Australians at War Film Archive

My name is Keith Prowd. I was born on 2 January 1922 in the little gold mining, dairying town of Gympie about a hundred and thirty miles north of Brisbane. My father’s name was Richard Henry Prowd and my mother’s name was Mary Jane Strain. Dad

was a descendant of a family that came to Australia in the first free settler ship in the year 1813 I understand and the name of the ship was the Golden Era. They settled in Melbourne and my grandfather was born in Melbourne either at St Kilda Road Toorak or Toorak Road St Kilda, we have two birth certificates. He worked for his father and had a row with him

and came up to Queensland where he met my grandmother at Rockhampton or Mount Morgan. They then moved to Gympie where my father met my mother because their houses were next door to one another or their land was next door to one another. Then I was born in 1922 on Horseshoe Bend in Gympie

and I went to Gympie State Central School. My grandfather was the head of the Gympie Gas works and my father worked for him as the foreman. Gympie gasworks being off coal gas not the modern gas. During the Depression my grandfather retired and my father was dismissed because he was getting eight pound per week and that was much too much money

in the Depression years. Then he purchased a horse and cart and we had two acres of ground in Gympie, we had a tennis court, a little gold mine, lots of dogs, lots of animals, lots of birds, wallabies. Dad then grew his own vegetables and went round Gympie selling fruit and vegetables for some time.

He purchased a shop in Mount Pleasant in Gympie and that was about a mile, a mile and half from the centre of Gympie. I also then went to learn to sing at Miss Macfadden who was the teacher and apparently I was all right because you will see a couple of cups up there from my singing days. Then

in 1934 my father decided there was not much chance of any advancement in Gympie for me and for his family. I was the only available child, my mother had lost five children prior to and after me and I was a bit molly coddled and we came to Brisbane and we lived at Mogga Road Indooroopilly and prior to that Stan Street Indooroopilly where

Indooroopilly shopping centre now is. It was from Mogga Road that I went to Indooroopilly State School where we did scholarship and then I went to state commercial High School with my best friend Jim Watt and I went to the same school, we went to the same class, we went to High School together and we played football together. He played Australian Rules and I played Australian Rules [Football].

We played tennis together, we played cowboys and Indians at the Indooroopilly gold mine where we shot ourselves with daisy rifles and I have a couple of bruises on my bottom which can still verify that point. My father had purchased an ice run and he went around Toowong, Auchenflower, Milton, Taringa distributing ice

before refrigerator days of course and then I had to leave my school because Mum and Dad couldn’t afford to keep me at high school so I went to night college and studied for junior and got through and then after that I decided to start studying for senior and I got a job working for the Wide Bay Cooperative Dairy Association as a shipping clerk at the age of probably

fifteen. I’d finish work at about quarter past five and I would go to college at the Teachers Training College in Talbot Street Brisbane which is now the State Government Insurance Office Theatre and I would go down to the Commercial High School at the end of George Street to study other subjects. I was getting six and sixpence a week

in Wide Bay Dairy Association and a friend of mine was in the militia so he got me to join the 9/49th battalion at the age of sixteen and a half, told them I was eighteen and they never questioned it. That was in 1937 probably and then because that was five bob a day

and I did six months at the Fort Cowan Cowan which is near Tangalooma on Moreton Island and we were there prior to the outbreak of war and after we came back from there the war had developed. I still went back to work and decided when I turned eighteen which was 1940

I asked my parents to let me join the air force because I didn’t like living in sand conditions in the army. I always was a crank on flying so after about nearly eighteen months before my mother would sign the forms and then I joined the air force, passed my medicals. We were in a

aircrew corps prior to being called up. We did a lot of night classes at the Brisbane Boys Grammar School and at the same Talbot Street college, air force subjects and then in 1941 I think it was December I was called up into the air force and did my aircrew training,

initial training at Sandgate. We were there for six moths doing intense study and having been in the army I had no problem with the military courses. I had to study to about three o’clock in the morning to really get what I wanted. I loved what I wanted to do. I loved the idea of the challenge of the study. I think we had

twelve subjects but I am not positive about that and we had to have an average pass of eighty-two, eighty-five per cent before they would accept us in aircrew. Of course everyone wanted to be a pilot. At the end of time I managed to get a bit higher than that and came second top of the course and we had an interrogation, not an interrogation, a categorisation committee

that selected whether we would be pilots, navigators, wireless operators, gunners or whatever. It was summer time and we were wearing shorts and it was very hot and I was standing before this committee of officers, I was an LAC [Leading Aircraftsman] at the time and my knees just shook and I couldn’t stop them no matter how hard I tried,

the harder I tried the worse I shook and the chairman of the committee said, “If we were to make you a pilot would you be more nervous than you are today?” and I said, “I would hope not.” Anyway I became a pilot. Some of us were sent to Narromine in NSW to learn, at that stage we learnt to fly in Tiger Moths and the de Havilland DH82

and half the day was in study and half the day was flying. We were there for probably another six months and some of us were sent to Canada to further their training and some of my best friends were sent to Canada but I with others was sent to Bundaberg where we learnt to fly on Avro Ansons.

There were two courses at that particular stage, one is the initial training flying school and the other one is the advanced training flying school and you had to pass the initial training flying school before you could get your wings and I was lucky enough to do that. Then the flying school I was lucky enough to pass out as a sergeant pilot. I was a bit molly coddled as a boy and I was never a grown up man probably until I was

over twenty and then I couldn’t think enough to become an officer I didn’t think. I did as I was told but I would not think to do other things. I changed a bit. I was sent to embarkation depot at Sandgate. From there we were sent to an embarkation depot in Sydney

and then to Melbourne and from Melbourne we were then shipped on a ship called the Nieuw Amsterdam which took us to San Francisco and it was a trial run because up to that stage a lot of aircrew were lost going around the Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope and through the Mediterranean, the ships were

shot down or torpedoed. The journey on the Nieuw Amsterdam we went to New Zealand dropped some troops off and then we went south towards the south pole and we actually visually saw ice bergs and we turned right north and came straight up the American coast where we landed at San Francisco. Across America on Pullman

coaches and we went to a camp at Taunton in Massachusetts called Camp Myles Standish. We were there for a month or so in the middle of winter, left Melbourne in January and got to Myles Standish in the middle of winter and it was minus ten degrees,

it was pretty cold. However the Americans looked after us, they gave us over boots for the snow and things and then after being there for about a month and being well publicised they decided we had to go to England and there was a train came into the camp and we got onto the train in the middle of the night and all the windows were darkened down so people wouldn’t see us after being walking around Boston and Taunton for

a month and then we entrained onto a ship called the Louis Pasteur at St John in Newfoundland. The Louis Pasteur was a blue ribbon of the Atlantic that means it had the fastest time from point A to B, that is American to Britain or vice versa. It was a French ship and there were thirty thousand troops on board.

We got about three quarters of the way to England when we were surrounded by submarines. The reason I can remember all this is I’ve just written it down. We were surrounded by submarines and we went in circles for about a day, day and half and then suddenly we weren’t even allowed to go down and relieve ourselves, if we had to relieve ourselves we did it on deck and then he went through, shot through at high speed like

as if it planed, it was a very fast ship. We were about two hundred miles off the English coast when we were met by Sunderland aeroplanes and war ships. We landed in Liverpool where my dear wife was born. Didn’t know her then of course and then went by train down to Bournemouth. As we hadn’t

done much work for a while we were at Bournemouth for only a matter of a week, I can’t remember, when we were sent north to the north of England to a place called Whitley Bay. Whitley Bay was a commando course and we did a months’ commando course training. When we came back we came back to Brighton and stayed at the Metropole Hotel and after being there for a short time.

That’s right, we had twelve gauge shot gun shots, shooting from out of the pull, clay pigeon shooting and I didn’t win it but I came second. And then we were sent to fly and went to a little place called Kidlington in Oxfordshire where we started on

Oxfords, flying Oxfords. Beautiful little aeroplane to fly, very ticklish, very touchy if you did the wrong thing you did a high speed stall and went into the ground. I loved that. We learnt training exercises there and we were there for quite a while, right next to Salisbury Plains near where Mr Whittle developed his jet. From Kidlington

we went to an operational training unit to pick up our crew and that was at a place called Chipping Warden where we learnt to fly on Wellingtons. When you have your crew everyone goes into a big shed like a hangar and there is pilots there and navigators, wireless operators and gunners and we were told to roam around one another,

of course everyone thought they were cracking, used to walk around with our pilot wings and think we were good. A chappie came up to me and said, “I would like to join your crew you are an Australian.” He was an Australian his name was John Werry and John was my wireless operator and remains a very dear and close friend to this day. He lives in Sydney. Then a navigator guy came up to me, he was an Englishman, his name was Mike Powderhill.

Mike became my navigator and then we had a Canadian, bomb aimer and an English rear gunner and a Canadian gunner. Their names were Reg Gibbs, Canadian bomb aimer, Des Ryan the rear gunner and Jim Gordon was the mid upper gunner.

We did a lot of training on Wellingtons and I think perhaps in my opinion it was a beautiful aeroplane to fly, it didn’t have many faults. It would cruise at about a hundred and eighty to two hundred knots, get to a height of about twenty thousand feet, that’s not fully loaded when we were training. A couple of things that come to mind when we were at Chipping Warden.

Chipping Warden is near Banbury, Banbury was famous for Queen Godiva who rode a horse naked through Banbury and there is a cross in the middle of Banbury called Banbury Cross and that is where she did her thing. I wasn’t there unfortunately. We did after a bit of long training we did preparatory to going to operations, we did

a leaflet drop over France I can’t remember where. It was well into France probably Paris area but I don’t think it was Paris. We dropped leaflets to the French to say war was coming to an end and we were winning and you have got to join our side. The French had a lot of underground troops. Then we did the next long

trip in the Wellingtons was we had a brand new Wellington arrived at the squadron, it was a well known aviator that brought it there and she was saying what a marvellous aeroplane it was to fly. It came straight off the assembly line and we were commissioned to have that one on a very long cross country trip

which started at Chipping Warden and went down to Lands End, up to Wales, into Scotland, across Scotland, down to Hull and Hull back to Chipping Warden. When we were flying over Wales we were challenged by the colours of the period, the colours of the period are colours selected for a specific time, hour at a time and the wireless operator

had to fire off his Very pistol with not the same colours but whatever his select colours were for that particular time. Everything was going along nice and swimmingly when I was tapped on my right shoulder, the pilot sits in the left hand cockpit and the wireless operator said, “We’re on fire.” So I said, “Well put it out, use the water,”

“Used the water skipper,” “Well use the coffee,” “Used the coffee, skipper.” “Well use the fire extinguisher,” “Used them, skipper.” Well I said, “Well pee on it.” I didn’t know where the fire was and it turned out to be above the wireless operator’s compartment in the roof and after awhile everyone was saying who is going to get on whose shoulder, it didn’t work out that way. Then I called

for an emergency navigation course back to Chipping Warden and when I rang we had an instrument called TR9D, which is a transmit and receive instrument next to the pilot. When I called up for permission for an emergency landing the control tower person said, “It’s all right we have already heard it.”

The fire had caused two wires to fuse together and instead of talking inside the aeroplane everyone could hear it on the ground and I understand that they took the girls out of the control tower because the language wasn’t bad but a bit high and I didn’t fall back on how to get the fire out. We landed and

we went into interrogation and went down the following morning to have a look at the aeroplane and it was burnt out from the wireless operators compartment right to the tail plane. To explain that, the Wellington has a geodetic construction which is braced on itself and the aeroplane would fly with a lot of this cover. It is covered by this cloth which is painted on, it is glued on

and then there is a gap of about an inch and a half of cotton waste and that is also covered over very strongly and that had caught fire. It had just smouldered fortunately, it hadn’t caught fire. We were very fortunate to come back from that. From there we were then transferred to a conversion squadron, conversion to four engine aeroplanes. I think most conversions are done on the Short Stirling.

Short is not the size of the aeroplane, Short is made by the Short brothers who also built the Sunderland and the Stirling is the land plane of the Sunderland. We there met our engineer who was an English Canadian, an English lad who went to Canada to live. His name was Reg

Matthews. That means we would have had two Reg’s on the aeroplane so I decided we would call Reg Lofty. Lofty was very tall and he was a particularly fine fellow. Lofty turned out to be very helpful to me. I didn’t really know what an engineer should do but he relieves the pilot an awful lot and you just had to check him that he has done what you should do.

The first Stirling we learnt on and I don’t know how some of the crew put up with my landings in the new aeroplane because I bounced them a fair bit for a start. We learnt on the Stirling Mark 1C and the Stirling Mark 1C has an exactor control on top of the throttles and you have four throttles which you hold together and the exactor control had to be pumped to increase the

boost of the aeroplane, the engines. When we were doing some circuits and landings which is practice I discovered that the port outer exactor control wasn’t doing its job so when we started up and went to do the next lot it was all right so we took off and did another circuit, circuit and bumps we used to call them, and

on their way in I noticed the exactor control wasn’t working at all and the revs were coming down on the engine so I got my bomb aimer to use the exactor control while I used the throttles and on landing you throttle back completely and the aeroplane swung fourty-five degrees to port because of the other two engines being stronger. In England there are three runways and those three runways cross

making a diamond in the middle and they use that diamond for sports grounds and on that particular day that I went through the sportsground there was a soccer matching going and I’m doing about a hundred knots and I ran over the soccer ball and burst it, I can still hear it, boom, and I called out, “Everyone right?” and in the middle of that there is a trench which the RAF [Royal Air Force]

army used for defence of the aerodrome and there is a rise at the front and it goes down flat at the back and I had to go over the rise and nearly got airborne and eventually got over that and the rear gunner happened to say to me, “Don’t do that again skip,” and I said, “No.” Anyway we are heading for the disbursement area and we are still doing about eighty knots so I decided to ground loop the aeroplane

otherwise we would have gone into the huts. The Stirling aeroplane wheels are about sixteen feet long and they don’t recommend you ground loop an aeroplane with long undercarriages. We got away with it and I rang up and told them that we had a problem and they came and then we were under arrest, open arrest, because they said we were fiddling and playing around.

There’s another story I should have told you about arrest. In the Stirling they took it up that night and said it was all right, there was nothing wrong with it, they examined it and unfortunately it crashed and they killed two or three, the pilot was a close friend of mine Joe Nicholson who was an English Greek and he was a very nice young man and he was killed and the instructor was killed and some of the crew were killed.

I was very lucky God has looked after me I can tell you that’s the truth. I may go back to Bundaberg we were doing an anti ground gunnery and two pilots, one flying and one on the gun it was an air Vickers gun and we fired at targets on the ground and I had been firing and a fellow called Ian Knot from Lismore was flying

and as I went to change over he was getting up off the seat both engines collapsed, they just stopped. I sat down in the second pilots seat and we did an emergency landing in a cane field and we were also told that we had been acting the goat which we hadn’t and they put us on open arrest again, for the first time, and then

that day they took, they reassembled the aeroplane at that place and on the Burnout River [?] there was a long piece of land that they took the aeroplane down and we had to go with the CO and fly it back and it flew back quite OK which looked bad for us. We just said it just stopped and it did, both engines just stopped. In the Anson

there are four switches all controlled by one switch you can main switch or you can control them separately but they were still down when we landed so it wasn’t our fault, they were down. They took it into the hangar and discovered with the constant wearing of pushing it up and down that the main wire had fused and on landing it had refused. When they started the engine up it flew

again so God was with me again and with Knot. Back to Stirlings. We learnt to fly Stirlings in a place called Cadborough and it was quite a nice place. I can’t remember anything historical about Cadborough and after passing out we were sent to 90 Squadron on Stirlings in 3 Group which was at a place called

Tuddenham and Tuddenham is near Bury St Edmonds and one of the very old aerodromes of England. There were two squadrons there. At Cadborough too we did a nickel raid over Europe in a Stirling, dropping nickel is silver paper which is black on one side and

silver on the other with strips of about an inch wide by about six to nine inches long and as you throw them out of the aeroplane, bomber command uses them regularly, as you throw then out of the aeroplane they make it look as though there is a thousand bombers on the way. That was a job we did over the Ruhr Valley. At Tuddenham my first operation was

as a second pilot to Flight Lieutenant Mills, an English pilot, I hope he is dead now and the Aussies on the squadron said, “You will be right Keith, don’t worry about it, Millsey always comes back because he aborts every mission he has been on.” I didn’t believe that but he did on this one. We were doing mine laying over Keel Bay and we got to within

three quarters of an hour of Keel Bay and the wireless operator called up and said he couldn’t transmit and Millsey said try this try that and he said, “We will divert, we’ll go back home. We’ll drop the mines over the North Sea.” I said, “No.” I was told to mind my own business which was quite correct. I said, “Why go if we can’t receive, it would be all right if we can’t transmit.”

He said, “Mind your own business” and he was right, I was wrong. We landed safely and the very next night we went on our own to Keel Bay to mine lay and on the way in from Heligoland which is near Holland the navigator, we were right on track into Germany into Holland probably and he said, “I’m sorry skip I’m lost.”

So I asked him what his ground plot and air plot was, the difference being that one plot is your course across the land involving wind and the air plot is the actual, you could be flying at a hundred and eighty degrees, that wouldn’t be correct going in there but say a hundred and eighty and the wind is making your heading a hundred and eighty five or a hundred and seventy eight or something. So we went by the ground plot

and it was only five minutes to when the first lot of markers were to come down which were white ones which said you were on course or you weren’t on course and that was five minutes according to Mike. So I said, “We will fly on this for five minutes and see what happens” and we did and there in front of us was the white markers so that satisfied Mike and he got his confidence back again. Remember it was their first

real operation, the other two were really jokes even though they were both over enemy territory. Anyway, we got in, we dropped our mines and on our way out in flying in operation you don’t fly a straight course. If you were flying one eighty degrees you would fly one eight five, one seven nine, one eight two and you fly an average. So we get to over

Heligoland on the way back and Mike said, “We are over the North Sea skip you can fly straight and level.” It must have been terribly difficult for these guys to try and write while the aeroplane is wobbling around in the sky. So I did and with that on the starboard the rear gunners and the mid upper gunner and the front gunner who is the bomb aimer said, “Fighter, fighter starboard go,” which meant there was a fighter coming in from the starboard side and I looked up and I saw him,

he had his navigation lights on. No, just prior to that we were hit with flak from Heligoland [German naval base] and at that time the flak stopped and the fighter came in and we actually shot him down and we were on our way back to England by this and I called up, “Is anyone hurt?” and the rear gunner said, “Yes I’ve been hit.” It turns out he was hit with flak [anti aircraft artillery fire]

and he still operated his turret and helped shoot that fighter down which we got credited with. John and I were went down and got Des out. I had taught my bomb aimer to fly the aeroplane straight and level and I had George flying too, George is an automatic pilot and with that

we issued morphine to Des, put him on the ground, had to cut his coat off which was one of those English beautiful fur lined coats but he had quite a lot of damage on his left side and we used his parachute to rest his head on and we went back to our job and the mid upper gunner became the rear gunner and the wireless operator became the mid upper gunner. We were going along nicely and the engineer said,

“I am sorry skip we haven’t got enough petrol to get back to England.” I said, “I don’t understand that” because the petrol tanks were self sealed, they had a rubber coating inside which if you got hit they would automatically self seal, you could lose a bit but not much. So he said, “I don’t know but the instruments say we are running out of petrol.” So I did a slow glide into the English coast

to a little place called Woodstock which was the crash drome for aircraft that were crashed and couldn’t make it home. We were heading only about ten minutes out of Woodstock and I said to Lofty, “How is the petrol situation” and he said, “I think we can make base” and we did. We made base and we landed intact and got an emergency landing for Des Ryan who never flew with us again.

He was pretty seriously hurt. I recommended him for a medal and he got the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross]. Quite a brave thing. After that at Tuddenham we did some more mine laying, we did a bombing mission I think over Ruhr Valley and then that was early 1944.

Tape 1? In early 1944, probably February, March the 2nd tactical air force was being formed to prepare for the second front. It’s been prepared before that but they were then developing squadrons to drop

paratroops. […] Go back to Tottenham?

The 2nd Tactical Air Force was being formed. Those of us in the squadron who had the least number of operations were the ones who were asked to go and join this other squadron, which was part of 38 Group.

38 Group was a subversive group in that it was involved on the ground of Europe. I was in charge of 6 crews sent from 90 squadron. We went to join 196 Squadron at East Leicester in the north of England. When we got there they’d just left and gone to a new location at Tarrant Rushton.

So the adjutant said, “You’re off operations.” I said, “Yes, we are, sir. Could we have a bit of leave?” We’d already had 10 days. He said, “All right, I’ll give you a week,” and we ended up with 10 days as well. We had 20 days on leave. Then we went to Tarrant Rushton and met up with the squadron. Three of them went to 299 Squadron and three of us went to 196.

We didn’t need our air gunner because the Stirling had been cut down, no oxygen bottles, no front turret and no mid upper turret. They were just all open space. The aeroplane was a pretty big aeroplane. 110 feet fuselage about 90 something feet. 98 feet wingspan.

You could have a ballroom dance in the fuselage. It was good. We had to do a lot of practise there for towing of gliders to find out how a glider pilot used his aeroplane. I decided to have a couple of trips with the glider pilot to know what he felt like behind another aeroplane. It gave me an

insight into what they were doing. I liked it actually. We did a lot of towing of gliders off the squadron. The glider that was used was a Horsa glider. There was another one used by the Americans called the Hadrians, but we didn’t have those on our squadron. Apart from learning to two gliders, oh, the rope between

a glider and an aeroplane, there are two big ropes go into one from the wings from under the aeroplane, not from the wings, it’s from the back. The two go onto the wings. One goes from the aeroplane, one attachment, and two attachments to the wing of the glider. That rope was about 2 inches thick, very thick rope. Metal containers

and the area where we had to drop the roped after we dropped the glider off, was not too far from the WAAF’s [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] quarters. Being a little bit devilish I used to drop the ropes as closely as I could to the WAAF’s quarters. I got into a bit of trouble over it, but that’s what I did. We did that. Whilst we were practising we also practised dropping paratroops over

Salisbury Planes. Then during a few times we did some operations into France dropping supplies, equipment, spies, servitors. I didn’t drop many spies or servitors, I dropped quite a bit of supplies. It was to the underground force in France, Holland, Norway, Sweden,

not Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and into Germany actually. One trip that I was involved in just touched the edge of Germany. Another trip that I did, which came to mind very quickly, was just a good bit before D Day. We had to fly into the border of Switzerland and

France. And to get to the site, which was lit up like a village, there were underground troops, lit like a little town actually, huge thing, I had to fly in to Lake Geneva and fly back out. Because even though we were still only 200 feet above the ground, our altimeter was round about 10,000 feet. So Switzerland was very kind to us. They had anti-aircraft guns, but they weren’t firing at

us, they were firing up in the air away from us, just don’t come near us, you know. We dropped those things and going into these underground trips the pilot had a little Morse code light sighting which he could touch if you had to, you did have to in more than one occasion. It lit up a light under the aeroplane. When you’re flying over France,

Holland, occupied countries, often you’d get a V for Victor on a torch, dit-dit-dit-daa. I always used to reply with dit-dit-dit-daa or dot-dot-dot-dash, whichever way you know Morse code. That came in handy all the time. We used to talk to our own aeroplanes, which depending on why they called you up, you’d reply with a long dash or something.

