‘I wanted to do my bit’: New WWII history tells story of Aussie teen soldiers

Len McLeod was 15 years old when he was accepted to serve in World War II. It’s a scenario that’s hard to fathom today, when most Australian teenagers are at school.

It was 1942, and the baby-faced but tall lad from Footscray succeeded on his fourth attempt in six months to join up by lying about his age.

Baby-faced digger: Len McLeod in his uniform.

McLeod was determined to “do my bit”, as he puts it, for the war effort, but in the three years he served in the Pacific he was often scared.

“Many, many times I thought, ‘This is it’,” he says.

Now 96 and a great-grandfather, he vividly recalls that within hours of joining his unit in New Guinea, he was in a tent when the Japanese bombed Port Moresby airport, less than a kilometre away.

Later, McLeod witnessed a Japanese kamikaze pilot fly low over his ship and crash his Zero aircraft into the side of another Allied ship off northern New Guinea. The ship sank.

Len McLeod, 96, served in World War II after joining the army at 15. Later in life, he helped pour the metal for the Eternal Flame at the Shrine of Remembrance.Credit:Jason South

But McLeod wasn’t the only teen soldier serving.

The war records are full of them, says journalist Paul Byrnes, whose new book Sons of War tells the stories of 30 Australian boys – including McLeod – who fought in World War II.

Some were as young as 13. Some were killed in action.

Three years ago, Byrnes released The Lost Boys, a book about underage WWI soldiers, and he thought the practice would have been eliminated by the start of the next world war. He was wrong.

Byrnes said among the 10 veterans he interviewed in person, most didn’t cite King and country so much as reasons for enlisting, but rather “their mates were going”, plus the desire for a regular wage after the Depression.

Some had heard the stories of their fathers and uncles in WWI and reckoned, “it’s my turn – I want to show I’m as good as my Dad,” says Byrnes.

McLeod – himself the son of a WWI veteran who died in his 30s, years after being gassed on the battlefield – said it’s hard for people today to understand the panic, the fear that the enemy would attack Melbourne next.

This was after the fall of Singapore and the Japanese bombing of Darwin. “I thought the country was in diabolical straits,” says McLeod.

Len McLeod (middle) with two friends from the US Army Small Ships, on leave in Rizal Avenue, Manila, in 1945.

What gave McLeod nightmares for life was entering Shanghai in 1945 after the Japanese had left and seeing mass destruction – and the bodies of starved people, including small children, being loaded onto carts.

It turned him into a pacifist after the war. In 1967 he protested the execution of criminal Ronald Ryan, and later took part in anti-Vietnam War marches.

McLeod is concerned about authorities continuing to deal with conflicts through war.

Len McLeod had this portrait taken in Manila, probably just after the war, wearing his US Army Small Ships uniform.

“Sooner or later, they’ve got to sit down at the peace table,” he said. “I would like to see it before more people die.”

Byrnes and McLeod – who is visiting from Queensland, where he now lives – will give a free talk about the book at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance on Wednesday at 2pm.

McLeod has an extraordinary personal link to the Shrine: when he looks at the eternal flame, he thinks of his brother, Donald, who died in his 30s from kidney disease. In the late 1940s, Donald, who worked in a foundry, moulded the flame’s metal bowl, and Len helped pour it out in liquid form.

McLeod’s daughter Denise West appreciates the book and says stories like her dad’s should be told. “People don’t realise how young some of these kids were. They were babies.”

Byrnes says he hopes the book helps prevent history from repeating and deters underage people from joining up.

“It’s not a pro-war book,” he said. “I hope people sit back and say, ‘What a waste, what a bloody waste that was’.”

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