Echuca World War II veteran Fred “Whoopsy” Brereton recently sat down and spoke to the Riverine Herald ahead of Anzac Day this week – and his 100th birthday in July.

Sadly Whoospy died on Friday, April 18.

During the interview, he said after the guns of war fell silent 80 years ago in many ways he was happy for them to stay way back there in the past.

But as he got so close to his centenary, this likeable character was happy to tell us his story, and an unexpected lighter side to his time under ‘friendly fire’.

If the Australian army had had its own version of the American Purple Heart, there’s no way Fred “Whoopsy” Brereton would have ever received his.

Because you don’t get a medal for running down Pakenham St and being shot in the butt by the publican of a local hotel – after kicking over one of his beloved pot plants.

Even if you were in the Royal Australian Air Force, and even if it was the middle of the war.

Lying face down on the doctor’s table having lead pellets plucked from his posterior was as close as Whoopsy would come to being killed in the war.

And, while he repeatedly let rip with his Tommy gun in action, to this day he has no idea where any of those bullets went and what damage they might, or might not, have done.

But has never forgotten the ones which hit him.

Whoopsy turns 100 on July 17 and was serving in Borneo the day World War II ended – but 80 years later, what was an immediate celebration the world over, remains an incredibly sad moment for the veteran.

“We had plenty of mates from Echuca with us, and as soon as I heard the war was over I bumped into one of them and asked him where Ronnie was, I had to speak to him,” Whoopsy said quietly.

“He looked at me and said: ‘You’re too late, he got shot yesterday’.

“That was just one day before the war ended, just one day.

‘’And Ronnie’s family must have been shattered, two of his brothers died as POWs and then he got shot.

‘’One family in Echuca, they had market gardens back then, and they lost three sons.”

Those are the memories which came home with our servicemen and women, mates made, and too many mates lost – memories which have haunted them across eight decades, and for our few remaining veterans, still do.

But even today, all but blind and deaf, Whoopsy’s larrikin personality shines through.

As a young man in Echuca, he had a running battle with the local fisheries officer, who was forever trying to catch him poaching.

He only got him once and had him hauled up before the local magistrate and fined.

It was a pyrrhic victory, Whoopsy almost always had the last laugh.

“We knew where and when the inspector went for a drink each evening, and that’s when we would slip out and set our lines in the river,” he said with a laugh.

“A few times he thought he had us — he knew who we were — but he couldn’t catch us no matter how hard he chased.”

And he would have had to chase pretty hard, because the young Echuca born and bred Whoopsy was pretty fleet of foot.

To the extent he and a mate once took a horse and cart to Cohuna (camping overnight at Torrumbarry before setting up in the Cohuna saleyards) and went on to win the Cohuna Gift over 100m and then backed up to take out the 400m event at the same meeting.

Revealing he and his mate had a good night on the cup eve, and he was “still half cut” when he got on the mark for the race.

Whoopsy was 18 when he went into the air force in 1943, and after basic training at Shepparton was transferred to Mildura.

When he turned 19 he was considered old enough for overseas service and was posted to Darwin — from where the military temporarily shipped him back to Echuca for the court case against the shotgun toting publican, who would be fined because neither Whoopsy nor his mate wanted to lay any charges.

“We arrived in Darwin just after the last of the heavy bombing raids, and I was put on the security team — which meant three-hour shifts on and off driving around and around the airbase there guarding the airstrips and planes,” he said.

“That went on for almost six months and then we were marched on to a ship and headed for Morotai (in the then Dutch East Indies) and from there to Balikpapan on Borneo, where I was still on guard duty, armed with my Thompson machine gun and the orders were pretty plain — shoot anything that moves or you see, then ask questions.”

For the rest of the war Whoopsy and his comrades would endure air raids and some attacks by Japanese soldiers armed with pipe bombs and small arms.

He said it was all a bit primitive, but they still had two people killed and quite a few injured.

There were 50 in his squadron — pilots, mechanics, aircraft gunners and ground troops and it was his job to defend the territory.

And in between guard duty and sleep, Whoopsy found a way to go fishing which made his clashes with the fishing inspector back home seem like child’s play.

“We built a small boat out of used fuel tanks from a couple of Spitfires,” Whoopsy said, confessing all these years later the fuel tanks might not have been as surplus as the RAAF realised.

“Then we used to row out a bit and drop a few hand grenades over the side — used to get a lot of fish that way,” he said with a grin.

“Then we would scoop them up and take them back to base and have them cooked up.

“It was certainly a very welcome break from the awful bloody food they gave us, day in and day out — either bully beef or a meat and veg mix, always out of a tin and it was always bad.’’

A diet also responsible for Whoopsy’s favourite memory of the war — climbing aboard a Catalina seaplane in Balikpapan and landing in Darwin 23 hours later just in time for dinner — not just in a tin, freshly cooked and as much as they wanted.

Into the military at 18, shot in Echuca, shipped to the Pacific theatre at 19, bombed, shot at and shot back, mates made and lost, flown back to Australia, trucked to Alice Springs and trained to Melbourne and then reposted to Nhill for three months looking after another training airbase, Whoopsy was sent back to Melbourne and to civvy street aged 21.

Unlike his friend Ronnie, he had survived, and he set about making the most of his new life in his home country.

That started with heading to Wakool and stripping rice in the fields there, before joining the ball bearing factory in Echuca for several years before heading off around the country on a working holiday with a mate — which included grape picking in Mildura, cutting sugar cane in NSW and laying concrete north of Brisbane.

Back in Echuca he worked hard cutting wood for farm fence posts — where he lost the sight of one eye when a wood splinter flew off a log he was cutting with a swing saw.

That might have signalled the end of his footy career as well, but in no way slowed down his commitment to his beloved Echuca Football Club, where he and wife Mavis would be powerhouses behind the club’s fundraising — with Whoopsy running the hot dog stand at games and the Sunday barrel the day after.

Husband and wife would become life members (Whoopsy would receive the same recognition at the Calivil Bowling Club).

Now Whoopsy’s world has shrunk to his room in Cunningham Downs, where the veteran spends more time than he would like sitting, looking out the window and occasionally taking a short walk through the facility.

But when he talks about his youth, his time at war and his memories of his footy club and his travels around Australia, he really comes back to life, and for that short time he is again the wild colonial boy dodging buckshot and baiting the fishing inspector, with the whole world at his feet.

Ahead of Anzac Day on Friday, April 25, The Riv will have a full list of commemoration services in Wednesday’s edition.

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