OBITUARY
SX9929 Pte William Hurtle (Bill) Schmitt
Born
Enlisted
Discharged
Died
: 30 April 1918, Cowell SA
: 27 July 1940
: 22 November 1945
: 6 May 2015, Adelaide
Bill Schmitt, who has died aged 97, was forced – by wartime incarceration in Changi – to remain in
the ranks, but rose to high office in the post-war years.
He applied his natural charm and intelligence to advancing the cause of former prisoners of war
through leadership of the Ex-POW Association of Australia. Bill had become national president
during the 1980s, subsequently succeeding Sir Edward (‘Weary’) Dunlop as patron following the
heroic military surgeon’s death in 1993. These considerable achievements were recognised in the
1994 Australia Day honours list, in which William Hurtle Schmitt was made a Member of the Order
of Australia (AM).
His grandfather, a German immigrant, was a blacksmith by trade; his father, Lincoln, worked as a
ganger on the railways. Bill was educated at Ungarra, near Tumby Bay, in the north-eastern parts of
South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, and clearly had the potential to advance his studies. However, the
grim economic realities of the time meant that, on turning 14 in 1932, he had to seek employment. His
father had managed to hang on to his own job, but only with a £1 reduction in his weekly pay packet;
the family therefore could not afford to send the young Bill away to high school. Instead, he joined a
local stock and station agent, yarding sheep and ‘pencilling’ at auctions. It was a line of work that
eventually, long after the war, would see him achieve a senior position in the agriculture sector.
In the meantime, he yearned for some adventure – and found it with the outbreak of war. Before
enlisting, Bill sought the counsel of an uncle, a World War 1 veteran who had won a Military Medal
while fighting on the Western Front. His uncle’s advice: join the machine gunners because “they’re
not right up the front like the infantry”.
His initial taste of action, against the Vichy French, occurred at Quoneitra, in Syria. It was a shock to
a young man more accustomed to the wheatfields and beaches of country South Australia. He was
immediately confronted by women and children caught in the battle, “running from their homes,
crying and screaming”. From there, he was part of the successful advance that effectively ended the
Syrian campaign of 1941. Then, early in 1942, came the military disaster of the Dutch East Indies.
Pte Bill Schmitt was among the 636 members of the 2/3rd Australian Machine Gun Battalion who
embarked, from the Suez Canal, on the Orcades. Their kitbags, Vickers guns, vehicles, and stores
were loaded onto a fleet of small freighters, bound – so it turned out – for Australia. The Orcades,
meanwhile, made its way to Java via Sumatra. As Bill himself would discover, on eventually reaching
Batavia (now Jakarta): “I had a rifle, five rounds of ammunition, and the clothes I stood up in. It was
hopeless – the biggest mess-up you’ve ever seen.”
Ordered to “split up” and avoid capture if at all possible, Bill and three others entertained the idea of
commandeering a boat. “But the Japs were all around us,” he said, “and the natives dobbed us in.” On
March 9 1942, he became a prisoner of war. Herded into the bowels of a ship and after a foul four-day
voyage – allowed on deck only to defecate over the side – the captives were landed in Singapore.
There, Bill fell victim to amoebic dysentery. He was admitted, therefore, to hospital at Selarang
Barracks, Changi. This episode was life-threatening in one sense but life-saving in another; for he
remained in hospital while the bulk of the battalion were despatched as slave labourers on the BurmaThai Railway.
Nevertheless, on leaving hospital, he immediately encountered other perils: malaria (14 bouts during
his years of captivity); shortage of food; exposure to the tropical sun while sent outside the camp on
work parties. The absence of protective clothing, ever since the Java debacle, was a constant
handicap. Bill developed severe sunburn, and was rescued from his predicament only by the initiative
of a fellow prisoner who gave him a shirt from the Changi concert party’s storehouse.
The capricious treatment administered by the guards posed an even greater threat to his welfare. In
one singularly violent incident, Bill had caused offence by his inability – after so much illness – to lift
a full shovel-load of dirt on an airstrip construction project. An infuriated guard beat Bill to the
ground, knocking him unconscious and breaking multiple ribs. The lingering discomfort troubled him
for years. “But I still had the strength to souvenir my cell-door number,” he would recall, long
afterwards.
At Japan’s surrender, and having unscrewed that number, he was flown to Brisbane in September
1945. The journey was interrupted only by an encounter, at a Borneo airstrip, with the entertainer
Gracie Fields. She endeared herself to the old lags of Changi and the Railway by walking over to
them, singing Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Good-bye. From Brisbane, where “beer was a high
priority”, Bill travelled by train to Adelaide, was “in and out of hospital for a year with malaria”, and
secured a job with Elders, the pastoral company that had taken over the agency for which he had
worked before the war.
He also found time to get married. Invited to a ‘welcome home’ dance at Cummins, Bill met a local
telephonist, Joan Heinze. As his daughter Sue Allard was told, years later: “Everybody was saying to
Mum, ‘You’ll be going home with him tonight’.” It was an accurate prediction; Bill and Joan were
married on April 24 1946.
The post-war years proved to be a time of deserved, if long delayed, reward for William Hurtle
Schmitt: advancement at work, to regional manager (finance) for Elders; the birth of three children;
high office within the ex-POW association; leading the Australian delegation of former prisoners to
Singapore, at the 50th anniversary of its fall, in 1992; delivering lectures, on his wartime experiences,
to university students; and, accompanied by Sue, visiting Japan. There, he found “nothing but
politeness and generosity” – and even an apology, for all that brutality during incarceration, from a
senior government official. As a consequence, he was able to say: “It’s all behind me now. I’ve
forgotten about it.”
As the life of Bill Schmitt ebbed away at a Daw Park care unit over these past few days, distinguished
friends recorded personal farewells. A former Governor of South Australia, Sir Eric Neal, was among
his bedside visitors; and a former Governor-General, Dame Quentin Bryce, telephoned the Schmitt
family to express her admiration for this remarkable ex-digger.