Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Gladesville a suburb of Sydney on the twelfth of April 1921. I started off at school

at Gladesville Primary School. At the age of eleven when I passed what was then the Intermediate Certificate. I went on to Drummoyne Intermediate High School for three years and I passed the, I beg your pardon no, at Primary School I passed the Qualifying Certificate, at high school I passed the Intermediate Certificate. I left school at that point because middle of

the Depression. My parents couldn’t keep me at school any longer. I had to go out and become self supporting. I had a battle grand for quite some time. Finally found my ambition was to get, be employed by a firm of chartered accountants so I could take up accounting studies and ultimately become a chartered accountant. That was, must have been late 1937

I started with them. I didn’t get very much further than the, what they call the Qualifying Certificate with the Chartered Institute. Which gave me the right then to proceed and study and do the examinations of the Chartered Institute. But war broke out at that point and one thing I always wanted to do was to fly. Like thousands of others brought up on the traditions of Kingsford Smith, Bert Hinkler.

All those heroes of ours. So I joined the air force and like a million others I think. And it was many months before I was even called up for interviews and medical examinations. That took place about June, July of 1940. From that point we had to spend two nights a week at a night school studying

various air force subjects like navigation, mathematics, air force law and basics. After six months or thereabouts on the second of February 1941 I was called up by the air force. Went into Bradfield Park the initial training school for initial training where we bashed the square and

did various classes and were assessed as to what we were going to be in the air force. There were the three categories, there was pilot, what they called an observer and later navigator and then wireless operator, stroke, air-gunner known at WAG. Great disappointment I missed out on the two top categories. I ended up WAG. Like the rest

of them we were very disappointed. But everyone wanted to be a pilot, everyone wanted to fly Spitfires. But could only, that could only be for the select few. Then on the, there were a hundred and fifty-two of us WAGs and they wanted eighty to stay in Australia for further training and the other seventy-two

to go to Canada. So they called for who wanted to go to Canada. Strangely enough it worked out just that way. So seventy-two of us on the twenty-first of March 1941 set sail for Canada. We had a wonderful trip. We went over on the ship called the Oranje. It was a civilian ocean liner, it had passengers on board. And we had a very happy holiday on the ship. We had to do a little bit of

drilling and training on the ship but not much it was mainly just a holiday. And we stopped at Auckland, Fiji, Suva, Fanning Island and Christmas Island. And then got to Vancouver. We marched straight off the ship at Vancouver and we were onto a train and we set forth to Winnipeg, which was in the middle of the prairie for training. It took us oh

over two days, two and a half days by train to get there. And from there we were taken into the signals training school at Winnipeg in a suburb called Tuxedo. It was previous to us going there it had been a blind school. But they cleared them out and we took over the school. And we trained there.

But we were, oh at Auckland we picked up about seventy-two New Zealanders too. So the Australians and New Zealanders went there. And there were about fifty Canadians also for our course. That was most of our course. And we had five months training in radio. We had to get more speed up to eighteen words a minute. And do various training on ground and flying.

And at that point we, in the final examination, much to my surprise I came second in the whole class. So I must have been a bit brighter than I thought. From there they split us up into half and half which including me, went to a gunnery school at a place called Portage la Prairie which is on the banks of the Winnipeg, Lake Winnipeg.

And we had a month there training in gunnery. That was great fun because a lot of the training first off was flying along shooting at ducks as they came up. That was good fun. And strangely again I topped gunnery. I was very, very fortunate that when we graduated as WAGs and got our wings I was commissioned.

There were four Australians were commissioned. And the rest became sergeants. We became pilot officers. From there we proceeded to Halifax on the east coast of Canada. Picked up, in fact we went over on an armed merchant cruiser. Three ships, they were previously civilian ships converted to naval ships

with a big gun on the back. We marched on, ours was the Wolfe. A ship called the Wolfe. It had previously been a French ship called the Montcanne. But the British took it over when France collapsed and called it the Wolfe. I don’t know how good your history is but Wolfe is the English General that beat the French General Montcanne at the banks of Quebec, heights of Quebec. Anyway we set off the three ships. And I

suddenly realised there’s a war on. Up til then it had been great fun. We had a wonderful time in Canada. The people were very kind to us and everything was light and airy. We had good meals, comfortable barracks and parties quite often with the locals. Wonderful time. But suddenly winter was drawing on then. This was November and it was getting cold and bleak and dark. We got on this

ship, it was all blacked out. And being a naval ship it was very disciplined, very strict on it. And I suddenly realised there was a war on. Particularly after being, going for a couple of days we ran into the U-Boat [Unterseeboot – German submarine] areas. And there were alerts practically every night. We would have spent most of the nights at boat stations. One night one of the ships was hit by a torpedo. We

kept going, we didn’t stop for that. We just kept going and we did hear ultimately that it managed to limp into Belfast. We finally arrived at Greenock in Scotland. Marched off the ship onto a train and compared with Canada it was quite a shock to see war time Britain and coming on for winter. Cold and dark and wet and gloomy and bomb damage everywhere you looked.

We got on a train down to the south of England and to Bournemouth on the south coast. This was a big manning depot. There were, oh there must have been thousands of, fair crew there waiting to be posted out. We spent about I suppose about four weeks at Bournemouth. Finally posted to Cranwell where we did,

I’m not quite sure what we did there but I think a refresher course in radio because we had to learn, it was alright to learn all these things in coming to Britain and in war time conditions things were different so we had a lot of learning to do. Had a month, might have been longer, might have been six weeks there. Had leave for a week or two.

Then went to from there we went to a place called Hooten Park near Chester in England. And there we did further training. At that point I realised I was going into Coastal Command. We could have gone to either Bomber or Coastal. But at this stage we were learning all the procedures required for flying the Coastal Command. We had a month there.

Then posted to Prestwick in Scotland, near Ayr. There we learned some very hush hush equipment. Learned then as S.E. meaning secret equipment or S.I. meaning special installation. But what it turned out to be was radar. It was all very hush hush. No, not many people had heard of radar at this point. And there we worked on unshielded

equipment there that worked on microwaves and radioactivity. All unshielded. Of course no-one knew the dangers of these things in those days. And to my amazement my watch just packed up. It affected my watch so badly; I had to get a new watch. It just magnetised the whole thing. Fortunately it had no effect on me but anyway from there

we went on leave, had a week or so’s leave and posted to an operational training unit. Coastal Command at Alness in Scotland just north of Inverness. That’s where we, for the first time we crewed up with pilots, navigators and for, this was flying boats so we not only had those, we also had flight engineers, riggers and

also radar operators. Well we trained in it, they needed us. And from there we crewed up so we had the two pilots, three WAG’s, an engineer, a fitter, a rigger, navigator. That might have been about it. From there another week’s leave. Posted to Mount

Batten in Plymouth. Just across the way from Plymouth to a new Australian squadron being formed at the time called 461 Squadron. And we were created beside 10 Squadron, which had been operating since the beginning of the war. They were a permanent Australian squadron. We were created there. We started our first operations with them under their auspices.

In fact I, our crew was also broken up. And we had pushed out with other more experienced crews so that we could then experience flying with them. The squadron was formed on the twenty-fifth of April 1942. That was Anzac Day so it was called the Anzac Squadron after that. On the,

we started our operations. Our first operation was the commanding officer who was an English man. We couldn’t, didn’t have enough Australians to cover every aspect of the squadron so he was an English man called Halliday, Wing Commander Halliday. The first operation he did an air sea rescue. Landed on the sea, picked up an air crew that had been shot down, got in the aircraft and flew it back. A short while after that, there was another

air sea rescue on. And he took that one out and that was our first casualty. Unfortunately when you’re looking down at the sea from up above a few hundred feet, it always looks so calm. And it’s very deceptive. And he didn’t realise how bad the sea was. And the aircraft didn’t have a good landing, it was smashed up. And the crew

got out on their wings. They dropped their dinghies, they found the crew that they were looking for and they dropped their dinghies to it. So they landed on the sea and they didn’t have a dinghy. The navigator saw one of their dinghies floating some couple of hundred yards away. He said he’ll try and get to it so he dived in and he got to the dinghy but he collapsed on getting in. And when he came to the

aircraft all the crew had gone. He floated around for oh it was about eight or nine days. But finally he was lucky he was picked up. That was our first casualty. Anyway we started; our main job was convoy escort and submarine searching. And our area was the Bay of Biscay, which came down the south of England down towards

Gibraltar. The, at this stage the Germans had got control of the French ports, the French channel ports. There was St Nazaire, Dieppe, Brest, Bordeaux, one or two others. And they found it easier; they then could leave those ports and go straight to the Atlantic Ocean to attack the ships. They didn’t have to go up through the North Sea like they had previously. So we had to patrol that area and stop them either

getting through or coming back. And that was our job I suppose for the rest of the war. The Germans used to send out fighters, mainly JU 88s to patrol looking for us, we were looking for U-Boats; the JU 88s were looking for us. And the British sent out Mosquitoes and Beaufighters looking for the JU 88s. So it was a bit of a personalised sort of

war. Which I suppose in a way was a good war. There were no, no civilians involved. There were no atrocities. In fact there was a lot of rapport. There were cases where an aircraft shot down, a U-Boat would surface beside them and say “Do you want to come with us? We’ll take you back to Germany as POWs [Prisoners of War]. Or you can stay in the dinghy and take your chances.”

And they always stayed with the dinghy; they wouldn’t go in U-Boats. But the Germans would give them water or medicines or if anyone was wounded. So there was big help like that. Later on in 1943 I think it was June ‘43, we on patrol, we’d heard of a U-Boats in the vicinity. And we went

over and there was three U-Boats. This is when they were coming out to; they started off the war crash divers. They saw an aircraft they crash dived. But they decided to have it no good. Because the aircraft they’d get over quickly and take a punt where they could be underneath, drop depth charges. They lost a lot of U-Boats that way. So they decided to change their tactic and stay on the surface, they mounted twenty millimetre canons on top. They had mainly

a bank of four twenty millimetres on the, just forward of the conning tower and two single twenty millimetres each side of the conning tower. And they went out in threes, usually threes. So they could bring a lot of firepower on the tanks. Anyway we arrived on the scene just in time to see a Liberator, a British Liberator attacking them. And they were putting up this

barrage. As you could imagine there was eight, ten, twelve, twenty millimetres sending out these shells. And they exploded, they were self destroying shells that exploded at a hundred, a thousand yards. If they missed a target they’d explode anyway. So you could see a great barrage of shell bursts. And he broke away as we came in and as he broke away they started firing at us. We broke away

and the Liberator had come in behind us and he attacked again. And he was hit and he broke away smoking, and we came in behind and we managed to straddle one of the U-Boats with depth charges. We went around then and we had to take photographs, had to prove any kills. You had to take photographs of wreckage or survivors, all that. We took

photographs and dropped one of our dinghies to them, to the survivors. Then we came around to make another attack. A Halifax was nearby; he came in at about three thousand feet. He was out of range of the twenty millimetres and he had a, it was good bomb aiming, he managed to drop a bomb near one of the other

U-Boats and damage it so it was going around in circles and smoking. And the crew abandoned ship. So we went to attack the third U-Boat just as British sloops came along. They came along firing. We thought oh they’re better equipped than us to, for the attack so we left. Examined the aircraft, it was okay. We had a couple of shell holes through it. It was going okay

but we were short of fuel. That was our worry then at that point. So we set course for home. And half an hour later we struck another U-Boat. So went in to attack that. And he got us before we got him. As he came in he was firing at us. And a shell came in just above the bomb release gear and started a fire. Anyway the,

that was the good news. I didn’t realise at the time, I was on the radio. What we didn’t know was that the controllers had jammed. We were right down on the surface of the water, heading straight for the U-Boat and the skipper couldn’t steer it. It was just, the controls were jammed. Anyway he called on the second pilot and he managed to reef it, pull it back and managed to cover, get around the U-Boat.

He jettisoned the depth charge, he only had one left. And he pressed the Claxon for to take our ditching position. But the engineer grabbed a extinguisher and started looking for the fire. He found the fire and he put it out with the extinguisher. Anyway we took stock. The U-Boat had submerged, he was gone.

We were short of fuel, we were damaged. Didn’t know whether we were going to get back. Anyway we set course for the Scilly Islands, we knew we couldn’t get back to base. So we scraped into the Scilly Islands and landed. We had to refuel the aircraft with four-gallon drums that they brought out from the shore in a little boat. And we had to get on the aircraft, up through the aircraft, onto the wing and to the tanks. Anyway we managed to fly it back to base and

landed safely. But the aircraft was so badly damaged that it was beyond repair so we got a new aircraft. Six weeks later we’re down in the same position. And we were attacked by six JU 88s. I was in the tail turret at the time and bad luck the, they attacked as they,

this was a very experienced squadron, the German squadron of these aircraft. And they knew exactly what they were doing. They flew up beside us, there was two on one side, four on the other. One stood back and ordered the others in. So they took, more or less simultaneous attacks. So we turned into one, they were turning out of the other so they brought, made alternate attacks on us. The first attack, they

started from the front because the main arm was in the tail with the four guns. And I was in there. Anyway the first attack they hit us with a couple of shells. As he broke away, I could see him breaking away and I tried to straighten the turret up to get into the turret was U/S [unserviceable]. And one of those first shells that hit a, there’s a hydraulic pipeline went from one of the engines right down through the aircraft to the tail turret. Gave the power for the turret.

And it was hit, had no power in the turret. So from then on, we combat lasted around forty to forty-five minutes. We, the skipper was twisting and turning the aircraft. I was, I had a little handle that I could move the turret a bit. I could fire the gun by hand but it was pretty useless. I kept firing, throwing tracer around so they’d hopefully think

the tail turret was still working. Because the tail, tail attacks are the easiest for them but they wouldn’t do it because of the fear of the turret. Anyway finally the, we lost one engine and then we lost the second engine. We only had two engines on the port side. And the skipper ordered us out of the turret to take our crash positions. Anyway I got out of the turret, I reported tail, vacating turret.

And he said “Stay there, I can hold height, stay there.” Well that was a dilemma because you can’t get back into a tail turret by yourself. You’ve got to close a door behind you and I couldn’t do it by myself. All the guns were stopped, the ammunition was being thrown around the turrets. I left it, I went into crash position. Went through and by this time I got up to the main part of the aircraft on the top floor. The,

it was a shambles, in fact the whole thing was a shambles, the whole aircraft. Things were being thrown around. The wireless operator lost a bit of his nose, the tail gunner had been badly injured, he’d collected a shell, a thirty-seven millimetre shell, one of the big guns, right in the nose of the aircraft had blown him right back through the aircraft. And his legs were shattered and he

had shrapnel in his, no his gun, he’d been manning the gun, had been thrown back into him and he was pretty badly hurt. Anyway we couldn’t do much, we, the skipper couldn’t hold it. We lost a third engine and he couldn’t hold height with one engine. So then we came in the drink. And there again you know we, we helped the U-Boat crew when they were

in the water. And we were in the drink. We got out on to the wing of the aircraft as it was slowly sinking. And the 88s were flying around us. And one of those things that really stick in your mind, the leader of the 88s came in towards us; we could see him coming in.

And the skipper said “I don’t know what he’s going to do but if he starts shooting, jump.” Well that’s good advice. So I went to the leading edge of the wing and I watched him come in. And as soon as I saw gun flashes I was gonna jump in the water. Not do you much good. But he didn’t do that he flew over us dipped his wings and you know flew off and left us. So anyway we were pretty,

pretty happy at that time. We thought well we’re down, we’ve got three dinghies, we’ve got all the equipment from the aircraft. So we floated the dinghies, we got in and we got, the wounded bloke, he’s our rigger. We got him into one of the small dinghies by himself. And dressed his leg as best we could. And we launched him off in the water and we dived in and got into three dinghies. And we had

a lot of, all our emergency equipment, we had pigeons. We used to carry pigeons, homing pigeons. We had pigeons. We had a dinghy radio and we had some, called two star red, little distress signals. We had a Very pistol with cartridges. So we thought “Oh we’re pretty right.” So we distributed ourselves round the dinghies. Then one of the dinghies went bang.

And blew up. And that had most of our equipment in it. It sank you know, started to sink and we got it and pulled it in as best we could, it had a great rip, been cut by a piece of shrapnel. And it must have just stayed good long enough to inflate and then bang it went. Well the pigeons were drowned, we lost our Very pistol. We had the cartridges but we didn’t have the Very pistol. We thought “They’re no good.”so we tossed them over

board. We had the dinghy radio. And we had the aerial and we had the kite to fly the aerial. We had the rocket to send the kite up. And we had the pistol to fire the cartridge to send the rocket up. But we didn’t have the cartridges, they’d gone down. So that was useless. A lot of our food had gone. We looked around, we had one can of

water each left and one little packet of emergency rations. And oh and the two star reds, the distress signals. We had those. And one other thing was a flame float too that we resurrected. So you know we feel pretty right except that you only had two dinghies. Then bang another one went. Oh, so the eleven of us, poor rigger who’d,

we thought he was pretty right in one little dinghy. He went down and we had to drag him out of the water and get him into this one dinghy. It was a six-man dinghy and we had eleven in it. And what equipment we had we hung over the side. The pigeons they were drowned and I was gonna throw them away but the skipper said no hang on to them, we might need those. Might eat them. Anyway we couldn’t do much. We

sort of, we at least had that one dinghy and just wondering how long that was going to last. And night came. And we thought “Well we can’t do much. We, come the morning, we’ll try and fly the kite for the dinghy aerial. Try and, someone can swim out with the kite and try and fly the kite. Don’t know whether we could but it was worth a try.” So we waited and came night time and the waves were pretty rough they were breaking over. Every now and again a big wave would come and break

over us. I had a little beaker and I was leaning forward like this and I’d scoop a little bit of water and hand it to someone who’d tip it out and it was quite good because it gave me something to do. Anyway about, must have been about two o’clock in the morning I suppose, we heard an aircraft engine. And skipper said “Oh give me a two star red.” So someone handed him one of these, picked out a, course it’s hanging over

the side. Gave him one. And you screw off the top and you pull a pin out. And it was wet and didn’t go off. So we thought, “Oh by this time the aircraft had gone.” So oh you better get me another one and have it ready. Little while later we heard another aircraft. Might have been the same one. And he pulled the pin out and whoo, up it went. And it was a Catalina,

what they called a Lee Light Cat. They had a big search light under the wing. They used to patrol the bay at night. And if they picked something up on their radar they’d come down, shine the search light on it. If it was a U-Boat they’d attack it. Anyway he came down and shone his light on us. And he stayed with us until daylight. Well we didn’t think he’d stay with us any longer than that because

they were, they had practically no protection and the JU 88s could have got him quite easily. But he stayed with us and he was signalling. We knew that the sloops, they were about a hundred miles away from us when we ditched. And we knew they you know, they could have, may be looking for us. And it was, he was homing these sloops onto us.

But he stayed with us and that’s something we were thankful for. He stayed with us til about half past nine it was. In broad daylight. And finally signalled with his radio and said that he “Had to go, was running short of fuel and help arriving at ten hundred hours.” Well we thought, we didn’t know what he meant by help. But anyway about ten o’clock we saw a

Liberator. It came over and he’s looking for us but he couldn’t find us. And he was about oh a mile or two one-way and then we saw the sloops. And we thought ah that’s good. And they came about a mile outside of us and they couldn’t find us. And oh we didn’t know what to do. Whether to use some of our pyrotechnics, or oh you know hang on. Anyway we let the plane float go,

and dipped it in the water and it started burning and setting off smoke. So anyway the sloop came over. And picked us up. So we had a very pleasant crew from the sloops. And they brought us back and they were going, oh at this stage we were based in Pembroke Dock in South Wales right down the bottom on the Channel. The

Bristol Channel there. And further up the Bristol Channel there was a Naval Base and one of the ships had to get to the Naval Base. So they, we transferred to them and they dropped us off at our squadron at Pembroke Dock and they went up to their base. So we got ashore there and we got a new aircraft, another new aircraft, that was the second one. And we continued on. Anyway, to cut

a long story short I finished my tour round about the end of the year. And for a while there I was acting as agent on the squadron. And then early in 1944 I was posted back to Alness where I’d done the operational training and training as an instructor. So I spent about a year there instructing. Shortly after I arrived D Day

started and they turned us into a semi operational base not just a training unit. So we did operational trips from there up into the North Sea up towards the Arctic Circle. Protecting the Murmansk convoys who were going through to Russia. I’ve never struck so much cold in my life. I’ve never known cold like this. So round about Christmas of

1944 I applied to come home. I thought “I’ve been overseas for four years. Bout time I went home.” so strangely enough I got a posting home practically straight away and on the twenty-fifth of March 1945 I arrived back in Sydney four years and four days after I left. So that was about, I messed around, I

arrived just in time to find that I’d been promoted to squadron leader when I came back. That didn’t do me much good. I just, I played, I was posted to Ballarat for a while but the end of the war was coming and I was finally discharged from the air force. So that was the end of my air force career. I went back to Hungerford Spooners a place I worked before the war.

And took up my studies. I qualified in 1952 as a chartered accountant. From then on I’ve been an accountant, I left the profession, I worked mainly in the companies, company secretary, chief accountant, finance controller that sort of thing. And that’s about it. I’m still doing a little bit of

accounting work. Still keeping my eye in and hopefully am having a very pleasant retirement. So that’s about a quick resume of my life’s history.

Oh I think it was fairly normal in a way. We lived at Gladesville, it was you know middle class suburb.

And dad had been, served in World War I and he’d lost an arm. His chances I suppose of getting a high paid job were pretty limited. But we did alright you know compared to a lot of other people. During the Depression he worked for the Water Board mainly and during the Depression he was on what they called ration work. And that meant that instead of where they had to get

rid of a lot of people job instead of sacking half the staff they’d put everyone on but they’d work half a week. Alternately. One week they’d work two days, next week they’d work three days. So while that was pretty tough, at least they had income. So we did fairly well in that way. We wanted for nothing, we had everything we needed. School was fairly normal. I,

I must admit I didn’t like school very much. I hated practically every bit of it. I used to always look forward to weekends. But I think I worried too much. I used to, as soon as I came home I’d get stuck into my homework and things. My two brothers when they got home from school they were out in the street playing cricket or something. I used to do a lot of worrying. Primary school was fairly uneventful.

I start, I got the QC [Qualifying Certificate] when I was ten but my parents kept me back. It wasn’t a very good pass. Even though it was a pass it wasn’t a very good pass. I only had access to a technical school from there. But they kept me back in their wisdom. And I did the second time, got a better pass. And had access to

the high school. So I did a business course with them. And strangely enough I, the two main subjects for business were business principles and bookkeeping. And I was clueless, I couldn’t, I did no good in those subjects at all. For things like mathematics and science I excelled at. No, very good at those.

