Larrikins in Khaki Page 3

  He had himself paraded to the commanding officer and told him he had changed his mind about being a postman. The CO was not happy and asked the reasons for the change of mind, wasting all that valuable training. Blazely replied, ‘I joined the AIF to do a bit of fighting, not to sort letters all day.’ So he became eligible for another selection parade. This time he chose a different method. As soon as soldiers started breaking off the main column and falling in on the various pegs labelled infantry, artillery, engineers and so on, Blazely took matters into his own hands and just walked over and put himself in the artillery, and that was that.

  From living in tents at Royal Park, we came to the standard ‘air-conditioned’ accommodation of the permanent army camps like Puckapunyal. This consisted of galvanised iron huts. The air-conditioning was basically stinking hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. The fixings, table, chairs, beds and so on were all combined in one item—the floor, on which you slept, sat or walked about as your fancy took you. The authorities kindly provided us with a bag of straw for a mattress, which when folded up made quite a good seat. Hardly gracious living really.

  Training at Puckapunyal was the usual routine of route marches, squad drilling and lectures, with a few kitchen fatigues and guard and picket duty thrown in. Blazely remembered one lecture on the composition of an artillery battery given by a lieutenant who was later to become a senator in the Australian parliament and, later still, knighted. In his account of his army experiences, Blazely nicknamed him ‘Lieutenant Senator’. One Saturday afternoon Lieutenant Senator had the bright idea that some gun drill would be in order. At that stage the Japanese hadn’t yet come into the war and training camps were conducted more or less on union rules—that Saturday afternoon was occupied in washing, spine-bashing (lying on their bunks) or better still heading into Seymour for a few beers. Lieutenant Senator dispatched a sergeant major, Mac, a big Irishman and an old soldier, to round up the necessary bodies to make up four gun crews totalling 24 men.

  All Mac, the Sergeant Major, could find, was half a dozen blokes doing their washing. Somehow all the other gunners left in the battery got wind of it and made themselves scarce. Mac had just got the drill organised when Senator appeared on the scene.

  ‘What’s this Sergeant Major?’ exclaimed Lieutenant Senator. ‘When I said I wanted four gun crews, I meant four gun crews.’

  Mac drew himself up to his rather impressive height and replied, ‘I may be a troop sergeant major, Sir, but I am not Jesus Christ.’

  The whole time Ivan Blazely was at Puckapunyal, he recalled, he did not do one session of gun drill—there were simply not enough guns to go round. But one afternoon there was a short route march, when one of the instructors laid a dead tree branch on the ground representing the barrel of a gun and another lying across it for the wheels, on which they drilled for a while. ‘But you could hardly call it gun drill,’ Blazely remarked.

  Bob ‘Hooker’ Holt trained at Ingleburn camp, which was still being built when he enlisted in the AIF.

  While the majority of us were issued with boots and an army hat, we trained in our own clothes and you could tell how anyone was going financially by the state of the gear he was wearing. We must’ve had an awful lot of swagmen with us. We were given army fatigue clothes a few weeks later. These were immediately named ‘Giggle Suits’ as we looked as if we’d come straight out of an asylum. I knew we were supposed to salute someone, but for the first few days I wasn’t sure whether it was the fellows with the pips on their shoulders or the superior beings with stripes on their arms—and there were many recruits in the same boat as myself.

  The vast majority of new soldiers had no military experience whatsoever and some rough diamonds weren’t amenable to any sort of discipline, with many of them recently not long ‘off the track’. The officers were most understanding and made allowances for this ignorance of military etiquette. Early on the commanding officer had occasion to speak sharply to a private of several weeks, Jackie White, of West Wyalong. After a belly full of beer at the Crossroads Hotel, Jackie returned to camp later in the evening and performed outside his CO’s sleeping quarters.

  ‘Come out and act the man and fight me, you undersized, black-whiskered little bastard.’

  Next day Jackie was fined 5 shillings. Three months later the same offence landed him in the Jerusalem Detention Barracks for 28 days.

