The ranks of the 'greatest generation' are becoming very thin

These are the men and women who, in the words of Australian War Memorial director, Dr Brendan Nelson were: "born in the aftermath of the war that was, grew up through the Great Depression [and] came to adulthood under the shadows of the war that was to come".

Weaned on the sacrifices of their parents, who had lost tens of thousands of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins and friends in World War I, this was also a generation that was under no illusions about the horrors of conflict or its bitter cost.

Every community, from the largest to the smallest, had a prominent memorial naming those who had served and singling out the more than 60,000 who never came home.

Despite this, as Nelson has observed on more than one occasion, "a million mobilised in a war that was no mere extension of World War I. 40,000 gave their lives and afterwards [those who came back] set about the economic and social reconstruction of our country."

This is also a generation that is rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth.

Just over a decade ago, in June 2005, the Department of Veterans Affairs had 116,484 WWII veterans on its books.

By June 2015 this number had plummeted to 28,388 and it is continuing to fall at a rapid rate.

Because women live longer than men, widows of war veterans now outnumber surviving veterans of both sexes by more than two to one with 64,917 being supported by the DVA in June 2015.

The expectation is that by 2020, 75 years after the conflict came to an end, only a handful of Australian veterans will remain.

It is for this reason that figures as diverse as Nelson, AWM senior historian Dr Karl James, former chief-of-army and University of Canberra academic Peter Leahy, and comedian, historian, author and dramatist Michael Veitch are determined to honour the last of these warriors and their partners while they are still alive.

"Australia's focus has [recently] been fixated on Gallipoli and World War I," James said.

"Given the scale of Australia's loss in that terrible conflict this popular interest is understandable.

"But it was World War II, the bloodiest conflict in history, that defined the 20th century. Western liberal democracies were faced with their greatest risk from fascism and expansionist militarism.

"In eastern Europe the war between the German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army was one of brutal extermination."

James noted the youngest Australian veterans of the campaigns of 1945 would now be 86 years old.

"How many of those who survive were combat veterans?" he said. "It is difficult to know definitively, but from the 8500 [Australian] prisoners of war of the Germans, for example, little more than 140 remain.

"The comparative figure for prisoners of the Japanese are just as stark. Of the 22,000 Australians captured by the Japanese in 1942, little more than 210 are still alive."

Noting it was now almost too late for the surviving veterans to tell their own stories, James said Australians needed to reflect on the country's involvement in World War II and to consider its legacies for this country.

"If not, the World War II generation might vanish before anyone notices."

Michael Veitch, while best known as a comedian and satirist on hit shows including The Gillies Report, The D-Generation, Fast Forward and Full Frontal, is a history tragic who has done as much as anybody to record and celebrate the experiences of the Australians who fought in the air war in Europe and the Pacific.

The author of Flak and Fly interviewed more than 200 former airmen over the last two decades.

"I was struck, time and time again, by their genuine and unaffected modesty," Veitch said. "Not a single one believed himself to be gifted, or special, or even particularly brave.

"They [always] said they were just ordinary blokes called upon to do extraordinary deeds in extraordinary times."

Veitch said every interview had been "utterly humbling, a lesson in contrast to the self-centredness that was my own growing up".

"The men who fought the war sacrificed their youth to defeat some of the darkest forces ever known to mankind. They did it bravely and, for the most part, honourably, then returned to get on with the rest of their lives. They bore the scars of their ordeal largely alone, in silence and without complaint."

Veitch said the statistically significant number of veterans he had interviewed detested war having seen it firsthand.

"[They] were often sceptical, even suspicious, of the contemporary Anzac resurgence, finding its jingoism worrying and distasteful," he said.

The events of the war, the loss of mates and a strong sense of the young men they had been, is never far away from the thoughts of the dwindling band of combat veterans.

Time does not cure post-traumatic stress disorder and a photograph, a name, a song or even a half-remembered scent worn by a sweetheart from decades ago can bring the past rushing back.

"After 70 years they were still quietly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what they had been through," Veitch said. "On several occasions one would handle an old combat photograph of himself, quietly shaking his head in disbelief of what he had endured."

