Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

William Lesley Wardley was born in Ormond on 31st October 1923 in Ormond, Victoria the second son of George Wardley and Lucy Moira Smith, the daughter of the well respected Kyneton photographer, William Hordle Smith.

His first memories were of the constant shifting around the countryside of Victoria as his father pursued his career with the railways.

The first town that had some impression on young William was Beulah where his father was relieving stationmaster for a time. As a mischievious young lad, he enjoyed the freedom and contentment of living in the bush, playing around the farms and  the general mucking  that all unfettered youngsters indulged in.

He began his education at Hopetoun Primary School under the stern but fair hand of Tom Skein who was “more sticks than carrot”. Unlike most teachers who made good use of the cane, Tom would only administer one or two “cuts” to those he deemed most deserving. After several more moves to Branxholme and Pirron Yallock the family returned to Hopetoun in 1930 where William continued his schooling and gained his merit certificate at the age of twelve, a great achievement as most students who attained this standard were fourteen or more. Bricky Brimer was the school bully and ruled with a rod of iron, it was rumoured that even Tom Skien was afraid of the lad.

About 1933 it was decided to build an additional room onto the school. It  was be to constructed of large blocks of limestone that were delivered to the school and cut on site by men wielding large cross cut saws. The blocks were kept wet to facilitate the sawing  and the young pupils watched in astonishment as the  metre square blocks were stacked one upon the other. It wasn’t long before the young students noticed that these blocks contained numerous fossils of shells, crabs and other small creatures and  they set about extracting them, using their maths compasses or indeed any other tool that presented itself. As the limestone dried out the task became more difficult and the holes became bigger. It wasn’t long before the pockmarked appearance of the newly laid walls came to the attention of Mr. Skein, who threatened any probing student with expulsion, or even death, unless the practice ceased immediately.

The school was right across from the railway station and William could gaze over at his father as he collected freight and generally organised the running of the large yard. The Railway Station in those days was the focal point of town activity, there were shearing sheds, the wheat stacks, goods trains coming and going continuously and a large turntable that was used to turn the locomotives around. Teams of draught horses would arrive on a regular basis and disgorge their loads of wheat into large pens constructed from corrugated iron to keep the mice out. Unfortunately, many arriving loads from the farms contained their own supply of mice and so the iron also kept them in. One dusty day, as the children were assembled in the schoolyard to recite their allegiance to the king, as they did every morning before the school day began, a team of three enormous draught horses took fright, broke away from the wagon they were pulling tipping it up in the process and charged through the schoolyard. Miraculously no one was injured. The children froze with shock as the bolting horses tore between them dragging their halters and chains, this is undoubtedly what kept them from harm. The poor beasts were rounded up and reattached to another wagon which was then stacked with two loads of wheat, the driver climbed up on the heap with his reins and whip and drove them mercilessly back around the school returning to the station to unload the bags onto the wheat elevators. When the job was finished they were last seen, sedately heading for home.

The bags of wheat were piled high  and often remained there for weeks on end. The roofing, also of corrugated iron, was constructed on the finished heap and lashed to the bags at the base to secure it. On one occasion an unusual squall passed through the town, and lifted the makeshift roofs from the stacks, hurling the sheets around the town. Now unsupported the great stacks slid one upon the other, spilling bags and releasing large numbers of rodents, and leaving quite a cleanup for the stationmaster and his staff. As the weeks passed  the ¼ acre stacks got lower,  as the bottom layer became exposed so would the scores of mice that had been breeding and feeding in the stacks. The older men would take to them with sticks and the young boys were invited to help with the roundup most of them eagerly accepted, evidently the girls would usually decline the invitation.

Come shearing time, large numbers of sheep would be driven to the station to be shorn, dipped and then returned to the farm. The wool would be baled and loaded onto the goods trains to be shipped to Melbourne. Many of the sheep would have lambs with them and after the shearing , dipping and somewhat rough treatment through the exit chute, it was not uncommon for them to become separated from their mothers. The lambs could no longer find their mother by smell, but the ewe’s usually knew their lambs. The whole mob would be corralled together and most families would be reunited but there was always a few orphans and young William would plead with his mother to keep one. She usually relented and as a result there was always a pet lamb kept at the small holding attached to the railway supplied house. One particular lamb grew to be a rather large ram and took great delight in rounding up the chickens, scattering them to the wind and then rounding them up again. The chickens refused to lay and the ram had to go. It wasn’t until many years later that William was told that it had gone to the butchers !

