3rd Australian Employment Company

11 Jul 1944 Loading an Army truckwith supplies.AWM photo 067544

Brief History

Initially known as 3rd Australian Labour Company, it was formed at Menangle (NSW) in March 1942 with volunteer enemy aliens recruited from internment camps throughout NSW. They moved to Werris Creek in March and had a HQ element and four platoons which worked at various armament and ammunmition depots in the Hunter Valley. In Jul 1942 a detachment was located at Spring Hill and in November the unit was renamed 3rd Australian Employment Company. By mid 1943 ther HQ ha dmoved to Ascot, and they haddetachments at Werris Creek and Rutherford In June 1945 the unit was rediced in size to three platoons operating from Ascot until the end of the war.

Two men died of illness while posted to this unit.

Unit Personnel

• Ivan Farac 10 Dec 1943 - 11 Feb 1946

Notes

During the Second World War, the Australian Army established 39 Employment Companies, totaling by war’s end about 15,000 men. While the name of these army units occasionally varied – Employment Company, Labour Company, Works Company, Labour Unit, Labour Corps – their function did not. They were established to ensure that the Australian Defence Force had a large body of soldiers dedicated to essential labouring tasks, the hard physical labour needed to maintain the war effort and support the fighting forces. Of the 39 Companies, 11 were in part or whole made up of ‘aliens’, non-British citizens.

The ‘alien’ companies were not armed. Soldiers without guns, they camped at places like Tocumwal and Albury on the New South Wales/Victorian border, where an earlier history of State rivalry led to the stupidity of differing rail gauges. There they worked on the trains, loading and unloading military supplies, including foodstuffs and armaments. Across the country, parties of Employment Company soldiers were directed to factories for packing and transporting goods; others worked on the wharves, repaired roads, drove trucks loaded with military equipment. In the words of a journalist, ‘Men who were not allowed to carry arms spent their days loading bombs on trucks.’ Some of the Chinese in the 7th Company worked in the mines in Queensland and later ended up under the control of the US military. A number of the Koepangese from the 23rd Company became members of the sabotage units in Z Force, sent to report on and infiltrate Japanese-occupied Timor.

Brief History content has come from The Unit Guide - Volume 6 - The Australian Army 1939-1945, page 6.133 - Graham R McKenzie-Smith - Big Sky Publishing - 2018