FINKELSTEIN, Harry - Interview

An Oral History of
World War II
recorded by Hal Finkelstein
WX4637 2/7th Field Ambulance.
Interviewed by Bob Huston for the Army Museum of W.A. on November 21st, 1998

Did you know that the war was coming along when you were a young man?

I think most of the young men knew because in the couple of years before the war when the excesses of the German movement were going through Europe there was an influx of young men along the Terrace - the fellas that worked in the bank, the insurance companies, the fuel companies and all of those young men, all joined the citizen's military forces. I think they were called the militia forces in those days. I remember joining the Cameron Highlanders because they were a spectacular looking unit and they always led the parades through the city. All the fellas from work, the blokes you went to school with, the blokes you played football with were all joining these units, half I think because it looked like a bit of fun but half because there was an atmosphere that made them feel that they should do this.

Did many of your peer group join or start to get involved because there were still the effects of the depression happening in Australia or didn't that have much to do with it?

To my knowledge I don't think the Depression had anything to do with it because I started work in 1935 and I had to wait until I was 16 before I could get a job with the Bank of NSW, they wouldn't employ anybody under 16 but in the six months or so after I left school until that happened I used to go looking at other jobs and there were heaps of kids looking for jobs but I would say that over a period of six months they all got jobs. Even though we were just coming out of the Depression in due time everybody got a job. Whether it was the job that they thought they wanted to do or not was another matter because I had some reservations about this. I saw kids at school in '32, '33 and 34 - my years in high school, where someone would come in with a message from the head master to say "is there anyone here looking for jobs" and the boys would put their hands up, because they had pressure on them from home for economic necessity to get a job if they could. They would go out for the job not knowing what sort of job it was even and if they could get one, they got it and they looked after it.

To support my argument that vocations and vocational training and guidance may not be as deep as it seems, I remember a young man that went out like that. He didn't know what the job was but he got the job. It turned out to be an office boy in an insurance company and he finished up as the Assistant State Manager in Victoria with that company. Anyone who got a job did it to the best of their ability and they looked after the job. I know that in adult life sometimes they were slightly square pegs in round holes but they still did the job well enough to stay with it.

So, as 1939 drew nearer from '35 when you started to work, was there any particular moments that you remember that really made you think "people are talking war and I think war is going to happen" or were you too young to really think about it and you were busy having a good time doing other things?

Well we were all having a good time but the thing was when poor old Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich, and I can still see the newsreels because of course we had no television - the news reel of him stepping out of his aeroplane and waving this piece of paper and talking about peace in our time, we were already then in the militia so there had been enough alarmist stuff and I suppose you can't see a country taking over this one and that one and pressing this one without realising that there's a bully on the loose here. So we thought it was coming to war.

Did that scare you at all or worry you at all?

No, it didn't worry us. It wasn't very pleasant; the idea wasn't very pleasant. When the war started, as you will know, the beginning of the '39 war was fairly quiet. After Poland was chopped up nothing much happened in Europe for a while and it wasn't until the following spring in Europe that Germany invaded the Netherlands and at that point I worked in the first floor of a building on the corner of William St and the Terrace and the Daily News, which was an afternoon newspaper, put up a poster saying "Hitler invades the Netherlands" and I said to myself "This is enough. I wrote out a note applying to the bank for leave to join the army and I asked a lady on the staff to type it for me. She just said OK and some time later when she hadn't given it back to me, I went up and said "what did you do with that note I gave you". She said "Oh, I crumpled it up and threw it out. I'm not going to be a party to that". So I had to type it myself and I was the fourth person in the Bank of NSW in WA to take military leave to go ahead of time. Of course it accelerated from then on.

Was there much of a foreboding or reluctance in a way because people were thinking about the WW1 experience in the community?

Well that was certainly the pervading thought because even in official circles they were still thinking of the '14-'18 experience and that was the way the war would be fought because I can remember my father saying when I let them know that I was taking leave from the bank to join the army, recognising that it was about the end of April, early May, he thought if I could put this off for 2 or 3 months until the summer in Europe was gone well then the winter would come again and it would give us that much more time. But I originally proposed to go as an air gunner because I could already use the automatic weapons that we used in the militia even though they were pretty primitive so I wouldn't need to go through all the training. We all have youthful ideas like that. I spoke to a cousin of mine who was a doctor in the city and he and I were great friends - he was a lot older than I was but they got me to talk to him and he was going on about all the problems of dying in aeroplanes and dying when you crash and burning and all this sort of thing and he implored me to go with the unit that an old school friend of his was starting. He said "this old school friend of mine is starting a unit now and you'll always have a bed to sleep in at night" and he told me that his old friend was Leslie La Souef who is now a Lieutenant Colonel and the unit he was starting was the 2/7th Field Ambulance. So when I filled in my papers for enlistment I nominated this on the papers and that was how that came about. Leslie was commissioned by the army in April of 1940 to form a unit and put it into training and he had one of his officers, who was probably only a captain then, name of Frank Wallace, down at the drill hall and everybody like me that had put this thing on, he interviewed them and accepted them or I suppose there were some he rejected.

Anyway we were all interviewed and we went into camp in June 1940. I can remember we had to go down to the drill hall and enlist on the 23rd and on the 25th we reported and we were marched down to the station and got on a train and went into Northam. We marched from the Northam station up to the camp which was about 3 miles. We were in civilian clothes and there was an advance party already in camp and as we marched into our lines some of these 'smart alecks' called out "You'll be sorry, you'll be sorry". This was a standard sort of call and a stentorian voice from our ranks came back "We were sorry when your arse holes were as big as shirt buttons". This was a WW1 soldier who was in our camp. But I'm jumping the gun a bit going to all these times.

When war was declared which was on a Sunday here, I received a phone call from my platoon or company commander in the Cameron Highlanders to report down to the drill hall the next morning & I said "Oh we were told by the bank that if we were being mobilised we had to seek a day's leave to make arrangements" and he said "You just be at the drill hall in the morning". So I went to one of my friends who worked in the bank and told him to tell them next morning that I had to go down to the drill hall. We were taken over to Rottnest to be a garrison to protect the big guns that were installed at Rottnest. There was an engineers company and a company of infantry, which we were, and we were supposed to be there for a fortnight. We were running around laying barbed wires and placements on the beaches where the enemy would land and digging trenches in the sand that filled in within a week. We went over there on one of the harbour tugs called the Ivanhoe, and a freighter called King Bay. The freighter was just a shell and it was very shallow draft and rocked amazingly. The weather was pretty rough as we went over. Sometimes we would lose sight of each other. I was on the harbour tug, the Ivanhoe. Everything was sliding around backwards and forwards on the deck because it soon had a sheen of vomit to slide in and when we arrived there, and got off at the jetty, the fellows were too staggery even to go through the drill which was called pile arms where you stack the rifles up together so we could unload the boat. But we managed and at the end of the fortnight, the weather was so bad they couldn't bring us back so we ended up staying there for a month. But we had the time of our lives. We were 19/20 years old, full of beans and we ran up and down over those hills like rabbits and camped out there. It was a great adventure and a great laugh and we had a great time. Then of course after that these units were going into camp at Northam and training with the preliminary AIF units and so on.

But I never went into camp again. I went into the AIF in June, as I said.

So how did your folks react when you joined?

Well they were upset at the idea and they talked me out of going in to the airforce. I joined this unit because a lot of the fellows from my militia unit were joining the 11th battalion and the 28th battalion. I thought to myself, when we get overseas, I'll hop out of this unit and go back with my mates. It so happened that very soon after we got into camp in Northam, there was a flu epidemic and half the camp were laid low. They were also collapsing from our para-typhoid injections; we were having small pox and para-typhoid injections and they were knocking the blokes about. They had welts on their arms; they couldn't touch them so they called for us as a field ambulance unit to help the dozen or so hospital staff because we had hundreds of people sick and many of the barracks were converted into wards. I went to help them and there was a chap in charge with a couple of us who knew nothing and we were looking after these sick people. I found it to be an interesting exercise and by the time we went away, which was only 3 months later, I was trade-grouped as a nursing orderly. I had no training of any sort except what I'd had in those sick bays and for the time being I decided to stay with it and as time went on, I must say I had a bit of a flair for being a field medical orderly; I thought it was interesting and I decided to stay with the unit and whether that was for good or bad no-one will ever know because you never know the slender thread that fate swings on.

We did our training at Northam and we had rehearsals for embarkation where at 6 o'clock in the morning they'd blow the bugle and come in and say "Everyone's got to be totally packed and out on the parade ground by 7 o'clock. Anything that's left in the barracks will be given to the Red Cross. We'd all get out and parade and the Colonel would look up and down and say "All right break off, take your pack off and go and have breakfast" and all this sort of thing.

Eventually, under the strictest secrecy; we were not allowed to even ring anybody up for a couple of days, we were marched out, marched down to the train at Northam. There were 3000 people at the station at Northam to see us off. We got on the train and we came through to Perth and every town we went through, there were crowds of people. So it was a highly secret operation. As we came into the city, and we never stopped at any station all the way through to Perth but every station was chock a block. We came into the Perth station and there would have been thousands of people on the platform. The train leaned over as everybody came to the windows on the passenger side to see the people on the platform. We went through the station and then the train leaned over the other way as all the men went to the other side to wave good bye to the girls along Roe Street who were all out waving at the fellas. So we got to Fremantle and of course there were barricades.

A lot of people were on the wharf; once we got onto the ship, they let them come on to the wharf. I remember a fellow there, he was standing next to me on the rail (I didn't have anybody down there, my family were in the bush) and his wife and kids were there, he was an older bloke, and he was saying in a voice only I could hear "you shouldn't have come, you shouldn't have come" and tears were streaming down his face as we were pulling out. It made a vivid impression on me because I was only 21 and I didn't have anybody. I had my own family but I didn't have any other attachments and here was a married man and his wife was there and he was going away to the war. It made a strong impression on me at the time and I can still see that fellow with the tears streaming down his face.

We got onto the ship early afternoon and we'd left Northam about 6 o'clock in the morning and we hadn't had any meals along the way so we got onto the ship and they served us a meal of mashed potato, cold corned beef and beetroot. We all gulped this down because we were hungry. As we got past Rottnest we hit the swell and the boat started to play up. For most of us, that would have been our first time on a ship. The crew went round taking all the outside lights off the ship. If they couldn't undo it, they just smashed it. Within an hour there was red-coloured vomit flying everywhere. Blokes were vomiting into the wind from the upper deck and it was a hell of a mess. We were slung up in hammocks in what they called a troop deck and the atmosphere in there was stifling and most of us were feeling a little queasy anyway so we stayed out on the deck and just lay down on the deck. The weather was quite good.

The next morning I went down to the dining room even though I couldn't eat a proper breakfast I did go down to the dining room and that was the last time I was sick but there were fellows who were sick for several days. I suppose I said earlier very few of us had been on ships because they weren't much travelled on in those pre-war years. We called in at Colombo, went ashore at Colombo, had a look at things. We didn't have time to go anywhere else, we were only in there for the day. Then I went out to the Galleface Hotel on Galleface Green and had a look around the town. That was about all, I think. We went on and never had any incidents. There were 4 ships - we had one escort ship and once we went past Port Suez into the Red Sea I think that escort vanished. We just went up through the canal which was an interesting experience. We all knew about the Canal but it's interesting to see a ship in the distance sailing through the desert because you can't see the water when you're at the same level. We got off at El Qantara which is a port half way up towards Port Said and we got on a train there and went off to Palestine and joined the Sixth Division who were then in camp and had been in training. We were not short on enthusiasm but we were pretty short on knowledge and experience. I would guess so were our officers. We suffered the deficiency out of the army system of having doctors running an army unit which is a ridiculous thing when you come to think of it. They weren't there as army officers, they were there as doctors but they were captains and majors and whatever. Some of them did quite well some of them did their best for sure. We went on manoeuvres with the unit, we went out, we walked as far as Beersheba, saw the old 14/18 signs of the war there; the half built trenches and the barbed wire emplacements and so on, the light horse would have gone over. We walked back again.

Did that impress you much, when you saw Beesheba?

It was interesting to see that because even though I know much more about it now than I knew then you had the picture of the horsemen.

Did you ever have much of a feeling at that stage of this WW1 legacy that you were the second AIF and you had a reputation to uphold?

I think we were young enough and brash enough to think that however good they were, we were just as good and that we could do the things that they did. In fact I remember a group of us; we devolved into groups and the group that I was in was not one that got drunk every time they had any money. We had a drink but we didn't depend on it and we weren't chasing it. One or two of the fellows were married but they were a fairly decent living mob and we went into Cairo. Of course there's this famous story about the brothel street in Cairo that the Australians burnt down in the 14/18 war that was known as the Burka. We got out at the train station in Cairo and went outside and of course a taxi driver immediately attached himself to us so we piled into his taxi and said "take us to the Burka". He looked a little bit surprised because it was about 200 yards around the corner. We went there and it was teeming; it was like a beehive, an antheap. Several floors of buildings and you went up an outside stair case and at every landing there was a woman there importuning the blokes to come in and all this sort of thing. We went into a place and I remember one of our young fellows had had a couple of drinks and he was a little bit affected by it. I was standing around pretty nervously because I'd never been in a place like that before and it was an incredible scene to see the girls ushering one fellow out the door and another fellow going in and all this sort of thing. The talk was pretty basic and I remember one of the girls, whether she was working or just playing around I don't know but she was amongst us and she was sitting down and this fellow said "Here talk to this boy, he's a virgin" and he pushed me onto her knee and I must have indicated by my attitude that I was as scared as hell because she made some remark about "what's the matter with you, what are you frightened of" sort of thing and I got off there because I was scared of the whole situation.

We used to run these Blue Light depots; we had to staff them at times as the field ambulance. These Blue Light units were where the blokes came back from leave and had to go in and have an irrigation and get some disinfectant ointment and stuff like that. But of course some blokes dodged it and there were some bad results. We were walking along one day and a young fellow, probably about 12 or 13, an Arab boy, got hold of us and promised us all sorts of exotic delights. There were 4 of us I think, maybe 5 and we were all pretty confident that we wouldn't get into trouble if we stayed together so we decided to go along with him and see these interesting things that were all pretty sordid. We were going down a laneway and we passed an 'out of bounds' sign which didn't really worry us. We were not scared of those sorts of things but we hadn't gone much further when we ran into two military policemen and they said "where do you think you are going" and we told them that this boy was taking us to some seedy thing. "Oh" they said, "you're probably going to so and so's. We'll go with you just to see that there's no trouble." So they went with us and we went into this place. There were a couple of women there and I think they were sort of past their "use by" date as far as the active scene was concerned and they put on their funny little bits and pieces and of course we had to pay them some money. We left and were half way down the track out of there when we realised that the MP's were no longer with us and of course we woke up to the fact that they'd stayed behind and got their cut because if they stopped the people going to this out of bounds area those people wouldn't have got anything so I guess the MP's were taking a rake-off.

We did our training in Palestine and went over to Egypt where we camped in a place called Burg el Arab right next door to a date plantation where legend went that was where the film 'Beau Geste' was filmed. It was an interesting area. There were a lot of Egyptian burial grounds and apart from our official walkings, our little group used to do a bit of recreational walking and you could walk out into the desert. You'd see funny looking things so you'd walk out there and find an excavation, a digging. There'd just be a hole there. We wouldn't go down a hole because you didn't know what was there. You'd meet a Bedouin; you'd go into a little Bedouin village and they were lovely people. They'd ask you to come in; we couldn't talk to each other but they would ask you to come in and you'd sit down and they give you a cup of coffee. They all had their black tents, three sided tent. I forget which way they used to face now but they were always open on one side and they had their goats and animals around. I found them to be quite nice people.

One day we went on one of these walks and went over a hill or round it or something and we came across quite a substantial looking residence so we called in there and found a fellow called Major Bromley. He was a retired British army man who'd been out in Egypt in the 14/18 war and became very interested in it. He classed himself as an Egyptologist and the holes that we'd seen were his diggings. He had this quite elaborate house and he had a huge well in the grounds with a circular stair case that wound round the inside of the wall going down. He invited the fellows to go down and I can remember thinking 'we don't know this fellow'. The others went down and I stayed upon top because he might have been a madman for all we knew but he wasn't. He turned out to be quite all right. I often wondered in years later what happened to him because he would have been pretty much in the war zone as it turned out later on.

We were there and we were training and there was a very interesting exercise took place. The army was getting ready to approach Bardia (I'm pretty sure it was Bardia; it was one of the early battles anyway) and they had half thought up an idea of a sea borne attack - that we would be taken up on navy ships, go ashore in rowboats and row ourselves to shore and make this attack. There was a party of us selected to accompany this organisation and we had to carry everything - our stretchers and water and medical supplies. We had everything; no-one had done anything like this before so the Colonel didn't seem to know where to stop. We were packed up like cart horses and if this exercise had ever taken place I'm sure we would all have gone to the bottom. We may have had to go off at any moment and would have had to be out and on our way within about 5 minutes. We had a few false alarms but I can remember once when we all paraded, and we were not allowed to go away from camp whilst this was on, we were all paraded there and were loaded up to the ears with everything and the Colonel said 'now, is there any man that can carry anything more' and a voice from the back said "Yes sir, I could carry an aspirin if it was crushed".

Fortunately for most of us that sea borne operation never took place because we were so ill-equipped to do that. If the people ashore had had any ability at all we'd have been dead before we hit the beach but they did the attack by land. As it happened, it used to get bitterly cold there on the fringe of the desert and the infantrymen had these sheepskin jackets that were tanned with the wool on them - the wool was on the inside and the brown tanning stuff was on the outside and they were sleeveless but they were hip length and when they advanced against the Italian emplacements, bearing in mind that the Italians had been there for years and were not well trained and not well managed and the morale was bad, so that the Australians advanced against them and the Italians put up a fairly feeble resistance they developed an impression that the Australians were wearing armour and that they were invincible and they surrendered in thousands.

The other interesting thing about that Bardia battle is that if it hadn't been for that battle where we captured a tremendous amount of Italian equipment apart from the prisoners, we would have never got to the war because we didn't have any transport. We were so badly equipped. When we left Australia we had 1914-18 equipment and we left the horse drawn ambulances behind in Northam but we had enough gear and stuff to send one company up to join the assault on Bardia.

When your company went forward with the assault, how far behind the advancing parties was your advance dressing station?

I wasn't at Bardia, I wasn't in the company that went up to Bardia but they would be just out of range. There was a preliminary skirmish at Solloum which was on the border and as we were making our way there slowly after the battle - I don't think we had the gear at that time, we were hitching rides with other transport units and things - we came to a small medical station in Solloum where they were still looking after a few people. There were two bodies done up in blankets ready for burial lying on stretchers and they were the first dead bodies I had seen. I never saw these persons - they were wrapped up in blankets.

Did it depress you in any way?

It did. I'd never seen dead bodies before; I'd been to funerals but of course you only see the coffin. I'd never seen people like this that had died in these conditions.

Did that make you realise that you really were at war?