Then when I got the Intermediate, left school, I did a vocational guidance test. And that came out saying that as in, how’d they put it, in a mechanical job I’d be very good. But in clerical work I’d only be average. So I took up clerical work. I’m not quite sure why I did it but I did it. But anyway, I,

I got through. Ah started, when I left school, bout the time I left school, to get a bit of money I started delivering papers. I, in those days they had little boys walking around throwing papers over fences and things. And I got to do that. And I had to be at the newspaper office four in the morning. And I’d probably work through til about oh bout eight o’clock I suppose, half past seven to eight o’clock. For that I got a shilling.

And that was seven days a week so I got seven shillings a week for that which was very handy. Then when I started to work at Hungerford Spooners I got fifteen shillings a week. So that with the twenty-two shillings a week I was able to cope fairly well and paid my fares in to work every day. Ten pence a day for fares. Lunch consisted of a, probably a cheese sandwich, that was the cheapest thing, that was four pence.

But I did alright. And when I got the, what are they called, I said it before, the first examination for the Chartered Institute Entrance Exam I got a rise then and at the time of when I was called up February 1941 I was getting thirty-two and six a week. And I went in on five

bob a day. So I went in on thirty-five bob a week. So I got more money that way. But that was good too. I felt rich then because they had food and clothing supplied and you know thirty-five bob a week. That was a lot of money. Tax free.

So, it was fairly uneventful. I had good friends. As a boy we used to

go down swim in the Parramatta River at Glades Bay. I learned to swim there. And later on when we got to about the age of, what would it be, ten or eleven, we got pushbikes. And of course then that was great. We could go to places like Manly and Dee Why and swim there, which was great. And oh towards, yeah round about,

round about just before war started, my elder brother got a motorbike. So I learned to ride a motorbike. And I think I was only fifteen when I got my licence. Think you could get your licence at fifteen in those days. That was great fun not that I could ever afford a motorbike but occasionally I was allowed to ride it. So much, apart from that,

we, I had I think an enjoyable childhood thinking back. I had good parents. And you know there was always lots to do. Had lots of bush round in Gladesville. So as youngsters we, I don’t think our parents saw us over the school holidays, we’d be down in the bush you know having stone fights with kids from the other side of the bush. And you know, oh that’s right, one

dramatic thing that’s right, before I started school, I was only four. And I used to go there with the bigger boys. Used to go down to the bush. And they used to light fires down there. And I used to enjoy fires. So I had another friend the same age as me. And one day when all the big boys were at school, we hadn’t started at that point, we got a box of matches from somewhere, I don’t know where. And we went down the bush and lit a fire.

And I’ve never forgotten that, it blazed up and I was frightened. And my mate got a branch, he was gonna try to beat the fire out like we’d seen the big boys do. And I said “I’m going home.” So he and I went home. And when I got home mum said to me, “What’s wrong with you, you’re white, what’s the matter?” And I said “I’ve got a headache”, so she put me to bed. So I remember going to bed and hearing the sirens going down the

road. It was the fire brigade. Anyway they told us later on that we were lucky, we only just got out before the whole bush went up. So one thing I learned. Apart from that as I say, fairly normal childhood. But very enjoyable, had a good time.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, my elder brother had a tin canoe. Oh he wouldn’t let me go in that. He had this tin canoe and he used to go out on the Parramatta River. Had no flotation tanks or anything. And oh mum was always worried about him going out because he used to go right across to Capalita, right across the Parramatta River. And there were a lot of

fishermen on the river those days. Professional fishermen who used to trawl the river for fish. And they used to go up to the fishermen and say “Got any crabs?” Cause the fishermen didn’t want the crabs, they’d throw those back. And they’d go “You got any crabs?” And they’d throw them some of these oh lovely big crabs and they’d bring them home and we used to eat those. But one night he didn’t turn home, turn up and

oh mum was worried. And I couldn’t understand why she was worried. You know he’d be back. And he was with one of his mates who lived up the road. And I had to go up the road to ask them up the road was their son was home and he wasn’t home either. And oh they were all worried sick. They finally turned up and with a tin canoe and a load of crabs. But I was never allowed out in the canoe. A couple of times he took me out with him. But I wasn’t allowed myself. You know he

was big brother.

Oh yes yeah. Except you know my big brother you know he was the boss and he used to take my, we both had cricket bats. And if he was playing with his mates he used to take my cricket bat so one of his mates could have that. But when I was playing cricket with my mates I couldn’t borrow his cricket bat. All those sort of things. Oh no, usual big brother, you know, he was boss,

he ruled the roost. But oh we were good mates.

Oh yeah, we’d go to Manly and places like that. Oh as we got older, we, I was never much good on a pushbike. But my elder brother was, he became good on his pushbike. He and his mates used to go to places like Woy Woy.

Go over, oh then, they, Pete’s ferry, you know you had to go down to the Hawkesbury River and go across on the ferry. And they’d go up to Woy Woy and places like that just for a swim. But I was never that good, you know I’d go to Manly, not much further.

Oh yeah it was then. Oh well it’s a major form of transport in those days too

for a lot of people. Oh and later on too my brother had a job at Vaucluse and he used to go to work on his pushbike.

Oh yeah, there was a lot. Oh very few cars on the road. No, not many people could afford cars. And probably a lot more motorbikes than there are now. Quite a few motorbikes. But mainly push bikes. A lot of people road to work

on a push bike. Yeah.

Oh yeah trams, it was a good tram service. Yeah that was the main thing that they had that they don’t have now the trams that go from Ryde through the city. You know through Drummoyne over the bridges Glebe, Glebe Island Bridge, Pyrmont

Bridge and around to the railway and down to the quay you know. A long ride. That was five pence for the whole trip. And when I was working I’d go on the tram cause I worked in town. But course when he was working at Vaucluse he’d have to change trams at, in the city somewhere you’d get to Vaucluse they had a little tram running into there. But that was you know, could cost a lot of money

having two trams to catch. Was a lot cheaper on the pushbike. Oh no, good, it was nothing to go from Vaucluse to Gladesville on a pushbike. It was quite easy. I suppose when it was raining it wasn’t too good. They had what they called

the jumpers. They were only four wheeled trams. They called them jumpers cause they’d bounce around a lot. But they had, maybe the trolley buses came later.

Oh yes, he told a few yarns, not that many. Actually he had a very interesting life. He left home when he was fourteen. He was born in Denmark and he left home when he was fourteen. He wanted to go to sea and his father wouldn’t let him. But one day he went down to the waterfront and signed on a Windjammer. You know what a Windjammer is? A four rigger, a square rigged masted ship.

Great big you know square rigged sails with the ropes and things. And he signed on as a cabin boy. And he went home and said to his dad “Look I’m going to sea now you can’t stop me.” And his father said “Alright, you can go but you’ll be back in six months.” So he went but never went back. And he roamed the world for fourteen years. And he used to get on the ship, he was

a, what they called an AB. An Able Bodied Seaman, you know that’s a trained seaman. And so he could get jobs on any of the ships. He’d catch a ship to a country and he’d get out and walk around. He loved walking. And he used to just walk around and look at the country he was in. He walked from New York to San Francisco in America. That’s the sort of walking he used to do. And

but anyway he was, he arrived in Sydney in 1916 and he had a look around the place and he, this was you know in the middle of the war and they were short of men to you know go in the army so he joined up. I suppose it was another adventure so he joined up, joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. And he was in France for two years in the trenches. And he was

wounded at Amiens. This was towards the end of the war when the final push was going on, you know push to the Germans back. And the Australians were trained up to Amiens and you know to the trenches. Anyway as they’re getting out of the trains at the railway station, the Germans had a big gun. And had it aimed on the railway station. And they started shelling it. And

he was blown up by this thing. He said he “was blown into the air” and when he came down the you know “The Red Cross people were coming along with stretchers” and he said “No, no my mate.” His mate hadn’t been blown up like him he was on the ground. He said “No go and get my mate” but his mate was dead. And he was blown up and down and he’d lost his shoulder, he’d

got shrapnel in his shoulder so he lost his whole shoulder. Anyway that finished him for the army and for going to sea again. He came back to Australia, married my mother and you know he stayed there. But in World War Two he wanted to join up again. And he went to the recruiting depot and said you know “He could serve on a ship.” He was an AB.

and so on. And they said “Oh you can’t do that.” “Yes I can”, you know, “I could serve on a ship again.” In fact he could do anything with one arm most men could do with two arms. And they said but “Yes but if you were torpedoed you wouldn’t be able to climb up a Jacobs Ladder”, you know that rope ladder. “You wouldn’t be able to climb up a Jacobs Ladder”. You know.

He said “Oh no I can do that.” They wouldn’t take him, he was very

disappointed.

I didn’t ask him frankly. I didn’t ask my parents I just did it.

Yeah I suppose so. Yeah I suppose he was the same he just did it.

Oh well only what I’d read or what he’d told me or what I’d seen. Cause there were quite a few films made about World War I during the war. And there’s one horrific film called All Quiet on the Western Front. That’s a classic. And you know that was very true to life. Most of them were they sort of glamorised war a bit I think.

But that one just showed it for what it was. And it was pretty horrific. And oh had a fair idea. Cause there’s always the feeling when you’re young, when you’re eighteen or nineteen you know you reckon you’re immortal. You know others might be killed, not me, I’ll be right. You soon get that knocked out of you of course after a while.

Oh yeah, oh yeah I think that was one of the reasons I joined up. I couldn’t understand why the western nations allowed Hitler to do what he did. I mean it was obvious what he was doing and like I suppose like Iraq today you know they’d say to the dictator “Oh look you can’t do that.” You know “You try to do that and we’ll stop you.” And

he’ll say “Oh no I didn’t do that, it’ll be alright. No I’m a man of peace.” They’re all men of peace, “No I wouldn’t do that.” And then they do something else you know. And then they say “Oh you shouldn’t have done that. Oh no that’s alright then”, the Western nations say “Oh well we’ll keep an eye on him, don’t let him do that.” And then they go to sleep again and boing he does something else. You know. It was obvious what he was doing. But someone had to stand up and say “No.” And

they had the opportunity for America, France and Britain. To just combine and say “No, no more.” You know, when he went in to Czechoslovakia, “Get out”. And make him get out you know. And they could’ve done it in those days because he couldn’t afford a war. But oh no they said, they’d say “Oh no, he means it this time.” You know “He’s an honest man yeah he means it this time.” After all they, they’d apologise for him, they’d say after all there were a lot of Germans in Czechoslovakia.

You know and I suppose it’s alright. And then you know when he started the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, you know when Hitler wiped out the Brown Shirts in Germany and got control of them. And then the Crystal Night when they went through and smashed the windows of

all the Jewish shops and all that sort of business yeah. I couldn’t believe that you know that we stood back and did nothing. And then finally you know it went on and on then finally came Poland. And Britain and France stood by their guns and said you know “You mustn’t do that. You draw out, we’ll give you twenty-four hours to get out” but America stood out of it you know. America didn’t want to know.

And but Britain and France stood by their guns and you know they were at war. And I thought “Well better now than later on”. Because the longer they left it the stronger Hitler got. He was taking over more and more territory you know. He controlled most of Europe by that stage. And so you know the war was on. You know you’ve got to do your bit I suppose.

Oh we were all

British oh in those days yeah. In fact it was surprising the day, the first day the war, like when they issued the ultimatum to Hitler they opened a big recruiting depot in Martin Place. And there were a queue a mile long. Of young men waiting to join up. With the, that was the army. For the air force you had to apply by letter. You had to send a letter so I did that. And you know

working for Hungerford Spooners practically the whole staff, the whole male staff got up and walked out. To the recruiting depot. The only ones that didn’t were the ones like me who wanted to join the air force or the navy who you know applied by another way. You know, but Britain was at war. We were British attitude, you didn’t question it. Not like now. They seem to think that you know we’re a different country.

I suppose we are.

Mmm. Yeah there was Friday night. We you know we had late Friday night shopping and oh I was with a couple of mates. And we were in a shop, a place called Millards. You know the Queen Victoria Building, Millards had a shop at the Town Hall end of that. And I still

remember on the radio they, their advertisement was Millards, the Town Hall end of Queen Victoria Building. Still sticks in my mind. And we’re in there, my mate was buying a hat. Cause everyone wore hats in those days. And he chose, had a little feather you could, had choice of what sort of feather you wanted to put in, tiny little feather in you know. And we were there and he was selecting a feather. And someone came in the shop and said

“Is there a war on?” And we said “Oh, what?” He said “I just struck someone who said he just heard it on the news that war’s been declared. And oh has it, has it”, you know. And then somebody else came in the shop “Yeah that’s right you know, War’s declared.” And anyway I can remember coming home by tram and looking around and there were a lot of young blokes like me in the tram and talking and laughing and acting the goat and thinking

you know “I wonder what’s gonna happen now? Wonder what’s going to happen to all these blokes and me?”

Oh by that time they would have known. It spread around like wildfire.

Oh strangely enough bit of a relief I think because everything was so

indeterminate at that stage. And you know it seemed obvious that war was going to come sooner or later. And I had ahead of me probably three or four years or five years of study and examinations I think. And wondering you know, “Is it worthwhile just continuing my studies and you know doing the examinations?” And I thought, “What will I do?”, and in fact I had, the year before when I was seventeen and a half had applied

to join the R.A.F. [Royal Air Force], the English Air Force because there was an advertisement in there for short term commissions in the R.A.F. I’d applied for that but I think about a million others had too and they had only about half a dozen places. But you know I wanted to join the air force, I wanted to learn to fly. And but this sort of crystallised things. Now there was no doubt I was going into the air force. And my mind was made up

at that point. Before that point it was all very indeterminate. And now my mind was made up, I felt a lot better about it.

Oh that, yeah that was the main reason why I didn’t join the army or the navy yeah. I suppose you know if I was gonna join up it would be the air force. If I’d

been knocked back for air crew I don’t know what I would’ve done then. It would have broken my heart. I might have joined the navy or something like that. I don’t know, hadn’t entered my thought.

No I can’t remember, first one, the first one I really can’t remember. I think it was just a letter but I heard nothing for about oh three or four months, for a long time.

Then an advertisement appeared in the paper saying that the “All those people that had applied to join the air force would you please re-apply because we’ve lost all the letters?” You wouldn’t credit it would you but they had lost them. There’d been so many apparently they couldn’t know what they did with them. So I think it was only a letter.

Oh no just you know getting a bit exasperated, I suppose. You know when’s something going to happen. I was called up just for a medical you know to have the medical and interviews and made sure I was a fit and proper person. And one thing I had to do was bring in my, take in my father’s

naturalisation certificate. To prove that he was a naturalised Australian. I dunno, if he hadn’t been naturalised, I don't know if he hadn’t been naturalised if they would have accepted me not. But he was. I went in there, it was a pretty, it took all day to have a medical, it was a pretty long medical. But they had so many people. And I remember when right at the very end when we were sort of waiting to be you know taken in to something else. And nearby

they were calling up a lot of the fellows and saying “Oh look sorry you haven’t made it. You’ve failed on eyesight or you’ve failed on this or something or other.” You know, send them on their way. And I think “Oh gee, I hope it’s not going to happen to me.” Actually it nearly did though. In I.T.S. that’s the Initial Training School we went down for rifle practise.

First time and I’d never fired a heavy rifle, at that stage I’d fired you know two-two’s and what not. Little things but I hadn’t fired a big one. And we were in, we had to fire from a building that was corrugated iron building, there was sort of open, it was all enclosed except for towards the targets. And where you know

sound drum, I don’t know what you call it. You know it accentuated the noise. And I thought I’d busted my eardrums the first shot, bang and I felt it go right through and my ears were ringing. And I asked for the Corporal in Charge did he have any earplugs. He said “No”. So I sat down and fired the whole magazine full of rounds. I was completely deaf, I couldn’t hear a thing. My ears were just

ringing. And I didn’t go sick on that. I thought “God if I say I’ve got ear problems they’re gonna kick me out.” Cause at I.T.S. too they were still kicking them out, people who couldn’t pass exams. Gee they were tough on them. Cause they had so many people at that stage. And so I wasn’t game to, so I persevered. And when we going into classes, I used to with our books, I used to watch what the fella beside me was writing and I’d write

that down. And out on the drilling and the parade ground I’d try and get in the back row. So you know when people you know salute arms I could watch what they were doing. But gradually my hearing came back after a couple of weeks. But I still have a problem, I still have Tinnitus, ringing in the ears.

Mmm. And any really loud noise will start it again and deafen me so if I fire a thing like a shotgun you know

like a Clay Birch or anything, I put earplugs in. If I don’t, I go deaf. So but they didn’t pick anything up in the medical.

Oh no still not, not definite. I, you know I had to

pass the examinations and the interviews and so on.

Oh mainly about what job I had and what was I doing and those sort of things. And oh of course education, what schools I went to and what pass did I get in the Intermediate and all those things. I suppose they couldn’t, there wasn’t much they could

ask me was there at that stage. I was nineteen then, was I nineteen, yeah I was nineteen. Yeah I don’t remember much about it. Oh one thing that was rather amusing, one test they put you through, you had to blow up a tube of Mercury. You know the one? They have a great tube of Mercury and they have, give you a thing and you have to blow it up to a certain point to

so you got pressure in your lungs and mouth and everything. And you got to hold that pressure and they take your pulse. And I have a funny pulse that when I’m holding pressure like that it disappears for some or other reason. And the doctor couldn’t believe it and I didn’t know at the time. And he said “Oh you know, do”, he got me doing it three or four times and he said “Oh that’s funny, pulse goes. Hang on”, and he went away and brought back another doctor

and got him to try it. And it’s gone you know. And they got another one in, I ended up with about five or six doctors all trying me, you know I haven’t struck that before. “Isn’t that good?” “Yeah try again.” And I ended up I had fingernail marks all over my arm. So I’ve gotta warn doctors now when they’re doing that sort of thing now, my, my, something to do with a muscle, I asked a doctor once what happens and he said “Oh when you hold your

breath somehow the muscle comes over here somehow and covers your vein or something”, I don’t know.

But it was pretty thorough what they put you through.

Oh they went all over your head I remember. And with a stethoscope and all

sorts of things. Oh and feet, oh that’s right and ran a things up and down the sole of your feet. Oh I can’t remember most of it now but some of it was very funny. And all this tapping business and around your back and everything.

Oh yeah, they said “Oh yeah you’re accepted”. And in fact in those days too at that point they told you what you were going in for. And I was accepted as a pilot. And oh pilot, oh good, goody. But it was about six months before I was called up and in the meantime we had to go to classes and my nearest ones were at Eastwood. They’d taken over the Gas Company Showrooms at

Eastwood. And we used to go there two nights a week. And we used to learn things like mathematics and navigation and aeronautics and oh Morse. We had to do Morse. And all those sort of things. And that was six months. And then when they called us up they told us “All this business you were selected for such and such, that was scrubbed and we’ll tell you

at the end of the I.T.S. what you are.” So I ended up being a WAG. I was very disappointed. And one thing that they do, they marched us back to our barracks and I remember all we WAGs all moaning and groaning and oh I don’t know why. And one fellow was with us said, oh he was from the bush, “I better write a letter to my parents and tell them I’m a WAG” and he went to his bunk and he sat down and he got a,

and he’s writing away there. And after a while he says “Hey fellas, how do you spell suicide?” And great roars of laughter. God knows what he was telling his parents.

Oh I went, when I went home, after the medicals and things, yeah I went,

they gave us a little badge and it says “Air Force Reserve” or something on it you know. And we can proudly wear that you see. And I got home and told them and “Oh, I’m accepted, I’ve got the badge and so on.” And my elder brother was most upset. The poor bloke he’d unfortunately, when he left school he got a job in an engineering shop, it was a sweatshop and they used juniors to do

tradesmen’s work. And he’d been working a power press. And the, with these power presses they have a guard so that when the thing came down you had to pull a guard down before the big press would come down. And then it’d go up and you’d pull up the guard and then you’d put something else in and then pull down the guard see like that. But apart from the guard you had a foot switch. Anyway

the, what people used to do, instead of using the foot switch to bring the thing down they used the guard which is really only a relay. And the, it’d been used so much that way, the wrong way, that the guard that’s supposed to cut out the switch wasn’t working and so he’d had his hand in and the thing came down and cut the fingers off his right hand. Cut off there.

So that finished him and he would’ve loved to have joined the air force. And he would’ve because he was a big tall athletic sort of bloke too, he was very healthy and strong and excelled at all sports. You know he would have easily got into the air force but because of his hand he couldn’t. And I remember he said “Oh give us a look at that”, and he took the badge. And I thought “I know what’s going on in your mind.” He would have loved it.

But the end, they took him in the army eventually but he, for a long, long while he applied for the air force, the navy the army. He applied for everything and they wouldn’t take him. Finally the army, after a couple of years when they were running short of men that they took him in. But he didn’t get any further than Darwin. He spent most of the war in Darwin and you know was a bit depressing for him.

But anyway, that was it, I was in the air force and I was only in the air force for what seven weeks and I was overseas on my way to Canada. Great excitement.

Oh yes.

Yeah well it was the Oranje, which was a passenger liner,

about ten thousand tonnes. We left on the twenty-first of March 1941. And we were travelling as tourist class passengers. It wasn’t a troop ship. There were passengers on board including some children and we, we were spread all over the ship. Some of the boys were lucky, got first class cabins and some even had suites

and things like that. But I was in a tourist cabin, which was quite comfortable. We had very good meals. Our first stop was Auckland where we had I think, we might have had two nights there, a full day. In which the local people showed us around, drove us around. We went to, what’s the place

with the, all the, Rotorua, that’s right. And had, we were entertained in their homes. Had a good time there. Picked up some...

That’s right, we picked up a contingent of New Zealanders there and set forth.

Our first stop from there, now I think we went, must have gone to Fiji first. And we had a couple of nights there so we had a full day but I wasn’t very keen on Fiji, was very hot and humid. And I thought Sydney was humid but there, not it was. There we,

we went, we had a fairly easy time on the ship. Mornings we usually had a parade and maybe a lecture or two. But after lunch the afternoon free, we had to ourselves. From there we went to Fanning Island. Which there was no wharf. They sent things ashore by lighter or some float

system. Then we went on to Christmas Island which was a, only a depot for the Trans-Oceanic Cable. And we picked up, there were only, I think only two white men on the island plus the wife of one of them and her little baby daughter who was about three I think, three or four.

We picked up the wife and the daughter. And they were going to Sydney but they had to come with us all the way to Vancouver then back to Sydney because it wasn’t stopping on the way back. The

Yeah this little girl was most intrigued apparently to see white children on board. She’d never seen a white child before, they were only black children.

she’d seen. Anyway we carried on and got to British Columbia where we got off the ship, Vancouver Island sorry, Vancouver Island. We got off the ship and went for a route march around the island, which was quite good. We’d been on the ship for quite a number of weeks. About three or four weeks.

Then back on the ship then they set off and went, got into Vancouver. On the, sailing through we passed a lot of islands. There must have been a fairly well catered with islands there because there were lots of them as we sailed through and there was very clear, cold and the air was so clear.

You know beautiful just standing on the deck going, sailing past these islands. We finally got to Vancouver Harbour and it looked a beautiful city with the sun shining on it. Everything glistening, it looked so clean and pure. It looked like the Land of Oz. It didn’t look quite real. And I thought “Oh that’s gonna be good to have a look at this city you know explore the city.” But they marched us straight off the ship onto the train.

