Keith Payne
1695
1RAR
AATTV
Tape 1

A: All right, my name is Keith Payne, born in Ingham 30th of August 1933, the son of Henry Thomas and

01:01:00:08
Ramilda Maria Payne. At that time I was the youngest of four children born to the family at that time, but the family did increase to a 13 bracket which was the pretty standard sort of a family back in those days now, in the country anyhow. City people didn't. Well they had a lot more to do with their time I suppose than rear children. And

01:01:30:17
I was educated at Ingham State School initially during the early part of the war years. Then we moved out to Trebon, changed schools there to the Trebon State School and subsequently came back into Ingham, probably in the late '40s we moved back into town. Father got another job back

01:02:00:17
in town so we moved back into town and into initially the family home. So we moved about quite a bit at that time because of work mainly and father just coming out of the military and re-establishing himself. From there I did an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker until I fell out with the boss and decided that it was time

01:02:30:16
I moved on, so I joined the regular army. Prior to going into the regular army I'd already joined the regimental cadets, and the regimental cadets of that time was greatly integrated with the then Citizens' Military Forces, now the Reserve, and we did all the training that the CMF [Citizens' Military Force] did, only they got paid and we never.

01:03:00:02
So having finished that and decided to join the regular army, I pulled the pin and [left] and went to Brisbane. And my boss cancelled my apprenticeship indenture, so I came back up again and had a few words with him. And he decided to change the indentures, and so I subsequently was enlisted into the regular army. From there I

01:03:30:12
did my recruit training and then my formal infantry training and everything prior to embarking for Korea in the middle of 1952. I served with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment for the ensuing nine and a half months while the battalion was in Korea. When the battalion left to come home, I

01:04:00:24
only had a short period to go so instead of going back into another battalion and upsetting the organisation there, I completed my time at 28 Brigade Headquarters in the rear echelon area, which I was pretty thankful for because I'd done my time in the line. And having completed that I came back to Australia

01:04:30:14
and was posted to a cadet unit in Townsville, remained there until 1955 and then transferred as an instructor to Wacol. It was during my period at Townsville that I did a

01:05:00:17
driver max course with the army and met someone that distracted my attention somewhat and was to be my wife for the next 50-odd years. So from there I went back into the regular battalions again, back to 3 RAR [3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment], did a training course leading up to deployment into

01:05:30:17
Malaya. We went into Malaya and did operations on the Malay-Thai border and against the Indonesians during the confrontation along the [Malay] Peninsula. From there it was back home. National Service had now started for? the second bracket of National Service had started, which saw our young men now deploying into Vietnam. After doing a

01:06:00:15
warrant officers' course I was posted to Skyville, which is the Officer Training Unit, to train the National Service people that had been selected to do officer training. Having trained them for a while I managed to escape Skyville. I went into the 2nd Battalion

01:06:30:21
of Pacific Islands Regiment doing operations along the Irian Jaya border against the Indonesian uprising during?in that particular area. Having completed that little part of the operation, I came back to my own barracks and took over as the transport officer until I was called home to finally do my

01:07:00:22
little stint in Vietnam. I did a training course in Australia prior to going to Vietnam. On reaching Vietnam I was assigned to Mobile Strike Force and I served with strike force for the next seven months before illness and everything saw me transferred back to Australia.

01:07:30:20
I was then posted to the Royal Military College at Duntroon, instructing young men to be officers in our regular army, and it was around this time that I was starting to get a little bit tired of not going anywhere. Things had changed drastically with the change of government and government policy, so

01:08:00:05
I elected to take to my discharge, and by doing so I applied for a job X, prior to my severing my operation with the green machine [army]. The job X I was given was here in Mackay as the warrant officer looking after the then still CMF

01:08:30:24
at Combiatan Barracks, a mortar platoon in Cerina. Having finished all that and got out, I then shifted off to Oman. I was leaving our green machine and I got a call and asked if I'd like to go to Oman and I thought, you know, "Well that's interesting. Where's Oman?" But however I subsequently left our army and

01:09:00:09
went into the Sultan's armed forces in Oman, along with a lot of British officers and everything because Oman was a British protected, British mandated territory, so I was very much tied up with the Brits then. I started to get ill and things weren't working too well for me, so when I came home I

01:09:30:16
tended to not go back. I finished my time. I said, "That's it, I won't be going back." From there I went fishing for a bit. I took out a pro [professional] fishing licence to sort of settle myself down and I made a go of that. I tried not to spend any of the money that I'd saved or anything so, and then I took

01:10:00:24
up? We were? What was I doing? Yeah, I was doing a lot of renovation work on homes and everything else like that until illness struck me down. And I then had to go to the Department of Veterans' Affairs and say, "Well." you know, "I can't work any more." So after some

01:10:30:17
tedious applications and running backwards and forwards, I was subsequently made a Totally and Permanently Disabled soldier. Having done that, we, my wife and I, settled down nice and easy and we came into our present residence some 10 years ago.

01:11:00:15
So here we are today heading for our 50th wedding anniversary in December and living the life of Riley [living well] except for all the complaints of the body.

Q: That's great. Thanks Keith. That's a really great summary. I'd like to go back to your childhood now, if you could tell me a little bit more about growing up in Ingham and your family?

A: Well the childhood days of course, as I

01:11:30:13
mentioned, we became a very large family. Prior to the war things were very, very tight. We were in the Depression years and father was always working, which was pretty damn fortunate. And the other very fortunate thing that happened at about that time was our very location

01:12:00:16
of Ingham. Ingham was then a very, very small country town on the railway line. You couldn't get into and out of Ingham in the wet weather anyhow, so the only means of access was the railway line and that used to flood as well, so we were a pretty isolated sort of a little borough. And of course it was still very much a bush town.

01:12:30:11
You didn't have to go far to catch fish. We used to just potter down around the creeks and everything around Ingham and we could always catch a few fish and everything. And certainly there was wild pigs not too far out in the bush, and we had scrub turkey and wild pigeon and everything else like that, so we were able to forage. During the

01:13:00:12
Depression years we were able to upkeep and sustain the family, from the land as well as what father brought home in the way of payment. Of course we had a big vegetable garden and everything that the boys all had to dig and grow lettuce and all the vegetables in season to help with the

01:13:30:15
larder. And things in those years were vastly different to what they are today. We never had fancy things like washing machines and radio. That radio. That Stromberg-Carlson radio, little bakelite, well was quite a big bakelite piece of equipment

01:14:00:18
that was put way up on a shelf because it was too high tech. It had two knobs on it, I think. Three knobs, one for adjusting, one for volume, I think, yeah, and one other, on-off switch. Three knobs. And it was put way up on a high shelf so Father could reach it. Mother couldn't even reach it. She wasn't high tech enough to turn this radio on, this magic piece of gear.

01:14:30:10
And of course initially we were running that off a battery and then when power came on, a big day in the home town. The power station kicked in on line and power came on and then we had big troubles with that radio. We were now getting more power than we needed and everything, but we overcome the problem, or father overcome the problem.

01:15:00:15

Q: Do you remember what sort of programs you were listening to?

A: Yeah, we used to sit there and listen to the old Don Bradman [cricketer] do all his things. And, yeah, we got the news and the weather. And of course, you know, it was only to be used when father was home. So, you know, we were pretty restricted in the listening period, though the girls later used to get up on stools and turn

01:15:30:16
it on and used to get - What were they? - 'Dad and Dave' and 'Portia Faces Life' [radio soap operas] or something. I don't know what the girls used to listen to, but cause we were all, I was at school or out in the bush and so, you know, it didn't worry us, but the? yeah, we were pretty primitive. We had a copper boiler

01:16:00:12
that we made out of a 44 gallon drum. I think every house in town had one of those, or if you were real fancy they made a brick concrete one and put the copper boiler in that. And they were mongrel things anyhow because you couldn't get the copper boiler out to clean it and everything and that was the boys' job, clean the boiler and cut the wood and light the fire. And the girls had to help with the washing. And we did all the

01:16:30:21
hard yakka [work] and of course we had wood stoves in the house and they had to be fuelled, so every now and again, we had in those days, we had an old T-model Ford. And I first started to drive on a T-model Ford when I could barely reach the pedals, all three of them. And it had another little thing you flipped forward like a handbrake, which was a top gear in actual fact.

01:17:00:11
The three pedals, you had a clutch, a brake, you know, and a drive pedal, right. And then this handbrake thing. So we'd go out in the scrub with the crosscut saws and the axes and everything and load up with timber and come home and saw it all up and cut it all up and stack it all up and the girls used to cart? We'd cart it upstairs into there and the girls would

01:17:30:06
burn it for us and we'd go crook at them quite often [yell at them], you know, "You're burning too much wood." And that was basically the life, and life went on.

Q: How many boys as opposed to girls were in the family?

A: We had seven boys, six girls.

Q: So dinner time must have been interesting?

A: Well yeah, you know, we had a big long table and

01:18:00:12
had long stools, you know, not enough room for a rounded table or a lot of chairs. There was two chairs at the table, one at the head of the table and one at the other end and that was Mother and Father. And Mother, of course, sat in the one that was closest to the stove and the serving bench and everything else and Father sat up the other end and, of course, various meal time regulations. You didn't talk at the table,

01:18:30:02
you watched your manners and you sat up straight, and you did all those sort of things that families did in those days. And after the meal it was clean up, wash up, wipe up. The girls washed up, the boys wiped up. It was just a routine that went on and on through the family, you know, through the years. So we were a pretty happy bunch. There was

01:19:00:15
a lot of fights amongst the kids and everything, but dare any outsider try and pick us, you know, it was one of ours because it was just all in. You try and touch one of the Paynes, you got a hiding. That was the end of the lesson.

Q: What was your mum like?

