Australians at War Film Archive

I sat for the naval exam for the naval college in southern Victoria in late 1938

and we went through a number of, quite a lot of boys sat in Western Australia for it and then they selected a number. I think it was about eight and took us over to South Australia to Adelaide, over the Trans train as it was then, where we did an interview with naval officers. It was a board that interviewed us.

And we did medical examinations of a high order and then they gave us a final medical exam and special eye test and all the rest of it and then they made their selections. This was going on of course all over Australia. But of course the entry was extremely small. Although the war was coming up and so they’d increased it. So there were 21 taken from the whole of Australia.

And there were two of us selected from Western Australia. One of them was just temporarily in the west with his father who was an army officer and then we were– I was the only one who was still in the west and my parents had to sign various forms and I was given a ticket to report in

Melbourne and that I'd be met when the train eventually got to Melbourne. Well, that was very wishful thinking. I was 13 and I was a country boy, so I hadn’t in fact of course seen electric trains or even street lights, even traffic lights of anything of that order.

Arriving as I eventually did in the middle of Melbourne, some days later, I think it was about three days later, it was a terrible shock to see the overhead transmission lines, electric trains, Spencer Street train station which I shall never forget. And there was nobody there to meet me.

Yes, that was an exciting experience.

What happened of course was things got extremely serious in the beginning of 1942, by which time I was in the senior year at the naval college. I was then the chief cadet captain

of the college and they told us that they were going to move the naval college and we were all going to sea early. So we were sent to sea in August 1942 which was really a very crucial time of the war. It was just as the sort of tide was about turning, but it looked the blackest days at the same time.

It was before the– It was after the Coral Sea and after the Midway, which was the crucial battle at sea, but it was before we began the thrust north and before the change of the scene in Europe because El Alamein was just about that time and Stalingrad and so on. We were sent off to sea early

as cadet midshipman and one of the most proudest promotions I ever had was some months later when we were granted our midshipman patches. We went to sea first of all, I joined the, only really for passage, for about a week, the armed merchant cruiser HMAS Westralia, which had been employed in anti-raider operations at convoy work, which was a converted merchant ship. Had been a passenger ship on the

coastal run, because of course the only connections between for instance Western Australia and the east was the railway, there was no road across the continent until the middle of World War II and passenger ships were the order of the day. And we were in her and we went up, and the flagship of the RAN [Royal Australian Navy], the heavy cruiser [HMAS] Australia, came into

Brisbane where we joined her. My term was split in half. We were in fact all to go to the Westralia and the [HMAS] Canberra but while we were waiting to join the Westralia, the Canberra was sunk in the Battle of Savo Island in the Solomons. So that half of the term was sent off to Britain to join British ships all over the place. But we stayed with the Royal Australian Navy and I joined HMAS Australia then

in, it would have been August ’42, perhaps beginning of September. Yes, the 22 of August 1942.

We served until the beginning of 1944 in the Australia with the exception

of about four months in HMAS Warramunga which was a new travel-class destroyer built here in Sydney.

We were operating in the Coral Sea almost entirely and in the Solomons and then in New Guinea in the push north. We were involved in the first pushes north after the Milne Bay action which took place about this

time. We were eventually moved into Milne Bay which became a huge allied base. There would be 50 or 60 merchant ships in there tied up to the palm trees alongside and we came in with Task Force 44 which consisted of the heavy cruiser Australia, American light cruisers, two of them usually the [USS] Phoenix and the [USS] Nashville

and later the [USS] Boise and we had American destroyers and we had the Australian cruiser [HMAS] Hobart. Two Australian cruisers, two or three American cruisers all under the command of the admiral commanding Australian fleet, or squadron as it then was, which was Vice Admiral Crutchley. He was a Royal Navy officer

who’d got the Victoria Cross, very very rare in the navy and also he held the Distinguished Service Cross which I think he got as a midshipman in the boats landing at Gallipoli. He was a very famous man. And our captain of course on the Australia was Captain Farncomb. Very famous naval captain and in the

Warramunga was Commander Dechaineux, who eventually was killed as the captain of the Australia.