Death is not the only bad thing that can happen in war. There is also the risk of terrible injuries, disfigurement and captivity to be taken into account.

One of my first employers and a valued mentor, George Henry Taylor, was a wireless air gunner with the RAAF.

Born in Dubbo in 1918, just over a month before the end of the "war to end all war", he trained as an accountant and worked at the Ford dealership established by his father, Harold W. Taylor.

He enlisted on June 22, 1941, and by 1943 was in England serving in Wellington bombers.

Taylor suffered horrific burns to his face and hands when his plane made a forced landing at the Church Broughton training aerodrome in Derbyshire on September 3 that year.

He was to spend the next 2½ years as a member of a very select group, the "Guinea Pigs" of pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe.

McIndoe's patients had to endure hundreds of operations and live with the constant risk of potentially fatal infections as he laboured to make them as "normal" as possible.

Taylor wasn't his best result but, by the same token, came off better than many others.

By the time I entered the business as a 90 per cent car washer and 10 per cent sales cadet he was in his 60s.

My memories are of a quiet, seemingly shy and punctiliously courteous man who took the time to introduce his most junior employee to Rotaract and, when I said I was applying for a job at the local newspaper, wrote me a glowing reference I have tried to live up to ever since.

Taylor never spoke of his experiences and I never asked about them. It was enough that we all knew he had been to hell and back. The story of his silent suffering was writ large on his face and hands.

Within months of joining the newspaper I met another mentor who had also lived through what was quietly referred to as "a bastard of a war".

This was Cliff Whitelocke, the London-born editor of the Narromine News, who had left his business in the hands of his wife, Jean, to enlist at the age of 30 on July 2, 1940.

Whitelocke served with the 2/15 field artillery regiment and, by January 1942, was in Malaya helping to defend Singapore against the invading Japanese.

When the unit surrendered on February 15, 1942, 556 men were taken prisoner. More than half, a total of 294, died of Japanese brutality and neglect over the next 3½ years.

I never heard Whitelocke speak of the horrors he had endured in Changi and elsewhere.

That said, he wasn't averse to sharing the odd light-hearted anecdote with his readers as this extract from his "Around and About" column attests.

"Listening to Lady Louis Mountbatten speaking over the national network on Sunday night [this was in 1946], I was reminded of the first time I saw her," he wrote.

"Ours was the first hut at the Changi POW camp she entered. Our dress wasn't very formal, and we were inclined to be bashful about it, but she and Lord Louis wandered around amongst us, chatted pleasantly and shook hands with men who hadn't seen a white woman for years. We [all] thought her the most charming woman we had ever met."

The first Changi newspaper, the brainchild of Gunner George Sprod also of the 2/15, was called The Narrowminded News in mock homage to the publication Whitelock ran in Western NSW for the better part of half a century.

Peter Leahy, who retired as chief of army with the rank of lieutenant-general, in 2008, has met and worked with numerous WWII veterans since the 1970s.

He has vivid memories of returning to the now silent battlefields with groups of veterans to commemorate the campaigns that shaped history.

"In Crete they told stories of going back, from the evacuation sites, to help their mates. As a result many lost their chance of escape and were imprisoned by the Germans," Leahy said.

"In Malaysia they pleaded with us to think of them as fighters not prisoners. These were the men of indomitable fighting spirit who blunted, but could not stop, the Japanese advance on Singapore who then suffered cruelly in Changi and on the Thai-Burma Railway.

"In Papua New Guinea they spoke of the closeness and intensity of the fighting in the jungle and nearly all told a story of how they held a mate as he died."

Leahy said even decades on from the experiences that had defined their lives the veterans were remarkable.

His "most closely held memory" is of a Canberran, Captain Bede Tongs MM, who died in January 2015.

"Bede was a wonderful man to be around," Leahy said. "He told great stories and was an accomplished poet. My favourite [of his poems] is called, What Do You Say To A Dying Man?

"It is the story of one of his mates who is shot by a Japanese sniper. The poem tells of their close friendship and time in the army together.

"As his mate lay dying he wonders what he will say to the man's family as he looks in his eyes and realises: 'It's late.' The power of the poem is in the last words of the dying man; `Tell them I tried'.

"Indeed they tried and they were magnificent."