Australians at War Film Archive

Yeah, well I’m originally a native of Sydney. I was born in Chatswood in the suburbs of Sydney in 1922. We lived in a suburban street, there was two brothers, one older one younger.

My father was an accountant he served in the overseas forces in France. my mother was a nurse and she nursed in England in Roehampton hospital during the war. She was Australian not English and she married my father because he went to England. We lived there until from 1922 until the early the late ‘30s. We moved to a northern suburb,

and my schooling was mostly done at state schools at Roseville, Chatswood, North Sydney and I finished my education at Sydney Church of England Grammar school which is commonly known by the acronym of Shore. I did my leaving certificate in 1939. I went from there to work in a finance company for two years. And in 1941 I was called up duty in the air force I had previously volunteered in 1940

but it took nearly 12 months before I got the call up. I went into the initial training school at Bradfield Park, which was only a 5 minute drive from our home in Killara. We did a 2 month initial training course at Bradfield Park. There the

trainees were divided into schemes for pilot training navigational training or air gunner training. I had always wanted to be a pilot, I had wanted to fly from the early days of my imagination allowed me to think about these things. And I was called out to be a pilot, I trained, went to Narromine where I trained for another 2 months. And trained on

tiger moths I had a quite a successful training session there. I soloed early in the course and didn’t do anything wrong. Was posted to a service flying training school at Forest Hill Wagga. And that was a 4 month training course where we flew Wirraways which were the best equipped, the best single aircraft engine that the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] had at that stage of the war..

This was in August to December 1941. We passed out of that course on the 7th of December 1941. Which was the day of Pearl Harbour, the day of infamy as you know there was chaos at the school because all postings were held in advance because the turn the war had taken with the entry of Japan. Finally they sent us to the embarkation depot, they equipped us for jungle fighting, and all

sorts of equipment that made us think we were going to Malaya. It was probably the plan to send us up there, but then when things turned bad in Malaya and the Japs overran right down to Singapore that posting was cancelled . We were all, all of my course was kept in Australia. We did an OTU [Operational Training Unit] course in Nhill in Victoria, OTU operational training unit, in Victoria and again we were

divided into streams of squadrons and I was sent to an army co operational school at Canberra. I had a one month training in the army cooperation, we did all sorts of work with the army. We were instructed in photography, aerial photography, what are called line overlaps,

artillery spotting, tactical reconnaissance, and the things that we would be doing if we worked with the army in operational areas. When we finished that course, I was posted to 4 squadron which was still training in Canberra. March 1942 I joined the squadron and we trained in Canberra until May, the squadron was still building up with aircraft still being supplied

more air crew coming through from the army cooperation course. And until May we trained there in flying duties in army cooperation work and various other training, air to ground, gun bombery, and that sort of thing. In May we moved to Camden which was just outside Sydney. We spent a little time in Camden and then to our surprise

the Wirraways which we were flying in Camden in the squadron and we’d be promised would never be used in operations again, were suddenly equipped with armour plating. You don’t use armour plating on a plane when you are a training squadron. But we had armour plating put in these Wirraways. We had radios put in them, we had all sorts of transport given to us. We were told we were going to be a mobile army cooperation squadron.

We were there until August, we were moved to Kingaroy in Queensland and from, which was another initial training school and they had the intake of normal trainees to the Kingaroy ITS [Initial Training School], as well as the squadron based on the airport there. We worked from Kingaroy with the US 32nd division which had landed at Rockhampton. And they were one of the first batches of American troops to come in

to Australia to support our own services. We had a detached flight with whom I was one, based at Rockhampton airport and we worked with the US Division which was hardly any, really they were militia, the same as our militia, they weren't trained soldiers and they were training just the same as we were for the operational work that they were going to be sent to do in New Guinea.

So we worked there with them until November. I was hospitalised for a couple of weeks and during the time I was in hospital the squadron got orders to move from Kingaroy to Port Moresby. Right into the path of the advancing Japanese so much for promises never to use Wirraways again. We had expected all this time to be

re equipped decent aircraft. And anything from Vultee Vengeance to Boomerangs which were then being manufactured in Australia, or Kittyhawks which were coming out from America. But we had no such luck we were sent to New Guinea with out Wirraways. I came out of hospital and went back to Kingaroy and found that the squadron had moved. They had proceeded to Townsville. On their movement

order and I was sent on leave for 7 days and finally got a reposting back to the squadron and when I got to Townsville to pick up an aircraft to fly me to Port Moresby I found the squadron still sitting there. They had not been able to fly across because the port was busy they couldn’t get the ground crews onto the Port Moresby wharves and the aircraft couldn’t fly over until the ground crews were there ready for them.

So I flew across and I was the 4th pilot to arrive in New Guinea . I had my first operational flight on the 17th of November. It was the fourth flight of any of the squadrons personnel and I flew across the Owen Stanleys , across the gap, which was supposed to be a weather reconnaissance to tell the Dakotas which were the biscuit bombers and

dropping supplies to our army, whether the gap was open and it clear for them to fly across the Owen Stanleys. I radioed back it was clear and continued on and flew right down to Oro Bay which was just south of Buna, came back and that was my first operational flight. It was couple of days later, somewhere around the 20th of November before the rest of the

squadron arrived and the ground crews were all there . And we found ourselves in this very, very muddy patch of ground which was the area allocated to us for our camp. It was, you know the black soil plains around Moree? Its was sticky black mud like that. We were plodding around until they arranged to get gravel to provide paths and parade ground and allow people to walk

around without getting sticky mud all over themselves. We moved into this area with no buildings on it , it was just plain open ground. We were there from some time, we had toilets but we had no showers. If we wanted to have a bath, and we all did of course, we went down to the Lakoki River which was about 5, 10 minutes drive away and you still in the river, crocodiles and all

and you bathed in the river. It was probably a month before we got any buildings and then the showers came and life was bearable with proper tents and proper organisation of the camp. When we started operations we worked first from Moresby flying across to the north coast of New Guinea and one of our first operational flights apart

from the weather reconnaissance jobs was support of the army at Buna and Gona, we flew over 19 sorties I think was the number counted of aircraft with 250 pound bombs which we used as dive bombers to hit the Japanese positions. And then dropped leaflets and strafed the ground in support of the Australian army. That

was a successful operation in its way but very bad for the squadron , two of the aircraft flying across were lost in the Owen Stanleys, of the 4 personnel only one walked out ,t the other three were lost. The , from then on we worked in dispersed flights. Ah flights were dispersed at Popendetta and Dobodura on the northern side of Owen Stanleys and from there we were

able to do reconnaissance flights up over the Japanese positions along the Sanananda Point and Buna Mission and not only reconnaissance but direct artillery fire onto the Japanese positions , they didn’t want to use these direction, the direct fire onto specific targets

but to use the directions as a specific ranging point at night they could blast the positions with the 25 pound guns, the army’s artillery and break the morale of the Japanese as well as do damage to their position. The Irony is that although the morale side of it might have been successful

there was very little damage done by the pounding of positions by these 25 pound artillery shells. Mainly because of the coconut palms which were growing in the area, under which the Japanese had taken cover. The shells would hit the palms and explode up in the top of the palms and if the Japanese were downstairs in a slit trench or a dug out, then there was very little damage done either to the dug out or the Japanese personnel. But the morale effect must have been very, very

bad keeping them awake all night. We had the disperse flights there for two different strips at Dobodura and Popendetta and we used to fly 3 and 4 sorties a day either on reconnaissance, photography or bombing or ranging the artillery. And this went on the whole time until the campaign finished in late January.

We lost aircraft we lost personnel, we have the dubious claim that the squadron lost more personnel than any other single engine aircraft any other single engine squadron operating in that campaign in the south west pacific area. And it wasn’t a very pleasant sort of life. You’d play cards with a fellow one night and the next day he was with you no longer.

I had the unfortunate experience of being grounded and somebody who took my sorties just didn’t come back. I suppose it was lucky for me, but it doesn’t leave a very nice taste in your mouth when somebody does your job and is hit and killed. I had the unfortunate experience of being shot down myself. I had to land the aircraft in the jungle, and walked out. And

it wasn’t a very pleasant experience either. That went on until the end of January and by that time the army had moved up to Wau and Salamaua and we sent a disperse flight up there to operate from the strip which had been used by the gold mining companies that were operating from Wau and Bulolo. And that was an experience.

I think I have a photograph somewhere of the strip, it was up a hill, it was a steep hill, you landed your aircraft up a steep hill and you took off down the steep hill. And if you wanted to go around again you had a mountain in front of you to try and avoid. And that was a lot closer to the Japanese at Lae and subject to aerial attacks by the Japanese, I was in the middle of one of them

and I had a bomb land, I was in slit trench, and a bomb landed as close as that blue box over there, 10 feet away, from where I was in the slit trench. There were other experiences, we lost an aircraft there , the two pilot and observer got out, we were right beside the aircraft when a bomb landed on it and blew up the aircraft, they escape with hardly a scratch but it was real front line fighting.

The Japanese were advancing on the strip and actually got the foot of the strip before the army could get enough personnel in to push them back. So that was Wau and that continued until June, until which time I returned to Moresby. And my 6 months tour was over in New Guinea and I returned to Australia. From returning to Australia I was posted to

24 squadron reposted to Test and Ferry where I spent 6 months flying aircraft all over Australia from Darwin right up to the northern part of Queensland, various types, twins, singles, various types of aircraft and getting a lot of experience. When I was in New Guinea, the air crew were given an opportunity to volunteer for

a specialist armament officer course and I , because of the boredom, and this might surprise you, the boredom of the work we were doing, I volunteered for this specialist officer armament course. The boredom resulted from the fact that we had two forward strips with two aircraft on each strip and that was the only

operational flying that was done. The rest of the squadron sat back in Moresby and of course doing, censoring letters and testing aircraft, it was very boring work, unless you were operating from the forward strips. So I volunteered for this armament officer course and I was posted on to that. that was a 6 months course and from there I was posted to the service flying

training school at Mallala as the armament officer and I stayed there for 6 months and then til June of 1945 when I was discharged from the aircraft and came back to civilian life. Where do we go from here.

Well when I came back it was a very mundane sort of existence and I went from flying

to studying accountancy. My father had been an accountant he had died just before I got out of the air force, and I studied accountancy and went into his practice. I worked in it for 9 years and found that it wasn’t giving me the sort of future I would have liked so I went into a commercial job as an accountant. And

I took 2 or 3 jobs and finally ended up working as the treasurer for a finance company, I went to Singapore and worked there for 2 years in a merchant bank. And came back to Australia worked again until I was in my mid fifties when I retired. And then went overseas, spent 2 years touring in Europe, came back to Australia, moved up here and we have lived here ever since.

He didn’t talk about his war experiences. I know that he went to Egypt with the light horse and from here he went to France, he became the rank of Captain.

I’ve seen a photograph of him in his uniform, that’s about all I know of his war experiences. Other than the fact that my mother went to England after he was posted overseas and nursed at Roehampton hospital. Mainly war wounded and she had a very high regard for them. But of my father’s experiences in the war. I

know little or nothing. He just didn’t talk about them

If he did it was never apparent to me. He was, a very solid man who kept his opinions to himself

and was very firm in his outlook. He wasn’t easily lead, he was, you might call him stubborn, I don’t know how you would describe him today, but he wasn’t the sort of man who talked about himself at any length.

Well she talked about her experiences in the hospital but of course

this was not in France itself. She married Dad before he was sent overseas. And she decided that she wasn’t going to stay at home and cook and twiddle her thumbs while he was overseas, so she took a ship over to England and nursed in Roehampton hospital. When we went over there for that two years after I returned

in 1970s, we went to the Roehampton hospital just to have a look at the place where she had nursed. And very nostalgic, but no one there of course knew of her or anything she did while she was nursing. She didn’t nurse when she came back to Australia , they came back on a ship called the Kaiser Hine, and it

brought back to Australia a lot of the personnel from 4 squadron which flew on the Western front in 1918. And two of the people that they mention often, one was Air Commodore Colby in the Second World War and the other was George Jones who became chief of air staff, they were both on the ship the Kaiser Hine. and mother remembered them well and spoke of them often. Not in the context of the Second World War

but simply the fact that she knew them when they were on the ship coming home. But they settled down when they came back to Australia in Chatswood, in a funny little street in Chatswood. It was a war service development. and they lived, we lived there until the late 30’s, I was born there, I understand in the house. Two brothers.

Why? No hospitals it was a new development I don’t know where the closest hospital was, North Sydney was the closest hospital that I could think of. Unless there was small private hospital around the place at the time. But when we were living there I can’t think of another hospital other than the Royal North Shore. Closer than the Royal North Shore. So

that probably is the reason.

Stanley Street, Chatswood. Mother used to refer to it as being called the bumpy road. There was some funny incidences. We had, bitumen on the road eventually but the verges on the side of the road were gravel and they

laid pipes and did all sorts of things. But the footpath on the other side of the road was nice and smooth and well laid. And out side of the road, it was you could break your ankle on some of the holes in it. When you complained to the council about the conditions of the footpath on our side of the road they said, “Oh, no good doing that up, everyone walks on the other side of the road” Of course they would because it was so bad on our side.

Anyway they finally did that up and if I remember correctly we still had the gravel at the side of the road when we left in 1939, just a bitumen strip down the centre. But the house is still there I have been back and had a look at it a couple of times. Was quite a nice house, it had some extensions on it, but comfortable looked after family of 5, 3 boys and mother and father.

And from time to time we had help, there was s spare room for the help, and it was quite a nice little place. We lived there right through the depression and of course the depression was very tough time for everyone. Dad was, had gone into practice as a public accountant at that stage, and things I suppose were pretty tough for him and we found we

didn’t have all the things that we would have liked. Luckily he was always able to run a motor vehicle. And we were able to get out and go on picnics and do the usual things that families, hopefully can be able to do, but the depression years were very tough around the 30s up to I suppose 33. When things started to get better and that’s when we moved up to Killara.

Oh cars were few and far between. We had bikes, the things we did on those bikes you would kill yourself today, because there is too much traffic. We used to race down the middle of the road no hands having races with one another on our bikes. Round the corner on the wrong side of the road, no cars coming, none anywhere. Of the houses

in our street, I suppose , we were number 26 so sip there were 30 or 40 houses in the street, there might have been half a dozen cars. Not everyone had a car and we were one of the lucky ones. But it was lot cheaper to run them in those days. Petrol was 1 and 8 a gallon, what would that be? About 15 cents a gallon

about 15 cents, 16 cents. And it was a lot cheaper to run cars, but we just didn’t have the money in those days.

No, he had a one client who ran a diary and occasionally he might have come home with cream

or something of that nature. But generally if he was paid, he was paid in cash, not in kind, with that one exception. Occasionally he’d come home with a bit of fruit, maybe a fish, fish merchant down at, fellow, I still remember his name. But no the clients were few and far between. My wife’s’ father probably got a lot more payment in kind, he was a doctor but he probably got more payments in kind than my parents did.

I don’t think so. I’m not aware of any of the other people living there as neighbours who were in the service. I was, well I left there

when I was 17 , didn’t I. I’m not aware of.

Anything and everything. We had our own little group, called it a gang I suppose that’s as good a name as any. And in the winter we played soccer or pick up games of rugby. In

summer we had cricket, you played sport on Wednesday at School, you’d bring home a bat or a ball or stumps, and we’d go up to the local park and set up the wicket and we’d play cricket. We had organised teams to play other teams in the local suburbs. We’d pay them on Saturday mornings. At school I played a little bit more variety in the sport.

I played soccer at school, I played cricket, I played , had a go at baseball, I wasn’t very good at that, I played rugby union, I played cricket, rugby code, that’s about the limit. But we tried to keep ourselves involved al the time. It wasn’t the sort o thing you hear today, there is nothing for us to do, we want centres where we can go and have some sort of entertainment.

It just wasn’t on in those days, we had to make out own entertainment. We had social functions the same gang, we used to have dances, we’d hire halls and go out and have dances. The soccer club used to have functions at the end of the season. And I played soccer on Saturdays when I was at the state school as well as at school. And we

had , I’ve got a cup somewhere for a competition we won. But it was , do it yourself. the original do it yourself, when it came to entertainment. After school or at weekends, and because of, we weren't so many cars available it was your own parents who provided the weekend entertainment with picnics and that sort of thing. Bush picnics barbeques and

that sort of thing, were very common. In areas today are covered in houses, we used to go, I don’t know if you are familiar with ST Ives, but where the Sydney Grammar school has got its preparatory school, we used to go up and have picnic up there, that was a half day journey up there on the road. And we used to go up there and have picnics and it was

the usual thing to have that sort of entertainment. Quite different from today.

Soccer was not played a great deal in, other than at schools, but they did have a soccer competition between

some of the companies in the Sydney area, Meters had a team, Meters who made stoves for kitchens, domestic appliances, Meters had a soccer team Goodyear had a soccer team. But that was the limit of he soccer that was played outside schools, that sort of competition. But not very much in school

it was essentially in state schools, not the private schools, the private schools didn’t play any soccer when I was at Shore. Although they do now. But I’d say it was the least popular of all the sports at the time I was at school.

No it wasn’t discouraged

some of the masters were keen to get it more greater support. But I suppose rugby was, I don’t know whether they played or union at the state schools, they played league apparently but I don’t know what they did in those days. I didn’t ever play rugby in the state school, though I did when I got to Shore because they had no soccer there.

Why?

I was not a scholar at school. We had the qualifying certificate at he end of the primary school, we had the intermediate certificate and the end of 3 years, we had the leaving certificate at the end of 5 years, and I passed all those, but not with flying colours. I got though I scraped through, and I

had two goes at the leaving certificate, actually I went back to have second go, but I left school before I had the second go, I didn’t have good enough pass to go to university the first time I did the leaving certificate so I went back but I only did 3 or 4 months and then I left there and went to work in a finance company. But I got qualifying certificate, I got 5 passes in the intermediate certificate, I liked some of the subjects

I had no interest in others, you didn’t have much in the , up to the intermediate certificate you had no choice. Except for the fact that when you came out of primary school, you either went to a business college or a academic line of study. Business college they didn’t business principles and some carpentry work and things of that nature. The academic you studied Latin and French and English and maths and history and

I went to the academic and I couldn’t work up any interest. When it came to the air force and the work was different and the work was applied to the flying we were doing, it was quite different. And I had some

extremely good results. I didn’t top the course at either ITS or SFTS [Service Flying Training School] but I was up in the top 10 of people at SFTS. At the armament course, the specialist armament course, there e were 12 of us. I topped that with the highest average mark that was obtained, it was a peace time course, two years telescoped into 6 months.

And I topped that with the highest average mark that had ever been obtained. When I studied accountancy I got a couple of first in Australia and a first in NSW. In the law and accounting I was studying. And the results were quite different because there was some interest in what I was doing. It seems to have rubbed off on my son too. He , the things he takes an interest in the things he likes he does well in

but when it comes to obtuse academic study, I was not interested.

North Sydney Boys High? I only was there for one year. We had a very strict disciplinarian as the head master a fellow named Harvey, Bob Harvey. And

he used to get us out on the parade ground and lecture us. Most days at lunch time before we went into class, and tell us what we had done wrong the previous day, and tell us why we were a disgrace to the school. I think we needed and it probably a pity its not done more these days. You know I went to Shore at the time when it was regarded as

one of the top private schools in Sydney and we were wearing those straw boaters which you probably remember which we were very proud of. It was a tradition of the school. And we wore jackets, we wore straw boaters and we were hauled over the coals if we even had buttons undone. You see photographs of the boys now coming and going from school, their shirts are hanging out

their sleeves are rolled up, they got no hats on, they could have come from anywhere and it all reflects, I think, not only on the school, but on the parents and the responsibility they have to their children. but its such a change from, we weren’t punished in the sense of beaten, but we were told

when we were doing thing that were wrong. And it was mental discipline as much as any sort of physical discipline that was instilled into us, and I think that’s one of the things that is lacking to day in the education system. I don’t know whether you agree with that.

Well I went, Shore I did one year of the leaving certificate and then went back the second year but I wasn’t keen on the study

I apparently made that quite plain to my parents so. I got a job and left half way through the year. And I went to a finance company , Australian Guarantee Corporation which provided finance, you probably know the sort of finance they provide for motor cars and house s and that sort of thing. And I worked there for two years.

My job, I was a lowly

mail clerk to start with. I was just 17 when I started, I started in the mail room and I was doing the deliveries all over the city and I knew the name of every street in the city. I used to run about to Darlinghurst and Flinders Street and all over the city with letter s and cheques and one thing and another.

And then at 6 o'clock at night when everything to hectic I’d take the bag of mail down to the GPO [General Post Office] and take it into the bulk mail department where it got sent all over Australia . I had, didn’t stay in that lowly job very long, apparently there must have been the stage where they were expanding because after 2 or 3 weeks another fellow came in and started doing that job and I went on to a more important job in charge of the mail room. And

I had a great big book it must have opened out that size, to record the mail that was sent out. And every letter was counted and every bit of postage was itemised under whether it was a penny or a halfpenny or threepence or fourpence, and the number of letters, and that particular, all done with a machine, franking machine, which they still use today. Your familiar with them I’m sure.

And I had the job of controlling the fellows who were doing the running around and the posting the mail and carrying the bags down. I used to tell them what to do. That went on for about 18 months.

Oh it was marvellous, it gave me a sense of power and it was boring. I really couldn’t see what all this was about. Anyway

after 18 months, they, there were all sorts of people going into the services. So jobs were coming up all over the office. And I went from recording the mail to doing all the banking. And we used to get, I suppose a very small banking in those days, I had to record it all and balance it and take it down the bank

mad rush in those days because they had Saturday morning banking. And you had to get all the balancing done, and get it down to the , often through the back door of the bank, wait in queues and get the deposit done. I had a very nasty experience one day, one Saturday morning, when I forgot half the deposit

I took all the cash down and left all the cheques on the top of the desk at the place, where my desk where I was working. It was too late to get anyone else to bring it down, and I had to rush in on Monday morning, I got hauled over the coals for that, but luckily it wasn’t the cash that I had forgotten, it was the cheques, so I banked the cash and did the cheques on Monday morning.

