away to fight a war," fair enough, what about all these blokes who have been training, and they are now hanging back? And that's where the term,

03:22:00:00
certainly derogatory term, 'Chockos,' was applied to those who were only available for home service, 'chocolate soldiers.' Sadly, there was very, very deep feeling between the two. So much so, that normally you wouldn't put them on the same troop train, now that's ridiculous circumstances. So if you had a couple of carriages, and they

03:22:30:00
were AIF, signed up to go away, do anything, and the other end of the train was blokes who were home service, was not good. It was really, very badly handled, but however, parliament then, the Act, didn't provide for conscription for overseas service. It was knocked back in the First World War, and that's how the Australian people wanted it, and that's the way it was.

03:23:00:00
Well then, when the Japanese came into the war and a mandated territory, New Guinea was threatened, so then these blokes who only wanted to serve in the defence of Australia, in Australia if they could, were sent up there. But as far as the Middle East was concerned, Greece, Crete, no, there was no provision to conscript people, neither did we want it.

03:23:30:00
Not the fellows in the AIF, they didn't want to see people put beside them who didn't really want to be there, any more than they did in the First World War. Complex situation, but I think that, I've got to be careful of my facts now, but I think the AIF was the only completely voluntary force in any country such as ours, all the others

03:24:00:00
had a proportionate of conscripts, call-ups - seemed to work for us. Whether it would work again - that's something else.

Q: Tell us about your role as an instructor with new recruits.

A: Well, at - from the time a person is first promoted in the army, from the time you first receive one stripe,

03:24:30:00
your job is to teach other people how to do things to the limit of your level of training. If you were going to teach people how to carry out parade ground drill, it would be assumed that you had passed a course, which qualified you to be promoted, and so a promotion to say, a corporal,

03:25:00:00
was quite different to a promotion course to be an officer, where you would have to learn more advanced map reading, and that type of skill, so that a young bloke with, an old bloke for that matter, with two stripes, would be expect to be able to teach people how to carry out weapon drill, how to fire a rifle accurately,

03:25:30:00
and then as he is further promoted, he takes on a greater responsibility, and a greater number of people. So a corporal would have responsibility for say, seven or eight or nine men, a sergeant would have a responsibility for maybe thirty or forty. The sergeant then is normally responsible directly to an officer.

03:26:00:00
So you teach what you are qualified to teach, and that would usually mean teaching a lesson. I'll just digress for a moment. There was formed what was called a 'methods of instruction team', these were a group of people who would arrive at a unit, a regiment, and their job would be to teach

03:26:30:00
the sergeants and officers the finer points of teaching, to turn you into better instructors, and then armed with that qualification, you were then, should be, having some sort of certificate for it, you were qualified to teach others, and the way that, how a lesson is put together, and that required a great deal of study, because if you are going to teach something,

03:27:00:00
for a forty-minute period, you could safely say that you probably put in a couple of hours in preparation of a lesson, and with the training aids you need.

Q: So am I right in saying that your qualification for teaching was your five years experience?

A: So, you go into the army, it's assumed that you know nothing, and gradually you acquire knowledge, and you go off, and you do

03:27:30:00
courses, and you fine-tune your skills to the point where you can teach others.

Q: So what was it like teaching the new recruits, how did you like that job?

A: Teaching?

Q: Yes.

A: Loved it, I never at any stage strangely enough - I don't know - but I have no experience in this sort of thing in city life, how could I have, it never bothered me.

03:28:00:00
to have to stand up in front of a group of blokes, and teach them how to do something, it never worried me a bit. It may have been, I don't know, a false confidence, but it never bothered me, I always worked on the basis that if I'd prepared my work, I wouldn't get a question that could stump me, and you confine your teaching of a period to one, forty minutes, don't take any questions, anything that does not relate

03:28:30:00
to what was being taught in that forty minutes, so you cover that. If anybody has any questions that were outside of the scope of that lesson I could talk to you afterwards about it, but you never let it interfere with the teaching lesson, demonstration, and practice, and all that sort of thing, and it's starts off with young non-commission officers, with fairly simple stuff that they are asked to teach, and

03:29:00:00
gradually your confidence builds as your knowledge builds. I mean, some lessons can be extremely intricate, teaching weapons drill, that's comparatively easy, you demonstrate something and have everybody practice it, so you can supervise them whilst they are doing it, and you build up their confidence as well.

Q: So how many men were you teaching in a group?

03:29:30:00

A: A lot depends on your rank, and a lot depends on the lesson, is it a practical lesson, is it a lecture, you could lecture a hundred, it depends on the facilities you've got to work with, whether you can make yourself seen or heard.

Q: Where was this teaching taking place, is this still at Moonee Ponds?

A: Your instructing would take

03:30:00:00
place either in the middle of a paddock, or in a drill hall, or wherever you happened to be. For night time training, it would be done inside the depot, if you can imagine, and let's talk about the immediate pre-war bit. If for example, lets say I was a newly promoted corporal, all of a sudden here I am,

03:30:30:00
the officer to whom I'd be responsible would say, "Your lesson for next week, you will teach that squad -of maybe ten men - how to turn to the right, and turn to the left, and turn about," and that would be a forty-minute period, so you would sit down at home with textbook, and you would put your lesson together, beside how much time you are going to spend showing them what it is you are going to teach them,

03:31:00:00
then teach them, then practice it, and you've got your notes to work with. Now you don't have your sheet of paper in your hand, you shouldn't. My training aids used to be a little bit of cardboard, in my wristwatch band there, so without being to glaring, I could just do that, and I could look at my next heading, and know whether I was on time, or

03:31:30:00
whatever. After a while you practiced to the stage you don't need that, but if you - so normally, a lesson would be say, a forty minute period, that's probably long enough, and then if it was a lecture, once again, forty minutes is about as much as people can take if they are not actually doing something, but even then, you need training aids, you need blackboards,

03:32:00:00
something to show people, something they can pass around. When I got this first batch of call-ups in 1940, because I came from the militia, I was the only one who had a rifle, there were no rifles for the rest of the others, and it sounds ludicrous today, and I would say to them,

03:32:30:00
"This is a rifle, you will all be issued with one of these things," and I would pass it around, and they would all have a little feel of it. And then I would go thorough naming the parts of it, and showing how to load it and unload it, each one being a separate lesson in itself. And so where these recruits were, in the first instance, at this particular camp site, what we did, we cut lengths of tea tree the same length as the rifle, and we taught them

03:33:00:00
how to drill with the branch of a tea tree. We just didn't have the equipment then, and this was largely affected by Dunkirk [1940, Allied troops were evacuated in Dunkirk in a major retreat under enemy fire] because any spare rifles we had were being sent to Britain, they were in a bad way also. So when I took my blokes, just on a hundred of them, aboard the

03:33:30:00
HMS Queen Mary, nobody had a rifle at all, "You'll get one when you get there," and with the tremendous faith that we had in the system, misplaced in many cases, that happened.

Q: How did those recruits react to that, the fact that they weren't handling rifles, what I'm getting at is, how did you find that as a group,

03:34:00:00
how serious were they, how committed, how interested - did you have difficulties with them?

A: Well it could be, that everyone reacted differently, had I been an older man, a more mature man as a raw recruit for example, it might have bothered me that they had nothing to issue me with, but the first call ups were eighteen year olds, so they were prepared to -

03:34:30:00
I imagine they were prepared to do what they were told. The only light machine gun that I had to instruct on, had parts of it missing, which doesn't do anything for your confidence. The light machine gun that we were using at that time had what was called, bi-pod legs, and so if you can imagine the barrel of the thing is there, and it has two little legs on it, so when you lie down behind it,

03:35:00:00
you're lying there like this, and down at the muzzle end, on these two little legs to keep it out of the dirt to keep it stable, that bit was missing from the one I had. That's all right, you can talk your way around that you know, to practice getting troops aboard a train into normal rail way carriages is a way of doing that,

03:35:30:00
if it's not going to be a complete Keystone Cops [Suffolk County Police; film] job. You carry a rifle a certain way, and you go in a certain way, you don't sling your rifle across your shoulders, you'll hit the doorpost as you go through. So we would draw out on the ground a railway carriage, and mark in the dirt where the doorways were. So somebody had to go through the motions of opening

03:36:00:00
a nonexistent door, the fellows would file in, close the nonexistent door, and there it was, so when the time came to get into a real fair dinkum train, you can do it in an orderly manner. So those pieces of tea tree, going to the extent of a Dad's Army job saying, "Bang, bang," but so we had no practice grenades, so we used

03:36:30:00
pine cones, well OK, they are good enough to practice with, but you hope that when the time came they would be real. So there was a great deal of make do, because we were really, completely and absolutely unprepared, that's my experience.

Q: Good old Aussie ingenuity.

A: So you put your faith in, I don't know, God, quartermaster, or somewhere. You will get these when you get there.

03:37:00:00

Q: So you were instructing at a very early stage in the war, I mean, a very early point when the new recruits were coming through, weren't you?

A: Yes.

Q: Were you involved in setting up instruction models do you think?

A: Yes, but I think we were doing it without knowing that we were doing that, it was simply that the textbooks which a lot of them I have to this day, are very clearly set out for the benefit of people who have

03:37:30:00
no training skills at all, or the very minimum, how you will teach this lesson - and providing that you followed the textbook, it is made easy, and everybody is teaching the same standard, and the same procedure, so that if a person were going to be, it would be true to say that if something happened to me and I had a lesson to teach,

03:38:00:00
that job could be handed on to somebody else, and they would teach it in exactly the same sequence, aiming at exactly the same results, so at the end of - when I finished talking to you at the end of forty minutes, or when you've been with me for forty minutes, you will be able to do this, you will be able to strip that gun down and put it together again, and you will be able to name every part, but that takes a long time to learn that.

03:38:30:00
Why does one have to learn every part? The theory is, if you ever lost a part and you had to order one, or ask for one over a field telephone, you could very clearly describe what it was, not, "The thingamajig at the end." So it's all done to a sequence, it's like having a machine gun, a crew, one firing the machine gun, the other passing either the

03:39:00:00
spare ammunition, whether it be a belt or a magazine. If the person firing the machine is killed, his number two ought to automatically be able to slide across, or roll over and take over the weapon and fire, do it instinctively, don't even have to think about it, because when you are under pressure it can be somewhat stressful.

Q: Do all these lads come from around the Moonee Ponds, Essendon area?

03:39:30:00

A: I'd have to stop and think about that - I would think so, I would think those who were posted to the regiment would have come from that area. I never even stopped to think about it, all of a sudden you have got all these blokes and where they come from is not really important.

03:40:00:00
They have been issued with a uniform, they are medically examined, received some dental treatment, and then it's a case of get them fit and train them, and it didn't work with everybody, some fall by the wayside, but there are a lot of things that you do in the army that you don't think very deeply about, you just take it, that's the job.

03:40:30:00
If it's too early to talk about that please stop me, but I mentioned that finally after I was commissioned, when I finally got a posting to an AIF battalion, which was then overseas, and had active service experience, which I had not, it put me in a bit of a tricky position.

03:41:00:00
I found myself at the camp in Darley [Camp Darley], which is up Bacchus Marsh way, right, the question I ask is, "Where are my blokes?" The answer I got was, "They are still walking the streets of Melbourne, they haven't been called up yet." So when they came, and there was just on a hundred of them, and there was another officer and myself responsible for these hundred reinforcements, most of them

03:41:30:00
had never been in uniform in their life with the exception of a couple that came from the militia, and a couple who served in the First World War and put their age back, so they were old enough to be my father, and had had war service, it's not easy when you are training. There was this one bloke -


Graham Palmer
2111
Tape 4

04:00:30:00

Q: So just give us a time frame here, it helps to clarify things, the period that you were instructing for, and what you did after that.

A: You mean between the start of the war and - ?

Q: Yes, when you started instructing at Moonee Ponds in 1940, it was early '40, wasn't it?

A: Yes

04:01:00:00
it was, there was a fair amount of chopping and changing when, on then, as you - I said, I went on to full time duty, and found myself then as a young soldier doing these sort of security type jobs, then the national servicemen were called up, I was recalled back to my battalion then, and I was promoted to sergeant, so

04:01:30:00
I was doing my job as a sergeant, then was second in command of a platoon. Now a platoon is forty men, so your job is leading them in the field, and teaching. So much of the time in the army is spent training, training, training, even if you've been in action, you

04:02:00:00
come back out of that action, you go back, you reform, you replace the blokes that you've lost, and you train again, and again, and again, until everything you do is instinctive, you don't have to stop and think, "What am I going to do next?" So with these call ups, my job was very much training, teaching weapons, drill, and

04:02:30:00
all that sort of thing. So what happened then, and it was around, 1940, so towards the end of the year, towards the end of that three month period, I was nominated to go to an officer training school, which was a three months course, to teach me how to be an officer, and to test my skill.

04:03:00:00
I completed that three months course at Seymour, went back to training the conscripts, and then I was sent for on one occasion, "Your commission has come through," and the commanding officer asked someone for a pair of scissors, or a razor blade - or

04:03:30:00
I can't remember, but I was called up to the officer and he cut off my stripes, and do you know the thought that went through my mind was ludicrous, I thought, "I hope he knows what he's doing, because Mum took hours to stitch those on." Mum was not terribly good at needlework as I remember it, the officer took one of his badges of rank, his rank would have been a star and a crown,

04:04:00:00
so he took a star out of his own shoulder, and made two little holes in mine, and put it there and said, "Congratulations," and from then on your life is changed, your old friends are no longer officially your friends, you cannot play cards with them, go out with them on leave, you are now an officer, and you can only associate with officers. That's the way it's got to be for reasons of discipline.

04:04:30:00

Q: That's great, that little sort of potted account of that period, and what you did.

A: So, my commission came thought in August 1940, I was then nineteen.

Q: Now you've been training conscripts, you've gone off to train as an officer, and I'd like to find out about, it's interesting

04:05:00:00
that you have then come back after doing that training, so I'm wondering too what challenge, how that might have been? First of all, talk about officer school.

A: Once I was commissioned of course - I have to answer your question - once I was commissioned, my responsibilities increased and I was responsible

04:05:30:00
for more people, so now I find myself in the position where I am supervising instructors, where I'm not doing as much, as an officer where I'm instructing on other things, and I'm supervising those people in the job that I have just left. So now I've got a group of NCOs, I've got a sergeant, I've got several corporals,

04:06:00:00
and I'm supervising them, and I'm making sure that they are preparing their work to present, and I would then be taking on the instruction of different things, like map reading, and tactics, and military law, and what the troops need to know about administration. So I've moved up,

04:06:30:00
so my supervisory role is now becoming different, I'm now becoming involved in such things as taking my turn at the inspection of the camp, which has to be done on a daily basis. An officer is appointed, always in the rank of lieutenant, to carry out an inspection of the camp, the kitchens, to

04:07:00:00
make sure they are clean and everything, and everything is folded and set out neatly, and the inspection of the showers, the inspection of the latrines -

Q: Did you learn that in officer school, exactly how it is supposed to be?

