Rudolf Danberg from Riga was probably a Baltic German. Emigrating to Australia, he worked as a labourer in Holyoak, south of Perth.
He served in the 11th Battalion, landing at Gallipoli on 7 May 1915. Three months later he was wounded at the Lone Pine Battle; recovering, he was returned to the trenches and was wounded once again, in the head. He continued his service on the Western Front and was killed in September 1917 at the Menin Road Battle.
His mother in Riga was never found and Mrs Mary Shaw from Queens Park near Perth, the beneficiary of his will, died soon after him, in 1918.
Militan Schatkowski was born in Plateliai in Russia (now Lithuania). He was probably of Polish and German origin. He left home as a young man working as a sailor. Landing in Australia on the eve of war he worked as a fireman on coastal vessels.
Enlisting in the AIF, he arrived in Egypt with the 2nd Battalion and was soon sent back to Australia with a returning ship on escort duty. He joined his battalion in Gallipoli only in October 1915. Soon he fell ill and spent some time in hospitals, arriving at the Western Front in September 1916. Surviving several months of heavy fighting, he fell ill again and was transferred to England, where after recovery he worked in the Administrative HQ and the Red Cross. In 1918 he married a nurse, taking her surname, Oldham.
In 1919 she came with him to Australia, but did not stay there long, taking their daughter with her and giving birth to a son upon returning to England. She died early and her children grew up not knowing much about their father. Only decades later Militan’s grandchildren managed to piece together his life using archival records. One of his grandsons is Andrew Loog Oldham, the manager of the Rolling Stones. His other grandson, Michael John Oldham, wrote an essay about the life of his grandfather.
Joseph Kleshenko, a 22-year-old seaman who landed in Sydney in 1912, enlisted in the AIF no less than seven times! The National Australian Archives records register his military career as that of three separate men and it took us some detective work in comparing his signatures, physical description and other data to determine that this was the same man. The first time he enlisted was in November 1914 as Joseph Noyland, a Russian subject born in Dubno. The application was filled in by an enlisting clerk, but by the time Joseph was meant to sign it, he had obviously forgotten the name he had chosen for his new identity and wrote at the bottom: ‘Joe Neyman’.
Enlisting, he disappeared without a trace and in the chaos of the first months of war the military obviously had no time to look for him. Three months later he enlisted once again, this time as Joseph Klinetinko from the same Dubno. The third enlistment he signed as Joe Klestenko, but the enlisting clerk wrote his name as Kleshenko and from now on his following enlistments assembled under this name. A number of his enlistments ended up with him getting venereal disease and discharged with the note ‘unlikely to become an efficient soldier’ or ‘services no longer required’, but he kept on enlisting again and again from different enlisting centres.
An obvious adventurer and troublemaker, he had a mark from a bullet wound on his ankle. This fitted well with his tales for the enlisting officers: that he not only served in the Russian army, but also in the American army for nine months; he even alleged that he received the bullet wound in the Russo-Japanese war. This seems unlikely as he was born in 1892; later, in any case, it turned into a ‘Gallipoli wound’ (and he most likely hadn’t ever been there).
As a result of his seventh enlistment, he reached England, where he met his future wife, the 17-year old Ethel from Manchester. Returning to Australia, he worked as a stevedore.
Russian Anzacs