Introduction
Jack R Herman
My father served in the 2nd AIF in New Guinea and lost his left leg as a result of the fighting. That was about it for our knowledge of my father's war effort. He seemed to be reticent talking about the war. He rarely marched on Anzac Day nor did he attend reunions of the 2/7th Battalion, his unit. It was something he seemed eager to forget. (By way of rebuttal, my father says that it just that no-one asked him.)
My father (pictured on the right with me at my recent graduation [click on the image to enlarge it]) was not the only 'victim of war' in the family. Like most Australian families, the two World Wars had left their scar on my family.
My paternal grandparents each lost a brother in WWI. My mother lost her only brother in WWII. My godmother (and aunt) lost her first husband in the same stoush. And my father nearly didn't make it.
My knowledge of his war was informed somewhat by an old extract from The Australian Women's Weekly. He had been one of a number of subjects of an article written by the then editor of the Weekly, Alice Jackson, in December 1943.
In September 1968, my father was the subject of a follow-up article ("Whatever Happened to Harold Herman") in The Australian Women's Weekly, taking his story up to the then present, 25 years after the original article. I was in my first year of university at that stage, and did not take the opportunity to question him about the matter. (My memory of the way it happened in 1968 was that the follow-up story was done at the insistence of my father's business partner, who was looking for promotion of their relatively new company.)
My discipline is history and I was just as eager to find out more about the war from the foot-slogger's viewpoint, to separate the myth from the reality. Family myth included the story that my father had barely stepped off the plane in New Guinea before he was injured and back on it again. As this memoir shows, that was someone else's war, not my father's.
In the 1990s, my father's attitude, it seemed to me, changed. He attended some reunions and made contact with at least one of the doctors who had attended him during the war. He sought and obtained records of his service and started to think more about what had happened to him and why. To try and recall forgotten events.
In late 1994 he consented to an interview, which I conducted on 27 December. Those tapes were eventually transcribed and edited (a process that was interrupted by my return to university in 1995 and 1996 to complete my BA) and the edited transcripts sent along to my father. He added some additional material and edited large parts of the transcript.
In 1998 I put the interview into narrative form and my father did a further edit which I have reviewed.
This then is my father's Second World War as he now recalls it.
to Harold Herman, my great uncle, who died at Gallipoli in 1915; and Hal Dent, my uncle, who died while flying for the RAAF off the coast of Europe in 1943;
to Trent and Aaron, my great nephews, and Jemma, my great niece, who will need to know more about their great-grandfather; and
to Cath McDonnell, who made sure I carried this through to fruition.