No it didn't at that time but it did not long after that. We got our gear and went on then. We picked up a lot of Italian medical gear too and we were pretty reasonably set up by then to go to war. When the war on Tobruk took place, we'd travelled up there. The Italians were marvellous road engineers; they'd built roads that were running up and down the escarpment. They were fantastic to drive on and we found that part of it quite interesting because there was nothing happening. The Italians were in a garrison situation in those towns along there and we would come along to each town, knock it off and then go on to the next one and nothing happened in between.

When we came to Tobruk, we had a portable operating theatre with a generator which had been captured from the Italians. It was dust proof and totally enclosed and you could go in and out and we had an advanced surgical team there. The assault on Tobruk took place; I can't remember the exact time because the artillery opened up with a big bang then the infantry went in. Our stretcher bearers were with the infantry and we were just out of range at the back. Bear in mind that there was no aerial war at that time so we didn't have to protect ourselves against bombers. We set up tents and things like that and in due course the wounded started coming in and they were doing advanced surgery in this place. There were a lot of gut wounds; they were doing major operations and some of the poor devils would come through the operation all right but then they were taken by ambulance overland back to Alexandria and the ambulances were staffed and run by the Egyptians. When we saw them loading these stretchers into ambulances with the wounded on, they were sometimes so rough and indifferent in the way they handled them that we had occasion to speak to them and straighten them out a bit but I often wondered, once they got out sight, how those poor devils travelled.

Anyway, the evening came on; I would guess that the assault started in the morning and by the time they got to us the day had advanced. We set up several tents which were holding tents for wounded people that had come out of surgery and we were designated to look after the tents - 'this is your tent', this is going to be my tent', 'this was someone else's, and this was someone else's. Until there were people in all of them, I was helping the people in the tents which were already filling up. It was night time and I heard my name called out and met this party going to my tent. They were carrying a hurricane lamp and they had a stretcher. I went in and there was one of our sergeants there and he said "this fellow is going to die." They'd operated on him but there was nothing they could do for him so 'just look after him until he dies.' We got into the tent and they left the hurricane lamp with me. The generator was powering the operating theatre and whatever they needed there so this poor devil, he came from Victoria, was laying there on the stretcher. He had a bad abdominal wound. Apparently it was a terminal situation and he'd been anaesthetised of course. The anaesthetics in those days were pretty rough. Nobody came out an anaesthesia and said 'where am I'. They usually came out thrashing and fighting and things like that. Anyway, he was there and started to come out of the anaesthesia and wave his arms around a bit. I was trying to get through the fog of anaesthesia and calm him down and he started kicking and thrashing and I tried to hold him down. It wasn't that I feared hurting him or anything because they'd told me he was going to die but it was very distressing, for me anyway, and I didn't see that it would help him to be thrashing and waving his arms around so I lay on him to hold him down and I kept talking to him. I don't think I ever got through to him and in the middle of all this - his breathing was gurgling and sounded most unpleasant - the generator stopped and there was dead silence in the middle of the night in the desert and all I heard was this poor devil gurgling his life away. I went to the window and I screamed out to myself 'get that bloody motor going' because at least the 'putt putt' of the motor made it a bit more bearable. Eventually they did and eventually I had a few more patients come in.

So he just passed on?

Yes. So I entered the night as a beardless boy but by dawn I'd been through the lot.

Do you think the sergeant that put you there knew what he was doing?

No, that was just incidental. I was just one of the blokes, I was just one of the orderlies.

That was going to be your baptism of fire.

No, he didn't think of it as baptism at all. He was just doing his job; he was running it - you do this and so on. It was just the way it happened. So by the morning I'd seen it all.

Did you ever feel that you were going through pretty tough experiences like that and that was just your first of many. That you thought 'I'd rather be a fighting man than.....

No it never occurred to me at all.

Why not?

Well, it's a funny thing. I seemed to develop a thing for looking after people and I was quite good at it, I must say. The more experience I got the better I became at it and I found it a very satisfying aspect of my service, to be doing this.

Did you find that was your first real experience of what was to come, what was to follow? Did you become harder, tougher?

It does happen that way, you become inured to it even though it doesn't change your own attitude with the individuals - you would still not do anything different with them but if they died, that was how it happened, unfortunately and you would just say 'oh so and so died' and do him up to be buried.

How did you cope with those types of stresses and pressures and how did your colleagues?

I don't know. I don't think at he time I ever said anything to anybody about my experiences with that poor young man. I've never followed it up. I knew his name and number; I can't remember his number but I can still remember his name. He came from Victoria. There were some people that I did go and see afterwards, after I'd come home, relatives of people who'd died but I never did with this man. I suppose because it was such a traumatic experience.

Anyway, that war didn't last very long. It was over by the following day and we went into Dema and occupied a hospital that had been occupied by the Italians and was left in a hell of a mess. It was shocking. They had flushing toilets that were blocked, the plumbing was crook and the place was filthy. Before we could put it to use, we had to scrub it, scrub it down and clean it. We did this, we pitched in and cleaned it. As I said some time ago, we were all enthusiastic about everything. We got into it and we cleaned the place up and we started treating wounded there. We must have been there for a week or thereabouts and then an English unit came up and took over from us. We had Arabs and all sorts of things because the Arabs, who may have been poorly treated by the Italians - I don't know for sure but the retreating Italians didn't treat the Arabs very well. In this particular circumstance, there was a group of Arabs and as the retreating Italians went past they threw a grenade into this group and we had two or three of these people in being treated.

One was a young girl and she had a serious wound and she had to be operated on. Two of them were men and one of them was my first instance of gas gangrene. In a attempt to hold this down we were specialling him; every two hours we had a shift change because it's a nasty unpleasant business and we were giving him hot foments on this wound in his arm, in his forearm, probably every half hour or so. I can remember the first time I took off the old dressing to put a new one on and his arm had swollen up; it was about the size of an ordinary Australian football and the wound, which wouldn't have been more than about 2 inches long, was gaping because of the way the flesh had all expanded and the stench was something chronic. I don't think there is a worse smell than gangrene. It's frightful and it seems to stay with you. We were working on this poor devil for probably a day or two and we weren't making any headway; the gangrene was slowly creeping up his arm and the doctors decided they would take his arm off. He wouldn't agree to it, he said 'how am I going to get on with one arm'. Anyway eventually he agreed; I presume he agreed to it, and they took his arm off. I was present at the operation and I watched it happen. They had to cut it off high enough where the gangrene hadn't reached but I guess, in the light of my later knowledge that it was a pretty chancy operation anyway. The other fellow had a wound in the upper thigh and we'd fixed up an antiseptic drip, we used USOL or Universal Solution, on him which was running down through this thing and fixed him. His infection retreated and withdrew and he was OK. I think the girl must have been OK as well.

Was this first operation you'd seen and being a young fellow, what fascinated you about it?

It was the first operation I'd seen. The doctor that did it was a fellow called Gillette; he was a doctor or GP from Kalgoorlie and he was a marvellous fellow. He did this operation and he was one of the few surgeons I was aware of who was ambidextrous. He would run around with a scalpel and then change hands and do the other side with it and he was very neat and very quick and a very good guy. I didn't faint or feel queasy or anything. I was interested in the techniques of it and the way he did a flap over the end of his arm and all that sort of thing. They sawed through the bone. I'd never seen one done and I found it interesting. I'd briefly been in the operating theatre at Tobruk; I'd had to go in there for some reason and there was an operation in course but I wasn't allowed to stand around and watch it. I had to do what I did and get out because they were trying to keep the place antiseptic.

How did the doctors impress you?

The doctors were great. That fellow Gillette was such a wonderful doctor and a great guy. He wore an ammunition box and a 38 pistol on his waist; the officers all had these for some strange reason. We of course were unarmed. I remember we were in a tent during the Libyan campaign and had all these fellows on the ground and on stretchers and he was trying to pick his way amongst them and bend down and treat them and this gear on his belt weas getting in the way and I said to him 'when are you going to get rid of that stuff'. He looked at me in a most aggrieved way, almost as if to say 'look these are badges of my status. I can't take them off'. They were very, very good. We had a great lot of people. We had blokes who had been flying doctors, early flying doctors who worked in the repatriation department which was in the old Royal Perth Hospital, we had country doctors, young blokes just out of college. We had a wide range of them and our commanding officer Colonel Le Souef; he had not been old enough to go to the 14/18 war or I'm quite sure he would have gone; had been interested in medical military or military medical ever since then. He'd qualified and he had been in fact the commander of a militia field ambulance and I presume that was why he was asked to form us.

People often used to use the term 'soldier' but I never regarded ourselves as 'soldiers'. We were out there on the medical side of it. Our drivers - truck drivers and ambulance drivers and so on, even though they were in our unit they were members of the service corp as drivers and they carried rifles. I remember one of them saying once how they were a trained infantry unit and I didn't laugh in his face because I'd been in the infantry before the war and they weren't even as well trained as we were which was only a joke. They carried rifles but I don't think any one ever shot one in anger.

We continued on; Dema wasn't any big deal. As the Italian campaign finished at Bengazi, the main body of us were set up in a barracks in Cyrenaica, which is part of Libya and the town near it was Barce. We set up a hospital there, a field hospital and the damaged of the campaign came to us to be looked after and we had a many as 60 to 100 patients there at times with sickness and odd little troubles that we fixed up. That was quite a good exercise. We gained a lot of experience at looking after people because the doctors would do rounds and tell us what to do and things like that.

So from the time you started at Bardia and by the time you finished at Bengazi, as a unit functioning in a war zone now, your level of team work and expertise and swiftness must have mushroomed.

It grew tremendously. The desert was an interesting experience. The sand storms would come up and were so intense that we'd be sitting in the back of a truck and have to cover our faces with a handkerchief or some bit of cloth. The vehicles had to close up because in a convoy they had to be a certain distance apart but if they stayed that far apart in a dust storm they'd lose each other so they had to close up. Sometimes you would be so close that you'd see a vehicle in the dust but you couldn't see anybody in it. You'd never distinguish people in it because it was quite intense and when you got out, if you had goggles (we used our gas goggles, we had gas masks in those days) you'd have these patches of skin. The rest was covered in this uniform pinkie grey colour of the dust. How the drivers managed I don't know but we never lost anybody.

Did you notice that you were getting quicker at setting things up and pulling things down?

We did, we became much more confident very quickly in doing things, in managing situations and reacting to situations. We used to bed down in the desert at times; when I say 'the desert' it's pretty rocky hard stuff with very little growth of any sort and it used to get bitterly cold at night. We had a ground sheet, which is a waterproof sheet and a blanket and we'd hollow out an area in the ground where you got your hip and then you'd roll yourself up in all of this. It was most uncomfortable and sometimes in the morning all the outside of everything was damp from the dew.

We still had no air war to worry about. There were Italian bombers that flew across but we never even gave them a second thought. I think they were only a token effort. They'd fly in towards Egypt and perhaps drop a few bombs but they were high level operations. At this time we had a few Hurricanes in the desert but we never saw them either and there was no opposition to them. Our hospital exercise in Cyrenaica was quite successful and we did well there. Some of the people that came there didn't survive of course because they'd had something that was going to kill them anyway but we packed up and went back to Alexandria. On the way back; it probably would have taken us several days to get back even without any stops; one night we were camped; the trucks were all parked in a row and we were all bunked down. During the middle of the night an aeroplane came flying down at a fairly low altitude - low enough to see these trucks and let out a burst of machine gun at us. We nearly died of fright; it was such an uncommon experience. It was a German plane. The Germans had already come in at Tripoli and that was the beginning of their exercise in Egypt. We were on our way back. That was the only thing we saw and we had no casualties.

At that state, up to Bengazi, had you lost any people in the unit?

No, we hadn't lost anyone in our unit.

At Tobruk, where there was a little bit more resistance, a few more casualties, how would you describe the wounded as they came in? How did they behave?

They were pretty good as a rule. They'd already been through the stretcher bearers and maybe a field dressing station. They all had dressings on their wounds and there was a little bit of a record. Some of them had morphia injections or something like that. They were OK. I never had any instances of blokes going on complaining about things. They were pretty good. Some of them were in pain of course but we couldn't help that. I remember one man, he was an officer and he had the misfortune to have some severe damage to his genitals. He was due to have surgery and he was in the tent with my friend and we were working in there. I'd been helping my mate in his tent with his people before my tent became occupied and this chap had this damage and had to have surgery. They took him away and he had his surgery and it was all OK. I don't remember the exact details of how he came out of it but he'd recovered from his operation and was sort of just recovering and the colonel came in, didn't realise that he'd had his surgery and said to this chap 'we'll have you right'. The fellow had the feeling that he hadn't even had his surgery and he said to my mate 'if I'm likely to die, there are some things I've got to do. My mate kept saying 'you're not going to die, you're not going to die'. Anyway this guy had a revolver and he pulled it out and discharged it into a sandbag at the end of the tent because if he was going to die, he was going to shoot himself. So that's an idea of what the blokes were like. By and large, I thought they were pretty good. They were pretty good indeed. Different ones had different attitudes. Some said 'oh what a business. Fancy copping this thing and now my mates have gone on without me' and others would have the attitude 'oh well, I'm going back, I'm not having any more of it.'

When you're at places like Dema where there's a battle on, what would be your hours of work?

If something was on and you started work, you would go on until it finished.

How did you keep going on?

There was never anything that lasted that long. Our experience there was all short sharp bursts. The longest I can recall is going from one morning until the following morning and then you might have had to pack up and travel but bear in mind that you also had a very high sense of excitement, not in the sense of pain but natural excitement and this would keep you going for quite a while. You were in overdrive, as it were. There was a funny thing happened when we were running this hospital. There were opportunities from time to time to have a day off and groups could get a truck and go off and look at some of the old places along the coast. We saw some interesting signs of the early Turkish settlements along there and Roman baths and things like that. I remember going into Bengazi into the town one day, about a dozen of us in a truck. The town was pretty good. It hadn't been damaged or anything of that nature. It was in pretty good shape and we didn't do anything very much but there was a funny story arose from there that one of our blokes told me about that one of the girls set up her brothel operation and there was a great line of chaps outside. One of our old fellows, a nice old chap, a bit older than a lot of us and a very quiet sort of fellow saw one of the blokes in this line and he went up to him and said 'what's this for? The pictures? So the chap told him what it was and he withdrew from that and off he went. But the interesting thing is that after some time, the girl came out with her last customer, closed the door and said 'look I'm sorry fellows but I've got to go out to the officers'.

How did the fellows react to that?

Well, they were a bit cross about it but she had to serve the officers.

We worked quite hard in that hospital. I remember the Colonel said he thought that was a great operation we ran and how well we did with it.

How many men would have been in that sort of unit that we're talking about there? A couple of hundred of you?

There were 243 of us who went away to the war.

So that was the 2/7th Field unit ? They're quite small really. A battalion was 1000.

There were 3 battalions in the brigade and a Field Ambulance for each battalion but in our unit we would have had 30 or 40 drivers, 60 or 70 stretchers bearers, administration people, stores people and with the doctors, including sergeants and corporals and so on, probably around 40. It's bit like for every soldier at war there were 6 people in support. In that hospital thing that we were in, it was the medical orderlies that were working out there. We had large wards; I'd say that each of us had about 30 people to look after but we only worked an ordinary shift at that time. Some of them were just sick. They'd caught illnesses and fevers and things like that. Sandfly fever was a bad thing that people used to catch.

So when you got to point when you'd taken Bengazi and you were moving back to Alexandria did you ever have a feeling of achievement about it?

We'd done very well. We had a euphoria about it. We had done well, we knew we'd done well and we told each other that we'd done well. In our youthful exuberance and ignorance we'd say 'bring on the next lot'.

We weren't long in Alexandria before we went to Greece.

So, you'd landed in the Middle East. From the time you'd landed to the time you were back at Alexandria, how many months are we talking?

We landed at El Qantara in the middle of November on 1940.

You'd joined up in June 1940 so in six months you were in the war zone.

That's right. We left Egypt to go to Greece in about March. So that was six months after we'd left Australia and we'd been through the Libyan campaign. We'd finished our training and had the first campaign of the war.

So you arrived in Egypt in November and that first campaign against the Italians was all over by March and then you were looking to go to Greece? So Tobruk was a major turning point in your experience. That was where the war really started, where it came home to you in a big way? When exactly was Tobruk?

That's right. We were in Palestine in November, we went over to Egypt around the end of the year and I would say that was probably about the end of January, beginning of February.

So before June, you were a little civilian, working in the bank and going to the movies and the dances and 9 months later something completely different altogether? Do ever think about that?

There's a point I will make with you afterwards, after we talk about Greece. When we were taken POW in Crete, it was on the 1st June 1941. We left Australia on the 22nd of September and on the 1st June 1941 we'd been through 3 campaigns, the unit was totally buggered, we'd lost all our equipment and 3/4 of the men. I went into camp on the 25th of June 1940, we left Australia on the 22nd of September and by the 1st of June next year, we were done.

Just shows how rapidly things were happening.

We were really just starting to fall into the hole because while we had a successful campaign in Egypt and Libya, it became much worse when the Germans came in and dropped all those bombs. They had a pretty tough time there. It hadn't been like that for us so much. It was hot but it was briefly hot whereas this was a bit more sustained.

During the first 10 months of the year, you had mail ingoing and outgoing?

Oh yes.

Who used to write to you and how important was your mail?

Well, it wasn't so important in those days because we hadn't really detached all that much from our home situation. We had letters; my family used to write. I had a girlfriend that used to write to me. That would have been all, just family and I used to write to them. 'AIF abroad' was our address and it used to go through the censors. I can remember watching the censor once cutting up a letter because he said 'this letter says we've come back from Libya to Egypt' so he'd cut out Egypt. They were so naive about the whole business, our people. We'd never really been in touch with war. We didn't know what it was like. They were probably printing it in the paper there and he was cutting it out of letters. It's so ridiculous but still, at the time they all thought that was the way it ought to be.

Had your attitudes changed at all during that first 8 or 9 months of fighting in a war? Did you have any views like 'I don't think it was going to be like this' or 'this is what I thought it was going to be like'?

I don't remember having any deliberations about that or coming to any conclusions about it. I think we pretty much accepted what happened as we went along. Bearing in mind that a lot of us were still 20, 21, 22 years of age. I was amongst the youngest ones in our unit. There were about 6 of us who were within a few years. So we were pretty brash about a lot of things I think.

GREECE

How long were you back in Alexandria before you started to hear talk of going to Greece? What did you think about that?

Well, we knew that the Greeks and the Albanians had been having a war for a long, long time and we knew that the Greeks were doing the Albanians. We didn't pay a lot of attention to the Germans but of course they came down through and took over from the Albanians and they eventually did Greece. At the time, we just thought we'd go in and do what was required of us in Greece the same as we did in Libya.

