Australians at War Film Archive

I’m Norman Sheehan. I was born in Rose Bay in 1923. While I was born in Rose Bay the family ran a hotel in Launceston, down in Tasmania, and that was my tribe because that was the Kennedy clan,

my grandfather, grandmother, their two girls and son and their family. And we ran hotels for 12, 14, 15 years in Tasmania and in New South Wales, and that’s the way I grew up. At the age of ten Grandfather decided he had had enough, so he bought a little cottage at a place called Narrabeen, north of Manly, and we all grew up

at Narrabeen, and that was a real surfie [surfing enthusiast] area back in those days. And of course the greatest ambition when you are a 10 or 11 years old is to join the surf club when you were 16, and that filled my life for the next 4 or 5 years. But somehow or another I managed to lob in Sydney High School, that was an entry by merit school, and I travelled backwards and forwards to Sydney High School.

I did my Leaving Certificate and went on to university. The first part of my life was just the surf club, tennis cricket, football, long before Manly Warringah started. But there was a surf club competition there. It was a very physical world, a world in which your physical exploits were more important than the money you had or anything else: whether you could surf, whether you could surf a plane, whether you could get in the boat,

get in the surf boat, go out on rescues, do shark patrols, do those kind of things. That was the whole life in those days. Still living in a tribal atmosphere, because my grandfather from time to time would see a business opportunity and grab a pub and the whole family would move into the pub. I don’t know whether he saved money doing that, on paying his staff, because I think the family probably took as much as the staff was going to be paid, plus their wages as well. Anyhow,

it worked out pretty well. And that was the kind of life that went on, which is encapsulated in the first novel of my trilogy, my publisher [published work?]. And anybody that wants to know about life in the raw at Narrabeen, the North Narrabeen Surf Club, or in Collaroy or South Narrabeen or Manly or Palm Beach in those days, would get a full earful from the first novel. But it was a great way of growing up. If you have ever seen The summer of ’42, the film, you would know what it was all about.

It was just beautiful. There was a drought on in Australia and the drought went to lots of sunny weather. It was good for surfing, good for playing on the beach, good for doing all those things that 16, 17 year-olds like doing. But anyhow, the thing progressed and there was a war in Europe, and it didn’t worry us very much, except politicians kept beating the drum about

money and people joining the forces. And all of a sudden, on the 7th of December the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor and that was like a slap in the face to all of us. We suddenly realised that the Japanese were a real threat. And week after week after week you saw them going further and further south. And when their aircraft attacked the English fleet in Singapore and sank two of the biggest

battle cruisers, the first time that aircraft had sunk battle cruisers, we knew we were in trouble. We were in bad trouble, too, and they started coming further and further down. That’s the drums of war were then beating, and all the talk, as far as the Australians were concerned, about war, it was a funny old do because most Australians of war age, at the University of Sydney anyway,

there were two divisions: ones that were against war and weren't going to go to the war, they expected somebody else to do the fighting for them; and those who thought it was the right and proper thing to go to war. But there was a split in the nation that way, so much so that there was a split in the nation as far as how the government treated people. There was a thing called “the militia” that everybody got called up into on their eighteenth birthday, and the big thing about the militia was the fact that you cold buy your way

out of it or get your way into it, whichever way you like. If you knew the right people you’d never go to the militia. The militia didn’t go anywhere, except for a couple of companies of poor individuals who found themselves at Darwin at the wrong time, a bit later on; and some of them found themselves in Port Moresby at the wrong time, a bit later on they got isolated up there. But apart from that they didn’t go anywhere except around and round, and playing soldiers around the country.

But I got called up into that mob when I was 18 and I was at Sydney University. So I went out of university and there, for the first time in my life, I met God in the shape of a sergeant major who there enlisted us, plying the oath, threatening us, he was going to put you in prison, he was doing to do all kind of horrible things to you unless you obeyed him implicitly. But anyhow,

that’s the way it went. And I spent a few months in the artillery out at a place called Holsworthy. And Holsworthy was famous because it had three camps there. One was the school of guts, where they sent officers, trainees for officers in the artillery; another one was the prison camps where you were sent to prison in the Army, you went to Holsworthy;

and the third was the 12th Army bloody Field Regiment, and that’s where we went to. And it was good initiation, because you walked in there and they threw clothes at you that didn’t fit at the time, put them on, and they threw great big palliasses at you and showed you where the straw was to fill them up, gave you some duck boards and a tent, and, “Righto, that’s where you are living,” and six of you go down and shove that tent in the ground and live there.

I was a little bit lucky because one of the six in my tent happened to be a fettler off the railway, and he’d lived in tents for the previous four or five or six years, so we got on all right there. But I got an injury there and I went to get treatment and finished up in the showgrounds at Sydney at the pig pens, which they thought was an appropriate place for people who were tyring to recuperate from a busted knee.

And the showground was full of people coming and going and all the rest of it, and there was a lot of Yanks there. And I’ll never forget one day that at the showgrounds there was a kind of an exhibition down in the main ring, lots of anti-aircraft guns there, a bloke from the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] there and a lot of Americans there. And the Americans had come down through their initial campaigns up in the Philippines and they were fairly new, of course, then; this was

early ’42. And there was some American fighters, Aerocobras, setting up in the showground and anti-aircraft guns were pretending to shoot them down and all the rest of it, and I got talking to some of the Yanks. And the thing that impressed me was the professionalism of the boys in the AIF and the Yanks as against the monsters that were trying to run the militia. They were far from people that you look up to.

Then I start talking to a Yank and the Yank was quite confused by the colour patches on their shoulders and he wanted to know the difference, and I explained to him how the colour patches of the AIF were and how the colour patches of the militia were different. And he said, “Well, what’s the difference between the two?” And I said, "The AIF go anywhere they are sent and they enlist for that purpose.” And that caused some confusion because an enlisted man, as far as the Americans

are concerned, is somebody who is called up and forced to go to war, they are all enlisted men who, they don’t hold rank. And he said, "What about you? What about your armband?” And I said, "It doesn’t go anywhere, it’s home-based and they are not permitted to send us overseas.” And he said, "Well, what the bloody hell am I doing here?” And I said, "I don’t know, what are you doing here?” “Going to do your fighting for you.” And that hit home a bit, started me thinking a bit, that’s exactly what he was doing here.

You know, “We don’t want to depend on other people to do our fighting for us, if there was fighting to be done, we got to do it ourselves.” So it was on that basis that I went back to the 12th Army Regiment and looked up general routine orders, and of course I was doing first year law at the time and found out that if I went and enlisted in the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] they had to release me from the militia, and that’s all there was about it.

And at that time there was a funny thing going on because we had had a, I think it was a colonel in charge of the 12th Army Regiment, and he called us on a general parade one day and told us the purpose of the general parade was to make everybody ashamed of themselves for being in the militia and join the AIF holus bolus, not next week or the week after but there and then on parade, and to such an extent he had arranged that

there were enlistment people from the AIF on one side of the parade ground, and the whole of the regiment on the other side of the parade ground. And he proudly marched off and signed the papers and enlisted and called for his general staff officers to do the same. Then they called for the other people to do the same. It was a surprise for everybody. And he had a picture of guys arguing in the middle of the parade ground, whether they should go over there and join the AIF or stay where they are in the militia. No time to consult with family

or wives or kids or brothers or sisters. “Here and now you do it.” Well, that went on for about 20 minutes half an hour, and I stood my ground. Those that were going to the AIF had to march off and march out. That was just a remnant of the 50 per cent of people still on the parade ground. And then along came the, I don’t know if you have ever met a regimental sergeant major?

Got a big voice. And he started haranguing everybody for not doing their job and not being true to their country and all the rest of it. And then one marched up to me and said, “And why aren’t you going, son?” And I said, " Well, I’m enlisting in the RAAF.” “That’s no excuse, we won’t release you.” And I said, " Well, I got a general routine order paper in my pocket that says you have got to.” “You are not exempt for that.” I forget what he said after that, he was going to put me on a charge for something or other, and I said, "You can do what you like but I’m not going to be blackmailed into going over there.”

But most of them were, most of them went over there, most of them signed up.

Well, they were forced into it, it was blackmail, because he turned around and said, “If....” All the sergeants and the staff sergeants and the younger officers were holding rank and privilege

and pay and position and, you know, they were pretty well off, and he told them straight: he said, “If you don’t come over here all your rank is gone.” Boom. You just reverted to ordinary rank, whatever basic rank was, and you go into the general melting pot. “Those that come with me with hold their rank.” So it was the biggest bit of blackmail I have ever seen in my life. And you know, it didn’t win friends and, as far as I was concerned, by that time I had been and signed the papers for the Air Force and

got out. I went down and saw the staff sergeant at headquarters and got the general routine orders and he said, "Yeah, we got that,” and he said, "You’re entitled to go, you’d like to go and pack and all the rest of it, I’ll sign your clearance.” So off I went, reported back to the Air Force, and that was the last I ever saw of the Army, thank God for that. But it was a funny experience. But then of course I’d been in the hospital with a busted knee.

When I got back, went back for the call-up in the Air Force, they wouldn’t accept me because I had a busted knee. So I went back to work, and back to work was back at the 53 Martin place in Sydney, in the legal section of the Department of Labour and Industry, so went back there. And there was a lovely fellow by the name of Jack Kelleher and he was the first Manpower officer in New South Wales. Manpower was that part of the state government which directed people

what they are going to do with their private lives: whether they were going to work, where they won’t work, males and females over the age of 18, and if he told me I had to go and work at a factory at Epping, I would have to go and work at a factory at Epping, that’s all there was too it. And Jack looked at me and he said, “Well, what are you going to do?” And I said, "I’m going to the Air Force.” He said, “You are mad,” and I said, "Probably, why?” And he said, "Well, I have lost all my staff, you are the only trained staff I’ve got. You’ve done first year law, your second year will be starting very shortly.

If you come in here, you come in as my assistant; by the time the war is over you will be so high up the rank with a degree and all the rest of it, basically a long way to catch you.” And I said, "Well, I’m still going to war, hopefully not to the war, but I’m going to the Air Force.” So there I was. So I duly come along and I went to the Air Force. But it was a good time there, swimming on the beach at Narrabeen, going home to Narrabeen every night, getting the Manly ferry across into the bottom of

Circular Quay and catching the tram up the hill to Martin Place and having the good life, going out to Sydney University, enjoying he uni out there, and going to the law school and listening to Doc Evatt teaching us constitutional law. He’d just been on the High Court. He retired from the High Court and he taught constitutional law, so they tell me, although he was a very hard man to understand. He used to stand looking out at Phillips Street from the lecture room and

making comments on all the barristers that he saw walking backwards and forwards to the Supreme Court and their politics and what they should do and shouldn’t do. And a bit of constitutional law. And then reverting back to his famous constitutional law cases and then turning around and remembering who he was lecturing too, people who were doting on every word. And he went into the War Cabinet shortly after that and we got a fellow by the name of J D Holmes, KC [King’s Counsel], who

kind of made up what Doc Evatt had missed in his lectures and we all got through that year. It was a good life and it was a wonderful life. There was only six million of us in Australia then, and Sydney was a place where, once you go into the university law school, you knew everybody by reputation, you knew then personally. It was like a big country town, it was though a big country town, until the Yanks came and all the foreigners arrived. But that was good, because if they hadn’t arrived

the Japanese would have come. But I wasn’t around for that because I went into the Air Force and I was off overseas by the time June ’43 came around. There was a bit of that going on, and I’ll tell you a bit about that. The

rationing in Sydney was an opportunity for the smart ones of society to start black marketing. Now, I had an uncle, Tommy O’Brien, and Tommy O’Brien, God bless his heart and soul, he’s gone to God now, he had a small broom factory and it was out in one of the suburbs, one of the outer suburbs near Parramatta. And he had this broom factory, Federal Brooms I think they called

it then, something like that, and Tommy was just making a living off that. But he was an Irishman and he was a bit of a pusher, and he went out into the bush and somehow or another he cornered the millet market. Now, how he did that he doesn’t know, but crops failed and all the rest of it and all of a sudden he was the only bloke in Sydney

with the millet. And this little factory suddenly boomed and became Federal Brooms and all the rest of it, and he got so big that he used to have an annual trip over to Japan to import the millet from Japan, take his brooms overseas sell them all over the place and have a very god time. But I don’t think he black marketed at all because it was too ordinary a thing. But you would hear about people and you’d know people in the game who had cornered the potato market

or cornered some other market and you would see them driving around. Well, they didn’t have fancy cars back in those days, but there were no Holdens on the road then, they hadn’t even started, but there were Fords and Oldsmobiles and thing like that, and, you know, they did very well for themselves. And the same with tobacco and the same with beer, and there was always somebody with an edge who could get you, a bit of extra money, you could get a bit of extra ration of beer and cigarettes. Cigarettes were terrible. I remember

Wild Woodbines, they used to call them “coffin nails.” And they really were, they cough after every puff. But anyhow, that’s all that you really heard. Sydney had, oh, blackouts, only when the Japanese subs came around. And I lived at Rose Bay, near to where the flying boats come in. That’s what gave me my first love of flying boats, that’s what I finished up on. And the Rose Bay golf links, the Royal Sydney golf links were

just opposite where I lived, in Latimer Road. And of course going to Narrabeen every weekend, I was on the Manly ferry, the last Manly ferry to go back to Sydney when I was in the Army coming back from leave, and that was the ferry that the mini-sub [submarine] followed in through the big boom gate. Sydney Harbour had a great net across it for the boom gate, to let the ships backwards and forwards, and that boom gate was around about

before you got to the zoo, but anyway right across the harbour. And I was sitting in the back of the ferry reading Noel Langley’s Cage me a peacock, which was a very risqué novel to read in those days, but it was, reading that, and I could hear “kaboom, kaboom”, depth charges going off. And a couple of mates were with me and said, “Oh, it’s the Navy having a few trials.” But it was getting closer and closer and as we’d gone through the boom gate, but evidently this sub was underneath us and got through the boom gate that way.

That particular time was when I was in the pig pens out there recuperating from a bad knee. And we got out of Circular Quay, get on the tram, got onto Anzac Parade, got to the showgrounds and I was, I had graduated from the pig pens up to the Commemorative Pavilion which stood there. And the Commemorative Pavilion had 500 iron beds in it, side by side by side by side

on a concrete floor and everybody coughing and spluttering all over the place, and that was a, that’s where you recuperated from colds and diseases and all the rest of [them], everybody in together. And we got into bed there and all of a sudden the sirens went. And there was a bang down on the harbour and that’s when the Japanese sub let a torpedo go and tried to hit the SS Chicago, missed that

and hit the little training ship that happened to be there at the time. Well, three stories arose from that. I had two surf club mates who that night had been AWOL [absent without leave] for four or five days. And they were on the, I think it was the Kuttabul, the training ship on the harbour that got hit by the torpedo, they were standing on the wharf there to wait for the boat to take them out to their training ship

to confess to their CO [commanding officer] and all the rest of it and take their punishment, and all of a sudden their training ship goes up in the air. And being surfies and quick-witted, one said to the other, “Quick, follow me,” dived into the water, swam out towards the training ship, stood there, put their hands up in the air and said, “Help, help, help,” and they picked up the two survivors on this boat that had blown up that they hadn’t been on at all. They got the purple heart [award] from that, the Yanks gave them the purple heart, because they were brave survivors.

That’s story number one. Story number two, there was some official officer there at the showground ordered us out, and it was, oh, a drizzly, rainy night and there was not too well and the AIF contingent was telling him in loud voices what he could do and where he could go and all the rest of it, and he’s ordering people to go in the slit trenches. And I know there was one fellow standing beside me and he said, “Slit trenches? You stupid bastard! Full of water, don’t go in there.

Follow me.” And we jumped in, splash, full of water, every body laughed and went back to bed. And the third thing that happened about that was the blackouts started in Sydney. I was going back home where my mum was in a unit near the Rose Bay golf links. There was one wounded: the neighbour next door was out late around at home, missed the gutter, slipped over, wrecked his ankle;

that was the only person wounded from that sortie, except the Rose Bay golf links got one shell in it, which went off, bang. They had a new bunker and that was the end of that. But the good thing about it was my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, or the person who became my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, they went up and down the harbour front, just past Kings Cross there in Rushcutters Bay, and the flats were empty.

Everybody in those flats just fled to get away from the danger zone. And he was still renting that flat at 12 shillings a week 5 years later because they had rent controls, beautiful flat, 12 shillings a week, “Going to stay here for the next war.” But that was Sydney in those days. But it wasn’t much different to London. I went over to London, there was still people there that say, “Hey, Aussie, do you want to buy this cheap or that cheap or...?” There was always people making the best they could out of a bad situation.

But he, there was a lot of fun and games going on, and politically it was, I never got to the bottom of that, or the Brisbane Line or anything else. The Brisbane Line of course was a device for politicians to save their own neck and themselves. The problem with the Brisbane Line was they drew this funny line from behind Brisbane and cut out all the big centres of population and got the Japanese to agree to it.

But they could see the whole of Australia except for these few important areas, mainly where the politicians came from. But there was an inquiry into the Brisbane Line. We never found out who was responsible for it, I think a famous Queenslander had something to do with it but I don’t know, I don’t know.

Well, the city wasn’t too bad because it was brand new and we needed them, and when you need somebody they are always your friends. But, you know, they came over and they had too much of everything. The things we didn’t have they had in plentiful supply, the PX stores, go to the PX stores,

were full of the things that were rationed, people couldn’t get hold of at all. And they became very popular with everybody, very popular with the girls, very popular with lots of people, can get things from them you couldn’t get elsewhere. But by and large they were all right. But the early Yanks were good, because the early Yanks that came were mainly the volunteer Yanks. The big difference between the volunteer Yanks and the Yanks that got called up towards the end of the war, I was over in England

when the, just before the Second Front when they were building up with everything they could get, and there was some horrors over there and, you know, they were ferals hunting in mobs to see what they could get from anybody. And, you know, the muggings and robbings and things like that were, you know, hard to control, particularly in Wales where I was. The barracks there, that was, I acquired a little

Austin A7 to drive around in, we used to go from Pembroke Dock to one of the neighbouring towns of a night, and these Yanks would stand across the road to try and stop you. And many a time you pressed right through the lot of them, because if they stopped you, you know, you might come out alive, you might come out with a broken arm or something, but it was on for young and old over there. But sometimes,

but that’s the way it was, you know. I’ve seen Canadians over there in some of the coastal towns, one of the coastal towns where we were diverted to one night in bad weather at Pembroke Dock, so we pulled in at Bournemouth and was there, and they’ve got huge belts, huger belt buckles than I had. And they were bollings [?], I don’t know who they were, friends or enemies, down at Bournemouth, with these belts, 20 or 30 of them, what happened to these fellows,

if there was anything left of them I don’t know. But they [had] that kind of violence. Well, it was war time. It was on, it was on. It was a different world. That world is gone now and if you didn’t live at that time you will never understand it, you won’t understand it, nobody will understand it unless you were there and did it. Unless you were there day after day after day after day and, irrespective of what you thought, the next day you’ve still

got to go out and do it again. Now, think of the boys in Bomber Command. Every time they went out, 15 per cent didn’t come back. They’d come back, saddle up, two nights later they’d go and do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and eventually you become a raving lunatic, to go out and do it again. And if you survive, what’s left of you was sent home.

You know, it’s, you’ve got to have experienced it all to, I don’t know how we survived but we did. And that was the main thing, the criterion over there was survival. And as far as I was personally concerned, I learnt the lesson very quick of survival. You’ve got to be better than the others. So I tried to make myself better than the others, and the others were the people you were going to

fight against, shoot against and fight against. You’ve got to be better than the others, that’s the only way you can survive. My 12 members of the crew, I made sure they were bloody better than the others, too. Because a crew of 12 we flew together, we went on leave together, and if anything went wrong, if anybody made a mistake, we died together too, and we knew that. So our total world was each other in that crew

during that 12 months of operational flying. Don’t talk about King or Queen or country or anything like that, we were there to survive, and in surviving we had to kill a lot of people and do what we had to do. That’s what we were there for, that was our job, that’s what we were trained to do. And we did it very well. I’d hate to go back there again.

London, you’ve got to take your hat off to the British people. They were bombed day after day after day after day after night. I was with them on leave and the bombing was going on and on and on and on and on, and they didn’t give in; they were still cheerful, they still had their jug of beer, they still, the girls chased the boys, the boys chased the girls. Everybody had a wonderful time and it wasn’t that,

you know, “eat, drink and make merry for tomorrow we die” kind of attitude; it was just pugnaciousness right to the very end carried them through. And when I saw the screaming that went on, well, when I compare the screaming that went on, poor little Midget submarine and that mother ship outside threw three shells into Sydney, and I thought to myself,

“God help us if Sydney experienced what London experienced.” I don't, I think that the probability is that in the first place the Londoners’ reaction was the same as the Sydney’s reaction; the first time it happened it was mayhem, chaos. But even in chaos there is order and certain things carry you through. But their war cops in London that I have seen on the beat, during the bombing, helping the wounded people and all the rest of it, [were] the greatest heroes I’ve ever seen, but they were going out and doing it, and they were

doing it the next night and the next night, and that’s their job. There are firemen in London there, again, doing the same thing, night after night after night. And whilst they are doing that there is 1,000 aircraft going overhead to bomb Germany. And if you ever want to see a sight that will either frighten you or impress you, walk past Hyde Park during wartime and see

1,000 rockets go up in the air to meet the German bombers, walking down Piccadilly and going from the one watering hole [drinks bar] to another watering hole. And a mate and I heard a rattle that was steel on tin, and that was the shrapnel coming down, and we were in the theatre district and an old bloke came and said, “Do you two want to get killed?” And I said, "Not particularly.” “Here, come with me,” and he took us down to the dungeons underneath the theatre

and we had, opened a bottle of something and we had a few drinks. And he had all the copies of the stage shows, Noel Coward and all the rest of his stage shows that were there, and he had been a bit of an actor. And instead of walking amongst the bombs and the shrapnel outside we spent a lovely night there, drinking his whisky and hearing the stories of the stage shows

that had come through that particular theatre. Quite happy. Driving through the fog in Wales going to a lovely place called, or trying to find a lovely place called Llanelly and going through Monmouth, they got lost, I didn’t know where the hell I was and pulled up at the side of the road, and it was real comfortable, and slept, and about

half an hour later I woke up, and there was a little lantern there with a bobby [policeman] on his bike saying, “Hello, hello, hello, who have we got here?”, and produced the identity card and he’s giving me a stern lecture and all the rest of it. And I give him a bit of cheek back and he said, “That’s enough of that, young fellow, you come with me.” So I went with him, luckily to his cottage, which was only half a mile away,

and he jumped in the seat and gave me a feed of bacon and eggs and a cup of coffee and all the rest of it, and I had a bit of a snooze and all the rest of it. And a couple of hours later he said, “You look a lot better now, on your way, on your way.” That was Dartshire [?], but those incidents were you know, they were little gems because we didn’t deserve that kind of treatment for that type of conduct, but we got it from time to time.