We did a lot of those trips. I’ve forgotten how many. About 20 I think, about that, in Holland and Belgium. The one in Norway was particularly interesting. Coming back from one of them we were flying at about 3,000 feet over the French coast. We climbed to go over that. We didn’t have to

climb to go over the coast, that was the rule, climb. I was hit by some flak from the Channel Islands. No great damage, but we lost one engine, that’s all. We landed back safely. No one in the aircraft was hit. They were very interesting jobs. I thoroughly enjoyed them. We had a liaison officer on the squadron who had been

an organiser of underground troops, he was landed in Norway and organised something there. He was landed in Holland and then in France. On three different occasions he was betrayed by the underground. He used to say to me, and I’m sure he said it to other pilots, “be careful what you do today. You’ve got dynamite onboard” or you’ve got

something that will blow up. “Careful where you go,” so we used to plan our trips so we’d run away from anti-aircraft fire that we knew of. He never said anything, we assumed it was OK. I think he was a very angry man. He was only 22 years of age, as I was about that time. He was an angry man. He was a real big man. He

was an expert of picking up languages. He could learn a language in a matter of weeks. He was an Oxford scholar. He was a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford College at that age. Highly intelligent person, but a very angry man. The three people who had betrayed him were all killed by him except the last one, which

he didn’t get. He swore that he would get him after the war and he did and he was tried for murder. I can't remember his name, and if I did I don’t think I’d tell you. Then the important day of all came along, the D Day. 6th of June 1944. Our squadron was one of the early squadrons in. I have some photographs of marshalling on that day.

We took off at 10 second intervals. To take a 4 engine aeroplane off at 10 second intervals, which means you had 3 aeroplanes on the runway at once. One just lifting off, one in the middle and one starting off. The prop balance you get was pretty heavy. I nearly got the chop and Edna would remember this, I’m sure. We were taking off and one would swing left,

one would go ahead and one would go starboard. I had to go starboard and I was hit with the propeller wash. Got our of it all right. Then we went at 400 feet across the Channel to drop the troops on D Day, and we did at a little less than 400 feet, 250 feet I think. The Americans dropped their troops on the

right hand side of the Cherbourg Peninsula and their instructions were “turn to starboard to go back to base.” We dropped them over a place called Cannes in France. The little village in which we dropped them was actually Wistrom. We were at about 250 feet. You have to throttle back to let them jump out cos the slipstream helps them a bit. Also, we were dropping

supplies out of the bomb bay. The bomb aimer does that. They were jumping out in a static line and the parachutes were opened immediately. I’m flying along fighting the aeroplane, because we were at low speed, and in my vision I looked up, and in my vision was an American Dakota that had turned left in stead of to the

right. I just pushed off all throttles wide open and hoped that I jumped over him. I jumped over him all right, because I didn’t hit him, but I did see a flash of what I thought could have been a bomb or an aeroplane. I presume it could have been him. It was a fantastic operation to be involved in and to be able to live and tell you about it. D Day, the flak that was coming up on D Day was so bright,

the traces bullets were so bright, I think we could almost read a book in the cockpit. I did a stupid ting. 250 feet, I said to the crew, “Put your parachutes on. If we get through this we’ll be lucky.” 250 feet a parachute wouldn’t open in time, but it’s the sort of stupid things you do. We got home quite safely. Not even a hole.

How we missed, I don’t know, but it was a huge amount of flak. You can imagine them sitting there with machineguns, just lying on their back and firing these because they were coming straight up. There was no trajectory or anything at all. We all got back. The next day we did a daylight raid, no two days later we did a daylight raid. We did about 5 in a row. This particular one,

our wing commander’s name was Alexander, and Alex as we called him. We were approaching Cannes to drop supplies to the troops. There was a balloon barrage up, a round balloon barrage. I said to myself, “What’s Alex gonna do here?” Remember I’m just an ordinary pilot. Good average one, but an average pilot. He

turned his aeroplane on the side and he flew through the balloon barrage as we all did. As I went sideways I saw this huge rope, expecting it to hit my tail, but it missed. How we got out of that one. We dropped our stuff. When we got back to base he rang them up and abused the hell out of them and said, “If I can get a squadron of Stirlings through, what do you think they can get a Focke-Wulf squadron through.” So we did

a lot of daylight raids then. One was from Laha. We had the V2 [rocket powered unguided missile] rockets fired at us. Spitfire escort pushed them off track. One of those trips, it was the same day, one of my trainee mates, a bloke called David Ross, was flying spitfires. He knew I was flying Stirlings because

this came over, “is there a bloke down there called Prowdie?” I said, “Yeah, there’s a bloke up there called Rossie.” That was all. David survived the war. He now works for the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. He probably doesn’t now, but he did work for the ABC as Uncle Davy to the children’s show. He had a little kiss curl, beautiful boy.

We were fired at by V2 rockets and the Spitfires used to tip the wing on them and put them off course and then they would crash. They were terrible things. War is terrible anyway. Anyone will think it is that got rockets on their head. It’s adventurous for a 19 and 20 year old to learn to fly an aeroplane and

get paid for it. That’s that important thing. After that we went on leave. Johnny and I decided to go to a place (UNCLEAR). We picked on a place called Dunkeld in Scotland. The township of Dunkeld was about half a mile off the railway line.

We were walking down looking and this woman came up to us, Mrs Wilson her name was, and she said, “you boys looking for somewhere to stay?” We said, “Yes, we are.” She said, “You can stay with us. I know you’re on operations because my son has just been killed. He was killed in Sunderlands and if I can do something to help I will.” We stayed with Mrs Wilson and she became a friend for life. We gave her our rations cards.

It was right on the River Tey. It was my first introduction to dry fly fishing for trout, which I thoroughly enjoyed after in civilian life. Dunkeld, we have some photographs there that Edna jokingly says I had another girlfriend because I have a girl sitting on my lap. We were climbing around the low highlands of Scotland.

Later on we went back to Dunkeld and Lockeridge and beautiful towns in Scotland. Edna and I went back together. Then we came back and as a bypass their son Kay, who was young, Mrs Wilson’s son Kay, came over to Australia to work on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Kay was the head of the motor section of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. He’s still living in Canberra and has been decorated

with the George Cross for something that I can tell you about later on. That was a life friendship that was made during the war. There were lots of life friendships. After D Day we did a few more operations dropping supplies to the underground and to troops. Then came along the Battle of Armand.

It was at the Battle of Armand that my first operation was of towing a glider. Towing a glider the glider pilot has to be sure that he doesn’t get too high above the tail of the aeroplane. You can physically imagine that if he got too high he could lift the tail up and we would be heading for the ground, and that’s exactly what happened. Lieutenant Davies, who was a pilot on that glider,

I just suddenly remembered his name then, I called out to him to put his airbrakes on and to lose speed, because I was heading for the sea. I don’t think he was flying it at the time, I think someone else was. I never heard back so I said, “I’m pulling you” and I tugged him off and he landed in the sea not too far from Holland. Johnny then,

there was air sea rescue craft following the raid and Johnny called them up to say they would need an emergency. So I flew and picked them up and circled them and went back and did this two or three times. I saw them reach the glider, which was still floating so it was good. I hoped that they got out. It wasn’t easy to do, I’ll tell you. A whole

load of paratroops. The glider was still floating when the air sea rescue arrived, so you just assumed they were OK. The next day, the 19th of September, we were taking supplies to the troops. On the way in, in Holland I was hit with flak and I lost my starboard outer engine, which I

couldn’t even feather because we were getting too close to the drop zone. Beside me was a guy called Fred Powell and we were within waving distance of one another and Fred waved to me and I waved back and we were just about to drop the supplies and I was hit with a shell underneath. I lost two

other engines and I bailed everyone out. There was my own crew, which consisted of the navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator, engineer and rear gunner, and a chap called flying officer Chalkly who was the navigator of another Australian pilot who went LMF, at least he refused to fly again, I don’t know whether LMF is the correct title. LMF stands for “Lack of Moral Fibre.”

He is still alive and lives in Sydney. He would have gone on that trip had I not gone. Chalkly was killed, Powderhill was killed, Gibbs was killed, Matthews was killed. We had two army privates pushing the stuff out the back with the

engineer and they were killed, as far as I know. There is still one chap missing. Up until a few years ago I got letters regularly from the defence department of Britain asking me if I knew about this Private Smite. All I could say was that I was the last out of the aeroplane. Our operational height was 1,500 feet and

I got most of the crew out at around about that. It was going down fairly quickly. I tried to control the rate of descent. When I left the cockpit to see if there was anyone else in the aeroplane it was about 700 feet. I ran down the aeroplane and I couldn’t get passed the main spa at the back because I think it was so thick with smoke. I screamed out

“is anyone down there?” I got no answer so I ran up the top and the speedo was reading a bit above 500 feet. So the pilot, navigator, wireless operator, engineer and others go out through a hole in the bottom below the pilot’s seat. I went down there. I looked down and

the word I used was “Shit! That’s bloody close!” I pulled my parachute and rolled out like that. I felt the pilot chute lift and I could see the trees approaching and I was stopped in the air. I say I was stopped by God. I hope that’s true. Then the parachute pulled and I hit the trees.

It was only a matter of 2 or 3 seconds between the parachute stopping me and hitting the trees. You do some funny things when that happens, it’s the first experience I’ve had, and I hope the last. I took my Mae West off and buried it. Parachute was up in the trees, and I walked away. With that I got to a clearing in the forest and I thought

what were American troops, but it turned out they were German. I surrendered. I had a bit of damage up my left side from when I hit the trees, but nothing serious. Then we were taken to Arnmond. The place I was taken to

was a Dutch farm called Klinekwwk, K-L-I-N-E-K-W-W-K it was a farmhouse and the lady there was particularly kind. I saw my navigator. He was machine gunned right down. He had been exposed by the machinegun fire. I asked that I could redress him and I did. A German guard let me do that.

Then we were taken to a transit area. The Germans were, little things that stay in your mind aren’t good. There was a paratroop major who had these anoraks on, the particular things that are supposed to be camouflaged.

This German private wanted it and the major, very unceremoniously told him he was a B [bastard]. I didn’t understand that a bastard in English and German is exactly the same, spelling as well as pronunciation. The poor old major got the rifle but in his face. He still got the anorak off him. We were then transported by

train. I met up with Johnny Weary and Jim Gordon who were the only three that survived. I’d seen Mike dead and Johnny had seen Reg Gibbs, who was still alive, but had been shot, again, in areas you don’t like talking about. He died. They think that when Reg was in hospital and

the British paratroops were attacking the Germans through hand grenades into the hospital, they seemed to think that Reg was killed by that hand grenade, but in actual fact, had he lived he wouldn’t have been any good anyway. Lofty apparently didn’t have his parachute down with him when he was pushing the stuff out the back, cos he went out on the top of a container and he was shot on the way down. They’re the only ones I knew about.

They were my crew. I never found out where Chalkly was. Nor did I find out where the others were. There’s been a few books written about Armand in which I am named. I was the only one of the squadron taken prisoner of war. There were other aeroplanes shot down, but they weren't’ taken prisoner of war. We were taken by train to Wiesbaden, which is near Frankfurt

am Main. Right next to the Frankfurt aerodrome it is. I saw for the first time in my life the German jet, which was exactly like a delta wing aeroplane. Beautiful looking aeroplane, and very fast. Later on, one of the chappies I was in prison camp with was a navigator on a Mosquito, shot down by this jet in a power dive.

The Mosquito was beyond the speed of sound because, now we know it was the speed of sound, he said there was a hell of a bang went on, this navigator said. So they were quick. At Wiesbaden we were interrogated, put in solitary confinement. I have a photograph inside of me with about a fortnight’s growth, even worse than your beard, and I look very angry. Very angry eyes.

It was an official photograph taken by the Germans. I can imagine it being “these are the nick figures that you are defending against.” We were eventually sent on a train to Breslau in the north of Germany. From Breslau we went by train to a little place called Kreuzberg. The

camp was called Bankau, B-A-N-K-A-U, Stalag Luft 7. The camp commander was a chappie called Peter Thomson who was from Perth. I know the camp commandant’s name. It was a so-called fool proof, escape proof, it was a brand new

prisoner of war camp, 20 kilometres from the Polish border, 20 kilometres from Krakow actually. Almost near the polish border. There was one incident of a Polish underground trying to liberate us, but very unsuccessfully. We were there when the Russian advance started. In prison camp the Red Cross were very good, I never saw a Red Cross parcel. At that stage of the war I remember the Germans were short of everything.

We kept our body and soul together with soup that was made from potato skins and turnips and hardly ever saw meat. I started to learn German as a language. We had someone German who were teachers. They were teaching accountancy, so being a book keeper by nature I

did some more. There were guys in prison camps who actually got degrees. That was my hope, that if I had to stay there long I’d get my degree and I could come back home and sometimes it’d become useful, which I hope it was. Then on the 20th of January 1945 the Russian advance started at Krakow. We were dragged out of bed at midnight and told to pack up.

No, we were warned before that. I had no headgear. The only clothing I had was my normal dress suit, trousers, shirt, tie and a scarf, the scarf that my mother gave me, which I still have. A part of my memorabilia. That scarf is in that photograph too, so it was quite good. I pinched a couple

of woollen socks and managed to get them stitched together to make a beanie, remembering that we’re in the middle of winter and in that part of Germany it’s pretty cold. I said it was minus 20 degrees, but I’ve since found out from that thing on the internet about this ‘Death March’ they called it, that it would be cold. It was about 15-16 degrees

below zero. We started marching in a hurry and we ate all the food we could eat. In that march most of us had dysentery and we weren’t allowed to stop. So I think your imagination would probably be accurate. As I was going along I was going “prrrt” and it would freeze. So things got a bit sore down in that particular part of my body. We walked quite a few kilometres and rested.

We walked that night and that day ahead of the Russian advance. We were quite happy to wait for them, but they didn’t want us to. So the prisoners I think were being used by the German hierarchy to use as a bait to stop advances, or be shot. That order was actually issued by Hitler, prisoners had to be shot.

Fortunately someone disobeyed it. Then we walked, I thought it was 3 months, but I find out it was nearly 6 weeks, 6-7 weeks. No food, only what we could steal. On one occasion I was walking beside a German guard when I noticed that his haversack was open. I noticed what looked like

sandwiches, their black bread sandwiches. So I got the guys to gradually ease out so I wouldn’t be seen by the other guards, and I pinched the sandwiches and immediately went into the middle of the lane. We spread those sandwiches around everyone. We only got a couple of mouthfuls each, but we got a bite. Another thing we did on that march was, there were cream cans on

the side of the road and as we were going passed everyone would lift it a bit and somebody would lift it so we got a cupful of cream. Those sorts of things happen. The only food we had to eat was grass or snow. Dehydrated silver beet was another thing we stole. We stole raw potatoes and ate them raw. The first night we stopped I took all my clothes off to wash because they were pretty

stinking. In the morning they were so stiff I couldn’t put them on. Fortunately I had a second pair. My socks were the same. I never took my shoes and socks off for the next 3 months, or 7 weeks. A bit longer than that. What else happened on the march? One of our prisoners was a guy who

was a reporter with the English Daily Mail. He was a foreign correspondent. He spoke fluent German. A warrant officer, Uber lieutenant Frank was the chappie in charge. A very fair man, was a prisoner of war in the First World War, but very hard guy too under the same circumstances.

He wanted to shoot George Pringle, who was the chappie that I can talk about later, who lived in Murgon in Queensland. George was the ferret who found these potatoes and dished them out. Frank wanted to shoot George. I’ve never seen two Germans have an argument, nose to nose,

literally, screaming at one another. This war correspondent and uber lieutenant Frank and they were rising on the tops of their toes. The war correspondent was slightly taller than uber lieutenant Frank and eventually the uber lieutenant gave it away. He said to us, “If you ever wanna fight a German in argument, you must be bigger than him, you must talk down to him.”

I never tried it. I wouldn’t ever even game it to be very truthful. I didn’t speak enough fluent German. That was a pretty traumatic march. I nearly died. We were shot up by thunderbolts. I think they shot 60 of us. When we left Bankau we were 1,550. I never found out the accurate amount, but George Pringle, the ferret, told me

less than 1,000 got to Luckenwald where we finished up. On the very night, just before we had a blitz, after the shooting blitz incident we had a three day rest. I can’t chronologically remember where that was, but that’s when I had this, what I thought was a heavy chest cold. It turned out to be double pneumonia.

For half of that day, George Pringle and another chappie Frank Tate from Townsville, both dead now, carried me, physically, literally carried me. Pulling me along. I would have died had it not been for them. I’m sure I would have died. We had an Anglican priest whose feet were that long. I think Ian Thorpe’s feet would have been small to his. His name was captain

Collins. Captain Collins, in the march, walked up and down to 1,500 people saying, “Not too many more kilometres to go fellows. Keep your pecker up. Not too many kilometres.” So he would have walked at least 5 times further than we went. At least. I’m an Anglican by religion, I still am, and he would conduct

a communion service made out of boxes and all sort of stuff. For him to administer the communion he had to stand a long way back from the block. It was quite humorous if it wasn’t serious.

Captain Collins, he walked up and down the line of the troops, about fifteen hundred of us and he would have walked four or five times further than any of us, very fine man, had very big feet. We had a doctor, Dr Morrissey,

he was a shell shock victim who was captured in Crete he was an Englishman but I had this pneumonia and I went to him and said, “I have got a cold” and he said, “You have got double bronchial pneumonia” and his comments were as I remember them as if it were yesterday, “Do you want to live or do you want to die? I can’t cure you I have got nothing to cure you with.

I’ve got a couple of tablets here,” I’ve forgotten what, sulphur nicomide tablets I think they were, “that’s all I’ve got. You can have those. Now I want you to go and beg borrow and steal as many blankets as you can get from your friends. In the meantime we make up a bed of straw here for you and we will heat some bricks. I just want you to get hot.” We had three days break and that is the only three days

break we had in the whole of that time and I just lay in bed sweating, drinking a lot of water and he actually physically cut off fingers and toes with frost bite that had gone gangrenous. His method of keeping them was he wrapped spiders web around it, keep in the blood. He could sew up things, he had that

sort of gadgets but that is what he did, he physically looked after people. At night time he would scream and being in the hospital, whatever it was, supposedly hospital, I could hear him and he had shell shock but in daylight he was right as rain. I believe he has died since. I understand Captain Collins who was a Cambridge Blue, an Oxford Blue not Cambridge Blue,

in the rowing race in England and I could never forget his feet they were huge. They say Ian Thorpe has big feet but I think Captain Collin’s feet would be equally as big if not bigger. He was a very fine gentleman. After a while and quite a few people were missing, there was one night when we were frozen in.

I think it was thirty two guys who didn’t want to get out of bed so they sent someone in and got rid of them they shot them. We know of sixty that escaped, of that sixty that were shot we know of some that escaped but we don’t really know how many got to Luckenwalde but George Pringle said about a thousand,

under a thousand, nine hundred to a thousand so I have always said six hundred disappeared. It’s my assumption, it’s not only mine but another guy from 299 squadron was in the same prison camp as us, Wally Tee from Adelaide and Wally said there’s three months of his life he cannot remember and that is how I am, three months of my life. A lot of detail goes straight out the damn door. In that march we weren’t fed.

We only stole food or we ate snow and grass. We weighed very little I weighed about eight stone and then we were put on, everyone, I reckon if we had to march the full distance I doubt whether we would have got through. They eventually took us to a train depot and put us in cattle trucks, locked the carriage up but no means of

sanitation, no food, no water and they then drove the train to this place called Luckenwalde which is about fifty kilometres from Potsdam not too far from Berlin. I thought we had walked about seven or eight hundred kilometres but I found out from a thing I picked off the internet the other day that it was about three hundred kilometres.

It wasn’t the walking so much it was the cold, it was bitterly cold. There was no way of getting warm except by walking. People fell by the way side and I would have fallen by the way side if it hadn’t been for George and Frank. I have been in touch with them constantly but they both have died.

At Luckenwalde it was a huge prison camp. I think there were about ten thousand Americans and twenty to twenty five thousand Russians and even Italians because Italy had got out of the war at this stage and we did as we were

told, it was the easy way. Something that happened at Luckenwalde that was quite interesting, the old hands that were there said if you want some warmth we had these fires, those round fires that have heat in them, we had those but

nothing to burn in them. They said, “If you want to go into that hut up there, we are getting all the timber out of there,” “What about the Germans?” we said. “Don’t worry about the Germans. Their job is to guard the prison camp against you escaping,” he said, “You have just got to watch for the ferrets.” The ferrets were the guards that used to come around and look for everything. We went up and we stripped this hut naked except for the outside walls and we were walking past,

I physically did it once and nearly died of fright, walked past guards on duty with this big log on my shoulder with another fella too. The log was about, it was pine, about eight or ten feet long by about three inches in diameter it was easy to break so we took that and burnt it in our fire among other things. We weren’t stopped

which absolutely amazed me and I believe that went on quite a lot. We also had a radio. We paid, I smoked in those days and the cigarettes I smoked were Gitanes, a French cigarette full of manure and sticks and stones and everything else and I am pleased that I smoked at that time because it staved off hunger.