Our transport went over on a separate vehicle and they were actually bombed on the way over. One of our blokes was wounded and later died. A couple of them were also wounded. We went over on another ship and we never saw a sign of anything but by the time we arrived at Athens, Port Piraeus had been severely bombed and we were not able to go to the wharf. We had to come off the ship in lighters and we went to a camp just on the out skirts of Athens. We were only there about 2 days then we all got on trucks and off we went up to the middle of Greece. On the way up we saw big flights of German aeroplanes coming down to bomb things and we were so brash about it all we'd hang out the backs of the trucks watching these aeroplanes. We'd never been subjected to bombing attacks and things at that stage. Anyway, we got up to the centre of Greece and the retreat was coming back so we just turned around and went back to the camp we'd started from. We were only there overnight; we got back into the trucks and off we went again. One of the officers subsequently told me he thought we were going off to get a ship and leave but we didn't, we went back up into the middle to Bralles Pass, the last of the mountain ranges at which the rear guard was being fought and we went into action there.

There was the main road up the middle of Greece and there was the railway that went up the middle of Greece. We went up the road and there was a nice spot where, being in mid-summer (this would have been April) there was a big sand bank that was a river be in winter and we parked there. The main road crossed the railway about 100 yards up the line and we set up our field dressing station there. We were working there; the troops were coming back through us and we also became subject to attention by the Germans. They dropped bombs on us.

Even as a hospital? You would have had the red cross on all your roofs and all that type of thing?

Well, in the beginning we didn't. In fact, it's funny when you look at it. They put a large square tent and the sergeant major had the blokes breaking branches off the trees to put up against the walls of the tent to break it's outline but he did it all around the wall of the tent and simply outlined the roof in a square. He did it as ground level camouflage and I remember starting to say to him 'don't you think we ought to throw some on the roof' and as soon as I started to say that - 'do as you're told ...' Anyway, there was an ambulance sitting there and they were working on wounded and so on when a plane went over and dropped a couple of bombs. One of them landed close by the ambulance and it blew the ambulance up and blew up two blokes with it - the ambulance driver and another man. A second bomb came down and it went into the sand bank. It's interesting. We had a little tent that we were sleeping in, three of us, only a small tent. After this attack took place, when we came out, the place was littered with broken branches and whatever and I discovered a square hole about 2 yards outside the tent opening sloping down under it and we suddenly woke up to the fact that it was a bomb that had gone down into the sand. It didn't explode, it just went in and was probably sitting a few feet underground under the tent. We vacated the tent; in fact we vacated the site and moved around the corner to an open site. But immediately after that attack we put out a large red cross and I would say that they didn't bomb us again after we put out the red cross.

What's it like to be bombed by air? How would you describe it?

It's a terrifying experience, absolutely terrifying because the bombs make a severe whistling noise as they come down and the aeroplane discharges the bomb some distance away because it takes this parabolic arc and you can hear the bomb start coming and it gets louder and louder as it descends and gets closer to you. There used to be a funny theory around that if the bomb was coming and you stopped hearing it, it was going to hit you. Of course, it's a ridiculous theory because nobody would have ever survived that situation. It's quite chilling because there is a particular noise that the bomb makes with the wind going through it's fins as it comes down. It's a particularly chilling noise and knowing what it portents, it has that effect on you. You're hugging the ground and you wouldn't believe you could crawl under a leaf of grass but you can. Of course when it goes off, if you're anywhere near and the blast goes across, it pulls at your clothes. You realise that it's a very serious matter.

Is it something you ever get used to?

No I don't think so. I think it defies human nature to get used to it.

Were there any blokes who were nonchalant about it?

Yes. Some blokes were by nature very cool and unflappable. Others got excitable. Generally speaking, the fellow who talked most, drank most and made the most noise was the one least likely to stand up when things happened.

How did you go at this stage of the war? Listening to you, it seems like a bit of a turning point for you because now you are taking casualties. Before the war, you weren't taking casualties.

Quite right.

How did that affect morale?

We were very upset when the driver died. There were 2 brothers in the unit; one was a driver and one was a stretcher bearer. One of the boys was wounded; he had a bad wound and was taken to hospital in Greece but they couldn't do anything for him and he died. We were all very upset when we heard about this because as you realise, we hadn't had it happen before. The only people who had been off duty were those who had got sick or something. This was a different thing. It was very serious. I don't think we had any more people killed in Greece although it was very bad. We were in a rear guard situation, behind the rear guard. They were coming back through the pass and from there to Athens was a pretty straight run.

Did you find that because you were now at a much higher level of threat to your own safety that you sharpened up the way you operated as a unit?

It sharpened us up, I think, in the sense of being more conscious of ourselves. We still operated in pretty much the same way. We still had the same unit feeling, the same group feeling and I think we did as well as we did before but we were more conscious of ourselves. One interesting thing at this time - we met a group of people called Friends Ambulance Unit. This was a group of English Quakers who, as conscientious objectors, wouldn't go to war but they formed an ambulance unit and were operating in Greece and we met them at this point. They were lovely fellows and they were prepare to put their lives on the line. I can remember sitting around and one of those chaps was talking about something and someone made some remark which surprised him. He gave a long whistle and I said to him "don't do that'. Even though we knew it wasn't a bomb, it had that overtone of a bomb whistling and nobody liked to hear that.

It wasn't long from there that the Colonel said one day that we would be evacuating at that point. We were going to embarkation but he said 'there's going to be a long convoy come dark'. We could only go out on the road in the dark and he said 'I propose that we do a ten mile dash late this afternoon so that when it becomes dark we're not at the back of the convoy'. As the field ambulance, we would be behind the battalion, you see. All our trucks had red crosses on them. He gave strict instructions that 'we're going to travel 10 miles and then we'll stop at a suitable spot and go off the road until dark. But you mustn't stop, you must keep travelling. Whatever happens, don't stop because a stationary truck on the road is death'.

We had one of these very talkative fellows driving our truck. He was a big 'I am'; we were driving along and we were attacked; even though we had red crosses on the roofs, we were attacked on the road. We'd stopped, you see; as soon as it stopped we got out; if you got out and got in amongst some shrubs and rocks and things and stayed still, the chances were that you wouldn't be seen. The top German bomber in those days was the Dornier Dox and it was called a flying pencil.

It was a long thin fuselage; when I say I 'long, thin' it was only a flea bit compared to the present planes but they had waist gunners and tail gunners and front gunners, I guess. If one of these bombers dropped his bombs, he only had his machine guns and I saw one of those bombers flying along the road looking for people to shoot at - flying so low that as the road undulated and he followed the undulations his slipstream stirred up the dust on the ground. That was the biggest flying planes of the day. If you didn't move, you could see the faces of he gunners behind the waist guns, they were so close to you. Of course, we had nothing to attack them with.

We got back into the truck; he flew away and we got back into the truck and we were going along the road when another plane high up somewhere dropped a stick of three bombs. The first one landed in a paddock about 60 or 70 yards up the track on one side. They were running across actually, they weren't in line with the road. He didn't aim very well. The second one hit the road about 30 or 40 yards ahead of us and immediately it hit the road our talkie driver jammed the breaks on and the next one went into the ground alongside the truck in the paddock. It went down and then exploded. As the truck stopped, this one hit and we were covered with dust and debris. We were out of the truck like greased lightning. I got out that side, saw this hole and dived into the hole. I didn't realise it was the bomb crater and it was still hot. When the dust and smoke died down and we got back in to go, one of our fellows took off into the bush. I saw him go and I knew what was happening and went after him. Another fellow saw this and joined me. We caught him about half a mile off the road and he was distressed. 'I'm not going back onto the road' he said. 'That's all right' we said 'we'll walk along this way'. So we followed along about half a mile off the road, just the three of us, through the grape vines and olive trees and things and the planes didn't worry about us. We were watching the scene and we would see a plane come along and drop a stick of bombs and see them mushrooming up one after the other as they dropped these bombs. It was a terrifying sight. Anyway, we persevered; we plodded on and we came to our group of blokes off the track which was an extremely fortunate thing because we could have been lost there and we would have been making our own way. God knows what would have happened. We came over a little bit of a hill and we saw all of our trucks there and just as we were about to go to them, a flight of the little Messerschmitt fighters came over the hill. They had a practice of flying along close to the ground and turning off their motors as they came up to a hill. As they crested the hill, they would turn on their motor again and their engines would start from the wind blowing their propellers so they'd have power again but they took everybody by surprise because they couldn't hear the engines coming up. Well, these blokes did this but we were too close to them for them to do anything to us. They flew past us and we could have almost spat on them. You could see the features of each pilot in his cockpit as they went past us. Of course we took cover, they didn't return for us - there were only 3 of us anyway. So we went to our trucks and had a drink of water. We'd had no water bottles or anything with us. The bloke was all right by this time, he'd calmed down and he was OK and we got into the trucks and off we went.

We arrived at Megara on the evening of the 24th of April.

Before you go on, going back to when those planes came over the top of you, and you could see the pilots, did it strike you that this was your first glimpse of the enemy?

We were bloody scared. We'd had enough experience in that brief time to know what to do and they went past us so quickly that they didn't do anything and we didn't do anything but watch in case they swerved round and came back; there were 3 or 4 planes in a flight. It wasn't worth their while to do it for the 3 of us. We would have been out of sight if they'd turned round because once they'd gone past us they couldn't see us; They were single seaters.

When you were in the truck and that bomb went off really close, I'm just trying to imagine what it felt like?

I don't know what size bomb it was. I would guess it was no more than a 100 or 150 pound bomb. The fact that it had gone down into the soft ploughed soil I think made a racket and it sent up a shower of rubbish but all the shrapnel from it was laid around the crater. The noise of course dazes you and I imagine that's what upset this fellow but he and the other fellow have since died - not that long ago, just in the last few years. I do remember when I jumped into the crater that I hurt my hip and it was my only war injury. That faded out after a while but it was uncomfortable for a while.

When we arrived at Megara, we parked under trees in an olive grove and we spent Anzac Day there. I remember the drivers took their sump plugs out, started their engines and left them running. We could only take off what we could carry. We each carried a haversack with a minimum amount of medical equipment in it. We never took anything else on. It was all left behind. We couldn't take anything with us.

So how did that go? Here you were, a unit now in retreat or withdrawal and now having to leave your equipment. How was morale hanging out?

Morale was OK; we were OK ourselves; I suppose because we were still intact. We realised that we'd been done and we felt pretty aggrieved at being on the one-sided part of the air-war. Every aeroplane was an enemy aeroplane.

So that was a lesson in it self - the power of the air.

Oh yes, that was a big lesson. We'd become very, very conscious of that. At that stage we'd never seen ground troops in action against us but we'd been very subjected to the war.

We spent Anzac Day under the olive trees and the planes were flying overhead all the time and never saw a thing. There were vehicles and hundreds of men there. The navy were on shore and they were in charge of that embarkation. It ran as smoothly as anything. They directed all the people into different areas and it was very well conducted. Come dark we marched down to the beach and we must have gotten into small boats and gone out. Some of the people got onto a freighter which went to Egypt. Most of us were on the two other ships that went to Crete. I got onto a destroyer - HMS Hardy and we climbed up the grappling nets over the side to get on. I can't recall now how many were there but it was chock a block. The navy blokes were fantastic. They gave everybody a cup of hot chocolate and all that sort of thing. There was nowhere to lie down of course; there were about 5 blokes to every space. I lay down up on the deck on a part of the deck not far above the engine room. It was warm and this destroyer was a smallish ship. You could just about get across the beam in two jumps and it was like a motor bike out in the ocean. The way it weaved and leaned over - it was fantastic and those blokes were terrific. They were so confident; if they came under attack the captain would be at the wheel and he'd have a bloke lying on his back watching the planes and between them they would direct where the ship would go. They were so manoeuvrable; they said 'oh they don't worry us; we can dodge them. By the time we see the bomb coming, we direct the ship away'. They didn't of course. They dropped on us all night.

We finished the evacuation from Greece and that was the reason we went to Crete. This ship was so fast it could take you there and back again to get another load whereas the old freighter went to Egypt because it would never have done that. The Hardy was lost in the evacuation from Crete but at that time if they'd said 'look we're looking to recruiting members' I would have signed up for the navy. I thought they were fantastic. They dropped us off at Crete; we wandered ashore and we were pretty dispirited at that stage. There was nothing happening on Crete and it was just as well because we had nothing we could have done about it anyway. After the evacuation from Greece was completed, the planes used to come over every day on Crete and drop bombs and machine gun it and we got used to it; we even got sick of it. It had momentary terror when it was happening but once it was gone, we'd go into the cafes and have a cup of coffee and have a look around. It was an interesting place.

We knew things were starting to happen because the bombardment got more intense and we were setting up what we would do under certain circumstances and things like that. One of our companies went off up the coast with the 11th battalion. We were left in this area and we ourselves never got into action there because the war was happening in a different way. The story of Crete was an incredible shambles. I've read up on it since and I'm ashamed to think that our war effort was being run by generals that were as incompetent and as insular as those blokes were. They mucked it up entirely because there is no question that we need never have lost Crete. Whether that would have been a good thing or not, I don't know. The Maori battalions were there; they were on the airfield and I heard them say "we could have got them off there, cleaned them up but they wouldn't let us get at them'. Our forces called the withdrawal; the Germans were on the point of giving up. Absolutely. I've read General Student's writing on it - they were on the point of giving up that morning, when he had to make the decision, they discovered our troops were withdrawing. So they had possession of the airport. They were able to land their troop carriers. Up the coast at Retimo where our people were, the Germans were beaten. But in the end they found the island had capitulated. There was very poor communication.

We walked across the island back to the south coast; they told us to head across there. I think there was only about one road there anyway. We had to walk at night because it was too dangerous to walk during the daytime. There were planes everywhere, shooting at us and we walked over the mountains; it was a very trying couple of days. We got to this place on the beach on the south coast and it was totally unorganised. I was there for at least 2 nights, probably 3 days before we capitulated because the hills where we were, were about a mile off the beach. The poor old navy that was coming in to take us off had to be out of range of the bombers because the Heinkel fighter bombers were there. The navy had to stay out of range; they calculated how far they had to be away so that a bomber wouldn't be there because it had to be refuelled. So they had to be that distance out and then they would come in full bore to the beach, pick up whoever was there and they had to be outside that range within a certain time. They only had a very small operational window. We were never able to coincide the thing because it was totally disorganised.

In my own experience at that time, there were no supplies of any sort. We were all gathered at some point together and the colonel was away somewhere and the Second in Command, Major Dawkins received a message that they were evacuating 50 people from the three Field Ambulances so he picked 17 blokes to go off and I was amongst the 17. I don't remember who the others were. We'd just picked up our haversacks, which was all we had, to move off when the Colonel arrived and said "hold everything". He had a conference and announced that the orders had changed; they were able to send off 50 people. So he picked a new group of 50 people and of the 17 original people, I was the only one that wasn't in the group that went off. I remember one of our fellows, he wasn't in the first group I was going off with and he said 'take these and get them to my wife". I gave them all back to him and he went.

Anyway, this was about midnight and the Colonel told us that capitulation orders had gone out and we were surrendering.

In all of the speculation that I had, and that most of us had, no-one ever dreamed of being a prisoner of war. They'd thought of being killed and wounded and crippled but I only ever met one man who thought he might be a prisoner of war. He was a WW1 man and he was a Jewish man and he arranged with his wife - he was quite a bit older than us and he wasn't in our unit - that if he was taken prisoner of war, he would register under such and such a name so that when it came back, she would know it was him. He was the only man I came across that thought that far ahead; I knew him, he was from Perth. I met him in Salonika later.

There was a church there; the Germans came around and they said 'you're all to go to the church and you'll be fed'. Like idiots, we all thought they were going to feed us. Where they were going to get the food for all this group of people, I don't know. A lot of the infantry men took off into the hills; they had very little stuff. They were very short of arms and ammunition but they took off into the hills. As Red Cross people, we really shouldn't do that; we should stay to look after our people. Under the convention, we were obliged not to escape. Anyway, we went to this church and there was a huge group of people. They did kill a donkey and cook it but we never saw any of it.

The next day they marched us back up into the island again, back to the north coast - where we'd started from in the first place.

So at this stage, were you seeing the enemy more now? What did you think?

They seemed to me to be quite decent guys. Change the uniforms and you wouldn't know the difference. We found this was always the case with the fighting men.

Did you have a different view between the Italians and Germans?

Yes, we had no respect for the Italian army but we had considerable respect for the German army.

Why was that?

Because the Italian army had given up. In Libya they'd just given it away. When we went through their areas, we could see they'd been in garrison for years there and their methods were poor. They were living in temporary camp situations, riddled with fleas. They had travelling brothels came to them. The whole thing was a very poor operation and they didn't maintain good discipline and good conditioning or anything of that nature. They'd all got tired of it so you couldn't respect them. There were lines of them - thousands of them, marching back on their own. There would be a group of them surrender and they'd form a line and march off. Didn't even have to send guards with them. They usually did have a couple of guards but they didn't have to have them under strict guard.

We walked back across Crete.

The Germans, you felt, had a completely different level?

Oh yes, these blokes were efficient, not to be taken lightly. They were dinkum and you wouldn't take any liberties with them. If they said 'jump' you'd jump, especially since they all had automatic machine guns with them and secondly they'd won the war as far as we were concerned.

So what was happening with the infantry on the aspects of surrender?

I remember seeing the Māori Battalion go off that night and they still had their rifles and if they'd been told to, they would have turned around and fought the Germans. They were terrific guys.

When you say Māori, they were actually native Māori people?

Yes they were a Māori Battalion. They were a New Zealand battalion but it was made up of Māori's. It was called the Māori Battalion. They're a big people.

So we marched back through the area that the fighting had been over. The Germans had picked up their dead but that was all.

So did you have to bury your own?

We didn't bury them. I don't know who buried them; they probably dragooned the Greek civilians into burying them. They just kept us marching all the way back.

So although you'd already seen dead people at our dressing stations and so on, this was a completely new experience? Just walking past them, it's a bit hard to take?

Yes. You'd swear sometimes they were just resting. I went up to and had a look at one bloke. The gas was starting to expand his skin and all his clothes were tightening.

Did anyone retrieve tags?

That was always done and eventually it went back through the system and they'd go through to Switzerland.

We marched on and we went right back up to Canea which was the main town and there was a prison camp on the outskirts of Canea and when we went in there, there were lots of people needing treatment. We went to the First Aid post and said 'we can help' and they said 'yes hop in here and help' and we were treating blokes that came in. There was a bit of gear there - a few pills and ointment and so on. I remember there was a small group of us, about 4 or 5 or 6 of us and we ourselves had put one bloke in charge of us. We actually started calling him 'sergeant' although we were all privates. An Australian bloke came in and I was treating his feet. He had badly blistered feet and I said something to him about walking around in bare feet and he said he didn't have anything to wear. In the course of it, he told me he'd walked several miles to get this treatment. I asked him where he'd come from and he said from a camp at a place down the road. I asked him if there was any medical treatment there and he said no so I called Ken and told him there was a group of people in a prison camp out here and there was no medical treatment for them so 'why don't we go out and look after them'. So he spoke to the doctors and the doctors spoke to the Germans and the outcome of it was that our little group went out to this camp and we set up a treatment centre. We were there for a couple of weeks and had all sorts of things happening. We must have had a bit of equipment. The Germans must have given us a bit of stuff because we went through a program of inoculating them against Yellow Fever or something and even though we weren't entitled to do we would make the entries and sign the entries in the books to show that they'd had these injections. Some of these fellows were worried about injections and they thought it would upset them. I saw them go through and get their pay book marked then sneak out of the line and buzz off. We let them go.

