Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Memoirs of a Machine Gunner 

by Dr Nigel Starke 

Random chance, inspired by unaccountable forces of fate, can play its part in military service. In the case of Ron Graetz, fate intervened on 1 February 1942 in the improbable shape of a British military policeman.

He served as a despatch rider with the 2/3rd Australian Machine Gun Battalion in the Syrian campaign. Following its conclusion, with the battalion shipping out, Ron rode his Norton down to the wharf at Port Tewfik, on the Suez Canal, ready to board the Orcades. He dumped the bike and raced up the gangway. “Hold everything!” shouted the MP. “Who owns this bike?” Naturally, his good mates in the 2/3rd pointed to Ron. The MP ordered him back on shore, made him stay with the Norton – which, along with Ron himself, was later loaded onto the freighter Industria. It sailed all the way to Fremantle, and then to Adelaide. The helpful ‘dobbers’ on the Orcades had, in the meantime, been diverted to the disastrous Java conflict with Japan’s superior forces. Those who survived it became prisoners of war; for many, that would mean slave labour on the Burma Railway.

Ron Graetz’s military experiences were dramatically at variance with his quiet, eminently predictable, pre-war calling. He had begun work at 14 (“one of the few people who did have a job”, as he remembered it) to drive a bread delivery cart for Klingbiel Bakery, Murray Bridge. As his employer’s name, and the name Graetz, would suggest, the region contained a strong German heritage. This factor had been brought home, with a remarkable lack of sympathy, to his bereaved grandmother in World War 1. Her son John was killed at Pozières, on the Somme; an official duly called at her home to convey the government’s regrets. Later that same week, the family’s surname inspired another official to call as well – this time, to question her loyalty, as a citizen of German origin, towards the Australian war effort.

Her grandson’s life on the bread cart, though, was generally free of intrusion of any sort. The horses were so accustomed to the daily round that Ron could leap off the cart at one customer’s home, walk to the back of the property, climb over the fence, and find the horse waiting for him at the next delivery address.  The only time that a horse wandered off course was during the great heatwave of 1939, when at one point Adelaide recorded its highest ever temperature of 117.7F (47.6C). He found it wallowing in the cooling water of the Murray River.

The river was a favourite place for the delivery driver too. A man of impressive physique, he came from a family with a rowing tradition; his father, Herbert Ephraim Graetz, had been a member of the Murray Bridge national champion eight representing Australia at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Ron himself was selected to represent South Australia at the 1940 King’s Cup, only to find the event abandoned because of hostilities. He picked up a .303 instead of his blade, and went to war.

He found that the prevailing mood at the recruiting depot was a casual one, with wisecracks flying about. “Come over here, you blokes. We’ll be mechanised,” called a spruiker for the machine gunners. “The other blokes’ll be walking.” That, thought Ron, made sense; so he enlisted in the 2/3rd – on the same day as Colonel Blackburn. He soon found that his CO believed in physical fitness. As shown in the photograph displayed at the end of this account (with Ron Graetz highlighted), the battalion marched from Torrens Parade Ground into the city of Adelaide in early January 1941. From there, they marched to the Warradale depot, 12km distant, and then to Woodside – a further 43km away in the Adelaide Hills. That was just the start of Colonel Blackburn’s toughening-up campaign. The next part was even harder: a 310km bivouac to the coastal town of Victor Harbor and back. There were moments of respite, however: cricket matches against teams from country towns en route, beer from roadside pubs, and a dance at the Victor Harbor Mechanics Institute. As John Bellair writes, in his official unit history: ‘All ranks had received much kindness and generous hospitality from the people of South Australia, a fact indicated by a sudden increase in the incidence of matrimony.’