And we set off for Winnipeg. We had to over the Rockies of course. And we had quite a long stop at Banff right at the top of the Rockies, a great ski resort. It was all closed up. It was a very big hotel there for tourists but it was all closed up. It wasn’t skiing season hadn’t started. But I was most intrigued because for the first time in my life I’d seen a Mounty

in his uniform. And it was so quiet. There were no birds, there was nothing really. You know you could stand still and the silence was almost deafening. Very strange. Anyway we set off. We went through Calgary, we stopped there in the middle of the night. And it was snowing. The first time we’d seen snow I think.

The boys had fun throwing snowballs at each other. And pressed on, we got to Winnipeg. Winnipeg was I think there were they said “Thirty thousand, three hundred thousand people.” So it was you know fair size right in the middle of the prairie. And they marched us to the camp at Tuxedo where we booked in and they took

all our usual particulars and then they let us off for the rest of the day to go into town, the city. And spent the day, the rest of the day just racing from shop to shop. Because all the shops were centrally heated. And they had big dial thermometers all around the town. Where we have clocks, they have these thermometers. And they were all showing the same temperature which was just freezing point. In was in

Fahrenheit. Thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, freezing point. So we ran from shop to shop. Look out and if it looked a clear way, we’d race like mad to the next shop. So we had to learn to walk on frozen pavements. And that’s something that’s very important that you learn because you can really kill yourself if you take a wrong step and slip.

Oh we did all slip one way or the other now and again but not badly. You had to learn to sort of walk in a sort of a lope with your shoulders hunched forward so that if you slipped you went forward not back. You’d go forward and at least you had your hands to protect you. Anyway we booked in there. It was, and we were surprised at the luxury of the camp because

in Australia all we had for beds were the iron bedstead, frame, an iron frame with a straw palliasse and one or maybe two grey blankets. But here we had proper, no double bunks with a nice spring mattress, kapok mattress on top of that. We even had sheets and not only pillows but pillow slips. Most impressed by that. Amazing.

And the meals were good. It wasn’t just sort of thrown at us like we had back home in Australia. No they really looked after us.

Oh no, no. Oh we were having fun. Ah they taught us to play baseball you know and a lot of building still going on there. They were converting it from the old blind institute to

the air force place and they had to build a lot of extra pre-fab buildings on it. And so there was a lot of mud and slippery places where we had great fun slipping and sliding on there. Ran along and sliding along it. That was good fun. And the barracks were two, they were an ‘H’ shape. The barracks and the long part of the ‘H’ and joined up by the ablutions area with the showers

and washbasins and toilets and everything. So you didn’t have to go outside like you did in Australia. So they were all very comfortable and very good. So but the thing we found hard to get rid of were the millions of mosquitoes and all other insects. It’s amazing in a place like that has such cold weather that they have so many insects there. And everything was screened, all the ventilators

and windows and doorways all had screens on them and plenty of fly spray and things. But it was good. And the Sergeants and Corporals were like human beings not like they were in Australia always shouting and barking and abusing us. And the, actually the whole lot of them were very

good to us. It was a very easy life and they didn’t seem, they didn’t have the strict discipline that we had, everything was so much easier. But we were surprised how you know their lack of education from our point of view. You know how uneducated they all seemed. And when it came to drilling and marching, the, they had a Sergeant in charge of our section and he was as proud as punch. Because of course we could all march in step

and really step it out and do everything we should have done. The Canadians were a bit of a ramshackle mob I think when it came to drill.

Oh yes very well. Mind you there was always a lot of good natured banter going on around various places. And it’s strange too how the Australians and New

Zealanders if you had them together, how they’d be abusing each other but if a Canadian came along they’d join forces and abuse the Canadian. It’s funny though we seemed to have this rapport with each other but the Canadians were outside. But it was all good fun. There was very little in the way of you know rough neck stuff. Except in good nature.

I think various things, you know at lights out and some people might want to cut it a bit rough or had a few fights while I was there but no one really got hurt.

Oh no, well, no not really except very late at night when some of the fellows that had got out of camp surreptitiously and found some booze. Cause there

was no booze on the camp, that was all dry. And you know they might come back late at night when everyone was in bed and fast asleep and they’d come in start pulling people into bed, well there was a real fight on then. No, we all got on well together. But there were a few you know insults hurled around at times. Not too bad.

It was very good, very enjoyable. And the local people were very hospitable. And if you were out of camp anywhere walking along the road maybe you know a car’d pull up and say “Hop in” you know, take you home for a meal, and take you round, show you the sights. They just couldn’t do enough for us really. They were great people. We did a lot of skating. The day we arrived there, they closed the ice

rink unfortunately. But the roller rink was open so we did a lot of roller-skating. I got quite good. And we used to play a lot of softball. In fact we divided I suppose into two groups. There was some of the fellows who insisted on playing cricket. Cause cricket was the only game. But and the others of us who including me who preferred softball. And found it a lot more fun, it wasn’t so traditional

I suppose. We went in there and had fun. There was a lot of banter between the two. Mmm, hard to think of much else that went on there. As I say we went on to Portage la Prairie. That’s where we really go into, we didn’t do much flying at Winnipeg. We had little,

Tiger Moths done with canopies over them to keep out the cold. Which we’d go out and do wireless exercises. Homing and contacting and various things. That was all but when we got to Portage, they flew Fairey Battles there. There were ex R.A.F. aircraft. They were a light bomber actually but they were obsolete when war broke out. And they were used by the

hundreds in France in the first days of the war and they were shot down by the hundreds so they were obsolete. They didn’t have a chance against the Messerschmitts and so on. So a lot of them were sent over to Canada and Australia, places for training. And we used to go out with two gunners and a pilot. The pilot would be flying and we’d take turn on the guns. And we’d do sometimes rogue shooting. They’d drag a drogue behind an aircraft, we’d

shoot at that. And sometimes splash targets they’d have a target in the water and fire at that. And then the pilots who did this day after day, day after day, got pretty bored about it all and they’d want to do a bit different so they’d, we’d do a bit of shooting and they’d say “Oh lets do something else”, like a few loops or something. You know go out and do aerobatics. Slow rolls and loops

or go out and fly along the surface of the, the edge of the lake where all the forests were, all the trees and raise these ducks up. And millions of ducks, I’ve never seen so many. And we’d go along and flying away at them. Never shot any, but it was good training and it showed how hard it is to shoot anything. You know you felt with a machine gun you’re pouring out bullets, you can’t miss. But you can miss. There’s more space than bullets.

So that it was good training in that way. So that was good fun. And one of the things we learned too, see Fairey Battles had a little, hatch underneath where you could put a camera. And the idea being that say if you were bombing anything, as you’d drop the bombs, you’d switch on the camera and as you flew away the camera would photograph the bomb blast and so on. But of course we didn’t have cameras but the hatch was there.

So, and it was traditional in the air force that if you were air sick when you got back, you cleaned up the aircraft. So they used to say “Now look, if you’re not feeling too good, don’t vomit in the aircraft, just open that little hatch and you be sick down there”. Anyway as you learned through the hard experience, what happened was the slipstream brought it straight back into your face. So when you got back, you’d say to fellas

“Now don’t forget if you’re feeling sick, open the hatch.” Anyway that was good fun. Anyway we graduated from there and they gave us four or five days to get to Halifax on our own volition. So it only took a couple of days to get there so we had a few days to have a look at places. And a mate and I we went and we had a day at Montreal and had a look round that town.

We got a, they have a sort of a hill in Montreal. I suppose it’s a bit like Perth where they’ve got this hill outside where you can go to the top and look down on the city. Beautiful view around. And they have horse drawn carriages. They’re the only ones allowed up there. So we hired one of those and went up there. And did a few things round the place, touristy things. Then we went to

Niagara Falls. We had to see that, which is great. And my mate had, at the time had relations in Buffalo which is just opposite in U.S.A. And he rang them and they said “Oh come over you know”. And he said “Oh”, cause America was not at war at that time and they were neutral. And he didn’t know whether he could get across or not. And they said “Oh, give it a go we’ll wait for you over the bridge.”

Anyway we went along, course had his uniform on, and didn’t have civilian clothes. And there was a guard on the Canadian side and he went to him and he said “Oh look I want to get to Buffalo.” And he goes “Oh that’s alright you know go across.” So he went across the bridge, he got to the American side to the guard there and told him, “No buddy, no, back.” So he couldn’t see his relations. Anyway we went on then to Halifax, had a couple of

days there. And then we were told we were going to England on these armed merchant cruisers, which I mentioned before. We were on Wolfe. And suddenly I realised there was a war on. And I didn’t like it very much at all. It was cold and dark and dangerous. I wanted to go home. No

hope. Anyway we survived and we got there and got to Greenock. Never, that was quite strange too. We got in a train, they, we got off the ship onto, well it was a railway station and the train came along. And I was staggered at the size of the train. It looked like a little toy train coming in. Because you know how big a carriage is. In fact those old wooden carriages they have on the

electric rails here though. I think they’re bigger than the ones we’ve got now. But these were tiny little ones. Gee they looked small. And then we went down first time you know and I saw the bomb damage and suddenly realised there’s a war on. Things are serious. And getting to Britain by then had been war for two years. And you know there was

rationing and blackouts. And the first time I heard the air raid sirens we were down in Melbourne and, down in Melbourne, down in Bournemouth. And the first day we arrived and we were sort of booked in and let off. And anyway we went down to the town a mate and I. And there was a film on, we thought we’d go to the pictures.

And we got in there, just, the film had only just started. And the air raid siren went. And the film kept going but underneath it reeled out, the alert has now sounded. “If anyone wishes to leave the theatre, the nearest air raid shelter is such and such a place.” So I went to get out. No one moved. Everyone just sat there. And

that’s really taught me a lesson cause I was scared, the bombs are coming down. You know “Let’s get out.” Then I thought “It doesn’t look good me racing out and everyone sat there.” And ultimately the all clear went. But Bournemouth at that stage, it had a couple of bad raids but the alerts were just, the aircraft, the bombs were going over to Plymouth.

Now it wasn’t Plymouth. Southampton. Which is nearby. The bombers were going over. Of course they flew over Bournemouth to get to Southampton. So the alert would go and then when they were flying back so. So people got pretty blasé about it after a while there. And that was I suppose a good beginning of it but

I learned not, you know, got used to hearing the alerts and sirens going. But it’s a nasty feeling when the first air raid came. And the first time you hear the bombs coming down and the shrapnel pattering on the streets.

That was, would have been November 1941. I was in Bournemouth

for a while then I went to the Head Office of the air force anyway. Where we flew. Oh that was another funny experience. We flew there in training, we flew in small personal Proctors. And the pilots that were there were Poles, they were, been through the Battle of

Britain and they were on a rest. And they were mad as rattlesnakes. I thought “God these Poles are mad.” It wasn’t much fun either, you never knew what they were going to do. We weren’t too happy flying with them. For them we did the, at Hooten Park learned what Coastal Command was all about. We did the course on radar.

And then the O.T.U. [Operational Training Unit] at Alness. And then that’s right when I was posted to squadron I went to Plymouth and that was an eye opener too at Plymouth. Because it had been badly bombed. And while I’d seen quite a bit of damage in London and other places I’d been, I was really taken aback with Plymouth. Because the whole centre of the

city was just rubble. And life was being carried on, on the outskirts of it. Incredible the damage that had taken. There again I was surprised at the spirit of the people. They weren’t, seem to be downhearted at all. They were very hospitable. And you know they’d help you all they could. They’d take you into their homes for a meal even though the

food they had was probably their next week’s ration that they’d give to you. We didn’t realise that for a while that we were eating all their precious food. And the thing that, another surprising thing too was after air raids. When you come out of the air raid shelter, how little effect it had on the children. They survived it better than ever. And to see these little boys and girls and their little gas mask

over their shoulder and racing around and looking for shrapnel and bits of bomb or bit of something else. A bit of an aircraft that had come down. And saying “Oh look at this and look at that.” And everybody else trying to get their nerves back into order.

They certainly weren’t frightened. But they were prepared for it. I was very friendly with,

with a family there that in Bournemouth. I got to know them, they became, a couple of the boys of the family became quite famous. One was, they were the Durrells. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Durrells. Lawrence Durrell was you know a very famous poet. In fact he was almost a poet laureate at one stage. And Gerald Durrell who was an author wrote a lot of books on animals and things. And he

started a zoo with, in the Isle of Jersey after the war. He was the first man really to start this, tried to protect wild animals. And he started breeding programs for various animals on this zoo. So he was the first man to do that. But anyway during the war they were only boys and I got friendly with the family. And they,

oh that’s right, bout the, course by the time I got there the fear of invasion was over. But they used to talk about it, people’d tell you all about the Durrells. One of the boys, the other one, Les Durrell, he was keen on guns and he had quite a selection of shotguns and rifles and revolvers and all sorts of things. And they were telling us how they used to try and teach their mother what to do

when the invasion was on. And you’d have to laugh. ‘Cause she was a tiny little woman, she was only about five foot three I think and probably weighed about seven stone if she was lucky. And they tried to train her to use a double barrel shotgun. And they’d have it all set up so that one of the boys’d be outside the house. One inside at the bottom of the stairs and Mrs Durrell would be at the top of the stairs with the shotgun.

And then they’d say “Right, start.” So they’d say “Hitler’s coming.” The next one would say “Hitler’s coming, and Hitler’s coming.” And at the sound of Hitler’s coming, Mrs Durrell was expected to open the shotgun and put the shells in and have the shotgun ready. But she didn’t have the strength to do it. She couldn’t open the gun. They were funny. And another time they, there’d been a bad, a very bad raid

on Bournemouth. And I’d just arrived in Bournemouth, I was staying with another family. I’d just come out of hospital, I’d had an accident in, I’d had a crash in a Wellington Bomber and I’d been in hospital for a few weeks. And I was just out of hospital and I’d had a few days off, sick leave, so I stayed with these people. Next morning, big raid on. Some Focke Wulf 190s

came across the Channel, under the radar and dropped these bombs on Bournemouth and were gone. It all happened in a few seconds. And there was fires everywhere. It was a big raid, there were picture shows, damaged, there were you know, destroyed, there were apartments, stores, churches, blown down. And after the raid I looked round and the Durrell’s house was oh a fair way away but I could see a plume

of smoke coming up where their house was. And I said “Oh it looks like the Durrells might have copped it.” So I went over to find out. And I, when I got there it was barricaded off and the Air Raid Wardens were there and I explained to him you know where I was going, so they let me through. And I got there but the bomb had landed on the house behind them. And it had blasted all their windows in and the power was off

and all sorts of things. And I went into the house and oh and they had a Greek maid. They’d lived in Greece for many years and when they came back to England they brought this girl Maria, she was Greek. Belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church. But anyway when I went in there were candles burning you see. And I thought “Oh you know power’s off.” Then I thought “But it’s broad daylight, what do they want candles for?” And I said to one of them you know

“What’s the candles for?” “Oh” they said that “When the bomb missed them Maria lit the candles to her Patron Saint and we thought that might help.” So they got every candle in the house, put them all round the house and lit them. They were very lucky. Actually that was a bad raid but it was lucky in lots of ways because it was Sunday morning, it was a beautiful Sunday

morning. And the churches had had their Sunday services and the people were out. The picture shows hadn’t started going so there was no-one in the cinemas. And being Sunday the department stores were shut and no one in them. And while they lost a lot of shops and cinemas and churches there weren’t many people in them, which was fortunate. But in Bournemouth just

on the sea front there was a beautiful park and the Bourne River comes down there and there’s a beautiful park on the Bourne River. And a lot of them you know out of church or waiting for picture shows to start or something, were in the park and the aircraft when they dropped their bombs went down and machine gunned the people in the park, so a lot were killed that way. But it could have been a lot worse.

These friends I stayed with had a dog called Bonzo. And Bonzo had his own little air raid shelter. It was in the kitchen where they pulled out a little tray thing. Above the drawers, a thing you pulled out and maybe work on it. But when there’s an air raid on they’d pull that out and Bonzo would go and get under that. If it was pulled out.

But strangely enough Bonzo always knew when an air raid was coming because he’d go to this place and he’d sit under it. And they knew and then after a while the air raid alarm would go. He always knew before hand. And yet British aircraft could fly over and it wouldn’t worry him but he could always tell the Germans. But anyway after a while they got what they called a Morrison shelter, which was a steel

dining room table. So that’s how it was, you could put it in your dining room and you could eat off it and so on. But if there’s an air raid you could get underneath it because it’s steel. And it had mesh around it so if the house collapsed the Air Raid Wardens would know where your Morrison shelter was and they could dig you out. When they got that well Bonzo shared that with the people in the house. But this very morning they had the bad raid. I

was just out of hospital as I said and I was standing in the lounge room of the house and the others were out the back of the house. And I heard the alarm go and didn’t take much notice. Being Bournemouth I didn’t expect the raid, I didn’t take much notice. But then the windows started rattling like that, rattling. I thought “That’s funny, what’s that?” And I went to the window and looked out and there was a Focke Wulf 190 coming down the road popping cannon shells, pop, pop, pop, pop. And you know next thing I was

flat against the wall at the back. I don’t remember coming back. All I could think of was glass cause that’s the worst thing, glass flies everywhere. And I didn’t know, I can’t remember doing a thing but my, I was flat against the wall at the back. All I could think of was glass, whoom. And then I, that’s right I went out the back then to where the others were and there was a neighbour there and they were talking to him. They were out in the sun and

oh no, first thing, that’s right I went for the Morrison shelter. And I raced round and I went to dive under the Morrison shelter and there was Bonzo, he was the only one under. And I went out the back and I said “Come on there’s an air raid. Air raid on.” And oh, and there the neighbour, “Oh” he said, “Peter, on leave, are you?” I said “Oh yeah I got a couple of days, quick get under the shelter.” I thought you know I better get them under before me. And by that time it was all over, all in a

few seconds, that quick.

Oh I didn’t know until as I say when I went to Hooten Park where they taught us the procedures of Coastal Command, which are different to Bomber Command. So I knew then I was. I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to go on to Coastal Command. When we got Wings we had the choice.

And we could write down the choices what we wanted. I remember I put down choice number one was long range fighters, choice number two was light bombers and choice number three was heavy bombers. But they sent me to Coastal Command. And after this at Hooten Park I met a fellow there who was quite a high-ranking air force officer. Like a friendly, “Oh don’t want Coastal Command I’ll see what I can do for you, see if I can get you off it.”

But nothing happened. So probably just as well.

Oh I knew they were pretty tough but oh you know I suppose you, it’s all a matter of taking a chance isn’t it? See Bomber Command too, people were

going through the squadrons all the time whereas we would stay with the squadrons. See they would do a tour of operations maybe in six weeks sometimes. Maybe two or three months, four months maybe. And they’re off on a rest, see more taking place all the time. Whereas it took me just on twenty months to do my tour. I had to do eight hundred operational hours. And then I, what they call a rest. Bit of a laugh.

Oh I don't know, oh well I suppose flying boats were considered sort of stodgy. And I suppose there was some glamour in that. I don't know but I think one of the things, I’ve never been really keen on the sea and the water cause

I nearly drowned once when I was a kid at Manly you know on a day I rode down on my pushbike. And they used to hire out surfer planes in those days. And I hired a surfer plane, you know those things they’re a rubber float actually. They’ve since been banned which is just as well. And I often used them and all you had to do you know was go out a little way, catch a wave, a little wave and come back in again. But this day there was a very strong undertow and before, before,

before I knew it, I was way out beyond the breakers. It took me out so fast. And I thought “Oh my God you know I’m so far off the beach.” But there were a few of us, there was half a dozen of us there. And you know well we’ve got to get in. And one of them said “Well, look there’s a wave coming, a big wave coming. We’ve got to get on this wave and get in.” And I thought “Oh my God.” So I turned around and got on it and I didn’t realise it was a dumper. And it dumped me.

And I, it just threw me over and the surfer plane went whoosh and I managed to hang on to it, thank God. I thought “If this goes I’m a goner.” And I’m hanging on, and hanging on and it’s getting away and I hit the bottom and finally boing I’ve lost it and I thought “Oh I’ve gone” and I was on the beach. It had taken me all the way in. I’ve never forgotten that. I didn’t go again that rest of that day. So I thought “No, I don’t want Coastal Command”. So I wanted land planes

but that was it. So anyway, I got used to it.

Oh bit hard.

Well I think oh one of the first things that made me appreciate how lucky I was being commissioned. Because when you got on the ship, it was an ex freighter of some sort. And so all the, my mates, who were Sergeants, went down into the freight hold. And they were down there with just palliasses on the floor. That’s what they slept on. But I was in a cabin, which was,

it was wonderful. Although, it was a bit worrying at one stage I, when, first thing we did on the ship of course was they showed us our boat stations. And when the alarm goes we had to get there straight away and all this business, put through the drill. So anyway when we got going I was in this cabin all by myself and middle of the night some time, and there was a terrible noise started going like a ratchet

going oooooooh. And I thought “Oh that must be the alarm for the U-Boats”. So I got up and I got my great cape and put in on over my pyjamas and pulled on some boots or something and then the noise stopped. And I thought “Maybe it wasn’t an alarm.” And I listened. And it was quiet and I couldn’t hear anything. So I thought “Oh couldn’t have been”, so I took off my boots, took off my great cape and got back into bed. And then after a while I heard running feet on the

on the passageway outside. So I got out of bed and opened the door and I said “What’s going on?” And the fella said “U-Boat attack. Get to your boat stations”. “Oh”. So back I go and put on my boots put on my great cape. No one had told me what the, they talked about the alarm but they didn’t say what it was. Anyway I got to my station and everyone’s saying “Where’ve you been, where’ve you been?” “I’ve been in bed”. Anyway that was quite...

From then on I knew what to do. Oh that’s another thing too. I dined with, in the officer’s mess with the Naval Officers. And that was quite an experience because you know I’d just turned twenty and hadn’t had much experience in formal dining. You know the passing of the port and all that sort of business. And I had to learn then. I did pull one terrible gaff I remember. The first course

was a plate of soup and I picked up my dessertspoon instead of the soupspoon. I remember that. Anyway I overcame that. Got to know it. Ah that’s about all, all I can remember about that really was being at base stations. It was freezing cold and waiting there, waiting to think “Are we gonna be hit by a torpedo or something?” As I say I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to go

home. I didn’t want to be there.