We had all sorts of illnesses come up in that camp. We even had what we then called infantile paralysis and we had typhoid cases but we were all as fit as a fiddle. We were all at the top of our condition at that time and we resisted the diseases.

It was an alpine battalion that had captured us and alpinees that were guarding us and they were quite alright. A lot of them were well educated, spoke English and that sort of thing. There was a German doctor there; his name slips my mind. He was attached to this Alpine parachute battalion and he used to talk to us. We had an English doctor with us, a fellow named Dr Carmichael. I don't recall where he came from but he came out to the camp with us and we were looking after the people as best as we could without much stuff.

What unit were these guys or were they just a mixed batch?

A mixed batch. British, New Zealanders, Australians in the main with a few Cypriots. As they got themselves organised, there were groups of fellows who were fit enough who were marching off and going into the main camp and eventually being sent up to Greece and through there to Europe. This German doctor who belonged to the paratroopers came in one day and said 'Germany has declared war on Russia. We will beat Russia in 6 weeks and then with all the equipment we gather from there we will go down to the channel and we'll invade England. By the end of summer the war will be over for you'.

We were shocked by this. We really didn't know a lot about Russia and we never heard any other news from anywhere. Eventually they said 'alright, you blokes are packing up'. They had a truck there and a few blokes that were remaining in the sick bay were piled on the truck and we got on and off we went back up to Suda Bay which was not far from Canea and they had their own operations going so they didn't need us. For a week or two we were in this camp at Suda Bay and we didn't work. It was an idyllic spot. There was a little bay with a headland on each side and all the Germans had to do was put a guard out on each of these headlands and they had a barbed wire fence around the camp up to the edge of the water. It was a beautiful clear beach. We used to swim there every day. It was the only way of keeping yourself clean and it wasn't too bad there. We knew it was only a temporary situation. We were fed a meal a day and I believe the German theory was that when you were in transit camps you were only on third rations anyway but we were OK.

Eventually we were marched down to the wharf and we got on a boat and went up to Salonika but this Suda Bay area was where the ships came in because the harbour and port facilities were there. There were 2 British war ships which had been sunk there and the York was sunk to deck level. It was sitting on the bottom and it's deck and armament was up above and they were using that as an anti-aircraft spot. When we arrived on Crete there were a few, perhaps 3 or 4, pre war fighters, Gladiators, and they were Royal Airforce because the British had a garrison on Crete for some time and there were some British conscripts there with a sprinkling of regular soldiers. The Germans would fly over from Greece and these poor fellows in the Gloucester Gladiators would go up to attack them. You had to admire them because they were just putting their lives on the line. None of them ever survived it because if they were bombers that came over, they all had machine gunners and these poor Gladiators were half the speed, half the armaments and half the manoeuvrability. For a few days they put up a battle. I remember being upon the high bank over Suda Bay at one time with Bert Palandri, a Perth doctor who was with our unit. He was the Officer in Command of B company, if I remember rightly, and he was a great guy. He was one of the coolest customers I've ever seen. I can remember being there with him and he had his shirt off and some planes came over and they were plying machine guns and things and the blokes were apt to, not panic, but move fairly quickly to get themselves out of sight and Old Bert took a lot stirring. He said 'calm down, calm down. Just keep calm. Just move quietly and get yourselves in a comfortable situation'. He never flapped and there's an incredible story about him. He was with the group that went up to Retimo with the 2/11th battalion and they set up a medical post. They were everything, first aid post and every medical service that was required they provided to the best of their ability. They serviced Germans as well as British and whatever. They were overrun by Germans at one stage and there was a German officer there who said 'you're all prisoners but we can't take prisoners so we're going to execute you all' and Bert said to him (this fellow spoke English) 'we're treating wounded people, we're not combat soldiers. 'That doesn't make any difference. I've heard Australians don't take any prisoners' and he pulled out his Luger and he put the muzzle under Bert's chin and he started to shout at him and go about him and everyone was just waiting for the shot to blow his head off and Bert was just calmly talking to this bloke and trying to defuse the situation and a stretcher bearer arrived with a wounded German and the Germans said to the officer 'these people are treating us better than our own people are' and the German took his gun away and told him to carry on with his men.

Is Bert Palandri still alive?

No, he died about 14 or 15 years ago, I think. A lovely fellow. He was a good doctor, not an outstanding man but he had a great humanity about him.

We had another doctor that was there - Max Mayrhofer in the same place. He was also a fantastic guy. Max is still alive; I don't know that he remembers a lot about it nowadays but he was also an ambidextrous surgeon. He was a lovely guy; he was in practise in Merredin I think when he joined the army though his brother was here in Perth. His older brother was also a doctor but they were fantastic blokes.

The only doctor that I had any disparaging thoughts about was a bloke who came to us on Greece. He joined us from another unit, I can't remember which unit he came from and it doesn't matter very much. He was a capable enough doctor but I don't know where he got his supply from but almost every evening he appeared to be under the influence of booze. I can remember on one occasion one of our sergeants taking him by the arm and shepherding him out of a tent where there were wounded because he was afraid he would fall all over them but he was a brilliant doctor when he was on his game. He was a GP not a surgeon. The colonel didn't keep him, he sent him on. I don't know what happened to him. Other than him, I had the highest regard for all the doctors.

So they were all Western Australian men?

When we left Australia every body was a WX number. They came from Kalgoorlie, Manjimup etc. There were blokes that were St Johns Ambulance men that had done St Johns Ambulance courses. There were saw millers, farmers, bank clerks; a very wide selection but they were all Western Australians. Anyway, this party of 50 that came up. The Colonel picked firstly the people that he thought were important as a nucleus to redevelop the unit because the Colonel stayed behind. He picked the core of central people to re-establish the unit and he picked the people he thought would not be able to handle being prisoners of war. Some of them might have been older, some might have been WW1 men and others he may have thought needed a bit of stiffening and moral fibre. I know this because subsequently in Germany I brought up this situation (I got to know him quite well and we got on quite well) and I told him about Dawky picking me in the preliminary party and when it was repicked, out of the 17 originally picked I was the only one that wasn't in the final party. I said that I was a bit surprised that being a 'Finkelstein', he would have let me be taken a prisoner of war and said that never went through his head. I can understand that; why would it go through your head but anyway we finished our time on Crete and we got on this dirty, grubby little coastal freighter.

So what time was this?

We were taken prisoner on the 1st June 1941 and we left Crete by about the end of June, I would guess, maybe early in July.

So after about a month you embarked for Europe.

Well, we got on the ship. We didn't know where we were going. We went straight across and when we hit the mainland of Greece we just hung around the coast because by this time the German attack forces had gone elsewhere and they were afraid the British navy, which had suffered grievously anyway and there were hardly any around anyway. So we stuck around the coast; it was a horrible little thing. I don't know what it carried but most of the blokes were just down through the hatch cover and in the hold and the hold had the curved sides of the boat and a big moulding over the propeller shaft. It was the bottom of the boat. It was just a hold. There wasn't room enough for everybody and luckily enough, I was wearing a red cross arm band and I stayed up on the deck. There were many others up on the deck. The toilet arrangements on this were a plank and a crossbar you would hold on to over the side of the boat. The people in the hold were brought up on deck once a day but the conditions down there were frightful. We were on there a couple of days and I don't recall being fed on that at all. They might have given us some hard tack before we got on.

The rations were pretty hard when you were a POW at this stage. They cooked and fed. You just received. You didn't have your own cooks nor anything?

Not at that point, no. We probably did at the camp on Crete. They would have brought our cooks in; they wouldn't have done anything for us like that. I can recall going along the coast and there's a point there going up the West coast of Greece where the islands are very close and we came to one part where you could have jumped from the boat onto the land on either side. Some of us were on deck and the Germans put 2 or 3 more of them alongside the decks and waved their guns -'don't do it'. They let a burst of automatic fire go just off the edge of the ship to let us know that it was an unhealthy sort of a hazard. Those blokes at that stage, if you did the wrong thing they would shoot you. Nobody's names were taken, we were only a number of people and a lot of us at that stage were missing.

So we arrived at Salonika and we were a pretty sorry looking lot after being on the ship about 3 days and they marched us through the town. The Greek people of the town just stood on the footpaths and never showed a sign of emotion. They just watched us being marched through the town. It was being done deliberately to show the Greeks who was boss. We were marched to a Greek army barracks that had been taken over as a POW camp.

How did you feel marching through the town like that?

We didn't feel too good. There were some blokes who didn't have proper footwear. There were some in ragged clothes. They really were a sorry looking lot. They were grubby and unshaven and really a very poor show. I can understand the situation.

So as a soldier it wasn't a very uplifting moment.

No it was very poor.

We arrived at this place and the camp was an army barracks probably about 10 barrack buildings and at the top end a 2 story building which was the hospital. There was a high brick wall around a fair bit of it and where there wasn't a high brick wall they had about a 3 metre barbed wire fence with hessian over it and on the inside of the fence, rolls of barbed wire for another 2 or 3 metres coming down to about 18 inches off the ground so that you couldn't get to the fence. Anyway that's how the situation was. There were people who'd been captured in Greece in this camp. There was a British Sergeant Major from armoured division who was the Sergeant Major in charge of the camp. He had been in the army of occupation after the First World War in Germany and he had married a German girl and for several years now I haven't been able to remember his name but he had quite an interesting story, this fellow.

He was collaborating with the Germans, he was up their arse up to his eyes. He was well dressed, he had a good uniform on, he was obviously well fed. I don't know where he slept at night but someone would have killed him. We were all lined up in the parade grounds and he stood out the front and in a sergeant major's voice he said "all Jews out the front" and I started to gather my gear together and some of my mates said "where are you going". I said "oh I'm going up" and they told me not to be so bloody silly. I asked them what they would do and they told me to sit down and shut up. So I sat down and shut up. Two or three blokes went out. What happened to them in the long run I don't know. Anyway, the next thing ....

Security was very strict in this camp; you were not allowed out after dark. There were patrols walking around the camp and if they saw you out there they shot you. There were 3 bodies pulled up against the barbed wire fence and this bastard sergeant major says "Can anybody identify these carcasses?" They were 3 blokes, that had been caught out and they'd been shot and that's what he said.

Anyway, that was our introduction to Salonika. It was a shocking camp.

My friend that I was with, he caught Sandfly fever in the desert and it was coming back on him. I was developing what we then called yellow jaundice. I had a feeling in my stomach like it was full of plaster of paris. The next morning they lined us up and they were calling out work parties to go and do a bit of work around the place. They called out the sick parade so Ken and I went off on the sick parade. We were sitting under a tree in the camp and we were pondering whether to report sick or just use our nouses and we were siting there and one of our blokes who was working in the hospital who hadn't come off Greece came down and said 'Oh, I was looking for you two. We want you to work up in the hospital. He knew we'd arrived the previous night and two of the orderlies had just been shot by one of the guards. We were not supposed to go near this low fence inside the fence and there was a water pump there, a trough and one of these blokes had washed some clothes and he'd hung them over the wire on the inside edge and a bloke came around and he was talking to him and they were standing there talking and the guard on the outside of the fence saw them through the hessian. You can see through the hessian and according to his story, he told them to move away from the fence. Whether they heard him or not, nobody knows. Whether they understood him or not, nobody knows so he shot them. They had explosive bullets in their rifles and he shot them with one bullet.

Were they 2/7th people?

No, they were British medical people. The Brits were in Greece and a lot of them were captured in Greece. They were already there, they weren't our people. So these were the conditions under which my mate and I went up to work in the hospital. The captain was the British medical officer and he was the senior officer in the camp at the time. He spoke fluent German and he protested to the camp Kommandant about this incident of the guard shooting these two orderlies. So the Kommandant had the guard brought in and he had the guard tell his story and that's how I know the guard said he warned them to move away from the fence and they took no notice of him so he shot them. The Kommandant said "Good shooting. That's two less of the swine". The captain came back and told us all this. He had no reason to exaggerate. He spoke fluent German and he knew exactly what they said. So that's what Salonika was like.

Do you know now from your own reading who was in control of that camp?

No, I never enquired about that but they were not front line soldiers.

So we went to work in the hospital. It was a 2 story building. On one occasion, I was working up on the top floor and I had a room full of typhoid cases, I had a black water fever case. We had some frightful diseases.

I don't think people realise just how many diseases there were. They tend to relate them to the Japanese camps.

We had very little stuff to treat these diseases with. I remember the doctors appealing to the prison camp population at large if anyone had any Bonox tablets or any of those things because they could treat the very weak ones with a concentration of Vitamin B. That's how we were situated.

Was the leadership very good in this camp?

They were very good. The spirit was very good. In this camp there was a group of Serbs and they were splendid people. There was nothing political in this situation. They were the Serbs who had resisted but been overrun by the Germans and they'd fought all the way back. There were Greeks in there too that had been fighting the Albanians because the Greeks had been doing the Albanians. The Serbs were magnificent people. They always remined me of legendary hill brigands. Big men, big moustaches, wonderful outgoing natures but I remember not long ago when I was talking to Alan King he said "when you think of those Serbs that we were with in Salonika, can you believe what's going on in Bosnia now!"

We were lucky that epidemics didn't go through the camp while we were working there. There was dysentery everywhere. The rations were poor. The day ration was probably a loaf of bread amongst a number of people. They used to serve the meal out of a big boiler and it was always a boiled up sort of soup and they would pour crude olive oil into it to give it a little bit of protein and this used to float on the top like green scum. It was totally unrefined. More often than not the soup was made of lentils. I'd never seen lentils at that time. We didn't have them in Australia and the British told us they were horse lentils. What that meant I don't know excepting that you would eat them in the soup and they would come out the other end just as they went in. Dysentery was terrible. There were blokes failing because their condition was falling away so much. With a few other illnesses, there were a lot of people dying.

Were you able to get anything through the black market?

Subsequently we did because as people working in the hospital, we were paid a mark a day. The Greek Red Cross were allowed to bring a little bit of stuff in which went to the patients in the hospital.

Was there much pilfering of stuff by the Germans?

That I don't know. I think they were reasonably honourable in that respect. The hygiene was bad in this camp.

So what did you to try and defeat them?

There wasn't much you could do except tell people what to do. It was hard. They didn't have any soap. There was water supplied but there was a toilet situation at the end of each barracks and there were probably a hundred in each barrack. There would have been a thousand in the camp at any one time, I would guess. It would have been made to house about 40 people. We were all sleeping on the floor. In most of the barracks it opened directly into the toilet. There were one or two where you had to go out the door and walk along the wall and it was a scary experience because if the patrol happened to see you, they would shoot you because you were outside the barracks.

In there there was a water trough situation with taps where you could wash yourself. There was a trough situation which was a urinal and there was another trough situation which had a tap at one end and a gravity fed slope and there were holes in the floor about 10 inches in diameter and there were 2 concrete foot pieces raised above the floor and you would squat there and excrete through the holes into the gutter underneath and there was a tap there that now and then someone would turn on and it would run down the gutter and wash the stuff away. There were rats living in those gutters that were the biggest rats I'd ever seen in my life and they were as brazen as you liked and when you squatted you had to make sure there wasn't a rat underneath. They appeared out of the holes in the floor and they were whoppers. The conditions were pretty bad so it was very easy for disease to spread.

Was it a hot place or a cold place?

It was very warm. We arrived there before the end of July and it was summer and the weather was quite reasonable. People were wandering around with hardly any clothes on and blokes would take what bits of clothes they had off and they would stand at a tap in the yard and wash themselves but some of them didn't and there were body lice. It was frightful. I came out a brilliant yellow with this jaundice but I was at work on the wards. Many of them had it anyway.

Was boredom a bit of an issue or were they going out on work parties?

They were going out on work parties. Boredom was a problem but groups of fellows would be together and they would tend to manage OK.

What about discipline?

The Germans had a parade every morning and you were counted. The rules were laid out pretty clearly. You knew what happened if you broke the rules.

What about the internal discipline? Was there any breakdown there?

I don't recall any officers being in that camp at all. I think it was a German policy that as soon as they got a group of fellows together, they put the officers away because in the German mentality, a group of men without an officer were hopeless anyway. That was the way they looked at. They didn't respect the individual enterprise that may have been in the soldiers. So I don't think there were any officers in there except the doctors. I'm pretty sure of that. I never saw any problems with discipline. They had a meal a day given to them and other rations like a loaf of bread or something like that. The rations were light, of course.

What did you do to work on entertaining yourselves?

In this camp there was nothing. This was a transit camp. There were groups being continually marched off and put on the cattle trucks and sent through to Germany. They were given hard rations for 4 days and invariably the trip took more than a week, sometimes up to 10 days blokes have told me, because it was low class traffic and they were pushed off to let other stuff go through. Eventually the people were coming up from Greece and Crete and going through to Germany.

One thing I'll tell you about that happened whilst we were in the hospital. We were up on the top floor and somebody said "oh look at this". We looked out the window; we could see over the wall into the street outside and there were two German guards beating up a Greek civilian out on the street. Why, I have no idea but the Greeks had a policy of passive resistance. Anyway, they were beating him up and one of them happened to see this group of faces looking out at them and he just started shooting at us, at the window. No warning, just bang. He hit the wall alongside the window but in a second and a half there was nobody there but that was the attitude. There was no question. Shoot first and ask questions later.

As the bulk of people were moved out and the numbers went down, they fenced off a quarter of the compound and moved us all into this area because there were so fewer of us. In the hospital Archie Cochran, a great guy, sent half the staff through but when there were about 7 or 8 of us left someone asked him how he decided who to keep and I can remember him saying in his drawling English voice "well we needed to have a couple of good orderlies so I kept the colonials". That was my mate and I and we needed someone to cook so he kept so and so and this sort of thing. We had our own cook house for the hospital and this little bloke who was a First World War soldier and an Englishman, was our cook. A terrific little guy, a fantastic bloke. They were a good group of fellows. One of the orderlies who went on was a son of an English lord and he was a supercilious sort of bloke. He knew his job and did it all right and we all got on well with him but he was a supercilious sort of a fellow but you had to admire some aspects of that type of Englishman. If he was sitting at the table eating and three feet in front him was a wall, he would sit there with a straight back and eat his meal. He stuck to it. One thing I didn't like about him - in our quarters there were 2 bedrooms and I think 6 of us were in these 2 bedrooms and my mate and I were in one of them with another fellow who I don't recall and some others and this chap was with us. Whether he had any idea or not I don't know but one night we heard him say in a fairly loud voice, one that he knew would be heard in the next room "I can't stand Jews. When I get near them my flesh creeps" and my mate and I just looked at each other and said nothing.

We were never registered up until then. One day we were all hauled out and lined up and they had about half a dozen tables and they had English or British sergeants at each of these tables and at each one was also a German guard. We were broken up into lines and we had to go up there add give our name and number. So we went up there and I gave my name 'Finkelstein' and this pommy bastard looked up at the German and said 'Finkelstein' and the German just shrugged his shoulders and took no notice. I had to stand there as if I didn't know what he was talking about. I could have cut that bastard's throat and he should have had his throat cut. I told a couple of my friends and he was lucky he didn't have his throat cut. It would have been the end of me if he had.

