The war came to Australia in 1942. With the destruction of the Northern Territory town of Darwin by the Japanese and their invasion of New Guinea, Australians faced the prospect of enemy occupation. Australia’s forces were engaged in the North Africa and in the European war zone, and could not easily be brought back to defend the homeland. The British High Command considered Australia dispensable.
Ian registered for military service, but like most farmers in his age group (he was then 39) he was required to remain on the land. However, he joined the Tambellup unit of the Volunteer Defence Corps and participated in weekend military training at the showgrounds. John Gittins was also in the VDC at that time.
With the war came shortages of all sorts of commodities, of which the most important from the farmers’ viewpoint was fuel for their tractors. They received special rations of petrol and kerosene, but these allotments were too small to support normal farm operations. They also had to contend with fuel thieves. One farmer set dingo traps for the rascals--or at least put about that he did--and another tried to bring down escaping rustlers with his war-service Lee and Enfield 0.303. But isolation worked to the advantage of the thieves, and they always escaped unharmed. There was a desperate need for a substitute for conventional fuel.
The solution was the gas producer, a charcoal-fired furnace which could be mounted on a tractor or other vehicle to produce as fuel for the engine a gaseous mixture--producer gas--consisting mainly of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. But at first nobody in the district knew how to make an efficient gas producer. Ian, John and Charlie gave over whole Sunday afternoons to ponder this question. Instead of shooting ducks they stood around drawing engineering sections in the dirt by the Gittins’ woodheap to compare the views of this or that self-styled expert. Then the government sent an advisor, Mr. Andrews, a serious, soft-spoken man who really was an expert. The much-needed know-how spread, and it wasn’t long before Ian and the Gittins brothers and every other farmer in the district had practical gas producers mounted on their tractors and other vehicles. Aside from a small amount of petrol required to start the engines, they were no longer dependent on rationed fuel.
Ian took Mr. Andrews' advice very seriously, of course, but found humor in his careful, somewhat verbose manner of delivering that advice. For years afterwards, Ian took every opportunity to mimic the young engineer's more ponderous locutions. For example, he never said "...and so on," it was always "...and so on and so forth, as Mr. Andrews would say."
On the 1942 vacation trip to Emu Point, the McRae family traveled in the Chrysler with a gas producer mounted on the back, while Charlie, John and Maud Gittins went in the Dodge truck similarly equipped and loaded with charcoal sufficient for the return trip. The usefulness of the gas producer was confirmed when both vehicles made it to the top of the long hill south of Mount Barker, without having to stop to change down into first.
Ian continued to attend the VDC parades on Sundays, but one incident undermined his and everyone else's confidence in the group's fighting ability. The local commander, a World War I veteran known as "Blood ‘n’ Guts," was leading the troops through a simulation of a standard grenade attack against a dug-in enemy, with pine cones for grenades. The exercise was going by the book until one of the "attackers" tossed, not a pine cone, but a sleepy lizard--a slow-moving reptile of alarming appearance, not venomous but mildly dangerous because it locks its jaws on anything it touches and never lets go. The "defenders" leapt in all directions, revealing their positions by yells of "You silly cow, wotteryer think you’re doing?" Everyone laughed, but the humor was underlain by the realization that for a group of undisciplined middle-aged men to confront the Japs in a conventional military engagement would be pointless suicide.
Gradually Ian and most of the others came to think that in the event of an occupation they would sell their lives more dearly as a guerrilla force, sneaking about in the bush to pick off an occasional sentry or setting a fire when the wind was right. Their thinking might have been influenced by yarns brought back by Australian servicemen returned from battling the Japanese in New Guinea, about a grizzled hermit known as the One Man Army. He was a with a habit of taking an quiet evening stroll through the jungle with dog and rifle in hopes of restocking his larder with wild pig. But after the Japanese invaded, he went after them instead of pigs, and claimed to have killed many. At least he'd cut a fair number of notches on his rifle stock.
In the event, of course, the Americans came on the scene with the numbers, the will and the weaponry to defeat the Japanese.
An eye-popping series of warships and aircraft came and went at Albany’s hitherto sleepy Princess Royal Harbour, and the submarine mother ship "Holland" had its base there. Evidently the "Yanks" did not consider Australia dispensable.
The Yanks meant business. Tall, polite and cheerful young men, many of them sleek and bulky from being "on good feed" in John Gittins’ rustic expression, they exuded confidence in their cause and their leadership. And they got things done in a hurry. Example: Informed by Albany Shire officials that they would have to wait to get a permit to extend a runway at the airport, the Yanks responded by hauling in a bulldozer--a novelty in Australia at that time--and finishing the job before the Shire office had even opened the following morning.
After the tide of war changed and it became clear that the danger of an enemy invasion had passed, the VDC continued to meet, but by then the parades were more occasions of good-natured fellowship than of military training. After the VDC disbanded at the end of the war, Ian found fellowship in the Tambellup Freemasons.
Two family members served in the regular armed forces during World War II. Dave McRae rejoined the 10th Light Horse in 1941. He served in Australia training recruits for combat, and as required by the applicable service age limit he retired in 1944 with the rank of Captain (acting Major). Ron Gittins was drafted into the army in 1942, but was soon discharged when it was found that because of his childhood head injury he was unable to wear a standard army helmet.
Continue reading: 3.2 Vignettes of Life on Gilella
Previous Topics
3. Ian and Blanche (1929-1975) Blanche (-1988)
3.1 Weathering the Depression (1929-1945)
3.1.5 Relations and Friends3.2 Vignettes of Life on Gilella
This Topic3.1.6 The War Years
Next Topic
No comments:
Post a Comment