Geoff Chapman was born on February 29, which means he only has a real birthday once every four years. That means he had only seen four birthdays when he signed up to join Australia's war effort at the age of 18. It seems unthinkable now but that is just what people did in the '40s Geoff said.
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"Why did anyone enlist?" he said, shrugging his shoulders.
At the time Geoff lived in Queensland. His first few months after training were spent on a base up there. He found it all rather silly, sitting at a base playing cards while other men fought in the war.
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"There was a keg opened most nights and I would have cigarette with the boys," he said.
"I thought 'this is stupid' and [then] we were moved from on the table lands in Queensland to Moratai."
Geoff's battalions number had been called and they were shipped off to South-East Asia. The platoon was destined to be apart of the assault on Borneo.
Geoff himself landed at Tarakan. The landing was the first stage of an assault on Borneo aimed at ridding the small island nation of Japanese forces. Geoff went out in the first wave of soldiers.
He remembers the night before the attack vividly. "I never really smoked" he said, but that night everything changed.
"They got us out of bed at 4am and they were manoeuvring us in an assault ship ... and I started smoking. I think I smoked about 40 cigarettes before we hit the beach," Geoff said.
Geoff's brigade was apart of the first wave to land on Tarakan. The landing on May 1, 1945 started a long campaign that lasted until the war ended in August.
The objective of the campaign was to capture the oil and airfields on Tarakan but neither were operational by the time the war ended.
Two hundred and twenty-five Australian soldiers died in the Tarakan campaign. Relative to the number of troops involved it was the most costly of all the attacks on Borneo.
The whole of the 7th Division was deployed to another part of the island and only suffered two more casualties. More than 1500 Japanese soldiers were killed during the assault. Geoff himself was seriously injured.
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"I got shot ... fairly badly wounded, went back to Morotai which was our headquarters there ... and I was in the hospital there for about four months," he said.
"He was a crook shot though because he had all of me to shoot at and the best he could do was hit me in the ankle."
His platoon commander wasn't so lucky. Victoria Cross recipient Tom "Diver" Derrick was killed during the attack.
"He was a bloody good soldier and he was a bloody idiot," Geoff said.
"He could have been discharged and he kept insisting on coming back.
"He won the VC,the Distinguished Combat Medal, [he'd] done enough I reckon and the army reckoned he had too but he fought the army because he wanted to go back."
After the war Geoff moved to Tasmania to take up a job with the agricultural department. Then in 2015 he was one of eight World War II survivors who got to return to Borneo for the 70th anniversary of the campaign.
"That was great ... to see how they had come along - it was a hell of a difference," Geoff said.
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Jackson Worthington
General news reporter with a special interest in social justice, the economy and family violence. Jackson.Worthington@austcommunitymedia.com.au
General news reporter with a special interest in social justice, the economy and family violence. Jackson.Worthington@austcommunitymedia.com.au