Well I suppose

a third of the deposit, and there would have been I don’t know what the size of the deposit was, it might have been about 5 or 6000 dollars a day, about a third of it was cash. And we’d get money orders and cheques and all sorts of things, and have bills presented at the bank. When you signed up for your car for 24 months or 36 months you’d sign promissory notes paying, promising to pay monthly on these promissory notes, which were just debits on your bank account. The way you organise it now

if you want to pay your bill monthly through your bank, you give somebody an authority to pay on a monthly basis, direct debit to your bank account. Sure you use that.

Promissory notes? No they were signed in the office and I had to lodge them with the bank and the bank would send then out to the various branches from which they were drawn.

Which they had, in those days you only operated at the bank branch were your account was situated. I mean today if I have got an account with Suncorp, which I have, I can go to any Suncorp office and operate on that account. If I, in those days you have to go to the Pacific Fair branch, you couldn’t go to the one up at Broadbeach, you couldn’t go to the one at Australia Fair, you had to go to Pacific Fair. So

all these promissory notes were lodged with the bank, a great big bundle of them like this and they would send them out to the various branches where the people had their accounts, and they would be debited to, one would be presented each month, and debited to his account. Sometimes the there weren’t sufficient funds and the promissory note would be returned and then we had to chase it, but that wasn’t my job, I just organised the promissory notes

to the bank, I did the banking every day, balanced it all and got the money down on time, except for one occasion I forgot. I’ve never told anyone else that. Except in the office, the office knew of course because they had no deposit on Saturday.

Oh it was because it

meant you had to get all your cheques organised, you had to balance with the cashier, the cashier would take the money, at the cashiers desk, you’d add it up and she’d say, I’ve got $5,600 how much have you got? And I’d have to balance with her before I went down. And I was balancing from the cheques and the cash, and she was balancing from the copies of the receipts. Before the people started going into the army and leaving these jobs vacant, they had

seniors on it, people who were drawing big salaries, you know, like 5 and 6 pounds a week, which was a solid salary in those days.

Ah 35 shillings a week. When I went into the air force on 5 shillings a day I was drawing exactly the same money I had been paid in the office. 35 shillings a week, but he point is they

had seniors on this job because it was regarded as an important job. But when I came along of course there was no one else to do it, I was just 19, just 17, 17, I was 17, and was doing this job that had been done by these other senior people. You know it s didn’t , no alternative, you just had to do it.

Well I always remember the first day I went into the office and I was introduced to this mail job by the fellow who had been doing it before. And he said, “You’ll find it such a difference working in an office to school, the way they talk to you is so different, they don’t scream out at you and

say Boydell do this, Boydell do that, they call you mister, and they talk to you, they are polite” There were women typists of course who were mixing with, it was all, no mixed genders at school in those days. So you were mixing with men and women as well as doing a different sort of work with a lot more freedom because

both in the mail work when I was getting out around the city and in the banking when I was getting down to the bank, you were out and about and you are dong exercise and you are looking around and learning about life.

About life? Should I tell? Really not very much because we were

very straight laced in those days. I don’t think there were any real experiences, except one fellow told me that he managed to get a date with a girlfriend. Another fellow who went into the army earlier, he came in after me and he was one of my juniors when I was in the mail room. He’d account some of his experiences in the army and how he, these things worked, how men and women

associated s they grew up. And it was quite an experience, even through I wasn’t doing it, to learn about these things from other people.

Well, there were strange associations because we were all

departmentalised you had a departmental head, to whom you were responsible. And the fellow we had, he was, he had a bad reputation as somebody who reacted very badly with his juniors and he, I fell foul of him once and I found that you have got to stand up for yourself, get somebody who

starts to take advantages or tries to take advantage of you, its no good just going along with it and hoping things will turn out to be alright because they never do, unless you stand up for yourself and put your own point of view.

You mean when I? Well I went down to a job, we had to look up some old records and I

went to the place where they were stored and you never saw such a mess in all your life. And I said to people who had told me where these records were, “What’s happened in here? Who’s been making a mess of all these things?” And I got quite upset about it. And apparently they got upset with me and reported to my departmental head, and he took it out on me and told me I shouldn’t have behaved like that. And I told him

what had happened. I don’t whether he took any notice, its beside the point. But I couldn’t believe they mess they had made of our records, and I just wanted to know what had gone on. They were supposed to be looking after these records for us and there were broken boxes, boxes moved everywhere, there was no organisation in the record keeping at all. And I was supposed to go down there and find

information that was needed back in the office. Anyway we had a difference of opinion about that.

Well I just told him what had happened, and what I had said. I mean I can’t remember the words I used but whether we started, we didn’t start shaking fists, it wasn’t a real blue. But it was simply a matter of standing up for myself and saying what I had done and why

I had done it.

Well I hope so. Its funny you see he became, I received a commission, you are probably aware, when I finished my training and he volunteered for the air force and he was an LAC [Leading Aircraftsman] when I was a pilot officer and we met one day in the office and it was quite embarrassing that he had to salute me, and I was

I did get respect but I don’t think there was anything related to that particular incident.

Well I didn’t know

anything about the city when I started. I used to go into he city occasionally on a weekend when my father was working in the office on Saturdays and I would go in with him occasionally. But I never did any real wandering around the city and finding out what was there. I used to find out all sort of strange things about the city. Which block in the city is completely

owned by one firm, which block in the central business district is owned by one particular firm, and I knew what the answer was, but I bet you don’t. You know Sydney? You know Mark Foys building? Right up Liverpool street. Well the whole of that block was owned by Mark Foys, you just learnt

that by getting around the city. All the little laneways, all little places, down in Haymarket that you never go to normally, they weren’t on the tourist route in those days. China town, down there in Campbell Street, all new, never been near it before,

never knew it existed. And you find out all these things when you are doing all these deliveries on walk about. the railway, the trains, Central Railway was a mystery to me, until I worked in the city. And of course you got to know it quite well. When you are catching troop trains and various things of that nature.

Walk in the city, getting out to Darlinghurst, or Flinders Street or Williams Street, trams ran out there in those days, and you take a tram out there. But deliveries in the city, in Pitt Street and George Street, places like that, you just walked. Al the mail was delivered in a sack carried over the shoulder down to the GPO.

The office was on the corner of Hunter and Castlereagh Street, the city Mutual Life building, the building is still there I think. Anyway that wasn’t a long journey it was just carried down in the sack over your shoulder and sometimes those sacks were pretty full and pretty heavy. You know the sack of mail would stand that high, pretty heavy. But we were young.

Well the 6 o'clock delivery at night was always hectic because the mail closed. And you always had to catch it, if you missed the interstate mail and the branches didn’t get their mail in the next morning mail, and interstate was overnight, you’d always get overnight mail interstate

but there was hell to pay if you missed the mail. So 6 o'clock were always hectic and Saturdays were bad. But because of the war I suppose business was getting quite slack and when people left to go to the army no one was brought into replace them, because they didn’t need them, things weren’t busy as they had been. But the

first ’39 and ’40, they were quite busy and then ’41 I went into the air force.

I’d, Friday night, it must have been about the 5th of September.

Anyway Friday night, I’d been to a concert by the Comedy Harmonists and the, Town Hall in Sydney with a friend, school friend, and we came out at 10 o'clock what ever time it was, and there was a special edition of the paper on the street, special edition in the middle of the night, saying that Hitler had marched into Poland.

And that’s when the balloon went up, and it was on the Sunday night when war was declared.

Oh the radio and, yeah I remember it quite well.

It was Menzies of course saying it was his melancholy duty to declare that a state of war between Australia and Germany.

And we didn’t think it was terrible thing, we thought it was the right thing to do. Because all these annexations of the various countries, Chamberlain had been over in ’38 to try and settle this with Hitler. He came back and said, “Peace in our time”. And then he wants more and more and more, and then he marches into Poland. And it was just a question of draw the line somewhere and

that’s it, it doesn’t go any further. But I didn’t think it was a terrible, I think my mother and father did, because they had both been through the first war. But to me, it just seemed the right thing to do.

Well we were a cohesive body. We were

of course at that stage a colony, we were regarded as a colony. And all the other parts of the empire were regarded as colonies. And we didn’t think this was a terribly bad thing, we depended on England for so many things. We depended on England for trade, particularly for trade because we weren’t recognised nation we didn’t have

any association with the United States, they were isolationists, they didn’t have associations with anyone. And our future lay with the mother country, and that’s what she was regarded as, the mother country. Savoir, in a case like this, and it was a our duty, as it had been in 1914, to support, not only to support her, but to send troops. Even though it

was on the other side of the world in the war we had little or no knowledge of. And of course the things got worse and worse and worse and more and more people were killed. The horror of it all, becomes quite apparent to everyone. But at the time it was the right thing to do, it was what we should have done. The Empire was what bound us together, we had ties to the mother country, and I think most people looked at it that way. There were

certainly no agitation to cut ties with the UK. But that was much , much later, I don’t know whether you have heard stories to the contrary but to my memory, there was no agitation whatsoever, until much, much later to cut ourselves adrift.

Oh, as I said, he was a quiet man, he didn’t say much, not like me he didn’t talk all the time. Actually I’m said to be very like him, but he, I was surprised. When I wanted to volunteer I was only 18

in 1940 and I needed parental consent to volunteer and I filled out the forms and I presented it to him after much soul searching and wondering what sort of an ear bashing I was going to get when I gave it to him. He looked at it, he read it and he said, “Well if you want to go, I’ll sign it” Not the response I had expected I had expected him to try and talk me out of it.

Because I was 18. I mean you weren’t an adult in those day, you did what your parents told you. And I just didn’t think that he would maybe, not refuse, but acquiesce so easily. He just made, didn’t demur, actually I had to get his signature witnessed. And I took it around to the

father of one of my friends who lived quite close and he raised more objections than Dad did.

He just said, you are too young, you shouldn’t be doing this. Anyway he couldn’t refuse he witnessed the signature, but that’s the sort of response I had expected from Dad, he just. Perhaps, who knows, perhaps he thought, well it will be some time before he’s called up, before, it will be another 12 months training and by then

it will be all over, who know what he thought. But he made no objection whatsoever. It was quite surprising.

Oh, she thought it was terrible. She didn’t say very much other than, I hope you know what you are doing, or words to that effect.

No, at 18 when you haven’t been to war and you volunteer, you don’t know what you are letting yourself in for. I mean, today you are an adult at 18, you are supposed to be able to make these decisions. I’ve been through that, you don’t, you don’t know, you haven’t got he experience, you haven’t got the background

the life experience to know what these things were like and what the consequences, what the consequences were likely to be.

Yeah, do you want me to enlarge on that?

Well she just though that I was too young, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that she knew, she used to talk about these fellows that she nursed in the hospital in England. And she knew what would happen in you were in the wrong place at the wrong time and how it could end up, perhaps even more than my father did. Unless you were

actually at a scene of a massacre, sometimes these are kept from you even though you are a front line soldier. But she saw the amputees and the blinded people and whatever it were, gassed, all sorts of problems. And she knew exactly what was facing anyone who volunteered to go to war. And she didn’t continue to try and talk me

out of it. she simply said I hope you know what you are doing, or words to that effect. But it, you see, until I volunteered we had had Hitler running across Europe, right across to Dunkirk and then holding his forces back and not chasing into Europe, ah England. But that face the empire

we all saw that happening, and every day going in to work on the train there would be another headline in the paper saying what had happened. And here we were sitting at home, there wasn’t even rationing at the stage because the Japanese hadn’t come into the war. We had petrol we had butter and meat and all the things. And here were these people in France being overrun by the Germans. If you had any feeling

for the cohesion and the support that you were supposed to give to an empire that looked after you up to then. Then you couldn’t help but think that something has got to be done, something, some one’s got to volunteer, somebody has got to make up the numbers to do these things, to volunteer and go and fight this war. And day after day after day you’d see this until finally I got to a stage where

I did volunteer. I’d always wanted to fly, right back to the days, the mid ‘30s I had my first opportunity to fly. Mother wanted to fly, not as a pilot but just to experience flight. And she did it she was the first one of our family to actually take a ride in an airplane.

Well she was on a holiday down at Bowral

and somebody in a little tiger moth or some similar plane was doing barnstorming trips and she jumps in the cockpit and flew around the place. She used to talk about that and the thrill it was.

Just how exciting it was, she thought she ought to experience this. But maybe I got the wish to fly from her, I don’t know, anyway I had always

wanted to do it and I had the opportunity to have a trip in the Southern Cross with Smithy, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, flying it, and we all went out there and hopped in this and flew around Sydney in the Southern Cross, this was in the mid ‘30s.

How did it happen? We used to get new clothes twice year to fit us out for school

and we happened to buy a shirt, which was a brand name now called a Pelaco shirt, and Pelaco to popularise the shirt, apparently, formed what they called the Pelaco Airman Junior Club. And I being interested in flying, I applied to join this club. It didn’t mean very much there was nothing to it except that you got a badge that you put on your lapel. Then out of the blue they said if you provide us with 10 shillings we will arrange

for a ride in the Southern Cross. So got 10 shillings and got my postal note and sent it off, and that is how it all happened. But it all happened because we bought a shirt.

Well that was probably the most, well not thrilling, but the greatest experience I had ever had, much more

so than flying in the air force. It was new, it was different, it was seeing the city from the air. It didn’t last very long I suppose half an hour at the very most. but we flew around the city right out far out as the suburbs went, which was probably not far out past Parramatta, out over Palm beach and down the coast and

it was just a thrill, and we were only half a dozen of us in the Southern Cross. But I actually flew in that airplane

Oh it was at Mascot, which is still the airport. No runways, it was just a green field, so it got pretty bumpy. But taxiing across the ground, but one you get airborne and lift off its just magic.

It’s an experience that, you’ve flown, you know what its like to fly

I think its more scary in a Qantas plane, with some of the pilots I have flow with anyway. But that, you know, that joking aside it was quite an experience. Something I wanted to do, it

fulfilled a wish. And I didn’t think anymore about it except at that time they were advertising occasionally for cadets to go into the air force and I used to think that would be nice to get into he air force , I’d like to do that and I’d like to learn to fly. I suppose that’s why I picked the air force when I decided to volunteer. I certainly didn’t want to march to my death. It would be much

more fun doing something you liked doing, so, that’s just the way it happened.

Well until ’41 very little because we were

remote, Japan was recognised as a threat but wasn’t expected to do what it did. And we were remote enough from Europe not to expect any sort of attack on our country. When I was in the , this was after Japan , not it wasn’t it was before Japan came in, I was doing a series of course, series of lectures before I was called up

into the air force and instead of the class that we had one night we went into a lecture by some air force squadron leader who told us about a trip he had just made to Japan. And he said, “If ever we go to war with Japan, don’t get yourself into a Wirraway”, he said, “that’s our front line fighter, it will

be shot out of the sky, if ever you get in a war with Japan”, he said, “They have got the most advanced single engine fighters in the world, we’ve seen them, we’ve seen them flying we know what they can do and our aircraft were no match for them” Now that was known in 1940 but we didn’t expect Japan to do what it did. So really there was no appreciation of what would happen if

we were suddenly threatened. And life just went on, there were no blackouts, there was no rationing, butter was, milk, meat, petrol, all plentiful.

Oh I don’t know, just on some sort of exchange

program. They do these things, it happens all the time that they have exchange programs with defence force personnel. If he told us why he’d been there, whether it was just a flying visit or not, I don’t know, but I’ve forgotten if he told us why he went to. But he was, he made no bones about it, the Wirraway is no match

for anything that the Japanese had got. That was some time in 1940.

Well, not the ones that went to the idle east. Actually I know some of the people who went to the Middle East. My brother in law went to the Middle East and my partner, when

I took over my father’s accountancy practice had been in the Middle East and then New Guinea, long story. But a lot of the personnel who went from the office, went into the 8th Division. And you know what happened to the 8th division, they all went into POW [Prisoner of War] camps in Malaya. So most of them, I don’t know of any from the office who went to the Middle East.

Oh they were all given a flag waving farewell. The Queen Mary which was the biggest ship afloat at the state came into the harbour. We all went up onto the roof of the building to watch it pull out or come out, either come in or pull out before it loaded troops to take them to the Middle East.

Oh, a big ship, I mean, you know, it was anchored way over near the zoo. and there we were I the city, it was quite a long way away but we all went up there. Security was a word in the dictionary in those days, you shouldn’t have known that that was coming, I men, if the Japanese had had a submarine outside the heads, the Queen Elizabeth with all our troops on board, it could have been

happened quite easily. Japan wasn’t in the war so Japan wouldn’t have done it, but there could have been a submarine out there there were plenty of enemy submarine on the coast. I’m sure you are aware of ships that were sunk around the Australian coast the memorial to them at Tweed heads. Didn’t realise how many until I went down there one day and had a look.

Like the raids on Darwin, we heard about the first one, we didn’t hear about the other 62. Until you go up there and find out. But all these things come out after the war, not during the war because of security.

Oh yes, you know boys enthusiasm, we all wanted to be in it. You didn’t travel in those days, there were no opportunities. You could get on a ship and go over to England and take 6 weeks to get there, but there was no opportunity for travel for the average person. We all wanted to get overseas and see the world. And that was

probably a motivating factor for many people who actually volunteered. They wanted to travel they wanted to see some of the other side of the world. Not going to happen to me, I’m not going to get killed. Everyone thought that, I thought that, it won’t happen to me. I was one of the lucky ones.

When I actually signed the application form or when I went into the service?

Oh, it was not very dramatic at all. It was the, recruiting office was up

in York Street opposite Wynyard Park, one of the buildings there. And it was simply a matter of picking up a form, filing it out, returning to the same place. And they just said , “Thank you very much, we’ll let you know”. And that was it, now obviously they organised everything else and a flood of applications came in because they

started getting in touch with us and as I told you earlier they organised this series of 21 lessons on navigation, mainly in navigation to keep the interest in the volunteers while they were waiting for call up. but there was no drama all.

It was simply preparation for the courses we’d study for when we got into he air force, got into initial training school. People

who had left school, the fellow sitting behind me when we attended classes said to me, “I left school 14 years ago, I haven’t studied since”. and here he is faced with these things that he’s got to work out problems in navigation. And he said, “I ma 14 years out of date” It was simply a preparation for study in the sort of subjects than would be taught when you got to the initial training school.

But there was no medical examination of any sort, there was no background information required. it was simply a questions of, I’m leading you astray here, it was simply a question of lodging the application, and then after how long I don’t know, we did a medial. It was pretty stringent,

I thought it was pretty stringent, because they said we get a very high rate of rejection on these medicals. And maybe this is one of the reason why my father didn’t object when I asked for the application to be signed. Because when I had been at school, I said earlier,

I rowed. And rowing is a pretty strenuous sport, and one medical examination I had when I was actually at school, they diagnosed me with a heart murmur. And heart murmurs were death when it came to a medical examination for the air force. If you had a heart murmur you were out, so anyway I had this medical examination and they didn’t pick it up

or they said it wasn’t bad, and I got through the medical examination with no problem at all. But that was about a month after the application and having got yourself through the medical then they sent you off to do these classes. What they call the 21 lessons. Which were mainly on navigation, and it simply got you away into the habit of study again,

and got your brain working when you’d had a long time away from school I’d only been out of school for 2 years.

I learnt a lot about navigation. Although I don’t know whether you studied maths at school, we did a little bit in a subject called mechanics, which dealt with the triangle of velocities and

result and forces, and when you applied two forces to a point what is the result. Which is very similar to the navigational problems, so in some ways it was similar. but I learnt a lot of new aspects of navigation that I knew nothing about. Very little of it would apply to navigation on the , in the ocean, because it is what they call dead reckoning.

You can’t use dead reckoning in the water because of the tides and currents. And it only works because you’ve got a wind for which you make an allowance in an aircraft and you’ve got, when we were flying these were all sightings of towns and railway lines and roads on the ground. So dead reckoning was the answer as far as

the navigation rules you were required to learn in a single engine aircraft. In twin engines or four engines they were later on, they got in astronav [astro navigation], which is of course from the stars. All the European bombing was done on astronav. And some of the , and of course here when they were flying over the water, they’d need to use it too. but the single engine aircraft

it was all dead reckoning. And these 21 lessons were just preparation for getting yourself back into the swing of study.

You’ve got a speed, and you’ve got a wind, and you got that way, because the wind blows you off course. And if you plot your wind properly and fly a correct course then you’ll know the track that you make good.

And that is simply a dead reckoning as to how you will get to a point. If you don’t fly the correct course, if you don’t fly the correct speed, if you got the wind wrong, you don’t get the point you are aiming for. The theory is that you fly the course correctly, fly the speed correctly and fly the wind correctly, the result is what they call a triangle of

velocity and the arrows follow one another around in the triangle. And the resultant which is the hypotenuse of the right angle triangle is the track that you make good. Because the wind is carrying off the course of the flying.

Well there were quite a few people who, in the office, who volunteered for the air force, they were going in and we all had little badges that said, we had volunteered. And it just went on and on and on, April until , sorry July until April. And you get to the stage when you think its never

going to happen, and the war’s going on and the bombing raids are going on and Europe’s been overrun. And nothing is happening and you get very complacent about what’s happening. But finally a letter comes in the post and says, bring a toothbrush and toilet articles, report to Woolloomooloo, Sunday I think it was, I think it was Sunday, Sunday the 28th of April 1941. And

report at 8 o'clock in the morning, which is an unheard of hour. Get down there and there are some people , one familiar face from the class of 21 lessons that I told you about. Never seen any of them before except that one fellow had been at school with me, but a different class. We formed up, got together and we went

did all of our training together, and then we split up after the training was finished. but it was 14 course, 28th of April 1941. And we went through together dividing up into pilots, navigators, air gunners, and then pilots dividing again into single and twin engine aircraft, and finally we come out at the other end. People joined the group

from other initial training squadron. When you are divided between single and twins, people came from other tiger moth training elementary flying schools, into your group and it kept the numbers up by bringing them from all sorts of forces, bringing them together to do the final course. Which I did at Forest Hill Wagga which was where we go next week for the association reunion.

