Australians at War Film Archive

Yes, I can do that. To start off with we would have to go back to where my father was killed in the Second World War. That was at the Battle of Sunda Strait and he was on the Perth then, a light cruiser, a 6-inch cruiser

and she was in company with the USS Houston, which was an American heavy cruiser and they thought they could push their way through Sunda Strait and get back to Australia because everything had collapsed in the Java Sea area because we had lost the Java Sea battle. So they tried to run the gauntlet on 2 March about midnight and unbeknown to them

they come across a landing, a Japanese landing at Sumatra and they really copped it. They put up a terrific fight in a battle, it is an epic in the American navy and both ships were sunk. And I was only 14 then, I was at school in Manly and Mum said, “You will have to leave school early,”

which was about 14 and 8 months, “Because we have got to get some money into the house, because we can’t live on your father’s pension,” that is the War Widow’s pension. What I did then, I left school about 14 and 8 months and I got a job as an apprentice toolmaker and I really wanted to go into the navy, that is all I wanted to do because

it was in my blood. So I said to Mum, “Can I join the navy, I can put my age up?” and she said, “No you can’t.” She said, “I have lost your father and I am not losing you.” She said, “When the war finishes, the day the war finishes, you can join the navy.” I said, “Right-o Mum.” So I went along with that. A mate of mine who left school with me about the same time, the same age we were,

he said, “Listen, you can join the American small ships, they carry ammunition up into New Guinea and places like that and they are taking kids at 15.” I said, “That would be great.” I said, “Give us the papers.” He gave me the papers so I fronted Mum with the papers and she said, “No way, you are not going, I am telling you.” It wasn’t long after that, about 6 months I think it was, and we found my mate had been killed up there.

They had a direct hit and an ammunition ship and it had blown. When the atom bomb went off, I think that was in August ’45 Mum said, “Right-o you can join the navy, the war has finished.” I said, “Big deal, right-o.” I was 17 and the navy was taking kids at 17, we were kids, now they are still at school.

So I went down to Phillip Street, the recruiting depot then, it was in Phillip Street, Circular Quay. I had been away from school for 2 years and I saw a fellow down there in the recruiting office, I think it was a 3-badge killick [Leading Seaman] and he said, “How are you with your Maths and English?” And I said, “I have been away from school for 2 years,” and he said, “Have a look at these papers.” He gave me

a look at a test paper and I thought I would have to go and study up. I went back to night school at Manly and my old school teacher was taking the night school, Mr Scotter, and he said, “Yes John.” He said, “Yes John, what do you want to do? You want to go into the navy like your father?” I said, “Yes,” and I said, “I think I would be struggling with the maths. I know my English is good. I am perfect, I can spell terrific,

my English is great. I got big grades, but I reckon I would be a bit dicey on the maths.” “Right-o son,” he said, “come down here two nights a week and we will get you ready. I have got a copy of these papers but they won’t be the same but they usually follow the same pattern.” So anyway after two weeks I go back there and I walked in and I got good marks in everything. A fellow said to me, very seriously,

“What is your name, Gubbins,” the 3-badge man who had been in 12 or 15 years. I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Your father was in the navy?” I said, “Yes sir that is right.” He said, “Larry Gubbins?” I said, “I don’t know. His name was John, the same as mine, the same as my grandfather, we were all John.” He said, “No, little Larry Gubbins, Irish bloke.” I said, “Yes.” And then he said, “Oh welcome to the family.”

The navy is an institution; it is a family. When you are in the navy you are in it forever. So anyway I stood by then to get my draft down to Flinders. Now I could have gone in then straight away but I had to wait about 2 or 3 months because they were sending big

shipments of replacements like us, kids 17 or 18 because they were demobilised in all the Second World War and we were taking the places, we were the new navy of perms, they called us perms [permanents], permanent service. Not 3 years, not 2 years but 12 years and if you went in at 17 you weren’t a man in the navy until you turned 18, so you had to do 12 months gratis

and that didn’t go on your papers, so you got seeing off for 12 months, that was the boys’ time, you were a boy, when you turned 18 you were a man. Away we go onto the train and I notice all the fellows who came from NSW on that train, there was about 3 or 4,000 of us went in on that intake and they became your mates for years and years to come, and on different ships and they

become chief petty officers, they become lieutenants and lieutenants, become commander’s captains and everything. But to cut a long story short we got to Flinders and that was a very cold night and it was raining. If you have ever been to Crib Point that would be the end of the world. We got off the train and in our carriage we had bought a bottle of rum, we were kids and having a bit of a sip on the way down to the thing,

to the depot. When we got out of the train we all had to line up all in our civvies [civilian clothes] and everything like that and we lined up in the indoor parade ground so we wouldn't get wet. They called out our names and the warrant officer and the chief says, “As we call out your name you shall be given a number and that number is yours until the day you die.

Don’t you damn well ever forget it.” They call out the name, “Gubbins,” and I didn’t hear it properly and he said, “Gubbins,” and, “Yes sir.” He said, “R282222.” I had a pencil and paper and I had to write it down so I wouldn’t forget it because otherwise I would be in big trouble. Then they marched us

into the dorms [dormitories] and we were introduced to a hammock.

After we did our 6 months training at Cerberus

we were all ordinary seamen 2nd class, we were under the age of 18 so ordinary seamen 2nd class what they did they saluted everything and called them sir that walked and they painted everything that didn’t walk kind of business. They sent us all to cruisers and the first ship I went onto was the Hobart , the 6-inch

and that went pretty near straight away to Japan on occupational duties. Well there’s quite a big story in all that too, so from the Hobart I was, I came off the Hobart as an able seaman torpedo class, I had done a course at sea for 2 years at sea, so I went to a destroyer,

the Warramunga and that was a great thing to go to, a destroyer because only the best seamen and everything went to the destroyers. I was on destroyers for the rest of my time in the navy. From the Warramunga I went to the Bataan and I had 3 years on the Bataan and from the Bataan I went to the Tobruk, a battle class destroyer and from the Tobruk I went to the

Vendetta which was another destroyer and after that I went to the Sydney, the aircraft carrier and from there they sent me to America for 15 months to train, to pick up a guided missile destroyer, the Perth and that was the last ship, I was paid off from the crew. That was all the ships that I had been on but over that time see I did 22 years

full time at sea, twenty two years permanent service and then when I came out I did 17 years reserve but that was active reserve so I was going in every year for a month or two weeks or three weeks, whatever, put it altogether I did 39 years.

No, I wasn’t, I was on Active Reserve then. I went to Reynolds to the Royal Australian Navy Experimental Laboratory because I was a specialised technician in sonar at the time. I can’t tell you too much about that, in fact I can’t tell you anything about that lot. At the time the drugs came on the scene where I was living

out on the North Shore and I had 5 girls and I said to my wife one night, “This is no good, let’s get out of here.” So we headed north to Lake Macquarie in Newcastle because I got a job as, not a senior technician but as a technician. I started from the bottom in Newcastle which was just like eating crow [humiliating] after being the chief. Which I did later on, worked my way

up to a senior. We bought a small property, only 25 acres, we called it Greenacres and all the kids had chores to do on the farm, and they missed the drug scene. I didn’t say they didn’t sniff a bit of stuff every now and then as kids would do and you would yourself to see what goes on but they come out of it pretty well

and all my girls did very well for themselves. From there that was it as far as the service work but being in a government job like the university I was given say 3 or 4 weeks every year to go to the navy to go and do my service time which was good. It kept me up with things all the time.

From Newcastle we head,

when I left Newcastle, see I retired there and I was paying in a pretty good super and the more you paid in the more you got out. When I left Newcastle we had our fifth daughter who had epilepsy and she was more or less uncontrollable epilepsy, the best place we found there was in Australia to help these children

was the Challenge Foundation at Tamworth, they were miles ahead of anybody else. We sold our property which we had just outside of Newcastle at Mount Vincent, beautiful place it was, beautiful place, and anyhow we did it for Vicki Ann because we had to do something for her and it was the best move we ever made in our life.

We bought two more properties up there and I learned how to farm and they said, “How do sailors learn how to farm?” I said, “Sailors can do anything.” I said, “If they want to do it, if they put their mind to it and they want to read up and study there is nothing that they can’t do.” In the end they said, “But how did you do it?” I said, “I will tell you I kept my ears open and my eyes open and my mouth shut.”

I said, “My neighbours taught me everything there was to know about farming and I loved it.” Then we came to a stage one time we had cut about 2,500 bales of hay and Betty and I were taking it up to the hay shed up a bit of a mountain, well not a mountain but a hill and it was moonlight and the dogs were with us and the moon was out, the old tractor is puffing up with all this hay

on the back and Bet said, “We must be stark raving mad.” I said, “What do you mean darl?” She said, “You know I love you I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” She said, “The work, we are working packing hay, 2,500 bales of hay and we are getting older. We can’t keep doing this.” I got the message, time to knock off. I retired and came into Tamworth.

Oh whoa, well I can remember when my father was at Crib Point in the gunnery school at Cerberus down at

in Victoria. My mother and myself and my little sister we lived in naval housing just outside the depot there and I would have been about 5 or 6 years old and he was then posted to ship. I didn’t see him a lot, my father because he was at sea most of the time and he was posted to a ship

whose home port was Sydney so to be next to my father we all moved to Sydney at a very early age. So we would only be, my sister would have only been about 2 and I would have been about 5 or 6 and we went to Watsons Bay and we lived at Watsons Bay, near Doyle’s fish café down there. There wasn’t much at Watsons Bay

in those days and from there we moved over to Manly to Marine Parade, Fairyborough near the South Steyne Surf Club and I spent all my childhood at Manly at Manly High School. We used to surf all the time, we lived in the surf, all the kids where I was at Manly, we just

lived there. We played football and we surfed and that was our life until we got older and we went all our separate ways. That is how I came to and then I went into the navy when I was 17 so I missed all my young life with the young friends that I had at school, girls and boys because I was at sea. By the time I was

21 I was a man well and truly, well by the time I was 18. The first place I went to was Shanghai on the Hobart and that was during the last stages of the big takeover by the communists, Mao Tse-tung fighting the General Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalists. The last stand there was at Shanghai

and we went up the Yangtze Kiang River to Shanghai to pick up our diplomats because they were all buggered now and we had to pick up our diplomats and take them out of Shanghai.

Yes at Manly, I went to Manly School. Well it has gone now, it is all taken down. It is all built out of sandstone and I can

remember the big bell and it was a great thrill to get nominated to ring the bell for a week. You had to be real good at your class and behaved yourself and done some exemplary action or something and the school teacher would say, “John you can ring the bell next week.” So that was a week’s ringing of the bell so it was a pretty good deal.

Yes he was, he was away a lot. When the war started it was a big thing, it was a big thing and it was ironic, when the war started in September ’39, the Second World War, he had just finished his 12 years in the navy and he had come out and I remember when I was a kid he came home and he was a 3-badges killick, three badges with one anchor on.

He was still in round rig, sailor’s rig, and he came over and took off his gear and threw it all in the corner with great ceremony, his cap and his uniform, and he said, “That is it, finished for the rest of my life.” Mum said, “But you are on Reserve.” He said, “We all have got to go on Reserve.” The Second World War started about 4 or 5 months later

and there came a knock at the door one night when we were eating our dinner and the Sergeant said, “Son is your father at home?” I said, “Yes sir,” and he said, “Well go and get him.” Dad said, “Who is it, what is it?” I said, “There is a policeman at the door wants to see you.” Mum’s ears go up, “A policeman, what have you been doing?” He gets to the door

and he said, “Yes sarge, what is it?” He said, “Get your toilet gear and that and hop in the car, you are off.” He said, “What do you mean I am off?” He said, “You are on Active Reserve, are you?” He said, “Yes.” He said, “You have been called back, the war has started.” He went straight back in and got all new kit, all new gear and everything and the next minute he was drafted to the Australia. That was an

8-inch cruiser and she went to England because England called in all the navy and that to protect the motherland and off went my father on the Australia. He was there for about 18 months, he was at the Battle of Dachau with the Australia. I have a bit of shrapnel from it, from the French battleship the Richelieu and he came home

on the Australia and then so we hadn’t seen him for 18 months, 2 years and then he did more training. He was in the gunnery, he was the main director, he was a range-taker and he was a specialist gunnery rating so he was then drafted. The Perth had come back from the Mediterranean because they had called all our ships and our troops

back because Australia was threatened from Japan and he went off with the Perth up into the Dutch East Indies which we now call Indonesia, and that is when the Japanese started landing in Singapore and Java and Sumatra and then he was killed up there. He was killed, because I met fellows in the navy that got off the ship and they went through the prisoner of war camps

and the Burma Railway and they said, “Your Dad was not on the Burma Railway, he never got ashore. He was killed, he was the main director and the bridge was hit.” And they said, “They blew it over the side so he would have never got out.” They said, “Maybe it was a good thing because he would have died under the Japanese on the Burma Railway.”

No, my grandfather was in the merchant service but he left County Cork in Ireland when he was only 14 and he was on clipper ships, he was actually on sailing ships going to China for tea and from there they. See the clipper ships only ran for about 20 or 30 years because they couldn’t carry enough cargo and the next ones that they

put the windjammers out, which were iron holds, steel holds. They were huge, they were immense, they were the biggest sailing ship the world has ever seen and will ever see and he was on those until they had finished and steam come out so he ended up then in a stokehole stoking coal the steamers. The tales that he could tell you on the windjammers was unbelievable, rounding the [Cape] Horn and all the different stories,

so as a young boy I was indoctrinated, brainwashed so there wasn’t anything else place for me to go. I had heard so many stories of the world and the sea that is all I ever wanted to be. You can ask kids today. I asked my grandson, I said, “Joel ,what do you want to be? You have just turned 16.” He said, “Pa I don’t know.”

But I did. Maybe if you are that close it must run in the family, runs in the blood, runs in the genes.

In World War II? Well in World War II we were living in a place called Queenscliff just outside of Manly up on the northern beaches and I was in the surf club,

and I was also an air raid warden’s runner so I had to get into the service as something. Mum wouldn’t let me join. I had even joined the Air Training Corps and I was in the Air Training Corps and I wanted to try and get in as an air gunner and put my age up and all the rest of it but I was thwarted, whichever way I went she wasn’t letting me go and that was it. I wasn’t going to a war.

So I ended up as an air raid warden’s runner at the post at Queenscliff. There was a Whitaker, which was the big timber yard there, he was the warden and I used to pedal on the bike with my steel helmet on and respirator on and take the messages from one post to the other and I can remember the night when the Japanese submarines hit Sydney and

that was a big to-do. Mum said, “You have got to get down the air raid main post immediately.” I got on my bike and this was about 6 or 7 o’clock at night and I zoomed down there and I was there all night. That was my war effort. That was my little bit to the war effort in the Second World War.

We were all a bit

scared, because the planes had been over or a plane, then the reconnaissance and then they said the Harbour had been attacked, and they were after the shipping in there. There was a lot of American ships and Australian naval ships in there, cruisers and that, and it was all very serious. I can remember sitting down in the dugout, we had all these sandbags

and that was our post down there, and the maps on the wall and the wardens were looking over the maps and everything and making sure everybody’s lights were off, but we took it very seriously.

Very little contact, only by a postcard or something like that. Mail wasn’t real good

during that period in the Second World War and the thing was where we lived in Queenscliff I remember we lived in Greycliff Street and I can remember nearly everybody was affected by the Second World War, nearly every family. All the way long Greycliff Street, some were in the army, the navy, either their girls were in uniform or their sons or husbands were away and

they used to dread seeing the police coming up there, knocking on your door, because they had these envelopes, dreadful things, they used to have them in those days, with a black edge round them and that was more or less meant that someone or your loved one had been killed or was missing in action or something bad had happened. I remember the night when they knocked on our door and the police was there and they said, “Is your mother home son?” and I said, “Yes.”

And Mum went to the door and they just handed her a letter with the black edge around it. It said, “Your husband is missing, believed killed in action,” and that is all they ever told you. They didn’t tell you where, what action or not until the war finished till we knew anything.

No, they didn’t tell you anything, very little.

They didn’t tell you anything at all.

Yes, the Perth and the USS Houston were missing, presumed lost in a naval engagement in the Java Sea that is it, that is all you got. I know when I have been in the United States I have talked with

people, naval people over there and they said it was the same in the US, they didn’t get any information, very little. It is funny the coverage they sometimes get, they say that the greatest naval battles in history were fought in the Second World War in the Pacific bigger than all the naval battles in the Atlantic and in Europe and all those places, even Jutland,

but the naval battles that were fought around the Philippines and later in Okinawa, they were the big ones, the real big ones. Some battles like the Java Sea, which you can imagine a 6-inch cruiser, Perth and the Houston she was a heavy cruiser, 8-inch I think it was, they were trying to fight their way through the Sunda Strait and the Sunda Strait

is very narrow, it is a very narrow section between Java and Sumatra. They had to, it was ironic that they had to try and force their way through just as the landing, the Japanese invasion of Sumatra started. The Japanese had cruisers, carriers, submarines, everything, and they didn’t have a chance in the world of getting through. They paid very dearly for it,

they took a lot with them before they went. Now in the United States naval proceedings papers, they say that was one of the greatest naval actions, one of the greatest naval actions of heroism and fortitude, the whole lot, but very little was ever printed, even today you can’t get books on it, you can’t read about it.

There is not even a book printed about it, it is amazing that they do these things, I don’t know why. Is it a political cover-up or do they at the time not want to expose it or give too much coverage to it.

Well yeah, it affected my mother and my sister and I. I couldn’t really feel the full force of it

for the simple reason that I didn’t have that contact with my father like a normal kid had. I went to the football with him and went swimming and surfing with him, went fishing with him, I didn’t have that. I missed out on that. By the time I was 17 and I went into the navy, by the time I was eighteen I was a real man. I had been up to Shanghai and we

took all those people off at Shanghai and then I went onto occupation duties with the Warramunga in Japan. We were going down to the Malacca Strait because the Indonesians were trying to stop Malaya from being a sovereign state and we had a confrontation but you didn’t read much about that in the papers but that was a war too. We were throwing shells at the Indonesians then, but a lot of the time the Australians denied it.

We haven’t done anything wrong over there.

Bad badly. The thing was that when my father was killed all payments stopped in those days, not like it is today. They throw money around anywhere today, payments stopped and you got, the war widow got a war widow’s pension

but you would be lucky to keep a canary on it today. Mum said to me, “Son you have got to leave school and get a job and help keep the home going. I shall get a job,” which she did. So Mum went out to work and got a job and I went out and got a job and I can always remember the last time I saw my father when he went on Perth and they went up into Indonesia,

the Dutch East Indies, he said, “Son I am going away and there is a war on now. You are the little man of the house, I am not the man of the house any more, you are, so take care of your mother, you must take care of your mother and your sister.” I knew then that I had to leave school and go to work and that was it. I used to give nearly all, to my mother the money that I earned

and we were doing war production. I was only fifteen and sixteen, fifteen and a half, sixteen and I was on a turret layer in a machine shop turning out parts for Browning machine guns, a kid. On those lathes it was easy to train a person to operate a lathe like that, it was an automatic lathe and it was turning out parts.

That was up near Darlinghurst, at a big toolmakers shop in Darlinghurst. They said, “You have to work overtime.” Everyone, this plant went all night like the dock yards and everything, twenty four hours during the war. I used to work until 10 o’clock at night and

I would get the tram down to Circular Quay, get on the Manly Ferry, I used to walk all the way home to Fairlight, yeah, Fairlight we were living then and then I would sit down and Mum would have my hot dinner and that would be about 11 o’clock at night. I would go to sleep and I would be up at 5 in the morning so I only had 6 hours and I would be back on the Manly Ferry heading back to that lathe,

to put out more stuff until 10 o’clock the next night. When I got my pay packet I would give that to Mum, the whole lot, she would give me money for the ferry and for my tram fares and a little bit to spend.

I think I got paid about £3 a week or £3/10/- with the overtime and that.

In those days it was about $7 a week.

It was 100%, people just gave themselves to the whole cause and that was it. Nearly everyone joined up that could join up of course. There was people, there were men and women, there were men who couldn’t

join up the service in the services but they did other things too. They went in other things, air raid wardens but everyone, it was everyone knew they had to do 100% effort or lose their way of life and their living because the Japanese were hell-bent on getting down here and taking the place. That was the feeling of it.

It was a 100% effort.

Well I have got to admit I didn’t mind at all because I wasn’t wrapped in school, all I wanted to do was go to sea, I wanted to be a sailor. When I went to sea and I had 22 years, had a little bit more, yeah, 22 years at sea and I loved every minute of it, I loved it, it was my whole life, I loved it.

