Playing Silly Buggers

Adelaide
(January 1942 - October 1942)

The Matisons

We finished up in a camp outside Adelaide, supposedly on our way to Darwin. The camp was at Woodside in the Adelaide Hills. It's not far from Lobethal. We spent three months there. And we played more silly buggers around Woodside.

While I was there, Cecil and Leah Luber, my aunt and uncle, sent me a letter introducing me to some Jewish people in Adelaide.

When I used to get leave, which was about every second weekend, I used to go down to the Matisons who lived in Springfield, which was at the end of the tramline out near the Hills. They had this most magnificent mansion. Eugene Matison was a doctor (an ear, nose and throat specialist)and very highly thought of. He wasn't a young man: he had children my age and older. The boy was in the Services and his eventual son-in-law was in the Air Force.

I was treated as one of the family, and in fact called Mrs Matison "Manya", which is "mother" in Russian. I came and went as one of the family without prior notice. Mrs M was a wonderful cook and, even though cream was not available in wartime because of rationing, they always had it on the table. They had a lot of sadness, as one daughter had died at an early age from polio. The youngest surviving daughter, Louise, who married , after I left, to Neil Lidgetwood who was in the Air Force (and was not Jewish). She had one child and later contracted polio. She was wheelchair-bound and later still had a further child. The older daughter, Nora, was married with a baby, her husband was an European new arrival named Hans Law and was not one of my favourite people. The son was in the Army and later became a lawyer. Neil Lidgetwood who was in the Air Force also went into the Law. His father was (I think) a judge and was, I think, appointed to a judicial inquiry in NSW some time in the fifties.

Woodside

Anyhow Adelaide was a lot of fun. We didn't do anything very special.

When I found that we were going to Darwin, somebody advised me to buy a .22 rifle, because there's a lot of good shooting up there. I think I bought the rifle in Adelaide, or I might have even bought it in Sydney on the way over to Adelaide. It never got used: I don't think I fired an angry shot out of it. Still, it survived the war and I kept it at home for many years.

I met some characters at Woodside. The sergeants there - I was allowed in the Sergeant's mess although I didn't have official Sergeant's stripes and was an acting, unpaid Sergeant - were "retreads" from the First World War and there were some bloody characters among that lot. One guy called Sgt Bartholomew, the bugler, who was known as "Bartholomew the buglering bastard" used to get drunk every night, and in the cold of the morning in Woodside, when he blew reveille, the taste of the brass mouthpiece of the bugle used to make him throw-up into the instrument. Beautiful music?

When we got to Woodside, the unit was split into two. Half of them went up to Peterborough where they worked on the railway, loading and unloading trucks. They worked up there for something like six months, loading and unloading trains which carried goods to Alice Springs where they were taken by road to Darwin. That's the way the goods got up there. Darwin was bombed in January and February I think while we were at Woodside training to be sent there.

Also while I was still at Woodside I flew over from Adelaide to Sydney for about four or five days' leave. I wasn't spending much money on myself so I had the money and I flew to Sydney by Ansett. The plane was a Lockheed Electra which held about 15 or 16 passengers, twin engines, twin tail, an ancestor to the Lockheed Electra of the late '50s - the four engine job. There was no hostess and it was a real up-and-down journey. You went from Adelaide to Renmark; Renmark to Mildura; Mildura to Hay; Hay to Narrandera. These were all stops. Narrandera to Wagga and then all the way from Wagga to Sydney. By the time you got to Sydney you felt that you were a piece of Barley Sugar. There was plenty of Barley Sugar and no-one to hand it out. But there was nothing else to eat on the plane.

Another thing about Woodside. The army in its wisdom decided to give everyone a dental check and, if any tooth looked dodgy, remove it. There was no such thing as a filling. In some cases the whole lot were removed, and replaced with army false teeth. In my case, my parents had looked after our teeth from an early age and the only thing the army could do was to remove the last three remaining wisdom teeth, the fourth having be done in my teens. This was of course done without the benefit of any pain relief. I was put straight back on army food. I was not too happy for a few days.

We were there from the end of January. By the time April came around, it was bitterly cold. The water supply for the camp was pumped out of a disused mine. It was as hard as nails and there was no hot water. You washed in this freezing cold water.

In April sometime we were transferred to Colonel Light Gardens, which was an outer suburb of Adelaide, but still on the tramline, just. The tram terminated at Colonel Light Gardens. We were just across the road from the hospital. I don't think it was a military hospital in those days, it was just a hospital that was eventually taken over and made into the Adelaide Repat Hospital.

Adelaide in early 1942

The 7th Division had been recalled from the Middle East, and a large number was sent to Adelaide. Apart from Woodside, there were no large camps to send them to, so tents were erected in the parklands that surround the city square and approximately ten thousand men (with their equipment) were encamped there. It is interesting to note that, when Colonel Light designed Adelaide, he set out the parklands for just such usage, i.e. encampment of military personnel. The addition of so many extra people strained the resources of a city as small as Adelaide was in those days.

