Cornelius, born 23 December 1920, was the son of Charles Allen Lyon, who fought in the Boer War but did not return immediately afterwards to Australia. Instead he married Elizabeth Johanna Ungerer in Pretoria on 12 June 1917 and it was not until 1933 that they moved to Western Australia with their six children and settled at Donnybrook.
Cornelius enlisted in the AIF on 9 April 1941 and after attending the School of Instruction at Guildford in August and September and enjoying a fortnight’s pre-embarkation leave he embarked at Fremantle on 7 November 1941 to serve with the rebuilt 2/11 Battalion in the Middle East. This was a Western Australian battalion which had suffered heavy casualties in Greece and Crete.
He travelled in Convoy US 13 (the prefix indicating those convoys which travelled between Australia and the Middle East) which was made up of the liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, escorted at first by HMAS Canberra and later by HMS Cornwall.
The Queen Mary had been fitted as a troopship in Sydney in 1940 making it possible to carry 5,500 passengers instead of the previous 2,139. Later refitting would allow her to carry 15, 740 troops and 943 crew (the greatest number of people carried on a floating vessel). The Queen Elizabeth had not entered passenger service before the War and was converted to a troopship in Singapore in 1940.
The convoy left Fremantle on 8 November, bound for Trincomalee (in Ceylon), still escorted by Canberra. Several days out of Fremantle, HMS Cornwall, which had come from Colombo, met up with the convoy to take over escort duty. Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary came to a stop in mid-ocean, while a pinnacle from Canberra collected mail from both liners, which was taken back to Fremantle, where Canberra arrived on 15 November.
Ron McCathie recalled, ‘The food was excellent and the bars opened three times each day. Pink gin or a scotch cost fivepence. The only universal complaint was the atmosphere once we were battened down for the night. The air-conditioning systems were never designed to cope with so many people. The odours and heat came from the turbines at full speed, cooking (which must have gone on for most of the time), together with the body odours from all of us. Add on a fart or two from the 5000 troops below and, by morning you could almost cut the air with a knife. It became worse as we moved into the tropics. We had an epidemic of what the medics called “blackout fever.”’
…After a quick stop in Trincomalee, the two liners continued to Suez, arriving on 22 November. Queen Mary went alongside first, but disembarkation was disrupted by an air raid alarm, during which everyone was required to go below decks until the ‘all clear’ sounded. Once her troops had disembarked, Queen Elizabrth was able to disembark her troops, then took on board a large number of German and Italian prisoners of war to be transported back to Australia. Departing Suez on 23 November, the two Queens voyaged together across the Indian Ocean to Trincomalee, arriving there on 30 November. Here it was planned that they would go their separate ways, with Queen Mary to proceed to Singapore for drydocking, while Queen Elizabeth returned to Australia.
Across the Sea to War: Australian & New Zealand Troop Convoys from 1865 through two World Wars, by Peter Plowman pp249-251
The battalion was rebuilt in Palestine, and between mid-September 1941 and late January 1942 joined the force garrisoning Syria. It left the Middle East on 16 February 1942 and arrived at Adelaide on 16 March, Cornelius travelling on the Durban Castle. The next month it was attached to the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Division to assist in the defence of Western Australia.
Cornelius was granted 6 weeks of leave without pay commencing on 1 April 1943 and made good use of the time–he married Constance Alma Sarah Burrows in Wellington, W.A. on 1 May 1943. The battalion rejoined the 19th Brigade in northern Queensland in July 1943, but another 18 months would pass before it saw action again.
After leaving Townsville on 5 November 1944 the 2/11th landed at Aitape in New Guinea on 13 November 1944 to undertake its only campaign against the Japanese. Patrolling, often arduous in nature, constituted the bulk of its operations. Its main areas of operation were east of the Danmap River (January 1945), and in the foothills of the Prince Alexander Range to the south of Wewak (April-July 1945).
Unfortunately for Cornelius, in the first half of 1945 he fell victim to the other serious enemy of the soldiers in New Guinea, Malaria. As the result of the work of the Australian Army’s Research Unit in Cairns a program of using regular medication had reduced the incidence of the disease but in 1945 the situation in the Aitape-Wewak area was the exception and it was discovered that some of the parasites involved there had developed a resistance to atebrin, the medication used. As a result between February and July 1945 Cornelius was a regular patient at the 2/7 Field Ambulance and the 104 Casualty Clearing Station.
Following the Japanese surrender on 15 August, drafts of 2/11th men began returning to Australia for discharge. Cornelius left Wewak on the Duntroon on 1 December and disembarked at Brisbane on 7 December 1945. He was discharged from the A.I.F. on 4 January 1946 Karrakatta, Western Australia and received the War Medal 1936-1945.
