The ADF

Australian ice hockey and the fight for the free world

"Someday I will understand Auschwitz". This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"

And the answer: "Where was man?"
— William Styron, Sophie's Choice.[10]

Auschwitz 2020. Courtesy Dick and David Mann.

WHEN WAR BEGAN he was a healthy well-adjusted young man living in Amsterdam and visiting Blankenberge Belgium in the summers. His large family had a 300-year history in Holland and Belgium. Many worked in the family diamond cutting and polishing business, but in more recent times they had diversified into entertainment.

"My sister and I were very close and enjoyed many of the same things in life," he says "including music, dancing, skating, sailing and ice hockey". The safe passage his father had secured out of Amsterdam meant they couldn't wait for his sister's husband. And, in effect, that meant they were all stuck there.

"She would not leave without her husband Abe," he says "and my mother would not leave without her. My father pleaded with mother to take me and leave, but she would not leave one child behind. So we all stayed. My father was later arrested in Antwerp Belgium. My mother hid in the attic with her mother straight after my arrest in 1942. The family of Mrs Fonteyn of Harlem hid and protected her for the next three years".

Arrested for being a part of the underground trying to escape, he saw his sister Betty and her husband, Abe Logger, for the last time on July 6th 1942 while he awaited execution in Amsterdam. They were taken to Sobibor in occupied Poland as Jewish prisoners, and murdered on arrival. Betty was only twenty-six years of age. He never saw the seven direct family members again.


THE FLEDGLING SPORT of organised Australian ice hockey had only been going 6 or 7 years when war broke on July 24th 1914. With only a few dozen players, the game immediately sputtered, and interstate competition blew out. Only local games continued in 1915, and by 1916 the League struggled to form two teams for occasional games. The sport required a complete rebuild from 1920.

On the other hand, the Australian Football League, the AFL, has since compiled records of 104 Victorian players who died during the First World War. The League considered suspending the season due to the onset of war, but the game went ahead with nine teams. The lowest point of the competition during the war years was 1916, when only four sides competed—Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond. [3]

The qualities of grit, endurance, fortitude, physical strength, aggression and teamwork are considered equally necessary on the sporting field as on the battlefield. Many sports men and women enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. Recruitment drives targeted athletes using posters that juxtaposed the importance of serving the nation as opposed to watching ice hockey, or football, or any other sport.

Algie Tause, an ice hockey fan and writer in Melbourne, was the first in the ice hockey community to give his life. He died in action at the Landing of Anzac Cove on 25th April 1915, the day about 20000 Australians and New Zealanders and some servicemen from other countries went ashore at the Gallipoli Peninsula. Tause was twenty-one when he landed in the second wave with the 5th Battalion AIF. He wrote the ice hockey notes for The Winner newspaper in Melbourne.

Ice hockey began here with the generation that gave the world the first Anzacs. Among the lost players were the captains of two of the first four ice hockey clubs in the country. Lieutenant Andy Reid, eldest son of the sport's founder H Newman Reid, died in action at Flanders on June 8th 1917. He was 27, a graduate of Melbourne Grammar and Duntroon Military College, and captain of the Beavers Ice Hockey Club in Melbourne, one of the original four. Reid was also the first secretary of the Victorian ice hockey association in 1908, in the years before the first president. He and his brothers Leslie and Hal helped win the first three Goodall Cups for Victoria.

Flight lieutenant Keith Curwen-Walker captained the Victorian team, and Melbourne's Ottawa ice hockey club. Killed in action in Palestine on April 3rd 1918, he was also a daring motor cycle rider with the Victorian club. He won the club's 100-mile race in 1914, and held notable records. [7] Walker joined the Flying Corps back when it started at Point Cooke.

In NSW, the state team lost a gallant Major Cyril Lane, killed in action on August 29th 1915, trying to take Hill 60 at ANZAC. He represented the state in net in the first two Goodall Cups. Barely 100 men of the original 750 who had marched around from Bauchop's Hill on the 21st of August were left uninjured after two charges made in a week of action. The 18th Battalion alone reduced to one-third its original strength, Lane its only officer killed.

Many claim that our nationhood was forged at Gallipoli on April 25th 1915, on the lands of the former Ottoman empire, when Australians fought not against, but in support of, the British empire to assist its ally Tsarist Russia.