In the beginning of 1944, we'd done our exams and things and we were sent off to go to Britain. We went by

merchant ship, non-stop, unescorted, blue funnel, cargo ship, a new one. We went non-stop from Bluff in New Zealand to Panama and then up through to Britain. Apart from being diverted at the Bay of Biscay to avoid the wolf packs,

the U-boat wolf packs, which concerned us a lot, because we were young naval officers and we were employed on the guns and the antisubmarine sonar set which she carried and on the bridge of this ship to assist the captain and his merchant navy officers. We were very concerned at being diverted into the Bay of Biscay but it all worked out alright. It got to Britain where we were introduced immediately

to first class air raids which was exceedingly exciting and somewhat disturbing in London. But you asked about the time in the Australia and the Warramunga. And this was where largely of course, the task force 44 which later became Task Force 74,

they renamed it with the 7th Fleet. This combined American-Australian task force was the one that held the Coral Sea so if the Japanese did thrust south through the Jomard Passage, we would be the force which would deal with it or if they tried to get round the corner of New Guinea by Milne Bay, past Samarai Island

through the China Straits we would have been the force to deal with it, and every now and again when the Americans suffered particularly heavy losses in their naval battles in the Solomons we were called over to fill the gap during which time of course, the cruiser Hobart was torpedoed and Australia was then down to one heavy cruiser, because the Canberra had been sunk, and one old

cruiser HMAS Adelaide which had been put on convoy work. And the navy of course was quite horrified when we - I was in the Warramunga when it happened and we even brought the Hobart back to Sydney. There was an explosion on board which involved, I think one of the dock yard workers was killed, but the dock yard declared the ship black. This is at the height of the war.

These are things which the navy was very bitter about and the government of the day did nothing to demand that the ship be repaired immediately. These were some of the really, the things the navy was very bitter about, as were the other armed forces. The army had to be put in, on occasion to

load ships because there were strikes. And we had a government which took no action and when we were at the height of the war so, there are some myths about which need adjustment in our history.

No. After getting to England we went all over to various naval establishments doing various courses in anti-submarine warfare, in gunnery, in torpedos,

in navigation, and in flying. We did a flying course up in Scotland to see who would be suitable and who would like to go into the air – Fleet Air Arm. And we did all sorts of courses at that time. Gas warfare and all sorts of things. These courses took place just before the invasion of France

And in London when we were at the Royal Navy College in Greenwich, it was the start of the heavy V2 and V1 [Vergeltungswaffe – retaliation weapon], particularly the V1 flying bomb raids at day and night. Mostly initially daytime, but with bombers at night, but then eventually they were flying V1s, some aircraft up the Thames which came right past us and

that was a very exciting time. And similarly on the south coast, all this was going on. People imagine, or perhaps they don’t imagine, but the air raids carried on in Britain right up to the end of the war and of course at this stage the Germans were trying to disrupt the organisations for the invasion and

at one stage, one course we were on had a battalion of a thousand sailors and one of our duties was to be one, in fact be in charge of this battalion which was anti-parachutist because they expected that parachutists would descend in almost suicidal missions to disrupt the invasion. And I had a brother then who had left Australia before the war and was in the Royal

Air Force and one of the remarkable things was he was posted by the Royal Air Force just to the next air station where I was doing my naval course at a place called Shoreham in the south of England, so I used to fly with him occasionally if I was off over the [English] Channel. It was

of course a remarkable sight to see what was happening. He was involved at that stage in air-sea rescue of, in fact I was in his mess one day when the alarm went and they rushed to get in their aircraft to rescue the 500th airman from the Channel, so that was really quite an indication of the immense air losses which were going on.