So going back to a happy hunting ground, a very fun station, a very, very happy station, it had been a permanent station (UNCLEAR) it was not just temporary buildings . We were treated better there as LACs, leading aircraftmen than most of the stations I served on after that, as an officer.

you had room to ourselves, we had beds with sheets and blankets, we didn’t have to make them up into a pile, just made our beds the normal way. Didn’t have batmen, but , I didn’t have a batmen, the only time I had a batman was when I was in New Guinea

where you’d lest expect to have one, but we had a batman, one to a tent, two people to t tent, and he served, did all our washing, looked after us, he was very good. But Wagga was very good for the service flying training, very good country.

Well it was a circular thing with an eagle

across it, and I suppose it had something about the Royal Australian Air Force on it , probably (UNCLEAR) at the bottom. You’ve not struck that before, when you passed the medical you got this little badge, said you were a volunteer that had been accepted, and you wore it on the lapel of your coat. And if you didn’t have one of those or an army

equivalent or whatever, everybody looked down their nose at you, you were doing the right thing.

Oh of course, that was what we wanted to do, and swapped it over from one suit to another if you were lucky enough to have two suits. I wore it very proudly I was very pleased to have it and , I don’t know what happened about that heart murmur, whether it disappeared

or what happened, but I got through the medical. I’ve heard of people who got half way through their flying course and when they had a medical, routine medical during the flying course were scrubbed from flying because of heart murmurs, but I had medicals, nobody ever picked it up, nobody ever said anything. And as far as I know I’ve had it

to this day, a heart murmur.

If it did they didn’t tell me. No not to the best of my knowledge. I was the young one in the group that I described earlier that did all the social gatherings, the cricket and the sport

I was the youngest of the group. And the girls went for the older blokes, not the younger ones. And it never did me any good in practice, I don’t know, my I was the first of our group to volunteer, but not he first to be called up because of the delay, my elder brother did later on and went into the navy, and one of the other fellows

elder fellows went into the army. But I was the first of the group to volunteer, but no joy with the girls. Not that I was aware of.

when we were called up? We went to Woolloomooloo,

as you come down past the Art Gallery, down that freeway whatever it is down into Woolloomooloo, there was a building on the left hand side as you got up to William Street, it was right on the corner and it had been a car showroom, because of the war, it had become surplus to their requirements I suppose and it became the recruiting centre. And that’s where we went in. We were given a couple of tests.

We had the shaky hands test, a test on your ability to take Morse code, not that, that’s another thing we did when we were waiting we did Morse code. But we had a test on your ability to take Morse code, not a message but they would simply send two characters and you ticked whether they were the same character or a different character, tell what

I suppose your hearing was like and whether you could pick up the differences. But that was just a group of people brought together, tested, given our numbers, told where we were going, loaded into buses and sent off to Bradfield Park at ITS. We were all a homogeneous group, there was no differentiation between the people who were in the group as to what they could become.

The division into pilots navigators and air gunners came at the end of the two months, when the decision was made as to how many pilots they wanted to full up the elementary flying school, how many navigators, where they could come from. We had, when we were divided up into groups, into teams, pilots, navigators, one fellow, the fellow that was in the bed beside me at Bradfield

, one fellow went to Tamworth, the elementary flying school in Tamworth, all the rest went to either Narromine or Temora, which were elementary flying schools, but one fellow, no reason given, went to Tamworth, they had spare spot up there. And of all the flying personnel on 14 course, he was only one who went overseas from

New South Wales from 14 course in New South Wales. The Tamworth boys went over, they came from Brisbane. And they came down the Tamworth, and he went overseas with that group from Tamworth, distinguished himself, did two tours and a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] and squadron leader and the whole lot. He did very well, we never kept contact. But all the others went to

flying schools in Australia, we came out, as I told you, we were posted to embarkation depot. Japan was in the war and our posting to Malaya was scrubbed because the Japanese overrunning Singapore and we were dispersed in Australia.

Well we were never let into that secret, we fronted up at the end of

the two months at Bradfield, in front of the board who asked us various questions, I can’t remember any of the questions, except what do you want to be, and I just said, “I’d like to be a pilot”. “Why?”, “Well, I have always wanted to fly”. You had to be medically fit. How I got through I don’t know, you had to be medically fit.

Your eyes had to be right, you had to have 20-20 vision, and presumably if they wanted pilots and you met those criteria you became a pilot. If your eyes were off or for some other reason, you were bad on reflexes or all sorts of things, I don’t know they never let us into that.

But the great bulk of the course from Bradfield went to elementary flying school. A few, only a few, literally a handful went to navigation school, and I think only one or two to gunnery school, they just needed pilots.

Well the pilot was in command of the aircraft and of course

I don’t think any one really wanted to be a multi engine pilot. In the aircraft that we had available, I mean our best aircraft until they started building the Beaufighter was the Anson, the Anson was just two steps down the ladder from the Wirraway, it was a terrible old airplane, it was used for training, but at the time we went to war, it was all we had in multi engine aircraft

And nobody wanted to be a multi engine pilot flying one of those. It was only when they started building the Beaufighters, in ’41. that they had anything decent to fly but the pilot was in command. they wanted to be I suppose single engine pilots because it was glamorous, all that firepower, Spitfires and Hurricanes and all the rest of it. We had dreams of flying those. Until

Japan came into the war all the pilots went to Canada to train or to the UK to fly after their Canadian training and that’s where they were flying to good aircraft. So rather than put your name for a navigator or a gunner, everybody wanted to be a pilot.

Oh it was great

I thought that was good, every did, everyone wanted to be a pilot. but it, it, I suppose because so many became pilots from that course, we were put into the pilot stream, it really lacked any thrill. It was very satisfying because I had always wanted to do it.

Well when I was posted to Narromine, every course that had gone to Narromine, up to 12 course had gone from Narromine to Canada to train in Canada and then go from Canada to Europe, every single one. When we got to Narromine to train, 13 course there, two courses there at the

same time, one doing the advanced flying and one doing initial flying. And 13 course was still there. when their posting came out at the end of first month we were there, their second month, they were all kept in Australia. We thought, god almighty what is going to happen now. we were all kept in Australia , 13 course, when our two months were up, our hopes were dashed about going to Europe.

We didn’t know what was going to happen. Then we were posted to the flying station at Wagga. Some went to Amberley in Queensland, that was the twin engine station, and we just, that was a disappointment. we had all expected that by being posted to Narromine that we would automatically end up in Canada and finish up in Europe. And die a hero’s death.

They were all, the losses were pretty horrific at the time. On 12 course, the , one of the fellows on 12 course at Narromine had been the senior prefect at Shore when I was there. And he went on to Canada and he went to England and he went to a Lancaster squadron

and he lasted three days. Killed. It was happening al the time, three days, wonderful fellow, wonderful sportsman, he had three days with the squadron. So that was the future was if you went over seas.

Oh I didn’t know, I think I told you the school got all the old boys to state what their experiences were during the war. And I only found out when I read up his history what happened to him. You didn’t hear much about it during the war, the security tightened down. Maybe they felt that in addition to that it would be bad for morale.

Quite apart from the security angle, to know what happened. We had losses up in New Guinea I didn’t know until after the war, although I had been there at the time. I didn’t know until after the war what the reality was, and what had happened. They just didn’t tell us

Never going to happen to me. You know its silly, the way you can be killed. People get what would be regarded as a soft posting. And its flying instructor killed because the pupil does something stupid, and it happened to fellows who went to instructor school from 14th course.

And , you know, they fly a Wirraway up in New Guinea for 6 months and you come back without a scratch. How can you tell. It happens, it , I don’t know

There were accidents, nobody was

killed in any of my courses, but there was some stupid things happened. We had a cross country to do at Narromine and we had to fly our triangular course. And we flew down south to a place called Trundle I think it was

Turned around almost 180 degrees, and fly along a railway line to a place called the rock then continue onto another town where you turned and flew back to Narromine. One of the fellows, flew down the first place where he turned and followed the wrong railway line, and he flew due west

instead of northwest. He just kept going until he ran out of petrol. We had a fellow at Wagga, he got into a spin, and he couldn’t get it out of the spin, so he jumped out of the airplane. He joined what was called the caterpillar club, saved his life with a parachute. but apart from silly things like that

there was no real incidents on any of the flying courses that I did. Oh yes there was, when we got to the ATU [Advanced Training Unit], two of the fellows who had been training with me flew up one day, it was very last day of our ATU, we were going on the train that night to go back to our posting, go back to Sydney or Melbourne or where ever it was that our postings were taking us

and they were up flying in this one day, and we used to practice mock air attacks, these two fellows decided to do a head on air attack on one another and neither of them decided they were going to give way. Luckily one went up and one went down, but they hit, and the rudder on one aircraft ripped a great hole in the leading edge of the wing in the other one.

No one was hurt and apart from the damage to the aircraft they landed quite safely, but that’s the closest thing that ever came to flying school training. There were other incidents when I was on the squadron.

Well I think it was all hushed up because it was the last day of the posting.

I know that both of them left the station that night. whether there were any repercussions, one fellow distinguished himself with a DFC, the other distinguished himself in a different way.

He was sitting in a Kittyhawk at the ATU at Mildura and he did the wrong things with the undercarriage lever, he pulled it up and

pressed the button and the undercarriage collapsed and he was siting on the tarmac. He got into a lot of trouble, he got himself into a lot of trouble in other ways too. He got he distinction when he worked at ANA [All Nippon Airways] before the war, of sending two lots of passengers to the wrong aircraft. The passengers to Hobart went on the Sydney aircraft and the passengers on the Sydney aircraft went on the Hobart aircraft. He was that sort of bloke.

Well, they wanted pilots badly. Oh dear oh dear. Yeah

I did very well, you know all due modesty, I did very well on the flying. Some people

couldn’t handle an aircraft. I’ve seen some people , funny things happened, some people just couldn’t handle an aircraft, it seemed a natural thing for me to do. I was the first one to solo in the course. I did 8 hours dual, then I soloed. I was never

cast as an above average pilot at EFTS [Elementary Flying Training School], but I was told later when I did my wings test on Wirraways at Forest Hill that I was all set for an above average rating. And I did a very stupid thing, I was landing an aircraft and I pulled the throttle off to soon and I dropped a wing and hit the ground, and there was an instructor in the back, he was a flight commander and he said, “I was going to give you

an above average rating, but I can’t because you dropped the wing on the ground”. that was just plain bad flying. But I liked flying, I was good at it. I got two exceptional ratings in the squadron flying. And I liked everything I did, except the boredom. Worse than driving a taxi, flying

an airplane, it really is. You read books about blokes and their aerobatics and the thrill and they do this and they do that and its such an exciting life and, when you are doing squadron flying, you are not out to please yourself, you have got a job to do, particularly in an army cooperation squadron. You’ve got a job to do and you’ve got to go out and

do that job and bring the information back. And if that means sitting there in a aircraft and just flying around and around in circles watching high explosion, 25 pounder shells blow up in the jungle, that’s what you do. And it’s a very boring life, when particularly reconnaissance in jungle area. We used to fly over a part of

the jungle called the Sanananda track, it used to run from the road to Kokoda I suppose if you were coming from Kokoda you’d turn off on Sanananda track to get to Sanananda Point. We were flying over that from November until January when the campaign finished there. And it was literally in the last week of the campaign, that I saw a fully equipped Japanese

hospital underneath the palm trees. We were flying along this track and I looked down and there were these little buggers sitting there on this track, staring up at us and laughing and joking. So we came back and I , I couldn’t shoot at them because I was, because of the trees, but I got my navigator to get his gun out, we gave them a squirt with guns at the back and

that was the first time that that hospital was seen under the trees. Although we had been patrolling that track for three months. You just couldn’t see, couldn’t see through the trees. And it gets a bit wearing after a while , and you see nothing.

Who cares, I mean My Lai in Vietnam was probably the same sort

of incident. We didn’t try and destroy the hospital. That’s the best I can say, but we certainly shot at the blokes that were down there. That’s not he only time we had fish in a barrel, we literally had Japanese swimming from Buna

to Sanananda, they had been cut off, the army had gone through the two points and these fellows were trapped in Buna and they were swimming from one point the other, there must have been 30 or 40 of them, at least. And the army called us up and two of us went up and we just had a shot of shooting these blokes in the water.

And of all things, half way through it, probably saved someone’s life, I had stoppages in both machine guns. We only had two guns in the Wirraway and I got stoppages , things wouldn’t fire in both guns. Somebody should have been on a charge over that, it was bloody stupid. The guns have what they call

shoots at the side to take the links after the bullets are pulled out and fired, the links fall away separately, and you have shoots down the sides to take these links and discharge them out of the bottom of the aircraft. And the bloody stupid armourers hadn’t taken the covers off the shoots at the bottom, so the links filled up and when no more links could get in the gun stopped firing, and you got rid of half the

ammunition I had. But that was just slaughter. But that’s what we were there to do, they would have done it to us if they were in the reverse position. I was just reading one of the publications that came out around after the war about that campaign. And it made the point that there were no POWs taken in the campaign.

I wonder what happened to them. We had right at the end, one of the new pilots, he hadn’t been with the squadron long, he joined us in New Guinea. And he was out one day and he didn’t come back and they went out and had a look and couldn’t find the aircraft

I came over the next day and took over from the people who’d been flying there. and we found the aircraft it had come down in the jungle, we don’t know whether it was hit by ground fire or whether he hit a tree or what it was. But there is was sitting down the middle of the jungle, the wreck.

And it was only after the war, well we found the bodies, and they’d been tied to a tree and used for bayonet practice by the Japanese. But it wasn’t until after the war that we found this out. But that is how they died. You know it, pretty scary to know that if

you come down, that sort of thing is likely to happen. I told you about the fellow who took the trip, the sortie that I was supposed to take. He had the commanding officer of the army liaison section really, and they went out to have a look at the area, the army liaison officer wanted to see for himself, the

area, what is was like, where the fighting was taking place. And they got hit with ground fire, the aircraft caught on fire, he got, the pilot got it down on the ground, but he was overcome by the flames and they both perished in the flames.

The Wirraways where very nice aircraft. But its got limitations. First of all, it was built as a front line fighter. It was a modification of an American design and

it incorporated some features of one aircraft and some of another. But it was never suitable for the purpose for which it was built. when they put it onto training it was very good training aircraft for a lot of reason. Because it was two place of course you could get an instructor in to help you fly and teach you and tell you what to do and get you out of trouble if you were silly.

It was also the sort of aircraft that responded to good , a good touch, it flew well if you were rough with it it didn’t like it. When you fly and aircraft, you don’t do this sort of thing, its not like turning a wheel of an motor car, its more precious, that sort of thing

and if you do this with it, it will stall, it will be very violent and it will get you into a lot of trouble.

Ah, it depends on how high you are, if you are coming into land you are in real trouble. Because when it stalls it does not just go like that, it goes, and that

happened to me once. If its stalls at height you have got plenty of time to recover, its easy enough to recover from a stall, it s part of your training. And if you do stall it and you are taught to stall it, and taught what will happen if it does stall, then its easy enough o rectify that, but you have got to be gentle with it, the Wirraway. It was

good training aircraft for those reasons, it taught you to be gentle and in some ways you forgot that sort of flying when you got into operations. Because there are all sorts of operations where you have got to be violent with an aircraft. I mean if you get somebody behind you trying to shoot you, you are not going to worry about whether you stall the aircraft or whether you do anything else, all you want to do is get away from it.

but many aspects of flying where you need the aircraft to be flown accurately, you can skid an aircraft you can slip it, you can stall it you can do all sorts of things, and all of those things throw an aircraft off the lien that you want to fly. If you want to shoot at a target down there and you are slipping, I mean,

instead of pointing the aircraft there you are going like that. And if you shoot at something over there when you are travelling over there, the bullets won’t go where you are pointing the aircraft. You have got to fly it accurately if you want the bullets to go where you want them to go. the same when you are bombing, you’ve got to fly it accurately otherwise the bombs don’t go where you want them. And from that

reason the Wirraway aircraft was good for training. It was good for the work we were doing, the army cooperation work, because you cold bomb with it, to a limited extent you could use the ground targets with machine guns. And you had two people in the aircraft to watch for whatever it is you are looking for when you are doing reconnaissance. The other things that

was good it was manoeuvrable, relatively slow and it was easy to keep it in the vicinity of the fall of shell when you were directing artillery. The artillery would be 10 miles behind the front line. You directed a shell onto that target there. And they are half a mile short. So you

tell them to adjust, then they fall to the left, adjust to the right, you have got to watch and be circling around the expected fall of the shell to pick up exactly where it falls and then correct by radio to gun positions which was miles away. And the aircraft of Wirraway aircraft was suitable for this particular job. But as a front line fighter it was shot out of the sky in a ball and

it was never used as a front line fighter again, except in an army cooperation. We used it in that, we were there for 6 months. I don’t know who made the decisions, but at the time when we were flying Wirraway aircraft up there in New Guinea doing this job, the army cooperation, they were equipping

Australian based fighter squadrons with Boomerang aircraft which were a much better aircraft for support for the army than the Wirraway was. But we didn’t get them, for some reason or another they equipped Australian based squadrons with Boomerang aircraft instead of giving them to the operational squadrons. I’ve got a copy of the memorandum from the army people to the air force saying its

time these people got better aircraft. They have done a wonderful job of the Wirraway, its time they got better aircraft to support the army because they can do a much better job than what they were doing, good as it was, they were very praiseworthy of the job that we had done. The army had never had support from , air support in the Middle East. Whenever they saw an aircraft in the Middle East it was a German or

Italian aircraft. When they came to New Guinea, every aircraft they saw flying around was an allied aircraft, mainly Wirraways. It was a tremendous morale booster for the army. And they appreciated that, but the artillery could never have operated in jungle conditions because you can’t spot the fall of the shell except from the air. So if

they wanted to range on a target and shoot all night to keep the Japanese awake and have an affect on morale as it did. You’ve got have an accurate ranging of that particular target. You can’t get it unless you see where the shells fall. And we were , we enabled, the Australia artillery to be much more effective as a result of that than they would never have been without air support, without air cover.

What’s that?

Oh, well, you’d never know. You see I always thought that if you flew low enough, you’d

pass over a particular armed point fast enough for them not to be able to get a shot at you. but you weren’t always over every point they were firing at you, I was doing a reconnaissance somewhere around, flying around looking for something. I looked up and I looked straight down the barrel of a gun that had just shot at me. And all I saw was the flash of flames from the muzzle of the gun. He’d been watching me and he had been ranging me, and he shot at me and I

looked up just as he fired the shell, and there was that flash of, so I took some evasive action, and with a great burst of grey up in the sky to where I would have been if it hadn’t. But you are quite right, if you were flying fast over trees they wouldn’t see you until you were right above them, and then you were out of sight before they could. But that didn’t stop them hitting the aircraft

with ground fire, I was shot down with ground fire. I’d been doing a reconnaissance a different day, not the one I saw the flash of flame, suddenly I looked up and there was oil spraying out of the motor everywhere, I couldn’t see through the front windscreen, just oil pouring everywhere.

You don’t hear anything. You don’t hear it when the aircraft was hit

you come back with holes in aircraft, the ground crew would show them to you. It was the first you knew about the fact that you had been hit. I’ve come back with bits of palm leaf, not palm leaf, in the tail blades, got stuck there somehow or another, but I brought it back.

it would be if that one that I saw shooting at me had been close enough

but not ground fire, not rifle or machine gun, you wouldn’t feel or hear those. The first time I got hit from the ground, cockpit here, the combing there, and about where you are was a nice little hull drilled in the cockpit. You know another fraction of a second and it would have been here. but it was just, I didn’t know I had been hit, when we got back the fellow went over the aircraft and said, come and have

a look at this, and there was a nice little hole.

I said, “Where is the bullet?” Can you find the bullet. But

I don’t know its just a , but it was unusual to come back without some ground fire having hit the aircraft.

Oh I don’t know, underneath the aircraft somewhere but I came down in the Kunai grass with the wheels up, sitting up in 6 foot high Kunai grass, 8 foot high Kunai grass.

Very hard. I told you about the flip when you stall, I came down, I should have known, I should have known better

but I came down into this patch of mooneye grass and as soon as the wings touched the grass all the airflow over the wings stopped. I mean you can understand that because its grass, not air. Ant the aircraft just went, down like that. With an almighty thump. We weren’t hurt but its an awful shock.

What did I think? where the hell am I going to get this aircraft onto the ground? I was over Japanese position so I wasn’t going to put it down there. So I pointed it south into the area that had been planted by the army, it wasn’t Japanese occupied and I got it down as soon as I can.

Oh I could have. this was just one week after that incident I told you where the two were killed because they were overcome by flames. that happened on the 27th of December and it was the 2nd of January.

Right in the front of my mind, right in the front. I didn’t want to be burned to a crisp. So I got here down as soon as I could

and we got out of it. We didn’t now where we were we didn’t have the faintest idea.

Well, no it didn’t turn over, down the wing hit the ground, and then crashed down into the ground. But the radio was still working so I had a navigator in the back , I got him to call up the base and tell them what had happened. And a fellow I shared a tent with was the other

pilot over there at the time. And he came out, he had no idea where we were either, we had to shoot a Very pistol up in the air to attract his attention, he was miles away.

Very, Very pistol, just you know, boom, bright light, like the fireworks, Very pistol. Attract his attention, he came around, he thought he was giving us a good turn, he threw a water bottle

with a message attached to it. But it must have landed in this long 8 foot high mooneye grass, 15 yards away from where I was, I had to go ploughing through this grass and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack, anyway I found it.