I was just homesick. No, you had to overcome that. That’s about all. You know we went through to Greenock. It was quite an experience there. The port there now, it was full of shipping coming and going and as you can imagine. There were naval

ships sailing around. And in amongst it all was a Catalina flying boat. Practising landings and takeoffs. That amazed me and in fact how he got permission I don’t know. There were ships all round, no one seemed to be taking any notice of where he was coming or going. But this thing landing and take off again and he’d go round and he’d land again. Anyway that was it, we got on the train, we stayed on the train and oh there was a very,

very hush hush secret too when we came off. They wouldn’t tell us where we were going. Said “Oh it’s secret, secret you know. Wartime, England, you know.” Then we got on the train and they still wouldn’t tell us. And I remember when we’d been going all night and I think they’d given us a packet of sandwiches or something and finally we stopped and they said “Oh you can get off here for a short while but we’re leaving in half

an hour or something. Just stretch your legs and get back on again.” And we got off onto this great big train station. Great big platform and great big domed roof and oh it was a monster size. And there’s an English bloke near me and he looked at me, he said “What’s this little town we’re in do you think?” And I looked round and said “London?” He said “That’s right”. So we were in London. So we saw London for the first time.

Oh that’s all I saw was just this platform. Course we’re back on the train and then we’re going. Anyway we’re going a bit further and then finally they said “Oh we can tell you now where you’re going. You’re going to Bournemouth. We couldn’t tell you before because the King and Queen were there yesterday or something or other.” Yeah it must have been the day before the King and Queen. Why they couldn’t tell us during the night I’m not

quite sure. But apparently they had been there. So when we arrived everyone was saying “Oh gee you’re unlucky, the King the Queen were here yesterday. And we met the King and we met the Queen.” I missed that.

Oh the worst was Plymouth, by far. When I got to Plymouth. The whole city was just a mass

of rubble. And business was being carried on around the outskirts of it.

I often wondered that they were. Business was going on. And you know restaurants, shops were open. All round the outskirts of it. Inside though I suppose they were clearing roads and things to get through it. But nothing, nothing was happening in there, just rubble. Rubble.

That was by far the worst.

Mmm. Course London was a much bigger city. Probably over, in total probably London would have been worse but it was spread around. Once on leave we, I went on leave with a fella that, Jimmy Lee who was the Captain of my aircraft at the time. And we went on leave together and went to London. And we were staying at

the Strand Palace Hotel. And we booked in and we went out that night and went to a picture show or something or other. Coming back we were going up in the lift and we were on the top floor. And the lift driver said “Oh you blokes are on the top floor”. He said “The top floors of this were bombed out in the blitz. It’s been re-built up there so if there’s a

raid on tonight, take my advice and come down and go into the air raid shelter in the cellar.” And we said “Oh okay”, you know. Anyway this is 1943 sometime and what was happening was the little blitz. The Germans didn’t have the aircraft to put on the blitz like they did in 1940 but there was you know a steady bombing raid practically

every night. But only by I suppose twenty, thirty aircraft. Not a big blitz. It was called the little blitz. Anyway we got into bed and switched out the light and pulled the blackouts across so we’d have light in the morning you know at dawn when the sun came up. We used to pull the blackouts across and got into bed. And hadn’t been in bed long and the sirens went. And I said to Jimmy,

“Jimmy will we be heroes or cowards?” And he said “Oh let’s be heroes Pete, I don’t want to go downstairs.” I said “Me too”. So we sort of snuggled down in bed and you know laying there for a while. And after a while we could hear the German aircraft. You could always tell the Germans because they used to de-synchronise their motors. They used to do it in World War I too. Have you heard of that?

Yeah twin engine aircraft, they,

you normally have them going at the same revolutions. But if you put them out of synch a little bit, the noise you get is, goes zzz zzz zzz zzz like that. And they used to do that to make, scare people. “Say oh, you know, air raid”. My dad said “It was the same in World War I, they did it then too”. Anyway we heard them but they were a long way away you know. So anyway we waited there for a while.

And then in the distance we could hear the anti-aircraft starting up you know, boing, boing. And out through the window you could see the searchlights. And we lay there a little bit longer. And the shooting was getting a bit closer and the aircraft engines sounded a bit closer. And then some bombs started to drop. And Jimmy said “Pete, let’s be cowards”. And I said “Yes Jimmy”. So we got out, put on our greatcoats on

and went down into the cellar. It’s a nasty feeling, cause you know you feel so helpless, and you feel that you know they’re aiming for you. It’s you know just I suppose a natural feeling. You forget that London’s a great big area and they could have been anywhere. They could have been a long way away. It sounds close.

The Germans were a lot better because the Germans excelled in radar-guided guns. And later on in the war the Brits got better with the proximity fuses too. So that if a shell was coming up you know if it goes near an aircraft, it’ll go off. Whereas previously they’d go up you know and they’d

explode and the shrapnel’d come down but they’d just have to be lucky to hit anything. Cause getting the right height you know is very critical.

Oh it blows off. If it, it’s a little transmitter and receiver so that if it goes near anything at all it’s got like radar. It’s sending out a beam and if that beam hits anything it

bounces back to the receiver and sets the shell off. So that if it’s going close to an aircraft it’ll set it off. Get the aircraft down, doesn’t actually have to hit the aircraft

Mmm, much more. And that’s the difference, see the British excelled in this miniaturisation to build, you can imagine the nose cap of a shell how big it is, and inside that they had to have a transmitter and a receiver and

switches and everything to set the bomb off. You know and be able to be light enough so it wouldn’t hold the shell back, the shell could still reach. The Germans couldn’t do that but they had radar in which they could direct their guns which the British concentrated more radar on their aircraft not on the guns. So two different ways of solving a problem. Proximity fuse and radar. But even so

they’re, very little was shot down by anti aircraft guns. Mainly the night fighters you know shot them down at night.

Well once instance I’ll tell you it’d been raining and this is Cranwell, which is the biggest air force, R.A.F. station in the world. It’s the Head Office of the air force. And they had all sorts of things, they had training

areas you know. They had operational and signals, they had an Officers training college. They had all sorts of things there. Plus a lot of air strips and so on. And a lot of them were just earth air strips you know. They weren’t, they didn’t have the concrete runways. Anyway we used to fly in one of these earth ones. And it had been raining and everything got a bit

boggy. So they said “We’ll shift you blokes to another one further out and stop this one getting any worse.” And we had to go to this other one which was oh it was real bog. And we were grouped, there were about I don't know seven or eight of us grouped at one end of the air field. And right at the other end was a Proctor

taking off with a Pole in control coming toward us. Well we didn’t worry, it was a long way away you know. We didn’t worry. And anyway we were just in a group talking you know thinking he’s keeping it down you know but suddenly realised he was holding it down on the ground. And at the last minute he just took off and someone yelled out, “Look out”. And one fella that had his back to the aircraft didn’t know what was

going on and he heard the roar of the engines and someone yelled out, “Look out and flop down” - this great puddle of mud. You should have seen him. And they must have only, he took the aircraft off, must have only been a couple of feet over our heads really. This fella went over oh mud from head to toe. Those sort of things. You know if they had the opportunity they’d do that. They were mad. Yeah and if it had been

an R.A.F. pilot doing a thing like that you know they would have been disciplined for it. But the Poles were just let go. Cause we sympathised with them. The poor blokes had their country devastated and probably these blokes had, their families could have been killed. And they fought their way back you know through Europe to get to England and in fact I did hear in the Battle of Britain they represented ten percent of the

fighter pilots that fought in the Battle of Britain. Ten percent. And they shot down something like forty percent of the Germans that were shot down. And it’s all they wanted to do, they just wanted to kill Germans. And you know you had to sympathise with them and so they weren’t disciplined too much. You know they’d let their head a bit. I met one, in fact two, a Pole and a Czechoslovakian who, when I was,

when I had this prang I’d, I was sent to a gunnery leaders school to do a gunner leaders course. And we were flying old Wellington Bombers there. And I’d had a prang and ended up in hospital. And I had three weeks in hospital then I had three weeks in convalescent home. And I got my feet again and walking but I had a limp. They sent me to a convalescent home then to, I wasn’t allowed back to the squadron to walk,

until I could walk without a limp. I had three weeks there. And I met this Pole and the Czechoslovakian. And somehow, reason or other, we got good friends. And you know you have to admire them and I really, I thought these were beaut blokes. But one thing that was, that happened there. We, the three of us went to the local cinema at one stage. And they showed a film on To Be or Not To Be, I don’t know whether you’ve

seen it. Jack Benny was in it, he’s a comedian. And it’s a take off of Hamlet. And he was basically a ham actor. To Be or Not To Be. And in one part, this Hamlet’s going on the stage and Hitler comes into one of the boxes. And he comes in and as he comes in everything stops you know and he stands up in the box there and the band strikes up Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. And these two blokes

beside me started singing it. And I thought God the MPs [Military Police] would be along and run us both in. Singing the German national anthem. But they were great blokes. I enjoyed them.

Oh well when we left the operational training unit they made up crew there with us.

When we got to squadron they broke us up because we were all just green, you know we didn’t have experience. And we were put with experienced crews. And I was put on to one and as I was a Wireless Operator Air Gunner but they wouldn’t trust me on the wireless, that was most important so I was their tail gunner. But I don't know I must admit for a while there it was an altogether different

feeling I suppose, different experience. I was pleased that I was sort of brought into it fairly gradually. Because you can do all the training you like but to go on actual operations was a different thing altogether. I don't know I can’t explain it, it’s, sort of you feel differently about it. When you’re training you know well it’s only an exercise run, training. But you know when it’s the real thing, it’s a different thing altogether.

In fact I remember reading about a trainee pilot who, he hadn’t gone solo night. And he’d been taken on dual night flying and then they finally sent him on solo. So his first trip at night and off he went just as a storm came in. And it really blew. And it was pelting down with rain and all the rest of it. And they thought “Oh my God this is his first

solo night, how we gonna bring him in.” The things were pretty crude at that time, at that stage, and they had to bring him in on radio. They didn’t have radar. They had to bring him in and they had the, the runway lights and things and they had to bring him in and bring him in on a circuit and bring him all the way around and down. And he landed and he did it beautifully. You know, just like a,

a veteran. So afterwards the CO [Commanding Officer] said to him “You know that was a good show you did then. How come you were so good?” “Oh” he said “All I did was I said to myself, this is just an exercise. And I pretended I was on the link trainer. And you know that’s it because you know, I don't know how to explain it, but you’re saying to yourself all the time I suppose that this is important.

You know and if I make a mistake I’m gonna kill myself or I’m gonna do this.” When he was in the link trainer it was just an automatic thing you know on the ground, it doesn’t matter, you can laugh and say “Oh gee whiz I landed twenty feet up you know, very funny.” But not funny when you’re there so I suppose you’ve got the adrenaline flowing through you all the time and the whole feeling’s different. So I was pleased in the way it happened that I was put on a crew and I flew with

them I don't know four or five operations I suppose. Then I, they made up another crew of I suppose most of them were like me that’d done a few operations, not me but starting to get into it. No we were right there. Knew what we were doing and we could do it.

Oh I don't know whether they pointed out anything really. I mean you were aiming for the one thing.

And it was like school I suppose in a way that school only teaches you how to learn doesn’t it? I mean when you leave school and you start a job it’s a completely different thing. You’ve got to learn your job haven’t you? It’s like that I suppose. They teach you how to learn and they do it. And they give you lots of little hints on various things and in turn explain to you how the mistakes they

made. Hoping that you won’t make the same mistakes. That’s just the raw material of it. But when it’s all boiled down you’ve just gotta teach yourself. They were a lot of permanent air force blokes had been in the air force for years. And I think I told you about, explained how

flying boats were, they kept their lines of communication open for the British Empire in peace time and only the very best, the top liners in the air force were posted to boats. So it was a, a proud moment you know. And they were proud of the fact to say “I’m a boat man. I’m a boat man. I’m the best.” And when we first, when I first went to, as I said Hooten Park where I learned

that I was going onto Coastal Command and I can remember one of the old boys, a Flight Sergeant but in the classroom he’s trying to teach us something and you know they’re all a bit over our heads. And I can always remember looking at us with disgust and he said, “And to think you blokes are going on boats.” They thought that was a disgrace. But that’s how it

was. Cause they were what they would call a Gen Man. You know they just knew everything, they’d been doing it for years. And then they, when they went into operations you know they knew what they were doing and they finished their tour and they came back to teach people. You know they’re teaching someone straight out of school. Not someone that’s had years in the air force.

Oh not really, you’re just expected to do your job. Oh no sort of protection or anything like that. I mean you just had to do it. If you didn’t do it you were in trouble. That’s if you lived to do it. Lived to tell the tale.

Oh good. Well it was different to the other squadron too. Bombers and fighters flew a squadron. You know if there was a bombing raid on tonight the whole squadron flew. Or a Spitfire sweep over France, the whole squadron flew. But not us, we flew as loners. So that you were by yourself and your crew

of eleven. And you just got to know each other. The others, when you were in the mess, at night when you weren’t flying, there’d be some of the squadron there but not all of them. The next time you’re in the mess, they’re not there but others are there so you didn’t get to know the other crews as well as you did your own crew. For you know the fact that you were always together. So that when you had a day off you did a lot of training on that day off in ditch and drill

and dinghy drill and things. You trained together, that’s just one crew not as a squadron. And then when you’d go on leave you went on leave together. You didn’t go to the same places but you took the same leave at the same time. And maybe two or three’d go that way and a couple’d go that way. And you know, so that you were always more or less together. Whereas with the rest of the squadron you never really got to know them very much at all. So different to the other commands

where you know you could be on one crew but your best mate might be on another crew. But you know you went on leave with him or you did things together because he was your mate. But we kept together. And of course you always had someone on the aircraft, even when you were moored you had to have someone on what they called boat guards. And had to be either two or three all the time on board the aircraft. Apart from the fact that you, you know, when you weren’t flying anyway you, probably most of the crew were on the aircraft

working on it anyway. ‘Cause there was always work to be done. But whereas with the bombers they only went on the aircraft when they flew.

Yeah oh that’d be in the old days more. We did

often be diverted to other bases. We did a couple of trips down to Gibraltar. And we had two or three days down to Gibraltar for instance. But basically we most of the time came back to our own base. And if it was closed in, if we couldn’t get back, we’d divert to another base, next day fly back to there. But we, not like the old days where they might, you know, if they were at Rangoon or

Punjab or Timbuktu or you know, they could be anywhere round the world in those days. And you know they might be sent off to the land on the Ganges somewhere. There might be a problem with the Sikhs somewhere you know. So they would have to take a contingent of soldiers there with rifles and bayonets you know and land on the Ganges.

Then wait til they got everything in order and put back peaceful again and fly back. So you know they might if they need to refuel, they needed the work done in the engines. They had to be very cunning about you know say in Rangoon somewhere you were short of petrol, what do you do. They’d have to go out and maybe even, when someone’s not looking, could milk petrol out of a

car. You know there’s all sorts of things that keep you flying. But we didn’t have that problem. You know we flew from base, from and back to base most times. Yeah one of our trips to Gibraltar we flew back some escaped prisoners of war. Men that’d bailed out over Germany or

Belgium or France or something and come back through the underground to Gibraltar. And there were ten or twelve of them that we were flying back to England. And normally when we took off we got all the crew, everybody would get on the top deck in case there was an accident and the bottom deck could be wiped off. But if you were on the top deck you’d be right so. You went all up top and in your crash

positions for take off. But this time when we had ten or twelve people in the wardroom down below, we couldn’t very well, all the crew disappear up the top deck and leave them by themselves. Cause they think we might have deserted them or something. So the skipper said “A couple of you better stay down below with these blokes you know so they don’t get worried.” So I volunteered. And next to the wardroom where they were was the galley where we had a little stove and things and

we could do the cooking. And we had plates and knives, forks and things. Anyway this night we’re taking off, we had to take off at night so that meant at Gibraltar we had to get towed out into the, oh in fact it’s the Atlantic Ocean because Gibraltar was hemmed in and they had anti submarine booms and all sorts of things there so we couldn’t take off in the day time. Couldn’t see what was going on.

So we were towed into the ocean to take off. And there was a strong wind blowing and it was rough. And so anyway the skipper started to take off and opened the throttles. And we were bashing through these waves and I was in the galley and we had a rack with plates in them. And the plates started to come down cause normally we don’t have to take off like that. And I was trying to hold these plates up and anyway it was too rough we couldn’t take off. So we stopped and he

taxied back and said “We’ll give it another go”. So he took off again and bang, bang, bang and oh had to stop things falling down. And couldn’t take off again. So he said “We’ll give it one more go. If we don’t get airborne this time we don’t take off, we taxi back.” So around he went again and boom, boom, boom and he got airborne. Oh. So anyway he got up to a couple of thousand feet, set course and hand over to the

second pilot. And came down and talking to the, these bomber boys. And he said to one of them, “Well what do you think about boats?” And the bomber boy said “Oh they’re pretty good when they’re airborne.” I don’t know whether he thought every take off was like that.

Yeah well the front door’s on the port side you know the left side near the front. And the dinghy comes alongside and you open the door and you can get in at that point. Well up on your left is just the nose turret. And there’s a winch, there’s an anchor, there’s a fog bell

cause flying boats have to adhere to the rules of the sea when they’re down on the water. So they’ve gotta have things like fog bells and things. Anyway, that’s that. Then you can go down some steps into the wardroom, which is quite a big room, and there’s a long bunk on each side and a table in the middle. And you go through that to the galley. And you go through another door and that’s the bomb room and that’s where we have the depth charges there up on the ceiling bomb racks. And

when we want to use them we pull down side panels and run them out on electric trolleys underneath the wings so they can be dropped. Then you go through that and there’s another little sort of a crew room with a couple of bunks. And then you go up some steps then there’s a flat area and there’s sort of a work area there. There’s a bench with a vice and that’s where the rigger and the fitter and the

engineer do any repair work they want. Then there’s a catwalk right down to the tail to the tail turret. And then you can go up steps, instead of going down to the tail turret, you can go back, up some steps and there’s the mid upper turret there. And then you can crawl through, it’s, you can’t stand up at this point because it’s fairly confined. So you can crawl through to a little door that you can open and you get through onto the bridge. And that’s

the main part where you’ve got two pilots. Behind that on the right is the radar operator and the radar set. Back a bit there’s the navigator who’s got a table and all his gear there. Then on the left is radio operator with all his gear. Then behind the navigator is the fitter’s bench, that’s got all his array of dials of

you know petrol and booth gauges and all those sort of things that he needs. And then down is, from that, is a hatch you pull up, you go down some steps into the galley. So that’s where you came in, that’s the aircraft. Between the two pilots there’s a little step down, a little staircase thing that goes down into the nose and then on the right there’s the toilet. And it’s quite a big

room with a flushable toilet providing you’ve remembered to pump the water up into the cistern. And there’s a washbasin with a mirror and oh a few other little things. Oh that’s about it. But that’s where people keep, kept their sort of magazine rack and things when they were going... In fact I’ve forgot about this.

Our rigger, the rigger is the man that looks after the airframe. And on take off he’s, when the aircraft’s on the water, he’s the one that works the hardest because he’s checking the wings and the body and everything. But when we get airborne he doesn’t have much to do. All he does really he just takes, watches on the turrets and a few things or do some cooking or you know that sort of thing. But what our rigger,

his name was Bamber, Pierre Bamber. We called him Pierre Bamber because his, he looked like a French; he’s a little slightly built man. He wore, he always wore a beret and had a little moustache and looked like a Frenchman. Pierre used to spend the first hour in the toilet with his magazines and books. And he used to call that his quiet hour. So when we’d get airborne and Pierre’d be you know. So anyway one day the skipper, we got airborne and the skipper got,

got in need all of a sudden. So he went down and there’s Pierre. Oh it even had a little lock on it you know it says vacant or engaged. And Pierre’d locked himself in and it was showing engaged. And the skipper, Dudley Marrows, “Pierre, Pierre hurry up”. And Pierre’s there reading, “Won’t be long skip.” And Dudley’s waiting around, “Hurry up Pierre, hurry up Pierre”. “Won’t be long Dud,

won’t be long. I won’t be long.” Anyway Dudley’s there and he looks around and he saw the fog bell. So he got the bell and he stood outside the door and he went bang, bang, bang. And the door flew open and out raced Pierre with his trousers down to his ankles saying “What’s up, what’s up, what’s up?” Dudley ran past him locked the door, closed the door, locked it and left Pierre outside saying “You bastard, you bastard.”

Yeah mooring up is a difficult procedure because the Sunderland has a great big fin. And so if you can imagine when coming in trying to aim for a buoy and you got wind blowing one way, you’ve got tide running in a different direction. And maybe even a swell coming in a different direction too. And it took a lot of skill for the pilot to be

able to wangle with the engines, it’s all he’s got, to get into position. Although we do have, did have droves. Sort of like balloons that we could throw over the side to sort of pull it round a bit. Which was a help you know attached to the hull of the aircraft. And then the nose turret would wind back, you’d have to wind it back and

people would get out into the nose of the aircraft, put a little ladder down the side of the nose and then one would have to get down and hang on with his legs on this ladder. And when he got to the buoy and the buoy would have what they call a strop, a big loop of cable like that sticking up. And as he got to that he had to be quick while the aircraft was maybe moving, with the, maybe have the tide behind it pushing it along. Get the rope through

and hand it up to his mate up top who’d wind it around a bollard. And you had to be very quick then to get, climb out of the ladder because a rope would come across your legs. And if you weren’t careful you could get caught there with the rope. So that was it and once we got the rope round the bollard that sort of hopefully if the rope didn’t break, cause sometimes it did was in strong winds or strong tide or something,

they could get in, pull in the ladder and then you had to go through the procedure of attaching it. And one of the steel cables and we had a, this winch thing in it and that had to attach to one part. Oh that’s right they had, there was a rope attached to the buoy and you pull that up and that had cables, steel horses attached to a big block of concrete down underneath.

And they had to be then attached to the aircraft at two different spots. And it’s very hard and especially when it’s in the middle of winter and it’s pouring with rain or snowing or very cold and difficult job. I can tell you.

Oh yeah, yeah, that’s right. And after all that then you have to get the refuelling barge and refuel and...

Mmm, oh that’s right, yeah.

Oh well when we got back from operations, the skipper and the navigator went ashore for a debriefing. And the rest of the crew would just have to do the work. Quite often the skipper would come back and help or quite often he, maybe if there’s

no need for him, he might just let the navigator go ashore. But the navigator never helped on the aircraft, never did a thing. Which I don’t blame them in a way because they had the hardest job of the lot. They worked all the time, they had no relief. There was only one navigator. We had two maybe three pilots, we had three wireless ops and we had about five or six who could do their turn on the turrets so everybody at some stage

had a rest. But not the navigators, they went all the time. And for twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours it’s pretty gruelling. Particularly with the responsibility of it, and you know, flying through storms and what not. And maybe pitch black at night and you know, so we never begrudged them that. But we’d stay back then, we’d have to, the most important thing was the refuelling, we’d have to get the refuelling barge. And that meant getting

out on the wing and opening little panels off each engine or each tank. And taking the cap off and getting the, they had, they’d throw a rope up, and you’d pull that up to get the nozzle off the petrol pipe and then you’d have to drag it over to wherever the tank was you know. And fill up, then you’d watch and then call out you know, “Petrol off. And fill up”

and then you’d screw that put the panel back, go on to the next one and so on. And then you had to do that with the oil because you had oil tanks. They were feeding oil into the engines all the time. And then you’d you know get the “Oil, oil on, oil off”. And one night I was, very, oh pitch black night. ‘Course that was another thing too. You weren’t supposed to have any lights, being blackouts. And, but you had a little torch, tiny little torch with you, go along

and use that to get the thing off. And you’d get the oil and you know. And I was doing that and I’d filled this oil tank up and I said “Oil off”. And I sort of pulled the nozzle out and put the cap on and then I went to walk over to the next one, next engine and I started slipping. And I got the torch and had a look and they hadn’t turned the

oil off. And it was coming all over me, all down my front, all over my feet, all over the wing and it was pitch black, it was blowing a gale and the aircraft was bucketing like this. And oh did I have fun and games trying to fill the rest of those oil tanks. You should have heard the invective.