I was quite keen to go into the Fleet Air Arm, but I didn’t, I decided I preferred gunnery for a number of reasons, but after the courses I was sent to join a transport in the north of Scotland, which I did. We then went in a convoy to the Mediterranean

where I was initially in Naples, quartered in a castle which was exciting. Dingy - hadn’t been cleaned since it was built in 1415 and then I was put on another transport and sent to a ship in Alexandria and we went in a convoy to Alexandria, then I joined HMS Kimberley there. I'd been quartered in

great luxury in a hotel to start with, in the Union Club just after, and then I was quartered in the Ras el-Tin Lighthouse. I'd never lived in a lighthouse before and that was exciting itself. I had to almost sleep curled up because there was just a palliasse up on the deck near the light and then I joined the destroyer HMAS Kimberley. And we operated against the Germans in the

Dodecanese [Islands] and in Greece and we operated against– I was in boarding parties in, in charge of a boarding party in an ML, a motor launch, which were used to intercept kites and boarded them and, to stop the gun running which was going on from the German held

islands to the mainland where we were engaged then with the ELAS and the ELAM, the communist insurgency which broke out as the Germans retreated and we took over [ELAS - Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos, and ELAM - Greek Communist partisan groups.]. It was a very brutal civil war between the Monarchists and this communist element.

The Soviets were endeavouring to make certain that Greece fell on their side of the coming Iron Curtain and the British were equally determined that Greece would be on the western side. Even at that stage it was fairly clear that it was likely that the

Russians would not be all that friendly when the war finished, even though we were allies while the war went on.

Yes. We took the last surrender in World War II in Europe of the general who commanded, the Germans had quite a large force, about 40,000 soldiers still. A tiny little

air element which was largely Fieseler Storch, small aircraft and they had equipped a number of their ships that they laid their hands on with heavy guns to try and stop us. And they had of course mined virtually all the Aegean passages north up to the Dardanelles.

So we had considerable trouble with mine fields and they had big gun batteries on a number of the islands in the Aegean. The Aegean of course, was extremely important strategically because if we had been able to get through and Turkey come into the war, which she did, about two months before the war finished,

then we could put shipping through and support the Russian armies with supplies which would be much easier for the southern front of Russia than the terrible convoy work round the Arctic. So as well as, of course, there was the road through Persia by that time, but never the less, the getting of shipping through the Straits, if Turkey came in, to help the Soviet southern armies would have been

a very great thing to do and in fact, just before the war finished, the last few weeks, we went up to meet the first Soviet ship that came through. We went up to the edge of Dardanelles to meet her. They’d cleared a passage through the mine fields. Our role on the whole in HMS Kimberley was to patrol in the middle of the Greek Islands,

which itself was–

Yes.

The Royal Navy was full of Australian officers and this story has hardly been told. There were some hundreds. I think something like a quarter or a third of the antisubmarine officers in the Battle of the Atlantic were Australian officers trained here at Rushcutter for instance. Most British ships had Australian officers as did most of our Australian ships have British officers in them as well.

When the war finished and I was then made the navigator of this destroyer, we went back to Britain and the ship paid off and I was then posted by the Royal Navy to join the British Pacific Fleet, which meant coming back to Australia, because it was based in Sydney. So I was put in a transport.

The most terrible journey back to Australia because there were 4000 sailors in this small ship, which were reinforcements. No women at all. These sailors were reinforcements for the British Pacific Fleet and most of them had a terrible war. Some of them had been sunk several times. All the rest of it. And they just wanted to be demobbed and get on with peace in Britain. They didn’t want to go and fight the Japanese.

That was a terrible journey. Then we got out here and there were too many officers waiting for the British fleet, so I went along to our Australian authorities and it was arranged for me to come back to the RAN which was short. So then I joined the tribal class destroyer HMAS Bataan. The war had finished just before we

got to Australia. The nuclear bombs had been dropped and the American and British fleets were bombarding the coast of Japan and it was all over before the bombs were dropped. But that was a very– That was the culmination which convinced the Japanese to stop. And then I was in this destroyer, the Bataan for a couple of years in the occupation of Japan. Then I was sent

to the HMAS Swan, a sloop, which was in charge of the mine sweeping squadron, the 13th Minesweeping Flotilla, I think it was, which was employed in sweeping the mines in the mine fields of the Great Barrier Reef, where we’d mined it during the war, all the passages except a couple, which we used, which were secret. This enabled of course, the ships to use inside the Barrier

Reef without escort, because the Japanese couldn’t really get in. And they would be in terrible trouble if they did. And then after that I was put in command of a little mine sweeper, which was a magnetic one. I think it was the first. There were just two little ships which we converted here in Sydney and we took them. We only had one foot six freeboard. It was

rather dicey old business. But we had to go from here to Kavieng in New Ireland to clean up the Japanese and American mines in New Ireland and in the Northern Solomons.