A: Mum was, Mum is, a very short woman of pretty solid structure.

01:19:30:12
And Mum was part Italian so she was very confused in her days I suppose because of her religion. She was brought up, her mother was Catholic and grandfather was Church of England and there was a bit of confusion reigned supreme

01:20:00:13
in those days. And I recall later on, somewhere about the end of the '40s, the priest dared to tell Mum that she wasn't married because she wasn't married in the Catholic Church. They were very funny in those days. And so the old man, my Dad,

01:20:30:15
found a bloke with his collar back to front and snotted [punched] him down the street and it turned out to be the wrong priest, but however the message got around, "Keep quiet." Yeah, so, but Mum was a pretty gentle sort of a soul. She was, well she's still alive, in her 92nd year, so

01:21:00:24
she brought up the family during the war years. She was a very protective mother and a very hardworking woman. And to bear all those children? And she lost two. Two of the boys are gone. All the rest of the family's alive and she suffered that loss and now she's suffered the loss of my Dad. But still alive, so?

01:21:30:17
Yeah, growing up in those days was one big ball. It was, especially when father went away to the war. I can recall that he put all the fishing nets away and it was all legal in those days. You know, well we made all our own nets and everything then and, you know, we'd save up money and have a look at a creek, throw a fishing line across and say, "We'll put a net here next weekend." and next weekend we did.

01:22:00:15
We'd sit down and start and one would work one end and the other one. There'd be singeing ropes during the week. Bugger the school work. That went by the board. The net comes first. After all the house chores were done, the chooks and ducks were fed, the wood was cut, everything was done and then we made net. And Father, when he went away in

01:22:30:15
'41, he put all the nets and everything away and naphthalene and everything, cause they were all linen nets in those days and we were too young to handle them, you know. And he hadn't gone out the bloody door I don't think. I don't think he'd gone out the door and all the nets were out and on the pushbikes and away we went, so we had a jolly time feeding the family during the war

01:23:00:16
years while he was away and everything. And, of course, we had a little BSA [Birmingham Small Arms] .22 that we were supposed to hand in. There was the .303 rifle that came out of the Boer War that we were supposed to hand in. Nobody was supposed to have weapons in those days, but we managed to forget about handing them in, and so we

01:23:30:16
still sustained the family with pigs and a couple of shotguns. We had a couple of shotguns, so with ducks and birds and all the rest of it we were doing quite all right. We thought this was cause we never had the restriction of Father. The only restriction we had at that time was ammunition for the weapons, but that problem was quickly overcome because the Americans were going backwards and forwards and they were camped just outside

01:24:00:15
of Ingham, so we would negotiate with the Americans for some of our goodies for their ammunition and all the rest of it and pinch their pushbikes too, because we couldn't get rubber for our pushbikes so we used to pinch them, acquire, relocate all the tyres off the American pushbikes onto ours and away we'd go again. Yeah, it was

01:24:30:12
pretty good times.

Q: What was your father like?

A: Henry was, when he? He was two men, Father. He was very? well one of the things that he was always throughout his life, he was very, very conscious of his responsibilities,

01:25:00:16
both to his families and their family, and his unemployment. Family first, everything was for the family. Prior to the war he was a pretty happy-go-lucky sort of a fellow as well. And the war years did change him and he was? For a while, he never drank, Father, so that was one consolation.

01:25:30:11
And he never smoked until the latter end of his life as well, so he became very bitter towards the whole lot of the system, the government and everything in their treatment of the veterans and everything else like that. And I think I've got a little bit of that from him as well because I see things now that tend to upset me, what the government don't

01:26:00:11
do for the veterans. Anyhow so, but he was two blokes, two different sort of blokes. And towards the end he seemed to stabilise in life and after his retirement and he enjoyed the last years of his life, he really did, yeah.

Q: Do you remember in Ingham when war broke out?

A: Certainly, God yeah! All these blokes were going

01:26:30:19
away. War was on. "We'll go to a war! We'll go to war!" Dear oh dear, cause I had uncles and everybody that were all going, and Father couldn't go for a while because he had the family. And he was a little bit older and they put him aside under the Manpower Act for a while, but then he subsequently, when the Japanese came into the war and things started to

01:27:00:19
look a little bit bad to our north, they said, "Righto Henry, you can put on a uniform." so away he went. We lost one of the uncles. He was killed in the Islands and fortunately the others came home in all different physical states

01:27:30:16
after their campaigning. Yeah, I remember the war years all right, yeah, by God.

Q: Do you remember the very day it broke out and how the news was relayed?

A: Yeah, well, you know, war. We were just, you know, to me when the outbreak of war, 1939, I was only six years old at the time and I've got a very small recollection of, you know, the

01:28:00:16
Kaiser, the Germans, box heads and all the things that they were talking about and everything. And I remember the uncles and everybody getting down in our back shed because some of them did belong to the, then the militia. Prior to World War II it was the militia, and they were doing a bit of rifles and have gymnastics down in the shed and everything and saying, "We're away. We're going to do sting."

01:28:30:10
and everything, you know. But, of course, a young bloke, I thought, "Oh well, here they are playing around again." Like bloody guns and everything, which was pretty normal in our sort of area anyhow in those days and, of course, when Japan came into the war, well I remember that quite well because it was some three years after and I was just that bit older and I could understand a lot better about the Japs

01:29:00:18
coming into the war.

Q: So you were saying that you remember when the Japanese came into the war?

A: Yeah, well, you know, the first thing that was very significant from my memory was everything that belonged to the Japs, was made in Japan, was either broken or thrown away or planted or something, you know. It was

01:29:30:13
a period of very much apprehension in North Queensland. Of course, about this time we started to get the Americans coming in as well and our own troops were all training up in the north in the Atherton Tableland and everything and all coming through Ingham and so, you know, the war was getting closer and closer to us at that particular time. And

01:30:00:02
we had great times with the soldiers on the troop trains. We'd fruit in season around the place, mangoes, pineapples, custard apples and all the tropical fruit, oranges and lemons and everything, we'd sell to the Yanks and half the time they never got paid anyhow, they never got their product.

01:30:30:05
We'd take their money and say, "The train's going." or? and they never got their fruit. Anyhow, but we always gave to the diggers [Australian soldiers]. The diggers got all the free stuff, which was only justifiable I suppose and, you know, we had lots of things that come to memory

01:31:00:10
about that time. I remember an American Negro, black African they called him, American African or something they call them now, cause in those days and, by gee, right through until not so very long ago, the American Negro was pretty downed on by the whites. And I noticed on a couple of trips to America recently that in the southern states there's still a little bit there, you know.

01:31:30:13
It's not very Australian to do those sort of things, you know. But anyhow, one of them jumped off the train. There was a little shop across the road from the station and he was heading in that direction to buy something, I should imagine, or something, and an American MP [Military Police] yelled, "Stop!" And he kept running and, of course, there was stacks of them running at the same time, you know, and the American pulled out his

01:32:00:13
pistol, went phu phu and dropped him - not very nice - and he remained in Ingham. I didn't ever get to know him, but I used to see him around the streets and that because he? they never put him in jail. They put him in hospital and he had a pretty good time for probably a couple of months around Ingham, you know, everybody looking after him a little bit. And

01:32:30:11
the white Americans used to frown on it a bit, but you know, well we never took any notice. He was just a nice little, old bloke. Well he was probably in his 20s or things like that.

Q: Where did he live in town?

A: He was based? He was in the hospital, recuperation ward in the hospital, and then after that he went to the showground. There was an Australian

01:33:00:15
transfer station, I suppose, for soldiers in the showground so he was there for a bit too before he went away to the American Army again. They probably give him a hard time then, I don't know. But I also remember a fellow we used to call old Andy. Prior to the war, probably about 1938, 1939 when

01:33:30:20
there was still swaggies [swagmen] on the line and everything else like that, there was a little bridge about half a mile out of town and we used to go out that way with our shanghais and everything and break into everything we shot at. And, you know, our favourite things were cups on telegraph poles and things like that. They all got busted and repaired, made work for around the place. The liney [linesman] got plenty of work

01:34:00:14
from the Payne kids I can tell you, with their shanghais. However there was a couple of swaggies and we used to call him old Andy, walking around with a beard and everything, you know, and his swag. And we got to know him pretty well and he came back again the following year. I think it was about that time they were chasing the cane up around,

01:34:30:21
and the fruit, on the Atherton Tableland and doing odd jobs picking here there and everywhere. And then the war broke out and course the following year Andy never came so, and then would have been a year or two after that, a troop train was coming through and all these diggers on board, and

01:35:00:08
I'm getting a bit sentimental, and old Andy as we used to call him, cause he used to always call us nippers: "Come on nipper." you know. And giving out a bit of fruit and this bloke says, "Hey nipper, how are you going?" And we're looking around, "Who the bloody hell? That's old Andy!" Cause he always used to get under the train, you know, would get underneath around the wheels and everything, right out of town, until they got to the grade and

01:35:30:05
get off and jump up in the bloody what's-a-name, in the carriage. So anyhow and we're looking around. He said, "I'm over here." and he was a bloody digger, yeah. So and we saw him there and we never ever saw him again so we don't know what happened to old Andy, but he wasn't real old any more. He had a shave and his hair cut and he had a digger's hat on and he was only about 22, yeah, so there's the difference of appearance.

01:36:00:17

Q: How did the town change with people leaving?

