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Daley Mail: St George Illawarra Dragons v Sydney Roosters 2:43
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Lara Pitt and Laurie Daley preview the annual Anzac Day clash between the Dragons and the Roosters.
NO one knows when Spencer Walklate discarded the cyanide. Only that he did. Ditching his little, plastic capsule for a death, which, in those hours before Japanese soldiers beheaded him, saw the Digger bound, stripped naked and beaten with bamboo. After that, sins unprintable here.
An executioner eventually offering three clumsy attempts with his sword before a .25 calibre bullet ended it.
“And all while Spence, he laughed at ‘em,’’ says Mick Dennis, among the last to see his mate alive.
“As a World War II commando, he had his cyanide tablet. We all did. But taking it would’ve alerted the Japanese to who he was; revealed a mission was on and more of us were out there.
“So Spencer tossed it and copped an incredible flogging ... and still, gave them nothing.”
Spencer Henry Walklate is the toughest footballer you never knew.
HINDS: WHY SPORT IS PART OF ANZAC DAY
Spencer Walklate Jnr, Jack Thurgar, Mick Dennis and Todd Walklate remember Spencer snr. Source: News Corp Australia
A hulking St George forward whose courage is defined not by those 15 appearances in the Dragons pack of ’43, but six hours when, captured by the Japanese during a reconnaissance mission of Muschu island, north of New Guinea, he offered up nothing but a rehearsed line about being nobody. The unranking survivor of a ditched plane.
A script that cost him buckets of blood.
Even now, 69 years on, you can read the Japanese transcripts detailing how this footballer and father of three, a soldier still only 27, refused to break. How with three mates hiding out in the jungle and two more floating on the ocean, trying to attract navy patrols, Spencer infuriated his captors by repeating his one line over and over and over.
SPORTING HEROES WHO MADE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE
Encouraging such torture, years later his Japanese executioner would kill himself before fronting a war crimes tribunal. So too the Admiral whose pistol shot ended it.
An unmeasurable bravery that, until now, had gone unwritten.
Some of the men from the 1945 St George team. Source: Supplied
“No one even knew Spencer got captured,’’ shrugs Geoff Black, the navy patrolman who transported the Dragon on what would be his final mission. “We thought he’d gone into the ocean for help and the sharks got him.
“Or maybe he drowned. Certainly no one had any idea what he’d done.”
And so we go back to the night of April 13, 1945.
To an Australian naval boat just off Muschu, where Spencer and his team of elite commandos, members of the notorious Z Special Unit, were boarding small kayaks for Operation Copper. A reconnaissance mission going so deep into enemy territory, many of their navy transporters considered it suicide.
Not Spence, though.
No, a hulking Sydney copper all barrel chest and thick neck, Walklate boasted exactly the grit you’d expect of a fella who signed up to fight within two months of his brother, Eric, being killed in battle. Who bypassed the rule exempting police officers from service by signing his occupation as “grocer”.
South Sydney Rabbitohs’ Nathan Merritt dropped to NSW Cup 0:47
Play video
South Sydney Rabbitohs coach Michael Maguire has confirmed that Nathan Merritt wont play in tomorrow nights ANZAC Day clash against Brisbane after being dropped to the NSW Cup.
“Dad reckons Spencer was the bravest man he ever knew,’’ says Greg Ashton, the son of Kangaroo forward and World War II veteran Ferris Ashton. “The pair were cousins, knew each other well.
“I grew up on stories of Spencer charging both defensive lines and machine gun fire like a man possessed.”
And yet for almost seven decades his epitaph has remained incomplete. An unjustice defined by that honour board in St George Leagues reading: Lance Corporal Spencer H. Walklate — Missing In Action.
Indeed, if rugby league boasts a more intriguing yarn, we’re yet to hear it.
Mick Dennis was the sole survivor of Operation Copper. Source: News Corp Australia
Dennis, the sole survivor of Operation Copper, recounting this week from inside his Clovelly home how when their mission was compromised — the enemy alerted by an oar that had washed ashore — he and three more went bush while Walklate led a second quartet on logs to sea, and help.
“And of the four of us who stayed, three were shot and killed,’’ the old commando whispers. “But the other boys ... never saw them again.”