It was while they were living in Hopetoun that the Wardley household first experienced the luxury of electric power. They had only one light in the middle of the kitchen fitted with a chinaman’s hat shade and a low wattage globe. Lucy was fortunate enough to own an electric iron and when required the light globe was removed and the iron plugged in. Eventually they acquired a double adaptor and Lucy was able to iron at night. The electricity was generated in the town by an enormous diesel engine with two ten foot flywheels driven by long flat belts. The electricity was very expensive and prone to regular breakdowns, it was only the hospital that had a standby supply.

One of the most fascinating things that William recalls was the book press. It was a large screw down press that was filled each night with all the important documents and receipts from the station. It was supposed to protect them in the event of a fire. One night at Beulah there was a fire and William recalls people running in all directions and his father stumbling around in the dark getting dressed to attend at the station. The fire was fierce and all that remained in the press was pile of ashes. This was not the worst. Young William had his money tin deposited in the safe at the railway station and upon recovery it was found to be a molten mass of tin, copper and silver. He treasured it for many years until it was eventually lost when he went away to the war.

All these marvellous events and inventions were what amazed young William as he grew up in the 20’s and 30’s.

During the depression years all public servants took a 10% pay cut, this created hardship for George and his family, but fortunately he remained at work so the family rode out the worst of the period with a lot less discomfort than many others at that time, especially in a small country town. Lucy was very active with the local church and charity groups, and was always willing to help a person in need. In those early years of the 20th century the bank managers, doctors, postmasters and stationmasters were reasonably well off and generally the most respected of the townspeople. People could come to them for advice and they could sign or witness many types of documents.

The  country way of life agreed with the young boy and he recalled these days with great affection.

In about 1937 it was time for the family to move on. William was now fourteen and his young brother George was five. George Snr. was sent to Narre Warren and William attended Dandenong High School with his two cousins Heather and Ailsa Smith, to finish his education. He yearned to return to the country, but this was not to happen.

On leaving school he got a job at Myers in the city and would commute each day from Narre Warren. It was not long before World War 2 put an end to his career in retailing.

A call was sent out for all able bodied young men to enlist. William couldn’t wait and like so many young men the perceived glamour of the airforce was what attracted him, he wanted to fly a spitfire. He had already joined the army cadets at sixteen when the Battle of Britain occurred and prayed that the war would not finish before he had a chance to join the frontlines. He  filled out his application form in October 1941and waited for the call to arms. When it came he passed the airforce written tests but at the medical examination they discovered that he was colour blind, so he immediately enlisted in the army in November 1941. A short time later the Japanese bombed Pearl harbour, the war had escalated and Bill got the call to bring his toothbrush on 31st December 1941 –  New Years Eve.

He had already completed the formalities and was signed up with the 19th Light Horse Machine Gunners as the romantically named Trooper Wardley. Within the week he was transferred to Torquay in an ill fitting uniform and boots and was put into training to protect Port Phillip Bay from a Japanese invasion.

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William Lesley Wardley was born in Ormond on 31st October 1923 in Ormond, Victoria the second son of George Wardley and Lucy Moira Smith, the daughter of the well respected Kyneton photographer, William Hordle Smith.

I spoke to him on the 26th May 2000 and the following are his fondest memories until 1948 when he met Esther Ursula Campbell.

“Well, of course I don’t remember 1923, I s’pose 1927 or 28. My father was in the railways as a stationmaster, he most likely wasn’t a stationmaster [initially], but he was eventually the youngest  person to become a stationmaster. They had some sort of scheme after the first World War, like an accelerated school for returned servicemen.

“In the first World War he was an ANZAC and as a matter of interest, something he was always very proud of, his number was 48 in Victoria, he was the 48th  Victorian to enlist. However, he was at ANZAC and then he was in France where  he got gassed, but not badly and  he was wounded in the ankle, right through from one side to the other. He went to hospital in England and I think he remained there until after the war. Then he came home and went back to the railways where he had been before he went away, this was after 1918.

“He did the course of study while he continued to work for the railways in the city and passed very well, he was well thought of and got sent to Beulah, which at that time was a pretty small station. That must have been in 1923 or 24. I was born in Ormond and we went to the country some time after that. I lived in Beulah when I was very small, that’s up in the Mallee, [but] I don’t remember much about [it]. As a matter of fact I think that he was an assistant stationmaster, but to be an assistant you had to pass the stationmaster’s exam.  Then for some reason, of which I was not aware of, he got a transfer to Creighton, and then we went to Hopetoun in about 1927 where I started school. We were there for a short period and then we went to Branxholme. They used to get shunted around a lot the new stationmasters, to get experience. I remember Branxholme well, [although] it was only a whistle stop. Then we went to Pirron Yallock, down near Colac. We then returned to Hopetoun where I continued at school, I suppose at this time I was about seven or eight.

