Salamaua Campaign
Behind the Lines
After the days on the front, we came back to Wau. When we got back to Wau, we were marching in threes up and down the road - we were playing silly buggers again. Then they got a bright idea that the lines of communication were too long for the telephone line. The field telephone was laid in insulated cables and laid on the ground or up a tree. Every few miles we had to have a relay station and the system wasn't working very well. So the engineers, or whoever ran the telephone service, decided to put up copper wires. The Carrier Platoon became old tree choppers.
We used to go into the jungle, sight a line off the track. I am talking about hills that went straight up. They weren't tall hills, about a couple of hundred feet high. You had to chop down trees and leave a tree, every thirty yards or so, standing. The jungle was so thick that you would say that one's got to go, that one doesn't. You'd chop the first one down and it would just stand. So we finished up chopping another length off it. We used to call it sleeper-cutting. We'd finish up having to chop the second tree down which you weren't going to chop down anyhow, to get the first one down. I was a horror with the bloody axe. I was like lightning, never struck twice in the same spot. So they gave me a machete and I was in the vanguard and I used to chop the thin rubbish out so they could get through to chop trees down.
We did that for some time.
Some time after the first time at the front, we had returned to Wau for a rest, we commenced a crash course in using a two pound anti-tank gun. In the space of a week's hard training were promoted from "Private" to "Gunner" (same rank and pay, but a much more prestigious position.) We actually fired the thing but were restricted to about two or three rounds, as that was the sum total of ammo available. At the same time the name "Anti-Tank" was changed to "Tank Attack" as this was "aggressive and not negative". Big deal as the two pounder would not go through hot butter, let alone a tank.
The next time we went forward it was, of course, as infantry, which didn't make much difference to me when I was wounded.
Remember I mentioned Johnnie, the Chinese bloke (John was his real name). He, incidentally, when we got into the fighting, was never brought to the front line. It was too dangerous for him, somebody on our side would pop him off before he had a chance. He had been a cane cutters' cook in Northern Queensland, so they offered him the chance to become a cook, but he refused. He wanted to be a fighter which he was but we wouldn't let him. He was a magnificent cook. When we were building the telephone line, he built himself an oven and made a batch of scones nearly every night. We had plenty of flour and rice. No meat of course except tinned meat or M & V (meat and veg), and dehydrated mutton, which was known as "dehydrated dog", and that's what it tasted like. It was revolting. You can imagine. It was ground up mutton and dehydrated and, no matter what you did to it, it never came out properly. But Johnnie used to make scrambled eggs, out of egg powder, which were beautiful.
He made an oven out of a five gallon drum, put a shelf in it, put it on its side - the lid of the drum was the door of the oven -, built stones and mud around it and a fire underneath. You could build a fire if you could find any dry wood. That was another problem, getting wood that would burn because everything in the jungle was rotten, wet through. There was about a foot and a half thick of rubbish on the floor of the jungle.
