Answering the country’s call
Keith Arneman didn’t think he’d see his 21st birthday. This easter he celebrated a proud century with his great great grandchildren
On April 11 Keith Arneman turned 100.
He celebrated with a party on Easter Sunday, surrounded by dozens of family, from children to great great grandchildren.
A scene unimaginable to his younger self.
Another major birthday, his 18th, marked a more sombre milestone. An end to school and sport. A time to enlist.
The starting gun on years when school and Army mates were lost, on the gruesome sights and smells of battles in El Alamein and New Guinea.
A time when seeing out one year, never mind reaching 100, was cause of relief.
“There were two or three occasions I never thought I’d make 21,” Keith says. “I’ll be honest, I prayed. I prayed of a night.”
SIGNING UP AND SHIPPING OUT
Keith Arneman grew up in North Sydney, where he still has his home.
He was a student at North Sydney Boys High School. He loved sport. His father took him to North Sydney Oval when he was just five to see his first rugby league game. He remembers meeting friends under its famous fig tree.
Another memory: heading to the Sydney Cricket Ground for a Sheffield Shield match in 1936.
“They were big games at that time. NSW and Victoria, it would be like a Test match. You couldn’t move on the old Sydney Hill.
“We got there, and the tram just got there and a chap was saying, ‘Don’t get off the tram, the King (George V) is dead.’ And the tram just turned around and off we went back to city. There was no cricket for two days.”
It was, Keith says, “a wonderful time in Australia”.
He played union for the Colts at Northern Suburbs Rugby Club. More great memories, but tinged with sadness.
“I played in a football side. I’ve got photos somewhere. A rugby union side. I played in the Colts for Northern Suburbs rugby union. In this football side there’s about 15, 16 in that photo. And I think there’s six or seven, all lost their lives in the war.
“When you think about things like that ... ”
Those lost souls had followed the same road as Keith, answering their country’s call, signing up when they turned 18.
He’d never left Australia before. But after a short period of training, he was off to the Middle East.
“I went on the Queen Elizabeth. The other ship going there was the Queen Mary,” he says. “Both together.
“... It took 21 days to get to the Middle East. They dropped us off at Port Suez – well named too, it smelt like a sewer – and then through to Palestine.
“We did training in Palestine and then up to Syria. And then urgently we were called, quick and lively, down through Egypt and through to El Alamein.”
El Alamein. A dusty Egyptian town. A place famous for the decisive battle in the campaign to rid the region of Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps.
INCHES FROM A DESERT DEATH
In the sands of North Africa, a soldier needed three things to survive: water, his rifle ... and a shovel.
Water was collected and brought to troops by convoys of tankers, trucks which could only move after dark.
“Mainly that was done at night time because they couldn’t have tankers, trucks all lined up. They would have been a great target for planes,” Keith says.
“One of the worst things at El Alamein was the low flying planes, fighter planes, coming in strafing down low. Strafing all the time.
“They (the Germans) had a big majority in planes over there. They could come regularly, and nothing to oppose them. They used to just go through the lines, come down low.”
The threat was not just to water supplies. Far from it. The raids were a terror that took the lives of many of Keith’s mates.
Their only protection? The simple shovel.
“You always carried a shovel. Apart from your rifle, your next best thing was your shovel. If you’re going to be in any spot for any length of time, quick and lively, you dug a hole.
“Almost like a grave plot. About five foot long and about five foot deep. And that was your cover. And with your mate – you always have to have a mate in the Army – both of you would hop down in that pit.”
The holes were also to protect from shelling. A terrible threat, perfected by the Germans with fiendish accuracy.
“The Germans, they had a wonderful gun, I don’t know why the British never copied it,” Keith says. “Their 88mm, they had it right through the war the Germans, that 88. It could be used for high antiaircraft, it could be used for artillery, God, it could be used against our tanks. One of those would knock our tanks for six.
“And also, as it sent shells over, well, when a shell hit the ground, normally everything, the shrapnel and all that, flew up in the air. Made a hole, but all the stuff went up in the air.
“But they also had what we called daisy cutters, and these daisy cutters would hit the ground and shrap and everything wouldn’t go any higher than a foot above the ground.
Well imagine what that did. God. It don’t matter if people hit the deck or anything, they could still get, you know ...”
Keith witnessed the aftermath. The body parts. The tags and wallets taken for loved ones back home. The desert burials.
Painful memories, not easy to shake.
“It’s particularly upsetting when you lose a few mates, you know. Lose a few mates. Chaps that you’re down in a hole with. You know, sheltering. You’re very close to them and all of a sudden something happens.