And people and other fellows went to sea and after 10 or 12 years did their time, they said, “I am getting out, this is enough for me. I want to be at home with the wife and kids all the time.” I just wanted to do what I was doing and I wanted to be a sailor and the thing was I was good at it. I was a chief. .

At Sydney itself?

There was a lot of ships in the Harbour, like mostly the United States Navy ships and British ships, I will say that and Australian ships. There was a lot of activity going on there. The dockyards were going, like Garden Island and Cockatoo Dock they worked all night. You could see arc welding,

you could see welding going all night and the noise, it went 24 hours a day to get these ships repaired and get them back up into the South Pacific but there was a lot of activity.

Yes, I was enthralled with it because I was patriotic and I would say, “I will be there soon.” It took a while to get there.

My father was always a destroyer man and he was on destroyers all the time. And after seeing Flinders and having six months of hell down there and seeing a capital ship like a cruiser and the cruisers were just like Flinders all over again at sea, I just wanted to get on destroyers and I went to destroyers and I stayed with them all the time and I loved them

and I was a destroyer man and I loved it.

He was only out for about 3 months so he didn’t do any work. He had 3 months holiday out of the navy and he thought he was made. He had finished with the navy, burnt his uniform and threw all his gear out until the knock on the door and the Sergeant

was there said, “Get your gear, you are going.” That is the way it was because when you joined the navy for 12 years it is not just till hostilities are over or anything like that or 3 years National Service, 12 years you are making the navy a profession, a career and they don’t let you go that easy. They don’t put that much money into training you and let you

get out on the street and don’t come back, so they put you on hold, on Reserve.

Yes I did, I had a lot of problems with Mum because she had lost Dad and she said, “I am not losing you.” Little did she know that after I joined the navy, another 4½ years later I was in a war myself

for 3 years, so she didn’t know that. I can remember then when I went to Korea they were needing blood because there were a lot of casualties on the first lot in Korea and Mum went up to Manly Hospital to give blood and when she went up there and the doctor said, “Oh yes Mrs Gubbins,” and she said, “I want to give some blood because my boy is in Korea. I think it is my duty

to give blood to the boys who are in Korea.” He checked Mum over and Mum was getting on a bit and he said, “Mrs Gubbins that is a great sacrifice you want to do for your boy, but I think you should keep all the blood you have got, my dear.” She didn’t have to give any.

When I

went to Phillip Street we were all about the same age, all 17, we had just turned 17 busting to get into the navy and we were all out the front there waiting to be called in and do our exams and they had this big room with all the desks and pens and everything. We had to sit down and they gave us the papers, the English and the maths.

There was a leading hand there, a 3-badge leading hand and they said, “Now pay attention.” “Yes sir.” “When I ring the bell that is when you will start your papers,” and you are given so much time. I had gone back to night school because I knew I couldn’t do that maths unless I did a couple of months refresher, but some of these kids walked straight off the

street, stars in their eyes wanting to be in the navy. When it all finished and they said, “And this is who passed.” Maybe there were 50 of us there. “John Thomas Gubbins passed, Kirsty so and so passed, so and so failed.” You could see the kids’ face, it was like a disgrace, how could he go home

and tell his people that he couldn’t pass the test to get into the navy. I said, “What is the matter?” This fellow, he said, “How am I going to go home and tell my mother and father that I failed the test?” I said, “You should have done what I did and you should do it now.” I said, “Tell your mother and father that you will come back but that you will go back to night school and you will study up on your English

and Maths and you will redo the examination.”

Oh well at night school at Manly I remember Mr Scott was the teacher, a great old man he was, a great fellow Mr Scott, he used to say to us, “I don’t care if you are the greatest doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs mathematicians or anything, all I want you to do is go out and be good citizens, and good

men, and have a trade and contribute something to your country.” That is was his philosophy. Mr Scott said to me in the class, see there was a lot of us, there were fellows in the class wanting to join the Public Service, the Public Service, everyone had exams in those days. All government jobs had examinations so they wanted to go there, some wanted to go into hospitals, some wanted to be in the

Fire Brigade, some wanted to be in the Police Department, some wanted to join the army and the air force and they used to have all the appropriate paperwork and they used to coach us for those exams so we could pass. Those kids had been out for three years away from school and you lose a lot in three years when you are working on a machine putting out war material. You are not thinking of the square root of something else or

the phase and all the rest of it. All you are thinking is you are making these parts and are they correct and all that.

What kind of questions? Well what they did you had to write a small composition, like why you wanted to join the navy,

and then you had to, what else was there? In the English there was composition and spelling and all the rest of it and with the Maths, the Maths were additions, subtractions, and division, and fractions and that was about it. You still had to,

it was still a pretty high standard, in those days they were. Not being negative you could get into the army a lot easier than you could the navy because the navy demanded a higher education. Possibly because you were engaged on more sophisticated equipment than you did in the army so you had to have a better education, that is all it was,

a better standard of education.

It was the Dee Why, the Kurl Kurl, the South Steyne, the Collaroy, the Barren Joey, all the old steamers and the best one was the South Steyne of course. When the tram used to come from Darlinghurst from where I worked

at the machine shop there and we got to the Quay you would have to run like mad before they would ring the bell and shut the gate otherwise you would have half an hour to wait getting home. . I would be up at 5 or 6 o‘clock in the morning to go back on the ferry. Mum would be worried.. Mum said, “I don’t want you to work this overtime,” but you had to. During the war you had to actually do it, there was no excuse,

you had to do so much.

My word. That was on my brain all the time. I was only biding my time.

They said, we thought, “Straight away we will be on the train at Central heading south to Cerberus to Flinders the big

naval depot, whacko.” They said, “It doesn’t happen like that, there is so many intakes before you,” and they were sending down, I forget how many they were sending down all over Australia but it was a lot. There was something like 38,000, 40,000 people in the navy in World War II and we had to take over from them. The greater majority of them were HOs,

hostility only, they had joined the navy just for the war and we had to then get back to a permanent navy and they wanted something like 30,000 perms, permanent people, to keep our navy going. We didn’t get to Central Station straight away and fellows down in Manly they would say, “When are we going? When are we going?

It shouldn’t be long, what intake do you think we will be in?” I was in November 45 intake so when we got to and they said, “Just take as little clothes as you can because you will have to send, all your clothes will be posted back to your mothers.” And then Mum and my sister were on the station at Central Station and we got on the train and I introduced

different fellows to Mum and because they become our lifelong friends and mates. And then we hops on the train.

I forget now, it’s a long while, it is a long while. I can’t remember, going back. All I was thinking about was me, me, me.

I got in, I passed the test, I am going and that was it.

Like the old train trips they used to have in those days, steamers. They had the big C38 engines, the big green steam engines, monstrous big things and the carriages and that had these steel water bottles in them to keep you warm during the night. You put your

feet on them and they put hot boiling water in them. We were all acting like men, bringing out our packet of cigarettes and having a smoke and all that and someone even had a bottle of rum and we were having little nips here and there to keep us warm on the way down and all looking forward to the big induction into the navy.

The trains were pretty full. They would be about, in the carriages would two or three hundred and then when the train stopped everyone would jump out at the railway refreshment rooms and grab a meat pie and a cup of coffee and zoom back in the train again. When you got to Albury you had to change onto the Victorian trains in those days.

We got to Flinders Street station in Melbourne and we were supervised too because we had permanent service sailors, killicks and petty officers there with us all the time, no playing up or anything like that. From when, we pledged an oath in those days which I don’t think they do today.

We pledged on the bible allegiance to the King of England or the Queen of England and you took a coin, they gave you 2/-d. and that means once you had taken their money, the King’s money, you pledge allegiance that was it. You pledged allegiance to fight any of his or her enemies or your countries enemies wherever they may be, all over the world.

If they picked a fight with Canada well you would be fighting the Canadians and you couldn’t say, “I am not going there, let’s have a Union meeting. Who want’s to go to Canada?” You had already pledged your allegiance, that was it, you were a professional sailor.

Yeah, I hereby swear and no, I

solemnly swear and everyone had their hand up in the air, all in this office, there might have been about 40 or 50 of us that I will give allegiance to my flag and to my country and to his Highness or Majesty King George VI or whatever it was,

so help me God, on the bible, you swore on the bible. We didn’t have all these different religions like we have today. We only had Catholics and Protestants so we all believed in the bible so we swore on the bible, that was it. Once you swore on the bible that was it and you weren’t released from that pledge until you left the navy. When I left the navy I didn’t have to pledge allegiance

to the British King and Queen any longer but I had honoured my bargain and I had honoured my oath to them over those 22 years when I finished I didn’t do it. I am a full member of the American Legion, I am a full member of the American Legion, as well as being a member of the RSL [Returned and Services League].

See the American Legion can join our RSL, the Americans can join our RSL and we can join theirs so I am a member of theirs too so this allegiance business is not like it used to be. A lot of people today because of their various faiths and various ethnic people might not want to pledge

allegiance to a foreign Queen or a King which is only right. They pledge allegiance to their country and that’s the way it is.

Oh yes, I can. We all got off the train at Flinders Street and instead of having one petty officer and three leading hands looking after the whole train as

two hundred, three hundred civilians, kids seventeen, they had brought down the heavies from the Naval Depot from Flinders. We are talking about the real navy now and they came on with their white gaiters and belts on and everything and when they said, “Jump,” we said, “How high, when can we come down?” And we knew we were in the navy, just like the sergeant saying or

the chiefs and petty officers saying, “You are in the navy now.” They used to say, “You will call anything that moves and salute it sir, anything that doesn’t move you paint.” We called everyone sir even, I was an ordinary seaman 2nd class I would be calling an ordinary seaman sir. He would be calling an AB [Able Seaman] ‘sir’ and it went on

up and down the line. I thought to myself, “One of these days I am going to be a chief, boy that is a long way up,” because chiefs were God, well actually captains were God but next to God was the chief and that is how it ran down, chiefs ran the navy, actually ran it. It is like warrant officers in the army, they just ran it.

The first night, we went into our dormitories and it was called Block H5 and my class was 21 and we went into dormitories and all our hammocks had been slung for us because they usually get the intake from before to sling the hammocks for the new boys when they come but they only do it once. And it was funny, we were falling out of them all night.

We just didn’t know how to sleep in a hammock and some kids were having a bit of a sniff too because they missed their mummy, they were only 17, “I want to go home,” and that was it. But anyway we got over that and then they took us down to, after we put our gear in the lockers, they took us to dinner down in the dining room and

they had a fellow down there, a cook and he used to have a navy singlet and a cropped neck, crew neck and he had tattoos all over him and he’s say, Right-oh you fellows.” He would scream out and everyone, you were just scared all the time. They would give you a thing and if you said, “What is this?” He would say, “What did you say?” And you’d say, “This looks good,”

not, “What is this?” “Now sit down and eat it.” And in the end fellows said, “I don’t eat cauliflower, I don’t eat this.” In the end you just would eat anything and having three regular meals a day and being made to eat vegetables and the food that was put before us because we were hungry, we were only kids, growing kids it changed us. We were fitter, we were lean mean machines, we were great stuff

by the time we left Flinders and it all came down to discipline. I used to always think, “Their discipline, what good is it?” Because you would go into the gunnery school and you would march in and your boots and had to be immaculate and shiny and your white belt and your gaiters and all your clothes, everything and your hair cut properly, pardon, and they would watch you they were like hawks. They were sadists, they were trying,

but it all had a reason for it. “Why do the navy do this? Why are they so hard on us?” And they had a big sign up there Fear God, Honour the King’, ‘Fear God, Honour the King’. This is a big sign they had got and underneath that they had in big gold letters ‘Silence’. This is in the gunnery school. You walk into the gunnery school and I’d say, “How you going?”

And the petty officer would say, “What did you say?” I said so and so and he said, “Read that sign, what does it say?” I said, “Silence, sir.” He said, “That is what it means and pick up that rifle or pick up that shell.” And you got a 6-inch shell or something which weighs about 50 or 60 pound and we are only young kids, and he’d say, “Right, now run up to the parade ground,

up to where the flag post is which is about half a mile and back again.” And he said, “I want you to run, I don’t want you to walk, I don’t want you to saunter.” He said, “I want you to fly.” You would get there and you would be that scared and you would run up to the flag pole with this thing and you’d think your arm was going to fall off and run back again. He said, “Now put it down. Now you know what that means don’t you?” “Yes sir.” That was discipline. It doesn’t come out

until later if you are in a war, if you go into action, if you are in a turret or a submarine or your every action is paramount to protect your mates or your friends so this is why you get discipline because it is all in the plan. It has all been planned out in your training because if you make one boo-boo it could be the cause of killing ten of your mates.

That is why they have discipline and it didn’t then, it took a long while for me to work out why are they so hard on us and why do they discipline us so much and they were so hard on us, there is a reason and that is the reason.

Oh golly, we used to have the serge, the naval serge and the bell bottoms and the collar, the

blue jean collar with the three stripes and our dickey front of our shirt with a blue jean tape on the top and cap and lanyard and then we had our silk, our black silk that was for the mourning for Nelson, they are still mourning for Nelson one hundred years later but it all meant something. The cord they used as a gunnery cord in the old days when they used to put on the triggers and locks on the guns and they pulled cords. And then the

three stripes on your collar was the three major battles that Nelson fought, the Copenhagen, the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar. They all meant something, everything had its meaning, had it’s thing. There was a place for everything and they discipline you so much so that even today you put your knife and fork at the right angle, you tidy the papers up on your desk

and you are being brain washed into it, into discipline. You never question anything. They always said, “Yours is not to reason why, yours is but to do and die,” so don’t question it, just do it and you did it blindly. There were always reasons for it.

It was horrific.

Well early training started about 5.30 in the morning, no, yes, about 5.30, we got up and then we went to the big bathrooms, like you are putting 500 or 200 fellows in the blocks through the bathrooms. You had all these big troughs with the taps in there, clean your teeth and then you’d have a shave and then you would put on your physical training rig,

put on a pair of a shorts, and a singlet and your runners, white socks and your running shoes and then you would jog or trot down to the seamanship school where they have these damn big barges. They were like a rowing boat that hailed about 20 or 30 people, the oars were like telephone posts, that is how big they were. We used to then hop in and we would have to toss these oars up in the air

and hold them in front of us and it took all your strength to lift them up, to toss them and lift them. And then they would say, “Toss oars,” and they would cast off and say, “Right put your oars into the water,” in goes the oars and we would row all the way down to the Inlet Sussex Inlet there, turn around and row back again. Then we would jog all the way back where we started from, our dormitory, we haven’t had breakfast yet, jog all the way back there

get ourselves ready and go back down to breakfast and as soon as you have your breakfast, that was about 7.30 and they would give us half an hour. Everything is one time, everything runs on time and if you are late you get punished. 7.30, you make sure you have your breakfast finish, clean up your locker, put your hammock away, bedding and all that and then you would run like mad to get down to the parade ground, you run.

You ran everywhere, you never walked, you ran everywhere. And you ran down to the parade ground and then you just got there five minutes before colours and the flag went up and you saluted the flag and the band played, some stirring march or a song and up went the flag, the Australian flag and you saluted and then you had to be inspected. That was when they went past and

said, “Ha his shoes. Did you have a shave this morning son?” “Yes sir.” “Did you have a shave? Now don’t you lie to me, you will regret it for the rest of your life.” “Yes sir.” “Well, you didn’t do a very good job of it. I will see you at 4 o’clock this afternoon.” So then you would run around with a rifle over your head for two hours. After you got through divisions then you split up into all your different schools. The gunnery school, the seamanship school, you went to

the Rifle Range or wherever you were going and this went on all the time. The discipline went on all the time, it never ever finished. We never ever got leave. I can remember the first leave they gave us, we were there for about 4 or 5 months and out of the goodness of their hearts they condescended for us to go up to Melbourne for a day but

we had to be on the train back at 7 o’clock so we that we got back by 9 o’clock that night. If you did not get on that train you didn’t know what, they would most probably hang, draw and quarter you. We went up to the thing and we weren’t supposed to drink because we were only 17 so anyway we went, boys will be boys. There was a place there called the Young and Jackson’s, a hotel opposite the

railway station there, not Flinders Street, the big railway station. It had a painting in there of Chloe, a woman, a beautiful woman with no clothes on, it’s a classic, a masterpiece. They said, “When you go to Melbourne on your first leave you have got to see Chloe,” so it was a thing that you had to do. So we went up to see Chloe, we walked into the hotel there and anyway

there was about six of us, and straight away they call me Shorty. They said, “Hey Shorty are you going to get the beers?” I said, “Yes I will get the beers.” We were only seventeen and a half. I went over to the bar and I said to the girl, “Give us six beers, love,” and she looked down at me and she looked down at me and she said, “We don’t serve sea scouts here.” I said, “You don’t serve sea scouts. I am in the navy. I am training in the navy.”

She said, “Yes but you are not 18.” I said, “I know, I know I am not eighteen but if I am old enough to put this uniform on and go and fight for you and I think I am entitled to be able to have a beer, I am man enough to have a beer.” And all the old fellows at the bar there said, “Give the kids a beer,” so she filled them up, “Give them a beer,” and that was it.

Discipline, discipline, discipline but I was learning, we learnt rifles, machine guns, pistols, 4 inch guns, 4.7, turrets, the whole lot. They put me in a director. When they drafted me then, when I left the gunnery school

and I finished my training, they used to have these big notice boards up where you went and there would be hundreds of names and different ships. And they’d say, “Hey Shorty, where do you think we will go?” and I said, “We will go to a cruiser for sure,” and that is more discipline. They will make Flinders look silly when you get on them. I said, “When is it going to end?” and they said, “When you get your first badge after four years, your first stripe,

they might put you on destroyers, destroyers are the best.” So anyway we are looking up there, “Hey there is your name Shorty, look you are going to the Hobart,” they said. I said, “What is that?” They said, “It is a 6-inch cruiser and then your mate might go there too.” So then you went to the Hobart.

I met a fellow

when I was training as a torpedo man and the sonar school at Watsons Bay, it was at Watsons Bay and there was a schoolmaster there called Tiger Lyons, Warrant Officer Lyons or Lieutenant Lyons and he was in the plotting room just below the bridge. And he said, “Your father was in the main director gunnery

and the bridge was hit and the main director was hit and the whole lot went over the side. Everyone was killed, everyone who was on the bridge, the signalman, the skipper, all the officers up there and all the people in the main director and the gunnery director went over the side.” He said, “Because I ended up, I got in the water and I was captured.” The Indonesians picked them up

and then sold them back to the Japanese, they used to get guilders for selling us back for prisoners. The Japanese paid them money if they can pick up any prisoners. He ended up on the Burma Thai Railway and Tiger Lyons, Warrant Officer Lyons he got through it. He said, “Your Dad wasn’t there, thank God that he wasn’t.” He said it was merciful what happened to him that he got killed

in the action rather than spend two or three years as guests of the Imperial Japanese army. Tiger told me that at Watsons, he said, “Petty Officer Gubbins, your Dad never got off.” So we knew for sure, we knew that for sure he never got off. I met a lot of others, survivors and that

different things in America, Houston people. Most of the people on the Houston was killed, a cruiser, the big heavy cruiser that was with the Perth. Only a few did get off and the ones that did get off two thirds of them were killed on the Thai Railway.

Six months, we did six months of our training right to the day and

off we went.

I couldn’t get out of there quick enough. Free at last, free, free get away from all the screws down there and the discipline down here because they make your life a misery but there is a reason for it as I said. We went to the cruiser and they were waiting for us and so we got it all over again.

I can remember when we were up, we went straight to Japan to the occupation, to do occupation duties and was occupied Japan and we had to go across. We went to Japan first and we had to do all the different ports in Japan. I remember when we came to Kure and to Hiroshima, it was only about eighteen months since the bomb went off and

it was so level, there was nothing there, just completely level and we went to Nagasaki where the bomb had gone there and it was completely level. The Japanese people were actually starving. They had given everything to the war effort and they were starving and they used to eat all our scraps. What they did, we used to then, we used to have little containers and things and

if we didn’t eat our mashed potatoes or pumpkin or something like that, or our meat we would put them all in different containers so they are not feeding people like pigs but we put them there and they all lined up. I remember seeing lines in Kure of Japanese women, the men wouldn’t do it, not the men, they hated our guts, the men did and they wouldn’t go anywhere near that, the

women and the kids and we helped the women and kids, the men we hated them.