I didn’t know, I didn’t know where we were exactly.

We had 38 revolvers that’s all.

Well it hall happened within an afternoon, I don't know what time I was hit but we walked out, and we were

directed out, keep walking he said, and you’ll come to a road. and we got to the road and a nice friendly jeep and American jeep came along and picked us up and took us to an army base. And we got back that night to our own base. But it would have been a long walk. That turned out very nice, very nicely. But that wasn’t a very pleasant

experience.

You mean was I, not really, I would have been happier if I had been steadier, perhaps I was like that, which isn’t bad for my age.

Perhaps as bad as that but I wasn’t really shaky.

He was alright he got a DFM [Distinguished Flying Medal], not just for that, but he was one of the unlucky ones , he was every pilot who did something different. He was with me, he was with a aircraft that got bombed up at Wau, he was in an aircraft that

pinpointed anti aircraft guns by flying low and in their line of fire. We got, we were the most decorated squadron of the Buna /Gona/ Sanananda campaign. We had three American silver stars, we had one DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross], and we had one DFM. And no other

air force squadron that operated in that campaign, that localised campaign, would see as many decorations as 4 squadron personnel did. And we’ve been neglected and ignored ever since. I was just reading some of the literature, I’ve been collected over the years about memorials that have been erected.

And one of them was a memorial at Buna for the air force personnel who, air force personnel who were killed in that campaign. We should have been there at the dedication. I’ve got nothing against the fellow who did go, but he came from an air sea rescue unit that didn’t even

operate in the area at the time of the Buna Gona Sanananda campaign. And here am I living in Queensland, flying through the whole lot of it, and ignored. They had, I’m getting all this off my chest now. They had a mission just a couple of months ago in New Guinea to rededicate a memorial for the squadrons that took part. 75 squadron was represented , 30 squadron was represented

22 squadron was represented, 22 squadron never flew in the campaign. They didn’t , they started flying in New Guinea after we did. They were a long range fighter squadron, they didn’t take part in the landings of the Japanese on the north coast. And they only had very, very few

sorties in support of the army in the campaign itself. We flew 3 and 4 sorties a day for 3 months. Two of our personnel were nominated to be a part of the mission. When we weren’t picked, we didn’t know you took part in that. Jesus Christ, sorry about that, you can edit that bit out.

But squadron was very upset about that, very upset. 4 squadron in the First World War had an unparalleled reputation and we carried it on and we think we did pretty well, and we’ve been ignored.

We think, and nobody has ever told us this, but we think its because we were seconded to the American forces

that were fighting in the area. As I said earlier, we worked at Rockhampton in the first flight with the US 32nd division, the first Americans to come onto the land, Queensland. They were the troops that were fighting in New Guinea and we were in support of them. And we were seconded to the American air force to support those troops. General Kenny the American was in command of the air forces and

that’s where the story about the placement of the commanding officer comes in. but we think its because we were seconded to the American air force that the army, the RAAF forgot about us, and never recognised anything that we did, as being worthy of note. it was only when these 3 silver stars were presented to the personnel of the squadron that the RAAF woke up and made the

DFC and the DFM available. Adgerton, still alive, I was talking to him the other day, he said, confirmed that that’s as close as he could guess to the story. He’d know more about it than I would, he confirmed that sort of story.

So I’ve told you now.

Yes we had a , we had a some sort of first aid kit, I was made up in our parachute sacks, and it was just a

tube of canvas which we tied around the waist. It was very bulky, I don’t know what sort of damage it would have done if you had jumped out of your aircraft with a parachute with this underneath the parachute webbing. It could have done damage to your back if not to your spine at least to your back muscles. But we had that, that

was filled with various things. There were silk map, I don’t think it would have been much good to find your way around because the maps at that stage were very, very few and far between and most of the photography we did while we were up there, was for the purpose of updating the maps and bring them into line with what was the reality of the terrain. But there was a map and there was some first aid stuff

at one stage I got out the morphine which was supposed to relieve the pain if you got into trouble. It was useless it was old and dried up, you couldn’t get anything out of , I didn’t get it out to use it, but I got it out and just threw it away it was useless. And we had a jungle knife.

No a lot of things that should have bothered me didn’t bother me. I should have been bothered by that. My 38 revolver, we never had any practice with it you know, we never had any bullets, to practice with, the bloody thing, you to use two hands to cock it. You know you’ve seen al these cowboy pictures where they flick it with their thumbs

do this, you couldn’t do that with my 38, you had to use, if I had met a Japanese I would have had a Tommy gun full of bullets in my stomach by the time I got to the 38 cocked, stupid thing didn’t do anything, there was something wrong with it. And I didn’t do anything.

Well I should have but I didn’t. I was just stupid I suppose. Anyway

I didn’t but I had this jungle knife too which was supposed to be able to hack your way through the jungle. I think they had been reading about this in books. So that was one of the things you should have. I don’t know how we would have got on if you’d jumped out of an airplane with all this stuff hanging off you.

Well I don’t know what was in it apart from this morphine, I really didn’t examine what was in it, I didn’t unpack it. I don’t know what was in it.

I don’t know that I was even wearing it, I can’t remember

I can’t remember . You see it was a very disorganised war, we didn’t have things laid on for us the way they are now. I’ve got some photographs you might like to look at later on showing the sort of flying uniform I had. You laugh when you see it, but it was the way I flew all the time.

Because we had nothing else, it was just a disorganised war.

I wore a short and shirt. That was my flying uniform. Little short shorts, didn’t even have long socks on, and then a helmet with ear phones, that’s how I flew. Not at night, night there were long trousers and

long sleeved shirts. To keep of the mosquitos and I was lucky I didn’t get malaria. Because I covered myself up, but we flew during the day in shorts and this little short sleeved shirt, and that was it. We had, we were issued with flying suits but it was hot.

You are hearing the truth now. So we didn’t wear them.

I said, “Are you alright?’ He said, “Yeah” very off hand about it.

He was good bloke, he’s dead now. He died not very long ago, he lived at Narrabeen or something like that. Had quite a remarkable career after the war. No there was no drama. I said, “Are you alright?” and he said, "Yes I am”, and I said, "Where are we? Do you know where we are?

We need to get on the radio and call them up and tell them we’re down and tell them to come and have a look for us and tell us how to get out” I said, “make a time for them to call back and let us know what they are doing, so that we can be listening out”. We don’t want to have the radio on all the time and flatten the battery and not be able to use it. So we did that and that’s when I suppose about half an hour later, maybe 45 minutes later

saw this speck in the distance, miles away from where we were

Oh, I wont tell yo.

I relieved myself and actually the other thing I did was remove the clock from the dashboard and put it in my pocket.

As a souvenir, I haven’t got it now but I did have it for a long while.

That particular one was my aircraft? No I don’t what aircraft it was, I’ve lost my log book in one of the moves we had post war. We didn’t have aircraft allocated to a pilot we had

at the most we’d have half a dozen aircraft for the service of anyone at the time with 18 pilots, and you’ve just got to in the next serviceable aircraft. But there were in training in Australia aircraft allocated but not in New Guinea, and I don’t know what it was that I was flying in that day. It certainly wasn’t an aircraft that had been allotted to me.

Oh well I don’t know what it was. One that was allotted to me, and I’ve got a photograph of it somewhere, I had a emblem painted on the front cowling and I had a bit of an attachment to that.

An eagle diving down with a bomb in its claw.

With due modesty I did some very, got some very good results from my flying. In the dive-bombing I have the squadron record for 6 bombs dropped from 2000 feet onto a target. They measure each distance from the target and measure them and divide by 6 and I got a 6 yard error.

6 yard error for 6 bombs from 2000 feet is not bad. And it set a new standard for the squadron. And I took it from that, so I had the eagle with a bomb in its claw. We were a dive bomber squadron and I was a dive bomber, I just liked the idea.

I hated it. No. Not in that way, not in the way you mean. Because I wasn’t an aircraft that was mine it wasn’t the one with the eagle on it. It was just an aircraft that I flew because it was one that was serviceable on that day.

It said, if you walk South you will come to a road and that will lead you back to an army camp, I don’t know whether they had an distances, they said just walk South from where you are and you will come to a road, and turn left and you’ll walk into an army camp. It was quite a long way, I wouldn’t have liked to have walked it, we had parachutes over our shoulders at this stage.

And we walked down, we hit this road, do you know what a corduroy road is? Its just a mud track with trees laid across it, and its like a corduroy pattern the material, they call it a corduroy road. We came to one of these roads wed been walking for about 5 minutes and this jeep came along and , we still didn’t know whether we were in occupied territory or not so we

hastily hid in the mooneye grass, right up to the edge of the road, and when we saw who it was we stopped him and jumped in the back and he delivered us to the army camp.

“Can you give us a lift.”

He was, he didn’t ask a single question, he didn’t say where have you come from, he didn’t say is there an aircraft there, he didn’t say have you crashed, he didn’t ask us if we were alright. He was

most disinterested.

No I just said we wanted to get back to our camp. He, I don’t know, he was probably a private and we were officers and he probably thought he should, I don’t know what he thought, but most disinterested.

Well they knew we were down because as soon as we were hit, I called out, “Mayday, mayday, we’ve been hit”. And we were trying to get out of the area, and they said, “Well let us know when you do” So when we got down and called them they knew what had happened. And we made this appointment to call back in an hour or them to call us, I’ve forgotten which way it was, and let us know what was happening so we could watch out for this aircraft.

No, well there might have been back at base, but not on the radio. Who knows, they certainly didn’t make a big thing of it, they didn’t crowd around me and say lets have a look at the scars or anything like that

Yes, but not apparent at the time, I’ve got a bad back

as a result of that, as far as we can judge, that was the cause of it.

I just went to bed that night, there was no drama. the next day I was picked up in a aircraft and flown back to base and made a report.

I went to see the CO [Commanding Officer] and he asked me if I was alright. And I said, “yeah I’m alright, no problem”, and he said, "What happened?” and I told him what happened, he said, “Okay” there is an accident record about it. So he said, “you better go and see the doctor” so I said, “Okay” So I went up to see the doctor, flight Lieutenant doctor, I walked into his medical section, whatever it was , pretty grim it was, anyway I walked in and he was sitting in a chair and he said,

“Hello, what’s happened?” and I told him and he said, “How are you?” and I said, "I’m alright” and he said, "Do you want to be grounded?” and I said, "No I’m alright”. That was the result of my medical examination after the incident. I was subsequently asked, when I went to veterans affairs to have the disability allowed, service related. I had to get

a report from the doctor up here, the GP [General Practitioner]. He said, “Did you have it x-rayed?” x-rayed in New Guinea, you would be lucky if there was one x-ray machine I the whole of New Guinea. No I didn't have it x-rayed.

You didn’t want

to be grounded.

Nobody wanted to be grounded, we wanted to fly. We wanted to do our job and on top of that you got so little flying, as I have explained they had the two dispersed flights with two aircraft each, the rest of the squadron sat at, nobody wanted to sit around in Moresby censoring letters. That’s what we did, we censored letters and we maintained the flight schedules and we tested

aircraft that had been fixed up, it was terrible. Absolute and complete boredom. I mean in one of the books that’s been written about the campaign I’m on record as saying that, not just to you I have said it before.

No it didn’t. No the, we wanted to fly we wanted to do our job, we wanted to get on with it and get the job done as quickly and as efficiently as we can. You know we all went through all this sort of thing. there were a lot of aircraft lost up there and

there were a lot of personnel lost. I was sitting playing cards with a fellow who took my flight, sitting with him playing cards, the next day he takes my flight and gets killed. You go back and play cards with one less the next day. My flight commander shared the tent with three of us, shared a tent with us, he went out on the 17th of November or the 20th of November or whatever it was

and flies his aircraft into the hills of the Owen Stanley ranges, walks back a fortnight later and gets posted back, you go on with life. You don’t sit down and cry you don’t get people coming around and counselling you as they do today, shoving it down your throat again as they do with so many things these days. You get on with life. You are

there for a job and you try and do it. The nerves get the better, and nobody to my knowledge got to the stage where they couldn’t fly. I know of one fellow who refused to fly, but not because, well it was a special circumstance, he said the pilot wasn’t safe. And the pilot subsequently killed himself a couple of days later.

I’ve told you about it.

Well the flight itself was quite an experience because all the previous flights had

an instructor with you and you knew that he would correct yo if you ever got into trouble. But when you are landing a Tigermoth, sitting in the back seat, back cockpit and when it gets down into the landing position you have got a long nose ahead of you and you can’t see a thing. And you get all sorts of funny feelings whether you are going across the ground like a crab, or whether you are going straight. Of course if you are going the wrong way and turn the

thing over and smash a wing, you are likely to finished up back at ITS or the navigation school or be scrubbed from flying. So it is quite an experience. I did two circuits first of all when I went solo. Both of them went perfectly, I had no trouble I came round came over the fence landed 3 points the way you are taught to do it, came back to the instructor, “Do it again “ he said, just the same. He hopped in and we

went back to the end of the lesson and he took up another pilot. but as for a thrill in itself. Its not a thrill in itself, you are concentrating on too many things, you are concentrating on too many things to get right. And you’ve got to get them right if you want to get an accurate flight. You have got to have the turns right, you’ve got to have your rudder right, your stick right, your revs

right and your speed right. And watching your instruments, actually you are told to keep your head out of the cockpit, not watch your instruments. But you watch them and check them all the time to make sure that you are getting the right result whatever it is you are doing, turning, climbing or coming down. And there are so many things that you have got to watch, other aircraft for example, the wind, whether you

are the right distance from the aerodrome when you cut off the power to glide in and finally land the aircraft and get over the fence. A lot of things to worry about and there are too many things to worry about to get excited about it. If you are excited about it you will probably make a mess of it. But very satisfied with the results and with the solo.

Very good, two of them very good.

They, were very, two very good three pointers the wheels and tail all came down at the same time. If you hit with the wheels while the tail’s still up you tend to bounce, well that is not a bad landing it is very satisfactory on your first solo to put he tail fin down at the same time. But an old saying in the air force that any landing that you can walk away from

is a good landing and there is a lot of truth of that, it depends on the circumstances that surround the particular landing, it was a good landing when in landed up in the jungle. But the first one was just a very satisfactory experience.

Terrified, terrified that I’d get it there, it wasn’t heading straight along the pathway I

had to tip it over and put in a wing tip or something like that. You couldn't see with this long nose in front of you you had to look out the side. And judge the height from the ground, the direction you are travelling, you are keeping the rudder straight and into the wind, keep the power off, stick back, wings level. Its all

part of the exercise.

Well I had 2 or 3 instructors, the first instructor I had took me for the first month, and then I had two more instructors for the second month . You changed flights because you went from the intermediate to the advanced flying. So you learnt aerobatics and things like that so you had different instructors. But in the second month I had

two different instructors, I had a pilot officer and Sergeant pilot. And they were good, they were good to me, they taught me how to fly, they told me what to do. A lot of them were, I suppose all of them were much the same as we were, volunteers who had come through the EFTS and the service flying school and part of the Empire Air Training Scheme.

They were two pilot officers I had, and one Sergeant, probably had come through the same way as we had.

I doubt it. The first instructor I had in the first month, was the first person I met when I got to Moresby. And he was up there doing something or other, and he actually came and greeted me on my arrival in Moresby when I was

just getting settled in the overnight accommodation they provided for us as Moresby before I joined the squadron. And he couldn’t believe we were still flying Wirraways up there in New Guinea after what had happened in Rabaul earlier in the year. But he went on to flying post eventually but he hadn’t any previous wartime experience. Most of the instructors, not all of them, but most of the instructors came straight off course, went straight to

central flying school, did an instructors course and then up to a flying school. which might seem strange way to do it. One of the fellows comes from the squadron, the one that put his airplane into the Owen Stanleys and walked out. He’d been with the squadron for 12 months or more, had operational experience in New Guinea. When he got back to Australia they put him through an instructors course and he became a flying instructor

on Tigermoths. I think he’s an exception rather than a rule.

Well a lot of the formality disappeared during the war. I don’t know what it was like during peace time but NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] were addressed as “Sarge” or “Corp” or whatever and sometimes by other names as well. But

officers, you were supposed to salute an officer every time you saw him. On the flying instructor side I had this pilot officer, he said, “When you come down, the first time I see you in the morning, you salute me, and that’s it, not every time you see me”. I doubt very much whether that would have been accepted in the peace time air force. A lot of the formality disappeared, it was volunteers, they had different

ideas, they weren’t in it for a career as so many of the peace time people were. With peace time air force didn’t join to fight a war, they joined for a career. And the attitudes were different, the peace time stations were different. The environment on a peace time station were so different from the war time stations that were developed to train pilots. A lot different

we were just talking before you came in to one of our pilots who lives up here, a squadron pilot and he trained his service flying school at Deniliquin. Which is a war time school, mine was Forest Hill, mine was a permanent station, his wasn’t. We were just talking about the differences in the treatment we received at those different stations. Formality wasn’t the order of the day, much more informal

by the time I got there than it would have been in peace time.

It would be a lot easier with a log book, wouldn’t it. I think I probably did about 40 hours, 40 or 50 hours, I was just trying to think if it would be in each month

between 80 and 100 hours at EFTS. And about another 150 hours at service flying school, making a couple of hundred by the time we had finished the training.

No that was the lucky break that we had. Because when we finished our OTU with very little extra flying after we finished our service flying training school, most of

only had 200 hours up. Some of the blokes went to fighter squadrons. When we finished the OTU they split up fighter squadrons, army coop and what are called staff pilots who just flew trainees around. And when I went to 4 squadron it was 9 months before, 9 months of flying, flying training before

I got up to New Guinea so I had a lot more flying time before we got to New Guinea a lot more time at army cooperation training with people that I got to know very well. People who went straight from an OTU to a fighter squadron like my friend from school who lasted three days. He did his service flying training in Canada, went to England, went into Lancasters, finished.

You need experience to avoid the problems, and you only had experience by flying them all the time. If you don’t have the time to put in to fly extra hours, you are in trouble. But as soon as you get into an operational area you are in trouble.

So we were very very lucky in that respect. It was one of the reasons I think why we did perform well because we had that extra training 9 months together, well the squadron had been going before I got there but most of us were there for 9 months before we got into operational areas.

I was just thinking about that

while we were having lunch, not in training but at the squadron. We had a few instances of blokes who were killed. Before we got to New Guinea. We went down on a dispersed flight to Albury.

And the army was down there somewhere around Wodonga, they were working in the hills, and we got a patch of bad weather. And two of us went out one day a fellow I trained with and we had our observers with us. We were told what to do and what not to do. If there was any cloud about to keep out of it. We got over to the area we were supposed to e working in and we got

cloud, cloud down on the hill, we were flying underneath in along valleys if we continued the operation. So we aborted it and we turned around and we were flying back. And something got into the head of this other bloke I was flying with and he said, he signalled to me that he wanted to turn off, we were flying back along the railway lines to Albury. And he signalled he wanted to turn left and fly off to the North

so I went with him, and we got up there and ground started to rise into the hills and the cloud got down and it got closer and closer to the ground and I said, I’ve had enough of this, an did signalled to him that I was finished and I turned around and went back. I got back to the aerodrome and landed and found that a farmer had rung in and said one of the planes was crashed, killed both of them, the pilot and observer. I don’t know what he did whether he hit a tree or a hill

he killed himself and his observer. If that wasn’t bad enough, two of the navigators, wireless operator navigators were sharing a tent, they were very good friends. And one of them had been out, I don’t know whether he had been to dinner somewhere and came back late at night. The fellow he was sharing his tent with pulled out his 38 and said, “Stick ‘em up”

and pulled the trigger and shot his friend straight through, between the eyes. Killed him on the spot. And that was a very nasty incident.

He either forgot it was loaded, I mean it was just one of those horrible accidents. I presumed he thought it wasn’t loaded, the gun wasn’t loaded

the first thing you learn about armaments, see the gun is unloaded, the first thing you learn.

Well there was a court martial I suppose, he was a very fine fellow, he’d been a teacher, very fine fellow and had a great post war record. He lived over at Armidale and we have seen a bit of him since the war and had a wonderful record in civilian life. But it went against him in the air force and he should have been

decommissioned a lot earlier than he was. Presumably because of this incident. is commission was delayed until we got up into New Guinea because it was 9 months later than it should have been.

I’m sure he wouldn’t talk about it, and I don’t think, I never talked about it. Its been talked about since the war, our association has got about 200 on the nominal roll to get

together every year and we talk about these things. And that incident we mention but not something you like to bring up. Terrible thing and two of them in a couple of days. Nasty.

By the greatest of good luck.

We thought we knew it all, we’d been trained we ‘d learnt to fly and we thought we knew it all. But we didn’t really get to know it until you had to , the blow torch is on your stomach as they say. Then when we got into operations , that’s when we learnt what it was all about. You can’t pick up the fall of a 25 pounder shell unless you are

right down on the top of the trees, right above, within two of where it falls. It isn’t a great flash of flame that you see in the TV, there is a little puff of black smoke, and that’s it, if you don’t pick that up you don’t know where it is and of course, if you lose track of the line of fire and you don’t pick up the fall of the shells, you can always call for the

gunners to fire around the smoke, so you can watch the smoke. But they don’t like doing that because they have got another round loaded, they’ve got to pull that out and put a smoke round in, they don’t like doing that, so you have really got to be on your toes to watch it. You have got to down on the top of the trees. that’s one of the reasons we had hulls in the airplane, one of the reasons why it was harder for the aircraft to be hit as we flew over.

Because we you had to judge the fall of the shell, there’s a formula for doing this and when they fire a shot at the other end they have called shot, so you have got to judge the fall of the shell at the target and the time your aircraft passes over it. Its quite a tricky operation, and you’ve got to watch your wing doesn’t hit a tree and a coupe of other things

like that. And it really very fancy flying.