But the Australian flashes on the shoulder, they were a passport to anywhere. We had a lady over there in England, Lady Frances Ryde of the Islands, and I saw a thing on the noticeboard somewhere saying that she was interested to meet colonial gentlemen. And I asked my mentor, a fellow on the squadron with me, Marsh Godsall, who was much older

than I was, and he was a practising solicitor up at Toowoomba before he joined up, and about Lady Frances of Ryde, he seemed to know all. “Oh, go and see her, Norman, go and see her, she is a lovely lady,” he said. So I went and saw her, made an appointment and went in there and learnt how to balance a cup of tea and some watercress sandwiches on the knees and all the rest of it, and had a talk to her.

And what she did, she made country homes available to dominion officers for 7, 14 days during their leave. We used to get 17 days’ leave every 3 months and what you did with the leave was up to you, and we used to go and book in the at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, and when I say “we”, the members of he crew and myself. And we’d go there and the first thing we’d do at the Strand Palace Hotel is to go down to the

barber shop down the bottom and have the lot. There was the girls doing the fingers and the nails and the boys there, and even pedicures, and getting the hair done, shave, the whole lot, you’d get the lot done, and then you are ready to go out and have a few drinks and see what was on the shows and all the rest of it. And

after you had too much to eat and too much to drink and got too dizzy chasing girls around you’d ring up Lady Frances Ryde of the Islands and say, “Can you get me in somewhere?” And she’d say, “Where are you?” And then you’d get a telegram two days later: “You are invited to be the guest of Colonel Waley-Cohen.” I remember him, he was ex-High Court judge, India, retired, and he had

about 300 acres, 400 acres property, a place called Chichester, and I went down there. Well, that was heaven, that was the place, 500 acres or 3 or 400 acres, he was fully self-sufficient with food and he had a full staff, a house staff and a game staff, and he used to go out shooting for the grouse and you’d eat the grouse. And you’d have early morning tea, morning tea, breakfast,

and breakfast was a matter of walking into their dining room and there’d be a sideboard, from memory 100 yards long, with terrines of all these things you could ever wish for for breakfast, with spirit lamps underneath. Helped yourself there and then you’d have elevenses, then you’d have lunch, and then you’d have afternoon tea. Then you’d have tea, then you’d have supper. That’s 88 meals a day, and in between times you had to

keep yourself busy. It was a wonderful place, they were great people. And the thing I noticed about that area, there was a lot of Italian POWs [prisoners of war] released working on the farms through there. So I went down to the local dance hall one night, and the Italian POWs, they were young and they were a very attractive race, and you couldn’t get a dance off the floor. The Italians had all the girls there, they had a wonderful time.

But they were the Italians that [were] captured in North Africa, [brought] back to England. A lot of them never returned to Italy, they had too good a time there in England. But that was a, there was the seedy side of life, too. You’d get up to Soho and we had a favourite pub [public house, bar] called the Chez Moi and that was in Jermyn Street, up behind Regent Place somewhere or

another, and you used to go to clubs because for a funny reason the pubs used to shut. And they used to shut at very awkward times, they used to shut in the afternoon, I don’t know, I forget, they used to shut. When you wanted to go to the pubs they were shut. So we went to these clubs, and these clubs were just places that provided you with bottled beer and the dancing

and a bit of singing and what have you, and dance of course, never forget the dance. Down the Windmill Club, that’s the place that never closed, where the young ladies used to divest themselves of their clothes and stand like statues, they wouldn’t allow them to move, and that was the idea. So the job was, when you got into the Windmill, to detect the first one that moved in the background. There was all these statues in the background. But we could never find [one] that moved. But across the road there was the Windmill Club and up there was the famous dart game. And if you wanted to lose five pounds quickly, just challenge a Pom [Pommy, English person] to play darts. All over the place. The money was on pinpoint accuracy.

The, I had a hard job to get into the Air Force because I had a busted knee. And I went to a recruiting centre, which is down near Riley Street in Sydney,

and the doctor there had a look at me and said, “We are not going to take you into the Air Force just to fix up that knee, you go back to work.” And, as I said before, I went back to work but they required me to go and see a specialist up in Sydney. I went and saw a specialist and he put me on a course of physiotherapy, which I did. And then he told me, he said to me, “When is the next call-up date?” And it happened to be on the 10th of October. My birthday is on the 12th of October so I went in the

10th October, got a call-up and he said, “Before you go in let’s....” I think it was on a Saturday and he said it on a Friday: “You go and walk around Sydney,” and he gave me a map of Sydney, “You go here and go there and all the rest of it, and you walk for two hours along those pavers up and down hills, and come back and show me your knee.” So I did that and I came back and everything was all right, and of course he passed me and I went on the 10th of October. They still gave you those confounded

exercises when you go in there, when you’ve got to step on a chair, up and down and up and down with both legs; well, I cheated, I didn’t step up with the bad knee, and got through and into a bus and out to Bradfield Park. Now, Bradfield Park is just over the bridge just to the north of Sydney on the Pacific Highway, and we got out at Bradfield Park and there was 30, 32 of us to a hut, all new to the Air Force. I had a look around, didn’t know anybody there

except one bloke that I recognised who had been a champion hurdler at Sydney High School. Moved down as far into the hut, but anyhow you got to know your fellow bedfellows pretty well. And then comes the drill sergeant and away you go at Bradfield Park. Now, Bradfield Park was a funny place because there was a what they call a category selection board there.

When you go into the Air Force, into aircrew, and, as I say, I was aircrew, you’ve got to be up to Matriculation standard in mathematics. Some part of Physics and a lot of the boys who weren’t up to that standard were given 24 lessons, they had t o take them home and they used to send the answers in to see whether they passed or not. I done honours maths for the Matriculation and then somehow or another

I remembered the general association, the general quadratic equation, don’t ask me what it is now. But they asked me what the general solution to the general quadratic equation was and I just blurted that out. And that was it; I didn’t have to do my 24 lessons. And so we went in and we had lots of ground subjects and mainly those ground subjects which are the basis of navigation and the understanding of how an airplane flies, what makes it fall out of the air, engines and that sort of nature. But the

whole idea of those ground subjects was to sort you out to see whether you were the proper people to be a pilot or a navigator or a wireless operator, air gunner, etc., or to be kicked out as ground staff. So it was pretty competitive. The other thing that they did, they used to march you around and drill you hour after hour after hour, to get your

reflexes to see whether you have got the correct reflexes or not. Also had an odd machine which was like an airplane, set of controls in a room, and they threw a light on a wall and they’d have a guard light to go all over the place, and you had to follow it in a pattern, and if you follow it in a pattern that means that your reflexes were good enough to be a pilot, that was the theory anyway. But anyhow, all these things went on and it was

about 10 weeks I think we spent there. And the big day came when you went up for your category selection, and that was your group of officers sitting there and asking you all the oddest questions in the world. And the, I know I went in there and you had to crash your foot down and salute and have the hand quivering and all the rest of it, and they said, “Oh, you are doing, you were doing law before you...?” “That’s right.” “You didn’t do very

well with your legal paper,” that’s in the Air Force law, military law. “I didn’t join up to do law, I joined up to fly.” Anyway, that was the right answer anyway.

Well, they used to ask geographical questions: “If you wanted to go from here to here which train would you catch?”, you know, and I don’t know, it was like the Navy. I tried to get in the Navy, too; it’s lucky I didn’t get in the Navy.

Because I had a friend called Noel Sanderson who was at Sydney High School at 14 as a midshipman entrance at 15. He went there and I struck him on the troop ship going over to England, and he was a full naval lieutenant and he was on the, was it the Canberra that got blown up in the Coral Sea battle? And he was a gunnery officer in the gunnery tower.

He said, “Everyone in the bridge got blown up,” he said, and he said, “You apply for a job and the guy that got that job was an administration officer, he got blown up on the bridge. If you had got the job you would, you know, ‘good night, nurse’.” But they used to ask very strange questions like, “Any of your relatives ever been an officer in the Navy?” If you said “no” you were out, if you said “yes” they’d ask you more. And of course I had a grandfather who was a chief warrant officer.

“Oh,” said one of the fellows, “Where was he at?” And I says, “He was at Launceston.” “Not that bloody Oz Kennedy?” Evidently, he was a WOD [warrant officer disciplinary], disciplinary, and had done the wrong [thing] by this particular officer to get through to him. “Goodbye,” as far as the Navy was concerned, as far as I was concerned. But these blokes were not as bad as that in the Air Force but they asked questions that, you know, “Which suburb of Sydney would be the best suburb to live in?” And

“What do you think of certain characters in politics?” Those kind of questions. Got nothing to do, I suppose it had a psychological, you know, they gave the psychological imprint of what the guard on the other side of this was thinking, but this wouldn’t do. “Why do you think you would make a good pilot?” “Because I am too big to be an air gunner,” was my answer.

“We could fit you in,” they said. “A bit of a squeeze, I think.” But anyhow I got through that. And then when you got through that you got posted to a military flying school, Tiger Moths at Narrandera. And I went there to Narrandera and Narrandera was the same thing: if you didn’t solo that Tiger Moth in 8 hours you were kicked out, you were scrubbed. And after that if you couldn’t do a fly roll in a Tiger Moth or two fly rolls

you were scrubbed. So I was very bad at fly rolls and I used to hand upside down and pray that the thing would flip over again, and it did.

To not think about it. You start thinking in an aircraft you’re dead. If you want to do a slow roll you know what the movement is, do it. If you hesitate or are hesitant or show a lack of confidence, you do it wrong. It’s like golf: if you think what you are doing in golf

you are doing it wrong. You get out there and enjoy the game and think, “I’ll hit this little ball,” and it will go far. I don’t know, it’s the, you’ve got to train the nervous system and muscles. You think, “Let them do it,” because if you try to think every action you do, “This way, that way with the joystick,” you are done, you are lost every time. Just

the Sunderland aircraft, there is 14 crew, there’s 4 motors, there, it weighs 30-odd tons, it’s a huge flying machine, you are skipper of that, you have got to know what every person is doing, what they are doing and all the rest of it the whole time. You’ve got to keep it, sometimes you are flying at 50 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, sometimes you are at the cloud base, the radar is going, all the reports are coming in.

The last thing you’ve got time to think about is flying it. If you don’t do it subliminally you are no good. Sublimation is the trick of flying.

There were three that didn’t, and those that didn’t, I remember a fellow, young fellow, they were all young, by this time I was 19.

I turned 19 two days after I got into the Air Force and I had my 20th birthday flying operations over the Bay of Biscay. My 21st birthday I was instructor up in Alness teaching other people how to fly. But it’s a composite thing, flying. It’s the 8 1/2 hours is what the rule book said; if you can’t go solo in 8 1/2 hours there’s no use worrying about it, you can’t do it.

That’s a lot of nonsense because if you give it another couple of hours you’d probably be a better pilot than most. But you’ve got to learn that trick of doing it for the thing, absolutely got to learn that trick, and nobody teaches that trick, nobody says that. It’s just do it, like you are doing a waltz and all the rest of it. It subliminal, like when you are driving a car you don’t think about driving a car, do you? You just do it. If you want to stop you just do it.

You don’t think, “I got to do this that and the other.” You start thinking that way, then you’ll have a crash. It’s just one of those things.

Well, one of them as a friend said, “Look, if you freeze on those controls,” he was in the front seat, I was in the back seat, “If you freeze on those controls like somebody did to me three months ago, I’ll pull this bloody

joystick out and hit you over the head with it, knock you unconscious, until you let go of that joystick, and I’ll put it back again. But,” he said, “that’s the hard trick, because there is a straight pin that goes in that way; once you get it out it’s hard to get it back in.” And I said, "Well, you must have done it once, because you did it once before,” and he said, "I was lucky, I was lucky.” No, they were good. But they, you know, you had several of them.

You went in flight, up at Narrandera you had, Narrandera was a lovely flat country, there is no hill, there was a little hill there, but there are no mountains there to crash into, and the weather was lovely, not too bad, it’s a lovely place to learn to fly because no matter what happens there’s a flat paddock, not too many buildings, not too many telephone lines and things like that. “Did you see our Tiger Moth out there? There’s a Snoopy in it this morning.” We had an

empty Tiger Moth up there for months and month and months, and one of the girls said, “I’ve got a spare Snoopy as the Red Baron,” and I said, "Well, put it in the Tiger Moth.” But anyhow, that training school, what they did there was not only teach you how to fly, but they had to select who of those people that could fly were going on to single-engine fighter pilot, or those that were going on to be multi-engine pilots. Now, the people who

thought whilst they were flying went onto multi engines. That was me; I went onto multi-engine. Those people who were, purely did it naturally and were, they went onto fighters, because fighters, things, it happens so fast. This Noel Sanderson in the Navy, he made a study of it. He had a few battles. Up there in the Coral Sea battle he was wiped off his ship and all the rest of it, and he said

to us, words of wisdom from the young, “Don’t worry about what happens because it happens so bloody quick you won’t even know it.” And that’s the truest words I’ve ever received: if it’s going to happen it will happen so bloody quick you will never know. And that’s the way it was. But anyhow, back at Narrandera, we had this fellow who had a good voice at the back of the hut, and we used to throw

pillows at him because he used to sing at night-time when other people wanted to sleep. And there was a popular song called Tangerine, “Tangerine she was all they claim”, and he used to sing that. And Narrandera’s got a beautiful big swimming pool, there was a diversion at Mulwala, the canal out of the Murray River, and that takes all the irrigation water out to Griffith,

and they feed off that into a great big swimming area at Narrandera. And they had the high tower and all the rest of it there at the swimming, and we had swimming races at Narrandera also there. And being a surf club fellow I was into those kind of things and.... But this fellow, I forget his name now, we were underneath this tower one day and one of my mates who was for ever drawing attention to himself, showing off,

he gets up on the high towers 30 feet above and does a reasonable dive and in and out and everybody claps and cheers and all the rest of it, and my little fellow Jack came, Jack Wiley came up to me and said, “It’s your go, Norm.” And I said, "No way. I’m not going to jump off that, I’ll break my bloody neck if I go off that, I’m not stupid.” And this other little fellow, the singer, said, “I’ll have a go, I’ll have a go,” and I said, "Don’t have a go, it’s too bloody high for you, too.” He was only a little fellow. And I said,

“Jack’s....” This Jack Wiley, he was not a professional diver but he used to got to diving championships all around the country and I knew that, and he could do it, and he was quite a good diver. “I’ll go up and do it,” said this fellow. And I said, “Well, if you do it, don’t dive, come down feet first, it doesn’t matter which way you do it, come down feet first.” Because he was a funny fellow and you knew there was something, something would go wrong if he tried it. Anyway, he

jumped in feet first.. Then he lay down in the sun there and because, “Why didn’t I dive, why didn’t I dive?”, going around and round in his mind, you know. “You are mad, mate.” He dived, he didn’t dive because it was the sensible thing to do. And I said, “Don’t take any notice of what Jack does, or what I do; do what’s good for yourself,” and he said, "No, I don’t know.” And I said, "Look, you’re not afraid of heights,” you know, pressing on, “and afraid when you get up there, are you?” And he didn’t answer, and it was; that was his problem.

He killed himself two days later, because that was the day he had to do solo spins. And the instructor would say, “Righto, you’ve gone solo, there’s the Tiger Moth, climb up to 5,000 feet and I want to see you do at least four spins before you pull out,” and, you know, you are taught what to do and all the rest of it. Evidently he climbed up to 5,000 feet and kicked it over and stalled it and kicked it over into a spin,

never pulled out of it, never pulled out. And it was all, and there was no way of telling that, except somehow or another I sensed that he was afraid of heights because he, the nonsense with the 30-metre tower. But there are other guys wiped themselves out there too, flying mainly to see how close you can get to that head or that tractor or this, that and the other, and you just make an error

of judgment. See, the air is not stable, it goes up and it goes down, like everything else, and if you hit a windshear it forces you down and boom, you’re dead. But, as Noel Sanderson said, it happens so quickly you never know what hits you.

Well, you had to learn how to start the motor because you’ve got chocks under the wheels, you have to spin the propeller yourself, and if you didn’t put the chocks under the wheels it would chase you

and you had to run backwards because it would chop you up, and there were quite a few people that had lost a finger or two fingers, the spinning of the prop. And you had to learn how to taxi it around because you had no brakes, the Tiger Moth had no brakes, so you had to keep it under control. You had to learn the weather, you had to know exactly where the wind is blowing from and to, you had to know the feel of the aircraft when it wants to fly,

there is a certain vibration that goes through it. You had to take off when you got this instructor bloke sitting in front of you and he’s a got a little tube he yells down, you got a couple tubes near your ears, the earphones on, he’d swear at you and go crook when you do this and he’d climb up to such-and-such, he’d teach you how to climb, and you got to, there’s motor settings for all these things and you got to climb up and you do the right one turn or to the left, port to starboard, and you’d do this, that and the other. And he’d teach you

how to do a loop-the-loop and gliding, a stall and various things like that, but mainly how to fly straight and level and keep a course, because the main thing about an aircraft [is] you’ve got to get from A to B, you’ve got to know how to do it, you’ve got to get up to a certain level, hold that altitude, hold that speed, and hold that course. And it didn’t help

because we didn’t have many instruments in the Tiger Moth, but anyhow we did it. We had a navigation exercise from Narrandera and from Narrandera you had to take off and fly to three points up to almost to Wagga, up to Temora and back home to Narrandera, well that was easy, there is a train line that goes to Wagga, so you follow the train line but from Wagga to

Temora it was a bit different because there’s only a dusty road that goes there. But from Temora to Narrandera it’s just back roads through there, so that was difficult except you just fly until you see the river. When you see the river you are at Narrandera, you’ve gone past Narrandera or you haven’t hit Narrandera; there are certain things you see if you haven’t hit Narrandera, there are certain things you don’t see if you have gone past Narrandera. So you soon

learn how to go about and do it. So the navigator used to say, the navigation officer at Narrandera used to say he could find his way around Australia from the smell of the country outhouses underneath him. I couldn’t believe that. But we had a great event happen at Narrandera. The first WAAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] arrived, and we had two public lectures from the CO how we have got to behave and look after these ladies who volunteered to join the Air Force.

Now, we are going back a long time, we are going back to 1940, ’42, just ’43 and the acceptance of females in the Air Force wasn’t 100 per cent in those days. And we were told how to behave ourselves and what he would do if we wouldn’t and all the rest of it, so it was a non-event actually because they put them to blazes, in huts to blazes way over there and we only saw them in the kitchen. We didn’t see any flying, oh no,

we saw some of them following the parachutes and things like that. It was quite some time before they assimilated properly right through it. I reckon they did a wonderful job. They flew the airplanes, they did the lot over there, they did a wonderful job.

Yeah, like a dream.

I told the flying instructor it was just like a dream and he said, “You better stop bloody dreaming or you’ll finish up dead.” Oh no, it was just like floating around, just like a dream, it was great. And that was before, January, February, the hot weather evidently hadn’t hit us because when the hot weather, it was no dream at all, it was bumping around all over the place. Those Tiger Moths used to bucket around in those,

in the updraft and all the rest of it, they’d bucket around all over the place, and you’d have to get up to about 8 or 9,000 feet to get up into smooth air. And of course they wouldn’t go that high, they wouldn’t go that high.