In fact, a series of peaceful conferences and conventions forged our nation during the 1890s, through creative political work that produced one of the most advanced progressive democracies in the world. A democracy in which women were granted full political rights in 1902; one reason, perhaps, that Australia was one of the few countries that didn't introduce military conscription in World War One. As a result, only one in two eligible Australian men actually enlisted to fight in that war.

During the Second World War, the British government put to its dominions a proposal to pool trained aircrew to serve with the RAF. The 3-year agreement known in Australia as the Empire Air Training Scheme provided 28000 Australian aircrew over three years, or 36 percent of the total.

The first basic flying course started simultaneously in all participating countries on April 29th 1940, and the first Australian contingent embarked for Canada that November. Australian trainees' efforts at ice hockey were a great source of amusement to Canadians. The foreigners played with more vigour than skill, and mostly in the prone position. Over 37000 Australian airmen trained as part of the scheme.

Victorian ice hockey lost Spot  Lloyd in a plane accident in England. Captain of the newly-formed Glaciarium Rangers, and vice-captain of the state team, the Winnipeg-born forward had arrived from Queens Ice Hockey Club in London, after repping for Great Britain against Europe and Canada.

St Moritz Bomber Kevin Stewart died in the air over Toobruk in May 1942 while serving as a wireless air gunner. Educated at Scotch College WA and Melbourne High, he was a good cricketer, and represented the RAAF in a series in Cairo in 1941. [4]

Stewart's teammate Keith Ernest Watson died of Malaria in a Malay POW camp on May 7th 1944. Educated in Melbourne at Elwood Central and Brighton Tech, Driver Watson was also a member of the Royal Brighton Yacht Club.

An operational flight over Northern Ireland killed Flying Officer John Russell Keane in 1943. Born at Camperdown in Victoria, he grew up in Footscray, and gained his wings and commission in Canada under the Empire Air Scheme. [5]

Major Ellis Kelly, son of W L Kelly, manager of the Australian cricket eleven on Bradman's first trip, was a former captain of the Victorian ice hockey team. He served as an artillery gunner between 1940 and '45, producing an eye-witness account by cable of the Battle of Crete and his escape with seventeen other men to Egypt. Kelly commanded about 80 men and 6 Bofors guns; one of the three troops of the battery. At the end of Middle East service, the Regiment had accounted for 101 enemy planes, but the loss in officers and soldiers was very high—162 killed in action or POW. [13]

Not a lot is known of the men and women who have served since the Second World War because the records are not public. Among them are Lance-Corporal Ron Sullivan who served in Vietnam, and Thomas Brett who served in Afghanistan.

Sullivan helped support a large contingent of Australian and New Zealand airmen in the seaport city of Vung Tau. He held the mile record for the Army, and on his return managed Pat Burley's rinks at Ringwood in Melbourne, and Prince Alfred Park in Sydney. Sullivan won three Goodall Cups and represented Australia at the World Championships in 1974 and '79.

Sydney Ice Dogs forward Thomas Brett fought in Afghanistan. Before he retired from the sport, he won two Goodall Cups and represented Australia three times at the World Championships, including two IIHF Division 2 gold medals and promotions to Division 1.

By 2020, forty-five ice hockey players or builders of the sport were known to have served in conflicts with the Australian Defense Force since the First World War. Eleven, or one-quarter the total, were killed in action, or in POW camps, or in wartime accidents. They are identified on the Honour Roll at the top of this article.

Among those not killed is Barney Allen, a former vice-master at Ormond College, Melbourne University, and vice-president of the Melbourne University Sports Union during the start-up years of ice sports here. A regular skater at Melbourne Glaciarium, and a former president of the national ice skating association, contemporaries considered Allen good enough to judge skating at international level before Australia joined the ISU. His place among the leaders of Victoria's earliest secondary and tertiary schools helped the flow of new enthusiasts and athletes to Victorian winter sports.

On ANZAC Day 1917, Allen enlisted at 42 and served overseas in the AIF Education Unit where he achieved the rank of captain. The AWM has his paper comparing soldiers of the 1st AIF with their ancient Greek predecessors. [7] Allen also compiled his university's Record of Active Service 1914-18. [8]

Lieutenant Norman Ducker, a Gallipoli veteran and player with the Ottawas ice hockey club, was New South Wales' first state ice hockey captain in 1909, and represented Australia in cricket. He was the top scorer and best player for his state in the first Goodall Cup.

