Carefree War

by Ann Howard

  Father was only a few minutes away from the shop. He decided to build a little weekender at Lilydale with his father. He bought a Rickenbacker car. The company was established by Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s leading fighter ace during World War 1. He flew a SPAD S.XIII, a French biplane fighter developed by Société Pour L’Aviation et ses Dérivés (SPAD), one of the most capable fighters of the war, with orders for around 10,000 cancelled at the armistice. He put his WWI 94th Fighter Squadron emblem depicting a top hat inside a ring, on both the front and the back of the car, and there was gas producer at the back of the car.

  Dad got conscripted. Mum made him a cut lunch. Off he went, they found he was in an essential industry and back he came. Mum was a Red Cross driver and dad was an air raid warden. His place was the centre where everybody met up with their masks and gear. There were trenches everywhere. At Casterton, there were four men in the Middle East. They came back and were sent on the Kokoda Trail. One got killed. Mum and Dad would come and visit and they would be loaded up with clothes - the family was always short of clothes and they’d hand them out. Coming back the 240 kms, they’d be loaded up with rabbits and vegetables. My mother had a good way of cooking rabbits with bacon round them.

  Some families could not afford evacuation. A Mrs Gale, with eight children, said her mother, on a farm in Gundagai, had offered to take the children for the duration. She told an Australian Women’s Weekly reporter she would willingly send them, but the eldest boy would pay full fare, and the others half fare, and her husband’s wage would not allow for it. She would wait for the government to do something. Meanwhile she had plenty to do and not enough time to worry.

  Laeonie David’s father-in-law made the decision to evacuate.

  My husband’s father sent his pregnant wife and five children to Young in 1942 when the Japanese were threatening to bomb Sydney Harbour and they remained there for about 12 months. My husband was born there and the older children went to the local catholic primary school. Regular visits by my father-in-law were made by train, as petrol rationing forbade any unnecessary travelling and both grandmothers took turns to stay with the family whilst they were there.

  Some grandmothers cared for other children. Jenny Hanson:

  My grandmother had a friend in Sydney, with a daughter who was about twelve, the same age as my father in the war years. This girl came up from Sydney and lived with my grandmother for about two years. She was an only child, but her parents were terrified of the Japanese coming and felt she was safe there.

  Families travelling by car needed food with them. The Wollongong Argus, August 1942, published advice on what to take for a carload of five for two days: Any bread, cake, scones etc in the pantry at the time should be taken, two large tins of fish or meat, two large tins of fruit, one small packet of biscuits, one small jar of peanut butter, one packet of Kraft cheese, half a pound of wholemeal biscuits, a jar of Vegemite, Marmite or Bovril, half a pound of tea, coffee or cocoa, one small tin of milk, one pound of sugar and a small quantity of salt. In addition, dates, nuts and raisins, chocolate, glucose and barley sugar could be packed - don’t forget the billy can!

  In working families, the youngest would be sent away. Alan Fletcher remembers his family splitting up.

  I was living near Tamarama in Sydney in the early 40s and was voluntarily evacuated, for the 1942 calendar year to Yenda, in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area near Griffith. I was born November 1930, so had just turned 11. My elder brother, born June 1928 was also evacuated but the eldest brother, born in 1925 and other cousins did not move out of Sydney. My family situation at the time was that my father had died in 1937, my sister, born 1915 was working in Melbourne and my mother was caring alone for her three sons. There were other aunts and uncles and cousins living around Tamarama.

  Empty houses from deceased estates were not unusual. Bill Geoghlin and his family used such a house:

  I am one of a family of thirteen. I remember adult males with cameras had to pretty careful where they took photos, due to security fears. The house we went to was I think, part of my deceased grandparents estate and had sat unused and there were very few buyers (if any) and it was not uncommon for houses to remain empty for years … No sane person would holiday in my country town. It is probably difficult for younger people today to understand the utter simplicity of life in those times. We weren’t brainwashed by TV, or newspaper commercials. In fact as a boy the only newspapers I read were behind the dunny (toilet) door. We had no grand thoughts of careers or Universities, (which only admitted people of means). We went to School but weren’t educated. School for the average boy was a place you went to and couldn’t wait to get out of.

  At some stage in the war seven of us (six girls) and me were sent back to a country town a long way from Sydney where there was a family house unoccupied and where my father had a business which was classed as essential industry. My brother was in the RAAF. The oldest of the girls was about 15 or 16 years. She had virtual control of the household apart from Dad’s occasional interference. It really wasn’t a bad experience overall even without Mum in Sydney. The older girls were subject to decisions by the Manpower authorities in some cases and in one case were sent to work at a factory which was two hours from our Sydney home. We were able to continue our schooling at the town’s Catholic school and I don’t feel we suffered any disadvantage from this.

