by Tim Bowden
Our home leave coincided with the 1st Marine division being stationed in Melbourne. They, of course, were doing it hard being camped in such places as the Melbourne Cricket Ground and other tough spots.
Some of the 9th Division troops found time to engage in a new sport of Yank-bashing. The Marines wore a large colour patch featuring a palm tree and several stars on their shoulder and everyone had more ribbons on their chest than our divisional commander, and he had been to two wars. They had them for being a good rifle shot and it was rumoured that they were awarded the Purple Heart—for being wounded in action—even if they had only contracted VD.
Norm, our snowy-headed battery headquarters driver, approached a Marine in the City Club Hotel and asked him to explain what all the stars on his colour patch were about. The Yank, who was pleased that an Australian would condescend to speak to him, explained they represent the seven major battles the First Marines had been engaged in.
‘Well,’ said Norm, ‘here’s where you get your eighth.’ And dropped him. There were many such incidents. No wonder the Yanks reckoned, ‘Back home we’ve only got one Joe Louis. Out here every second guy thinks he’s one.’
One night about 5.50 pm Ivo was drinking in Young & Jacksons. The ‘six o’clock swill’ was in full cry, with closing time only ten minutes away, and the total bedlam can be imagined. The bar was full of soldiers, sailors and airmen, all Australians, getting their last drinks into them before lockout time. With about five minutes to go, a half-full Marine came in and tried to push his way to the bar. ‘He must’ve been demented or totally full, because he said, “Get out of my goddam way and let a Marine get a drink”,’ Ivo recalled. ‘He never knew what hit him. As he was going down I made a grab for his decorations as a souvenir, and managed to get one of his ribbon bars … Someone propped him up in a corner and we got on with our drinking. What happened to him after that I don’t know.’
The Australian troops from the Middle East arrived back in their homeland that had been traumatised by the Japanese bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942, and continuing bombing raids on northern Australia, including Wyndham, Port Hedland and Derby in Western Australia; Darwin and Katherine in the Northern Territory; and Horn Island in the Torres Strait. The last bombing of Darwin was on 12 November 1943. Even as early as 1941, before war was actually declared, there were fears that Australian coastal cities on the east coast would be attacked, and some parents sent their children to inland towns and those adults who could do so went too. These fears were later strengthened following the brazen attack in Sydney Harbour by three midget submarines on the night of 31 May 1942, and a few days later one of the larger Japanese submarines fired ten shells, fortunately mostly duds, into the coastal Sydney suburbs of Rose Bay and Bellevue Hill.
For the first time in its short history, there seemed a real possibility that mainland Australia would be invaded by a foreign power.
When Gunner Bob ‘Hooker’ Holt arrived back in Australia early in 1942, his first port of call was Fremantle, then Adelaide, Melbourne and finally Sydney where his family lived. Before that, the arrival in Western Australia was something of a strange anticlimax. Holt had arrived fresh from the Lebanon campaign, where the Australians had fought beside the British. ‘We had our problems with the Poms at times, but at least we respected them.’ He saw his first Americans in Perth and, with their flash uniforms and loud mouths, they did not impress him at all.
Bob had a home leave pass for fourteen days and ‘French Leave’ (absent without leave) for another fourteen. ‘I went to see the family doctor in Lakemba and told him a pack of lies about not returning to camp owing to my wounds playing up. He gave me a certificate and we spent the next hour discussing my experiences in the Middle East while the fair dinkum patients in his waiting room sat around and chewed their fingernails.’
His unit was camped at Bonegilla in Victoria. He caught the train and belatedly reported in. He expected bother with his out-of-date leave pass but no one was particularly interested in him.
Camping in huts, with sheets on their hospital beds and first-class food, this was considered really high living. There were no nominal roll calls. Soldiers off the Duntroon kept trickling into camp but their numbers remained much the same, ‘as just as many took off on unofficial leave’.