The women and children as I say they were starving so we used to go to the canteen and if I was going ashore I would buy a packet of biscuits, Arnott’s biscuit or something like that and put them in my sock because you weren’t allowed to do that, to take any food or give them anything. And the little kids were there and we would get into town and pull a biscuit out and give them a packet of biscuits. The mother would say, “(speaks Japanese) and

thank you very much,” and we’d say, “Think nothing of it.” The kids thought it was marvellous, they just thought it was marvellous but you weren’t allowed to do it. The men would walk on one, they were stripped of all their rank and what they did was all the badges on their caps and uniforms, they didn’t have any clothes so they had to wear

their army gear but we made them take any insignia off them. The used to walk on one side of the road and the hate they looked at us and we looked at them kind of business and that is the way it was. In those days the man walked, even if you saw them out with their families with the Japanese wives and their children

the man walked three paces ahead of the woman. The woman walked three paces behind with the kids and carried all the gear. It was a man’s world up there, complete man’s world. Women are worth nothing in Japan they didn’t exist, they were lower than dirt. We helped the women and we helped the kids, we wouldn’t do nothing for the men, never gave them anything and that was the way it was. It was,

I mean it changed by the time, I did the whole occupation up there too, by the time we left MacArthur had given the women to the right to vote and the worm was starting to turn and the men didn’t like it either, because it had been like that for thousands of years.

I was down the quarterdeck, the quarterdeck division

and the quarterdeck division had to man the quarter deck and you had to be perfectly dressed at all times and it was pretty hard duty down on the quarter deck.

It was a mess deck. We would have a mess deck, and we would have maybe forty or fifty in the mess deck. See that’s

the quarterdeck division mess deck.

It is all steel decks which we had to wash, get down and scrub every morning. The tables were wooden tables, long and everyone had their right seats to sit in and you dare not sit in another seat otherwise someone would dong you. They were scrubbed white and you could eat your dinner off them and it was done with, I remember that,

Pearson’s sand soap and we used to scrub them every morning and all the knives and forks were polished with Brasso and everything was just like being back in Flinders in the discipline and this is a cruiser and that is how they ran cruisers.

Six or seven hundred and they still ran it like Nelson ran the Victory a

hundred and fifty years ago. The navy never changed, we were still doing things they did in 1800, back in the Napoleonic Wars.

On the Hobart? Well we were, there is fore top, main top, the fo’c’s’le’, and the quarter deck, that is the four parts of divisions on a ship, on a cruiser and I was in the quarter deck division. The quarter deck division they manned the quarter deck for the officers and for incoming dignitaries and people and all that

and we did the colour guards every morning and to raise the flags and to do that we had to have immaculate uniforms and it was a life of complete regimentation on the quarter deck. Everyone would say they had got to the fo’c’s’le or the main top, or they would say, “Gee we hope we never ever get drafted to the quarter deck.” We had all our rifles and we had to keep them polished and cleaned and we had to,

we lived on the clock and on a bugle. You thought to yourself, “This has got to finish,” there must be light at the tunnel somewhere that you get off it. They put me in the main director because my father was in the main director on the Perth so they thought, “Like father like son,” the son follows the father. I was up there with the two

chief petty officers they were good, they were really good to me and they weren’t hard with me at all. When we were shooting at targets and things like that at sea they would let me do different duties. I ranged to elevations operator up there and I had my duties to do. They said, “John do you like gunnery?” I said, “As a matter of a fact, no.” But they said, “Your father was in the director like we are.”

I said, “I know he was, but my father always said to me, ‘Son, when you do get into the navy, do something that you can use.’ He said ‘There is no jobs for gunners outside in civvy street when you get out, so become a torpedo man’ because torpedo men in those days were electricians. And he said, ‘That is what you are going to do, learn to be an electrician.’” They said, “What do you want to

be?” I said, “I would like to be a torpedo man.” The chiefs talk and they run the ship and they all talk in the mess at lunchtime, they said, “How is young Larry Gubbins’ kid doing up in the director?” “He doesn’t want to be gunnery.” “What does he want to be?” “He wants to be a torpedo man,” and the chief torpedo man said, “I have got a place for a young bloke if he wants to train, if he is any good.

We will give him a try.” So next time when the chief see me up on the director they said, “You have got to report to the torpedo workshop to chief torpedo man so and so.” They had pulled the strings for me and I went down there and they tried me on there and I took to it like a duck to water.

Well I had to go to electrical school and they have their own school room on the ship. I had to do all my,

I had to do more or less an apprentice electrician trade on the ship which I did and passed. When I did that, that opened the way for me because I got out of big guns because big guns mean big ships and directors and big guns and big ships means discipline so I was trying to work around this. They said, “You are being drafted off the Hobart.”

I thought, “Yes,” and you are going to a destroyer, one of the best, the Warramunga. I went to the Warramunga and I got off that cruiser, tat-ah, never to be seen again.

I was there for about eighteen months, a year and a half.

The ship was on occupational duties in Japan

and we were in the China Sea, we was in Shanghai, Hong Kong and then all of Japan from the north island of Hokkaido right down to Honshu, Kyushu, the whole lot.

We landed at Yokohama.

They had bombed it, levelled it. Just before they dropped the two atom bombs

at Hiroshima and Nagasaki there was something like fifteen or twenty carriers operating on the Japanese coast line and that was the British and American carriers and those carriers, you only needed two or three carriers today could level a city like Sydney. They had fifteen or twenty around Japan and they were looking for targets as they had nothing to shoot at or to bomb, they had levelled the joint.

There was no smell of say, well there was a bit I suppose but it was mostly a building smell of masonry and all that. When we first went to Yokohama we landed there and we were given leave and there was nothing there as I said but there was no animals there. They had eaten everything, cats, dogs, horses everything.

The people were starving, absolutely starving. There was no food as they had given everything to the war effort. If they hadn’t of dropped the atom bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki those people would have fought on to the death to the last person and maybe 1½ to 2 million people, allies, Australians and Americans may have been killed.

So actually people say they dropped the atom bomb how barbaric, 37,000 people killed but we are talking about millions that would have been killed if they had to take the islands so I think the bomb was a good thing.

Not at that age, we were only seventeen and a half you have got to remember I hadn’t turned eighteen yet. We were only boys, we weren’t men until we were eighteen so we got

boy scouts leave what they used to call it. They would let us off at 4 o’clock in the afternoon for two or three hours and we got back we had to come back on board by seven.

We went drinking and dancing and dancing and drinking, all the things that young men that age would do.

Our duties was to show the flag, let the Japanese know that they were cornered, they were under an unconditional surrender and that is where we were running the show. We got them back to work real fast, we got them back. See our ships, we got their dock yards going. When we went into,

our main port in Japan was Kure and there was a huge dockyard there which they build super tankers in today, it was called the Hirema Dockyard and the Hirema Dockyard was levelled, it was a huge dockyard and all you could see was machines, lathes and millers, drills, everything all standing bare, bombs had just flattened them. In the dry docks there the Japanese were still building submarines and

they must have had about ten submarines in the dry dock and what the Japs had done they had blasted the gantries, the big steel cranes and gantries and filled them in on the submarines so we couldn’t use the submarines. It was a stupid thing to do because we made them take it out. We employed them, we paid them and we gradually got them back to work and then they had money coming in and they could buy food

and get them back on their feet. The whole idea of the occupation was to give them democracy because the Russians didn’t want that. You have got to realise that only about one hour flying time was Vladivostok, Russia and Vladivostok was a big naval base.

Now when the war started in 42 in the Pacific Russia was our ally, Stalin was but he wouldn’t let us base troops or bombers or planes or bomb Japan from Russia, from Vladivostok and it was only an hour’s flying time so it took us three and a half years to get up to Japan for the surrender and so many millions killed

when we could have, in ’42 we could have bombed Japan from Vladivostok, from Russia and maybe bombed them into submission in six months and saved all those lives and Russia didn’t do it. The second that the atom bomb went off and the Emperor Hirohito said, “Right, that’s enough, finish,” the Russians declared war on Japan and came over into Korea.

and then were heading for Japan to get their share of the booty. The Americans and the Australians and their allies, the British said, “Pick up your gear and get going. You wouldn’t let us near Russia to hit Japan and now it is all over, you want to come in for a share of the loot.” They said, “We are not getting out of Korea,” and that is when we said, “Right-o

we will make the 38th Parallel line, you take north of that into North Korea, that will get into Mongolia and into Russia and we will take the southern part, ours will be a democracy and yours will be a communists,” and that is how all this started. Always lots of politics when we first went into Japan in the occupation but we didn’t, wee were there for about, the occupation started in

1945 and it went through until about 53 so the occupation went for about seven or eight years. The Japanese kids at school were taught that Japan had never been occupied but that Japan had come through the war but they had never been occupied or conquered and I got news for you, I’ve got medals that said that it was.

It was great, all of a sudden you start to think I am starting to earn my salt. I have learnt the trade, I have been four years at sea in the navy and now they say you can go to a ship that needs seamen and skills and things like that and destroyers they were different altogether. You just went to a destroyer and they were the greyhounds of the deep. They were great ships and

their discipline wasn’t as harsh as the capital ships. For the first time in your life in four years you were able to make a decision and think for yourself and it was good.

For a start the stupid uniforms that we had been issued with at Flinders. When we first went on into divisions on the destroyer,

that is when you are inspected the captain comes through, the executive officer and they inspect every division and you put on your best uniforms with the gold badges and the whole lot and that was our first inspection and the captain of the Warramunga, I think it was Captain Harrington who ended up an admiral,

he said, “My God is that what they are issuing the sailors with at Flinders?” and the executive officer said, “Yes sir.” He said, “That material, that cloth is ghastly, shocking, get rid of it, get them into better uniforms.” In Flinders we dare not touch our uniform, that was it, is was sacred. In the destroyers he said, “I won’t have men

dressed like that in my ship.”

We got tailor made ones, we went to the tailors and we got lovely navy serge and good uniforms.

There would have been about twenty or thirty. All the rest of them moved off the Hobart because the Hobart was a training cruiser but they would be refilled with the new intakes

and although only twenty or thirty came across the rest of them would have gone to other ships because we had to fill up a navy that was actually 38,000 because they were all getting demobbed and they are going back to civvie street and we are taking over as permanent service.

I went on there I went on as a torpedo man. My action station was the torpedo tubes and

and being a torpedo man I was also an electrician and I was down in the boiler rooms and engine room. I was the boiler room and engine room electrician.

It was pretty hot down there. You would go down there more to maintenance and repairs and stuff, fans go, motors go and you have got to strip them down and take them out and all the rest of it.

We would just wear overalls, we were allowed to wear overalls and stuff like that.

We couldn’t get around in shorts because you might get burnt with steam and stuff.

We slept in the forward lower torpedo man’s mess on the Warramunga. They say, “Oh, the Tribals [Tribal class destroyers], beautiful ships.” They were, they were great, they looked like greyhounds they really did, but they were wet ships, they took in water.

They had scuttles, you call them port holes, we call them scuttles and nine times out of ten they leaked and in heavy seas you would have water on your mess deck about six inches deep and it was bad, your clothes were wet and the lockers were bad. The living conditions on tribal class destroyers was shocking, they were bad.

You live like a lot of pigs. They weren’t good living conditions. I never got good living conditions in the navy at sea until we took over and we bought American ships, American destroyers and boy that was heaven. They were dry and warm and they would have left our ships for dead. All our ships now come from the United States, most of them.

The ones we do build we build under licence.

I was on the Warramunga and the Bataan I was in three typhoons on those three ships. On the Warramunga we left the Philippines, we left Manila and we were just off Leyte on the Mindanao Deep, that is one of the deepest parts of the world,

the Mindanao Deep and we were crossing the China Sea, the Yellow Sea to go to Hong Kong and we had no sooner left and we were about two days out and a typhoon formed in the south China Sea. And they spiral and they do have a centre, what they call the eye of the typhoon and that centre could be a hundred miles across

and in that water it is calm, it is like a mill pond, it is eerie and it is not dark but it is not light. It is a real subdued light and there is a tremendous amount of static electricity in the air on your clothes and things like that. You often see little moths and birds called Mother Carey’s chickens, little tiny birds and hundreds of moths and where they come from I don’t know.

That moves, the typhoon moves and you have got to go with it so you have got to break into that typhoon. You have got to get out of that calm water. You can’t stay in that calm water all the time and when you go in there it took us four days to get to Hong Kong and we looked like having to blow our mast off because we were getting top heavy and it could have turned us over. In fact the Americans lost

three destroyers up there, turned over up there at Okinawa, they just capsized so we looked like we were going to blast our lattice mast and put all the weight over the side. Anyway we got to Hong Kong about four days later all the davits on the ship, the steel davits had twisted like a piece of liquorice and it shows you the power, the immensity of the typhoon

You couldn’t sleep and we were, I was up on the upper deck because I wasn’t going down below mate because I thought, “If she is going over I was going in the water,” and I was a good swimmer. I was a great swimmer in my day because I used to swim from Manly, South Steyne and, Queenscliff and Harbord to all and

I thought, “I am in the water I have got a chance, down below I have no chance,” so I was up in the radar room I was sitting up there for four days. You couldn’t get any dinner because we couldn’t cook anything so we just went on watch and we just rode her out for four days. When we got there we had to go into dry dock, the dockyard in Hong Kong and there was a lot of work to be done.

The ship was torn to bits, all the upper deck and all our boats had been taken, smashed to pieces over the side so we had to get new whalers and a captain’s motor boat and all that.

On the Warramunga we went, we did occupational duties but more so than the cruiser did. The cruiser did what we call a jolly,

they we went around and showed the flag and met the mayor and the dignitaries in all the Japanese cities. On the Munga it was down to tin tacks, it was occupation. We had to go into all the various ports and little out of the way places we went to. We went to Fukuoka, we went to Makabe and Alboia and Sapporo,

all different small places to see how they were fairing, how were the people fairing? What were they eating? Were they being employed? All the rest of it and doing something about it.

To start with it was bad, it was real bad. It was heart breaking really to see them although we didn’t have no remorse for the males, for the Japanese men. The women were

treated so badly by the Japanese males and their children we had a lot of time for them and we helped them and give them stuff. We used to give them bread and stuff. On the ships they would bake their own bread and food and things like that and sometimes the Japanese would come up early in the morning and you would see a mother with two or three children in a little kind of a sampan would come up and she would put her hand over the side

and you would give her some bread and food and say, “Go on, beat it.” If they saw you on the ship you would get punished for that.

Because the stores, all our stores had to come from Australia and they only had so much. They couldn’t feed the Japanese, let’s put it that way. They said, “We know you like to help them, we know your heart goes out for the kids and women to try and help them

but there is a limit to it because we are up here for the next nine months so we have to look after ourselves.”

Not a great deal, we were at sea most of the time and then when you did get to a port they had to have a duty electrician so all the seniors went off and muggins had to stay behind because I

was the junior and I had to look after the ship, all the electrical circuits and all the maintenance and everything while they went off and had a good time but what goes around comes around. When I got up the ladder a bit I went off and the junior fellow stayed behind on my next ship.

I bought a lot of souvenirs back. I can remember

the first transistor I brought back, that was about in 1948/49 and people had never seen them before and they didn’t realise that they can make them so small. When we came back to Garden Island to the dockyard they said, “What, is that one of those new transistors?” I said, “Yes.” They said, “That is unbelievable, it is only that big and that wide. That is a radio?” I said, “Yes, that is a radio,

turn it on, listen.”

Back to Australia? From what ship?

Oh yes, oh yes. We bought Dr Evatt and his party of politicians and ambassadors and that we brought them back from Shanghai and we brought them back to Australia.

It was good, it was great, it was great, the food was better. Up there all sailors like milk, fresh milk, don’t know why because we don’t get it and we never had ice cream or fresh milk all the time we were up there. We would live on powdered milk or canned milk, mostly canned milk and just to get home and taste a baked dinner, a leg of

lamb, and vegetables, fresh milk, fresh fruit and all that, great, great.

Yes, sailors are always superstitious. We never sail on Friday 13th, never. There is no ship in the sea will go to sea on Friday 13th and captains will work anything to get out of it.

They’ll go one minute after midnight which is Saturday 14th but Friday 13th if possible they will do anything to get out of it.

Ships that had cats on them and the cats walk off the ship for no reason then something happens to the ship. Just before the Perth was sunk the Perth had a pet cat on the ship and when you have got six to seven hundred

men on a cruiser like the Perth and you have got one cat it is a spoilt cat isn’t it? It gets lots of TLC . When that cat tried to get off the ship when they were oiling just before they left to go to force their way through the Sunder Straight the cat walked off the ship and ran off and would not come back. They put the cat back on the ship again and it ran off again. The sailor says there’s an omen there, a

superstition and it goes back hundreds of years where sailors have always been superstitious. The cat is trying to get off the ship, why is the cat trying to get off the ship? Like the rats remember the old saying like rats leaving a sinking ship. When the rats go off a ship they know it is going to sink, if the cat goes off the ship the ship is going to sink, a sailor superstition.

I went to the Bataan then. That was one of the best ships I ever went to because that was home. It was a different ship altogether. See ships can, there is good ships and there is bad ships, there is happy ships and unhappy ships, do you get what I mean? It is like a home the ship is your home. You are on it for three years, you are living in the one area for three years in a room, very small space there might be

twenty of you. You know each other’s everything, you read each others letter kind of business, you help each other, if someone is sad, “What is the matter with you?”

They were Tribal class destroyers. See I often go to a lot of reunions and fellows that were

hostilities only, that were only in the navy for the war, the Second World War, they might have only spent twelve months, eighteen months or two years on a tribal class destroyer. They can only think of the good things, “They were wonderful ships,” and, “They were fast, they were all that,” but you spend thirty nine years in the navy and you spend not one and a half years, but three and a half years I spent on

on one tribal class destroyer and they weren’t good living ships at all, they were hard. You used to have to do your washing in a kerosene tin and then you had to try and find somewhere up on the upper deck or in the engine room to dry it. Then you have to iron it, it was a big deal, everything was a big chore. They only took enough fresh food to keep you going for about two weeks, the tribal class and then you ate hard stuff, baked beans,

you ate ship’s biscuits because there was no more bread, there was no more fresh meat, there was no more fresh vegetables. When these things were in Korea and we were on the gun line for something like six to eight weeks so the first four weeks you are eating and drinking like a sailor with reckless abandon and then you’re eating bad stuff, the hard. These American ships we got, the DDT’s, they

were fantastic. They were dry, they were beautiful ships, you loved them. When I used to come back to the Perth of a night and see her alongside the wharf with a search light on her bow D38, oh home, beautiful.

On the Munga? They were good mates on there. Everyone looked after each other, they always do.

They look after each other they are like you are a family. If you go out anywhere and say we were in Yokohama or Tokyo and we had one of the fellows who couldn’t drink too much we would never let him go off by himself. If he passed out we put him under the table and take him home with us when we left. You just looked after each other all the time, you were all like brothers.

We were the brothers.

Not very much on the Warramunga, nothing. The only thing I saw on the Warramunga I remember we were going up to Hong Kong ,we had been up doing occupation duties and we had to go to Hong Kong to go into dry dock because we had a shaft or something that had to be done and then we would come back again to Japan.

We couldn’t get into the Japanese docks then. The Japanese docks weren’t working properly and there was a ship being looted by pirates just off the Chinese coast, a big British merchant ship and the pirates were looting it, unloading it at sea with the lights on and all and their motorised sampans, huge things they were, they had 50 mm cannon on them and all.

And we came, they gave us an SOS so we raced like mad about thirty five or thirty six knots and we closed up for action stations on the Warramunga and here they are wholesale looting the ships. There was gear coming off, everything, and they were putting it all, they had all these sampans lined either side and they were loading them. When we got close to them they hauled up the Nationalist Chinese

flag. We honoured the Nationalist Chinese flag, the same as the United States. When they put that flag up how could be fire on them? That is if they were nationalist Chinese we would have started an international incident. We had to stand there with the guns trained on them and watch them looting the ship and do nothing.

Well they looted it and when they got their gear they said, “Ta-ta,” and away they went.

We went onto the ship then and the master was on the ship and he realised that we couldn’t do nothing, once they put that flag. We said, “Were they Nationalists?” He said, “No they were pirates, Chinese pirates.” They operate on the Chinese coast between Hong Kong and Shanghai, there are lots of little inlets and it is still alive today, piracy is still on the seas today.

That was the only first one I had ever seen, the first incident, but that was wholesale. They just stripped the ship of its cargo and sailed off with it.

When we did the occupation, when we first started the occupation there was Australians, Americans

British, there was Indian, Dutch, Russian, that is about all but they only lasted for the first twelve months and all their countries took them out. The only people that was left holding the baby and it was a big baby, Japan, trying to get it back on its feet because Russia wanted Japan into a communist country, come hell or high water they

were going to do it and that is how all Indochina and Vietnam and Korea started from all this. It started all over the 38th Parallel jazz when the Russians wanted to take all of Korea and then Japan. So we found in the end there was only two nations there that were left to look after Japan and the occupation. That was the United States which was the US 7th Fleet, the United States Naval 7th

Fleet and the Australian Fleet. We had the southern part of Japan which took in the southern island of Honshu and we had Kure in the Inland Sea as our Naval Base. The Americans had Yokohama and the top half, the northern half and between us we occupied Japan for seven years

and we got them back on their feet. We became part of the US 7th Fleet Australia because our fleet was so small compared to the United States Navy 7th Fleet so that when we went up there on occupation we automatically came under the command of the US Navy, the US 7th Fleet. When the Korean War started we came under the command of the United States 7th Fleet and we were part of the US 7th Fleet.

