Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Charles was my paternal grandfather. I clearly remember him telling me this story when I was a teenager 30 plus years ago. He said that his unit had been given an afternoon off, so they all headed straight to the beach for a swim, where he ran into his older brother. Apparently, if both parties agreed, the older sibling could have the younger seconded into his unit, which Charlie was happy to do. Turned out it was a very good thing he did, because his old unit went out on patrol the next morning, and were ambushed by the Japanese (not the word he used to describe them, but I’m trying to be polite!!) and wiped out to a man!! I also remember him showing me a photo of him in the Army Annual standing next to a mortar as it fired with a finger in one ear and a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, and a stack of mortar rounds in the background stacked almost head high, the end of the stack went past the edge of the photograph. He first pointed out the stack of rounds and said “We’d go through those in a day.” He then pointed to three men out of the 6 or 7 pictured and, pointing to each, said “he was our forward observer; he was killed a couple of days after this photo was taken, he was a good mate of mine, he didn’t make it back, and that bloke accidentally triggered a booby trap - a grenade blew him in half.” What struck me was how matter-of-fact he was when he told me - no emotion that I could see, it was like what he was describing to me was an every day occurrence; which I suppose it was from the time he left on active service with the 25th Infantry Battalion.