I stopped smoking in 1966 when they got to two and nine pence. a packet, that was too dear for me. The Gitanes was a cigarette that wasn’t very pleasant to smoke but it was good to smoke. We also smoked dehydrated silver beet in bits of brown paper so those sort of things. We had a radio and it was a radio out of a Lancaster that

one of the German guards had pinched and sold it to the camp for fifteen hundred cigarettes, so we all had to dip in and find some cigarettes. Then you had the guys that came around with the news report about where the Russians and the Americans and the British were. Luckenwalde was about fifty kilometres from Magdeburg. Magdeburg was on the Elbe River. In time we were

liberated by the Russians and that was before May anyway, probably April, can’t remember exactly and they came in with tanks and we knew that they were coming because of the wireless and the German guards disappeared. We had a German guard called Sergeant Schultz. If you have ever watched Hogan’s Heroes there’s a Sergeant Schultz there and our Sergeant

Schultz was exactly the same size, no fool, no act, just fact. He was a beautiful tenor singer, he sang in the Berlin Opera House. All he could complain about was his belt was getting too small for him because he had to pull in contrary to me. Sergeant Schultz was a bit slow getting out of the camp and we helped him to get away. Then the Russians came and they ran their tanks down the side of the barbed wire and

of course barbed wire in tank tracks, they don’t agree very well. We think Sergeant Schultz got away, we hope Sergeant Schultz got away. There were a couple of things that happened with the Russians. They fed us for the first few days and then they called a meeting of all pilots and there were quite a few of us, Americans, British

Australians and Italians. The Russian chappie got up and said in English, “I want you people to fly our Yak,” the Yak is one of their aeroplanes and we just flatly refused and from that time on they starved us. We had guards in the corner posts and

halfway down they were running Bren gun carriers around and they had dogs, the Germans had dogs too, but their guarding was much more strict than was the Germans. Between the time that the Russians came and the Germans left we had seen a part of the wire that looked as if it could have been opened and there were half a dozen nails that with the aid of a bit of

iron rod that we had we opened the nails up and went for a walk in the camp. Unfortunately quite a few of the guys went into Luckenwalde itself and pillaged and raped and did things that was out of my capacity to even contemplate because I don’t believe it was necessary. We then went back and as we went back inside we mended the fence because we thought we would go for another walk.

There were eight of us did this and then the Russians came and they stopped us from doing what we wanted to do. They wanted us to fly, they actually issued bandoleers of ammunition to their own people with a rifle, a Tommy gun and told them to go and fight. Some of them of course couldn’t because they were pretty sick. I could describe and the ambulances would arrive and we were thinking,

“Gee they don’t take long to take them out” and I reckon they were only taking them into the forest and burying them. The Russian part of our camp they had a trough down the middle of water and the Russians weren’t allowed out except in daylight and if they wanted to relieve themselves that is what they would do they would do it in the water and I don’t think it takes much imagination to know that the stench that comes

from that and the disease those poor beggars had. It was beyond reproach and that is the way the German’s treated them and I suppose in retrospect I can understand why the Russians treated the Germans the same way and us to a lesser degree. Then we received a visit from an American war correspondent who had heard that we had been liberated.

I have a photograph inside that shows an official American photograph where my face is in it circled that proves I was a prisoner of war and they then hadn’t known we were liberated so they were going back to talk to the Americans, the Americans were on the other side of the River Elbe and I cannot

remember the name of the town. One night just on dusk when the Russians seemed to drop their guard a bit we eight decided to get out of the camp by this means that we had found. We drew straws as to who would go first second, third, I was in the middle

and we, six of us got out and then bullets started to fly. I don’t know what happened to the other two but we got together and we were walking down to what we thought would be the way to the River Elbe but we saw this truck arriving and we thought it was a Russian truck but it was an American truck and when it got close we stopped him. They were going up to see how many they could liberate,

bring back. We told this guy about what was going on, the officer who was a Russian speaking American and a Negro driver, I say that, I say Negro because later on the story you will know why. We told this American officer what was going on down there so we hid under the seats in the truck while they went and organised a

number of guys to get into the truck. We then set out for Magdaberg. We came to this town that was absolutely flattened, there was not one brick standing on end, every house was missing, there were dead cows, there were dead people, they were all bloated with gas and the Russians were going along bayoneting them.

There was a Bailey bridge across this road and there was a Russian hut, I think it was probably the original German hut which would have been the only building standing, they must have wanted that to use for crossing purposes and there was a barrier there to stop people coming through. We had in fact picked up a Russian officer who was supposed to give us the journey to

this place but all that happened every time we stopped he went and had a few Vodkas and the American officer said, “I feel this guy is running us round in circles .I think I know the way,” and he did, that was the right road. We got about two hundred yards off this barrier and he said to the driver, “I want you to go flat out and break that barrier.”

I was sitting on the left hand side front seat and I could see the driver’s face, he was a black man and to this day I would say his eyeballs would have been two inches outside of his face. He said, “Me boss? I can’t drive through there” and he said, “You will do it or you will get shot.” Anyway, he did. His eyeballs just stuck out. It was humorous but sad, the poor beggar was so frightened. Anyway he broke it down

and about fifty yards down by the time the Russians started firing at us we turned right and hit the Bailey bridge at about thirty miles an hour and it’s not a good idea because they wobble over. Anyway, we didn’t crash. They stopped and we went across to the American zone where everything was clean and nice and tidy. We hadn’t eaten for quite a few days. When we got to the other side the Americans had a beautiful hut or tent

with everything in it, lots of food, chicken and ice cream and coffee and cakes and everything we wanted and of course we all bloated ourselves up, a huge stomach and no body. We then were taken by truck to Brussels

and every time we got somewhere we were deloused. We still had the same clothes and if you have ever been deloused it is a powder that they spray into your body and they put it up round your legs and down your crutch and up your back and down your head and in your hair and you look almost white. When we got to Brussels

we went to another camp and we were deloused again and that night we went out to the 21 Club and I’m a complete non drinker and they tell me I had a beer, I don’t remember and I was chasing after girls. That is so contrary to my life but that is apparently what they tell me I did. Edna knows the story. Apparently I didn’t catch them, I don’t know.

We flew home in a Stirling aeroplane to I can’t remember where we landed and then we were taken down to Brighton which was Australian headquarters and deloused again, deloused when we landed on the squadron, deloused at Brighton and re-clothed and got my gear and then I rang to find out where Edna was. Going back to when I met Edna.

Edna was a truck driver, a transport driver in the squadron and she was very popular as could be understood and I had noticed her but never took much notice of her. My wireless operator and rear gunner had gone to the Lake district on one leave and they were given a

King Charles spaniel puppy which we adopted as our crew mascot. Johnny and I were walking with this dog back to the mess and Edna stopped to talk about it. I never took much notice of her to be very truthful, I just thought she was attractive and then a few weeks later we were swinging the compass and swinging the compass the aeroplane is set on a heading

say north and then a guy with a true compass, not been deviated by the magnetic force that an aeroplane builds up, he stands further out from the aeroplane and you have got a tractor that pulls you around on north and he says, “No, you are two degrees out” or whatever and you take that deviation and if you are flying due north you would are probably flying

due north plus one or plus two or minus one or minus two and so that went all the way round the compass. Edna was the transport driver that brought this transport fellow out and I looked down and I said to Johnny remembering that the cockpit of a Stirling is about twenty-six feet or twenty-two feet off the ground, the top of the aeroplane is twenty six feet off the ground and I said to John, “That is a nice looking sheila [female],”

and he said, “Yes it is.” I said, “Would you like to go down and ask her if she would come out with me?” and he said, “No mate you are my best mate and you are my skipper and that is something you have got to do yourself.” Some time after I was driving into Trowbridge to go to the pictures and Edna was driving out on a push bike with another fellow and I knew he wasn’t her type of guy so I then plucked up courage to ring her up one night and it happened to be

the night that she was on night duty, in the morning and I got her out of bed in the morning and I don’t think I was very popular but we did get together and then some days later we were on D Day. Just before D Day I received a letter from Brisbane which was anonymous with a white feather in it. If you know what a white feather is it means that you are a coward and I understood that because

most of us Australians wanted to come back to fight the Japanese but we were sent to England, we didn’t go of our own free will and accord and this person whoever it was thought it was appropriate that we be cowards. Of course within a couple of weeks of that we were dropping paratroops over D Day.

Ever find out who it was? No, I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t want to.

I think I know who it was, I think I knew the hand writing but it was from Brisbane, t he post mark on the envelope was Brisbane. I would never know who it was and I don’t want to know. I can even remember why, I can understand why but people think we didn’t go over there to have fun.

Threw it away. I should have kept it.

That’s how much I thought about it, it was so useless as far as I was concerned, so unnecessary. OK I am an Australian serving in Europe not an Australian serving in Australia which is what I think the inference was. There was a letter written about it. I can’t remember, on purpose I wouldn’t remember its wording but I knew what I was doing. I showed Edna, I showed the letter to her

and I don’t think Edna understood what it was at the time but there was more than one white feather sent to England, more than one. There were a couple on 90 Squadron that I saw and another one on 299 squadron. They were pretty prevalent and that was the reason really, we were fighting in Europe and not in Australia.

I just showed them, they just

giggled. In fact it was a giggle. If anyone took it seriously at a time like that, at the beginning of training to become war pilots I might have worried about it but having been over Europe, doing the job, it was very obvious to me that Britain had to finish first, the war in Germany had to finish first. I don’t say at the sacrifice of Australia but

the Japanese were stopped at Milne Bay and that friend of mine Jim Watt was in the 61st battalion at Milne Bay was one of the battalions that actually stopped the Japanese so they were stopped in New Guinea and never landed on Australian soil but they could have and would have but whether they could have survived in this country I don’t know. That’s another story.

This was before D Day and we were doing a lot of flying, training mostly and dropping stuff in Europe to the underground and to the troops. We used to go out, we used to cuddle up in the wireless operator’s compartment of my aeroplane and

we would put his wireless on and listen to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] Forces program, we listened to Vera Lynn a lot and the flight sergeant in charge of the ground crew came to me one day and said, “That battery of yours is going flat. You’re not in there with Edna are you?” I said, “Yes we are as a matter of a fact. We cuddle up in there and listen to the BBC,” and he said, “OK, so long as I know.” From that time on he had a generator

ready and we did our kissing and cuddling in there. It was good I loved it, still do. I’m not that old. Flight sergeant was very kind about it, nice bloke. There were a few German fighters around particularly for

us who were disturbing the situation because we were dropping troops and underground supplies and the underground forces were becoming quite a menace to the German machine and they were taking fighters and after I was shot down a couple of our chappies were shot in the circuit around our squadron. Shot down over the squadron. Wally Marshall was one, he survived but he is very sick at the moment.

I don’t know of any others that I could name, I can’t remember. Then after that I rang Edna up from Brighton to find out where the squadron was and said I was coming up and they were at Weathersfield,

Shepherds Grove which is not too far in East Anglia anyway. So I went up by train to Shepherds Grove and met up with her and we kissed and cuddled in front of everyone and the Squadron Leader gave Edna the day off and we made arrangements for our wedding which happened to be on 6 June 1945, twelve months after D Day.

Edna could probably tell you more about that. She had to borrow a wedding dress and her auntie was a confectioner and made the wedding cake, her uncle was a taxi driver who leant us the cars.

Edna’s sister in law gave her the wedding dress from her wedding, Edna’s brother was a Harley Street specialist. We were married in Elm Hall Drive Methodist Church was the church that Edna’s family went to in Liverpool

and we had the reception at Edna’s parent’s place in Liverpool at Moseley Hill, Armdour Close was the name of the place. Uncle Fred took us to the train and we went into a carriage and they wrote just married right along the carriage and we went from there to

the George Hotel in Trowbridge where we stayed overnight and from the George Hotel we went to Salcombe in Devon. Transgressing again, the George Hotel. When I was a prisoner of war the interrogating officer said after three weeks interrogation I went in and there was 196 squadron folder and you would have to be

an idiot if you didn’t look down and I looked down and I thought, “Oh I have given it away” and he said, “Don’t worry about it Mr Prowd, we know where you came from,” and he said, “Have you ever been to the George Hotel in Trowbridge, you meet some interesting people there.” So the assumption was there had been a network of spies in the George Hotel in Trowbridge whether that was true or not I don’t know but I reported that when I came back to England. We went to Salcombe

and stayed at one of Edna’s auntie’s friends, Mrs Jarvis. Salcombe was a submarine base during the war and we had a lovely holiday there, lovely honeymoon. I would ring up and say, “My wife has got more leave, can I have more leave?” “Yes,” and she would ring up and say, “My husband has got more leave before he goes embarking back to Australia,”

so she got more leave. So we had quite a few weeks together, I can’t remember how long. About six or seven weeks. Three weeks, it seemed more than that.

Love. It was a love. Love is love. It’s not sexual love, just love.

Love in war time is no different from peace time if you are genuine in your attitude and both of us are. Fifty nine years married next June so it is fair enough.

I left on 6th August to come to Australia. On the HMS Orion

which is a luxury ship, all full of prisoners of war. While we were on our way through the Atlantic Ocean VJ Day was declared, Victory in Japan and the silly idiot fired off all the guns on the ship and we are all prisoners of war and we just dived under anything we could find. It was a stupid thing to do I thought but anyway. We got back to Sydney.

We went to New Zealand first, we dropped them off in New Zealand. We had a couple of days in New Zealand at Wellington and we had free use of the Wellington RSA [Returned Services Association] which is the RSL [Returned and Services League] and then we landed in Sydney. One of the greatest sights you will ever see coming in by ship is the coat hanger over the heads,

Sydney Harbour Bridge just comes straight over the heads, it’s incredible. We were met by certain dignitaries and I came back to Queensland and went to, registered to do some study for Accountancy and as I am about to sign the discharge papers at Redbank a sergeant

said to me, “Excuse me sir, do you want to sign that form or that one?” I said, “What’s the difference?” He said, “One is for disability pension, the other one is for straight out leave, l eave the air force,” and I said, “What do you suggest?” He said, “You had a problem when you were a prisoner didn’t you?” because I had written all that down and I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I would sign that one.” So I signed a disability paper

and I ended up being in the air force for another nearly six months. I spent time down here at the Sir Lesley Wilson Rehabilitation Centre which is now Huntington next to the Southport Bowls Club. Sir Lesley Wilson was an ex-governor of Queensland and he had a residence there and that was the rehabilitation centre. I spent some weeks down there. Some months actually having tests and

examinations and eventually I was discharged with a sixty per cent disability pension half of which was paid for by Britain. Some years after that I received a letter saying that Britain had withdrawn its support for the troops and their portion of the pension for troops that served in England so in actual fact I was on a thirty per cent pension.

I didn’t bother to whinge about it. If I had any brains I would have said, “Well if I am sixty per cent I am sixty per cent” but I didn’t. I was too interested in having a marital life and having Edna out here. Then I started studying in the rehabilitation centre for Accountancy. Whilst there before Edna arrived

they were looking for various occupational things and they were looking for a clerk at a company called William Brooks and Company I with many more guys went down for an interview. By the way the chappie in charge of that rehabilitation centre was a fellow called Mr Packman. Mr Packman was my high school teacher at high school and the by play is that his son Jim

whom I went to school with, Jim Packman is a resident of Paradise Point and I see him from time to time at the Paradise Point Bowling Club where I bowl. Mr Packman sent others and myself down and I was the one chosen for the job. I objected because I wanted to do my study while being paid for by rehabilitation.

I started there as a junior clerk and did night college at the commercial high school and the old university which is down where the old governor’s house was and where we used to have a lot of sessions in the chemistry section and that went on for some years. In the meantime I got a bit more knowledge about what to do with Accountancy and I became a senior clerk and

eventually a sub accountant and then the accountant. The two managers that I had, one was a Mr Rowan who is now deceased. I was very fond of Andrew Rowan but unfortunately he decided that he couldn’t get on with the board in Sydney and he brought a printing company in Brisbane known as Morecomb Enterprises I think it was

and he brought them out and it became Rowan Morecomb which I think is still a printing company in Brisbane. He did some dirty deeds which I shouldn’t mention but I then became assistant secretary with the then secretary, no manager and Mr Whiteman was the secretary and the board used to come up regularly

and at one meeting they said to me, “We are going to make you manager,” and I said, “Thank you but you have sacked two managers in my time in the company. If I am not good at the job, if I don’t do it satisfactorily I don’t want the sack I will take demotion” because it was a lovely company to work for and they said they would do that. I became their manager and at a later date general manager and then managing director

of both Sydney and Brisbane. The chairman died and I became the managing director.

What would you like to know?

Gympie was a gold mining dairying city, very hilly. If you are born and bred in Gympie you have got good legs because t here were very big hills. Gympie was discovered by

a chappie called John Nash in 1827 or something I can’t remember but John Nash discovered gold near, there is an area in Gympie called Nash’s Gully, a gully off the Mary River and he discovered there’s gold there and he put a claim in for the gold

and there became a big gold mining rush. I am right in saying that at the time gold was discovered in Gympie the Treasury, I am not sure whether it was the Queensland or the Australian Treasury, I think it was the Queensland Treasury had no money in its coffers and the discovery of gold in Gympie was a god send to the Queensland administrator whoever it was at that time.

I went, I had a bit of sickness in Gympie. My mother had five children, one after me and twins after me who all died. Leonard I remember quite well, he was about two years younger than me. He died in my father’s arms while rushing him to a hospital

at Horseshoe Bend where we lived. It was only three doors away but Leonard died between there and the little hospital. Being the only surviving child my parents were very protective. In fact in a way I was probably a little bit sissy. I don’t think I was sissy but I was protected,

they didn’t like me to do things that might endanger me.

Leonard had convulsions, the twins died at premature birth. I don’t know what my two sisters died of. One lived quite a while I understand, Mum told me her name, I can’t remember. She died at

school and when I got this kidney problem which I was about to tell you they were very worried about that. We had a doctor in Gympie called Dr Millet who was a First World War doctor and he had a twitch. He’d be going like that and he spoke very quickly and Mum called him up and he said yes, he took samples and he said, “It’s kidneys.” I was blind.

I had nephritis which is a disease of the kidney and he wanted Mum and Dad to close off my room, let no light in it at all but burn a kerosene lamp under the bed and around the bed and as many blankets as they could have on top of me and underneath me, that was to make me perspire. Apparently I was like that for three

weeks until I then vomited and Mum rang the doctor, we were on the phone in those days. Dad was at the Gasworks being the foreman, his father had already retired from there so he was still a foreman for awhile afterwards and Dr Millet said, “That is exactly what I wanted to happen. He will be right for the rest of his life.” It was very strange and Mum was happy about that

and I did get all right. I was very weak, I don’t remember a lot about it but then when I joined the militia I told them about this, when I joined the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] I told them the same story and they obviously found nothing wrong because they tested me. After that Gympie was a wild town.

I can very vaguely I remember my grandfather on my father’s side he was, there is a suspicion that he was married before I have no idea why, my cousin told me that. We have traced the family history back and there is a woman in there but I think it is his father that we are talking about but Basil, my cousin said he thinks it was Pa,

we agreed to disagree on that point. Pa I remember very well, he was a typical dapper man of money. He wore spats, he wore bow ties, long ties, his hair was never out of place, he had a white goatee beard and he wore tight pants as they did in those days around the bottom,

they called them snake proofs and he also had very highly polished shoes. I remember him most specifically because he smoked a pipe and his white moustache was nicotine stained and every birthday every grandchild got the same present. They had a

shop, Ma and Pa ran a shop in Mary Street after he retired in Lawrence Street where they lived after he retired. They had a couple of acres of ground there and they owned a couple of shops in Mary Street, the main street of Gympie and Ma had a small business to satisfy the local people and Pa used to bring up a shoe box of lollies. They weren’t completely full,

there was stuffing at the bottom and a couple of layers of lollies but the top of the them always had a ten shilling note on top. That is every grandchild got that, never any difference until he died and then poor old Ma she ran the shop, she had to sell the buildings they had in Mary Street. My grandfather on my mother’s side

he was a gold broker, that is he bought and sold gold and he was the manager of a gold mine out at Monkland which was called Great something Western and my grandmother on my mother’s side was the daughter of an Irish doctor

and Grandpa Strain was an Irishman and being the daughter of a doctor they sat in the hierarchy part of the church and Grandpa Strain being an ordinary commoner, he sat down in the pews in the bottom and I guess you could understand that they used to make eyes at one another or he made eyes at her but she was a qualified matron and she attended to all the sicknesses

in and around Gympie and their land butted up to Prowds land and I guess that’s where Mum and Dad met, how they met, I don’t know how they met but I guess that’s how they met. Grandma Strain, Grandpa Strain was a very heavy drinker, he also owned every hotel in Gympie at one

stage but gambled the lot away as would be so in gold mining towns and the one hotel that I can remember they owned at the end was the one right opposite my uncle’s boot shop and my mother’s job was to go down and get him out of the pub and Mum tells the story that she used to say, “Dad,” she would open up these swinging doors and he would say, “Minni

you’re a bugger,” but he always came. He was killed in a horse and sulky accident. My two uncles, Mum’s brothers, they were all school teachers Mum’s family, all Mum’s brothers and sister were all school teachers. I remember Auntie Maggie and I remember Uncle Dick and I remember Uncle Alec. Uncle Dick left school teaching

because there was no money in it and he went mining in Newcastle. He ended up with consumption and came and lived with us in Horseshoe Bend. I remember him well, he lived out on the verandah, nice bloke. Uncle Alec married a lady and they lived in the grandparent’s house in Gympie and eventually that went to Auntie Mag, Uncle Alec died.

My parents got nothing out of their inheritance, the in-laws got everything. Uncle Alec was a fine guy. Auntie Mag was a school teacher in Gin Gin and she married a cane farmer by the name of Fred Stone. Jack and I, my brother, he wasn’t my brother by birth but my brother and I used to go to Gin Gin, Kurrajong Creek where the farm was

for a lot of our school holidays. Jack my brother that I mentioned was my cousin by birth. Another sister of Mum’s, I can’t think of her name, married Charlie Fleming who was a Union organiser and Auntie died,

was dying at birth and she asked Mum to take the baby and Mum did, she reared Jack as his own and it wasn’t until he was twenty-one that he was told that he was my cousin, not my brother. He was a lot older than me.

I think I probably knew

whether I was told, I don’t remember being told but I think I knew and I think Jack knew too. He was a fine fellow. He was in the air force in the ground staff for the fighter pilots, in fact he was Bluey Truscott’s mechanic. Bluey Truscott was a fighter ace in England during the war and came out here and flew against the Japanese and

Jack was his mechanic. He was also cut off at Port Moresby at some stage and he got involved with drink and it never stopped, he died of alcoholic remorse. He ended up getting an engineer’s degree, a second engineer’s degree and was involved in the construction of Somerset Dam. It was alcohol that got Jack.

His wife died and we reared both their kids Janice, more particularly than Gregory and Janice is still our fourth daughter. The kids regard Janice as their fourth sister, she visits us regularly.