When Vietnam started we became part of the US 7th Fleet, not the British Fleet. The British businesses had finished and Australia was a nation in its own right and for logistic purposes we had to use all American ships and weaponry because we couldn’t go back seventeen and a half thousand miles to good old England to see if they would build us a ship or give us a gun or something.

Our whole defence alliance was tied up with ANZUS [Australia New Zealand United States Treaty Alliance] and we had to do that, whether you liked the Yanks or whether you don’t like them.

The best thing we ever done, it’s big brother. We were the little brother and he is the big brother otherwise the Indonesians would have owned this country fifty years ago. They are frightened to touch us

because big brother is looking, says, “Touch them, hit them and we hit you.”

How do you mean in that?

About communism? I hated socialism and communism and fought for it from the time I was eighteen in the navy. The Russians had it for seventy

years in Russia and that folded up, it doesn’t work. This share the wealth business doesn’t work, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t say a brain surgeon or a doctor who has put seven or nine or ten years into it, they were saying, “Why should he get $100,000 a year and I get $10,000 and what are you?” “Oh I am a bricklayer,” it doesn’t work

but under the social system everyone should be the same right across the board, it doesn’t work. We didn’t like it, sailors didn’t like the communist system or socialist system.

Sailors are the greatest card players in the world, never get caught in a game of cards with sailors because they do it all the time, they can read your mind.

They can read your mind and they even know what you have got in your hand and what you are going to put down.

Unofficially.

Oh card games? Oh yeah, they did gamble on cards, they played euchre and poker but the big navy game was the dice game crown and anchor dice. They still use them today. They tolerate it.

They played a game what you call ludo but we called it huckers and we made the ludo boards ourselves as big as this carpet and we used a bucket to put the dice in and throw it. We used, sailors have got all their own rules. Completely different game, it is a sailors game and they make up the rules. They really get

upset too if you do the wrong thing.

We sometimes we would swim at sea. They would stop the ship and we would have a game of water polo and all the rest of it.

We would have a fellow on the bridge with a rifle, an SLR, a 762.

Yes, “Quick get out of the water.” We used to put a landing net over the side. The

engine room would play the sailors, the seamen would play the engine room. It was very funny at times because sometimes there would be big currents, fifteen knot currents and you would dive in and end up a mile astern of the ship and they would have to go back and pick you up in a motor boat.

At the time the communists, led by Mao Tse-tung, they had just about taken China and the Nationalists were cornered around about Shanghai, Chiang Kai shek

who fled them to Taiwan to Formosa and it was very critical that we get our embassy staff and top business men etcetera out of Shanghai. We went up the Wang Ho, which is a tributary that Shanghai is on, of the Yangtze Kiang and we took off our people there. When we took them off the Brits were up there taking theirs off and the French and that

and there was a British frigate called the Amethyst too and she fought in Korea too but at that time on the way out on the Wang Ho she got stuck on a mud bank and the communists shelled the billy-o out of it and she really got cut up bad. Anyhow we got back and we took Dr Evatt and the

politicians and that, we took them back to Australia.

No, no way, the communists were only twenty miles out of town, it was very serious to get them out.

Over to Malaya. When Malaysia

had its sovereignty from the British and they wanted to make it a sovereign nation, state the Indonesians who were led by Dr Sukarno who was a rabid communist. In fact the Indonesian Communist Party was the biggest communist party in the world, that is card holders and they were sending insurgents across to Borneo and Malaya and that was called

the Indonesian Confrontation. If you can remember we had a squadron of RAAF at Butterworth, just outside of Singapore or Kuala Lumpur and then there was, I think there was a battalion of infantry in Borneo and then the navy was, we were patrolling the Malacca Straits and sending them back,

to turn them back. You wouldn’t remember but in those days there was great terrorism in the rubber plantations and horrific murders and stuff like that.

Yes there was. Not so much Chinese but Korean. The Koreans for some unknown reason wanted to get across the Toshima Straits

to the mainland of Japan and we had to turn them back, we turned them back.

They weren’t in very good condition although I think they looked better to me than what the average person was that we saw in occupied Japan. They were really destitute. They were destitute and I think they were starving too.

Well they were starving.

We had the New Zealanders, we had British, Australian and American. The Australian and American sailors always got on well together. It was like Australian sailors and Australian soldiers, infantry, we get on like brothers, we look after each other and

we get on real well. There was a little bit of animosity with the Poms, we were baiting them I think half the time. I remember there was a song came out and it said the ‘Battle of New Orleans’ and it goes ‘And they ran through the friars and they ran through the thickets and they ran through the scrub

like a wild woolly hares’ or something ‘And they ran so fast the hounds couldn’t catch them’ and the Brits hate that song because they were beaten in the Battle of New Orleans. When we went to a bar and if there was a juke box there and there was the Battle of New Orleans, “Put on the Battle of New Orleans.” “How many times?” “Ten times.” And we would play it over and over again and the Poms would be sitting over there and they would be seething and they would get up and

the biggest bloke would point his finger and say, “If any more of you Australian monkeys put that on again there is going to be a blue.” “Put it on again.” We were just baiting with them.

Yes, some good ones too. When I was in Korea on the Bataan there was one

European record for our phonograph, we had one of these wind up phonographs that we bought in Japan, HMV, and the only one we had was the Ghost Riders in the Sky, all the others were Japanese records. We didn’t know what they were singing we used to just play them. But the Ghost Riders in the Sky one of the fellows he had been divorced just before the ship left and

the song that his wife, his former wife loved was the Ghost Riders in the Sky and he hated it. Every time that we were playing the phonographic we would say, “What will we play?” Ghost Riders in the Sky. That was the only record we had so they put it on and old Donny Blair, Leading Seaman Blair and he would say, “Don’t put that record on

I hate it, it reminds me of my wife.” “Put on the Ghosts Riders in the Sky again,” and we used to get into lots of blues over that record mate.

Now wait a minute, I said we didn’t go ashore in Shanghai didn’t I?

But we did go ashore in Shanghai because I remember we had two nights. We had one watch went one night and the other watch went the other night. The surgeon commander who was on the ship who was a doctor he said, “When you go ashore I do not want you to drink the fresh water although you have had your typhus shots I don’t want you to drink water.

“Oh well Sir, can we drink beer?” “Yes, that is quite all right, as much beer as you like and also don’t touch the Russian vodka here,” he said, “Because it is bathtub stuff. It’s made out in the bathroom and they make it when ships come in and stupid sailors like you.” He said, “They use wood alcohol and a bit of flavouring and all this and they throw it into a bottle and it will kill you. It will send you blind.”

So what do you do if you tell sailors not to do something, the first thing they do, “Where do you get this vodka from?” Anyway they were cot cases. The whole sick bay was full of them, the next day the whole sick bay was full of sailors. They had alcoholic poisoning so the commander, the exec [executive] on the ship, David McNichol,

I think he was the big fellow on the Daily Telegraph, a journo [journalist] or something, he said, “I haven’t got my sailors, my working hands, you’ve got them in your sick bay,” and the surgeon commander said, “Yes that is right, they have alcoholic poisoning.” He said, “I want them.” He said, “Well you can’t have them.” He said, “Well I want them.” “You can’t have them. I will let you know when they are ready.” They were all laying in sick bay.

Very big, very, very big. For a cake of Palmolive soap that we paid at the time 9 pence or 10 pence or something in Sydney we could get, in yen, we could get about £2 worth of yen for a 10 pence cake of soap. Sugar

was the same, cigarettes it was just a complete huge market in black market because there was no currency. When I say no currency there was the Japanese Yen currency but it was powerless it couldn’t buy much, it didn’t have any power and the black market got out of hand so great in Japan that they bought out occupation script,

army money and it was called script money, BOFM, British Occupation Forces Money, that was the only way they got round it because they were wheeling and dealing with this black market and there was big money to be made, big money. A lot of industries and things started from the occupation.

Rife.

In the Korean War in Sasebo they had 75,000 prostitutes but they weren’t proper prostitutes, they were just girls from the country and everything that their fathers and mothers said, “Go down and make some dough.” You got three quarter of a million Americans and Australians, there was twenty two nations in Korea so that was a big industry but they used to call them business girls.

You would say, “I met a beautiful girl last night,” and you would say, “Oh yes, what does she do?” “Oh she is a business girl.” I said, “What is she, a typist?” They said, “No she is a business girl.” She was in business but the wrong business.

Oh yes they were only kids, didn’t know whether you may be killed tomorrow and went out, short and happy lives

and you only got ashore for two nights out of two months and they were like mad dogs off the leash. Yes of course I did.

Yes, not like it is today. But it was, it was.

Yes. You just,

you have to be very, very cool if you get what my meaning was. No one would want to end up with anything like that.

We are talking ’48, 1948.

I was leading seaman. I had my hook. I had one badge that was between four and eight years and I was a, my right arm rate was a torpedo. I dropped the electricians rate and I was a TD2, a torpedo Detector 2. I was a torpedo man and a sonar man and I specialised

in demolitions, sonar, torpedoes, mine sweeping, mine warfare and that was my specialisation and as a TD2 I was second in charge of the torpedo party on the Bataan. The only person in front of me was a petty officer, a TD1.

On the sonar,

my job was on the sonar. Do you want to know how Bataan came into this action? We were on our way from Sydney to Hong Kong to relieve the Shoalhaven, a frigate, for occupational duties. We usually always relieved at Hong Kong because it was a good place for a party and all the rest of it so we relieved at Hong Kong.

They said, the Shoalhaven said, “You can relieve us at Sasebo on the southern west Naval port of Japan,” and they said, “Right-o.” We were on our way to Sasebo, we passed Okinawa and we were about twelve or fourteen hours out of Sasebo and all of a sudden I was up on the bridge and I was fooling around with the sonar set. I think I was working on

the range recorder on the sonar and anyway the next minute the ship did a 180 degree turn, comes back on its own wake and there is only one thing at sea when they do that, someone has gone over the side. I said straight away, “Has someone gone over the side?” They said, “I don’t know, I don’t know?” All of a sudden the PA system comes on and the captain, that was Commander Marks, Harpo Marks and

he said, “This is the captain speaking, pay attention, the captain speaking,” and everyone is listening. He said, “This morning at 7 o’clock or whatever the North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South Korea.” The United States, the United Nations have been informed and they are in session now.” The United States

she occupied with her troops South Korea because they knew it was dicey because Stalin wanted to take all of Korea, that was it, so his North Koreans were just stooges of Russia that is all they were and he outfitted them with weapons and everything they had quite a big army and they had good tanks the T34s, better tanks than anything we had. He said

“Consequently our government has been informed and the Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, has agreed for the Shoalhaven and the Bataan to be handed over to the US 7th Fleet as part of the US 7th Fleet to combat this aggression. The ship is now steaming back to Okinawa to put the ship on a war-time footing. As soon as we get back to Okinawa no leave or nothing

all the torpedoes have to have their war heads on and ready to use, ammunition lockers have to be filled, all the guns have to be ready, the ship has got to be ready to fight by the time we leave here tomorrow morning.” We worked all through the night, we worked all afternoon until we did our action stations and watch bills and did everything the guns and everything. We had eight or ten Bofors on our ship. The Tribals had very, very big armament for a destroyer.

They had two depth charge throwers, depth charge rails that could throw a ten charge depth charge pattern. They had twin 4 inch down on the text deck, they had two 4.7 inch low angle guns down aft on the stern and they have four 4.7 guns foreword

and that was about the lot but the armament, for a destroyer she packed a punch, those things really packed a punch. Because when they built them they didn’t think of the sailors or their luxury, whether they had air conditioning or a nice cafeteria or that, they were thinking of ammunition, guns and it was built to fight those ships.

Once we left there the next morning we were ready to go and we were coming to Sasebo to relieve Shoalhaven and then we were told, “Shoalhaven is not going home. It is staying on station, she is going on escort duty,” so she went and escorted a ship for the army, American army from Japan to Korea and we went to

Yokohama and picked up a troop transport with the 1st Cavalry Division and we took them to Pohang and did an amphibious landing. And that was the 1st Cavalry Division but you are looking at post war kids of eighteen that didn’t drink much beer, they drank more Coca Cola and ate more ice cream than beer and I didn’t think they knew one end of the rifle from the next one.

And they put them in at Pohang against a seasoned communist army, a seasoned army that had been fighting for eleven years or more, or seven years or eleven years in China and in Mongolia and they didn’t last two minutes, mate. I think their commanding officer was General Walker and he was captured and I think most of the 1st Cavalry was

wiped out at Pohang. That was our introduction to Korea, that was our first action and in that action after they did the landing and landed ashore we were very, very worried about Russian submarines because they were only about two days steaming from Vladivostok from Pohang and the Ruskies like to have their nose in everything, so why didn’t they have submarines there?

I remember that morning I came on watch early for the morning watch about 4 o’clock in the morning and about 6 o’clock in the morning and I set the extreme range and the water conditions were perfect and you could hear your sound going out, “Boing,” and it was travelling on and on and just before I changed for the next bearing, the next 5 degrees, I was doing it in 5 degree steps, I hear this, “Bip,” just one little, “Bip”

so I kept on it and the range started to close, “Bip, bip,” I had a contact, I had a submarine contact. The rules of engagement at the time was if it is a submarine contact we were to attack it and that was Admiral Joy Turner’s, US 7th Fleet, that was his orders, if it posed a threat to a landing or if it was in our area where the war was being conducted

why are they there? Engage them. We attacked it and we dropped a pattern of depth charges on it and nothing come up and we lost contact with it so whatever happened to it, that was it. We got the first submarine contact we reckoned although they say today there couldn’t have been a submarine but who knows.

Alive mate, it was like you were on the hunt, “Oink, oink,” tally-ho the fox, I am going to get you baby and kept on him all the time. I was giving range and bearing and alteration to courses all the rest of it and the skipper was up there and he didn’t know whether to have a crack at it or not but then he had the directives, he had the option.

He said, “Right we are going in, we will drop a pattern on it,” but we dropped a pattern and that was the last we saw of it. Then they said it wasn’t a Russian submarine, I don’t know maybe in another 50 years someone will be going over there with a echo sounder, a really up to date modern echo sounder and say, “Ooh, there is a submarine lying on the bottom there.”

Great, lovely bloke. Commander Marks, Harpo we called him, he was great.

He was a great rugby player in his time. He was a big man, heavy, he looked like a bullock, big muscly man with his steel helmet on he looked fearsome but yet he was a great skipper, we loved him. He knew everybody’s name and he didn’t take any malarkey [foolishness] from us and he used to say, “You boys, I want my boys drink hard, love hard and play hard

but fight hard.” He said, “I don’t care what you do ashore but when you get back to this ship you have got to do your job and you do it one hundred per cent.” That is what we did and we got on well with him mate, he was a great bloke..

Nothing, absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing.

We weren’t up in it and even when we went to Korea we didn’t know what was the beef. Then we had intelligence officers on the ship and they took us on the upper deck and put up their charts and the pictures of Korea and showed us everything was going on and why it was going on, it was the first we ever head of it. We never ever thought of it because

we weren’t, I don’t know, I suppose we were young and young kids don’t turn on the news broadcasts and say, “What is going on in the news?” You would say, “What won the last race in Randwick?” We had Radio Australia and we would say, “Did you have a bet on Saturday?” “Yes.” “What won the last race, do you know?” But not the news.

It changed completely, completely changed over. The divisional officers said, “Well the spit and polish pristine barrack room discipline is finished. We are going on a war-time footing, Everyone has got to do their job one hundred per cent because

we all rely on each other for the safety of each other and the safety of this ship,” and it worked, we had no trouble. Sailors did the right thing, there was no trouble or anything and they did it and they pulled it off. Of a night time when you were at sea someone would light a cigarette and they would say, “You idiot, get down below if you are going to do that. You know you can see a submarine from the shore, shore batteries can see that for sure.

It sticks out straight away that something is out there and they will throw one on you.” Everyone was concerned about each other’s safety, we were and the ship changed and it changed for the better, changed for the better.

We would do a search, what we would do without going into it too deeply but

there is directional sonar, unidirectional sonar, and we have passive sonar so we can either listen without transmitting to giving our position away or we can have maximum transmission ranges and we sweep certain arcs depending on the course of the ship.

We never sweep astern through your own wake, you just sweep from the beam foreword. If you go onto maximum transmissions you just sweep from half foreword all the time until you get a contact. If you go passive you are just listening, then you listen for the propeller noise.

Straightaway I would hit the bells, submarine contact and straight away the bridge and the plot, everyone is alerted, you hit the bells. If you are not at action stations the ship goes to action stations, you give out straight away a range and bearing of the contact, that goes on the chart and that is plotted immediately and it is kept plot off your sonar and then you, in modern sonars,

the sonar that I ended up with on the Perth, the American DDG [Guided Missile Destroyer] that we bought that was so far advanced on the Tribal classes it was just unbelievable. There you just switch to tracking and it tracks itself and it sets up your weapon, your Ikara and the bird flies a

Mark 18 acoustic homing torpedo into the water. One the Bataan those trials we used to throw depth chargers, cans, they went out years ago and they were hit and miss things.

Yes, right up until the time until you attacked it, you dropped a pattern. Pretty near, I mean the

depth charges went out very early. In 1950 new modern sonars came in, ahead throwing weapons, they came in on the battle class on the Tobruk and the Anzac was the first to get them.

Well as soon the alarm bells go and we go into action stations

you’ve got a watch bell, two watch bells, say port and starboard watch bells or action watch bells, the action station watch bell which is kept in the gunnery office shows everybody’s position and job when you go to action stations. Everybody has a job, even

the cooks have got jobs. The cooks go down into the shell rooms and the powder rooms and they load, they put all the ammunition in the hoists and it goes up to the turrets. A supply assistant he might go to the sick bay and help there, gunnery people go to gunnery, torpedo people go to the torpedoes, sonar people go to sonar and so it goes on. Everyone has a job with action

stations so you go into what they call the first degree of readiness action stations, you are ready to go. They are all waiting on the sonar man or it could be radar, radar picks something up on either a surface target or an aircraft but when you go to action stations everyone has their job and they know what to do so the ship can fight, the ship can’t fight unless it is closed up properly.

I thought the organisation was very good but you have got to realise that this time the North Koreans had crossed the 38th Parallel, we were being pushed into the sea. We were in a piece of land

the size of Tamworth and they had pretty near encircled us and we had our backs to the sea. They had to do something so they landed them at Pohang which didn’t come off too good because the troops were green. In the United States and Australia they were recruiting, all people who went to Vietnam were volunteers. They were

recruiting people from the Second World War, they are the ones that they wanted. They didn’t want to send kids for six months down to go to school and learn, they wanted veterans and when the bugle went up, the last call of the bugle they asked for volunteers here in Australia in RAAF, navy and army but Second World War people that had been veterans. They got flooded, got flooded.

Blokes wanted to come back and have another crack so that is what they wanted but that first initial hit had to be absorbed by a lot of kids up there until they had flown the vets up there and then Pohang we looked like going into the sea. And they said we couldn’t push us into the sea because

it would be, we could never save face in front of the communist nations, a power like the United States and all its allies had been pushed into the sea. That is when we did, MacArthur came up with the big one we did, the Inchon landing, it was the second biggest amphibious landing in history next to D-day, they did Inchon.

No, we didn’t give gunnery support, we didn’t. There was other ships there like destroyers and cruisers that give gun fire support. Our main job was pure anti submarine protection for the fleet. They were all anchored and the landing ships were anchored and all their boats going ashore so they were a sitting target for submarines

Yes, I though we would pick up submarine. The Russians weren’t going to let, being so close with Vladivostok and we knew what they had at Vladivostok. They had quite a navy there and they were always like to stick their nose in and see what is going on, even if they didn’t actively participate on the side of North Korea.

They were supplying the North Koreans with all their weapons. I mean the Russians supplied North Korea with thousands of mines, thousands of them, Mark 26 mines, so why not bring their submarine force in. Anyhow we did our job there and we did make contact and we did an attack so that was our part. We hadn’t fired a gun up until then,

but that was only ten days or two weeks after it started from Okinawa. I mean that was our first taste. We went straight to Yokohama and picked up the 1st Cavalry Division and took them to Pohang.

I don’t know about so much my Mum but my wife Betty she was thinking a lot.

We weren’t married then, we were engaged.

I met at a party. I grabbed her in the passageway and kissed her.