  Holt was fifteen years of age, but big for his years—his good mate ‘Snowy’ Parkinson was small, boyish, blond and eighteen. They had enlisted together and on receiving their slouch hats and boots, proudly took off to Sydney to celebrate. They lined up at the bar of the Great Southern Hotel and called to the barmaid for two beers. She looked at the two of them and said to Bob, ‘You’re all right and you can have one, but your young mate had better piss off and come back when he turns eighteen.’

  Back in camp the lads were introduced to the delights of the game of two-up which was run by very battered ex-boxer, Bob Delaney. There were never any prolonged arguments over bets after the famous ex-lightweight champion of Australia had given his decision. Bobby was still a very capable pug and even the look of him would frighten most players into agreeing with any ruling he gave.

  In those early days there were no wet canteens for the troops. Two shops which were run by a private contractor sold soap, toothpaste, lollies, ice cream and soft drinks at highly inflated prices. It was not long before there was an undercurrent of bitterness among the troops at the rip-offs by the get-rich-quick operator.

  One evening Holt was talking to Sid Elliott—with whom he had boxed at the Leichhardt Police Boys Club—when a soldier protested at the price of a bottle of soft drink. The owner of the canteen told him if he didn’t like it he could take his business somewhere else. The soldier threw the bottle, which splintered against the wall. Somebody else did the same, and then everyone got into the act. ‘Let’s burn it down!’ was the cry and inside of two minutes the canvas structure was up in flames. ‘Let’s burn the other one down too!’ and with that the mob ran to the second so-called canteen and that also went up in flames in short order.

  It was a drastic action to take. As Holt said at the time: ‘But the smart businessman had been warned about rorting the soldiery and he could only blame himself and his profiteering for his misfortune.’ Later the army took over the canteens and prices dropped dramatically.

  Roy Sibson was born in Bowen, Queensland, and, like Ivo Blazely, was a tough bush kid who left school early—in his case at fourteen. He was actually only fifteen when he joined the Australian Militia, but said he was sixteen. His military training began immediately.

  Sibson went to drill every Tuesday night, then went to a camp in Townsville at Kissing Point for two weeks a year. He got no pay until he turned eighteen, although the other soldiers used to take the hat around to collect a few bob for the young recruits.

  When I was eighteen we got eight shillings and sixpence a day. We got our shirts and uniforms issued free, and sometimes wore them as work clothes. The army let us take our rifles home, one Sunday in four. They took us to the rifle range. When we were shooting with the Lewis guns they had a target about six feet long and three feet high and we had to shoot at this. Any holes in the target told the men in the butts—the trench behind the target—how straight we’d shot. Some of us used to aim along the top of the mound so the stones would fly up and poke hundreds of holes through the target. The men on the butts would get hit with the stones also. The phones would ring hot to ‘Tell the silly buggers to raise their sights’.

  One day Sibson had a young cadet on the range. He was shooting with the .303 rifle which was dirty and the recoil was kicking hell out of his shoulder. After lunch they changed to Lewis guns, which fired about 600 rounds a minute. However, when the lad’s turn came to fire the Lewis gun, he could not be found. When he was located he said that ‘If the rifle hurt his shoulders one shot at a time, what would 600 a minute do?’ Sibson told him that Lewis guns didn’t kick ba
ck. ‘They actually walked away from you and had to be pressed back against your shoulder. That lad took some convincing.’

  Up to then life had been fun and games. But then things started to get serious. When Sibson’s unit landed in Townsville on 6 September 1939, a lot of young men joined up straight away with them. Some had civilian clothes, wore sandshoes and ‘looked a raggedy lot’. When they got off the train and formed up outside the Townsville railway station, they were marched down the main street to Kissing Point. They could be only described as ‘a ragtime army’. When they marched back down the street a couple of months later, ‘You would never know it was the same mob.’