One of my mates used to have a bucket of water waiting for him every time he landed and he’d have to clean out the cockpit. He’d throw up every time. But he survived, they gave him pills and things like that, he eventually survived it and when he got out of the little aircraft

and onto multi-engine flying, in the bigger aircraft you’re right. See, up at Bundaberg, the last thing we did at Narrandera, we had to do some night flying in a Tiger Moth. Now, that was a thing, because the airfield didn’t have any lights, so they found a nice flat paddock and they got the little tar bowls with all the lights on it

and put about 10 of them in a line down there, and that was the flare path, no other light in sight. And the secret of doing a night circuit in a Tiger Moth is quite simple, if you stay calm and cool and all the rest of it, and that is never lose sight of the lights, that’s number one. And as soon as you leave the ground you start doing a rate one turn to the left,

just a nice 10-degree turn to the left, and you keep on doing it, keep on doing it, keep on doing it, and all of a sudden the lights will appear in front of you again, and you come on down. And of course you’ve got to go up and down at the same time. But that happened at, one of my mates mucked up his landing, they pulled him up out of the aircraft before it went up in flames. But he was lucky we got him out. Apart from that everything was good. And once you’ve done your one circuit, that’s it, you go home, and they just certify

that you could go night flying on a Tiger Moth. Then up to Bundaberg. And of course once you did that, you were an AC2 [aircraftsman second class], when you were doing all this you became an LAC, leading aircraftsman, and your pay went up to about 12 shillings a day, which was quite good in those days seeing as you were fed and everything. Up to Bundaberg we went and Bundaberg was

quite good because we had those, we had twin-engine aircraft up there and that was a different game altogether. Where we had one of everything before, we now had two of everything. When I got into a Sunderland, instead of having two of everything, you had four of everything. So that was the end of it. We had the old Ansons. The trouble with the Ansons was, the English, being kind-hearted, gave Australia about 20

Avro Ansons in 1938 I think it was. And I’ve seen photos in the Sydney papers of them, these wonderful new bombers coming to Australia. The problem with them [was] they didn’t have any hydraulics on them, and to get the wheels up you had to wind them up, and to get the flaps down you had to pump them down. So you are flying along in a circuit and you take up, you’ve got to wind up the wheels, and look out the front

and turn to the left, and adjust the throttle and do those kind of things. So you go back to what I just said before, you start doing a rate one turn and turn in a circuit like that, but do all the right things. On the downward leg, you’ve got to see that you are the right distance away from the runway. You had to pull the throttles off, because if the wheels were up and you pull the throttles off a warning horn went beep in your ear. The first time you did it

it frightened the pants off you, but you got used to that. Then you put it back again and down goes the wheels and you had to pull it back, no beep, they’re down, you hope. But then you had to do your base leg, and as soon as you do your base leg, you had to start losing height, down to about 600 feet for your final leg, down goes the flaps. You still there? Down goes the flaps. And of course as you let the flaps down, push them down too far, you’ve got to push them up, you just released it, and when you do it

they go up and you’ve got to push them down again. It was really, you know, exciting, real exciting. But we got used to it.

Well, everything went wrong with the Ansons. The worst thing that can go wrong in an airplane is if you lose a motor on take-off. And we were told that an Anson will not fly on one motor on take-off. I made one fly on one motor on take-off,

because bowling down that runway, and all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom, the starboard motor goes. I looked up and I think, “I can’t pull up I’ll go crashing straight into those bloody trees. I got to go.” So even though that motor was making, both motors went straight through the gate I had open and I held it down and cleared the trees by 20 feet, I did the famous rate one turn around like that, very slowly around, and I see some and boom!

They’ll keep on walking through there.

Yeah. Well, I caused a consternation because we had to do a night solo cross-country from Bundaberg down to Maryborough, from Maryborough down to Childers or some place right in there, and back to Bundaberg, and that was a night solo across-country.

At Bundaberg at the same time there was a group of Beaufighter planes, anti-submarine planes carrying 250-pound bombs. And I was lined up, there was a Beaufighter lined up to take off on the runway. And, as I said, I was all on my own, sitting there waiting for this bloody great plane to get off and watched it take off, climb up, lose a motor

turn over like that, go straight to the ground, kill everybody, boom, up in flames. One of the bombs, boom, up went the petrol tank, fire, and the poor devils, they didn’t have a chance that were in it. And there was I, I was next, I had to take off and do my cross-country. There was a knock at the back door, the Anson had a back door, I travelled back

and there was the CFI [Chief Flying Instructor]: “You right? You right?” He said, “Change runways, you can’t fly over that.” So we changed runways and I took off and went down to Maryborough. And down at Maryborough, for some unknown reason, the, I just pushed the nose down and turned left and I was in a hurry, and whoosh, a plane went north going past me.

And that was a plane, I believe it was a plane with people coming up north that were, report of the Beaufort going in had reached them and they were going north for an enquiry. And there was nearly.... Oh, no formal enquiry on that. But anyway, went around the circuit, and the CFI said, “Well, luckily

both bombs went off when that plane hit the ground,” and I said, "One bomb is still unexploded. As I sat there I watched it. Petrol went, bomb went, second bomb didn’t go,” so I had an argument about that, and I said, "Look, I am not going near the bloody place.” He wanted to get, this was the next day, he wanted to get a mob out there to clean up the mess, and I said, "There is an unexploded bomb there. You should [get] the people to get the unexploded bomb out.” But anyhow that was the end of that, they got the unexploded bomb out.

Well, Bundaberg is a wonderful place, you know, it’s a big town. Its main claim to fame is that the troop trains going to Townsville used to pull up there and rewater. So if you were in Bundaberg when the troop trains pulled up there, and the AIF came there, the first thing you were waiting for was the first guy to serve, sight the first pub down Bourbong Street. And all of a sudden there was a crowd at this pub,

come the crowd down the first pub, then the second, then the third, then the fourth, then the fifth, I think there are 30 pubs in Bundaberg. We tried to do a pub crawl there one night but didn’t succeed. And they’d all go. And the train would start whistling for the boys to, “Don’t worry we’ll be able to catch the train.” I don’t know what the fellows did, didn’t realise there was a bridge. Now, it’s very hard to run across that bridge, the poor old train had to stop there until they filled them up again, and away they went. But it was a

great event. And it had Bargara Beach, and the pub at Bargara, I think it got burnt down about 3 or 4 times, but every time we could we used to go to Bargara. And it had a very new, hospitable golf club there and the golf club used to put on dances and events and things like that, so Bundaberg was very good.

Well, we used to get time off of a weekend,

we’d go out to Bargara, they’d have nice buses going out there. And we got made honorary members out there, a few of us that played golf were made honorary members, we used to go out there, enjoy a game of golf. And of course they had a bar, and they had very attractive members and they were very good company.

Well, mainly not get lost. The thing to do on a cross-country is to keep a log on your knee and just have your time of take-off and your time of, you have a map which you’ve pre-prepared, and the pre-prepared map has got a mark every 10 nautical miles for a Tiger Moth, you try

to locate where you are every 10 nautical miles, take the time you get there, and then you work out what your ground speed is. And it’s not your airspeed that counts; your airspeed is very important to keep you up in the air, but it’s not very important to let you know where you are, because it’s your ground speed that counts. And if you’ve got a, you know, the old Tiger Moths used to fly at about 70 knots, and if you had a 10-knot head wind then it’s only 70 knots over the ground. And you’d have a navigation exercise, which means to say you are able to show when you get back, from your log and the marks on your map, that you know where you have been

all the time, and you got to place on the ETA [estimated time of arrival], worked out an ETA for the next -- for Temora, we had to land at Temora, climb up the steps at control tower, report in, have something to eat at the airport and go and take off and report back. And the tower at Temora was reporting back to Narrandera the time that everybody arrived there. Anybody that got lost and landed out in the

bush, well, the search parties went out for them afterwards. And quite a few did, too, but the orientation, it’s an exercise in orientation, to know where you are all the time, and you got to know where you are all the time. When it come, it comes to you, see, when I was flying in the Sunderlands, down at the Bay of Biscay, the first time I went out there, that’s 14, 15 hours out to the sea, we used to go from

from the edge of England there, down to Cape Fenestra in Spain, and the only navigation we had was dead-reckoning navigation. Now, dead-reckoning navigation means you have got a course, and you hope your pilot holds that course true, that’s number one; and number two, you’ve got to find out what the wind is, so you do what’s called a three-course wind every hour. In other words, you change direction 60 degrees, 120 degrees; 60 degrees get you a drift

through the drift recorder, how do you do that? Well, you line up, navigator lines up a little sight with lines on it and runs, makes sure it’s at an angle which runs all the wave caps down it; oh, [if] there were no wave caps we’d drop a flare out the back, and the rear gunner lines up the flare and tell you how many degrees port or starboard it is. That gives you the three drifts. You do that on the little computer, the three drifts, it gives you where the wind is, the wind speed and direction, and you

put that on your map, and you alter your position and your direction in accordance with when we first went out. Around about the time of D-Day they’d given us a compass that hung off the, from the roof of the Sunderland off the tail, distance-reading compass, so there was no compass needles all over the place. They were little repeaters which showed you a precise direction

at any time, and it didn’t swing backwards and forwards, just click, click into position. You had a what they call Alarand [?] which was a device to fix your position from radio waves, and they have three stations in England, widely separated, the master separator would separate, trigger off the slave station, and you got a little cathode ray box, and you put these

signals up and you got a chart, you measured it and you got your position within about 100 metres. You had radar, and you could read the French coast like a map if you were close enough to the French coast, and I could get the French coast at night, used to lose at 90 nautical miles with the extent of the radar, and you could read the French coast, read the British coast, Welsh coast and Ireland, any time. So

by the time D-Day was there you used to come home on those directly. And of course at Pembroke Dock there was a radar beacon: you just hung on the radar beacon, not only home on the radar beacon, but you could land your aircraft there without seeing. They also gave us a radio altimeter as well, and thereby hangs a story. But they gave us these devices so that we could attack submarines at night-time, good navigational aids at the same time. Back to Narrandera,

you had none of these gadgets at all. You had an altimeter which was sometimes right, most often wrong. You had a compass needle that swung in alcohol, which you would over-read or under-read, depending on which way you were turning, and you had two parallel lines on the glass thing and you had to keep the needle parallel, like that, and just keep your head in. But, you know, you had your native intelligence: if you knew the countryside at all, looked on the map, you knew what was coming up; you looked for it, found it,

identified it and went on to the next. And that was the way it was. But no matter if you are flying in cloud or you were flying in the open day, your orientation was always important, you had to know where north was, south was, east was, west was, automatically, without knowing. And at night-time over in Europe of course they had the famous stars, the constellations. And my biggest mistake was

identifying the star Betelgeuse, which was blood red as a ship on fire at sea, but the learned navigator corrected me about that, that’s about the second or third trip out, and as a punishment I was given an astro compass. Now, there is a thing, an astro compass. Up in the astrodome is a perspex hood you have and it stood on the table and you got this little thing and you find the north star, and when you think you’ve found the north star then you put the astro compass on it, locked it on it and

that’s north, and once you know, you know where you are going. But sometimes we used to get the wrong stars up there, so.... But even had the, well, in the early days they had every aid to navigation, they even had a loop aerial, which is a funny thing, which is a

little loop out there on the side of the aircraft, it would pick up a radio signal and you’d… whether it was 30 degrees this way or that way. But once we got radar we didn’t need that at all because radar, the anti-chipping radar we got at the end, there was 360-degree coverage out to 90 nautical miles. And if we were on a submarine patrol, the job on anti-submarine patrol is to find shipping

and, whether it be submarine or any other type of shipping, investigate it and attack it. And I could be flying at 50 feet and still have 90 nautical mile coverage, all the way around. And sometimes you had to fly at 50 feet because the Sunderland was beautifully camouflaged, and out over the Bay of Biscay, the Atlantic, [for] an aircraft to see you, an aircraft could be at your height; if it was any higher

9 times out of 10 it would miss you. And the Germans, we used to fly north-south to cut the submarines and the shipping, and sometimes the Narvik destroyers who were trying to get in and out of the Channel ports, and I used to fly east and west with Junkers 88s and other photo range [?] aircraft [trying?] to shoot us down.

The Ansons. Okay.

Yeah, Bundaberg was a bit of a culture shock to get from New South Wales, Narrandera, which was the flat, dead heart of Australia, you know, that’s where the “Black Stump” [mythical boundary marker denoting the start of the Australian Outback / the end of civilisation] is and all those kind of things, up to Bundaberg. But one thing I knew about Bundaberg before I got there was that’s the place they make all the rum in the world, up at Bundaberg. And I remember when we got to Brisbane on the way to Bundaberg we had to

go off to for three or four days to some place on the coast that was an Air Force station, I forget the name of it now. But one of my mates had been in the AIF and he had been overseas in the AIF, this is one of my mates on the same course in the Air Force that I was in, and he was a pushy sergeant in the AIF, and of course he declared

himself to be an under sergeant in charge of our troop. And when we got to this Air Force station for 3 or 4 days, in walks an officer, not the WOD. Walked in, “Who’s in charge of this unit?” “I am, sir.” “But you haven’t got any rank.” “I’m the under sergeant, sir.” “Oh, what makes you sure that [you’re] under sergeant?” “I was a sergeant in the AIF, sir.” “Oh, were you now? Well, what are you doing

in the Air Force?” “Well, I thought I’d do a better job in the Air Force, sir.” “Oh,” he said, “What was your unit?” And he said what his unit was, and, “Oh, I though your unit was going up to Milne Bay?” “Yes they are, sir.” “Oh, you wanted to avoid that, did you?” And that was a bit true too, because he did want to avoid that, but mainly he wanted to become an officer; he couldn’t make officer in the AIF so he thought

it was going to be a breeze in the Air Force. So he marched us all over the place. And it was great, but mainly he used to march us with a file under his arm. And he’d march us, there was about 30 of us, around and around this camp and then down to the main gate, out the main gate and down to the main shopping area and then into the main pub, where we’d stay for an hour or two, then he’d march us out and march us back again. That went on for two or three days. It was very good, but it didn’t last forever.

And we got up to Roma Street, got on a train to Bundaberg and, lo and behold, and Roma Street, the train to Bundaberg was an end carriage and a great big, long, troop train to Bundaberg, here were the friends in the AIF all going up north, up to Townsville. And it was there that I heard these stories of the Battle of Brisbane. And the Battle of Brisbane evidently was a little bit of conflict between

the Yanks and the AIF over the just desserts of war because the boys in the AIF said it was started at some kind of a party at the PX [Post Exchange Store], the supply store that the Yanks ran, they were holding a big party and there was cigarettes and there was beer and there was spirits and there was music

and there were girls, and the AIF boys tried to get in but it was forbidden, or something for Yanks only. So they got a few reinforcements and they said it was for them, and they got in; and the Yanks got a few reinforcements and put them out. And one thing led to another and there was a bit of a biff [fist fight] went on. And the result of that was their under sergeant declared that

he was glad he got out of the AIF because he had no intention of fighting the Yanks at any time, there were other people to fight and not him. Anyway we got up to Bundaberg on this great train. Well, the train was good because it was kind of a suburban carriage, and they had no toilets and they had no water on board, but not to worry about that; it went so slow and they had to get water so often that there were plenty of stops. There were plenty of chasers, too,

from the rear of the train. And we got up to main station at Bundaberg, looked around and saw what I described a while ago: the rest of the AIF getting up and finding pubs, pubs, pubs, pubs, down the main streets. And they’d get onto a truck and around to the Air Force station, and it was very well set up. It was a few miles out of town and there were plenty of accommodation for the lot of us

and it was very efficiently run. The only difficulty there was, one of the officers in charge was a fellow by the name of Tritton, and I understand his family ran a lot of furniture stores in Brisbane or up in the coastal towns. And he was very small, he was only about 5 foot 2, 5 foot 3, and every time I marched a group of blokes along the street if he’d be on the other side I couldn’t see him, and I was pulled up once or twice

to say, “You’ve got to salute an officer, you’ve got to do this.” “Sorry, sir, I didn’t see you, sir.” This is the worst thing I could have said. So you just say, “Sorry, sir,” and take your punishment like a man. And we were introduced to these Ansons, and to me at that time they looked like a huge behemoth of a thing, and you climbed in the back door and when you got in the back door there was a funnel, and that funnel was a pissaphone [urinal],

for that purpose, and if you learned how to fly it properly and your friend ha d to go and use it by the back door and you did the right manoeuvres at the right time, you’d get it not to flow out, but to flow up, and once you know how to do that you know all about the airflow for the main plane and things like that. But you always flew together, you always flew the instructor in the right-hand seat, you sat in the left-hand seat. Not that you flew with a mate and you did all your flying together.

There was a, the course was divided into two sectors: two months of initial training, learn how to fly the confounded thing; and the other two months advanced training, learning how to use the thing operationally with smoke bombs and things like that. So we spent the first two months there learning how, the tricks of how to fly the machine and how to navigate it, we did our ground subjects, we did the other subjects.

We enjoyed the climate at Bundaberg and particularly the outside film shows down in the Bundaberg town itself, and we used to get a two- or three-day pass every month to go down and play golf at Bargara or go down the beach at Bargara. No surf there, unfortunately, but it was good enough to have a swim at. And we had a flood whilst we were there and we had to go out and help the local natives to recover all their belongings in the flood.

But unfortunately the local native residents didn’t seem to think much of the Air Force; we had very little interplay or socialisation with the local residents. And I suppose, thinking of our age, at the time we were all about 18 or 19, 20, 21, I suppose we deserved that, anyway. The flying was exhilarating. The Anson was a funny old aircraft; it was very true, it flew very well, I was able to fly it very well and

I got through the course very well indeed. There were 30 fellows, I think, on course, on my particular course, and after leaning how to fly it we went on to advanced training. And the advanced training introduced me to Mr Tritton, Flight Lieutenant Tritton. And he wasn’t a ogre at all, he was a pretty good kind of a guy, [I] got on very well with him. And there

was a very, very lively and active office assistant and I got on very well with her, too, so it was a very good period. Marsh Godsall told me the lady had a very, very good family, had lots of property in the country, so it looked like the future was all secure. But in wartime nothing is secure. Anyhow, we finished flying there, the advanced flying was low flying and flying at great height and running around with bombs,

dropping little smoke bombs on targets up and down the coast, probably all over Noosa and certainly over Maryborough. And I did have a, had to land on Fraser Island on one occasion because of engine trouble, on the beach there, and take off again, and that was all very interesting. And the, my friend Jack Wiley had to jump out because he got stuck on a navigational exercise, and when he got back to

Bundaberg there was nothing underneath him except fog so he had to jump, he had to take his aircraft over the Wide Bay and jump out. And that was no loss, the aircraft was no loss; Jack Riley got back all right. And then, lo and behold, there came a day when we were all declared to be fit to wear wings, and that was a great day. And on that course, five of the 35 got made

officers, of course, and I was lucky enough to be made one of those, and that patterned my Air Force career from then on, because the living conditions and the lurks and perks of an officer are not to be denied, and they weren’t denied. But you kind of lost friends because your friends, most of your friends were sergeant pilots and, you know, you went first class, they went second class; and oh, God.

Wouldn’t have a clue. I wouldn’t have a clue. That AIF fellow didn’t make it, so it worked properly as far as he was concerned; he was just, he was pushy. But he eventually became an officer. I don’t know how it worked at all, with Marsh Godsall I think it worked because he came from a very well-known family in Queensland. But he was a very good officer, too, he was a very fine officer, because

he was a solicitor and he would defend all his mates if they got into trouble, court-martials and things like that. Young Tim Bunce, well, Tim and I were the youngest; he was probably two weeks younger than I am. And so it’s not on age, because we were the youngest in the course, so the youngest, so Tim and I became the youngest skippers on Coastal Command, because I had a 20th birthday flying operations. And you had to do three months, four months

to know how to handle and control a 30-ton flying boat and a crew of 11 Australians in that flying boat; over in Europe it took 300 hours, 400 hours to do that in any way, shape or form. And even when you did it and you had your own crew and you took off, you weren’t 100 per cent efficient; another 100 or 200 hours, it’s a huge learning curve,

but anyhow we did it, you know. And....

Yes, I paraded down Bourbong Street in Bundaberg after having consumed about eight or ten rums at Bargara. At the Hotel Bargara we had the passing out thing, and I don’t think my feet hit the pavement once, I think I flew straight down the middle of Bourbong Street. Nothing official on the station,

it was very poor that way, but we made out our own party at the hotel at Bargara and then went on our own celebrations after that. And we were immediately all posted out of the place, so there was no.... Made Monday, it was sad, Monday, because we all had terrible hangovers, terrible place for rum that place, and off we went. And old Barrows told them the posting would be Central Flying School;

it was all changed; evidently we, and we were all posted to embarkation depot, down in Sydney, to the posting overseas, because we were.... See, back in those days first and foremost we were British, secondly we were Australian, but

first and foremost all our loyalty, our whole training, our whole education was British; and it was only when the British failed in Singapore and the Navy failed against the Japs [Japanese], when they were attacked by fleet-borne aircraft up there in the China Sea, that the realisation came through that the world had changed, Britain can no longer look after us, and in come the Yanks.

And that was the birth of Australia as a separate nation altogether, psychologically. Psychologically we were British, we were part of an empire in which the sun never set, we were bloody proud of it too, no bloody doubt about that. And, you know, England was still considered as “home”, much like if you go to New Zealand you’ll find that New Zealand has got the same attitude, England is home. They're British;

they happened to be south of the equator and close to those crazy bloody Australians, but they are still British and they never forget that, particularly if you’ve got to go to court over there. Don’t quote an Australian case, quote the British cases. Anyhow, that was, that’s the way it was: at the embarkation depot, and in no time we were back on our way north to Brisbane, on embarkation. And

of course where did we go but we went to the Brisbane River. At the portside there were all the big ships pulled in, there was this great big Yankee 28,000-tonner to take us overseas with lots of Yanks on board. When I say “lots”, there were Yanks returning home on service and lots of wounded Yanks on board.

So that was the SS Monterey. So on we get and, being officers, we climbed up the gangplanks and my mate Marshall, who was the leader of the push, he walked up first and checked in with the officer at the end of the gangplank and made sure that his officer friends had a good cabin and his sergeant pilot friends were fairly treated. And he said, “Well, if you got to go, you may as well go in class,” and in class we went, because we had a cabin the 10 of us shared

on board that ship and we had a waiter in the cabin that looked after us all the time, and it was, we ate in the mess, it was just like peacetime. There were so few people, four decks were closed down. Anyhow we got into this cabin and we decided to take the best bunks, and I was in the cabin there for a while and there was a “ho-ho” from the door, and in came three Australian Naval officers, and they

created quite a stink because we got there first and chose the best bunks from the cabin, and “Don’t you think it would be fair if you waited for him?” And I looked at the fellow that was talking and I thought, “That’s me old mate Noel Sanderson from Sydney High School,” and, begorrah, it was, too. And he walked in and I told him to shut up and he told me to shut up, then he recognised me, recognised each other, and we kind of capitulated. And he told me

the story about the sinking in Sunda Strait by the Yanks of that cruiser, the Canberra, and how he really had some scars on him, he’d been wounded. And I said, “What are you going to England for?” And he said, "We’ve run out of ships. The Yanks have sunk them all.” And they, whether that was true or not I don’t know. He then took charge because taking charge means he got us up

at 6 o'clock every morning, we had to go and do our drill, we’d go and walk around and around the decks of the boat I don’t know how many hundreds of times, to keep fit. And then he introduced a game of contract bridge, and I think he, I think I ended up owing him a couple of million pounds, there was no dollars in those days, by the time the trip was over. So walking around that, it was a beautiful ship, and

we took off and we, down the Brisbane River and we went out, passed the islands and out into the ocean and there waiting for us were 2 destroyers. And we zigged and zagged the destroyers for a couple of days, past the, New Zealand. Evidently the submarine activity had been fairly strong up to that point off the Queensland coast.