Oh no, no you fly parallel to the line of the shell and turn across, you know, the shell is coming this way, turn here and fly across it, and by the time you are turning across, its coming down. Unless you judged it very badly.

You deserve what you get.

Well you are looking down over the wing, so you are really seeing the trees and the wing and the fall of the shot at the same time. I mean its not as thought you are going this, you’d never see the fall of the shot. And the odd things was

we were trained as pilots, to note the fall of the shell, not the navigator who sat in the back working the radio. Presumably trying to watch if there were any other aircraft trying to shoot us down. But they weren’t trained to do this and call the shot it was the pilot that did it.

Well the first indication of change of course was the EFTS at Narromine. When 12 course went through Canada, most of the course, most of the pilot trainees went overseas to do their

service flying training in Canada, and when 13 course didn’t go that was the first indication that numbers of pilots were going to be kept in Australia, and this was because, presumably because the Beaufighters were coming off the line, they were starting the manufacture the Boomerang and I suppose they had made arrangements to get other aircraft. We at one stage expected to be equipped with Vultee Vengeances.

But that was the first indication we had, that number of pilots, courses, whole courses were going to be kept in Australia and we didn’t know whether that would be the case until our posting came out. Just when 15 course went through, some stayed in Australia and some went overseas. And then they started sending lots of pilots overseas because there were numbers of pilots they were losing in ’43 and ’44. So it

it was a multiple equation as to where the numbers were required and where the aircraft were for pilots to fly. And we had no answer for that until our actual postings came through.

That was the 7th of December and we were at Wagga, service flying school, we finished out course,

we woke up on the 7th of December to get a posting somewhere or another and learnt that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour and that, threw everyone into confusion they had no postings come through for us because they didn’t know where they wanted the pilots to go. And the poor old SGI [Small Group Instructor??] I remember him saying, “I’ve got a course here that is

still in residence and you want to send me more trainees. What am I going to do with the fellows I’ve got here?”, and he had no posting for them. Anyway they finally sent us to an embarkation depot and we thought we were going to Malaya. And that was cancelled because the Japanese overran Singapore and there was no point in sending us there. while we were there actually I few people went to Malaya.

navigator who went to Malaya found that the squadron he was posted to in Malaya was single engine squadron it didn’t take two people it only took a pilot. So he was sent back to Australia and he came back and joined us in 4 squadron . but he actually went to Malaya while we were sitting

waiting for a posting. And they’d cancelled our posting in Malaya so things were a bit confused. They really had a lot of pilots they didn’t know what to do with, they were going to send away and no where to send them to.

WE eventually went to the OTU, we had we went to embarkation dept about he first week, second week in December ’41. And

we went to the OTU towards the end of January. So we had nearly two months at the embarkation depot waiting for a posting to come through.

We went on leave most of the time. I lived just 5 minutes drive away, spent a lot of time at home. We used to, one of the fellows had a car, things were put in to make it work

it was surprising but we used to go down the beach in the afternoon and run along Manly beach and up over the headland to Harbord and run up along the beach at Harbord and then come back again and keep ourselves with a bit of running. But we just sat around and went on leave most of the time. They didn’t have jobs for us. We wouldn’t have liked that.

Lighter fluid, methylated spirits, kerosene, all sort of things, anything you could get. And occasionally you’d get some petrol, petrol rationing was on then. We had a lot of fun in that couple of months, Christmas at home, all newly commissioned. They did some funny things.

When we got our commission they said, you’ll get a 25 pound uniform allowance. so we said, id don’t know why, we got it whether it was an overseas allowance , anyway we got it, said we’ve got a 25 pound allowance for our uniform so we all went off and had our uniforms tailored and fixed up. and then out of the blue when we get to New Guinea

they say you had your overseas postings cancelled that uniform allowance has got to be repaid. No, they did that to us. They took the 25 pounds back.

Yes and no. We all had our own groups, the fellow I did the 21 lessons with

and the fellow from school who I met when we went down to Woolloomooloo and myself were all in one group. When we were at ITS at Bradfield when we started training we’d have sport on Wednesday afternoons. And I used to get this group and we’d take them home and we’d play tennis on our tennis court at home. And we went

right through together the three of us, right through to OTU and through embarkation depot and this period we were in December, January ’42 and ’43. And we stayed together and we used to do these things together. But there were other groups, they used to go off and some of the hair raising stories they told us what they had done the previous night makes some of the schoolies week stories pale by comparison

but they were, there were some pretty wild people and some pretty wild stories.

Oh I can’t remember any detail

Well that’s where we were taught to do all things we had been taught not to do at the other flying schools.

At the flying schools you were taught you had to be accurate with your flying you had to keep about 1000 feet, no low flying , no dog fighting, no air to air attacks, no, you were really controlled in everything you did. when you went out you went out to practices aerobatics or navigation or whatever it was. Operational Training Unit was supposed to be your training for your work in the fighter squadron,

that’s what the purpose of an OTU and we had days of mock attacks, we had days of air to ground gunnery. We had a little bit of gunnery and a little bit of bombing but not much, not nearly enough, it was the number 2 OTU course. And they hadn’t got it organised and they had a couple of fellows back from the Middle East who had fought in 3 squadron over in the Middle East.

And they were supposed to take us through these courses and teach us all these tactics, but it was, we were left to ourselves what we did, low flying or gunnery or what ever it was. And it really didn’t fit us, any of us for a fighter squadron. And of course it had no application for an army cooperation squadron. Most of the blokes went to either 75

or 76 squadron, they were the two new fighter squadrons that were quipped with Kittyhawks that the RAAF had acquired from the Americans and they went there and trained up on them. Nothing to do with me but a flight from Bankstown to Amberley when they were taking the squadron North, they struck bad weather and half the pilots

pranged their aircraft, bent their aircraft and some of them even killed themselves on the way up because they got into bad weather and didn’t know how to handle it. There is a right and a wrong way to do it. And they didn’t even get into operations. One of the fellows was an old Shore boy, just married, killed himself

the squadron leader lost his command of the squadron as a result of that. He was an ex 3 squadron , none of that is my personal experience, but those are things that happened to the fellows who were on course with me.

Because we normally didn’t have bad weather here. In the , all my flying up to

that stage, had been done in perfect sunny weather without any clouds or any cessation of flying because of bad weather. They were flying from Sydney to Amberley on, probably on the same route that the old Stenson took, you know the Stenson diaster that went into the mountains up there on the New South Wales border in the 1930s? Before your time. They were probably flying the same course, and

I don’t know why but they must, these ones that got into trouble must have come down through cloud. Been lost not known where they were come down through cloud and that’s where they were and put their aircraft into the hills. And that was probably their first experience of bad weather flying. They had plenty of it in New Guinea, if you want to learn to fly in bad weather that’s the place to go. But if you do it the right way and the wrong way, the wrong way you don’t last very long

The only instruction I got on bad weather flying is if you are descending through cloud you put down your wheels and flaps, that’s a lot of help if you are in hilly country and you, just an incident that happened later

when I wasn’t there. One of the fellows was on the OTU course I trained with did exactly that and just flew into the side of the mountain. So even if you did it the right way you’d still get into trouble. but I tried to kill myself up there in low cloud. We used to alternate these dispersed forward airstrips.

And we’d come back in the after noon, the Owen Stanleys were bright and clear in the morning, not a cloud in sight. the afternoon we’d come back the cumulus had built up to 14000 feet and the poor old Wirraway would have trouble getting up to 14000 feet. So rather than trying to spend all that time trying to climb up to that height, I tried to be smart and go in underneath the cloud. Two or three

times I did this instead of going through the gap which was closed I used to fly up a valley or an extinct volcano cater, which then opened the way to the other side of the mountain, the other side of the Owen Stanleys. And you could get across the top of the crater and over the edge and down into the valleys and fly straight back down to Moresby instead of going up over the top

The last time I did it, the cloud base was lower than I had ever experienced before. I had no idea what I was going to do when I got up to the craters because if it had been right down, I wouldn’t have been able to see the edge of the crater to get over it, back into the valley on the other side. And I got there and was literally not much more clearance than the height of this ceiling, between the cloud base

looked as if it had been cut off with a knife, flat as a pancake, and the ground. And I came raring into this thing, I turned the aircraft and there were blokes running in all directions of the army camp, blokes running in all directions. I came around and turned and put the end of the aircraft in the area that I knew I should be going to

When I came to the edge I just pulled back on the stick and hopped over the edge and down the other side. The last time I tried that. Actually that was the last time I came back from the southern forward strip. I worked from Wau from then on. But that is probably the closest I have ever come to killing myself in an airplane, I might have had some other experiences.

What was going through my mind? What the hell am I going to do? I mean you had the option of going on or getting up into cloud. Getting up into cloud was the last option, and once you lose track of the ground you are on your instruments but you don’t know what you are heading into. I just sat it out, luckily there was enough clearance when I got there

to just hop over the edge of the crater and out the other side and down out of the cloud, just literally like that.

Probably.

Well we had a VC [Victoria Cross] from Dunkirk, British army instructing us as the Army Coop. school. But we did all the things that an army cooperation is required to do. We did gunnery and bombing, we did photography, we learnt about cameras, we learned about

line overlaps which are, you look through the right lens and you get a 3D image. We learnt how to do those, the theory of how the line overlap gave you a 3D image. We learnt about reconnaissance , we learnt about army unit, and we learnt about ranging of guns for the artillery. And this fellow this VC from the British army

had a I don’t know what an army call it but it was a reconstruction of a battle field. All done in hessian with buildings on it and roads and one thing or another and they would simulate the fall of an artillery shell by puffing flour through the hessian so that you would get a white smoke coming through as through a shell had burst. And we were

taught how to range the guns onto a target. And the right way to do it and wrong way to do it, if you were to the right of a target, try and bracket it, instead of trying to hit the target, try and bracket because distances are very difficult to judge from the air. So if you bracket it you know if you were the same distance across as you were short now far to bring it back

to be on target. And that was the approved method of doing it. We were taught the formula, the chatter, the RT chatter to work with the army itself, that they would understand what you wanted when you called out , “right, right” or “Left” or whatever it was. And we learnt all those things we learnt. We did a simulated exercise. It was an overnight exercise, we were supposed to be called out in the middle of the night to do a

reconnaissance and they pulled us out of our beds and gave u strong information without a mythical army unit, we had to go out and bring back a report and say what we had seen, and it was just simulating the exercises we would do when we got

into an operational situation. So the photography was the most interesting part of it.

Well I was, we were asked when we were at service training school what sort of work we would like to do when we finished and when we went to a squadron. I was saying 3 squadron in the Middle East which was the only RAAF squadron

overseas at that seas. It was an army coop squadron, we would be sent over to the Middle East and I thought if you are an army cooperation pilot, that might be, get you into 3 squadron in the Middle East. The other reason was that instead of just flying around as top cover in a fighter plane guarding some bombers that were going to bombs somewhere or another, instead of going up in the blue sky looking for other aircraft that were going to kill you

I thought it would be better to be in an army cooperation squadron, every time you go out you are looking for something you are trying to find something to either support the army on the ground, not doodling around in the air , but trying to support them on the ground, bombs, guns, strafing, destroying the enemy lines of communication all that stuff, and the photography and the reconnaissance go with it which I thought would be more interesting sort of job to be doing than just flying about

upstairs. So that was the choice that I made when we were asked. But I have no idea whether that had any influence on the actual decision to send me there or not. I want the only one to join the army cooperation squadron, there were 4 and 5 with the two squadrons, the designated Army Cooperation. And I suppose there must have been a dozen pilots split between the two. From the OTU course

I went to 4 some of the others went to 4 and others went to 5. So you know I couldn’t claim that I was the one picked because of my choice. I don’t know. But I got what I wanted.

Yeah, we had what was it called, the G 24, I think, camera.

Which was quite a big thing, big magazine, film magazine this size on it and if my memory serves me correctly the area on the ground that the film covered, the negative covered was a equal to the height that the aircraft was flying above it. So if you were 5000 feet you covered 5000 feet on the ground. But we were taught to do

what they call line overlaps which gave us the 3D effect. You get a 60 percent overlap look at it through propers lenses and you get a 3D effect from those photographs. You have probably seen those things you put on when you go to the pictures, those 3D, same thing. You get the 60 percent overlap. The funny part about this training that we did while we were at the army cooperation school, in a Wirraway, its

the navigator in the back seat who does the photography, because the camera is in the floor behind his seat. Its not the pilot who does it, now we were taught how to do it, but the poor old navigator behind us had to do the work when we did the photography.

No they didn’t we had pilots and army officers, the army officers were training to be army liaison officers between the army and the air force and they

worked with the squadron. but it was army officers and pilots, no navigators on the course I was on anyway.

Our ones were taught in the squadron, we had a photographic officer and they were taught in the squadron how to do it. but it was quite an art because you have got to time the exposures and the LG 24

although there was an electric control that would do it automatically, the squadron didn’t have any of these things. They were made but equipment was so short we didn’t have any. So you had to wind the negative like that and time the shutter which is moved, manual shutter release with a stop watch.

And that was, gave you the overlap of 60 percent on your photograph. But the poor old navigators had to do this and work it out. The last job I did when we were flying from Wau in the highlands of New Guinea was a line overlap and there were no maps of the area, they needed the photographs to map the area and we got a very good result. It

took nearly an hour to do it.. And we were about 20 minutes flying time from Lae which the Japanese main base. So I was asked if I would like to do this job. Don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, they said. I said, no I’ll do it. and we did it and we got a good result. That line overlap and they said it turned out very well, the army got exactly what they wanted from it.

Firstly over the area that you want to photograph, secondly at the height you want, and third in a straight line. And flying in a straight line with your head down you don’t have much chance to see what’s going on around you. The navigator is in the back seat with his head down operating the camera. We didn’t have much chance to see if there was anything around that was looking for us.

There wasn’t luckily. Up at Wau the , we , it was quite common to have air raids from the Japanese I told you one bomb ran quite close to the slit trench I was in. But they were common, we were so close to Lae which was their main airbase in the south pacific area. And they’d

come over and they would bomb the spit, they didn’t cause a great deal of damage but enough for us to be wary of them and when you are flying along with no one looking out to see what happening, it s a bit nerve racking. That’s the way these things turn out. But that was the last job I did in June of ’43, June ’43. Then I flew back to Moresby and was posted back to

Australia.

Well junior pilots didn’t have much contact with the army, it was the army liaison officer who liaised with the army.

We would be briefed by the army liaison officer who was assigned to the squadron. We had a very good man , Rod O'Lown[sp.?] and he took charge of the job, he briefed us on it, and half the success of any job that you do in this sort of work depends on how well you are

briefed and told what to look for, you can expect to see and the result they want from it. And he was exceptionally good at it. Not only in briefing us but in working with the army itself. And he would get from the army what work they wanted, where they wanted it and would brief us on the job to be done. when we are finished an artillery shoot, perhaps one of the army officers who was in charge of the artillery would come around and

talk to us about the result of the shoot. But as for organising it, its all done through army personnel. The army liaison officer who as with the squadron and the particular unit you were working with.

Oh, the usual abbreviations for the work we were doing. Radio silence was pretty well enforced at that time. And chatter was discouraged. the only time we

really used the radio was when we were doing one of these artillery shoots.

Well, Roger, received and carried out or something of that nature.

Yeah, roger, roger. There weren’t very many, it was a standard format the procedure on

an artillery shoot. And there wasn’t very much room for improvisation.

Well one of the troubles of communication in any context is that the fellow at the other end should understand exactly the message that you want to pass. If you don’t achieve that you haven’t communicated accurately. And that’s why

we were using a standard format of the artillery shoot, so that they would understand exactly what we were saying while we were saying it.

Oh well, it was simply the call for the artillery to shoot, and they’d say, “Shot”

Oh I’d just call out, well, if you imagine a call sign, “Blanket to dusty” that’s just a call sign

the aircraft is blanket, dusty is the one on the ground. You just call out, “Blanket to dusty, on target” and they’d say, “Yes, range on target, shot” And that would mean they’d shot around. You’d then say, “Blanket to Dusty” again, “Left 200, left 200”

he’d say, “Roger” and then he’d call shot again. So he’d call shot again, so It wasn’t a long conversation. You didn’t have a conversation, it was a format that you followed so that he would know exactly what you wanted and why you wanted it to ensure that you didn’t mix up left and right through bad communications, you’d say

“Left, left” and “Right”, “Left, left, and Right” so that you couldn’t mix up the two.

So that to distinguish it from the “Left Left.” That’s the reason for it, to make sure that he got the right message. And it was just one of the formats that were devised, I don’t know whether the army devised it or the air force, but one of the formats that were devised to make sure the communication

we didn’t have goo do communications like they have today. You know the difference the difference between an AM [Amplitude Modulation] and an FM [Frequency Modulation] signal, I mean , the static, the effect static has, we were all AM and if you got bad weather you could have very bad interference with thee radio signals. And that was one of the reasons you needed

to be clear on your communication.

No we were taught this at the school, the school of army coop. And whether, I suppose it developed from Europe, from the European theatres where they would have been doing this for a long while, longer than we had. And that was the procedure they brought with them.

Just by guess and by God. But that was the reason you were taught to blanket, to overshoot, to blanket the target. If you landed to one side and you wanted to correct

you didn’t try and judge the distance to the target. If you thought it was 100 metres, 100 yards, you’d correct 200 and check how far across the target the shell landed. It might be the same distance as you were short before, but it might only be half of the distance. In which case you have misjudged the distance. But the rule was you don’t; try and get the target with the next shot, you

go shoot over it, overshoot, and make sure that your distances were right before you try and correct onto the target. but there was no, the army before they used aircraft to spot, used a system with their hand. And when they were trying to call the shots in open country where they could see, they’d use their knuckles.

To judge the distance that the shot was off the target, and that’s how scientific it was. We were a little bit better, you know, I mean some people had an arm this long, some people had that long, some people had big knuckles and some people had little knuckles, it wasn’t very scientific.

Yeah, that’s what they did when they were calling from a ground station

but you couldn’t see in the trees, that’s why they needed observation from the air. That was the only way that the artillery was able to operate effectively.

Well we didn’t start using live ammunition until

I don’t think I did any shoots with live ammunition I might have done one. But the reality was we only did simulated training at the school of army coop. , we’d have this map made out of hessian with buildings and roads and things on it and you’d call for fire on a target and they’d blow flour up through the hessian.

That would simulate the fall of the shot, and then you’d correct according to the formula you’d been taught. But that was the way we learnt not with live ammunition. I don’t think I ever did live shoot in Australia, it wasn’t until we got to New Guinea. We were well trained through.

What sort of armaments? It had carried two 250 pound bombs, it could carry, I don’t know how many rounds, but we used to carry 400 rounds of ammunition on two forward mounted machine guns, firing through the air screw, between the blades. And we had one rear mounted

machine gun which was operated by the observer on a rail, he could swing it around from one side of the aircraft to the other. three machine guns and two 250 pound guns, that was the total armament. When we went out bombing of course we carried the whole lot. But mostly it was just the armament in the machine guns, we only bombed 3 or 4 times.

The pilot, power.

He was highly trained ,highly skilled and highly efficient operator. I told you , did I tell, I told you about the fish in the bowl when I saw the Japanese. Yeah, that’s right and we got the Japanese swimming across from Buna to Sanananda

Well I had a special little procedure you went through, you had what is called the ring and bead side. And the ring is just like that with a little circle in the centre and way out the front is a thing sticking up with a red tip on it

and you’d just line that up on the target, and I used to put my seat down until, I was big in the aircraft , a lot of the fellows were a lot smaller than I was, and I used to put my seat down until my eye was level with the ring sight, so that I was looking straight through the sight. Some of them used to get down like this, and that didn’t appeal to me, so I put the seat down, looked through the sight, and it was just a matter of aiming the aircraft, in the aircraft you had two little triggers in the,

top of the joystick, just press that and bang, bang, bang. I set a new standard in the squadron for air to ground gunnery. We used to do a little bit of it not very much because you couldn’t get the ammunition

it was all going up to New Guinea and Malaya or wherever. And we used to come back we used to go out and fire on ground targets, and you used to come back, and if you got half a dozen shots on the target, he said , that was goo, that was good training. And I went out one day and I decided I was going to do it my way, not the way they were doing it, so I put my seat down and did all the other things I had to do and

fired at the target and came back and the flight commander said, “I was flying around watching you do air to ground gunnery, you were doing it all wrong, you don’t do it that way at all, you’ve got to do,” whatever it was he said.

Well I don’t know I’ve forgotten what he told me but he said, “You should do this, what you are doing is all wrong” and he said, “What score did you get?”, and I went and had a look and I

put 200 rounds on a target out of 400, and 8 of 10 was the standard, well maybe we’ve been dong it wrong, oh. But you’ve got to get bullets on the target, you’ve got to get bombs on the target, that’s what you are there for. I mean you are wasting your time and lives and everything else. If you don’t get the result you are looking of and that is what its all about.

It’s a nasty dirty business.

I had no qualms about shooting the men in the water, I tell you that, none at all.

Oh it think about it, I think about how defenceless they were, but they

you know, the treatment of the Japanese , everywhere, stemmed from their treatment of our prisoners. And I don’t think there was anyone in our armed forces who , at the time they did it, had second thoughts about what they are doing. they might later on, might think about it and think I murdered men and I killed living souls and all the rest of it. But at the time

they did it I don’t think there would be anyone , maybe Aubrey Murphy or who ever it was but, you don’t know about Aubrey Murphy he was the bloke who was court martialled for refusing duty or something.

He was court martialled and shot, an American, he was the only soldier it the American army who was shot for dereliction of duty.

Yes, he was put in front of a firing squad, the only one.

Because he wouldn’t obey orders.

Oh I don’t know, it was portrayed in a picture, Aubrey Murphy was the star of the picture, he wasn’t the fellow but he played the soldier in the picture.

