An unforgettable photograph. The photograph, taken on the 25th of June 1966, is of a torchlight search by Sapper Raymond Bellinger, of Melbourne, Victoria, as he crawls along a Viet Cong tunnel during Operation Enoggera. Sapper Bellinger was one of a team of engineers who searched hundreds of yards of Viet Cong tunnels after the 6th Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment (6RAR), had occupied a Communist village. During the Vietnam War, ‘tunnel rat’ became an unofficial specialty for volunteer combat engineers and infantrymen from Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, who cleared and destroyed enemy tunnel complexes. Typically, a tunnel rat was equipped with only a standard issue M1911 pistol or M1917 revolver, a bayonet, a flashlight, and explosives. Besides enemy combatants, the tunnels themselves presented many potential dangers to tunnel rats. Sometimes they were poorly constructed, and they would simply collapse. Tunnels were often booby trapped with hand grenades, anti-personnel mines, and punji sticks. The Viet Cong would even use venomous snakes (placed as living booby traps). Rats, spiders, scorpions and ants also posed threats to tunnel rats. Tunnel construction occasionally included anti-intruder features, such as U-bends that could be flooded quickly to trap and drown the tunnel rat. Sometimes poison gases were used. In the years since the Vietnam War ended, tunnel rats have suffered from a high percentage of Agent Orange injuries and diseases, due to their exposure to the chemicals on the ground, or that leeched from topsoil into the tunnel environment. While in the tunnels, soldiers were breathing air heavily saturated with Agent Orange. Lest We Forget. Information came from the Australian War Memorial and Wikipedia. Photograph came from the Australian War Memorial. Photographer: William Cunneen. Image file number AW M CUN/66/0523/VN.
Went down one of those tunnels when on Holiday in Vietnam. Only a small section is open to Tourists. We were told the rest are still maintained just in case
^ I would love to know the story behind this picture! Nice to see what appears to be a "Lady" working on the middle plane. EDIT "Google lens" did help, although slightly different stories :- A line of Spitfires Mk. Vc of No. 253 Squadron undergoing service and repair in Italy, 19 July 1944. Note the inscription GUNS UNLOADEDand the date chalked under the cockpit. The aircraft nearest to the camera is almost certainly EF553, a Mk Vc (Trop), built with a Merlin 46 by Westland; produced in February 1943 and sent, along with JK226 visible in the far back, to Africa. The third visible aircraft, SW-K is JK868. After the liberation of Corsica, No. 253 Squadron returned to Italy in April 1944 to perform fighter-bomber duties over Yugoslavia. According to its archival caption, this image depicts the training of Yugoslav ground crew with the RAF In Italy, prior to the creation of No. 352 (Yugoslav) Squadron http://spitfiresite.com/2009/02/no-253-squadron-in-italy.html Not for discussion on here, but i will never forget this:- https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/19063 now fully restored and airworthy:-
I listened to a podcast about pollination the other day. It was absolutely fascinating: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028jtx
Killed or mortally wounded on 1st July 1916 - First day of the Battle of the Somme. On that day British and Commonwealth casualties totalled 57,470. Of that number 19,240 were killed and 2,152 missing or captured. This photo collage shows some of the faces behind those awful statistics. 1 Private Thomas Chambers, 9th Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers, 17 years old. 2 Private William McFadzean VC, 14th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles, 20 Years old. 3 Serjeant Frederick Ashton, 10th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment. 4 Lieutenant William Hodgson MC, 9th Battalion Devonshire Regiment, 23 Years old. 5 Second Lieutenant Eric Heaton, 16th Battalion Middlesex Regiment, 20 Years old. 6 Private Horace Iles, 15th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, 16 Years old. 7 Second Lieutenant Gilbert Waterhouse, 2nd Battalion Essex Regiment, 33 Years old. 8 Private Frank Skinner, 11th Battalion Suffolk Regiment, 21 Years old. 9 Captain John Green VC, R.A.M.C, 26 Years old. 10 Second Lieutenant Henry Cowin, 21st Battalion Manchester Regiment, 31 Years old. 11 Lieutenant Wilfred Nield, 11th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, 25 Years old. 12 Captain William Green, 1st Battalion Dorsetshire Regiment, (Mortally wounded on 1st July and died on 6th July). 21 Years old. 13 Second Lieutenant Ronald Grundy, 2nd Battalion Middlesex Regiment, 19 Years old. 14 Unknown soldier from 29th Division being carried along a trench. This man had just been recovered from No Mans Land but died shortly after the image was captured. 15 Captain Raymond Smith, 11th Battalion Border Regiment, 27 Years old. 16 Captain Charles May, 22nd Battalion Manchester Regiment, 27 Years old.
Me Granddad the poor fckr and lucky I guess served in the artillery so didn’t see the front line. He was wounded in 1917 by shrapnel after the ammunition limber got taken out by a direct hit, not enough to make the rest of his life restricted through injury. Wiped the rest of the gun crew out, as he was tending to the horses and that’s all he ever really spoke about his experience of ‘The Great War’.
I guess there's less and less of us that actually knew men that experienced the horrors of the 'Great War'. I have a permanent (1950s) memory of my Uncle Tom Crow (actually my Dad's Uncle, but that was how I knew him) sitting hunched by the hearth in their small terraced house, still coughing his lungs up as result of a dose of gas at the front. A truly gentle man and a railway worker, until he (quite soon after) couldn't work any more. I suppose he was lucky to have made it as far/long as he did. No fanfare. No financial or other help. Dirt poor all his life, but would give you anything. These men experienced things we thankfully can't imagine. WW2 was no better. I also cared for my father (RA N.Africa & Italy WW2) as he suffered PTSD in his old age. It never leaves them.