Yeah I screamed out to the winds.

There were times like that when I, you know when you wondered why you were on boats. I think everybody in the squadron was trying to get off boats. Oh it was good fun.

Oh well it depended, if you’d used the

depth charges, you had to get the bomb scourer alongside and replace those. Well that wasn’t very often but it was a terrible job. And always the fear that, see you had to, they had a little winch attached to the bomb rack. And you had to sort of pull that up and bring this thing up into the bomb rack and you had to attach it to the fittings up there. And on odd occasions it’s given way

and the thing’s come down. And it’s happened on some occasions where it’s sort of hit the barge and rolled into the water. Now they should be on safe but you can never quite depend on it. And everyone just holds their breath and their fingers cause if that depth charge goes off with the pressure of water well you know that’s the end of it. They reckoned they’ve seen some people walk on water getting away from them.

But there’s that and if anything went wrong you know there’s always something going wrong with a complicated thing like an aircraft. Always something to do. You know maybe fuses have blown somewhere. I’m trying to think what.

Oh no I think that

more just what they called a D.I. a Daily Inspection. They were, you had certain routines that you had to go through inspecting and that took a long time. And then there was the cleaning out of the aircraft. Cause, you know, had to be kept clean cause they’re like a ship they’ve got bilges. And if any food or anything gets washed down into the bilges you know that could start rotting and create terrible smells and so on.

So we spent a lot of time cleaning and you know just checking everything. And you might reckon that, you tested the guns every time you went out. So there was a bit of ammunition to replace. And also you might find, feel that one of the guns is not firing properly or something. That’s you know, in fact that’s something we had to do was clean all the guns too when we came back.

That was a big job cause you had eleven guns. And they all had to be stripped down and cleaned and you know reassembled and have ready for putting back into the turrets next time you take off.

Oh could be, oh well you’d be inside the aircraft. In fact I got into trouble once. On a squadron we did a, we did

a test flight on an aircraft. They decided to put an extra four guns in the nose and this one had two guns in the turret too. And we did test flight and we tested all the guns and everything was okay. And it wasn’t our aircraft, I don’t know why the crew who owned it didn’t do it. But we, when we came in we cleaned all the guns. That’s all we had to do because it was

the only thing we used was the guns. And to make matters worse I’d just had a shot in the arm for something or other. A booster shot for something and I wasn’t feeling too well. I wanted to go ashore and go to bed. Anyway, and it was only a scratch crew. So I said “I’ll clean all the guns”. So I was left on the aircraft by myself cleaning all these guns. And I finished them all and as we used to do on my crew,

everyone had their own routine for doing things, but I left some of the guns on the fitters bench at the back. And the crew were going to take off next morning. That was the plan, they were to take off so I didn’t grease the guns. We used to put a light film of grease on them. Anyway it rained the next day and it rained for about the next three or four days. And nobody could get off. And by the time the crew went on board, what had happened, not being my aircraft I didn’t

know, there was a leak just above the fitter’s bench and the water had come down onto the guns and they’d rusted. And I was disciplined for that.

Oh I, it didn’t go on my record fortunately but I said “But, I thought, it wasn’t my aircraft, I thought the crew were responsible for their aircraft to look after it.” They were to take off the next morning. “Why didn’t they go out and check?” “Oh no, but you were the, you were

the one. You put them there.” “But I didn’t know the...” But that was the beauty of owning your own and working on it. You knew every little thing about the aircraft. And that was a benefit we had because you know things like the condition of the battery system you’ve got. You know keep an eye on something you weren’t too happy about. But gun cleaning was very important and of course with the salt air, they just rusted

as quick as anything. That’s why if we knew it wasn’t, they weren’t gonna be used for a few days, we’d put on a good coating of Lanolin all over to stop them rusting. But it was gonna be used the next day I just put a film of anti rust grease over them. Thinking “Oh they’d be used next day and put out.” Oh it’s one of those things. I suppose I should’ve, when they didn’t fly, I should’ve at least gone and

seen someone on the crew and said “Look you know you better check those guns.” Or something because the guns can’t be left for long. In that environment, the salt air, they should be checked every day. That was another thing, trying to grease guns when they’re cold. Lanolin, I don't know whether you know but when it gets really cold it sets, it goes as hard as a

rock. And under normal conditions like here, if you get Lanolin on your hands you know and just spread it over the guns and so on. But when it gets cold in the middle of winter, especially up in Scotland, it sets so hard. And the thing you try you know, you do this, oh you think you can’t spread it’s so hard and you get a bright idea. Everyone got this bright idea. Like these bright ideas, you don’t tell anyone else.

And got a small tin of Lanolin, took it into the galley and warmed it up so it was nice and pliable. Got nice and liquid so you could use it with the brush then. So I got, went back to the bench and you couldn’t pick the guns up with a bare hand. They were too cold so with a bit of cloth and grabbed the barrel and I got a, with the brush a bit of Lanolin and put it on the barrel and it was stuck

like that. As soon as it touched the barrel, all the heat went out of it, it stuck hard and I couldn’t with the brush. So you had to learn these things the hard way. So what we had to do in the end was just use anti-freeze grease. Even that used to freeze you know. Anti-freeze grease.

Oh it was so cold, I never knew what cold was like. Till I started flying up, went flying up from Alness on this,

from so called O.P.U. that they converted into an Operation Base. And flying up towards the Arctic Circle. Oh my God the cold, I’ll never forget it. It’d get right inside you. Something you never forget. And of course if you ditched in that water, you were dead, you didn’t have a hope.

Mmm?

Oh not really. The Sunderland’s did have an in-built heating system but it never worked. We got it working once I must admit but it didn’t seem to last long so we gave up. You get it working for a while then it’d pack up.

Oh we didn’t fly at high altitude, we had to fly low. Well to use

the radio we’d needed a pencil we had to write in the log. The only thing you could do was have a pair of knitted gloves. Hand, you know ordinary woollen knitted gloves. And a pair of leather sort of mitts that sort of just came like that. And over that a full pair of chamois gloves. And you could use a pencil with that. You know you could

write with that. Chamois is a wonderful material. Just hand written, hand written, or hand knitted woollen gloves are no good. And leather gauntlets are no good, you can’t hold a pencil. But they were good, so as long as your fingers had chamois over them. But oh the, you know you’d just put on every bit of clothing you could find. And you still froze.

Oh yeah I think we did. Oh yeah we certainly had pride of it. Especially see 10 Squadron were the first Australian Sunderland, well the only Australian

Sunderland squadron, we were really a British squadron. They were the first people in action in World War II, first Australians in action in World War II. First Australians to be killed in action in World War II. The first Australians to be decorated in World War II were 10 Squadron. So that’s something proud on our banner. We’ve got first into combat. So while we were, I was 461 Squadron, we were really an

adjunct to 10. And 10’s still flying so we called ourselves 10 Squadron then. So we take that as a matter of pride.

Mmm, oh yeah, yeah. Oh I will say they have a bit of tradition about them. Like the windjammers, you know people talk about the old sailing boats. That sort of the glamour of the past. Well flying boats were a bit like that.

They’re gone, there’s none now. They’re all gone but you know part of the past.

Well the main one was when we actually sank a U-Boat. We sighted four U-Boats on one trip and that was very unusual because we did several trips without even seeing one. And but on that one, that was a patrol, it was called the T3 Patrol, which we took off from Pembroke Dock, fly over the Scilly Islands, take bearings and,

and then fly down to the southern part of Spain. Then we’d follow the coastline of Spain and Portugal up to that top part called Cape Finisterre and then from there a direct line back to the Scilly Islands and then back to base. On this occasion we took off, we made contact with the coast of Spain. We had to fly up,

keeping outside the three mile limit. Because that’s territorial waters. We weren’t allowed to go inside there. And we flew up. It was a beautiful day, that day I remember. The, we could see the beaches on Spain, we could see people surfing and swimming there and we thought you know how lucky they are. And continued on to Cape Finisterre, we made that point and there was a big

tower had been built by the Germans cause they were friends with the Spaniards. And they had a cook, they had a lookout. So we couldn’t do much about it, we knew they would sight us and reported us. Then we made our way back. So we weren’t too worried at the time because there was quite a bit of cloud around. Which to us had a safety, that was life insurance. ‘Cause if we saw fighting we could duck into the clouds.

Anyway we continued on for about an hour from there. And we got a signal from group saying “That a U-Boat had been reported at a certain position”. So we made our way to that position and could find nothing. So we started a search, what they called a square search of, that’s flying in a square pattern getting larger and larger. To make, cover all that area. Then we got another signal from group

saying “Oh sorry we gave you the wrong position” and gave us another position. So we went there, by this time we’re getting a bit low on fuel. And we found the position and I told you previously when we came onto it we could see the, as we approached we could see a Liberator attacking one of the U-Boats. We could see the barrage of gunfire that they were putting up. I thought at the time

“Probably our job”, we knew the sloops, the anti submarine sloops there were six of them I think, were patrolling not far away from there. So I thought “Our best job would be to home the sloops onto them”. They were better equipped to attack submarines than we were. But the skipper apparently had other ideas. And he, “We have a, to give an order to the whole aircraft, we, you have to what’s called a

Claxon”, just a big horn I suppose. You pressed the button and it went dit, dit, dit meaning ‘S’ meaning submarines and that meant that whoever was downstairs had to race into the bomb room pull down the sides and run the trolley’s out with the depth charges on them. Anyway he, I heard him, I switched over to the intercom and heard the skipper say to the first pilot, “We’ll take the one on the left.”

And the first pilot said, “Why not?”, there were three of them, you could see the three. He said “Why not cut diagonally across and we’ll get the three in one go?” And I thought “Oh my God”, you know. I thought “Bad enough attacking one but he wanted to take all three in a go”. So anyway the skipper said “Oh no we’ll take one at a time”. And anyway we went into the attack, got down to about a hundred

metres from the submarines and ran into this barrage of the exploding shells that were throwing shrapnel around and I heard the shrapnel hitting the aircraft. And every now and again a propeller would pick up a piece of shrapnel and throw it against the side of the aircraft. And that was a louder noise than just flying through it. Anyway we, he was taking evasive action of course, up and down, up and down, trying to avoid it. But

we had the three submarines firing at us and the barrage was a bit too heavy, so he pulled away from it realising then that the Liberator was coming in behind him. So he came round in a circle, the Liberator then continued the attack and he was hit and started smoking and he broke away. We came in behind and the front gunner opened

fire and he could see the gunners on the U-Boat falling over as he was hitting them .And we swept over it. Dropped seven depth charges diagonally across coming in from the front. The, we had a problem, that, what they kept doing was coming round and facing us so that it was hard to get the diagonal run. But anyway he made it, he got this

diagonal run. And seven depth charges went diagonally across the U-Boat and then the, immense explosion that broke the U-Boat in two and down it went. And we swung around and came back to take photographs of you know the result to verify the kill. And oh I’ve never seen such a mess in all my life. If you imagine all the fuel oil

was coming out of the sub onto the surface and it was mixed up with, oh there was all sorts of flotsam. The, bits of the U-Boat, bits of a, oh there was paper. There was all sorts of things coming up. Including bits of bodies and dead bodies, and survivors who were coming up and you know struggling for survival. There was a, quite a traumatic feeling because at one instant the whole thing was something that was

evil and you know fighting back at you and next minute it was a load of scrap iron. Anyway I was very relieved to hear the skipper say to the rigger down below to “Get ready to throw a dinghy out”. So we threw the dinghy out and we saw some of the survivors swimming towards it. As it hit the water it opened up you know. He then swung around to

take stock and see which one to attack next. And then the Halifax, they were, actually when we arrived there were two Liberators, an R.A.F. Liberator and an American Liberator and the Halifax which was from Bomber Command. And all he had on board were bombs so he couldn’t come down low so. But what could have been three thousand feet, we estimated he flew over and had a near miss on sub

number two and that damaged it. It started puffing out smoke and was going round in circles and the crew abandoned the ship. They jumped out, they all had little one man dinghies. And as they jumped into the water all the dinghies opened, it was like a lot of flowers blooming. It was all these you know orange coloured dinghies opened up all round the place. Anyway he had a look around there was one left. So he prepared to attack that and started

to come into attack and he saw splashes all round it. And he thought that’s funny. And looked up and the sloops had arrived. And they were shooting at the U-Boat and the U-Boat was sailing towards them shooting back with his big gun, one big deck gun. And then he submerged. We found out later that he submerged, he got away from them but they stalked him for I don't know four or five days, depth charging and chasing him

and picking him up on the ASDIC [Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee] and finally got him. And they got a few survivors, it surfaced before it sank. Anyway we were left there. We took photographs, we could see survivors in our dinghy and nothing else to do so we set for home. We were getting very short of fuel at this time because in combat they put it too rich in mixture to get more boost

out of the engines. And we were running a bit short of fuel. Anyway we set course for home. And about half an hour later we struck another U-Boat. So into the attack we went and they started shooting at us and we’re shooting at them as we came in. They hit us, they got a shell through just above the bomb release gear and it exploded, started

a fire. And the skipper pressed the Claxon for ditching, da-dit-dit, ‘D’ for ditching. So we prepared to ditch. But the engineer got a, one of the extinguishers and went searching for the fire, found it and put it out with the fire extinguisher fortunately. The skipper continued the run but his, what I didn’t know, his controls were jammed and he couldn’t,

couldn’t pull it up. We were heading straight for the conning tower of the U-Boat. And the nose gunner reckoned he saw the gun crew jumping overboard seeing as they were quite sure we were going to hit them. They jumped into the water. He managed then, the first pilot, used all his strength and pulled the stick back and managed to get over. He pressed the button to drop the lone depth charge we had left but it misfired, it hit on the bomber.

So he swung round and we took stock anyway. The fire was out, we were still airborne and looked like we’d get away. The U-Boat had submerged so nothing we could do there. So we set course, we knew we couldn’t make base, we didn’t have enough fuel, so we made for the Scilly Islands. We threw out all the gear from the aircraft we could to lighten it and

just about wave top height. We kept it airborne and managed to land at the Scillys. And there we, there were no flying boat fuelling facilities there. So what we had to do was get the base ashore to load a dinghy up with four gallon tins of petrol and run out to the boat where we’d take them in the front door and up through the Ward Room, up through the,

onto the top deck through the astra hatch onto the top of the aircraft and refuel the aircraft that way. We re-fuelled and took off again. And made for Pembroke Dock Airbase. We got there safely. There were a few other hits on the aircraft and it was written off. The main trouble was, the shell that hit the main spar of the wing had taken a large lump of metal out of the main spar, well that was the thing that kept the wings

up, there was a great danger of that breaking off and couldn’t be repaired. So the aircraft was written off. It was just used as spare parts after that. Cannibalised. That about sums up that event. That was the, I suppose the highlight of my tour having struck four U-Boats in one trip, which was something of a record.

Not very much. No on the wireless, I was sitting back behind the, well back behind the pilot. And there’s just one little porthole that I had to look through. So I saw very little of what was going on. I did look when we first arrived with the three U-Boats, I remember looking out of the porthole, seeing the Liberator making the attack and seeing the barrage.

And we wouldn’t attack that cause all we had on the front, this was an early aircraft, and all we had was one single gun in the nose turret, just the one gun and that only had a hundred rounds of, pan of ammunition. So when that was out it was quite a job to change you know another magazine. So we weren’t really equipped for a front on attack like that. Later on they put a two gun turret with

a thousand rounds for each gun in the nose turret and also four fixed machine guns in the nose of the aircraft. So that would’ve been a lot better if we’d had that. But we only had the one gun. We were fortunate too that our, the fitter on the aircraft was a very good shot. Before the war he used to be an expert rifle shot. He used to go in for shooting competitions. So he was a good shot and we were very fortunate because he, he was able

to clear the gun crews and cause with the, our aircraft taking avoiding action, it’s pretty hard shooting in those conditions but he did very well. It’s strange though that with a thing like when you have recollections of it. Later on when we got to know, later after the war got to know the captain of the U-Boat, he was one of the survivors. And

he had a completely different recollection of that attack. He said as we were attacking, and you know we were shooting the guns, he said that “His guns ran out of ammunition just as we got over them.” He was quite sure that our gunner, hadn’t been shooting the gunners. And also he was quite sure that the

second U-Boat that was sunk by the Halifax, as I told you it was, had a near miss, it was going round in circles, smoking and everyone abandoning ship. He was quite convinced that they had scuttled. That they weren’t hit at all and that they scuttled before he was sunk. And that’s strange. But we’ve tried to argue with him but he’s quite adamant that he’s correct

It’s funny things like that how, people you know being there and yet have a completely different idea of what was going on. He was very bitter about something, I could never quite make sure what it was. That, ours was U 461, this, another one was U 462. They were Milch Cows [German resupply vessels for U-Boats]. And the third one was U 507, which was an operational U-Boat. It wasn’t a

supply U-Boat. And U 462, he was very bitter about it because number one he disobeyed orders when they were leaving Bordeaux. He gave orders for the three of them to, they were travelling at night and as they left Bordeaux at night time he told them “All to remain on the surface until dawn. And to meet at a certain point. From there, they,

being daytime, they’d submerge.” But U 462, instead of staying on the surface from Bordeaux submerged and went under water. And when they made the, U 461, 507 made the contact, 462 wasn’t there. And he was about to leave and go on his way when he saw them, they were signalling on, with their searchlight. And anyway they sailed over to him

and he had flat batteries and he couldn’t submerge, had to stay on the surface in broad daylight. And he was very annoyed about that because they should have submerged where it was safer. He’s cranky about that and then when he reckoned that they scuttled instead of fighting back, he was cranky about that too. But we said “He didn’t, they didn’t scuttle it.” We saw it was damaged, it was smoking you know. But he was quite adamant about that. Anyway,

that’s his recollection of it.

Oh at the time yes. As I say the, it was a very traumatic experience this sudden change you know from I suppose absolute fear and then you know to see you know people in the water you know struggling for survival. You know a sudden change. And the relief when I heard the skipper order you know “Drop the dinghy”. You know it was a very strong feeling of relief that

now we’re trying to help them. Oh later on you know thinking back you, you feel sorry for the people you know I suppose a terrible death going down in a U-Boat like that and there’s nothing you can do. And it got broken in half. Oh and another thing too that happened, when the sloops came up they had their ASDIC going and they apparently must have picked up the sinking

U-Boat and thought “Oh you know the U-Boat’s there”. And they start to drop depth charges. Well these people were in the water and the, Will Schteeple [Korvettenkapitän Wolf-Harro Stiebler (U-461)], the Captain, told us afterwards how, what they did was with the U, with the dinghy, they got the wounded, got a couple of wounded fellows and got them into the dinghy. But the others who were okay, floated in the water hanging onto the dinghy and the depth charges

were going. And you can imagine the compression, a depth charge can sink a U-Boat, a steel hulled U-Boat, you can imagine the pressure that puts up. And while the depth charges were a fair way away, he could feel the pressure on his body, and he said that he “Felt that his eyes were going to pop out.” And he was “Quite sure that he was gonna die”. And that must have been a bad experience. But anyway, apparently they survived that.

Not at that stage no. But I must admit we, you know while our job was to trace them and sink the U-Boats, you know we had a lot of respect for them. They were very courageous men. And apparently of all the men who vol, and they were all volunteers, volunteered to go on U-Boats, eighty-five percent

were killed in action. So you know they had a very tough job. So you know we admired them, they were very courageous people.

We’re still as I said, we’re still in touch with some of them. Will Schteeple [Stiebler], Captain died oh when was that, must have been the early nineties I think. About

1990, ‘92 something like that. But there’s still four or five of them. They still, they have a meeting every year in Germany. We’ve been invited over but haven’t gone yet. We’re still in touch with them. Oh they’re very nice people. Yeah it’s strange, we’ve been to a naval reunion in Germany, in Raganville in Germany [possibly Regen or Regensburg in Bavaria, Germany]. Had a, you know, great,

great time, you know great people. You know they’re just like us you know.

No I haven’t. Oh there are some who, a bit reticent, didn’t want to talk you know. They had their own thoughts. But oh most of them are quite happy. Look over experiences and laugh about it. Oh yeah.

Oh at the time I couldn’t believe it. We were just so dumbfounded, we couldn’t believe it, I don’t know what I thought.

Well you know Spain was a neutral country. We didn’t think they’d do anything like that but you know they had their territorial rights, we were doing the wrong.

We can’t blame anyone but ourselves, we shouldn’t have done it. Anyway further up the Cape Finisterre, as I said the Spanish allowed the Germans to build this tower where they kept an eye on us. Oh they were very friendly to us. And we found out when we did the trip to Gibraltar that we weren’t allowed into the little town. You’ve got the rock of Gibraltar and that’s

joined to Spain by just a little narrow neck of land and the town, I think it’s La Linea, the Spanish town there. And the Spanish used to come in every day to work, they used to work on the rock. And at night time they had to go back, they went back to Spain. And we were told “To keep well clear of them”, they didn’t like the English at all. They liked to work and get the money and also the Gibraltarians who

I suppose ethnically were the same as the Spaniards but they were very patriotic British and they hated the Spaniards. So they had to, you know keep those two races all apart. But the Spaniards were, I think the Gibraltarians were very patriotic. They, everywhere were pictures of the King and Queen and Union Jacks flying everywhere. And course

there’s talk now the British giving Gibraltar back to Spain but the Gibraltarians won’t have it. Won’t have these Spaniards.

No. But they look the same. As I say ethnically they are the same race you know but that divide.

Oh well with wireless it was only a matter of keeping in contact with base. And picking up beacons and you know that sort of thing. But we had to maintain radio silence while we were on patrol. After we left the coast of England, we were on radio silence until we got back to England. But we had to listen out because we could take messages from England. So if they heard of a U-Boat

somewhere they’d ring us up and say “Right you know go to so and so”. So we did. But we were only there. In emergency of course if the aircraft was, had to ditch, you know we’d try and get out an SOS to let them know. But only for emergency use. And oh if we sighted U-Boats or attacked by aircraft we’d tell them then, we’d break radio silence to let them know. But and

also, usually as a, coming back to England especially at night or in storms and so on to pick up beacons for the navigator to get a radio fix. You know we might pick up two separate beacons and with a direction finding loop we could give the navigator a direction of that beacon and a direction of that beacon. And with that he could work out exactly our position.