And that’s because since that fateful night in ’45, rugby league’s bravest man has lain buried in an old army waste pit.
His remains battered, burned, then crushed by an iron bar. “The result,’’ says former SAS Major Jack Thurgar, “of an enemy determined to have no one hear his story.”
A contractor with the Army’s Unrecovered War *Casualties office, Thurgar has devoted the past four years to unravelling those final hours of the men from Operation Copper.
An exhaustive search, involving army records, topographical maps, even interviews with Japanese veterans in Tokyo, which eventually finished with this incredible Aussie, on hands and knees, digging for a month into a New Guinea hillside where his work suggested the old Dragon lay.
And then last May, Spence was found.
Former SAS Major Jack Thurgar and a local man search for the remains of Walklate and Eagleton. Source: Supplied
The final piece of an incredible jigsaw revealing that while two of the four who went back into the water were drowned and buried by local islanders, both Walklate and Private Ronald Eagleton, 20, were captured, tortured, beheaded.
The Japanese even creating an intricate cover story, complete with fake ashes, about the pair dying of disease. A yarn that, while proved false by Thurgar, still leaves him feeling: “Sadness, just an incredible sadness.
WHY ANZAC DAY CLASH IS A CELEBRATION
“What these men endured, it was terrible.”
And so next month, inside the Lae War Cemetery near Port Moresby, the bravest footballer you never knew will again be laid to rest. Buried this time alongside Eagleton and the other five Diggers from *Operation Copper, with full military honours.
Daley Mail: Brisbane Broncos v South Sydney Rabbitohs 2:39
Play video
Lara Pitt and Laurie Daley preview the round eight NRL clash on Anzac Day between the Broncos and the Rabbitohs.
And as for the eighth?
Well, old Mick Dennis, he turns 95 this year. Explaining how his own “little story”, the thing that saved him, was seven days avoiding 1000 Japanese soldiers before swimming 12 hours through shark-infested waters to safety.
That, he said, and Spence.
“We’d only known each other a few weeks too,’’ the commando recalls. “And still he gave ‘em nothing.
“I can just imagine that big, tough bugger laughing at them.
“Laughing and saying he’s nobody.”
Daley Mail: St George Illawarra Dragons v Sydney Roosters 2:43
Play video
Lara Pitt and Laurie Daley preview the annual Anzac Day clash between the Dragons and the Roosters.
NO one knows when Spencer Walklate discarded the cyanide. Only that he did. Ditching his little, plastic capsule for a death, which, in those hours before Japanese soldiers beheaded him, saw the Digger bound, stripped naked and beaten with bamboo. After that, sins unprintable here.
An executioner eventually offering three clumsy attempts with his sword before a .25 calibre bullet ended it.
“And all while Spence, he laughed at ‘em,’’ says Mick Dennis, among the last to see his mate alive.
“As a World War II commando, he had his cyanide tablet. We all did. But taking it would’ve alerted the Japanese to who he was; revealed a mission was on and more of us were out there.
“So Spencer tossed it and copped an incredible flogging ... and still, gave them nothing.”
Spencer Henry Walklate is the toughest footballer you never knew.
HINDS: WHY SPORT IS PART OF ANZAC DAY
Spencer Walklate Jnr, Jack Thurgar, Mick Dennis and Todd Walklate remember Spencer snr. Source: News Corp Australia
A hulking St George forward whose courage is defined not by those 15 appearances in the Dragons pack of ’43, but six hours when, captured by the Japanese during a reconnaissance mission of Muschu island, north of New Guinea, he offered up nothing but a rehearsed line about being nobody. The unranking survivor of a ditched plane.
A script that cost him buckets of blood.
Even now, 69 years on, you can read the Japanese transcripts detailing how this footballer and father of three, a soldier still only 27, refused to break. How with three mates hiding out in the jungle and two more floating on the ocean, trying to attract navy patrols, Spencer infuriated his captors by repeating his one line over and over and over.
SPORTING HEROES WHO MADE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE
Encouraging such torture, years later his Japanese executioner would kill himself before fronting a war crimes tribunal. So too the Admiral whose pistol shot ended it.
An unmeasurable bravery that, until now, had gone unwritten.