Second Lieutenant Norman Steele of the Australian Flying Corps died of wounds whilst a prisoner of war on April 20th 1917. One of three sons of the first president of the Victorian association to die during the war, Norman played for the Melburnian ice hockey club. Melburnian was another of the original four in Victoria, and in Australia.

A national men's trophy bears the name of Sergeant Jim Brown. But Australia's first ice hockey and speed skating international also distinguished himself in games for Britain, including the first time the Brits levelled a game against a Canadian side. The St George club captain set a personal record for Goodall Cup victories here, (11) which is still unbroken 80 years later.

Army Captain Russ Carson managed Australia's first Olympic ice hockey team in 1960; the 1962 Worlds team where Australia won its first international ice hockey medal; and the play-offs for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. His wartime hockey school and club competition were part of the reason Victorians achieved pre-eminence in ice hockey after the war.

Private Philip Ginsberg became national president of Australian ice hockey where he fought and won equal opportunities for local players long disadvantaged by players born or developed overseas. Percy Wendt was a state captain, winner of 9 Goodall Cups for NSW, and the top point scorer of the first half century of Australian ice hockey.

Private Jim Kendall, who revolutionised NSW ice hockey from 1911, fought with the First Expeditionary Force in New Guinea with Sydney rink entrepreneur, Jimmy Bendrodt. Ice hockey player and speed skater Ken Kennedy became Australia's first Winter Olympian in 1936, then fought in the RAF.

Many others such as ice rink entrepreneur Pat Burley have served, but not in conflict. And still others like Dick Groenteman did not serve, but survived the unimaginable conditions of death camps like Auschwitz.

Australians know too little about our distinctive political and civil history. It features world firsts such as the secret ballot; the eight-hour working day, introduced in Victoria in 1856; the first legal minimum wage, established in Victoria in 1896 and defined as a "living wage" in the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in 1907; political rights and a maternity allowance for women; and old age and invalid pensions in 1908, paid on an individual basis with equal rates for men and women.

Before World War One, Australia enjoyed a high international profile as a world-leading progressive democracy, but there were some who thought there was something missing from our national story. The idea prevailed that men needed to prove their manhood and nationhood in a military feat of arms. A surprising number were ice sports men and women.

While researching this story I was especially saddened by those who did not return, but also heartened by all those who fought for a free world during the bloodiest century in history. I also thought about our creative political achievements, which, though forged in peace, were also bold, brave and path-breaking.


IT'S JANUARY 2020, and 96-year-old Dick Groenteman and his youngest son David are at the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. Later they will retrace Dick's steps in the lead-up to his incarceration. Dick survived two years at Auschwitz, and this is his fifth return visit.

"During the war, I was very lucky to have been young, fit, strong and able to do the work physically," he says. "Some of the jobs I did to survive included hard labor in the quarry, the mines and unloading provisions from trains; removing bodies from the wire fence in the mornings; filling the mass graves and shoveling lime on the bodies.

"These [jobs] would have killed me eventually," he says "however, I was lucky to have had Ko Waterman with me, and when the Commander wanted skilled labor in the Ein Dracht Hutte at Swientochlowitz, under Ko's advice I was to risk death and lie to the German Officer, and explain that I was an apprentice to Ko at the Fokker factory under Ko's supervision in Nazi occupied Amsterdam.

"At that point I was willing to try anything to get out of what I was doing as I would not have survived much longer. My ability to learn quickly and the support of Ko meant I was under a roof and working in better conditions on 12-hour shifts. This saved my life".

The Americans freed Dick Groenteman from Auschwitz on the 5th of May 1946. He travelled by plane, car, bike and bicycle back to Amsterdam to search for family and belongings. He found his house occupied, his belongings gone, but miraculously he found his mother still alive. Friends and family murdered, home occupied, he decided to leave Holland and migrate as far from Germany as possible.

"Australia has been my home for more than 70 years now. I am welcomed and included in every aspect of its culture. I have raised my family of three sons, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild here in Australia, had success in business, and have been honoured to be inducted into the Australian Ice Hockey Hall of Fame". [1, 12]

________________

With thanks to David Hunt, ADF Ice Hockey Association (ADFIHA).

Further Reading:
The Gates of Freedom, Victoria Arena, Calgary, 1940s.

The grave of Lieutenant Jack Keith Curwen-Walker of the Australian Flying Corps, who was killed in action in an aeroplane accident on May 3rd 1918. [11] Walker captained Victoria's Goodall Cup team, and the Ottawa ice hockey club in Melbourne, one of the original four.