Ron Graetz, the tall, handsome baker’s roundsman from Murray Bridge, remained unattached in that regard – although, as he recalled 74 years later: “I didn’t get many knock-backs.” Travel, in the meantime, was seduction enough: to Colombo, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria. Ron seized this opportunity to record exotic views for posterity, buying himself a camera (of the ‘Coronet’ brand) in Jerusalem. His album, ever after, would display images of the Cedars of Lebanon, of orange groves and date palms, of suntanned men grinning under their slouch hats in the desert, of the Temple of Jupiter in Baalbeck, and even of a Vichy French tank knocked out by Allied action.

That tank had nearly brought Ron’s own war to an early end. He and his mate Norm Wilkinson had been ordered, with others, to ‘dig in’; but they struck rock, and had to shelter behind a thoroughly inadequate soil-and-sand parapet rather than a trench. At two in the morning, the tank rumbled menacingly into earshot and began strafing the Australians’ position with machine gun fire: “Poor old Norm was shaking like a leaf. I was frightened too, all right, but I wasn’t shaking.” They eventually found better protection behind some rocks. The Vichy French tank had been a constant irritant to the unit, making frequent sorties from Fort Merdjayoun, until an anti-tank gun was finally brought into action, scoring seven direct hits in a thunderous salvo. The tank’s war was over; Ron’s went on.

It continued, at this juncture, in an unexpected manner – as demonstrated by another of his photographs, this time of Ron Graetz himself as a despatch rider on a 3.5 side-valve Norton motorcycle. The coveted, if often vulnerable, selection as a despatch rider for Lieutenant Hugh Weir of A Company had come his way because his predecessor broke a leg when (so it was said) taking evasive action from the enemy; despatch riders were popular targets for the Vichy French artillery.

The campaign as a whole was a short, but bloody, one. According to Australian War Memorial records, Australian casualties during the fighting in Syria and Lebanon numbered 416 killed and 1,136 wounded. Approximately 1,000 Vichy French troops were killed in this theatre of war. For its part, the 2/3rd Australian Machine Gun Battalion supported two infantry units in particular: the 2/2nd Pioneers and the 2/27th Battalion. “The infantry had heavy casualties in Syria,” Ron Graetz recalled. “We took our hats off to them … salt of the Earth.” Much later, in New Guinea, he (along with other members of the re-formed 2/3rd) would be deployed as an infantryman himself. His role in action against the Vichy French, in the meantime, had its own hazard: the sheer noise of the Vickers machine gun. As a No. 2, with his left ear perilously close to the gun: “The blast was so bad that sometimes, for days and days afterwards, you could see blokes’ lips moving but you couldn’t hear anything.” His hearing was permanently, and seriously, affected as a result. Such damage was hardly surprising when it is realised that the Vickers would fire up to 500 rounds a minute.

Following the Vichy French surrender, though, lighter moments could be enjoyed: the distilling of ‘home-made’ whisky on which “the cooks got drunk for a week”; a watermelon, dropped with deliberate accuracy from a balcony, onto an Australian officer’s head; and an incident in which Ron himself rode a donkey, naked, up and down the stairs in their billet.

But on returning to Australia early in 1942, he could no longer be just one of the boys. Only some 200 members of the original 2/3rd, those who had avoided the ill-fated Orcades voyage to Java, were left. The others had become prisoners of war. When the battalion was being re-formed, with reinforcements, Ron was called up by the new CO, Lieutenant Colonel Sidney Reed (“A good bloke, old Sid”). Promotion was ordered, over Ron’s initial objections: “I don’t want stripes,” he said. Colonel Reed pointed out in response that Ron – as a veteran of the Syrian campaign – would not like to be “bossed around” by the newcomers. He was made up to corporal consequently, and then (after attending specialist weapons courses) to platoon sergeant.

They re-grouped, first at Cowra, and then on the Atherton Tablelands, before going into action in New Guinea towards the end of 1944. For Ron, the only reverse within the intervening two years had been lending £2 to an evasive warrant officer; he was never repaid.

