The following story was told by Les Bryant and recorded in World War II Stories from Brisbane’s South West
My aunt was one of MacArthur’s drivers in Brisbane, but her story started overseas.
She actually arrived back in Australia about the same time as Macarthur, as an evacuee from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), which were overrun by the Japanese early in 1942. Her husband had been killed when the KLM plane he was piloting was shot down, killing all the evacuees he was transporting from the fall of Batavia (now Jakarta). In the chaos, another pilot simply took another plane, and with five uni students, a doctor, my aunt and her three year old daughter – plus US $1m – and escaped to safety. What happened to the US $1 million? It was taken by Government as it came out of a US Bank Agency. (All cash was removed so the enemy didn’t gain US currency to fund their war effort).
They were strafed in the Timor Sea, but managed to limp into Darwin on one engine.
So my aunt told me that driving MacArthur around was a breeze.