That was my first command. GPV-963. We had a crew of six, a steamy and we had 20, for mine sweeping we got extra sailors from the Swan.

We nearly sank in the Coral Sea actually, in the great storm there. We were more underwater than above.

After the GPV963 I was posted suddenly– They got all the names mixed up because there were lots of Robertsons in the navy and we had similar initials. They posted the wrong fellow

and suddenly discovered I was, they thought I was in one of the other ships and they got the initials mixed up. Then they discovered I was in Kavieng, sweeping up mines. This was a rather difficult thing to get me from there to England. Anyway eventually a flying boat arrived among the island and popped me in it, a Catalina and I eventually got to the long gunnery course in England

which was one and a quarter years starting at the Royal Naval college in Greenwich then at Portsmouth in HMS Exmouth. I qualified in the end as a gunnery officer, a specialist gunnery officer. Came back from there and went to the gunnery school at Flinders naval depot for a year and I was one of two specialist gunnery officers there

and I was sent to– I used to do of course, the training of about a thousand fellows a year we trained through the gunnery school and I did much of the ceremonial in Melbourne and there was a lot in those days. And then I did the trials of the new HMAS Anzac, which was one of two new destroyers being built, battle class

destroyers, [HMAS] Tobruk and the Anzac being built. They were extremely advanced technologically. I’ll tell you about that later. It was an enormous leap. Probably one of the biggest leaps we've ever done was the building of those ships. Getting them going. Then I was posted as its gunnery officer and then as soon as we got the ship, well, in a reasonable

state we were sent straight to the Korean War. So I was in her for– We were up there a couple of months to three months and came back and got the rest of our armament, because we hadn’t got all our armament before we went and then we went back again. And then I was posted to the carrier [HMAS] Sydney and she went to the coronation.

I trained up the coronation contingent and the street lining party. About 120 sailors were manning the Mall in the coronation and I was one of the officers for that. We did that. Fairly interesting cruise and then– That itself was quite a saga, with the coronation.

Having a line of Victoria Cross winners chipping on the flight deck was something not often occurred in history. And we had of course, the navy’s George Cross winners on board. Very fine men. And then we came back from that. Went back up to the Korean War and this was in the final stages when they stopped the shooting but they hadn’t agreed on an armistice. Or at least they hadn’t agreed on any

long-term arrangements. So we were ready to go and I was in the carrier Sydney, I was the gunnery officer there. Which was, the gunnery officer was responsible for the air armament as well and for the bombs and the efficiency of the aircraft in bombing and gunnery. And then from the Sydney I suddenly found myself posted back to London, on the

staff of the RAN liaison officer who was the head Australian naval representative in London. Which one of the most interesting things I've ever done. I was the only seaman officer on the staff. We had the [HMAS] Melbourne, the new carrier building up in Barrow and we had the tanker, the [RFA] Tide Austral, which became eventually HMAS Supply

building in Belfast. We had HMAS Queenborough to take part in exercise if we could get her in, which we managed to do, and we had a great number of people training all over the place. And a huge equipment program too, so it was a very exciting and busy time. With the trials of these ships and then after that

I did the naval staff course at Greenwich for six months and that again was an interesting time because Suez broke out it the middle of it and lots of officers had been told, what was called the dry list, suddenly found themselves, they were not going to go to sea again, were suddenly given five hours notice to get out of the place and pull landing ships out of reserve and

be in command again at sea.

