Something that will never leave Morwell 92-year-old Edmund ‘Ted’ Dent’s mind was a moment of strange coincidence as bombs landed around him near the shores of a Borneo seaport city.
The World War II veteran recalls arriving by ship from Darwin in 1943 at the Balikpapan harbour as a Japanese bomber flew overhead.
“They didn’t bomb the ship. All their bombs landed in the water around us,” the former SEC boilermaker said.
Fallout from the air raid caused steel from an Australian army workshop to fall over the entry to an air shelter.
“They brought a bulldozer in and pushed it out of the way and my bloody uncle [Jack] walked out of there. He spotted me straight away,” Mr Dent said.
When Mr Dent, who was born in 1925 and grew up in Abbotsford, received his conscription letter at 18 he “wasn’t worried about it”.
“We slept in the MCG before we went to Adelaide on our way to Darwin. You slept on the seats,” he said.
He served for the Australian Army in patrol at Borneo until the war ended in 1945, then travelled by ship to Japan after the United States detonated atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Mr Dent recalls passing through Hiroshima daily by train to Kure harbour, where the nuclear bombing left the city as “just rubble”.
“There was one big building standing with a dome on the top of it and other than that the only things standing was marble walls,” he said.
At the Mitajiri port the Australian troops lived in an old Japanese navy camp on the seashore where Mr Dent met a local family and brought them food out of his own ration.
“The whole lot of the people were quite friendly and placid but this family I was looking after, they were as good as gold,” Mr Dent said.
Before Mr Dent left for WWII he lived at Thornton, where he met Phyllis Webster, who he married not long after returning from war.
“She wrote to me the whole time I was away … I didn’t even know her in those days,” he said.
They had four children together before Phyllis passed away in 1990.
Mr Dent lives at Mitchell House in Morwell and will be 93 in August.