  Their first job was to guard the aerodromes, fuel supplies, wireless stations and other essential installations in Townsville. Sibson’s first assignment was to guard the aerodrome on Ross River. The louts in Townsville used to think it was all a joke and would crawl up in the dark and throw stones. There were a few shots fired, but no results. The commanding officer told Sibson the stones could just as easily have been a hand grenade and ‘If there were any more shots to be fired, he wanted to see the body.’ Sibson obliged:

  The hangars where the aeroplanes were, were all floodlit. While I was on guard, I saw the grass moving where the light met the dark. I thought it was somebody crawling up closer. I eased my safety catch on the rifle forward and waited until he broke cover. It was the biggest black cat I’d ever seen. The commanding officer never said what sort of a body, so I shot it. Next morning the CO congratulated me for being the first man to hit something. The rest of the guards were sleeping and did not wake up or turn out. So he made them dig a hole six feet deep and bury the cat. I wasn’t too popular that day.

  At the aerodrome gate where Sibson was on guard duty, visitors had to present a pass to get in. One of the commercial airline executives in Townsville wanted to catch a plane which was ready to take off, and as he was running late the car was speeding down the road, with the driver leaning out the window and waving a piece of paper, thinking he would be let straight through. ‘I lifted my rifle, eased the safety catch off and aimed at the driver. That car must’ve had six anchors. He threw them all out at once. I never saw anything stop so fast. Then I waved him on and he came, very slowly. I read his pass, and I let him through. I really would have shot him, too.’

  On another occasion Sibson took part in an exercise at Duck Creek. There was intense competition between local Militia units, so one company from Ingham was dug in along the creek and was supposed to be defending it. Sibson’s job was to infiltrate their lines. They were issued with dummy hand grenades that only made a loud bang and were not supposed to be thrown closer than 25 yards from anyone. As he was sneaking through the outposts and foot patrols, Sibson heard one patrol coming his way and lay down in a plough furrow while seven men walked past him so near, ‘I could have undone their bootlaces.’

  He eventually got through their lines and found the command post, then crawled up to about 20 yards from them. They were all bent over looking at their maps using a tiny torch. Sibson lit his Bakelite grenade and threw it among them. ‘Just as well it wasn’t a true grenade as they would never have known what hit them.’ He reckoned they got such a fright, ‘they must’ve had a smell about them when they got back to camp’.

  There were still some laughs to be had in camp, though, as Sibson recalled:

  Two of my mates got weekend leave and went to Proserpine. They must’ve had a good time because they arrived back the worst for wear. One took out a big girl because he arrived back at camp with her voluminous bloomers. I don’t know if he did any good. When he got back on Sunday night he hoisted her bloomers up to the top of the flagpole and in the morning when we were all on parade, they had to pull the bloomers down to hoist up the Aussie flag. When the bloomers were coming down, the lads on parade started singing The Old Red Flannel Drawers That Maggie Wore.

  Sibson’s unit had three and a half months at Miowera in 1942 then were sent home for a few days leave before they were moved back to Townsville. The Americans had started to arrive, and the Militia’s job was to unload their ships. They worked all week including Sundays as they sensed the war was starting to get serious.

  At this stage of the war they were getting 8 shillings and sixpence a day, and the wharfies were getting 10 shillings an hour, and used to call Sibson’s mob ‘scabs’. They were Communists and tried to pick arguments. Looking back with hindsight Sibson didn’t know why they took any notice of their officers and didn’t throw the wharfies into the sea. The soldiers were doing twice as much work as they were, and when Russia came into the war on the Allied side, they gave no more trouble. ‘But later on when I went to New Guinea, some of our cases of beer had as many as six bottles missing and a few stones put in their place. I hope it made them feel proud.’

  Joe Dawson, also a Militia recruit, attended the Footscray drill hall in Melbourne for three nights a week and at weekends, and was eventually accepted. They were intensively drilled with rifles and other weapons. Gradually the rifle that seemed extremely heavy when he first got it ‘began to feel lighter’.

  The recruits were also taught army regulations and other necessities such as how to use a gas mask. War games were set up on a type of elevated sandpit with small artificial trees and miniature soldiers. Scenarios were provided for them to solve. For example, they were told how an attack would be started and they would have to follow through while covering fire from light and heavy machine guns and mortars were simulated around them. Then the ground features were altered and situations changed for the next exercise.