A: Probably, what was it, it'd be about 1943 when the Japs were in New Guinea and they'd bombed Townsville and they'd bombed Darwin and a lot of people were now moving out of the north in a hurry. And

01:36:30:14
we bought our own, the big family home at that time, right then. Yep, Mum bought it, 600 pound, a big old Queenslander, yeah. And she paid it off during the war and the old man said, "What the hell? How am I going to pay for that?" you know. But she'd made a deal with Mrs Kemp next door and it was all all right, you know, so we moved into the big house. I think she

01:37:00:17
must have paid 10 pound deposit or something, yeah, so we acquired the big family house, probably the only way we could have acquired a big family house with a big family and everything and the low wages and everything in those days. So to buy a big home like that wouldn't have been within Father's financial bracket

01:37:30:15
because of the family that he had to support. Anyhow, so Mother did quite a nice little bit of negotiating at that time. But your question was, "How was Ingham in those days?" People moving out. It was becoming very concerning. The people were leaving and those that were remaining were basically

01:38:00:17
the people that had husbands and fathers and sons and what have you. Like ooh, so we were becoming a town very smartly of either very old men and women, a bunch of children, and women with children, and no young men in between, you know, that military age bracket in between.

01:38:30:07
And the town was being run by a very old council and everything else like that. And the families were being managed by the boys of the family and the older girls and everything. And the concern, of course, was whether the Japs would in actual fact get there. But we always took the attitude,

01:39:00:23
"Well look." you know, "They've got to get through all these?.." Cause there were all these Americans and all these soldiers of ours, you know, and little did we realise the number of Japs. That was another story and, of course, it was around this time too, the Battle of the Coral Sea was taking place. And we had a small air emergency landing strip in Ingham and we were getting fighters and everything coming into there that

01:39:30:19
had been engaged in the battle. And we'd go out and service the aircraft and reload them with ammunition and everything. Everybody sort of mucked in and did a whole heap of things towards the war effort. And everybody had a victory garden, of course. You had to have your victory garden, grow your own vegetables and give to the soldiers what you had left over and all the rest of it. And the army

01:40:00:21
pretty well survived in the north on victory gardens for a while. I'm pretty sure of that, you know, because, especially during the wet weather because the transport couldn't get through to give them their supplies and things like that so. Yeah, it was a pretty tormenting little period. And my father came home on leave

01:40:30:12
before he went to the islands. And well he'd been to the islands and he came home on leave and then he went back to the islands. Before he went back to the islands so, we cranked up the old T-model Ford [early car]. And we couldn't get petrol in those days so we got some shellite and power kerosene and mixed them all together,

01:41:00:23
and a bit of methylated spirits, and we had a lot of backfires in the old T-model Ford. And of course we pinched some petrol from the American vehicles around the place, just to make sure that the old T-model did run all right. So we went up to Mount Fox. Father said, "Okay, take youse all up to Mount Fox, up in the mountains and we'll find a place

01:41:30:22
and if anything happens, this is where I want youse to all come." So the boys had the responsibility of, up on the Fox, building a shack up on the Fox.

Keith Payne
1695
Tape 2

02:00:31:07

Q: So your father took you to?.?

A: Yeah, well of course, and as I mentioned, it was the boys' task to build a bit of accommodation or something up on the Fox and to have the vehicle ready to evacuate the family if necessary, and of course we had to have, take old Billy Morton with us. Old Bill was a mate of my father's

02:01:00:13
and Bill was a World War I veteran. He was a saddler, a damn good saddler too, but he was blind. He went blind in his latter years and we nearly lost him going up the Fox. We burnt out the clutch on the T-model Ford going up and down the hills and we all bailed out in the cutting and old Bill was half deaf and blind and he was just sitting there,

02:01:30:13
and the dicky Ford's taking off back down the hill and the old man chasing it to get on board it, yeah, so we nearly lost him. But we got things going and the old man was a pretty fair bush mechanic and he ripped the clutch out of the old T-model Ford and took off his belt, his leather belt, and put it around the gears

02:02:00:18
and what have you, around the drum, and away we went again. But we had our task all laid out for us and we had a cache of food and, you know, milk and things like that that we got around the place because that was pretty hard too because it was rationing in those days.

02:02:30:03
And because father was in the grocery business and he knew all the grocer shops around the place, we got a lot of things that were left over and of course we never, ever used our sugar rations and that was no? We either sold those or traded them for bread and things like that and of course meat, we never worried about meat anyhow. Howard Kirkwood had plenty

02:03:00:14
of cattle so we used to help ourselves to that one and then we always had pig and fish and everything else like that. So we were trading a lot of gear and the sugar, well we had a sugar mill around the place and those days they always used to shift it in sugar bags, so a sugar bag would go missing now and again. Survival they used to call it. But most people in Ingham

02:03:30:13
never bought that because they'd just go up alongside the truck, stick a knife in, walk along with a bucket and fill her up with sugar. Never wasted it though. Always somebody else there ready to put, you know, take the rest of the bag, yeah.

Q: Ingham was quite a multicultural town wasn't it?

A: Yes.

Q: At the beginning of the war was that an issue in Ingham?

A: Yeah, very multicultural and probably

02:04:00:08
because of the sugar industry and when they stopped bringing the Kanakas over - the islanders over from Vanuatu and Peru and places - to cut cane and everything. And back in the latter end of the 1880s and well into the 1920s

02:04:30:17
they brought a lot of? There was Italians, Sicilians, southern Europeans who were now probably refugees from the First World War. There were some Balts, Hungarians and all sorts of people. But basically it was the sugar industry that brought about this multicultural society

02:05:00:18
in this little borough of Ingham, right. And that's probably? See, my father was English. My grandfather was Welsh. My father was born out here. His eldest sister was born in Wales, but Mother's father, who was a Pom,

02:05:30:13
married an Italian girl. And back in those days that was very frowned on, plus the fact that there was this church business that I mentioned before, right. And then along comes Father, who's bloody Church of England, and Mother's with this? halfway through a Catholic business and halfway through a Church of England. And plus the fact that she's half Italian. And it was definitely all frowned on, you know.

02:06:00:17
In those days you didn't marry outside your race or something, you know. But it didn't bother our family in that little borough called Ingham. It was a little bit of a rabbit warren anyhow, right, and yeah, so. And today Ingham is still a very multicultural little place. Everybody knows everybody if they've been there long enough, you know.

02:06:30:16

Q: Were Australians suspicious of the Italians because the Italians were in the war? Was there that kind of suspicion going on?

A: Yeah, well, the First World War? First World War, the Italians were on the right side of the business. In the Second World War, initial stages, they were with the Germans. So Mussolini [Benito Mussolini, Prime Minister of Italy] was with the Germans and I can remember that quite well because some of my

02:07:00:19
uncles were interned during the war. Others went into uniform, Australian Army uniform, and went away and did their thing. So you had a bit of a mixture here - some who were interned because they were Italians, and others who were Italians but were serving in the military forces. And it was just a mess. And I might add that the multicultural

02:07:30:13
system? Just after the war when I went into my apprenticeship, I went in with Messina & Son, who were an Italian family. And the son, Gino, who only passed away not long ago, he was in the Australian military forces as a sergeant interpreter and his father and his uncle and everybody were in the internment camps

02:08:00:09
that he was the interpreter for. So he was on the outside having a jolly time and they were on the inside. And a lot of the people in Ingham who were interned, and when they came home later on, rather frowned on Gino when he started to run the factory and everything else like that.

02:08:30:13
It was only for the father that they bought off Messina & Son because of? Gino had also married an Aussie girl in Melbourne, who he met in Melbourne during the war, but that marriage didn't last anyhow. But once the father went out of the business and everything, so consequently the business went down the drain because the Italians

02:09:00:11
were very much like that. They said, "No, no, no. You did the wrong thing, Gino." You know, "We're not going to buy your goods." That's the end of that lesson, so of course I'd left by then and, you know, I'd gone away into the army myself when all that happened, but yeah, it's?

Q: So it must have been confusing as a boy, to have some uncles interned and some uncles fighting for the??

A: Well yes and no.

02:09:30:10
You got over the shock of all that nonsense, you know. As far as, you know, we were concerned, they were away in a camp and everything and course they were having a pretty good time, too. They were fruit picking down in the Riverina area and everything. A lot of them ended up settling down there and buying farms and all sorts of things, you know, the people that were interned. So

02:10:00:13
they didn't have it too bad because they basically, the people that were guarding them or supposed to be guarding them, the people that were looking after them and the people that they were working on, on the farms and everything, knew that they weren't enemy collaborators or anything. They just happened to be Italian. So once Mussolini surrendered and Italy changed flags

02:10:30:09
course they all got released and some of them came back and went into uniform to fight the Japs. So she was a little bit of a mixed up old sort of a business, yeah, and really there was no animosity, you know. Well it didn't, it certainly didn't reach our little borough in Ingham. There was no animosity against anyone or anything, you know,

02:11:00:07
because we all knew each other and we were all interrelated somewhere along the damn line anyhow. It's almost like Norfolk Island, yeah. But it was a good growing-up period in Ingham, you know, we had our floods, big floods, floods, dear oh dear. We don't get rain in the north like we used to get rain. My God, every year, floods, floods, floods, floods,

02:11:30:15
floods. Course it was good for the kids, when you're a kid, you know, but later on when you've got the responsibility, as still a kid, looking after the family and everything else like that and make sure that the house keeps working and yeah, hard days, hard days, but good days.

Q: What was your concept of war then as a kid? What did you think was happening over there?

A: We knew that there was a lot of soldiers

02:12:00:13
being killed because, you know, every now and again Mum would say, "Oh so and so was killed and Mrs so and so's son has been wounded." and you know, so, "Gees, here we go." you know, all of these sort of things were happening and we knew that it wasn't very pleasant, you know. We knew that this wasn't just a jolly old experience because it was

02:12:30:17
hitting the families, you know, yeah.

Q: And do you remember the day your dad came home?

A: After the war? Yeah.

Q: Can you tell us about that day?