  For some reason we were returned to Sydney but following reports of Japanese planes overflying Sydney and the midget submarine raid, back we went to the bush to the same situation as before, except another sister was in charge of us. I can only remember the good bits. But it was hot and dusty and there was some resentment by some town kids against the ‘blow-ins’. We always seemed to have plenty to eat. People would kill a sheep, the baker still ran his shop, and fruit and vegies were always available. There was food rationing and my father couldn’t get enough petrol to run his car so we used a horse and sulky if we had to travel anywhere. Plenty of milk, DIY butter, eggs laid on, and mostly it was home cooking and whatever we couldn’t get we simply did without it without any concern.

  When the war situation improved we came back to Sydney. Rationing carried on for some time after the end of the war and I recall going to the grocer with ration tickets in hand. In terms of running a household, at least for food, it was a lot easier in the country (from my perspective). I spent a lot of time going out to various farms with my father where he used a steam traction engine to provide a huge belt drive to a chaffcutter or hay presser. He employed a handyman cum cook to feed his work team and a mobile cookhouse went with us when we moved on to other farms. Needless to say, I spent a fair amount of time with the cook. He was actually able to provide plenty of roasted meats, gravies and damper washed down with hot billy tea for the men who refused to drink it on payday because they ‘saved their thirst’. Actually they were paid in the pub on Saturdays. There was not a lot (or even any) entertainment - there was a ‘picture show’ in town, very occasional Sunday football at the grounds, at which lovely pies were served, but we often sat on the veranda with some of the neighbours in the hopefully cooler twilight armed with the Boomerang Songbook and sang for hours.

  Australian evacuees made the best of it, with grandma there to give warmth, comfort and advice. If you were lucky, grandpa would be there too.

  Chapter 14

  No More Flowers - Western Australia

  At one point virtually all the women and children in Geraldton were evacuated. We thought the Japanese would come down the west coast, as we had training fields for them to land. We thought Perth would be blown off the map.

  – Stan Gratte.

  Secession was a recurring theme in Western Australia from 1829, but in 1942, they were caught up in the same war related problems. The author, Randolph Stow, born in Geraldton, was evacuated for a short time to family properties in the hinterland in 1942. This shaped his novel The Merry-go-Round in the Sea about a Geraldton family. In the book six year old Rob goes i
nland to Sandalwood Homestead, and there is talk of fleeing to Bogoda Station, Mount Magnet. The little boy doesn’t understand. ‘The war was a curse, a mystery, an enchantment. Because of the war there were no more paper flowers. That was how he first knew the curse had fallen. Once there had been little paper seeds that he had dropped into a bowl of water, and slowly they had opened out and become flowers floating in the water. The flowers had come from Japan. Now there was a war, and there would never be paper flowers again’. Stan Gratte was in a hive of activity. The whole district became one big army camp, with tents everywhere in the bush, trucks, jeeps and motorbikes with troops:

  At one point virtually all the women and children in Geraldton were evacuated. We thought the Japanese would come down the west coast, as we had training fields for them to land. We thought Perth would be blown off the map. A lot of troops moved in to fortify the area. Bridges all around were stacked with gelignite and the authorities blew large sections out of our long jetty. My dad worked in the plotting room. He spotted a little plane that came round about 30 miles north. The RAAF rang up when it went over the town. They thought they might bomb us that night and told everyone to ‘get out of town’. We had a lot of service families. My wife went to Allenooka, but people went to the little mining towns around where they knew someone. We took the dog. While we were away a lot more servicemen moved into the area. I was 12 years old and it was a great adventure for me. I’m quite sure my parents were scared, but I wasn’t. We were encouraged to do plane spotting. Wherever you went there were illustrated charts and Kellogg’s put out a book of planes. We hung up model planes on lengths of string so we could look up at them. Hot, dry Wiluna, on the edge of the western desert, was supposed to be of interest to the Japanese for its mining activity, especially arsenic, which they needed for gas bombs.

  From his book A Boy and the War Stan says:

  * * *

  We were warned at school to steer clear of Army installations and we thought about those bayonets the guards had on their rifles. This warning eventually wore off and we got quite cheeky as all boys do. I know we climbed over the two metre high sandbag walls around the American set-up and got into the gun pits. There were boxes of 30-calibre ammunition in steel clip belts, in boxes, in the walls. We’d peel a yard of ammo off and skedaddle over the wall. We’d pull some to bits to see how they worked. Chuck some in a fire to hear the bang or swap some with your mates for Perspex or whatever you could get. I guess that sort of thing goes on wherever there are armies. And I expect other boys pinched gunpowder off Napoleon’s soldiers.

  * * *

  George Cusins lived on the Perth Road:

  Our whole family went to an old farmhouse we rented in the middle of wheat fields. We drove into Geraldton for supplies. I wasn’t scared. I was excited with all the army personnel and equipment in the town.