A: Yes, but a lot you are going to learn as you are going along, and so you would carry out that inspection as in the capacity of - he's called the Orderly Officer, and his duty starts

04:07:30:00
at retreat on one day, so that's a six o'clock tonight, and you go through to six o'clock the next night. You inspect the guard, which is to be mounted at the camp, so you are responsible to the commanding officer for everything that goes on in that camp period. So you are up before six the next morning, and you are

04:08:00:00
ready to go down to the kitchens, to make sure the food is being served the way that it should be, that you are present in the mess huts, now I'm talking about a standing camp, in action in New Guinea it becomes different - and so you are there, you are there to ask if there are any complaints, taste the food yourself, make sure they've all got a proper serve

04:08:30:00
and that everything in that mess hut was conducted the way it should be. Then when that's done, you carry out your inspection of camp, and you do it in sequence, you do the camp lines, all the tents, just have a look, and you liaise then with a person who would be, imagine here is a

04:09:00:00
battalion of eight hundred blokes, and that is split up into companies, sub units of say hundred and fifty or so, now they would appoint a company orderly officer. So I would come around, and I would meet with this fellow, and I would say, "Like to have a look at your tents and your latrines and your kitchens," so he would accompany me, I'd have a sergeant with me,

04:09:30:00
he would be the orderly sergeant. So you go through this routine of inspecting the camp. I think that - I don't know if they could make a musical out of this, but they might make a film which no one would believe, and that is when you inspect kitchens, and latrines, and so on, now imagine, try if you can, imagine an army as it was in those days, there's no barriers between the toilets, there is one great big

04:10:00:00
line of seats, and blokes sat down, had a bit of a chat, and some had more reliable rumours than others. People would say, "Where did you get that rumour from?" "Seat number two, that's the rival," a bit of a joke. So then my orderly sergeant, the one who's on duty today, he would precede me into that latrine, which was probably all occupied,

04:10:30:00
he would blow his whistle and call everybody to attention, and so he would say, "Good morning chaps, any problems?" "No sir, everything all right," we would proceed out the other end. Now, if you saw that in a B Grade English film, you would not believe it, never the less, that was the procedure. I mean, you could, if you wanted to, but very early in the war, that was the drill.

04:11:00:00
We'd all, the orderly sergeant and myself, we'd be all pansied up, I'd be carrying a sword, he'd be wearing a bright red sash, and all very regimental, "Morning chaps, good," and I mean the same thing used to happen during the course of the meal, a whistle would be blown and people would stop talking and stop eating, "Any complaints?" Well that was, thank God that was changed, an

04:11:30:00
orderly officer could simply go in, make himself known at each table, and I'd have a little bit of a taste, someone would give me a spoon, just make sure it's all right, don't ask the question, "Any complaints," because just prior to the war, at Seymour, we had a lot of hard blokes in the army block then, and this dreadful dish, sago pudding had been served, have you ever tasted sago?

04:12:00:00
Anyway, the orderly officer came in and we were sitting at a table like everybody else, of course I wasn't an officer then, and the orderly officer asked, "Are there any complaints?" And this fellow, three of the plates that he had, and it was one of those enamel dishes, he said, "Do you expect us to eat that bloody stuff?" And he threw this thing and it hit one of the tent poles and the plate dropped to the ground, the sago hung onto a nail that was in the pole,

04:12:30:00
and I can see it just hanging, like something from outer space, and I thought the sago was all right, I was new in the army, you don't complain, you just eat it. But no, this other fellow was not amused - he didn't hit anyone except the post. So that's been changed.

Q: How did you feel doing that latrine inspection, just as you've described it, did it bemuse you, or

04:13:00:00
were you disgusted?

A: It kind of amused me, I've always had a sort of weird sense of humour, but that's the way that I was shown it was to be done. I can remember my first stay in army hospital, and the beds were, take a sort of Florence Nightingale sort of scene, all the beds there, and the beds would have as the top cover would be a white sheet with a red cross on it, and prior

04:13:30:00
to the inspection by the duty medical officer, matron would be around to make sure that all those red crosses were straight, you sort of lay like this you see, with the sheet up here if you were confined to bed you stay there, no crinkling of the top sheet, so that you could look down that ward and you could see all those red crosses - beautiful, lovely sight,

04:14:00:00
and the duty medical officer would come around, and usually, in many cases I think, he ignored the patients and would ask matron what was wrong with this person, "This man is the tonsils," "I see, thank you matron." If you were capable of getting out of bed you stood to attention by your bed and answered the questions from the medical officer. I should think it's all

04:14:30:00
changed.

Q: That's fabulous, I want to actually cover what it was like for you going to officer school and stuff, you've given us a fantastic picture of the day to day duties of the officer, in your situation,

04:15:00:00
where you were going into officer school as a - (UNCLEAR) level, and coming across the kind of disciplinary - (UNCLEAR), what did you think of it?

A: Well my own experience, I mean perhaps the, some blokes entering the army today who applied to be accepted for Duntroon [Royal Military College Duntroon, ACT], it's a quite different lifestyle, they've got years there to study, not only military subjects, but civilian

04:15:30:00
ones as well, for a qualification, but the war was on and had to churn people out, so three months was as long as they could afford to spend training an officer, all the niceties had to go. So you are now back to being a cadet officer, and normally you would be accepted into that officer training

04:16:00:00
with the rank as sergeant, some might have been accepted as corporals, but there was this desperate need with the expansion of the Australian Army, that we had to have officers, and get them through as quickly as possible. So then your training starts all over again, and the niceties of military law, and map reading,

04:16:30:00
general administration, all that sort of stuff that an officer must know, it is assumed that your drill is good, but that doesn't get you off the hook, you are now going to be trained all over again. Then that was repeated when I left Australia, arrived in the Middle East, all of us who then had been officers for varying periods of time, six month job lots, whatever,

04:17:00:00
we then had to go to an officers training school and do it all again, just to make sure that what they'd done to us back in Australia was good enough for when we get over, and we were now going to join our troops, some of whom had been in battle, and then this fearful responsibility of leading blokes who'd experienced what I had not. There they served up to us British Army instructors,

04:17:30:00
from the Brigade of Guards, and they were tough, and we really didn't know what had hit us until the time these guys took us over.

Q: So who was training you at officer school?

A: At the first, many of these people were First World War officers, and NCOs, and blokes who were considered good enough

04:18:00:00
to train officers. It was hoped that they had more experience and better skills, so you were sort of moving up, and then you had those theoretical and practical examinations at the end of it, and then it's a case of, "Ta ta, we'll let you know," and eventually the result is published in the Commonwealth Gazette,

04:18:30:00
in my case Gazette number 190 of the Second Order, why do I remember that? What useless information. But so you go and look it up in the Gazette, and in my case I was called in before that, the CO said, "You're it, move your gear from where you are sleeping into the officers lines,"

04:19:00:00
and, "You are not a sergeant any more." That was a big thrill. "Go to the Commonwealth Clothing Factory, get yourself a uniform," and the day I presented myself to be measured for a uniform in South Melbourne, there standing beside me getting measured was Don Bradman, my idol from all my school days. I thought, "My God, is that him?"

04:19:30:00
You get yourself kitted out, you are given a sum of money to buy things that you now need as an officer, a cabin trunk, items of clothing and equipment that weren't necessarily supplied, a sleeping bag, a valise, I've still got that down below, my cabin is still in the garage, cabin trunk is still there.

04:20:00:00
I think that was an allowance of twenty-five pounds to do those things, but I don't think, that doesn't happen any more. But so much of what we were doing was a carry over from the First World War, we had no other model to work from, we were really just simply extending the First World War

04:20:30:00
in a lot of things, but we quickly had to change.

Q: When you went back to instructing, after you'd been to officer school, how were the teaching resources?

A: Were they getting any better?

Q: Yes.

A: No I really didn't notice much improvement,

04:21:00:00
we were dragging the chain in the Australian services for a long, long time, so you improvised, you made do with what you had, and that in itself is not a bad thing, so long as your teaching doesn't suffer, so long as the blokes are not disadvantaged because of something they can't see, or touch, or feel, or practice with.

04:21:30:00
So then as I say, we left Australia, there was six thousand soldiers on the Queen Mary, and I don't think there was a rifle between the lot of them, and everybody was jammed onto that troop ship, the question was asked of me on that phone interview, "Did you play deck tennis, or deck quoits?" No, there wasn't room, there was barely room to stand up, to conduct any classes, you had to take it in turns to occupy a certain

04:22:00:00
amount of deck space, to sit people down, and somehow keep them active. So when I was posted to the AIF, I had to go off and do a physical training course at Caulfield Racecourse, that was for a month's duration, so I could teach physical training, and understood a little bit about it

04:22:30:00
when I got my troops on the troop ship. They kept shoving courses at me, I did a signals course, I did a course in which every officer had to learn to ride a motorbike, drive an ambulance, drive a truck, drive a staff car, drive a small tank, or what was known as a Bren gun carrier, then, so in an emergency, you could do any one of those jobs. They just kept pumping the courses into you, and

04:23:00:00
you spent a tremendous amount of time between the time from April when I was posted to the AIF, and September when I left Australia, it was almost continuous courses developing my skills, and making me more competent so I didn't get blokes killed when they shouldn't have got killed due to my lack of knowledge. So it starts then, from the time you are posted,

04:23:30:00
it all starts to take on a very serious - it's for real now.

Q: In '41 you were posted?

A: April 1941 I was posted to the AIF, and September we left Sydney. But then they didn't believe all that training when we got to the Middle East, it was, "You will do another course." So every moment in the army when you are not

04:24:00:00
actually engaged in actual fighting, you are training. Otherwise, what else would you do?

Q: So, just to look a little bit more at what you were doing in that period during 1940, before you were posted to the AIF, after your basic training -

A: Well, yeah, OK, what was I doing?

04:24:30:00
I was training to my embarrassment because as I said, my parents had said they would not sign the paper for you to go into the AIF. I was training reinforcements, young soldiers who had enlisted in the AIF to go away, and I met up with lot of them later on over there, but at

04:25:00:00
that stage, they had the distinctive, have you ever seen what army colour patches look like? You had your colour patch, which told everybody what was your battalion, what was your division, and so on, and then if you were AIF it had a grey background on it, that was it.

04:25:30:00
So I was in a situation, blokes then - before I got an AIF posting - who had all volunteered for overseas service, and I had not, and it was, they could have felt most resentful, here's this young bloke, we're going away, he isn't. How could I say to all those young blokes, "Me Mum won't let me." Can't do it, so here I am, struggling to get a posting to the AIF,

04:26:00:00
and I had to wait. Anyway, when I met them later on, they still spoke to me.

Q: How did that affect you do you think, in the way that you taught them?

A: I couldn't let it affect me in the job I was doing, and my responsibility for them, just had to do my job, that's all. I can't say,

04:26:30:00
"Mum won't sign my papers," how silly would that have sounded? But it was just fortunate that when - see what happens is, you could say, "He's gone AIF," that means that you wear little Australia things on your shoulders, and your colour patch has grey behind it once you've been posted to a regiment, and I had this period of,

04:27:00:00
it's not like a private soldier where you report down there, that's you, but if you are an officer you've got to be slotted into the team, every regiment has a certain number of - the colonel, then the CO, the officers, the captains and the lieutenants and they can't exceed that, the thing you have to try and get yourself posted, and while this was going on,

04:27:30:00
a member of my family said, "Uncle Charlie was a Major in the First World War, and he's down at Victoria Barracks, why don't you go and see him?" You know, pull a few strings, so I did that, and within the space of twenty-four hours I was on the mat in front of my own CO who ticked me off because I was trying to jump the gun, and pointed out to me, "There are a lot of people besides you

04:28:00:00
who want to get away, don't ever do that again, don't jump the queue." I felt put down, I thought, "All I want to do is go away, fight."

Q: But you got your commission in the last month of 1940?

A: August 1940,

Q: August '40? And it was another six months before you got the AIF posting?

A: I had to get a posting then.

Q: Why did it take so long do you think?

04:28:30:00

A: Because it was based entirely on the number of army units that had been formed at that time, and as I said, a regiment only has a certain, what we call, establishment, so many captains, lieutenants and so on, and if they have got their full quota, they don't need you. So you wait for new units to be formed, and the AIF was building up then, this was the 6th Division, the 1st Division that I'm

04:29:00:00
talking about, later on was formed the 7th Division, and the 8th, and the 9th, and so on. The only way in which I eventually got that posting was, therein lies a story, because while I was still waiting for a posting, there was another young officer, a friend of mine, we were sharing the same tent, and the

04:29:30:00
adjutant, who was the senior administrative officer of the battalion, staff officer, came out of the tent and said, "There is a vacancy in a certain battalion, which one of you two blokes want it? Either of you two blokes can have it, we can nominate one, toss a coin." We tossed a coin, the other person, my friend won, he was posted to this particular battalion, was captured

04:30:00:00
in Singapore, and died as a prisoner of war. That's the sort of the luck of the toss of the coin, and that was later on that I got my posting, it was as tough as that to get an officer posting.

Q: At the time, when he won the toss -

A: So he immediately left, he packed up his gear and he was posted to the 8th Division, the 29th

04:30:30:00
Battalion, and I think he was one of the first killed in that first campaign with the Japanese. So had I won that toss, my life would have been, who knows?

Q: Were you upset when you lost the toss?

A: Oh I was, we both wanted it, as I say, all we wanted to do was get away, that's what we are in uniform for, who wants to hang around Australia? So that was it, a toss of a coin decided his fate, and mine.

04:31:00:00

Q: Once you got your commission though, and you were still instructing the conscripts, that must have made a difference to - ?

A: I was instructing reinforcements to AIF battalions overseas, and that's when, if I talk about my own particular battalion which left early in 1940, then they suffered casualties

04:31:30:00
in North Africa, and so they needed reinforcements, men. Then they went to Greece, and there were a lot of deaths, a lot of casualties, and prisoners of war. A lot of our battalion were captured, so then once again, they need more men, so more reinforcements go over, so these

04:32:00:00
six thousand troops on the Queen Mar,y and the six thousand on the HMS Queen Elizabeth, were all reinforcements to battalions that were already over there because our casualties after Greece, and Crete, were very heavy. And then you get over there, you train again, you build up the battalion and get everybody working as a team, and then it's a case of, "We are leaving the Middle East," and

04:32:30:00
no one knew whether we were coming back to Australia, or Burma, or what, and that's another story in itself.

Q: OK, lets dig up the story from leaving Australia, embarking on the Queen Mary, did you receive some leave in there, to catch up with your family?

A: Normally you get pre-embarkation leave, yes, and I can't remember whether it was a week, or a fortnight.

04:33:00:00
Theoretically you should have put all your affairs in order, made your will and all that sort of thing, and anybody who's involved in a business would. You know, because they had learned in AIF, there were blokes pushing their ages down, as I said, some of them old enough to be my father, they were from the First World War, but didn't tell anybody.

04:33:30:00
They said, "My age is - " whatever, if it was under forty-five they were accepted. So pre-embarkation leave, and then hop on the train and go off to Sydney. That photograph that I have there, is a troupe standing on the wharf.

Q: What did you have to put in order before you left?

A: I was a single bloke, there was nothing for me to do. I had no

04:34:00:00
'baggage,' was a common term. For me it was easy, I had no relationships, I don't think people had relationships, I don't think that we knew we were allowed to, I had no girlfriend at that stage, it was just a case of go, say goodbye to Mum, and catch up with Dad, my two sisters -

04:34:30:00

Q: So you went down to Spencer Street to get to Sydney?

A: From Dali, Bacchus Marsh, we went from there, up to Sydney. Arrived there in the early hours of the morning, straight down to where the jetties leave from.

Q: Just on that train trip, were you responsible for any men, were you - ?

A: Oh yeah, one other officer and myself had, and I've still got the list of names there, some ninety-eight blokes that we were, it was our responsibility to get them to the ship. And then when you are on the ship, the blokes are given their sleeping quarters

04:35:00:00
down in that part of the ship, and where they will eat, and the officers are sent off that way, to where they will sleep, and where they will eat, and for the voyage, which was nineteen days, it was a case in getting as much training by way of trying to keep them entertained, and active, with very limited space to do it. Everybody wanted to get up on deck when the weather was fine.

04:35:30:00
While it was not fine for the early part of the trip, both drill, make sure people knew what to do, and when the alarm was sounded - Every officer is given a part of the ship to be responsible for, in terms of the discipline of troops, so I was responsible for a gaggle of people for, in the event of

04:36:00:00
having to take to the boats, and it was rather sobering, we found that where we were standing, there was no boat. There were only these things not much bigger than that table, which were floats, and the idea was that you chucked those over the side, but you might have to go over the side first, which meant that wearing a lifejacket, the fellows had to be taught that if they had to leap over

04:36:30:00
the side of the deck of the Queen Mary, which meant that you must hold your lifejacket in such a way otherwise if you jumped into the water without holding that, it could take your head off when that hits the water before your chin does. But it was a bit off putting, because one of the blokes said to me, "Where's our boat, boss?" and I said, "It would appear that that's it." Fortunately we didn't have to do it, but

04:37:00:00
because the Queen Mary never took that many passengers, and it was such a huge ship, just to practice finding your way up onto the boat deck was a job in itself, because the actual size on the main deck was about the size of the average footy ground, but elongated. So, finding your way from where you were, and where you were sleeping, and the

04:37:30:00
alarm was sounded quite a few times on the voyage, and it could be in the middle of the night, two o'clock in the morning, and that's when it starts, when it comes to you, "We are not playing anymore."