A: The day he came home, yeah. We arrived up the station to see this bloke get off the train, yeah, and he immediately got rid of his uniform and started work, yeah, and he didn't want anything to do with army,

02:13:00:12
military, nothing. He just wanted out. He never went to the RSL [Returned and Services League] or anything, Henry, no.

Q: Do you know anything of his war experience?

A: Yeah, but he never used to talk much about it. I know that he landed in Balikpapan. I know he was on Finschhafen, yeah.

02:13:30:14
I remember when he was wounded and everything, yeah.

Q: He was wounded in Balikpapan?

A: No, Morotai, just towards the end of the war.

Q: What was the wound and how did you hear about it?

A: He got hit in the leg, in the foot actually, yeah, but he was all right. That was only a superficial wound. He used to limp around a little bit, but he always managed to get by so. But he

02:14:00:17
never spoke about it too much, the old man and you know, I can understand that. I can live with that.

Q: What about your brothers, were there any that were close enough to the age of??

A: No. I had one brother that was older than me, 12 months older than me, but he wasn't old enough. Probably if it'd kept going on another two years he would have, but no, he?

02:14:30:01
We were all just that bit too young for the Second World War, thank God, yeah.

Q: And what happened over that time with schooling, did you??

A: We just went along to school, yeah, we just went along to school and we did our air-raid practices. We had air-raid shelters all around the school grounds and the bell'd ring. The air-raid siren would go and we all poured out of school. We all knew where we

02:15:00:11
had to go and everything, and of course as the war progressed along, the Guinea grass got longer in the crawl trenches and our trenches and everything and the boys and girls used to divide off and the air-raid siren or all clear would go and the classrooms never got filled up for a while, but I remember that was boys and girls, yeah.

Q: Did you like school?

A: We did our

02:15:30:01
air-raid drills and everything else like that and yeah, sang 'God Save the King' every morning and saluted the flag and the flag raised, very patriotic, which I think was a must during those war years, something to help hold the nation together and

02:16:00:16
being patriotic was one way of doing it. And yeah, I think it was a lot of comfort to the younger generation who were starting to realise what was happening around the place. It was, you know, strength in unity, but other than that we just got along with school work. There wasn't

02:16:30:08
the sporting equipment because that was going to the army and a lot of things couldn't be obtained because the material to make them went into making other things and everything else like that, so we missed out on a lot of things, but we gained by improvisation. We became, well, if the rest of the nation followed Ingham

02:17:00:08
we became a very, very?a nation of very good improvisers over those years, on fuel and everything, I think, chook manure, driving motor cars and big gas tanks sitting up the back and boilers and oh my God. The things we used to do to make a car go and of course, you know, there were all old Dodges and Whippets and things back then and the engines could take it. Today's

02:17:30:09
motor wouldn't take it because it's all aluminium and everything, but we had all cast steel with big pots and everything and they could cop a pretty fair bashing around which is? So it was a vehicle of the time.

Q: Do you remember how the town reacted when the war was over?

A: Well we had a big dance and we had a big party on that occasion.

02:18:00:12
Yeah, all the oranges were in season and everything. There was? And it was just around the cane cutting season coming on and we had a big party in Ingham, and the sly grog shops [shops selling alcohol without a licence] were really copping it because there were a lot of stills around Ingham in those days, I can tell you now. We never operated one, but we knew

02:18:30:07
where a lot of them were and we'd sell a lot of funny water to the Americans. But they were operating in fine style because being a sugar town and a sugar mill, you know, you've got all the gear there. You may as well do something with it. You don't let it, you know? And the mill had a lot of copper pipes and everything. Now they were fermenting plants and I think one of the best stills was right in the mill itself.

02:19:00:16
The blokes that worked in the mill made a still while? So it was pouring out of one thing and into? Yeah, so.

Q: So how much would the funny water go for, with the Americans?

A: From memory I suppose about a dollar a bottle in those days, yeah. Everything was a dollar, a dollar this and a dollar that and a dollar something else, yeah. Nobody else knew dollars, but we knew dollars mate.

02:19:30:11
We knew them dollars, big round dollars, the silver dollar.

Q: Can you tell us the lead up to you joining the army yourself?

A: Yeah, well when Mother finally? I finished school and then I had? My mother was arranging for an apprenticeship and I had a bit of time before the start of the new year to start my apprenticeship so.

02:20:00:12
And I'd left just prior to being 14 and that's August, so I still had four months there. But I think I pulled the pin a little bit earlier than that, probably about the February or March, you know, getting in early, getting practice at being away from school. But nobody worried about it in those days anyhow. They were too busy doing other things and chasing truants. But

02:20:30:14
at that time I'd joined the regimental cadets too, so that was a great interest to me.

Q: What did you do with the regimental cadets? What sort of activities would you do?

A: We did all the training that the CMF did. We did exercises, bivouacs. We did it, right, cause they had school cadets and, you know, I think of today, they've taken rifles off everybody.

02:21:00:24
In those days, as 14-year-olds and 13-year-olds, we used to? We had all our equipment: bayonets, rifles, everything, and away we'd go on our pushbike to training and take them home and everything, you know. And now they, I don't know, you're not allowed to have a rifle. I don't know whether it's the right direction to go. I think they could have trained the people on how to safely handle

02:21:30:10
weapons and secure weapons without taking them off them. But, you know, done that and the government works in mysterious ways so yeah. Having done that and then I cut cane for a while. And that's a bugger of a job because I wasn't seeing much of my girlfriend and we were working from? I used to get up

02:22:00:17
at four o'clock in the morning and I'd collapse in bed at eight o'clock at night, you know. I mean it's hard, hard yakka. But I was getting good money. I was getting like about three quid a day in those days and that was a lot of money for a young bloke, you know, compared with when I started my apprenticeship. I was getting seventeen and six a week. Mate, I mean that was a big downturn in the old economics, you know. But

02:22:30:19
and then I helped drive a bunch of cattle off, from the Barkly Tablelands. It had come down from the Barkly Tablelands and I met the drive outside of Charters Towers and we came through to Selene and we trucked them in Selene on the railway trucks and brought them down to Alligator Meatworks in Townsville.

02:23:00:05
And I paid off then anyhow so. The drove was over anyhow so then.

Q: What were the other blokes like on that trip?

A: They were a pretty good bunch of blokes. I ended up, one of them I ended up, the key drover was a bloke by the name of Chook Doherty and his younger brother ended up in Korea with us, same time as I did. He

02:23:30:14
joined about the same time as I did, yeah, so I think he must have done another drive and joined about mid of the following year, yeah. But they were good blokes, some old ringers, been around for along time. We had I think about four or five Aborigines, four or five Abo [Aboriginal] blokes with us -

02:24:00:14
or indigenous. But it didn't worry them and it didn't worry me. I used to camp alongside them and eat with them, you know. I've got no problems there so yeah, they were all a pretty good bunch of blokes, all a lot older than I am, you know, I was probably the youngest of the lot, yeah, although Doherty would have been a couple of years older than me I suppose,

02:24:30:18
yeah.

Q: And so after that, you??

A: Yeah, after that I took up my apprenticeship and I wasn't long at that. I went into that. I'd done about 18 months and he was doing the wrong thing by me. This Gino had come out immediately after the war and

02:25:00:12
they bought an old Chev [Chevrolet] Blitz, army Blitz, and I was driving that and I wasn't supposed to. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't old enough to have a driver's licence and everything. But I was carting timber from Stan Ply Mill up on the top of the range at Cardwell and hauling it down and stacking it and everything, every Saturday morning, which is supposed to be my day off, you know,

02:25:30:14
no extra pay, no nothing. And in the end old Matt Donohue, the police sergeant, said to me, he said, "How old are you?" and I said, "Arrr arrr rrrr." and he said, "You'd better come and get your driver's licence, hey?" Course in those days you had to be bloody 18 to get a driver's licence too. But I got my driver's licence a bit young.

02:26:00:14
So be it, and it was about this time when I what, blew the head off things. I'd just come back from a camp at Selene with the cadets and that was my holidays, you know, my annual holiday. And of course Gino, the boss,

02:26:30:14
he was the sergeant, still thought he was a sergeant promenading, you know, the interpreter. And he tried to push me around a little bit and he didn't succeed too much. And I'd done a trip up to Stan Ply and came down and I'd racked up the timber. And on the Monday morning we're putting it through on the machines and in the machines you've got

02:27:00:07
one that you put an edge on and under, and a side, and then the next one you put it through a thickness, and we were cutting them down from about an inch and a quarter to seven eighths, all in one go. And I was tailing out-coming, off the tailing out table, and there was chips flying at me all over the place. And we knocked off for smoko and I had little prick marks and bloody blood was all

02:27:30:21
coming out over me and the dust. I was pretty angry and so we knocked off for smoko and he said, "Righto, we'll start again." So I got up and I went back to the machine and I switched on the machine and I'm starting. "Come on." he said. "No." I said, "you're tailing out, buddy." cause he was only a little bloke too and I was a pretty hefty kid. And so he pushed me

02:28:00:14
down over the heap of shavings and everything. And the greatest mistake he made, he followed me. So I picked up a lump of timber and I went whack and down he went. Then a couple more smacks, not with the timber any more, with my fists. And down over the loading ramp he went, right, so. And because I was an apprentice, we didn't come under an industrial award in those days.

