In total, 229 Australians and 1800 Japanese soldiers were killed. Caldwell helped round up and guard Japanese prisoners at Balikpapan, and later at Celebes Island (today’s Sulawesi) and the town of Parepare.
Max Caldwell on enlistment at age 18, in 1943.
That was 80 years ago, and 5000 kilometres away from where Caldwell celebrated his 100th birthday, at a Regis aged care home in Blackburn, in Melbourne’s east, on Sunday.
Caldwell is one of two surviving soldiers of the more than 3000 men who served in the 2/14th Battalion, according to its Battalion Association. The other surviving veteran, Les Cook, 102, lives in Canberra.
At Caldwell’s party, guests sipped champagne and ate a birthday cake topped with a 1920s logo from Caldwell’s beloved Collingwood Football Club.
Among the guests were Magpie great Peter McKenna and 3AW presenter Darren James, the latter a friend of Caldwell’s son, Bruce.
Caldwell’s sister, Betty Caldwell, 96, remembered that in 1943, when Max was 18 and she was 14, their mother, Hazel, and sister, Joyce, 21, were in “floods of tears” at seeing Max off to war from their Kew house.
Max Caldwell at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, date unknown.
Betty said when Max returned home three years later, he was so thin she didn’t recognise him, and he was “as nervous as a kitten” from his war experiences.
After the war, Max married his sweetheart, Betty Waddington, and spent 45 years working for an insurance firm, rising to be deputy state manager before retiring in 1986.
Betty died last year. The couple have four children, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Asked why he enlisted to serve, Caldwell said there was a sense of adventure, but also of duty.
“I thought it was the right thing to do,” he said.
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