  Dawson’s battalion went into camp at Mount Martha on the Mornington Peninsula, near Frankston, south of Melbourne. The camp was just being established so they lived there under primitive conditions with hardly any facilities. It was a tented camp, with eight men to each tent. Meals were cooked on open fires at the end of each company line of tents and food eaten inside the tents. The showers were galvanised iron sheds with a rudimentary system of cold water shower heads. The ablutions block was simply rough-hewn timber covered with galvanised iron. There was no hot water. Eventually a cookhouse was built and cold showers and ablution benches were installed.

  I remember on one occasion seeing a fellow busily scrubbing his rifle with a brush, soap and water. He had obviously been told ‘clean’ his rifle. I’m not sure whether he decided he didn’t like the army or whether he really was a nutter. Once when I was shaving, my toothpaste and toothbrush were sitting on a bench nearby. The same fellow pointed to the toothbrush and said, ‘What’s that?’ It became apparent he was a real bushie and I don’t think he had too many friends! He was not in my unit so I don’t know what happened to him.

  However, despite the rough facilities and make-believe scenarios, most of the troops considered themselves well-trained soldiers, ready for whatever the army had planned for them.

  Chapter 3

  SAILING TO WAR

  In 1940, few Australians had travelled abroad. Many of the troops about to head for the Middle East had not left their own states in their young lives. The Australian government, short of shipping for essential cargo work, had no capacity for sending troops abroad, and with the agreement of Britain, co-opted luxury passenger liners for the task. Some of the liners, but not all, were stripped of most of their luxury fittings before becoming troop carriers but were still an exotic experience for Australian soldiers.

  On 4 May 1940, the liner Queen Mary sailed from Australia in convoy with the Aquitania, Mauretania, Empress of Britain, Empress of Canada and the unfortunately named Empress of Japan. Other smaller foreign-flagged ships were also pressed into service. Leaving Australia on some of these behemoths was a never-to-be forgotten experience.

  This was an exhilarating part of army life, leaving Sydney on a fine morning. It was supposed to be a secret, but the ships’ presence disclosed that something big was happening and every privately owned boat in Sydney Harbour was out as the Queen Mary led the convoy down towards
the Heads. There were bands on the forepeak playing ‘Now is the Hour’ (the haunting Maori farewell), people were cheering, and the boats were tooting their sirens as they headed out to sea. Every craft that could float turned out to see the troops off, from canoes to packed ferry steamers—whistles blowing—and the soldiers were all cheering.

  Gunner Bob ‘Hooker’ Holt was also looking forward to getting away. Early on the morning of 9 January, Holt’s battalion moved out and boarded the liner Orcades. All embarking troops had been issued with full uniforms and the 16th Brigade put on quite a show as the smartly dressed men marched through Sydney on 4 January 1940. But Holt was not among them. He was unfortunate enough to be in hospital with a poisoned arm. By the time he was discharged, he found himself dropped from the embarkation rolls. ‘I believe I would have been the most despondent AIF man in Australia,’ he wrote.

  After a few weeks in Melbourne, Holt was transferred to Puckapunyal camp in Victoria and told he was now a member of the 2nd Australian General Hospital. He quickly discovered that the soldiers in the hospital unit were different from those in the battalions.

  Our training consisted mainly of erecting and dismantling tents and I (together with most Sydneysiders from the other battalions in the 16th Brigade who were with us) made up my mind to re-join my battalion at the first opportunity. None of us were sorry to see the last of Puckapunyal and we were more than pleased to board the Strathaird on 15 April 1940. We were seen off by a team of high-ranking officers including our Commander in Chief General Thomas Blamey, while the band played ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ and the unforgettable Maori farewell. We lived the life of Riley aboard the Strathaird, sleeping in two and four berth cabins without any duties to speak of. There were physical jerks twice a day. The two-up school was booming on deck, as was the dice game in the ship’s canteen of an evening.