They ‘fooled around the camp’ through the days and had leave every night to Wodonga and Albury. But it was not the great holiday it was supposed to be because there appeared to be no organisation at all at Bonegilla camp and no reason for its existence. Holt presented himself to ‘the powers that be’ and asked to be transferred to the 2/3rd Training Battalion at Bathurst. There he was greeted by many men he knew from the battalion, including ‘Slim’ Huntington and Johnny Perry, who had been sent home from the Middle East after it was discovered they were under-age.
For some reason they had been off-loaded at Bombay in India. There they had cobbered up with a leading Australian jockey, Edgar Britt, who took them into his home and gave them the occasional winner. They were both very happy with this arrangement and spent their money freely at an establishment close by.
It was Johnny’s boast that he was known to the ‘ladies of easy virtue’ as the little boy with the big Zoobrick. All good things come to an end however, they were eventually shipped out and returned to Australia. As they had both turned eighteen, they were on their way back to the battalion.
The provosts ran amok in Bathurst one evening and anyone with white gaiters and puggeri (hat bands) was fair game. The Bathurst Police Station was packed to the rafters with men on leave from the training battalion. The following day they were driven back to camp by the provosts under close arrest.
For whatever reason, the provost captain threw the book at all returned men and each had a list of charges as long as their arms. The provost ‘was ably supported by his fat-gutted, cowardly, underlings, but when our Colonel questioned them closely they were proved to be liars, thugs and agent provocateurs. Every returned man was exonerated from the dozens of soldiers charged with every sort of offence. I believe only one was ever convicted.’
Holt recalled one occasion when the troops tried to take a stand:
There had been complaints about the food and the amenities by newly conscripted troops and the rumblings of discontent grew until a meeting was called. There was wild talk of a walk-out from the camp and a march to Bathurst. Some of the Training Battalion went to the meeting to see what was going on. There was a large crowd of men milling around, listening to fiery speeches by agitators. Eventually the call went up to march out of camp and on to Bathurst.
I suppose 1000 men started off to march the mile to the gates. Along the way men dropped off the march like fleas from a Kelpie dog and by the time the main body reached the entrance to the camp, only about 50 remained. An officer told them of the penalties of what they were doing, and about half the marchers retired. The few still left marched twenty yards along the road to Bathurst where they were confronted by the camp guards with fixed bayonets on their rifles and the ‘Great Bathurst Walkout’ stopped right there.
The 16th Australian Infantry Brigade, which had been defending Ceylon, returned to Australia and landed in Melbourne on 8 August 1942. They proceeded to Seymour camp, where they were issued with clothes, money and leave passes. The brigade then marched through Sydney on 12 August to the cheers of Sydneysiders and moved to Greta camp on their way to New Guinea to take part in the Owen Stanley campaign. Bob Holt joined them:
I was medically re-boarded A1 fit, and reported back to Bathurst just in time for a move to Cowra. After a week or so, a draft consisting of old hands left to rejoin the Battalion in New Guinea. We had a long boring uncomfortable train trip to Charters Towers where we were held up waiting for a ship. There wasn’t a great deal to do.
An ageing harlot, Yvonne, was the only lady of the evening in this quiet Queensland country town and business in her establishment was very brisk to say the least. The army pickets stopped claim jumping
in the queue, and kept order generally. At the finish of the evening, when Yvonne had shut up shop, the big-hearted whore gave the pickets a cup of tea and a free fuck.
Their draft embarked at Townsville and went up through the Whitsunday Passage to land in Papua, at Port Moresby. From there they were taken by truck a few miles out to Donadabu, where they met the ‘Left Out of Battle’ (LOB) Party which was commanded by Billy ‘The Pig’ McDonald. The 2/1st Battalion had been nearly wiped out in Greece and had to make up its numbers from other battalions in the brigade. The LOB Party had been created in the Great War, and continued in the Second World War. In the event of the battalion’s luck being out in the campaign, the LOB Party would form the nucleus of the reformed battalion.
Among the sick and wounded recently discharged from hospital were Holt’s mates Tommy Graham, ‘Cooee’ Davidson, Andy Anderson and a host of others. He was shocked at the number of casualties and tales they told of the privations over the Owen Stanley ranges.
