Ronald Herbert GRAETZ

GRAETZ, Ronald Herbert

Service Number: SX6465
Enlisted: 22 June 1940
Last Rank: Sergeant
Last Unit: 2nd/3rd Machine Gun Battalion
Born: Murray Bridge, South Australia, 4 January 1919
Home Town: Murray Bridge, Murray Bridge, South Australia
Schooling: Murray Bridge High School
Occupation: Bread Carter
Died: Goolwa, South Australia, 17 February 2017, aged 98 years, cause of death not yet discovered
Cemetery: Not yet discovered
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World War 2 Service

22 Jun 1940: Involvement Sergeant, SX6465
22 Jun 1940: Enlisted Wayville, South Australia
22 Jun 1940: Enlisted Australian Military Forces (WW2) , Sergeant, SX6465
9 Jan 1946: Discharged 2nd/3rd Machine Gun Battalion
9 Jan 1946: Discharged Australian Military Forces (WW2) , Sergeant, SX6465

Eulogy written and delivered by Bill Denny AM, BM for SX6465 Ronald Herbert Graetz Goolwa Bowls Club 10.00am Friday 24 February 2017


I’d like to thank June and Doug, Helen and Rudy and the marvellous array of young ones for inviting me to say these few words about Ron’s military service.
I would also like to thank military historian Dr Nigel Stark for providing much of what you will hear today.
Ron was a member of the RSL and I know that his family are pleased to see the President of the Goolwa sub branch, Bob Plummer, and so many of his fellow sub branch members here today.
SX6465 Sgt Ronald Herbert Graetz was born in Murray Bridge on 4 January 1919.
By any measure he was a remarkable man and a wonderful example of his generation – a generation to whom we owe so much.
A quintessential Australian, with an enthralling personal history.
Good looking, charming, laconic yet open and embracing, he had a “no nonsense” manner about him.
He was a “man’s man” who was both interesting and interested.
All these characteristics were to serve him well during military service
In 1940, like so many of his generation, he “sprang to arms.”
For eminently practical reasons (ie to avoid walking which is the lot of the infantry) he joined the 2/3 Machine Gun Battalion under Arthur Blackburn, a Victoria Cross recipient and veteran of World War I.
It was a proud unit and its former members ensure it remains so today.
After basic training Ron was destined for the Middle East. He enjoyed the aesthetic seduction of new lands - of Colombo, Lebanon and Palestine, before experiencing the war in Syria.
It was a short but bloody campaign with Australian casualties numbering 416 killed and 1,136 wounded while over 1000 Vichy French were killed.
Ron regarded himself as lucky to survive contact with a Vichy French tank that made frequent night time sorties to machine gun Ron’s position. Thankfully, with the arrival of an anti-tank gun, Ron survived – the tank didn’t!
Later Ron became a despatch rider for the Coy Commander of A Company.
To be a despatch rider you needed courage and skill.
Despatch riders were popular targets with the Vichy French artillery and it was said that Ron’s predecessor had suffered a broken leg taking evasive action from the enemy.
Ron was just your man and was more than equal to the task!
Nigel Stark said in his book Memoirs of a Machine Gunner:
“Random chance, inspired by unaccountable forces of fate, can play its part in military service.”
This was never more so than in Ron’s case.
On 1 February 1942 fate intervened in the form of a British Military Policeman.
It was to change the course of Ron’s military service and his life.
The Syrian Campaign was concluding and the boys were going home.
The unit was assembling at Port Tewfik on the Suez Canal and had boarded the Orcades.
Ron rode his 3.5 side valve Norton motorcycle onto the wharf, dumped it and raced excitedly up the gangway to join his mates.
“Hold everything!” shouted the MP. “Who owns that bike?”
All fingers pointed to Ron who was unceremoniously ordered ashore to remain with his bike.
The Orcades sailed.
Ron said he stood on the wharf and cried as the men he had grown so close to disappeared into the distance.
A day or so later Ron and his bike were loaded onto the freighter Industria which sailed all the way to Freemantle and then Adelaide.
Fate saw the Orcades - together with the rest of the unit aboard, diverted to Java. There, without their weapons and equipment, they faced the Japanese. Those who survived became Prisoners of War, and for many that would mean the hell of Changi, slave labour on the Burma railway or in the mines under the Sea of Japan.
On returning to Australia in 1942 only 200 or so of the 2/3rd MG Bn remained.
The unit was reformed with reinforcements. With Syria under his belt Ron was no longer one of the boys.
In spite of his remonstrations he was promoted to Sgt.
By my estimation he would have made a really good one.
Ron never wanted stripes, but the logic conveyed by his Commanding Officer was that he had the experience.
The CO was smart enough to know that Ron, the seasoned soldier, would not stand to be mucked around by the newcomers to the unit.
The unit re-grouped and re-trained before deploying to New Guinea toward the end of 1944.
There were more serious challenges to confront in this theatre, especially when Ron became an acting Platoon Commander.
The terrain was entirely different to that of Syria.
It was brutal and the climate was oppressive.
Ron described the enemy as remorselessly “cruel” and “filthy.”
We know that Ron was impacted by the brutality which included seeing evidence of Japanese cannibalism of their own dead and an Australian casualty.
Fortunately, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the end of the war came relatively quickly and Ron had the satisfaction of seeing General Hatazo Adachi, the Commanding Officer of the Japanese 18th Army, and hand over his sword in surrender.
What followed was a relatively small event but, to me, it epitomises Ron.
Right at the very end, with the war over, Ron was ordered to take a patrol to a village some 2km into the isolated jungle to see if the village was still occupied by the Japanese!
Being killed on the first day of the peace was not on Sgt Graetz’s agenda so he employed typical Aussie logic.
He marched his unit down the path and out of sight. He then sat them down for a bit of a rest and a smoko!
Ron then quite honestly reported to his superiors that “No Japanese had been seen.”
Ron was discharged on 9 Jan 46 after nearly 6 years of service.
He had served his nation with courage and skill.
The resettlement advice offered by the forces was contained in one simple statement “Get on with it!”
And get on with it they did!
We have always been immensely proud of Ron.
Like others of his generation he was a wonderful role model to those of us that followed.
They were men and women who saw the horrors of war, yet were able to return to build Australia into the extraordinary nation it is today.
I fear we will forever live in their shadow.
June said to me recently that she and her sister Helen were lucky to have Ron as their Dad.
I agree with that sentiment.
I must add that the rest of us were privileged to know him.
We were lucky to walk the earth at the same time as this extraordinary man.
He has made a difference, he helped fashion Australia and left it a better place.
If subsequent generations can “see further” then, to quote and old saying, it is simply because we have been lifted onto the “shoulders of giants”.
Giants like Ron.
He will never be forgotten
Lest we forget

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Biography contributed by Robert Kearney

 

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.”

 

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