And this was in June of ’43. And I said to Noel, “Righto, who looks after us for submarines after we get out to sea and these boys go home?” And he said, "We look after ourselves. This is an independently-routed merchant run.” And I said, "Well, that sounds very nice, what does that mean?”

“It goes so fast that the subs don’t catch up with it.” And I said, "Well, they can intercept it, can’t they?” And he said, "Indeed they can.” And I’m walking around and I said, “Well, what have we got to protect ourselves?” And he said, "Well, there is a pop gun down the back. See the gunnery officer,” he knew all about these things. And I said, "What about lookouts? Why don’t we get some lookouts, put them around and put them together and telecommunications to the bridge and at least have a lookout, at least see a torpedo track coming towards us? Can we dodge?” “Yes, we can.”

So that sounds okay. And I forgot about that conversation until they came over the PA [public address] from the bridge: “At the request of Pilot Officer Norman Sheehan, all meeting down here because people volunteered for submarine lookouts.” Did I cop a lacing over that! All the boys reckon they were going to have a good rest on that boat and enjoy a trip like gentlemen,

“And here you are putting us to work,” and all the rest of it. Anyway, the Yanks co-operated and we all co-operated together and we had it all the way around that ship, and all wired it up to a central point. Nothing, nobody ever saw anything, didn’t see a torpedo trail or anything like that. But I’m sure if there had been one we would have seen it, would have done it. And we had a lovely trip across, all the way across, and it was.... Then Marshall

got a bit imperious with his rank of course, and being a solicitor of course, and he made himself a bit unpopular by marching around and ordering his sergeant pilot mates to do this, that and the other. So one of them said, “How can we get even?” And I said, "The only way we can get even, I think we are going to cross the equator any day now, we can have the good old King Neptune job and everybody’s got to walk the slippery pole and

do things.” “Can we shave his moustache off?” And I said, "He’ll kill you if you do that.” He said, “But can we?” And I said, "Don’t ask me for permission,” you know. “We’ll organise it.” So we went and organised that. We were lucky because we had some mermaids there, because we had some American nurses on board and they loved to be mermaids, and the doctor in charge of the hospital ship said, “Oh, a show, a show, we got a show.” So he become the showman of the troops there and we had a great

day on that. Unfortunately nobody shaved Marshall’s moustache off. He became King Neptune, you see, because he became judge and jury, and all the fellows that wanted to shave his moustache off, they were told to walk the greasy pole and finished up in the water. But it was a good trip. And after a while we pulled into Colombia, and Panama City first and all the wonders of the Panama Canal, just been through that, and the great big ship

was lifted up step by step by step by step. And as we were going through the lakes there I said to one of the Yanks there, who was on board, there were Yankee soldiers everywhere with machine guns on board the ship, and I said, “Is that to protect us, or what is going on?” And he said, "Oh, as a matter of fact, this part of South America is in revolution at the moment, they are just to stop the boarders, people going over the borders.” But we didn’t see any boarders either. And they

laid us down the other side into Colombia. And the Yanks put on a great show for us there, the photo I remember most is the sight of pulling into Colombia, wharf side, and the, who was it, it was the English contingent there,

they got themselves some bananas and they were throwing the bananas down the wharf that was full of these dark people, but they were all American Negroes, as well-educated as, making disparaging remarks about them. And we weren’t allowed to go down on the wharf after that, for some reason, some kind of offence taken to what ever happened with the ship on the side there. But I can always remember Colombia,

not for that reason at all, but for Drinking rum and Coca-cola, Working for the American [actually Yankee] dollar, [songs] by the Andrews Sisters, blurted out all the time. So we went through the Sargasso [Sea] and from the Sargasso to New York, and there were two whales in Sargasso and they sounded and their spray went up in the air and somebody sang out, “Torpedo, torpedo,” but it wasn’t torpedo, it was two whales. But the saddest thing I ever saw was a Yank,

we had a piano in the recreation part of the ship and there was a fellow there with mutilated hands, he had a couple of fingers and a thumb on one hand and a couple of fingers on the other, he’d had a propeller accident of some kind or another. And he’d string out, it had a very pretty melody with the fingers he had remaining, and they were all bandaged and bloodied and he was still using the fingers, and evidently he was some kind of a

pianoforte soloist in civil life and there he was looking at two ruined hands from the war. And we were sitting there one day and he was playing Old man river, and in one burst he got up and out the side, over the side of the ship and into the water, and it was suicide, straight in. And I rushed to the side, there was no chance of getting anywhere near him, and I could see him wave goodbye, and one of the fellows threw a float overboard but he disappeared

around where the screws of the ship were, and that was the end of him. But his nurse said that he was desperately depressed because of the fact, because he wouldn’t follow his career any more. And he just did away with himself. And the fellow that threw the float over got put in the brig because it might, the spot where an American troop ship was crossing in the Pacific,

the PA system on the boat all the time said “Keep off the rails, keep off the rails,” this ship would not stop for any person who falls over the side. It was up to yourself to keep away from the rails. And when the whales sounded in the Sargasso Sea, that ship heeled over almost 30 degrees, trying to [avoid] what he

thought was a couple of torpedos coming and particularly, well, you couldn’t keep your feet just at that point if you happened to be on the rail, just you’d be over. So we took warning of that. And we stood up on the deck one morning and we sailed into New York and there was the Statue of Liberty waving at us and down below was the wharf, and we got off there and that was the, practically the whole of the course that did the training with us together at Bundaberg.

And then we had two weeks in New York.

It was a great, a little bit alive there in New York, more people. The thing I hate about Europe and India and Africa and China is that you can’t get away from people, there is people everywhere, just people, people. And the, we had a good time in New York, the Yanks are very hospitable and

they take you to a lot of the places. Oklahoma [stage show] was just showing in New York so we saw Oklahoma, which was one of the shows. We also saw the Star and Garter Girls, but couldn’t see much of them, and various other shows. And then we were gathered together to go over to England and that was

on the Queen Elizabeth. On the Queen Elizabeth we had 23,000 Yanks on board with us, and 23,000 Yanks on board a ship means that they have red buttons and white buttons, and for 12 hours the red buttons are outside and white buttons inside, and reversed. But you should have seen the toilet arrangements. They outrigged wooden toilet arrangements, out the side of the ship towards the back, and they had to be like acrobats to lean all the way out there and

be on show, and at one stage, when the Atlantic played up, copping a bit of spray, and the hoses going all the time, it was ruthless.

Well, they had no toilets on board to handle it so they had to put toilets over the side, and to do that they outrigged, they put beams out with flooring on it and holes up there, about 8 or 10 of them, and some with very little covering at all. And, you know,

the Queen Elizabeth was a big boat, but the seas were massive, and they had to be there, and if it went the wrong way they’d be messing on the decks. So the hoses were out to keep it clean and, Yanks being Yanks, the hoses were everywhere, and you put your life at risk to go to the toilet, and that’s the way it was.

We had an exercise yard up the top of the Queen Elizabeth that [was] supposedly to get a breath of fresh air, and there were 200 officers trying to get into an area as big as this room to get a breath of fresh air. But the rest of the ship, up the top [of] the superstructure they had, ah, people on duty, just observers, and guns, things like that. Some

of the ships used to drag barrage balloons with them, and that’s a balloon on a steel hawser on the basis if any plane wanted to dive bomb they had to get past the steel hawser first. That was a bit of a joke because the steel hawser was only a couple of hundred feet long. I used to shoot down those barge balloons over the English Channel on the,

over the Bay of Biscay, because they used to come adrift and they used to float down, and not so much the balloon itself but if you’ve got half a mile of steel rope underneath it, [if] you get that tangled up in your motors [it] would cause a little bit of death and desolation. But anyhow, it took us three days to get across the Atlantic, the north of Ireland, and we pulled up at Greenwich or north of Greenwich

and we were lighted ashore, there was no wharf or anything there, there was, the motors were running all the time and the nose was pointing to the open sea so if there was any attack it could get away.

No, it was another independent merchant route. Anything over 30 knots or 25 knots I think it was independently-routed and [would] go on its own, convoy if it was underneath that speed.

But most of the merchant marine, I believe they were off on their own rather than convoy.

Oh, we had a cabin meant for four that had 16 beds in it, you know, you just.... The best part was the lounges, you’d get into the lounges and get some space in the lounges. The chow call,

two meals a day, and you had the number of the chow because they gave you numbers, and there was a big area of the ship downstairs where everybody ate. And if you missed your call you missed your meal and that was it. It was only four days, anyway. But the Yanks being a very initiative, they made sure that their bottles of Pepsi-cola had whiskey in it and rum in it,

and they got on the pianos and they’d sing their marching songs around the piano, they belted that out all day and all night. They’d carefully avoid their “coloured” [African American] brothers, even though they might be officers, that was the bad part of the show. But I did see Judy Garland in New York, actually talked to Judy Garland: that was a great event as far as I was concerned. She was the greatest product that America had ever produced.

Well, we got to Radio City. And of course the Air Force were very cunning, they gave us ranks, and I was a mere pilot officer, which is a thin blue line and big eagle. Now, an eagle in America is a colonel, and once the Yanks saw that eagle they saw nothing else, we were all colonels. Once we were colonels we got a pass to go anywhere we liked. And I expressed a wish to say hello to Judy Garland,

“Yes sir, yes sir,” and so when she came off stage there was I waiting and shook her hand and blinked into her eyes and that was it. Then they had the stage door canteen and I didn’t see anybody of note in the stage door canteen, there were pretty [UNCLEAR] of people there of note to see, but there was just a blur. Then we went to a few nightclubs.

Like any other place, if you had the money, well, you had a good time; if you didn’t have the money, well, they didn’t want you. We weren’t allowed to go to the Negro part, down to Harlem or anything like that, because there was a revolution going on down there of some kind or another. They had their problems. But one of the greatest things we saw there, when we got on the Queen Elizabeth, the next wharf

was a big French ship that somebody had bombed and sunk at the wharf. And the Yanks had put pumping stations, hundreds of pumping stations along the decks, filled her up with concrete to stop the water getting in, and it was pumping her dry. It did eventually pump her dry and [they] pulled her out. But she was on her side about a 40-degree angle, and when we got on the boat to come over to England

they got her away. The Yanks were very pro, went to a few of their USOs [run by United Service Organisations], their clubs, and very pro-Soviets [Russian communism and its sphere of political influence, i.e. United Soviet Socialist Republics] at the time, and anybody that could be done in the world the Soviets could do better than anyone else at that stage of the game. That was before the communism fear grabbed them.

A lot of anti-British there, anti-British sentiments running from the old colonial days. And I suppose that the most telling, as far as Australia was concerned, is, “You boys certainly picked up the language well on the way across, didn’t you?” I guess we had; we came on an American ship, they had very good teachers, yes. So much for America. The Americans were very good; when I struck them in Europe

they were very, very good indeed. And it was certainly different from, their bombing command over there had extraordinary losses. But one thing, I was talking about the navigation earlier, is their failure to train their bombers in night flying and night navigation, and that meant

they had to go over in daytime. And the navigation, every time their bombers went out they were given targets of opportunity. If they went to bomb that city, well, they were given a photographic reproduction of what the adjoining cities looked like and where to bomb the adjoining cities, because if they got lost, if they flew over any city they had something to bomb. And that’s not all of them, because they were very, very good indeed,

but the rank and file of them slipped away. And as time went on over there in Europe, and D-Day came along and went, England was like a huge battleground ready to go, where everywhere you drove in England before 6th of June 1944 you met plant, equipment, planes I’d never seen before, guns you had never seen before, tanks you’d never heard of before,

all these things lying in paddocks, stacked and stacked and stacked to go over to Europe. And you can imagine yourself the forces over there on D-Day, the provisioning of those forces, the ammunition they had to have, the fuel they had to take across with them. The whole operation was a gigantic mess. When I was, when I say mess, they didn’t muck it up, they did it very well; but it was everywhere,

so there must have been some organising brain that knew where everything was to get it to the right place at the right time. And when I was over there in America and New York, we were stained at a place called Fort Slocomb for a short period of time, half a dozen days, and that was a training school for American transport officers. And people were coming off their four-weeks boot camp there, going in as a civilian and coming out as colonels.

But in the railway system of America they were the top dogs who knew the railway system backwards. And they put them in and they gave them that rank, and when the Second Front opened they went straight in and ran all the trains in the stations and the trucks and the transportation over there in America, that made the Second Front such a success. Because without that organisation, you know, you wouldn’t get anywhere. You’ve got to have, “The Army marches on its stomach,”

Nelson said, but it marches on its supplies. But those Yanks, they were good; but the dregs that came over at the end, they were, you had to steer clear of them. I suppose it’s the same with every Army, not just the Yanks, but there was so many of them.

Most of the time. And that didn’t worry us at all, because

as far as we were concerned, psychologically at that time we were English, part of the British Empire and that’s it, we came from Australia. As I said, the Australian end, I suppose there’ll be arguments about that until the cows come home, but it really started when the Yanks came into Australia instead of the British. The British had gone. And how so many, you know, the other thing that’s still got to be explained is how so many

English soldiers capitulated to so few Japanese at Singapore and through that campaign, and through the campaign in that part of the world, you know, it’s difficult to explain. They outnumbered the Japs. And the only thing that the Japs had that were superior to the English running down the Malaysian Peninsula were pushbikes. We were bogged down in our trucks and great big tank things; they had all pushbikes, they were mobile.

Where were we?

Haven’t we got to England yet? Greenwich, yes, near Glasgow. When I got to Greenwich we went to the railway station there I think, and there was a fellow, an air commodore, with a broad

blue stripe there and an Australian uniform. And I just said, “Well, what are you doing here? Are you part of the official greeting party?” And he said, "No, I just happened to be in the area. They told me there was a contingent coming from Australia and I thought I’d come down here and say hello and all the rest of it. Is there anything I can do for you?” And I said, “We haven’t had anything to eat for a long time,” which we hadn’t, because with the two meals on a boat every day

we had missed out, and docking, and I don’t think we had eaten most of the day. So, God bless his heart and soul, he took us down to the NAAFI [Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes depot], and the NAAFI is where you get a cup of chai and a wad, cup of chai is tea and a wad is a sandwich, and sit there and eat it. And we ate that, and I said, “What are you doing here?” And he said, "Well, I was here in World War I and I started to get elevated in rank so I decided to stay here.” And I said, "Well, are you

never going back home?” And he said, "No, never going back home.” And I said, "How do you put up with that?” And he said, "Well, you know, you’ve got to do things, career is one thing, and life’s another.” And I said, "Where are we off to?” because I had no idea where we were going to. “Oh,” he said, “you are going down to the South of England. You are going to have one big holiday,” down to Bournemouth or some place like that. And I said, “I suppose we’ll get there, does the train take us all the way down there?” And he said, "Oh no, you’ve got to change in London.” And I thought, “Oh, well.” So we

got on board this train and we made, most of us made idiots out of ourselves on that train because everywhere we went people recognised the uniform and hoo-hoo’d and hello’d to us, and of course we hoo-hoo’d and hello’d back to them all the way down, from Glasgow all the way down to London. I think this was assisted by the fact that this commodore bloke had given us a couple of bottles

of whisky just to ease our journey down, so it was the first alcohol we’d tasted since leaving New York. So we got down to London, the train down there, and we went further south. And there was a big, there was a big group of Australians and Canadians and South Africans all together staying at the hotels and the resorts, and we

finished up at Brighton, and Brighton was a place just cross the Channel from occupied France and it was suffering from hit-and-run raids by the bomber aircraft from time to time, and we nearly experienced one of those. We actually missed one of those by a few minutes by going to do our swimming training. I had a, no outdoor

swimming pools in Brighton, of course, but big indoor swimming pools there in which they put these dinghies and they made you get in the dinghy and then they pushed you out into the swimming pool and [you] had to get back in the dinghy and [they] had to push you out again and did all these funny things to do this that and the other. And they didn’t know that they had the cream of the Australian surf life saving movement; they wanted to know, “Swim as far as you can,” so six or seven of us were still swimming an hour later, backwards and forwards

down the pool. We were told to get out and behave ourselves. Anyway that was the first swim I had and the last swim I had for a long time. And the, we get down there to Brighton and our mentor Marsh looked after us, and Tim and I sat down very seriously with Gordon Yorston. Gordon was a very unique fellow, Gordon Yorston joined us at

initial training school at Narrandera and up to Bundaberg and was on course with us, and he came from China and his parents were missionaries in China. And I said, “Well, how did you get from there to here?” And he said, "Well, actually I snuck behind the Japanese lines and I caught a train and I knew the language and I got myself down here

and I was in front of the Japanese by about a week all the way down.” And he came down on the Malaya Peninsula, still hitching his way down to Australia, and I said, "But what for?” “Oh,” he said, “My country needs me, I’ve got to serve my country,” and that’s the type of bloke he was. And Gordon was there and he said, well, we were wanting to get onto flying boats, onto 10 Squadron, and we hadn’t heard of 461 Squadron then,

which 10 Squadron gave birth to, it was a separate Australian squadron, and two of my other friends wanted to get onto fighter bombers, Mosquitos and this, that and the other. Everybody had their pet theory of what they wanted to do when they were over there. So Gordon got onto Bomber Command and he didn’t survive more than two operational trips, and so much for him serving for England. But

Marsh said, “Look, there is a notice up on the noticeboard I have just seen, and that’s three of the officers in charge of 461 Squadron.” And I said, "Well, what’s that?” And he said, "Well, that’s the Australian flying boat squadron, Sunderland flying boat, operating out of Pembroke Dock.” “Where the devil is that?” “In Wales.” “Oh, yeah?” “And they are after a new, they used to

train all their aircrew up at the England coastal operational training unit in Alness up in Scotland; now they want to do their own training on the squadron.” Now, the idea of that was so that the Australian aircrew could be trained on the squadron by the Australian senior captains and go into their crews straight away and get used to and crewed up

together, and so a whole new [group] didn’t hit the operations together. Because that is fatal; you have go to have experienced people on the crews. And it was a very good idea, so they did it. They were down there and many applicants, but they chose Marsh and Tim Bunce and myself to go. And so very quickly we were whisked away by train to Crewe, where I learned to hate Brussels sprouts because the Crewe Railway Station changed the crew to go to Wales,

and something had gone wrong and they had Brussels sprouts that had been on that station for about two months or three months, and you have never smelled anything worse in your life. And I made the mistake of going up and identifying where the smell was coming from, and I have never eaten a Brussels sprout from that day to this. But anyhow, we got up to the squadron,

we got on the squadron there, and we were all, it was a very old Welsh, Pembroke Dock was a naval station, there was a dock there and the destroyers used to come in and be careened and provisioned and remedied there in Pembroke Dock. And the Navy used to enjoy the mess the same as we did, and we enjoyed what the Navy had left behind there, because they had top class quarters there.

Not only top class quarters, but when we were shown our first digs they were rooms in a three-storey place, and we even had our own batmen to look after us. And I said, “I’m not going to have a batman to look after me,” and all the rest of it, and Marsh turned around to me and said, “You’ll do what you are bloody told, mate, that’s that fellow’s war effort and he likes doing that and that’s what he wants to do, so don’t you bloody spoil his enjoyment of life.” So “Okay,

what do we do next?” “We go down the mess.” So we go down the mess, and the mess was closed. But like most messes it had a little side door, and if you give it a knock they’d open up and they’d serve drinks. And in came our CO: “Oh, you are the new boys? Oh, yes, the new boys. Well, I want to tell you this: all esprit de corps in this squadron come out that door there, right there.” And Marsh said, “Does it, sir?” “Yes, it does. What will you have, sir, will you have a scotch [whisky] or a gin?”

