Why is The Army so Coy About Gunner Vandertak?

By Frank Cranston

5 November 1977 The Canberra Times

We kids were not Catholics nor was the family but he sent us all to Catholic schools so that we would not have to salute the flag and sing the national anthem like they did in the Government schools. That's how bitter he was about it.

"They took his good name from him and he hated them for it until the day he died. He never forgave them for not trying to find out what his side of the story was.

"They were covering for some- body then and they still are but I am determined to get to the bottom of it. I do not want to go to my grave with that slur still on Dad's name".

Not a particularly robust woman but certainly a determined one, Mrs I. C. Struber, of Howe Crescent, Ainslie, has taken on the Australian Army and will not let go until it either admits to a cruel mistake some 60 years ago or can prove to her that her father, 574 Gunner Vandertak, W. H., 37th Battery, 10th Field Artillery, AIF, deserved the stigma of the dishonourable discharge with which they thanked him for four years' service.

Because Mrs Struber has another document, a fading parchment, and according to that, "No 574 Gunner William H. Vandertak, 37 Bat, 10FAB served with honour and was disabled in the Great War. Hon- ourably discharged on 7 September 1918".

The signature below is that of King George V.

Cover-up

"One of them was wrong and I am out to find out which", Mrs Struber said. "It killed my Dad and I know that Mum worried about it all her life too.

"I can't even find out what they said Dad did, but I do know that he   was brought home from France before the war ended. Somebody said once he came home in a strait-jacket, and I would not wonder after what they did to him.

"Then they put him in Darlinghurst jail but he was only there for a little while before they had to let him out again because he had the King's discharge.

"I asked them to let me see Dad's records so I could go through it myself but I was told that would need his signature or my mother's. They know he has been dead since 1938 and that my mother died about 12 years ago. How stupid can they get?

"Then one of the officers from Melbourne, when I asked why I could not see the records, said.

This picture of Gunner W. H. Vandertak has been enlarged from the photograph appearing in the calendar reproduced below.

"You've got the bloody pardon. What more do you want?"

"I think they are trying to cover up something awful that happened 60 years ago. I know my Dad was the straightest man in the world.

"He always told us that you could do something about a thief but you could never trust a liar. And that was something I never found him do - tell a lie - because he always said you had to face up to things.

"They tried to make it up to him at one stage by offering him a wounded soldier's pension but he told them where to put it. He got the ordinary pension instead after he got so sick he could not work.

"My mother got the soldier's widow's pension after he died and she got help to buy a home.

"Why did they do that if Dad had been dishonourably discharged? I thought that if they chucked you out you lost all that.

"About 18 years ago while Mum was still alive one of my nieces wrote to the Army and asked if she could have her grandfather's war medals.

"She got back a very curt note saying that he was not entitled to have had any medals because he had been dishonourably discharged.

"It just seems to have been so vindictive. How could the Army say he earned no war medals when he was in it so long, even if there was something he did later which I do not believe anyway?"

Private Vandertak was a big lad, 6ft 4½in in his socks and built wiry.

the way they bred them around Tumut in those days. He was 21. His father had died when he was 14 and he was the family's support but when the Kaiser's war came and everybody else was joining up his mother did not hold him back.

With scores of others he went to the recruiting depot at Wagga just as soon as it opened, but like a lot of the others he had to wait his turn to get in. They took him on September 9. 1914.

Basic training was got through pretty quickly in those days and with the rest of his mob, the 13th Battalion, AIF, he took his place among what was possibly the finest body of young men ever to leave this country's shores. They sailed away on December 21 full of stuff about God, the King and the Empire and the horrible, brutish Hun.

A bit more training in Egypt and they pushed forward again to the lovely Aegean island of Lemnos, near where Rupert Brooke was to die after writing his immortal "If I should die."

And on April 25, 1915 they slashed their way into history as they stormed the terrible beaches at Gallipoli. Vandertak's mob went in on the first day.