Q: So you had responsibility for what, an almost company-sized group?

A: Yes, just on a hundred, yes.

Q: How did you coordinate on this,

04:38:00:00
like, given that there were thousands, how did you coordinate that?

A: That was one of the problems because, when you find space to assemble them, when you find a little bit of space to deliver lectures, for example, we were given little books that gave us guides as to how we should treat the Arab people in Palestine,

04:38:30:00
they would have been our first contact, how to behave yourself, things that you need to know, what the things are that are acceptable and not acceptable when you are on leave, so you needed a little area to get people together to talk to them about these things, you couldn't do any weapon training because we didn't have any weapons - the odd lecture, finding a spot to do some PT [physical training], to keep them reasonably fit

04:39:00:00
for three weeks, and it was a matter of - so the ships staff had to do that, and that from say ten o'clock, to eleven o'clock tomorrow morning, you might have that much space on B deck, or whatever, because where the troops were sleeping, they were down on the decks where their hammocks were strung above their eating tables,

04:39:30:00
and when the time came for bed, you cleared the tables, and they sleep in the hammocks, and the ones that got on at Fremantle, got the worst accommodation, and once the Queen Mary had arrived in the Red Sea, it was very hot, and as many as could, tried to take their mattress if they had one, those who had mattresses, try to take them

04:40:00:00
up onto deck, and try to get a bit of relief from the heat. The ship was never designed for the tropics. But the feeding of six thousand, so it was continual, you could have chef number one, two, three, and by the time that was finished, it was time for lunch, and it started again. But having said that, for me, I was sharing a cabin, class distinction of course it was,

04:40:30:00
they brought the paper to me each morning. The paper was printed on board, a cup of tea, and the dining facilities for the officers were what civilians would have enjoyed in peace time, no limit to nice food, and wine, great stuff, if we had been torpedoed we could have been in big trouble,

04:41:00:00
while I was sitting and enjoying this meal, but that's the way it was, I used to feel terribly guilty when I went down to the troop deck and the blokes down there were all squashed in like sardines, "What's it like for you, boss?" "Quite nice."


Graham Palmer
2111
Tape 5

05:00:38:00

Q: Lets just pick up the story, you told us that the quarters were quite plush, and you felt a bit guilty, the troops down below -

A: Yeah well, there were limits, well you can't do anything, that's where you are allocated, that's where you will sleep, that's what you will do. Even taking into account that an officer's first responsibility is the

05:01:00:00
comfort of his subordinates, there was nothing I could do about it, please don't boast about it and say, "We are having a whale of a time," but I think that its possible they were happily - I'll go back a stage. The troop ships would be escorted, and when we come down the East Coast, and into the Bite, it was very, very rough,

05:01:30:00
and we had two Royal Australian Destroyers, now they are fairly small ships. The Queen Mary, and the Queen Elizabeth were cruising at thirty knots, which as you might know is about thirty five miles an hour, you are moving eighty five thousand tons at thirty five miles an hour, and both those ships could plough through the

05:02:00:00
waves. The destroyers kept hitting them, and rising above them, they had a rough time, and the message we got, right or wrong, they would have to drop back and reduce their speed, they couldn't handle it. When we left Fremantle, we sailed, unescorted, and they were two very much prize, ships, indeed submarines could have shot at it, but they

05:02:30:00
relied on their speed, and they were constant zigzagging, and you just hoped you didn't cross the path of a U-Boat [German submarine], because there were U-Boats operating in that area. But on the ship, you wouldn't know anything about that, you would just go about whatever it is you are doing, perhaps if you were a passenger, even do nothing except count the days. We had a brief spell in Trincomalee Harbour [Sri Lanka], and, but didn't go ashore,

05:03:00:00
and then went on to Port Taufiq, on the Suez Canal, where we disembarked there. So what else was done on the Queen Mary? Not much, you were too restricted for space.

Q: So to get us on the time line again, when did you embark?

A: We left Sydney on the 2nd September, it was a nineteen-day trip.

05:03:30:00

Q: 1941?

A: Yes, September '41, yep.

Q: So at Port Trincomalee did you actually get on shore, or was it just - ?

A: No, not there, so it was just a case of pressing on. The weather of course was improving, and it was, the Red Sea

05:04:00:00
was as calm as a - there was barely a ripple. So from, we disembarked at Port Taufiq, and then had a short stay in Egypt, and then travelled by train from there up to our campsite in Palestine, just south of Gaza.

Q: What were your first impressions of that part

05:04:30:00
of the world, I mean the Red Sea?

A: No one stepped off the ship at Port Taufiq, I can remember the smell of tar, and strangely that's sort of stuck with me. I think everything was grubby, I think it was a culture shock for me, it's like somebody going on a holiday to Asia,

05:05:00:00
and it takes you a little while to get used to it. I think we found it a bit off putting to look over the rail of the ship, and see troops who had been there longer than we, who were kicking bottoms, and hitting Arabs with sticks, and all that sort of thing. We haven't behaved too well in some of these places, and there was a bit of calling from the ship, saying, "Leave them alone."

05:05:30:00
Sadly, we hadn't been there very long before that bunch of blokes, were doing exactly the same thing. I think its, somebody explained it, nobody wants to be the bottom Indian on the totem pole, everybody likes to feel that somewhere there is someone below them, and if you can't do that, go home and kick the dog, or whatever.

05:06:00:00
It might be an exaggeration - but I developed quite a liking for the Arabs, they didn't have an awful lot going for them, they had a reputation for telling lies, they were dirty, they didn't want to work, they'd pinch anything, but somehow they were likeable, and that sounds like a contradiction, but if I were ever to be put in the position of taking sides in this Gaza thing.

05:06:30:00
If it happened or not, I'd be inclined to say Arabs, I think they've had a rough trot, have for many, many years, but no, we didn't find them difficult to relate to at all. I think the standard of cleanliness is not what it might be, I think you'd find the same thing in India, or China. So

05:07:00:00
we then proceeded to this great big campsite, huge area where they were training battalions once again, and new recruits, new members for the battalions that had lost people through casualties, or found not suitable for some reason, or other.

05:07:30:00
So, in that particular area, we were able to get a bit of leave. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, were the two most commonly visited places, there were some of our fellows who had the experience of spending perhaps a week in a kibbutz [communal farm], which they said they found interesting. The stipulation was that you couldn't go on leave unless you had a

05:08:00:00
certain amount of money in your pay book, and the going rate if you wanted to go to say Alexandria, or Cairo, it was required that you had at least sixty pounds. Sixty pounds is a lot of money if you take the private soldier who is paid five bob a day, and who may have been sending money home,

05:08:30:00
but then you can build up money in your pay book if you go to those places where you can't spend money. I had Christmas Eve '41, in Jerusalem, and I stayed there with a - Jerusalem seemed to be divided into, there was the French quarter, and the German quarter, and two or three blokes and myself stayed in the German quarter,

05:09:00:00
and we were extremely well looked after. But, on Christmas Day, the family we were staying with produced a Christmas pudding with Aussie coins in it, which was a nice touch, and it was the first time I'd seen brandy poured over a Christmas pudding you know, that was happening in Europe, I'd never seen it in Australia, it was very impressive,

05:09:30:00
it snowed, and we were able to visit a lot of places of historical interest in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the place to see things of that nature. Tel Aviv being the city, was more the night life, there was nothing much to see during the day. I think Tel Aviv was only a few years old as a city in the '30's. The one thing I regret, was that I hadn't

05:10:00:00
read more biblical history before I went to Jerusalem, because I would have got a lot more out of it had I done that. Anyway, I knew a little bit more when I came back, but it's an interesting place, and one I'd like to visit again.

Q: So were you already posted to the 2/6th at that time?

A: I'd been posted, but I was still with the training battalion until such time as you are called up to join a battalion,

05:10:30:00
wherever it is.

Q: Was there actually training going on at the time?

A: Yes, all the time.

Q: Were you actually conducting that, or still being trained?

A: As I mentioned, I had to do another officers' course, and qualify again. So that was part of my time, and then at the drop of a hat they would send officers, and NCOs off to specialist courses, but it's training, training, all the time.

05:11:00:00
But with leave, when they could afford to send you off on leave, there would be a notice on the notice board, there would be a seven day leave party going next Monday, write your name down, put your name down if you were interested in going. So from that point of view it was quite good.

Q: So were you responsible for men at that point, during your training?

05:11:30:00

A: Once again, you had - so it was the training battalion that fed the actual battalions, so you still had a responsibility for training, even so, that went on all the time. I missed out on a glorious opportunity, when I was a child I used to suffer with tonsillitis. I got tonsillitis when I was in Palestine, and the medical officer

05:12:00:00
said to me, "One more bout of this and we'll have them out." Strangely enough I never go tonsillitis after that. What I didn't know, was that, had I accepted the offer, I would have had the pleasure of fourteen days on a houseboat on the Nile - opportunity lost, it was merely convalescent.

Q: Did you get down to Egypt at all?

05:12:30:00

A: Yes, but only briefly, both going over, and coming back, only a very limited area, but no, it's interesting country, and we could see the troubles going to arise once we left the place, because the Arabs were pinching stuff, but I think they were pinching it with a view to using it later on.

05:13:00:00
There was talk of when the Australians had moved out it was going to be really on here, and there was no love lost between the two. So fellows occupying a tent, they had to take the bolts out of their rifle, and there would be one sentry per tent, and that one sentry would have a haversack [backpack; a bag carried by a strap on your back or shoulder] with the bolts, the rest of the rifles had to be chained to the tent poles,

05:13:30:00
otherwise they would walk, and it was all in preparation for once the Europeans had got out of the place. So the two nationalities appeared to dislike each other immensely, but having said that, I found everybody friendly, but particularly Arabs. On a Sunday morning, a friend and I used to go down to church, go down to

05:14:00:00
a tiny little village of just a few hundred, and sit down and have a talk with the local chieftain, while he sat and smoked his little 'hubble-bubble' pipe, and I was offered the opportunity of trying that, and I declined. I'm not even sure what's in it, but it seemed to make them content.

Q: You mentioned how, when you -

05:14:30:00
you saw some of the Aussie troops that had been there for a while treating the locals with not a lot of respect -

A: I think it was, I don't say it was sadistic, but to have a stick, and give somebody a whack across the bottom was, I don't know, perhaps it was a way of asserting your, what you hope is your superiority, but it wasn't uncommon, but how can I put this, not everybody was doing it,

05:15:00:00
I think a lot of - Australians being what they are, do a lot of things light hearted. You often wonder how the Arabs would have viewed it. For example, climbing onto a tram in Cairo, and taking charge of it, and all that, and I've often thought, "How would we have reacted if the Yanks had done it to us during the war, we wouldn't have thought it was very funny."

05:15:30:00
However, that's Australians, and mostly the discipline was very good.

Q: Do you know of any more severe cases of that type, where there was violence perhaps, or very bad mistreatment? Or going both ways, where one person might have taken out their -

A: No I don't think so, I think that is as far as it

05:16:00:00
went.

Q: So what was the training consisting of at that point?

A: Once again it was training as if the battalion was going to go off to the desert again, North Africa, and of course that didn't happen. It was very much desert training, we were surrounded in camps, it was all sand, and we were only a short march from the beach

05:16:30:00
of Gaza, so it was possible on a number of occasions, blokes would put their towel around their neck, and go over the sand dunes and down to the beach, get nice and cool, and get hot coming back again. But then of course when Japan came into the war, everything changed, and the Australian Government were clamouring for trained troops to come back to Australia, and the

05:17:00:00
rest is history. Britain didn't want that to happen, or Churchill didn't want that to happen, and so when we left Palestine, and went down to the board the ship, I certainly didn't have the faintest idea where we were going, all our equipment was marked, "SA1," or, "SAI," so that meant that people were guessing, "Does that mean, 'See Australia

05:17:30:00
First?'" or whatever, trying to read all these things. But then people were looking at - from then on we set sail, every night there were blokes out there looking at the stars, trying to get some indication of what direction we were going in, working our way away from the Pole star, and we could see then we were gradually heading south, but

05:18:00:00
while we were doing this, all this toing and froing was going on between the two governments, "Is it going to be Burma, is it going to be Java, where are we heading?" So there were bets being laid on the ship, and eventually we found out that Java had fallen, so that left Java out. So Burma they thought would be a dead loss because the Japanese were doing so well in Burma

05:18:30:00
that we'd have merely suffered the same fate as the British troops in Java. So we sat in the harbour at Colombo, while somebody was making up their minds what to do with us, and eventually we went ashore, and we spent the next four and a half months in the south of Sri Lanka, as it is now, waiting to see just how far south

05:19:00:00
the Japanese would come down through India. We didn't have a lot of support. I fear that had they done that, we may well have become another Singapore. There was bombing by Japanese aircraft while we were there, our task, our battalion's task was protecting the sea planes just south of Colombo,

05:19:30:00
and those sea planes, they were Catalinas [amphibious flying boat], and they used to fly, I think they call it a, 'double sunrise flight,' or something like that. They would fly on a daily basis from Ceylon, to Western Australia, and come back again. They were Dutch aircraft, but I have a piece of paper, which is -

05:20:00:00
now I was a platoon commander, my company commander which is the next highest rank, had sent me a signal, and it's a pity it doesn't appear in our history, what is says is that, and it's pretty dramatic stuff, "There is a Japanese invasion fleet off Colombo," we were to take to action stations, large force of enemy aircraft had been sighted, and then it authorises me to requisition two bicycles

05:20:30:00
from the population. I hadn't the slightest idea what I was supposed to do with the bikes, but the two locals I got them from were not terribly happy. I gave them a receipt, because a pushbike to people in, you know, at village level, is like someone's BMW. So I never found out what the bikes were for, but the next day I was give authority to return one

05:21:00:00
bike. Now I had discussed this with my batman [orderly assigned to serve a military officer], and I said, "What are we supposed to do with these things?" And he said, "Maybe they are for you and I to shoot through on," you see, "No I don't think that's the idea," but yeah it sounds quite ridiculous. So actually Ceylon then, was a very good training ground for an introduction into jungle warfare, we were in jungle country the whole time,

05:21:30:00
the jungle surrounded the Catalina base. We had a little leave there, and we could, we call them reconnaissance parties, but they were just an excuse to use a vehicle to take the blokes, just for a break up into the hills, up to Kandy, and Nuralia, Ceylon's very beautiful place. It's a pity they have had so many problems there, but you should have a look at it.

05:22:00:00
Once again the difference between Palestine and Ceylon, having come from one to the other, the local people in Ceylon are very, very clean people, and they never seemed to stop washing themselves. To the best of my knowledge, Arab's never do, that was a big difference I noticed between the two, and the people in Ceylon seemed to be very proud of the fact that they were classified as British, and that stuck out.

05:22:30:00
Colombo's a nice place, it was not an unpleasant stay on the way home.

Q: By the time you get to Ceylon, you are part of the 2/6th already?

A: I'm part of the 2/6th, yes.

Q: Where did that happen?

A: That happened in Palestine, I joined the battalion there some - about a month, or six weeks before coming back,

05:23:00:00
before leaving rather the Suez area.

Q: Right, and your rank at this point?

A: Lieutenant.

Q: - and as soon as you joined, you were given command of a platoon?

A: Yes, that's normal.

Q: OK, what was that like, what sort of reception did you have with mainly reinforcements, or were you - ?