“Thank you, my friend, I’ll have scotch.” So there he was, carrying on like a bit of a pork chop [fool], when up came a fellow with the news one of the squadron had failed to return and the boat was missing and so many people were dead, lost. So off he disappeared and I looked at Marsh and I said, “Is this what squadron life is really like?” And he said, "This is what this squadron is like, so you better,” you know, “better

behave and do it,” so that was it. Every night at the end of duty we appeared at the little door, or if the mess was open the mess, to have a little bit of esprit de joi, not too much. Well, it got too much because I know the old fellow, and he got a bit concerned with the drinking habits of aircrew, and he put a limit of five pounds per month on

the amount of pay we could draw out to spend, and he issued tickets. Well, the black market on those tickets doubled the value of the tickets almost overnight. So he stopped that because it didn’t stop anything. But the English drank just as much, too; the Irish drank more; and nobody could match the Yanks. We had a Yankee squadron, they just drank all the time. One Catalina crew actually broke open their compass and drank the spirits

from the compass and one went blind. You know what the pope says, “Don’t do that, you will go blind”? Well, this fellow did go blind for a short period of time. They got him back again, but why he did that I don’t know. I asked him, he said, “I don’t know, just seemed like a good idea at the time.” But it was a bit of a Mad Hatter’s [surreal, absurd] place, when you changed from the ordinary way of life

to a place where people are getting killed all the time. And you’d go down to.... Pembroke Dock is inland from the actual sea, and it’s about five or six miles inland, and nevertheless we used to have to go down on our pinnaces and our (UNCLEAR) occasionally because objects would be seen just off the shore

there and there’d be a dead aircrew, particularly German, in their little dinghies, and that kind of indicates to you what, you know, the facts of life are if you don’t do the right thing. And of course the stories in the mess got higher and higher and higher and worse and worse and worse. You got to a stage in the beginning when you didn’t know what was the truth and what wasn’t the truth, because everybody tried to outdo each other with stories;

they used to call them lines, “You’re shooting a line. Okay, you shout for the mess, you pay for the mess.” So that stopped after a while

Well, some of them are too rude to mention, anyhow. The, no, we’ll skip that for a while. But the thing was, what do you do now? You are there on a

squadron, you’ve been told to have a drink by the CO, he’s rushed off because he had to put an air sea rescue operation in place, not that anything happened; you couldn’t find anything out there in the Atlantic anyway. And you would always be able to work out where a bloke ought to have been, but he was never there, and if he was it was too late by the time you got out there. And, see, this was, see, our patrols took us too far off the English coast and the French coast to

be within reach of a ship. The patrols were 14 hours, there was about seven hours to get down to France, Portugal, shore and seven hours to get back, depending on the winds. If the navigator was good you got back to England; if he was bad you got back to Ireland. The Irish were very good because they always had big white rocks along the coast every couple of miles with the E-I-R-E on it so you knew it was Ireland,

so don’t drop anything out of your airplane here. And if you went east and you hit France, well, you killed the navigator anyway, he was no good, he was useless. But that’s the way it was. But so really what I’m saying is that, having been brought up in a tribe, I joined a tribe. And the

main tribe was the squadron, that’s all those blokes that you see in the photo, and it’s hierarchical from the CO down. That CO was changed shortly after I got there, too much joie de vivre or something like that, but we got one fresh out from Australia. And a CO fresh out from Australia is an officer with new ideas and radical ideas,

and that is another story as far as.... But the squadron was a tribe, but in a tribe there are always tribal groups, and your tribal group is your crew. I remember going out to the, down to the flight office, and they’d say, “Well, you are assigned to Flight Lieutenant Newton’s crew.” “Good, who is he and where is he?” “Go down to the marine section and they will take you out. He is on such and such an aircraft.”

So you went down there and got into a little motorized dinghy and he took you out, and one of the crew was there, and the exact introduction was that it was the first pilot and Roger was up on the wings refuelling the aircraft, which was a long job, a lot of fuel, 2,000 gallons. And he was refuelling the aircraft, and that was the first

pilot’s job so he was a bit abusive, and he said, “Who have you got there?” And he said, "Oh, this is our new crew member, Roger.” “Who is he, who is he?” And, you know, Don forgot my name; he said, “Pilot Officer Sheehan.” And a cheeky head stuck his face through the, from the mid upper gun and said,

“Pilot officer? They’re as rare as rocking horseshit, I’ve never seen one of those for years. Come aboard, pilot officer.” And they called me pilot officer for the next three months, then I become an FO because you started off as pilot officer for six months then you become flying officer. So that was Ron Hawthorne. Ron Hawthorne was our mid upper gunner, and he was famous because it only took him six bullets to shoot down a Focke-Wulf 200 on one occasion. The problem was he didn’t know he shot it down, and the problem,

and the telling part of the story was the pilot of the Focke-Wulf 200, once he was captured, he was landed in the sea, he was picked up, got in touch with the squadron and thanked him for shooting him down, because he didn’t want to be flying the little Focke-Wulf then, he wanted to do what was done. That was Ron Hawthorne. So you get on board the boat there and you got to learn the crew. Roger sat me down and said,

“These are the facts of life, this is the way it is, there is no rank out here on this flying boat except me. I am the skipper, what I say goes, irrespective if you agree or not. I’m the skipper, what I say goes, that’s it.” And he said of the crew, “Your loyalty always goes to the crew, first second and last, no matter if they are right or if they are wrong, you support the crew, they’ll support you as long as you do the right thing.

If you do the wrong thing you’ll be punished by the crew, that’s what life is.” He said, “Because we fly together we do the right thing, we live together; if we do the wrong thing we bloody well die together, it’s as simple as that.” So with that remark I said, “Well, what do I do now?” And he said, "Well, you go and learn, here’s a manual, go and learn every part of this book. I want you to know everything, every rivet in this flying boat from beginning to end, and you sit with every member of the crew and find out what they do and how they do it. And

in the meantime your official duty is to clean the heads,” that’s the toilet, “and if you get the taps the wrong way instead of going over the side it comes up in the toilet, which means you got to clean it up again, so there is a learning process there. So you do that.” So you got your jobs and you just did them. In 24 hours I was on the first operational trip and the only thing that happened there some Beaufighters got lost and came screaming at us,

and somebody reported some Junkers 88s who didn’t have his aircraft recognition up to date and frightened the pants off the lot of us. That was it. But it was a funny, you know, it was a, [there was] no command in which you had to fight your way through every day of the week like on Bomber Command. There is nothing out there. You are looking for something and the Germans are out there looking for you. And the procedure’s to miss them, we weren’t out there to fight the Germans; we were out there

to sink the U-boats [Untersee boots – German submarines] and to report on the shipping and that was our job, and if they got in the way you had to deal with them, and a Sunderland flying boat can deal with them quite adequately as long as you knew what you were doing. And the, there’d been many an encounter in which the Junkers 88s had come up second-best; there are many accounts in which they have come up first. So, you know, it was even money both ways. But the idea was to see without being seen, to go out there and penetrate, and later

with your radar, early visually, and do the best you can. And the U-boats were, England was only living because of the supplies they were getting from America and other parts of the world by ship; if the U-boats got out there and stopped the shipping, England was done, it was done for. If we got out there and stopped the U-boats it survived. But when the Second Front started, in the English Channel if any U-boats

had got in there, a complement of 12 to 20 torpedos, there’d be no Second Front, they’d [have] blown the bloody lot up. Our job was the keep them out of the Channel and the, that we did. So much for the tactics of it. As far as the rest was concerned, on D-Day I excelled myself by playing cricket against the Poms and winning. Oh, my team won, anyway. And there was, we had just come back from a patrol and

I’d been down to the night flying area, which was about five miles from where we had moored the flying boats, and it was on the way back that we got the American news up and they told us about D-Day and we were all very disappointed that we weren’t part of it because we were told that we were going to be an integral part of the D-Day offensive, and la la la

and all the rest of it, but as usual that didn’t happen. That’s one thing about a war: the things that they tell you are going to happen usually don’t happen. Things that do happen are usually things they don’t tell you about.

We had some superannuated RAF [Royal Air Force] officer come along to us, oh, D-Day was in June, I suppose it was March or April, with the good news that the squadron was going to be built up to 50 per cent above-strength, extra boats were going to be put on the, I owned my own flying boat, I had to sign for it as skipper, and you weren’t going to have personal use of your own flying boat any more; it’s going to go in and everybody is going to use it because the

demands of service are going to be so high, the losses are going to be so high that we’ve got to expect a third to be lost. Nothing like that happened; they used my flying boat and they didn’t clean it properly and I went crook on them and things like that, but nothing happened at all. What did happen

was that the Yanks got belted there because the [Operation] Mulberry harbour they put in got blown away by a 100-mile-an-hour gale three days after it went in. And I was flying in that gale and I was flying along the English Channel and I had to get back to Pembroke Dock, which is in the west, and there was a screaming westerly. My radio operator was measuring the trough to the crest of the wave at over 100 feet underneath me. I was flying at 50 feet above the crest because it was too turbulent

up there. I had the automatic pilot in, and then my first pilot and I were on the controls manhandling that aircraft through it, so we had it on full power, we were making 20 miles an hour, that was the force of the weather over there. Absolutely fantastic. I’ve seen Atlantic gales over there and flying boats moored on the trots [?] with their nose in the wind, and

the force of the wind was so strong it was turning the propellers against the compression of the motors. Unbelievable, those Atlantic gales. And that was the thing that wiped out one of the Mulberry harbours and that’s why they got into a lot of trouble over there on D-Day. But after that things [were] kind of over and done with very quickly.

But as far as Coastal Command [was concerned], their main effort was, in around about the time I finished my tour.... And that was a funny thing because that was in August, late August of 1944, and I was having a few drinks in the mess, getting some esprit de corps, and my CO came up and said, “Hey, you have gone so many more operational trips than anyone else in the squadron since the beginning of the year. Do you know what you are up to?” And I said, "I don’t know, we are just ready all the time.” See, I

sat down with my crew and I said, “There are two ways to handle this war. We all want to survive. We can do like some of the crews are doing and just take our time and do three or four trips a month and just let time waft us away; otherwise we can have our boat ready all the time, as soon as we come in we get it ready, and we do as many trips as we can,” because it’s an 800-hour, operational hour, tour,

“get our 800 hours up and go home. What do you want?” They said, “Let’s do it as quick as we can.” The book, the record book of the squadron showed that in the time that I did 32 operational trips, my mate Tim Bunsen did 24, 23, 24. So we got it over and done with and got out of there. So I said to the CO, “I don’t know, it’s getting up close to 800, probably got two or three trips to go.” And he said, "You’ve got no trips to go, you are finished.”

And that was the end of that, I was kicked out of the tribe. Went down and said to the crew, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” and I said, "You are going to go with Vince McCauley the first pilot, he’ll look after you.” “Oh no, we want to go with you.” And I said, "You can’t; I’m finished.” And then I got news that some of the boys, the news came through suddenly that this Gordon Yorston bloke had been killed in action and another

fellow had been killed in action, so I kind of blew the lid over that and they sent me away on four weeks’ leave, R&R [rest and recreation].

London. Actually I did a tour, I got into my Austin

and I drove the Austin to Nottingham, and one of my mates, Jack Wiley, was over there on Bomber Command. And I’d been in touch with him and I drove in and picked him up and I got onto the station and he said, “Well, look, you are on the station, you won’t be able to get off it,” because he was on a job to sink the

Tirpitz up in one of the fjords up in Norway and I said, “Well, I can at least stay here until the trip’s over.” So I stayed, but it wasn’t a very comfortable trip because he was so engrossed in the job at hand that there was no time to do much, but I learned how to fly a Lancaster, circuits and bumps, bit of local flying all over the place, and he didn’t bomb the Tirpitz, he couldn’t get to it, the weather was bad or something like that.

So I pushed on and went down to London. And I picked up a couple of Yanks on the way down to London and gave them a lift, and they were very aggressive when they noticed the wings on the uniform, and they had a kind of a thing about pilots. And I said to them, “What’s your gripe, what’s going on?” They were in the landing of the Southern France and they were on a DC-3

and they were in gliders, and the DC 3 pulled the cord and let the gliders go, a couple of hours early, they [had to] fend for themselves. And I said, “Well, what are you doing here?” And they said, well they’d found out where the DC-3 came from and they were going back to the squadron and have it out with the pilot and see what was being done because they lost a lot of their mates. I’m glad I wasn’t there. I was glad to get rid of them,

they were murderous. But those things happen. Quite murderous. Fancy being [in] a glider, of all the rotten things you can be in a war, they shove you in a glider and they put a rope on it to the DC-3, it takes off and you are at the absolute mercy of the navigator in that glider.

Well, these Yanks I picked up were part of the invasion force from the South of France, Marseille area somewhere, and they were towed in gliders from North Africa, they crossed to a dropping area, and they all had their maps and everything like that, and they were pretty well-trained kind of guys. And their story was there were so many in the glider, 20 or 30 in the glider, and

the glider drop was supposed to be in an area, and where the pilot in fact dropped them was about 50 to 60 miles short of this area. Dropped them too early, too soon. He said there was anti-aircraft fire and things like that, and when they got out they found themselves in amongst the Germans and of the 20 there is only 3 or 4 left, survived. So

they were out to get revenge against this pilot and they found out where the squadron was and know a thing for that, and I was glad to get rid of them. I had my own (war…UNCLEAR). One of the things about England, there are so many stories over there, so many people that you met. There was one lass that I used to drink with in the Chez Moi club, and she was a Don R [despatch Rider] she drove

a great big Harley Davison motorbike around London carrying war dispatches, and she was employed by the War Office. And she used to spend her time, came out drinking with me but picking up Yanks and taking them out, and coming back again and having a few more drinks and telling of her exploits. And the, she was a very special kind of a person because England at that time, around the War Office, around to the areas where the operations were,

was heavily trafficked, badly lit. At the time we were there there was a girl. And here she was, this slip of a girl, and she was about your size, with this great Don R. And she had this fear, and I know that one particular night she said this had this dream, she said, “I dreamt of you last night,” or something to that effect,

and I said, “Yeah, what about?” And she said, “I dreamt that I was coming back and I lost control of the bike, and the bike slid sideways across the intersection and all I could see was this big tank carrier coming towards me and I knew I was going to hit it and I wanted to tell you about it.” And I said, "Okay, you have told me about it. Now get it out of your mind, forget it.”

But in three days that had happened to her. One of her friends had told me that she went over under a tank carrier and that was the end of her. But there were dozens of people like that, it was an amazing place. I talk about heroes of war, most of them are walking around the streets. They really were. The Norwegians and even the, we had Norwegians on the squadron and

they came through and manned the, they were manning the air sea rescue boats. And they were telling me about the Poles, the Polish contingent out there, manning the rescue boats, because they picked up Germans. They would use the Germans as buffers on the side of the boats.

When they came into the wharves, still alive; then dead, they’d kill them, they’d kill every German they found. And the Norwegians said, “We can’t do that, we can’t do that.” And I said, “Well, what do you do?” They said, “We pick them up and bring them back. But,” he said, “we haven’t had the same experience as the Poles have had.” I doubt that, but anyhow, it was a different situation. And the French, we had a French guy from Normandy on the squadron,

and we were forbidden to go into Europe after the Second Front but he got across there because his family had estates there. He must have been fairly well-off. And he went back there to the family estates to see how things are going and it was “Catch 22”, because 20 or 30 Germans surrendered to him

and he had to turn them in, and when he turned them in to the Yanks they said, “What are you doing here?”, and he got trapped and he got caught. But no matter where you went you always struck those people. I think one of them was the section officer that we

had on the squadron that later I met up with in, when I was on these, the trip after I had finished my tour, and her husband told me that.... She was a very strange lady on the squadron, she was section officer in charge of the WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] there in telecommunications and all the rest of it. But she

was no longer with him, she had gone back to France. And I said, “Well, how did she get back to France?” And he said, "Well, she had to go back because she was in the underground [resistance movement] there.” And she got caught by the Germans, and she escaped the Germans, but the Germans killed the fellow who I understood she left her husband for, took him away to kill him, and she had to go to find out what was wrong with him. And I

said to myself, “How did she get over there?”, number one, and number two, “All these things are going on.” And he said, “She’s the kind of person that if she makes up her mind to do something she usually does it. And she’ll do it, she’ll find out about it.” And of course the Germans as far as the underground over there, it was their concern, my experience of talking to people over there was that they were mainly communists,

some of the members of the communist party had enough tribal force within them to hold themselves together to fight against the Germans. The French didn’t; they traded with them, by and large, the French. They surrendered to the Germans and they traded with them; they didn’t fight them. We had two destroyers up in the islands just to the north of here under French control, because

they were anti-British, pro-German during the war. They don’t love us. Even now they still remember it. If you go up to Vanuatu or further south you’ll find the same feeling. But there was a lot of Vichy French around, lot of Vichy, and that was just their point of view.

Well, the will to survive is the only one, and that’s a matter for each crew, not the squadron. I couldn’t give a damn what another skipper did with his crew, that was his business, and they wouldn’t give a damn. Within reason, of course. You’re got to follow operational orders and go where you are told to go and all the rest of it, but the, I don’t know about Bomber Command or Fighter Command,

but insofar as Coastal Command was concerned I was a skipper of my ship, and once I took off the only law was my law, right or wrong: as far as wrong they kicked my backside for it.

(jokingly) They’d have a beer as often as they could,

ah, no. We went to Mass fairly regularly, those of us that were Catholics; others went to church fairly regularly if they were churchgoers. But mainly no.

Yes, well, Vince McCauley was my first pilot, and he was a guy that [came] from Palm Beach, north of Sydney, just a bit further away from North Narrabeen where I came from, but he was in Palm Beach. He was in the Rural Bank when he signed up and

he and his sister, I think it was, ran one of these matching or dating agencies in Sydney where they get the people together and things like that, and he was over there a bit earlier than I but finished up on Training Command teaching instrument flying and things like that when he came onto the squadron. And he was a bon vivant, he was a, I don’t know whether he ever married the lady or not, but he used to get

mail from a lady over in England. The content of the mail was her bank balance, which was always in the 30 or 40 thousand pound mark, which was some kind of coercion, I think. He said, “I’ll have to get married, she’s got too much money.” And I used to say, “Vince, that will be all right for the first six or seven years, but after that you’ll be saying, ‘Have you got 10 shillings, love, I want to go to the

pub’.” I said, “Don’t be a kept man, do it yourself.” But last time I saw him he had married a French lady, I don’t know whether it was the same lady, and he had twins, and there he is, 50 years of age, bouncing twins on his knees, saying, singing of all things The Ball of Kerry moor which is a very wrong song, these twins were only months old, and I said, “What are you singing

these filthy squadron songs for?” You want to know about religions and things we used to do: we used to sing dirty songs, at the top of our voice all the time around the piano, and get it out of us, yes, yes, the funny thing we did do to ward off the evil spirits. And don’t forget we were in Wales, and Welsh have a whole history of mysticism, which I will not talk to about on this program because I have written at length about it, and those Morgen and Rhiannon and Pwll [pron. Pooth] and the rest of those people, as far as I’m concerned....

Vince McCauley, yes, Vince was a good bloke. I told him the proper songs to sing to his two twins and he learned to do that as.... Seriously, but

they had a series of second pilots. The second pilot was always a pilot under instruction so the new boys coming onto the crew used to fill in as a second pilot a number of times. You didn’t give the pilot too many hours flying on the left hand seat, the skipper’s seat, because you had to be ready for any kind of enemy attack; so the skipper used to out of the 14 hours do probably about 8 or 10 hours, and the other’s flying out to the patrol

area and into the patrol area, reckon they are fairly safe, let them in to fly. They all had to learn how to fly, how to handle the aircraft, and they had to learn what everybody else did. And probably one of the most important fellows on a Sunderland crew was the flight engineer, or I found it that way because I paid 50 quid to get hold of Jim. And Jim was a Canadian of great experience because he started life up there in the north of Canada looking after those flight [light?] planes that flew from place to place, and he was

a wizard with the motor. And he was also a wizard with females: I don’t know that they saw in him, but oh well, Jim was that kind of a fellow, I suppose. But anyhow he got into very serious trouble in Canada with his proclivity for females and he was a given a couple of alternatives, so he tells me, and I believe him,

and it was to get out or join the RAF. So he joined the RAF and they found him a place on the squadron over in England, the English squadron that shared Pembroke Dock with us. And he was on another crew and they didn’t like him because he used to smoke too much, drink too much and he used to pinch other people girlfriends, but he was the best short order cook I have ever seen in my life.

And he was a, type of food, I don’t know if you have ever been to Canada and tasted their food over there, flapjacks, maple syrup, their coffee, their bacon, their eggs, their ham and all the rest of it, he was a magician. And of course on the Sunderland we had a kitchen with paraffin heaters and all the rest of it, but I took him up for a trial run in an operations trip and the smell of his bacon and eggs going through the Sunderland just brought everybody writhing in ecstasy. Coffee coming out all the time. And I thought, “We’ve got to have this fellow, we’ve got to have him.”

So 50 pounds changed hands and he changed crews, so that was Jim. And Jim was one hell of a good engineer, he was a good flight engineer. And the flight engineers had a multitude of duties because behind where they sat was a great vacant space where you kept all your pyrotechnics and your spare ammunition and the bits and pieces of all the electrical

devices [that] failed, and he was very good at bringing bomb doors down. Bomb doors in the Sunderland were huge, 20 feet by 8 feet, parts of the side, held in place with clips and with very large elastic ropes, and when you wanted bomb doors down you pulled a handle and they came down like two guillotines on the Sunderland, and if you happened to be under it

you lost what ever part of you happened to be under those. And if they didn’t come down Jim would have to crawl out there and lever them open himself, and then (UNCLEAR). Also there with the handles, the Sunderland used to carry 425-pound depth charges, they were hung inside the aircraft on racks, and the theory was that you get the bomb doors down and you wanted the bomb bays to be operable.

An electric motor took them out to the wings, but if that electric motor didn’t run properly there was a handle for Jim to turn, he had to turn the handle. He did this on a number of occasions, quite accurately and quite well. And also he was the guy that used to look after your petrol control, because going for 14 hours carrying 2,000 gallons of petrol you had to balance the aircraft, you had to make sure

it was being used from the proper tanks, and you had to keep an eye on the hourly average petrol consumption, make sure there was enough petrol there to get you back home. That was very important, and that was Jim’s task to do that; he did it adequately for me all the time I was there. In fact, when I wrote the three novels, I wrote over to Jim over.... He settled at a place called Neyland, that’s near Pembroke Dock. There is a bridge there now, but in the old days when I was there there was no bridge to Neyland

and that’s where the train ran to, so if you wanted to get the train back to London you had to go across to Neyland. And Neyland was famous for one thing: every time you went to Neyland it was always raining, always raining at Neyland. So I wrote over there, because Jim had some stories that would raise your hair, curl your hair, and probably the eyebrows of all the rating experts whether a thing was fit to go to press or not all over the world,

and he had some of these stories which I included in the novel. But unfortunately [I wrote over] to get his permission to publish them, because he always made himself the central character, and this I didn’t believe, but anyhow he did, only to find out that he’d just died. But his son wrote back and said, “If you say it’s right, if you say that Dad said it, I believe in you,” so that put me in a position where I couldn’t publish it at all. So much for Jim. Jim was our flight engineer. The person to tell you where to go,

the person who told you where to go and how to get there was the navigator. Navigators where a body to themselves. On the squadron they had what they called a “navigational leader”, and the navigational leader used to get all the navigators there after every trip, they produced their log books and [would] go to the bench and there get the charts and just trace back to where in fact they had been. Not where they thought they had been; in fact where they had been. And if they had a tolerance [margin of error] of

the course they had flown and all the rest of it, and they had the winds by that time from meteorology in the past, there is always a certain science – in the future it’s not a science at all, it’s guesswork – and they used to chart that out. So the navigators used to go out there and they used to be separately briefed, and they would also be told by the meteorologist, and I’d be told by the meteorologist, that the weather is likely to be A, B or C. And if you went down to, out about 2 or 300 nautical miles

and you see A, well, you can tip that B and C is going to follow; if you don’t see it that way it will be D, E and F that will follow, and so on like that. It was hit and miss the same way. They were in charge of making sure that all pilots kept an accurate course, and you had to be able to fly a course to plus or minus one or two degrees of true course, if you wanted to get anywhere, because if you are one degree out, one degree in 160 nautical miles out, off course....