What an amazing thing to do!

There was frightful bigotry in the English forces, frightful bigotry.

Did you ever think of changing your name?

I never gave it a thought. It was in Salonika in the early stages that I met this other fellow that I knew from Perth and I greeted him. I used to play First Division soccer in Perth before the war and he used to follow the soccer team and I saw him there. I didn't even know he was away at the war. He was having terrible trouble with his eyes, the poor devil and I happened to have a pair of sunglasses and I gave them to him. He was eternally grateful. He was the only bloke; he was a First World War soldier and he arranged with his wife that he would change his name and he registered it and it went home to his wife and she knew he was OK. He told me.

My mate and I were there for about 3 months at Salonika because we were working in the hospital there and we stayed on when the hospital was reduced because we were good at our job.

What was his name, the other fellow you were with?

Ken Sykes.

Is he with us still?

No he died many years ago. We had some interesting times after the war too.

While we were in this restricted area of the camp, the rest of our unit arrived up from Athens. They'd been taken over to Athens and they'd been in a holding camp there and then they arrived up.

That must have been uplifting?

Yes it was terrific. The colonel was sick and Frank Gallash was sick and we admitted both of them to the hospital.

What were they sick with?

Stomach upsets, nothing major. One of our friends, Peter McRostie was acting as batman to the colonel so we admitted him to the hospital too because we knew they would be passing through. We put him down as dysentery. The German doctor used to call in every day but he never saw Peter. He was either in the toilet or he wasn't there and fortunately the German didn't pursue the matter. Every morning we were counted and I can't remember if we were counted again at night. We had an English speaking bloke who used to come round and do it all. I remember once I met a fellow who had come up from Athens. He wasn't in our unit but he was a Perth bloke and I was talking to him and I was late for the counting parade. I went bowling around and I joined the line and the fellow said "I already thought you had escaped". We wouldn't have escaped anyway because we were working at our job.

Did many people try to escape?

There were lots of escapes. In this reduced area, there was one barrack space that a lot of people were in and it was part of the Greek barracks and very poorly built. Brick and concrete but we had iron beds. No mattresses or anything. Some of us had blankets but with the weather it didn't matter but this place was over run with bed bugs. At night when people were going to bed, if they had it, they would have a bit of paper and a match and they would light the paper and they would go around under the bed to burn off the bed bugs or they would lift it up at one end and thump it down on the ground and shake them off and then do the other end. Some would lie on the floor, some would lie on the beds and the bed bugs would come down during the night. In the morning as the dawn was breaking they would go back up the wall to their nests in the cracks up the walls. It was so thick it was like a lace curtain going up the wall. If you had a basket ball and you threw it at the wall you couldn't avoid hitting a bug. They were that thick. There were these bed bugs; I don't know what particular bugs they were. There were lice, body lice. I saw body lice getting in under a man's skin and you could see it moving around under his skin. Blokes that let themselves go and didn't maintain their hygiene as well as they could.

So the best way to keep the lice down was to keep washing your clothes and yourself?

Keep as clean as you could and particularly making sure that if you went to the latrine you cleaned yourself in some way.

You wouldn't have had any toilet paper?

No toilet paper and no soap either. You could wash yourself with water and wash your hands as well.

The medical part was pretty rough. We did the best we could but a lot of them died of course.

What was the success rate?

I don't know.

Were you losing people every day?

Oh, probably most days someone would die. I remember one big fellow, a New Zealander military policeman who seemed to be obsessed with himself. He got dysentery and he collapsed so they took him into the hospital. He wouldn't take his medicine and was a bugger of a patient. He was going down and down and he had skin infections; he was one of my patients and I knew all about him. I was dressing his stuff every day but there was nothing I could do. They were continuing to spread. He lost his condition. We had to go off to our own barracks at night and I went up to the hospital one morning and whether he'd tried to get up or something but he was half off the bed and half on the floor and his leg was caught in the bed or something. He was in extremis and I put him back up on the bed and I went to the doctor and said that he was no good and that he looked as if he was going and what should I give him. He said to give him a shot of adrenalin but he didn't think it would do any good. So I gave him a shot of adrenalin but he just quietly died. He was a scrag by the time he died. He would have weighed 6 to 7 stone.

So it was more mental ability than physical ability to see yourself through?

You had to have it, yes. There were blokes who died and we'd take them out of their beds and there were tablets in their beds that they didn't take. We were not practised enough to give them their tablet and say "take it now' as they do in hospitals. This was where the black water fever came in.

The poor bastard that had the body lice under his skin died when he was taken away, I cleaned up his bed and I took his blanket and put it on the window sill to air off. It was alive. As the sun shone on it it was moving. It was full of lice.

We'd all been inoculated against typhoid so that didn't go through us.

Was cholera a problem?

No, we never saw any cholera. We had typhoid and several different types of fevers. I think we were all inoculated in that camp again against yellow fever.

The men that died there were just taken away and I never had anything more to do with that. I don't know what happened to them. One of the saddest things that I came across was a fellow who died - he was a tall man and we couldn't fit him in to the coffin they gave us. Can you imagine it - this poor bugger's dead and we're trying to wriggle him into this coffin that's too short for him. What a thing to have to do to people.

When the Colonel and Frank Gallash got better they joined our staff and I've got a feeling Archie Cochran went and Les became the senior officer. He was very good as a senior officer. He was unforgiving and he was tough. Eventually, as men continued to be shipped off and we were left, the German doctor, who wasn't a bad bloke came in one day and said "you will be going on the next hospital train". That was the only time I'd ever heard of a hospital train and he said "I would advise you to go on this train". We went with about our last 80 patients, 8 orderlies and 2 doctors.

So this German doctor spoke English?

Yes. His name was Doctor Pfeiffer. They changed during the course of things.

You asked me a question before about escapes. In this barracks we were in where we were riddled with bed bugs and things there was a door opening onto the perimeter fence. Of course it was barred and bolted but enterprising fellows had figured out how they'd get through that. There was a machine gun tower at each corner with a searchlight and the searchlight used to play around. They weren't as bad at this stage as they were when we first got there. One night I'd been kept at the hospital barracks and I started to go to my own barracks for the night. It was dark and the searchlight was on. I had a Red Cross brassard on my arm and I left the hospital and I just walked quietly across to the barracks. The searchlight picked me up but I didn't panic I just continued quietly walking to the barracks. I must say I was quaking but they realised that I was coming from the hospital and going to the barracks and they didn't shoot at me of course or I wouldn't be here talking to you.

These fellows, though, I'll never forget. There was one New Zealand lieutenant - he must have come up from Athens. He was a tall man and he had the New Zealand army hat and he was amongst this group. During the nigh they watched the searchlights and they opened the door and went out into the night. This New Zealander was a great tall man with blonde hair and a New Zealand army hat but they got away! Some of them were picked up by the Greek partisans. There was a fellow, one of our former patients who had gotten better and went off in one of the cattle trucks to Germany - about 2 1/2 years later after I'd come home and was in Hollywood Hospital a fellow was brought in and put into a bed. He looked to be in a very poor way and when the afternoon tea trolley came in I went up to him and asked him if he'd like a cup of tea. It was this bloke who'd been our patient and who had gone off in this cattle truck train . At one point on the trip out it used to go through what they called the wood yard. There were stacks of timber and things and it was a grading or a bed where the train went slowly. These cattle trucks had a little window high up on one side which was normally covered with barbed wire. They built a sentry box outside up high so that the guard could see down on either side of the train but he couldn't see right alongside the train. He was one a group who whipped the barbed wire off and went through the window going through the timber yard. He was picked up by the Greek partisans and he stayed with them all the time. He got crook and his condition got bad and he came out through Turkey and was sent home from there.

Of course, Turkey was neutral.

Yes. There he was, he came into the hospital in Hollywood. He was only there for a day. Intelligence wanted him.

So you were at Salonika for 3 months and left there in what month?

About early to mid November, 1941.

So you still hadn't been in the war 2 years yet.

No only a little over 1 year - 18 months.

At this stage, in this reduced camp area the Germans allowed us to go into town with a guard and a little hand trolley and buy stuff in the markets.

That must have been a revolutionary privilege.

Yes. I went on this trip twice. Two of us used to go with the cart and a guard and it was amazing. The Greek people would come up to us and put money in our hands or they'd put a parcel in the cart. They were careful not to antagonise the Germans though but they were fantastic.

So the Germans saw this?

Well some of the guards would shoo them away and some wouldn't take any notice. These were ordinary private soldiers; they weren't officers. They were just blokes and they didn't care much. If they were told to shoot you, they'd shoot you but they didn't have strong feelings about things.

The Greek people were fantastic. We would buy mainly fruit and vegetables which went into the kitchen. Beautiful fruit they had. Peaches and grapes and watermelons during the summer that the patients had. We had a bit of it too.

That Sergeant Major vanished from the scene. It's amazing that his name won't come into my mind. I don't know who I could ask that would remember it. There was a story subsequently that he arrived at one of the stalags in Germany and word went around that he'd arrived. Within an hour they had torn his gear to shreds and he would have been killed if the Germans hadn't taken him out. That's the kind of man he was. He thought the Germans were going to win the war and had decided to pitch in with them. A mistake. Whatever happened to him I don't know but he would have surely been court martialled when the got back to Britain.

As we were reduced into that smaller area it wasn't as bad as it was in the big camp. They relaxed a little bit.

Probably because they realised that you guys weren't going to do a runner.

Well there were very few troops there. There weren't many left. The whole camp had been reduced and probably only one more cattle train had gone and we were left. That was when the German doctor advised us to go on the next one. It was an ordinary hospital train with German wounded or sick on it. The only variation was that we had an armed guard in each of our carriages and the Germans didn't but outwardly there was no difference. We had the same rations as they had. I was an orderly in one coach and I think we had about four compartments so we'd have had about 20 each in these compartments. There were two decker bunks along one side of the carriage if I remember rightly and I had a foldup bed that I put down at night and I stayed there all the time. We were third class traffic too and it took us over a week to go through but in the day time the windows were open. At night the windows were all pulled. We could see it all as we went and it wasn't such a bad trip. We looked after what needed to be done with our patients but it wasn't too strenuous. I remember we went through Vienna. As we were going into Vienna we went into the railway yard. It was evening and I lifted up the blind and looked out and there was a line of carriages and trucks on that side and another line on the other side and that was all I saw of Vienna.

We could see all the country side as we went through. I didn't have a word of German and the guard had no English so I couldn't ask him anything. We went up through Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Austria into southern Germany. In Yugoslavia, there had been the first snow falls and the thaw as we were going through and the landscape was just a muddy looking mess. They were there in bullock carts. The normal type of farm transport was bullock carts and we'd see a bullock cart full of turnips coming into a market or something. I didn't know what 'turnips' were in German and the only thing I knew in German was 'kohlrabi'. I'd say this to the guard and he didn't know what 'kohlrabi' meant. So I learnt nothing on the way but it was an interesting trip.

Once we got into German territory the people would come rushing out with goodies and if any of the soldiers were at the windows the girls would rush up and kiss them. I remember one situation when some of our blokes were there and all of a sudden the girls saw the guards and withdrew en masse because they realised we were prisoners not victorious German wounded.

We came into a place in Dieburg and they had taken over a monastery as a prisoner of war hospital. It was occupied by French when we were taken there with our 80 patients and our orderlies and 2 doctors. They moved out a group of the French to another little town about 2 miles down the track and we came in and occupied it.

So the two doctors now were the 2 Australian blokes?

Yes, they were our own members.

We arrived in the morning and I suppose we were taken by vehicles to the hospital. I can't recall that part of it. I remember as we came into the semi-basement room where we were going to live and it was occupied by a lot of French orderlies, one of the French men said to me "Can we give you something to eat. I struggled through my French from five years previously and I said "we had to eat on the railway". I can still remember saying this. There would have been a few more Frenchmen than there were of us, probably about 12 of them. They were looking after French sick and we were looking after ours. There was a lot of work to be done on ours because we had surgical facilities at the hospital and the supplies were not bad. We were using German supplies now so people who needed working on were worked on. For the next 6 months this was what happened until the German doctors considered that they were all fit enough to be sent off to stalags and we were dispersed.

There was an administration in the hospital and there was a guard. The guard was in charge of what the Germans called an underofficer who would have been about Corporal rank. He was actually a 2 striper sergeant. He had the guards and there was the hospital administration inside. The guard commander was not a bad sort of a guy. We got on quite well with him. We used to go outside the grounds and they knew we wouldn't run away. We used to do exercise things - we'd play volley ball and quoits and things like that. He asked us once if we'd like to go walking and we did. He organised that when a group of us wasn't working we'd go for a walk about 10 miles out into the countryside. He would take us to see an old castle because he liked walking too.

This was a turn around from Salonika.

Yes a big turn around but this particular bloke had a son on the Russian front and his biggest whinge was that he wasn't allowed to go up and fight on the Russian front. One Sunday morning he came down in to our room because one of the French orderlies was a priest and he used to go down to the group who had been moved down the road and taken a church service. The commander came in and he said "where's the priest who wants to go down to Klein Zimmern" and one of the fellows, a good little Frenchman, went up to the Commander and asked if he could go with them. The Commander asked if he was the priest and made the sign of the cross. "No" he said " I just want to go down and see some of my friends". "Where's the priest" the commander asked "it's all hocus pocus because God is my country and Adolf Hitler is my Christ". No one moved. If anyone had said "oh poof" he would have shot them on the spot because he was possessed. This was the strange thing about those people. He would go with us on these walks and tell us what was going on although he only spoke German and then he went berserk like that in this situation. Quite amazing.

There was another interesting event there. The French were not particularly good medical orderlies. One of their blokes had been operated on for appendix and he'd not been nursed well and had developed pneumonia. He was in a serious state and they asked our doctors to have a look at him. I think the Germans asked our doctors to look at him. There were some French doctors but they only called in. I don't think they stayed with us because I don't recall them there every day. Anyway, they had a look at this chap and they decided that he was too far advanced to move so we had him sitting up in the bed in what was called a fowler's position and they came in behind him and they started drawing off this fluid from his lungs. They drew off a pint and a half of fluid and said 'now we think we'll take him up to the operating theatre but be very careful because the wall of his lung is ulcerated from this and if it breaks this fluid will go into his lungs and he'll drown'. We carried him over with the greatest of care and got him into the operating theatre. We had a proper operating table; it wasn't anything fancy. We got him onto it and they went in through his back. They were going to take a rib out and put a drain in. Just this and maybe the movement made his lung burst and he was saying 'I'm drowning, I'm drowning and Les said 'quick tip the table up'. I got under the table and I operated the controls to tip it up so that the fluid could run out and the foot part collapsed so I had to hold the foot part up to keep him in line while they went on with the exercise and got the drain in. He survived this and we recorded him as a resurrection.

This fellow's name was Chase.

Did you ever hear of him again throughout the war?

No I never heard any more but he survived that and we nursed him back to health. I had a photo of him taken out in the grounds outside. He was still lying down with several of us around him and several of the French orderlies were among them. A few years ago Les rang me and said he had some French people coming to see him who had a relation on the staff in Dieburg and I said 'I've got a couple of photo's there'. The interpreter used to take photos and sell them to us. I took the photos I had and one of the girl's uncles or something had been in it and we were talking about it. By the time I left this place I spoke fluent French and I was asking her about her uncle and he was a baker. I said 'here's the baker' and showed her the photo. She said 'no, he's not my uncle'. Anyway there were 3 or 4 French orderlies and I gave her the photo.

We're still at the camp at Dieburg.

This was an old monastery that had been converted in to a Prisoner of War hospital and we had amongst our patients there an Irishman whose surname slips my mind but he was called 'Paddy'. He'd been on the deck of a ship in Suda Bay in Crete when the ship was bombed and the impact had damaged his feet badly. He could only wear big sized wooden clogs; he couldn't put a shoe on and he had to shuffle so the Colonel thought he might be able to do some surgery on him that would help him. He arranged for Paddy to be taken to see a German specialist in Frankfurt and on the day that it happened I was designated to go with him to look after him and of course a guard took us. We went on the train into Frankfurt and went to see this German specialist who spoke fluent English. He was wearing an army uniform and we had a note from the Colonel which I showed him. He read it through and he snorted because the Colonel had said 'what sort of operation would I do on this man?' and the German snorted and said 'English syntax'. He discussed his injury with Paddy and as soon as he heard Paddy's accent he said "where do you come from" and Paddy said "I'm, from Ireland" and the German asked if the British had conscripted him into service and he said "no I was a volunteer". The German then asked me the same thing and of course I was from Australia and I was also a volunteer. I think we put him off a little bit because he said there was nothing that could be done for this man's feet . The Colonel also asked if we could have some special footwear made for him and he said they could make the footwear but it would require leather and they weren't putting any leather into service for prisoners of war. He said "better the Russians than the British" so we had obviously upset him and we didn't get anywhere. We left there and our guard wanted to do a little bit of shopping or something in Frankfurt so he dropped us off at a small camp in the middle of the town that was occupied by French men who were doing ordinary community work around the place - probably emptying rubbish bins and things like that. Paddy was wearing a blue jacket and trousers of some indeterminate nature which were the hospital uniform and I was wearing a British battle dress jacket which we nearly all wore which came to us through the International Red Cross. We were indistinguishable from the other people except that he was a patient and I wasn't. We went in and the guard left us with the guard at the gate. We're put into the camp and a group of Frenchmen came along and asked us what we were doing. I told them where we were and what we were doing. One of the Frenchmen said "your accent intrigues me. What part of France do you come from?" I've held onto that story for years because it was the highest compliment any Frenchman ever paid me.

So we didn't do any good with that exercise and eventually Paddy would have been repatriated because he could hardly walk.

By the end of about 6 months in this place the patients had all the work done on them that needed to be done. Some of them had been sent off to other camps. Those that were able to go to work were sent to working camps and we were all dispersed and separated from the two doctors. The group of orderlies were taken off and after 2 or 3 days travel we ended up in a Stalag. I can't remember the number of it - it was either 8 or 9, A or B. It was still in Southern Germany in Thuringia. We came into this stalag which was occupied by the British and there would have been about 12 of us altogether, including half a dozen Australians, 3 or 4 New Zealanders and a couple of Englishmen. We were new to this camp and this area. The population was mainly remnants of the 41st Highland Division who were captured in the retreat at Dunkirk. A lot of them were Scottish Battalions and we were new ears so we had to hear all their stories over again because they hadn't had any fresh ears for a long time. It wasn't a bad camp and we settled in there quite well. It was summer time because they were running a British basket ball tournament. British basket ball is played much the same as our netball. They had these teams and they said "what about the colonials putting in a team" so we were able to field a team. I think there were 5 or 7 people in it a side. We were able to make up a team of Australians and the New Zealanders were also able to make up a team. The Australians particularly did well at this because we were used to football and things of that nature. After becoming familiar with the game, and it was a bit of an effort to start with, we entered the competition and ended up playing in the Grand Final against the Sergeant Majors. I don't honestly recall who won but it was a very hard fought match and the crowds were watching. There was a lot of interest in it and everyone was barracking for us to beat the Sergeant Majors. We also used to have a social game with the New Zealanders and of course this was an absolute lark. At times there were more people on the ground than on their feet but we used to have a terrific time there.

