Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

EASTER SUNDAY, April 5, 2026. From my home, an 850 acre, mixed arable family farm in North Kent near Rochester and on the Greater London Border.

It's with a heavy heart that I write this because I feel it is has taken far too long to honour to my grandfather, Stan Marsh, and what he did during the war. My mother never spoke about him nor did his wife, Lillie, my grandmother who I grew up with in Cairns, FNQ. Grandma was often visiting and helping us out in the home.

I made an intense effort to find out who he was in April-May 2024. So exactly 24 months ago, around a month before his only child, my mother Desley Pudniks, nee Marsh, passed on the 16 June, '24. I had been going back and forth from the UK to Cairns to help my father, Karl Pudniks (born Peitzker) looked after Mum as she needed 24/7 care for years. I returned around 6-8 times from 2022 to 2026 for months to help my parents. During her terrible illness, my mother called for her Mum and Dad.

So this is a tribute to their difficult relationship; it was made traumatic and silent due largely to the frightening and threatening PTSD that Stan suffered postwar, from the scraps of info I gathered from relatives. The VWMA and an archivist, Robert, helped me locate Sidney Stanley Marsh, in their digital records. It was urgent because I literally had nothing to say about him for my mother's eulogy and desperately wanted to find out something about my grandfather for the funeral and her wake in July 2024.

I deep dived into his numerous military records online, from Cairns to Canberra, and discovered so many things about this heroic man that I am still processing it. It's only been 24 months so I plan to return to the records and do further research in other Australian archives once I am settled back in the South of France, my fave home in Europe. My mother, his daughter, always wanted to live on the Cote d'Azur so am honouring her as well by undertaking the next stage of uncovering more about Stan from there.

I have just uploaded the only photo of I have of Sidney Stanley Marsh. It is their wedding photo that my mother's cousin sent me long after Desley's funeral - late last year. I have no other which means I would very much like it to be uploaded to his records at the VWMA. He looks like Errol Flynn! That was a delightful discovery and I shared it with my brothers but they are taking longer than me to process it all given the (life)long family secrets and silences.

Who was Stan? He was a mechanic born in Bulli, coastal NSW - the part below Sydney. It looks idyllic and he was indeed a surfer from the 1920s! And also went fishing and played football. I know this from reading his medical reports because the army doctors made notes of his athleticism, fitness and sporting hobbies.

The military records I did a "crash course in" for his daughter's eulogy also revealed that Stan really wanted to become an airforce pilot. He was in the RAAF flight school and a LOT of his military records are all about these tests and preparation to become a wartime pilot. The examiners seemed to have given him a tough time as a working class, Aussie larriken. They ultimately failed him on "character grounds" asserting that he was "likely to lose his cool when landing".

This is sort of ironic - and clearly untrue - because of what happened next: Stan was sent to the UK to learn how to fly Spitfires and other WWII aircraft (this part of the story delights my British farmer-husband who has a penchant for collecting memorabilia about these planes and WWII history books specifically about the RAF). Clearly Stan could indeed fly well or they wouldn't have flown a cocky Aussie to England to be upskilled in their best warplanes in the middle of the war.

I say cocky because more of the hundreds of pages about my grandfather reveal that he was "formally disciplined" a couple of times for "drinking too much and telling a British superior officer to F--k off!". With remarks about grandad's rebellious character by the said Brit officer. From what I skim read in a flurry, trying to grasp who this completely unknown person was in relation to my mother, my grandfather didn't take kindly to BS and was a True Blue Aussie with regard to bossy Poms! A trait I must have inherited BTW... I've just spend 14 years of my life in Old Blighty and can't say I enjoyed that much of it overall.

Anyway, after training up the rural, sporty, confident mechanic from Bulli who passionately desired to be a pilot (my observations from the commentaries of the RAAF examiners and doctors about him), they sent him back to Far North Queensland. However he had met my grandmother in Sydney who was in the Women's Airforce Auxiliary. I don't know how and when exactly that love story began. I saw a photo of her in uniform and other women on an airfield when I was a child in Cairns. That pic has gone missing and nobody else seems to know anything about it.

Stan was then sent on "salvage missions" into the jungle in South East Asia. I don't know any more than that. From what I could glean from my cursory reading through the massive tranche of papers and records about him, he took leave once for R&R before the end of the war. It was somewhere in North QLD. And the rest is evidently a "Top Secret" mystery. Piecing together what he was trained for, it seems Stan was sent into the jungle to recover crashed aircraft and fly them back out for reuse.

This seems incredible but not far-fetched as my Brit husband informed me that Spitfires and other planes were increasingly scarce and they did everything they could to salvage the few they had left after warring with Nazi Germany and the invading Japanese forces. I guess someone with a tough attitude like my Grandad was up for rescuing the machines, given he was a trained mechanic already who really wanted to fly.

That's all I know so far. If anyone reading this knows more, please contact me at www.taniapeitzker.com You will see on my Author Portal (I am a published writer and a specialist in AI and Emerging Tech) that I am also writing a private blog for historians and genealogists. That's to help researchers about Stan, Lillie and my other set of grandparents who were also "war heroes".

Elisabeth and Karl Peitzker were in the German Resistance as German Jews and he was a highly trained, elite German officer and mountaineer as a professional vocation pre-war. Of course. More secrets and skeletons I am dragging out of the family's closet. Wish me luck - if you want to know more I can give you the password to that locked page on my website.

And thanks for any kind words of advice for my own research about Stan and Lillie - I would really like to know more about the WAAF. The RSL in Cairns - which I joined several years ago to honour my grandparents and many of my earlier Australian relatives in Victoria & NSW who were also in the military eg a Victorian great great aunt who was one of Australia's first radio operators! - then please do get in touch. As I've explained above, my siblings and I live in blissful ignorance of the sacrifices that have gone before us. But we are eternally grateful for them, that goes without saying.

With love on the day that an American colonel was rescued in Iran after his plane was shot down thus "triggering" this story ie me to offload it and upload my grandparents' wedding photo,
Tania
Dr. phil. Tania Peitzker