Those sort of things they were the job of the wireless operator. As gunner the main job was search. And we had a pattern of search we had to maintain. And it was a very concentrated thing. We had to, in the turret you swing the turret around to its extremity and start a search above the horizon and then down, back again on the horizon

and down to below the horizon. Then you go up above the horizon and you had to do that and searching. Not just a matter of sitting there looking, you’d never see anything. You had to search and that meant concentrating on every little bit of the sky or the sea or the horizon, whatever you’re looking at. And you could only do that for one hour, the concentration was so hard. You only had an hour in the turret then

you had to leave. We had a roster in the wardroom. And anyone that was on rest at the time would keep an eye on the roster. And when someone in the turret was due for a break in an hour on that time, you’d go and change and then they’d come back and make themselves a cup of tea or maybe go on the wireless for a, on the wireless we had two hours break. But that was only to keep rotating. Because there wasn’t that much work when you’re down on the,

down on patrol. So they’d have a, after two hours, have a break. So this rotation all the time between the turrets and the radio. And if we’re doing the radar too we’d have a turn on that but mostly we were on radar silence too because the Germans could pick up the radar. And they could pick us up before we could pick them up. We didn’t use the radar except in special occasions. And

then of course if aircraft were sighted or a U-Boat was sighted well then you stayed in your positions until combat was over then you’d start that again. That was it, just you know rotating all the time. And if you had a bit of spare time you might make a cup of tea or bit of toast or something and take it up to the navigator because the navigator never had time to do anything like that. He was working all the time, never stopped. He was twelve, thirteen, fourteen

hours of concentration for him all the time. He was only the one of them around the place. So that’s about it.

Oh not really, oh no. No, it was good to have a change you know. I wouldn’t have liked to have stayed with one all the time. But having a break with the, on the wireless for a while

and in the turrets.

Oh yes, yeah our main one was six weeks after we sank the U-Boat and we’d, we’re on the same patrol. We’d hit Cape Finisterre, we saw the big thing, we knew they were looking at us and set off towards home.

It was very cloudy that day so we weren’t too worried, we loved cloud. That was wonderful, that was life insurance. Anyway we were flying a, went about an hour and the cloud disappeared which was very worrying. And we had this great clear area and way ahead was more cloud. And I thought “Oh we’ll get there”. So we kept on

course and I was in the tail turret, I took over. And we’re you know searching, searching, searching. And then at one stage, I, we got half way across this clear area and I saw a spot dead astern. It was, I estimated, took a punt on it, about seventeen miles behind us. And

it was, see you can’t, bout ten miles is the furthest you can see an aircraft. But beyond that, after training you could see further than that. And it’s not even a spot, it’s a seems to be a break in the blue or something, blue of the sky, something, you know it’s there. So I reported that, “Dead astern”. And the navigator got up into the astrodome to look, he couldn’t see it. And I said “Oh don’t worry, I’ll,

I’ll keep an eye on it.” Anyway we kept going on and on. In a little while, you know every time on the search I’d checked that one point. And I’d checked it there, and I kept searching, searching. Then I checked, there were two. So I reported that “Two now”. And kept searching. Then there were three. Then there were four, then there were five, then there were six. Well we knew the British had the long-range fighters

down the bay but they never went in sixes, only the Germans did. So we knew they were coming, they must have been coming towards us. They were getting closer and closer. And at this stage when I saw them, they could have been ten miles behind us. But they were a lot faster than us. So we kept going and the skipper had the cloud ahead. He was trying to get to the cloud and they were trying to get to us. Anyway they got closer and closer and finally they were close

enough to identify them, they were JU 88s. Anyway they came up, I think I mentioned before they came up behind us, split up. Two came up on the port side and four on the starboard side. And they came up beside us and they were looking at us. They were about a thousand yards out I suppose. Bit further than that, bit too far to start shooting. And they sized us up. Anyway they kept

going and got ahead of us. Well I couldn’t see, they went out of my sight, I couldn’t see them. Well it was obvious they were going to attack. And they were, with four on that side they had the leader and they’d start the attack on that side. So they’d start from our starboard, the skipper would turn that way into them and they’d break away. I worked it out, they’d break away on our starboard quarter.

So you know I swung the guns around to the starboard side. The first attack came, I heard the three or four shells hit the aircraft, it broke away and I tried to get an aim on him and the turret was U/S, it was out of order. And when those shells had hit the hydraulic pipeline that fed all the power to the turret. So that was our main source of

protection were the four guns in the tail. And that was out. So, anyway, we, they kept attacking, we kept fighting. The, oh the mid upper, we had trouble with that too. Actually it was, the new aircraft, after the, our first one had been written off, this was the new aircraft and we had trouble with the mid upper turret, with the guns jamming, I won’t go into technicalities but we had a problem with the,

the links of the belts used to jam the guns. And we’d worked on that, we’d done a lot of work on that. I thought we had them cleared but unfortunately his guns jammed. So we were left with practically nothing, we only had one gun in the nose. We had a couple of guns out of the, one each out of the galley hatch. Oh we put in another gun underneath the nose turret. And the second pilot had one out of his window, which was pretty useless

but he used to spray tracer around the side. But the, you know, our main source of protection was gone. Anyway the combat there lasted about forty to forty-five minutes. I’m not sure, I did take an estimate later when we ditched. But round about a quart, three quarters of an hour. And that’s when we ended in the drink and got our dinghies out. We were very fortunate

because the aircraft was like a colander, it was full of holes. And there was only one of the crew was badly wounded. We all had a little sort of, bits of shrapnel cuts here and there. But we were very lucky, it’s amazing how it happened.

Oh see when a shell bursts, it flies apart and it breaks up into millions of pieces.

Some of them quite large but some of them are very fine like sand. And they’re just enough maybe to cut your clothes or if they hit your face, just a little cut you know with the blood coming out. But you know not enough to do any harm to you at all. But we all had these cuts in our clothing and things. But I’ll say this just the one, poor old Pierre Bamber, that you know the shell blew him,

he was in the nose and it blew him back, his gun and all back into the wardroom. Right through the middle back into the wardroom. Anyway the skipper landed successfully and we were able to get out onto the wing of the aircraft. That’s when the leader, you know when they’re circling, and he came in and flew low over us and he took photographs. Later on we got photographs of ourselves in the,

in the drink taken by the aircraft that shot us down, standing on the wing. I’ve got two photographs of that.

Ah well two ways, before the end of the war, well when I finished my tour, I served as Adjutant on the Squadron for a couple of months. And various magazines and literature used to come through.

A lot of it was secret and semi secret and so on but as adjutant I had access to it so I could see it. And I was going through one magazine it was put out by Coastal Command Headquarters. And on it was a photograph of a Sunderland in the drink with survivors on the wing and it was captioned, captured German photograph of a crew of a ditched Sunderland taken in their dinghies. And I looked at that and it was us.

So I knew exactly how we were standing on the wing. We had one of the wings, one of the dinghies had been inflated on the wing and that’s definitely us. And the wounded Pierre who was laying on the wing itself. There he was you know. So it was definitely us. So we had that but later on ...

Seventeen hours. We, all night, we were shot down in the afternoon, all night in the dinghy, picked up the next morning. So seventeen hours in total. I remember that, I was the only one who had a watch that didn’t stop.

Everybody else’s watch stopped. So I was the timekeeper.

Well there were eleven of us in the six-man dinghy so it was a bit of a crush. It was a round dinghy and what we did, we sorted ourselves out. Had someone sitting on the edge of the dinghy, the next one sitting in the middle and the next one on the edge and the next one in the middle. So that we were able to squeeze in like that. But we were in sort of a

very tight position. And we, course we were dead scared that it wasn’t gonna last long either. And so that if you moved a little bit with the wet clothing rubbing on the side of the rubber dinghy would make a squeaky noise. And everyone would call out “Don’t move, don’t move”. And as I said my position, I was sitting in the dinghy and sort of crouched forward and I had this little beaker. And

I sort of, sorted a few legs and feet out and I managed to get a beaker full and I’d hand it back and someone behind me who’d tip it out and give it back you know. Which was wonderful because I had something to do and you know I’d make a good job of getting the dinghy almost empty of water. Then a wave’d break over us again and I’d start again. So I enjoyed doing that because it kept my mind off other things. But the, we had our few

things. We had, as I said a can of water each and a little square pack of rations. The other thing we had, a flame float and a bag of pyrotechnics that we had to keep over the edge, tied on to the dinghy. No room in the thing for them. So it was very, very tight fit. But we fitted in there

somehow. And because we had to take, Pierre Bamber’s leg had been shattered. We did what we could, oh we did have a first aid kit. And one of the boys had managed to bandage his leg as best we could. Got a flying boot, that was, one of the type that zipped up the front. And we zipped down and opened it up and sort or wrestled his foot in that as best we could.

He sat there, he didn’t say much. And every now and again someone’d say, “How you feeling Pierre?” “Oh I’m okay”, he’d say “I’m okay”. But after a while he looked at his watch and he started complaining. He said “My watch has stopped”. He said “Look at it, it cost me ten pounds and it’s not worth two bob. Damn thing, I’ve only had it a month and look it’s stopped already.” Whinge, whinge, whinge, oh he kept going on about his watch.

Finally I said to him, “Look Pierre, if you just shut up and keep quiet, I promise you I’ll buy you a watch when I get back”. And he shut up then, he didn’t say another word. And when we did get back the first thing he said, “Don’t forget you owe me a watch”. So I bought him a watch. I think the worst thing was night time, although I must admit night, when night came

the sea seemed to subdue a bit. It didn’t break so much, it was big heavy swell and we were going up and down. But at least it stopped breaking over us so that wasn’t too bad. And the moon came out and it was you know shining on the sea its silvery moon path we could see. And it was funny that, after a while you know we were sitting there, still going up and

down, up and down. And I must have fallen asleep but didn’t think I’d fallen asleep. But I felt I was on the surface of the moon. Was a funny sensation just going up and down and this sort of this silver path on the sea. And suddenly a shock, you know oh, you know. Where am I? Oh. Anyway that continued on until morning as I said, we heard an aircraft and the

skipper got a pyrotechnic and it didn’t work, it got wet. And we thought “Oh if they’re all wet, we’re sunk”. Anyway the second time the pyrotechnic went off and we heard the engine again. And he picked us up on his big lee light and he stayed with us until morning. So I might mention to at this point that the skipper of that aircraft was John Cruickshank.

A couple of months later he won the Victoria Cross for a submarine attack. He was badly shot up. Anyway they stayed with us even when daylight came which we didn’t think they, in fact they shouldn’t have really. And why the JU 88s didn’t come and find him because he was homing the ships in, well they could’ve just homed onto him. And you know he would have been mincemeat.

They had practically no protection and especially with a big lee light under the wing. It was you know, the aircraft was aerodynamically unbalanced anyway. You know he wouldn’t have had a hope. But he did it. Anyway the sloops came and we were very fortunate. We were very fortunate they were there because there was no way a flying boat could have landed on the water.

They couldn’t have picked us up. So we were picked up by the sloops. And then we had very pleasant crews on the sloops. They were there for a special reason too. The Germans were developing a glide bomb. And it was carried by a big German aircraft called a Heinkel 177. And a big four engine aircraft. And it used to carry these glide bombs and

instead of dropping a bomb down on the ship from up above and maybe getting hit by the flack, they could stand well off and let it go and guide it by radio control to the ship. And it’d glide in. And these sloops were down there with the express intention of being attacked by a glide bomb. They had a cinema,

cinematographic man, what do you call it, a cinema, cinema, a cinema man with a movie camera. And his job was to stay on the bridge of the ship when the glide bomb was coming in and photograph it so that they could analyse it and find out you know the dimensions and the size and how it worked and so on. When we heard that we weren’t too happy but we weren’t attacked while we were with them.

And we had a most enjoyable time on the ship. Pierre went to the sick bay. The NCOs [Non-Commissioned Officers] were put on the rum ration and the Officers, that was the navigator, the skipper, the first pilot and myself, we went into the Officer’s Mess and every morning we used to have breakfast with Captain Walker who was the commander of the flotilla. And he was a wonderful man. So we had a great time. They put on

a special display for us showing how they put on a dummy U-Boat attack to show us. And they had the six ships steaming line abreast and throwing out the depth charges and dropping them off the stern. And the chaos that they created to see the whole sea boiling up. That was a great sight. God knows what that cost the taxpayer, all those depth charges. Later on we, when that was over

we went round through the area again looking for fish, hoping there might be some fish. But we didn’t find one. Not one thing came to the surface. And anyway that lasted a few days and then we came back to England. We were transferred to another ship that was going to the naval base up the Bristol Channel and they dropped us off at the wharf where our squadron was.

And there we were met by a welcoming committee of one, the Flight Commander came down to see us. Nobody, the Commanding Officer, the Officer Commanding the station didn’t come. They were just, the Flight Commander who came back who greeted us with, “Boy have we got some bastardry lined up for you blokes”. We thought he was joking but we found out he wasn’t.

Oh some of the

nasty jobs round the place that no-one wanted to do. Anyway I suppose we had to take our turn on that.

Oh I don't know I suppose he was trying to be funny or something. But no one seemed to worry too much. You know we went to the squadron and we, oh we were told too, “Got good news that survivors leave

entitled us to a fortnight’s leave but bad luck we’re short of crew.” They gave us five days off and then we came back then we had to break in a new aircraft. We had to get another new aircraft. And that takes a long while because just, they’ve got to swing the compasses, they’ve gotta check over engines, gotta harmonise the guns and synch, the turrets, you know check all the radar and radio,

intercom. Everything had to be checked over and over. That took about a week. Then we were back on ops again.

Oh once yes. We didn’t know who it was, nobody told us who it was but later on, I was out, most

of the crew had finished by this time. I was still, I was almost at the end of my tour. The skipper had finished his, he’d moved off but I was with what was basically a different crew, mostly. And we were out on a patrol and coming back we were diverted to Poole, a base at Poole. So I landed there, oh we landed there, and came ashore and I went to the Officers’ Mess and when you go to a

new place like that, you’ve gotta book in, like you know like going to a hotel. And had to fill in the register, there was a fellow beside me with an RAF uniform on. And I wrote in “Name, number, squadron”. “Oh” he said, “461 Squadron. Do you know Dudley Marrows?” I said “Oh yeah, he used to be my skip.” And he said “Oh were you with him in the drink?” And I said “Oh yeah”.

He said “I’m the one who found you.” I said “Oh, shook him by the hand. So you know I don’t know what a life’s worth but I reckon it’s worth a beer.” So I bought him a beer. So as I said later, just shortly after that, that he won the Victoria Cross. He was badly injured in a U-Boat attack and he flew the aircraft back, got it back home, and they got him,

they put him into hospital and they fished seventy-two bits of shrapnel out of him. He’s still alive too, he’s still living in, he’s a Scotsman, still living in Scotland.

Oh and also one of the crew lives only a short way from here at Willoughby. Oh he did, last time I contacted him, haven’t for a while. He was a member of the crew but he wasn’t with them when they found us. He was off doing a course somewhere.

Operational hours yeah, that was a tour yeah

Oh anything from twelve to fourteen hours. My longest one was fourteen hours. Usually round about twelve and half, thirteen. Suppose thirteen’d be the average.

Oh not very often. It was mainly very boring, that was just out there searching, looking for U-Boats, you know concentrating all the time. And mostly it was just plane out there and back again. Not much to see, not much to do, very boring, wonder why you’re doing it. Have various

problem times when you’re caught in storms and so on. ‘Cause the Bay of Biscay is well renowned for the weather patterns and you could run into some very bad storms. Aircraft have broken up in them. One of our aircraft was very badly damaged. They think it, oh some of the crew reckoned it looped the loop in this storm, caught in the thunderhead. And

it you know just I don't know whether it looped the loop, the second pilot reckoned he saw four hundred knots on the air speed indicator. They could not believe, it had caused some, had some very, very high speeds at one stage. The whole aircraft, the airframe was twisted when then got back but they got back somehow. It was all warped.

The batteries had broken loose from their fittings and there was battery acid everywhere. The, oh someone, one of the crew was in the galley at the time, made himself a cup of tea, and he just put the cup of tea down and when it was all over the cup of tea was still there with tea in it. And yet all this happened, things upside down, flung around.

They were just lucky to get out of that. That’s what can happen to an aircraft. Some of them were just wrecked that way. That was probably our worst, not our worst enemy but certainly one of the enemies we had to contend with. And in all of this too, you know the navigators had to be able to navigate and get you back home. If they couldn’t navigate straight you might end up in enemy territory or out in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere

with no fuel. You know it’s just a, that was probably one of the things we had to contend with was just the weather, as much as the Germans. In fact we did like a bit of bad weather because it gave you the safety in the clouds and so on but not too much.

No good, bout as good as we get today I think.

We had, I must admit a briefing, we got a briefing before take off. When the Met [Meteorology] man came to give us a Met briefing I just switched off, I didn’t bother listening to him. And I remember at one stage, “Oh” the skipper said to me, “One of our Met Officers was a Welshman. And he always looked as if he’d just woken up from a deep sleep. His hair all over the place and bleary eyed.”

And the skipper said to me, “This bloke’s fantastic you know. Whatever he says, it’s exactly the opposite.” I said “Oh it can’t be”. So anyway I listened to him that time, and he told us, he said, “You’ll be flying in clear weather”, mind you it was raining at the time, lots of cloud. But he said “You’ll be flying in clear weather til you get to a certain point and beyond that you’ll be in ten-tenths cloud.” Well we flew in ten-tenths cloud to that

point and it was clear weather. It was, that was incredible. But it was quite useless you know weather reports. They only, well I suppose it gave us some vague idea of what might happen.

Oh yes that, there were occasions on very bad times we couldn’t get airborne. I can’t actually remember

any that we were held up with. At times, we could be held up at times. And might be say an early morning take off you know. And you get out there and it’s still dark and you’ve got a couple of hours before daylight, and there’s a howling gale blowing. And as I say, if there’s a clear path, if everything’s ready for take off, but use your own

discretion. If you want to stay, want to wait til daylight use your own discretion and invariably we’d wait til daylight because there’s, we were you know as the skipper said, “If he was to take off then with that order, use your discretion, if it was a failure, if you crashed, it was his fault”. Because it was he who gave himself the permission, not,

not the Ops Room. So we always waited til daylight. But that was all. Sometimes there have been, you know where maybe snow storms, winter time, snow storms blowing. And there’s a problem that in the winter time, that if there’s frost on the wings you’ve got to sweep the frost off before you can take off, otherwise you’ll crash. And there have been times when there’s snow storms and they can’t get up to sweep the frost off.

So you know you’ll be delayed maybe for some hours maybe. But it wasn’t that often.

No, that was the beauty of being back behind a pilot. Being a WAG you had such faith in your pilot. We all did. And I’ve often thought now, thinking back,

you know times when we thought we were completely lost or being tossed about by storm or whatever, there’s always that feeling, “Oh we’ll get there. The skip’ll get us home. Poor old skipper’s probably up the front sweating blood.” Oh no we had such prophetic faith. Everybody did, everyone was sure, their skip was the best. The best on the squadron. Oh I suppose human nature isn’t it you know, you trust him

because it’s good to trust him.

No, not really. No. Yeah, I suppose it’s human nature just trust him. Yeah it was, that’s right, I think probably I had such peace of mind thinking back to some of the times. I think oh gee, I wouldn’t go through it again. Couldn’t. And course when you’re young

too, you’re quite convinced of your own immortality. Mmm.

Oh in a way yeah, I think everyone had a little, what do you call it, a little teddy bear or something or other. I think number thirteen was my superstition.

I, that happened when I had the prang. We were lined up to get, just a parachute harness and you have to sign for it. And we were lined up and they were getting you know here’s number seven, here’s number twenty-four and here’s num... And I got, the fellow before me when the man behind the counter said “Oh number thirteen”, oh no one’ll

want that and he went to throw it back. And I said “I’ll have it”. Oh he’s giving me a funny look so I took number thirteen. Anyway that’s when I pranged so. We only just got airborne and I ended up in hospital for three weeks and three weeks convalescing, three weeks rehabilitating. But then that might have been lucky mightn’t it because I only survived because I wasn’t in my crash position. I was, when I knew we were going to crash I didn’t have time

to get to my proper crash position. So I, which was at the main spar of the wing in the middle of the aircraft. And I didn’t have time so I stayed where I was, which was second pilot’s, second pilot’s position. And the aircraft broke its back right at that point and the fellow who was sitting there was killed. If I’d have been with him I would have been killed too. So I suppose I was lucky. But after that I used to find that you know the Thirteenth Op

I didn’t want to fly on the thirteenth. It’s all silly you know.

No, I’m trying to think of that word. No a lot of the fellas had little teddy bears and what to you call it?

Yeah tokens or

Yeah, most of them had something like that. Or there was also the thought that

the most dangerous trips you went on were your first one or your last one. So no-one ever wanted to fly with anyone that was flying for the first time or no-one ever wanted to fly with anyone that was flying for the last time. Quite often what they used to do was especially with the skipper, when he’d got about maybe seven hundred and ninety-five hours up or something and he’d, the Commanding Officer’d say, “Oh I think you’ve finished, you’ve finished your tour.

Don’t fly the last run.” And that was done quite a lot. In fact when we’re shot down, one of the fellas with us was doing his first trip, the engineer. He was on his first trip. That was some initiation for him. He was later on killed that poor bloke. That’s about it.

Oh yeah, oh. that’s where training and discipline comes in. You just go onto automatic pilot I think. Because you’re so scared you get, my hands used to shake, which I couldn’t stop. We used to talk about this and what effect it had. And I remember one fellow he was,

his knee caps used to rattle. But you did your job. You just went ahead and did it. And it was just experience that came through I suppose. You know the fear is beyond explaining, in fact I think my old dad used to say something about World War I. He used to say, “He was never afraid to die, but he was afraid of fear.” And I realised

what he meant by that later on. You know it’s not a nice experience, you know something you don’t want to experience but when it’s all over, it’s all a big joke. You know when we’re on the wing of the aircraft we were joking. I remember I, when the aircraft flew away from us and I yelled out “Come back and fight like a man”. You know come back you know. And someone said “Oh cut it out Pete, they might hear us”. You know oh we’re making jokes

and laughing. And the adrenaline is still going through us as quickly as that. But then suddenly it hits us. “Oh look at our, look where we are now”. We weren’t too worried to start off with, three dinghies and all our gear. But when one went and then another went, and then when’s the third one going. That wasn’t fun anymore.

Not that I recall. There’s just one fella I remember, a navigator, I think he had problems. He used to walk at night and things. And one day he just wasn’t with us anymore, he was transferred out or something. And might have been some, something. But no apart from that. No we were all scared, we’d admit it. But

no-one ever called what they called ‘lack of moral fibre’. No, no one, just went ahead. That was your job. That’s what you signed up for. The big relief you know when it was all over. Now that I think someone said it,

that I couldn’t go through it again but I wouldn’t have missed it for quids. I think that about sums it up, now it’s all over you know I’m pleased I did it. But I wouldn’t do it again.