“... Once I was demobbed, at times there you’d wake up of a night. Different things. Not nowadays, but in the earlier days, you know. It wasn’t a problem, but you’d think about it and think, ‘Oh God, why did this ever happen. Why couldn’t the politicians stop this years ago.’ Things like that.”
THE BRIEFEST OF REPRIEVES
After El Alamein, after a victory hard won, Keith returned to Australia. But the reprieve was to prove very short lived.
The Japanese were in New Guinea. Australia itself was under threat.
“I only had about eight or ten days leave I think it was and then straight up to Cairns,” he says.
“We were there a week or two getting used to the jungle up there and then straight over to New Guinea.
“Over there we went up on the LST (Landing Ship, Tank)
small things, just outside of Lae, amphibious landing.”
Keith had landed at Red Beach for the assault on Lae. Success there was followed by a second mission.
“After the big show was over quick and lively we did a second landing at a place called Scarlet Beach at Finchafen,” he says.
“And from then on, no more lands, the Japanese were chased right up.”
The conditions Keith and his mates encountered in New Guinea he rates worse than the Middle East. Because as well as the Japanese there was another, insidious danger,
one that sapped Australian forces.
“The malaria, God that knocks you around. And that Dengue Fever, what they call now the Ross River virus, that really knocked you around.
“There was so much of it around.
“... Some of the units, that many had malaria, they had to pull them out until they recovered. They couldn’t use them. It was rampant malaria right through there.
“The Army did everything they could to kill all the mosquitoes, they also gave us stuff to put in the water, but there’s so much water around.
It rained every single day, and when I say it rained, it actually poured. It poured, and then ten minutes later it was steaming hot. “Terrible place.”
Keith was among the many who copped it hard.
“I got it pretty bad, the malaria,” he says. “I was in Australia from then on, in hospital, until I got demobbed.”
PUBS CLOSED, BUT A MASSIVE PARTY
Keith was in the Atherton Tablelands – the Ninth Division’s north Queensland base – on Victory in Europe (VE) Day.
He had just returned from New Guinea. “We had a big celebration up there,” he recalls.
When victory was declared in the Pacific, he was even closer to home.
“I was in Sydney. I was in a mad crowd in Martin Place, of all places. You couldn’t move there,” he says.
“I just happened to be in Martin Place. And everyone was kissing each other and patting each other on the back. But all the pubs were closed. They closed the pubs straight away, I remember that.
“I still think a lot of blokes, the publicans let them in the back door though.”
He has led a full life since, meeting wife Peggy at an RSL club dance after a chance encounter with an old school friend. “The chap said, ‘look, I’ve got a good sort I want to take home, will you take me sister’ ... That was how we met.”
They had two children, Karen and Greg, while Keith worked hard, at the Bantry Bay Explosives Depot, and later at the Department of Mines, “on welfare work, dealing with widows, deaths of miners, injured miners, all that type of work.” Among those he helped, the families devastated by the deaths of 14 men in the 1979 Appin coal mine disaster.
Peggy, “a very fine woman”, died in 2013, since when Keith has divided his time between his home in Northridge where, with help from son Greg, he still lives independently, and daughter Karen’s home in Pacific Pines on the Gold Coast, where most of his family is now based.
Daughter, grandchildren, great and great great grandchildren will be by Keith’s side on Tuesday. For Anzac Day – another hugely important date.
SHORT LIVES, AND A LONG ONE
Keith and his loving family will attend a ceremony at a war memorial in Upper Coomera on the Gold Coast.
Built in an area of rural calm, the simple, dignified cenotaph – a statue of a lone soldier atop a pedestal – is quickly being enveloped by a youthful city of bubbling life and good fortune.
On its side, an inscription that reminds all who pass of the young people who gave up their own lives to make it possible.
“They gave their all.
Let you who pass, saluting here their names,
See that through you no slur, nor stain, nor shame
Falls on the land for which they gave their lives
- Australia.”
Keith will remember his lost mates, salute their sacrifice, on Tuesday, as he does every Anzac Day.
“I never miss it,” he says. “I don’t think it glorifies war. I don’t think that. I think it does the opposite, I think it tries to teach the young ones we don’t want any more wars.”
He’s 100 years old now. But he still sees the faces of his lost friends, including in the young people who are part of his life today.
“I often look around in Northbridge, I see young blokes there now, and I think, ‘Good God, in that suburb, we lost a lot of young chaps’. From 18 to about 20-odd, in the Army, and particularly in the Air Force.
“We lost quite a lot of young chaps there. Cream of the youth.”