After a minimal amount of training, the 7th Div. was sent to the Atherton Tablelands (outside Cairns) for jungle training, and then straight into the hell that was the Kokoda Track.

Colonel Light Gardens

Meanwhile we played more silly buggers in Adelaide. This was supposed to be training but it was repetition. It was just absolute boredom because you were doing the same thing every day. The trainers had mostly been in World War I and their war had been trench warfare in France but none of them knew anything about jungle warfare or civil defence. We were being trained for Darwin.

At Colonel Light Gardens I was still an acting Sergeant. We had about three officers. I was on very friendly terms with the Captain (whose name escapes me) and we used to have long talks.

Number

On 10 July 1942, I was transferred to the AIF. I had volunteered for the AIF a long time before and it finally came through. What happened is they buggered things up and I still had my old number. My number was N42468 in the militia and I kept it right through. For some inexplicable reason, they made it "NMX". Now "X" meant you were in the AIF and could go anywhere in the world. My 'real' number was NX142729 but I didn't get that until much later.

In The Fiery Phoenix, the number in the front of the book is NMX 42468 and my number in the "wounded" section is NX142729. The "N" denotes the state - New South Wales in this case - where you enlisted. For example, "V" is used when you enlisted in Victoria. My first number included an "M" denoting militia.

It's amazing, after 50-odd years, you can still recall your regimental number. It's a number you never forget.

We had not been put in a regiment at this stage and were still in the same unnumbered CMF group. We had been training for six months to go to Darwin. And we hadn't done much at all except sit around in camps and play silly buggers. We might have had a "shoot" at a rifle range. We had real rifles once we got in the army. There were plenty of rifles. They were left over from the First World War. During the Second World War, the British and Australian troops used the .303 Short Lee Enfield rifle which was at least 50 years old. We also had the use of the Bren Gun, an excellent automatic light machine gun. "Light" is a relative term as it weighed about 20 pounds, and that did not count ammunition.

Sandy Creek

On 26 August 1942 we transferred to an official training Battalion at Sandy Creek (near Gawler). At this time the people who had been up north at the railway at Peterborough rejoined us and we came back into the one group.

Aside - Leave

While we were at Sandy Creek we eventually got some "home" leave and that was an interesting concept. You'd go by train to Melbourne, overnight. You'd get to Melbourne about 9 or 10 in the morning, spend the day in Melbourne. At about 7 or 8 at night you'd get the train from Melbourne to Sydney, changing at Albury at about midnight. They weren't the most comfortable trains. They certainly didn't lay on sleepers. They were just ordinary carriages. You were lucky if most of them had toilets. But what used to happen was that you'd get to Melbourne and there was absolutely nothing to do all day, so you'd finish up at Young and Jackson's pub. By the time you got on the train at Spencer Street at night, you were all pissed as parrots and either vomited your way to Albury or slept. I used to sleep most of the time. You'd change at Albury because the states had different rail gauges. When you got to Moss Vale in the morning, any time from 5 in the morning until 9, they served breakfast. There was only one thing they ever served: curried sausages and mashed potatoes. I think we got a week or 10 days leave and would basically have 3 or 4 days in Sydney, and spend the rest of the time travelling.

I'd become friendly with one of the Lieutenants, and I invited him home to stay. He lived at our house in March Street, Bellevue Hill, much to my sister Joan's pleasure. She carted him around, except one memorable day when we went on a "pub crawl" which was a difficult feat in Australia at that time. Because of the influx of Australian and American troops, the pubs had little or no stocks to sell. The beer would come on for about an hour, by which time the "ration" would be sold out. So on to the next pub, if you could find one with beer. If you could not find one, then you drank what ever you could find. This day all we could find was gin, on which I overdid it, to put it mildly. To this day I cannot drink gin. The only things that stick in my memory from that day were that we walked across the Harbour Bridge and I was not well the next day.

Back at Sandy Creek

Sandy Creek is about 5 miles out of Gawler. We used to do lots of forced marches, 25 miles marched in a day. Sometimes with gear, sometimes without. I remember on one memorable occasion we did a 25 mile march in heavy boots and gear ... not full packs but small packs. When we came back, half a dozen of us had a shower, got dressed, walked our way to Gawler, danced all nights with the mostly German-descended girls - Gawler was very heavy on the German department - and then walked all the way back to the camp again. We stayed at Sandy Creek for about a month and a half.

Specific comments about Harold's memoirs can be sent to Harold Herman.

Harold's War was written and is maintained by Jack R. Herman as a part of the history section of his website.

Published by
Jack R Herman
Sydney, February 2002

All material © Copyright: Jack R Herman and Harold Herman.
Email: hhermie@iprimus.com.au

Last updated: 28 February 2002