“It was a very frightening time and I knew it was only a matter of time before we would join up and go away,” he said.

“Most of our age group was looking forward to it and I wasn’t unhappy about it and all my friends joined up. Of course my family was dead against it.”

George, who had just turned 19, found himself training with the Australian Imperial Force at Seymour in his native Victoria.

“We all became friends but more than half of us didn’t survive the war,” he said.

“I was one of the fortunate ones.”

George’s unit was posted to Port Moresby in New Guinea in 1943.

“We then flew into Wau (in northern New Guinea) and all the rest was on foot,” he said.

It was a four-day march from there to where the action was, and the New Guinea jungle was a hard enough place to be, let alone fight a war.

“You couldn’t see five yards in front of you,” he said.

Action, and indeed death was never far away.

“You just didn’t expect anything to happen to you,” he said.

“We got caught out one morning. Our patrol went out for a look-see for the Japs about half a mile from camp. We slept 20 yards off the track.”

During the night, the four of them could hear soldiers in a Japanese patrol talking, and were soon exchanging gunfire with them.

“Our sniper got one of them in the head and our Bren gunner got one as well,” he said.

“We were there for three or four hours. The next day we found bloodied clothes and they had disappeared. The four of us were only too happy to get out of there.”

George was grateful he carried an Owen gun, an Australian designed and built submachine gun.

“It didn’t look like much but it was light and very good,” he said.

“I thought I was lucky to have it and I felt sorry for the guys with .303 rifles, which were three times as heavy and only had one shot.”

George remembers the impact warplanes had on him and he fellow troopers.

“They frightened the hell out of us and they were ours,” he said.

“One time we were at base camp and this formation of Mitchell bombers opened fire above us,” he recalled.

“The shells fell down on us. They were attacking a target a longh way away from us.”

George went home on leave at the end of 1943, but then returned to the war when he was stationed at Bougainville.

“That was different altogether,” he said.

“We went from the boat to the landing craft about a hundred yards off shore, and the landing craft was so hot you couldn’t touch the sides,” he said.

“One time there was a 50-yard long line of blokes, and we heard this rumble and roar and the ground was shaking. There was an active volcano about 10,000 yards away,” he recalled with a laugh.

Fortunately there was less danger posed by the enemy at Bougainville as there had been in New Guinea, even if the war was still on.

“Our HQ was shelled,” George said.

George had served with a hospital unit in Bougainville, and when the war ended, he returned to Australia with tuberculosis.

I spent two years in Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital,” he said.

“That is the part that hurts.”

However, it got better because George was discharged in 1947 turned to poultry farming back in Victoria. He married Grace and “lived happily ever after.”

Sadly, Grace passed away in 2003, but he has three children, seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

As most of the men he signed up and served with were from Victoria, he has lost contact with them over the years.

“The person who was keeping records died,” he said.

However, he has earned the right to march with pride on Anzac Day.