Digger recalls WWII Balikpapan mission nearly 80 years on

He was still in school when Eric Flood experienced his first taste of war, hiding under a table with relatives when Japanese submarines would enter Sydney Harbour in 1942 to attack ships moored within its supposed safety.

“It was rather scary, we didn’t quite know what was happening. At Clovelly where we were, we didn’t feel the blast but we heard about it next morning.”

A couple of years later and fresh from school, with a few months of work in the public service in between, Eric Flood would join the fight in the Second World War.

And after training, Eric Flood would be sent to his first combat mission: the amphibious assault on Balikpapan in Borneo, one of the last invasions in the Pacific campaign.

His youthful disposition would mean little to the experienced digger next to him in the landing craft.

“And he said to me, ‘Floody,” says Eric, pausing to recall the memory, “it doesn’t matter what school you went to now mate, it’s what you do in the next few minutes that counts’.

“Age just seemed to fall away. If you could do what you were supposed to do, you were accepted.”

It would be a nervous night on the ship before next morning’s attack.

“Some of them start talking about their families, a wife and a child they’d left behind.”

Eric would see that father the next day on the sands of Balikpapan, on a stretcher, approaching death.

“He obviously was in a very serious situation,” Eric recounts, “I remember that very well.”

Eric also remembers the cracks created in relationships on the home front by over-officious censors, in letters sent to loved ones.

“One man came back very distressed saying he’d been called before an officer because he was saying too much about his feelings towards her. The letter was held up and it was shredded.”

Eric knew the power of the written word to a waiting wife; his father a Flanders digger, Eric still treasuring the poppy he would send to his mother.

His time at war would be thankfully short, his platoon alerted by a parachute from a spotter plane.

“We didn’t know what it was, but when we got the note that was there, it simply said pull your heads in blokes, it’s all over; it’s all over.”

And the way the troops were sent back home at war’s end still rankles with Eric.

“Nowhere was the battalion gathered, and someone gave us a talk about what we had done and how well we should feel about having achieved this.

“It was just broken like a jigsaw puzzle that suddenly fell apart.”

But war’s reach would not end for Eric Flood, from his decades of postwar support to Legacy, to reading the ode at today’s commemorative service at Tarragal Glen Retirement Village at Erina, where he now resides, along with the visceral memories of war that can never be erased.

“When you smell burning oil,” I ask, “what do you think?”

Eric grins ironically in acknowledgment.

“There’s only one thought; I think of Balikpapan.”