So you had to be dead on that [precisely accurate]. And the other thing was they used to have to send the reports back to base as to where in fact you were, in code of course, and we kept the telecommunications down to a bare minimum, because the Germans were very, very good at picking up the telecommunications and be able to fix where they came from. So that was the navigator. He was second on the crew, he ranked second from me. The,

he was also, in attack he was the guy that got up into the, sat on the navigator’s table and put his head in the astrodome there and [it] told him where the attacks were coming from. And there was a definite procedure to ward off the attacks by German fighters and it was always diving turns into the attack. [With] the diving turn into the attack, you increased the angle between the attacking aircraft and yourself to such an extent they couldn’t fire. See,

you’ve got to fire in front of an aircraft to hit; if they can’t fire in front, they can’t hit. They can fire all day behind me, as far as I’m concerned and as far as anybody else is concerned. And if they tried to steepen their dive, you always fight at 2,000 feet, 1500 feet, so you don’t allow them much time to pull up, and many aircraft hit a high-speed stall and just vanished into the water because they didn’t pull out in time. So that was the (UNCLEAR) but he was the guy that would tell you where they were coming from. The Germans would get on both sides of the aircraft for an attack, they’d come out in flights of four, five or six,

they’d come out there, throw three on one side, two on the other side and they’d feint attack so that three at most would go on your tail if you dived the wrong way. So he had to work all that out because once you are flying an aircraft you can’t see what’s coming behind you, and he would be, arise in that direction. The radar was no good, the craft were too close, and the pilot would be

assessing exactly the height at which to do the turn from, which way to turn and all the rest of it, and he did it. And it’s a turn, it’s not a gentle thing, you stood on one wing tip and you went straight down. No mucking around in a Sunderland. As a matter of fact, when I was instructing I took a squadron leader and his crew out and had a mock attack by a Mosquito fighter which lasted for 30 minutes, over my firth[?],

and the only time he reckoned he could get a hit on me was when he approached and wobbled his wings to say he wanted to play. The rest of the time I just took him through the procedure that they had to adopt to save their life, and he couldn’t get his guns on me; he got them onto me, but not in a position to hit. So it worked that way, that earned me the sack as a flying instructor from the chief flying instructor because he said, “The way the book says [is] you do a climbing turn in an attack,” and I said, “We don’t have the motors to do a climb.

You can dive fast, but you can’t fly fast.” He said, “Well, you are no good to me. If you can’t follow instructions you can’t instruct,” so he sent me back to somewhere else, made me CO of test flights. That was another story. And that was the navigator’s very important function, getting up there and doing that. He also kind of collated, in a later stage, when we got high-tech, all the high-tech gear together, he was the guy that did, he did the radar course, he did the

course of the navigational aids and the radar. After that was the wireless operator mechanic. The wireless operator mechanic sat there in charge of the gear, operated the thing, but he was the guy that fixed up everything that was wrong. The radar was a constant trouble because the radar had scanners, under each wing, and it was a

blip under each wing with a scanner inside it and the scanner used to scan to about 30 degrees to the starboard of the nose of us on the port side and then cut out and the other one would take in and carry you all the way around and cut in and cut out, so you got full scanning five miles out from the aircraft behind, and full scanning at any range in front. And to do that of course you had to have the electrical gear on board to do it, and it was run by batteries.

The batteries were charged from the motors, and the motors, the various motors had the electrical producing gear on them. If a scanner jammed, or the radar jammed too high a proportion of the time, you were useless out there. What you are going to see on, with just pure vision is incomparable; you can’t, visually you can

see nothing except what is directly underneath you or directly in front of you. With radar you knew everything that was going an all around you, up above you, down below you, all the way around you. And you had to have your orientation right up here in your skull because you were in a ball flying down a fixed path, with knowledge of everything that is going on around you and all the rest of it. The allied aircraft had IFF [identification, friend or foe], which is a little radar transmission on them,

sending out in morse code on the radar screen the blip for the day, a couple of letters, some numbers and something like that. You look up for the blip of the day is, that’s friend or foe, IFF, friend or foe. And the Germans never had that. They had radar and they had things to interfere with our radar and they, I took the boffins [technical experts] down in the back of my Sunderland from time to time off the coast of France, near Brest and just south of Brest, to try and

interpret, interpolate what they were using down there and how they were, you know, bending our navigational devices more than radar. But they were very high tech indeed towards the end of the war, and so were we. And, you know, you had to keep up with that so you had that WOM [wireless operator mechanic] on board who not only knew the technology of the radar

and the rest of it but how to correct it, how to fix it if something went up with it, something went wrong with it. I told the first radar leader, a Canadian, “[If] this gadget doesn’t work, it weighs a quarter of ton, it goes out and into the sea because I can’t carry dead weight, and if he can’t do it....” “I’ll put you on charge. It’s worth half a million.” And I said, “If it doesn’t work it’s out the side.” So he sent a (UNCLEAR) with a fan and kept it in order. And that was what it was all about: you needed to do a job, and if things didn’t do the job for you, you didn’t want them,

you didn’t want to be worried with them, there was too much to worry about. And then every wireless operator, there were one, two, three stations in a Sunderland for air gunners, nose turret, the two Browning, and a mid upper turret with two Brownings and the tail with four Brownings. Then you had the ports out the side of the bomb room which you could open up, in the wardroom I should say, that you could open up, the gas-

operated machine gun in there. They gave me four fixed guns in there for anti-submarine attacks and, unless they used them for chasing seagulls around and round the rocks outside the Pembroke Dock just to get a little bit of training in the use of them.... But I never ever used them in action, they used to jam too often, they became a nuisance in the end because the gunners made me clean them myself if I ever used them,

and that was a bit of a job. But the gunners were there and there were enough gunners to man those positions, and two extras, who were resting in the wardroom, so there was a rotation of all these people. Every gunner was also a wireless operator, so they used to do the patrols, there used to be a list and we’d draw up a list of the positions they all took, standardised how long they would stay in that position, how often they’d changed,

because you can’t have people sitting in the same place just staring at open space for too long, they’ve got to change, change, change all the time, so they have got to turn their instruments on and off. And one of the prettiest displays I ever saw was a display of St Elmo’s fire one night flying back over the Bay of Biscay and there was an electric gun sight on the nose turret and there was a fuse that was shorting, and it was beautiful, electric St Elmo’s fire, went right up in the air and encompassed each one of the four propellers and beautiful

blue and red lights going like that, just like as if it was a neon [sign] like. Of course it was beautiful to look at but it was no good to see, because if we could see it other people could see it, too, and it only took us a couple of minutes to tell everybody to turn off their electric sight, and when the nose gunner turned off his, it went. So all those gunners were there, there were two off and there was one, two, three and there was four, five, six. And this one, there was a radar

operator behind the second pilot seat, there was little cubby hole in [which] was a radar set, in the radar set was a screen, a round screen, and the radar arm used to go rotate around the screen the whole time. If it picked up contact there would be a flickering light exactly where it came from, that you can measure off the distance and range from you, and the distance for, watching its movement you can work out its relative course to you, and watching that you can see whether it was an aircraft or something on the sea or what.

Also down the bottom was a height tube which [was] the old tube they used to use before they got the scanner in, and that gave you an approximate direction and approximate length, and that was the thing we used to pick up the radar beacons on. And England was covered, the South of England, Wales was covered with radar beacons and they used to occult their code name, and you could get a bearing and a distance and you’d get a fix that way, from that.

I also used to, the radar operator used to do that, and that used to switch because the, everybody was trained to be a radar operator from second pilot. The pilots didn’t do it, but the second pilot and all the gunners used to rotate through all those positions, and there were always two off: if the flight engineer was cooking a meal somebody got up to look after the flight engineer’s post. And that was the crew. They were all different people; they were all, mostly they were all Australian, although we had a,

well, we had the Canadian, the flight engineer, and there were a couple of, every now and again, there was an English air gunner taking up his position there. Fundamentally the, Roy House was the navigator, he was the guy from down in Melbourne, I saw him a few years ago, and he was a very good navigator. Before that we had a previous guy as a navigator I inherited from the previous captain,

but he unfortunately got himself mixed up in a little bit of trouble, no fault of his, and he missed out becoming permanently on my crew. And once you get set on your crew and everybody gets set with the members of the crew you don’t change them, you just keep going all the time. And then I had a rear gunner who was a nice kind of a chap. We went down to,

oh, early days I think it was, early days, we went down off the coast of Spain and there were these fisherman out there and they were taking supplies out to the U-boats. They were taking all things that the U-boat captains and the crews want to eat and drink. And we were told to drop pamphlets on them; next time we went down there we were told to shoot across the bows. Well,

unfortunately the rear gunner, who I won’t name, left his intercom on and you could hear the machine guns going off and he was singing out, “Run, you Spanish bastards, run.” And I understand that he was putting shots into the ships. But anyhow that’s war. But I told that story to a very prominent politician from the Riverina, Al Grasby, one day; he said, “You’re the bastard that killed my grandfather.” And I said, “What are you talking about, Al?” “My grandfather was out there, he was a fisherman, his dad was a fisherman,

his grandfather was a fisherman, they were fishermen all their lives, down come the English, ‘Get out of our sea, you can’t do this, you can’t do the other,’ and he said, ‘The English can go and do this that and the other,’ and he went out, and what happened? A Sunderland came down one day and fired shots him, and when he come in he was full of bullets and he died. You killed my grandfather.” And I said, "I’m sorry, Al, will a drink fix it up?” “Yes, a drink will fix it up.” And Al Grasby was the Member for Riverina, good bloke, top bloke.

But that’s the crew. And the thing about us they all became, tour expired at different times because of our policy to marry in the experienced with the inexperienced, obviously, they all got to go. And you used to feel it, you feel their loss very much when they go, you want somebody who was dependable to do a job and they are not there. But anyhow, that’s the way it worked.

Well, the first thing I saw was, you know, “Bloody big.” The first time I saw a Sunderland I got up there onto the whaleback and the what’s-his-name, Ross Beard, took us out there, the flight commander, and got up through the manhole of the navigator onto the roof. And it’s, there’s a photo of the crew there on the back of a Sunderland, and he [took] us

down the back of the Sunderland, and he said, “Come down the whaleback, there is a little aerial sticking up, and have a good look at it.” And I said, "You can go down there yourself, Russ, I don’t feel like a swim today.” And he conned [persuaded] one of the boys to go down there and he finished up on his belly hanging onto the side, flipping over. That was an old trick, you know. But it was wingspan 65 feet either side, 130 feet plus the width of the aircraft again;

all-up weight 65,000 pounds, that’s fully laden with gas, the eight 425 [-pound] Torpex depth charges, the crew, enough, half a ton of ammunition on board. It was immense, it was huge. It was the most beautiful thing, the mostly gentlest thing you’ve ever flown in your life. It responded to the controls, it responded to everything.

It only drew two foot three inches of water when it was in the water. The technique to get it off the water, of course [was] to hold everything back, to get the propellers free of the water, splashing around, getting some forward speed up, then [when] it got up there to push everything forward, then go planing on the keel, and from that point it was just a piece of cake, it just took off beautifully. No vice in it whatsoever. And I was [with an] instructor and the first thing we did was took a Sunderland up to 5,000 feet and see

exactly what vice it did have, we stalled and every possible thing, just mushed and straightened out, beautiful, high wing all the way underneath, it just mushed down, it was very, very good and it was very manoeuvrable on water. You had to be careful though because the construction of the keel surface wasn’t that strong, they could be hulled fairly easily

on take-off, so you had to make sure that take-off was clear. One of my mad friends tried to pick up a crew in the Atlantic and on take-off hit some thing and put a hole right through the hull of the Sunderland. So he flew up to a place called, a little grass strip right down next to Pembroke Dock, and they

came and he landed there on the grass. And although he landed, they all got out of it, but he couldn’t land in the water because of the hull, the water just ripped the bottom out. The thing you had to be careful of was that every one of those aircraft had a trailing aerial, which is the high frequency aerial which comes out through a hole in the bottom and trails the hundred feet to get your proper transmission and reception, and if you forget to wind that in it pulls out the bottom, and a couple have forgotten to do that

It was, a beautiful aircraft to fly, it was very good for its purpose because its best cruising speed was 120 knots. Now, if you know anything about navigation it was a beautiful speed to fly at, 120 knots, you know, it makes everything so easy. And the thing about it is that a faster aircraft could do the trip down to Spain and back again in half the time, but they wouldn’t see anything.

The thing was to cover the area, be in the area as long as possible, and that’s where it did its job. You could send a Spitfire down and see nothing, going too fast.

Like a boat. It had a very shallow draft and it had a very high tail and it had a very high body, and over there in Wales you had a 14-knot ebb and flow of tide, and you had buoys to moor up to, and you had the wind

mainly coming from the west, it was right angles to the tail, so that you have got to do a little bit of calculus in your mind to work out what the angle on constant approach is going to be to reconcile the two forces. And that’s what it was all about. You didn’t think of it that way at the time, you did when you started but after a while you got used to it, and it was just like doing a knot, which way to go to get the best approach, because you got a fellow in the bow with a boathook and he has got to

pick up the flying pennant and put it over the bollard, so if the whole things stops, even then, with the best experience, you are not, you don’t do it. And once I had to get someone at the back door to pick up a flying bollard through the back door, put a rope around it and take the rope around the front and pull the thing back. But needs mush, needs mush. But one of the horror things about a Sunderland, if you are going to take off

at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, as you often did, you had to take the crew down to the night flying area, [which] was about 5 or 6 miles down the firth to the take-off area, and moor it there and leave two on board, then the rest of you get up and you have a good breakfast and you come down on the pinnaces and you get on board and knock on the side and “Wakey, wakey,” and all the rest of it. Those two that were

left on board used to have the most horrible tempers you’ve ever struck in all your life, fists and things hurled all over the place; I don’t know why, it was just the way it was. Well, you get on board, everybody had their job, and the next minute you are taxiing around and off you go. And all you had was an Aldus lamp to see where everything was, you knew what the harbour was like, not for the haven [?]. The only time

that failed was when we went down one morning and the French fleet had arrived from Iran and North Africa and they surrendered the French fleet to the English. And they had the most beautiful battleship I have ever seen in my life, the Richelieu, moored in Milford Haven with the support of destroyers and cruisers and things like that. And it took up most of your night flying area, and they never used it; it was just moored there from that point onwards. I don’t know what they finished doing at the end of the war, they probably gave it back to the French.

But they just neutralised it, put it out of action. But Milford Haven, the main town, Pembroke Dock, probably 5 or 6 miles apart, and the far [farthest?], I’ve flown those Sunderlands. Actually, it’s not flying because I still had the hull in the water at 100 knots all the way down.

The Haven, that was a beautiful feeling, but I had to be careful of the floats: if you just dipped one of the wings just slightly you’d wipe the float off; if you wiped the float off there is nothing to support that wing and the weight of the motors will take it down into the water. If it goes into the water, the next thing is it turns over. So you’ve got to be very careful of those aspects of it. But after this experience you will, didn’t even think about it.

Not in my experience. When I was up in Port Moresby flying Sunderlands there, at the end, towards the end of the war, we had a trip, we were transport and taking trips over to Bougainville, and there was still fighting going on in Bougainville although I think the war was almost officially over, but they didn’t know in Bougainville and the Japs were still fighting there. We used to go to a place called

Torokina and land there, and that was an open sea. And by the time I got the troops going and off, and they took them about five miles across the bay to the landing, the actual landing where the Army was, and we had happy faces coming back home in the landing craft and we got those 40 on board, there was no way in the world you wouldn’t take off; they would have killed you if you didn’t take off. But if you

used your judgement and your, there is a rhythm in the sea, there is always a rhythm in the sea; if you went with the rhythm of the sea you’d be fundamentally right, and fundamentally means you can do anything you like on the water up to a certain speed; once you hit 40 knots you got to be careful. Once you hit that forward speed of 40 knots then you’ve got to have a straight line, then you’ve got to take off. And one thing, cross-wind take-offs and cross-wind landings are the things that you dread because the only

way you can guard against the float dipping in the water and being taken off in a cross-wind landing [is] you’ve got to drop a wing into the high side, and you’ve got to be very careful that way. But apart from that it was all right.

Aluminium, it’s hardened aluminium, and the spars were all aluminium punched with holes, they call it dural, so it’s a combination of aluminium

and steel of some kind or another, and it was made of that, and only a very thin skin. My tail gunner shot the nose gunner in the backside once aboard the Sunderland, and fortunately for the nose gunner there was only, it wasn’t the front of the gun that went off, he took the back plate off

and put the recording portion backwards and forwards and boom, pulled the spring out, and a bang went through the aircraft and they confessed that he had made a boo-boo [error] down the wardroom, and the nose gunner was thinking, “That’s lucky because that could have hit me,” and he moved and he felt a pain and thought, “My God, he’s hit me!” and put his hand under his pants and came up with a hand full of blood. And the first thing I heard was, “I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit,” so we put him on the wardroom table, pulled his pants down, he had been hit.

They took just the tiny little bit, just enough to make it bleed, off his rump, that was the closest we ever came to onboard adventure. On another occasion one of the stupid second pilots had touched a switch, and the switch that he touched when he was in the pilot seat was to let go of the,

oh, the gas cylinder and dinghy from under the wing. And the cover flew off the wing and the dinghy went out, wrapped around an aerial near the tail and the gas cylinder started to bash the elevator off, bang, bang, bang. And we had to do something about that, and the tail gunner did that. He and a big, massive fellow we had there, what was he,

he was another gunner at the time, roped themselves into the inside of the plane and then grabbed hold of the air gunner’s legs and he went out into the slipstream with a knife and cut the cord, the cylinder was bashing and once he cut the cord it all went. But those misadventures do happen. The biggest misadventure I had was on my 20th birthday. I had a cigarette case flown out to me, sent to me from home,

and I was putting the rear-facing camera in up the back of it when, it was in my top pocket, and when they took the hatch off the little hole the rear-facing camera goes in, my cigarette case went plonk, straight through that hole and out in the slipstream. So immediately I asked the navigator for a fix, and he said, "What do you want a fix for?” “I lost my cigarette case,” and he said, "We are over the bloody Atlantic.” “I don’t care, I want to know where it was, I’ve got to

report it back to Mum. She will want to know exactly where I lost it.” So he gave me a fix, and I put a notice up in the wardroom when I got back, in the flight room, a reward was offered if anybody found a cigarette case at that fix, and the flight commander came in and said, “What are you trying to do? You’re mad.” And I said, "Why?” And he said, "That fix is in the middle of the bloody Atlantic.” And I said, "Yeah, I know. If somebody has a snorkel and flippers they’ll find it for me, it’s mine.” That joke didn’t go down too well.

The Fokker-Wulf 200, there were four Narvik destroyers trying to get back into running the blockade to get back into France, they had been out in the Atlantic somewhere up in the North Sea and around and back and for some reason or another wanted to get back into the new Channel ports, probably down St Nazaire which is just below Brest,

and there was a concerted effort for us to get out there, find them and shadow them. So we went out and, instead of going straight down to Spain, we turned right out to west looking for this Focke-Wulf 200. The bloke that the (sh…UNCLEAR) up the turret and we came through a great big fluffy cotton ball of cumulus cloud and

as we came out into the clear this Focke-Wulf 200, a bigger aircraft than us, heavy bomber, long-range bomber, came out of a cloud like that. And so Ron let off two bursts from the mid upper, the Focke-Wulf let off a couple of bursts at us, next minute they disappeared into clouds. We didn’t have the you-beaut new radar at the time, it was still the old radar, so we couldn’t pick him up; he was lost.

He went out of sight, that was the last we saw of him, end of story. But what had happened, two weeks later a message came through: his navigator had seen, our squadron numeral was 2, P was my aircraft, “2P” on the side, found out who it was and thanked the skipper for shifting down because he didn’t want any more of the war. And they had landed in the sea. What had happened

was the bullets had hit a glider bomb, and the Germans at that time were using glider bombs which were hung underneath the wing of the aircraft, and evidently it had a long wire on it and they guided it for the first part of its trip to the target. And the bullet had hit that and it had ignited, a slow burn, not an explosion, and then it got into a wild burn, set fire to the wing and he had to land.

And where he landed was where the Allied ships were; anyway, he got picked up and that was it. But because we didn’t claim it we weren’t credited with it, except by the skipper, who thanked us very much.

Well, we didn’t know anything about hitting the glider bomb. Ron reckoned he got the bloody thing down, but we didn’t take any notice of him; he was always

saying things like that. You had to have evidence, you know, you had to see something happen. The same as the submarine I put down in the English Channel on the 8th of June in ’44. That was at night, that was at midnight, that was the first time there had ever been a night radar attack using low-level bombsight, no, Barnes-Wallace bombsight, using

radio altimeter from 200 feet at night. Nobody thought it could be done. I did it, a successful attack photograph and everything. The next morning they had the damage in the water, they had the debris in the water, same spot, same area, same area patrol. I was awarded a “damaged”, I think; we found out later from after the Second Front, we got information that it had been badly damaged and returned to St Nazaire where it was put out of action,

which was good enough, did the job.

