Carl Kills was born, most likely, in Voskovtsy village in Volyn Province in Ukraine and was probably an Orthodox Ukrainian. He came to South Australia from South Africa in 1910 and worked in Port Pirie, later moving to Melbourne.
Enlisiting in the AIF, he was discharged four months later with the formula ‘unlikely to become an efficient soldier’.
After the war lived in Melbourne, where he married and worked as a carrier and later as a goods dealer.
Stanley John Siwczynski was born in Tomaszów in Poland; he was a saddler by trade. Leaving Poland, he spent a year in Germany and then came to Brisbane in 1912.
Enlisting in the AIF as John Stanislaw Siwezynski, he served on the Western Front in the 49th Battalion as a saddler; in 1917 he was appointed corporal. In January 1918 he was awarded the Belgian decoration Croix de Guerre. In September 1918 he was withdrawn from the battlefront and returned to Australia with a group of Russians ‘on account of Russian nationality’.
After the war he spent three years in the USA, working at the motor vehicle factory in Michigan. He married there and in 1924 brought his wife and daughter to Australia. They lived in the Northern Territory and Sydney, but the marriage broke up and Stanley took the daughter with him to Queensland, where he had a hard time during the depression working as a motor mechanic and cane cutter.
Albert Benjamin Fredrickson from Finland came to Australia in the late nineteenth century and worked in Western Australia as a prospector.
Enlisting in the AIF in Norseman, he served with the 32nd Battalion on the Western Front, attaining the rank of Lance-Corporal. In October 1917 he was wounded in the head in the battle for Passchendaele and invalided to Australia.
In 1921 he died in the sanatorium of Wooroloo, in Western Australia.
Alfonso Eugen Edman, a Finnish seaman from Helsingfors (Helsinki), came to Australia in 1914.
Enlisting in the AIF in Sydney, he served with the 18th Battalion at Gallipoli and then on the Western Front. In June 1916 he took part in a raid on enemy trenches; a month later he was severely wounded at Pozieres, receiving wounds to his leg, head and right arm. After two months in hospitals he was returned to the trenches and killed in the Somme battle in December 1916.
Fradolf Mattson from Mariehamn in Finland came to Newcasltle in NSW as a seaman in 1913.
He enlisted in the AIF in Sydney on the same day with his countryman Alfonso Edman and they sailed on the same ship, Runic, to the battlefront, but they served in different battalions. Mattson served with the 13th Battalion at Gallipoli and with the 45th Battalion on the Western Front, where in 1917 he was transferred to the machine gun company.
Returning to Australia, he settled in the Newcastle area, working as a labourer, married an Australian girl, Esther Annie Smith, and had a family.
Russian Anzacs