The rainy season had set in, and you could set your clock on the rain pouring down for an hour every afternoon. The roads were in constant need of repair and this is where we came in, shovelling metal all day to patch them. At the first opportunity I visited old mates at the Australian General Hospital. It was enough to make strong men weep to see soldiers of the calibre of ‘Tich’ Parker and ‘Nigger’ Matthews putting on a cheerful face by making light of their fearful wounds.
The heat was horrific, the drinking water warm and the food entirely unsuitable—particularly so for gravely injured men. The medical staff and orderlies did their best, but even walking through a hot tent ward with a dirt floor made Holt sick to his stomach. He was able to yarn with dozens of old hands, including the ever-smiling ‘Ned the Glut’, who was assisting in the operating theatre.
Conditions in the casualty clearing station at Koitaki were even more primitive than the Australian General Hospital, but at least the men there were recuperating. Louis Whiteman was getting over a painful wound in the ‘bottle and glass’ that he had received at Eora Creek. He reckoned he was the only man in the brigade to be shot in the bum whilst going into an attack. Cheerful Tubby Bruce of the J Section Signals was giving the nurses ‘what for’ with his antics. The spirits of the wounded were terrific.
Holt recalled that at Donadabu there were several tents full of Christmas parcels. Many of the men they had been addressed to had been killed in action. Holt and his friends occasionally collected them. ‘I’m sure the men would not have minded their comrades helping themselves—nor for that matter, would the senders of the parcels.’ There had been talk of the garrison troops in Papua calling themselves the ‘Mice of Moresby’, but this did not go down well with the Middle East veterans. It was suggested that the main occupation of the ‘Mice of Moresby’ was nibbling away at the Rats of Tobruks’ food parcels.
Stories had been circulating of the inhumane conditions experienced in the crossing of the Owen Stanley Range, and that on occasions the Japanese had eaten the Australian dead. Regimental Sergeant Major Billy Duff and three comrades were ambushed and killed while carrying ammunition to the front lines. One of the men was never found, but the other three had great chunks of meat cut off them by the ‘cannibal’ Japanese.
Holt was told that even among these men the exploits of ‘Tarzan’ Pett stood out. As a Bren gunner at Eora Creek under Major Hutchinson, he had taken out a series of Japanese machine-gun posts, for which he was awarded the Military Medal. At Oivi Ridge, Pett also was magnificent, but received a head wound and died shortly afterwards at Kokoda. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross and would have received this highest of decorations but for a senior officer refusing to sign the recommendation. ‘This gentleman remarked that in his opinion the Victoria Cross was for officers only.’
They knew the remnants of the battalion fighting at Sanananda were at the end of their tether and were exhausted. While waiting around to see what was to happen, Holt’s mob went to the open-air picture theatre at night or watched the show put on by the search lights and anti-aircraft as the Japs bombed Moresby, which they did most nights.
Word eventually came through that the 16th Brigade had at last been pulled out of the firing line. They came out on 23 December—152 men out of the brigade.
If I live to be 100 I will never forget the state the men were in when they arrived at Donadabu. They were a pitiful sight. They were as thin as rakes, haggard, sick and dead beat and we were proud of them.
The cooks put on a spread for them that the sick, wounded, LOB and reinforcement drafts had forgone their beer ration for the returning men of the battalion of at least three or four bottles per man. It was a wasted effort, however, for they were in such a state that they couldn’t eat more than a mouthful or two of food. Even such enthusiastic beer drinkers as Joe Hurley and Jika McVicar would drink only half a bottle of beer and then throw up everywhere and go to sleep. The brass hats realised the state of the men of the Sixteenth Australian Infantry Brigade, for they were returned to Australia for home leave at the first opportunity.
The ‘Left Out of Battle’ Party, the odds and sods who had not been over the Owen Stanley ranges and some of those who had been lightly wounded earlier in the campaign, left Moresby by ship early in the New Year. They landed at Cairns and went into camp at Ravenshoe up on the Atherton Tablelands behind Cairns. To show their appreciation of the valour of Australia’s soldiers in New Guinea, the people of Atherton invited Diggers to their homes to stay for a couple of days.