Oh, there was always enemy aircraft around but there was never any attack. You flew to avoid that and you knew how to avoid it; I could pick up enemy aircraft 40 miles away. Why wait? If there was cloud around I’d go. And I’ve been followed by enemy aircraft in the cloud off the Spanish coast and, you know,

the radar operator’s saying, “It’s getting closer, it’s getting closer.” “How close are they now?” “About 5 miles.” “What level?” “Oh, about this, that and the other.” “Okay.” Say to the navigator, “Well, do about a 60-degree turn. Where are they now?” You know, they would follow you all over the place. They had their night fighters too. They, it was a game of chess, you know, but there was

never a time that I got caught napping in the open within an aircraft. The morning after I had my sub attack a JUO8 flew within half a mile of me, but it was a weather JUO8 going out on a weather patrol, and he just waggled his wings and went on. I didn’t chase him; no fun in that.

The German submarine was, until the last period of the war, the vessel that operated on batteries. Now, batteries

run out quickly, underwater they could do three, four, five knots on batteries, for a limited period, six hours, so they couldn’t get very far, they couldn’t go very far. To recharge those batteries they had to get up on the surface and run on diesels. The diesels had generators, so the practice was for them to run on the surface on their diesels for eight hours, nine hours at night and recharge their batteries fully, get into a position

as close as they can to wherever their intended target was and then submerge and just stooge around. So you can see from that the tactic was to use the diesels at night to position themselves [in] the best position to pick up their enemy targets. As far as the Coastal Command was concerned, there was one aircraft that was fitted with a lee light, which was

just a floodlight, light up the surface of the water one mile, two miles in front, and that was a Wellington. And of course the trouble with the lee light [was] as soon as they got down to position and turned the light on, the Germans could see them coming, they could see exactly where to shoot, shoot there and most cases blow the aircraft out of the, or damage it to such an extent or at least hit the lee light so it was inoperable. So it wasn’t

a very successful solution. So we used to, we went up, when I say “we”, the squadron, went up to the Irish Sea in an operation called Oasthouse, we had a Royal Navy submarine up there and he used to be available there for exercise. So the first time I went up we went up there on an Oasthouse operation carrying the old two-dimensional, not three-dimensional radar.

And two-dimensional radar meant that all we could pick up was some 45 degrees either side of us in front, from a range of about 8 or 10 miles. And from that we had a screen that only showed with a blip on it, and a blip on the scale was probably two miles wide, so it wasn’t very accurate, this blip, how far away it was.

And so far as telling you how far it was to the port or the starboard, you can only tell that from the amount the blip was either port or starboard. You can home in on it roughly, be, you know, pretty well right, and we tried various manoeuvres with that and found that it was not worth worrying with. So we had a “wish list”, and we knew that the Mark 3 radar was coming up and

that was fully omni-dimensional and it could pick up the blips before, behind, in front of you, beside you, below you, all over the place, and it will enable you to measure exactly how far that blip, which would be the submarine, was away from you and exactly how many degrees port or starboard it is, and upwards of dead accuracy. So we took that machine up there and the problem was, yes, that worked well, we’d go under the hood and we’d fly on instruments and almost

invariably with the old equipment plus with the Mark 3 radar be able to position ourselves over the top of a submarine; so, having done that, the next exercise we concentrated on was how we were going to see the confounded thing and how we were going to drop the depth charges on the target. Well, one thing that was needed was flares; because it was a night-time operation

that’s number one, flares. Well, there were the old flares on the parachute: that was no good because you dropped a flare on a parachute then you flew around in circles to position yourself. By this time the submarine knew you were coming. They one of two things: they either shot you or they submerged. So the idea came up that we should have flares that came out of the back of the Sunderland out of a chute, and it was electrical connections top and bottom

and a cigar-shaped flare. We should be able to get ignition for the flare for a short period of time at a very high candlepower. So we got the initial flares, that went to the boffins to work out, eventually it was half a million candlepower for 5 seconds, so if we can pump 5 or 6 out a second it didn’t mater. The thing is to pump them out, don’t let them flare whilst they are in the pipe, so there was more muscle load to the gadget to push them out; that happened.

So that solved those problems. But there were two other problems: height above the water, how high have you got to be to drop them? So we tried that visually and we found that around about 200 feet was the best height. But we couldn’t do that on the old altimeter; we had to have a device. And Barnes Wallace came up with such a device, the damn things, two lights that intersected

at the right height; but they came up with the radio altimeter, and the radio altimeter we took out on test was accurate enough o fly confidently on at night-time at a height of 200 feet. Now, the radio altimeter had its needle, which was a number of feet above the surface. It was, but also had another gadget put in it, which from a pilot’s point of view was excellent: it had three lights,

red if you were below the chosen light, white if you were on the chosen height, green if you were above the chosen height, and if you just saw those out of the corner of your eye you could adjust the elevators so you were right on the white light all the time, you could hold your height accurately. And the last thing was who’s going to drop the bombs? Well, the good old navigator, he’s going to drop the bombs. How is he going to do it? Well, Barnes Wallace came up with another low-level bombsight, a low-level bombsight that was simplicity itself,

because Barnes Wallace started on the premise that at a height of 250 feet there is always a datum point in front of an aircraft that an object released will land [on]. There is no doubt about that, there is always a datum point in front of an aircraft where that object at 250 will land. So all he had to do was devise a gadget which gave you the screen covering the area and a descending grid, and when the object and the grid moved at the same speed

you were at that point; you released it then. Well, we [went] over the fixed level bombing range, went over that time and time again, had a, you know, you hit the target plus-minus 14 yards every time. Well, a stick of depth charges, 15 feet in between each depth charge, a sixth of 250 feet, it’s plenty of give and take there. So there we go. The next thing to do is

how the devil do you manipulate yourself over to the target? Well, that’s where physics comes in because the reconciliation of forces in physics [means] that if any two moving objects are going to cross over each other or meet or collide there is a constant angle of bearing between the two at all times. You try it out: there is always a constant angle of bearing at all times, that’s why you have intersection crashes on the highways because they are both moving at the same time; while they happen to be behind part of the turret you don’t see them in a motor car,

you’ll have a crash, so we get a lot of that. Back over to Oasthouse over the Irish Sea, tried it out and it worked. Now, there were those on the squadron and those in Coastal Command who said it was a lot of jiggery-pokery and “it’s all this high-tech nonsense”, and “it will never work”, and there were those on the squadron that wanted to go out like the pirates of old and do it in the good old way and, you know, eyeball-to-eyeball, but I was from the high-tech generation so we grabbed it and went

along with it. Now, we had a new CO a bit earlier, and he came from Western Australia and he was an Australian, [was] made CO of a squadron and operation in England – there was a lot of jealousy with that – and he backed us to the hilt. So without knowing it, on the 8th of June I went down there to get my Sunderland out, and we were all “2P” and we were all ready to go up on

the extraordinary patrol, box patrol, they were the entrance to the English Channel, just near Brest, the area where the U-boats would be trying to enter the Channel after D-Day. And we were to fly this patrol all night; irrespective of if we had an attack we had to fly that patrol, and it was about 200 miles long by about 100 miles. Around and around and around we went and, irrespective of what happened, we were to attack, report and go up, because follow-up planes would finish any attack. Now, when I got down there into the dinghy to go, I looked up

and there was the CO, and I said, "What are you doing here?” And he said, "I’m coming with you tonight.” “Oh, good on you.” That was his first operational trip. So he came with me that night, and we got up there and got the boat ready to take off. It was a take-off at [UNCLEAR] in the afternoon, and the

I said, “Well, do you want to take command?” “No, no, no; you’re commander, you tell me what to do.” “Right, well, you’re bloody first pilot. You know how to operate this you-beaut, low-level bombsight?” “No.” I said, “Well, there is a gadget there beside you got a little handle on it, the low-level bombsight has to know exactly what our airspeed is, because the unknowns are, the knowns are the height

an the unknowns are the airspeed, because airspeed tells you where you are going to drop. Okay?” “Yeah.” “Okay, your job is, when we get into attack, to keep that needle on the edge, look at the airspeed indicator and just keep it on it, is that okay?” “Yeah, that’s fine.” He was a pilot of great experience flying Sunderlands. I didn’t mind him coming along; it was great. And he was itching to get his hands on the control, so I let him fly it and all the rest of it. When we got out to the night patrol area

we were about six hours into our patrol, and around and round in circles we had to go, and the radar operator reported a blip so I went and had a look over his shoulder. The (UNCLEAR) sitting on his first pilot, I go and have a look over his shoulder, and by that time you could recognise whether it was possibly a submarine or a vessel standing higher out of the water, and you could see the

distance appearing blip if it looks like one. So I turned around and did put it dead ahead, and I was about six miles ahead, right on course, locked all the instruments, did that; “Okay, now we do a procedure turn and I fly away from it.” “Why?” he said, “Go in and do it.” And I said, "No, I haven’t got time.” So we flew away from it, so [I did] the procedure turn and flew away from it, and lost it at about 16 nautical miles. And I was at that time down to about 1200 feet so went

up to about 2,000 feet and started the procedure too [two?], and at the same time I said to Jimmy, “Those bomb doors are down?” and he said, "They are not.” And I said, "Put the bloody things down,” so he went and did his job there. We turned around and I put the control over for the depth charge to go out on a wing. I said, “They are not under wings,” because when they are under the wings there is a massive change in the trims of the aircraft and all the rest of it. “ Get a move on, Jim, what have you done? Get them out there.”

There was Jim winding away and I got the blip straight ahead and just held that course to see where it went, and it went left, it went left, it went left, and I held that course, “Righto, I’ll give it eight degrees to starboard, reduce the height,” got he back fellow up there on the flares, got the navigator down the front, got the CO under the, recording the speed, the

alternator going, got the white light on, right, five miles from it then, it was still seven degrees, seven degrees, seven degrees, and the bloody thing’s started to change, right, at seven degrees, and I said, “Well, it’s going. Get the flares out at two nautical miles.” And the speed came down. It was very, very, very slow coming down the distance. Then at two nautical miles I said, “Right, flares.” And the CO said, “Look, I can see the bastard, we’ll go left.” And he kicked the rudder to the left just enough.

Roy down below said, “He’s right,” or something to that effect, and I just held everything steady. Bombs away, over, finished, that was it, rear-facing camera, except that he is firing twin Oerlikons at me. Have you ever seen twin Oerlikons fired at night? Oh, pretty sight, they come up like red and passed like that. And that gunner probably got 100 rounds off there,

but because the flares were behind he hadn’t allowed enough in front, and they were going underneath me, underneath me, underneath me. And that was it. And the rear gunner, I said, “Watch for explosions.” “Yes, the depth charges have exploded.” Boom, straight up they exploded, that’s all we could do, so I just went, flew past, did what was ordered and resumed patrol. Disappeared of the screen, never saw him again, and just returned to base

the next day. Too easy, wasn’t it?

To me, they go straight up to intelligence officer of the squadron and they just interpret it and the photographs of, the rear-facing camera will take photographs of everything you have passed over, and the flares were still going when it started, when you press the bomb tip the camera starts, so everything that happens down there, so the passage

of the submarine underneath just corroborates everything.

Well, the boys on the squadron knew it worked, the system worked. Norm did it the next night, another bloke did it two weeks after, another bloke did it. Before that the squadron, the blokes that had been there longer than us: “Can’t be

done, it won’t work.” That’s confidence, you have confidence in your method. Usually a truth.

They were sceptical it was going to work, because they reckoned that nobody could fly accurately enough long enough to achieve the results over the Bay of Biscay at night, at 250 feet. The psychological pressure would be too much.

But I was young enough not to believe it. If I would have been three or four years older I would have believed them. I was stupid and so was my mates. But there was a younger generation that did it. Now, one of the older generation had the opportunity of doing the same thing

and he found a moon path on the water and flew around and got the sub in the moon path and had an attack that way, which was ineffective, because to get something in a moon path and position yourself, it means that they know you are there. It’s a cat and mouse. They didn’t know I was there until the first flare went;

they had enough time to get off 100-odd rounds of twin Oerlikons [anti aircraft guns] and they all went to the port, under port wing, and up to the port wing, height about 50 metres behind me.

Three of them, with certain knowledge. See, after that, the Germans got the snorkel, that enabled them to breath air under the water.

They didn’t have to surface again to recharge the batteries from the diesels and, in point of fact, they didn’t have to use batteries very much at all once they got the big snorkels in because they had an exhaust sticking up in the air from underneath the water. And they would increase their underwater speed no end and changed the whole name of the game.

I had left the squadron by then.

Yes. They had devices that dropped into the water, Asdic devices, which indicated the direction and which [UNCLEAR] the sub was. But that wasn’t very satisfactory, either. It actually got back to shipping after that, not aircraft. Because for it be effective with depth charges an aircraft [has] got to actually see its target. If you can’t see the target the rest is just hit or miss.

Well, that day we came home with the CO, and of course he was elated because he’d proved a point. And the point that he proved [was] that an Australian CO knew as much as those COs that had done all their flying over in England. [It was a] big thing in the Australian Air Force between those that have been overseas and those that hadn’t, it was a huge

thing there, great schism. But the, he of course went and waxed delirious about his experience about the first time he had ever flown, you know, with me. We had that success. But the thing about it is that his input was putting the right speed on for the handle and probably kicking, oh, 10 feet to port

in the last agony of the moment. But [that’s] neither here nor there. See, an aircraft is like a ship; you can’t make it turn like that, you know, a couple of miles up. But anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. So that was at midnight, it was about midnight that that happened. We continued the patrol for another, back on base about 8 o'clock that morning. Nothing else happened or occurred except

in adjoining patrol areas there were submarine sightings, ship sightings, E-boats [German attack boats] and all those kinds of things going on closer to shore, inland. That wasn’t our do; our do was anti-submarine and the.... We retuned to base, we saw this Junkers 88 going out and getting, doing the weather report, as we assumed, because it just waggled its wings at us and [we] passed it 10,000 feet further up. And

we got back to base, we landed at base and just did the usual: I got off the boat, handed the boat over to the first pilot, first pilot got the crew, cleaned the guns, all the guns were taken out and cleaned, and the refuellers, ordered the refuellers to come out and refuel,

for the flight engineer to go through his flight engineer’s log and go up and report any repairs or anything that he thought needed to be done, the wireless operator mechanic to check all the gear and the radar gear and all the rest of it, and just general maintenance, they did general maintenance before they went ashore, had their breakfast and went off for the day. I went up to the intelligence officer and we rehashed what had occurred. The navigator went up as well with his navigation charts to get exactly

the location of where the attack was; and the tail gunner as to what he saw visually as to the result of it, and they compiled a report of all that. And that report went out of my can, I signed it and off it went. Then we just went up and had a shower and had breakfast and went to sleep. We had been going, by that time we had been on our feet

for 14 hours out and two hours or so of repairs, 17 hours, we’d been up for 20 hours, so had a good sleep.

No, no. Pills? No.

There was a form, blank form and it had the

order of business for the rest of the week. And you went out today, and you knew you were going out, I always had my boat ready and they knew that, and we’d just, I’d go out every third day, sometimes every second day if there was somebody whose boat wasn’t ready or something went wrong or something had to be fixed up, and if I was ready I’d go out. Because the whole thrust of the crew was to get this whole business

over and done with as soon as possible.

Because they started at different times, so that’s the way it went. And the air gunners were moved in and out all the time. You always had, they were transient, they were moving in and moving out. Usually the, see, the one, two, three, the three air gunner positions, the two pilots, that’s five, navigator is six

and the engineer is seven and the radar is eight, there are eight positions and we used to take twelve people out.

Yes, oh yes.

I kicked a couple of them off. I found a, I walked into the, pulled the curtain aside where the radar was once and found an air gunner asleep there, and the radar showed the coast of Spain half a mile in front of us. It was rather high there, so out he went, the navigator,

out he went. If they didn’t perform I didn’t want them. I just told the flight commander, “Idon’t [want] him. Put him somewhere else.” Some of them protested, but that was my choice. And if I didn’t do it the rest of the crew would kill me.

Terrible. We tried to keep fit, we used to, no matter how often I went out I used to, I always had hours on the link trainer, every time I was ashore, just practise instrument flying in a box, you know, on the link trainer. We played basketball, we played cricket. We had a

gym, we had squash, although I broke too many squash rackets and they wouldn’t let me up there any more. And yeah, we kept fit and lean and hungry and fit, yeah.

Oh, very important, very important; if you got too serious you would end up in the giggle house [insane asylum].

We had some good humorists on board. Don’t ask me to quote, but the, this Ron Hawthorne was one of the funniest men I’ve ever struck. And amongst the lot there was always chatter on the intercom. Everyone was connected to each other by intercom and the idea was that you would only use the intercom if it was essential. But that was a load of rubbish; we used to keep in touch with each other, what was going on in the boat, through the intercom. And the

day that, you know, things happened on the intercom, oh, a light or something would flash past and somebody in the turret would say, “Did you see that?” And a laconic voice would say, “Yeah, he was wearing a bowler hat, too,” and another voice would come in and say, “Oh, that’s the bastard that’s been pinching my sandwiches from downstairs,” something like that. It was just nonsense, but you had to stay sane.

I worried mostly when my tail gunner, he is way up the other end of the aircraft and all the action is around the pilots and the navigator and all the rest of it, and he used to feel terribly lonely, and the only view he’s got is where you have been, and he got silent for a while and he got me very, very worried. And he got, in one of the attacks he got hit, not badly, but bad enough for me to go up there and pull him out.

He was in a bad way for a while, psychologically bad way, he was remote, and once that remote has developed into silence, well, you got to watch out for them, and yourself too. There were times there that my stress level, I know there were two occasions towards the end of my tour, at night-time, a dawn landing back at base

where I had to hand over to my first pilot hours before we got there. I was finished. I’d had it, I was making mistakes and I knew it, he knew it too. Go for a walk around the plane, have a cup of coffee, go downstairs, go down, get a glimmer of light up there, once you’re light you’re okay again, you’re right. But the sensory perception used to go first, and of course [it’s] probably the eyes that went first, but 14 hours is a long time to fly.

When you are a skipper there is no rest, it’s your responsibility the whole time. But that was the same for all skippers, there’s no picking them out, some of them were much more intense than I was. I wasn’t intense at all, not till the very end; I got a bit intense towards the end there. But

most of them were on the same balance as we were. See, Tim Bunsen and I were the youngest skippers to ever go on Coastal Command, we were both 20, and most of them were 23, 24. Not much in age but a lot in psychological experience, and we were probably too young for the job, probably too young. Tim got shot down. See, the funniest thing, not the funniest thing, the most peculiar thing

that ever happened to me, you ask me if I’d take anything out there for good luck: I didn’t need it. I was in Wales and Wales was a place of the lake islands, it’s the place of mischief, it’s the place of contemplation, it’s a place of mystery, it’s a place of singing, beautiful signing. Have you heard the real Welsh singing in Wales? These people, their beautiful voices. Ladies playing a pianoforte solo, making music ripple through the air. It’s

a wonderful, beautiful, mystical place. And one of my mates there, Ron Kennedy, used to get quite forlorn and talk about Wales and all the rest of it, and he was a squadron leader, and go outside the mess and the trees were there and the moon, and he used to claim to the fairies he saw in the garden, “No more the raucous roar of the bar room, it was the quietness

of the cloisters for me.” “You silly old bastard, what are you talking about?” And he said, “Can’t you hear ’em, can’t you hear ’em?” And I said, "Hear what?” “The Welsh fairies, the fairies?” And I said, "Come on, they are going to take you away.” “They look after you, they look after you.” So Ron was a great drinker and a great storyteller too, and lovely fellow. But anyhow

it happened that the trio Godsall, Sheehan and Bunce were down for flying on the same day, it only happened once, and Bunce was to go off first, Godsall second, and I was the third take-off. And when you’ve got that kind of take-off you went to bed fairly early the night before and you are waiting to hear the footsteps down the corridor of the duty officer

to wake you up and shake you up and get you on your way. And it’s amazing how the ear, your ear is still up listening for these sounds: it didn’t come and nothing came, and there were no sounds. It was 7 o'clock, so I got up and quickly, you always went to bed ready to go, you always had your shower first, you put on your pyjamas and all the rest of it, when you went flying you still had your pyjamas, you took nothing off, it was too cold over there, just added clothes over the top. So I did that and went down to.... [UNCLEAR]

“What’s happening, what’s going on?” “Oh, Tim’s in trouble.” “What do you mean, ‘Tim’s in trouble’? I’m here. Why aren’t I called?” “Oh, there a funny sea fog rolled in tonight, last night. The first two got off but it was too thick for you to take off so we didn’t call you.” “Oh, thanks a lot.” Tim Bunce got shot down, Marsh Godsall got attacked, I was left alone. I didn’t take off. I went and thanked the fairies for looking after me.

Of course, of course. It’s like at anything else, you know, at the end of the day, at the end of 800 hours’ operational flying you’ve had it, you're spent. No matter how good you are, you are spent.

And it shows up in a myriad of ways. You can cover it with too much drinking. I was very lucky, I didn’t drink too much because it made me too crook too quick, so I had a safety measure there. My friend “Wonk”, of course, I once picked up his glass by mistake playing booze that night and that is the last I remember of that night. I don’t know how they could drink it. Some of them said they could drink it, I don’t know how.

How did I cope? I did more flying than any of them and got rid of it. Probably because I knew I wouldn’t have been able to cope. I couldn’t have stretched out as long as they do, no way, so I coped that way.

But after the CO said, “Your tour’s expired, you go now,” [it was] like you are kicked out, nobody wants you any more, and you were lost. You didn’t have a squadron you didn’t have a crew, nobody was reliant on you; you were just an ordinary mortal again, you weren't the boss any more. There was nothing, nothing left, and boom, that opened a chasm, and [it] was the chasm I had to get over.