Oh yeah they probably were yeah. I must admit I didn’t make any commitment but some did. Oh yeah quite a few of them got married too. So.

Oh well we had on Operational Squadron we had a fortnight’s leave every three months.

Which was pretty good. And so we you know we had quite a lot of time that way. But it mostly, London was a place. You know I’ve often regretted that. That cause, you know as soon as you got leave you know you were down to London. And going to all the shows you know and having a good time. But I’m often sorry now that I didn’t get around and see the country more. Cause you, we were very fortunate that

we could get a car and we could get petrol. Millions couldn’t get petrol in England at all. And if you were, when you’re going on leave you’d get enough petrol coupons to take you to where you’re going on leave and back again. So naturally when they say “Where’re you going on leave?”. You say “Oh, I’m going to John O’Groats or wherever you are”. You know if you’re up in Scotland, “Oh I’m going to Lands End you know so you get petrol coupons for that”. And then you’d set off

and because there was no civilian use of petrol, you know a civilian car on the road was pulled up you know if there was a civilian driving it. There was a black market for petrol. And the service stations always had an allowance for evaporation and spillage and all that sort of thing. So they always had a bit of surplus petrol. So what you’d do, you’d go in and say “Oh could I have a gallon of petrol?”, and give him a,

a ticket and get the young man and say, “You wouldn’t have any spare would you?” “Oh, I could let you have half a gallon you know”. And get it that way. And it was an opportunity. ‘Cause cars were cheap, you could get a, buy a Rolls Royce for probably a hundred pounds. Not that you would. But you’d get very good cars you know for you know twenty, thirty, forty pounds you know. And you know with all the petrol going,

what an opportunity to get round and really see the country. But no it didn’t occur to me. First of all it was London, you know going to London to see all the shows. And I had friends at Bournemouth and it was just like home to me. It was just a nice homely, friendly people and I used to spend part of it there. And I had a lot of friends in Bournemouth. And that was about as far as I got. I had a few holidays away. Lord Nuffield

had a system for Nuffield holidays or something. For operational crews and they could have a week at various places round the country, free in hotels, you know and he’d pay all the expenses. And I had a week at Cambridge under that which was very good. Went punting on the Cam River and all that sort of thing. And it was great. But I’d say mostly, it didn’t,

interest me much, you know history and that sort of thing like it does now. Could have got round. You can imagine England in those days, there were no tourists. You could go round to all the historic sights and things you know. I didn’t see much at all. Oh I had a, one holiday too at a place called Weeford in the Midlands somewhere. And that had Weeford Abbey, that was

one of the, ruins that Henry VIII had sacked and pulled down. I stayed with a squire of the town. And that was very pleasant too. But mostly it was you know down to London and hiding in the air raid shelters when the raids were on. And Bournemouth, cause I was in Bournemouth when they had their worst raid.

That’s about it, wasted opportunities. I’m sorry about that. Can’t be recalled though.

Oh yes, I didn’t put up, I wasn’t there during the big blitz in London. I was never in any of the really bad air raids. Later on they came more sneak raids you know the quick ones in and out.

But they were oh frightening in the way that you always had the feeling that they’re aiming for you. You know you can hear the bombs around but you’re sure they’re heading for you. And the fact that you can’t do anything. It’s not so bad when you’re in an aircraft, at least you can shoot back and do something. But when you’re in an air raid shelter, all you can do is sit there and wait. There’s nothing you can do. I think that’s

the worst thing of it. But I didn’t have that much experience fortunately.

Oh that was, at a place called Lough, Sunbridge. Sunbridge was the central gunnery school

of the Royal Air Force. And I was sent from the squadron there to do a gunnery leader’s course and take over as gunnery leader in the squadron. And it was a month’s course and I went there, there were about, I’m not sure, about twenty in the course. And from all squadron, bomber squadrons and any Command that had a need of gunners. And

we were, were to be trained, not so much training in gunnery, but trained how to teach gunnery. We went there and they had, on the base were Wellington Bombers and Spitfires. They were to be used for training. They were training aircraft. And

had the staff pilots that flew them. Anyway, the first thing they did, they ran us all into the drill hall there and gave us the great talk about what a good safety record they had on their base. “They hadn’t had a fatal accident for six months and we’re gonna keep it that way and you blokes adhere to all the safety rules and regulations. And we won’t allow anything to go outside that, we’ve got to blah, blah, blah.” And

then we lined up for the harnesses which they were most unusual harnesses. They also had a Mae West. It was a Mae West and parachute harness in one. Never seen them anywhere else. We lined up and I had number thirteen and got onboard. And I got into the second pilots position. One in the bomber, there was the pilot and there were four gunners, that’s right.

Four trainees, you know me and three others. Anyway we got airborne and there was low lying cloud that day, only a couple of hundred feet up. We got airborne and just got above the cloud when the port engine cut. And I wasn’t too worried at the time. I thought “Oh we’ve only just taken off, we can, he can come round”. And I didn’t realise,

didn’t know then, that when an engine cuts on take-off, you never come round, you keep going. And crash land ahead of you. I didn’t know that. But anyway the pilot was on the radio to ground, you know talking to them. Obviously telling them that “I’ve got engine failure and blah, blah, blah”. And I was sitting back, waiting to hear something. On the Sunderland and most aircraft

the radio could go through the intercom so you knew what was going on but I couldn’t hear and I didn’t know what was going on but I was sitting there and waiting, you know, “Oh we’re going to land soon”. And we came down through the cloud and all I saw were high tension wires in front of us. And I suddenly realised we weren’t going to land at all. And whether he went under or over these high tension wires, I don't know, I just closed my eyes I think. But we missed them somehow and next thing

we’re right down on the deck and oh just a couple of feet above the, just enough area for the propellers to clear. And straight ahead was an earthen wall. And what it was, it was a tidal swamp. And they had this wall around it to keep the water in. But I didn’t know that, all I could see was this big wall coming to us. And he flew straight at it. And

what he was doing was holding air speed. And I’m wondering “Why don’t you pull the nose up? Pull the nose up.” But he held it down, he did good flying I realise now. He held it right down til the last second and he just managed to get the nose above the top of the thing and it hit halfway down just at this area where I should have been. And we hit and I was thrown forward into the windscreen and down to the bottom of the aircraft.

And it skated all over this swamp. And anyway it came to rest and I was tangled up in all the wreckage of the aircraft. The Wellingtons are made of geodetic construction sort of like an aircraft with longerons and covered in metal, but made of like lattice. Imagine lattice made of metal and covered in fabric. And so when I, when we land, when we hit, I

was in amongst all this thing. All the wreckage was sort of coming over my legs and when we stopped I was trapped by my legs in the, in all this wreckage. I couldn’t pull my legs out. The ammunition in the turrets, oh it was burning, the ammunition in the turrets was popping away like firecrackers. And the whole aircraft was split open which was just fortunate for me. And I saw the pilot walking away. And there’s a saying in the air force,

“Any landing’s a good landing the pilot walks away from”. So I thought “Well it’s a good landing”. Then he turned around and saw me and he came racing around. Racing back and he started to pull all the wreckage off me. And I thought this leg had been cut off because it was in amongst it and it was hurting like hell and I wondered about this leg. Anyway he came and I said “Don’t touch my leg, don’t touch...” And he grabbed my leg and I said “Don’t touch”. And he grabbed my

arms and he dragged me out and dumped me and went back to get the others. Anyway we were fortunate that just next to the crash there was a couple of St John’s Ambulance men going past on their push bikes. And they came racing over and they helped. And anyway they dragged me and the other three gunners out. One was dead, he was the one that was sitting at the thing. And they laid us out.

Anyway the ambulance from the base took about an hour, he got lost, he couldn’t find us and finally found us, got there. And actually the St John’s Ambulance bloke sort of felt me all over and said “Oh you alright, you haven’t got any broken bones”. And I said “Oh thank God for that”. And but I had bruises, bruises and cuts all over me. Had bruise right, whole arm was one bruise. And

anyway they said you

One of the St John’s Ambulance men came up to me and said “Oh do you want a shot of morphia?” And I said “No I’m alright, I’m alright”. Anyway eventually the air force ambulance arrived and the air force doctor came up to me. Took one look and felt in his pocket, pulled out a syringe and oh. And the St John’s Ambulance man said to him “But he said he didn’t want morphia”.

“We tell these blokes what they want” and boing into my arm. And the most beautiful feeling. Oh, all the pain went and I sat up there and somebody produced a cup of tea for me and I sat up and I drank it. And they started to load the other fellows onto the ambulance and they said to the pilot, “You better come with us to the hospital for a check up”. And he looked at his watch and he said “Oh no, I better get back to the station otherwise I’ll miss out on lunch”.

And I said “Oh I’ll come with you”. And I tried to struggle up, I felt so good. And they pushed me down again. Anyway they pushed me into the ambulance and off we went to Ealy hospital. And I was there for the next three weeks. And they sewed me up. It was mainly my legs were the problem. But there was cuts and bruises all over and feeling sick and sore and sorry for meself. And

anyway it was three weeks I was there, best forgotten, it wasn’t much, I was just lying in bed. Couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of the place. From there I was shifted out to a little town called Little Port to a convalescent home there, which the air force had taken over. I was there for three weeks, I had my

twenty-first birthday there. And after a couple of weeks I managed to be able to stand on my feet and I was able to hobble around with a walking stick. And later on after a few days I was able to go for a walk around the area there. But then I was called up for a check over and I said “Oh I’m right now, I can walk, I’ll go back to the squadron thank you very much”. And “Oh

no you’re not, no you’re going to Loughborough, up north near Scotland to a con, to a rehabilitation unit there”. So I went there and it was very pleasant, I enjoyed it there. The mornings usually consisted of sort of massages and treatment and things. And the afternoons were, you just pleased yourself. Just pottered around, walked.

And they had a thing like a scooter there, like a child’s scooter only a lot bigger with big wheels. And you’d get on that and by using a sort of pump action you could move yourself along. It was a big building with lots of grounds, lawns and gardens and things. And it used to be good fun riding this thing around all the paths. That’s where I met the Pole and the Czechoslovakian. We got,

got friendly there. Anyway finally had three weeks there then got the okay to go back to squadron. I was given a couple of extra days, which I spent with my friends in Bournemouth and that’s when that air raid was on. That I was involved in. And also the squadron had moved. It was at Poole near Bournemouth when I left it and in the meantime they’d moved to South Wales

to Pembroke Dock and I had to find my way there.

Oh the hospital was typical of the old type of hospital. Long dormitories, there were, you know probably twenty-five, thirty people

in a dormitory, great long with you know both sides, beds on both sides. Actually it was quite pleasant there because they were all airmen there. And all having a go at each other on the aircraft they flew or how they pranged or what happened to them and so on. So, you know it was quite good but you couldn’t move you know. You were just lying in bed all the time. That’s about it.

Oh the Scotsman. Oh just one, at the convalescent home, one of the other fellas there was a Scotsman who’d, he’d pranged in a Wellington much the same as I had. But he was badly burned. And at this stage he’d been in and out of hospital for about eighteen months. Having all the treatment. He’d lost an eye, half his face was sort of burned off. And he was having

the skin grafts by Doctor Mackindale, the great surgeon you know that made a name for himself in treating burns. And he, he was a good bloke, he had a glass eye that he used to try and put in upside down to frighten people with. And he had to, he couldn’t shave because his face was too tender. And he used to have to pluck his whiskers out. He used to

every now and then sit down with a mirror and a pair of tweezers and pluck these out. Where his face was sort of badly burned they just sort of came out but places where the skin was alright he’d sort of yelp as he was pulling them out. Yeah at the convalescent home I quite enjoyed that. There were five, I think five or six of us in the ward. And we were all different nationalities like where we had a

Scotsman and a Welshman and an Englishman, a Canadian, a New Zealander and me, an Australian. And we used to have arguments about our countries. And in fact we used to have very interesting discussions about all sorts of things. You know about religion and politics and it was good. You know it’s good to have a good discussion group. I liked that.

Oh mainly climate or the number of beaches. I know there’s New Zealanders always reckoned they had better beaches than Sydney. And oh just various things and that, they just crop up, sort of ad lib. In the air force we were either discussing or arguing or you know.

Oh the, I think overall they got on very well. Whatever country they came from. The only exception’s the French. The French for some unaccountable reason

kept to themselves. They kept in groups whereas the others, you know the Poles and the Czechs and Norwegians would mix. And with those countries too they, if they came from their own country, you know they got smuggled out and they couldn’t speak English, they were given a course in English before they you know went to the air force or army or whatever they went to. So they could all speak at least a bit of

English. But the French wouldn’t, the French would never speak English. And in the training school like at Alness at the OTU there, they always had to have interpreters. So, course the instructors were mainly English, speaking English, and they’d have to have an interpreter to speak to the French. And they were, because of that, they were disliked. And I remember the

senior, the group that was Alness when I was there. There were about a dozen of them I suppose. And they had this, the senior Officer, he was an NCO. And in the Sergeant’s mess, one day he was, one night it was a dark night. And of course everything is blacked out as you can imagine. So that when you come from blackout, you go through the blackout curtains into a brightly lit room and you don’t see much for a while. Anyway

this fellow was going into the Sergeants mess, and as he came through the curtains into the brightness somebody’d hit him in the eye. But nobody ever knew what it was. For days he was going round with a big black eye. But apart from them. Oh they were alright, they kept to themselves, never got into trouble or anything. But the others always got in you know. At the OTU once the hot water system ran out of, out of wood.

It was a wood fired thing. And they just called for volunteers, “Anyone want to go out and chop some wood” you know. And everyone went out to have a chop, but not the French. They wouldn’t do anything like that, they kept away from it all. Those sort of things you know, they wouldn’t join in, in anything. Seems strange. Course I think, come to think, cause the French themselves were split. There was the de Gaullists and the Gerodists. And

the Gerodists were very anti British because the British, I don't know whether you know they bombarded the French Fleet in North Africa there. Cause they were scared the French were going to hand them over to the Germans. And they sank the French ships and of course killed a lot of the Frenchmen. And the Gerodists never forgave the British for that. As for the de Gaullists, they were a lot better but even so they still had that

sort of attitude. Even de Gaulle himself was very, he didn’t have a friendly attitude to anyone. Even with Churchill you know, he treated him respectfully but that was all. There wasn’t any closeness with him.

Oh the OTU took you to a, actual operational conditions. That’s what it was, everything else, you know you’re training on land or in the air or whatever, was only training. But at OTU you,

you had all that basic training. And that’s where you learned, you know they put you with a crew. You flew as a crew and learned to operate under those conditions. So that when you got to your squadron you know hopefully you were ready to start operational flying. That was the idea of it.

Oh yes, oh very much so. In fact the OTUs were probably as dangerous as the squadrons

because you can imagine with training crews just learning you know you still had a lot to learn. But a lot of mistakes were made. Apart from that they always had the old aircraft. You know when an aircraft had reached its operational life it was sent to an OTU. So there were trainee crews flying clapped out aircraft. So naturally you had to have problems.

Oh yes we always had a little suitcase we took. We called it our diversion kit because see quite often when you’re out if, coming back home, if base was closed in you had to go somewhere else that wasn’t closed in. And sometimes

you might be there for two or three days before base opens up enough for you to get back. So you had to have this, these things. Make sure you have clean underwear, and a clean shirt and your razor and you know various things. And also a uniform because you weren’t allowed in the mess in battle dress. You know that’s just soc, very strictly conformed to

in the air force. So you had to carry a uniform because if you were for a couple of days, you only really needed it for evening. Only in the evening when you had to have it. But if there for a couple of days, you had to have a uniform. But when we were shot down they accepted that you know you had a razor and you had clean underwear, clean pair of socks and this, that and the other. And you got paid for it but uniform no, that didn’t count.

And so I lost a uniform, not only that, but they didn’t even give me the clothing coupons for it. And cause they were in short supply. So I had to use my little store of clothing coupons and my own money to buy another uniform. It was a bit rough.

Oh not when we’re flying no. No we weren’t allowed to carry anything

that could identify us like that. If we were taken prisoner you know they might find a letter from home to somebody, that might say something or give them a clue to where you came from or something. And things like that.

Oh yes. I used to I suppose write at least once a week.

And mum used to write you know quite regularly to me. A lot of them were lost on the way you know when ships were sunk and so on. But parcels were always a problem, mum was always sending me parcels from home. But most of those disappeared on the way. She found through experience, always a good idea, whatever she sent me she put in you know those round Willow cake tins. She’d put in, put them in one of those cake tins so that it looked as if she was sending me

a cake. And most of the people, the pilfering that went on in wharves and things like that, people were looking mainly for cigarettes. Cause cigarettes were you know greatly sought after during the war. So when they see, “Oh that’s a cake”, they’d let it go so I got a lot of parcels after that. The square parcel I never got.

They had a wonderful system there too. Aero, aerogrammes,

I forget what they call them but you could write a letter to home and then you’d go to the post office and you’d pay oh not very much and they would copy it and reduce it in size. So you might have a sheet that big reduced down to a little micro-size. And then they could be flown or you know got home quickly because they’d have lots and lots of those, you know, thousands of those. And then when they’d get back to,

get to the destination they could be then sort of brought up, enlarged and delivered. And it was a wonderful plan, it just faded out during the war. I wonder why they don’t keep that going. ‘Cause, with the techniques these days, they could do it so much better and quicker. But that was good when they came. You’d get the letter it was fairly small when you got it. And you know it was a bit hard to read cause it was so small it was never blown

up to full size. But it was readable and it was good and it came quickly too because you know at times, part of the way might have been flown whereas the others just come by ship.

Oh yeah, oh it was yeah, it was really great, yeah.

That’s a good question, I’m trying to think. She used to send me all sorts of little odds and ends. There were things, I used to write home, when my watch packed up and I wrote home and told her to send me a watch but she couldn’t buy one here anyway. So I finally got one from Ireland. A friend went to Ireland on leave once and bought me one there.

Now I’m trying to think. I suppose mainly cakes. She sent me a Christmas cake once that had threepences and sixpences in it. But I suppose really we had practically everything in England we needed. There were no luxuries or anything. Isn’t that funny, I can’t think of anything.

Oh yeah we were you know, got a lot in the news there about it, yeah of course. Of course Britain, the thing that a lot of Australians don’t know is that Britain had a whole army there, in Burma, the 14th Army. And they did most of the fighting. The Yanks get most of the credit for their island hopping. But all those big wars, the fighting of the Japs was by the British Army

up through Burma. So there was you know quite a bit in the paper about it. And course in New Guinea, the Australian news, we got a lot on that.

Mmm, it was a worry. I remember when they first came into the war you know they started in China, there had been a war in China

and coming down through Burma, and I remember writing to mum. She’d written you know saying “You know the Japanese are advancing down through Burma or something like that”. And I wrote back and said “Oh don’t worry they won’t get past Singapore”. Just went through Singapore. But really the south part of Australia was not really affected very much by the war really. It was

certainly worrying for them especially when the Japanese shelled Sydney and couple of submarines got into the harbour. That would have been worrying for them.

Oh I don't know you didn’t think much about that. I suppose you

mainly lived for the day you know. You knew your luck could run out as quickly as anything. And I certainly was very lucky with the things that happened. And you won, I suppose you wonder why you had the luck. How the luck kept coming because you know like that, I was saying that the first trip was

always the most dangerous one. And I remember when I was leaving the squadron I was packing up ready to go and a young pilot came in, he’d just been posted to his station. And I had a chat with him. Anyway I packed up and I left and I heard later that when he went on his first trip, he was shot down, down

in Spain somewhere. That was his first trip you know. And I was thinking “God you know poor bloke, his first trip, only you know a few hours operation and he’s gone and yet I’d done eight hundred and I’m still around”. It’s just fate isn’t it, just luck, just happens that way.

I don’t know we just took it for granted it was happening, you know it was happening regularly. And I suppose a benefit too as I said we didn’t have that many good friends in the rest of the squadron. Our friends were on the crew. Not like Bomber Command where you could have a good friend on another

crew. So that when a plane was lost, well usually you didn’t know half of them anyway. You never met them. You know particularly with the NCOs in the mess. You know these, you knew all the skippers and the navigators and all the Commissioned crews. You knew them by name but in most cases they were just names and faces. And you know I don’t recall that

I had much feelings about it one way or the other. Just “Oh well that’s it, that’s happened, you know another one, another crew not coming in”. Except it’s a regular occurrence that’s all.

Oh yeah for, yeah. The idea of it too was probably a good plan because you could feel it getting to you. And you know in some ways the worry seemed to be there more. More than to start off. And just bit of relief you know when it comes. Because even though you’re going through an OTU at least you feel

that, you know, good time to relax and get it out of your system a bit. You know it’s a good plan that way I suppose. But more refreshed I suppose.

Oh well you know talking about the shakes, they seemed to come more

readily. And...

Oh well I don't know not visual shakes like that. Just, you could just feel it in your hands. It just at certain times. I did get them only once in a briefing. That was,

that was on Christmas Day 1943. When we had to go down there with a couple of blockade runners coming into the, trying to get into Germany. They’d come round from Japan and trying to get into Germany. We had to go out and shadow them. And you know that was going to be a dicey one, we knew that. They, the Germans had sent out eleven destroyers to escort them plus three [(UNCLEAR)]

which were flak ships. They were ships with nothing but anti aircraft armament on them. And air cover of JU 88s. All we could hope for was cloud. And you know that got the, started to fell it. That was Christmas Day. As it happened we had an engine cut on take off then too and got her down safely. That wasn’t our aircraft too, we were flying somebody else’s

aircraft which something we, no-one ever liked doing because you don’t know the aircraft. And this one the engine, we just got airborne and the engine cut. Fortunately we got down alright. And then after all that we got the engines fixed and we were off again. Then they called us back, the navy had got a cruiser, got a ship. There was a naval battle going on so they didn’t need us.

So we had our Christmas dinner after all.

Mmm. Oh just, I don't know just I suppose tense might be the term, just was tense.

Oh that might have been it when the engine cut.

No we didn’t prang, as I say we got her down safely. But that certainly got us jumpy I can tell you. Then we had to moor up and had to get the Wing Commander in charge of engineering from the base. And he came out and of course he was as cranky as anything because he was pulled out of bed early on Christmas morning which was a thing that he

didn’t like. And the fact that it could have been his fault. Because why did an engine cut. But anyway it was found that the previous crew had disconnected the petrol line and hadn’t reconnected it. It was as simple as that. Anyway.

We were lucky we had water underneath us when the engine cut.

We shouldn’t have taken off that way, we should have taken off... it was just on dawn, it was just as dawn was breaking and the flare path was still out. And we should have taken down the flare path. But the navigator said “Look why not take down the river, take off down the river because you’ve got more water that way?” And the skipper said “Oh yeah, good idea I’ll do that, it’s light enough to take off without the flare path”. If he’d gone down the

flare path he would have ended up over the little town of Nayland across the river. We would’ve ended up in that so. We were lucky we took off down there. You know just little things like that you do that just, you wonder why. Why didn’t I take my crash position when I pranged you know? I wasn’t, I was where I shouldn’t have been. You know things just happen like that.