Oh, years and years ago, I’ve forgotten.

Well I never thought I was forced to do things. I was given orders to do them, but I never thought

I’m going to be court martialled if I don’t do it. I mean I was there to fly an aircraft, to take photographs, to bomb, to strafe, if I was told to go out and do it I said, yeah its my turn. Not I’ll be court be court martialled if I don’t do it. And it was just a state of mind

Well I’ve questioned what I was told to do, not because I thought it was a bad thing, well sorry, I questioned that I was told to do because I thought he instructions for doing it were incomplete. And I wasn’t clear on what it was I was doing. the first time I went out and bomb a target in support

of the army, I was given a photograph and was told that was the area you have got to drop your bombs in. It was a photograph of coconut palms, it could have been anywhere. There were no maps that you could relate the photograph to. the result was I went out there and I picked a spot and dropped bombs, it might not have even been within 5 miles of the are that was in the photograph, no idea.

But I thought that was very odd, that all they could give me to pick the area that I had to drop the bombs for the army was a photograph of coconut palms, odd.

No, no. That last job I did the line overlap, photographic job

I was asked if I would do it, I was told you don’t have to, but I thought I mightn’t come back with photographs anyway. But I was asked if I would do, and I said of course I will do it. Because that’s he job we were supposed to do. We were different people perhaps from the concept of

the military man of today. I don’t know, I don’t know if you have got an idea of what a soldier does or doesn’t do, or questions or doesn’t question today. But we were there because we wanted to be there because we were volunteers as distinct from some people who were peacetime volunteers, who joined for a career

rather than to fight a war. And there are some people I met who are like that. So its just a different state of mind.

Well its quite true that you didn’t question orders in the normal sense, the only instance I know of an order that was questioned is the one I mentioned before we broke for lunch. When one of the navigators refused to fly with the pilot, he said he wasn’t good enough to be doing his job, and he was proved to be

right when the pilot killed himself and his navigator a couple of days later. Literally a couple of days later.

I don’t know but he joined us when we were in New Guinea, I don’t know what his background was, he was, all the pilots in the army cooperation squadron were commissioned officers, the navigators weren't but the theory

was if you were mingling with army officers you should be commissioned yourself to work with them. This fellow was a warrant officer, and why he had been posted to the squadron, no circumstances, no one quite knew, but whether he had short circuited the system and come to the squadron without doing the training that we’d done. I don’t know I never did find out his background

he wasn’t , frankly wasn’t with us long enough. We got most of our replacement personnel from 5 squadron who were still in Australia. But he didn’t come from 5 squadron he came from somewhere else, I don’t know where he came he came from, I don’t know how he got into the squadron , it was strange. Another fellow came with him was a Sergeant pilot, I don’t know how the

two of them got there they certainly didn’t come from 5 squadron. Which was normally regarded as how replacement air crew.

he smashed his airplane up, whether he, I don’t know whether he was shot down from the ground, whether he was hit and crashed because of that or whether he got too low and hit a tree. But he smashed up his airplane, got down in the jungle

he and the observer were pulled out and tied to trees and used for bayonet practice. It wasn’t; very pretty, this was right at towards the end of January, towards the end of the campaign in Buna. It was only matter of days after this happened, a jeep up there had gone up to the aircraft and found the bodies of these two tied

to trees. Not very nice.

Well I didn’t learn that that was their fate

I thought they might have been killed in the crash, I didn’t learn that was their fate until after the war. And a lot of those things , I didn’t learn about the two who were killed when their aircraft burnt. That that’s how they were killed until after the war. These things weren’t made public and they weren’t talked about. Overall, during those times.

There were certain things that were talked about, there was a very infamous episode when the pilot of one of the aircraft in 22 squadron was captured by the Japanese and beheaded, and that is a very public sort of information, a lot of publicity was given to that, but

maybe that was done with a purpose to stiffen our backbone if you like. You never like to hear about your fellow man being treated like that. Yet we did it to a lesser degree with the Japanese, that’s life.

Well he sat here in this lounge room and told us about it. and he said that he was told the consequences of refusing to fly, he said, “I am not refusing to fly, I am refusing to fly with that pilot” But I don’t think that would have made much difference if that was his only

defence. But he was hauled up before the CO and he was told the consequences of his action, and he told us as he sat here that while he was with the CO being told about this, the phone call came through that this bloke had killed himself. And the CO said, well apparently you were right, he wasn’t a fit pilot to fly with

and he was never court martialled although that would have been the consequences of his actions. Perhaps in other circumstances.

Well the biggest barrier to a relationship developing between them is the rank.

Most of the navigators were Sergeants and the officers and Sergeants didn’t fraternise, either on or off the station. In those days.

Not 100 percent. But it was a big barrier, we didn’t fraternise in the mess, where normally fraternisation takes place

Sergeants could invite officers into their mess, but couldn’t invite Sergeants into the officers mess. And there were a couple of occasions when I visited to Sergeants mess but that wasn’t the way you built up a close relationship with the Sergeant. The only time that you really had anything close to any sort of close relationship was in

your actually flying operation, in the crew room itself, or in the aircraft. And then again you had changes to your navigator, I had 3 , 4, 4 or 5 different navigators through the time I was with the squadron. Some were posted away, some perhaps thought I wasn’t a good pilot, I don’t know.

Anyway they did get changed around and it wasn’t a close relationship for those reasons I suppose. We called one another by our Christian names, we didn’t carry it that far but it wasn’t a social relationship. It wasn’t one were you would go out and get drunk together.

Oh I don’t think there is anything lost by a closer relationship, I think it might have worked better. Some of the fellows had commissioned navigators, the fellow I was telling you about

who sat here on the lounge, he was a commissioned officer at the time this happened. The incident about the non flying, he was commissioned at that stage and he was working with a commissioned pilot. Except for the one occasion where he was told to fly with this warrant officer. But I think it would have worked

perhaps it would have worked better if it had been a closer relationship that developed in the officers mess rather than the Sergeants’ mess. The, most of the Sergeants were commissioned while we were in New Guinea, but it was only a very short period, that we were all in the one mess, most of the Sergeants were in the Sergeants mess.

Well Peace time you have always got a posting if you went from a Sergeant to warrant officer or commissioned officer, for the reason that your have just outlined, that there are problems but it didn’t happen during the war. You didn’t get posted away because , all the Sergeants who were commissioned came into our officer’s mess and

they were all welcomed of course because had been working with them for a long while. We knew them, we knew they were good blokes. But they, that wasn’t the case in peace time it was different set of rules in peace time.

We had the squadron training at Camden, there was no particular reason why it should be there. We didn’t work with the army, the only thing we did which was served us at

a later stage, the reconnaissance aspect of our work. this was in the middle of ’42, May, June, July 1942, and it was petty cold. This was at the time when the Americans were just coming out. The American air force was just coming out and training their pilots in the Kittyhawk aircraft which was a new aircraft of the American

air force just as it was for us. And they had dispersed airstrips all along Sydney out along the banks of the Nepean River, up its head waters. And we used to go out and we’d do a reconnaissance over the area to try and pick up these dispersed aircraft which was supposed to be camouflaged and hidden and it was quite hard to pick them up

but we were doing that as part of our training we found a lot of the strips when they were operating and we used to cover the roads south and the railway lines south through Sydney right down as far as Picton, Campbelltown and Picton and watch for army movements in trucks down the road and trains on the railway line. And of course this

was all supposed to be part of the training for the army cooperation. there wasn’t much of this sort of work, trucks and roads and railway lines when we got to New Guinea but it was all part of the low flying that we had to do and the training to watch for something while we were making sure we didn’t hit trees. We didn’t see it that way at the time but it tur5ned out to be good training for that. We did a little bit of simulated shooting

with the army, not with live ammunition but simulated shooting and just doing the radio communication part of it. So that we would all be proficient and understand one another as to what we were doing. We just had to imagine that a shell had landed, give a correction and then the army would respond to that and shoot again, but that was the work we were doing at the

time. We were there we were equipped with radios, the aircraft were equipped with radios, armour plate, and we had a lot of transport provided for the squadron so that we would be a mobile squadron. I don’t know what they thought we were going to do as a mobile squadron, where they thought we were going. As soon as we got the posting to New Guinea all the transport was shipped off somewhere else,

we didn’t take it with us. We might have taken a couple of trucks, but not all the transport we were given when we were at Camden. So we didn’t know really what we were going to do, what our fate was or what our future was from the events that happened at Camden. But it was cold wether there, it was, oh I got onto the tiger moth aircraft, we were equipped not only with transport but

with two tiger moth communications aircraft. More than two, it must have been more than two, we went down to Cootamundra by train, picked up these aircraft from Cootamundra and flew them back in a very tight formation, right back to Camden. I was talking to one of the fellows from the squadron

during the lunch break and I was remembering an incident that happened while we had these tiger moths at Camden. and we had a very heavy wind storm, and one of the fellows who was flying the tiger moth tried to land it in this wind storm. And he lost control of the aircraft and flipped over and damaged the upper surface of the wing, and probably the rudder and few other things

As punishment the CO made this pilot commissioned officer repair the aircraft himself. He had to get out with his whatever tools they used to repair them with cloth to cover the wings and needle and thread to fix the cloth on, and do it all himself and get the aircraft back into flying condition. And that was pretty grim, it was a nasty sort of thing to do. But

that happened while we were at Camden. From Camden we moved up to Kingaroy. And that was where we had, struck an ITS initial training school at Kingaroy. They went there way and we went our, we were in the aerodrome, they were in the buildings surrounding the aerodrome. And we didn’t have very much to do with the trainees except when it came

to the question of who would go and be suitable for pilot material and who wouldn’t. But test was leg length, could you reach the rudder pedals. and poor buggers they had to get in the aircraft and try and reach the rudder pedals, there were some pretty short fellows I had to tell one fellow he wasn’t going to make it I think he walked around the other side of the aircraft and joined the group that were going to make it but

they put these fellows through this test, can you reach the rudder pedals on the Wirraway, you are probably pilot material if you do. While we were there we had a dispersed flight at Rockhampton. And they, we were sent up there to work with the US 32nd division. It was equivalent to a militia division, I think they call them the national guard in American. but they were

untrained soldiers and had to be trained not only in their land warfare tactics but in the working with army cooperation and aircraft. So we got to know these fellows , got to know the officers in charge of them and we worked them for 2 or 3 weeks until they were moved north and the disperse flight was moved

back to Kingaroy.

They didn’t teach us much.

Oh, they taught us how to drink spirits. While we were at Kingaroy we’d always had a good bar at the squadron wherever we were at Canberra or Camden, we always had well stocked bar, while we were at Kingaroy rationing came in.

And it was restricted what we could buy was restricted so they cut out all the fancy drinks. Being very naïve and not being aware of these things I was induced one night with another fellow to have one drink of everything in the bar. And I think we had 40 different drinks, there were half a dozen liqueurs and different beers and different things

like that but we had one of everything. And that wasn’t a very nice experience the next day. That was probably the hardest lesson I learnt, how not to drink. And but the Americans were great, we couldn’t get any amount of beer or any amount of spirits from rationing on, but he Americans always seemed to have spirits an they preferred spirits to beer. And

they used to get these bottles of beer and post operation get together they used to pass around these bottles of gin and brandy and drink direct from the bottle of gin and brandy. That wasn’t very nice, they seemed to be able to put up with it and stomach it, but our officers couldn’t. I kept out of it I was too young to be allowed to join in

with that sort of thing. But some of our blokes and drinking spirits straight out of the bottle, its got no future. but he Americans did it that was apparent. One of their tricks that they taught us, apart from that, nothing in military tactics. they were learning more than we were , they were learning to work with the army, with the air force and they were learning their own

tactics at the same time. They subsequently went to New Guinea and when we went up there we were working with the same people, the 32nd division and the Buna campaign. And they weren’t terribly enthusiastic soldiers. General MacArthur sent General Eichelberger up to command the forces on the ground

in the Buna campaign. And he is reported to have said, “Take Buna or don’t come back” to Eichelberger and Eichelberger did with the assistance of the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces], push in and take Buna and then that’s when the Japanese resistance started to crumble when they lost the Buna Mission. but I was going to say,

Yeah, oh , no Eichelberger was very… what’s the word I want, he was very taken with the work the squadron did, his artillery and with the spotting and reconnaissance and he is on record as saying that if it was an

American squadron it would be taken back to American after the campaign and (f…UNCLEAR) and paraded through the city as a group of heroes. He had a very high regard for the work that we did and that’s borne out by the three silver stars that he awarded 2 or 3 pilots in our group. And

as I said earlier, we had 5 decorations from that campaign, for personnel and the squadron, more than any other squadron had for that campaign.

You mean when I was in limbo.

Well do I have to tell you how it happened? A young lady of my acquaintance had mumps and I picked it up from her. And it turned nasty when we were in Rockhampton. And I thought, I developed a rash on the chest, and I thought, I went to the doctor and they thought it was some sort of dengue fever or something. Anyway they took me up to the Rockhampton general hospital

and they put me in bed and it turned out to be mumps. So down to isolation I went and I was down there not very comfortable at all for some weeks, a couple of weeks, whatever it was 10 days, I don’t know how long they kept me there. Then when I came out of ho…, while I was in hospital

actually while I was in hospital I received a letter from one of the squadron fellows saying the squadron has been posted to New Guinea. So I didn’t know what was going to happen I went back after I was discharged from hospital to Kingaroy. And when I got there all the aircraft had gone, all the transport had gone. It was only a skeleton staff packing up the rest of the beds and equipment

and they said, well the squadron going onto New Guinea and you have been detached from the squadron. So I said, Well what do I do now?” and they said, “Well you go on leave until you get another posting, and you’ll go home and report to embarkation depot in Sandgate in Brisbane on whatever date it was” perhaps the end

of October. Something like that. So I went home, one of those photographs in that album was taken when I was on leave. And I went home and went , came back to Sandgate on leave. There was one other fellow an air gunner there, when I arrived. He’d just been detached from somewhere or another. We were the only two in the embarkation depot. And then a whole group

of trainee pilots arrived, there must have been 20 or 30 of them. And I thought well when they get posted I will be posted with them, I have be sent here to wait until they arrive and we will all go away together. I woke up one morning and they had all gone and I was still there. The air gunner fellow got posted to a Catalina squadron in, wherever they were based, somewhere on the Queensland coast and I

was the only fellow there. I got my promotion from pilot officer to flying officer when I was there. The adjutant, was the adjutant at Canberra when I had been there and we knew one another he promulgated the promotion and told me I could put on my new insignia. So I sat around

for another week or so and then I got he posting to New Guinea. Back to 4 squadron, so I hopped on a troop train, I had orders to fly across to New Guinea from Townsville. I hopped on a troop train and up to Townsville. When I got to Townsville, I must have been about the 8th or 10th of November, and the aircraft and the

personnel of the squadron who were flying from Kingaroy to Moresby were still sitting in Townsville. They’d been held up because the ground staff couldn’t get into Port Moresby and there were no ground staff to attend to the aircraft when they arrived so they had to wait until the ground staff arrived in Moresby. So there they were sitting there at Garbutt air strip waiting for orders to fly over. I hop onto the flying boat and fly over ahead of them. So I arrived

there about the 7th or 8th of maybe the 10th of November. And that’s when I rejoined the squadron, and I mentioned earlier the first person who greeted me was the first instructor I had at Narromine flying school. He asked me what I was doing there and I told him and he said, “You won’t be flying Wirraways in operation, you’ll be equipped with something else”, sounds like famous last words though.

We were going to fly Wirraways , nothing else. And then about the middle of the month, the rest of the squadron arrived. I have got somewhere in my papers the movement orders and show what aircraft flew out of Kingaroy and onto New Guinea and where they stopped and what time they arrived in New Guinea. but

it was about the middle of November they arrived, I arrived about a few days before them. My first operational flight was the 17th of November.

Well I was told to go up and do a weather check on the gap. And I said, “Where is the gap?” and they said, “Up there”. No maps no nothing, just go and find it. So when I found it I didn’t know whether I had found it or not, I thought well this looks like it

and this is clear. The biscuit bombers the Douglas DC 3s which was supplying the troops from the air and just dumping the stuff overboard when they got to Kokoda were coming backwards and forwards from the gap. So I said, “Yeah, its all clear” and we went over, flew right down along the road or track as it was then past Waropi and Soputa and Dobodura and right across to a place called

Oro Bay which is south of Buna. Just looking, there was nothing in the air nothing of any note, I wasn’t doing a reconnaissance I wasn’t looking for Japanese aircraft I wasn’t trying to bomb anyone, I was just curious and looking. and when it got to somebody down in the boats down in the water Oro Bay way waving madly, so we turned around and came back and flew over the Owen Stanleys

and came back. there was nothing exciting about the trip. There was a fell of trepidation about going over there onto the northern side of the island where the Japs were enforced and still retreating, just been pushed out of Kokoda. And so they were still in force being pushed back by the army. And it wasn’t until January

until they were actually pushed right out.

At Bomana, Bomana air strip was about 12 miles out of Moresby and it was strip that had been conducted by, constructed by the Americans before we got there and they had a flown a squadron of air cobras,

quite an inferior aircraft, the best that the Americans could come up with at the stage of the war. And their squadron had actually left the strip, the Bomana strip, but they had left all their aircraft behind, these air cobras were parked all over the place. No batteries, no guns, no nothing in them they were just almost wrecks because they

had been pretty badly mauled by the Japanese when they came over in , they got up in the air. They were commonly known as the fishing fleet, because they used to fly out to sea when the Japanese arrived and come back when the Japanese had gone. And they were quite commonly known as the fishing fleet, this squadron. But that strip was adjacent to the camp site

I suppose a couple of miles away from the camp site. and curiously enough at the end of the strip, the strip, the end towards which you took off was a cemetery which is now the Bomana War Cemetery. And tended by the war graves commission and quite a big cemetery, there is a bit daunting to take off and fly over a cemetery at the end of the strip. But

that’s where they started it , it wasn’t an all weather strip, we were never prevented by flying by bad weather ruining the strip, and we were really never really prevent ed from flying by bad weather. The morning in the November to June that I was there, the morning were always clear and bright and blue sky. Except for one morning, the afternoons

the clouds came up and it would rain, not torrential rain, but just steady rain. the one day that we were prevented from flying was the day that I had an ear infection which presumably I had picked up from the river when I had bathing before we had showers and a fog, of all things, a fog came down over the

strip and prevented us flying. So I said, “While the fog is there, while we can’t go up I’ll go up to the doctor and let him have a look at my ear.” And he said, “Yes, if we don’t do something about that it will develop into something pretty nasty” So he worked his magic and put something in it and said, “You are grounded for 2 or 3 days”. That was the day I was supposed to go out on a trip

somebody else was sent out in my place, and was finished up in a ball of flame. That was the one day we were prevented from flying by bad weather. Somebody was watching over me. Although if I had gone on that trip I could still be

alive or I wouldn’t have suffered the fate that that bloke did because I wouldn’t have been flying where he was, I wouldn’t have been at the same height, I wouldn’t have been at the same speed, I might not even have seen what he said and went down to have a look at, nothing would have been exactly the same. Where he was hit by ground fire and brought down in flames, I wouldn’t have been in the same place, which makes it harder.

Not at the time, not at the time. Prior to this, this happened towards the end of December, the beginning of December the fellow I was sharing a tent with went out and flew his airplane into the mountain and jumped out and walked out of the jungle. The only one of 4 who went in on this day, no it

wasn’t; hard to deal with, the second occasion sort of thing had happened.

He wasn’t away for two weeks in the jungle, he was probably a week, probably a week, and if its of interest to you I can get an account that he wrote of his experiences, I was looking at it yesterday.

He’s got a quite a fascinating story about what happened. He got out of the aircraft, he got his navigator out, he said when his navigator got out I got out, made sure he got out, when he got out I got out. He said, “My parachute tangled in the aircraft as I was trying to get out” He said, “By the time I got it untangled I was almost in the trees”,

he said, “My Parachute opened as I hit the trees” and he said, “I got down , I cut my leg but it didn’t do a great deal of damage” and he said, "I was follow the creek and I was trying to use the creek to bring me back to the south side of the island” and he said, "I had no food, apparently we hadn’t been given any food in those

packs around our waist or else he didn’t have one. He said, “I had no food and I saw a duck sitting on the river” so he said, “I got my 38 out and I was creeping up on it to shoot it” and he said, "The gun went off” and he shot himself in the foot. That’s the… , where that phrase originated believe it or not.

And he said , “I didn’t take my boot off, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it on gain if I took it off” so he said, “I plodded on with my foot, the wound in it” he said, “I suffered from malaria” and he said, "I was out on my feet and I was walking along a track and I was intercepted by natives”

and he said, "I thought that looked a bit hostile so I kept my pistol handy” and he said, "I don’t know whether they thought I was going to try and get in amongst their women, or whether they through I was a god because I had come down out of the sky or because I was a blond headed man” He said, “I don’t know what it was, they looked

a bit hostile, I kept my pistol handy” he said, “they looked after me and attended to my foot” And they carried him out and to the nearest hospital which was at the top of the road and this other fellow who was sharing a tent, he and I went up there and we saw him the first day he was brought back into the hospital. He was

a bit of a mess, he’d been without proper food for the best part of a week, he had a wounded foot, he was suffering from malaria. Turned out he had an ulcer as well, he was a bit of a mess, anyway. He wrote this account of his experiences, he was posted back to Australia, he recuperated and then went to central flying school and trained as

an instructor. And he was a Melbourne man, moved to Sydney where we became very close after he moved to Sydney. And he and I were well associated in the squadron association and his wife and my wife became very firm friends and played tennis together and voluntary workers at the same hospital in Sydney. We got very close and he died

just last year. So that was a very sad loss, he’d had heart bypasses and all sort of problems, all sorts of operations, and it was mazing the work he was able to do right up until the time when he died. He wasn’t bed ridden he’d been to Melbourne to attend the funeral of his brother in law. And driving back at Gundagai he got out of the car and into a motel and laid down and

he just died. The only way to go.