Yes, I attacked straight away and I thought, “Well this is it kid.” I had been around, I had done four or five years, I was twenty two, just turned twenty two and

I thought, “This is going to be my wife,” that is it.

Yes it was, yeah but Bet was a fantastic sailor’s wife. She brought up five daughters and I wasn’t there to bring them up, she bought them up.

It was a bit dicey then too because I wanted to marry Bet. On the second trip up, I went up on the Tobruk, not getting off the Bataan, but I thought, they said, “You are going back to Korea again.” I said, “What a second tour of duty?” And they said, “Yes.” “Oh fair enough.” I signed the book and put my hand on the bible and all the rest of it and I thought I might as well get married while I am home, kill two birds with one stone.

So I took my mother, in those days you used to take your mother or father and get permission and ask for the man’s daughter hand in marriage, it was the right thing to do. So I goes there and I said, “I want to marry Betty your daughter.” He said, “You are going back to Korea?” I said, “Yes I know.” He said, “Not on your life.” I said, “What do you mean not on your life?” He said, “You might put her in the family way and then you go to Korea and then you,

she is a young woman and she has a baby.” I said, “I never thought of that.” He said, “Well I did, no,” and I thought, “You old bugger.” I said to my mother I said, “I don’t like that.” She said, “Put yourself in his shoes and you would feel the same way, he is right, he is right.” Well he was right anyway but to a twenty two ego, young man I thought

he was very unfair, but anyway that was that.

No, no, very few, oh yeah, Donny Blair was married, the one who hated the record the Ghost Riders in the Sky but he would have been about the only one out of twenty of us, nineteen of us were single.

I was because say from seventeen to twenty two, that is nearly, I was seventeen and a half, that is four and a half years I had been at sea. I had been to Japan once, twice, three, four times on occupation duty. I had been around and I had seen the score and I was only twenty two but I was worldly wise.

I thought it was time to get married and settle down and I think the others would feel like that but there were all various ages, Our youngest then, I had three, there was Pony Moore, Doc Livingston and George Winken and they were only seventeen and a half, eighteen and they weren’t thinking of marriage the, they were thinking other things.

There was only one mongrel on that ship and we used to call him the Black Prince. I won’t tell you his name but he was bad news, he was bad news. The rest of the officers were pretty good. Our torpedo and anti-submarine officer, Freddie Pitt, he was like a father to us and he used to call us ‘his boys’.

If we ever got into trouble he used to say to us, “Now listen here, I am like a father to you boys. I have never done anything wrong with you, why do you do this to me?”

He was straight out of the gunnery school. Where the officers said, “We have got to lay off this barrack room spit and polish business, we area at war now, we have got to help each other.” He was aloof, also he was a

college officer. He didn’t come up from the ranks and he was a different kettle of fish than the others because they were brought up different. They happen to look down a little bit on officers who had come up through the ranks because they had just come up from the rank and file as the college officers were money people, their sons had been put into the college.

The gun battery duel started like this. It started early in the piece and actually it was the first shots fired by the navy in the Korean War. We were patrolling up past Inchon near the Gulf of Haeju one afternoon

it was and it was the sun was starting to ease off and go down a bit and they spotted about four or five motorised junks close up shore going up towards Haeju and we believe they were carrying supplies for the troops up there. So Captain Marks was delighted at seeing a good target like that so he said

“Let’s go in and get them.” He took the ship in and before he went in there he said then to everyone on the ship, “This is the captain speaking. Now they might have shore batteries here and if they do, if you see a flash and you can mark it in your memory on the land or the hill, whatever, come straight to the bridge and let us know and tell us know exactly where you saw it.” Anyway everything was going real fine, it was good

and we were getting closer and closer into the gulf and all of a sudden up on the hill six flashes one after the other and the next minute there are six shells coming over. They landed short and about four landed short and two went over but when you think of it ships don’t take on shore batteries if they can help it because shore batteries have the whole area grided out.

They don’t have to cut ranges and bearings because they have them on a grid. They said, “If we miss on such and such a grid we go up to the next grid line so they have the advantage. The only other disadvantage, they can’t manoeuvre, they’re fixed, they are there, if they give themselves away that is another story.”

They started up on us and all thoughts of chasing the motorised sampans with the supplies and that went out the window and the skipper, we started firing and they starting firing and this went on for about twenty or thirty minutes and we were taking straddles all the time, one short and one over, two short and three short and two over and

we were just lucky, we were very, very lucky and we didn’t get hit. We knocked out five of the batteries and they were 120 mm which is about five inch and that is a fair size shell a five inch and they would be firing at about fifteen thousand or ten thousand yards. And so we knocked the five out and who should come on the scene then was the Belfast the cruiser, the Pommy [British] cruiser. I think she is a six or eight inch

cruiser and a great gunnery ship. In fact she is in a museum now in the Thames near the tower of London and she opened up and finished the last one off. That was the first time we really got stuck into it and everyone, that was we were blooded then so that was a good thing in one way that we didn’t get any casualties.

It was a good thing that we got it off our chest what it was like someone throwing a brick at you.

No good, when I first started I was dam scared when it first started because it would land real close to the ship and a big water spout goes up and I thought everyone they were firing looked like it was going to hit you right between the eyes and they are aiming at me, they are not aiming at the ship, they are aiming at me but after about two minutes that all went and it was

just pure anger then. “How dare you try and kill me,” and you were looking at the gun crews and they were going like mad loading and firing and I said, “Get into them, kill them,” and that was it. At the same time the Old Harpo, he was a bit of a character and he turned round to the chief yeoman, the signals officer and he said, “Yeoman hoist the Australian ensign, battle ensign.”

It is an Australian flag but it is a big one and he said, “Take it right to the truck, take it right up the mast and let them bastards see who they are firing at.” That is the words he said. He said, “Let them see who they are firing at.”

Yes, I was on the bridge. I was up on sonar, see I was on the sonar station on the bridge because I was pinging all the time for minefields.

The amount of minefields sown in Korea was unbelievable. There were thousands sown and they all came from Russia, they were brand new mines. Anyway so up went the battle ensign and we all got it off our chest and the Belfast got stuck into them and finished the last gun off and we felt real good and that was the first time we went into action.

Fantastic, they went good. They did

exactly what he wanted, there was no foul ups and everyone was looking after each other’s skin and it went off well, we fought well.

It went back to what I was telling you when we went to gunnery school in Flinders, like just do what you are told and it does work, do your job and do it properly and do it, and it works, it does work.

Like a big team we were, we were lucky we never got hit.

Yes, five inch. They pack a fair wallop. Yeah, the five inch shell packs a fair wallop.

Depending where it hit if it had come into the boiler rooms or the engine rooms and could have done a lot of damage, could have stopped us dead in the water and then

with a grid locked onto us they could have pounded us, just kept on pounding us mate but we were lucky too that this English cruiser came up, the Belfast and she was a very good gunnery ship and she could see that there was one gun still firing on us and she just swung her turrets around and wham, blasted the last gun.

The Inchon landings, if you remember we were talking about the 1st Cavalry Division that landed at Pohang that was a stop gap because we were being pushed into the sea and something had to be done and done fast to save face, for the United Nations to save face and to save a lot of lives. So MacArthur was the grand master at amphibious landings because

he had done them in the Second World War in the Pacific, all the way up to Okinawa but there was Truk, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Guadalcanal all those landings, amphibious landings. He said, “Right, we will cut them off there is something like three hundred and fifty thousand troops down in this perimeter and if we can cut them off, say one hundred mile up further up, or two hundred miles we have got them in a pocket, we’ve got them.” They pushed themselves in too far.

So anyway he came up with a great plan of landing at Inchon. Now Inchon had a terrible tidal problem, it was like Darwin or Broome. There was only certain times of the month or the year that you could do a landing that would give you sufficient water. Luckily that time was only about six weeks off or something so he thought if they can hold on at Pohang and the Pusan

perimeter, if they can hold on for six weeks I am going to put a division of marines, a whole division at Inchon so he came up with the idea. The Joint Chiefs of Staff poo hooed it, said, “You can’t do it.” They said, “The casualties will be horrendous,” and they said, “You won’t be able to show your face in the United States again.” He said, “No, I believe in it, I want to do it.”

They took it to Truman and he met Truman at Wake Island and they had a meeting at Wake Island. They flew Truman to Wake Island and then they flew MacArthur there. Now MacArthur and Truman didn’t get on too well, they were like that, they didn’t get on too well at all so Harry S. Truman was in the First World War and so was MacArthur too and they weren’t the best of buddies and MacArthur said, “I want to do and I can do it and I know I can do it”

and Truman said, “Well the Joint Chiefs of Staff said You can’t do it because it is impossible, it is too hazardous.” MacArthur still wouldn’t give up so he went back to Japan to Tokyo and called in the Joint Chief of Staff there and he put the case to them and it took him all day, from early morning, talking all day to late evening that day. They said, “Right-o Mac you have got, it we will let you have a go.” They planned the Inchon landing.

There was two hundred and sixty one ships in the Inchon landing, there was a division of marines and five aircraft carriers took part in Inchon. We softened up and bombarded it for a week before it actually happened and they put the marine division in, the losses were minimal and they achieved the objective and it was a

they said it was the most brilliant piece of amphibious landing planning they had ever had. And it come off so fast, just off the shelf and everything went right.

Our role? Prior to that we didn’t take part in the landing, the landing is mostly taking part by landing ships, command ships. My LCVPs [Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel], you know the

landing barges? So that was there and our role was softening up beforehand of various parts along the coast, bombarding and then we pulled out and the heavier ships go in, the cruisers and the rocket ships. They look like LSTs [Landing Ship Tanks] and got thirty or forty big rocket launching devices on their decks and they just put in, they look like what the Russians call a Chicago piano, whole waves and waves of rockets just keep on going in.

We teamed up with the five carriers and we worked with them, just at the rear of the heavy ships, the cruisers and stuff like that and they flew sorties day and night. Within two days Inchon was taken. Inchon was taken and they cut off about three hundred and fifty thousand troops in there and

that was only a start there was lots of things happen after that.

That is a good question, that is a real good question. We were still back in the British navy type ships and the British signals and communications and all that, where we are working with a huge fleet, the greatest fleet on earth

at the time, the United States Navy, the US 7th Fleet and the logistic question was bad because we are using ammunition in British guns in Vickers Armstrong guns. They are using the same ammunition but it is different five inch, ours are 4.7, theirs is five, how do we exchange, how do we pull out of the gun line and go to a supply ship

and fill us up with more ammunition and have the same couplings and gear to put fuel into us and all the rest of it? The logistics was bad and they learnt a big lesson, the Australian navy. At the time it was time to finish with the Pommy navy and building English ships and thinking of a supply line of something like twelve thousand miles.

It was ludicrous, it was ridiculous. Around about that time the ANZUS Treaty started and that is why we have gone one hundred per cent American as far as armament, ships, planes, infantry and everything because of the logistics. We have got to so we can swap and supply each other and we learnt that lesson in Korea and especially at Inchon and that stuck with us from then on. We had all the old die-hards

“We have got to have British stuff, it is much better, it is better than American stuff,” and all that. We are looking at the logistics of supplying an army or a navy or air force in the field with spare parts with armaments. “Hold on, stop the war we have got a supply train coming in from UK in about another two months.” You can’t do that so this was good, what we did was good.

Engaging in tanks, trucks, troop deployments but we used to try and get in closer to get into the railway lines, industrial plants, petroleum, knock out stuff like that.

Ours was twenty thousand yards, ten miles.

I always thought it sounded great, a good solid bang, a thump you can feel it all through the ship. The ship jumps back a foot in the water and the old flame spurts out and throws itself along the sea. It is not a bad feeling. The best I have ever seen was when we worked with

the Missouri. We’ll go into that I suppose later.

That would be a bit hard for me. I would be telling a lie as I wasn’t gunnery but we fired, the navy fired all told in three years in Korea, the navy ships that took part in Korea, not all the navy ships took part in Korea because

they only wanted destroyers and carriers. They didn’t want the small ships, real small ships. We fired forty thousand, seven hundred rounds so that is a fair amount of armaments we put in.

Oh yes, sure, the gunnery officer and the skipper they would be on line of sight binoculars on the bridge, high powered terrific binoculars that sings jingles and has a bearing ring and everything. Of course not that they would fire from there but they could fire from there. That is called local control but because it is fired from a main gunnery table down in the bowels of the ship and there is quite a lot into it. It is like that computer, it computes the

range and the trajectory, the wind, the whole lot but the captain and the gunnery officer is on that and his other others would be spotting with binoculars fall of shot. Say they fired and they could see their batteries and they know where they are now because they have plotted them and they can’t shift the batteries because these are permanent batteries so they

know where they are. So they said, “Did you observe that last fall of shot?” “Yes we went over.” “Right, drop the range, down one hundred, down one hundred, all guns down one hundred, fire on A turret, range on A turret,” and A turret fires and gets a direct hit. And he says, “All guns broadside,” they all fire on A guns last hit and that is how they do it. They are all up there and they all have a job.

The signals people, the yeoman,

the petty officer yeoman and his boys, myself, that was sonar, my sonar set is up there and that would be about it.

Just after the Inchon landing you have got to remember all those troops were trapped

on the bottom section of the 38th Parallel down to the Pusan perimeter, to the perimeter and they were still trying to supply them, the communists were trying to supply them with weapons and armaments and supplies and there was a place called Chosin just south of there and it was like a gulf, a harbour, a big one, bigger than say Sydney Harbour and

wider than the Heads. And Chosin was right at the rear end of that and we had to have, we were snooping our nose in there to see what was going on down there, were they trying to get their troops off there or what were they doing? Not forgetting the minefields that were laid on the west coast and on the east coast. There was something like

twenty thousand laid alone up in Wonsan in one huge harbour, huge harbour, we say harbour, a gulf. Anyhow we were coming into Chosin and the skipper was going real slow which was good for me with sonar because I wasn't getting any turbulence or water noise and I was getting good ranging. See we have never pinned on a minefield before but we had all the training at the torpedo school, the sonar school at Watsons Bay

and we knew when you hit a minefield, see the mines are spaced out and instead of getting one solid ping she went “ping ping ponk ping ping” and the sound would be hitting the mines and it would be decaying all the time so that the last sound wouldn’t have the same volume that the first one had and I got one and I got the dots on my range recorder

and I said, “Mines bearing 035 range fifteen thousand yards or range ten thousand yards,” I said, “I think.” The next minute the big head came through in the sonar room with the steel helmet on and he said, “Leading Seaman Gubbins,” he said, “you what?” and I told him again. He said, “You think!

Son, you have got the lives of two hundred and sixty men on this ship in your hands here, now what is it, a bloody minefield or not?” I said, “It is a minefield, sir.” He said, “Good.” So anyway we established that so from there on I never ever said, even to this day I never said, “I think,” it is either yes or no. So anyway they more or less stopped the ship and there was a Canadian,

there were three Canadian Tribal-class destroyers there, the Athabascan, the Sioux and the Cayuga and one of them had been working on this minefield. We didn’t know this and he came along side so the two skippers, they threw the anchor down the two of them and they went over and conferred and the Canadian ship said, “We have been working on this the last few days, there is a hell of a minefield here,” and the captain said, “Yes I know, my sonar man

told me,” and he said, “Have you called in mine sweepers?” He said, “We haven’t got any mine sweepers. The only ones we have got are on the big minefields over on the big coast, Wonsan. How are we going to get in there to get at this mob?” He said, “We can’t get through the minefield.”

He said, “What have you been doing?” Now you’ve got to get this, this ought to go down in history on the camera, I’m telling you, he said, Harpo said, “What have you been doing?” He said, “You know our dinghy, our little dinghy?” He said, “Yeah,” he said, “we have been making up one and a quarter pounds blocks of TNT,” they are the standard block, he said, “With a primer and a detonator and an underwater safety fuse on it and we have been going up to the mine, tying it on, lighting the fuse and rowing away and the motor boat waits for us just a little out there, throws us

a rope, we tie it on to the dinghy and they tow us away and the mine explodes and detonates two or three around it like what they call sympathetic detonation.” I didn’t know anything about this because I am still back on the ship. “Leading Seaman Gubbins report to the torpedo room and the anti-submarine officers cabin.” I go down there and there is old Freddie Pitt, our boss, Fred and he said, “Shorty

we have got a great idea.” He said, “The Canucks [Canadians] have been doing it.” I said, “Yes sir.” He said, “You are in it,” he said. He said, “There will be you and me and we will take two or three of our good boys, our best boys.” I said, “What are we doing?” He said, “Well what they do,” he said, “we make up these pound and a quarter charges of TNT and we put them in the boat and we take the camera with us because we want to photograph these mines.” I said, “The what?”

He says, “The mines.” He said, “At low tide the mines float on top of the water because the tidal drop is so great,” they are on a cable, on high water the mine gets covered. “That sounds great,” I thought, “He is kidding, you have got to be off your brain.” I said ‘now how are we going to tie them on?” He said, “I will tie them on, you just do the rowing.”

He said, “You are pretty good in the dinghy and you are a great little rower, I know that,” and I said, “What if I bump the mine?” He said, “It is all over.” I thought, “All over, all right, I am going home kid, I don’t know about you but you can stay here if you want to.” He said, “What do you think of that?” and I didn’t say anything. I thought, “I am not chickening out on this,” and I signed up and righto I will do what I am told.” I thought, “This is ratbag, it is crazy.

I don’t know if I could keep a dinghy with the swell and the mine bobbing up and down and the dinghy.” Let’s say the wind blew me and I was on the top of a swell and the dinghy went over the top of the mine and hit it. I said, “Wham-o we are gone in one big flash.” I said, “Jesus Christ.” I said, “All right.” So away we go, the motor boat tows us in, stops, lets us go and old Shorty is on the dinghy rowing to the mine, there she is bobbing up and down.

It is bigger than a forty four gallon drum so that it is a lot of explosives in it, it has no horns, it’s got a big brass bung on the top. They’re brand spanking new mines, you can see, Russian mines, all black and shiny no crustacean or growth on them or anything. They are brand spanking newies. But having no horns they have a trigger mechanism inside that when it is given a knock

it starts off a chain of events in this arming device and explodes so I thought, “I don’t know how we are going to keep this off.” Fred has this pound and a quarter block, the first one and he said, “We will do this one first,” and I said, “Right-o,” and I am on the dinghy and he says, “Don’t bump on it.” I said, “I am trying not to,” and I am holding

the bloody dinghy there. He puts the pound and quarter there and hits the lighter and lights the fuse and say’s righto mate,” but it was a long fuse because we had to get a long way away away, if you get me. The fuse could have been from here to the door long, about that length. We worked out the time on it, the burning rate of it. Away she goes, I get on the dinghy, the motor boat backs in, comes in astern

and throws us the rope, the kid up the front of the dinghy that was with us he ties the rope on the dinghy, the killick seaman who was in the motor boat he panics. He said, “We will all be killed, we will all be killed, we will all be killed,” and he puts the damn thing in reverse instead of forward, the rope goes under the motor boat and goes around the screw and jams the screw and seizes it up.

There we are, the mine is going and fizzing and the dinghy has flooded because he ran over the top of us, the motor boat can’t do anything so Fred says, “I think we had better get in the water because we will all get killed here.” I said, “We will get killed in the water won’t we Fred?” He said, “Yes we will I suppose.” I said, “I am swimming to the mine,” which was only about from here

to the door. I said, “Bugger this, I am swimming over to the mine and see if I can pull the fuse out of it.” He said, “You will not.” I said, “I bloody will so.” He said, “I am giving you an order,” and I said, “Bugger your orders, mate.” So I swam to the mine to pull the fuse out of it. I wasn’t going cheap mate, I wasn’t going to sell myself rather dearly. I go over there and I can’t find the fuse,

the big length of fuse, but remember the motor boat went over us and sunk the dinghy and we were in the water. Somehow Freddie, me, with the two kids in the boat could have got their fuse tangled around their leg and when they were swimming away from it pulled the fuse out of the charge. The charge was still there but the fuse wasn’t.

I swam back to the boat. Freddy said, “How did you go?” I said, “How did I go, the fuse is not even in it. Someone has tripped the fuse and pulled it out.” He said, “No, no, no, it will be still there, we have only got two minutes to go,” and he’s got his watch and we’re all waiting there and we said, “Oh yeah, two minutes.” Old Pony Moore who was with me he said, “Hey Shorty, I am twenty one today, it’s my birthday.” I said, “That is a bugger isn’t it?” I said, “You are twenty one today? and he said, “Yeah.”

