Curtin's Victor Lederer considers himself "bloody lucky" to have it made it to his 100th birthday on Tuesday.
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The former AIF captain and oldest known surviving Australian World War II electronic intelligence specialist nearly had his life cut dramatically short a couple of times while monitoring Japanese communications in the field.
Born in Lancashire in 1914, he was the son of a successful Austrian businessman who imported British cotton to Europe.
The talented linguist was exposed to four different languages before his 10th birthday and went on to master Japanese, Malay and even the "pidgin" used by the New Guinea tribes.
When war broke out he was working in Sydney after a stint droving cattle with Vesteys in the Top End.
"I was not going to stand by and watch while Hitler took over the world for Nazism or Stalin took over the world for communism," he said. "What little I could do, I would do."
That turned out to be quite a lot. Impressed by his flair for languages, the army used him as a translator in its signals intelligence unit and sent him to Egypt to eavesdrop on the Germans and the Italians.
"We were at Heliopolis, pretty close to Cairo," Mr Lederer said. "Rommel was only 60 kilometres away at one point. I always felt Rommel was a decent fellow, not like those other Nazi bastards."
When the Japanese announced their entry into the war by bombing Pearl Harbour Mr Lederer found himself a lot closer to the enemy than that.
He was assigned to General Douglas MacArthur's top secret Central Bureau Intelligence Corps and sent to Moratoi to monitor and translate Japanese radio transmissions.
This was the unit that gathered the intelligence that made victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea and the assassination of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto possible.
"They told us there were about 200 Japs left on Morotai," Mr Lederer said. "It was closer to 3000. If they had been better at their jobs I wouldn't be here telling you this."
His closest shave came when a Japanese raiding party crept into the camp and threw a grenade into a tent where he and other men were sleeping.
"If they had stayed around to finish the job we'd have all been dead," he said. "Instead they ran away. The only casualty was the fat American cook [who was wounded] and he got a medal for it."
Mr Lederer and his mates tracked the Japanese to a stand of thick scrub and machine gunned it with all the ammunition they had.
"When we went in they [the Japanese] were all blue and dead."
He still feels no remorse. The Australians had declared total war on the enemy after learning of the massacre of Australian nurses during the fall of Rabaul.
However, not every contact resulted in death and destruction.
"I was crossing a narrow bridge [near the camp]," he said. "I turned around and saw a Japanese. I saw him, he saw me and each went his own separate way. It doesn't sound very heroic I know."
At the war's end Mr Lederer became an immigration selection officer, screening thousands of "Balts, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Serbs, Croats and Germans" who wanted to come to Australia.
He used his language skills to overhear conversations and weed out Nazis and communists.
"I did the best I could and brought thousands of people to Australia," he said.
His greatest achievement was "picking one for myself", a beautiful young Lithuanian girl called Tina who has been his wife for the past 64 years.
Mr Lederer's final career was in property and finance and this brought the couple to Canberra in 1973. "Tina liked it because it reminded her of Lithuania," he said. "I can't think of a nicer place to be."