One day the luck’s got to run out for some.

Oh 10 Squadron

were great on doing that more than us. They used to put curtains on the portholes and you know put frilly cushions in it. You know they used to you know dolly up their aircraft. But we didn’t do it so much. A couple of them sort of painted things on the other side like the Yanks do but no we didn’t do much. I suppose you had enough of other things to do rather than worry about that

sort of thing.

The last one?

I can’t remember it so it must have been uneventful. I’ll look in my log book later if you like and see, tell you. Can’t remember it.

Oh no, I’m pretty sure I did my eight hundred. Think I went a bit over.

Doing, doing the last one?

Oh as I say, I can’t remember, can’t remember. See there, a lot of the trips we did were completely uneventful. You know nothing to remember them by you know. That must have been one of them.

No I don’t remember much about it at all. Actually I wasn’t posted out for a while, I stayed on. The Adjutant was going on holidays and so I was supposed to take over the post of adjutant of the squadron for a while there. Which I did, which was good because the Adjutant had certain

powers and one of them was to, see the NCOs, if they wanted clothing, see they didn’t have, we were given clothing coupons but they weren’t. And they had to have someone in authority authorise their, either their purchase of something or to draw it out of the stores. And the Adjutant’s I suppose that was his job, he was pretty strict about it you know cause if you thought the fella didn’t deserve it, didn’t need any

new socks or something, well you wouldn’t sign it. But when I was adjutant I’d sign it for everyone. So they made hay while the sun shined and they got lots of new things.

So that was good, I was popular then.

Oh yeah, didn’t like

leaving the squadron. Oh one thing I didn’t mention too. Once, my biggest mistake and I was in trouble over it too. When we, when you’re on patrol, if you sight a U-Boat or you’re attacked or something like that, you’ve got to get a signal back to base very quickly. Because if you’re shot down without getting a signal back they don’t know.

So the navigator, every half hour I think it was, he put a little note on the wireless operator’s desk, the, what the position was so if you say, you lost an engine and you were coming down, you could get an SOS and the position quick. And then if you saw a U-Boat, you’d send out the signal, signal four-six-five, that’s a code, four-six-five meant U-Boat.

They’d say four-six-five and position. So if it was enemy aircraft it was, no it was four-six-seven. Four-six-seven was U-Boats, three-six-five was aircraft. Anyway we were on patrol and this was our first trip after we’d been shot down too. So we were all a bit jumpy and we’d just got to the

position where we’d been shot down and I was thinking to myself, “Oh gee you know this is where we were shot down”. And then suddenly the navigator jumped up into the astrodome. That was the first indication of something was on. If the navigator hops up to have a look around. So I switched over to intercom to hear the mid upper gunner say “They’re 88’s”. And I thought “Oh my God we’re being attacked”. So I switched on and said to the skipper

“Do you want a signal?” He said “Yes, send out four-six-five quick”. So I send four-six-five and the position. And then turned out, what had happened we just got through cloud and we were right in the middle of three JU88’s, were all flying together. And the skipper woke up before them and ducked back into the clouds. So we got away and that was alright. So the navigator then had to code the message back to base to say

what happened. And anyway I sat back waiting for him to code this message and I got a signal coming from group. Oh I heard it coming. And I took it down and I said to the skipper “They’re calling every aircraft in the bay except us to go to some position”. And he said “Give it to the navigator”. And the navigator got it. And he said “There’s U-Boats

fifteen miles behind us”. And I thought “Fifteen miles behind us. I’d sent out four-six-five instead of four-eight-seven”. So they thought we had, that’s right three, I’d sent out four-six-five-three, yeah four-six-five-three, so they said “Oh three U-Boats”. I should have sent out four-eight-seven-three. Oh I’d sent out the wrong signal. Oh my God. So

I said to the skipper “Oh look I’ve sent out the wrong signal”. “Oh”, he said, “You’d better send it back plain language, cancel it for God’s sake”. So I did I immediately got on and said “Look oh cancel four-six-five, should be four-eight-seven”. And then there was quietness for a long, long while. Finally signals coming back from all these aircraft again, resume patrol And I thought “Oh my God

you know I’ve got every aircraft in the bay diverted to our position. And oh dear, there’s gonna be hell to pay over this.” And I worried myself and anyway got back and it was all over the station. When we landed the dinghy came alongside and the dinghy driver put his head round the door and said with a big grin, “Who sent the four-six-five?” Oh anyway we got ashore and nothing was said

about it. And went back into the mess and the Flight Commander came up and said “You sent that four-six-five did you?” And I said “Yeah”. He said “Oh the CO’s gonna have a word to you about it. He’ll call you soon.” “Oh, oh”. So anyway nothing happened that day and I thought that’s strange. Next day the signalist, the signals leader came up and said “The CO wants to see you.”

So I went round to the CO’s office, knocked on the door, went in, saluted, “Jensen”. And he looked at me he said “Yeah, what do you want?” I said “Didn’t you want me?” “Did I, what for?” I said “Oh I think it was four-six-five”. “Oh”, he said, “You sent that four-six-five”. And he had a big grin on his face. He said “Do you know you scrambled every

Royal Naval ship on the south of England. They were sending the SPs around to all the pubs getting all the sailors out of the pubs and getting them onto the ships. The ships were putting up steam. They thought there was another wave of U-Boats coming out”. And he was laughing. And then he sort of stopped he said, “That was serious you know”. He said “You won’t do it again will you?” I said, “No sir”. “Right, dismissed”. “Yes sir”. Out I went.

For a long while there I was called “Four-six-five Jensen”, I must admit.

I thought I was in trouble over that.

Oh quite a few yeah. I never had a nickname. Oh sometimes you get, I don't know well I’ve had four-six-five you know it lasted a couple of weeks and then

it’s gone. And for a while I was called “Pancake Pete” because I used to make pancakes in the galley and I made a pretty good pancake too. But with permanent nicknames we had three. There was Pierre Bamber I told you about cause he looked like a Frenchman, there was “Bunny Sydney” who was our tail gunner. He was, that was the nickname he had in peacetime

apparently. I don’t know how he got Bunny. Who was the other one? Oh there was another one. For a while we had an Irish engineer, his name was Reginald Watson but we called him “Paddy” of course. But oh there were a few. A few people had permanents but I think mostly they were just

you know call them by their Christian name or an abbreviation of a surname. Oh that’s right our fitter was “Bubbles”, Bubbles Pearce. Because he’s a bit overweight. So we called him “Bubbles” that’s right.

Oh not really, not really. I suppose I would have preferred to have been home at that time. But as it worked out, I was pleased I was in the European

theatre for the fact that we lived a much comfortable life than they did in the islands or even in North Africa. So oh no, I think overall I’m pleased I was where I was. Particularly the fact that I survived it anyway.

Oh,

altogether. I was amazed, I couldn’t believe how different it had become. I can understand now how immigrants coming to this country, must be terrified in a way because everything’s so different from anywhere else. So dry and bare looking and sparse and hot. And oh yes I couldn’t believe it.

And you know as for my family, you know, they spoke a different language. And they hadn’t realised how I’d changed and for a long while people accused me of speaking like a Pom. But you know I couldn’t believe it. Everything was so strange. I remember once I’d only been, I think it might have been the first day I was home. We came into

Sydney, they took us to Bradfield Park and had a final parade and our families were there you know. And we went home. Next day I was sitting on our front veranda and it was quite good that we had a palm in front of it so you could sit on the veranda, you could look out and see people outside in the street but they couldn’t see you. Anyway just up the road from me was a woman who was a school teacher. Her name was Emily Hughes.

Anyway she came past and my mother was out the front and Emily stopped and was asking me about our, “Oh she said I believe you’ve got an Englishman staying with you now”. You know, “Oh yes, yes, Peter’s home”. And then she said “And what about Stan?”, that’s my younger brother. “What’s Stan doing now?” And she, mum said “Oh still working or doing something or other”. “Oh”, she said, “I thought he joined

“the Nye-vy”. And I thought, she’s a school teacher and she said “Nye-vy”. Anyway later on I said to mum, “Did you hear what Emily Hughes said? She thought Stan had joined the Nye-vy.” Mum said “She didn’t say that, she said Nye-vy you know”. Oh forget it. But that’s how people sounded to me when I got home. I was like a stranger in a strange country. Strange. But after a while it didn’t, I sort of got back into the swing

of things. Oh and that too, mum had gone shopping and she came home and with her shopping bag. And I said “How’d you go with the shopping?” “Oh”, she said “There’s shortages, oh this war, there’s shortages everywhere. All I could get was a bit of bacon”. And I thought “Oh must have got a couple of slices of bacon”. Cause in England I think the rations were, the ration of rashers was one slice per month or something like that. Yeah, bit of bacon and she pulled out a

whole shoulder of bacon. I couldn’t believe it. That would have been a year’s supply of meat in England for a person. And you know to, they were complaining about the rations there but really and truly it was nothing like England, you could get practically anything. But very strange and oh another thing my first glass of Australian beer too cause I didn’t drink til

I was overseas. And I was brought up on English beer, which is to our taste now very warm and flat. And when we got back to Bradfield Park and we were given a meal and a glass of beer and a middy of beer and oh it was cold and gassy and oh I thought “Isn’t this terrible”. But I soon got the taste of it. I don’t think I could drink English beer

anymore.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh if they wanted to know. But oh it was hard to convey it of course. Oh yeah I told them about it. How in the underground stations in London. That you walked along the platforms, that you were stepping over people sleeping.

The Londoners used, a lot of them used to sleep in the underground stations. And to get a train you had to step over all these bodies to get in. Oh little things like that. But no it was good to be home though, it was good to see the old place again. I went to Ballarat for a while but that was just on the end of the war so. That was just to, oh

just party time. We did nothing there but just had parties I think. At the station they were all like me, just ex-servicemen come back and you know getting, waiting to be discharged.

Very much so, very much. Actually when we first got back we were told we were going to the islands and

we had to give a choice like you do when we got to England of what aircraft we wanted to fly in and I selected Mitchells. Mitchell Bombers. And then later on I met a pilot that was at Bradfield Park. And he’d been flying Mitchells up in the islands. And I said “Oh Mitchells, I put my name down for that, what are they like?” “Oh”, he said, “Alright but they mush.”

And apparently they were doing the bombing missions there coming in you know between mountains and things in New Guinea coming down into a clearing, dropping their bombs, bringing their nose up to climb out and they’d mush, instead of climbing they’d mush into the mountains. Lost a lot that way and I thought “Oh gee I’ve put my name down for those”. But I needn’t have worried, I didn’t go, didn’t go anyway.

Oh hard to say. I suppose in a way you know where, I suppose we felt proud of our service. You know took pride of you know going on leave and having a

nice clean uniform to wear. Try and look the part. Oh yes. Oh you know a matter of not letting the side down. You know I suppose it worked out alright I think. I was proud of the service.

Oh not really. No I would have liked to but I got caught up with

getting a career back on line again and catching up with my studies and getting stuck into all the humdrum of ordinary life again. But no I would have like to have flown because you know I always wanted to. We used to be given a go at flying the aircraft straight and level and all that sort of thing. I would have liked to have been able to fly properly. No never,

never tried to really. Put it behind me.

Oh if I, yeah, if I’d been sent to Bomber Command oh yeah. Cause it’s impersonal, all you’re doing is dropping bombs, you don’t see the result of it. That’s why I feel fortunate that I was on Coastal Command you know that I never had to worry about that side of it. That you know there were no civilians involved, you know it was soldier against soldier

and that was the end of it. And if we won we won, if we didn’t then bad luck. You know I was fortunate that way.

Oh it was you know and the fact that we got to know these people afterwards and you know we can share stories and you know enjoy each other’s company. Get to know their

side of things, oh yeah. There were, it was good that way, you know, we were very fortunate.

Oh yes, that was shortly after I got back and I went into town I remember. I was going to say on a tram, no it was a

bus. The bus, and went and wandered around and had a look at the celebrations. VJ [Victory over Japan] Day I was down at Ballarat. So all we did was have a few drinks on the end of the war and that’s it. But oh there was a march, that’s right the air force put a march through the town of Ballarat to celebrate but I wasn’t invited because I was a Squadron Leader and I was, didn’t

have anywhere to put me in the ranks. So they left me out so I was pleased with that.

Oh no not really, no we knew the war was coming to an end, there was no real climax about it. No it was tough on

those that were still fighting in Europe but you know as far as we were concerned, it was all over.

Oh yeah I suppose so. I suppose a certain amount of satisfaction that, knowing that I did my little bit towards it. That’s what I joined up for so at least I did something. I

sank a U-Boat. I suppose you know, really for each person involved, individually you don’t do much. Except you know maybe the Dambusters or something. No these odd things that happen. The raid in Norway where they got that heavy water that the Germans were producing that made the atom bomb. Things like that probably had a very big effect on the end of

the war. But mostly people just did a job. That was it.

Oh I think it would be yes. Yes. Oh don’t know proudest, but most memorable certainly be the word. Just a very, very

traumatic experience that you know is always there.

It was a bit difficult for a while I must admit. I started off with a great burst, got all my study books

out and I used to study every night till about midnight you know and go to work and you know. For, that lasted for about three months I suppose and someone said “Oh we’re going out at work you know, out after work, we’re going to have a beer down the pub, how bout coming?” “Oh okay.” So had a beer down the pub and that lead to another beer and then that was it. And later on “Oh there’s a party on somewhere, let’s go to the party.”

And then you know you’ve got a group of friends and someone’s having a party at their house and a party at that, their house somewhere else. And after about six months or something you realise it’s getting nowhere. My studies had gone by the board and I was having a good time. So I pulled my socks up again and got stuck into the study. And I didn’t work as hard as I did originally but I finally got through,

got the exams. Bit of a slug but I’m not really bright when it comes to academic work. And you know it took me a fair while but I got through. I persevered, I qualified then after that I went on and did some post graduate work and that was it.

Oh well Pierre Bamber, the one that was wounded, he was invalid home of course. He was never really well. And he was married before the war and he and his wife have got a house down Saint, San Remo I think it is. In Victoria at the bottom of Port Phillip.

Down there, San Remo and he became a recluse, he just lived there for the rest of his life. And we used to a few of us would you know go somewhere or other and have a reunion here. We had a reunion in Queensland and Dudley Marrows lives down in Mildura, we had a reunion there and so on and in Melbourne. And we’d ring up Pierre and say “Look, we’re having a reunion, come up”, but he wouldn’t come, he wouldn’t leave there. We went down there a couple of times

and met him but he just didn’t do anything, he just became a recluse and every afternoon he used to go to the local RSL club or something, I think he spent most of his time there. But the rest of us, I don’t know we just went back into our old jobs and carried on. But I don’t remember any of us had any problems that way.

Mmm, can’t remember. I think you know we all just slipped back into civy life, pick up the threads and carried on. All we wanted to do anyway. I know by the end of the war we’d had enough. All we wanted to do was to get out of it and get back to Civvy Street. Didn’t want any recollection of it or anything. In fact a lot of them still

don’t you know come on Anzac Day marches and things. Still don’t want to know anything about the war. Just want to keep it out of their system.

Oh not very much unless it comes up in conversation. I think particularly after the war I don’t think people were interested anyway.

No one seemed to want to know anything and you know there was always that feeling that “If I say too much they’ll probably think I’m boring them or something”. So you kept your mouth shut. It’s funny how in later years like this it becomes a lot more interesting to people. I know my children weren’t particularly interested in hearing from me but you know the grandchildren want to know. It’s funny.

Oh I don’t know it was great importance but no I did. But I didn’t get very involved for some years. But I did keep contact with a few of them. We’d have meetings, reunions, you know we formed a branch of the air force Association. That became a focal point.

And we’d meet occasionally. And in fact later on, like to start off there wasn’t much, we’d have a meeting and have a few beers and go home or maybe have a meal, go home but. Later on it became more, more joined us and we became a bit more serious and we used to have meetings, invited wives along and we have, put on a dance, hire a hall somewhere, put on a dance you know. We’d have

you know a hundred, hundred and twenty people along. And have a good night. But then gradually that’s got smaller and smaller so now we only have two functions a year. So it’s got down to that. Don’t know how long that’s going to last either.

Oh yes. Yeah well I’m President of the group now through default because no-one else will take on the job. So we march on Anzac

Day and we lead the air force contingent of the march in Sydney because we were first into combat. And you know first killed in action so we have the proud job of marching in front and me being President, I march in front of our mob. So I’m there sticking out like a sore thumb. But it’s getting harder, I don’t know how long we can keep it up.

We only had about, I’m not sure how many, maybe eight, ten of our mob of our chaps there but some of them were bringing along their children or grandchildren and we’ve got a couple of fellas that flew in 10 Squadron after the war and they come and march with us. So we got a few things to bolster up the numbers but how long we can keep going because the RSL [Returned and Services League]

runs the march and they don’t want groups that are too small, naturally. So once they think we’re too small they just say “Well you know disband and you join one of the other groups”. So we’re trying, we’re padding it up as much as we can to keep our place in the march.

Mmm?

Oh well that’s right, it’s important. And

we just got a new banner made too, to take. We have the little Air League and Air Cadets carrying the banner for us. We used to carry it ourselves once but not anymore.

Oh yes, yeah.

Oh yes I think I got a lot from it. Oh yes you, you certainly find out about yourself you know in that situation oh yeah. Like I said I couldn’t go through it again but I wouldn’t have missed it. Now that it’s over and done with yes it was a good experience.

Oh I don’t think outwardly it changed me very much in that way. I was always fairly shy and retiring type. And still am but I’ve got certainly a lot more self confidence. You know I can do things now that maybe I might have found difficult. Getting up and

speaking before people or leading the air force march doesn’t, wouldn’t worry me. You know doesn’t worry me. You know I think self confidence is the main thing. You know being able to look back too I suppose and you know realising you’ve done all these things. And no, you know you didn’t force yourself in any way. At least I don’t think so.

I think fire would be our greatest fear. And yet

strangely enough the fellow I mentioned previously who was badly burned in an aircraft accident, he said “Once when his time comes he wouldn’t mind burning to death”. Which surprised me but he explained when he crashed in this aircraft, he was the navigator and his escape hatch was the astra hatch. And he got it and tried to pull it in to get out and it was jammed. So he’s only,

and the other way of getting out was the pilot’s window. So he had to go through the aircraft to get out the pilot window but the whole front of the aircraft was smashed in, he couldn’t get out of there. So he thought “Well the only thing, I’ve got to get the astra hatch”, so he went back through the burning aircraft, managed to pull it in and he got out. Now he was badly burned but he said all that time “He didn’t feel any sensation of burning”. The

only thing was when he got over the main spar, he put his hands on it to get over, that must have been red hot, but he said “It felt warm, just felt comfortably warm”. And you know when they got him into the ambulance the skin was just hanging off him. But he said “It was a beautiful feeling”. And he had the feeling that he wanted to jump into the flames, he felt an affinity with the flames. And he

said “He’d read about that, that people feel that you know when they’re in flames”. And that’s what he said, “That he wouldn’t mind”, and yet that’s I think what everyone fears. So but that’s it I think probably we used to think a lot about it ourselves that I think when death finally comes it’s probably,

probably a comfortable feeling. I think it’s, that’s nature. But, but like we all have that fear.

Oh if that’s what he wants, yes. Oh I think you’d have to say “Yes after all”. If they want that you know they should have it. Even though it might lead to disaster I think

they have to have the opportunity. You know I don’t think there’s any doubt, should be there.

I’ve just written a letter to the Commanding Officer of the 10 Squadron. I don’t know whether you know they’re in Iraq at the moment. And you know I was wondering about that myself when I was writing to him. I just, you know,

just wished the squadron the best of luck, a safe return. No I don’t think there’s much, they’ve gotta learn for themselves. We found that out you know, you did all the training right up to OTU, and you did training and you’d feel you know everything but until you go into actual operations it’s so different. Very different. Even with the aircraft it’s different. You know I found with the, when we

were in action with the 88’s that the things the aircraft went through with the skipper, you know twisting and turning, trying to keep away cause you could see the shell bursts around, you could see them popping coming towards you and you know he’s trying to dodge them all the time. That sort of manoeuvring was never done other than in combat because no-one would ever do it. The aircraft wouldn’t

stand it you’d think. And I know in the tail turret when that was going through. And when we were in practise, we’d think “Oh my God the turret’s going to fall off”. But the aircraft hangs together and the, I found that the ammunition in the bins for the four guns when he was going through such tight manoeuvring, were being thrown up and bursting open the tops of the bins and coming out

and twisting and stopping the guns. Now that never happened in peacetime. The people who designed all those and had taken the aircraft through all the manoeuvres that the pilot could do. But you never did that sort of manoeuvring. Because they, they hadn’t designed it to cope with it. And it’s the same with yourself, you do things you wouldn’t do otherwise, and you’re capable of doing things you wouldn’t be capable of otherwise too I suppose. So,

and these things you’ve got to learn yourself. They can’t teach you. Mmm that’s about it I think.

Oh no. No I couldn’t have gone into the army, no, that’d be a, the navy maybe. But oh no, I couldn’t be a footslogger. In fact there’s, I remember a

television series about escapists, the airmen that were shot down over occupied territory. And some of them joined up with the freedom fighters there you know the Marquis and what not. And I remember in one session that one of the men in charge of this group of Marquis, said you know “We’ve got some airmen here.” He said. “I don’t want them, airmen don’t make infantry.” And he was so right.

Couldn’t be, they’d be more of a hindrance than a help. Oh it’s just a, different world, different thing altogether. I think probably the navy might be a bit like the air force. Much the same, you’ve got a ship, a bigger vehicle and more people in it but it’s much the same. You’re out on the ocean; we’re out in the air. So I think I could join the navy. But no, only a second

choice.

No I think you’ve dragged everything out of me. I can’t think of anything else. No anyway it’s a, well it’s an enjoyable experience in

lots of ways you know, I think warfare’s been described as something like ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent panic and that does about sum it up I think. But a good experience, yeah.

Oh of course, oh yeah, yeah. And you forget the boredom.

You spend half your time in the services just waiting I think. Waiting you know. You go for a medical examination “Oh wait over there.” Or you’re going to do some exercise or other, “Oh wait over there.” Waiting all the time, boredom of it. And then even flying you know as I say a lot of our patrols, our patrols, most of them, the bulk of them were just sheer boredom. And yet you had to concentrate, you had to keep your concentration

so much. Your life depended on it; you had to see them before they saw you. So you had that impetus. So you’d come back having done nothing and worn out. And then have to get the aircraft ready for the next take off.

Oh yeah.

Oh well you had to keep alert. You couldn’t afford to let your, to let it go because you just don’t know. There might be aircraft anywhere especially if there was cloud around. And with the bright sun too, that was another thing you had to look into the sun because the fighters knew how to attack from it. If they saw you first they’d

manoeuvre ‘round til they got between you and the sun then attack. So you had to see them first before they saw you. So most important. So you knew that, you knew the whole crew depended on you. Had to concentrate and keep concentrating.