Some of the men from the 1945 St George team. Source: Supplied
“No one even knew Spencer got captured,’’ shrugs Geoff Black, the navy patrolman who transported the Dragon on what would be his final mission. “We thought he’d gone into the ocean for help and the sharks got him.
“Or maybe he drowned. Certainly no one had any idea what he’d done.”
And so we go back to the night of April 13, 1945.
To an Australian naval boat just off Muschu, where Spencer and his team of elite commandos, members of the notorious Z Special Unit, were boarding small kayaks for Operation Copper. A reconnaissance mission going so deep into enemy territory, many of their navy transporters considered it suicide.
Not Spence, though.
No, a hulking Sydney copper all barrel chest and thick neck, Walklate boasted exactly the grit you’d expect of a fella who signed up to fight within two months of his brother, Eric, being killed in battle. Who bypassed the rule exempting police officers from service by signing his occupation as “grocer”.
South Sydney Rabbitohs’ Nathan Merritt dropped to NSW Cup 0:47
Play video
South Sydney Rabbitohs coach Michael Maguire has confirmed that Nathan Merritt wont play in tomorrow nights ANZAC Day clash against Brisbane after being dropped to the NSW Cup.
“Dad reckons Spencer was the bravest man he ever knew,’’ says Greg Ashton, the son of Kangaroo forward and World War II veteran Ferris Ashton. “The pair were cousins, knew each other well.
“I grew up on stories of Spencer charging both defensive lines and machine gun fire like a man possessed.”
And yet for almost seven decades his epitaph has remained incomplete. An unjustice defined by that honour board in St George Leagues reading: Lance Corporal Spencer H. Walklate — Missing In Action.
Indeed, if rugby league boasts a more intriguing yarn, we’re yet to hear it.
Mick Dennis was the sole survivor of Operation Copper. Source: News Corp Australia
Dennis, the sole survivor of Operation Copper, recounting this week from inside his Clovelly home how when their mission was compromised — the enemy alerted by an oar that had washed ashore — he and three more went bush while Walklate led a second quartet on logs to sea, and help.
“And of the four of us who stayed, three were shot and killed,’’ the old commando whispers. “But the other boys ... never saw them again.”
And that’s because since that fateful night in ’45, rugby league’s bravest man has lain buried in an old army waste pit.
His remains battered, burned, then crushed by an iron bar. “The result,’’ says former SAS Major Jack Thurgar, “of an enemy determined to have no one hear his story.”
A contractor with the Army’s Unrecovered War *Casualties office, Thurgar has devoted the past four years to unravelling those final hours of the men from Operation Copper.
An exhaustive search, involving army records, topographical maps, even interviews with Japanese veterans in Tokyo, which eventually finished with this incredible Aussie, on hands and knees, digging for a month into a New Guinea hillside where his work suggested the old Dragon lay.
And then last May, Spence was found.
Former SAS Major Jack Thurgar and a local man search for the remains of Walklate and Eagleton. Source: Supplied
The final piece of an incredible jigsaw revealing that while two of the four who went back into the water were drowned and buried by local islanders, both Walklate and Private Ronald Eagleton, 20, were captured, tortured, beheaded.
The Japanese even creating an intricate cover story, complete with fake ashes, about the pair dying of disease. A yarn that, while proved false by Thurgar, still leaves him feeling: “Sadness, just an incredible sadness.
WHY ANZAC DAY CLASH IS A CELEBRATION
“What these men endured, it was terrible.”
And so next month, inside the Lae War Cemetery near Port Moresby, the bravest footballer you never knew will again be laid to rest. Buried this time alongside Eagleton and the other five Diggers from *Operation Copper, with full military honours.
Daley Mail: Brisbane Broncos v South Sydney Rabbitohs 2:39
Play video
Lara Pitt and Laurie Daley preview the round eight NRL clash on Anzac Day between the Broncos and the Rabbitohs.
And as for the eighth?
Well, old Mick Dennis, he turns 95 this year. Explaining how his own “little story”, the thing that saved him, was seven days avoiding 1000 Japanese soldiers before swimming 12 hours through shark-infested waters to safety.
That, he said, and Spence.
“We’d only known each other a few weeks too,’’ the commando recalls. “And still he gave ‘em nothing.
“I can just imagine that big, tough bugger laughing at them.
“Laughing and saying he’s nobody.”