I said, “What a way to have your twenty first birthday. Tell you what mate if we get out of this we will give you the best twenty first birthday you ever had when we get our first leave in Japan.” “Yes right-o.” Looks at the watch again, it didn’t go off, didn’t go off, all the time this leading hand in the boat is panicking, “We’ll all be killed, we’ll all be killed,” and Freddie said, “If you don’t shut up.” Freddie had a revolver, a hand gun with him and

he said, “I will shoot you right now,” and he meant it too, “If you don’t shut up.” He said, “Look at these kids they are much younger than you and they have more guts than you and you are unsettling everybody, now shut up.” This bloke, I won’t mention his name because it’s not right to do that, but he panicked and the land mine didn’t go off. The motor boat can’t go anywhere because it is,

got all the rope on the propeller shaft, seized tight. So anyhow the motor boat and the dinghy we are now floating and the tide is coming in and we are floating further into the minefield with another two hundred mines in there and we are floating into this minefield. We said, “That one missed us these others might get us if we are lucky.” Fred said, “What are we going to do?”

I said, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, sailors have their sailors knives with them.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well make sure they are all sharp.” I stripped off, just to my underpants and a chief VRO who was there, a mate of mine he was a great swimmer too because we used to play water polo together, he stripped off his and he said, “Right-o Shorty, we will take it in turns.” We dived underneath the motor boat and grabbed hold of the propeller shaft and I had the sharp knife and sawed through, ran out of air, come up again and he went down

and did that and we kept on doing this all the time, one after another, we are pulling bits of rope off. The long story of it was we managed after about an hour to get all the rope off the propeller shaft and we got back into the motor boat and we were just about to take off and a jet flies over, a fighter.

And one of the blokes in the boat he says, “It is a MiG! It’s a MiG! We will all get killed!” Freddie says, “Shut up! We should have been killed back there you idiot.” We got back to the ship and Fred gives this bloke a real dressing down. I don’t think he would have ever got any promotion anywhere and took me into the cabin and throws a rum into me. I didn’t say anything but Fred was a great demolitions officer but I mean Fred was a great demolitions officer but

he was very blasé, he was too familiar with the job. It was a stupid thing to do, fancy trying to detonate a mine like that, God almighty. That was the mine thing so I reckon my number wasn’t up that day. I thought to myself, I am a religious man, I believe, I am a believer, I am not a fanatic but I believe and I said, “Someone up there loves me,” and I was

going home to my fiancée. Amazing isn’t it, it wasn’t meant to be.

Well I have often thought about that too, I’ve thought about that. Why didn’t they use gun fire on them? I don’t know why they did it like that, I can’t to this day, I think because the Canadians did it and got away with it

that Fred would say, “Oh yeah, we could do that, anything you can do we can do better.” It wasn’t, it was a stupid thing to do and it was all hushed up, never ever got out, never made the press when we got home, nobody knew anything about it.

He just hushed it up mate, it never happened because his name was on the line and Freddie made a boo-boo,

they both made boo-boos really. The captain for okaying it and Freddie for even suggesting it. Nobody was told anything. The only reason that anybody knew anything about it in our world, in the anti submarine world, because it filtered through with the sailors, “You should have seen the stuff up, up at Wonsan.”

Yes, they were, over there they

were.

On the Bataan we had a cargo net on the starboard side. Now they were flying forty three sorties a day some carriers, that’s a lot and a lot of them were shot up and their under carts were shot up and they couldn’t land so what they used to do they would fly ahead of the carrier and they would get to a certain height, I don’t

know what it was but it was a certain height for bailing out safely. We would be up there, we would race ahead, being a destroyer we would race ahead and we’d get as much underneath when they went out and hit the silk as we could. They came down in the silk and the plane flew on and they usually fly on for a while, and then they start to die down and turn over but they usually track pretty straight for awhile.

Anyway we were with a Pommy carrier, I think it was the Ocean, and anyway in the Pommy carriers most of the pilots are officers and gentlemen, they come from the old school and out comes the fellow in the silk. He is about twenty two or twenty three, the same age as me, comes down, hits the water. They have their life raft on their chute with them

and when it hits the water it blows up and it becomes a dinghy and they have little tiny oars and he’s sitting there with the oars. So I swim out to him, from about here to the front door and I said, “Are you right sir?” and I grabbed the dinghy to pull it in. He said, “Yes, jolly fine show, I feel great, thank you very much, very much,” in the real English accent. Brings him up to the

landing net and he clambers up into the landing net and salutes the captain and says, “Lieutenant Farnsworth sir.” The captain said, “Oh good, let’s go to the wardroom and have a drink.” What a circus, he has just come out of a fighter, he has been shot up and couldn’t land. Dry as hell, real matter of fact dry and that is what we used to do as swimmers.

I didn’t then because the water wasn’t that cold then but I did later on in Sasebo. Our the leading hand that was in charge of the motor cutter he was all dressed up and it was winter time and the water was real cold. It wasn’t thirty below but the dam water was freezing that is for sure, real freezing. He had this duffel coat on and big leather boots and

a leather helmet and he slipped and fell into the water when he was getting onto the motor cutter. And as soon as he hit the water he knew he was gone, he was dead because he would just go to the bottom like a stone because you can’t swim with the gear that he had on. Even if he was the best swimmer on earth he couldn’t. I just happened, luckily I was going to the sailors bathroom to have a shower and I only had a towel around me and pair of underpants on

and I saw him, as soon as he hit the water I didn’t even stop to think I dived straight into the water. And I grabbed, I put my arm around him and lucky off the motor cutter the painter, the front rope was hanging in the water so I grabbed the rope with one arm and I had the other arm around him so he couldn’t sink. I inched him over to the line and he put his hand

on the line so he was held there so the fellows up on the main deck they saw us and they threw a line down and I put the line around him and tied a bow on him and pulled him to the side of the ship and they hoisted him up and then they hoisted me up. When I got up I was like that and the captain, they informed the captain straight away and he sent half a glass of rum, OP rum

down for me so I stood under the shower and I drank half a glass of rum. That was a funny thing that happened. When I was on the Tobruk three or four years later I went to Perth, to the Empire Games or Olympic Games or something and I was in a hotel having a drink with a mate of mine and this fellow spotted me. He said, “Shorty,

don’t move, don’t move, don’t dare move,” and he races off and he comes back with his wife and I said, “Yeah?” and he said to his wife, “This is Shorty.” She said, “Shorty I owe you my husband’s life, we were engaged and he told me about it when he come back from Korea that you saved his life in the water.” She said, “I have always wanted to thank you.” I said, “That is nice, isn’t it,” but fancy that happening?

I think we went to Kimpo. This was in early December about 5th December. The Chinese had come into the war. We were up on the Yalu River, that is right up on the border into Manchuria, into China and we were

singing that song, “I’ll be home for Christmas,” and it wasn’t to be because the Chinese came across the border and they put seven hundred and fifty thousand across the border, three quarters of a million and they already had about two hundred and fifty thousand North Koreans so that was a million man army. We had about three quarters of a million, allies between us, that is air force, army and navy.

All of a sudden we started going backwards because we couldn’t hold the Chinese, not because of their technology, their numbers, they were like ants and they pushed them back. So started the big bug out, what they called the big bug out. The temperature was down at the most to minus thirty degrees below zero. Anyway the

3rd Battalion RAR and I think there was two British, I think they might have been Middlesex and Argyles that were with them, there they were designated to hold the front while the rest was evacuated. The only port they could get them off was Chinnampo which is the sea port for Pyongyang which is the capital of North Korea, it is about twenty miles. To get to Chinnampo you

had to go up a river, something like the Brisbane River with mud flats and all that business, a bit wider so there were six destroyers designated to go up the river, pick up the 3rd Battalion and the army and that and get them off. At the same time they were loading American troops onto troop

transports and they were getting them off too. When we got, to get up to there we went up there in a blinding snow storm. There was the Athabascan, the Sioux and the Kyuga, they were Canadians, the USS Forest B Royal, that was an American destroyer and then there were two Australian, the Warramunga and the Tamp. There was a blinding snow storm that night and

we got, the captains of the destroyers had met and said, “We will go at first light in the morning,” but the situation at the front deteriorated so fast he said, “You won’t, you will go up now in the dead of night in a blinding snow storm.” You can imagine the navigation that you would have to do to even get up there in such a,

conditions plus it was mined, it had never been swept. So up we go. The first ship Warramunga runs aground, so she didn’t get up, one of the Canuck ships got a mine round its propellers and they had to stop and get someone over the side and cut the mine free before it hit the ship and the three of us got up there.

That was the USS Forrest B Royal, American ship, oh no, there were three, that one and there was the Bataan and there was a Canadian ship. We got up there and it was chaos. They were loading all the transports and the refugees, the people, there were hundreds of people. You could say thousands of people that were on the wharves all screaming

to be taken off because they were frightened the Chinese were only twenty mile away, thirty mile away and the Chinese dealt very, very harshly with them and they knew they would all be killed if the Chinese got them. We couldn’t take them off, so anyway when the transports were loaded they took off straight away because it was still light and they could still negotiate the channel so they went down and we stayed behind.

And they said, “There is three destroyers here,” and we had a town like Newcastle, like the wharves, the wharf area of Newcastle. They said, “Right, level everything, the wharves, the oil refineries, the railway yards, level the whole lot.” We said, “What about all the people on the wharves?” They said, “We can’t do anything about them, when you start firing they will take off.” An interpreter on board, a North Korean interpreter, and

they took him ashore in a motor boat to the wharves with a loud hailer and he talked to them. He said, “We are going to level this town right now so get under cover or stay right on the water edges, get out of it.” There was junks coming down, they were in sampans and there was everything, it was pathetic all trying to get away before the chows got there.

We opened up on the place and it was point blank range, they weren’t even aiming, they were aiming from the guns, the open sights on the guns, telescopes and they were hitting the factories and there were railway trucks going up in the air and turning over. And then we hit the refineries and they went up, all the oil refineries were burning and all the oil and gasoline spilled out on the river and the river caught fire and the river was a mass of inferno of flame. The people, we don’t know what happened to the people

but and they kept on firing and firing until we had just about run out and just before it was dark we took off to get down the river because we didn’t want another night incursion. So we got out the river and down and we got back out and they say even in the books, the ones I’ve got up there from the war Museum, they said it was the most

hazardous and dangerous naval operation of the Korean War, the evacuation of Chinnampo. We were very lucky to get out of that because the chows were trying like mad to get down the river before us and seal the river up and close it off and trap three ships up there. We got out.

We didn’t evacuate anyone because the 3rd Battalion ARA [Australian Regular Army]

and the Argyles and another English battalion they were fighting a rear guard and they couldn’t disengage from the front so they held the front while everyone else got out.

Yes I do, they fought their way all back to the 38th Parallel and on fighting their way back

they fought the Battle of Kapyong which put them, made them immortal, the 3rd Battalion. It was one of the biggest battles in Korea. Three battalions, two Pommy battalions or one Scots, one Pommy and an Australian held up something like thirty seven thousand Chinese troops, the whole division of troops, held them up, stopped them coming through,

so it all worked in like that they did.

It was gruesome it was, awful. They just panicked, we couldn’t do nothing for them. We couldn’t do anything for them, we couldn’t take them off, we weren’t equipped to take them off. If we would have put the ship alongside to get them they would have panicked and all come in and they would have dam near sunk our ships.

We would be in trouble. They did send the interpreter, he went there. I was on the bridge at the time and there was the interpreter and he told them to beat it and they said, “Where do we go, where do we go, the Chinese will kill us.” They took off, they scattered as soon as the first shells hit the ground, you could see them running like hell.

I will always remember there, any bloke who was there will remember this, there was a great big factory chimney there near the oil refineries and it was like one of those brick chimneys and very high and they kept hitting it with shells and bits were blowing out of it and chunks of masonry going and the damn thing was still standing. In the end the skipper is saying, “When is that B ever going

to fall.” It took a hell of a lot of firing. The biggest spectacular was the oil refinery, when they hit that. The tanks, the shells went in and exploded and the tanks opened up with big gaping holes in it and the fuel came out and it was molten and it looked like a volcano, it was coming out and it was on fire, a lot of dysfunction there. I’ve got photos there, I sent the photos to the War Museum, they’ve got them.

Anyway that was Chinnampo so that was another one under the belt.

You have got your duffel coat on, you’ve got mittens, wool mittens, maybe a parka, a wool parka, you have Vaseline smeared on your face so that spittle and things like that don’t freeze.

You can’t smoke although you feel like you want a cigarette but you couldn’t because when you took all your gloves off, your woollen mittens, and you put it back in and then you have got to put them all on again and then you’ve got to put other ones off, so it is not worth it so you forget about smoking, it is too cold.

Okay, tell me about it, these ships being British designed ships they were built in

Australia Tribal class, the same as the Canadian ones were built in Canada but they were designed for North Sea and Atlantic conditions and usually North Sea conditions, when they were at sea for a week and have a fight with the Germans or something and then hop back in and have a couple of days in the pub with something to eat and drink and go out and have another go. We were out there for a month and a half

and the ships were not built for that, inasmuch that the bulk heads on the ships, the air being warmer inside you got a lot of sweating. You have got to realise outside from that photograph of mine up there, that big one, the ice flow so they are there and they are banging the ship’s side all the time, boom, boom, bang, bang, they’re banging the side all the time. Ice forms on the inside of your ship and the ice is about an inch thick, an inch and a half

or twenty five, thirty millimetre thick of ice so you are going into your hammock with ice alongside of you. You can pat it, if you were having a scotch and soda or something you could chip off a bit of ice and throw in it and that is the conditions you are sleeping in, boom, boom, boom.

Everything, everything mate, take me half an hour to take my clothes off. You couldn’t have a shower for about a week because the showers froze up, the toilets froze up, we had to have,

the plumber on board he used to have to put a blow torch on them. It is terrible conditions, how we lived there I don’t know. And a lot of the fellows in the engine room on Bataan they ended up with TB and everything because they were breathing steam and got moisture all the time and we were forever cold.

We were never ever warm, we were always cold and being young we were always hungry and we didn’t have a lot of food. We made it but we weren’t eating in the Ritz or anything like that.

By that stage we were eating, all the fresh meat had gone by that stage because we had not gone out to get supplies. We were eating mainly baked beans which is not

bad, I don’t mind baked beans, they are good for you really and bacon. When they cut the bacon they didn’t have it like paper, they had a good thick slice, and ship’s bread, thick ship’s bread and it kept us going and we were only young and we would eat anything at that stage. You couldn’t fill us, we were only kids. When we went to the reunion in Canberra for the Korean reunion

we where with a lot of soldiers from the RAR [Royal Australian Regiment] the 3rd Battalion and they said, “You sailors had it easy,” and I said, “I know we did. I am not arguing with you but remember this mate, if we went in that water we only had three minutes and there were mines floating around everywhere mate, everywhere. We had missed so many by yea-much,” I said, “So we always had that to contend with. I know we didn’t have what you had.”

I said, “You had to build a foxhole to get into it and you were fighting the Chinese and they were like ants.” He said, “Yeah.” Bet said, “How did you build a foxhole?” You had a buddy, you worked together, there was two of you, you have a foxhole buddy. It is a system, you are never by yourself, with your mate, that is the way you make mates. Bet said, “How did you get a foxhole so you could get

cover from the Chinese?” and he said, “Betty If you have got bloody twenty thousand Chinese racing towards you, you’d be amazed how quick you can dig a foxhole.” We killed ourselves laughing. They had it pretty hard, we had it a lot better. We got a hot meal, it didn’t matter, they were eating K-rations mate

out of cans and tablets and all that. We had a hot meal even if it was canned bully beef or anything they would make a stew out of it or something or they would heat it up for us and we always had something hot.

Yes we did.

We drank what they call ky they have it in the navy but they don’t have it any more, they reckoned it cost too much. It was put out by Cadbury’s Chocolate

in Claremont in Tasmania. It was like a cooking chocolate, a dark chocolate, it wasn’t a milk chocolate, it was a dark, heavy chocolate and they put it in the boiler, these stainless steel steam boilers and they melted it and they filled it up with canned milk, like Carnation Milk and water and they made a thick hot chocolate drink and it used to stick to you like

oil but gee it kept you warm. It was scalding hot and it kept you warm, it was good, ky we used to call it, that was the sailors slang name for it.. We used to woof this ky in and it kept you warm. The army fellows couldn’t do that, they had to melt snow and they had these little tiny kerosene lamps, methylated spirit lamps and all that and I don’t know how they survived.

Unbelievable they are my hat comes off to them. I said, “I am never ever going to join the army.”

No.

We went over to the east, yeah you’re right, we did just after that, we did a lot more bombardments, what they call gun fire support. The troops call you in

and say we want fire effective coverage on map reference and we used to carry an army artillery officer and then we would give them gun fire support.

Well it works like this, we had an army artillery officer and wherever the troops were, the maps for that area, they had the maps for that area and all the maps are coded, grid locked,

so the army calls us in, they get on the blower and say, “Map reference,” we will just say 05 Lima 3, “We want saturation on that point.” Well what the ship would do would then would then work it out on the map, get the map, they would lock onto that, they would send one shot from the turret, say from the A gun, one shot out of one barrel, boom

and they would find out where it lobbed. If it lobbed five hundred yards to the right of that map reference the army would say, “What are you trying to do, trying to bloody well kill us or something, come left and go up one hundred,” come left, go up a hundred and fire another shot, boom, “Beauty, right on, let them have it,” and they would just fire bullets all the time. The army would say, “Right, that is enough, you have done the job,” and then we would go somewhere else.

All the time, months, months.

On there? My role was always on sonar. I was the mine man but I had to pick up mines if they were floating or they were in the field.

Cut the ship in half. There’s one up the back there, going up. Did you see that photo I had? That’s a ship going up, that’s a mine sweeper going up, up in Wonsan.

Anyway to cut a long story short, we did go back to Australia after all that, we went back to Australia. I then went and did another course which took four or five, six months, something like that I was a TASI, a torpedo anti-submarine instructor, petty officer and

low and behold there was another ship going to Korea so who should be on it, your mate here and I was going back for another hit, the second lot.

Yes. So anyway up we go for the second lot and I was on the Tobruk, I’ve got a photo out there of the Tobruk, and she was a gunnery ship, she was the latest destroyer, brand new, oh beautiful ship she was, good, great ship and great gunnery and

it had all radar controlled guns everything. The sport of the day up there then was smashing trains. On the east coast there is a railway line on the east coast from Mongolia follows the coast all the way down right on the coast and it follows it all the way down to South Korea so that is a great way of supplying your armies by rail.

They could only do it of a night because if they did of a day we would knock them out so they used to do it of a night. On those rails there was a lot of tunnels so if the train was fired upon the train would go like mad, choo, choo, choo, into the tunnel and stop and stay in the tunnel and we would be waiting for them, be like the fox and the hound, the rabbit in the rabbit warren and we’re looking and they are not coming out.

So anyway we used to get, one ship got about eight trains that’s fully laden too with ammunition and stuff like that and they make quite a spectacular sight when they go up. We got about three on the Tobruk, four, three or four I think we got, it’s in the books there. They got wise to us in the end, see of a night time we used to lock onto them, you know how we knew,, the fireman had to open the big door on the boiler to

stoke the coal in and as he opened the door the light and we said, “There is a train coming,” and then they would put the radar on it, the guns and they would switch to the train and the guns would be training on it all the time and they would be working out the solution, the fire control solution all done, like that little camera there of your’s and they were getting trains one after the other and hunting was good.

Then they got an idea, the Chows got an idea. On the train they would put a big platform like they use for putting trucks and tanks and things like that on, they’re a flat platform and they put radar controlled guns on it, the same size as ours so that fouled up the whole thing. I mean they weren’t very good sports at all. We were real careful then because they were firing back at us.

So anyway that went on until about just a week before the Armistice, that was 26th July 1953 and we were right up, we were sixteen miles from the Russian border, right up near Russia and there was a damn mine layer up there, a North Korean mine layer. See they used to lay them off their rails and they had laid, they had

dropped a whole lot of them so we captured her and they were going to say, “Will we sink it by gunfire,” and they said, “No let the torpedo men,” I was doing demolitions. They said, “Let the TAS,” they called us TAS, torpedo anti-submarine, they said, “Let the TAS rates blow her.” My boss, the torpedo officer said, “Right-o take a squid bomb,” that is a bomb

about this high and about that round, it is a type of depth charge, and he said, “Take one of those and put some plastic explosive on it and a safety fuse and a detonator and take it down the hole and bung it on the ship’s side and blow her.” I took over three blokes with us, there was four of us and we hoisted this thing, it was heavy, put it, lowered it down in the hole, brought the fuse up, lit the fuse, got back in the

boat and headed back to the ship, the Tobruk, the destroyer. Everyone is watching, waiting, we had taken the North Koreans off, they were prisoners of war and anyway we were all watching there and the TAS officer said, “Listen Shorty, that had better blow or you are in for it.” I am watching and boom she went but it wouldn’t sink, it only came down to the water line and this is fair dinkum, it wouldn’t sink, it must have got air pockets or

something in it and in the end the gunnery people had to have a go to sink it. The next day, the next day, the 26th was Armistice, they had the Armistice and the war finished, how unlucky can you be if you were on the mine layer, the North Koreans, they got caught the day before, they weren’t meant to win.