Gympie in general. It was really tough, Gympie is a tough town, a hard working town. There was nothing easy in Gympie. The Depression hit it very badly because the gold mining had ceased and there was the dairying industry and the dairy industry kept it alive. Some of my uncles on Dad’s side were farmers

and I had holidays there. I got caught in a flood with Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie’s family now live in Ipswich and we are still very friendly with Ron. He had a farm at Six Mile and we were out looking after cattle, finding cattle, walking, the flood came and we had to walk across the Six Mile Creek. Uncle Charlie knew the narrow parts but there were

snakes and goannas coming down in the flood and he put me on his shoulder and carried me across it, that is one memory I have of Gympie. Another memory I have is with my brother and the Johnson family brothers, a fellow about my age, having Moses in the bull rushes, you know the big Moses bull rushes stalks, we used to have fights with those and he always beat me.

I’d come home with blood all over my face. The elder brothers thought it was good fun, Mum and Dad didn’t. Another thing that came to mind about Gympie was when we went on holidays. We used to go to Tewantin for holidays. Another two little things, Uncle Tom, Dad’s next brother

was a larrikin, the nephews loved him because he was always up to tricks. One fishing trip we went on Uncle Tom had a great chaff sack. If you know what a chaff sack is it’s about four foot long, open mesh and he had this thing full of stuff and he said it was his fishing gear and we weren’t allowed to touch it. Dad was the only one with a truck because at this stage he was doing his fruit run.

So we went to Tewantin to fish. They went to school with Howard Parkin who had the boat shop there in Tewantin so they hired a couple of rowing boats and we went down to Gympie Terrace, no bridge there of course in those days, and we started fishing off Gympie Terrace and off the boats and Uncle Tom said he wanted his gear.

Now his gear consisted of a bottle of castor oil and a mallet. We said, “What is that for Uncle Tom?” and he said, “Well I pour the olive oil on the water, the fish drink it and they get diarrhoea and as they come to the top I hit them on the head.” That was the sort of guy he was. It wasn’t true but that was the sort of guy he was,

he thought up these things to entertain his nephews. We always had holidays at Tewantin, we stayed at the Church of England grounds in Tewantin. My father was a warden of the Church of England in Gympie. It was big preparation to have tents in those days, one tent was for sleeping and one tent was for camping, cooking and Dad went to great pains to dig a trench around the tents

in case we had a storm, being Christmas time it was always stormy, not so much these days and we did have a storm. It blew the tent away, the cooking tent was completely blown away and the tent was threads and we are all wet and we ended up in the holidays sleeping in the Church of England hall. That’s a memory of Gympie. We also had an Auntie that owned Noosa,

the Noosa Heads hotel, there was Nagoona House and Noosa House and she owned that and we used to go down and help her at Christmas time too. When I learnt to sing in Gympie I was trained by a Miss McFadden. Apparently I had potential

to be a boy soprano and I entered a lot of eisteddfods and won a lot of eisteddfods and I was sent down to Brisbane to compete in the Queensland eisteddfod, a little fat boy with short pants. We had the heats of the boy sopranos in the Albert Street Methodist hall and the finals were in the city hall and being a country boy

who’d never been out of Gympie apart from going to Bundaberg, the city hall was a palace. Standing up in that environment to sing to a full city hall, it was pretty full, I was so nervous it wasn’t funny and I can remember my knees were shaking again but I came second and I got seven and sixpence for it. That is another memory of Gympie.

The depression hit Gympie very badly. My father had, his father at this stage had retired as manager of Gympie Gasworks which was owned by Coates and company from Melbourne and I think that is how Pa got the job because he was friendly with the Coates brothers, they went to the same, lived the same life together in Melbourne and when Pa retired Dad was the

highest paid employee at eight pound a week and when the Depression hit that is when he was sacked which was a bit stupid. They would have given him a reduction in pay which he would have accepted because he was the only one in the whole of the firm that knew where all the gas pipelines were because h e drew them and he helped dig them and the plans were in his head and then of course when they wanted to find out where they were they came and asked him and he refused to give them

unless they paid him some money and they refused that so there was many a pipeline had been dug up in Gympie because they didn't know where they were. Then Dad, as I said, we grew our vegetables. He had a horse and cart. The horse was a beautiful trotter, a cream coloured horse called King. King would shy at the drop of a hat, if he had to pull a load of

mum and I and Dad up a hill with a full load of vegetables Dad, he would stop half way up and we would have to get out and lead him up. Later on Dad brought a truck and he did it in a truck but King was a lovely horse, he was a trotter. In 1932

or something Gympie was hit by a tornado and Mum and Dad had the shop at Mount Pleasant and I used to stay with my Grandma in Lawrence Street and that is where the Central School was and it was only a matter of walking a few hundred yards down to the school from Grandma Prowd’s place and when I was walking down I saw this funnel and it was a tornado which just about wrecked that whole of Gympie.

That was a bit of an experience, it didn’t affect me, I ran home. It never touched the school at all. It seemed to follow a creek bed. It wrecked a lot of Gympie. One of the people who were learning to sing with me at Mrs McFaddens was a girl called Jean McGill and she was a beautiful pianist and Jean’s piano was sucked up in it my mother and father told me, sucked up in the

tornado, the whole house was sucked up in that the tornado. Jean McGill later married one of my best friends in Gympie. Jean died and he married a girl I went to school in Indooroopilly with. They kept it in the family. What more can I tell you about Gympie?

We moved to Brisbane when Dad brought that ice run.

I learnt to swim in Gympie on the Mary River, I was thrown in, that was the way you learnt to swim and I always had fear of water from that time on more or less, not really now but I did for many years had a fear of water. Gympie flooded well, it was low lying and when the Mary River broke its banks which it did on a regular basis Gympie flooded quite a lot. Still does to this day. I loved Gympie as a town,

it was my childhood I suppose. We came to Brisbane when I was in scholarship class and I met up with Jim Watt. The move was dramatic, a country family and all born and bred country. Mum and Dad was born in Gympie, Mum was born in Gympie and it was a bit traumatic to come down to a big city.

It’s only a hundred miles away, it’s not that far but it took a couple of days to come down because you didn’t drive very far in those days, thirty miles an hour was the maximum, and that’s all the car would do I think. Dad had an old Dodge truck. We moved down and we lived in Stamp Street. I can’t think of anything more in Gympie.

We lived in Stamp Street in Indooroopilly

which later became Indooroopilly shopping town, the whole street was taken over and Indooroopilly shopping centre is now quite a large complex. We lived on Mogga Road, right on top of Mogga Road. I went to Indooroopilly State School and lived opposite a guy called George Negus, his father, George and I knew one another well and I remember George, I nursed him as a baby. That was in Edna’s time.

My parents, my Dad, I had to help him on the ice run and I used to get up about five in the morning and go and help him and we would do a couple hours’ delivery and he would drive me back to home and I would go to school. Life was tough, it was still Depression years and that is what made me join the army.

My first job I had was clerk at the Wide Bay Dairy Association which is a Gympie company and I was getting six and sixpence a week. So this Cab Shirley whom I met, he was a neighbour, he was in the militia in the 9/49th battalion, the machine gun company and I was encouraged to join

at about sixteen years of age because I was getting five bob every time we went down to practice. We never had any rifles, we had wooden rifles, we practiced with wooden rifles, no live ammunition. Then we got to be sent to Fort Cowan Cowan where we were issued with live ammunition. Dad’s cousin, Tom Richards was the warrant officer of the battalion.

I never knew how to load a 303 rifle, I knew how to load a 22 because we had 22 guidance but we never had any 303 so I looked around and saw the guys pushing the magazine of ammunition in, closing the bolt and pushing the trigger so I did that but unfortunately there was a bullet in the barrel and it went bang. Fortunately the gun was up in the air. Tommy Richards came around and said, “Who was the

so and so.” “Sorry sir.” “Harry’s son. You don’t know how to use a rifle. Come with me,” I went through hell with him for awhile. We went to an outpost on Mount Tempest, the highest sandhill in the world and you step up two steps and climb back one. It took a long while to get up Mount Tempest believe me it took a miracle. A lot of things happened at Cowan Cowan

after we did our duty upstairs. There were lights observed by the guard from Mount Tempest and we went down the other side and of course Japan wasn't in the war then but we did see evidence of probably Japanese, those toed sandals they had, we saw evidence of that and we saw evidence what might have been a German boot, you know the big soled heeled

shoes that the German’s wore, might have been that. I didn’t see that but that is what they saw and that is what they reported.

Yes, there were imprints in the sand. There were lights seen from the guard and then they went down. Then we went back down and I was stationed at a machine gun post toward what is now Tangalooma and we were visited, a lot of people wrote to their parents

saying the food was bad and they still do, I wasn’t one I might add. We had a visit from the minister for the army who was I think Mr Street and a storm blew up overnight and we were told by the wind up radio that he would be staying overnight and we had orders

to shoot at anything two hundred yards off the beach. So we were asleep in this dugout under sand, swallowing sand which I didn’t like very much and we heard the machine gun going off and it was the corporal and he was on guard duty and he saw these lights coming up the beach and he fired at it. He fired and shot one of the lights out.

We saw the white light disappearing out to sea. It turned out it was Mr Street having been called back to Canberra. Nothing was said about it. Also at Cowan Cowan they had the two guns off the old HMAS Sydney and between those two guns was a fibro observation post which we used to call the O pit. We were

all called down to witness the firing of these two big guns and they were big. They were well entrenched in heavy cement and unfortunately the O Pit, the Observation Post, wasn’t. So they fired this gun off, boom, then they fired the next one off, boom, and the observation post just rattled and fell. All the officers up top,

we thought it was great fun, we had a great tickle out of that.

Money. It was worth ten bob a day, five and six a day, five bob a day in the army and it was more money than I was getting working for William Brooks and company. I had six months of it down there and they had to put me back on the job and then when I turned the ripe old age of eighteen I joined the air force. I had enough

of sand and after all the air force paid us ten and sixpence a day, a bit more money.

I think it was probably mixed emotions. I wanted to learn to fly an aeroplane but the ten bob was probably the enticement. I had the opportunity of becoming an officer in the army. I worked in the office as an officer clerk and I was a range finder and I

had two or three qualifications and I was a lance corporal and I had Captain Young recommended that I be and I said, “No.” When I went down and gave my resignation into them I was shown what if I joined the army I could become an officer but I wanted the air force. They were the two reasons, I wanted to fly and it was ten bob a day.

Yes absolutely. Training was different training, the army is more physical training, the air force was mental and physical. A lot of the physical training I learnt in the army was repeated in the air force and I had no difficulty with that all but t he theory training was intense and we were I think we had electrical science,

we had physics, we had pure maths, we had navigation, air force law and we had airframes, aircraft recognition, there were ten subjects, gas was another one we had to study. For me and not only me but quite a few of the other guys, we

would have this day’s study and then we would go into the huts and study to two am or midnight, sometimes even later. We had a chappie on course called Bunny Albreck from Bundaberg. Bunny was a tall thin guy, he topped our course in, he liked his spirits and Bunny would go out on night leave and come home while

we were still studying and he would be asleep and we got up to have our shower and we were discussing a subject and this dreary voice would come from the bed, “You are bloody wrong, it’s so and so.” He had a photographic memory, fantastic pilot, fantastic student. He went off course, commissioned, topped the course in theory and in flying and he only ever did a junior

education. He was a plumber. An incident about Bunny, don’t know if I’d like this in fact repeated this particular section. When we went on night leave I had friends in Bundaberg by the name of Jeff Coates and I used to go and stay with them on weekends. I would fly over their house and throttle back twice, they would know I would be coming. If it was three times I would be staying overnight, if it was twice

I’d be staying for lunch or dinner and I would go off with Jeff Coates or go to a picture and Bunny would go to his pub and always he would be not well when he came back and I used to grab him and shove him in the bus. This one particular night I said, “Where the heck is Bunny” and they said, “He’s lying down in Hinkler Park Keith.” So I went down and said, “Come on Bun, time we went back to the hut.”

“Go away,” with suitable language so I took his wallet out of his pocket and left him there. The next morning the SP’s, the special police came for me and said, “We’ve got Bunny Albreck down at the gate he hasn’t got his money, his wallet was stolen. Would you like to come and pay the taxi fare?” and I said, “OK” and I paid the taxi fare out of his money. I did that for about a fortnight until pay day.

When it came payday he came to me and said, “How much do I owe you?” and I said, “Nothing.” He said, “What do you mean nothing?” and I said, “Here’s your wallet.” He abused hell out of me and he never spoke to me from that day on. That’s the part I don’t want recorded. Bunny ended up a VIP [Very Important Person] pilot. He was the guy that landed Deputy Prime Minister Fadden with one engine in a DC3 up at Rockhampton. He was in the VIP

fleet and he deserved it because he was a very good pilot and I thought he was a good friend. So I took that aboard and said that’s it. Anyway, that was Bundaberg. I told you about going to the embarkation depot and then across to England and America.

’39/’45? I was in Brisbane.

I would have been 1939, I would have been seventeen working at the Wide Bay Dairy Association as a clerk and I think at that stage I was getting a pound a week because I impressed them I think. I was doing the clerical work, doing the cash work, taking butter out of the butter box they had, paying the icemen. My boss was a fellow called Viv Willcox,

a Gympie man. Damn good bloke, whether he recommended me I don’t know but I did a lot of work in the clerical. I loved clerical work, I loved figures, male and female.

That’s war, that’s life, sad, it had to happen. The history of Germany taking over Europe and then

perhaps taking over England, something had to give and Chamberlain said, “Peace in my time,” and Hitler was laughing at the same time. I think it was a war that had to happen just as I think the Iraqi war was a war that had to happen. People become despots and can the world stand despots? It happened in Russia, Russia collapsed because of despotism. All the isms have collapsed even capitalism has

collapsed. The isms of the world are not good for life. I don’t think we are intended to have all this worry in life. I don’t know what God’s intention was, we were born for a reason and I don’t think it was to be just dictated to by one individual. Democracy with its faults is possibly the best way to go. I think in Australia we have a great democracy.

I don’t know what your politics are, it doesn’t matter to me but I do think we have got a very good Prime Minister who is tried to be made a fool of and he can overcome all his problems and he does it without notes. He doesn’t have many notes at all. Jim Watt who I about over at London met him and he said he is a very fine person to me. I have never met him, never had that privilege.

I think we had some very good Prime Ministers. I think Ben Chifley was an exceptional Prime Minister as was Curtin and then we come along with other people who tried to nationalise banking, Menzies tried to nationalise banking, Menzies I thought was very good. Then we had Whitlam who was probably the most intelligent Prime Minister we ever had, all he wanted to do was dictate. He borrowed fourty billion dollars without the sanction of government. Probably shouldn’t say those things should I.

Primary School? We had at Gympie I went from Grade one to Grade six in Gympie and we played a lot of sport, tennis,

rugby union and we played cricket. Our education was I think good, a lot of rote, you know, “One and one is two, two and two is four” and so on and spelling was also a lot of rote. Then when I came to Brisbane it was an entirely different system. No, the system wasn’t different but the way of teaching was different and it took me a long while to catch up and I think probably a year.

Anyway, that is when I met up with Jim Watt. Jim and I, he was about my standard, we weren’t over intelligent, we liked our sport and we liked our fun but we had a teacher in Gympie called Mr Eric Enwright.

Mr Enwright was one of those who yelled and screamed but he got the best out of his class. Mr Enwright had a nephew, this is transgressing a lot but he had a nephew whose name was Eddie Hide and Eddie Hide was a pupil teacher at Indooroopilly State School when I was in Grade seven and the headmaster at the time was a Mr Mills. On Guy Fawkes night Mr Mills’

letterbox was blown up and who should get the blame of it but Jim Watt, Keith Prowd, Allan Russell and Ray Edwards. We were no where near it. Many years later I was in the Boomerang Club in London and this good looking guy came up to me and said, “You’re Keith Prowd?” and I said, “Yes.” “I have been wanting to see you for years.” I said, “Oh yeah.” I remembered him, Eddie Hide, I said, “Yeah Eddie,

I remember you at Indooroopilly State School” and he said, “Yeah and you got the blame for blowing up Mill’s letterbox” and he said, “I did that.” That is bringing back education, the subject of my education. We played, at Indooroopilly we had a very strict scholarship teacher, Mr Hagan, who became a very close friend afterwards but he disliked us being taken

off to sport on a Friday to play for the school and both Jim and I and a few others were the ones that were in it and he made us work twice as hard on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and we got through. At high school I did commercial subjects. I was taught by Mr. Packman whom I’ve mentioned before, I was taught by Dave Longland

who was one of Queensland’s top tennis players, he and his wife. Dave Longland later became the Immigration, head of the Immigration Department and when Edna’s father came out for three years with us who should we have to tally up to than Dave Longland. He remembered us so it is good if you make an impression with a school teacher he remembers you.

Even if it is only the cuffs. I enjoyed school. I wasn’t a hard worker, I wanted it to come easy but it never did and to pass any exams I had to really work hard. After the war when I was working I studied for Accountancy, started on Commerce but I got so busy in the company that I didn’t finish either. I got nine tenths of an Accountancy Degree

and failed the last exam and I couldn’t be bothered for resitting for it. Degrees are a means to an end and they were in those days and if you got to the end and I had it, the rest of it didn’t matter. I had all the subjects in my mind. I failed by two points in the final exam. I could have done it next year but I couldn’t be bothered.

You shouldn’t ask those questions. In Gympie

not too much actually. We had a lot of animals. Mum and Dad were hard tennis players and Dad had built a court in the backyard and we played a bit of tennis. We also had dogs, we bred cattle dogs which are now called blue heelers. We had lots of birds, cages of parrots and

pigeons and a koala, a ring tailed possum. The koala had been injured and Dad put it in a cage to get it well and it did and when we opened the cage we took it out and it came back and went into the cage and it stayed there. It went out and came back, it never left the house. We had parrots, we bred canaries and finches.

When the Depression hit it was a pretty hard life, gardening and so on. We sold most of the birds and things off but Dad still bred dogs.

We had our threepence pocket money and if we didn’t do our, scrubbing the verandah was one of mine, hosing it down and scrubbing it and I would lose a penny and in those days we had a thunderbox in the backyard,

had to make sure that was clean and the sawdust was full and had to do the washing up or drying of the dishes. Helping getting the copper stove ready for washing, they were all wooden copper stoves in those days. Even when we came to Indooroopilly Mum had a copper stove, later she had a copper washing tub, later she had a gas one.

There was no mechanical drying that was part of my job, mowing the grass, push mower or using a scythe which I never ever conquered. My father could do it but I couldn’t. Running the messages of course and that is about all.

It didn’t change dramatically because we were

doing much the same thing and remembering that was in the 1930’s and Brisbane wasn’t such a big place as it is today. Indooroopilly for instance was the last, just beyond Indooroopilly school which is only a few hundred yards from the shopping centre was the end of the bush and it was all bush from there on as was Mount Cootha. We used to walk up, we called it One Tree Hill, now called Mount Cootha.

We used to walk up there and it was part of our exercise, you had to climb that hill in twenty minutes or less. There is a pool up there which is the lake crater of a volcano and we used to swim in that and you used to see gas bubbles come up there and you used to try and swim over the top of them. Just a good old country life, that is what Indooroopilly was, a country town, a country suburb.

Not very often. Later on Dad used to take a Thursday afternoon off and he and Mum used to go shopping. I think I used to go in with them occasionally but not very often. They always went to George Street which was McDonald Easts in those days and practically all the Western suburbs shopped in McDonald East because the East family lived in Toowong and we had to patronise the western

suburbs people, that was part of life. Also I was a Sunday school teacher, I was in the choir and I was an altar boy. When I was singing they had an eisteddfod at Karroy near Gympie and the adjudicator was a Mr Percy Bryer and when we went to Indooroopilly

he was sitting in front of us in church and I was singing away and he turned around and he said, “Who said you could sing?” and my mother said, “You did.” Those things come back to memory. At Indooroopilly School and church we went down to Long Pocket a lot and played a lot of, chased a lot of people around there. Fished a lot down there, got a lot of good fish at Indooroopilly Long Pocket. Dad

and I did that, we used to catch our own prawns in the river and use them for bait. Life was pretty hard. Those things you wouldn’t do today, you wouldn’t go and catch your own prawns in the river and fish with them. We used to get tailor down there which is an unusual thing, a lot of flathead and bream and ordinary perch, sea perch would come up and when they were on we used to get dozens of those.

To me it was the important thing of life and basically I suppose I still think that. I believe there is a basis of life, it’s not just come, get born, go and have a feed, go to work and come home, I think there is more to life than just that and I do believe in God and I do believe in religion.

I’m not sure I like the way religion is going but that is nothing to do with me, my beliefs are still the same. I maintain I was kept alive by God.

When I felt I had been held up in the air for a fraction of time the first thing I did when I got to the ground was kneel and say, “What do you want me for?” They were the exact words I used because

there is no question I should have died. Had you jumped out with a handheld parachute at five hundred feet you very seldom don’t hit the ground before the chute opens properly. I opened it up first and the natural jumping out, your arms just automatically go away. I rolled out and I felt the pilot’s chute go out and then I felt another stopping and then I felt the big chute.

That is when I hit the tree so I just felt God was saying something to me, I don’t know why, I don’t know how. I believe in the bible and I believe in God, I still do and so does Edna. To me that is life, I think he has helped me a lot.

In Indooroopilly, we had some good friends,

the Beck brothers, Bobby Beck and Johnny Beck and they were cranky on hand gliders and I used to make hand gliders before I met them, none of them flew very well but they were much older than I was and they flew them very well. So that’s where I got the fascination for it, with them. We would go up to Mount Cootha and fly them off there and hope they’d come somewhere near home. It was just,

also I was in Gympie when Bert Hinkler landed in the showgrounds. That would have been 1930 I think. We went down to see Bert Hinkler and he was a Bundaberg boy which means he was a local and I remember saying to my parents, “I would love to do that one day.” Whether it started there I don’t know but I have always thought it was

fascinating. It is a fascinating thing to do, to fly an aeroplane. You conquer the elements. I still love doing it.

They didn’t mind that because the war wasn’t on and it was a matter of five bob every time I went down and had a gay night with Cab Shirley. They didn’t mind that but very much against me joining up to the air force.

I would have been conscripted as it turned out had I not and I think perhaps that is how Dad talked Mum into it. It took eighteen months to get my mother’s signature, you had to have both of them in those days.

I knew, she had lost so many children, five children and I was the only surviving blood relative even though she treated Jack as the same, I was her

blood and I simply understood that. I think Dad talked her into it and I think he probably said, “If he doesn’t go voluntarily he will be conscripted.”

