World War II
In 1940, having worked with Smith's Weekly, one of Australia's most patriotic newspaper-style magazines, and The Wagga Advertiser, he enlisted in the 2nd Australian Imperial Force. He trained as an infantryman and later completed an officer course before serving in New Guinea, the world's second largest island. While convalescing in Sydney in 1943 he met his future wife Hazelle, a young VAD/VAR.
Read more about this topic: John Laffin
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“In peacetime, they had all been normal decent, cowards, frightened of their wives, trembling before their bosses, terrified at the passing of the years, but war had made them gallant. They had been greedy men. Now they were self-sacrificing. They had been selfish. Now they were generous. War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best, the highest morality he is capable of.”
—Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981)