There were more serious challenges to confront in New Guinea, especially when Ron became an acting platoon commander. The terrain was daunting, the climate oppressive, booby traps had to be rigged each night, and the enemy (the Japanese) impressed him as remorselessly “cruel” and “filthy”. “We killed a few of them,” was Ron’s laconic observation. Perhaps the most vivid memory of those times was seeing evidence of Japanese cannibalism – of their own kind and, in one singularly distressing incident, of a slain Australian soldier. In each instance, the Japanese had eaten flesh from the thigh. As Ron put it: “When we recovered Vic [the Australian casualty], half his haunches were missing.”

Then came the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sgt Ron Graetz saw General Hatazo Adachi (CO of Japan’s 18th Army) ceremonially hand over his sword in surrender to the Australians; Japanese troops swarmed down from the mountains (“I gave one of them a kick up the arse as he went by”); and, right at the end with war officially over, he was ordered to take out a patrol to see if the enemy still occupied a village some “2,000 yards into the jungle”.  Somehow, he did not relish the prospect of being killed in what were supposed to be the first days of peace. Sgt Graetz therefore swore his patrol (which included the addition of a young graduate from Royal Military College Duntroon) to secrecy, marched them “up the path and had a smoko”, rested for a while, and then reported that no Japanese had been seen. Later, he confessed what he had done – to the officer who issued the command. The officer, in turn, laughed it off, saying the instructions had come from Brigade and he (the officer) had guessed the tactics that Ron would employ.

He found the adjustment to post-war Australia difficult: “I was all at sea. I’d lost my way.” For some weeks, Ron would spend most of his time drinking at the Bridgeport Hotel in Murray Bridge. The river still exerted its appeal, nevertheless; Ron went back rowing – and stroked the South Australian crew at the 1947 King’s Cup in Perth. It proved to be a fiasco. Because of bad weather, the course was shortened. Victoria, equipped with the boat best suited to rough water, won; South Australia, the pre-race favourite, had to use a ‘practice boat’ and was roundly defeated.

In the meantime, Syd Cawte, a Murray Bridge carrier, had given him a job – lumping bags of superphosphate, in company with a man named Les Jericho, “the toughest bloke I’ve ever seen”, who would live to the age of 103. It was painful work, ripping the flesh from his shoulders, but he stuck at it and was rewarded with a better job from the same firm, this time trucking fruit to market.  From there, Ron found a fresh line of employment in the hotel trade. He became a barman at the Bridgeport Hotel, where he had frittered away those first weeks of 1946, and achieved an unexpected bonus through meeting, and then marrying, the hotel’s receptionist, Tressa Bowman. They moved to Adelaide, and a succession of ventures ensued; running corner stores, working in bars, and eventually – in the 1960s – securing the licence of the Rising Sun pub at Lobethal. Ron Graetz turned on all his innate charm to make this a success. He cleaned out the pipes (the beer had “tasted like vinegar” when he first took over), sponsored sporting organisations, and became patron of the football club.

The last of those initiatives proved to be a notably rewarding one. Lobethal (‘The Tigers’) won the 1966 premiership, defeating Birdwood 14. 8 to 13.10. Ron gave them two kegs, and soon recuperated the expense through increased bar sales over the ensuing months. “Those,” he always liked to say, “were the best years of our lives.” But when 10 o’clock closing was introduced in 1967, neither Ron nor Tressa fancied the idea of working 12 hours a day.

They had two daughters, and wanted more of a family-oriented life; grandchildren and great-grandchildren would follow. Never afraid of hard work, he became a barman again (at Tailem Bend), drove a front-end loader for a while, then ran a wine shop in Murray Bridge. In retirement at Victor Harbor, to where he had marched with the 2/3rd under Blackburn those seven decades earlier, SX6465 Sgt Ronald Herbert Graetz was able to reflect in a 2014 interview: “The battalion was a top unit, and I met some great blokes. I wouldn’t have missed my army service for anything.”