John Rawlins’ family has a proud history of service to Australia; his grandfather, William Rawlins, served in WWl and suffered from the effects of being gassed, his father, also named William, was a Japanese PoW in WWll after the fall of Singapore and John served in Vietnam.
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John’s grandfather, William enlisted in WA and went to France in 1916 with the 11th Battalion as a rifleman. He had previously been in the Boer War.
“He was gassed and he came back pretty crook. I used to go and see him and he would cough his heart up but he lived until 1954,” John said.
“He never talked about it. We used to go to a milk bar where there was a man with shell shock. He used to rat-a-tat his fingers like a marching drum, to stop himself shaking. It was only later that I realised.”
Not surprisingly with his family history, John has taken an interest in military history.
“After the bombing of Darwin we realised we were in dire straits. It was only after the battle of the Caral Sea that the Japanese lost their sea power. Then there was the bombing of the flying boats coming into Broome from Timor. The Japanese attacked the flying boats as they came in; they were full of women and kids,” John said.
John’s father, William enlisted in 1941 in the engineers, 8th Division.
“He had a hammer and a pair of pliers as an insignia on his arm,” John said with a smile.
“He went to Singapore and then they were moved out to Malaya. When the Japs attacked Pearl Harbour, they attacked Malaya at the same time. It was December 1941 and they moved down the coast very quickly and our troops were in retreat to Singapore.”
There were some successes but they were small in the overall scheme of things.
“Our blokes were trained in barracks in Melbourne for six to eight weeks and then put on a ship to Singapore,” John said to emphasise they knew little of the terrain or the very different style of warfare they faced.
It was during the pullback to Singapore that John’s father was captured and taken to Changi prison camp.
“The Japanese wanted every 8th Division man to say they would not try to escape but they all said ‘no’.”
They were taken to Selarang Barracks but refused to sign a pledge not to escape, and were forced to crowd in the areas around the barracks square for nearly five days with little water and no sanitation. The executions of the recaptured POWs failed to break the men. The commanders however finally capitulated on 5 September when their men started to fall ill and die from dysentery. Upon signing the pledge, the men were allowed to return to the barracks buildings.
Twice John’s father was sent out to work on the infamous Burma Railway and was mentioned in dispatches; he was away for several months at a time and was in the same area as Weary Dunlop.
“They were used as labourers but they had to be scallywags. Sometimes they managed to steal tinned food and then they’d try and get sea water to cook with so they had some salt.
“The Aussies all helped each other; a big thing was water and one job my father did was to boil the water for drinking. They got ulcers, malaria and beriberi and my father suffered with malaria up to the time he died.”
Like many of the returned soldiers, John’s father never really talked about his experiences and turned to alcohol for relief.
“It was the only relief the average returned service man would have. I remember we would often go out to see him at the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital. They looked after him when he came home but there was no money but when the Vietnam vets came back they took the government to task.”
John was in the Citizens Military Forces in IRVR rifle company when the military asked for volunteers to sign up for Vietnam.
“Around 90 per cent were national service men but they needed men from the forces.”
John signed up June 1966 and spent 10 weeks in a boot camp and then did another 10 weeks infantry training. He then did six months training in jungle warfare and how to survive before being posted to Vietnam with AAU reinforcing company. He was with 6th Battalion D Company for six weeks and then moved to 7th Battalion D Company for the remainder of his tour and was based at Nui Dat.
“My nick name was Mother. I was 32 and a lot of the Nashos were a lot younger. I used to look after them a bit. We used to do seven days out in the bush and then come back. Every unit had a boozer and some of the 19-year-olds would be gone after a couple of glasses,” John said.
The threat of ambush and attack was constant and guards were posted around the camp.
“We’d go out on search and destroy missions looking for pockets of insurgents. We never walked on the tracks, we always made our own tracks through virgin country using compass bearings.”
When they went out they were still using 1937 style webbing to carry three days of rations, eight plastic water bottles, 200 rounds of machine gun ammunition, explosives and a Claymore mine.
Although the Australians laid a minefield close to the coast, the Viet Cong managed to extract the mines and ended up using them against the Aussies.
“The whole thing was a disaster.”
Occasionally there were leave breaks to Saigon and these usually followed guard duty at a Saigon Hotel (nick named the Canberra Hotel) where many of the officers stayed.
“I was one of 20 men picked to go for the Saigon guard. Normally you did seven days guard and then had 48 hours off in Saigon. I got there two days before the Tet offensive started and then for 23 days they couldn’t fly us out,” John said.
It was the start of the Chinese New Year and the first night we thought it was the fireworks going off but it was mayhem. I was doing fire watch on the roof of the hotel and the Americans kept the area illuminated like bloody daylight with parachute flares; the whole sky lit up like day.
“The hotel was in the old French quarter. We saw the VC (Viet Cong). The VC fired an RPG down the street and our fellas fired on them. All our battalions were under strength. Normally guard duty was a bit of a holiday but no one got a break. The VC attacked the airport and the US Embassy.
“The next day the guard went around checking wires because we had a signals post there. Outside the US Embassy there were VC bodies lined up on the nature strip. They did that so the family could come and pick up the body.”
John said that the Americans lost 300 military police in 27 days.
“It was horrific, the US lost so many lives. It was 27 days, every day, but the night time was bad. We had a radio station, signals and we had to guard that and at the back was a VC PoW camp. That was a bit of a worry.
“It was the beginning of the end for the war. With the loss of life and the casualties the Americans started to realise people back home couldn’t take it anymore.”
After the 27 days, John went back to Nui Dat where the troops there had been under fire.
“We lost more men in that few weeks than the whole time.”
John came home for six months after contracting pyrexia of unknown origin (PUO) possibly from a parasite that would get into the soldiers clothes.
“At that time Malaya still had a bit of insurgency and I went back there after six months as a truck driver with 8 RAR in Malaya.”
In a strange turn of events, John served with 1 RAR and was sent to Singapore where he was stationed at Selarang Barracks, where his father had been a PoW.
What does Anzac Day mean to John? “A couple of my mates got killed in Vietnam. I always reflect and have a bit of a sook.”
When he returned home he visited the Bentley RSL in uniform with his father.
“The old blokes reckoned we weren’t in a war. Everyone’s got an attitude. We were shunned. But in the 80s the marching out parade in Sydney was a break through. Those politicians they’ve never been in a situation where they were being shot at; they just wouldn’t know.” John said.