  Harold McCashney’s parents were concerned that Perth would be bombed:

  I was evacuated from Bassendean, a metropolitan suburb of Perth to Cadoux, (named after Donald Cadoux, an early settler who died in World War 1), about 180 kilometres northeast of Perth. My sister went with me to my father’s sister and her husband. They didn’t have any children. I can’t really remember much - it was a 15 hour train journey on a freight train that stopped a lot - I was seven. We were very well treated. They had a farm - 1,000 acres or so - with good food. My dad was a wagon builder for the WAGR, a government job. My mum stayed with the two other kids, one older, one younger. There wasn’t a phone at the farm or in the village. We had letters from home.

  Patricia Wood’s father was interned in Singapore:

  There were quite a few people - women and children - who were evacuated from Singapore in January 1942 in troop ships that had dropped off British troops to defend Singapore. Many people didn’t believe they would be staying long because of the defence of Singapore. That didn’t succeed of course. In our case, my mother decided to leave the ship at Fremantle because it was the closest place to Malaya for when it would be OK to turn around and go back to our home there.

  As it turned out, by 1943 we obviously weren’t going back, so my mother was able to buy a house near the beach quite cheaply. Houses in the coastal areas near Fremantle were sold and families had moved inland, so I suppose we benefitted from the displacement experienced by local children who were evacuated from the coast at that time. It’s an odd world! We have published a book that is made up of letters from my mother to her English family and the diary that my father wrote in internment in Singapore. It’s called If This Should be Farewell.

  Lindsay Carter thought he was going on holiday:

  I can recall being sent to a farm in Pinjelly south of Perth with my older brother. I was not aware of the situation at the time, probably thought it was a holiday. I remember very little about it. I was born in 1936, my brother three years older. He remembered a lot more, including the name of the farmers but has sadly passed away. The only events I can remember about the farm was being sent in search of hen eggs in the sheds under farm machinery etc. and finding some of them rotten, riding around the farm on a horse and cart early in the morning laying rabbit bait, very exciting, and being scared to hell by an wedge-tailed eagle hovering above me. Years later in my late fifties I had a weird dream recalling the incident vividly. The dream told me that the eagle had not meant to scare me but was sent to protect me. May be I was a bit traumatised by the whole episode.

  Chief Evacuation Officer F Huelin said: Big families who have to be billeted have given billeting officers a headache. One family of mother and father and ten children will have to be evacuated. ‘We shall endeavour not to split families, but if we have to they will be put as close as possible to each other,’ Mr Huelin explained.

  People of the romantic city of Broome believed they were out of range of the Japanese fighters, did not fear invasion and then overnight became a staging post for allied aircraft. Timor was invaded, providing a Japanese air base at Koepang within striking distance of north Western Australia.

  Dutch, American, British and Australian naval and army forces had fought the Japanese around the Indonesian Archipelago, throughout February 1942, but the Japanese war machine advanced relentlessly, and many military planes arrived in Broome, carrying Dutch refugees. The attack on Broome was heralded by a Japanese Kawanishi flying boat, 50 metres over the town. Six flying boats had landed each with over 30 Dutch refugees. There were limited facilities for refuelling or for ferrying passengers to shore, so they waited in the military planes.

  On the airfield, Dutch military pilot Gus Winckel, had stopped to refuel his Lockheed Lodestar, after getting his passengers to safety. Guessing his plane could be a target, he removed one of the mounted machine guns and waited. Nine Zero fighter planes armed with machine guns and 20 millimetre cannons and one navigational plane approached from the north, sweeping around Gantheaume Point. People heard the rat-tat-tat of machine guns destroying the 15 flying boats. The Zeros turned their attention to Broome airfield. Six large planes on the Broome airfield and an American B-24 bomber were shot down shortly after takeoff with the loss of 19 lives. More than 20 children were amongst the almost 60 dead as people struggled for survival amongst the burning debris.

  Mr Winckel said when visiting Broome for the 60th anniversary of the air raid, ‘And luckily, one of them came very, very close to me and I gave him a long burst. And also, I shot him down. I wish I shot a few more down. I hit another one who had to dump in the sea.’ The Broome incident fuelled invasion fears elsewhere.

  The Australian government wanted their contribution to the war sufficiently recognised. Britain’s Ministry of Information was consulted and they contacted Ealing Studios, who were enthusiastic about making a film. The Overlanders was the result in 1946, based on a true incident in 1942 when 100,000 cattle were driven 2,000 miles in the Northern Territory to escape the Japanese.

  The Overlanders is about evacuation and removing a food supply from the enemy, as drovers take a large herd 1,
600 miles overland from Wyndham through the Northern Territory outback to Brisbane pastures. (The film makers had obviously not heard of the Brisbane Line). In the movie Dan McAlpine’s character Chips Rafferty, empties his water tanks and sets fire to his homestead, watching the flames engulf his belongings, declaring grimly, ‘The Japs will get nothing from me.’

  John Nugent-Hayward’s character Bill Parsons was also filled with the need to escape, fearing invasion, Parsons leaves his homestead in northern Australia with his wife and two daughters, Mary and Helen. They join up with Dan McAlpine’s cattle drive south. The Japanese are never mentioned except for a scene where a plane comes over as they are droving and somebody asks, ‘Is that a Jap?’