No, because I was Royal Australian Navy and by this time we were not seconded to the Royal Navy. And then I came back to Australia and went on the staff at the naval headquarters as the gunnery officer on the staff for training and for new construction and for the staff requirements

of the navy. And everything involved in the gunnery navy. That was at Melbourne in the naval headquarters there. Then after that I got sent then to, I got promoted and I got sent in command of HMAS Quickmatch. HMAS Quickmatch

was a Q-class destroyer from World War II which had been in the RAN, had done much service, more in the Indian Ocean, not the Pacific so much and the Quickmatch had been converted into a, what they called a fast antisubmarine frigate. She had been equipped with the new big antisubmarine squid missiles, squid system.

Limbo system I should say, which fired large projectiles over the mast ahead of the ship about a thousand yards. Very big they were and very powerful. Had six of those and very good antisubmarine sonar equipment. So I was in command of her for 18 months and

then I was posted from there to be on exchange with the Royal Navy again and I was sent up to Singapore without any accommodation and I had a little family of two and a half children by this time and that wasn’t very easy because there were no real estate agents anywhere. It was a terrible time because Dr Sukarno was coming up

the Strait and building up a great military power in Indonesia and the Royal Navy put me in as their naval planner on the staff of the British defence coordination committee which was the top body in the British command system in the Far East,

which was based in Singapore. But included Hong Kong, North Borneo, Sarawak, Brunei, Singapore and as it was then, Malaya. And of course, the British forces were very powerful then. The navy was their biggest fleet based on aircraft carriers and we of course, Australia

provided always as least two destroyers and the Melbourne had a group that would come up every year as well. And the New Zealanders provided a frigate. And the Royal Navy itself was a very powerful force including commandos based in, eventually in the old carrier [HMS] Bulwark and the [HMS] Centaur and the army had a very powerful force there and

so did, of course, the Royal Air Force. That was a very tense time because Indonesia of course, had taken over West Papua and the Russians were very much in Indonesia building up the Indonesian forces. They had very modern equipment

with Russian technicians to teach them how to operate it. The political side was extremely tense and very worrying, so that was an interesting time. At the same time Malaysia was about to be formed by the British. Independence was coming for Malaya and for Singapore and the whole scene was beginning to change.

When that finished I was sent to the flagship HMAS Melbourne as the fleet operations officer in charge of operations under the admiral and we took part in the SEATO [South East Asia Treaty Organisation] set up in the Far East. At that stage

Australia had a very powerful naval force based on the Melbourne with the latest aircraft and with new destroyers, the [(UNCLEAR)] class and very good anti-submarine frigates, Deane class frigates coming on stream and in the great SEATO exercise, it was interesting, although there were six or seven nations involved in SEATO,

The only nations which were allowed to run the big naval exercises were of course, America and Britain and Australia and so this is a very interesting time. They were very big exercises in other people’s countries that were run, using other people’s resources, and all done from the Australian flagship.

Yes. This is 1962.

we’re talking about.

Then they changed the command system a little, and I was occasionally in the Sydney doing the same job, but rather divorced from the Melbourne, then back in the Melbourne again for the big exercises. That went on until 1964 and

In the beginning of ’64 I was sent as the director of manning and training in navy office in Canberra which is responsible for the navy’s sailor manpower. What we needed, all the training, all the posting of the sailors, discharge, the enlisting. That was a period of immense expansion of the navy, for three years I was in that job. Very interesting difficult time for the navy. As usual it was short of all sorts of people but we had to produce guided missile ships and they were American ones with complete new equipment which we'd never seen before. Up to that stage the RAN was a British navy on British equipment and that was a sea change because they had to change the manpower structure of the navy and we had to change our training methods and our equipment.