“I remember old Tom Skien, he was a great teacher, I was very fond of Tom. He was one of those unusual teachers that didn’t belt you everytime you did something wrong. It was more sticks than carrots going to school then, but we all accepted it. And even when you were a little bloke you’d get a couple of cuts, not hard though. But once you reached the age of responsibility which was about seven, they belted the tar out of you if you did anything wrong.

“We were there for a few years and I got my merit certificate at the age of twelve, which was a fine achievement, because in those days you were assumed to get that at fourteen, that’s when you left primary school. My life living in the bush was terrific. It was a great life. There was all sorts of fun things to do, you did pretty much what you wanted.

“I remember Bricky Brimer, he was a fat, tough kid and he ruled the school with a rod of iron. I think even old Tom Skien was a bit scared of him.

“I [also] remember while I was at Hopetoun, they built a new room on the school and they bought these enormous blocks of  some form of limestone from South Australia. It was named after the town it came from Mount Gambier or whatever. It used to come in these big blocks, they would have been about 3 foot cube and they were soft and sloppy because they were full of water. They kept them wet and then the labourers came in with big cross-cut saws and cut them into bricks. They cut quite easily zip, zip, zip and they’d be through it, I guess that’s why they kept them wet. They built the school room while they were still damp and they were full of fossils, really good fossils, numerous shells and crabs and all sorts of interesting things and we used to love digging them out. But after a while it was noticed that the school was looking a bit bodgy, because as the stuff dried out you had to dig a bigger hole. So sanctions were imposed and we were threatened with death if you started poking your compass into the limestone bricks. Anyhow I was very happy at that school.

“[The school]  was right near the station and I can remember all these enormous horse teams, six or eight draught horses, bringing in these enormous wagons of wheat to the wheat stacks. There were no silos then and they used to stack the wheat inside corrugated iron fences to keep the mice out. Of course it didn’t work because they bought a lot of mice in the bags they bought in from the farms. It was a fascinating sight to see, although it caused one hell of a lot of dust.

“I remember once a team bolted and broke away from the wagon and tipped it over and the horses bolted right through the school yard where we were all lined up at 9 o’ clock saying honour the king and honour the flag, we used to say that every morning in those days, and the next thing three enormous draught horses, still with their chains and their collars around them charged through the schoolyard with us all lined up, and it was a miracle they went right through us, right down the line, we didn’t have time to scatter. We were all sort of stunned, which was probably a good thing – nobody was hurt. A lot of us were pretty scared, including me.

“Anyway, they rounded up the poor horses put them back on the wagon, put all the wheat back on, apart from the bags that were broken, and then they put another wagon load on top. Then the driver got up with his whip – boy he made those poor, bloody horses work. He made them drag this enormous load right round the town and we were allowed to watch. They were sort of leaning forward and digging their hooves in. I can see it now, with such clarity, it was quite dramatic. So they bought them back and unloaded the two wagon loads off them. They used to go up on elevators as they built the stacks. Then they took the horses, put them  in the traces and they trotted off home, very sedately.

“Another thing about the wheat stacks, they’d be there for maybe two or three months, they used to put a corrugated itron roof on it and lash it down to the bags. At the end of winter about three months after the harvest was in and the stacks, which were the size of a house block and there maybe three or four of them right beside the railway line. When they were getting down to the bottom layer we kids, if we were good, were allowed to go in, the girls didn’t much want to, but nobody had to. Because when they got to the last layer it would be swarming with mice, literally millions of mice. They used to go round wacking them with sticks, we weren’t allowed to do that, but we were allowed to watch.

“Anyway, I remember another occasion when we got a storm, which was pretty unusual a wind storm up there, and it lifted the lid of this enormous stack , which was built in a wooden frame and then wired to the bags of wheat so the bags kept it down – this time the bags didn’t keep ‘em down so the lid lifted and there was sheets of iron flying everywhere, like a tempest and then the stacks slowly started to slide and I was there about half an hour later. In the country if there was anything going on you put your hat on and you went. The stack slowly subsided into a great heap of broken bags. I tell you there was wheat and mice and God knows whatever else spread everywhere. That was the most dramatic thing I remember about my youth. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

“Then the sheep used to come in, there was a shearing shed in the railway yards, it was a little industrial complex to itself in those days. The whole economy of the place revolved around it.