A: It's a very good question, in the - I'd joined the battalion with the rank of lieutenant with

05:23:30:00
quite a number of others who'd come over from Australia at various times. I think the commanding officer was, I don't know that he welcomed us, because he had people that he would rather have seen commissioned himself, because he'd seen what they could do in action, and his

05:24:00:00
reaction was a normal one, but it made some of us feel rejected if you like. It was, the officers' mess was a long marque, and it was common to see the newly joined officers up one end of the bar, and the old sweats down the other end,

05:24:30:00
and it really took, it took one action, it took one fight to get the two together, in New Guinea - I don't know, I think that some of the troops, diggers, and private soldiers, some of them experienced similar problems, they were tried, untested, nobody knew how

05:25:00:00
they were going to go. I suppose that's been going on since Julius Caesar, but that was what happened, and in the case of an officer where you've got your sergeant who is your second in command, if you like, where he is actually being shot at, and experienced it, he must have had feelings of apprehension.

05:25:30:00
You know, "This bloke's going to be calling the shots, he has seen no action, can I trust him?" So it was something that only time would take care of. I didn't expect - there was the odd snide remark you know, "We didn't do this when we were at Tobruk," but you learned to live with that, try and prove myself,

05:26:00:00
because nobody knows how they are going to cope the first time they are shot at, you know, you can be a fine specimen of a man out on the parade ground, but that's not the way it often works out when you are in action. You don't know what your reaction is going to be, I don't think anybody knows at all, you could go completely to pieces, or whatever, just part of your makeup.

05:26:30:00
I think the biggest - I mean you can be afraid, there is no rule against being afraid, the big thing is you don't show it, not for an officer anyway. Somehow you've got to cover it, it doesn't matter if you feel more scared than the other blokes do, it's a funny feeling, it's expected of you,

05:27:00:00
you are an officer, that's your job, your job, whatever fears you've got, you can't communicate those to the blokes because as they say, "If he's scared, maybe we should be too," they think. So it was, once again, it was a settling in to the battalion, but fortunately at the time I joined there was also a lot of reinforcements, and just a sprinkling of those who'd been in the first action in the desert,

05:27:30:00
and in Greece, Greece took a toll on the battalion, there were a lot of casualties, so we had a lot of building up to do at the time.

Q: Like you are suggesting, in its way, it was a pretty stressful period of time, when you need to prove yourself, like you say, you couldn't really do that until - were there ways, things you could say, or do, which illustrated your capacity to lead?

05:28:00:00

A: See, I don't know how I should answer that, there are a lot of things I would change if I had the opportunity. I don't know - I think you play it the way you've been trained to play it, and if you can, try and learn something from those who've been through it in such a way that it doesn't

05:28:30:00
make you look that you are completely clueless, but respect the bloke who has developed the reputation of having done a good job, sometimes they are the most unlikely people. The blokes that join the army in wartime are pretty much a mixed bag, I think if you analyse, "Why did Bill Smith join up?" It would be nice to be able to say that everyone

05:29:00:00
joined for King and Country and Empire and all that sort of thing, but that wouldn't be true, there were a lot of blokes joined up for a sense of adventure, they had boring jobs, who maybe wanted to get away from Mum and the kids, who perhaps had nothing in life, and this sort of offered them a permanent job. 'Course, you think of all those who were on the dole in 1939,

05:29:30:00
they were out of work for years, they caught rabbits for a living, and humped their swag [rolled up blanket] around Australia, so there were blokes in there for all sorts of reasons, so I don't think it - it doesn't always help to examine motives, and in a battalion you are not interested in motives, all you are interested in is moulding a team together in such a way that they can do a good job.

05:30:00:00
"Why he joined up," that's his business, and we had a lot of people who were completely, and absolutely undesirable, they were being put into detention camp, but really, they should have been sent home, because there were a lot of naughty blokes. You get X thousand males together, or females if you like, and there have to be a few baddies among them.

05:30:30:00
Detention camps were something to be avoided, anyone who went to a detention camp didn't want to go a second time, they were there to make life hell for the person who'd been sent there. Lots of petty types of punishment were dished out. You'd find that anyone who'd done twenty-eight

05:31:00:00
days somewhere in one of these detention camps wouldn't want to go back again. Some of that would have been, you would have been able to see a film that was called The Hill, made a few years ago, I'm not sure if Sean Connery wasn't in it, that pretty much exemplified a real, serious detention camp.

Q: Is this in the Middle East?

05:31:30:00

A: In Egypt.

Q: In Egypt, yeah, it sounds like you had your work cut out for you really, because it was a big ask, were you helped by the fact that there were a lot of reinforcements?

A: I think if I'd been a bit older I might have been a bit more sensitive, but I was at an age where I tended to play things by the book, and as you get older, you realise

05:32:00:00
that's not always the way to do it, you learn when to turn a blind eye, you learn to recognise what you should perhaps avoid making a big deal out of, and what not, and try and assess the individual for what he is. A lot of blokes in action are tremendous,

05:32:30:00
when they come out of action they can be absolute villains, and that's just the nature of the bloke. A fellow might get himself three stripes in battle, and then immediately lose them when he comes out of it because he hits the grog, goes AWOL [Absent Without Leave], or punches somebody. There was - when I was on the ship, there was a thing called the, 'Shark List,' and the, 'Shark List,' was supposed to consist of

05:33:00:00
officers the troops didn't like, and that person would be in grave danger of going over the side, to what extent it was ever implemented I wouldn't know, but there used to be much talk, "He's on the 'Shark List'." Now it may have just been talk, but nevertheless - "So don't get carried away with your own importance, mate."

Q: Did you ever have occasion to see someone

05:33:30:00
off to the detention centre, that kind of thing?

A: Well, the only person in the battalion who can do that is the commanding officer, officers have very limited powers of what they can do to people, like ordering extra duties, extra drill, stoppage of leave, stoppage of pay -

05:34:00:00
the maximum punishment a CO could award would be twenty-eight days, of course then, a person can then ask for a court martial, which means that he would then be judged by someone other than his CO, so that's - depending on how serious the offence was. If the CO would say that if a person was marched in before him that, "You were charged with the following offence,

05:34:30:00
do you wish to be charged by me, or by court martial?" Now it's a bit of a, you are walking a tight-rope, because the person might think, "The CO hates me, I'll go for a court martial," but if he's found guilty by a court martial, it can award more severe punishment than the CO can, so you have got to be careful how you play it. But, the punishment could be a warning, it could be a

05:35:00:00
demotion in rank, and in action of course, what a CO can do to punish somebody who transgresses, is very much limited because if you are stuck up the jungle track somewhere, there's not an awful lot you can do to a person to punish him, and depending on how serious the offence was, and taking into account that the bloke might be over stressed, and behaving

05:35:30:00
out of character - but that's wisdom and maturity that enables any officer to dole out any punishment at all. A great deal of wisdom is necessary, and even CO's have got to learn that. If you go from being perhaps a battalion second in command to, all of a sudden, he's boss, is like a ships captain,

05:36:00:00
he has tremendous powers, particularity in wartime.

Q: So how would you characterise your relationship with the men, the sergeants and the - up until the time you got to Ceylon?

A: I'd like to feel it was good, I - simply by following the rule that you show an obvious interest in their welfare. You get to know a great deal about

05:36:30:00
the fellows that you are serving with, and over whom you have authority, the way of doing that is because you are with them twenty-four hours a day, there is no escaping it, you as the officer for that group of blokes. You are responsible for everything they do or do not do, and you can't pass the buck [avoid the responsibility] to somebody else. If discipline is bad, it's got to be your fault.

05:37:00:00
That's the way the army sees it, that there is no such thing as bad troops, there are only bad officers - maybe that's an exaggeration, but that's the way it's looked at, and I think that one of the ways that you get to know people, is that one of an officer's duties is to censor mail, so people write a letter home to their wife, or their girlfriend, or family, it has to come to their officer to be censored, to make sure that they are not giving away information that

05:37:30:00
could be of value to the enemy if intercepted. When you are reading these letters every night of the week, you get to know a lot about people, a bit frustrating in a way because you never read the reply, that doesn't come back to you. Now, I had the experience that I had a bloke in my platoon who could neither read, nor write, he didn't want his girlfriend to know that, and he came to me and asked me to write a letter of

05:38:00:00
proposal to her, which I did. I said, "You tell me what you want to say," trust me, I'll write exactly that on the piece of paper. Sadly I never knew whether she accepted him or not, which is rather a pity, I would have liked to have known, but censoring mail, far from people thinking, "That must have been a lot of fun, reading the letters," it's a pain in the neck, it can take -

05:38:30:00
depending on how much mail you've got, it can take, depending on how conscientiously you do it, it could take several hours at night when you could have been having a beer somewhere. No, I found it terribly boring, and in may cases, embarrassing. But nevertheless, your job was to, "No, you can't write that," I would just cut that thing out, so some Mum would get a letter at home and hold it up to the light, and all she will see is, "I'm having a great time

05:39:00:00
at __________," and, "We went and did, _________," and the blokes would try it on, see if I would let one through, so no, don't do that, from the beginning.

Q: We've interviewed a number of guys who were privates, who had their mail censored, and they said they felt like they used code systems with their - ?

A: Oh yes, we knew about that, you know, they make an arrangement before they go away and say, "When I say I did this, that means,

05:39:30:00
it was something else," I don't know how you beat that.

Q: You didn't come across anything that struck you as a little bit out of place, or odd, that maybe meant something that it shouldn't have?

A: I think once it's sunk into the blokes that a breach of security could be very serious indeed, if they said something like, "I hope to be home soon," a little bit along those lines,

05:40:00:00
and the mail was intercepted, you've got someone sitting down plotting all these things, everybody is shown films on security, and Belle remembers - and God please let me keep my big mouth shut, he was a parrot or something, that I did talk too much - so they were well conditioned to that sort of training,

05:40:30:00
that, "Don't be stupid, you'll put your mates' lives at risk by indicating where you were heading," not so much where you are now, although that can be of interest to the enemy, as where your next movement is going to be. "We hope to be on a big ship soon, but I can't tell you where we are going," "Now don't be silly, cut that out."

Q: What about your mail?


Graham Palmer
2111
Tape 6

06:00:34:00

Q: We are back on and you know what the question is going to be?

A: You asked me the question of who censored the officers' mail? The officers' mail was subject to random checks at base headquarters, and you'd be very stupid to contravene that, you didn't. The use of cameras was, I suppose the blokes hadn't had cameras, and mostly they were little Box Brownies, you know those

06:01:00:00
little things that you buy for ten bob. If you were really flash, you had the type that you pull out, with the thing at the front. There were problems with getting film developed, you had to be careful what you were photographing if you were going to send it in the mail back home. It was just a matter of being sensible about the whole thing, and knowing that you were subject to random checks.

06:01:30:00
There was the other aspect too, that mail that I sent to a friend whilst I was away, and they kept it, people kept them, and it was very interesting because it was a letter I'd written, whatever, and half of it was charred, and it had been recovered from an aircraft that had actually crashed on landing, or been shot down, or whatever, but anyway it was

06:02:00:00
on the letter was: 'Damaged by enemy action,' and it was an interesting souvenir, with half of it that had been burned away.

Q: So what was the policy again, with cameras, taking photographs, because everyone seems to have a great collection of - ?

A: Yes, I've been taking photographs of mates and all that sort of thing, but it was a matter of taking photographs of things you shouldn't be taking photographs of, and

06:02:30:00
it was a difficult thing to police, because you could take along to somebody locally in the village, or in the town, and they would develop them, and give you back your prints, so what do you do with it then, if you keep it among your own gear and you are captured and taken prisoner, then there might be something which could be useful to the enemy, or if you sent it through the mail - but having said that,

06:03:00:00
it wouldn't be as much evidence today of a lot of things if fellows hadn't taken cameras with them, the biggest problem was, that they were just a nuisance to carry. But then, I took shots while I was away - see as far as the Middle East was concerned, it was comparatively easy for officers to carry all this stuff, because we were

06:03:30:00
allowed a cabin trunk, and that cabin trunk, in that was spare uniforms and all that sort of stuff, and it went into the hold of the ship when you travelled by ship, but the troops didn't have that facility, they had a kit bag, and it was just more stuff to carry. An interesting sort of episode was when, on Ceylon, the locals put on a

06:04:00:00
dance for something, I forget what it was, now brigadier went along, and he used to wear a cap with a red band, while he was up dancing, someone pinched his cap, he'd put it down on the thing, he was particularly annoyed, because on Ceylon we were inspected by the Duke of Gloucester, the brigadier particularity wanted his cap, rather than felt hats,

06:04:30:00
it looked much more appropriate, and he was not amused by the fact that all attempts to get the thing back resulted in nothing. Eventually the cap was found, but not the red band that had the nice little badge on the front with the lion and crown, when we got to sea, and we were heading then away from Ceylon, coming back to Australia, the instruction was that we

06:05:00:00
were to take all the gear off the blokes, and see if we could find that band. So I was with three other officers, and we weren't the only ones involved, we had to go down into the hold, and this was, it was very, very hot, and we had to try and open up all these kit bags that they put their gear into. Dirty, it was horrible, searching for this blessed cap,

06:05:30:00
and I said to my company commander, "What happens if we find it?" and he said, "It will go out the port hole." I don't think he would have done that, but, however, just simply to illustrate, that bloke, all his possessions are in that kit bag, whereas an officer would have other privileges, and I don't think anybody would have searched our gear. With privilege, goes responsibility.

06:06:00:00

Q: Did anyone turn up the brigadier's band?

A: The cap was found somewhere back on Ceylon, but the red band and the badge was never, so somebody's got that at home, probably hanging from a coat hanger.

Q: This is totally unrelated, but yesterday you talked about from the other side of the fence, that such a thing went on,

06:06:30:00
the VD [venereal disease] clinic, was there anything of that, not only that, but the VD parade, and saying how one of the officers would have to come past and check that they were clean, eventually?

A: The officers didn't, but the medical officer did, it was all very undignified, and this would happen after blokes had been on leave, if they had been on general leave there was always the risk that they'd picked up something

06:07:00:00
unpleasant, which would make that bloke unfit for service, so it was necessary, I mean the ways of treating then was, any form venereal disease, was pretty primitive, they really didn't have much, that I was aware of, anyway. So it would be necessary for them to have a parade, so all the fellows would be lined up on the parade ground, and an inspection was carried out, all

06:07:30:00
terribly undignified. Were officers required to be on that parade? No, they weren't.

Q: So, just the medical - ?

A: Were officers at risk? Yes, they were, and there was a hospital in the Middle East that was known as the Eight Special Hospital, which treated all venereal disease cases, and they had their share of people one though would not have been there, including the odd Padre [military chaplain], or two.

06:08:00:00
No one's perfect. The inspection itself, no, that was carried out by the medical officer, not by the officers, who'd want to?

Q: So was there a separate parade for officers, or were they trusted?

A: I cannot tell a lie, no, there was not, whether it was fondly hoped an officer would be sensible enough to do something about it himself if he recognised that he had a problem, I don't know, but certainly I was

06:08:30:00
never subjected to it. I think, going into the army, that latrine incident, it must have been a shock to all the young blokes who grew up in very sheltered circumstances, even that fact in those days of having a shower with maybe twenty, thirty, or fifty blokes,

06:09:00:00
might have caused some people some embarrassment until they got used to it, we'd never taken their clothes off in front of anyone except perhaps their Mum when they were little kids. I wouldn't have thought there was any attempt to humiliate anyone, or make them feel embarrassed, it just happened. You just had to get used to it, and I imagine the girls went through it

06:09:30:00
under the same circumstances. So the conditions then, were different for storing films, and all that. I've got a lot of stuff from the Middle East that, had I had to carry in my kit bag, I wouldn't have even thought of it. Even Ceylon, Ceylon was a wonderful place for carvings, particularly of elephants, and you could get carved elephants up to that size,

06:10:00:00
two feet. I can remember marching down to the ship, one of the fellows had one of these big things on his pack, he could have bought that very, very cheaply - after the first half a mile, it was heavy. Tea, I brought back boxes of tea, because someone had told me it was short in Australia, those I gave it to I can't even recall them saying, "Thanks very much."

06:10:30:00
But once again, it went into my cabin trunk, and it was comparatively easy. But the scene changes then, when you talk about New Guinea, whole different ball game altogether.

