Digger’s Story: Surviving the Japanese POW camps was just the beginning

by David

  Digger’s real enthusiasm during this period was for rabbit-shooting with his friends on a Sunday. He had acquired a .410-bore shotgun and a .22-calibre rifle and loved to use them.

  I really looked forward to the odd weekends I would get off from the glassworks. Arthur Bowden and Charlie ‘Tusker’ Blewett were my mates at the time. We were about fifteen and would take the train up to Clarkefield, north-west of Melbourne. I remember it well: one pub, a store and a railway station, but plenty of rabbits.

  The pub would sell us beer at the back door, and we would get other supplies at the store and then go to our favourite campsite, about a mile away. It was down a steep gully and on a flat area halfway up the other side. One day we started drinking the beer as we walked to the camp, and as we made our way down the steep gully I fell and tumbled nearly all the way to the bottom. Thank God I wasn’t carrying my rifle, but I was carrying the food, including a half pound of butter we had just bought at the store, in my inside jacket pocket. By the time I stopped rolling down the gully the butter was through everything. I told my mother the truth when I got home except for the bit about the beer!

  We would sit around the fire at our camp in the evening and talk about the war, which we all knew was coming, and tell each other of our plans to join the army or the navy. We all knew that the Japanese had invaded China, and that they had murdered thousands of Chinese. During the day, we would practise with our rifles, firing at tree trunks right next to where one of us was standing. It was just the kind of dangerous stupid thing that young blokes do. We always had a few rabbits to take home on Sunday night. All three of us joined the militia as soon as we turned sixteen.

  Digger joined the 16th Field Ambulance, 2nd Cavalry Division, Light Horse. He chose the cavalry because he thought riding horses would be easier than walking. The navy was out because he didn’t fancy swimming to save himself, should the need arise, and the air force was just all too dangerous. It was simply chance that he ended up in a Field Ambulance unit.

  They were a part-time volunteer force, and most men who had regular jobs, as Digger did, were given time off by their employers to take part in weekend training. They were ridiculed by many members of the regular army, who referred to them as ‘chocolate soldiers’ or ‘chocos’ – since they believed these amateur soldiers would melt in the heat of battle.

  Despite this, Digger loved the training, which got him away from his father. He spent as much time with the militia as he possibly could and learned a great deal. He particularly enjoyed the company of the older men, veterans of World War I, of whom there were many in his unit.

  Our last camp was at Torquay in Victoria in January, February and March of 1940. There were 6500 men and 3000 horses. Most of the country men had their own horses but us city boys didn’t. We were given what they called ‘remounts’.

  I was about the last to get one, and I called him Lop Ears. He was a funny horse, and when we got onto the beach in the sand he would lie down, roll in it and wouldn’t get up. An old soldier told me that to get him up I had to piss in his ear. So I took him at his word and, right enough, it worked well!

  What I enjoyed most was driving the limbers. They were two-wheeled carts, with one in front of the other, and they were pulled by two or sometimes four horses. Sometimes they transported stores and sometimes they pulled artillery pieces. They were very difficult to drive. There were two drivers if there were two pairs of horses, but I only drove the two-horse limbers, so I was the only driver.

  The driver was always mounted on the left horse of the pair. The driver had the reins of his own horse and of the one to his right. You also had a leg iron on your right leg to protect it from getting squeezed between your horse and the shaft. It was great being able to drive them properly, but it took a while to train the horses to do exactly as you wanted.

  Not long after this camp, Digger went to the Melbourne Town Hall to enlist as a regular soldier in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). It was 24 June 1940 and he was eighteen years old. Like most young men, Digger wanted fun and adventure – there was no thought of service to country or any of that nonsense.

  At the Town Hall, the sergeant in charge took one look at Digger’s slight frame. ‘You’re too young, son,’ he said. ‘Come back when you’re older and you’ve been round the block a bit.’

  Of course, Digger already was eighteen, although he knew he looked much younger. He decided to take the sergeant literally. He ran round the block and came back to the front entrance of the Town Hall, where he met a different sergeant. This time, he said he was twenty years old and he was duly signed on. His army papers would always list him as two years older than he really was, but that didn’t matter – he was in!