“There was goods trains coming and going all the time, puffy trains of course. There was a big turntable to turn the engine around, engineers to check motors and so on.

“I often went to work with dad, but you got used to it and it was pretty boring most of the time, except when they were bringing in the wheat or when the flocks of sheep used to come into the shearing shed.

“When a flock of a few hundred  sheep came in to be shorn, they’d be from one fellow one week and someone else the next. Gee, those shearers used to work hard. They’d bale the wool up, there wasn’t any hydraulic rams, it was all done by hand with jacks. The shearing gear then, they didn’t have cable drives like we’ve got now, it was revolving rods in a complex sort of thing in tubes with universal joints, very heavy things to use, whereas these days they’re elctric or on a cable.

“Every year there would be a few lambs lost, they’d lose their mothers at the shearing shed and they used to put them in with the sheep and sooner or later they’d find their mother or their mother would find them. But because the mothers had just been subject to a certain amount of shock, tipped on their back and fed down a chute, some of them were too confused to find their lambs. So when the flock had to go there were always a dozen or so lambs left there and you could have them if you wanted them. Every year I’d go home to mum and say -Mum can I have a lamb, can I have a lamb and she always said no, no, no. Eventually of course she said yes, yes, yes. So all my life I had a pet lamb and I’d feed it and love it until it grew up then it was just a pest through the neighbourhood. When they grow up and they’re fully adult they’re pretty strong and they can break their way through fences and everything. But we had one used to get our poultry, which we kept in a cage in the yard. We had plenty of yard about half an acre or so, where you could keep a cow or whatever. Mum used to let the poultry out every morning and this particular lamb got to the stage where it was a large sheep, it used to round them up like a sheep dog back in the cage. When they’d settle down there, it would go in and stir them up and kick them out, chase them around the yard then round them up again. So it had to go. I didn’t know until many years later, mum gave him to the butcher. But that’s what life was like then, I’ve got no complaints about my life, my early life.

“Mum, as far as I can remember, kept house cooking and cleaning and she did good works for the Anglican Church and that sort of thing. And I suppose she yapped over the fence. I don’t really know, she always seemed to be busy. She had to wash by hand, she had an old wood stove, she used to iron – all that sort of jazz.

“It was while we were at Hopetoun we got electricity. No power points. Just light. And of course, it was generated in the town. We had one of those chinaman hat shades with a very low wattage globe, because it was horrendously expensive. We had one light in the kitchen which hung very low and the reason for that was that was that the electric iron had an electric globe plug on the end and you could swap them around. Eventualy we got a double adapter with the light sticking out one side. It cost you a lot more money in those days to have just one power point in your house.

“The generating place, you were only allowed in with your parents, had what looked to me like an enormous generator with two ten foot flywheels and a very long, flat belt. V belts weren’t used in those days. I suppose it had a throw of twenty or twenty five feet from the power source to the generator, which used to pack it in pretty often. The lights would all go out. They had a smaller generator which was just for the hospital, maybe the banks, particularly for the hospital and that had its own motor and would cut in if the big one packed up.

“So they’re the things that fascinated me in my youth.

“During the depression years, I think all public servants, which of course included the railways, took a ten percent pay cut all round. But they still had a job. They were well off compared to a lot of others. We were well off and in those days, the doctor, the bank manager, the stationmaster and the postmaster were high society, as well as the people who had a lot of money. People used to go to them for advice, they could sign documents and that sort of jazz. There were still a lot of people around who couldn’t read or write. They had the sort of capacity that a JP has today.

“The most fascinating thing was the book press, all the important documents used to go into it. Two big metal plates and they screwed it down with a knob on top. All the important books and documents went into one of those overnight, screwed down in case of a fire. Well at Beulah, I think it was, there was a fire. And I remember that, just that I woke up in themiddle of the night, everyone was rushing round and the old man was getting his pants on going off to the station. Anyway it burnt down and the books and book prtess were pretty well destroyed. It was such a fierce fire, it burnt in from the edges.  I had some money in a money box, I used to keep it in the safe up at the station, just because I thought that was a big deal. For years later I had this melted, mass of silver that came out of my money box. I still had it when I went off to war.

