80 years ago this week: 26-year-old Australian Army Private Rosslyn Frederick Gaudry (Service Number: NX94822) of 2/3rd Infantry Battalion, 16th Brigade, 6th Division “watches his sector with his Owen submachine gun in a forward observation pit at Kalimboa Village” in Aitape, Wewak, New Guinea, 26 April 1945.
Australian War Memorial AWM 091259
Raised for WWII at Victoria Barracks, Sydney on 24 October 1939, 2/3 Aust. Inf. Battalion A.I.F. sailed from Sydney just 11 weeks later for North Africa and disembarked in Egypt on 14 February 1940. Fighting first against the Italians in Libya in early 1941, they were sent to the fiasco in Greece then evacuated to Palestine where they fought the French in July 1941 then remained here until March 1942 as a garrison force. Returned to Australia, they were soon fighting along the Kokoda Trail and would remain in and around the green hell of New Guinea until the end of the war. The battalion left 207 of its men on the Roll of Honour, earned boxes of decorations (4 DSO; 16 MC; 12 DCM; 30 MM; 2 BEM; 73 MID), and 16 battle honours stretching from Tobruk to Mount Olympus to Damascus and Kokoda.
As for the very haggard Pte. Gaudry shown above, he was born in Gulgong, New South Wales in 1918 the son of George Henry Gaudry and Maude Gaudry (nee: Lyons). He enlisted in the Australian Army on 10 April 1942 in Paddington, Kandos, NSW and served in 2/3 Bn across New Guinea from the Owen Stanley Mountain Range along the Kokoda Track to the Aitape-Wewak Campaign.
Discharged from service on 4 October 1946, he returned to NSW and became a salesman. Married to Joan May Gloede in 1953, Gaudry passed at age 61 on New Year’s Eve 1979 in Homebush, Australia.
He is buried in the New South Wales Garden of Remembrance in Rookwood.