Just to finish that manpower job, the government was trying to expand the armed forces as fast as possible because it looked a very serious international situation and we were invited to introduce submarines which we hadn’t been in for 20 odd years and that, at the same time, tankers and patrol boats, so it was tremendous period of

expansion and change. Then when that finished I was taken out of there after about three years and sent to command the frigate squadron with HMAS Yarra and we were– in that time, of course, the Vietnam War was going on and we were mostly employed

we went north in the Yarra in the strategic reserve based in Singapore under British command, but then we were hauled out to escort the Sydney into Vung Tau. Had to do certain intelligence work and escort her in and look after her while we were there and then bring her out again. So we did that sort of thing. That was in the Yarra. The same time

we were developing the digital Ikara system, which was the most advanced antisubmarine system probably in the any navy, using British sonars, Australian designed and built. The Ikara system which the British took on and the American navy would like to have taken on, we suspected, but there were problems of where it was built, things in those days.

Then after command of the Yarra, I was sent as captain trials and superintendent of the RAN experimental laboratory. That meant I ran the trials of all the new ships of the navy which were coming in. Patrol boats, all sorts of things. Frigates, everything. And I was also the superintendent of the experimental laboratory with all the scientists, which was

looking into future developments, particularly antisubmarine but not in that field alone. That was interesting, but it was only for a comparatively short time because they reorganised the department of defence and I was sent up to the department of defence as the leader of the joint policy staff, which was a little staff of navy,

that was me, army, air force, one of each, a Foreign Affairs and a Defence representative that did the policy for defence, the higher defence policy. That was three years and then I was sent to the Royal College of Defence Studies in London for a year and did that and I came back and commanded HMAS Sydney, the old aircraft carrier which I'd been in before,

which by this time was more of a troop transport. And I also had the first Australian training squadron which was the ships which were then allocated for training, as well as the Sydney. We developed the Sydney into an amphibious attack ship in a way. We were on the way to doing it. We took a battalion to New Zealand with helicopters and

supported them there and brought them back. That was the sort of first since World War II where we'd really got back in the game of supporting the army. Then I went up to navy office for a short period when the Sydney was paid off quickly as the director general of personal services, looking after

all the personal services of the navy, but only for a very short time and I went to command the naval air station at HMAS Albatross. That was in 1974 and I was there until 1976. I was promoted from there– not really a promotion. They introduced the rank of commodore and the senior captains

were made commodores and I went then as director general of naval operations and plans in the naval headquarters in Canberra. From there I was sent over to London as the head, as a rear admiral, as the head of Australian defence staff and the defence advisor to the high commission responsible for all our defence activities

with Britain and effectively with Europe. From there I came back and went as the naval support commander of the naval controller of shipping in Sydney in Botany Bay and the naval support commander, naval support all over Australia and from there I retired.

It probably affected me quite a lot because we started off in 1927, my father

who had been in World War I in a Scots Regiment, he was one of the ‘old contemptibles’ [nickname for the British Regular Army], in the first initial landing just before the Battle of Mons in August 1914 and he was wounded three times in World War I. Then he transferred to the Indian army and he was an officer in the Indian army for a few years then he decided to migrate to Australia

with four kids. We went inland in Western Australia on a soldier’s settler’s block, which was very very remote and we hadn’t a vehicle of any sort. Everybody depended on horses and we were a long way from any where and then the Depression struck. It was a terrible tough existence, but it also meant that we were very much to ourselves

in that remote area. We lived then outside Perth in a small mixed farm and then I was in the navy which was very much part of the Royal Navy. We were absolutely interchangeable all the way up in those days. And the Royal Navy influence is very strong

indeed and all officers of the permanent navy trained in Britain and so there were - and you had to understand that the British admiralty, in the wartime the RAN transferred over the control effectively, of the Royal Navy, even though it was run locally in the worldwide

disposition of British naval power. It wasn’t until the Americans came in that the command changed somewhat and eventually of course, it changed altogether. I would say in those days, and of course, Western Australia was very isolated. It looked to the Indian Ocean

and it looked to India and Britain and was much more maritime even though it’s a huge land area, all the people virtually, except those in Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie and a few inland towns, it had a very maritime outlook. It depended almost entirely on the sea for its communications and support, so

it was probably rather different to the rest of Australia.

Yes. I was only about six.