Q: We will get to that -

A: There was none of that luxury, or any of that nonsense.

Q: Would your batman

06:11:00:00
look after that for you?

A: The duty of a batman is, he's what you call a runner as well, he will take a message from my platoon to another platoon, it was part of his duties. He was to do for, those things for an officer, which the officer would have to do, and prevent him

06:11:30:00
from looking after the troops. In theory, if I'm spending time doing my washing and ironing, I'm not doing my job with the blokes, I'm not keeping an eye on them, I'm not ensuring that they do all the things that they should be doing. So what did the batman do? Washing, did your ironing, clean your boots, make a cup of tea first thing in the morning,

06:12:00:00
give you ordinance rumours, borrowed money for two up and lost it all - So what sort of bloke became a batman? Sometimes an older bloke because this would get him off parade ground, a batman became very

06:12:30:00
protective of the officer they were looking after, it was a source of pride for many of them that their officer was always well turned out, otherwise the other batman would sling off and say, "You are not doing your job mate, look at the condition of his belt, that needs cleaning, " or, "I saw his buckle today, and it looked horrible," that sort of stuff. I was lucky I had,

06:13:00:00
you've heard of Joe Gallet have you? His name must have come up, he was the son of Sir Henry Gallet who was a member of parliament, Joe Gallet was a Rhodes Scholar, an officer in the battalion, went into parliament as a Liberal member after the war, and he, when I got to the battalion, he gave me his batman. That should have made me suspicious

06:13:30:00
from the start, because he was a funny bloke, he was bald as a badger, his one ambition was to win a Victorian Cross, and he sought every opportunity to do it, he did extraordinary things for me. There was a fortuneteller in Melbourne back in the '30's, and her name was Madam Gerkah, a most unusual name, but she used to operate in the City of Melbourne, in Bourke Street, or little Bourke Street,

06:14:00:00
anyway, she was a fortune-teller, and she was this particular person's mother, he procured for me when we were in the middle of the jungle in Ceylon, he managed to get me hot cross buns from somewhere, now I didn't enquire where he got them, because I knew that it meant that he'd left part of the unit that he should have been in, where he would have been, I don't know, but these were his peace offering, and on

06:14:30:00
Good Friday he produced hot cross buns, I asked no questions. So basically, the batsman's job is to look after his officer so the officer has time to look after his troops, and act as a runner. A bloke wouldn't normally be appointed to that job if he had no interest in it, why would you want to do that? Sometimes there were fellows who said, "Look, I get that job, I look after that fellow, that's all I have to do, don't have to go on parade

06:15:00:00
'cause he wants his washing done," seemed to work.

Q: Did he stay with you throughout, that chap?

A: I had two or three different blokes, once again, in New Guinea the batsman was more of a runner, more of an orderly than - what were you going to ask him to do, you certainly couldn't do any washing, certainly no polishing boots.

06:15:30:00
So the role changed, but then when you come back to the mainland, will we still need him again?

Q: It would be good to hear just a little bit more about Ceylon, you were there for about four or five months did you say?

A: Yes, four or five months.

Q: So you were sort of garrisoned, you were guarding the - ?

A: Catalina base.

Q: What was the routine there in regards to the actual work that you would do?

06:16:00:00

A: It varied when - in the initial stages when there seemed to be a real threat, it was very much a, patrolling the area in which you happened to be occupying, then when the - there was no more bombing after a certain point, then it was a case of once again, keep training. In the jungle

06:16:30:00
we were trying to adapt ourselves to jungle tactics as opposed to open country, or desert, and try to give the blokes a bit of leave if we could. The sickness, and general health of the fellows was pretty good, there was a great deal of malaria, although we were taking quinine there. I don't know of many cases of malaria in Ceylon.

06:17:00:00
There may have been, but I don't know of them. So the four and a half months seemed to go fairly quickly, I think.

Q: You were there for some bombing raids?

A: Yes.

Q: Do you recall the first of those, what sort of - ?

A: Close to it, we saw the aircraft fly over when we were patrolling, and we could just hear the sound of aircraft engines through the trees, we couldn't see them. I thought they were ours, but

06:17:30:00
they weren't, so this Japanese invasion fleet was somewhere off the coast of the island. What their intentions were, I've never been able to find out, but things were pretty dicey then, the Japanese were winning all along the line. Singapore went, and Java, Burma was going down the gurgler, it was very serious stuff, and I can imagine how much the Australian Government wanted the fellows back in,

06:18:00:00
trained troops, experienced troops, back in Australia, so we just had to wait.

Q: What was the moral of the battalion, did it feel like it should be somewhere else?

A: We were only getting sketchy news, it seems that the closer you are to where things are happening, the less you know, and that may sound a contradiction,

06:18:30:00
so we were getting a locally produced army paper which kept us up to date with what was going on, and Russia, and so on. I'm not sure if we knew just how serious it was back in Australia, certainly some of the blokes were getting a bit anxious saying, "What are we doing here when we should be protecting our own country?" But there was nothing they could do about it anyway, so

06:19:00:00
just hope that everything was under control. So it was, then sort of back to Australia a brief spot of leave, and straight up to New Guinea.

Q: So you came back to Melbourne for that period did you?

A: Yes, from Melbourne we went to Seymour, and that's where the fellows

06:19:30:00
were granted leave, to go home wherever they lived, and our battalion was a Victorian battalion, we had some Tasmanians with us, but in the main they were Victorians, and Tasmanians, so they were sent off to leave, and it takes you a while to get them off, and back again, and then head north for a short spell in Brisbane,

06:20:00:00
and then, on a Dutch ship, a little thing, we went to Milne Bay, which is down at the east end of New Guinea, we relieved a battalion that had just been engaged in an action with the Japanese there, and that battalion moved out, and we took over. There was a lot of malaria in Milne Bay, was thought to be one of the worst areas for

06:20:30:00
malaria in the world, mainly because of the rainfall, and the pools of water, and the conditions under which mosquitoes bred was absolutely ideal for mosquitoes, and despite the fact that we went off the quinine, and went on to the atebrin, which is malaria tablet, and it has the effect of changing the colour of your skin,

06:21:00:00
but even though the fellows had to take that, I mean it was necessary to stand in front of a bloke and say, "Now put that atebrin on your tongue, and there's your water bottle, swallow it," why was it necessary to do this? Word had got around that atebrin, if you take it long enough, and it will have a

06:21:30:00
big effect on your sex life when you get back to civilisation, I don't know if there is any basis for truth, but had an affect on the blokes, and they tried to dodge taking it. I must find out the end of that story some time, but it was necessary to line them up, take that tablet, and a gulp of water.

Q: That was your responsibility?

A: It was the particular officer's responsibility to see that that happened.

06:22:00:00
But having said all that, I got malaria very badly in Milne Bay and I found myself on a hospital ship back to Australia, and I got repeat bouts of malaria after that, and I took that atebrin religiously, atebrin was meant to be a suppressive, it didn't stop you getting it, but it was supposed to minimise the effect, but

06:22:30:00
I would say malaria was the cause of the loss of more men from battalions than anything else, than any other battle casualties, and there were varying degrees of it, it comes in two forms, there is BT, I think that stand for benign, or something, and malignant, BT, and MT, whatever, and then of course there was cerebral malaria. So

06:23:00:00
initially a lot of the blokes were inclined to treat malaria just as if they were getting the flue, but of course we all know what the death rate is in Third World countries, it's pretty horrible.

Q: When did you first go off to Milne Bay, it was 1943 by this stage?

A: This was '42.

06:23:30:00
We were still up there in 1943, so I came back and was treated for malaria, and then on a hospital ship to go back up there again, and that sort of went on. I was a bit unlucky there, I had a lot of malaria, so did thousands of others.

Q: So is there anything worth recounting for us, the trip back from Ceylon, and then from Australia?

06:24:00:00
From that period were there any sort of significant incidents?

A: I think, of significance, I think, once again, Milne Bay was an extra training area for us to acclimatise to jungle. Fighting in jungle is unique in as much as to me it was a claustrophobic

06:24:30:00
feeling. You would never be able to see the sun, to be only able to see yards ahead of you, to experience being shot at and not knowing where the firing is coming from, you could be engaged with the enemy for days on end and never see one. Thy were there all right, because they were shooting

06:25:00:00
at you. A most depressing atmosphere, I suppose if you asked anybody who went to New Guinea what was their overall impression, it was fighting the terrain, the countryside. OK, Japanese, big problem, but fighting, the fact that you are wet all the time,

06:25:30:00
that you are in mud because it never dries out, and this feeling of claustrophobia, it had that effect on me, and knowing that if you got sick, or if you got wounded, you would have to walk out, and maybe days to more specialised treatment. The natives in New Guinea were

06:26:00:00
tremendous, and without them, I don't know how the New Guinea campaign would have eventuated - not eventuate, but how it would have ended, because to carry the heavy stuff that you need to take, like mortar bombs which are say, ten pound each, and you are carrying, everyone has got to share the load, officers or not, and help carry this stuff,

06:26:30:00
without the natives to carry it, without the natives to carry our stretcher cases, I don't know how it would have got on. I don't think they got much compensation for that, if anything, at the end of the war, but the evacuation, the natives tended, in my experience, tended not to want to carry malaria cases, because to them, malaria, an everyday occurrence.

06:27:00:00
So if you had someone who was really, really bad, and couldn't walk after a short period of rest, you had to tell the natives that it was something else, put a bandage on them somewhere, and put them on the stretcher, and ask them to carry this man back to hospital, back to the next casualty clearing station. So I would think one of the great improvements in warfare

06:27:30:00
has been casualty evacuation. The way they could evacuate casualties in Vietnam, in a chopper, if only we'd had that.

Q: Just going back to Milne Bay, your first time there, obviously that battle had been won, but were there not Japanese still in the hills at that point, were there any skirmishes, or - ?

A: I didn't see any personally, but it was suspected that they were still hanging around, so

06:28:00:00
we continually patrolled, and cleared any that might have been left behind, but as I say, I'd been back there a while, and I had been evacuated back to Australia, then back to New Guinea again, and took up where I left off, by that time we'd moved beyond Port Moresby, into the highlands of Wau,

06:28:30:00
Bulolo, and from there up to Salamaua, maybe other people have talked about that particular area?

Q: We haven't interviewed anyone for a long time actually, so if you could tell us more about that?

A: I could talk a lot about the Kokoda Track, well that was fine, that happened to be our first engagement, but

06:29:00:00
that was fairly typical of most parts of New Guinea, New Guinea terrain, and conditions.

Q: So when you came back, were you with the same section?

A: I went back to the battalion, but to a different company, but officers

06:29:30:00
tended to be transferred within the battalion from one job to another. Every now and again they would cross-post people, and that was a good idea. Private soldiers when they joined up, and if they were in say, A Company, they tended to stay with A Company for the rest of their service, why would you move them? But officers can be sent to schools, and when they come back their appointment has been filled, so they go to another company,

06:30:00:00
or they are given another job in a battalion for experience, say the intelligence officer, or mortar officer, or something of the kind, so you continually moved around. So it's not - when blokes who serve with the one company all their life, they develop a mateship, which is in my experience once again, is not common amongst the officers ,because you move around. You are isolated, but

06:30:30:00
when you are commanding a group of blokes, you can't be mates with them in the sense that you take leave with them, play cards with them, all that sort of thing. You are with them, but you have to hold back a bit, and so it's not easy to develop close friendships among your fellow officers because in

06:31:00:00
New Guinea, where the battalion members split up - in the desert, the battalion members were together, in the jungle, you've got A Company over on that, and you've got B Company over there, and you've got C Company over there, and that could go on for months like that. So if you had a friend in another company, he could be evacuated, sick, wounded, dead, you wouldn't know,

06:31:30:00
and probably not until you get back to Australia would you realise who you've lost as casualties. So the difference between the two different types of warfare, are completely, and absolutely different.

Q: So what were the dangers in an officer becoming too matey with his men, what was the problem there?

06:32:00:00

A: Say again.

Q: What were the problems, why was it so difficult for the officers to become mates with the men?

A: It was a question of discipline, if you formed a friendship with one, he might be accused by all the others of being a favourite, being given jobs that might be more attractive than others, or being favoured in terms of discipline, you couldn't do it. If you went on leave,

06:32:30:00
corporals tended to go on leave with other corporals, sergeants the same, your sergeants ate separately, and slept separately in standing camps, to the blokes subordinate to them. I was brought back to earth very suddenly on one occasion shortly after I was commissioned, I tended, because the battalion I was commissioned into, all of the blokes in there were a lot older than me,

06:33:00:00
some of them were even First World War, I tended at night to go down to the sergeants lines for a bit of a chat, and a cup of tea, put the billy on, and a game of cards, that's where I felt comfortable, until finally it was pointed out to me that, "That will not happen, and if you want to go back to being a sergeant, we can arrange that, but you will not mingle with them,

06:33:30:00
it's bad for discipline," and they were quite right. I developed friendships after the war, through my battalion association with blokes who were private soldiers during the time I was an officer, and the blokes have got family just the same as I am, but it couldn't have happened during the war.

Q: Did that change at all in the jungle though?

06:34:00:00

A: Well no, it didn't, you were still the person responsible, you were still that person, so it didn't matter who you were, if I had my platoon out on a trek somewhere, even the other members of the company, you slept together, ate together, and all that sort of stuff, but you were still the bloke in charge,

06:34:30:00
and you still had to some extent, keep your distance, in terms of who you got close to, or it might look like you were favouring that one, or that one. Probably the person you get the closest to is your platoon sergeant who is your second in command, or, strangely enough, even your batsman.

06:35:00:00
You were like a little team in themselves, and you can still be close, but it's a strange arrangement that they have got to remember who's in charge, and you have got to remember where their duty is, and where your duty is. But having said that, when it came to making a meal, you pool all your tucker, and put it in there, there is no aloofness

06:35:30:00
or anything like that, not in the Australian Army anyway. The blokes very quickly sort you out, and Australians have a way of doing that, to use the expression, "That particular bloke, we've given him away," he might have been their officer, but it means that they will do nothing for that bloke that they don't have to do, and it's almost like you know the old expression, "Someone's sent to Coventry," don't have anything to do with him.

06:36:00:00
The aborigines have got a word for it, they will banish somebody from the tribe, and there are subtle ways of doing it, if you are away mate, they will do nothing for you that they don't have to do, and that's not a nice feeling when you have a group of blokes. I used to try and cultivate that feeling that I was really interested in

06:36:30:00
them, and I believe that I was, part of the camp at night time, if all my blokes were in one long hut, at night time and say, "Good night," to them, now that may sound ridiculous, but I used to make a point of doing it, you know, "Good night fellows, that's it." I used to think that, if it's genuine, otherwise you can forget it.

06:37:00:00
In fact, I was told on one occasion, and I have no recollection of doing this, one of them said, "You were late coming in last night," "But I didn't come, I went to bed early," I said, "Yes you did, you came through here, you are having me on," "No, he'll back me up." Now did I sleep walk? I don't know, I went to bed early, they said I went through the hut

06:37:30:00
and I had my great coat on over my pyjamas, I mean we were a standing camp then, so interesting, truth is stranger than fiction.

Q: OK, you've kind of got us back to New Guinea, do you want to set up the scenario for just after Milne Bay, you were talking about Wau, and Salamaua, and so on, and how did operations and controls start there?

06:38:00:00
Was there a standing camp in Port Moresby?

A: I came back, and after I was treated in hospital, a short convalescence, I went to the battalion at Wau, and so that's where we took up the fight against the Japanese who were endeavouring to come down the track from Salamaua with their eye on Port Moresby, so then it was a case of

06:38:30:00
maintaining contact with the Japanese, and endeavouring to push them back along the track to where they came from. It was just a matter of plugging away, and I, the thing once again about jungle warfare, is that you are confined to a track, one man wide, so if you are right up there on the front, the next face you see is not going

06:39:00:00
to be a friendly one, and it's a very lonely job for a forward scout. So a force would move along a track, there would be a scout, and then another scout, who would be keeping him in sight, and then there'd be the rest of the section, probably seven or eight blokes following, keeping each one ahead of him in sight, and then would follow the platoon headquarters

06:39:30:00
in two sections, and that's the way you move on a one-man front. The trick is to rotate those sections so that you don't have one section right up the sharp end all the time. It was very stressful, because you get no warning at all, it would be a burst of fire, and that's it.