They can be anything, they can be anything, they can be junks, sampans, anything that can hold a set of rails. And on the rails the mine which is about one and half times the size of a forty four gallon drum, all black and shiny and it is on a square steel box which they call a sinker and the sinker has four square little wheels and those little wheels go on the line. The lines are protruded over the stern so that when you push it, it runs along the line and

goes plonk into the water, the mine unreels the steel cable, the sinker goes down on the bottom and then pulls the mine down under with it and sets the mine at a certain depth. Then they go on a little bit more and push another one off, push another and they can sow them like smoke, hundreds, thousands.

Who did? We took them on the ship.

That was nothing, just put them in the slammer until you get somewhere where you can off load them. I did see, when we were down at Wonsan when we did the mine down there, there were prisoners taken and the South Koreans they were pretty bad like the North Koreans, don’t kid yourself, they brought the prisoners on board, the North Koreans and they said, “Captain-san, we have brought

six prisoners, we want you to execute them, it is a very great honour for you.” The skipper said, “You have got to be joking.” They wanted us to execute them, so they just took them down in the boat I think and they whacked them later on, further down and they pushed them over the side. They were very, they were a hard mob, the Koreans, very bad. You ask any digger or anyone who was a prisoner of war

who were the guards at Changi and on the Burma Railway and all those places? The Koreans, a very, very sadistic, cruel people. It is the Mongolian breed I reckon in them. Like Genghis Khan and the Mongols and the Tartars, very cruel people.

Yeah, yeah, I did, yeah.

Only the involvement of the every day to day workings and that. We had Korean sailors on our ships, they could translate for us. There was no good us going up there and fighting a Korean War and you can’t speak Korean, the army had them too, translators.

I suppose that went on. I never ever went into

my mind. That department, the James Bond department, wasn’t on my agenda. I just did my job and that was it.

We were there, we were there, we were only sixteen miles from the Russian border when the order came through and everyone said, “The Armistice has been signed, yabba dabba doo.”

There is more too, there is Vietnam and then there is America. I don’t know if I’ve got enough time for all this.

After the Armistice was signed we came south to Australia and Vietnam and Korea had more or less finished, yes it was finished

but you have got to realise that the Vietnam War never, the Armistice was the Armistice, it wasn’t a surrender or it wasn’t a finish, we just stepped back we had been punching each other and said, “Right-o we will carry this on later, this is not finished, don’t think by a long shot, we haven’t signed any surrender,” and we said, “We didn’t sign any surrender,” and, “Right, we will meet later on,” which

is what it is happening up there now, things are getting a bit tight up there now. Indochina which was Vietnam, Indochina as you know was a colony of the French and the French and Indochina and anyway the French were fighting them and they were defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu

and they were defeated there. And the French said, “We are pulling out, this is costing us too much money, we can’t win,” because after Korea had finished the Chows [Chinese] said, “Let us put forces into Indochina, we are at a stalemate in Korea, let us go into Vietnam.” They called it Vietnam then, “Let’s go into Vietnam, we will go there,” so they start putting, the Chows start putting armaments and backing the Vietnamese like they did the North Koreans and they

backed them with weapons and everything and they put it in and then America was very worried about the saturation of the communist forces into South East Asia, badly worried, Australia was worried too. And said, “Right, we are part of South East Asia, this is bad news,” so

the Americans said, “We will just put observers in there, warrant officers, highly skilled professional soldiers in there as observers and maybe to give them a little bit of help to show them how to use their gear and weaponry and all the rest of it.” Australia said, “We will do that too,” so Australia put her warrant officers and all that in there and then it got a bit more and a bit more and it escalated

to a full out war where there were only two countries participating, Australia and the United States no other country would go to Vietnam.

Well I was involved with Korea and I think there was a reason for it, I can’t see why they was any different. A lot of this malarkey about people saying, “Oh yes, but they put National servicemen in there,” they did not, they put volunteers in there. If they were National Service they were not forced

to go to Korea, they were asked, “Would you like to volunteer to go to Korea?” People say, “They say they put the poor Nashos [National Service soldiers] in there,” bull. They put volunteers, everyone who went to Vietnam was a volunteer they never forced people to go there at all. They misconstrue a lot of this stuff. Anyway that finished, my brother in law went there.

He was in the Fleet Air Arm, Barry and he went there with a chopper squadron, the 371st Assault Helicopter Squadron I think it was, I’ve got it written down anyhow but that was an American Assault Team and he was a specialist like on engines in helicopters and that so they welcomed them when they went there..

And then we had one of the biggest teams we had in Vietnam, that is the navy, I am talking about the navy, not the army or the air force, was our SEALS [Sea Air Land Team], navy underwater demolition teams, they did a lot of work there.

No, because they were a pretty secretive mob. They were like the US Navy SEALS, they didn’t give much away, they don’t give much away. And they are like the SAS [Special Air Service], they don’t talk about themselves or they don’t say what we did or what we didn’t do.

I believe they did a lot of good work there. I was drafted to an aircraft carrier then, the Sydney. The Sydney had to have all this work done, a lot of splicing and stops and different things made to baton down tanks and trucks and that were going to Vietnam because the Sydney carried them on her flight deck. She carried them in the hangars and she carried all the

trucks and that on the upper deck and so they wouldn’t roll off when the ship was at sea I had to go over there and I had a couple of hundred young blokes there who didn’t know much about splicing or seamanship and then I organised that and I got all that done.

I’ll tell you, I designated authority. I got about half a dozen of the best leading hands there, killicks,

and I said, “This is what I want you to do,” and I worked with them for about two weeks and I worked with them, with myself doing it. I said, “Now you do it, copy me, does anyone want to know anything? If you don’t know now speak now or forever hold your peace,” until they all had it. “You six are going to be like my disciples, think of me as JC [Jesus Christ] and you are the disciples, you are going out to spread the word.”

I said, “Now we have got two hundred kids there, you have got to split them up yourself, six threes are eighteen, thirty blokes each and you have got to teach them how to make this stuff because it is all going to Vietnam,” and we got it done.

Lousy. After a destroyer but I was only on loan, I was only on loan. They just loaned me because I was only there about six months and did all that work and organised them and got them going

and they said, “You have got to come back to the sonar school, the torpedo school.” I said, “Why is that?” They said, “You are going to America.” “I am going to America.” They said, “Yes you are going over to commission the Perth, the second Perth,” they said. “Your father was killed on the first Perth.” I said, “Yes that is right,” so I was a bit of celebrity. At that time I was president of the petty officers’

mess, I was a petty officer, a 3-badge petty officer and I was a 1st class TAS-rate, torpedo anti-submarine instructor. So anyway we all got on the 707 Constellations and they flew us across to New York and they picked us up in New York and we were taken to Rhode Island, there is a big destroyer school at

Rhode Island.

It was based in Sydney, it was based in Sydney and we were doing tests on the lifts and everything, how much ammunition the lift could carry and they could put down and we were running times, like a time check, when they check you for time

and all that and we had to do all that. Then we had to work out all these lashings and straps that had to be made. There was quite a lot of work that had to be done and then there were trials. We went to Brisbane at Hervey Bay and we did a mock landing to see if everything worked and it did.

That was funny. We were with a landing ship, a navy landing ship,

I forget the name of it, could have been called the Tobruk, and we got all the stuff off there, there were a few foul ups but that was the idea of it.

I was unloading trucks, I was unloading those personnel carriers, they were unloading 105 mm howitzers, all army stuff, none of our stuff,

chopper parts and pieces of choppers, helicopters and all that.

It was satisfying but I knew I had to designate authority. I had to have my six disciples and I had to train them so that they could do the job. you had to off load that

and you supervise the six men and you can do it but you can’t do it all yourself. Once you have taught them you are right so it went off good. I got a bit of a wrap. I ended up making chief you see when I went over the other side because all those things were on my papers and I got good recommends for chief. I didn’t think I would ever make chief. Someone has to die and you have got to be in the navy for

fifty years before you make a chief.

My naval career? Well when the Korean War finished that was say what, ‘53 I went back to Watsons Bay for the torpedo anti-submarine school and I was teaching there

for awhile and I was then drafted to the Vendetta, a Daring class destroyer and she was the top of the line at the time, remember I had just come off the Tobruk, and I commissioned her when she was brand new but the Vendetta was the top of the line stuff and she had a lot of torpedoes that had to be fired because the ship was doing trials and once

you were caught in the torpedo anti submarine web and if you are any good with torpedoes you get stuck with them because everybody hates them and they steer clear of them.

It is a lot of work, a lot of work, a lot of work and a lot of hours and sleepless nights and up, it is just a lot of work mate. You take them to sea, you prepare them in a

factory and the factory used to be just at the base of the Harbour Bridge at North Sydney. You prepared them, there you loaded them on barges and then you took the barges to Garden Island and then you craned them off the barges into torpedo tubes and then you went to sea all day and all night firing and when they were fired you had to pick them up because they had practice heads on them, buoyant heads. Then you had to go through all the paraphernalia of the records, of their depth

keeping and their speed and their course and there was a lot in it to do it. So if you were any good on torpedoes you got stuck with them all the time so you went to that kind of ship. I went and did all that and then I paid off. No, I didn’t, come on, come on, come on, after that

the Vendetta, after the Vendetta, the Sydney I did that didn’t I? And then in 1965 I went to the States, yeah 1965 I went to the States and we got to. We left Sydney in summer on a 707 and we had blue suits on and we had to have all our uniforms, our best uniforms and we

were told when we got to the States we would only be there for seven or eight months, that we wouldn’t have to take our wives and families because you had to be there twelve months to take your wife and family so we went there. We got to the airport in New York and it was freezing and we had never been so cold, it was

snowing and everything and we ended up at Newport, Rhode Island at the destroyer school at Newport, Rhode Island. They had, it looked like, we had six months there and the ship hadn’t been commissioned yet, five or six months and we had been to the war college, we had done every class they had to do with that type of

destroyer. We was pretty good, we had to get something like about seventy five or eight per cent our marks every Friday morning when we sat for exams to enable us to go ashore for the weekend. If we didn’t pass we went to compulsory school for the weekend so we had to pass. So what we used to do of a night instead of going out on the town and things like that we used to sit in bed and

ask each other questions on the test papers so we could get a good pass. Anyhow we finished all that, we had a good time there, it was a real good time and we had learnt a lot there. Their schools, especially their damage control was excellent, much better than anything we ever had. A lot of their stuff, their training, and they admitted themselves, their sonar training

and a lot of their training was not as good as ours because they have been trained specialists on one thing where we were cross trained and we could take over in a situation because we did a big battle problem in the war college at Newport and I had a Junior Grade Lieutenant with me and our cubicle was a submarine. We had left

Bear Island and we were engaging Russian submarines and it was the real thing on a huge screen, a huge screen it is and you can see the whole game enfold, it takes about all day to do it. The Junior Grade Lieutenant when I got down he said, “I am a clerk. I haven’t got a clue on this. Can you take over chief?” I said, “Yes I will take over. This is a piece of cake to me, I’ve been

trained to do that, I am an instructor, an anti-submarine instructor.” Right-o, so I took over the thing. They weren’t trained like us, they just didn’t have that training we had. When we went on exercise and if we were doing exercises with them which we had to do when the ship was commissioned, we put a really good performance as far as sonar even their sonar

chief said, “There is no doubt about you fellows, you are really on the ball. You can pick up stuff that our blokes won’t learn for another 10 years yet.” Anyhow to cut a long story short there, the ship came down from the Great Lakes. She was built up in Michigan in Base City in Michigan by the De Foe Ship Building yard and there she was waiting for us

in Boston at the navy yard down at Boston and mate I have never seen anything so beautiful in all my life, God she was a beautiful ship. At the pulling up of the flag and the playing of Waltzing Matilda and the Australian national anthem we charged on board. Everything was different but we had learnt it at the school if you get what I mean. That five and a half to six months at Newport

we’d learnt all this. We knew all the markings, the pipes, the colours, everything, it was just all that we had learnt, there it was and we took her to sea the first time we took her to sea. We hadn’t signed the papers for it yet, De Foe’s still owned it, De Foe’s still owned it still and we took it to sea to do its sea trials. They were narrow gutted and they were fast,

they were seventy seven thousand horse power and man they could go. The acceleration rate on them they wasn’t like our boilers where they had to work up. Our trial on our destroyers which was the British ones had to work up. These things you just rang down revolutions, two, zero, zero, at two, zero, zero and “Ding ding” you could hear them going up and the ship would just put her stern down and take off.

It was a big thing to me. They played it up in the papers too at Newport, they played it up in the papers and had a big thing on it and it felt great and it felt good and I was glad the navy had done it, I’m really glad they did it. As I say the navy is a family and they stick together and we were all family and I thought it was great, it was really good.

Well when we left Boston they took the ship down to New York, the skipper did that on his own back, that was the kind of skipper we had and he took us down to New York and he took us under the bridge and round the island and back out again and said, “Right, you’ve seen New York,” and he got permission to do it, the Americans gave him permission to do it.

No, we didn’t we went down then to Norfolk, Virginia, Norfolk and we had to get something radar stuff calibrated or something like that and all of a sudden the chief coxswain, Tim Collins, he said, “Shorty come over here.” I said, “What’s the matter Tim?” He said,

“You are going to be a chief tomorrow. I said, “Go on, you’re joking.” He said, “You will have your buttons tomorrow.” I said, “What? I didn’t even think I would get that in the next thirty or forty years.” He said, “You have got them.” I said, “How come?” He said, “You know Tommy Powell?” He was one of the other torpedo anti-submarine instructor chiefs, he said, “He has just packed it in. He has retired and you are next on the list.” “Whoa.” He said, “All right keep it to yourself,” and he said, “When

the captain orders you to his cabin at 9 o’clock in the morning look real surprised. Don’t you dare say that I leaked anything to you mate, because I will string you up. You won’t be gong home as a chief, you will be going home as OD.” The next morning, “Petty Officer Gubbins report to Captain Tavern on the double.” Knock on the door he says, “Come in petty officer. I have some good news for you,” and I said

“What would that be?” He said, “You are going to be at my table in another half a hour and you will become a chief.” I put on the big act, the surprise and everything like that. We are talking in the naval base there, there would be about twenty or thirty destroyers in at the time in Norfolk and all the carriers are in there too, it was a carrier base and all the destroyers are tied alongside each other, what we call

destroyer trots, ten here, ten here and we are right on the out side. We had to go over ten ships, boom, salute, ten lots before you get to the wharf. Tim said to me, “You have got to go to the chiefs’ club at midday and they will pick you up in the bus here and the chiefs will escort you onto the bus and to the club.” I said, “What for?” “For the initiation.” I said, “What initiation?” He said, “To be a chief.”

He said, “In the US Navy that is the biggest step you can possibly get, you are next to God.” I said, “Right.” They said, “Chief Gubbins report to quarter deck,” right oh away you go and two chiefs there escorting me and we are going over each ships, saluting away and all that until we get to the

wharf and throws me on the bus and takes me to the club. The club was a drunkathon, mate. It was, we had to serve all the other chiefs we had to drink great steins of beer and yard sticks of beer and what they didn’t do is nobody’s business. At about 10 o’clock that night when they delivered my body to the wharf and I had to get

ten destroyers out I think they brought a stretcher out and put me in it and carried me across ten ships and dropped the body on the quarter deck and said, “Chief Gubbins.” The officer of the Watch was Taf Jones, Lieutenant Commander Jones, a good mate of mine and he said, “Holy bloody hell. Take the chief forward to his quarters.” The next morning I was and that is how I become a chief.

Power mate, power, unbelievable, unbelievable but power that you don’t abuse, that you use and you have got to be good. I always felt then that I had reached that far in the torpedo anti-submarine world and I knew I was good at it. I was one of the best and it made me happy to feel that way but I never abused it and I helped all the others,

the younger blokes as much as I could. The ships went from there and we went to ‘Gitmo’, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and at ‘Gitmo’ we did our sonar calibration trials as the water at ‘Gitmo’ is isothermal and it is very , very deep and what they have got there it is unique. They have a proper submarine, a fair dinkum submarine, it is trimmed and it is on chains to a buoy on

the surface and chained to the bottom and you can operate your sonar on it as a real submarine. You are not getting changing depth or movement, bearing movement but it is good to calibrate your set on, to calibrate your set to see that it is transmitting correctly and the rest. We spent a couple of weeks at ‘Gitmo’ and we calibrated that.

Then the Tata missile and radar systems had to prove that they worked so we went down to Port Rico. On the way down to Port Erica they were thrown up these dummy planes, these drones, aeroplanes with nobody in them and blast them out of the sky like smoke and they only gave us three and said, “You are not getting any more, they are too damn dear mate.” We stayed for about a week down at Port Rico

and went to the, what’s the rum they make down there, the white rum? Bacardi, we had a day at the Bacardi Rum Factory and I have never seen anything like it and you wouldn’t want to. They wouldn’t let the sailors go, they said, “Only chiefs and petty officers can go to the Bacardi Rum Factory because the sailors if they got down there on the rum they would tear the place to pieces.” They would go berserk

so only us went down. We ended up in the bar after we saw the kegs and the barrels and how they distil it and they gave us each a “Rum crusta” which was a fresh ripe juicy sweet pineapple with all this meat cut out of the centre filled with a bottle of rum, ice and all the goodies and passionfruit and it had a straw and it even had a little umbrella, Japanese umbrella

on the top. They reckon no one ever got past two of these things so the chiefs were trying to prove them wrong and there were very few got to the three. I had the one and I was, I had to go out that night, I had to go to the Columbus Club that night and when I got back to the ship and the officer of the day is waiting for me he got a smile and they are laughing themselves silly and they said, “Here comes the Bacardi Rum man.”

“How did it go?” Standing under the cold shower I was in the chiefs’ mess with just a cold shower running on me and mate I just couldn’t shake it. We had a really good time there and then we went through the Panama Canal and that was an experience going through the Panama Canal, the locks and up into the bit of lakes and down the other side, it was marvellous and wonderful. No

pumps there at all, it is all done, the rainfall is so heavy on top of the bit of lakes that the water that takes the ships down or brings the ships up is replenished even though it is exhausted to the ocean, it is replenished by the rain and there is no pumps, it is amazing. We came out of there and we went to Long Beach California

and from there we worked for about six months on that coast at San Diego at the sonar school and up in Point Magoo firing missiles and Mare Island in San Francisco and then it was time to head to Hawaii and Fiji and home. We brought the first guided missile ship in the Australian navy home.

She was due to go to Vietnam so I thought, “I will be going to Vietnam too.” We got everything worked up on our weapons system and everything was going good, they said, “Chief, the captain wants you.” “Yes sir.” He said, “You have been taken off the ship.” I said, “Why have I been taken off the ship?”

I said, “I am qualified. You have got no one else.” He said, “But we are putting Chief Salway in your job, he was at the school.” Ernie Salway he was a training officer and he said, “I want to go to Vietnam.” They said, “Shorty is going there.” they said, “No he is not. I want to go.” He said, “He has been to Korea twice so why does he want to go to Vietnam for?

Does he want to go three times?” So anyway I was taken off.

Lousy because I joined the navy and I said, “I go wherever they send me,” type of business. I do my best job and all that. It was no big deal to me but they were saying, “But he has been to a war twice, what does he want to go three times for? Take him off,” so they took me off.

I was skidded by an officer who hated my guts really.

Skid underneath, put oil underneath you or butter underneath you when you launch something, a ship and shove it away, so they shoved me away down at Lonsdale down in Victoria. I was only down there a little while and I didn’t hit it with the executive officer down there because

because here I had done twelve or thirteen months in the States going to school, studying myself silly and being the only person in the country that could teach it and I was there because I got skidded down because, it is a long story, it’s politics. I said, “Right-o every dog has its day, my day will come.” Darn me if a big planning committee of officers came,

they came through the establishments to see why there was trained men in establishments. They brought a Committee around to see why there were highly trained personnel in depots that the navy had spent a lot of money on. But anyway who should come through there but Commander Beaumont and

Commander Beaumont used to be a commander when he was a Lieutenant of a mine-layer, and him and I go back a long way, we were really good buddies when I was a petty officer. Him and I used to have a few jokes together and everything and he came past and he spotted me and he looked and he said, “Chief Gubbins, what are you doing here, didn’t you just come back from the States after spending all that time with the DDGs?” I said, “Yes sir.” “Who sent you down here?”

“They did.” That afternoon the master-at-arms came down to me and said, “Chief get your gear, you are leaving first thing in the morning.” I said, “Where am I going?” He said, “Back to the sonar school. They flipped when they saw you down there. Beaumont he went berserk. He said, “He couldn’t get back to Canberra quick enough. He said you are going in the morning.”