02:28:30:11
I don't know about now. But anyway, industrial inspectors were for labourers and tradesmen. But not for apprentices. Apprentice, you just did what you did and you suffered it. So I wasn't going to suffer this bloody nonsense so I went over, jumped on my treadly [pushbike] and away I went over to the industrial inspector and he pointed out the wrongs that I couldn't come and see him,

02:29:00:17
I shouldn't come and see him. But he told me to get back to the factory. So I went back to the factory and, "Jesus, who's this bloke turning up? It's the industrial inspector!" Well he went through that place like you wouldn't believe, and they had to put in blowers to get rid of all the sawdust and covers over the machinery and big changes in the factory. And these apprentices, they had to have

02:29:30:06
a carton of milk, a pint of milk, every morning and everything. I used to take great - I hated milk - and take great delight, go, "Gees I can't stand that stuff." It was part of the? And I think it was over that or my little bits and pieces and we weren't too, getting on. The old man I got along with well

02:30:00:07
and I was his apprentice, not Gino's. I was his apprentice, the old man's apprentice, and I was, you know, I was getting along very nicely with the old feller. But Gino was upsetting the apple cart all the time so I said, "Well." I went back to another camp and I said, "This is it boy. I'm away out of here." so. And around this time I'd

02:30:30:12
transferred to the CMF because I was still under age of course. Harry Cushla, who was the CO [Commanding Officer] of the depot said to me one night, he said, "And how old are you, Cadet Corporal Payne?" And I said, "I'm 14, sir." And he said, "You're not. You're 16." And I said, "No I'm not." "No." he said, "you're 18." And I said, "No I'm not." And I was 16, I think, yeah. I said, "No, I'm 16." He said, "No you're not. You're 18." And I said, "No, I'm 16."

02:31:00:12
"Sergeant Miller, take Cadet Corporal Payne outside and tell him how old he is, will you?" So Sergeant Miller post marched me outside and he said, "You silly little twerp." He said, "He wants to pay you. How old are you?" "I am 18." Marched back inside. "How old are you, Cadet Corporal Payne?" "I'm 18, sir." "Corporal Burner, enlist this man." So I got paid

02:31:30:18
and now I had a regimental number, so when I went into the regular army I didn't have to have a birth certificate or anything, you know. I was a fully-fledged soldier. So I got in a little bit younger as well.

Q: How did your father feel about you going into the army?

A: He wasn't very pleased about it and neither was Mother because they'd? we'd lost the uncle as I said, and you know, we?

02:32:00:17
They weren't? The old man had been in the war and of course Korea had just started, you see. And I thought, "Well, here we go." you know, the big adventure. And the old man thought, "It's all right. They won't send him away. He's too bloody young anyhow." so. Well when I enlisted, after I finally did get in I, cause I went back up to Ingham, as I said before, and punched Gino in the ear and let him see the error of his

02:32:30:20
ways, that I wasn't going to be his apprentice anyhow, right. I wasn't going to be the flunky around the shop, so he cancelled me. And Dad said I was able to enlist and so I got into the regular army pretty good after a while and sorting a few things out. And

02:33:00:15
as I say, I already had a regimental number so I didn't really have to have parental approval any more or anything, you know. But father give me his blessing so I said, you know, and his advice to me, "Be mates with the cook and the quartermaster." and he was so right. I could never advise anybody that's joining the military to be better mates than the cook and the quartermaster. You've got all your

02:33:30:15
equipment, you've got tucker, yeah. They're good blokes to know, yeah.

Q: What was the initial training like for you?

A: Recruit training in the regular army, I breezed through that because I'd already copped a pretty hard pounding in the cadets and CMF and everything. It was just now that instead of being part time, I was full time and

02:34:00:17
a lot of the fellows were older than I was. But they didn't know really how old I was anyhow. They thought I was one age and I wasn't, so it never really worried me. I made some good mates and some of them, we're still good mates today. One of them was subsequently taken a POW [Prisoner of War] in Korea and he was a journo [journalist] with the Courier Mail,

02:34:30:12
and we're still good mates today so, yeah.

Q: Where was that initial training?

A: Enoggera in Brisbane. Well when we first enlisted I went out to Indooroopilly, which turned out to be the provo [Provosts - Military Police] depot later on, and then we went to Enoggera, which was a personnel depot, and then towards the latter

02:35:00:14
end of my little stay there they turned it into the hospital and they brought all these females in as nurses. And it was a terrible place to be in, you know, young blokes with all these women around the place, damn terrible. And they shifted us all out to Enoggera and Enoggera then was entirely different to what it is today. Where all the main barracks are and everything now used to be a rifle range, and where married

02:35:30:09
quarters are used to be a grenade range, used to throw grenades there so, yeah. And of course down the other end of the camp we had where the personnel depot is now, that was a migrant camp. People that were coming over at the end of World War II, refugees and everything, had a migrant camp there and so Wacol was entirely different then. And of course you always had the

02:36:00:06
trams going to Enoggera terminus, which was the end of the line, so we'd go backwards and forwards by trams in those days. That's when we didn't miss the late night tram. If you missed the late night tram, you walked and you swiped all sorts of things on the way through because the butchers and the bakers and the candlestick makers,

02:36:30:15
you always used to put all the goodies and oranges and fruit and everything all outside the shops for the shopkeepers to pick up the next morning and put in their shops. And when you're getting home at half past two, three o'clock in the morning, you need substance so, whoop, and go to the next shop, whoop, yep.

Q: What did you think of Brisbane, coming from such a small country area?

02:37:00:02

A: Eyes wide open all the time. Of course the biggest attraction in those days was all these females that were around the place and they were right animals.

Q: But you'd had a few sisters, were they different? Was it different in that way?

A: Yeah, well they were sisters, these others weren't. Yeah, the others weren't. We used to go to the dances

02:37:30:10
and another thing in our youth, we all went to dances and everything, you know. That was part of our social outings and everything. You had dances and you had the dances and the pictures. That was that. So you took your girl to the dance or you took her to the pictures, one or to the other, right, and if you took her to the pictures you never paid for her to go in anyhow. You waited till she went in and then you got in and then, you know, and half the time you snuck in anyhow.

02:38:00:12
And if she was lucky you'd get there without or with something clean on or something. But other than that, many a time I used to wash my legs and everything and get all the mud off them and break the shotgun down and have the ducks in a sack bag and get into the pictures and put them under the seat and, "Hello, how are you going?" Yeah.

Q: Did you leave a girlfriend behind in north Queensland when you came to??

A: Yes

02:38:30:10
of course, yeah, and, you know, yeah, she married a bloke while I was away too and I wasn't happy about that. But, yeah, and years later when Flo and I were engaged, Flo came up to Townsville cause I was up in Townsville at the time, a place in Townsville, and Flo come up

02:39:00:07
to Townsville to meet the family who come down from Ingham and everything. And Flo got off the plane in Townsville and walked in and mother was there and the first thing she said to Flo was, "Has Keith told you about Betty Roberts?" I said, "You bloody old bitch." you know, "bloody witch."

Q: Went over like a lead balloon?

A: Yeah, it did, yeah. But yeah, we've?

02:39:30:20
A normal bringing up, you know, boy meets girl and all this sort of thing, yeah.

Q: What were the Brisbane blokes like that were training with you?

A: The city blokes? Strangely enough there wasn't too many city blokes. There was? We had a Pommy [English] remittance man. He was a bit of a strange character cause I'd never met, you know, a fair dinkum Pom before.

02:40:00:11
And then when they were saying, "Oh no, he's a remittance man." I thought, "What the bloody hell's a remittance man?" you know, so I soon learnt what a remittance man was. He'd been cast aside by the family, doing naughty things or something or the wrong side of the blanket or something, you know, and he was a bloody good bloke. He was obviously an ex British serviceman. He knew how to do all

02:40:30:14
his gear up and everything and showed us a few tricks of the trade and everything else like that. Some of them were considerably older. Jack Butterworth, who I got to know quite well, who was killed in Korea, we lost Jack in Korea and he was older and well educated. He come from Footscray in Melbourne and

02:41:00:06
he was a big rough looking sort of a bloke, you know. And he was an agricultural bloke and he was working out at Roma at the time and Calley was from Roma. He was a wool classer. They were a pretty fair old mixture of rough bag rough nuts and have a dig and that. All turned into bloody good soldiers though. That's, you know, that's part of the whole

02:41:30:14
gambit. They acquitted themselves well, yeah. Bluey Donnelley, as I say, he was a city bloke. But he'd kicked around a hell of a lot, you know, so he wasn't real city slicker. I think we only had a couple of real city slickers, pansies with, you know, pansies from the city, yeah.

Keith Payne
1695
Tape 3

03:00:32:09

Q: So Keith I'm just wondering, what do you think your main motivation was for deciding to join up?

A: I liked the military type life because I'd been in the cadets and the CMF. I was getting sick of the factory work and everything. There was far too much noise in a factory anyhow, all the machinery and everything and God bless me, I go into a bloody military and there's no noise in the military, oh my God.

03:01:00:24
Anyhow and the big adventure was there. It was open because, and having grown up with all these soldiers in and out of the place, I was very uniform oriented and it looked pretty glamorous to me. And Korea had broken out so the big adventure was on. The opening for the adventure was on and I said, "Well that's my way out

03:01:30:17
of leaving the borough, of leaving the family nest or whatever. I'm away." So that was the greatest motivation I think was just to get away from the factory, get away from home. I wasn't impeded at home in any way. But, you know, spread your wings sort of thing, yeah.

Q: But you said earlier that you knew that war was pretty serious, that you knew people were being killed in the Second World War and so forth. Was that

03:02:00:07
in the back of your mind at all, or you were just??

A: No, no, no, no. When you're young, Jesus, you're bulletproof and yeah, nothing had to happen and, you know, even in Korea or anywhere else, you know, it happens to everybody else. It never happens to you, you know. The young very fortunately see life in that direction.

03:02:30:16
You see it today, young people getting killed in motor vehicles and yet the others just put their foot down on the accelerator just the same, you know. It happens to them, it's not going to happen to me, yeah. That never worried me at all. I think the big adventure of A) going to Brisbane. B) You know, going out on

03:03:00:24
my own and then travelling overseas. That was the big adventure, yeah. The rude shock was when I went into the line in Korea. That was a shock. That was not supposed to all come about, that lot, you know. That wasn't in the scenario at all. But of course it had to be because it was

03:03:30:21
part of being in the military and I still? I enjoyed the military life right through until almost the end when I'd just had enough of what the government was handing out and everything. Things had changed, policies, and it wasn't my army any more.