It was pretty grim when we got there, it was just black mud. There were no buildings there were a few tents

the messes , the officers mess and the Sergeants mess were just tents. A very basic cooking facilities and a very basic food. The first thing that happened to improve our conditions was the provision of showers. Up til that time we had been going down to the Baloki River[?] and bathing in the river, which was where I think I picked up this ear infection.

And then gradually things started to get better and the camp aspect of things. We had a mess hut built, a native type mess hut, a long building with a thatched roof, must have been oh about 40 or 50 feet long and 20 feet wide. Quite a big hut in which we

used both for a mess hut and for just socialising after a meal. And then gravel started to arrive. they were tearing down a hill just between us and Moresby and getting ravel for al these camps from his hill, half the hill had been dug out when we got there. Anyway

they started building and bringing in gravel covered the parade ground, tracks to the various sleeping quarters to the mess huts and then a second hut appeared, one was kept for mess and one was kept for social activities. And things started to get better, we had

Either

the tents themselves were enough camouflage, most of them were in trees or the just the huts themselves, there was no other worry. The parade ground the gravel was this sort of colour. It couldn’t have stood out more clearly from the black soil that was there, the rest of camp if you tried. But

we had Japanese raid on Moresby, they used to come over every night. But a couple of daylight raids weren’t very pleasant and they used to do a lot of damage. they’d hit supply dumps, petrol would go up with great black smoke everywhere, they’d do damage when they came over it wasn’ta question of , they couldn’t bomb accurately, they’d do damage but

they didn’t ever bomb our camp site. they had better things to do. Why would they want to bomb a camp sight? A poor old Wirraway squadron . Actually the Japanese out on the Northern side of the island hated the Wirraways, they got hold of us they didn’t treat us very kindly.

They were dispersed in camouflage, they were , the because the Americans were on the flat side of the strip. It wen tup the hill on the high side and then I was flat on the other side of the strip. Because the Americans were there first they had all the dispersal bays on the flat ground. We had all our dispersal bays on the

side of the hill, quite an effort to taxi an aircraft up a hill, and then turn it around in the dispersal bay without letting it run down the hill again. You couldn’t push them up, they had to taxi them up on the air strip with the motor. It was quite an effort to get them up, quite a trick getting it up and getting it into place and getting the chocks under the wheels before we ran down again. But we used to get them up there and we used to have guards on them, guards used to go to sleep

every night and an orderly officer would have to go down there and wake them up and tell them to get on with the job and look after the aircraft. I did that more than once. No fun, I men you are in a war zone and the guards are on duty and you get down on an aircraft drive up in a truck climb up on the aircraft and have a look in it, plant bombs in and the guard doesn’t even wake up.

That was a joke, but oh no, things gradually got better, towards the end we actually acquired a car that was used for people going on leave. You cold go into Moresby and there were clubs in Moresby for officers and Sergeants and you could go in and sleep. You didn’t do anything different in there it was just

a different environment. It was quite a pleasant club, the officers club. It was built out over the water, and very spacious not many people used it, it was very quiet and you cold get in there and spend a couple of days. But we used this car for the pleasure of the officers and the Sergeant. We even had a touring troop of

what were they? Army blokes who were put on a mixed show with some dressed up as women and some as men. And they were excellent they were a wonderful show and it lifted the spirits no end. The most nights, not every night but most nights there were picture shows.

And we’d all pile in a truck, the transport people would know where the picture shows were, we’d all pile in the truck with out chairs and our mackintoshes to keep the rain off, it rained every night. And off we’d go and half way through the picture show the siren would go, the picture show would shut down and all the Americans would bolt for the bush. We usually just sat there and waited till the all clear was given and the picture show

started again. There was no point in running you were just as likely to run into a bomb as you were trying to run away from it. And we weren’t in any exposed areas, any target areas, so there is no point in trying to avoid a bomb, just as easy to sit where you were and wait until things quieten down. But most nights you would have a picture show on. Some blokes didn’t like doing that, they used to sit in the mess and play poker. Good luck to them

I was never a card fan. But the camp gradually got itself organised. And it was not pleasant but it was quite liveable in the conditions that we had. We had a batman, first batman I never had in the air force and he did all our washing and cleaning, made our beds.

Packed up our clothes and put them away for us. And that was most of the story of our life at Bomana.

Yes that was in the Buna campaign, when we were doing reconnaissance and photography and artillery spotting. The 25 pounders wanted targets that they could range on and shoot all night to kept these

little Japanese people awake, and break their morale, which was the whole purpose in shooting all the time. And you go up to do a ranging on one target, afternoon they’d want something else. In the mean time you’d find these people swimming in the water and you’d go up and you’d do an exercise on them. The same day that we found them

and I had that frustrating experience of stoppages in the guns, I went up that afternoon, and I know one bloke made it. Cause I got across to Sanananda point and he was just coming out of the water. And I couldn’t I tried hard but I couldn’t get him because he got behind a big rock. And every time he came around this side, he ducked around this side of the rock. But

at least one bloke made it, but that’s the sort of thing that happened. You are familiar with episode of the Wirraway and the Zero? No, alright I’ll tell you about that too. This was just about Christmas time, December the 24th I think it was. We were at Popendetta and

we had a couple of aircraft in the air and there was a warning of a Japanese air raid and the radio operator from the ground called the aircraft in the air and told them that the Japanese were coming over . There was going to be an interception by American aircraft and get the hell out of it and come back and land at the air strip. And I came back, I’d been up, I came back

and I landed and the other fellow we didn’t hear from, a fellow by the name of Jack Archer. And he didn’t reply, we thought when we kept calling him and no reply and the bombers came over and the fighters and the Americans took them on and blew hell out of them. Couldn’t get in touch with Jack and we thought, he’s been caught.

By these Japanese fighters and we have lost him. And the next thing we know, a Wirraway comes circling around the strip, comes down and lands and Jack and his navigator jump out of the aircraft and say we’ve shot down a Zero. We hardly believed him he said, “We were flying around and we didn’t hear anyone call, we didn’t hear anyone say come back, so we were just

doing our reconnaissance we were right up the coast” Well he was too far away to hear. He said, “We came back and there was a wreck just of the coast, one of Japanese ships bringing the troops in when they first landed had been sunk. So I came back to this wreck, just off Gona and he said, “I saw this aircraft flying around the wreck, so I recognised it was a Japanese aircraft so I just dived down on it

pressed the triggers and hit him, he turned over and he went straight into the water”. And that’s the only time a Wirraway has shot down a Zero and the only time its likely to happen. It was confirmed by ground troops who saw it happen. And that happened on I think it was the 24th of December. I got a photograph of him being chaired when he got back.

And there was signal sent back to Moresby, “Archer shot down a Zero, send 6 bottles of beer.” The story is that the beer was sent, but that’s not true. the island was dry under Macarthur’s orders at that stage there was no beer, it was a nice signal to send but they never got any, well that’s the story, send 6 bottles of beer and it duly arrived, but they didn’t get it.

But that’s the story of the Zero and its a true one about a Wirraway shooting down a Zero. that was going to lead onto something else and I have forgotten what it was. What were you asking about?

Oh yeah.

Well it depends on what you were doing, if you were doing an artillery shoot it was, this is, they’d show you a photograph that had been taken of the area. There was a mission, a civilian mission at Buna, which is simply known as the Buna mission and one of the shoots I did was on this particular building. They just showed you a photograph and said to do a shoot on this mission

want you to do a range on that. And this is the call sign, they gave us a call sign when you get up, might be blanket and dusty, it could be anything. And when you get up, call them up, they will respond and you call for the fire and they will answer and carry out the shoot. That was a standard sort of briefing for an artillery shoot. But of course the photography was different. You’d go and you’d photograph

a particular point, or you’d do the line overlap as the one I described at Wau. Or you do a new sort of photography that they developed it was, instead of going vertical out of the bottom of the aircraft, you were shooting out of the side of the aircraft, they called it a (UNCLEAR) oblique. And it was supposed to be

accurate but because of aircraft moving you couldn’t guarantee that the grid that was superimposed on the photograph you took out the side of the aircraft, that the grid was accurately superimposed on the photograph. So any readings you took from the grid to take a

reading from, I have trouble remember terms these days. If you wanted a grid reference from the grid superimposed on the photograph you couldn’t guarantee how accurate it was because the aircraft might be level at the time the photograph was taken, it might be like that, might be sideways. So it wasn’t a very successful operation, the (UNCLEAR) oblique. But we went out and experimented with that.

And we’d simply do the reconnaissance, I told you about he hospital, I told Keirnan about the hospital that I shot up, you won’t tell anyone will you. And if was amazing what was down there underneath the trees. Until you got up there and looked, I mean on the ground, and got up there and looked you weren't aware of half the stuff the Japanese had up there.

But we were looking al the time and every time we’d see something different. But that might take 2 or 3 trips in one day. We had, I think I ma quoting correctly, 50 sorties in the month of November 1942. From the 8th or the 9th of November until the end of November.

That’s 20 days, 50 sorties, that’s 2 to 3 a day. And we were operating from Moresby then, it wasn’t until December that we went over the dispersed flights. We were flying right over the Owen Stanleys and back again we did 50 in a month. If , I told you how upset I was about the squadrons that represented the mission to

the memorial service just a couple of months ago. If either of those squadrons did 50 missions in the whole of the campaign, that’s all, we did 50 missions in the first month. Very disappointing.

I was given a little, what is it, St Christopher medal, St Christopher? God of safe return or something or other. I was given one of those, I think I lost it, I don’t know what happened to it, I might, I just don’t have any memory. but no , not necessarily.

That’s a bad practice. It’s a bad thing to do. There is only one way to get into the front seat of the Wirraway and that’s to put your foot on the step on the outside, put your other foot on the seat inside and sit down. But developing a habit such as you are suggesting consciously

is bad, because one day you’ll say, did I do that? Your concentration goes and you do something silly.

I don’t think so.

I don’t know, they could have, they could have, I mean people do silly things

like putting on the left shoe first, I didn’t ever do that, I didn’t have the imagination to do things like. No I didn’t I don’t know if other people did but it’s a bad habit to get into , to form that sort of habit. Because one day you’ll say, did I do it that way. And it might be too late.

No in the number of sorties, when I was up there our tour of duty was 6 months. And I was there from November to June, which was nearly 8 months, a bit over 7 months.

But it was later extended to 12 months and that was very hard on the air crew, particularly if they weren’t and I don’t know whether they were able to get on top of malaria. There were days or times when it was hard to find a pilot who was able to fly, malaria hit us so badly. Malaria and dysentery, dysentery was a bad one too.

But I was acting as CO of the squadron at one stage, probably because I was the only pilot who was on my feet. I wanted an aircraft tested, I’d been up in the engineering department and they said, we want some one to test the aircraft and I said, “Well I don’t want to hog all the flying I’ll get somebody else to do it”. and I

couldn’t find another pilot in the flight who was serviceable they were all in the sick lift. I finally had to do it myself. And I was extremely lucky, I didn’t get either dysentery or malaria. One fellow who got dysentery, a fellow named Steve McGovern, no Steve Major, he was never

a robust sort of a man, but he was one of those people who once you met him you’d never forget him. He had an unending supply of jokes that he would tell, we’d go out at night flying and sit around the lamps and marking the flare path and he’d tell jokes one after the other without repeating himself all night. You couldn’t forget him, anyway he picked

up this dysentery, there is a specific name for it but I have forgotten. And he literally became a skeleton, I visited him in hospital and he was just bones sticking out, like the prisoners in Singapore, the same sort of look about him, because of his dysentery. And I met him again later on in life, I became member of the lions club and he was the district governor of one of the

districts and he was exact opposite, he was huge, huge. He’d gone from one thing to the other, probably some reaction from the dysentery he had had which impaired some control mechanism in his body, and he was huge. Very sad, very sad. But that was later on long after the war

was over.

Yeah, the Wau air strip was put in by, I suppose it was the plasser development, the gold mining company that worked Wau and Bulolo. And there was no road into Wau

they were working on one when we were up there but there wasn’t one at the time. And everything had to be flown in, they used these big German tri-motor Fokkers to fly the equipment in for the mining. And There was no, the mining was done in a valley there was no, just no flat land, so they put this strip on the side of the hill and the Fokkers could land on it

or take off on it because they would stop very quickly going up the hill and accelerate very quickly coming down so it was, worked, it was quite feasible. But it was a very dicey operation. the first time there you really had to think twice about how you were going to put your airplane down. Because if you landed too short you’d have to get the rest of the way up the hill. If you landed too far up the hill you run off the end.

Anyway there was a big hill a the back strip and that was the obstacle that had to be overcome if you misjudged the landing. And one day I was shaving and , yeah we used to shave up there, I was shaving and I heard this mighty roar. And rushed out side to see what had happened

and one of the American Douglas biscuit bombers, they used to land on the strip they didn’t dump this stuff there, thy landed on the strip, had misjudged this, his approach very, very badly, full power on pull his wheels up and tried to go around again. and we thought he was going to take the General with him in his hut over the side of the hill. I swear his wing didn’t miss the hut by more than 10 feet.

anyway he got around again but I didn’t think it was possible to get an aircraft to go around again on that strip, and particularly a big Douglas. It was a frightening experience just watching him. But this strip it was incredible that it was such a steep hill that was used to flying.

Oh you couldn’t level it. You couldn’t because it was part of the mountain. Maybe these days they couldn’t level it along the valley floor but there was no time for that, getting the equipment in to do it would have been the great problem at that stage. but this strip and the operations that

we ran from the strip were right beside the gold mine working and they were all alluvial, they had great big hoses that they used with water pressure to wash the earth down and then take the gold out. It was all still there and some of the blokes used to go out and do a bit of panning for gold. I don’t know if they ever got anything , but it was a very rich mine. But that was an extraordinary operation from Wau

not just from the point of view of the strip. But the point of view of the fighting that took place from the strip. When our flight got up there, the Japanese were right at the bottom of the strip, in the valley floor, ready to take us and take control of the strip and stop all the supplies coming in to support the army. They managed to get the army in before the Japanese

took the strip and the , and the Japanese were pushed back. We helped in that doing the reconnaissance a bit of rounding up of the Japanese as they retreated. One of the pilots got up there and he found them retreating up the other side of the hill and he directed the artillery onto the retreating Japanese and directed on so successfully that he

annihilated most of the Japanese who were in that group, I don’t know how many there were I wasn’t there. But it was one of the incidents that took place there.

Well it was always a problem, the Japanese weren’t close enough to infiltrate our lines, once they were pushed back they retreated back towards Salamaua, Salamaua, you came from Salamaua, up the side of the range

through the valley and down into the Wau valley. And when the Japanese retreated they were pushed back into this valley that looked down onto Salamaua and we used to fly up there and do a reconnaissance to see where they were. Look down and have a look at Salamaua, and we weren’t allowed, in the Wirraways, we weren’t allowed to go down there. They put a

stopper on the areas that we could fly because of the aircraft we were flying. So security was always a problem and anybody could have had he so wanted been a menace to those installations there. But so long as the guard stayed awake every=thing

should be in order, it was just a question of whether they stayed awake. A lot of them didn’t.

Yeah, the bomb landed over there.

Well there were regular air raids on the strip. I told you about he fellow that got the DFM, he was in an

aircraft that came and landed on the strip in the middle of an air raid, they pulled up hopped to of the aircraft and a bomb landed right beside the aircraft while they were lying on the ground beside it. The only injuries they suffered was Alan Cole who was the observer, got a piece of shrapnel under his shoulder blade, the pilot didn’t get any injury at all , but the aircraft was a wreck. It went up

in flames. And this other occasion when I was up there we got the warning that the aircraft were coming over, the bombers were coming over, so we hopped down into a slit trench which was just outside the hut. Memories are coming back. There was a hedge growing along the edge of slit trench

I don’t know whether it was supposed to hide us or the slit trench was just conveniently dug beside the hedge. Anyway when the bombers dropped their bombs one dropped on the other side of the hedge, and the hedge was blown to hell and dropped all over me, wasn’t any further away from that, I was down in the slit trench, the bomb was up on the ground level but the debris flying everywhere the hedge was blown out of

creation and a lot of shrapnel actually pierced the wall of the hut which was right next door to the trench, slit trench, and I got a hole in the brim of my hat which was hanging by, not on my head I had a steel helmet on my head, on the brim of my had that was hanging in the wall in the hut and

I had a belt for my 38 an a piece of shrapnel cut through half way through the belt, just sliced half way through, not right through, but half way through the belt. I was lucky I was wearing it. But that was the closest I ever got in an air raid there was a couple of other in Moresby when they did quite a bit of damage.

Not very nice. Not very nice at all. No it never, I found it was never a worry until such time as the bombs landed. I mean I was in a air raid at Popendetta when we first went over there

and these aircraft came flying straight over the strip, the aircraft sitting right out in the middle of the open space, it wasn’t dispersed it wasn’t camouflaged it wasn’t anything, and down comes these bombs. And I ran for it. But until the bombs started coming you just stood there and watched them. It was just, not for me, it was a detached interest you had in what was happening.

Well we thought it must have been hell for the Japanese and it wasn’t until we pushed them out and walked up and saw the placements that they had dug

just what sort of situation they had been in when all this artillery bombardment had been going on.

What sort of a position they must have been in and what sort of affect it must have had on morale. It wasn’t until you got up there until you realised how bad it must have been for them.

Well mostly debris, although the

dug outs the underground dug outs were very well protected. The coconut palms, all the tops of them were shot off. Just no vegetation on the top of the coconut palms at all. They were just like an electric light pole because the shells had been coming over hitting the things and exploding up there, up the top and not doing the damage down below. but even at that they were very well protected with coconut palms and

sand bas and all the rest of it and the deaths must have been very few and far between from the artillery bombardment, but the affect on morale wouldn’t have been very good at all.

Oh I don’t think pride, no , very pleased that that campaign was over. Quite funny

the things we did, we walked up to the strip and there was a Zero on the strip, parked at the side of the strip, it looked as if it was ready to fly. But obviously it wasn’t, they hadn’t been using it. So it was plainly unserviceable, but we climbed all over it. And it was

quite extraordinary the quality of the workman ship in that Japanese built aircraft, it was absolutely first class. And it was most impressive because where their sheets of metal butted together, they were flush jointed like that. Where the metal sheets in out aircraft joined together, they were like that, and

you know it needs a lot more precise engineering to do that, than to do that, and if has an effect on speed and manoeuvrability and all the other things that make an airplane good. But it was quite strange to find the quality of the workmanship. It was the first time that I had realised that Japan was turning out quality products. Before the war Japanese toys were regarded as a joke, tin muck. But they

sure knew how to make an airplane. And

Well they were very good, they had to be, to achieve the results they did. They not only had the good aircraft but, I mean an aircraft doesn’t shoot other aircraft down, its the pilot that operates it that makes sure that happens.

And they had absolute air superiority until our pilots got aircraft which were capable of matching a Japanese and matching their tactics. But the Japanese were too good for our pilots in the early days of the invasion of Malaya and even New Guinea. And it was a very, very

hard learnt lesson that they first class aircraft and first class pilots. Not withstanding what that lecturer had told us before the Japanese came into the war about the quality of their aircraft. I don’t think anybody took them seriously, couldn’t have.

Well

the image of the Japanese prior to this was that they were little short squat men wearing glasses. They are not like that, some of them are, some of them they seem to have some sort of eye problem, so many of them do wear glasses, but you can’t wear glasses if you are going to fly

not in those aircraft. I mean a lot of Qantas pilots wear glasses these days. But so much of the flying is done by computer that it’s a different ball game all together. In those days you had to have good vision and the Japanese obviously had it. And the mental picture that we had of them was quite wrong.

Learnt a lot.

We couldn’t have operated without them. They were absolutely magnificent. I’ve got a memo over there written by a high army General I think it was saying,

“Don’t send 4 squadron up here to do army cooperation we need an army cooperation squadron but not 4 squadron because they got Wirraways, they are not dependable , they have problems with motors, problems with the aircraft and we need something that is better than the Wirraway to be sent up here, don’t send them” He couldn’t have said it more plainly, yet the ground crew kept us flying.

We didn’t have all the aircraft serviceable all the time, but we had enough aircraft serviceable to do the job we had to do. and it was only because of the work of these ground crew, you couldn’t praise them enough. You know they might have slacked and bludged and may, what do you call those things? Oh, the word won’t come…

Ah, it will come in the middle of the night. They might have slacked and bludged and slack off into corners when they were in Australia and a lot of them did but they buckled down when we got into New Guinea. We , it was crying shame the aircraft that we were provided with. Jack Archer and I had to bring two aircraft back to Australia because they were, had as much flying time and the air frame would take they needed

a complete overhaul which we couldn’t do in New Guinea, and we were to pick up two other aircraft in Australia and fly them back in their place. The ones we took down which were time expired were better aircraft than the ones we picked up and brought back to New Guinea because the work had been done on these aircraft, properly, the ones in New Guinea, the work

on the Australia ones that were picking up hadn’t been, been slovenly and suspect leaking hydraulics, the flaps wouldn’t work, it had to oh. It was a shame, these were palmed off us by people who didn’t want these nasty aircraft from flying school. And they were palmed off to an operational squadron that was operating in New Guinea.

And they went straight into the workshop to be overhauled, those two aircraft. The ones that went down were better than the ones that came back. But they couldn’t fly on because the rules say that after 50,000 hours or whatever it was, you’ve got to have a complete overhaul.

I’m sorry what

With the ground crew? Oh you said air crew.