06:40:00:00
So a good company commander would say, "Righto, you've had your turn up there in front Charlie, you swap over, give him a go," and keep moving that way, and try to keep moving up the track. I don't think it's good for the nerves, but everybody has a go at it, that's the way it operates,

06:40:30:00
and of course you are doing that day after day after day, but as I say, you continually, and now and again, you will lose somebody who's evacuated sick, can't go on, dysentery or whatever, and then they go to where the medical officer is, way back along that track, try and get some attention, will they come up and join you, or will they go further to the rear,

06:41:00:00
maybe go back to a general hospital in Australia. So this sort of thing goes on for months, and its, the problem too, is getting sleep, I've know blokes who are too tired to stay awake, and too scared to go to sleep,

06:41:30:00
and it's difficult to get any clothing off, if you stop, try and scratch a hole in the ground, and try and get below the grounds surface to try and get a bit of sleep, and if you dig a hole in the ground for water -


Graham Palmer
2111
Tape 7

07:00:41:00

Q: OK, we're back, so I think perhaps we would pick up where we left of last time. You were giving us an overall description of jungle fighting, which is really interesting, but can

07:01:00:00
we just go back and get ourselves oriented? Your arrival in New Guinea, and how you were briefed, what you were briefed to do when you arrived?

A: We weren't told a great deal, we left Brisbane on a very small Dutch ship that just accommodated the battalion, and that was all.

07:01:30:00
I can tell you the name of the ship, but it's not important, it's only a short trip to New Guinea as you know, New Guinea is closer to the mainland than what Tassie is to Victoria, which is often overlooked. That was if you kept in a straight line, kept heading northeast to Milne Bay. So we relieved a battalion there that had been

07:02:00:00
in action with the Japanese, and we hoped they'd cleared the Japanese from there, but however, we continued patrolling in that area, and from time to time the army endeavoured to provide some sort of entertainment by open-air picture show, so you try and find out where it was on, and thumb a lift, and take

07:02:30:00
a box to sit on, and sit there, and hope you didn't get a red alert, or whatever, which meant that you had to clear the theatre area, so that sort of helped to break the monotony. Occasionally there would be a concert party -

Q: Can I just interrupt? I'd like, I think it's interesting that we are talking about Milne Bay now, but this was your first foray

07:03:00:00
into action as an officer leading patrols, is that correct? OK, can you give me some idea of what that was like for you, do you remember the very first patrol that you had there with the men, and how you made decisions?

A: The orders I would receive would be to patrol a certain area, taking maybe, in some

07:03:30:00
cases, only two or three people, so the patrols come in various types. A fighting patrol, you need a fair bit of strength, and you need weapons. In the case of a reconnaissance patrol, you are going out to find out is the enemy still in that area? That may be your sole task, to go to a particular area, and find out if there are any signs that the Japanese have come back into it.

07:04:00:00
You try to vary as much as possible the route you use out, and back, otherwise you could be ambushed, you tried to vary the time so it didn't become a routine. Now you don't have a lot of - working in the jungle, you don't have a lot of scope to vary things, you set up off a track, and you may say, "We'll go off the track at this point," cross a river, so coming

07:04:30:00
back, if you are doing a circuit, you try not to go straight up the track, and back by the track, you try to find a different way to what you went up. You do it at a different time of the day, not at night because in jungle you can see nothing at night, you can't see the stars, you can't see the person next to you. Even a little thing like, I'll give you an indication of how dark it can become, and you

07:05:00:00
can get it here in Australia as well, so if there was a couple of holes dug in the ground that you'd slept in at night, although it was better to sleep, holes tended to get a fair amount of water in them, so you tended to make some sort of a bed of some kind to get yourself out of the mud, just putting some sticks down, and spreading them across

07:05:30:00
so at least you try to sleep dry, wherever you had a latrine dug you would have a piece of wire going there, and back, because if you went there you wouldn't find your way back. So that sort of orders I would get were, "Go to that area and see what you can find," as simple as that. Out at a certain time, back by a certain time, so that where you've got

07:06:00:00
fellows right up forward, you can hear movement in the jungle, they can look at their watch and they can say, "That's our patrol coming back in," or it's not, and if it's not, they can open fire on it, so you've got to stick to a strict timetable.

Q: In patrols were you just going out with a section, or - ?

A: No, just with two blokes, two or three -

Q: Would you always take the pointy end of the patrol, or - ?

07:06:30:00

A: In the case of a patrol, yes, in the case of when your whole platoon is moving, you've got a routine for doing it, and a formation that you adopt, the section, the headquarters, because if your whole platoon was strung along a track like that, it may cover, let's see thirty blokes or so, you might stretch a hundred yards, so if I'm down right at the very front as the commander,

07:07:00:00
I could get shot at, I've got no control then over the people behind me. I've only got one means of communication, I've got one radio to communicate with the next line of formation, I've got one set per section, maybe my runner is carrying the radio. What you try to do, as an officer, is not dress in any way different to the rest of the blokes,

07:07:30:00
don't carry a map case where the world can see, don't carry binoculars, you wouldn't want them anyway, don't wear badges of rank, snipers in the trees, that's what they will look for. Knock off the key person, whether it's the commander, or his bloke with the wireless set, or whatever, so you don't want people running up to you in the jungle and saluting you, there is none of that business.

07:08:00:00
There are times to salute and times not to. So that would be a simple reconnaissance patrol. You may not go far because once you get off the track, there is thick undergrowth, and there is a particular type of bush in New Guinea, and it was, what it's botanical name is I don't know, but it's called a, 'waitawhile bush,' and it's got all little things little spikes on it, and if you get it in your clothing, it's damned hard to get free,

07:08:30:00
and when you get off the track, then you've got to use these big machetes to sort of cut your way through, that makes noise, and the last thing you want is noise, that was one of the reasons we wore steel helmets. Some of the troops did, where our battalion never did, they are cumbersome, they are heavy, and they make a noise, they scratch against things, so that's why.

07:09:00:00
So that was a reconnaissance patrol. A fighting patrol would be more in number, and would be more heavily armed, and for a particular purpose. You may have reason to believe there is a small enemy force located at a certain position, and you go out with the intention of knocking them off, but anything bigger than that, you would try to launch an attack, but once again, when you are confined to a narrow track,

07:09:30:00
it's very hard to get people out to the sides of it.

Q: Can I just ask you something about the reconnaissance, did you say you had a signaller working with you, I'm just wondering, did you communicate with - ?

A: You take one of those things, they were called walkie-talkies then, with a long little aerial on it. Under certain conditions you could communicate quite well, other conditions you could hardly get through at all. They were, the walkie-talkies we had were

07:10:00:00
within line of sight, so if there was anything in between you, and the person you were trying to communicate with, communication could be bad, but you didn't want to be talking in a loud enough voice that you could be heard.

Q: You said that you were still doing training at Milne Bay, so was that like going out on patrols with a supervisor, or how was that training taking place for you?

07:10:30:00

A: Training, this training business fascinates you doesn't it? Well you see, you are doing your patrolling, so what do you do with the rest of them? They can't sit in a hole in the ground all day, they are going to go batty, so you can get them together in little groups and you practice something, handling their light machine guns, loading and unloading, and becoming faster, and better, and stripping down, there's not a lot you can do, but it's a matter of keeping them occupied

07:11:00:00
just so they don't get bored, they loose concentration, and the patrols, I mean, you might send off one patrol that way, and another that way, and invariably by day light, I've heard of patrols at night in New Guinea, I don't know how they did it, my impression was you couldn't move, you couldn't see where you were going -

Q: Remember when there was the Japanese, there was a raid actually in Milne Bay, in '43?

07:11:30:00

A: No, we were not there, that happened to the previous troops that were there. But, how can I put this, it's simply that patrolling, the more patrolling that you do, the less that the enemy are likely to do because

07:12:00:00
in fact, by vigorously patrolling that area, you are denying the other side of doing exactly the same thing. You can't see people, that is the problem, the first indication that you knew that there was enemy there, was shots being fired, bursts of fire, bits flying off trees, or leaves, or whatever. But you know there is someone up in front, where

07:12:30:00
the dickens are they? Down in here, in Melbourne, they got the bright idea at one stage, the Japanese used to build bunkers like a pill box, they are like a little log hut if you like, very hard to knock out, the artillery could fire upon them, but they were so strong, this -

07:13:00:00
in a lot of cases it was coconut wood, or very green wood, it would take a lot of knocking out, they would be sunk down in the ground, and a slot across the front, so the Japanese could look through there and see that you were there, and they were very difficult things to attack. Someone got the bright idea that if you had a long pole, a box of explosives on the end, and you ran up the track and poked it in the hole,

07:13:30:00
that would mean you would knock out that bunker, but I would say to you as a VC [Victoria Cross], and for anybody ever doing that, because it was entirely dangerous, you run up a track holding a long stick with a box on the end, there is no future in that, it was regarded as a very unpopular way to knock out Japanese bunkers, so they were hard, especially if you used

07:14:00:00
flame throwers, but then again, you had your - to get close enough to get the flame through the slot. Carrying a flamethrower was not a sought after job because you were carrying on your back a thing containing flammable liquid. That was not sought after either, that job. So the trick was then, if

07:14:30:00
you were stopped at a point, and you were coming up this track, to try and get around behind them, there has got to be a way, the Japanese get in and out, so to try and get in behind them to throw a grenade in. Either that, or you bypass it altogether, and keep going, and leave that isolated back there somewhere.

Q: So is this -

A: - and leave someone else to clean it out.

Q: Is this something

07:15:00:00
that you did in Wau?

A: Up the track, yes, on - between Wau and Salamua, we shifted from Milne Bay, and we've gone further to the west, and if you can visualise where Port Moresby is, and then look north of Port Moresby, you start to, north west of Port Moresby, you are starting to look at the area of Wau and Bulolo gold fields,

07:15:30:00
and so there was that one track that was established, that the Japanese were using to come down from Salamaua, down through the Bulolo gold fields and hopefully to Port Moresby. So you are fighting on a very narrow - it's not like the big battles of France - you are fighting invariably with one man, unless, as some battalions experienced where they fought on coconut plantations, you can spread out that way,

07:16:00:00
and it means that one person is not carrying the whole burden.

Q: You got malaria when you were in Milne Bay didn't you, and you were returned to Australia.

A: Yes.

Q: And then you went on to where - ?

A: And then I went on again, I picked the battalion back up in Wau, and at that time they had been airlifted - probably they had been taken by ship to Port Moresby, and airlifted

07:16:30:00
up into the highlands of the mountain range that runs the length of New Guinea, the Owen Stanleys. So I think that we as, forgive my French, but there's a

07:17:00:00
book been written, it's on the bookshelfs, and in the book shops at the present time recently, and the title of the book is simply, A Bastard of a Place, that's the title of the book, and that sums it up, if you ask anybody who's been to New Guinea, "What do you think of it?" an Australian would describe it that way. It was, I think what the blokes were trying to do, they were trying to cover country that patrol officers

07:17:30:00
before, would have never have attempted to navigate without the native porters to carry all our gear, but nobody had told us that, so the fellows are carrying packs on their backs, they are carrying rifles, they are carrying ammunition, they are carrying a pick or a shovel in order to dig a hole if they come under artillery fire and they want to get some sort of cover.

07:18:00:00
You are carrying rations - all those things, and I have seen blokes crying with fatigue. They had to drag themselves up the side of a mountain, and sliding, and scared of being left behind, and being isolated, it's very frightening country, and it's all very well for young people now to go off to Kokoda and say, "We'll try and experience it." No - they couldn't experience it.

07:18:30:00
They couldn't experience the stress, they couldn't experience the feeling in many cases, distinctly unwell with either malaria, or dysentery, but they've got to go on, because where were they going to go? You might get somebody who - well let me put it this way, I had an experience where I had to find a fellow in recent years, because I don't think I thanked him enough,

07:19:00:00
and we were trying to drag ourselves up the side of a mountainside, he was a big strong bloke, and I had my rifle, and I wasn't going to make it. He didn't say a word to me, he just reached over, and took my rifle, and put it on his other shoulder, and we got to the top.

07:19:30:00
I have never thanked him for that, and I want to, and if I can find him, I can still do it. He did not say a word, "I'll take that," and that got me to the top, I don't know how he got there otherwise, and I was supposed to be setting the example.

Q: Were you not well did you say?

A: I was particularly unwell, I had dysentery, and the onset of malaria again, it was tough if you were fit, but it gradually takes a toll, and I think that if you are not getting proper nights sleep,

07:20:00:00
we tried to make the blokes shave every day to keep up their morale, we felt that that was necessary. Changing socks, and clothing, what you would do with your shirt is, take it off, dunk it in a creek if you were near one, and put it straight back on again, at least it smelt a bit better.

07:20:30:00
So when we fought the country as hard as we fought the Japanese, that about sums it up, and I don't know whether the Japanese did it any easier, they were tough people, they were just soldiers the same as we were. I bore no particular hatred towards the Japanese, I just felt that they were doing what we were doing, trying to do their job.

07:21:00:00
Ex-prisoners of war have got a different experience, that's something else.

Q: With Wau, was that the road, the Bulolo Track, was that like a continuing advance for you?

A: Yes, and of course, so how did you get food up there? The aircraft C47's [same as later Dakota DC3; military air transport plane], would fly over and drop rations, but they only needed to be,

07:21:30:00
you know, the mountains are like that, so they only needed to be a little out, or the wind in the wrong quarter, and they'd drop the rations not where you wanted them in a clear patch, but over there where the people on first aid had to go and first find them, and then carry them back, and there was one particular fellow up there who was killed when they free dropped, no parachute, in a box of all things

07:22:00:00
of canned fruit, preserved fruit, it struck him, and killed him outright. What a way to go when you are hungry, killed by food. In the case of a free drop, all you can hear is something crashing through the thing, you know, "What the hell's that?"

Q: How long was that period of time that you were advancing?

A: That was over several months.

07:22:30:00
I'd have to do some checking, but it covered several months.

Q: That was pretty relentless wasn't it?

A: I think, I don't know whether you ever completely adapt to it, you know that when you move that's what you've got to do, you've got to carry your gear, nobody else is going to carry it, where an officer would normally carry a pistol, I

07:23:00:00
had one, but it was in my pack, I preferred to carry a rifle because (a) they are more accurate, (b) carrying a pistol holster on your back I felt was a dead give a way that you were an officer, so I didn't do it. They are useless things anyway, felt like the side of a house, never mind The Lone Ranger, and picking them off of the top of a hill, no, it doesn't quite work like that.

Q: So how -

07:23:30:00
were there any opportunities to take a break, I mean as in to take - ?

A: See the only way to get a break really was to stop at a particular point and let perhaps another unit or sub-unit pass through you, take the load off you, and perhaps give the blokes a chance to get a bit of sleep

07:24:00:00
and get perhaps better meals than if they were really up ahead, right up the sharp end, but people who did a marvellous job in that respect, were the Salvation Army, I had several experiences where you would say, "Now when I go round that corner the first face I see if I'm going to see one is a Japanese," but it was a

07:24:30:00
Salvo bloke with tins of Milo, with just the lid pulled back for a handle, and he'd been able to get there simply because in this case there had been someone going ahead, but the Salvos did a marvellous job.

Q: What a sight.