Politics in there.

I went back to the sonar school and I was due to be made warrant officer and which would have done me fine because warrant officer was a good rank and you weren’t too much into the officer business where you had to socialise too much although didn’t mind the socialising but not too much.

The training officer said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I have been offered a very good position in the ex-lab at Reynolds the Ex Lab, the Experimental Laboratory and they want me there.” He said, “Fair enough, but I think you are a fool. I think you should knock this back.” I said, “Oh well, fair enough.” When I went to the Experimental Laboratory

I was spending more time at sea than I was in the navy, the only thing was I was getting paid for it, after 4 o’clock onwards I was on time and a half, double time or something.

No I wasn’t. I had a rank of honorary lieutenant and when I went to sea I was in the ward room. I was on Reserve, I was Active Reserve and

I still was governed by the navy but I was Active Reserve. I was Active Reserve and the when I went to sea on the ships and we were doing specialised tests and things like that firings and all the rest of it I lived in the ward room as an honorary Lieutenant. In the ward room I had a good job and I could have gone a long way. What happened then was we lived at Avalon, and

the four girls were going to schools up there on the Peninsula and the old heroin and grass hit the scene up there real big in the schools and I said to Bet, “This is no good. We will sell up and get the hell out of here and we will take them and go up into the country.”

She said, “You know nothing about the country. I said, “I will learn. Take the kids out,” but she said, “You have got to get a job and commute.” I said, “I will get a job at the university.” She said, “How do you know you will get a job at the university?” I said, “They are building,” they were expanding the University at Newcastle and in the engineering and electronic engineering and chemical engineering and metallurgy they needed technicians which meant starting at the bottom again which was

like eating crow after taking fifteen years to become a chief now I am starting off as an OD again. I thought, “I suppose it would be worth it just to be with Bet and the kids and all the rest of it and they won’t get near the drugs.” Everything went great, it was hard for me and it took me about fifteen or seventeen years and I become a senior technician and I was back again.

I had come back again but I still think I might have been better taking the warrant officer’s commission and I wouldn’t have had to do that fifteen or seventeen years and I would have had the money there and I would have had the job and job satisfaction and I could have had a small command.

You don’t.

It is with you all the time, you just don’t walk away from it, not when you have done that length of service because you are gone mate. You are brain conditioned, your language is different. Even sailors wives talk different to any other. They pick up the slang and all the rest of it and they are different women than others because they have more responsibility,

it is foisted upon them because their husbands are at sea. I don’t think you ever throw the navy away. I have never thrown the navy away, never. That is it, that’s life but the greatest thing, see we had the five girls and then I had a son, another John Gubbins, John Gubbins the 4th.

When he was about nine months old he had to have a triple antigen needle which is a needle of vaccine against whooping cough and diphtheria and all that and it killed him. He was one in a million that was allergic to it, one in a million, work those odds out and all I wanted was one son but I couldn’t have him, it was denied to me. It’s amazing, isn’t it? That’s life and then

Becky Ann came along, Bet said, “Let’s try again, the last time Becky Ann came along and then she started having seizures and we took her to the best neurologists in Sydney at North Sydney, Dr Davies and he just said, “That is not a birth defect,” she had been, her head had been bumped and there is a

there is another big blow although we have had a lot of happiness with her. My name finishes, there is three generations of seamen there, there is three lots of medals up there, my grandfather’s, my father’s and there is mine and that is all finished, it finishes with me because I haven’t produced a son

to carry on. Possibly our family goes back hundreds of years so it is a bit disappointing in that respect but let’s say I would do the same things again. I would join the navy again, it was a great life as far as I was concerned. It was a hard life, it was a hard one but I enjoyed it and I think I really pulled my weight as

far as the navy was concerned, more than pulled my weight.

Discipline. When I was over, when I went over to the States three or four years ago when we commissioned that LHD [Amphibious Assault Ship] the Bataan, we went to a colour guard parade one evening at a cocktail party. The night before the

commissioning of the ship we were all invited to the officer’s cocktail night and it was a great night. I will never forget it, it was a great night. It started off with the marines and I have had a great love for the marines and I always say that even in Korea and even in Vietnam

they are the best dam fighting force the Yanks have got because they have got one thing all the others haven’t got and that is discipline. It has got discipline and it is still the same, they are made that way. I was standing there and I had my miniatures on, my medals because it was a cocktail party and I had the little ones on and Andrew Robertson, the admiral, was standing next to me and a few of the others and this young

marine come up and he was immaculately dressed, immaculate, good short hair cut, the whole lot and he was spotless and he said, “Excuse me sir,” and I said, “Yes?” He said, “May I shake your hand?” I said, “Of course you can shake my hand, how’s it going mate.” He said, “It is a pleasure to shake your hand,” and I said, “Why is that?” He said, “You came all those thousands of miles from Australia for the commissioning of this ship, our ship.”

He said, what did he say? He said, “I think we have some allies, the United States but I think Australia is our greatest ally that we have got.” I said, “Possibly because we are blood-related, we are cousins.” He said, “Yes that is true but you are the best we have got.” I said, “That is a very nice thing to say.” Now see the respect, the discipline and respect never hurt him.

When I left the navy I could tell you tales where senior chiefs and petty officers were trying to enforce discipline and respect amongst the sailors and they were thwarted every time by the executive officer or the commanding officer. “Chief can you prove your case?” All this, “You will be up on a charge next not this kid.”

“Dismiss the case,” and all this, we got no back-up from the officers. Once the chief petty officer structure and the warrant officer structure got no support from the higher command we were useless, our power went, we couldn’t do it. Some of these things were blatant, absolutely blatant that they did which they would never have done

in the old days and they got away with it. We got no support at all from the higher ups and it become the discipline went out of the navy altogether and the old fellows we said, “This is no good for us. We are getting out, we have had enough,” and that was it. I saw that in the States in the navy, they have still got it but

not as much as they had but the marines have got it, they got it all the time mate, they have never been without it.

Yeah, well I spent thirteen or fourteen months there on course. I went back to a commission and spent another couple of months. I have been back there three times, my daughter married a chief so I have.

I have had it out with them over there. Some of them, the education system over there in some cases is good and in some places it is sadly lacking. They say, I remember an old Negro. I was on my way to Arlington to see Arlington Cemetery and he was a grey headed old Negro man

and he said, “Where are you from?” and I said, “Australia.” I was in uniform because we had to be in uniform all the time. He said, “Austria.” I said, “No, not Austria, Australia.” “Man,” he said, “where the hell is Australia?” Didn’t even know about the country, he was supposed to have gone to school. I spoke to a lot of them down in Mobile and they said, “You have seen more of America than what we have seen, you have seen it all, the whole

lot?” I said, “Yes.” “What have you seen?” They said. “The furthest we ever got was up to the capital, to Montgomery two hours up the road in the car.” I said, “Haven’t you seen anything else?” “No.”

Very, very important, I think that is our main safeguard because we cannot although we are related and we are blood kin

to Europe, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany we are Anglo-Saxon but we are also related by blood to the United States. You say to anyone there, “Oh you come from Australia.” “Yeah.” “I am an American.” “Are you?” I say, “Where did your mother come from?” “Oh she come from America.” “Where did your grandmother come from?” “She come from Scotland.” And,

“Where did your grandfather come from?” “He come from France.” “Is that so?” I rest my case. You can see it all the way down the line so they are related to us so they won’t sell us out and we won’t sell them out, we can’t sell them out because we are related by blood. Blood is thicker than water.

There is a long story to that, but we’ll make it short. I was ashore at in Sasebo during the Korean War and after about two months they condescended to come into Sasebo because we had to get repairs or pick up replenishments and we had a night out on the town. We went to the Hot Springs Hotel and they had a tattoo place there. So three Americans and three Australians, including myself

decided to go in and have a tattoo but I said I wouldn’t have a tattoo, no way. The others said, “We will get them.” But after half a crate of long neck beer and I had drank six bottles, I was at a stage that they could have chopped my head off, they could have done anything to me mate because I felt no pain and apparently the Australians had been putting the Australian tattoos on the three Americans friends that they were with

and they decided to put one on me and they said, “What tattoo do you want?” and I said, “I couldn’t care less, go for it.” I ended up with the American Presidential seal on me. Every time I go to the States to see my daughter everyone sees the tattoo and say, “How did you get that?” “You put it on me.”

They were good, they were good, they were pretty

professional. They are like us but although they admired our professionalism and they thought we were outstanding, they thought we were outstanding, that our training was exemplary but their professionalism is good. As far as far as a fighting force I think their marine corps, they have that discipline and that is it. You can’t beat them.

What I can’t understand is, now there are twenty two countries took part in Korea. The casualties was just on four million. Now that is all up, four million, three and a half million to four million all up which is pretty horrific when you think it only went for three years

so it was a pretty nasty bloody war but they were reluctant to speak about it. There was never any movies made about it, the only one that ever came on was MASH and MASH went for about ten years about Korea but nothing else, they just didn’t want to, it was like a political war, “It is a hot potato, don’t go making movies and things like that, we might

harm the Chinese relations or the relations between us and Soviet Russia,” they just didn’t want to know about it, that is how we perceived it, but one of these days it might be told. I suppose even my interviews now, what I am saying now helps to have this story told.

It is hard to say, it’s hard to say because they are dying out too, a lot of them are dying out. I think the Korean veterans, there is a great solidarity amongst them, the same as in Vietnam. Vietnam was a nasty war, people didn’t like it but Vietnam was a TV war, Korea wasn’t a television war. You didn’t sit down and have your Corn Flakes and watch someone

going into action. You had to wait in Korea until the newspapers and the Movietone News came on in the theatres to tell you what your troops were doing in Korea, we didn’t have that coverage. I feel sorry for the people who went to Vietnam, I do, I feel real sorry for them. They were only doing their duty and doing their job that they volunteered to do and swore on the bible that they would do for their country.

His name was Trader, T R A D E R, Horn and he was around rig petty officer. He was like an acting petty officer, hadn’t gone into square rig, a petty officer in a sailors uniform. He had the quarter deck on the Hobart when I was an ordinary seaman too, so he was like God to me.

In fact you really had to put in an application to speak to him. Anyhow we were down near Garden Island and we were out on a buoy and they were painting, they were painting the ship and the masts and everything. Now the masts on a six inch gun cruiser, the Hobart, was pretty darn high. In fact when you went under the Harbour Bridge you thought your mast was going to hit the bottom of the bridge ,of course they weren’t but

it felt that way. So I was singled out with a pot of paint, a boy with a brush, a pot of paint and a brush and told to go up and paint the yardarm. To me it must have been over a hundred and twenty or one hundred and fifty feet up and I thought, “I can’t chicken out, I have got to go up, I joined the navy mate and we’re sailors and in the old

my grandfather was on windjammers and he was climbing and sailing and everything,” so I went up. As I went up the deck got narrower and narrower and narrower and I got higher and higher. I got out on the yardarm to paint and I froze up and I looked down and I was just standing with my two feet on an iron, about a half inch iron bar on my feet and I was holding on with one hand and had the pot around my neck and I was trying to dip the brush in and do the painting.

And Trader Horn was down on the quarter deck, he looked like a little ant. He had his hands cupped and he said, “Gubbins get out further, further.” I said, “Further, further like hell mate, I am not getting out no further,” because the yardarm was getting thinner and thinner and thinner as you were getting further out

even if I hit the water I will get killed it was that high up. So he said, “I am telling you,” and he roared at me and everything and in the end he came up the mast and he said, “Give the thing here and come over here and get down,” so I went down and I got on the deck and he said, “When I tell you to get out you will get out and you will do what you are told.” I said, “Sir, you

cannot force me up the mast, I know that, I know my rights.” “Don’t you tell me your rights, you ain’t got no rights.” Anyway years later when I was a chief, now where was I? That’s right, I was with the last, just before I paid off. I was the chief petty officer with the torpedo anti-submarine school and

I was chief of the division and I was calling all the names out of all the young ODs there, a new batch had just come in, and I said, called them out, “Horn.” You don’t see that name much and then the old recollection come back, “Trader Horn, what a mongrel he was.” I said, “Horn.” “Yes sir.” I said, “Did you have a father in the navy.” “Oh yes sir

in fact they used to call him Trader Horn,” and the old eyes flared up and I was thinking, “What rotten job can I give you?” and I thought, “Can I hang him or whip him or can I put a cat-o’nine-tails on him or something like that?” And in the end I thought it wasn’t the kid’s fault that he has got him as a father, I said, “I remember your father well.” He said, “Great chief, what was he like?”

I said, here I was lying again, “He was a good seaman, he was a good man,” and that was the saga of Trader Horn. It’s funny, there is a saying “every dog has his day,” and sometimes it comes up. I remember when I was training at Newport in the destroyer school the mate and I went up to Canada and we went into a

bar there, we went up there on leave and we wanted to see the Follies Bergeres up there, it’s a big show, like they have in France in Paris, very good and anyway we’re drinking in the bar and there is a fellow with his wife, he used to be in the navy, he said, “Hey Shorty, what the hell are you doing here?” All those thousands of miles away from home, you drink one beer in a bar and someone knows you. Amazing isn’t it?

We used to call it Number Eleven jankers, the punishment that you would get. A chief could stop your leave, he had the power to stop your leave. He had a power that if you were deficient in your learnings or your school work or anything he could forcibly make you go to school of a night, instead of going down with the boys and doing things, going down to the pool and playing water

polo and something like that, you would have to attend school. People like Trader Horn, who was gunnery and they were disciplinarians, they were gunnery, they could say send him to the gunnery school for two hours between four and six. At 6 o’clock you would have to race like mad to get up and get your dinner otherwise you’d miss out and didn’t get fed that night. He would keep you down there for two hours down there. They could find that many

things for you to do, polishing, scrubbing, anything or just put a rifle in your hands and say, “Put that over your head and don’t drop it and keep it over your head and run down, you see that place right near the hospital, run round there and back and face me when you are finished.” He said, “And I said run didn’t I, not walk, not loiter, not crawl

run and they say that means fly.” Off you would go with the rifle over your head and you run and come back and your arms are nearly breaking and then there was lots of ways that they could discipline you and you took it and that is it.

Yes I did and they deserted but that

was very, very rare, very, very rare. We were in the gunnery school and we were doing four inch loading practice with projectiles in the four inch guns, twin four inch. And they are fixed ammunition and they would be yea high. They would be about what? Three, three and a half foot high and they are pretty heavy and they would weigh about sixty or seventy pounds. Now you’ve got to pick those up and you pick them up at an angle and you have got to punch them in with a pad up into the breeches and

it is very hard to do. I could do it because I was only small and wiry but I could do it, I was strong and I used to put it into the breech and the breech it hits the leaders as it goes in and the breech closes and then you fire and it ejects the empty shell. There was one kid in the whole team and he was a big bloke twice my size he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t lift the shell up and he couldn’t put it in so straight away

they would jump on him. The gunnery people would jump on him and when they blew a whistle whatever you did you just froze, whatever you did, if you were picking the shell up and they blew the whistle you just stood there, nobody moves. Then he goes round to this fellow and he said, “See that little bloke there, he is in your class, you know him, him, Gubbins.” He said, “He can pick one of those shells up and he can throw it into that breech and you can’t. Why

can’t you do it?” He said, “I don’t know.” “Two hours every night you will be down here for the next two weeks loading that gun with a shell until you can do it, do you get that?” “Yes sir.” The kid would be down there for two weeks banging shells in until he can do it. That is how they did things, they wouldn’t get away with it today but they did it then. When my father was in the navy, he went

in 1928. In 1928 it was like Nelson’s navy. If they could use the cat’o’nine tails and flog you they would have but they weren’t allowed to do it because flogging finished about 1860 or 1870 or something, corporal punishment with the whip. It was a hard life, sailoring was hard lives.

Very important, you always stuck by your mates, they were great, they were great and

we still do today. We got to each other’s place, we have reunions and it is a big deal, it is, it’s a big deal, it is like brothers, it is called a band of brothers, a band of brother.

A lot, we go to all the reunions. We go to all the reunions. We never miss Anzac Day marches and I go to all the

ceremonies and everything here and Butcher is coming out from the States and he is marching with me this year, he’ll be marching. When I march over there I wear my Legion cap over there and here I wear my navy cap when we march.

I am a full member of the American Legion.

Because I wanted to, because that is the Irish in me.

When I finished the pledge of allegiance to the British Queen, I said I would never ever do that again, ever. I pledge allegiance to my country, Australia and I will die for it but I won’t pledge allegiance to a foreign Queen. So I joined the American legion.

I think it is getting bigger and bigger all the time. I have only noticed and I have noticed in Australia, especially in Tamworth over the last ten or fifteen years it is getting enormous and we get such an input from the young people. My grandson marches with me every Anzac Day and he is very dedicated to it because he wears his grandfather’s medals and my other little grandson

he is only yea high, about seven and he wants to march now. They don’t march just for a bit of a fair or a circus arrangement or anything, they are real serious. Young Alex, he is serious. I took him to Ballina to the big reunion we had at Ballina and when we had the service down there in front of the memorial and they played the Last Post

Alex he is only seven stood straight as a die and saluted to the flag. We find it here, Anzac Day in Tamworth it is getting bigger, it is not getting smaller, it is getting bigger.

No never, never, never, never, never. It doesn’t matter whether it is a big war or a little war

or what kind of war anybody, if one person gets killed it is bad and that is how it is. I don’t think we would ever get that, I don’t think we’d ever get that. The First World War’s diggers they are finished, they have died out and I mean we can’t stop this, we’re just getting older. And the Second World War are dying at a terrific rate now, a terrific rate that they’re dying at

and they will be wiped out before long and that has only left the Korean veterans and the Vietnam veterans and we have got this follow up wars, we have Timor, we have Afghanistan and Iraq, the whole lot and it will go on, it will go on forever.

Why? I think because of the people that died. When you think of the amount of people that died

in such a short time, three and a half to four million people in three years, my goodness. You think to yourself, “What a carnage, what a waste.” Possibly it was all triggered off by one person, by Stalin and look at Hussein, he killed thousands of his own people with nerve gas to see if it worked. He wanted to see if it worked. They said, “Oh yeah,

we just killed three and a half thousand, it works.” “Oh great, we’ll buy some.”

I have no qualms whatsoever, whether we have National Service or whatever, that the young men of this country today would rally to the cause if need be. If their country was threatened, their way of life

was threatened, their sweethearts, their mothers, and sisters and brothers were threatened I would say ninety nine out of a hundred young men of this country would go in to fight for what they believe in. I don’t think pacifism, we have pacifists but we mustn’t look down on pacifists as they have their way of thinking, we have got ours. It is like turn the other cheek but most of us on our breeding and the way we are in

the countries that we came from in Europe we don’t turn the other cheek, “You hit me buddy, you get it back,” and I will hit you twice as hard, that is what it is. There is very few people, that the people that are pacifists well fair enough they have their rights and they have their way of thinking and that is fair enough.

I think it is good thing, they can do it in Israel. If the Jews can do it, it is great. Women have a lot to give

to their country and I think it’s good and they are very intelligent and they are good in all ways.

I can’t agree with that because I am an old sailor. It is something I can’t agree with that but that doesn’t put me down because men are men and boys are boys kind of business

and like having women in close proximity. The thing is on a ship you are living in each others bed type of business. It is too close and what happens is sailors wives and sweethearts are saying, “How many women have you got on that ship?” “Only fifty love.” I don’t know,

I might be old fashioned in that way and then the superstition, that sailors always reckoned that women were bad luck on a ship but that could be a lot of malarkey too but everyone to their own thoughts. There would be young modern sailors today it is great, they are good, they are very good at their job and it works. They are not my era so I say if that is so that is good, that is how I look at it.

I wouldn’t say no, never, never. If you think or say it does work and they are an asset to the life of that ship and the workings of that ship, fair enough, good, I will go all the way with you.

I would say this to young people today

when you go into the navy you are not just going in for two or three years as a job, because you have got no job. You have got to take it on as a career, it has got to be a career. Every job has to be a career. If you are happy to stand behind a counter in Macdonald’s or Hungry Jacks or something dishing out hamburgers, fair enough but if you want to learn something the navy

gives you so much opportunity and they have the best schools if you have any intelligence whatsoever they can teach you, they can train you and it is free. Three meals a day, medical, the whole lot and travel and it is there if you want to make it a career. They say, “Oh yes but the discipline you have got to do what you are told,” and a lot of kids don’t want to do what they are told, they want to do their own thing all the time.

You can’t do your own thing all the time, you are always accountable to somebody. There is always a boss above you. You just can’t walk into this world and say the world owes me a living, it doesn’t, you owe the world a living. Like John Kennedy, “Think what not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” And that is the whole set up. So I finish off there and rest my case.