24 family members went to WWII
Did you know that the 7 children of George and Jeanetta Menzies who survived to adulthood saw 24 members of the family join the Australian Defence Forces in World War II? They included 10 sons, 10 husbands of daughters, one granddaughter and 3 grandsons.
Three of these people served in the Royal Australian Navy, 4 in the Royal Australian Airforce and 17 in the Australian Imperial (Army) Force. Among them was one woman, Margaret Gillespie nee Aubrey who reckoned that while she waited for boyfriend, Adam Gillespie, she may as well do some ‘serving’ herself. Two older family members also served in World War I on the Western Front. The wonderful thing is that all of them returned home safely after the war was over although they were never the same again.
They served in a wide range of theatres of war including France, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, India, Borneo, Philippines and New Guinea. One, Major George Carson was awarded an Order of the British Empire for service in New Guinea, his brother Barron Carson served for 8 months without relief in the defence of Tobruk. He was one of the ‘Rats of Tobruk’. After officer school he served in New Guinea. Another brother, Jim, also served in New Guinea fighting the Japanese. Bill Brew fought the Luftwaffe in the skies over England and France until he was shot down. Adam Gillespie flew sea patrols out of Dakar in West Africa and then flew bombers over Borneo and Timor. Don Menzies flew Spitfires over France and then Egypt and India. His sister, Jeanette, lost her husband, William Howard, in a flying training accident before he was due to go overseas. George Menzies served in New Guinea but was severely wounded and was repatriated back home while his brother Jack was taken prisoner when Singapore was surrendered to Japanese forces early in 1942. Tom Aubrey and Peter Garde captained merchant ships dodging torpedoes and gunfire from submarines in the Pacific. Bert Brew joined the RAN and chased German raiders and minelayers around the Australian Coast in 1940/41. Happily he didn’t catch any and finished the war doing inshore surveys in preparation for amphibious landings in Borneo. Geoffrey Warner was caught in a floating dock when the Japanese bombed Darwin but finished up in the cruiser Hobart at the landings in the south west Pacific where his uncle Bert had surveyed.
Geoffrey’s uncle, Willie Warner, was the first of the family who joined up because he was already in the Naval reserve forces when war broke out. He began the war lecturing at Flinders Naval College in Westernport in Victoria but early in 1942 as the Japanese swept south, conquering all before them, he was sent by sea to join an Australian corvette in Colombo. Unfortunately the ship he was in was intercepted by two Japanese raiders in the middle of the Indian Ocean and he was taken to Singapore and imprisoned in Changi Prison with army prisoners. By a great twist of chance, he was on a wharf when he came face to face with his cousin Jack Menzies who had been made a prisoner of war on the fall of Singapore. It could well have been the day that Willie landed after his capture at sea. After recovering from the shock of meeting a member of the family so far from home they exchanged some clothing and moved on before drawing attention to themselves. Sadly both men finished up as slaves in Japan, suffering torture and much privation from poor diet and inadequate medical care. Even their passage to Japan was fraught with danger; American submarines were very active and sank large numbers of Japanese ships without knowing that they were carrying allied prisoners of war.
Bill Brew was the furthest from home. He was shot down and bailed out of his Spitfire over St Omer in Northern France in August 1941 and sent to a prison camp for Air Force personnel in Germany. His was also a story of privation and his stomach never recovered from the poor diet that he had to subsist on for nearly 4 years. At first his prison was in Lithuania, far to the east and close to the Russian Border but as the Russians forced the Germans back he was moved west ahead the conflict. At one stage he was in the prison camp where the great escape of movie fame took place but was moved out before it happened, otherwise he might not have survived. In fact he attempted to escape 4 times but didn’t finally succeed till April 1945. On this day he was being ‘marched’ down a road just south of Bremen with fellow prisoners, watched over by frightened German guards and whimpering dogs when the column was strafed by a low flying Spitfire. All the prisoners scattered and Bill and his mate, Alan Bull, dived into a ditch and lay hidden until the guards gave up looking for them. They then made their way through the forest further west until they ran into some British tanks that had pushed well to the east ahead of the main allied forces. From there it was only a matter of days before he was on a plane back to England, a bath, clean clothes and good food.
1998 - Some of those who went to war: Don Menzies in the red jumper to the left, Bill Brew in the centre in red jumper, Adam Gillespie in the foreground in green jumper, Margaret Gillespie nee Aubrey bottom right.
For those who served, their physical wounds soon healed, and they got their health back but for some the psychological damage was perhaps greater than at first realized. The question might be asked, why did they serve? And with such a sense of urgency? One of them, John Aubrey, enlisted as soon as he finished school and as an 18 year old just made it to the war zone before peace was declared. It no doubt says a lot about the values their parents and grandparents taught them. Bert Brew was taken to task by his mother-in-law who told him “you should not go, you have a wife and child to think of first”. Needless to say he didn’t ‘give her the time of day’ as they say.
