ON the 70th anniversary of the battle of Kokoda, World War II veteran Rev Peter Holloway remembers well the 14 months he spent fighting in Papua New Guinea.
Rev Holloway, a member of the 39th militia battalion that fought against the Japanese, spent his 21st birthday in PNG.
He fought in a machine gun company that battled on the northern beaches and laughs that he was on ‘biscuit bombing’ duties during the battle of Kokoda – flying overhead dropping food supplies to comrades below.
Now 91, and with a career as an Anglican minister behind him, Rev Holloway will speak at this week’s Anzac Day service at the Epping RSL, touching on Anzac Days he’s experienced throughout his life.
As a child in Bairnsdale his job at the dawn service was to hand out programs. “I was only seven or eight, but I felt the awe and solemnity of the day,” he says. “As a kid I had no idea what war was like. I thought it was like a football match, with two sides shooting over a wall. And yet the fighting in New Guinea was that close. We were only feet away from our enemy but we couldn’t see them. We fired a shot at any movement.”
He often thinks of the comrades who had to be buried along the track – the ones who have not been retrieved in post-war efforts to inter bodies in a war memorial.
The 39th battalion surprised commanders with its success in the war. As militia, or homeland army, they were dubbed by the regular army as ‘chockos’; likely to melt like chocolate in the heat of real battle.
That view has long gone, but Rev Holloway says it gave him sympathy for the Vietnam vets, and more recently soldiers in Afghanistan, who he says are fighting without a lot of public support.
Rev Holloway hopes to return to PNG this year with filmmakers.