However, one day there was a requirement for some medical orderlies to go out to a camp and they picked us. We were the last into the camp and we thought that some of the British medical orderlies who had been sitting there for 2 years could have gone out instead of us who had just come off work. We had a little sergeant from NSW, a fiery little bloke, and he went to the British doctor who was in charge of us in this camp and made a protest and he ended up saying "you should send them out. We were the last in, why should we be the first out". He thumped the table and said "we're not going to go". So we were put in the bad books and the next thing lists go up on the board of people going out to work camps and we were amongst them. We couldn't argue about that. Three of us were in this group that went out to one work camp. Two of them worked for infantry battalions - they were stretcher bearers. I was really the only medical orderly when we arrived at this camp - I can't remember the name of the town - the stalag that we left was Niederorchel. The men were working in a plywood factory that was just out of town. It was not an essential industry and they were allowed to use bits of the wood. However, it was a rule that anybody who was a non-commissioned officer didn't have to work under the Convention, only private soldiers but if a fellow didn't have evidence that he was a non-commissioned officer the Germans required him to work. So many of them wrote off to their battalion headquarters and bases in England asking for evidence that they were such and such a rank. But all this took time and in the meantime they had to work at the plywood factory. The factory put their own building up. There were a hundred of us there so it wasn't a big operation. The building was totally built of pine with double floors, double walls and double glazing. They were not insulated. The roof was a wooden one covered in a sort of pitch paper - paper covered with tar more or less. It wasn't too bad. The bunks were two decker bunks and they were in groups of eight so that there was one two decker bunk head up with another two decker bunk and they were alongside another pair situated the same way so that you could walk all around the bunks. They didn't occupy a lot of floor space. You would get into each bunk from one side. In those small working camps the members had to elect their own representative to act for them against the Germans. He was their camp leader and we elected a fellow who was a big Irish regular army sergeant in the Royal Engineers. His name was Paddy Russell and I was the medical orderly. In the camp there was one room for the camp leaders and that was Paddy and me. We had a small room with two single beds in it that we slept in and opposite this room was my sick room which had a double decker bunk and a cupboard and a table or something like that. The rest of the people slept in the large dormitories but we had our own cooks and our own cleaners and the operation soon settled down and went along all right. We were getting Red Cross parcels fairly regularly. It used to break down in winter when the roads were snowed up or something like that. They'd have transport difficulties.

What did you get in a Red Cross parcel?

Well a Red Cross parcel would have a bit of tinned stuff and a bit of packet stuff. Nothing could be fresh. You'd have some tinned fish, a tin of bully beef, 2 ounce packet of tea, sometimes a little tin of Canadian butter, a tin of meat and vegies or something like that and perhaps a packet of dry biscuits or something of that nature.

So they didn't contain clothing or anything like that?

No, families sent clothing. In addition to these parcels we started to get parcels from home. The English of course were getting them. They'd have parcels with cigarettes. They'd get perhaps 500 cigarettes or parcels with clothes. We started to get these a long time afterwards. At Christmas time there would be a few Christmas cakes.

Did you get socks and balaclavas and things like that?

They came through stores and were supplied through the International Red Cross. The British supplied them to us through the International Red Cross.

With some of the other things within the camp, did you know how the war was progressing? Was there any illegal information coming around under the table?

Well we did get into that later on. We didn't in the first place. We were well out in the country and there was nothing much around. The men were working in the plywood factory and there were German civilians in the factory. That was the source of our information. They were very much a peasant type of people. In fact they were so peasant like that I remember one of the Germans saying how their stukkas, which were their dive bombers, had bombed the narrow neck of land that joined England and Scotland and they'd separated Scotland from England and one day later on we had some Canadians come in and there was a Canadian who happened to be in a situation where he could see the night sky and he said to a German "just imagine, those stars are shining over my family at home". The German got very upset and denied that those stars were shining anywhere but over Germany. They were ignorant to a terrible degree about anything outside Germany.

So they were highly nationalistic?

Oh yes. I remember the Kommandant of this camp who was a non-commissioned officer, the guard commander in the camp and he was the Kommandant. That's all there was, there was no administrator in command. He ran the lot and he was boasting to us once how little Germany had conquered all of Europe and all this sort of thing and he was very full of himself. He had a gammy leg and wasn't eligible for active service. We got on fairly well with him. We didn't treat him with any more respect than we had to. The guards were sort of B class soldiers, home guard types and we had no problems with them.

After we'd got settled, I instituted a practice of going to the gate and saying to the guard that I wanted to go over to the factory and I did this in a confident fashion and he used to open the gate and let me go. I would walk over to the factory which was a few hundred yards away; we were more or less in the factory grounds and I would walk through the factory and look at all of our fellows at work and when anyone asked me anything I would say I was just seeing how our wounded men were able to manage the jobs they were given and that they were not under any undue stress and I got away with this. I maintained this stance because I felt it was important that whatever privileges we had we had to maintain. When there was a little bit of trouble or somebody escaped or something like that everything was tightened up for about 3 or 4 weeks and they wouldn't let me do that.

Did many people escape?

Yes there were many escapes because there was a night shift working at the factory and this gave opportunities for people to go. We had probably 20 or 30 escapes from that camp. No one went anywhere. Everyone was caught and brought back. These fellows were all caught within a couple of days and brought back and they would get a sentence of 30 days in the punishment camp which was in the cells. They would go to a camp which was a gaol camp and they were worked in this gaol camp. The trouble was that there were so many people going into these punishment camps that they had a waiting list and some of them probably never served their sentence because they didn't have time.

We lived in our own quarters and at the end of our mess room - we had a large mess room, a large dormitory, the leader's room, the sick room and toilet. The toilet had about 12 wooden thunderboxes and the wash room was quite open to everything and that comprised our camp. At the end of the mess room there was the kitchen and on the other side of the kitchen was the guard room. All of these camps now and then were subjected to a search. I'll tell you this story because it is absolutely true and I don't want it to seem as if I'm boasting but you get to know the run of things pretty well. One day we had a group of people who had come from a camp which had closed and it was what had been called a light work camp and these people had not been subject go the same discipline as we were. A few of them were working in the factory which was not particularly heavy work. One morning I wanted to see the German doctor in the village; when I had sick people I had to take them down to the German doctor. They wouldn't go to work in the morning at half past six, they would let me know they were sick and I would take them down to see the doctor. On this particular morning they came in from work about 9 o'clock in the morning for what was called breakfast and they had a half hour break at that time. While they were in the mess room I went through the kitchen and opened the door of the guard house to get a guard to go down to see the doctor. Sitting at the table there was a strange officer and about 10 extra guards that didn't belong to us. I had suspected this because I'd seen some fellows riding push bikes up to the gates. I immediately excused myself, closed the door and went back into the mess room. I called their attention and said "there's going to be a search this morning so make sure anything you've got that will cause trouble is put of the way. Remember you're not to have amongst your stuff any uncensored photos, and you're not allowed to have petrol cigarette lighters". Some of these new blokes had uncensored photos and some of them had cigarette lighters and they asked what they could do with them. I said "give them to me". I was wearing a British battle dress and I put the photos in my top pockets and the lighters in my trouser pockets. We'd hardly gone through this exercise; other blokes had scurried off to put things out of sight that they didn't want found; when the door opened and in they came. Everybody was called to attention and sent out into the yard. Our camp leader happened to be away at the time and I was acting as camp leader so I stayed with the German officer and the guards searched everybody. Then they left everybody out in the yard and they go through and search the camp. I was with the officer and our camp commander, who was about sergeant rank, was in charge of the search party and they went through everything. Because the men worked in a plywood factory, they were allowed to take discards and seconds and in the mess room all along the walls we had little cupboards hanging from the walls for our mess gear. In one of these they found two eggs. Of course there was no way that we had eggs so they asked whose cupboard it was. There was no point in not saying whose cupboard it was or that I didn't know so I said it was so and so's. It happened to be two young English boys who were working out there. They finished the search and we went back into the guard room and in front of me he searched his men because there had been complaints that they'd pinched razor blades and things. He searched all his men and I held my arms up so he could search me and he waved me away. I went back and gave the blokes their stuff back. I don't mean this as a form of bravado but I knew without question I wouldn't be searched. I wouldn't have been so foolish as to do this otherwise. He wasn't going to search me. In their outlook, would anyone stand up to be searched when he had his pockets full of gear! Of course he wouldn't I knew of other instances where men were being searched and when they had their hands up they would pass stuff from hand to hand.

The two boys were brought in to be questioned about the eggs and they had very little German speaking ability so I had to stay with them and help them through and act as interpreter. The German officer asked them where they worked and they told him out in the timberyard. "What do you do?" "Well the timber is out there drying and when it's wanted in the factory we load it onto trolleys and take it to the factory". Are there any chooks running around in the timber yard?" "Oh yes, there are chooks running around in the timber yard". "Is that where you found these eggs". "Yes, we moved a stack of wood that was dried and there were bolsters under it to keep it off the ground and in the space there was this nest with these eggs and that's where we got the eggs from". You could see the officer was working up to his big finale and he said" it's the first time I've known chooks to lay eggs with an Egg Board stamp on them". He roared laughing and everyone else laughed too because the officer had made the joke. "Thirty days in the cooler" but I know for a fact that they never served their 30 days. They never even got to it.

Another funny little thing that happened there was that one day the Kommandant sent for me and he was quite a nice old bloke. We'd had a change at this stage and we used to call him the farmer. He called me in and gave me a card from the International Red Cross which certified that I was a qualified medical orderly and had to be treated under the Convention as such. I'd never seen one before but he said "oh, you're OK now. I've often wondered about you". He opened his cupboard and gave me two little green pears as a sort of token of peace and friendship. I thought it was strange the way his mind worked. He was curious about this Finkelstein bloke who was in the camp, not curious enough to do anything about it but he was intrigued and when a card came from the International Cross saying he was a medical orderly, everything was OK.

On one occasion, most of the British NCO's who were working in the factory and had asked for proof from their battalion headquarters about their non-commissioned status, got fed up with the delay and told the Germans that they believed the mail from their army headquarters was being delayed so they could be kept working. They gave the Germans a time and said if it wasn't back by then, they'd stop work. The time came and the Kommandant came in the night before and told them there was to be none of that rubbish, they were to go to work in the morning. Everybody was gathered there and Paddy Russel was trying to run some kind of meeting and put a case to the Kommandant. The Kommandant said he'd had no proof from anywhere so they were going to work. Paddy didn't know quite what to do and one of the fellows in the group said "Ask us if we want to go to work" so Paddy asked them if they were going to go to work and everyone bellowed out "No". The Kommandant stormed out. Overnight he got more blokes in.

Everybody was got out of bed at half past five next morning and he had extra guards come in. He asked who was on night shift and the fellows put up their hands. He told them to go away because they weren't required to go to work. He then asked who was on afternoon shift and dismissed them as well because it wasn't time for them to go to work. That left him with just the morning shift and he had as many guards as prisoners. He told them to go to work but they just stood their ground. The guards then laid into them. They hit them with rifle butts, jabbed them in the kidney area with the muzzle of their rifles and so on and drove them to work. One bloke, who was a mild mannered little bloke, dug his toes in and said he wouldn't go to work. We never saw him again, he was taken off and clamped into the cells somewhere and sent off to punishment camp. It's strange how different people react. The blow hards went to work and this little bloke, who was a nice little bloke and very quiet, stood on his dignity and said no. It wasn't a very serious offence. I never heard of anybody receiving a more serious punishment then being sent to the punishment camps.

So, what was the outcome of the strike in the long run?

It collapsed. The morning shift had gone to work, the afternoon shift knew what would happen if they didn't go to work and the Germans showed good sense in separating the shifts as they did because it gave them a much stronger position. The night shift couldn't refuse to go when they were ordered out because they weren't required to go to work and that was the weakness in our plan.

However, as people did get evidence, they went back to Stalag. Every work camp like this was attached to a Stalag and they would go back to Stalag and spend the rest of the war playing basket ball or whatever they did in the Stalags.

Were there many other forms of resistance?

No, we did all sorts of things like work to rule.

Was there any sort of industrial sabotage? Things not made properly so they'd fall apart, that sort of thing?

No, we didn't have any great opportunity to do anything like that. In most cases, our blokes were working with German civilians. The group that had come from the light work camp had been working in a chewing tobacco factory; I've never seen chewing tobacco but they used to make it. The tobacco was wound up into twists and soaked into vats of this evil smelling stuff and they told us that what went into these vats you wouldn't want to know about. We used the privileges that were offered by the factory management to build ourselves things to improve our facilities in the camp.

What sort of things did you build?

We built a stage at one end of the mess hall and we used to put on concerts there.

What sort of concerts did you have? Did you ever do anything in the concerts?

I was the director of entertainment. They gave me this title because I think I organised one - a concert or a sing song thing. We got better and better at that. They would allow us to take stuff to build scenery; we'd ask permission and so on.

Did you have any musical instruments?

We gradually collected a few things like a banjo, a guitar and a few things like that. In the end we did get a piano.

So the men would dress up as women and all that?

As a matter of fact, as we got under way, we used to put on a concert every fortnight. They were on Sunday nights and while one concert was being prepared for, we were preparing the ground for the next one. On the Monday after the concert we would start getting ready for the next one.

When did you do your practising?

Well, different blokes were on the different shifts. We managed though. We put on a few plays; we wrote our own scripts and we used to borrow the Kommandant's typewriter to type out our scripts. While we had his typewriter, we used to type out these passes for the railway because if anyone was going, they had to have passes for the railway between certain towns. We'd make passes to go between this town and that town and from that town to another town. We used to type these out on a bit of paper and one of the Canadians was a very handy man and out of a raw potato he caved the eagle on the swastika stamp that the Germans used and we used to put an official stamp on these documents.

And it worked?

It worked. Out in the bush you could get away with anything. In the Red Cross parcels we used to get a little tin of black current concentrate and somebody discovered that you could boil khaki clothes in that and it would turn them dark bluey purple. In the wash room we had a copper for boiling clothes and they used to boil these clothes and dye them. Of course they had to be kept out of sight. They had to wear these when they escaped; there wasn't any point in escaping wearing khakis.

I remember one fellow. He dyed his overcoat and he dyed his trousers from the knees down because in didn't have enough stuff to do the rest of it. He went out that way, kept his coat on. It was estimated at one time in Spring there were 40,000 prisoners on the roads all through the summer of whom about 1 in 10,000 might get away.

Were you ever tempted to try to escape?

No I was obliged not to escape. I used to make up the passes and participate in all that. We dug a tunnel. The bottom bunk in this dormitory was only a few centimetres off the floor and the side board more or less masked the floor. Under the straw palliasses there were bed boards and we used to take up the boards and go through the floor at that point and start the tunnel. They'd go out under the fence intending to come up in a field which would have a crop in it during summer so that the opening was masked. It went down and they used to distribute the dirt they were digging out under the floor. We tapped into the lighting and had lights down there.

What, you ran cables down there?

Yes, it was very ingenious. They could do anything. They made tools, they pinched things out of the factory. We only had to have a sort of scraping tool.

What sort of dirt was it?

It was loamy dirt and very easy to handle. They built little trolleys as the tunnel progressed and they'd pile all the dirt onto these trolleys and haul it back to where they could go up and distribute it.

Did they work mainly at night or all the time?

There were lights down there and when they were working in the tunnel we had people at a window on either side so that as the guards went on their patrols and reached one point we would turn off the light and the blokes would stop digging. When the guard reached one point, the look out would signal, we'd turn the light back on and they'd resume digging. It was only a few feet under ground so you could hear them digging when you walked over the top.

Did you have any cave ins?

No, we use the bed boards to support the tunnel; a lot of people were losing their bed boards.

Amongst the people who came from this light work camp was a fellow, an English soldier and he came to me one day and asked me if I would sign his passes because he was going over the fence, as we used to call it. I signed them for him using the name of the German SS officer for the area and after he'd gone; I think he had 4 or 5 passes to cover the district he wanted; I went back into our room, mine and Paddy's, and a couple of his mates were there, some older fellows and I happened to say that I'd given this fellow these passes and one of the old blokes said "I wouldn't have done that". I said "what do you mean. Why not?" and he said "because he hasn't got a good reputation. He's suspected of being a collaborator. If he gets caught with those passes and they want to know where he got them from, he'll dob you in".

One of my mates in this camp, a London bloke, a terrific guy, the sort of bloke that if you were in a tight spot, would be the bloke you'd want, was professionally a crook. He used to drive a car for smash and grab gangs. He was a tick tacker at the races. He did a bit of burglary. He told me a story once of how he and his brother went in and robbed a warehouse and then discovered a day later that that was where their sister worked. He served a couple of terms in jail and the magistrate told him that the next time he appeared before him, he'd have a good term. I told him about this and he said "don't worry about it. I'll get them back." During the night he went through this fellow's gear and found the passes and took them off him. The next day this bloke came to me and told me someone had pinched the passes and did I know anything about it. I told him I'd burnt them and he got a bit upset about it. I told him that a few of the older fellows had told me that he had a bad reputation as a collaborator and that I wasn't prepared to run the risk of being involved in it. He threatened that I was going to be court martialled and all sorts of things. In fact he did escape without the passes but was back in again within a day. I never heard another thing about it and I never worried about it again either.

Was the tunnel used?

No, the reason I brought that fellow into this was because one day they searched us as they did from time to time and they found the tunnel. We often wondered how they came to find the tunnel. On one occasion; the Kommandant came to see me or Paddy or someone; and as he walked up through the dormitory the tunnel was open but a group of fellows soon obscured his sight and we don't believe he saw anything. We never discovered how the tunnel was found. The Kommandant at that time was a fiery little bloke and he said that if he'd caught anyone in the tunnel he would have shot them because they were out of the camp grounds. So it never got to its conclusion and they had to fill it in.

Did they punish the camp for the tunnel?

Yes they imposed strict discipline. They may even have restricted our access to Red Cross parcels for a short time but it soon went off again.

What about the Canadians that came along, did they fill you in on the latest happenings?

Oh yes, they gave us some information at that point, particularly the Englishmen. We realise now of course that that wasn't a serious invasion and they were the bunnies. Paddy, who was an engineer, had to supervise the filling of the tunnel. Our tinned food that we received; the empty tins would normally have been put out in the rubbish but he saved all the empty tins and at the last point of the tunnel he threw all the empty tins in without crushing them so that if the tunnel was ever reopened up again it would be easy to continue.

That's another interesting thing. When the Red Cross parcels were received, everyone had his name on his parcel and there was a little storeroom with shelves that was particularly designed for this and all the parcels were put in there and they only opened it at a certain time every day and every tin that was opened had to be opened up in front of the guard that supervised. I had the job of opening the tins with a specially sharpened opener that slid around the top of the tins and the guard stood there watching. He was often involved in conversation and if a fellow said "I want a tin out" we would organise it so that the guard didn't see this man get his tin without opening it and he was gone.