“I left Hopetoun when I was about 13, about 1936. That was the end of my country life unfortunately and we came down to Narre Warren, and I went to Dandenong High School, which was pretty humdrum. It wasn’t a very good school I don’t think, nobody was very happy with it. My cousin, Heather Smith daughter of Uncle Ken, who lived in Dandenong with his wife, a fat, jolly woman, did very well there much to my everlasting grief. Ken had two daughters Heather and Ailsa. Heather was the brain, she went onto University, when I went to the war. They moved and I’ve never seen them from that day to this. Mum used to tell me that Heather had a spectacular job, she did very well at uni, she was secretary of some very high grade official, a professor or something, at the University of South Australia. Then she married a peasant, a small farmer, and mum lost track of her.

“So off I went to war, I came home and went to hospital for eighteen months or so.

“I put my name down, there was a call up. You got a form to fill in when you turned eighteen. Eventually you would be called up. They called us in groups like they did for Vietnam. I was in the cadets, the army cadets not the school cadets. The army used to run what they called senior cadets, which was pretty hot stuff. It was just like army training, like the army reserve.

“I was terrified that the war would be over before I got into it. I tried to join the Air Force because everybody wanted to fly. Anybody worth his salt wanted to fly a spitfire. This was after the Battle of Britain, I was only sixteen when that occurred. So when I went to join the Airforce they seemed to do things back to front. I did the written exam and then the health thing. Ithink it would have made more sense to go the other way round. They found out that I was colour blind, so I put my name down immediately to go into the army, that must have been about November. I had put  my application in when I turned eighteen in October. They told me that it would be two or three months or something. Well of course when I failed the airforce exam, that was about a week before Pearl Harbour so thenext thing I knew I got my call to bring my toothbrush and everything and that was on New Years Eve, 31st December 1941.

“I went in and had already done the preliminaries, so I went into the army straight away. I became a light horse machine gunner in the 19th Light Horse Machine Gun Battalion. That was the traditional name they actually had no horses. I was never a private in the army. I was Trooper Wardley, that had a nice romantic ring to it. So on the 31st December 1941, I was in the army, sworn in, with an ill fitting uniform, some boots but no weapons or anything. About a week later I was officially a machine gunner and I was down on the coast near Torquay, to stop the Japs in their tracks. I still don’t know why they thought they’d come in the back door. There was practically nothing there.

“The thing I remember about that was the field artillery, they were down there too. They were going to shoot a target on the ocean. These were made like big trellaces and sat on pontoons, not much bulk but you could see them. So our CO, Jones I think it was a nice guy, arranged for us to join in the shoot with our Vickers machine guns, with a big round barrel ful of water, I was about the number five on the gun with no chance of getting behind it at that stage. We went down to the beach early one morning. There were three targets and the arrangement was as soon as the first artillery gun fired the machine guns could cut in, mind you we were just visitors. I think at that time we had about 30 or 36 machine guns. We  got it all set up and eberyone was ready. The boss was going around and saying ‘Don’t fire ‘til you here them start..’. So the battery fired a cell of shells and missed and with that thirty odd machine guns opened up, in about five seconds, the targets were gone. They were gone. We chopped them to pieces. If a shell hit them, it would just make a hole, that was the whole idea of the exercise. But that’s not the way machine guns work. There was an awful mass of metal, the artillery boys were furious, we’d spoilt their game. We were sort of sent home in disgrace, because it was a bit irregular that that sort of thing should happen. Of course we were very cock o’ hoop about that. That must have been about the end of January, I was real green then. Just as well they didn’t let me near a machine gun.

“The next thing I knew I was on a train to Darwin in time for the first air raid on the 14th of February 1942. On the way through I’d been in the Alice Springs Hospital, we’d just had our vaccinations and mine went bad. We were travelling in cattle trucks that had just been hosed out and I got a bit of cow dung or something while I was asleep and I was real crook. I went to the hospital in Alice Springs for a few days.

“I’d been in Darwin about three days when the first bomb dropped, I was on guard at the front gate with my rifle in my hand, when they started dropping. I wasn’t really scared, truly, at that stage. I was more interested. It was right on the main road, the Stuart Highway I guess, into Darwin. It was just like army camps all over the place then. Corrugated iron rooves and a little guard box like you see outsied Buckingham Palace.