‘When we arrived in Atherton we were introduced to the kind lady who owned the guesthouse where we were to stay,’ Holt recalled. ‘She was very enthusiastic about meeting some real live fighting soldiers and as we sipped tea the good lady told us that the town in general and her guesthouse in particular was ours. We were then taken around and introduced to the open-hearted Syrian Mrs Malouf, who owned the cafe where we were to eat.’
Quite a few old hands of the battalion were returning from leave, hospitals and convalescent depots. Holt’s unit began to receive new drafts of young reinforcements from the Canungra Training Camp.
The Third Militia Battalion, which had done so well in the Owen Stanleys campaign, came over to us in its entirety, Captain ‘Whips’ McCracken, Sergeant Bede Tongs and Sergeant Major ‘Nobby’ Clark were among the outstanding men we gained at this time. Nobby in particular would have stood out in any company. He did spend a great deal of time with us, as his true age became known to the military authorities. He put up Boer War and First World War ribbons, stopped dying his hair, indulged in strong drink and became a grey-haired old man overnight. He was honourably discharged from the AIF and returned to civilian life.
Holt’s group began to train in earnest. Route marches and training exercises became the order of the day. The 2/2nd and 2/3rd Battalions had transferred about 100 men each to the 2/1st Battalion in June 1941 to build up the numbers after they had been so badly knocked about during the fighting in Greece and Crete. Their relations with the 2/1st Infantry Battalion since that time had been really good. They knew a lot of their old hands and they provided most of the competition in the sporting events of the brigade—football, swimming and boxing.
Its commanding officer Colonel Cullen had the reputation of being as eccentric as Holt’s own Colonel Hutchinson where the welfare of the men of his battalion were concerned. The 2/1st had a mascot. He was a castrated goat, Stanley NX-2 (minus two). Stanley became an identity and was let out on battalion parades, bedecked in a flash jacket of the battalion colours, black over green.
Stanley was very well known throughout the Sixteenth Brigade and his demise was very sad, particularly in so far as his batman was concerned. Stanley licked a newly painted fence and up and died. His batman, who had the job of burying him, didn’t dig the grave deep enough, so Stanley’s legs were sticking out of the ground. So he cut them off with a shovel. The Colonel was incensed about Stanley’s undignified burial, so the ex-batman finished up Confined to B
arracks for his trouble, or lack of it.
Beer nights were always keenly awaited. Every company had a keg, and for an hour before the barrel was tapped, soldiers would line up with their ‘Lady Blameys’—beer bottles cut off just below the neck.
You would make your bed and when the keg was finished you would wander off and climb straight into it. You could always tell the mornings after a night by the soldiers poking at heaps of spew, looking for their missing false teeth. One night ‘Boof ’ Barnett put a large dead snake into Ali Oop’s bed. When the beer was finished Ali climbed into bed and when he discovered the snake, he let out a fearful scream. He grabbed his bayonet and was about to run amok. Boofhead ran for cover, while the rest of the fellows in the tent took time out to pacify Ali.
In Holt’s company at this time were four Norfolk Islanders: Joe Menzies, Jack Quintal, ‘Lovie’ and Eustace Adams. These men were descendants of the mutineers on the Bounty of 1789. Some of the mutineers settled on Pitcairn Island in 1790 with native women from Tahiti. The island became overpopulated and in 1856 about half of the inhabitants shifted to Norfolk Island, which remained isolated even though they were bizarrely in the electorate of East Sydney. There were three or four other islanders in the brigade and when they came over to visit ‘it was a pleasure to listen to them singing in harmony’. Among themselves they spoke in a patois. On Norfolk Island they illegally brewed beer which they called ‘soup’.
Beer was in short supply in the Tablelands so Holt’s crew prevailed on Joe to make some ‘soup’ for them. ‘The taste was right but there was no kick to it. However we remedied the situation with some lemon essence and a jolly good time was had by all.’