  Perhaps it was because Digger was in his Light Horse uniform that the very day he joined the regular army, he was ordered to march twenty or so other new recruits down to Flinders Street station, where they were to take the train to Caulfield Racecourse.

  I was expected to be in charge of this lot, and I didn’t even know where Caulfield Racecourse was. However, there were plenty of local lads in the group and so we were able to make our way there. When we arrived, a sergeant major threw two stripes at me and said, ‘Get those on, lad,’ but I said no as politely as I could. All I wanted to do was enjoy myself, and I was wise enough to know that responsibility would cramp my style.

  My first two weeks in the AIF were spent at Caulfield, and most of us slept in the stables. From there we went to Mount Martha, down the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. We slept on the floor on palliasses but I didn’t mind. The routine was normal drills, route marches, gas drills, keeping fit and first-aid training. I really enjoyed it.

  When my sister, Iris, was due to have a baby, I asked for leave to visit her but they wouldn’t grant it. So I thought, ‘Bugger them!’ and I just took off and stayed away a couple of days. When I returned I was charged with being absent without leave, but Colonel Glynn White, the Assistant Director Medical Services of the 8th Division, sorted it out and got the charges dropped. He was a mate of mine because he’d also been in the Light Horse.

  I didn’t know it at the time but I was being held back, waiting for the formation of the 2/9th Field Ambulance. I should have been sent to the Middle East with the 7th Division because all the guys that joined up with me were sent there. We privates had no idea what was happening. I just accepted it all. I eventually found out that Lieutenant Colonel Dr Hedley Summons, who had been our commanding officer in the Light Horse, had been promised a unit. He had directed that his men from the Light Horse be held back from assignments until his AIF unit was formed.

  From Mount Martha, many of us were moved to a camp at Puckapunyal, around sixty miles north of Melbourne. This was where the 2/9th Field Ambulance was formed in July 1940. Medical training was all the go from then on. We were given stretcher and ambulance drills, bandaging drills, procedural drills in the case of a gas attack and so on. I was in A Company. It was great!

  Colonel Summons was well liked and respected by his men, many of whom had served with him in the militia. He was a great fitness enthusiast, and so when the unit was required to move from Puckapunyal to Bonegilla, near Albury, he decided that the men would march the 130 miles or so. The men in his unit were also put through a rigorous medical, including an assessment of their mental fitness – although none of the men were aware of this at the time.

  Summons was determined to take only the best soldiers with him – wherever it was he was going. By the end of September 1940, fourteen men had been discharged as unfit for various reasons. Those over forty years of age were considered unsuitable for overseas service, two men had physical illnesses, and six were mentally unfit. Colonel Summons wrote somewhat bitterly in his report: ‘There were two high grade imbeciles, one moron type, one congenital criminal and two anxiety states (one severe). These might not have been spotted in non-medical units. Several others were irresponsible, uneducated or a general nuisance.’1

  Digger’s
physical and mental capacity was never in doubt. In fact, his mind was so sharp that he didn’t have to march to the new camp. He was able to organise it so that he went on the train, looking after the unit’s supplies and medical stores, all the way to Bonegilla.

  Digger and his mate Joe Milledge had organised a couple of days’ leave in early November 1940 to attend the Melbourne Cup. While in Melbourne, they met another friend of Digger’s, who assured them that a horse called Old Rowley would win the race. Like most punters, Digger and Joe believed that a hot tip from a mate was much better than any other method of choosing the winner, so they put every penny they had on the horse – including their money for the train trip back to Bonegilla. Old Rowley came in at 100/1.

  Digger and Joe were at Spencer Street Station a day later, already AWOL and planning to go somewhere else to spend the rest of their winnings, when a railway employee came up to them. ‘Are you blokes on embarkation leave?’ he asked.

  ‘No, we’re AWOL,’ Joe explained, in his normal innocent and honest manner.

