Remembrance Day 2025: Memories of WWII Australian veterans who will pay respects at Kings Park service

Among those who will pay their respects at Remembrance Day at Kings Park will be a small and special group. They wore the uniform in World War II, a time when Australia was in mortal peril. And among the group will be George Franklin, 103, and Russell Hosken, 102. Mr Franklin was working at an accountant’s office in Perth and studying at night school before enlisting in the RAAF in August 1940. His first posting was to Pearce air base, where he did his initial training before going on to Cunderdin flying school. It was there he got a shock. “I found out I was colour blind,” Mr Franklin said. “I was not able to go into air crew.” Instead he went to bases in WA’s north-west which re-fuelled and re-armed the heavy bombers which flew long and dangerous missions against the Japanese forces to Australia’s north. Initially this took him to Noonkanbah Station. Mr Franklin recalled heavy equipment was brought in to bulldoze ant hills into air strips. But if the earth was not packed down firmly it would be “lifted up like a carpet” when a plane landed. US aircraft would fly in for a few days at a time. “We had a job to do, to (re)-bomb them, refuel them and get out of the road,” he said. Then he was sent on to Corunna Downs, about 50km south of Marble Bar, one of the key airfields used by RAAF and US aircraft. The base and airstrips were placed far inland so as to keep them at a distance from potential Japanese air raids. But for added protection camouflage and nets were used. Conditions were extremely basic, with many accommodated just in tents. “We were camped on the side of the hills, it was all iron stone,” he said. With classic understatement, he added it was hot. “There was over 100 days over 100 degrees (Fahrenheit),” he said. After about six months he was posted to Cape Leveque on the Dampier Peninsula, where there was a radar station. It was then on to Kalgoorlie, where he was when the war ended. But he was not finished with the services, and having been a musician all his life he joined the Army band in 1954, and stayed until 1977. Russell Hosken’s father Leonard had served in World War I, and Russell, now 102, was working on the family wheat and sheep farm at Wickepin when he was called up to the Army in 1942, aged just 18. After reporting to the Claremont Showgrounds to be “kitted up” he was sent on to Northam for training. He went on to join the team working 24-hours a day on the two 11m 9.2-inch defensive guns at Oliver Hill on Rottnest Island, which had been built to defend Fremantle Port from enemy seaborne attack. On one occasion before he was posted to the island the capacity of the guns was demonstrated when target practice went a little awry. “It only lasted about five minutes,” Mr Hosken said. “And they had blown the target to pieces.” “They should have been firing a couple of degrees behind the target, so that they could keep practising what they were doing.” Mr Hosken said that in 1942 Rottnest was a designated war zone, so when ever they got leave back on the mainland they had to take everything with them. “Our kit bag, rifle, everything except our bed, just in case you couldn’t get back again,” he said. He then went on to work on a radar station on the island. After Rottnest he went on to a base near Wodonga, in Victoria, where driver training meant his pay went up two shillings a day. Mr Hosken was at a base near Cessnock in NSW, packing food to be dropped from aircraft, including by parachute, when the war ended in 1945. Mr Franklin said Remembrance Day brought to the surface thoughts about others who had served. ”Those that didn’t come back, you’ve got to take your hat off to them,” he said. Returned and Services League WA chief executive Stephen Barton said as part of the service commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII in August the league had attempted through the Department of Veterans’ Affairs to contact every known living veteran of the war in WA. About 20 had attended that service and invitations had again been extended for the Remembrance Day service at Kings Park this year. “We regard them as representatives of that mighty generation and will continue to invite them as VIPs while we have the privilege of their company,” Mr Barton said.