My mother was– I had a great grandfather who was an admiral in the British fleet, through my mother’s side and my mother was very– My father was army and I had a brother in the air force and my mother was very keen on what went on in maritime affairs

and she took me down to, the first ship I ever went on board was the German cruiser [DM] Cologne which came out in 1935 or something like that. And very soon afterwards the cruiser Sydney arrived and she took me and this was quite a journey to do to the Sydney, which was a very

interesting experience for me. And I suppose all those things combined. But I suppose the biggest effect was the little– I was sent to a little school in Kalamunda called Kalamunda State School which the headmaster, a Doctor Miller, was a remarkable Scotsman, a great teacher

and he had a very great reputation and he and his daughter were the only two teachers in this school. They taught everything up to what we now call HSC [higher school certificate] level which was then in Western Australia called the leaving certificate. Right from kindergarten, literally, up. Just the two of them. This little school, he was very keen on the

navy and his eldest son who became a commodore in the RAN was the only one taken from Western Australia and it became a tradition in this school. He wouldn’t let anybody sit the exam unless he thought they were adequate for the Royal Australian Navy. He was a very strong personality. I was the second one to go in. I went in with his second son

who unfortunately– he was a brilliant man, he failed at his last medical exam, over a silly thing which nowadays would be considered ridiculous, but he then went into Duntroon and he became Dr T. B. Miller who set up at the ANU [Australian National University], strategic studies centre. I've forgotten what it was

called then. He started Radford College in Canberra and he became eventually the head of the Australian studies chair of King’s College in London. He and I had gone for the naval exam together. There was another officer followed to the naval college the year after me, then there was another one

who became Admiral Stevens who lives nearby here. There was another one who went into the navy who was killed as a pilot from the Sydney in the Korean War. Then when the headmaster died or retired, I don’t think there were many more after that.

Kalamunda was a little town then, on the top of the Darling Ranges and it had a railway of course, which had a famous zigzag railway. Went up the side of the hills and the railway went on to a place called Traralgon where they used to get all the jarrah and that was the main thing, carrying this jarrah timber down to Fremantle by the railway. It was a little place, it’s now

quite large and my old school is now the museum.

I don’t think, today Australia is so affluent they have very little idea of how tough it was. We had

emaciated old fellows, I used to think they were old, they were probably very much younger than I am now, who’d been picking apples in the south west of Western Australia and they would then, on foot, with their Matilda on their back, would trek north looking for work or food and we'd have them coming emaciated.

One of them died one night at home. But I don’t think people realised how tough it was.

My mother

had a tent– These fellows would arrive and my mother had a tent at the back of the, call it a house I suppose that we lived in, because we had to clear the land

and try and make a go and plant the crops and burn the timber. We had a mailman who bought whatever fresh vegetables or so-called, they were already about a week old. Once a month he came with the mail. These people would arrive and my mother would put them up in the tent at the back for the night.

And they’d do anything for a feed. It was a very tough thing. When we moved down to the Perth area, we first of all went to– Everybody walked off. Everybody. There was virtually nobody left because it was impossible there. If you did get a crop,

if you didn’t have a drought or a flood or something, the dust storms or the heat was tremendous, the prices were not as much as it cost you to put it in. So everybody was broke and it was an utter disaster in Western Australia, inland. When we moved down there was a little town below us and

lots of people lived in houses which were made of kerosene tins which were cut to give you a bit of metal. You can spread them out and make a thing out of it. And hessian bags which were wheat bags and bush poles to put it up. Now we live in such an affluent society, I don’t think people have any idea of how in

the, well, that wasn’t the early days, that was the 1920s. And of course, in Western Australia there were a lot of native tribes then who had never seen white people and if you were on the outskirts it was a bit concerning still. There were still people being speared and of course, we didn’t speak their language and they didn’t speak ours and

people were frightened. That’s often forgotten. Those were realities then. There was no threat in fact, but people were worried because occasional things did occur.