  ‘Well, all the rest of your mob seem to be on embarkation leave.’

  The two decided that their Melbourne Cup holiday was over. On their return to camp, they told their story and received a dressing-down. They were told they would be dealt with later, but in the meantime they were sent on embarkation leave. Six months later, long after they arrived in Malaya, the case of their going AWOL came up. They were fined a couple of days’ pay but it had been well worth it.

  Chapter 2

  To the War

  At two a.m. on the morning of 2 February 1941, a little over seven months since Digger joined the AIF, the men of the 2/9th Field Ambulance arrived by truck at Albury railway station. They were off on the greatest adventure of their young lives.

  Since the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, everyone expected the eventual involvement of Japan in the war, so troop movements such as this were kept top-secret. Few details of the journey were known even to the soldiers themselves. But somehow everyone from the Albury-Wodonga area seemed to be at the station to see the boys off. Half an hour after this great farewell, all on the train were fast asleep.

  By the early afternoon they had arrived at the Pyrmont dock in Sydney, where they were transferred onto a queue of ferries that took them to a huge ocean liner at anchor in the harbour – the RMS Queen Mary. As they approached, there was a gentle swell in the harbour. The massive ship was anchored opposite Taronga Zoo and within sight of the Heads.

  Digger and Joe could see two ferries on the port side of the ship, loading soldiers onto the Queen Mary. As the ferry and the pontoon at the side of the ship moved up and down, the soldiers were required to jump at just the right moment. Their mates still on the ferry threw their kit bags after them onto the pontoon, then the soldiers scrambled up the sea ladder attached to the side of the ship, before disappearing through very small doors about halfway up the hull. The ferry carrying Digger and Joe moved around to the starboard side. They were soon moving up the ship’s side and disappearing into its belly.

  As they entered they looked around in awe. Despite the masses of young men, the place was strangely quiet. There was carpet on the floor and crew members were holding buckets from which soldiers had to draw a number. This determined where they were to be billeted on the ship. It took Joe and Digger a good half-hour to find their allotted bunks. They had been lucky, drawing a cabin with two separate bunks and its own porthole. The glass was painted to black it out but they kept it open during the day. Many of their mates were in the main hold, they learned, each man with just a hammock to himself.

  The Queen Mary had undergone a refit in Sydney the previous May. Formerly, she had hosted 2140 well-heeled trans-Atlantic travellers, but now she carried 5500 poorly paid troops. She had also lost her colourful paint job and was now a dull grey. Anti-mine paravanes had been fitted to her in Singapore in late 1940. Despite these changes, the lavish furniture, the carpets and the art-deco interior made the troops feel like they were about to start a luxury cruise.

  The next day they remained at anchor while troops from the 2/10th Australian General Hospital (AGH) filed onto the ship. Joe had found some of the ship’s old stationery in a bottom drawer in the cabin, and he was busily drawing. This was his way of recording his experiences.

  In many ways, Digger and his mate were very different characters. Digger was always up-front and keen for others to know his opinion, while Joe tended to keep his thoughts to himself. Joe worried a bit about Digger’s opinions getting him into bother, but Digger’s forthright and assertive manner never changed.

  Joe always wanted to know how things worked, and when he and Digger saw the paravanes Joe could not rest until he discovered more about them. He questioned members of the crew and met a like-minded individual who, despite the rules about secrecy, was happy to explain the principle to him. Digger, despite his relative disinterest in the topic, eventually found himself in possession of most of the facts about how a paravane worked.

  The ship towed two paravanes, one on each side. Each one was attached to the bow by a thirty-metre tether. Because of their fins, the paravanes would travel a metre or two under the surface and pull the tether outwards from the bow as the ship moved forwards – ‘just as a kite keeps pulling on the string’, Joe explained. If the paravane towing lines encountered mines, they were diverted away from the hull of the ship and collided with the paravane. If the paravane was destroyed the crew simply fitted another.

  Joe sketched the ship’s paravanes, showing how they were attached and how they would operate to protect it from mines. Later in the voyage he offered Digger a drawing of his choice. Digger chose a drawing of the Queen Mary, although Joe thought he might have chosen the paravane diagrams, of which he was very proud.

