A World War II veteran who believes war is "pointless" and "never achieves anything" hopes the next generation of Australians are taught the horrors of the historic battle he fought 75 years ago on the Kokoda Track.
The Japanese landed in Papua New Guinea in 1942 and aimed to take the region and isolate Australia.
Despite being outnumbered, the Australians fought the Japanese in bloody jungle warfare for several months, and eventually drove them out of PNG, in what was turning point for the nation in World War II.
Alan Moore was in the 39th Infantry battalion during the campaign. The detail the 96-year-old tells everyone is that war is terrible.
"I hope that none of my grandchildren are ever involved in warfare. War is pointless and it has never achieved anything, and it should be avoided at all costs," he said.
Arnold Forrester is worried the battle, and the hard-fought lessons they learnt from it, will be forgotten by Australia once the last veteran of the campaign dies.
"The Great War is more prominent than the Australian war," said who .
"People, they just don't know about it, or don't want to know about it. I think it'll just fade away."
Mr Moore remembered Japan as a brutal enemy that swept through Asia, defeating all before it.
"The Japanese were highly trained. They had done a lot of jungle warfare. They were aggressive and ruthless and they seemed to take great delight in torturing captives," he said.
"We had old fashioned first world war weapons, we didn't have any modern machine guns, we didn't have anything.
"We hadn't been issued with properly clothing. It rained every night, we didn't have cover. That was when we started suffering tropical disease casualties.
"And I believe, over the whole campaign there were more disease casualties than battle casualties."
600 Australians killed on Kokoda track
Arnold Forrester, who was born in Victoria but now lives in Queensland, also said younger Australians would be shocked to know how poorly prepared soldiers were.
"I remember there were more blokes shot by our own than there was by the enemy," he said.
"It was a historic time. The Kokoda track did happen, more than 600 Australians died there, 350 were wounded."
An unknown number of locals who fought with Australia against the Japanese also died, and to mark the 75th year since the battle, services are being held across the nation and in PNG.
This weekend a service is being held at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.
But Mr Moore said unlike Gallipoli, Kokoda services seem to be reliant on a survivor being there.
"Of our battalion, there are just 21 left, all of us well into our 90s," he said.
"When all the veterans have died off… over the years it will die off. The details of it."
But while Mr Forrester fears the story will "fade away", he hopes future generations will remember.
"I'd like to see it commemorated every year keep it going, it should do. It was a very important occasion," he said.
