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Keith was a Charters Towers boy born in 1916. Not much is known of his early life however he did enlist in the 11th Light Horse Regiment in 1939 and at the age of 24 he travelled to Toowoomba and enlisted in the AIF on 28th May 1940. For reasons known only to him, he put his age down by 12 months, telling the enlistment officer he was born in 1917. Perhaps he did not want to appear too old to enlist.
His first posting was to ‘A’ Squadron, 7th Division Cavalry Regiment and by December 26th, 1940, Keith was in the Middle East, initially training with Australian made Machine Gun Carriers but later his unit were back to using guns mounted in trucks. His unit returned to Australia in March 1942 and he was allocated to 2nd/4th Australian Field Regiment. After training at Atherton in North Queensland, he and his unit deployed to New Guinea on 28th September 1942. By this time, Singapore had fallen, and some 130,000 allied personnel were prisoners of war. Of these, 15,000 were Australians and the situation in the Pacific looked very grim.
Keith had vivid and disturbing memories of the Huggins Perimeter and the Battle of Sanananda where he came close to death on several occasions. A while later, in 1943, he was in one, of two, gun detachments attached to the American 503 Parachute Regiment when they launched their memorable airborne assault on the air stirp at Nadzab in the Markham Valley of New Guinea. This was a precursor to the advance on Lae by the 25th Infantry Brigade. Keith was the only Queenslander who made the jump. One can only imagine how it must have felt to respond to the order: “Stand to the door!” Keith said of that jump: “I seem to recall that on landing I felt rather like a punch-drunk boxer answering the bell for the 12th!”
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