  On 4 February the Queen Mary weighed anchor and sailed in convoy with the Aquitania, a slow four-funnel coal-burner that had been launched in 1913, and the Nieuw Amsterdam, which was loaded with Kiwis. They travelled through Sydney Heads at the speed of the slowest ship, the Aquitania, and then began to head south. Two days later, having rounded Tasmania, they were joined by the Mauretania, from Melbourne.

  The troops knew they were travelling west through the great Southern Ocean. They also knew that the British army had retreated from Dunkirk in May and June of 1940, and that Britain had successfully repelled the German air force later that year in the Battle of Britain, but at great cost to London and other cities on the southern coast of England. Those aboard the Queen Mary who took more than a passing interest in international affairs, such as Digger, knew that China and Japan were also at war, and that this European war was very likely to spread to Asia, with Japan on Germany’s side.

  Anticipation was in the air. All knew they were on a great adventure. They were volunteers, and were ready to fight wherever they were asked to fight, secure in their ignorance of exactly what this meant. The topic of just about every conversation in the cabins, on the promenade decks and in the canteen at the stern was where were they going. To Europe to fight the Germans? Or perhaps to Asia, where the Japanese were becoming more aggressive and talking of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’? Many of the other ranks on the ship were well aware that the Co-Prosperity Sphere was a plan by Japan’s prime minister, Fumimaro Konoe, to unite all Asian nations and free them from the influence of Western powers.

  The voyage was generally calm. The only time Digger and Joe felt much movement was when they climbed the broad staircase at the stern leading up to the canteen. They never noticed any movement on the way down again after a few beers. And the cigarettes and the booze were almost for free. While the troops enjoyed the old-world elegance, the wood panelling and the plush carpets, they deplored the near constant diet of stewed kidneys. The officers, on the other hand, had printed menus and a wider selection of fare.1

  The men had several theories about why they were served kidneys so often. One was the strong flavour of the kidneys was to disguise the taste of pota
ssium bromide, which they were being fed to reduce their libido. Another was that the rich passengers who had sailed on this ship had eaten all the good cuts, and kidneys were all that was left. Yet another was that the cost of the officers’ menu was so great that the army had to save money somewhere. The most popular theory, however, was that the ship’s provisioner and the captain were colluding, to the financial benefit of both.

  As it turned out, Joe and Digger didn’t have to eat kidneys for much longer. With absolutely no effort on Digger’s part, he was about to land butter-side-up again.

  The convoy anchored at Fremantle but there was no shore leave. Digger decided that, against all the rules, he would write a letter to his mother and let her know how he was enjoying the trip. He wrote the letter, put it in an envelope, along with a stamp, and enclosed it in an empty tobacco tin. He then joined the crowd at the rail, gazing down at the small boats fussing round the big ship.

  Digger waited until a group of likely-looking young lads in a tender was directly under him at the rail. He attracted their attention and dropped the tin down to them. They looked up, waved acknowledgement and soon disappeared towards the shore. Digger was sure his mum would get the letter eventually.

  However, the crew of the tender had obviously been well briefed about the rules regarding unauthorised communications, and Digger was dobbed in. After the war, he discovered that his mother did eventually receive the letter – suitably censored – but in the meantime, he was sentenced by his company commander to work for the rest of the voyage in the galley attached to the officers’ mess. Joe and Digger lived off the officers’ menu for the rest of the voyage. A nightly ritual developed, as they discussed what they might fancy eating the following day.

  After leaving Fremantle and pushing out into the Indian Ocean, the convoy was joined by two destroyer escorts. The men were notified that all the ships apart from the Queen Mary were going to the Middle East. The Queen Mary – which was like a speedboat compared to the other ships – sailed around its fellow boats as everyone sang the ‘Maori Farewell’ (to the tune of ‘Now Is the Hour’). Digger watched the boats lean as people moved from one side to the other as the Queen Mary sailed around them.