Q: Well when you joined up and you went to Enoggera what, in those initial stages of training and so forth, did the army sort of meet your

03:04:00:20
expectations?

A: Yeah, I had a great ball and I did all the way through. The military is what you make it, you know. Once you learn the system, you use the system and the system's a pretty good one. You keep your noise clean, you do your job and nobody ever worries you, you know,

03:04:30:17
do all the right things. You do the right thing and nobody bothers you and by purely and simply by doing the right thing, people leave you alone and you get a little bit more freedom on movement and everything. Recruit training is the time that it's go, go, go, orders here, people shouting and screaming and I thought, "God mate, get off yourself." you know,

03:05:00:24
but. And then of course when you become an instructor and you're doing exactly the same thing, you say, "Hey, whoa up." you know. But that has to be. You have to train people in the ways of military and you have to train them and then indoctrinate them to instant obedience to orders without question. And

03:05:30:14
there's no parallel in the world that requires that particular thing than military because if you don't have strict obedience, instant obedience to orders, then people's lives or your own could be lost because you don't do what you're told to do at that particular time, so there's no ifs, buts or maybes. And of course

03:06:00:13
to go with that you have to do it hard physically and mentally and everything to make sure that you do react whilst you're under that physical and mental strain in accordance with what is required so, and you get all of that in recruit training. After you leave recruit training and then you go into

03:06:30:17
what you call corps training or infantry training, training of the finites of military fisticuffing, you then learn all your tactics and everything else like that that help to keep you and other people alive. So it's a very exacting business, soldiering. There's no

03:07:00:18
room for error. Errors occur, people die so, and, you know, you still see it today, you know, they call it friendly fire. I don't see anything friendly about getting shot at by your own aircraft or something, you know. That's a mistake, so you've got to make sure that you can avoid those mistakes. People don't

03:07:30:17
and then they get into problems. However I enjoyed the old military life. It was for me.

Q: You said you loved it when you first joined up in that recruit training. What did you love about it?

A: Probably the military life itself, being amongst blokes who were all thinking in the same

03:08:00:16
direction. The relaxation times of on leave and everything else like that, you know. We were pretty fair teddy boys in those days, you know, we dressed well and we captured our share of hearts and everything. That's a very important part of life, that capturing hearts and

03:08:30:15
the training went along smoothly and it was everything that a young man could expect, you know, yeah.

Q: Were there blokes though that weren't up to the training and sort of had joined thinking like you, that they were, it was going to be great, but couldn't cope with the army life?

A: Well we never struck too many of those. What we did strike, they couldn't cope with the army life. They couldn't cope with some of the physical aspects. In those days

03:09:00:15
physical aspects, they had the mental attribute for the military. They were switched on in that direction. But their bodies wouldn't allow them to, though they were supposed to be medically fit, you've got to be reasonably strong and everything in an infantry type situation. People's slight frames and bodies and everything don't have the physical makeup

03:09:30:11
to carry out the arduous duties of humping big, heavy packs and doing all the things an infantryman's supposed to do. So they still mentally are very wide awake to the military and everything so what they do, they just transfer them to a corps where it's not so physical, into medical corps and things like that where their physical attributes

03:10:00:14
will allow them to carry out their duty and they do it tremendously well, tremendously well so. But I never struck anybody in my part of that particular part of my service that couldn't put up with military discipline. And of course we found that even right through to the first bracket of National Service

03:10:30:12
in the '50s. When I started instructing in the '50s and struck that first lot of National Servicemen I went through, there was very few of those that couldn't cop the discipline because we were a pretty disciplined nation back coming through the '40s and early '50s. Time has tempered. I did notice in the second bracket of National Service there was people that just could

03:11:00:09
not mentally put up with the discipline of military service. They'd been born free or something, I don't know. But times had changed. The discipline of our society had broken down a bit, you know. They weren't, I don't think they were required to do what we used to have to do in the '40s and

03:11:30:16
'50s, yeah. I think that they become, started to become a different nation, right, a different people. Even, you know, you could tell the country people from the city people. But even the country people were starting to, you know, balk at the discipline and I felt that that was a little bit of a downturn on our society. But

03:12:00:18
no, we never struck any of that sort of problem.

Q: What aspects of the training did you personally find most challenging?

A: Probably for the educational part of it, anything that required education because I left school very early, and which you did in the war years anyhow. You'd

03:12:30:19
come up on 14, you know, everybody was away. Manpower said, "You were 14, you're finished school, you're away." So in those initial years probably the hardest thing I struck was anything to do with arithmetic and things like that, you know, conversion of bearings and all that sort of thing, which become secondhand later on. And of course I went

03:13:00:03
through the military educational scheme and all through the years and upgraded myself education wise so, you know, I didn't, though I left school early, A) to support the family that was increasing in ever rapid numbers, and B) it was, the soldiers were,

03:13:30:18
the elder ones were all away at war and everything and we just had to do our thing.

Q: When you joined up, how old was the youngest brother or sister in your family? How old was the youngest child?

A: My youngest sister was born when I was in Korea.

Q: So there were children being born even as you were joining?

A: Yeah.

Q: So was your salary that you were earning, was that going towards helping your family?

A: Yeah, I was, even then I was

03:14:00:18
allocating a certain amount to the house out of my salary, yeah.

Q: And was that expected or was that something that you wanted to do or??

A: Well I wasn't asked for it. But, you know, it would have been frowned on had I have not. But I'm pleased to say that, besides all that, a lot of that money wasn't used. Mother put it in my bank and if it came up

03:14:30:20
something of a necessity then she'd use it, you know, and tell me that she'd used it. Father never had anything to do with the bank account or anything, it was Mother run that part of the business so, you know, when I came home I had a tidy little sum in the bank and Mother hadn't used a whole heap of it all so, which, you know, I thought, "Well it was allocated for that.

03:15:00:16
If you didn't use it well you didn't really need it." right. But where she did need it, she used it.

Q: So with your brothers and sisters being born over those years, even for the time that you were in Korea, what sort of sex education had you received, what did you know about how your brothers and sisters were being born?

A: Coming from a small place like Ingham and working, you know, we had dairy farms and we used to bloody deliver

03:15:30:20
milk and everything and deliver rice on Saturday mornings and the chooks laid eggs and the eggs had chickens and everything. We knew about sex life all right, mate, don't worry about that, right. As old Joh Bjelke-Petersen [Premier of Queensland] would say, "Mate, don't you worry about that."

Q: But what about contraception? Had you been taught anything about that?

A: No there was none of that, nothing taught in school, you know,

03:16:00:16
of anything of that nature. We knew of women's problems because you had sisters and everything else like that and you knew Mum was pregnant and you knew the lady down the road was pregnant and then you got the whisper, "Oh, she's a naughty girl that one. She's going out." and, "Oh, my God." I thought, "If only you knew, Mum." all right, yeah. And of course sex education

03:16:30:09
in those days was very much a practical thing, rather than? It was never mentioned at school or anything like that, you know, and I don't know whether that's a healthy arrangement really though I think today sex education and everything in classes, if it is controlled,

03:17:00:12
I don't see it controlled too well these days. I don't know, I've never been to a sex education class so I don't know what they talk about. But I feel that there's a little bit too much permissiveness these days, a little bit too much freedom. A naughty girl from Ingham

03:17:30:13
went on holidays to Brisbane for, you know, six months or 12 months or something like that and then she came home again, right. But?

Q: With baby in tow or without baby?

A: Without baby, very much frowned on, yes. I mean

03:18:00:01
having a child out of wedlock in those days or becoming pregnant outside of wedlock in those days was very much antisocial, very, very frowned on, probably one of the reasons that it's better to have sex education today. But then again you also have today love childs all over the place. They're just

03:18:30:09
part of the scene and, you know, marriage was the thing of the day and marriage was meant to last in those days. And a lot of the people of those days made marriage last and they worked their way through the problems and they stayed together. Now our society have brought about

03:19:00:16
an ease of breaking a relationship or breaking a marriage and, you know, unsupported mothers' pensions and rental assistance and all this sort of thing, whilst that is so, it's probably a good thing in one way. But not in another. I think it's just an easy out.

Q: So what about when you joined up and in that initial training, was there any sex education

03:19:30:14
for the young recruits?

A: Yeah.

Q: What were you taught about contraception or??

A: Well when you say sex education, mainly it was on the venereal disease side of things, right. You had a lot of lectures on the social

03:20:00:14
diseases of sex because soldiers are like that, right. And foreign countries, you know, the Americans brought a lot of social disease into Australia. But then again Australia had very little social disease compared to say

03:20:30:13
Malaya or Japan or? But wherever troops go, social disease follows, right, purely and simply because of, they're all fit young men and life goes on but. And of course with the variety of troops that go through the place, you know, only one bloke's

03:21:00:07
there and the next thing bloody half a dozen's got it so yeah. We had a lot of education on the social diseases and what to do and what not to do and that sort of thing and the only preventatives we had against pregnancy and everything in those days was the old French letter [condom] and all that sort of thing, you know, which was, you know,

03:21:30:18
which acted as a fair part of stopping social diseases as well, yeah.

Q: So how did you personally react as a young man to those sort of lectures about VD [venereal disease] and the potential to catch those diseases and??

A: That was all right, you know. God, you know, before that I'd pulled calves out of cows

03:22:00:19
and, you know, got my?

Q: So it didn't worry you too much then?

A: No, never worried me, you know, of the education part of it. I was always very careful of repercussions of my actions, you know, that you'd be very careful of that.

