‘Ducks’ and ‘alligators’ in Maitland’s floods
A major feature of the response to Maitland’s great flood of 1955 was the role played by ‘ducks’ and ‘alligators’. They weren’t real ducks and alligators, of course, but army-operated amphibious vehicles used for rescue and evacuation purposes and to supply essentials to people who had been cut off by floodwaters. The vehicles played major roles in Maitland’s worst-ever flood, saving lives and otherwise helping the community through a time of much inconvenience, hardship and pain. They carted drinking water in drums and brought food to stranded farm families in areas like Phoenix Park, Duckenfield and Millers Forest. The fact that they carried radios meant that they were also useful in relaying messages. But a radio aerial on one of them was to be the cause of a tragedy involving three deaths.
The vehicles
Technically, the ’ducks’ were DUKWs, six-wheeled truck-boat vehicles designed and built in the United States during the Second World War and destined to be used in the invasion of Sicily, the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy and the assaults on Japanese-held Pacific islands, including Saipan and Guam. The letters were codes: D meant 1942 (the year of the vehicle’s design), U meant ‘utility truck’, K indicated the all-wheel drive mode and W stood for the rear axles. A single propeller gave the DUKWs forward momentum in water.
A DUKW operating in Maitland in 1955
DUKWs weighed two and a half tons, could carry up to 30 people and were known to everyone as ‘ducks’. All told, about 20,000 of them were manufactured during the Second World War. Some were used into the 1970s during the Vietnam War.
The ‘alligators’ (LVTs, or Landing Vehicles Tracked) were caterpillar-tracked versions of the DUKWs. There were fewer of them than DUKWs, and they never became as famous in the several flood-liable areas of New South Wales in which the two types of vehicle were used during floods from 1949 onwards.
An alligator in High St, Maitland, in 1949
(Peter Bogan Collection, Maitland Libraries)
About 30 DUKWs and alligators were deployed by the army in various locations during the 1955 floods in NSW, six of them in Maitland. Two that operated in Moree were not particularly effective: they spent much of their time pulling each other out of mud.
In Maitland in floods
One DUKW was deployed to Maitland in 1949. Its bow wave, caused by the vehicle being driven faster than necessary, was held responsible for the collapse of a sandbag wall built at the Maitland Mercury corner (High St and Hunter St) to protect Horseshoe Bend. Allegedly, bow waves also caused the breakage of shop windows in High St, creating ‘unnecessary’ damage and greatly angering shopkeepers. This was a case of the response actually exacerbating the damage. Trucks were at fault here as well.
In 1950, 1952 and 1955 DUWKs were seen again in Maitland. No severe problems were reported, and they developed a revered place in the minds of Maitland people. They were heavy, cumbersome, less than ideal on streets and in swift currents, and prone to being fouled on fences, but they were useful as transports nonetheless. They symbolised the imperfections of the equipment available at the time, but being amphibian were more versatile than trucks. They also caused great excitement amongst children who scored rides on them when task loads permitted.
In 1955 a DUKW was involved in a tragedy near the Maitland Railway Station when its tall HF (high frequency) radio aerial hit a live 66,000-volt high-tension power line and three of the five men on board were electrocuted. Signaller Eric Chard was killed instantly, as was Sergeant William McGrath. The third, 24-year-old Constable Bernard Orrock of the Sydney Water Police, was rushed to the Maitland Hospital and placed in an iron lung normally used for polio sufferers, but he did not survive. Constable Arnold Garland of the Water Police was thrown into the floodwater, as was ambulanceman William Brown of Telarah, but both survived.
Constable Bernard Orrock
(Australian Police, memorial website)
Orrock was posthumously awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for Gallantry and the Bronze Medal of the Shipwreck and Humane Society for his efforts in Maitland during the 1955 flood.
He is listed on the Honour Roll, National Police Memorial.
This incident occurred on 26 February, the day after an accident had killed two men just north of the railway station. The two were dangling on a line under a helicopter, but one fell onto electric wires and the other was probably killed on impact with the floodwaters. Both occurrences reinforced in people’s minds the dangers of flooding. The four men who were electrocuted in the two incidents are the only cases of people known to have died by electrocution in Maitland’s flood history.
An incident off Newcastle
DUKWs and alligators were seen in other parts of NSW, during floods and on the coast, in the years after the Second World War. Several were involved in a night-time army training exercise in the Stockton Bight in 1954. The exercise started from Camp Shortland at Newcastle’s Horseshoe Beach, but rough seas saw some of the participating craft swamped by large waves and sunk. About a hundred servicemen were thrown into the water three kilometres offshore, and three of them were drowned. Several DUKWs and LVTs were lost as well and have never been recovered. The episode was a disaster.
How useful?
The amphibious vehicles made an important contribution to flood responses in Maitland. The responses would have been less effective without them, despite their deficiencies.
In 2015, a DUKW was displayed outside the Maitland Town Hall during the commemorative event held to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the 1955 flood. Other DUKWs have been re-purposed elsewhere, including several that are in current use in a rainforest nature park in far northern Queensland. There, they carry passengers across creeks.
References
‘Awards for gallantry in NSW floods’, Canberra Times, 22 November 1955, p5.
Keys, Chas, Maitland, City on the Hunter: fighting floods or living with them? Hunter-Central Rivers Catchment Management Authority, Tocal, 2008.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: ducks and alligators in the 1955 flood’, Maitland Mercury, 22 March 2024.
Scanlon, Mike, ‘Bight tragedy recalled’, Newcastle Herald, 3 February 2024.
Scanlon, Mike, ‘Stockton Bight disaster resurfaced’, Newcastle Herald, 2 March 2024.