I joined the air force in July 1941 and was called up in December 1941. We did six months of theory training at the Brisbane Boys Grammar School and Morse Code and a little bit of theory about air force law and a little bit about air frames but I was quite happy,

I enjoyed being in the air force. I never thought I would be a pilot but with the high mark I got in those final exams I felt certain I would be a navigator. A, I am not very tall for a pilot to fly bombers, I had to have special seat and a seat type parachute under my bum when I was flying because the aircraft

stood like that and it is not easy to see over the windscreen but I could do that if I had that built up, I wasn’t the only one. I just felt I wanted to pilot and I got to pilot. I was never a very good one, I was an average pilot. I wasn’t a Bunny Albury, Bunny was a fascinating pilot, he couldn’t do anything wrong. The first mistake we made and it was the first one

that I had in Tiger Moths was he said, “I will meet you down at so and so farm and we will go round the paddocks.” I said, “OK.” I didn’t know he meant to go round the fence line. Thank goodness I was behind him, a good distance and he did a sudden left hand turn, a ninety degrees and so did I and I touched the ground, I couldn’t have touched the ground but I was so close to the ground that the wind blew stones onto my

goggles. I just flew up and landed at the furthest point of the drome at Narromine and had a look and there was a little scratch there so that was how close it was. A little scratch in a thing like that, a Tiger Moth, it was just pure fabric.

An experience. It wasn’t hard to learn to fly Tiger Moths. You are supposed to learn to fly solo in no more than five hours.

I soloed in three and Bunny soloed in one, that is the difference in our abilities. I couldn’t handle so much the aerobatics, I think my mind was too steady, I had a steady upbringing instead of being, I wasn’t like a Bunny Albury who went out with the boys all the time. I was in the Scouts.

I did some silly things with the Scouts.

In Indooroopilly. Walking across Indooroopilly Railway Station at the bridge there was a set of signals just on the other side and we had the old bike, we disconnected the signal. I didn’t do that but someone else did and I had the torch with had red white and blue so we put a red light on and old Dick Chamberlain,

the local policeman, when he started his car you could hear it for about five miles away so by the time Dick got down there we were gone but this particular night he was waiting for us. We didn’t go to goal or anything but we got an awful kick up the backside though. I can still remember it.

It was an experience. You are not sure you are good enough.

I think that applies to all pilots except for a person like Bunny. You are never sure whether you are going to do a landing correctly, I think you could be sure that you would take off correctly, I think you are sure you could turn correctly but it is the landing part that seemed to always worry everybody and it worried me but I didn’t do any damage, they bounced occasionally but didn’t do any damage.

Aerobatics as far as I was concerned.

Flying through and in and around clouds, that experience I had with nearly touching the ground at Narromine taught me that I shouldn’t low fly but if you went above the clouds you had hills and mountains and valleys and you could fly into them and if you touched them it didn’t do any damage and

I enjoyed that, very much so. Also you had the feeling of speed because flying an aeroplane you have really no thrill of speed, you know you are going across the ground and you can look at the speedometer and find out how fast you are going but as for being relative speed you wouldn’t know but it was flying in and through clouds at low flying.

Fighter pilots were people who were generally pretty good at aerobatics, bomber pilots were people like myself who were steady on the line. I think that was it. There is not much difference in the ability to fly probably being a bomber pilot you have got the added responsibility of other people where as in the

fighter pilots you can act the goat and no one knows. Sometimes you get a bit stupid in bomber pilots too and I was one that was. I was and this is on the squadron, we had a thing called Fighter Affiliation where a fighter would meet you at a certain place at a certain height and you had to

do your manoeuvres to get away from him and that manoeuvre was called a corkscrew. You would drop a wing and go down and climb up on the other side and do the opposite on the other side. I was flying with one of my dear friends on the squadron Ron Minchen who was from Perth and we were using his aeroplane and his crew and my gunner and myself and Ron had done a particularly good

fighter evasion and being ex 90 squadron bomber commander I thought I could do better and being a bit of a show off I thought at that time I went beyond the vertical. Unfortunately we were about seven or eight thousand feet and to get a bomber out of that you have to keep the nose straight down and it comes out this way. We came out at six hundred feet. That was a stupid act of flying which I

would condemn anyone for doing including myself and it wasn’t until the Perth reunion which was in 1980 or something like that we were talking about this sort of thing. I said to Ron, “Do you remember the time I turned the Stirling on its back,” and he said, “Was that you?

You would never do anything like that,” and I said, “That was me.” He said, “You should never admit that” and I said, “Oh yes. The truth is the truth. You can’t beat that.” Anyway, I get it thrown up at me every now and then but it is only lately that he knew, only in the last ten years or so.

I think everyone wants to be a fighter pilot. It was the thing at the time, if you remember

Battle of Britain stuff and so on. Everyone wants to be a fighter pilot, everyone who becomes a pilot. I might be wrong but most people wanted to be a fighter pilot or twin engine stuff.

The daily reports, we used to get reports in the air force and we were brought up to date with stuff that probably the public didn’t know. That is I can’t remember any incidents in fact

I don’t think I can remember any incidents but I know we were told the truth. We went in with our eyes open. There is more money in it, when you became a pilot and got your wings you got a lot of money, thirty bob a day for seven days a week not five days a week, that was ten quid. That was a lot of money.

I didn’t spent it all either.

To fight, I think after you got over the initial stage of economic balance you realised what the Germans were doing to occupied countries, stealing all their artwork and having slaves virtually

and my experience as a prisoner of war told me that they had slaves for more purposes than one, some very attractive young ladies were used by the Germans for their purpose and if they fell pregnant they would shoot them. There was more than one incident happened when I was a prisoner of war. I couldn’t name any specific time but I know it happened, I knew about it.

Patriotism of the way Britain was bombed and blasted, you had to be there to really understand how patriotic the British people were and particularly people like Edna. One stage of her life she was bombed in a theatre for a couple of days, she was bombed in overnight and

you have only got to see incidents like that and at this stage we weren’t retaliating very well. Britain wouldn’t give in to Hitler and he had to bomb them out.

Good. Both Avro Ansons and Tiger Moths are

pilot friendly. They were both, you could do a precautionary approach with both of them at about thirty knots, you were just squashing down and at Bundaberg on Avro Ansons one of our favourite hobbies was that people used to come out and watch us flying on the main road, it wasn’t a runway, it was grass and depending on the way the wind was blowing you went that way,

against it and we used to make a favourite habit of getting our wheels as close to the top of the cars that were there at the time. Stupid idea, no one ever made a mistake which was good. Many years later on we were attending the Mermaid Beach picture show and the manager of the Mermaid Beach picture show happened to be a Bundaberg resident and I was introduced to him as

a pilot who trained at Bundaberg. He said, “I remember you guys. I was four years old. Do you remember flying so close to that wireless?.” He remembered that from four years old. There were people who made mistakes but not that sort of mistake. Flying close to the sea I remember one pilot got his propeller tips caught in the sea. Fortunately got back with bent propellers but he got back.

That thing with Ian Knot when the switches broke, that was just through wear and tear and lack of maintenance. That’s something they did after our accident was they pulled them all apart to see how well those wires were. Remember these aeroplanes fly all day and all night sometimes and the number of times you press switches up and down and remember they were the old type switches not the more modern switches.

I don’t think we had, there was the Stirling one that was bad. On the Avro Ansons I can only remember the one where he bent his propeller. The name of the pilot was Davenport, he was ahead of us. I can’t remember. What you did,

there was incident when my instructor was Flying Officer Palmer and I got into the aeroplane to take it off and the revs were dropping off on one of the dynamos and I said, “I don’t want to fly this” so I went in and they said it was all right but take another aeroplane. Anyway, they took it inside and found out there was a problem.

If you do your pilot cockpit drill properly there shouldn’t be many problems except errors of judgement.

No it changes around.

You usually have our own aircraft. I had my own aircraft in 196 squadron, V for Victor and in 90 squadron I think

I would have had S for sugar because I flew it about three times and that was going to be mine.

No.

We weren’t told, we went to the embarkation depots in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and we got on a ship and we just

were going overseas. We assumed we were going to England.

Great. Where can you get a job that teaches you to fly a four engine aeroplane and sends you around the world and it costs nothing, you get paid for it. Great. That is where my Accountancy brain comes into being.

For food it was exactly the same, there was no distinctions. Officers probably only had two to a cabin, we had three or four to a cabin but it wasn’t inconvenient, that was it. You accepted in those days you accepted your lot.

I know that doesn’t happen these days but I think I wish it would. You accept the lot, if you are born poor you are poor, you don’t go and try and rob everyone to get more, not that that didn’t happen in my early days, it did, but everyone, you could walk out of your home and leave every window and every door open. Sometimes people would come and have a feed and then they’d say, “I was going past, I noticed you were open and I was very hungry” and they would come and tell you.

Never stole anything that I can remember, never been stolen but when we came to Brisbane it was slightly different although we did leave our house open a fair bit in Brisbane. We were on the main road and there was not a lot of chance. I just feel life has got a lot more difficult than it should be.

From Melbourne to America,

thirty days and about four days across America by train. We stopped every day. A little story that reminds me of San Francisco. We had porters on each coach and ours was a black porter and everyone wanted to smoke American cigarettes, being a smoker in those days.

I said to him I wanted a carton of Chesterfield so he went and I gave him a twenty dollar bill which I thought was a two dollar bill, the American notes in those days apart from reading the number they looked exactly the same. So I probably said, “There is a couple of dollars,” and I got the change of a couple of dollars. It wasn’t until later on someone asked me if I

could lend them something and I said yes and I realised what had happened. I went up to him and I said, “You remember you bought those cigarettes for me in San Francisco?” He said, “Yes boss.” I said, “You gave me the change of a two dollar bill,” “You only gave me two dollar boss.” I said, “I gave you twenty dollars.” What could I do. That was one incident. Going across America was quite good. We stopped every day.

When we landed we got on the train and the first stop was on the Rockies in the middle of winter, I had a photograph of that somewhere and then we walked around there for awhile and every town we came to in the morning we got off and walked around in a controlled march. It was in Demoign where we were marching

and we were heading back to the train and about a twelve year old came up and said, “Would you have one there about my size?.” Other people would say, we have our Australia flashes on our shoulder and they would say, “Australia, never heard of that as a State of the Union, never heard of that.” And others who knew Australia would say, “How did you learn to speak English?” “Did it take

you long to learn English?” And this David Ross was with us on this occasion and David was a real curly head, a kiss curl came down on his forehead and he had curly black hair, a very babyish face and we were sitting in this carriage and this elderly lady said, “I have heard about Australia. What about wallabies and kangaroos that I hear about, what are they like?” and David just said,

“Never like to talk about them.” We give him a side glance because he is always up to tricks and she said, “Why?” and he said, “I don’t want to talk about it lady. I am sorry but I don’t want to talk about it.” She insisted and he said, “Well to be very truthful, after they finish work on a Saturday they come into town and get drunk and they have knives in their pouches and they go round and kill all the children, kids and babies.”

She said, “Is that so?.” David said, “Yes, that is so.” That was the sort of thing he did. The same fellow walking over Sydney Harbour Bridge said, we didn’t have our caps on and a guy said, “Where are you guys going?” and David said, “We are going to walk across the bridge,” “You are not allowed to walk across there, you are out of dress.” David said, “No we are from Queensland we don’t know anything about this dress business.” He said, “I will report you” and he said,

”My name is Charlie Smithson and his name is Kevin Blitz” and walked away. He got up to all sorts of tricks this fellow.

Played cards, played pontoon, played bridge, played black jack walked around the deck about twenty times,

had about three showers a day and got dunked when we went across the Equator, all that sort of thing. It was quite good I loved it. I loved America too.

They really looked after us. I met a Mrs Webster there who was a hostie for the PX [Postal Exchange – American canteen unit] and she played bridge with us

and we were invited to her place for dinner one night, a chap Bradford from Sydney, can’t think of his first name and she tried to cook corned beef and cabbage and make tea. The corned been and cabbage was all right but the tea was one dip of the tea bag. So we taught her how to make tea and kept in correspondence with her for years. She said that they were having

tea as a regular drink.

Just the bigness of it and the hustle of it. Although it wasn’t as bad as it is today. Our last trip over to America we flew into Los Angeles and the amount of traffic in Los Angeles, I don’t know how they find their way. So thick and so many bridges

on top of one another.

We went in to Boston. One of the guys with us was Keith Miller, the cricketer and Keith got in touch with a young lady from Boston whom he later married and we used to stand in line for Keith and someone would say, “Miller,” “Here,” “Prowd,” “Here,”

all that sort of rubbish.

We had Australian pounds and we used to walk around and get the best rate which was about two American dollars for one Australian pound, sometimes it would be a little less but mostly it would be about two dollars to a pound. Things were reasonably cheap.

They were dearer than here. Different habits of eating, different ways of living but similar. They are anglicised, they came out of the Mayflower people but I think their population is more diverse than Australia. They are having their problems I think because of that now. I liked America, I didn’t like New York very much. Being an old country boy

I don’t like a lot of hustle and bustle and that is what America is, hustle and bustle.

Yes I constantly wrote to my parents. I didn’t tell them where I was because you weren’t allowed to and I constantly wrote to them while I was in England. Everything went through Australia House in England. I don’t think we had any real problems, I never mentioned

where I was. One of the things that comes to mind when we were on leave we would go to Queensland House and the chappie in charge of Queensland House was a friend of a friend of ours

In England, London, Kingsway, in the Strand at least and he, I would always ask for him and he would have the local papers there and he would send a cable and it would be in the local papers in Brisbane,

in those days it was called the Brisbane Mail and he would write the Brisbane Daily Mail and he would send a cable and it would go into the paper that Keith Prowd called into the Queensland House and he is well and looking quite good and fit and he did that for every Queenslander who called. We also went into Australia House where we were also looked after by ex-Australian that were

living in England. One of those occasions was when we went and heard the Polish Men’s Choir in Albert House and an Australian who lived in England had a box in Albert House and here we are sitting up in this box, real snooties. It was Johnny and I mostly. Another occasion was a burlesque show

and Johnny was cranky because we never had any binoculars. They were French girls who stripped down. They also had skin covering, nothing wobbled so I can only imagine. Poor old Johnny, really a good boy. I didn’t mind them either.

When we

went to America it was pretty obvious. I think we always thought we were going to England and Japan wasn’t anything to do with us at that stage. I think Japan came into the war while we were on our way. September ’42. No, we were finishing and we had known that we were on our way to England

I am sure.

Oh no.

I think we always thought they would come in. I think you would have to have rocks in your head if you didn’t. After all Churchill was married to Roosevelt’s cousin and Roosevelt was married to an English woman. They were helping us out with ships and

they called it lend lease in other words we didn’t pay for it.

I didn’t think there was any animosity at all. I never saw any. In the camp Myles Standish where there were thousands of American soldiers we were just treated like other servicemen, we were Australians and in the middle of winter they gave us their overboots to wear, gave us their heavier overcoats than we had.

They are a boot that fits over your boot and they clip up and they are very thick, thick soles and they clip up over your shoes and when you come in out of the snow you take them off and you have clean shoes. They are very good and I had mine when I got to England but someone when I became a prisoner of war commandeered them, don’t know who it was, never found that out.

You could only see the bubbles of the torpedoes and the Louis Pasteur being a fast ship we stayed on deck with life jackets on all the time. We didn't think we wouldn't be hit, we thought we would be but we weren't and they were cheeky beggars because

there wasn’t many guns on these big liners. They had some but not enough to damage a submarine, they didn’t have any depth charges for instance and this was a good way away from Germany really, three quarters away across the Atlantic. It is still a long way for a submarine even though I know some of them went to America, some actually got to America. I think we just thought of it as,

hope they don’t hit us.

Yes I think so. We went very south and we realised why we went south and then we suddenly realised we went almost direct, not south, we went south east and then we went north we realised we were going up the American coast

but the only, or alternatively some speculation was going through the Panama Canal but the Panama Canal would not have been able to take the Louis Pasteur. Although we came back home with the Orion through the Panama Canal. I think we always thought we were going to America.

We are home, we’re here, it’s on now and we will find out what it is all about now. I think that was the reaction. I think the average Aussie is quite philosophical about life. It’s here, I have got to do it, it is my job.

No I never had that feeling because my forebears on my mother’s side were Irish and my forebears on my father’s side were English and German. So

Pa Prowd never spoke about England at all, he didn’t know it, he was born in Australia and Granny Strain was always talking Irish. Very lovely lady, only a little person, as was my other grandmother.

I saw the Liver birds when we came into the Mersey River at Liverpool

and I saw this big bird on top of a building and they told me it was a Liver bird but I have never understood how they could call it a Liver bird and still call the town Liverpool, it should be a Liverpool shouldn’t it? And then we got onto a train and there was trouble in England when we got there, the

ship workers decided they weren’t going to unload us and Churchill called the army in and in fact he gaoled a few of them, this is war time you don’t do those things in war time. We were held on a ship for a while but not that long and then we went down by train.

A pasting. You had to be there to appreciate w hat they actually put

up with and you had to be in England and to be there for a fair while to understand the English attitude too, to the war. They hated Germans and I think basically still do and they don’t have a great love for the French either and I think they basically still don’t, the English when they played the French the other night it was pretty obvious they weren’t pleased with one another.

I think that the amount of lend lease and stuff that Britain got from American as did Russia and the amount of equipment and the problems we went to liberate firstly France and the rest of the countries, I think it is pure arrogance on a lot of Europeans parts to try and

and force them into doing things they don’t want to do, a la the Common Market. Britain is still not a member of the Common Market and refused to accept the Euro, for which I don’t blame them. I suppose a lifetime has gone by since that and just that example I showed you for us that took part in D Day, a couple of us were decorated with a lower class

Croix de Guerre, when we arrived back in Australia as it was given to us by General De Gaulle it wasn’t accepted as being from the French Government. I don’t know the background of that, all I know is that we were told to take them off and I had one and we just threw them away. It was never promulgated, as you get a diploma of honour from the French Government for your participation

in the D Day landings forty something years after the event. I think it is sheer arrogance. If they wanted to do something for us it should have been done shortly after the war. I don’t dislike the French, I don’t like them, I don’t dislike them, they are just another people but I do think they are arrogant as is Germany.

We had Canadians, one American,

Baker, he later left us and joined the American air force, he joined up in Canada as an American. We had South Africans, we had people from Honduras, we had a lot of Australians, we had a lot of English, a lot of Canadians and New Zealanders, they were the four basic nations – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and England.

I don’t think that we ever had any great command structure. The Dam Busters Squadron Leader Miller, he ended up hierarchy and there was a couple of, Bennett, there was general too, there was an air marshal who was an Australian

whose name escapes me but in the hierarchy I think we were accepted as being the workers. Ronny Minchen, he became a squadron leader and Charlie King who has now died was a flight lieutenant. We did get rank there but never got into the real, group captain, in our side of it.

In Bomber Command they did because in Bomber Command they got killed off pretty quickly but within our section we were pretty lucky.

I can remember the leaflet raid which was nothing much really, just dropping leaflets outs and no bombs and I can remember the nickel raid. I can remember the first mine dropping, the one I told you about where we supposedly got lost and didn’t have enough

petrol to get back to base. That is one I remember mostly.

I think we overcame, the crew overcame its own nervousness. After we got back to base and we got the wounded gunner out, the crew decided to get out and I said, “No you just sit here and we will talk.” We talked for about half an hour

and we never had any problems at all after that because it was sheer nervousness of operation and someone has got to have his feet on the ground and the pilot is expected to have his feet on the ground even though you might be as nervous as they are you are not allowed to feel it or say it or act it.

You usually

you are put up on the board - operation tonight, this crew. Your navigator would then go to the navigation section, the wireless operator would go to his section, the bomb aimer would go to his section and the gunners would go to their section. They would get their particular, engineer would go to his section and they would find out distance and how much petrol we had to have and what the course would be and what the wind basic was and then we would all get together for the briefing.

Pilot was usually didn’t go anywhere until the briefing but normally in our crew anyway the navigator and the bomb aimer particularly would come and say, “This is what we are doing tonight” and it will be up on the board when you get there, tells you where the flak areas are and you would get in and see this big line, this is where we are at Tuddenham and this is

your first course, second course and third course and a few people, I didn’t because I was too nervous, too shy in those early days to ask a lot of questions but a lot of guys would get up and say, “How about we miss the Ruhr Valley by taking ten degrees further north or five degrees further south and we would get away from that flak area that I remembered very well last time I was over there.” A few of the Aussies on 90 Squadron used to do that,

more particularly the Aussies [Australians] I noticed and they might alter the course and they might not and they may say, “Our information is that this is the safest way to go,” in which case you did it. When you got in the air you could do what you really wanted but I was one of those who believed you were told for the best as far as they knew and I tried to do that for all courses. Sometimes in this lower level stuff where

I was I got to know it better, I got more experienced, I used to change my course occasionally. The same result, you would get to the target and that was the more important thing.

Yes, when you are in the air. What I used to do, I’d go with the navigator and say that’s 250,

that’s 301 and I would make a little note on the hand and I would remember those and if he gave me a course of 250 and he gave me 180 I’d say, “Are you right Mike? Is that what you really want me to do because on briefing it was 250.” “No I have just had a message, Johnny’s had a message on his wireless and they’ve changed that course,” “OK,” but I always mentally remembered what courses we should be on and if they gave me

one that was within a few degrees different I would question it. Bomb aimer, I would go through with him the reading of the maps on the ground and roughly remember any sort of landmarks I could pick out like the cape of an island or the shape of an island or the shape of aerodrome, not an aerodrome because we never flew over them but the shape of rivers, the shape of streets, I always tried to

remember those. You had to remember them for that one mission, not any more. When we were flying low level that was pretty difficult, the bomb aimer was the most important person there, he would get a map one inch to the mile and he would go on board with maps like that. We could actually pick out fences or wires, electric wires

and sometimes it would pay us to fly under them and sometimes over them, depends on the situation. If there was a decent flak area on the other side of it you didn’t want to do that so you would fly under them and you were gone before they had a chance to see you. The engineer, it was his job to check the whole aeroplane as was the pilot’s but if Lofty did it and he did it accurately always, I never had any reason to

doubt him.

The Stirling wheel was about that high and when you landed and it had a rim like a tyre and it had two paint marks and if that mark was over there the wheel had crept too far and you were in fear of having a blow out so you would have to check that those two creep marks were

opposite one another, you would check for oil leaks, you would check for the earlier leak to see if it was OK, look up under the fuselage, you looked at the rear tyres, you looked at the bomb aimer’s spot to see if it was OK. In a Stirling that wasn’t that easy but in the Wellington it was. Just looked generally around the aeroplane and then when you came in, in the engineer’s compartment you look at your petrol, the oil pressures, all that sort of thing.