03:22:30:10

Q: So how long was the? You had the initial recruit training and then you had corps training, and what changed for you in the corps training? Or before you left for Korea, to what extent were you prepared and at what stage were you as a soldier?

A: On completion of your recruit training we were then posted from Enoggera down to Puckapunyal to the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment which was at that stage a training

03:23:00:22
battalion that hadn't gone on active service for deployment to Korea. It was purely and simply a training battalion. Life had changed considerably from recruit training to corps training. Now you had a lot of live fire exercises and you had live ammunition going round you all the time and

03:23:30:02
the training was very intense. The preparation for war was very much put to the fore and we were very, very well trained. And I'm happy to say the Australian soldier is still very well trained for the duty he has to carry out. We had?

03:24:00:08
We weren't equipped very well in those days. We were still utilising World War II equipment, which didn't stand us in good stead in Korea because we had tropical studded boots and we were in a 30 degrees below zero thing, and the leather just froze up and the studs seemed to drive needles through your feet and all these things. And we had

03:24:30:15
a blanket and a greatcoat and a poncho and the equipment we had was not near as good as what it should have been for combat troops in a Korean theatre. We did survive by liberating a little bit of American equipment. Quite a lot of American equipment

03:25:00:15
was liberated as a matter of fact. Vehicles and everything, we liberated from the Americans. It just changed sides a little bit. But same war, same vehicle, but different drivers. And we then started to get, later in the campaign, we were getting issued with British winter equipment which helped us a hell of a lot, you know, and we

03:25:30:20
just got rid of all the Australian gear, yeah. It just wouldn't stand up to the cold at all.

Q: Now you were pretty excited about going to Korea. When you joined up that was, you said Korea was the big adventure that was looming. What was your understanding about what was happening there?

A: We were well briefed all the way through and what was occurring and who was in action, what units were in action, what, you know, what was happening. And you had to have that so that you

03:26:00:23
could build a pretty fair picture in your own mind. And all your training was virtually what happened in Korea today was happening to you in your training tomorrow sort of thing, you know. You were living that experience of yesterday in Korea, today in Australia, so that when you got into Korea it wasn't a great shock. The only thing that become the shock was the two-way rifle range, you know. You were shooting,

03:26:30:16
he was shooting at you and you were shooting at him and it was the other way around was you knew that anything that was coming in your direction wasn't going to hit you or wasn't supposed to hit you, it went overhead. But on a couple of occasions we lost a few blokes, lost a couple of blokes in training through accidental fire from weapons and everything, giving overhead cover and things like that.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit more about those accidents in training?

03:27:00:18

A: Yeah, well one of them, one of the accidents we had was brothers and they were firing a two inch mortar. One elevated the bail too much and the weapon hadn't been cleaned. The firing pin just engaged the cartridge and it just dribbled out the end of the bail but enough to

03:27:30:13
charge the bomb. And it landed just in front of them and exploded and one of the brothers was killed. The other one was wounded and a couple of other fellers were wounded as well, so that was one of them. And another we had, he was hit crossing a rope on a creek. One of the instructors got a little bit overzealous and lifted the Owen gun a little bit too high and hit him across the legs.

03:28:00:14
Another one drowned. He had all his equipment on on a river crossing and he couldn't get out of his equipment. There was no quick release on equipment in those days so he sank. And we tried to get him out but couldn't get him out and by the time we got him out, we were bashing him and everything. But nobody knew CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] in those days, see. He

03:28:30:16
probably would have been alive today if somebody had known a little bit about CPR. And there was another chap hit. We had a very low wire entanglement about a foot, or 500 mil [millimetres] if you like high, and the idea was you take your pack off and you crawl underneath it, pushing your pack and pulling your rifle underneath the wire. And a machine gun was shooting over the top of the wire

03:29:00:10
and it was pretty dusty and everything and the fellow couldn't breathe properly so he lifted his head up through the wire and crack, crack, crack. He got it. So all those things. But in those days too it was? See we had a percentage of accepted casualties in place.

Q: Yeah, can you just

03:29:30:10
say that again about the acceptable?

A: Yeah, well, you know, with the casualties that we did receive, we had a five per cent casualty rating, accepted casualty rating in training. And that particular training, we called that a battle inoculation training, so that was the last period of our training prior to going

03:30:00:15
overseas. And of course when we left Australia we had? I had 30 days' leave before I left Australia. I went home and took me a week to damn well get home from Puckapunyal, which I didn't have to go back to Puckapunyal. I went back to Sydney and was mustered at Marrickville and then flew out from Sydney

03:30:30:16
to Port Moresby, Jackson Strip in [Port] Moresby and then onto Okinawa. Okinawa to Iwo Jima to Kure so, and of course now was in the big land of the oriental people.

Q: Just before we go on with that, can I just ask you a little bit more about those accidents in training? How close were you to any of those blokes

03:31:00:14
who died during training?

A: The bloke that got shot, I was about two behind him. He was in front of me and there was another bloke between him and I and yeah, I was pretty close. We pulled him out of the wire in actual fact. But he was gone. We knew he was gone. He was gone.

Q: And how well did you know, him?

A: Good,

03:31:30:12
yeah. Yeah, it didn't please us. We all had to go back and go under the wire again and go up under the wire again and all sorts of things, you know.

Q: Immediately after?

A: Yep, to make sure that you wouldn't balk in future, you know.

Q: How hard was that?

A: Pretty hard, yeah, pretty hard. But you knew by then

03:32:00:15
too that the machine guns that were fixed on tripods on fixed lines and everything, their elevation had been corrected and they'd been test fired and everything so you knew that they were going over the top. And also you knew that if he'd have kept his bloody head down, right,

03:32:30:09
he would not have been hit. Or we thought that if they'd dusted it down, put water and stopped the dust and everything so you could breathe. But they said, "Well that's not part of the training." you know. "You've just got to put up with the conditions that are there. Nobody's going to go and sprinkle the soil with water in a dusty area to let you through in action." you know. "You've just got to go." So you could see that.

03:33:00:21
I mean it was nobody's fault, only the digger's fault. But he probably got a little bit claustrophobic and couldn't breathe through the dust and everything. And you're hot and you're breathing like bloody, you know, you're? It's the end of about a half mile run up hills and over obstacles and this was the last of an obstacle going up hill so yeah, you were

03:33:30:12
puffing and panting. And there he is trying to breathe, puffing and panting and he got dust and everything and it's coming down his throat and his lungs and he, you know, well we all had it. But he just couldn't do it and he stuck his head up. And to go back through again, well, you know, we've seen all the preparation done to make sure that the gun's elevation was high enough and all the rest of it, so it was

03:34:00:13
just a case of keep your stupid head down, right.

Q: How did those deaths in training affect everybody?

A: Can I say you accept it? You accept it to a certain degree because the training is very, very intense, you know. One of the things that you do as

03:34:30:11
training, you're given a shovel and you've got a whole heap of bits of dirt like a graves pit locked on the top of it and they say, "Go and dig a hole in there." right. And you've got to dig deep, you know. You've got 15 minutes I think they used to give you in that soil, and by gee, you just got down below 15 minutes and then you'd have to lay in this trench

03:35:00:07
that you'd dug and the instructors come along and checked and made sure that you were down deep enough and everything else like that. And that you had a clod of dirt in your hand, right, and then a Matilda tank came out of the scrub with its BSAs firing over the top of you. And then one track run over the top of you, right, and as it went over the top of you, you had to get up and throw this sticky bomb on the tank -

03:35:30:11
which was a lump of dirt, yeah. All that sort of training was, it was very realistic training. And we'd do section and platoon attacks, company attacks, under live fire, with live fire going in support, in front of us and all the rest of us. So to see somebody hit, it was purely accidental.

03:36:00:09
It was a mistake made by them. Or in the case of the mortar, the mortar hadn't been cleaned and those kids should have cleaned the bloody cannon anyhow. It was their responsibility, you know. Their mistake, they suffer. It's not pleasant. But you accepted the casualties in training because the training was

03:36:30:12
intense and meant to keep you alive. Most of the time military training is harder than action, sometimes.

Q: To what extent though did those deaths influence perhaps your thoughts about your own mortality?

A: No, gee whiz, no. You're still bulletproof and yeah. You're full of life and bulletproof.

03:37:00:16
No it was, you know, you learn not to make mistakes, simple. That's what you learnt from that, don't make mistakes, don't do something stupid. So it's a good learning curve as well, isn't it?

Q: During training, what did you discover about yourself in terms of your qualities as a soldier? What you were good at or what you weren't good at or??

03:37:30:18

A: I think I discovered that I could keep up and do as good a job as anybody else. I always strived to ensure that I never let the team down, never let myself down personally. And I found that I

03:38:00:14
could achieve quite a lot that others couldn't achieve, purely and simply because of determination I suppose. I was a pretty determined sort of a bloke, you know. If there was a challenge, I'd accept the challenge and I'd make a fistful of it, do the best I could about it.

03:38:30:10
So yeah, probably I learnt to accept challenges and I learnt that within myself I could do all of the things that were expected of me.

Q: What do you think had shaped that sort of determination that you had?

03:39:00:02

A: Probably the upbringing in the family, the responsibility of the family that? The responsibility and determination of having to care for the rest of the family or, you know, be part of the family unit and not let the family down, so you don't let a team down sort of thing, yeah. And I think it was

03:39:30:16
mainly the family upbringing and the environment in which I was brought up in a little country town and, you know, we were pretty adventurous type kids. We were pig hunting and everything when we were 13, 14. We were out there doing it, you know, and we were riding horses and bloody buck jumping cows and cattle and bloody calves and, you know, anything we could,

03:40:00:13
want to jump on anything's back and ride the guts out of it and, you know, yeah. So I think a lot of it was the environment we were brought up and the responsibility of the family that brought about those sort of things.