“When the bomb lands three hundred yards from you, you might hear a bit of shrapnel and see a lot of smoke, but I didn’t find it immediately terrifying. What is scary is when they drop a stick and it goes boom, boom, boom, and it’s coming your way. I tell you what, that’s scary – will it stop before it gets to you ? That’s the thing that impressed memost about the war. It was my first experience of being shot at and that. And all the Jap zeroes were zipping up and down the main road. There were six of us on guard and I happened to be the one at the beginning in the little hut. When my two hours was up another bloke came along with the sergeant to relieve me and he stood in the hut. In the meantime there were zeroes from time to time running up the road, dropping bombs. We all shot at them with our 303 rifles and probably had no hope of hitting them. Although we did shoot one zero down, not me personally, but some of the other guys set up machine guns. They didn’t have proper arrangements for anti aircraft so they put them on the backs of trucks and so on and we got creditied with one zero in our battle honours.

“This is the military mind at work. They had huge, military oil tanks in Darwin Harbour. And some wise bugger had put a couple of machine guns up on top of these tanks wiith sand bags round them. What did they think the bloody Japs were trying to bomb ? The oil tanks. And they got ‘em. There was poor buggers still in Heidelberg after the war, living in baths of olive oil from the horrific burns they got back then. That was the military mind at work.

“Anyway, they wrecked Darrwin and it came out in the paper the next day. They denied that anyone was hurt and that it was just a minor skirmish. It was  a slaughter really.

“They knew there was some planes coming. But they were expecting Kitty Hawk fighters from America. They were being flown from somewhere or other and that’s who they thought it was. They didn’t have radar but outlying posts. Nobody was ready for it. The people in the post office, the poor buggers, that’s where the first bomb hit. The Japs knew what they were doing because it cut off all communications. I think there were nine or ten people in there, bang they were all killed right away. All civilians of course.

“The poor wharfies, it’s the only time I felt sorry for wharfies. There was a big long wharf and they were unloading a ship full of military supplies, mostly ammunition and bombs and so on. The Japs knew what every ship had in it. They only went for the those that had important stores. I suppose this jetty was a quarter of a mile long and one of the first bombs, which may have been meant, cut the jetty. Then they concentrated on the ship, and the wharfies, poor buggers, had no where to go. That was called the “Zalandia” I think, that ship. Then the war went on and life went on.

“After Darwin we went to Queensland for a quick training course and then to Moratai on an old ship called the “Cape Mendasino”. Cape Mendasino” is the western most point of North America, down in California. It was a so called ‘troop ship’ and I’ve never seen such a sight in my life. Up on the bows there was a row of toilets bowls, about twenty or twenty five feet long. They were about six inches apart and you’d sit there talking to people you’d never seen before in your life. They emptied into big holding tanks and then after dark the whole lot would be pumped into the sea, and you knew when they were pumping them out.

Moratai is in the East Indies, it’s part of Indonesia now. Half of it the Japs had and the other half we had and we spent a couple of weeks poking around. There was a battalion of black Americans, in those days the American army was divided into black and white battalions, and they had a long barb wire fence and as long as the Japs stayed on their side they left them alone they were being blockaded and starved out. If the poor buggers tried to get some food they’d take shots at them but other than that they just sat around all day. It must have been a very boring life. We got all sorts of new equipment flame throwers, for God’s sake, we were trained to use those, I’m glad I didn’t get one.

“We went to Balik Papin then Borneo, where I was when the war ended. The end was obvious to us but a lot of the Japs didn’t know and some that did were determined not to give up. I knew a couple of blokes that were killed after the war was over.

“Then we went back to Moratai to be re-equipped the onto Japan, Hiroshima, as an occupation force. COF, Commonwealth Occupation Force. At this time I was in the 2nd 31st platoon in the 7th division and for a time I was platoon sergeant.

“When we first landed there we were in shorts and shirts and there was snow on the ground. We stayed in big tin sheds with forty four gallon drums for heating and there was no doctor. I was in the advance party the first hundred or so. I got really crook there with pleurisy, I thought I was going to die and in fact I wished I would. Anyway someone got some medics from a yank unit nearby. A guy came over and said “I think you’ve got pleurisy Oz…” they used to call us Oz then, it wasn’t until later they called us Auzzie. He gave me a handful of sulphur tablets because you couldn’t get penicillin then for anything but wounds. My comrades in arms stuffed these things into me for nearly a month before I recovered.

“We were there for the best part of twelve months then I got sent home for an officer training school, I’d half decided to stay in the army. But when I got back I had the wog. I probably picked that up in Japan when I was sick with the pleurisy. So I arrived home and got sent to hospital and that’s where I met my dear Doonie. I got married and you know the rest.