Not the flying, but the loss of the tribe.

Instant.

Yeah, yeah.

Of course. We’d been, you know, the main bulk of the crew, four of them were just newly on the crew but the bulk of the crew there, yeah. But they translated, transferred to the first pilot Vince, because he’d been with me for a long time, too, and I knew they were in good hands, safe hands with Vince.

That didn’t worry me too much. But anyhow you had to get it out of your system. And when I went up to Alness there, the CO, Chief Coastal Operational Training Unit, you know, there were the oldies, the old members of my crew still wandering around, but not crew any more. The tribal liaison was gone. That would never return.

So that is the sad part of it. The happy part was I’d made application to fly for British Airways or whatever it was in civilian street [i.e. after leaving the armed forces], and news came through that I had been accepted. Then I went down and met “Gubby” Allen down in London, and “Gubby” Allen was, told me to come and see him after I had done another course. So I went down to Blackpool, and

Blackpool had what they called a general reconnaissance course going, and that was a navigator’s course. I did a navigator’s course down there and enjoyed the joys of Blackpool. That got me out of it. Ever been to Blackpool? Blackpool Tower, where the Beatles come from, just next door to where the Beatles come from. There was a building there, ten storeys high, full of dance halls, cinemas, pubs, you name it.

A pavilion of pleasure. There was also Blackpool rock [a type of hard candy]. I didn’t take to Blackpool rock. Blackpool, that was very good, too.

Yes, I went away on holidays for about a couple of weeks, went to London and all over the place, and I drove all over England having a look at the

places where the, you know, the Second Front started from, trying to get over there in fact to have a look at it, but we weren’t allowed. But that was a great day. But, because I was accepted to fly with British Airways, they got me home quickly. So I got back to Australia and I flew on DC-3s out of Essendon for five or six months, and

then they had five Sunderlands from 461 Squadron that the early members of the squadron had flown out a couple of years before, up in 40 Squadron in Port Moresby, so I went up there and flew them for six months or so up over the Owen Stanleys across the Markham Valley, up the gap and to Bougainville.

But [when] I tried to contract to fly with British Airways I got a tongue infection when I was up in New Guinea and it put me in hospital for three weeks, and I decided that flying depended on your physical condition, whereas doing law didn’t. You can be crazy and still do law, but you can’t fly. So I went

back to law.

Yeah. Yes. Whatever gift he gave me, the thought that the flying career is absolutely dependent on your physical condition is right.

I was at the operational training unit instructing and I actually dreamt that he had been killed, and there was a phone call waiting for me that morning

that he had been out on a patrol and hadn’t come back. And that’s all I know about, that’s all they know about it. Evidently, in the dream the stress of weather was his undoing because [of] the frontal systems that had [gone] through and the atmospheric pressure had dropped, which means the altimeter was over reading; and that he tried to come in underneath it off the Norwegian coast and hit the wave that had been waiting for him for 45,000 years.

That was the dream that was most unsettling during the period when I was out of the tribe.

I know

roughly where he went down. My eldest son down at Albury, I told him all about this and he actually went to Canberra and he got all the records out, of that particular incident. And the records he thought were very poor, he’s a lawyer too, and very incomplete, so he wrote to the Norwegians who did an underwater survey there and he gave them roughly the area that it’s believed he went missing,

and they gave him underwater surveys which showed four or five metallic contacts at the bottom of the sea there. Evidently there is a shelf there is under about 3 or 400 feet of water, and then there are great big gullies and all the rest of it there, and it could be his aircraft; it could be nothing to do with it at all. And that’s the area in which he went down. And his object was to try and get the

war graves people interested enough to have a look see to see what they are, which they can do these days, now, and just to see whether there is an indication of a Sunderland aircraft or not. If they do, it will be him; if they don’t, well, who knows?

Well, I’ve got the feeling that he wants to come home, he wants to be buried where his father and mother are.

He had a daughter who I met at, oh, when we were up doing the OTU [Operational Training Unit] at Bundaberg, who was this high, about one year old then, and she did come and she did discuss the matter with me. And she is married, she is an American citizen now, she married some kind of a gentleman over there in the United States when she grew up. Her mother married somebody in the diplomatic corps and

she was interested in co-operating, too, but then that contact was lost. I think that it’s too far gone for her now and she has no recollection of her father at all, much too young, and the mother is long dead too, so that was that. But not only Marsh but the whole crew, the whole lot of them over there, and as far as I’m concerned the government should bring them home if they can find them. Should make an effort to find them and bring them home.

But it’s a long time ago now, isn’t it, ’44? Be 60 years now. (UNCLEAR). When I wrote my three novels I then, there was nobody to worry about, why should I do this, why should I write all this stuff out again? And I sent, I was asked to send my medals and my log book and a citation for

the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] down to my son at Albury: his daughter Meg was doing an Anzac Day composition and she wanted to refer to them. I finished up getting 26 letters from her class down there. It was wonderful, showed interest in the whole business. And I thought, “Well, it might be the younger generation that might be interested, you never know.” Because the generation that followed me was not that much interested and the one following that was, you know, too far away,

too far away, but the youngsters showed a lot of interest.

Well, there was nothing in the citation. It, the citation I received from the, message from officer in charge of 9 Group in England, the operating group that looked after us, “Congratulations on the immediate award of DFC, full stop.”

And it went to our CO and the CO announced it in the mess, and they all bought me a drink and that was it. And the bloke that got the next submarine two nights later, he got the citation at the same time that I did, so there was two of us being shouted [bought] drinks by everybody and sundry. It was very good. But the reality of it all is that it was, as I said to the crew, it’s a crew citation because everybody had a hand in it. Everybody had a hand in it, but then as leader of the crew they made the award to me.

It was very satisfying.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Oh, awareness, the fact is, a Junkers 88 going there, “Don’t tell me we got to bloody well fight on the way home.” But the, it was the navigator that had a look and said, “He’s a bit high, he must be a weather one.” And he didn’t alter course, he just went on; just, you know, he went that way and I went that way, and that was it. But we did send out a…. , and the people back at base were waiting on tenterhooks

to see what was going on. We soon reversed that, but no doubt the Beaufighters were waiting for him on the way back.

Yes, there were two or three incidences. The, who was it?

Yes, before I became skipper of the crew Roger Newton got a letter from one guy about an incident that I wasn’t involved in. I only knew about it after the war. He rang me up and said, “This fellow wants your address; do you want him to know?” “Not particularly, but what’s it about?” But there was a bit of that going on. When I was at Deniliquin

there was a German guy that ran the store just outside of Deniliquin, a little country place, and he came into the Rotary Club and made a speech and he was, oh, around about the same vintage as us and he was a Luftwaffe pilot.

And he finished up flying Junkers 88s down there in the Bay of Biscay, he’d been in the German Air Force for years and years. He was in there when they didn’t have parachutes, and he was in the, so he told me, and he was in the parachute regiment, up the north there near Norway, Sweden, Finland. They made him jump into snowdrifts; they didn’t have parachutes so they made him jump in a snowdrift. But he spoke, but he said to us

just something he was doing to fill in time at the end of his career as a pilot there. But apart from that not much else, nothing else. Except this bloke that had the estate at Normandy, he was the bloke that brought back the message what happened to the particular U-boat that we happened to attack, and he got that information from the people there.

But the Germans were very co-operative, enough to, most Germans wanted to see the end of the war anyway, along with everybody else. Gone for too long.

25-pounders. 25-pounders pulled by Herrington truck, and we used to parade around Liverpool and those places west of Sydney and go into there and pretend to fire them. And they took us down to Greenbank, Green something or other, they had

an artillery range near Holsworthy and we used to fire a few shots there, but nothing very serious happened there. That was a fake Army, that one.

Yes. I used to live in Latimer Road, Rose Bay. And that’s near the

Woollhara golf links, which is beside the Sydney golf links, the Royal Sydney. And across the road there, New South Head Road, was the old swimming pool, the Harbour Swimming Pool, and that’s where myself and several of the lads from Sydney High School used to go and do our swimming training. Then the flying boats were right next door at the base, they used to pull up there.

Empire flying boats, Sunderlands, same as us. But civilian, not military.

And I used that. When I was up in Port Moresby, on two occasions I brought Sunderlands down for maintenance down to Sydney and moored the things up there and flew off down the harbour, once flew under the Harbour Bridge, and use the facilities. But the Sunderland had to have minor repairs and major repairs and

I think it was every 5 or 600 hours it had to be brought down for a good go-over. They didn’t get much of a good go-over there in Port Moresby.

No. The, it was not accidental either, but one of the motors was giving me great trouble and I didn’t want to climb over, and I just kept it low to the water and went underneath.

Not that I know of. The Catalinas went in and out there, but mainly on the east coast. The only Sunderlands that came out here… . Well, the Empire flying boats used to go in and out of Darwin, that’s for sure, because they didn’t have the range to go any further than Darwin, to get the next leg in.

Well, I never, I gave up flying when I got out of the Air Force, did my law course. I went into practice and established a practice down in the Riverina. I did very little flying on my own account there right through until about the 1970s. Then the cheap Cherokee 6 [was] going for sale, so I went down and flew that down in Melbourne and came back and joined the flying school at Deniliquin

and rig up, got my civilian licence back there, and I flew quite a lot in the Cherokee 6 around the place, which was very satisfying. But I had a big practice then and it was very useful in practice to be able to fly from place to place. But then I just did a few trips around Australia and

that’s about the size of it.

Oh yes, yes. I, you hardly ever lose it. The thing you lose is the being used to it, the thing that you lose is knowing precisely where you are and where everything else is at the same time subliminally, so you’d have to go back. And I’d have to do probably 20 hours, 30 hours flying around before

it became automatic again. But that’s the nature of things. The thing that worries you most is your eyesight is the first thing to go, and by that I mean the eyesight on the instrument panel in front of you, that’s the first thing, as far as I was concerned. That worried me. When I say, the long sight is still okay and the take-off, landing, there is no trouble with that, but if you’ve got to go straight to your instruments, well, you are likely to be a bit slow. Only these things; the lettering is way too small, like the phone book,

the print is too small.

I went very well. I got a, graduated with honours and got “most distinguished” in the Ex-Servicemen’s Award for the year, and was working with some pretty good fellow students. There was the Chief Justice of the High Court,

Tom Hughes, and the “my little friend” Lionel Murphy [reference to a widely-publicised utterance of Murphy J], a few other notables. It was a good year.

Typical law lectures. They were very good, actually. I was there in front of the big class, the big class was the year after me, and back in ’45, and there was about 4 or 500 in the next big class.

There was about 40 or 50 in our class and we did very well, it was very good. The lectures were excellent. And everybody was vying with each other because we had become very competitive after being in the forces. Yes, I, no holds barred, it was very good, it was okay.

I went to the public service. I was in the Crown Solicitor’s Office

in Sydney and I stayed there for a while. And then I got my problems: I got bowled over with the strain of war service and had to take a year or two off, and went back to it after that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was very well known, yeah, very well known. But anyhow, I was lucky enough to have a doctor who was wise enough to recognise it straight away.

For what?

“Stick to routine. It’s up to yourself, mate.” Nothing varies.

Well, I went to Griffith first, with an old friend of mine from the law school there, and was with him for a while, to get back into it properly. And then I decided to strike out on my own. I went and hung a shingle up in Deniliquin

and started a practice there, and I built up a very big practice there over a period of years. And I concentrated on helping people with their probate duty problems, tax problems, trust, companies, commercial law, things of that nature. And then it all got a bit heavy so I lit out of there and went down to Melbourne, oh, later on, in ’78, ’79.

Took it a bit easy again then. And then I stayed in practice down in Melbourne until ’91, ’92, then came up north here then.

Probably. Well, I’m Irish; we always stick to the grog.

What?

Yeah, that was Marsh Godsall, a group of three mates. There was Marsh Godsall, myself and Tim Bunce, and we had

been through the same flying school together, we went overseas together, we had the same experience together. We were the three that were picked to go on the squadron. Marshall was four or five years older, we only, he took the position of being the older brother and adviser. He was our mentor, and a very good one, too.

It’s a very good and very necessary

celebration, I think. As far as I’m concerned, Anzac Day is to honour the dead.

The people that aren’t here. And I gave the Anzac Day address here and I was,

told the youth of the country that if they ever found themselves in the same position as my generation, that they found themselves in, that the same thing for them to remember is to survive, and if you want to survive you’ve got to be better than the opposition.

It was a bloody waste of time, of effort and of people and of money and everything else. When Rudolf Hess landed in 1941 evidently to offer some kind of armistice, some kind of arrangement, I think it should have been accepted. We lost six and a half thousand aircrew

in Europe, that’s Australia, without counting the Pacific Theatre operation, six and a half thousand. And they were the, out of six million people in Australia at the time, we could not afford to lose those six and a half [thousand].

Well, it’s had a physical, psychological and emotional effect all the way through. As I say, you have to be made of brick and stone for it not to be any other way. But I suppose it’s

tempered one, to a certain extent.

Yes. Very hard to do, they were from all over Australia. The ones that you mostly dealt with are still over there. The ones that are left, we have a Sunderland Association down in Melbourne,

but that gradually, you know, finished. Everything finishes and has its use, but I’ve done about probably, here 10, I thought,how many years of work for ex-servicemen,to get them pensions and things like thathelp them legally, and without charge and without worry,So that way , I kept up a good association with

those that…

No, it’s not mateship, it’s a matter of mutual experience. The thing with mateship comes from the crew, that’s where the mateship is.

At the time very important. I expected them to shoot straight and do their job properly, they expected me to fly properly; and, you know, expectation

to live up to; and the mutuality about it. But it got us all through. I didn’t lose anyone.

Oh, there were postagrams and things like that came through, they were okay. But it got very hard to write home. I know that I had a very good relationship with a lady up at Bundaberg, but things happened so quickly once you got over

there onto squadron and flying operations. By the time I got mail to her and it was delivered she’d gone and married somebody else. But anyhow, probably just as well.

The highlight of the war is the fact that

I was on the cutting edge of the aviation industry, there was nothing that hadn’t been invented that I hadn’t handled, and handled well, and I was at the top of my profession. I was chosen to go on to British Airways out of hundreds that applied and that was, without further training on the Australian airlines then, it was as high as you could go.

But I dropped that for the security of the law.

Something like that.

Up at Port Moresby? Well, we played cricket

and we played cricket very successfully. They made me bar officer up at Port Moresby and I found that where I had two messes to look after, I was bar officer in the officers’ mess, and that’s where all the young blokes who wanted to drink beer were, and also of the airmen’s mess, and that’s where all the old blokes that wanted to drink spirits were, so we used to swap one for the other and it enabled me to get some spirits up to the Yanks

in Madang in exchange for cigarettes, which everybody enjoyed back at he bar there. And it enabled me to throw pretty good parties. I used to fly the colonel’s dry cleaning and washing down to Cairns for him one a week, used to stumble around Madang from time to time and Lae and Finschaafen,

and look at New Guinea from the only place that one should look at New Guinea, and that’s from about 10,000 feet.

Beautiful and lush and green. Very lush and green, but they have their problems up there, they had them then, they’ll have them forever, but that’s their problems. But it’s different, it’s so different there.

Oh, they were just taking trips. We took a lot back from Madang, and Madang because it has a river, and it hasn’t got much else at Madang, and we could land right in the open, see, on the river and vice versa taking off. And they were at Bougainville because it’s got a sheltered bay on it. But as just straight transport, there are no thrills in that. Just ordinary flying. The

only thrill was landing in the bloody river at Cairns, that was a thrill.

Well, there is not much room to land or take off at Cairns. Just think of Cairns: it’s got a river that comes in full of boats, and it snakes off around like that, that’s where you had to take off and land. So that was the most exciting thing at Cairns: you couldn’t do it anywhere, there was too many sticks coming out of the water.

Ah,

you could just get off at low tide, yes, just get off. But it wasn’t, it was mainly stick, but when, I had a Sunderland prang because I tied up there and we got a cyclone in and the boat drifted, and a lighter full of fuel knocked a hole in the back water lien and we had to rig that up and put some canvas over it and fly it down to Sydney to get it repaired. But [there was] nothing about the, nothing much about

the islands of Cairns that enhanced [entranced?] me at all. Flying was easy. The only thing that was not easy about it was to get over the range there between Port Moresby and Madang, and you had to be at 11,000 feet to get through the gaps, that they called mountains going up beside you, and that was the limit

of the altitude we could get in a Sunderland, flying at ten knots above stalling speed and mushing along and hoping we’d get through. We got through.

We were close to it. Sunderlands are a very graceful aircraft that will not do anything violent unless you treat it violently, and if it stalls it just loses height and mushes down like that.

It might drop a wing to the side, but once you start losing height you’ve got to regain it. But that didn’t happen. We had the Martin Mariner, two Martin Mariner aircraft up there, a Yankee job, they are fully electrified and if anything goes wrong with the electrical, you know, you’ve got to take it back and land it. And one of my mates was teaching me the tricks of the Martin Mariner in the gap there on the Owen Stanleys and lost a motor. Now, that was exciting,

because once he lost the motor he either had to keep it going, and it might spin off and go through the cavern, or he had to feather it, and if he feathered it it became useless. And he [had to] get down to land somewhere and it had to be on the water, and could we make Port Moresby Harbour, or do we head for the coast and land on the coast? So he was right there, and I said, “Straight back to Port Moresby, and keep all motors going, keep them all going.

The motor is buggered now, so there is no point to worrying about that.” And we made it. We got there, we only had 50 feet to spare but we got there. We had 40 troops on board, they were hilarious because they were going back north. But apart from those things, flying in New Guinea is a matter of dodging misadventures.

I was at, Victory in Europe, I was in Sydney. And I’d just gone out to pick up the wife and Victory in Europe, and I said, “Do you want to stay in town for a party, or do we go back to Narrabeen?” And she said, “I think we’ll go back to Narrabeen.”

So we went back to Narrabeen, caught the Manly ferry and went back to were my folks were. That was Victory in Europe.

Well, there was no-one to share it with, you know, nobody was home, nobody from the squadron was around, you know, you were on your own. Not like the Army where you’d stick with your unit all the time; once you’d done your job they sacked you and you were off.

What?

Yes, of course it was.

I don’t know. The Fleet Air Arm, they have got their Naval people and they don’t have a tour of operations; they just, if there is a war on they just fly all the time, that’s their job. But they could do it that way. But the thing about it is, if you don’t take a person off operations, they are going to prang an aircraft and kill people, their own people.

So you’ve got to do it, you got to lower it down. And it’s, you know, it a pretty high-pressure job and that’s why we were all kids, we were all 18 or 19 years of age, 20, 19, 20 years of age. And those that were over 24, 25 were probably too old for it.

I don’t think so. Oh, later on a lot of people came back for their second tours of operation, went off for a year and then came back to the squadron, and that was the way they used to work it. They used to work it so that, see, by the time I had finished, after D-Day, well, the war was over, the hard part of the war was over, there was only the

Battle of the Bulge afterwards that the Germans nearly got through, that put the issue in doubt. But even then I was only in doubt for short periods of time. But the idea was to go and take your experience up to an operational training unit, use and operational training unit by passing it on to others, and after you’d gone six months on an operational training unit go back to a

squadron, and there is nothing wrong with that. But I think half the problem is being a member of a minority race over in Europe, this was it. There was all Australian and then Australia was, you wouldn’t feel it. But then again there is a vast difference between the Air Force in Australia and any air force in Europe. Air force in Europe was a professional crowd; out here was just an amateur job.

Oh, yeah.

We were told.

No. We were told there was going to be a Second Front in Europe; we weren’t told of the date, that’s all. You only had to drive around England to see that, there was so much, so many men, so many troops, so much equipment, so much everything, you know, England couldn’t hold it.

They knew; they didn’t know when, and they didn’t know exactly where. See, their best response to D-Day would have been just to amass their troops somewhere centrally so they could get to the point of impact ASAP [as soon as possible]. But they second-guessed.

I was standing in the mess at Point Cook, they’d asked me to do some kind of a course down there, and it came over the radio at Point Cook. I was standing in the mess having breakfast, and it came over there. And we looked at each other and we said, “What does that mean? What’s that all about?” Because at that point of time we had no foreknowledge about an atomic bomb, none whatsoever.

“Oh, thank God for that. That will finish that war.” Because we had seen what happened at Okinawa and those other places, and it would have been, you know, the war still probably would have been fought. There had to be some kind of a clincher to end it all.

Oh,

I don’t know. I think it was probably, it was more than just something to do: I’d been told I was going to write and write and write, so wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. Just,

I had a mate, way, way back, at Narrabeen school, and he used to write and write and write, and write and write and write, and he was a very good writer. And I got interested in the way he did it and all the rest of it, and he said, “We can all do it, we can all write like that.” And he wrote some good stuff, and he got killed when he was still a kid, he got knocked over by a car at Collaroy. And somehow

or another he told me, he said, “It’s your turn to write now, mate.” So anyhow, that came on me at that time, I thought, “Okay, I’ll write.” But there were the Welsh people with their Feinists [?] also said the same thing when I was over there, I spent a lot of time in Wales, I met a lot of people in Wales, did a lot of reading in Wales.

But it was time to write, so I wrote.

No, that was the first time. Yes, but the book is not actually my experiences; it is a composite of everyone’s experiences, composite of everything, mine and, you know, probably 50 or 60 per cent of it is autobiographical, but

I’ve used my experiences as the hooks on which to hang the coats.

Oh yes, he read my novels, he reckons there is too much sex in it. I wouldn’t get it through the critics, through the, or what, anything published

A bloody waste. All those lives gone, all those bloody people, on a ship, in the harbour looking at the Statue of Liberty, looking around at fellows, half of them are dead. They didn’t last more than several months after that occasion.

A waste.

Not that often. Anzac Day, Remembrance Day.

I don’t know, I never tried not to think about it. Doesn’t come around often. Doesn’t come around that often.