You had them in front of you in the cockpit anyway.

No, we went through the back seat. The exit I said was underneath the pilot’s seat.

Easy, it was just four steps, we had a little aluminium step at the back door and that is where they threw out the stuff.

Just general yakka. Ground crew, you always asked them if they had checked on this or that or one of them would come and say, “You have got a bit of an oil leak here but it is OK. Your batteries are pretty good, we will have to watch them next time you come back we need them replaced.”

Great, it had to be great. The most important person to a pilot was the

ground staff, o n the ground. You make an enemy of them and you are dead.

There were a number of crews looked after a number of aeroplanes but usually we had our own engineer, our own frames and our own mechanics under the charge of the flight sergeant but they were always split up into planes but

my lot might also have to go and do another one. I always had the same one.

No, we never.

Yes I have still got mine, a little rabbit in there I carried with me all the way through, Germany and all.

My mother gave it to me. Mum or someone gave it to Mum.

It is still there, still inside.

Just a rabbit, a felt rabbit.

Put it in my inside pocket. It was in my flying jacket. Didn’t use a flight suit, just used flying jackets. That was always with me. Even on leave I took it with me.

We took coffee, a lot of coffee. We usually had a meal before we left. There was no food in general terms on the aeroplane. Chewing gum was something. In bomber command it was very difficult because your mouth was covered with a mask for oxygen so you couldn’t eat anything there but you could have an odd sip of coffee. In flying low level I was

too busy making sure there was nothing ahead of me but I had a sip of coffee occasionally but you couldn’t afford to put it down anywhere because a four engine aeroplane shakes a fair bit in those days.

We had our own little communication, little microphone through the oxygen mask even though we still used them when we had no oxygen

that was our communication. It was called the TR9D which I spoke to you about. If you wanted to transmit to the pilot you would just do it, he was the transmitter and just talk between the aeroplane when the transmitter was turned off.

Not unless you were cheeky which I was a couple of times. Ron Minchen and I used to tease one another a bit. I would say, “Minch.

Who’s that? Minch. Who’s that? Minch,” and then shut up. Then occasionally you would hear, “Prowd, Prowd” and shut up. That shouldn’t be done.

A lot of films have been written about stress in squadrons. I read a book, I went to sleep. I think occasionally I had a sleepless night or two but I don’t think there was much in it, it never worried me much. I had more worry managing a company in telephone book printing than I did flying an aeroplane.

Flying was lovely, it was something that I wanted to do, something that I loved doing, running a company was something that I had to do and if I made a mistake something like a couple of thousand guys would maybe lose their job. That was the stressful part of it, I had a heart attack when I was working for the company. I have never had a heart attack flying an aeroplane.

They come in bundles, I’ve forgotten the quantity in a bundle, probably a couple of hundred, then they’re just pulled off and thrown out. We didn’t do it but the crews did it. They are thrown out the back door in a Stirling and some would fly back in too and they would sweep them out. The nickel raids they were done in bundles of a hundred and you

just let them drop and I have never seen the effect of them but apparently they were very effective. We did that on a, I did two leaflet raids but I haven’t got them written down in my log book, I haven’t even got the nickel raid down in my log book but Johnny knows we did the three of them, two leaflets and one nickel.

Me, careless. That was something to do, I loved flying and I just wanted to fly and if anyone got into trouble landing and we had one of our senior pilots on our flight, an Australian by the name of Van Wrenin who always without fail when he landed he landed the aeroplane half way down the runway

and it always run through to the mud and bog and they would come down and get me out of bed at two, three and four and five o’clock in the morning and say, “Come on Prowdy we have to pull this aeroplane out.” They knew I loved doing it. It was never stressful to me, I think in the early stages when you are learning, you are trying to make your mark it is but as for it was something we had to do. I felt at that stage of my air force career

quite patriotic. I didn’t in the early stages, it was just another thing.

Falling asleep. I did fall asleep on one occasion, on a low level mission too. I had George in and one of my instructors Mr Palmer, who I mentioned before, taught me to

fly with the seat of my pants, it wasn’t what he called them. He said, “Until you can learn to fly and know that the aeroplane is moving by the feel on your backside you will never be a pilot.” He used to put a hood on us, you couldn’t see anything, you could see the instruments but you couldn’t see anything outside and then he would put a goggle on us so we couldn’t see the instruments and as soon as the aeroplane moved you would feel it. This particular night we

were flying at about two hundred and fifty feet over France and I was very tired, I don’t even know where it was, probably that one over Lake Geneva I think and I put George in but George wasn’t working properly because I found myself leaning like that and I woke up. That is the only time I have been tempted to go to sleep. Probably her fault, probably had a late night out.

No, I never took any of them.

Yes, regularly. They were on our squadron, people took them but I didn’t. I could always sleep well and I still do. It wasn’t when I was in the company I didn’t sleep well, so that is the difference in stress. The stress of doing something you really loved to do against something

you had to do.

When the wheels touched down. One of the crew, one of the pilots on the crew was a guy that I tested, his name was Foreman. I was asked how long

I thought he would last and I thought he was a bit rough, he might only last about half a dozen missions but when he came back he used to go close to the hedges and he would cut off a bit of hedge every time he came in and he did this until there was about that much cut out of the hedge. I could never do that, I wouldn’t be good enough but he did it and I didn’t think he was good enough to do it either but he went right through the war, finished the war and has been in touch with us once or twice.

In England, England was a war zone, there were enemy fighters and there were friendly fighters. We had an instrument in our cockpit IFF. Identification Friend or Foe and if you didn’t have that on when you got back to the English coast you would expect to have a problem so you had to remember

all the things you had to do and I think that was what kept you awake and the flying itself, flying is a challenge, it is a lovely thing. Johnny Werry he had his aerial from the aircraft was a long extended aerial of wire that hung about fifty feet out beyond the aircraft itself because the aircraft was all metal and inclined to give a lot of false readings

to the wireless operators and if Johnny didn’t remember to wind that in and he didn’t more than once, I could feel it when it hit the hedges and broke and you would feel that little jerk and I would say, “Johnny.” Never roused on them, no need to, they know their own mistakes.

Debriefing, you are examined by

a doctor or a doctor sits in on your debriefing and you are asked questions about what did you see, where did you go, did you change your course, if so what did you do and you always told them the truth because it would be on your records anyway, on your navigational charts and where did you see anything extraordinary, troop movements, that was nearly always the rear gunner who would see that,

any engine problems or aircraft problems. One particular night I went out with five other crews to Holland to drop some supplies and we ran across a serious of storms that weren’t predicted and I climbed to a reasonable altitude without oxygen, ten thousand thereabouts and

couldn’t get out of it, dived right down low, couldn’t get out of it. We went through a series of six storms in and out and when I came back I was sitting at debriefing and the doctor said, “What’s wrong with your wrist?” and I said, “Nothing doctor” and I looked down and my wrist was all swollen. I had sprained my wrist and my jacket had to be cut off so I was grounded for about six weeks.

Just trying to hold it still. I didn’t know. I think that is adrenalin that comes in, I don’t now what it is. All I know is that I had a strained wrist. I was the only one to get home that night. It was a bad storm, we didn’t drop our stuff either.

Its

worst peculiarity was it couldn’t get high. In bomber command its height would be about, fully loaded, sixteen, seventeen or eighteen thousand where as the Lancaster and Halifax would be sitting up at twenty two or twenty five thousand. Coming home it was equally as fast and more manoeuvrable

than most of those in the air but on the ground it was a bit hard because of the height of its undercarriage. It was, I loved flying it and it could do anything you asked it to do. When we were coming home we would go in at about a hundred and eight knots and come home at about two hundred and twenty, a much lighter aeroplane. It was very quick. It was an all metal aeroplane and very heavy. All up weight was seventy thousand pounds,

thirty five ton.

I think so. Both Halifax and Lancasters were fabric coated aeroplanes. The Stirlings have come back bullet hole riddled, for instance that Middleton bloke who got the VC [Victoria Cross], the first Australian VC. His plane come back absolutely wrecked and he dropped them off at

Woodstock and flew the aeroplane into the sea but he was injured too. He flew back from Germany from the Ruhr Valley with a very badly damaged aeroplane and he was not the only one. We had all those holes when we came back from Heligoland, the aeroplane didn’t fly any differently than if we didn’t have any holes. The time I lost an engine over the Channel Islands the aeroplane didn’t fly any

differently except you had three engines instead of four and there was a little bit more drag on the side so you compensated for that with trim.

Lovely aeroplane, lovely aeroplane. Biggest fault was the propellers were too close to the fuselage and the rear gunners had a favourite habit of turning their turret around and walking out, falling out, getting out and walking up the side of the fuselage

before the engines stopped. There has been more than one rear gunner killed that way. I actually physically saw, not my aeroplane but I was right opposite an aeroplane where a guy did this and he walked through the propeller without being touched. Actually saw that. Admittedly the aeroplane was slowing down. I would have never attempted it

in a hundred years. It was a lovely aeroplane to fly, very manoeuvrable, very light in its movement and as far as I can remember it had no faults. Except I reckon if they had made the Wellington more powerful and increased the framework a bit it would have been a good bomber. It was a good bomber, very good but it didn’t have a long range. It was a medium

range aeroplane.

Years and years ahead. In fact at the beginning of the war the Anson was still an RAF bomber. When the Wellington came on the scene that was one of Barnes Wallace’s inventions, it was streets ahead. Streets ahead of the Blenheim, streets ahead of the Whitely it was

the aeroplane and it was one that I loved anyway. I would fly it again if I could, if I was allowed to.

No this was all boy soprano stuff. I sang the Messiah and took a solo in that on one occasion. My mother and my auntie were both singers. My auntie, I didn’t like her very much

but she was a beautiful singer. She was trained by, not a teacher of Dame Nellie Melba but one of Dame Nellie Melba’s sidekicks, Mabel Cox her name was and she lived in Gympie. Auntie Holly should really have given her voice to the world because it was a really beautiful voice, very powerful. She taught

me to sing the Lord’s Prayer properly. She also sang duets with my mother who was also a pianist and a contralto and they sang a lot of church and concert duets but Auntie Hollie was a powerful singer and if high notes were taken she would out step anyone. She was a beautiful singer.

No I haven’t done much singing since the war.

No. I always maintained at crew meetings we had that their job was their job and if we could all cooperate together each job becomes easier whereas if one failed someone had to step in and help them out and that is what I said when we had all that problem on the very first

time that they said they were lost and had no petrol left and all those sort of things and I said, “If you guys could do your job properly without panicking we would have no problem,” and we never had any more problems. I didn’t rouse on them, they were all grown men they were older than me, four of them were older than me, I was the youngster in the crew, Johnny Werry was the youngest and I was the second youngest. It is

true if each can do his job.

No, I think that first trip it was a panic situation when he found he couldn’t get the course properly, he thought we were lost and I think it was a panic statement that he shouldn’t have said. As I said to him later, “You shouldn’t have said I am lost skipper.

You should have said I am not quite sure which course I should take. It is five minutes to the white flares, how about we skip and go along to that,” instead of me saying it to him he should have said that to me. I think that also gave confidence of them in me as well as me having confidence in them because we never ever had another trouble, never once.

We only had uniforms. In Australia we used summer uniforms which was khaki shorts and shirts and a slouch hat and then our out clothing was long trousers, khaki and a bit like a safari jacket top and again hats.

In winter time we had the blue uniform, I actually went and got a special suit when we were in England, a better cloth. It was all right just a bit rough on the skin but the clothing was good. They gave us an issue of winter underwear as well as summer underwear. They gave you an issue of plenty of socks and a couple of pairs of shoes.

I preferred rubber soled boots and they gave you those. I think I had one rubber soled shoe and one rubber soled boot. One pair of each, it’d look funny with one different one on each foot, and in summer time it was brown shoes and socks.

Mostly we wore black shoes and socks even in summer. Then we had, you were issued with heavy weather flying gear, that was the sea kit bag you took. There was more than one occasion where those sea kit bags which had never been opened since we left Australia , probably never opened even after they were issued like mine for instance, I never got mine out. They

would explode. You take them across, they got a bit wet going across in the boat and when we got to Brighton and Bournemouth quite a few exploded under beds because the static electricity built up, it was full of silk, everything was silk, no rayon or nylon, it was silk and we had parachutes that were silk. That is why we got a caterpillar when we would save our life by parachute.

I have mine in there, it is a little thing about that big. Actually it was stolen in a robbery we had here and I had to get a new one. I only got it back last month.

It is a little pure gold caterpillar about that big.

It is a caterpillar and the significance being that a caterpillar spun the silk that we used in our flying gear.

If you wore them out you got a new issue but you had to make sure. I never liked their shirts, I used to like officer’s shirts so I told them when I was a warrant officer that I was then an officer so I should have the right shirt, and they issued them.

The gear was all right, it was better than being naked.

Yes we did. I should have got my little rabbit out, there were things like that and personal things from your parents and

your own shaving gear, even though shaving gear was issued by the air force. Practically everything was issued, there wasn’t any need for any, personal photographs and we used to take a camera, the old 127 camera, a very small photo. I used that a lot in America and so on. Photographs perhaps,

we were never allowed to take them in operations but there wasn’t much we needed except for air force gear.

That is a long while ago, that’s sixty years ago.

You wake up, have your shower and do your toiletry and get dressed and you go and have breakfast at the mess and you yakka yakka and you are due down to the flight room, we were in A flight and you would go down and sit around there and talk about everything and

nothing. One of our favourite subjects and it was nearly every day was that the propeller of an aeroplane had limited ability, that is it couldn’t go beyond a certain speed because of its physical ability, it had to cut air and we talked about the octopus which sucked water in and blew it out, we talked about the magnetism of

north and south repelling, of means of transport. We used to talk about these things rather heatedly in the flight room and always in fun, never angry, “You bloody idiot what would an octopus do flying an aeroplane,” that sort of thing but in fact it was relative to flying and

it is true that the propeller is limited in its ability to go fast, faster than the speed of sound for instance even though a Spitfire did go through the speed of sound, even though a Mosquito went through the speed of sound but they didn’t realise that, that was just a noise that happened and it wasn’t until the de Havilland Comet, it was a de Havilland aeroplane anyway that

a Spitfire pilot was a test pilot for one of the test aeroplanes to try to get through the speed of sound because they had lost a lot of pilots trying to do that and he went through the speed of sound and remembered that when he did it before his controls were reversed. I don’t remember the story about that. So instead of pulling the nose backwards which is the right thing to do,

he pushed the nose forward and the nose came up. It would appear that your controls are reversed once you go through the speed of sound. That was how they discovered how to get out of the speed of sound. That was from a war time pilot, I think it was de Havilland but I could be wrong, I think it was the de Havilland Comet that they found it too. I am not even sure that is right.

We would have these long discussions about nothing and if anything was on the flight commander would come in and say, “Right oh fellows you, you and you tonight we are on Keel Bay, right oh Prowdy you are on tonight. You were there last night with Millsey so now you are on your own.” Then the various sections would be told the same thing because the navigators and the bomb aimers and the

wireless operators would go to their various sections. We as pilots went to the flight section and they would be told the same thing so they would get their details and then you would meet again and have a discussion and go to briefing where the map would appear up on the wall showing where you were going and t hey were the courses that you would adopt. That is about all there is to it. Navigators and bomb aimers

got a fair bit to do and the engineers got a fair bit to do to work out how much petrol they would need. Every aeroplane is different, some use more petrol than other aeroplanes, some pilots use more throttle than other pilots. I came into the category where I used to throttle back regularly and as long as I could remain air born and remain at a good speed that is what I would fly at. I was one of those who fiddled with throttles.

In a four engine aeroplane you try to get all four engines purring as if it’s one engine. If you can hear an aeroplane sometimes going across and you hear three or four different sounds, if you heard just a they are all synchronized. Sometimes you have got to fiddle with the throttles because you can physically hear it yourself. It might only be a matter of ten revs or something and you get

them. You can have them staggered but they would be all one speed and you were flying at the lowest possible revs to achieve the main object because you never know when you are going to be diverted. England is subject to fog so you never knew when you were going to not land at Tuttenham but land in Scotland, we never knew so I always tried to make sure we had plenty of petrol left over.

You would go and have bacon and eggs for dinner or tea was our normal meal on our squadron anyway and you would go and change into your flying gear if you were going to use flying gear. Put my scarf on and a sweater or two on. I never used flying gear, I didn't even use flying boots I found them uncomfortable. I used ordinary boots that is what I

used to fly with, boots, not shoes. Then you went down to the crew room and went to the parachute section, got your parachute issued. In the mean time you have gone and walked around the aeroplane and talked to the ground crew about it and se what they thought what was going to happen.

Then you got into your aeroplane, got driven out by people like my dear wife in a crew bus to the various aeroplanes. Sometimes Edna would just drive out the squadron leader or the wing commander on their own because she was a privileged one. She was the pet and she deserved it too. We of the common herd were taken out in a crew bus.

We went around the aeroplane again and kicked the wheels and hammered the sides to see if everything was all right. Hammered by fists I mean, not hammered by hammers just to see if anything was rattly. There were certain controls put into the elevators and the ailerons and the wings that if you left there you can’t move them so you would have to pull those, make sure they’re out and then we would fly in the cockpit,

get up and walk into the cockpit, check everything as you are going through, glance at them.

Varies, I think the longest flight I did.

Over to Keel Bay, about six or seven hours. That is about normal bomber flight, five to seven hours would be the normal. Berlin was a seven hour trip.

The other end of France was about five hours. They are travelling at two hundred miles per hour so it is a thousand miles you travel each way, it is a fair run.

That was the one where the navigator thought he was lost. We were into Germany I think, certainly into Holland, no, into Germany and he said he

was lost and I asked him which plot he was using, the ground plot or the air plot. The ground plot allows for the wind that is flying over the aeroplane and the air plot is the plot that you are supposed to be flying one eighty degrees instead of one eighty two or something. He said his ground plot was on course and it was five minutes to when the white markers came down

so I said we’ll fly on for the five minutes and see what happens and the marker was there. That was OK, we dropped our mines in Keel Bay. I think they had something to do with one of the big battleships, they were trying to close the bay up with mines. There were quite a lot of trips, I noticed I did three trips to Keel in my log book, all within that short period of time. We never had any trouble in any of the others.

Coming out, everything was all right until we hit Heligoland when the navigator said I could fly straight and level and then a big fighter came in, we were hit with flak first and I didn’t think very seriously but we were hit and the flak stopped and

that’s time you look for a fighter because the flak suddenly stops and they know they have hit you there is something else to happen. You wouldn’t have been out of their range because it is too close. The three gunners said, “Fighter starboard go,” which means you fly into him going down and he had his navigation lights on, they actually saw his navigation lights on, a fairly foolish thing to do and the gunners shot him down and we had that credited to us

as a fighter shot down. When we were flying straight and level into the North Sea I put George in and called up if everyone is all right and Des said that he had been hit in the rear turret. Johnny Werry and I went down, I got the bomb aimer to sit in the second pilot seat to watch the aeroplane. I had already taught him how to fly

straight and level and Des had been hit in his arm and his side, he had shell marks and I think there were shell splinters in there too. Up until I was shot down I had a splinter of that particular shell in my possession but that disappeared too. We gave Des, let him lie down

on his, he used his parachute as a head rest and we laid him on a bit of cloth and introduced morphine injection. I am not sure whether I gave it to Des or Johnny did, one of us did. We carried those sort of things in the first aid kit

and then we were going along very nicely and the engineer told me we didn’t have enough petrol to get back to base. We headed for a crash drome which is called Woodstock, on the chin of England, and it was very long and very wide so that crashed aeroplanes could land there or crash there whichever they wanted to do. About ten minutes out from Woodstock

I asked Des, “How are we going?” I said we can go into Woodstock and he said, “No, I think we have enough to get back into base.” I queried why we were short of petrol because each tank has a self sealing inner rubber tube, if flak went through that petrol wouldn’t leak out very much and I questioned why we were running short but he was the engineer and had the instruments in front of him and all was well, got back to base.

In the arm.

We ripped that all off, cut it all off, to his disgust because it was a beautiful wool lined rear gunners jacket, a beautiful one, I wouldn’t mind owning it myself.

He just went, he doped off. He was pretty good actually, I recommended him for a

decoration and he got a DFC out of it.

Not that I know of. I wasn’t, Johnny Werry wasn’t, as far as I know the navigator and bomb aimer weren’t and I don’t think the engineer was, except when he told me about his petrol, I think he was panicking a bit then. I think it happens in lots of crews in their very first major operation even though we had been over there

a couple of times with leaflets and things, that is not really an operation even though it is credited as one. You weren’t dropping any bombs, you are only telling the French in our case that they should be on our side not on the German side.

I’d called up for an emergency landing and they had an

ambulance and I didn’t let the crew go out, I stopped them from going out and we had a little talk for about half an hour and we never had any more problems.

Not to panic. If you are going to die, you are going to die, if you can’t get out with a parachute you go down with the plane. That was really what we said and they all apologised and said it was just panic. I’m sure

Johnny Werry didn’t panic and I know I didn’t because I had been in the place before.

A few months later I was in 196 Squadron.

In those early days we were practicing towing gliders and practicing

dropping paratroops. Strange as it may seem you have to be flying at a very low speed as the paratroops come out, gliders are not so bad, they can drop off any time you like. Paratroop dropping is not as easy as it sounds. The Stirling had a very high stalling speed of about

a hundred and four I think, knots, and we used to come in at about a hundred and ten to a hundred and fifteen, anything faster you would definitely overshoot. We used to drop the paratroops at about a hundred and ten and there is a lot of give in the controls and you are really fighting it. Whereas if you are flying at your normal speed of a hundred and eighty knots

it is just a matter of easing the controls, that’s the difference and it is not easy from a pilot’s point of view to drop paratroops. You have to be really concentrating on your instruments because once you pass the stalling speed you are dead at that height because they just go down, they are very heavy aeroplane. Not only Stirling but every aeroplane.

Yes we dropped supplies to the underground troops in France and Belgium and Holland. One trip near Germany right on the French German border. One trip on the Swiss border. Most of them were in France, Holland and Belgium. I did one to Denmark,

a couple of guys did some to Norway and a couple of them lost their life in Norway. Iced up, icing on the wings and we had no means, we had a little vibrator on the wing but if you let the ice develop too much it would overcome the vibrator. Now they have some sort of alcohol through the wing tip. The idea being that if the ice builds up

you haven’t got your cutting edge through the wind and you can develop a stalling situation and you drop a wing very quickly. If you try to dive it out you might build up more ice so we had a little vibrator on the leading edge of the wing. We would always watch for it, I watched for ti, the bomb aimer watched for it and the wireless operator watched for it

because he could stand in the dome, the wireless dome, and he could see a lot of things but we never had any problems like that.

