Bemboka’s last surviving World War 2 veteran recalled he enlisted two weeks before his 18th birthday.
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“Like everybody, I thought it was the right thing to do,” Cyril James Allen said.
Mr Allen, who is known as Bill, lived in Bemboka with one of his sisters before he enlisted in Bega in June 1942 and joined the Royal Australian Air Force.
After training with 5000 recruits in Sydney he was detailed to a local butcher shop in Bradfield Park for 12 months as he already had four years of butchering experience.
Once this stint was completed, Mr Allen was posted to Darwin to an airfield construction and repair unit where his duty was to build and maintain airfields.
“Most of our repair work was done after Japanese air raids,” he said.
With five months construction work under his belt he applied to do an armament course and on completion was posted to 24 Squadron in Fenton, Northern Territory.
This was a Liberator bomber squadron that carried out raids on Japanese occupied islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Mr Allen would arm aircraft with bombs and ammunition as well as go up in the bombers to test their machine guns.
“I was happy where I was, I formed very strong bonds there,” he said.
The Japanese would bomb the airstrip every night when it was full moon as they could see their target, so every time the siren rang Mr Allen would have to run for the trenches as fast as he could.
But the worst memory he had of this time was when he was splattered with boiling tar while repairing an airstrip.
“I can remember it was very painful – my God, it was painful,” Mr Allen said.
It burnt up his knee and even reached his forehead and once he was taken to a American field hospital the doctors could not even work out how to remove the tar for a time.
However, after three months at the hospital he said the doctors did a good job and he did not scar.
Mr Allen got on with the Americans well, but said compared to the army rations the Australians lived off the US servicemen “lived like kings”.
“They were paid about 10 times more than we were,” he said.
He recalled there were about 500 people in his camp, and once a week they would all put a shilling in to go and buy a bullock as they were not given much meat.
As Mr Allen had been a butcher, it was his task to cut the bullock up for everyone.
He remained in Darwin until the end of the war and was discharged in the late 1940s, after which he returned to Bemboka and took over the town’s butcher shop with his brother Vic.
Mr Allen went on to run the shop on his own – operating it for 36 years – and bought a property at Bemboka where he still resides to this day.
“I’m the only World War 2 veteran left in Bemboka. There used to be 30 to 40 of us, but they’re all gone now,” Mr Allen said.