Yeah, ah no, again this barrier of rank

Oh lord yes. Yeah they serviced it right up to the time that you taxied away from the rank, they were the first ones out to

get you, signal you in and take you out to a special bay or wherever it was that you were going to park the aircraft. They were the first ones onto the aircraft so if you got out, they opened it up, they had a look at the armament, they had a look at the guns, the ammunition , they had a look at the oil and petrol, and reserviced it and have it again, ready to fly again in an hours time.

And they really pulled these aircraft out of a great big deep hole that they had sunk into and made them serviceable and a good operational aircraft.

Oh yes, of course you did.

Oh you just pass the time of day with them and tell them what happened. The first time I went out and came back with holes in the aircraft, I think he was a Sergeant

the Sergeant called me and told me about this . I didn’t tell him, I didn’t know about it. But these things, just a normal relationship. I mean some people you would know better than others, the ones who worked on the aircraft at eth time you were at the

not dispersal, the forward strip, you would know more intimately than the ones who were back in Moresby working on the aircraft in the workshop because you wouldn’t normally, you might talk to the engineer officer about how an aircraft was getting on but you wouldn’t normally pass the time of day or do more than pas the time of day with a mechanic who was working on the aircraft. But on the forward strips you would have a lot more to do with them, but

there was no social life. There was a lot of alcohol, I said it was dry, but there was a lot of alcohol in New Guinea. The old coconut provided it. If you got yourself a coconut and pushed out the eyes and dropped two or three raisons into the coconut and sealed it up again, it would ferment nicely. And you’d

make yourself a very potent brew. I told you about the 2 aircraft we took down to Australia and brought two more back. When we were down there I had some money to buy as much alcohol as I could to bring back. We brought an aircraft full of alcohol back with us. Much as I hate to admit it, it was for the officers mess, not of the Sergeants. and we put this in

the mess. We finished up, I suppose that we got a lot of things that the mess in Townsville didn’t want, just as we did with aircraft. But we finished up with a lot of things that people didn’t want to drink if they drink. And the doctor said, “Well I’ve got some alcohol here” he said, “You tip all of that into a vat and I’ll put in 10 gallons of alcohol and we’ll squeeze a couple of lemons into it, and we’ll make up some punch and

we’ll have all the nurses over from the hospital and we’ll put on this show”, that I told you about, with h men, cross dressers or whatever you call them. Everyone drank this stuff and we had a marvellous night. And that’s how we finished up the alcohol. That was a real party. The nurses

were very charming.

You know there are two things I remember about the party, the nurses and the songs that they sang. There was one bloke there singing , taking a woman’s part, in the show. And he had the most beautiful voice

I don’t know who wrote it , whether it was Schubert of who it was, but he sang a song, Vilia, and it was absolutely beautiful. I remember that as long as I live I think, we had lots of concerts you know we had visiting concert artists as well as the films but that always sticks in my mind that song that he sang that night

ah, there was just comedy sketches, they had probably a chorus, they were dressed up as attractive ladies. And they put it over beautifully, this is getting into the area where we were really winning the war, and things were getting more organised on the home front. And these people used to come around and tour at the forward bases.

And they certainly put on the show for us, we had special stage set up for them. And the CO had the front seat and we lined up behind him. But I can’t remember very much about the concert except that bloke singing.

Vilia

Vilia the with of the woods

my wife would probably know what the context is, but he had a beautiful, I don’t know if he was a tenor, but probably higher than a tenor. The first time I’d seen that sort of show. There were plenty of post war shows of male impersonating females but that was the first time

I’d seen a, this show that came around to the squadron.

Pretty good. After you haven’t seen women for quite a while they looked pretty good. Not as good as the nurses but they were very charming. It was too late to from any sort of relationship we were just about finished our tour.

And we didn’t see much of the nurses out there unfortunately.

I tried. But it was too late we were going home. No I tried to charm one in Rockhampton, that’s another story.

Not telling

Getting?

Well we all knew that we were going home after 6 months, that our tour was 6 months. And it was a question of rotation, we didn’t all go home at once. As aircrew got the chop, to put it bluntly, replacements came from 5 squadron so that there was a flow

of replacement personnel coming up the whole time. In April, the end of April, the first lot of 6 months there, who had done a 6 months tour of duty went back. I don’t know how they picked them, they didn’t pick all the married men, perhaps they picked them on health because so many of the fellows had been so badly affected by malaria. But the first lot went back at the end of April, May they went back again

and I was in the last lot to be sent back. Which made me the longest serving of the aircrew personnel who went across in November 1942. Anyway when it came up it was just a signal to say you were going back. I was posted , no I

wasn’t posted, I got to Townsville and I was told there was two aircraft, not the two we had taken down earlier, but there were two aircraft that had to be taken back to Sydney. To Richmond, and another fellow who was in the same draft as I, got these two aircraft, we had two navigators. Bloody lot of use they were, we had no communication between one another, we had no maps, no nothing.

Except two aircraft that we could hop into and fly it back down the Sydney. And we got down to I suppose it was, this is the first night from Townsville, we got down to Taree and the nearest, it started to get dark. And we had hoped to get right through to Sydney before it got dark. But

the nearest aerodrome was at Wingham which is just 14, 15 kilometres west of Taree, incidentally my wife was born in Taree and came from Taree, I would have been in her territory if we had landed there. But at Wingham, I didn’t know where the aerodrome was and when we , it was time to get down and I looked for somewhere to land and I landed in a blokes, plough, not a ploughed paddock, but one of his paddocks, I had to chase the bullocks off the

ground before I could land. Anyway I got down safely and we spent the night in Wingham and went onto Richmond the next day with these two aircraft. They were clapped out things, they were as bad as the ones we had taken back to New Guinea . I don’t know where they came from, they weren’t the ones that we took down. Anyway we took them out to Richmond and I brought back all sorts of cigarettes and

things of this nature. I brought back a grass skirt which I though would curry favour with one of the females that I’d known before I went off the New Guinea. We got out to Richmond and we had to catch a train into Central. So we all hopped into the train and I said to these three other fellows with me, “Well come and stay at our house, we have got plenty of room” We had a big house, there was plenty of room there.

And I said, “Well come and stay” and one fellows aid, “Well I’m a Tasmanian I’d like to get home” But the other two came and stayed and what did I do I left the grass skirt in the train when I got to Central. So there was no grass skirt for a young lady. But we got home and that’s when I got he posting to 24 squadron. And at 24 squadron I found when I reported there had

just gone back to New Guinea. So I said this is no fun, I’d never flown Vultees I reported to the orderly room, they said, “What are you doing here if you have never flown Vultees” and I said, "I don’t know I was posted here”, “Go on leave” they said, “And we’ll tell you what to do” The next thing I know I am posted to Test and Ferry. Test and Ferry was in two parts, one was test flight and one was ferry flight. Test flight was

testing the aircraft that were coming from the De Havilland assembly drop on the other side of the airport. And they were assembling mosquitos over there and they were testing these mosquitos. Anyway I didn’t go to test, I went to ferry and the first job I had was to take an aircraft from Wagga to Darwin. And that was an experience. We had to fly

to a place to a place called Mount Eba which became the rocket range in the centre of Australia, it was a commercial air strip actually. We were lucky it was a commercial air strip because it was quite a featureless sort of country, and we were trying to find this in this dusk of a day when you hardly see a feature from one distinguish one feature from another. And lo and behold what happened? A commercial aircraft took off from the strip and

blew up a great cloud of dust. Probably would have flown right over the top of it if it hadn’t down that. Anyway we stayed there and we continued up through to Darwin and I'm just trying to think of the sequence. From there we had to fly to Tenant Creek, that’s right, Tenant Creek, and we said, if we fly North we’ll hit the railway lien, and we’ll follow the railway line up to

Tenant Creek. But I had a lazy observer and he sat in the back reading a magazine while I tired to fly the airplane, we flew right over the railway line without either of us seeing it, finished up in the middle of Lake Eyre before we realised that we had done something wrong. Back we came turned round, came back, picked up the railway line and followed it up to Tenant Creek. Then the fun started because we started running into tropical

storms, we were stranded in Tenant Creek for two days because of these tropical storms flooding the aerodrome. And flying up, I didn’t go above 1000 feet from then on to make sure I didn’t miss anything. And flying up over the road over the army convoys that were using that road to take stuff up to Darwin. We’d come to a sign in the middle of a raging

torrent, 200 metres wide, and the sign would say, narrow water crossing ahead. Here was this great torrent of water from the overnight rains that just turned the country into greenery and flowers, coming up overnight, it was the most amazing sight to see that water all flowing, I suppose down to Lake Eyre. But it was just strange

to see these army convoys held up at these water crossings and these little notices saying, Narrow water crossing ahead. Anyway we got to Darwin and that was my first trip with Ferry flight. Nobody else I suppose would take it so the junior pilot got it. But it was quite an experience, I’ve never flown one of these aircraft before, my first experience

with a twin engine aircraft, never flown a twin engine before. But it was like a tiger moth with two motors, old DH dragon, and I was regarded as the expert on Dragons from then on. and while I was there was at ferry flight we got the air training corps come out one day. They all wanted to go up in an aircraft so they put them up in this

Dragon. And I had to take them out and fly them around Sydney in this dragon. The silly goats all got down the back of the aircraft and I had the worlds worst job, the hardest job in the world trying to get the power of the aircraft up the air so I could take off. But we got them, we got there. It was all good experience.

Test and Ferry, 6 months

from about August to February, August ’43 to February ’44. And I went from here to the school, ah, what they call the air armament and gas school at Nhill in Victoria, this is a posting that I volunteered for, they gave the crew the option of volunteering for this armament course

when I put my name down when I was in New Guinea and forgot all about it. Anyway the posting came though, and I didn’t want to go, I had just been married. I would rather have gone back to the squadron and go back to the armament course, but they said its too late your name is on it. So I went down there . We wangled a train pass for Lyn to come down, she joined me down there.

And that’s the course I think I told you earlier that I took, it was a two year course that was concertinaed into 6 months. And I finished up as the armament officer in Mallala, gain a very nasty posting because of the way things turned out. I was supposed to get the choice of postings because I topped the course but the course commander took the posting I should

have got and I got the nasty ones. And, oh.

It was so far away from Sydney. I just married, it was a twin engine school, the choice posting, the one I should have got was a single engine Wirraway school in New South Wales. I would have been able to get home occasionally, I did get home but I spent half the time

travelling, coming from Mallala I had to get down into Adelaide, across from Adelaide to Melbourne. Melbourne overnight to Sydney an Sydney to Taree. I spent half the time travelling I used to get home late from leave every time I went on leave, I used to get home late. Get back to the station late.

How?

How did I meet her? She

when we arrived back from New Guinea and I left the grass skirt in the train. We got home and she her cousin, I think her cousin, were at the house. Lyn’s aunt lived just around the corner and Lyn’s mother had asked the two of them to come around , I don’t know whether it was because we were coming home or whether it just happened

but they were both there and that’s when I met Lyn the night I cam back from New Guinea. And we just took it from there.

Nothing. Nothing, she says she wasn’t impressed. She didn’t stay long, there were 3 of us, mother wanted to talk to us, so I suppose she felt out of it because she didn’t know any of us. And she

didn’t stay long, it was only when I took her out to a Cole Thomas, the nightclub in Sydney. We had a dinner dance there with one of her friends and she was nurse at a children’s’ hospital, weren’t you? And we had some experiences at the children’s hospital in the middle of the night. Getting home

I walked from Wynyard to Killara more than once, the trams used to stop and trains used to stop and it was very difficult getting home for Children’s hospital. But that’s when I met Lyn, the night I got back from New Guinea.

When was it on your birthday? [off camera] When I proposed to you? Was it your birthday? Anyway

somewhere around her birthday in September. Her birthday on the worked trade centre in New York, same date. Never forget her birthday in future.

So we didn’t waste any time.

Sorry?

Well nothing on the first night when we met, I mean ,

neither of us were impressed, it just developed over the next three months. And I didn’t think of it in terms of meeting somebody on the first night back.

Oh well yes of course, I mean, the girls I had known before I went away were otherwise engaged. One of them married a

fellow who went in on the same day as I did at Bradfield. He used to come and play tennis and the girls would come and play tennis with us. On the Wednesday when we had sport at Bradfield. He married one of the girls I knew. Another one married an army fellow I knew who was lost an eye in New Guinea. And the third one was tied up with my elder brother who

at that stage was up in Rabaul. But I think she was older than I was, my brother, I suppose she was.

What do you mean meeting some one new?

Oh well he hadn’t met Lyn, he didn’t know Lyn. The odd thing is is that he and Lyn would make a good pair. but he hadn’t met Lyn at the time I had

met her. He’d come back, he’d been in England and Africa and he’d come back and gone up to Rabaul, but, you didn’t meet Arnold before he went up to Rabaul did you?

Another sad story, you want all the sad stories don’t you? My father had died before I got out of the air force he had a bad heart and ha a stroke and he applied

for my discharge on compassionate ground. I wasn’t doing anything over at Mallala it didn’t matter that there was no armament officer there because of the way the lines of communication worked, and the fact that I left made no difference. So I suppose all these things were taken into consideration, I was married, he was sick, I wasn’t necessary . So I got out in June ’45 and

V Day VJ [Victory over Japan] day was in August of course, and I went back to Bradfield and when I started the whole sorry story for my discharge and you had to get a clearance every time you left the station, you got a clearance and you had to sign that you weren’t taking any stuff away. And this included a medical and dental clearance. And I went along to the dentist

I had no complaints about my dental health, and the great galoot got me in the chair and stated drilling away at one of my teeth. And he put a filling in it and he said there you are, and I said, “That’s all finished is it?” and he said, “No that’s not finished, I’ve only put a temporary filling in that” and I hit the roof, I said, “What on earth did you do that for, what have I got to do now, go and

have it all drilled out again and have a proper filling?”, “Yes” he said. I said, “Why on Earth did you do that?” and he said, "Well you only come in reasonably dentally fit so we send you out reasonably dentally fit” So I got the wing commander out and we had a terrible argument about this tooth. And they couldn’t do a bloody thing. I’d had no dental problems during my service. I went in dentally fit

as reasonably fit as you could expect. I had no, I might have had one filling, I can’t remember, I can only remember one session with the dentist while I was in the air force, I mean, a filling, one filling with the dentist while I was in he air force. This great fool put the temporary filling in. It only lasted 2 or 3 days and the tooth broke in half. So lost

two teeth at the back of my jaw as a result of this temporary filling. Apart from that it was a routine discharge. I got coupons issued, everything was still rationed, food coupons and clothing coupons. I was introduced to the RSL [Returned Services League] and asked if I wanted to become a member, and I said yes, of course. Can’t think of much else. Maxine was there getting her discharge at the same time.

That’s my cousin, she had been in the WAAAFs [Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force] , and she was there at the same time getting a discharge.

I couldn’t get out quick enough. I’d had quite enough of the air force, I’d had quite enough of flying. I , it was my burning passion when I went in, I couldn’t care less when I got out.

Apart from commercial flying , you know, in Qantas or one of the other airlines, the only flying I had done since the war was in a glider when we were in Melbourne. And one of the Lions club members aid, “I’m an instructor in a glider club, would you like to come out?” and I said, “Alright yes I will, and I didn’t enjoy it and I haven’t been up in a airplane since except on a commercial aircraft. And I don’t want to.

Oh, I went into my father’s accountancy practice and I was in that for 9 years. With a fellow who was badly wounded in New Guinea, he was shipped out just at the time I got there. He had quite a story to tell, but he got a discharge early because of his wound and it was somewhere in the head, and he got a discharge

he was an accountant, when I was studying my accountancy. And we set up this practice and after 9 years with a family and not at the progress I was, I decided to get out of it. So we split up amicably and I got a job as an accountant with a firm of flour millers. I moved for that to a firm that manufactured floor covering. And finally finished up with a

finance company. While I was with them they took an interest in a merchant bank in Singapore. And they sent me up there to open it up and I was the managing director there for two years in the merchant bank. We did a lot of business we got a licence to deal in foreign currency just at the time I got back, I had two years up there.

And that was very wearing. The time we spent there, event the natives of Singapore, the Chinese, they’ve to the get away from that climate at regular intervals. We had a four week leave period with air fares paid to your home state or equivalent.

Once very four years, the conditions were good, air conditioned offices, air conditioned cars, air conditioned apartment we live din. the company paid the rent of the apartment I lived in. And we learnt a lot about life and I learnt a lot about finance. In the two years I was there. So I came back and went to Melbourne for a while, but back with the same finance company, Melbourne for while. Came back to Sydney

by this time the company had got into serious difficulty while I was in Singapore. And I took the opportunity of early retirement, I got out at 55 and I got a reasonable superannuation payout, and decided that I didn’t like work. So at 55 we packed up we sold our house in Sydney and we wen over to Europe and

we stayed over there for two years. We bought a caravan and a car and we toured around Europe for two years. Then my mother was ill. I got a letter from my brother saying if you are coming back now is the time to do it, she is not well. So we came back she went on for another 4 or 5 years and died in the early 80s and in the mean time we came back we came up here because we had

no house in Sydney and we have lived here ever since.

Oh I knocked off for the day. And had a big party. Everyone, I would think that 90 percent of the offices closed for the day. And everyone flooded out into

the streets, you could hardly move. And we just knocked off. My partner and I and the fellow we shared the office with, another fellow we shared the office with, all repaired to his home in Killara. We had a few drinks and celebrated the end of the war and how lucky we were to have survived it. And that was really

the end, we didn’t carry on with the celebration the way they have six month anniversaries and then 12 month anniversaries of the Bali bombing, we didn’t do that. We celebrated on the day and then forgot about it. Funny differences. And time makes for the way you look at things.

Oh I’m 100 percent disability now. And I’ve got a bad back, I can’t hear, my sight has been impaired. I’ve got a bad knee, all service related, a few other things. I had a heart bypass. All

accepted as service related. The heart condition was service related. And 100 percent disability and that’s a generous sort of recompense I think. Nothing will recompense for he health problems but they are not so severe that I can’t do things. I try to lead a normal life

I try to be active and that’s why I’ve been getting up and walking around every time we have a break because its not good for me to sit and let the blood stream slow down. It, don’t want to let the cholesterol build up in the, I did quite well on the cholesterol I’ve been keeping it down.

Not war dreams, but I have a lot of bad dreams, mostly about the work I did when I was working. God knows why. I mean

I dream about some problem that I had and I can’t see a solution to it. I mean what’s it matter it all over, I’m done, I retired, I don’t have those problems any longer. But no bad war dreams. No, lucky.

Yeah, post accountancy dreams.

Would you like to read it?

Well we

got there in the first week in November, and he was gone at the end of November. I didn’t know the full circumstances until I read , reread the memo that John Mormon wrote of the circumstances, the real circumstances, the rumour that was going around was that he had an argument with Blamey. The argument centred

on what action should be taken to make the Wirraways more visible to American pilots who couldn’t tell a Wirraway from a Zero. They wanted to paint us yellow, paint the aircraft yellow and Quinan wouldn’t have a bar of it , he said that its suicide to do that. I think he was overstating it but never the less, he didn’t know that because this was in the very first part of November when nobody knew what the opposition was or what the performance was going to be like.

However, he had this argument, the story was with Blamey, but actually it was with General Kenny, who was the American in charge of the flying forces in New Guinea. And Kenny told Quinan he wanted to talk to him about this and Quinan said, “I can’t come I’m ill I’ll send the second in charge” So he sent flight commanders and the second in charge,

flight Lieutenants to talk to Kenny, Kenny probably didn’t like that. Didn’t like, he wouldn’t have liked the squadron leader either, but he didn’t like a flight Lieutenant even less. And these fellows were representing Quinan, putting Quinan’s point of view that it w as suicide. Kenny said, “You have got to have a formula for making these aircraft safe, I wont’, unless you agree to this formula, I wont take responsibility for any that get shot down by

American pilots”. And Quinan hit the roof, he said, “You ought to train your pilots better” and Kenny didn’t like it and Kenny recommended he be removed. And he recommended that to Blamey and Blamey concurred. The strange part is, the Quinan couldn’t attend Kenny because he’d been out on one of the islands, I was with him the day it happened.

Out on one of the islands sunbaking, he got his feet so badly sunburnt that he couldn’t get his shoes on. that’s true, that’s why he couldn’t go because his feet were so swollen with sunburn that he couldn’t get his shoes on. Anyway , that’s the story, he stood up for the pilots. We didn’t get our aircraft painted yellow. You probably know the roundel

on the RAAF is red centre, white and blue they painted out the red centre so that it couldn’t be mistaken for a Japanese roundel. And we flew normally, the Americans moved out soon after, they went flying in our area, we were the only ones flying in the area. So it wasn’t until the squadron moved up to Nadzab and Markham valley which was after I left that

they came into contact with the American air force again and the Americans started shooting down the Boomerang. The first pilot to take a Boomerang to New Guinea was a fellow by the name of Jim Collier. And he and Earll Shawn, Earl Shawn was the CO. And one other pilot brought 3 aircraft, 3 boomerangs up. And Collie was shot down by American ground forces up near Salamaua. He landed on the

beach and apparently did a bad landing and hit his head on the reflector sight and killed him. But he was shot down by American ground fire. Others’ there was at least on other Boomerang was shot down by an American fighter. Luckily the pilot got out of it and they had a drink together afterwards.

And the American pilot painted a roundel on his plane instead of a red spot, it was red white and blue spot. He was proud of his kill. But he story with Blamey was that when this argument was going on about painting them yellow Quinan said, this is suicide its stupid and all the rest of it, he said,

to Blamey “I will fly the first sortie in a yellow airplane if you will come with me in the back seat” That’s the rumour, whether it is true or not I don’t know. But, didn’t get any brownie points with the General , so Quinan went.

I think it was an experience that I wouldn’t choose to repeat. But it was an experience that was invaluable in developing me as a person. I was charged with responsibility right from the first day I finished my training at flying training. Because I was commissioned and I was expected to take charge of men. And that stood me in good stead

ever since. And I think from that point of view it was very, very valuable but it is not something I’d choose to do again.