A: So I never knock back the Salvos when they come to the door and ask for a gift - Nescafe, that's what that was, but I think

07:25:00:00
it was - Wherever possible we tried to get the fellows one hot meal a day, if they could get that, and we had a thing called a twenty four hour ration pack, which was a box about ten inches by maybe five inches or so, and in that ration pack there would be, in that tin there would be three packs, and it was supposed to be,

07:25:30:00
I think two lunches, and one dinner, there wasn't a hell of a lot of difference between them, there were things in there to loosen you up, and things in there to bind you up, on many occasion we just tipped the whole lot into one dish and stirred it up, "What the hell, I'm too tired to worry about it," but it was supposed to be a balanced diet, that you were getting the nutritional value out of this thing,

07:26:00:00
but unfortunately the only way you could open those tins was using the point of a bayonet, which meant bashing on the can with a bayonet, which tended to be noisy, once again, those people who designed it back in Australia hadn't given it a great deal of thought. To give you some indication of the problems of the terrain, I had an experience

07:26:30:00
where we were going up a track, and we'd stopped overnight, and I think the cooks had got a bit of a fire going to try and heat something, and evidently the smoke, smoke's got to go somewhere, so it came out through the trees, it was spotted by one, or more, I don't know, never counted them, Japanese bombers. They came over

07:27:00:00
and dropped bombs on the area that we were occupying, now we had little fox holes, slit trenches, about six by a couple of feet, and in the middle of this raid, my sergeant got up from the hole he was in, and ran to another one, it was years before I found out why he did that -

07:27:30:00
because he was a very, very experienced soldier, he'd been in Greece, he'd been in Crete, he'd been up the desert, why would Jim have done that? And it wasn't until I was at a reunion gathering only a couple of years ago, that one of the fellows I was talking to said, "I can tell you why he did it," after the first bomb some of those trees came crashing down and those trees were full of little red ants,

07:28:00:00
it fell across the little trench that Jim had dug, and he was trying to get away from the ants. The next bomb they dropped, or among the next bombs they dropped, they caught Jim between that hole and that hole, and he was hit by a very large chunk of bomb fragment. Picked him up, took him back to the regiment, that's where the medical officer is, and got him

07:28:30:00
onto a makeshift table, and while the medical officer was operating on him, they bombed again, and they had to leave that thing and take cover, Jim died at that point. So it was what killed Jim, ants. Really. But so, that is all part of the terrain that you are fighting.

07:29:00:00

Q: What about intelligence - in your position as an officer you've got to plan patrols, so do you need to be privy to what's going on?

A: Not really, no, I think it was because nobody seemed to know anything, I don't know if the commanding officer was any wiser than I was, I mean his job was, "Push on up that track, and over there clear the enemy from that feature, clear then from that one, and your ultimate

07:29:30:00
objective is to save Salamaua." I don't think he knew any more, I might be doing him a disservice, but he wasn't able to tell us anything at all. What could I have done anyway? The sort of orders you get were, "There are enemy on that feature up ahead, capture it, and we will send you up a hot meal." There was never any suggestion that you might not

07:30:00:00
capture it. So, you were there to do this, it was all very simple stuff, and your interest in the war was about one hundred yards in front of where you happened to be, anywhere else was just not important, and you had to quickly resign yourself to that. I think getting mail from home was good for the morale, it was good for the morale of the blokes,

07:30:30:00
and I hope those at home realise what letters to the blokes meant. So it was, that was a sort of how do you keep the morale up, but if you were cold and hungry, or hot and hungry, to keep their spirit up

07:31:00:00
a lot of it's got to come from within, you've got to believe in what you are doing, and there were a lot of blokes asked themselves the question, "What are we doing in this place?"

Q: Did they ask you that question?

A: They didn't, I'm glad they didn't or I would have found it hard to give them an answer. Ours is not the reason why.

Q: What about when you started to have casualties, you know, wounded, and as a leader of the men, how did that affect you?

07:31:30:00

A: Not only are you the leader, but the blokes that belong to your little team, how do you feel? I don't think there is much room for emotion at the time because if that person has been hit or killed, well it's happened, and all you can do is to try and find the time at some stage to try and give that person some kind of burial.

07:32:00:00
Although it might be left to somebody else to do it, if you can't, if you are advancing you can't stop for casualties, you have got to rely on someone coming behind you because if you all stopped to help your attack is finished. You have to rely on stretcher-bearers to do that. Someone might be hit and dead straight away, and somebody else

07:32:30:00
might be wounded, and somebody else either they have got to apply what we called a field dressing, it's like a padded thing that you put on to stop the bleeding, whatever, or somebody does it for them, and then try and get them to the rear, out of the way. So then - they are then facing a long, long walk, they've got to go back over the country that they've plodded over.

07:33:00:00
I was almost into Salamaua when I got a bout of malaria and an enlarged spleen which was very painful, and of course your stomach would swell, your belt would be horrible, and I had to go back to the rear, and I think I had four and a half, five days to cover over the track that I went to with another group of fellows, a mixture of injured, wounded sick,

07:33:30:00
"Stick together as close as you can, don't become isolated unless you become cut off completely, and just carry on to where you can get better treatment." It's normal, so it's endurance I suppose. There are no alternatives, what are you going to do, you can't sit down and burst into tears,

07:34:00:00
and if you are not fit, you can't lead your blokes, they are looking to you for guidance, they are looking for you to lead them. If you can't do that job you are better out of the way, and leave it to somebody else.

Q: In the case of somebody being killed in action, and I understand that you'd have to leave them, would you have time to bury them or say a few words, or - ?

A: That was done wherever possible, I can't think of

07:34:30:00
anybody's body that was just left by the track because if you've got no time to do it, if you are the leading formation in the advance, you've got no time to do it, but there will be troops coming behind, and you endeavour to mark where the body is, or if you've got time to dig a shallow grave, because the soil was conducive to that, it was soft and muddy, and

07:35:00:00
you could stick something in there to indicate that there is a body in here. The troops wore round their neck their meat tickets, they have got two little metal things on it, you'd leave one on the body, and keep the other one.

Q: Would you -

A: - try to see that if it's possible to have a little burial service, and that can be done, and it's very moving.

07:35:30:00
If the chaplain is able to conduct the service, that's good, we had a chaplain in the brigade, a Padre O'Keefe, who was very highly regarded by the troops, and whatever, he was I supposed almost an unsung hero, where he could perform a service he would, if you knew, if you'd stopped advancing and

07:36:00:00
you were regrouping for a while, and then you say, "Righto, it's going to be on again, we are going to move forward again, we'll move forward again tomorrow," and if the chaplain could get there, the word would get around, and there would be a little service down at the creek bed, at the time we would just go down there, and he would conduct it, a non denominational, just a simple little service lasting five or ten minutes.

07:36:30:00
Some took advantage of that, others didn't, depending on how you feel - but that can be very hard for a battalion chaplain if you've got a company over there, and one over there, and one back there, and he's only got two legs, and he hasn't got his push bike or a motor car, he has to use his two flat feet as well.

Q: They worked very hard didn't they, the padres?

A: Yes, some were better than others.

07:37:00:00
Some of the chaplains I think were completely out of their depth, and I think where they had been used to looking after their old ladies, now all of a sudden they've suddenly got rough young diggers, and some of them didn't quite know how to handle it, they, "Should I pretend to be one of the boys and have a beer when they have a beer, tell rough jokes when they tell rough jokes?" But that's, in my experience, that's not what the troops expected.

07:37:30:00
They expected the chaplain to be the chaplain. For example, that was the way we thought then, you wouldn't swear in front of the padre, oh God no, "Shhhhh." I can remember an occasion in New Guinea, I was in Milne Bay with a fellow when the blokes were having a meal and you know, fellows get into the habit of swearing a lot of the time without knowing they were swearing, just become a habit,

07:38:00:00
and one bloke was using pretty rough old language, and this time it was the Salvation Army Chaplain, and he just said to this person, "Did your mother teach you to speak like that?" And the boy was so embarrassed he blushed, he was so embarrassed, he really didn't know that he was swearing as much, I'm sure.

07:38:30:00
"No, Mum didn't teach me," very touching, but then he was only a kid anyway, wouldn't have been any more than eighteen, nineteen, he was growing up, but it just becomes habit.

Q: But what about for yourself, was that a difficult line to walk sometimes, that line, I know you talked a little about it before, but in those situations in the jungle where - it's a great equaliser, isn't it,

07:39:00:00
the fine line between being one of the boys, and being a leader, and being an officer within whatever it is that you have to uphold?

A: No, I think you develop a relationship with these blokes, they know who you are, you know who they are, there is no jumping around saluting and standing to attention up

07:39:30:00
there, you hope that you are respected in some way, you hope that what you ask them to do they will do willingly, no, there is certainly nothing stiff or starchy about it. It's different in a camp in Australia. I -

07:40:00:00
you know, a camp in Australia, an officer walks around with a group of blokes there who are required to stand to attention, you get six people, the senior one will salute, that's that, but that's not in action, you just don't do it that way. I suppose, who is your employer, you ask yourself that question, "How does that employer maintain your respect without

07:40:30:00
getting too close to you?" I think a lot of managers have got to face this, I worked with the McKewans organisation for just on fourteen years, and a branch manager would have, well, lets take Northland the branch manager there would probably be a young bloke, he would have a staff of perhaps twenty, twenty-five bearing on the time of the day,

07:41:00:00
or the week, casuals - firm, fair and friendly, I think that's what they tried to aim at. Everyone there knew he was the boss, and if he was, he's got to be approachable, otherwise they will never tell him the things he maybe should hear. If you make yourself so distant and so unapproachable, certainly you are keeping people at arms length, but you are not achieving the

07:41:30:00
relationship that you should be.


Graham Palmer
2111
Tape 8

08:00:32:00

A: The blokes would willingly do what you asked them to do, and not to because they were afraid of being disciplined, they wanted to do it. There is something wrong with your leadership style if that's the situation, I believe.

Q: So how would that play out for you in the jungle when you are actually in action there, just

08:01:00:00
trying to - day-to-day situation commands, things that needed to happen?

A: Perhaps I'm lucky, but I've never had a situation where anybody even looked as if they were going to refuse to do what I asked them to do. Maybe because what I was asking them to do appeared reasonable.

08:01:30:00
I only remember one incident where, in one particular situation I asked one of my corporals to go forth and try to establish whether the Japanese were still in a position, and I said, "Take your blokes up and endeavour to draw their fire so we can see where they are." He was very distinctly taken aback, "Oh Gee," I said, "Stan,

08:02:00:00
get cracking," and off he went, and that was it, he wasn't wrapped in the idea, I mean it was, what I was asking him to do was not abnormal, he was the point section and that was his job until you strike opposition, but I don't know - he'd got

08:02:30:00
married on his previous leave, and I think he didn't want to die at this point. Neither did any of us. Now if he'd been fired at - after all, in the infantry that's how battles start, somebody shoots somebody else, but I've never had anyone say, "No, I won't do that."

Q: What about this idea that a good officer won't ask his men to do anything

08:03:00:00
he won't do himself?

A: I think it's more accurately, I wouldn't ask anybody to do something I wouldn't be prepared to do, otherwise you'd be doing everything, but to order someone into a situation that you would not be putting to yourself if you had to, I think that's unreasonable.

Q: Is that something that you were conscious of, like

08:03:30:00
sending men out to draw fire, was that something that you would do yourself?

A: Yes, I mean after all the CO, the commanding officer says to me, "Take your platoon and get rid of the Japs that are occupying, and you will do that at fourteen hundred hours today, and when you capture it we will send you up a hot meal." So I accept that, that's my job,

08:04:00:00
somebody's got to do it, I'm not being heroic about it. So we say that he should be prepared to go and lead every patrol, he was the sort of fellow who would do it, in that position. My CO was not the sort of bloke, I don't think I got along with him terribly well, but I never accused him of cowardice or lack of moral fibre, or -

08:04:30:00
and he was the sort of bloke who could say, "Right, follow me," but you can't have the commanding officer doing that in every situation, or he will get knocked off, good commanding officers are hard to find.

Q: So once the CO had given you your instructions, for example at that - (UNCLEAR), what would you then do once you had

08:05:00:00
been briefed?

A: I would get my - depends on how many blokes I've got left, in a normal size platoon you can see what the numbers were down to. At one stage, I would normally get together my three subordinate officers and my sergeant, and brief them, they in turn would brief their particular blokes, so I'd give them the job that I've been told to do, and their particular role in it,

08:05:30:00
"Corporal Smith, you will be the forward section, Corporal Jones, you will pull up behind me, when we reach the objective this is what we will do, any questions? Right, that's it, go," and give them a little time then to brief their blokes. Everybody hopefully is in the picture, so that if all these corporals get shot, the fellows know what to do.

08:06:00:00
So the thing wouldn't collapse, if I got shot, somebody would know what task was given to me, and that's the way the system works. As I say, it would be no good knowing what the task is, and saying, "Follow me chaps," and go off, and they are standing around saying, "What are we supposed to be doing?"

Q: Were you,

08:06:30:00
were you working at all with the ANGAU system [Australia and New Guinea Administrative Unit]?

A: I had an acquaintance with them but not a lot, you are talking about the administrative unit? ANGAU as I remember used to provide a lot of native porters who carried the loads, and that sort of thing.

08:07:00:00
Back at battalion headquarters they had more contact with them than I would have, because they would have been carrying up ammunition, they would have been doing all sorts of stuff, carrying the food that was not air dropped, after all, if you are going to drop any sort of supplies using parachutes you need a clearly marked spot for the aircraft to find

08:07:30:00
and I sympathise with the navigators of aircraft in New Guinea because every feature, you know the ridges of the mountains, you go up one side, down the other, up and down, must have been very, very difficult for them to pick up the objective, and I remember at the reunion we had a person along, an air force bloke, and somebody said to him, "What squadron were you in?" And he said we

08:08:00:00
were supporting New Guinea," and there was a hush fell on the multitude, two or three of their aircraft had mistaken the target, and instead of shooting up the Japs, they shot us up. It's a mistake that can happen, it's very difficult to distinguish, we would have had to have some sort of markers down so they wouldn't make that mistake, and they didn't know they did it, and it was not uncommon to the extent that if

08:08:30:00
they came over and you had natives working with you, they would tend to run away, why? Because they had experienced being shot at by aircraft, so don't tell me, what they call today, 'friendly fire,' we've had that, we're off. So they might have been black, but they weren't stupid.

Q: So just on that subject of

08:09:00:00
air attack, is that a common occurrence for you, I'm thinking of the Wau, Salamaua?

A: It wasn't an everyday thing, it happened, but it was - yeah I'd be more inclined to use the word isolated. There was always the danger, and it occurred, but it wasn't a day-to-day thing

08:09:30:00
because at that stage, we had pretty much command of the air.

Q: So if there was an air attack it would be, what, one or two zero's [Zero Fighter plane] coming over?

A: I find it very hard to tell because if you are on a track, and you are in jungle, you can't count them, all you can hear is a couple coming very low and dropping bombs and go. Now is it the same aircraft coming round to make another run, because

08:10:00:00
invariably - invariably - I shouldn't use that word, but what was common practice, was that they would come in, drop their bombs, and the tail gunner would open up with machine gun, at the target they'd just flown over, the bombs had been dropped, now it's a matter of making sure you are not hit with machine gun bullets.

Q: And you -

08:10:30:00

A: As what happened when my sergeant was shot, Jim, or rather a bomb fragment. So all you hear is the noise, it's like sitting in the house here and hearing a .747 going over, one .747, or two of them, I wouldn't know without going outside. You know, it wasn't ever that much extra noise that I was ever able to discern.

Q: Could you identify the sound of

08:11:00:00
the different aircraft?

A: Yes, they were certainly a craft that you can pick, it was a strange type, one I'd never heard before, you might not be sure. For example, Australia developed an aircraft, which was a Boomerang, it was something like

08:11:30:00
a low winged aircraft, one engine, looked a bit like a Japanese Zero, it would be hard to tell if it was flying towards you, in fact when the first Boomerang, that was an Australian developed fighter aircraft, when the first one arrived up the north coast of New Guinea, there were American anti aircraft batteries up there, they knew that there would be a new Australian aircraft in the area, watch out for it, they still managed to shoot it down which is a bit sad -

08:12:00:00
but then, lest I sound too critical, you can get very tense when an aircraft is flying towards you, and it looks like another Zero, because they did look similar, from the front, not from the side, so can you pick them up? I suppose I always know the sound of C47s, you know they were later called DC3s,

08:12:30:00
I can never hear the sound of one of those without thinking of New Guinea airdrops, casualty evacuation, troop movements, lovely old aircraft, never forget that. Could I pick up the sound of a Zero? Don't know, I couldn't guarantee it, because usually they are flying so quickly, it's not like bombers which fly at great altitudes, and they are taking a great time to approach.