After that the routine of an Anzac's life. The horrors and the debacle of Gallipoli, a bit of square bashing and the like as they got back into shape in Egypt after their mauling at the hands of the Turk and then the mud, the blood and the senseless slaughter of France.

He seems to have been a steady soldier if an unspectacular one. He had made corporal by mid 1917.

"He would always have done his best and to the limit but he was not the sort of man who tried to attract attention", Mrs Struber says.

But attract attention he did. "Somewhere in France", as they used to say, something went terribly wrong and he attracted a great deal of attention.

Bitterness

Mrs M. Muller, of Sydney, a younger sister remembers. An old lady now, she recalls the bitterness with which it affected him and indeed the whole family's attitude toward the Army.

"He told us that he had come in from a patrol and he found the officers very drunk, one of them toasting the Kaiser", she said.

"He got so angry he tore his stripes from his arm and he told them all what he thought of them.

"After he went out a Provost (military policeman) followed him and said he was drunk and that he was under arrest. He told the Provost what he could do with his arrest and started off down the road toward his quarters. The Provost shot him.

"He ran through the gates of a house that a French woman held open for him with the Provost after him. The woman shut the gate after him and then the doors of the house as he ran through. They got him by following the blood trail. He was taken to hospital very ill.

Angry

"Somebody told him later that they got the Provost.

"All the boys with him in the unit were angry when they heard what happened to him.

"There was one fellow involved - he was a Wagga boy too - who wasn't fit to wipe my brother's boots but he was part of what they set up against him. He was mainly to blame because he knew it was all wrong, but rather than get into trouble himself he kept quiet.

"He came back home about Christmas time (it was in fact March 16, 1918, according to official records). He had been sentenced in France to five years' prison but they let him out to stay home with us until his wound was healed.

"A lot of people would have simply gone missing, but when he recovered he reported to Sydney and was sent to Darlinghurst. Then when he had been in jail for only about 10 days he was told that his case had been reviewed and that he had the King's pardon and he was released.

"He had not been out long when he saw a Provost beating up a little bloke and my brother took the Provost and nearly did for him. Nothing happened about that.

"He was a great brother and a terrific sort of a man. He was in the first boatload from his unit to go ashore at Gallipoli. Not long before he died the head of his unit tried to get a war pension for him but he was dead before it came through", Mrs Muller recalled.

He lived around the Lidcombe district after the war gradually becoming a popular figure in the community and making a name for himself as "Tiny Wilson" in the world of competitive axemanship. He chopped at the Royal Easter Show and other venues.

But the bitterness of what he believed to have been the Army's injustice to him lingered on. He threatened to disown his daughters if ever they joined the Army and his widow passed the enmity on to one grandson who, wanting a service career, wisely joined the RAAF instead.

After Mr Vandertak died in 1938 his widow was granted a war widow's pension in 1939 and later repatriation finance to buy a home. The family believe though the Army was still not willing to admit that it might have made a mistake, it was at least prepared to advise other departments that there was no reason why the relatives should be treated differently from other relatives.

After corresponding with Central Army Records Office (CARO) in Melbourne (having been directed there by Army Office, Canberra) Mrs Struber believes that at last the light might be dawning and that what she believes to have been a grave miscarriage of justice 60 years ago might yet be righted.

Some time ago the certificate issued to Gunner Vandertak over the name of King George V was sent to CARO for authentication.

"I have now been able to photo- graph the copy of the Certificate signed by King George", she was advised by the Colonel-in-charge of CARO, last month.

"I have sent the photograph to Army Office for consideration as to whether the records relating to the discharge of your father should be altered.

"I have asked Army Office to reply to you direct. I expect that it will be several weeks before the reply is sent".

Search

With the Army still refusing to give Mrs Struber access to her father's 60-year-old file that for the moment is where the matter has to rest. She believes as her father did that it was "trumped up" and that the Army has been covering all these years for a terrible mistake and a terrible injustice.