Keith Payne
1695
Tape 4

04:00:32:04

A: Every house had a weapon and strange, there wasn't the accidents and all this bloody murders and nonsense that you have, no, a different society.

Q: So by the time you were 18 you'd really sort of, you were quite, would you describe yourself as being mature, I mean in, how?

A: I was overseas when I was 18.

Q: How old were you before you actually, by the time you finished?

A: 17 when I went.

04:01:00:12

Q: So you were only 17?

A: Yeah.

Q: So you were just a kid. But how prepared did you feel to go into war?

A: I was a big kid. I was still, I was nearly 18 anyhow. But I just accepted it. I wasn't a kid any more. Well

04:01:30:10
you know, it's? Try and understand, we weren't kids any more, you know. We'd grown up. We'd grown up fast, too fast I suppose. But we knew life. We'd lived life, you know, God, dear oh dear and what grooming we never got on some aspects. We got overseas?

04:02:00:17
When we got overseas anyhow cause once we got to Japan we went through a whole heap of training again to? Once again, the conditions that were on at the time in Korea and Japan, climatic conditions? We were there acclimatising ready to go because they were virtually on the same parallel anyhow so the climatic conditions from here, transfer on the

04:02:30:11
OE Sang [?] and day and half later land in Korea at Pusan and then a day and a half by train and it all started to come to pieces, that holiday you were having. It was no longer an adventure.

Q: When did that happen? When was it no longer an adventure?

A: When somebody started shooting at me - wrong war.

Q: So how soon was that after arriving in Korea?

04:03:00:07

A: About two days, two and a half days, yeah. We moved into the line. We landed in Pusan and went overnight up to Seoul. We overnighted in Seoul. We went up to Hwach'on Bu the next day and that night we moved into the line.

Q
How much training had you done in Japan

04:03:30:21
before you went to?

A: About three and a half months, four months.

Q: So?

A: I was over 18 anyhow. I was?

Q: You had your 18th birthday in Japan?

A: Yeah.

Q: What did you do for your 18th birthday?

A: I think I slogged my guts out with a pack on my back between Aramura and Kure as a matter of fact. Was not a very nice birthday, yeah.

Q: What were your impressions of Japan?

A: Great, you know, oriental

04:04:00:14
country. The eyes were wide open, a young man's delight, you know, and the Musamays [?] were great, friendly people and yeah, I enjoyed Japan. I would have quite happily stayed there, you know. But they shipped me off home.

Q: What did you see of the effects of World War II in Japan?

A: Well I

04:04:30:13
went to Hiroshima. I didn't go down to Nagasaki. You saw a lot of the effects and, you know, the docks and everything, still early in the '50s, hadn't been built up and Hiro where we were was a port town anyhow and it had been blasted something terrible and all of the structures now were bamboo and

04:05:00:19
paper and everything, you know. They hadn't started to build and any decent building that was standing, the old Jap barracks never got hit. The POW barracks never got hit. But we occupied those and the Brits occupied the POW camp and the hospital. We took over the hospital.

04:05:30:11
We took over some of the bigger hotels and things like that that hadn't been knocked around and turned them into canteens and officers' quarters and all that sort of thing.

Q: Can you describe the living conditions that you were in in Japan?

A: Well in the camp itself we were all under tents, right. We did have, there was some buildings there. But they were mainly ablution blocks and

04:06:00:18
Q [quartermaster] stores and headquarters buildings and everything else like that. But all of the troops, we were all under tents in tent lines and I think the greatest cultural shock I received when I first, first time when I walked into the toilets and I was about doing my business and a Japanese lady walked in to start cleaning around and

04:06:30:24
no problem at all. I thought, "God!" bit of a cultural shock. But you soon got used to, you know, all those sort of things that, the different cultures of a different country, right through your service and everything else like that. And Korea was once again a country that was now pounded by war and there was refugees

04:07:00:23
and it was of filth and? Though they were a clean people. They tried to keep things clean. But there was, you know, they were very nomadic because of their refugee status. They'd be here and they'd gone and, you know, the war moved, they moved and yeah.

Q: You said you went to Hiroshima. How did seeing that impact on you?

04:07:30:08

A: I was rather startled I think to see the devastation of one bomb. I think that impressed me rather than I did think about all the people that were killed. But that was, "Okay so that happened." but

04:08:00:24
to see the destruction that one bomb had done, you know. Cause we're now training and we'd seen bombs land and they blew big holes in the ground, and we'd seen artillery shells and mortar shells and everything. But nothing like this. This was just complete and twisted steel girders and God, dear oh dear and when you think that it was one bomb,

04:08:30:17
you know. The casualties didn't sort of, that didn't worry me at all, right. I think it was the devastation and the effects of one bomb that more impressed me than anything else.

Q: And what about the Japanese people, how did they strike you?

A: They just wanted to get on with life. They had

04:09:00:18
no animosity towards us. I think they realised that. And a lot of the younger ones would say, "Well grandfathers started the war, so we had to suffer because they made the mistake of starting, going to war. They should not have gone to war." so they weren't blaming us. They were blaming the grandfathers

04:09:30:07
for putting Japan in the war.

Q: Now you were 18 years old, what were your political views about Australia's role in Korea, what we were doing there?

A: Yeah, well once again we were pretty indoctrinated towards that too. The United Nations, see we knew we'd been through the League of Nations business and we knew the League of Nations had collapsed and

04:10:00:15
United Nations had taken over, and this was the first time that the United Nations was called upon as a unity to exercise its charter, and we knew quite well that this was what the rest of the world wanted, right, and that the

04:10:30:08
Australian government was complying to that. I mean there was no anti-Korean feeling or anything in those days. It was a forgotten war really, you know, most people just forgot about it. It happened too soon after the other one. They all thought it was part of the other one, you know, part and parcel.

Q: Before you left Australia, what was the atmosphere like in terms of that fear perhaps of a

04:11:00:14
communist threat or that whole sort of Cold War period?

A: I don't think the Cold War period had really struck Australia. I don't think it really struck Australia until probably about 1953. We knew the Russian bear was there. But

04:11:30:14
we? I don't think the Australian citizen really had any thought or anything about the Cold War, right, at that stage. By gee, they did by 1953 though.

Q: So by the time you arrived in Korea, what was the situation in terms of what was happening there?

A: Okay, tactically on the ground at that time

04:12:00:17
the line had started to stabilise. The United Nations forces had pushed the North Korean and Chinese forces back north of the Yalu River and then they'd subsequently come down again and stabilised the other

04:12:30:12
side of the Imjin River on the 38th parallel, or just north of the 38th parallel. So when I got there we'd just gone into the final defensive stage of the war. We were still pushing forward in small groups. But more we were stabilising on the defensive line, rather than heading

04:13:00:22
north and at that time there was drifting in the wind. But though nothing, no negotiations had taken place or anything. They were still talking in Paris about having a negotiated peace settlement or something, you know. But nothing ever happened at that time. But it had certainly happened by the

04:13:30:10
end of or mid 1953. Mid 1953 they had negotiated and they sat at that table and we used to watch the light at P'anmunjom, the searchlight up there, all the time and say, "Well, when it blinks out we know that they're going to call the show off." you know. And of course, strange as it may seem also because they'd started to go

04:14:00:08
into this stabilised defensive line and they were starting to talk about, you know, having a negotiated settlement. We were saying, "Jesus, I hope it's not all over before I get there." you know. Yeah, it's strange isn't it? Yeah, nobody wanted the war to end until they had their little share of it, you know. Sorry state of affairs. But that's what it's like

04:14:30:19
so there we were. We'd gone into, by June of 1952, we'd gone into a stabilised defensive position along the line and we were building up, fortified the defensive positions all along the line.

Q: So can you describe for me that first battle when you said that you first realised it was a fight?

A: God yes, I did.

04:15:00:12
As I say, we went into a defensive posture and one of, the activities that we were carrying out then was we'd had our outposts out from our defensive position. We'd carry out fighting patrols, recce [reconnaissance] patrols. We'd go out and try and capture prisoners and everything else like this and we'd do a company attack on positions and on the enemy

04:15:30:17
positions and he'd do them on us and we'd do them like that. Reciprocal, back and, "Your turn next buddy." you know. So the first time I went out it was just towards the end of winter too and? No, it was the beginning of winter. And we'd just started to get the first of the snow and I was bitterly cold.

04:16:00:12
And we hadn't gone into smocks in those days. We were given a combat smock, a green one, and on these recce patrols and things like that we'd put on a white suit over the top of it, a snow suit. And we didn't have those and I was

04:16:30:04
forward scouting on this particular patrol and Charles [Charlie - the enemy] decided to take a few shots at us and I thought the whole bloody Chinese Army was shooting at me, you know. There was bits of snow going poong, poong, poong, all around me and I thought, "My God." you know, "this is not supposed to happen." But, and I felt rather large. I felt like an elephant, you know. I thought, "Jesus, I'm only a little bloke." you know.

04:17:00:07
I felt pretty big though and I thought the whole damn Chinese Army was shooting at me so. We got out of it anyhow, obviously, all right. But that was pretty frightening to be in a situation where, you know, a couple of nights before we were getting artillery shells and everything. But that's not personalised. It's a very personal sort of thing when somebody's shooting at you,

04:17:30:15
you know. You're the target. It's quite different when there's a lot of ammunition coming in and it's impersonalised. It's going anywhere. But once you know, that you're the target, it becomes a worry. In fact you say, "I hope you keep missing me, you bugger." you know.

Q: How far were you from the people who were shooting at you?

A: At that stage I think about 150 yards, yeah, not too far. But far enough.

04:18:00:02

Q: Could you see them?

A: I could see them all right, yeah, I could see them all right, yeah, you