08:13:00:00
People in Britain could do that, they could tell at certain times the engines weren't completely synchronised with the two engines, no, I can't say I've become an expert on that.

Q: But as soon as you hear an aircraft?

A: Oh I'd know a C47, yeah.

08:13:30:00

Q: Now, let's move on to -

A: - and I think both of them had a peculiar sound, but I couldn't say what they sound like. I'm sorry Cath, you were going to ask me - ?

Q: I was just going to say, let's now talk about the tail end. I think, when you were not well, and you had to walk out, were you walking back, or were you walking - ?

A: Back.

08:14:00:00

Q: Where were you walking back to, where did you - ?

A: I was walking back to the next, if you look at the casualty evacuation system, there is the regimental aid post, if somebody gets wounded, the individual does what he can with this thing called a field dressing which as I said, is like a big pad which you tie on. That person

08:14:30:00
is probably going to need more treatment than that, so he makes his way back to the regimental aid post which was back at the battalion headquarters where the medical officer is. Now the medical officer, so much, he can't hold the people for great lengths of time, the amount of surgery he can do is limited by the instruments that he has and the staff that he has at a particular time, and the facilities, and so he might say, "You need to go

08:15:00:00
further back for this treatment," who knows, it might need amputation. So you go back to an advanced dressing station, or he might have to go back then to a casualty clearing station, and then further, and further back is a general hospital, Heidelberg. It might require a long period of treatment, so it's just a matter of how far back you've got to go, the further back you go of course the more likely you are for

08:15:30:00
transport to be available.

Q: So what was the situation for you, how sick were you?

A: So where did I go, I'm trying to remember, I can't remember whether I then, oh crikey, I knew it was about four days, four and a half days I was on the

08:16:00:00
track. I was with a group of other fellows in a similar situation, we needed to be evacuated to where we could recuperate and convalesce - Wish you hadn't asked that question, I can't answer it.

Q: Was that when, did you go back to Australia?

A: It would have been four or five, just marching for as many hours as you can, distance was not relevant, it was the time it took to go

08:16:30:00
from there to there. You measured in hours rather than kilometres, or miles.

Q: I'm just wondering that you were so sick that you needed to be sent back to Australia?

A: On that occasion I can't recall, I had that many attacks of malaria that it's similar to other people, you

08:17:00:00
rest up for a few days and then you say, "Oh I think I'm good enough to track on," only because the alternative is unpleasant walking all that way back and you know at some stage you've got to turn back and catch up with the blokes. So you tend to sort of stick it out and say, "I think I can manage," but when you get to the stage where you can no longer effectively command your platoon, then you've got a responsibility to get out and get treatment if you can.

08:17:30:00
So I don't know, my medical record indicates how many times I had malaria, it was just, well in fact malaria recurred in me for about ten to fifteen years after the war, I was just having bouts of it, but further, and further apart. There was one particular strain, I think it was MT, which hangs around in the system.

08:18:00:00
So I don't know, I can't truthfully answer that question. On that occasion that I was evacuated again, my experience was probably similar to stacks of other blokes.

Q: So when did you complete your posting?

A: In 1943, and it was on the outskirts of Salamaua, in nodding distance. In fact I read a book recently,

08:18:30:00
a book by a fellow who had documented all this stuff, he was moving with our battalion headquarters, and he had the facilities - he had a notepad that he could keep dry, he wrote it all down, and I got in touch with him also to compliment him, "I lived it all by what you wrote, I lived the whole thing over again, and you were absolutely spot on,"

08:19:00:00
bearing in mind that it's all a hell of a long time ago, and it gets a bit blurry at times.

Q: Well yeah, you have been very good, you've been talking all day really, you are remembering things, but let's sort of wrap up your time in New Guinea, you got to the outskirts of Salamaua, where - ?

A: - and then I came back to Australia, so

08:19:30:00
I had a fairly long convalescence, that's getting 'round about the time that I met, and married. I was classified, I think six months, no tropics, that was the decision of the medical staff, you don't go back into the tropical areas for at least six months,

08:20:00:00
and so I was posted then to a training battalion in northern New South Wales, and whilst I was there, I carried out various tasks. I did - at one stage I was at Bathurst, and I was defending officer at court martials, very interesting.

08:20:30:00

Q: Can you tell me about that more?

A: Yes, well when troops are on fairly severe charges of desertion or whatever, which is a serious charge, and very hard to prove, the difference between desertion, and absence without leave, is the intent of the individual. If a person has an intention to go back to the unit,

08:21:00:00
it is absent without leave, if a person has no intention of ever going back, that's desertion. The trick is proving it, and so while I was with the training battalion in Bathurst, I was appointed as, with no legal experience at all, to defend certain people who had been charged with desertion. Very interesting experience, and the

08:21:30:00
proceedings were held in the court house at Bathurst, all very impressive, that was very interesting.

Q: Any significant cases that you could tell us about?

A: Yes, one bloke who gave me a real tearjerker of a story, and I stood up in front of all these important seniors, and officers, and I entered a plea of mitigation, meaning, he's guilty, but treat him gently, and then the prosecuting officer

08:22:00:00
produced a list of this bloke's offences over the years, and completely shot me down. He'd given me a load of old cods wallop [lies], and I believed everything he told me. There was a lesson there, "Believe nothing." But found guilty, sad about that. Yes, so it was hardly a Rumpole of the Bailey [British television series] job, but it was absolutely fascinating.

Q: So you would have needed

08:22:30:00
to know a bit of military law?

A: As a commissioned officer you learn the legal aspects, you've got books to guide you, the Manual of Military Law, and the regulations and orders, and all those things are there, so you abide by normal procedure, and present the case for the defence. It just so happens, I had no defence - telling porkies [rhyming slang: pork pies for "lies"].

08:23:00:00

Q: So in defending men who are charged with desertion, were they all pleading not guilty, or did you have any that pleaded guilty on particular grounds? Do you know what I mean, like -

A: As I said, it is a difficult charge to prove, to sustain -

08:23:30:00
if you had a situation. Well let me give you an interesting one, when we were at Milne Bay, there was American aircraft there on the strip, and two of the blokes from my battalion were offered a lift, a flight by these Americans to America

08:24:00:00
for a few days, just for a bit of fun. Who would knock that back, we weren't actually in action at that particular time, so they accepted the offer to New York, and they had a whale of a time, all they were wearing were their smelly old jungle greens, trousers and slacks, but they were treated like royalty, so they told us when they came back. Now they, if they had deserted in the face of the enemy, if they had

08:24:30:00
done that while they were in action, they were guilty, but no, we weren't in action, and it seemed too good to miss, so they said, "In effect, we will accept this offer, and when we come back, what can they do to us? They can't confine us to barracks because we ain't got no barracks, if they stop our pay, well, tough luck, there's nothing to spend it on up here anyway." So they took the risk, and when they came back, and they returned

08:25:00:00
of their own volition, there was no thought that they were deserting, they returned. They were charged with being absent without leave, and they were dealt with, and it wasn't severely dealt with, I think the CO was a bit sorry that it hadn't been offered to him. Now, on the other hand, if they'd been caught leaving Milne Bay on a ship bound for South America, it's fairly safe to say they were not going to come back.

08:25:30:00
You could probably make a desertion charge stick under those circumstances, their intent was not to come back, so it's a sticky one, but there are other clear cases of desertion, the one where the bloke threw his rifle down and ran away, never came back, or he deserted, and they picked him up in Hobart

08:26:00:00
when he really should be in New Guinea, and he's wearing civilian clothes, and has a civilian job, he ain't going to come back is he? Interesting -

Q: So were you defending deserters that there really was no defence for them?

A: You mean the bloke I was trying to defend?

Q: Oh no,

08:26:30:00
when you were representing them, were there cases when they had no defence at all?

A: I can't recall. I was so interested in the bloke that I was with, my first case, and I was on a steep learning curve. So what was he charged with, he was found guilty of being absent without leave, so he got the lesser penalty, it was

08:27:00:00
probably twenty-eight days in the detention centre. I was hoping I'd get him off altogether, the tearjerker got to me, I don't know what it was. Someone said, "Codswallop [nonsense], these are all the things he's done, he's done this before."

08:27:30:00

Q: Were there any men you thought were really justified in getting out of the services, that their reason for deserting was fair enough given who they were, and what their circumstance were?

A: Personally I don't know of any, but I can understand that there would be. If someone had a sick wife, if he had a sick child, if he applied for leave and it was refused, I can understand him being

08:28:00:00
torn between two loyalties. I knew of a case of where a fellow took off without leave because his wife was scared of living on her own, I think there was some suggestion that she might have been attacked, she had no one to live with, and she was saying, "Please come home, I'm terrified, I've got no where to go." Now I

08:28:30:00
can understand a man being really upset by that, he went to the CO who refused him, he said, "We can't spare you." So he thought, "Blow it, I'm going anyway." It would be hoped that he would be treated leniently, providing he was not creating a situation where he was letting the mob down, and his loyalty to his mates was not greater

08:29:00:00
than it was to - I don't know, I wouldn't like to adjudicate on that one because I think I'd feel compassionate about it.

Q: What about men who could simply not bear the thought about killing another person?

A: Once again, I don't,

08:29:30:00
if you knew that before you joined up, or you joined a part of the service where you would not be required to do that, then on the other hand, someone who was put into that situation and found it completely repugnant, I think he would have to talk to someone about it and say, "I can't bring myself to do this any more."

Q: Did you have any,

08:30:00:00
or know of any cases?

A: No, I don't doubt that there - someone who said, "I can't kill a person in cold blood any more."

Q: What about within your platoon, the men that you were leading, was there anyone amongst that group, any men that you would have to counsel?

A: You would be adverse to doing that.

Q: Yes, that you could tell they were sort of teetering?

A: No, I don't, but on the other hand I know of

08:30:30:00
people who enjoyed it, but you will get those in any community, or any army, who can justify in their own mind, killing for the sake of killing. They can justify it by saying, "If I don't kill him, he will kill me." That's one thing, but someone who will go out looking to kill, yeah, there are those people. They've got their place in the army, that's their nature.

08:31:00:00
I don't admire it, but those people do exist, whom joining the army justifies and satisfies this desire to take life, a feeling of power that it gives you.

08:31:30:00

Q: So lets talk about - now you are discharged, and you are coming back into civilian life, and what you experienced? You were discharged in - ?

A: It's a question of terminology here, I was placed on the, 'reserve of officers,' provided you are still within the age group in which you can carry out your duties, so

08:32:00:00
I went on to reserve, and the requirement that I had to notify the proper authority once a year, to advise my name and address if I want to be kept informed of what's going on, and if I ever want to come back in the future. Now at this stage, so December 1945, I transferred to the reserve, at this stage I was married, and it was a

08:32:30:00
bit of a mad scramble to get out and get a job because obviously there were going to be a lot of people out seeking work, and no one knew if it was the same as it was pre-war, with jobs hard to get, or whether there was going to be a boom, and houses were going to be built, all these blokes are going to need houses, will the money be there - anyway, the thing was, get out, and get a job.

08:33:00:00
So I got out, I applied for rehabilitation training, I had to wait for that to be approved, in the mean time I had to have money coming in. I had a small amount of deferred pay, but nothing to write home about, so I took a job in Flinders Lane in a clothing factory,

08:33:30:00
a greater contrast to what I'd been doing for the past six years you couldn't imagine. There were other ex-servicemen there killing time 'till they got jobs that suited them, and of all things, there we were making ladies blouses. A short while people had been leaping to their feet, and saluting smartly, now I'm trapped in a factory, but I had to have money coming in, so I did,

08:34:00:00
I don't know, some months. When my rehab [rehabilitation] course came about I started it, the intention being that, my father, being in the building trade, that I would follow him once I acquired the skills of doing what he did, and we would prosper because there would be a big demand for houses. It didn't work that way, I was tied down to an

08:34:30:00
employer for several years. Dad went off to work down in Gippsland, I hated the job, and looked for something else. So I got involved in selling, then the army reserve forces started again, I came back into the army in 1948

08:35:00:00
in the Victorian Scottish Regiment, and served for another twenty years. In the meantime the family was growing up, my wife was virtually raising the children because I was never at home, because of my military duties, so it was an interesting twenty years. So I finished my army career as a lieutenant colonel, that was it, transferred to retirement,

08:35:30:00
finito [finished]. Spent seven years in the Scout Association as a headquarters commissioner - went from, with my selling experience, I became a sales manager in office equipment in Sydney, then got into staff training with McEwans, and I was with McEwans as staff training manager, for thirteen

08:36:00:00
years. Joined Carrion [?] thirty-two years ago, and when, if retired from McEwans, I took on the present job that I'm doing in my retirement, and I've been doing it for twenty-one years. I don't think I'll be looking for another job, although I'd like to get back into night school, teaching,

08:36:30:00
which I was doing for quite some time with TAFE [technical and further education institution]. No, it hasn't been dull.

Q: What about your career during the Korean War, were you ever interested in - ?

A: No, I had a young family at this stage, it had all changed, at the time of the war I was freelance, what I did didn't affect anybody else, but I felt it might have been nasty, a bit much.

08:37:00:00
Is my wife making rude gestures to me? No I felt a bit much with a young family, to go back into that sort of activity. I did look, almost - I was offered, and almost accepted the appointment as UN Observer in Canberra, but once again, it would have involved family problems, the family would have been living in

08:37:30:00
New Delhi, which was a long way away from where I would have been stationed in Cashmere. Once again, I thought it was all a bit of a strain, "Why am I doing this, I don't have to?" It would have been an interesting appointment - I turned it down.

Q: We've only got a couple of minutes left, but what I'm curious about now is, that, looking back on

08:38:00:00
your military career, how you feel about that now. You said something earlier about, you find that you did things by the book do you have some observations you can share with us?

A: Silly, can't reinvent the wheel - In my post war years in the army,

08:38:30:00
see, once again, as I was becoming more senior in the army, the demands on my time, and greater responsibility, and all that sort of thing, but I think it got, I think the army reserve was unrealistically demanding, and I neglected my family responsibilities, and I regret that, but I don't know how I could have reconciled

08:39:00:00
the two. In the army reserve ostensibly, they say to people, "Give one night a week, and occasional week end." Now it doesn't work like that at all, and we worked so hard in the Scottish that we had a good regiment, probably the best, we did a lot of activities, we took part in, while - I was doing extra promotion courses which were taking me to places like Canungra,

08:39:30:00
and away from home. I was attending courses outside of the regiment. We were taking part in military tattoos in Melbourne, we were trooping the colour, which involved a hell of a lot of rehearsal. There were social activities which I was required to be at, I mean, they were all nice, the regimental ball, and all these things, but all these things make demands on your time,

08:40:00:00
and I - there is no doubt that the time that I devoted to the army, was disproportionate, and I think that in the reserves, when you have people, if you get the right sort of people, and someone who's got ability, probably someone who's going somewhere in city life, and if you start to make too great demands, you lose them at the time when they just start to acquire a few skills, it's

08:40:30:00
one of the reasons that the turnover rate is so high. It's unrealistically demanding, yeah, I regret that bit. My time in the service, no, I don't regret anything, but post war -

Q: And what about the network you have as a result of having been in the services, is that extensive?

A: Yeah, that's been tremendously helpful,

08:41:00:00
particularity in the job that I'm doing now, as executive officer, because you get a lot of things done because you know people. I would say what helped me get the training job with McKewans, was my army experience, being responsible for training for the whole organisation when - we had twenty-two stores then, and the staff used to come through my department.

08:41:30:00
Yeah, I'd say that my military experience gave me an 'in' there. I've been involved in other activities, and I think that there are some people who are influenced by the fact that I had reasonably senior rank in the army, and would it have changed if I'd not done that? Don't know,

08:42:00:00
I don't regret.
INTERVIEW ENDS