In 1941, Reg Day was among the first group of 18 year olds to be called up to join the Australian Army. He spent two years in Dutch New Guinea (now part of Indonesia), and has vivid memories of difficult times, but more good times, and many friendships formed along the way.
This Remembrance Day he will be thinking of those friends, especially those who didn’t make it home.
Now 97, Mr Day was born in Bendigo in 1923. He grew up in a family already ravaged by war. Two of his uncles were killed in World War I, one in Timor and another in Malaya, and his own father was also killed, leaving his mother to care for four children – two boys and two girls – alone.
“She had to go out and do all sorts of things to put food on the table,” Mr Day explained to HelloCare when we spoke earlier this week.
Mr Day left school young, and began studying accountancy at night, but that all came to an end when the call came, and he was conscripted at the age of 18.
“That was the end of that,” he said matter of factly. “It was quite a shock,” Mr Day explained. All of a sudden he was living with “all types of people: some of them very good and some very bad.”
Looking back, Mr Day realises he was lucky to survive the war. “I consider myself fortunate, having seen people that you’ve lived with just disappear,” he said.
Tragically, during the war, one of Mr Day’s closest friends took his own life.
The war ruined lives, but it was also a time strong friendships were forged.
Mr Day made several lifelong friendships, and he remains godfather to one of the men’s daughters, a fact of which he remains proud.
At the mention of the difficult times he endured back then, Mr Day became overwhelmed with emotion and he stopped speaking for a few moments while he collected himself.
Every year there are fewer and fewer soldiers to mark Remembrance Day. “The reunions go by year after year, and they become less patronised as each year goes by,” he said. “Now there are only the families of the departed left.”
“I just try to think of the good things and not consider the bad things.”
Mr Day clearly remembers the day World War II ended. “My unit had not long come back from Dutch New Guinea and we were being reequipped in an army camp in Brisbane. All of a sudden there was a great commotion and in the army prison which held soldiers that had broken the rules or shot through, and they’d set the place on fire!”
“That was how they celebrated,” he said.
The arson attack did not worry Mr Day. “It was part of life. All those guys who were in those places they were pretty tough boys,” he observed.
Originally, Mr Day’s unit was a member of the light horse, but it was converted into a motor battalion, and became part of the Second Armoured Brigade which eventually went to the Middle East.
When the Japanese entered the war, troops in the Middle East were recalled to fight the Japanese in New Guinea, and Mr Day spent two years in New Guinea.
Dutch New Guinea had a strategic airfield that the Japanese tried to attack two or three times, and Australia established posts that stretched for 100 kilometers up the coast.
“I was pretty lucky because I was in signals and I was attached to Regimental Headquarters, and you’re never going to find them on the front line,” Mr Day told HelloCare.
On Remembrance Day this year, Mr Day, a resident at Arcare Malvern East, will be thinking of the friendships he formed as a young man fighting a war in a foreign country.
“I’ll be remembering all the mates I used to have. The good times and the bad times. I think I was fortunate in that the good times were better than the bad times.
“When I say good times, I mean good mates. There was nothing like having a good mate. And this is the day for remembering them and remembering all those who are no longer with us.”