A search of the war diary of 10 Field Artillery Battery at the Australian War Memorial discloses no court-martial action involving

Gunner Vandertak after his return from Franco in 1918. With him are his sister Matina (now Mrs Muller of Sydney) and his mother. At the time it arranged the flags and the welcome the family was unaware of what lay ahead.

Gunner Vandcrtak between June 1917 and March 1918 when he returned to Australia.

In the records of 13 Battalion for January 1918 there is a list of about 30 soldiers subject to field court martial for various misdemeanours attracting penalties of up to 15 years' imprisonment. Gunner Vandertak's name is not among them.

Some of the comments against the names of those in publicly-available records at the War Memorial are not very flattering. "Arrant coward" for instance. And the record alongside one man's name that he had escaped five times from custody and was still at large. One hopes they never caught him.

Mrs Struber believes there can be nothing in her father's record so bad that she should not be permitted to see it and to make it available for publication if she deems fit. She was asked by one Army officer recently if she wanted access to the record so that she could write a book.

"I would never have dreamed of writing a book", she said. "I would not know how. But even if I did, surely that is something for our family to decide. I am sure that anything we wrote about Dad would not reflect badly on him.

"I knew my father and I have spoken to a lot of other people who knew him. I have been told the Army nearly had a mutiny on its hands because of the way they treated him. He was in it from the beginning and he fought right through to the time they shot him and sent him back to Australia.

"How did he qualify for a King's discharge if he had been dis- honourably discharged? If that was not a mistake, why is his record still marked dishonourably discharged?

"When we were kids we knew there was something wrong. He never marched on Anzac Day or joined in any of that sort of thing yet we knew he had been to the war.

"He told me a bit about it when I got older and Mum told me a lot more.

"'He never whinged about the Army but he hated it through and through. He was a man who could take his medicine and he brought us up to be able to do the same thing.'

"I do not believe Dad did anything in his life he was ashamed of. They worried him into his grave at 46 over this. They are not going to do the same thing to me", Mrs Struber said.

And that, for the moment, is where it rests. The Army would not co-operate with us in our inquiries, even to the extent of refusing us a copy of the photograph it took of Mr Vandertak's King's discharge if indeed that is what it is.

Stigmatised

But Mrs Struber and the rest of the family have no intention of letting it lie. After 60 years, they say, there can be no valid reason why the Army should not let them have full access to all the documents pertaining to Mr Vandertak's war service, the circumstances surrounding the manner in which he was shot in the back by a military policeman and was then imprisoned and stigmatised in the worst possible way for a man of honour such as they believe him to have been.

The family wants the truth no matter which way it goes. It is their belief, particularly because of the manner in which the Army has handled the affair, that the truth will vindicate the memory of a gallant soldier whom they believe to have been the victim of a massive and prolonged cover up, possibly favouring somebody who subsequently rose high in the service.

It has smouldered now for 60 years but the resentment is as strong as it was the day it began back in 1917.

Mr Vandertak's family has been frustrated in a manner of which only bureaucracies arc capable, particularly military bureaucracies.

It was just that sort of frustration which first led Mrs Struber to contact us just over a week ago.

"I've been told that nobody can help us", she said, "but somebody thought you might be worth a try".

Was 574 Gunner Vandertak, W. H., 10 FAB, so guilty of such a heinous crime that despite Gallipoli, Mesopotamia and the terrors of Flanders his record must for all time be marked "dishonourably discharged" or was there a miscarriage of justice at a time when the implications of prolonged exposure to the traumas of war were only dimly understood?

The answer to that is up to the Army but then it has been for the six decades that one family have lived with it. A little more under- standing and a willingness to put that family's mind at rest would prove to them at least that the Army is not still the same now as it was when the story first began.

Photo Caption:- The Daily Advertiser (Wagga) calendar which carried the picture of Gunner Vandertak reproduced above. The calendar is in the possession of the National Library.