Murray Bridge RSL Museum

25/04/2026

16/04/2026

13/04/2026

02/03/2026

27/02/2026

On the morning of 27 February 1951, Corporal Leonard Opie was twenty-seven years old and climbing Hill 614 under fire. He ran out of ammunition on the way up. He picked up weapons from the ground and kept going, three different fi****ms before he reached the top. A gr***de detonated close enough to drive shrapnel into his hand. He cleared the foxholes and reached the summit. He was the only man from his group still standing.

For that action, seventy-five years ago today, he became the first Australian in Korea to receive the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

It was not his first war. Opie was born in the dry dust of Snowtown, South Australia, in 1923, and enlisted at eighteen. The Army sent him into the deep mud of the Kokoda Trail with the 2/14th Infantry Battalion. He fought through the close-quarters slaughter of New Guinea and the amphibious landings at Borneo. When the fighting stopped in 1945, he remained in theatre to translate for Japanese personnel on trial for war crimes at Macassar.

Civilian life did not hold him for long.

He spent 598 days in Korea across two tours with the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. In May 1966 he deployed to Vietnam as a captain with the Australian Army Training Team, working as a training chief in the CIA's Phoenix Program.

Between tours he spent twelve months in the mountains of Kashmir as a United Nations military observer. The Army sent him to the Jungle Training Centre at Canungra to instruct young soldiers until his full-time service ended on his fiftieth birthday in 1973. He retired from the reserves two years later as a major.

He was awarded twenty-two medals, including the Efficiency Decoration. The 3rd Battalion holds an annual Opie Trophy military skills competition in his name.

The man who had fought across three wars spent his final working years in an office, managing a map company until 1989.

He died of leukaemia in Adelaide on 22 September 2008. He was 84.

Lest we forget.

Rod Hutchings
Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans' Association

05/02/2026

31/01/2026

Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, a British RAMC medical officer attached to the Liverpool Scottish, remains the only person to receive both a Victoria Cross and Bar during World War I for gallantry at Guillemont on the Somme (1916) and Wieltje during Passchendaele (1917).
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At Guillemont in August 1916, despite shell splinter wounds, Chavasse spent 48 hours rescuing around 20 wounded men from no-man's-land under incessant machine-gun, sniper, and artillery fire—crawling as close as 25 yards to German lines, carrying casualties 500 yards to safety, and burying fallen officers amid bombs. He first earned the Military Cross in 1915 at Hooge for 12 hours of similar frontline aid.
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During the Third Battle of Ypres on July 31–August 2, 1917, severely wounded in the head and stomach while evacuating a soldier, he refused evacuation from his aid post, then spent two days in mud and rain repeatedly crossing open ground to retrieve dying comrades—saving many despite exhaustion, starvation, and mortal injuries from a shell hit on August 2. He died August 4, aged 32; his Brandhoek grave uniquely bears two VCs.

24/11/2025

On the 24th of November 1943 Sergeant T. C. Derrick, VC, DCM, of the 2/48th Battalion, was awarded the Victoria Cross at Sattelberg, New Guinea.

Derrick, one of the great Australian soldiers of the Second World War, seized the summit of Sattelberg virtually single-handedly, leading the way for the Australian occupation of the dominating feature.

Read more here: https://vwma.org.au/explore/people/14016