Love letters, meat, papers, ammunition, guns, food.

It was a prepared fire.

We were told to go to a certain spot and if we flew over that spot on our time usually a fire developed and it was a fire in a triangle, a fire in a straight line, when I say a fire, it was lots of fire and they could be in a circle, it could be two lines, they are the ones that I can remember that we had. If they came on then I would press my Morse code

light underneath and it would be a pre-arranged B or A or C or SOS [Save Our Souls – distress call] or whatever and you would get the reply from the base. They would then have to reply with a certain signal and there was two occasions when I came back with supplies even though the fire was there because they came back with the wrong signal and I didn’t wait for anything else, I just came back home. The Germans

had a habit of finding out about these things through observation, through getting some of the underground people and making them talk through torture mostly. If you got the right signal you dropped the stuff and then they had to put the fires out and run for their life.

I went to 196 squadron early part of 1944 or the late part of 1943 and D Day was on the sixth June, so six months. In the mean time we were making supplies and practicing. We were doing lots of cross country runs too, low level, for practice because things are different at low level than they are at

height.

Fantastic. We built up, it was a build up. There was a map in one crew room the whole width of the wall and the only people that were allowed in to look at it were the navigators and pilots and there were guards at every window and guards at every door so that no one could see it and we had to learn that off by heart

and we did. We did we never had any problems. Then we introduced the bomb aimer to it. We were at two hundred and fifty feet when we dropped them so you don’t see much and we were at three thousand feet approaching the coast, you are diving down quickly, so the navigator and the pilot had it in their hands. A lovely operation.

That day.

We never knew the sixth of June until the last minute.

No, we were prepared something like a fortnight before with the map. They knew where it was going but we never knew the day. In fact the day had been cancelled once apparently, it was to be the fifth June.

The same old thing. Well you don’t send letters home saying, “We are going onto D Day,”

they wouldn’t get out of England, they wouldn’t get out of your squadron because they read your mail. You would just write letters and say things are going normally. I used to go to London and call into Queensland House and Mum and Dad would know I was there on that day which could be only a day before or two days before. On the squadron, we never mentioned what we were doing, just flying operations we always said.

Yes, I think it was a minimum of one a week.

I think it would be a lie to say one wouldn’t be worried but you are philosophical about worrying. You were there to do a job and if you missed out, to the death. It wasn’t easy but it wasn’t hard and you got, to be in D Day

was the greatest thrill of an operation that you could be in your life. It was so big, so massive and even to a week or so after when we were flying daylights the amount of traffic across the channel was incredible. I often wonder how they didn’t hit one another, even today the channel is so narrow and

the amount of shipping that goes up and down there. How they get away with it.

If the pilot is philosophical about his attitude the crew adopts the same principle. They should and they did in my crew. The biggest problem I had with my crew was with Johnny Werry and my rear gunner, Jim Gordon. They were much younger than us

and Jim being a Canadian was a bit of a rebel. Not that I think all Canadians are rebels but Jim was a rebel. He came from Windsor, Ontario and they used to go and drink a bit too much. I’m a non-drinker. Edna and I would go to the pictures or somewhere and we would meet them on the train in Bath for instance to go back to Keevil

and on one occasion Jim had a fight with an American and he had his throat cut and fortunately for him it missed the jugular vein on both occasions. Johnny wasn’t hurt, he had a bit of a bloody ear. I said, “That’s the last time you guys do that.” I didn’t mind them having a drink,

that is their problem but Jimmy never did it again and Johnny didn’t. That was getting up to D Day because all the paratroopers were around town. The paratroops, the British paratroopers helped them out. There was a guy called Mick Keely, his name just came to mind, Mick Keely stepped in on their side and he was a wild Irishman. Johnny only the other day we were talking about

Mick Keely and he said, “He was the greatest bloke I knew.” I said, “Do you remember the Bath incident?” and he said, “I certainly do.” The Americans and the British paratroops were close together in camp and that wasn’t a good thing. They were so highly trained the pair of them. Fit as a mallee bull. I wouldn’t take any of them on they were so fit and they were so tense too, they were all up. They weren’t tense, they were just waiting to fight, both of them.

Well, I suppose there were. None in our squadron that I know of. I never knew of any and we never had any in our crew. I don’t think we had any as far as I know, I never knew of any in the squadron. It was life. There were a lot of Aussies in our crew and the

Aussie skippers we had on the crew were particularly steady fellows and quite a few of the Pommy [English] fellows, a bloke I wrote, about fifty eight years he hadn’t seen me, he was a very steady fellow, very steady.

She was in watching us take off. You were driving the CO weren’t you that day?

Anyway, she saw us take off. I t was taking off at ten second intervals, it was good. One guy crashed and got killed on D Day just off the drome. I can’t remember who that was but there is a memorial to him there.

Just goodbye,

see you later.

The next day, I suppose. We were pretty busy around about then. It might have been a while but we used to try and see one another every day even if it was only a wave.

Great. An achievement, couldn’t have been any better achievement than opening up a second front and such a big one, such a huge one.

It was beyond all comprehension, the size of it. I have no idea how many aeroplanes were in it. There would be a minimum of a thousand, I am sure of it. Fortunately we were the second squadron in it so we were in the early part of it. I don’t know how many aeroplanes were lost, I have no idea. We lost one, Flight Lieutenant Gribble was shot down on D Day but he was the only one in our squadron. A few planes had holes.

I didn’t even get a hole.

Probably but I wasn’t one that did. My normal celebration was Indian Tonic and then on one occasion they put some Vodka in it and I was as sick as a dog. They said, “OK we thought you were telling lies but we know you don’t like it.” They never did it again that was on 196 squadron.

No. I suppose there is. Not as much pressure as running a company. Everything is done for you, you are done with it, you run with the flow. You are driving an aeroplane, the navigator has done his job, the engineer has done his job, the wireless operator has done his job, t he bomb aimer knows his job, it is just you to make sure they all coordinate.

We never had any real problems apart from that very first trip, nothing else.

Yep. I liked doing what I did and I think my crew liked me too. One of the things you were lectured on as a pilot was your crew is your responsibility twenty-four hours a day and you must see to that and that is pounded into us day in and day out in training.

Different when you got on a squadron but if one of your crew played up, you. Johnny had, one trip we did without Johnny, he liked the girls and he was very friendly with a nurse in Bath and he had a motor bike and I went down to the squadron and I said, “Anything on today?” and they said, “No.” Johnny had already asked me if there was anything on and I went and said no to him

and then later on we found that we were on. I got the SPs [Service Police] to try and find this nurse in Bath. They never did so we went without Johnny, we went with another operator from Adelaide, Allan Yellan who has unfortunately had a stroke too now. When we came back Johnny realised, when he got back he realised

we weren’t there. I had to take him up before the CO, before the flight commander and I pleaded for him too because I had told him there was nothing on and the CO had told me there was nothing on and it was all right but that is the depth to which it is taken as far as the responsibility of a pilot for his crew. Whether it is so now I don’t know.

We had a bit of a kiss and a cuddle. We used to go and sit, drive our bikes down and take a blanket and have a bit of a kiss and a cuddle. I made a mistake once at one family dinner, I’ve forgotten what it was about and I was asked to speak.

Was it your 80th birthday? And they asked a similar question to that and they said, “How did you do your courting?” I said, “We did most of it in the wireless compartment of a Stirling aeroplane” and the words I used was, “We made love there,” but that wasn’t true, the love I am talking about is kissing and cuddling. You should have heard

the kids, they were up in the air. The kids screamed at me and said, “Dad” and I said, “Not the sort of love you are talking about. It was just kissing and cuddling,” and if you look in a bomb aimer’s compartment it is impossible to do that anyway.

Physically impossible.

D Day? We did a number of daylight trips, I think it was five or so after D Day and as we had done our allotted number of trips before a break we went on a break and Johnny Werry and I went up to Dunkeld which is beyond Edinburgh,

near Perth and we went to this little village called Dunkeld and Mrs Wilson put us up after she realised we were on operations because her son had been killed in a Sunderland just prior to that, we were on a rest for a while. I loved Dunkeld, loved that part of Scotland and Edna and I have gone back there, of course the Wilson family are dead

but her son Kaye, he is Canberra and we correspond once a year now. He is not very well, he had a couple of bad accidents during the Snowy Mountain scheme construction. Their son is a pilot in the RAAF so that sort of thing has always been in their blood.

I think there is always the knockers, everyone knocks everything, the Wallabies couldn’t beat the Kiwis, but they did, Australia couldn’t win against England because of the Rugby League players that aren’t any good over there, but they did, everyone knocks. Everyone likes to knock it and you would say that

Mrs Wilson said, she wasn’t a knocker by the way, and she would say, “Have you been in the D Day operations?” and we said, “Yes we were” and we explained to her what it was all about. But one of her neighbours was saying, “Oh yes but you know we have got a lot of troops there and they will all get killed and we won’t get them back.” There is always knockers no matter where you go or what you do. I honestly feel that in

Britain there were positive things about D Day than there were knockers. It was the opening of the front, it was the beginning of the end for the Third Reich and that is what it was all about, that’s why it was done.

No, ignored them. Better to ignore knockers. I am probably a knocker in some ways too.

I thought the Wallabies would get beaten as well but I never said so. I might have said I thought the Kiwis were a better team but we are a world of knockers. Tall poppy syndrome.

I don’t think so. I don’t think I can remember, we always had our banter,

we called them Pommy so and so and they called us so and so, just as we called aborigines a black so and so and I went to school with them and they called me a white arse. That’s all in fun, if you take it seriously you are dead, you’ve got no life in you. I think we are taking things like this too seriously in life now. I think the amount of wars and terrorism that is on, it is probably very serious I think.

I am concerned for the world as it is, I am a bit of a knocker in that regard I have to admit because no one seems to be doing what seems to be the right thing. Back to the D Day situation I don’t remember any bad knockers but when Germany was bombing Britain so much if you went down in a subway

to come home to your squadron to get into a train there were a lot of knockers there but when things got better. It was incredible the British people are probably the most resilient people I have known. They said, “Oh well, our house was bombed we will go and live somewhere else and the government will fix us up when they can.” That was the attitude

I heard.

The first day we were in I had to drop off the glider because he was lifting the tail up and the second day I took in supplies and we were going in at fifteen hundred feet

and I was flying next to one of my squadron friends Fred Powell, he was on my left side and we waved across to one another, just prior to that I had been hit with flak on the starboard outer engine and there was a bit of smoke coming out of that. I didn’t have time to feather it or put the fire out which made me a target of course because I am an injured aeroplane

and then we dropped supplies and the shell hit us and I didn’t know it was a shell until I saw Fred Powell fifty eight years later. I knew we were hit with something. I said it was flak but Fred said it was a shell. He actually saw the shell hit us and he got a hundred and four holes but he got back to Britain. That gives you an idea, the Stirling was

quite resilient, you get a hundred holes but you can’t take a shell and go very far. I lost two other engines. I wasn’t game to feed too much petrol to the engines for fear of blow up so I got them out and I went out last, I got out at about five hundred odd feet and made some rude comments before I dropped because it was close to the ground and

I hit the ground and buried my Mae West, I told you about the feeling that I had been held up and I knelt on my knees and said, “What do you want me for?” because I felt sure I would have been killed and I didn’t even thought about dying, I just felt sure it was too close to the ground and I would be lucky to survive. I never thought of trying to save the aeroplane because I couldn’t, it was too far gone and I knew that.

Fred Powell fifty eight years later said he saw the actual shell hit the aeroplane underneath. Must have been in the bomb bay because we were dropping stuff out of the bomb bay as well as they were throwing it out to the side and he said he told them back at the squadron that we had no chance of getting out of it, it was all fire and smoke. To his surprise

Johnny and I survived. We are the only two now surviving because Jim Gordon has died since. So we’re both over eighty and he is just turned eighty. The battle itself, we were on the ground, lots of rifle fire going around. I was then captured by a line of German soldiers who lined me up against a tree and they were in a line and I thought

I was going to be shot but they just searched me and they asked me if I had been hurt and I said I had up here and my back was bad but I could walk all right.

About six German soldiers, a little patrol I think it was but I didn’t see them until they lined up in front of me. They must have been behind the trees I think. I was about to say, “Hi you Yank,” and

I realised when I saw the swastika. They marched me off to a place which was called Klinaquick and the lady, I saw my navigator there, he was machine gunned from toe to foot all the way down like that.

I had to redress him, his privates were hanging out and I thought that was a bit indignant. A German soldier allowed me to pull his trousers up and then the Dutch woman gave me some blankets and I was probably in a bit of shock at that time, I don’t know, I didn’t feel as though I was in shock but I think you can betray shock.

I just had a couple of blankets and I think I went to sleep for a short time. The battle came on again and I heard it and then I woke up. It wasn’t a long sleep and then they marched us away to the Arnhem township where we were put on a train. Many years later in 1977

we went over to Germany to a printers’ convention, Edna and myself and Bill, Edna’s brother and sister in law, we paid for them to come over with us. and I went to Klinaquick [?] and asked for this lady whose name I can’t remember at all and they said she was in a nursing home in Arnhem and I said is there anything that I can do to help her and I told

the young couple the situation and she said, “Well I am glad you called in because we thought she was betraying the Dutch people, we thought she was a spy,” and I said, “As far as I am concerned she wasn't because she nearly got belted over the head with a German rifle when she wanted to give me blankets.” She didn't get belted but she was threatened so I said so far as I was concerned if it is money or anything I can do to help her I will. They said no she

was too far gone but they were going to tell the Dutch people around them that story so I said if I have done that I am happy. Klinaquick is a small creek, that’s the Dutch translation apparently and then we were cattle trucked down

to a little place called Wiesbaden.

I think I accepted the fact that I was caught. I don’t remember I had any animosity. We were issued with

revolvers, all our crew were issued with revolvers. I refused to wear one on operations. I used to wear it for practice of going down the range because my thinking was if I was ever shot down and I had a revolver I would be tempted to use it and if I used it they had every reason to shoot me, so if I had no arms at least I have got a better chance than

normal and I think that was true, the guys that I know that wore their revolvers got themselves into trouble. Not through any other reason than they were threatened and they had to pull it off. Reg Gibbs, one of my crew, he always wore it, Mike always wore his but I noticed it was gone when I saw his body so the Germans took that. My philosophy was they have every right to shoot me if I

am trying to shoo them and that’s true, that is just nature as far as I was concerned.

I had an escape kit which is held in our pocket inside our jacket and they stole that. I didn’t blame them for that. It only had chocolate and a compass and I had another compass which I have still got, it was in a button on my coat, it was a button here. I had a dummy one on this coat

and it had a right hand thread and if you lifted it in your hand a little magnetic compass would show you north, south, east and west and I used to use that a fair bit. I didn’t use it on that occasion but when we were marching I used it a bit then to see which way we were going. That is about all I had, I had my scarf and my little rabbit.

I must get that rabbit to show you. It’s a bit moth eaten now, it’s sixty years old too.

We heard that they didn’t treat them very well. We actually had a lot of lessons on squadrons and on training squadrons that if you were shot down these are the things you say and these are the things that the Germans are likely to get you to try and say.

I don’t think many air crew were maltreated in that if you were meaning we were belted up. I think a few of the stupid ones might have, the ones who were smart alecs but I think if you accept the situation that you are in it usually falls into your own court without any worry and that

is what I did, I accepted the situation, I was shot down, I was caught. Up until I was caught I was prepared to try and get away but I was caught. What is the point of fighting six guys with rifles, I wouldn’t win one way or another. I really feel that was my actual philosophy, I wouldn’t wear a revolver and I got into trouble for it

but that was my argument and the squadron accepted that. I wasn’t the only one by the way, lots of other guys refused to wear them for the same reason. Lots of guys wore them to protect themselves, this friend Ron Minchen hardly walked around without it on, even on the squadron. I never wore mine, if I had to go down to rifle practice I used to wear it and try and shoot properly with it but I wasn’t a very good shot. A Smith and Wesson doesn’t fire very easy.

The ones that captured me spoke no English, until I got to I think when we were in training some spoke English. Some of them their English was very good, some of them went to Oxford and various places like that, America. A lot of them went to America.

I had a smittering of language but I never let on that I did. If they spoke quickly I couldn’t understand it but if they spoke slowly I sometimes got a smittering of the meaning. When Edna and I went on a trip over in 1977 I could understand a bit of their German if they spoke slowly and I used to say that, “Kleiner slow.”

No, not really. I wouldn’t say, when we were in the prison camps you had your rules to follow. If you could escape you would but when I was shot down I don’t think they were aggressive to me. There were some who were aggressive and I think I told you the story about the major who had his anorak stolen and he called the German a B

and the German belted him over the head with his rifle and I understood then that the words were the same in English and in German, I don’t think I knew that before, never used it again in front of a German. I don’t know how I would have been had it been a Japanese. I don’t know. I feel that I would have had a different attitude. I was always scared

when I was being interrogated that they would have found out that my forebears were of German extraction on one side, on my grandmother’s side. The first submarine, my grandmother’s name was Kritchmare and she was born in Bremen and came out to Australia as a babe in arms. The first submarine commander that

was captured from Germany name was Kritchmare and he came from Bremen, it was in the papers, so he would probably be a twenty four thousandth relation somewhere along the line, I’ve never tried to find out. The one scare I had and it’s probably why I kept my tongue a lot, was for fear that would find out I had a German extraction and what their reaction would be to that.

It was only one quarter.

Yes there were quite a few in the camp, I forgotten how many were in the carriage but there were quite a few. Some from ours, Jimmy Gordon was there and there was some others from 299 squadron. One of them that came to mind was Wally Tee who’s an

Adelaide fellow. We met up with him even though he is now a Melbourne fellow we met up with him in the Adelaide reunion. Everyone tells you what to do. The guys who are in there they say this is a bloke you can’t trust and they are OK and you know.

Jimmy Gordon, we were on the same plane together, we came on the train together.

Jimmy became a bit different. He had, at Luckenwalde where we finished up after that march Jim had an appendicitis operation and I got permission to go and see him but he was more content to be with the Canadian boys than he was to be with the Aussies and that suited me. I accepted that and I understood that because I wanted to be with the Aussies.

Just the three of us met together and we just hugged one another, how great it was. Johnny had seen Reg Gibbs and had seen Lofty Matthews and I had seen Mike and we hadn’t seen any of the others so I don’t know what happened to them. They were dead there was no doubt about that. Some of

them might have been hit with the shell for all I know, in the plane, I have no idea because I couldn’t see or hear anyone when I went down to have a look.

I have some photographs in there if you’d like to see them. We were in three tier bunks of slats of wood about that far apart and we had palliasses of straw

and that’s about it. We were issued with two blankets and one we put on the bunk and one above. Inside the hut, this new room POW camp, it was a new camp, the conditions were quite good. I can’t remember how many were in a room, it was

probably twelve people in the room with all sorts of noises through the night time, lots of snoring etc but they were pretty warm in winter. It was coming on to winter when I was shot down.

That varied. My attitude was to forget that I was a prisoner of war and try and get my brain working onto other things like learning German, learning accountancy which I was studying before I was in the air force and they had the Red Cross had produced those things for them and there were guys in camp who were qualified and they were teaching. There was some pretty intelligent guys in the air force, much more intelligent than I am

and they taught us the various things. Lots of BAs [Bachelor of Arts] and nearly all English but they were quite good. I don’t know what happened to those particular scholastic things we had to learn but there was a lot of it that the Red Cross had supplied. There were lots of subjects you could have studied, carpentry and plumbing.

Of course there were those people but I always shunned them. They were the knockers as far as I was concerned. If it was someone I knew and they got into a fit of depression I would go and talk to them but I don’t think I had an occasion to do that that I can remember. The worst part was in that march when I nearly died from pneumonia,

that was probably my lowest feeling in the march and as a prisoner of war. And the time the Russians compelled us to do things we didn’t want to do. That was probably as bad as any and running away from them in that truck was pretty horrific too for a day and a half, not being able to get anywhere.

We were treated

as I would expect we should have been treated. We treated our German prisoners better than the Germans treated us but you must remember two things A, they had nothing, the war was coming to an end and B, if they could steal what you had they had every right to do it. Under the same circumstances I think you and I would be doing the same thing. I have no sympathy for the Germans and I had no sympathy for them, still don’t

but if you take it in reverse, if our ministry and our government said you have to go to war to conquer Poland or conquer New Zealand as an example we would do it because we were signed up to do those things. I don’t know whether that would happen in modern day but it certainly would have happened in my day in the services.

If the government said, “You do this,” you do this and we respected discipline and they respected us for that discipline. I think that times have changed quite dramatically, as you said, Peter [interviewer], officers and the other ranks in the navy calling their captain by Christian names seems so

impossible, particularly in the navy. Bad enough in the army and the air force. In the army it is very understood because no one wants to know who the captain is or you don’t want the enemy to know who the captain is, if your name is Bill he is just another soldier as far as the enemy is concerned but in the navy, that’s sacrilege in my opinion, absolute sacrilege. The air force is as bad enough but in operations we

were called not by our Christian name but by our particular position in the aircraft, engineer, navigator or bomb aimer or skipper, tail gunner.

There could have been but I never found any of that or saw any of that. They would be called ‘poofter’ [homosexual] and they would be shunned,

full stop. Never saw any sign of it in our squadron. I am not saying it wasn’t there, we just didn’t know about it and if we did know about it we didn’t want to know about it.

Yes. In our prison camp we had whom I think was

that very blond headed English fellow who was a very successful female impersonator who travelled around Australia, can’t remember his name. We had a concert and they put on a concert in the prison camp and we had him doing his female impersonator, beautiful wavy blonde hair, absolutely glossy.

What was his name? Danny La Rue and he was a hell of a nice guy but by crikey he could fight so no one picked on him.

Just the same. He wasn’t homosexual but he was a female impersonator in fact he was married, had children. He was

an extremely capable female impersonator. We had this concert on and the Germans closed the concert down because they reckoned we had females. There were other guys doing a similar act to make sure, it was the chorus girls but they stopped it.

They wore clothing that they had stolen and pinched. You have read stores about pinching stuff in German camps and that was nothing unusual.

In some instances they turned their own shirts inside out, all sorts. Danny La Rue he was the best I had ever met. We went and saw him when he was out here and he still looks as I remember him as a prisoner of war. Beautiful skin, beautify wavy blonde hair and if any place your hair is going to go bad it is prison camp but he had a knack of knowing what to do and he did it.