So you didn't get your parcels given to you in total. They were doled out piecemeal?

That's right. As the fellow came in, there would be 2 of us at the counter in this store room (like a bank), he'd get his parcel off the shelf and he'd open it up and say "I'll have this" and he'd take it out and he'd give it to me and I'd have to open it and off he'd go.

Was any food pooled for communal use?

No, we didn't.

What about for black marketing?

Well, people did that individually. Things like soap - we used to get a small 2 ounce bar of chocolate in this too, a cake of soap, tins of cocoa, odd things like that and that was how those kids bought their eggs that they got into trouble with. Of course the German civilians were strictly forbidden to trade with us so we had to be very careful not to get them into trouble too. At Christmas time if we were going to have anything special, we used to put stuff in.

In general we formed ourselves into little syndicates. For example, these other 2 stretcher bearers and I mucked in ourselves so that we could open say one tin of bully beef and make something to share between the three of us instead of each of us opening a tin.

We were fed a reasonable meal every day from the camp but it was always lots of things like potatoes and swedes and cabbages and things like that. We used to get a meat ration and the burger-meister from the village used to handle that and I often wondered what rackets went on there. I remember one day our meat ration was a cow's udder and the cooks put it in the boiler with all the rest of the barley and cabbages and whatever and boiled it all up but you couldn't possibly eat it. It was like eating a piece of galvanised rubber. Sometimes there would be a bit of meat. The food was always a form of thick soup but if you wanted to you could get your potatoes without them going into the soup. I used to do a little bit of the preparing of the meals for my mates because I was in the camp whilst the blokes were working and I'd make a sort of potato pie or something. I'd mash the potatoes, put some gravy or something in it and put it in the oven in the kitchen and brown it off and that sort of thing. This made it a little bit better for the blokes.

Some people were loners and worked on their own and eked it out like that but generally most people mucked in together like that.

Did you lose much weight as a POW? What was your general health like?

When we arrived in Germany we were at our poorest. We were all quite fit when we were taken POW and our worst period was that period immediately afterwards. The Japanese prisoners were also fit when they were captured and their best period was that immediately afterwards when they still had their own supplies. As their supplies diminished their condition fell away and their whole situation went bad on them whereas in our case, when we were fit we had nothing and we were fit enough to go through that period of bad conditions and once we got to Germany, even if we hadn't had Red Cross, we would have survived all right on this fare. It wasn't a skimpy meal of root and leaf vegetables.

Were you able to grow your own stuff?

No we had no ability to grow.

So was your weight about the same or a little bit less?

Well after we got to Germany everybody lost a bit but then we put on weight because we were eating those big bowls of cabbage and potato and swedes and everybody got a little pot belly. We used to have these huge bowel motions but it soon settled down. We used to have to sometimes go and bring bags of vegetables in from somewhere and of course you could store all the vegetables in cellars and that was where they were stored because over winter that was as good as any refrigerator. I remember one poor little bloke who went down to the cellar to get some cabbages and he had to pick all the outside leaves off them and in doing so, all his fingers got frostbitten. I wasn't familiar with frostbite and when he came in to me, he said he couldn't feel with his fingers any more. I decided to put him in alternating hot and cold baths and as it happened the German Kommandant came in whilst I was doing this and he asked me about it. I told him and he said "don't do that . Just use cold water, just cold water and rub it. If you use hot water he'll have blood clots running through him". It sounded sensible so I took his advice.

Did you have many casualties at all?

I'll talk about this now because these fellows were all fit to work. From time to time they'd get sick but some of them had different things that had never been treated. I remember one fellow coming to me saying he had a pain in his back. He'd been hit by shrapnel or something. I felt around his back and I could feel something. It wasn't very big and I told him about it and what I thought I could do. I didn't have any anaesthetic or any scalpels but I had some sharpened instruments so I cut into his back and took this bit of shrapnel out. It was corkscrewed and when he lay on it he could feel it. Another fellow had bits of stuff in his face, tiny little bits and I took those out. I was confident enough to do all sorts of things for these blokes and they were confident enough to let me do it. I had an bit of a flair for this. I was able to latch onto the way to do things and when somebody was sick, if they were able to walk we had to take them down to the doctor in the village. There were rare occasions where I'd say "he's got a fever and he can't walk and I'd tell the doctor what I thought it was and the doctor would prescribe. We used to go into a civilian chemist to get our supplies.

So did you used to go and get the medical supplies personally?

I always did because I was the medical orderly.

How well kitted out were the Germans or were they pretty skint themselves?

The thing was that a guard had to take us down to the village and we saw this German doctor. He didn't speak English at all and I had a bit of German at this stage. To talk to a doctor was a bit different and I had a tiny German English, English German dictionary, a little pocket thing that I used to take with me all the time. He was a severe man, this doctor and the only time I ever saw a glimmer of a smile on his face was one day when I was trying to tell him something and I got the dictionary out and looked through it to find something to tell him. He was fair with us, he was reasonable but the Germans wouldn't give me the authority to write anybody off work. I tried to make an arrangement, and it worked a little bit towards it, where every day I could have one bloke off work so that I could tell the fellows that they'd all get a day off work but it would have to be rotated. We didn't have much success with it because they weren't prepared to let it go that way. We did have one chap die in the camp. He was working with the electrician over at the factory and they were outside doing something with the line. He took this wire and threw it over a tree and didn't know it but he hit a power line on the other side of the tree and as he was holding the wire, he was electrocuted. It was mid winter and the ground was covered with snow. We didn't know how long he'd been lying in the snow before he was found. They came for me; there were two blokes trying to resuscitate him: two of the Germans and I'm afraid I didn't know enough about electrocutions to help them either. They had also sent for the doctor but to my mind, this man was as dead as he could be. The doctor came and changed the massage at one stage he thought we might have had him. We were making him breath but he didn't survive. He was the only death we had in the 18 months I was in this camp. We had a funeral for him. The Germans gave us a coffin and the service went through. He was buried in the cemetery in the village. He was an Englishman, I can't remember his unit. We sorted through his gear, made up a parcel of his personal stuff and sent it home to his widow. I wrote to her and explained how he died and what we did and that he was buried. We got a good reply from her.

When we were going to bury this chap, there was a burial party to take him down and we had to march through the village. Everybody was dressed up, their shoes were polished and they were smart and they marched. They put on a very good show. I didn't know how to conduct a funeral service, had never even thought about it even though I was Director of Entertainment in the camp. We managed a few words; there was an escort party of Germans of course. He was buried and the Germans fired a volley in traditional symbolic fashion. The thing that upset me the most was when I was getting him ready to be buried. I asked one of the other Australians, a big tough fellow from Sydney to come and help me and here's this big rugged Australian talking to this dead man saying things like "come on Freddy, none of this silly business. Get up Freddy, come on back" and it really tore me apart.

During this time the Germans were doing well so they were pretty confident and it was also during this time that Stalingrad took place. The Germans had such a disaster at Stalingrad that to my mind, it changed the mood of the whole nation. After Stalingrad, instead of boasting about little Germany doing this and that they were saying "it's foolish. We shouldn't be at war against each other. We should be fighting together against the Russians."

So in many the Germans were really good sports in many ways?

They were reasonable in many ways. Generally speaking, they adhered to the terms of the Geneva Convention with the outstanding exception that any people like me who were taken prisoner were supposed to be repatriated within a very few months but they kept us to look after the others, which was not a very unreasonable thing. That is what makes it so hard to understand how a race which had centuries of civilisation and culture behind them could have done the things that they did. Not to us because we had German POW's but they certainly didn't treat the Russians the way they treated us and even the French and the Czech's and those people who didn't have a country to stand up for them were not treated as well as us either.

                                                     61

During this 18 months - 1943, did you see any signs of the war waning, like allied planes flying overhead that you hadn't seen 6 months earlier?

As I was saying, before Stalingrad the Germans were so good and after Stalingrad they were saying how we should be fighting together against the Russians who they were trying to portray as a common enemy. Of course the Germans lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers at Stalingrad and they were put into a very ignominious retreat. We had guards coming to our camp who had been on active service, who had been wounded and had come out of service and were assigned to light duties. We had one young fellow come as a guard at the camp whilst he was on light duties before he was sent back to he front. He was telling us how on the retreat from Stalingrad in the bitter winter they had been marching along and if men were sick and fell by the roadside, nobody did anything. They just left them there and marched on and they would have just died in the snow. He said men had crook guts, dysentery and they were walking along shitting themselves and they couldn't even stop; they had to keep marching on. He said it was the most ghastly experience. He was a nice young man.

He told you in English or German?

He spoke English, this boy. He was a university student. Well educated young man, nice looking guy. The girls in the village - every night he was on night shift they were up there with him because they were hard done by. Just as a matter of interest, there were a couple of girls working in the office at the factory and one of them was a very good looking girl. Of course there weren't too many robust young fellows around the place so she was eyeing the prisoners off as much as they were eyeing her off and one of the cooks who used to take a meal over to the night shift - they used to take a meal over around 9.30 or 10 o'clock each night and because everyone got familiar with everything, they didn't have an escort. They used to just send him off and expect him back after a while. Anyhow, somehow or other, he met this girl and for a bar of chocolate, she was prepared to carry on with him. I though it was amazing but it was quite true that whenever any young active guards were around the place, the girls were there too.

The guards patrolled the perimeter of the camp, which of course was barbed wire. They had a sentry box at one corner away from the guard house and that was where they used to have their little sojourns. In the fields around there, the ordinary people were growing their crops. The women were planting and harvesting whatever the season required and I remember one of the fellows who was working in the factory telling me that one of the young women was saying she needed some help to dig the potatoes - "if you come and help me, you can sleep with me'. They were just like cows. Another interesting thing happened there one day. I used to go down with the guard to the doctor's surgery. If we needed a script he would write us a script and we would call in at the chemists and I would get it. We had prisoner of war money because the men who were working were paid a mark a day and I was paid a mark a day. There were hundreds of marks around the place and the fellows used to play cards for 10 mark a point and if anyone wanted money they just took it. There was no value to it because what we could do with it was very limited but I could buy odd things at the chemist. I would buy tooth paste but you couldn't buy paste, you could only buy a cake of tooth soap, as the Germans called it, a solid cake and other odd stuff. There was not a lot of this stuff around. He had a young woman assistant in this chemist shop and the shop was the front room of his house. You went in the front door of the house and the first door on the right from the passage was his pharmacy. He was a very nice old gentleman, a curtly old man and one day I only had one patient and the guard and he stayed out at the gate while I went into the chemist shop. I opened the front door to go in and apparently we'd been seen through the windows because as I opened the door to go in, this young woman came running up the corridor with a bag of buns which she stuffed into my battle dress jacket and I was taken by surprise. Fortunately the battle dress jacket is a bulky sort of a thing and I had to go into the chemist shop; by now she was back in the chemist shop; and I didn't even look at her. I was scared until I got back to camp and was able to get it out. When I used to see this woman in the street she used to give me a very bright and cheery wave but I treated her very carefully.

Another interesting thing - there was a baker down in the village who used to supply our bread. This was rye bread, or black bread as they used to call it. It wasn't black, it was brown and was pretty hard bread. He had his bakehouse and his residence and the whole thing all in one construction and it was surrounding a courtyard. The courtyard had a fence and a gate and in winter the animals used to come into this courtyard. They'd let them out in the day time but they lived in. Around the inner walls of the building surrounding this courtyard they had shelves and when the bread was first baked, it was put on these shelves and it was left there for a day before you could use it. If you ate it the day it was baked it could make you sick. The other interesting thing was that in the middle of this courtyard was what was called a midden, which is a cess pit. The courtyard was sloped so that the animal manures and things would all go down into this cess pit in the middle of the court yard and on the shelves around it was our daily bread. It's not as bad as it sounds because in winter the air was pretty crisp and there weren't many germs running around. I've seen meat hung outside to store in winter and it would be blue, frozen blue and if you happened to leave any clothes out in the winter they'd be like a board. You had to let them thaw before you handled them or the threads would all break. That's one of the reasons we were as healthy as were because no germs ever survived that winter.

Even so, we had minor illnesses. We had a drama there on one occasion - one of these young Canadians came in one day to the room (by this time Paddy had left and we had another camp leader called Frank) with Frank and I and he said "I want you to tell the guys I'm a good guy". We looked at him in some surprise and he said "I want them to know that I'm a good regular guy" and I said "everybody knows this". We called him Charlie, this young fellow. Anyway we sort of put him off. We said "we're not going to go around saying "Charlie is a good guy" when no one said he wasn't a good guy. Anyway, he started to get funny and we locked him in the drying room. Because the men worked in a plywood factory, it created a lot of sawdust so we had stoves in our camp that burned sawdust. They were used for warming and heating. They didn't use them for cooking stoves. It was a metal cabinet that had a shelf at the bottom with a space underneath it and a hole in the shelf and a plate on the top with an aperture leading to a draft chimney. We had these metal cylinders with a base and a hole in the middle of the base and we had this stick that went down the hole through the middle and we packed round it with sawdust, pretty firmly so that when you pulled the stick out the sawdust would stay firm. This went into the cabinet and we lit a fire with a few bits of paper underneath and the fire burnt up this hole. The thing would burn for 2 hours and the heat that would come off it was terrific. In this drying room we had a big double one of these stoves to dry the clothes and other than that it just had a clothes line. Charlie was starting to play up so we locked him in this room and told the Germans that he'd gone silly. Anyway during the night there was a hell of a racket - shots and god knows what. It turned out that Charlie, who was a very slight bloke, had taken his clothes off and was able to slide out between the bars on the window. The guard found him out in the courtyard without a stitch on. There was a hell of a ruckus and the guard who was on the outside of the camp couldn't see anything, heard all the ruckus, didn't know what was going on and wasn't of a mind to find out what was going on and let a shot go. He fired up under the eves of the building and it ricocheted off a beam and hit a fellow in the shoulder which added to the general panic. I dressed this fellow's shoulder. It was a clean wound and was OK. He did have some after trouble with it but I dressed his shoulder. The guards made Charlie get back into the drying room as he'd got out and the next morning he was sent off, as was this fellow who'd been wounded. The interesting thing - Charlie was dressed and knew he was going off to Stalag and he stuck his head into my sick room where I was and said -"no work in Stalag" and away he went. I don't know whether he'd put it all on but it was an interesting little interlude.

Come Christmas, the fellows wanted to have a church service.

Was this Christmas of '43?

No Christmas '42. I wasn't there for Christmas of '43. I left in November '43.

Christmas of '42. One of the Canadians, who was an absolute scoundrel - I wouldn't have trusted him with a dog - came to me and said "can we have a church service at Christmas?" I said I supposed we could. Somebody in the camp had an army prayer book so I got hold of this army prayer book and got some of the blokes to copy out some of the well known hymns. I looked through the formal service. They decorated the stage and put a little lectern on it and we bought paper, which we used for our Theatre stuff, and draped it with purple and black paper. They lined all the forms up and we had a church service the next morning. I remember the night before, as I was going to bed, I got hold of a New Testament that I found lying around the place and I was looking to find something that I could talk about and I found a phrase that I thought would suit. It comes out of Corinthians and it says "and there were Faith, Hope and Charity, these three and the greatest of these is Charity." That's how it was printed in that book. I know many don't agree with that now but I thought "that's something I can talk about to these fellows." I lay in bed and thought about it for about 5 minutes and then I went off to sleep. I preached a sermon on it next day because I thought it applied very much to the people on the spot. I'd never done a church service and I remember talking to a pastor who said that she devoted a day of the week to preparing her service and I had to tell her about this service - what a brash young man might do in that situation.

One day the Kommandant sent for me and told me I had to go into Stalag in the morning and I asked what for. "I don't know" he said "an examination".

An examination for what" I said "that I'm a medical orderly or something".

"I don't know" he said. "The guard will get you up in the morning".

They always used to get us up before dawn and we travelled everywhere by train. We had about 3 or 4 changes of train on the way. We picked up with another bloke and another guard who was the same as me - a medical orderly in a working camp. He didn't know what was happening. By the time we got to the Stalag, there were probably about 4 or 5 of us as we got out of the train, there was another bloke getting on a train with his guard who'd obviously been there. We called out to him "What's going on?" and he yelled out "you're going home." We thought he suffered from delusions. We went in and eventually got to a stage where an interpreter told us that there was going to be an exchange of prisoners and we who were medical orderlies had to say whether we were prepared to forgo our right to repatriation as non-combatants or whether we would be prepared to stay to the end of the war and look after our fellow prisoners. None of us placed a great deal of weight on this because there had been two or three abortive attempts at exchange prior to this. There was a line of us and the one in front went up to the desk and there was an officer sitting there and an interpreter and they took your name, age etc and when it was my turn, I gave my name, age, marital status and so on and he asked me this question. I said "I don't think the question would arise because I'm 24, I'm not married and there are many who have been here ..." The interpreter said " You have to say if you volunteer to stay". The pommie bloke in the line behind me whispered "Don't volunteer for anything" so I said "no, I don't volunteer". I felt ashamed because I felt there was no reason why I couldn't have volunteered but I didn't volunteer.

So that was all. We went back to our camps and I told the blokes about this and said that whether there was anything in it or not, time would tell.

How did they react to your news?

Well most of them, the Englishmen, and they were nearly all Englishmen in that particular camp. There were only about 4 Australians, the rest were pommies said "Oh there have been a couple of those. They took a whole train load of wounded blokes as far as Rouen in France and then the exchange fell through and they brought them all back again. Some of these blokes died they were so upset about it" so there wasn't a great deal of belief in it.

This would have been just after Christmas?

No, about April 1943 or something of that nature. A few months went by and one day the Kommandant came in and told me I was off to Stalag next morning.

"What for"

"I don't know what for. You're off to Stalag that's all".

I always thought that whenever anything like this happened that they were on to me, not that I ever gave any sigh of that.

When you say on to you, you mean because of the Finkelstein name?

That's right.

He said I had to pack all my stuff so I started to give stuff away to blokes. I didn't want to carry all this stuff with me and blokes started coming in and giving me cigarettes and said "you're on this going home thing".

So what time was this?

About September or October or thereabouts. It was still fine weather before winter had started. Several months had gone by and I'd completely forgotten about it. When this message came, I thought "good heavens."

Anyway the next day I was loaded up with gear, messages and Christ knows what. I got to the Stalag and sure enough we were being collected there for an exchange. Blokes were coming in from everywhere. I was on my own with my guard but a few more got on and we were all together by the time we got there. We went in and there were a new lot of guards who all spoke English in the camp. Over the next 2 or 3 weeks blokes arrived until there were about 2 or 3 hundred people there. I was looking out the window one day and I saw the shiny head of my old mate, Ken Sykes. There was a great gathering together.

Another point you made which slipped away earlier - by this time for 6 months or more there had been big mass raids coming over from England and at night we could hear an air raid siren far away in the distance and hear the sirens picking it up and getting closer and closer and it's a very chilling, ear-piercing sound, an air-raid siren. Then we'd hear the planes and there were heaps of them. That was the beginning of what became the Thousand Bomber raids. They went over in waves and even though they were well up in the air, the vibrations from the engines made a hell of a row. We were all cheering; the black out was strict of course but we were cheering and going on. We were getting a little more information by this time. There were various areas of clandestine radio stuff and it seemed to sneak through from all sorts of places.

But not in your camp?

No, we didn't have any radio but we seemed to be getting information because one bloke was rash enough to be putting up a map on the wall showing all the fronts which the Germans pulled down of course. I used to do a program every fortnight for our concerts and I used to put a lot of effort into drawing drawn back curtains and the program and so on and this fellow was saving all these programs and he used the back of one of them to draw this map of the war in Italy or some place. He lost that one because the Germans ripped it down.

So we were gathered in this camp and of course it was totally relaxed. We didn't have any parades - they just had to make sure they had a certain number of people and they used to arrange things. If we wanted to go out and have a football match, they'd let us use a field and so on. There would be a few guards around but we weren't under guard and the Kommandant would give us a big talk - "you're going home". You're going to be repatriated. There were the two groups of people who were unfit for service and you people who we repatriate under the Geneva Convention. Tell everybody how you're being treated" and all this sort of thing. It was quite a picnic and after some time, about the beginning of November we were getting ready to go. By this time we only had a small haversack with a few personal things in it. Whatever else we had we gave away. We had to collect at a railway station. We had to march down to the railway station which was a couple of miles away in the town and we got to the station and one of the air raids came over. We couldn't move and had to sit in the station for about 3 hours whilst the air raid was on in the lower industrial area of Kassel and those places, about 30 miles away. We could see it all, the searchlights and the glow of the flames. When that was all over we took off. We went down through Alsace Lorraine and all the way down through France and we stopped at a number of places. I spoke fluent French, better French than the average Frenchman because I had the grammatical education in it. We stopped at one place and I put some tea in a billy and asked a Frenchman labourer in the railway yard to put some boiling water on and he didn't understand what I meant. He came back and he'd tipped the tea out and put some fresh water in it. We used to go up to the engine room and get them to make the tea until the poor fellow ran out of steam, there were so many blokes making tea. It was a picnic trip, not that anyone was running away. I remember one place where we stopped and there was a bridge across the river not far off. It was in Avignon and this woman on the bridge was calling out asking who we were and what were we doing. I was speaking to her and she came down off the bridge and into the yard and was talking to me. A French woman talking to a prisoner of war was a bad situation and all of a sudden the guards came along the train and this poor woman said "I have to save myself" and shot through. The guards took no notice of her at all; they were on a goodwill mission and they were very nice to us all the way.

We ended down at Marseilles and we were put on a ship and we travelled overnight from Marseilles to Barcelona and pulled up at a wharf in Barcelona. We were there pretty much all day but there was a ship on the other of the wharf and a wharf shed in between us. The ship on the other side of the wharf was a British ship with German prisoners in the same situation as we were, in the same situation a us. Those who couldn't walk were carried on stretchers like ours. One lot went through the wharf shed and the other lot went round the end of the wharf shed. I can't remember which was which. We went round and onto the British ship. We were on protected voyages and were lit up. They took our names and numbers because up until then they didn't know who was coming. When we left Barcelona we went back to Alexandria in Egypt, straight across the Mediterranean. Every 20 minutes they were radioing our position. We were fully lit, no question of hiding because it was a protected voyage and that was why they were radioing in. In between they started radioing in the names. We arrived in Alexandria and were taken to a camp nearby.

So you were back where you started from?

Just about. There was a reception staff there for us and the poor devils didn't know what to do. They didn't know what we would be like, whether we'd be ga-ga or crazy or what and they treated us with kid gloves. All they did was have a parade every morning to count us. Other than that, we could do what we liked, within reason.

We arrived there on, I think, the 23rd of November 1943. We were there for some time. We used to go off into town and there's an interesting story here. I was in Cairo before I went to Greece and I went into a studio and had my photo taken to be sent home. I gave him directions and he was supposed to post it. Whether he did or not I don't know but I never got it. I was walking along the street in Cairo and I saw his shop so I went in and talked to him and told him my story. He went and got some dust covered boxes and he had glass slides. He found my pictures and printed me another set.

Have you still those?

There were a few around. I could have a dig around and find one.

While we were there and they were working out what to do and how to handle it, they organised a trip for us through into Palestine, Lebanon and so on because the war was over there. In fact, there was no active war anywhere in Egypt at that time. A group of us went. We were camped at Nathania which had a leave camp a few miles out of Tel Aviv on the coast. It's a big thriving metropolis now but it was a little village then. We were able to join a bus tour through this ancient land, and I wished I had known more about its history. One of our unit, Roger Bramich, was a big help. He'd gone through theological college and had graduated as a minister of the Methodist Church. He hadn't been ordained and came away in our unit as a private. He was with us and knew a bit about it from his theological studies which was a help. We went through Damascus, past the Sea of Galilee and those sorts of interesting places. I remember we stayed overnight in Damascus. We did a bit of shopping in some of these places and there were 2 New Zealand nurses on this trip. There were a few of us who were not rooting and tooting blokes who got boozed everywhere and we took these two nurses under our wing so that when we stopped any where they could be with us. They enjoyed it and when we were in Damascus, one of them retired and went to bed whilst we went round the town with the other one. There was an MP's post and I was so brash that I went into the MP's post and asked for the officer in charge who was out at the moment. I said to the fellow who was there "look we're repatriated prisoners of war and we're on our way home from Germany and wonder if we can get a pass to go into restricted places like the Officers' Clubs and things." This pommy sergeant who was there said "I don't think you'll do any good with that and as a matter of fact, you're lucky that the officer in charge is not here. You've walked in with shoes on and no hat and he'd dob you in if he saw you. So we left.

Because these two New Zealand girls were nurses and as such were officers, we went into the Officer's Club and were sitting there, about 4 of us and the waiter came we all ordered drinks and he said "I'm sorry, I can serve the lady but I can't serve you." So we went out. We didn't get into any trouble though.

We went on as far as Beirut which had been a bit knocked about but we stayed in interesting places on the way. Then we came down the coast through Tyre, Acre and some of those old places which were just little Arab villages. They're all towns now I understand. I haven't been back there since.

We spent a couple of weeks in Nathania and then went back to our camp. One day the chap in charge said to me that he had a telegram for me. It was a telegram that had come through the Red Cross and these two New Zealand nurses were working in a hospital near Cairo and she'd sent this telegram, addressed to the camp where we were, asking for me - would Roger and I come up and have dinner with them in their camp one night. I said to the Commander "can you give us a pass to go to Cairo?" and he said he couldn't he could only give us a pass to go to Alexandria. I said "never mind, that'll do." So Roger and I got a pass to go to Alexandria and I altered it to go to Cairo.

We went to Alexandria and took the overnight to Cairo. We had to catch this funny little train in a place called Bab-el-Ouk and go out to their hospital in a suburb a few miles away. They met us there and showed us around the place and we had dinner with the nurses and spent the evening with them. They told us that the train was very unreliable but that they'd better get us back into Cairo to catch the train back. As we were going down to the station we heard the toot and when we got there the train had gone. There were a few taxis there and they quickly sensed what the situation was. We decided that we'd have to take a taxi back to Cairo and they told us that the fare was only so much. The driver realised he had us over a barrel so we got into the taxi and told him to hurry up because we had to catch that train in Cairo. Not that we had to catch that train we had missed but we had to catch the main express and we didn't have a big margin. He kept saying "so many piastres, so many piastres" and we argued and bullied him and gave him hell. Then we got to the outskirts of the town and hailed a city taxi and transferred us over. Then we started bullying the new taxi driver to get us to the station. We got to the station and as we ran onto the platform the train was starting to move and I hopped on the train with Roger following me and he hopped on and this taxi driver was hot on his heels. Roger swung his haversack and whacked him. We did the dirty thing and never paid anything for our trip in.

So in all this time that you were out of a POW camp for the first time in 2 1/2 years how did you find being amongst civilisation?

We were totally relaxed. Ken and I were in town one night and there was picture on called "They Were Hitler's Children." We thought we'd go and see this picture. Ken was lined up to get the tickets and I was waiting for him when a Yank came up and spoke to me. He asked us what we were doing and where had the Aussies come from because he hadn't seen any Aussies round.

I told him the story and he told us not to buy tickets because they had a box and "come and join us in the box." So I pulled Ken out of line and we went up and joined these Yanks in their box to watch the film. It was only a German propaganda film, not much of a film but we were interested to see how it was being presented to people. There were silly things in it. The sort of thing they did was that they encouraged young women to have babies by big strong blue eyed, blond haired Aryans and you'd see a young girl about 17 pregnant to one of the soldiers saying "when I have my baby I hope I have much pain so I can bear this for the Fuhrer" and all that sort of rubbish. It was powerful stuff.

After the feature, they invited us down to the club and I thought they had an American Serviceman's club. So we went in and there was a fellow on the door who appeared to be making motions and I said "are we supposed to pay to go in."

"Oh it doesn't matter because we practically own the club anyway."

So we went in and they asked us what we wanted to drink. They were most hospitable and pleasant guys and entertained us for the evening, then we went back to the camp.

How long were you there for?

We were 6 weeks there. It was an unusual situation because once they discovered that we were all right and didn't have to have any sort of psychiatric treatment they started organising our trip home. It was 6 weeks before we left. I can't remember the exact date we left but we got home on the 19th of January 1944.

When you left the POW camp in Germany, they took you in the morning and was there any sort of a farewell parade?

No, I said goodbye to everyone the night before and left in the dark next morning. I organised a little Scottish stretcher bearer, showed him the medications and told him what to do with things and how to manage it, and said goodbye to everyone. When I first got into the Stalag, there was a British doctor there who I'd had something to do with - I'd sent messages to him and different things like that so I went and said "good-day" to him and thanked him for his efforts. He was very complimentary about my work.

Then they moved everybody out except the people who were going home so we were totally a repatriated mob. They made a public relations exercise out of that.

So away you went.

Yes. We spent this time in Egypt. We used to have a parade, it may have even been a roll-call every morning and sometimes we'd see taxis come tearing out of town with blokes coming back to attend the parade so they wouldn't start looking for them. Blokes were getting clothes made in the tailors and playing up like hell. We'd all accumulated money whilst we were away.

How many Australians were in the Australian contingent?

Probably a couple of hundred?

And of this, how many were 2/7th that you recognised?

I would guess that there would have been 60 or 70 of us came out in that group. There were two more of those later that took out most of them. They may have been from different areas. Some of them came from Sydney. We got off at Fremantle. We had a bunch of New Zealanders with us.

The trip back. Was that the same thing - lights on?

Yes, we were protected all the way. We were lit up as a hospital and repat ship. There were lights on and a red cross. There was some talk during one night a submarine surfaced near the ship but whether it happened or not, I don't know.

So what was the journey home like?

It was like a great picnic. We didn't stop at any ports, we came home. It was a strange feeling really. We were almost going into an unknown situation. Wherever you are, you get used to that. When I went from the camp to the Stalag not knowing what was going to happen it was a time of nervous strain. When we got on the train to come out, that didn't bother me but when we got to that fact of the ship coming home, I started to feel the strain of it then.

You wouldn't have been alone in that.

No, there was a whole range of feelings.

Was there a lot of talk to work that through?

No I don't think anybody talked about it. Everybody had their own way of doing it. We didn't do anything on the ship. We just entertained ourselves, did what we felt like doing. There was very moderate discipline and you just had to look after yourself. We were still in our familiar surrounds, we were still the same group of people and it wasn't until we hit Fremantle that we suddenly wondered "what the hell..." There were cars there to take us to the showgrounds where they received us. The families were there and so on.

So the ship just docked quietly without fanfare?

No fanfare at all.

Do you remember seeing that?

I remember the pine trees, the Norfolk pines at Cottesloe. They showed up. I remember getting up to see the Southern Cross.

We went straight from the ship to the Claremont Showgrounds and our families were there. I think they gave us a cup of tea and a cake or sandwich or biscuit or something. We all went off from there for a couple of weeks. We had to go back to hospital to get examined. Most of us were admitted to hospital for various tests and examinations and in my own case I was B classed because one day when I was out at the working camp I took a group down to see the doctor. It was the middle of winter and all the ground was frozen over. We had adequate clothes and I remember I had my full uniform on and boots and probably a pullover on under my great coat, a balaclava and a forage cap over the balaclava and we were walking back up a hill. It's very hard to walk up a hill when the ground is frozen and you have ordinary army boots. You walk in a very awkward sort of a fashion and we had just gotten to the top of the hill, probably about 400 yards away from camp and it felt as if somebody hit me in the chest with a sledgehammer. I thought I was going to collapse and die. My heart started to beat and when I say beat, I was actually rattling at every joint. My pulse was running at 210. I stopped momentarily, we were straggled out a bit. As the moments passed and I didn't collapse, I walked quietly along. It was no good me telling anyone about it because no one knew what to do anyway. There was no one there who could do anything. We got to the camp and I went and lay down. About 3/4 of an hour later, my pulse subsided to be around 96 or something. I felt quite all right after that. Now and then under certain positions of physical stress, if I was kneeling and holding things or doing something upside down it might hit me again. When I got back onto the ship I reported it; there were no medical records about it. When I got back to Australia I told them about it and it was recorded as Paroxysmal Tachycardia. "Tachycardia" is a heart condition and having it in the paroxysmal fashion means that every now and then it hits with a burst and then fades out again. It's a well known condition.

I couldn't get discharged. I was B classed. We went through an aptitude test which made us laugh. We came home from the war and had to do an aptitude test. A lot of the fellows that came home got discharged and went back to farming, timber milling or whatever they did. I couldn't get a discharge. They put me into army amenities and loaned me to the Australian Comforts Fund. I ran the office in the comforts fund for about a year before they gave an option of discharge to ex prisoners of war. I was actually in the discharge area of Karrakatta going through my discharge the day Japan capitulated.

So you were pretty pleased about seeing it out.

No, I couldn't have cared less about it at the time. I suppose looking back it was alright to see it out but of course the last year or so in Perth was a waste of time. I used to live at home. We had a house in Perth; Dad had bought a house in Perth and my two sisters were living in it. Now and then Mum would come down from the farm, or Dad would but a lot of the time we were on our own, the three of us. They were all working. One sister was a school teacher and the other one worked in a bank. We used to go off to work in the morning and come home in the evening. I was very busy chasing girls. I had a lot of catching up to do. Soon after this I turned 25 and I'd missed a few years. I was able to buy a car. I'd heard about someone selling a car and I rang this fellow up. I bought this car which gave me tremendous freedom and I was buying petrol ration tickets; I never ran out of petrol. I had the time of my life for a while. When I got my discharge I went over to Melbourne and saw my brother then came home and went back to work. I started work on the 26th of November 1945.

There was an interesting thing I must tell you. Someone in headquarters had an idea that all these base fellows had to go and do rifle drill. You've never heard anything so ridiculous. I said to the Honorary Captain that looked after the comforts fund "look I'm not to do this. One of the conditions of my repatriation under the Geneva Convention is that I don't go back into active service." I could go out as a medical orderly but I couldn't do any combative service but he couldn't do anything about it so I had to attend. We went to Forrest Park and there was some captain bloke there in charge so I marched up to him; I didn't have a lot of respect for rank or anything; and got his attention and told him my story. This man said to me "what would you do if your home was invaded by the Japanese?" I nearly spat in his face. I had to restrain myself because I'd go on a charge with a man like that. I went out and it started to drizzle with rain. There was a sergeant or somebody in charge of us and he told us to get into his tent. We were all in this tent and I said to him "look I've just come home from being a POW. Would you like me to give the blokes a talk?"

"Yes, that'd be great!"

So we spent our time there and I gave the blokes a talk about my time as a POW and that was the end of it.

Were the guys interested?

They were rapt. A lot of them were base men who had never been out anywhere and we were the first people home. We wore 4 service chevrons and no-one else in the Australian army had those.

When you came back and after your family get together at Claremont, did you go back to the farm, did you walk in town?

Yes, we did all that. I didn't go to Shackleton then. We had the house in Perth and all the relations came round and so on. I went up to see an old girlfriend of mine that I'd had in Kalgoorlie and said farewell to her because at the time I went to the war, she was the one for me but by the time I came home it didn't mean a thing any more. I feel sorry about that because she waited for me but she got married to another fellow soon after. We had a fortnight of this sort of thing, going around and I had to tell my story. I only told a superficial story at that stage. I was asked to go and address one of the Jewish organisations and one of the fellows there who obviously had come from Europe himself before the war asked me what I saw of the Jews in Germany. I said I didn't see anything. In one place where I was I saw a little girl walking along the footpath and she had the yellow star on her sleeve. She was just walking along the footpath. He seemed disappointed that I wasn't able to give more graphics until another fellow said "where do you think he would have seen them?. He was in prison camp". There was a lot of this. As I said earlier, there was a group of people - the parents of the prisoners of war organised a meeting in the Town Hall and I was one of the speakers and arising out of that I was asked to talk at different Red Cross branches and different other charity things for parents groups and whatever. No doubt all the others did too.

Did you find that difficult?

No, I had no trouble with that. I don't think I got in to the grimmer parts of it but I never had any feelings of stress in talking about it at this stage. Strangely enough, about a year or so later when I met the girl I got married to, in her home, nobody ever said a word about the war and I felt a little bit slighted that they weren't even interested in where I'd been and what happened. I never said anything and years and years later their sister told me that they were forbidden to. They just thought they mustn't say anything about it. At the time I would have been happy to talk about it.

Did you find it difficult to settle back in to peace time life and then in to civilian life? Were there any difficulties?

No the first few months were a bit difficult in that you didn't know what to do with yourself. If you weren't doing anything, you'd think of something to do. You didn't seem to be able to just sit around and relax and look into space.

Was it difficult not to be around that army camp atmosphere?

It was a big change and even though I was still wearing a uniform, it was totally unmilitary. It was during that time there were enough of our people back that I organised a reunion and we all got together one night. It was great. I rang up the secretary of the Swan Brewery and he gave me a voucher for a 5 gallon keg of beer and we had a reunion in one of the rooms at the WACA and the blokes came together. We collected enough money to pay for the beer and I may have bought some eats but there wasn't much of that sort of thing available and I'm doing reunions now. I recently conducted my 27th reunion of the unit. Since 1971 I've been organising reunions and it's gone down to 15 people at the last reunion but I'm hopeful now that with all our memorabilia and the money put up to the army museum that we'll have our display cabinet set up and that will be the memorial to the unit.

When you look back at settling back, what difficulties were there?

I had no difficulties with any aspect of living the way we were living. That part was all OK. The adjustments were that you needed to be occupied. I found that I couldn't sit down and read a book even; I had to go out to see somebody or do something but other than that I didn't really have any problems. I spent a lot of time catching up with girls. They were something that we'd missed and I enjoyed getting back into that aspect of life.