They shut it down, they stripped them, the boys and said they didn’t believe they weren’t girls. I think he came under a bit of criticism for a while Danny La Rue.

Yes, plenty of escape attempts. We were told in our camp not to have any escape attempts because it was getting too

close to the end, that was told to us by the Red Cross. They visited each camp periodically and they visited our camp just before, probably a month before the Russian advance through Poland. We had to hide a couple of Jews in our camp because the word had got around that the Jews were to be shot and they were

known and I am sure it was said they had escaped but they were still on that march with us, there was no role counting on that march. We had a little cell dug under one of the huts under the stove and that is where they stayed and we fed them, I wasn’t in it but the camp did. They were Jewish boys and

they were nice fellows.

If you were a Jew you realised you were persecuted anyway and they expected to be persecuted I’m sure but they weren’t and they got away with it thanks to our mob. I liked those two boys, nice fellows. I don’t know what has happened to them.

The Jews?

I don’t think they tried as far as I can remember I don’t think they tried to push their nationality onto us. I am quite sure they didn’t, they were just talking normally. I think they would have said something along the line of, “I am a Jew. I am from Israel,” or Jerusalem or Palestine it was in those days

and as far as I can remember nothing was said nothing, just two other guys. Their name gave them away of course and their name I can’t remember either. They were just normal guys. On the march it didn’t matter. Whether they died or lived I don’t know whether they came through or not.

I was shot down on 19th September and went into there in September and we started the march on 20th January and we were liberated in May before VE Day, Victory in Europe Day. I was only there for eight months.

In that eight months I lost a couple of stone but I put it on very quickly particularly when I went to America I had a big fat stomach bigger than this and this is bad enough. As far as I was concerned it was a lesson in life, part of living, I didn’t like it but it was my lot.

What had happened we found out afterwards, we didn’t know this where we were at Kreuzberg but we found out afterwards that there had been an order issued that all prisoners were to be shot out of hand for fear of getting in the hands of the Russians,

in other words being liberated by the Russians. We heard about that after the march and above all people I understand who disobeyed that command was Himmler, probably the greatest criminal of them all out of the SS [Schutzstaffel]. I am not sure that was right but I did see the English translation of a German letter from the German High Command saying that all

prisoners of war no matter what nationals had to be shot, how they were shot or disposed of I don’t know, whether they used the gas chamber I don’t know but it wasn’t done and had it been issued at Kreuzberg it would have been the ideal position for us to be shot because it would be a good way for the Germans to get away quickly. They were pretty close, the Russians were close, less than twenty kilometres away.

We were at Krakow, they had taken Krakow and Krakow was twenty kilometres away from where we were and we were pulled out at midnight and we walked all that night and all the next day before we had a rest. There was one bridge we had to cross too that the Russians wanted and before the Germans blew it up and I can’t remember what bridge that was. That was over probably the Oder River or one of

its tributaries.

I think that march was.

We thought we would be liberated, we were happy about it but the Germans had other ideas and we accepted that of course, had to.

It was either that or get shot. We tried to collect, keep as much food as we could for a rainy day and we had to eat all that because you couldn’t carry it and some had a lot of stuff that had been there for a long while and we were helping them eat that and that was what gave me dysentery

because there were prunes in amongst them and things that were not very good for the bowel or good for the bowel whichever way you like to talk about it. It was an experience. I think Australians, I might be wrong but I think Australians have got a philosophical attitude to life when you get down to it. Okay, the Kiwis [New Zealanders] will beat us so bad luck, we knew

we weren’t good enough but we won, great. We joined the air force to win the war, we won the war, good. In the mean time we had a bit of discomfort, we were prisoners of war. I wouldn’t have liked the same situation to have occurred in Japan. I don’t know how I would have felt. Quite a few of my friends were and quite a few died. Quite a few died in Germany, quite a lot died in Germany. I think something like

one third of all prisoners died in one way or other, on that march and misbehaving. The Stalag Luft escape, they shot seventy five in that, the tunnel. There is a doctor on the coast here who was instrumental in helping dig that tunnel, very old now of course, an Englishman.

Chocolate, very strong pure chocolate, fishing line, knife, compass. It was a very compact

thing that fitted inside your pocket. It had sugar, can’t remember all its contents but there were things like fishing lines, matches, I think there were cigarettes there, there was money, German money, quite a few things that you would need if you were escaping from somewhere.

The Germans when they got it they ate the chocolate very quickly. I don’t blame them, I would have done the same thing.

We had a raft that was inside the aeroplane, we had two rafts actually, one that could take the crew of six as it was later but we would only

need one but if you landed in the sea we had a means of having a raft.

Yes provisions inside that too. I don’t even know what was in them, I don’t think I had ever been in one even in practice no, I don’t think so.

Could be, I don’t remember.

No I have never seen inside one. I knew they were there. What it should have been and it could have been part of my cockpit drill to find out if they were still intact but I don’t think I ever did, if I did it was just normal, you just fly past it.

Just the normal, what squadron are you on and why are you an Australian flying for the British and very tricky in their questions. My normal, we were taught you look over the interrogator’s head. You pick an object beyond his head and never take your eyes off it. The head

that I was, over his head, I was standing and he was sitting and it was the K in German, it was on top of a roof and I just kept watching that and to all intents and purposes it used to move but I know it wasn’t. You glance at something long enough and they move don’t they. I had my normal comment was, “425052 Warrant Officer Keith Prowd RAAF,” and that went on for about three weeks

and then eventually I went in and then they offered me a shave and when I came into to have a shave there was a squadron leader in there who was British, not British, he was a German I am sure and he made some comments which I can’t remember and I just said, “Yes sir, no sir,”

and left it at that. I had my shave and shower and went back to my cell. Next day he mentioned the 196 squadron and I ignored the comment because I was walking away from him but I am sure I would have raised my eyebrows had he said it. When I walked into the interrogating room and this 196 squadron manila folder was there I am sure I looked at it and he

said, “Look, don’t worry about it. We knew you were from 196 squadron,” and then he said that remark about, “Have you ever been to the George Hotel in Trowbridge?” Which I told you I reported to the interrogating officer.

Luftwaffe, yeah.

We had SS in the camp yes.

The ferrets were mostly SS but they weren’t the type of SS you see on Hogan’s Heroes, they weren’t all bad blokes. I never struck any good ones but I am sure as the German stock and the British stock is pretty close to the same I am sure there were some good and some bad. I can’t remember any bad SS people.

In Luckenwalde yes but not at the camp that we were originally sent to. Luckenwalde was a big camp and had a lot of SS but they never treated me badly. I kept out of their way.

A lot of walking, walking around the perimeter thinking of ways to maybe get out of the camp. Made a couple of attempts but they

were futile. Only got as far as the gate once and a guard screamed at me so I said, “Just walking,” but it would be futile to try and escape at that time of the war because they were in fact beaten. They were beaten for some months before they actually gave in. Very well beaten too and if they had any brains they would have surrendered long before the destruction of Berlin and

of course the Russians weren’t very kind, they would have done it anyway I think.

We got the notice from the radio we had, the secret radio. They listened to the BBC and there was a special program and it came over from the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] for things like telling us where the Russians were, maybe accurate, maybe inaccurate,

telling where the Americans were, where the British were. We knew the British and the Americans were meeting up pretty close together near where we were.

We weren’t very happy. There is one incident that is reason it cannot be printed. They captured a German officer

and we were forced to watch this exhibition of two very buxom Russian ladies stripped stark bollocky naked, rubbing themselves up against the German officer and then cutting him up, they physically cut him up, garrotted him, cut his organs out. We went to walk away and bullets were fired at our feet. That incident did occur,

a lot bloodier than I have made it but that didn’t go down very well at all. They tried to show their superiority and then when there was talk of peace we wanted to celebrate by having a bit of a bonfire and we were stopped from doing that. That’s when we decided it was time we went because they were firing Tommy guns on the ground at us but

it would only take some idiot for a bullet to ricochet off a rock or a bit of cement or something and you would be dead. Not necessarily us but someone else.

Yes I have a vague. The Russians owned nothing, they lived on American lend lease and I suppose to an extent so did the British but the British did in fact build some.

The Russians built their own aeroplane called the Yak and it was pretty awful, it was a pinch too. It was a pinch from a Messerschmitt but it wasn’t a bad aeroplane I suppose but it wasn’t up to our standard. They lost a lot of their aeroplanes, lost a lot of their pilots. A lot of them parachuted without being shot down in enemy territory.

Lots of stories about Russians, most of them aren’t very pleasant.

We were, yeah.

Very bad. There was a guy up the front trying to tell them who we were but it didn’t do any good. I think we lost sixty blokes on that shoot. Looking at it from the eyes of a pilot, coming down all you see is

people walking with German soldiers beside it. You can think two things can’t you, when we saw he was coming with intent we dived off the side of the road but and some guys dived into a ditch and they escaped. I wasn’t one of those, that was when I was pretty sick. Looking at it out of the eyes of a pilot

all he could look at was German soldiers, he couldn’t look at us with humpies on our backs even though he might have seen it his thought would have been German soldiers. I don’t know what was done about that particular shoot up but we were shot.

Yes it did I am sure of that and that is when some guys decided to

walk away. Some guys didn’t walk away, they just couldn’t go any further and we never knew what happened to some of them but some guards would stay back and they would catch up with us in a couple of hours’ time and you can only assume that they shot them, you can only assume that.

Yes they had volleyball, had soccer, rugby league, they had footballs, badminton, quoits and that is about all I can think of but I think there was plenty of entertainment if you wanted to use it. Plenty of reading, there was a good library, all supplied by Red Cross.

I read a few books in there. I read a book, have you ever heard of Paul Rubens the Dutch painter? Well I read his life story and it was translated by a guy called Heisen Yarnie and if the translation was correct he was a real larrikin. He was a courtier, he was a spy for the British, he was a spy for the

Germans, he was a spy for the Dutch, a spy for the French, he was being paid by all these countries to spy and he got away with it for years and years. The book was very thick and it was foolscap size. I took a long while to read it but it was a fascinating story.

No. Officers and NCOs were never forced to work only privates and

corporals were asked to work.

Roads and ditches and repairing roads and working on bombed buildings. I was never a witness to that. I knew about it.

A pure commando course. We had a lot of easy fat around us and the idea was to get that off and we had a month of that and we got to the stage where it was jumping over logs and over creeks and fighting and sword fighting and running and exercise push ups and parallel bars. We had a lot of

hikes, a lot of swimming. The day we left we were pretty smart, we were pretty fit so we all stripped off much to the instructor’s request saying it would be too cold and dived into the North Sea. It was cold all right, a chap called Ted Polsen was ahead of me from Brisbane and I was on the way in when

he was coming out and he was blue. We were the only two that hit the water, everyone else gave it away and we were the idiots and then we noticed that there were women up on the hill watching us in our birthday suits.

It was cold, I can assure you.

Yes, back into condition. We were super fat in America and we were there for a month and we were going from embarkation depot to embarkation depot and we were in Melbourne for about three weeks and probably four months before we got to England and before that commando course.

Probably six months.

As strange as it may seem, very easy, all you had to do was learn the cockpit drill and carry out the cockpit drill. I was surprised and I think all my mates were surprised how quickly they took to it. I think it boils down to training, the way you’re trained and I think we were trained very well, Australian pilots were trained very well.

They could be dicey.

Plenty of fog, plenty of rain and mist. Navigation was easy because it was such a small country, if you got lost you would be in the sea. They had white horses over there. We used them a lot and I was surprised they hadn’t covered them in because the Germans could have used them too because they were on every map, the white horses

and we used them a lot if we looked like being a bit lost on our own before we had a crew this was, w hen we were doing our own flying and navigating. There was one incident that I did some formation flying with an Airspeed Oxford but it wasn’t an Oxford at all it was one that Mr Whittle was using for a jet. I got into a lot of trouble over that but I didn’t know, I got out of it all right.

I was interviewed by MI5 [British Intelligence Organisation] but there was no problems.

I can’t I was told never to repeat what I saw and even though it has gone by sixty years ago I feel it would be the wrong thing to do. I swore that I would never repeat it but that was the basis of it, I formulated on

another Oxford for practice and wondered why it was going so quickly. When I say I was arrested I was taken off my aeroplane and moved away from the camp and that is all I am going to say. I was back in hours.

No, did duty officer a few times but not duty pilot.

I didn’t think we had duty pilots on our squadron as far as I know. If a pilot took sick they would call on someone and I usually, I had my name down to volunteer for any flying but I don’t think I was ever called except to taxi things at Vanrenen [?] when they got stuck in the mud. That was about the only time I did any extra.

In bomber command it was thirty operations and in special duties I thought it was thirty operations but I found out that was in ours the equivalent. Now you take an average flight of five hours for a bombing mission, some were longer, some were shorter, that’s a hundred and fifty hours. I think on our special duties squadron it was two hundred hours and I did a reckoning the other day

from my log book and I had reached those and passed them. My own fault, I should have done it before hand but when you are in love and wanting to get married, I think I would have stayed on the squadron had I been finished. I would have stayed on as an officer there and I would have taken a duty officer job, not a duty pilot’s job, a duty officer job and fly too.

It upset you, heck yeah. You had to say, “That’s bad luck Johnny has gone.” There were a couple of very nice mates of mine, one guy had his throat cut in London, Johnny Bree, for no reason. He was such a delicate boy he wouldn’t do anything. Rus Tickner was shot down in

Norway and he was a very close friend. He was from Western Australia but you have to learn to accept it, it’s part of your discipline I think. Some took it worse than others. I took some bad ones I took it bad for some of them but it didn’t affect my duty to the squadron. I never got up and said, “I’m not going to fly here any more,” I never

did anything like that.

Lack of morale fibre is when a person says he doesn’t want to fly any more. I have never been in that position but one of the chappie that I took over from for the 19th of September was said to have gone LMF and he disappeared off the squadron, his crew stayed,

I think they had another pilot but they said that he was dishonourably discharged and sent back to Australia. But I don’t know. I think the average LMF case was usually a court case and they were imprisoned and in some cases they had their wings taken from them. We were told when we got our wings that they were a decoration and we could wear them on civilian clothes. I have done that

only once, I am not sure it is the right thing to do or not. I asked a couple of my mates and they said it was OK. This fellow I play bowls with, Lorrie Coleman, he wears his wings every Anzac Day and every celebration, he has got them sewn into his jacket. I am OK with that, I am OK to wear them myself but when we were in Perth at one of our reunions I got a pair of golden ones at the RSL at Perth and

I would wear them in preference because my wings are still in there, I’ve still got the original ones and another pair.

I think that is probably true but in the case I am talking about he never went through anything.

Nothing more serious than the first day at Arnhem with that glider, he was on that operation. That was the day he came back and said he wasn’t flying any more. OK Arnhem was a drastic operation but all the others were really apart from D Day, were really quite comfortable. I never ever thought about LMF, wouldn’t think about it.

I think so. I didn’t even know Cec had gone LMF until someone told me, he just disappeared. I said he was sick, my mind said he was sick. I never liked the man, he was one of those gruff Australians who knew everything and knows nothing.

The only thing we were allowed to put in our log books was ops France, ops Belgium, ops Holland, nothing else but Charlie King I have spoken of, his father was a pilot in the First World War and he said to Charlie, “Whatever you do take notice of every operation you do and make a note of it.” I didn’t do that but he did and he could probably write a book on it but he is now

dead anyway. I did as I was told, put down ops [operations] France, ops whatever. When we were in bomber command I was allowed to put Keel Bay, Le Havre, Ruhr Valley.

I did three mining missions and

that was just straight mines. Bombs over, I think it was mines over Le Havre too or bombs at Le Havre, I don’t know, but they would only be ordinary two hundred pounders and incendiaries. I think the one we did over the Ruhr was incendiaries and explosive bombs, I don't know, I can't remember.

I am sure there was and I am sure we all thought, “Here we are burning up a number of people.” I know I thought that. I wasn’t so unhappy dropping mines because even though you might hit the shanthorse [?] or the shanthorse might hit it, so be it but I think there was always reticence about dropping bombs but

they were dropped on us.

What else? They dropped them on us, why can’t we drop them on them and after all we didn’t start the war, they did b y not obeying the league of nations, as the Iraq situation, as the Afghanistan situation but I am afraid they lack a bit of clout at the moment.

He has no control. You sit on a target at a special speed and a special bomb run on a point of compass, say for instance oh nine oh, east and the bomb aimer you say to him, “The aircraft is yours Reg” or bomb aimer and he says, “Left left steady” so

you use your rudders to do that because you don’t want your wings to move. “Steady, steady, steady” and I know he wants you on that course and when the target reaches the cross bars which he has, he then presses the button and says, “Bombs away” and the aircraft rises quite considerably depending on the size of the bombs and it is quite frightening for the first time, quite frightening

because an aircraft that goes like that can stall just as quick so you have got to be prepared to turn the nose down slightly to hold your speed and then you get out of the way as quickly as you can.

Not that I am aware of. I was never anywhere close. You must remember in bombing command you have probably got two hundred aeroplanes

in an area and they could be from here to next door away or they could be five miles away. You don’t see them, it’s dark, you haven’t got any lights on and neither has he but if you can see them I often pressed one touch of the Morse code light underneath to show where I was. If I was to see him against the moon and he couldn’t see me because I was on the dark side, I would do one touch.

Oh yes, that was scary, that was four am in the morning, it was scary, really scary. But we came through without a hole which I was surprised but telling my crew to put the parachutes on was a stupid act but I never thought

we would get through and we only lost one aeroplane. In fact I have Eisenhower’s letter there and we had a visit from Montgomery. Eisenhower said D Day was coming and good luck and all that and Montgomery visited the squadron and told us they expected twenty per cent air casualties and that was all right, we thought there would be a lot of casualties too but I understand the figures were less than one per cent.

We didn’t do any bombing missions, we kept on supplying. Probably we didn’t do any in the week leading up to D Day but there were certain missions going out, supply missions. I believe bomber command were doing bombing missions around

the dropping zone and the Americans were doing the same thing in their area. We didn’t do anything like that. After Arnhem our squadron was dropping bombs as well, they were doing it under ten thousand feet because they had no oxygen. I wasn’t there then but I understand that is what they were doing.

Huge. You saw everything. There were tanks, there were men, they were everywhere, trucks and the Germans must have had photographs of them because there were fields and fields of them. Okay, they were camouflaged but they were huge. We had near us the British 2nd Division paratroopers were just down the road from us and

they were very protective of the girls, the WAAFs. If they thought anything was going on they would come up and protect them. They were very good that way. They were British boys and they were everywhere around us because we were near Salisbury Plains. They were everywhere, aircraft everywhere flying, it was like Queen Street, that is exaggerating but there were a lot of aeroplanes in the air.

I dreamt about prison camp for a long while and that is why Edna and I started sleeping in separate beds because I woke up one morning and she had this ring had bruised her chin and there was blood from it. I said, “That’s the end of that.” I had never hit a woman in my life but that’s what happened, I had a dream about prison camp.

I don’t now and around about September I often have a dream about it.

I was psychoanalysed by a psychiatrist in Surfers Paradise for DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] and his summation was that I had classical prisoner

of war psychosis, in other words I was mad but his recommendation was that nothing needs to be done with it and I became a TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated pensioner]. I never did anything about getting any increases because I was too busy studying and running a company. Edna and I were driving around, we had already bought the house in Paradise Point

and we were driving around England and I saw a house that had a new top put on it and I said to Edna, “How would you like a top put on that house in Paradise Point?” and she said, “That would be nice” and then we saw something else and we did that too but that was good, Edna was upstairs and I was downstairs and she looked out over, we were on a canal and she looked out over the canal.

I didn’t get any. I wrote the number of times I was allowed to and I think that was one a month, one a fortnight and they issued us

with the various cards, they were soft printed cards, “I am well,” “I am hurt,” “I am not well,” that was the first card that went back and I sent that to Edna’s parents not to my parents because I knew then that they would get that fairly quickly and the squadron would know. Then I sent the first letter to my parents and they never got anything and Edna never got any and

Edna wrote weekly and I never got any but Edna got some of mine, still got some cards that we had.

I reckon I relied on God, full stop. I know I did a lot of praying. I had a lot of faith in myself

at that stage. In the early part of my life, my career I don’t think I had a lot of faith in myself but I did have a lot of faith in my own ability at that time. I reckon that I believe in God and I believe that God helped me, I believe that quite sincerely and quite honestly and I still believe that and I just don’t understand why Edna has had to go through this trauma now, that upsets me quite a lot.

I can cry about that very easy.

No. But they will be pleased to hear this tape.

Edna knows a bit now. She has heard it all today if she hasn’t heard it before.

Now I think it is important. Now I am eighty I think it should have been done fifty

years ago or thirty years ago when your memory is more viable and you would remember a lot of things that you can’t remember now. Having started to write my memoirs, that has brought it back a lot and if I get this tape I don’t need to write my book.

I have never marched on Anzac Day apart from when I have been on a squadron reunion. We had one in Melbourne, we had one in Sydney, we had one in

Adelaide and one in Perth and we marched then but we didn’t march at Perth and we didn’t march in Adelaide but we did in Melbourne. I feel it is right to march and I feel I am silly in not marching but if I do march I remember my dead boys and I get

too upset. You have got to remember that as a skipper of an aeroplane or the skipper of a ship, if you lose your guys you are the one responsible even if you are not. I felt that, still feel that, probably will always feel that but I do believe that the guys who walk on Anzac Day need all the support they can have.

I back them all the way. I am a little bit upset about going back to Arnhem in September next year if I do go for two reasons. I know I will be terribly upset, I will cry like a baby and I don’t like leaving Edna but I may do that but I know the kids will look after her and I know the therapist we have Susie Goodman will also look after her.

Our niece Janice, who is our fourth daughter will also look after her. I feel that but I still feel a little bit unhappy about deciding to go. It is quite a thing, one pleasant thing would be to see Edna’s relatives probably for the last time and because

Edna’s brother is not a hundred per cent and Edna’s sister in law is ninety and not very well at all so that would really upset Edna and I know that. That’s the penalty she gets for marrying an Australian and not a Pom, the penalty I get for marrying an English girl, who I love dearly.

Well I

put it behind me. Otherwise why would have I studied or why did I take on the job as manager, money perhaps, children, give them as good an education that could be got, the love of a woman. That then overshadows war time experiences because war time

is a one up episode even though I had a good war, I saw a lot and did a lot, it’s in the back of my mind and probably will be there until the day I get buried or burnt.