As a person? Australian. There were a lot of British immigrants. In the Depression of course, there was considerable feeling against migrants because there was a feeling they were taking the jobs from the native born Australians. When I say

native born, I mean people born in Australia. Indeed, the little school we went to for a while in Perth there were mobs of kids who used to stone us on the way home, which is rather frightening. Things like that used to happen. But there were a tremendous number of people who had been born in the British Isles. I think it was probably in those

days, the majority.

Not a great deal I suppose. I learnt more about my father’s history in later life. I knew that he'd been

wounded and he'd been in these various things in World War I, but World War I was very close you see. This was only 1927. That’s only nine years after World War I so in Perth, the lifts in those days were all driven by men and they usually hadn’t got any legs or got one leg. Virtually all the lifts. All these sorts of jobs were done by the wounded

soldiers from World War I. So it was very close and very much present. Our next door neighbour had been, he was in the AIF [Australian Imperial Force], and he'd been badly gassed. It was very very close in time. It’s like looking back to

1994. It’s just round the corner, isn’t it? The place was full of wounded soldiers and tremendous proportion of the population either had their son or husband been in World War I or they had been. It was a very different atmosphere. And it was very much of course, part of the

British empire, so you considered yourself very much West Australian, but it was, the empire was so close then, which it isn’t of course, today and the empire’s finished and so on, but everybody considered themselves as British, but they were Australians. And in particular, a place like Western Australia you were west Australian because when I was

a little boy the referendum that was held as to whether Western Australia should secede and I remember my parents talking about this and thinking it would be a terrible thing if Western Australian seceded, but an awful lot of people in Western Australian thought it ought to secede. And if I remember rightly, the referendum was passed to secede from the commonwealth about 1930 is I think. And it was overruled by the Privy Council. I think that’s right.

The feeling in the west was very much, those eastern staters. They just buy up our firms and close them down. There was a very strong Western Australia identity. We felt ourselves Western Australia but we felt we ought to remain part of Australia as a family.

I think it affected him a lot. He'd been in the thick of the fighting at Mons and Ypres and in the Somme and virtually all his friends had been killed around him. He had almost nobody left that he knew. In later life I used to say to him, “I bet your soldiers were glad that you were the company commander, because you knew the rat races

and how to survive.” It must have been a terrible carnage that we can’t believe now. Today everybody– the press is full of a few people getting knocked off each day in Iraq. That’s absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. He told me in his old age that when they attacked the Somme, his army corps, in the first half hour, had 43,000 casualties.

That’s not killed, but it’s still probably 15,000 killed as they went over the top. Division after division going straight into machine gun fire.

I think there were great strains because there were great hardships.

My mother had moved from a very social, I suppose privileged background in London, to chopping wood and skinning rabbits and trying to exist in the backblocks of Western Australia. This was a

very big thing. My father of course, had gone through World War I and I'm sure he was considerably affected by that experience. It was a very very tough life. And they had the problem of educating their children and–

We weren’t alone. There was family after family just the same situation and a lot worse. It probably affected our lives to a considerable extent, but we as children had a very country life as children. We used to have to go out and get the supper, otherwise we wouldn’t eat. So we had to go out and catch rabbits. We had a very good dog who

helped and I helped my sisters and we pushed them into logs and catched them.

I was very close.

It was obvious to my parents that a war was coming up and I remember from a very early age that when Mussolini moved into Abyssinia and when the Japanese moved into Manchuria, and then into China,

and Hitler moved into the Sudetenland and then into of course, Austria and eventually Czechoslovakia and finally World War II and it was obvious to my father that war was inevitable and he was in the Australian army reserve and my brother had gone away in

the merchant navy, again, the merchant shipping around Australia was virtually all British and he joined an Alfred Holt ship which was the Blue Funnel Line. It was clear that war would come because the approach of the British empire and France to

the rise of the dictatorships in Italy and Germany and perhaps in Spain was such, and the rise of communism in the Soviet Union, where totalitarian organisations which were just going to steam-roller over everything. And so

the mood really was that it was going to happen.

The attitude was very different then. The attitude, at least my family was different and a lot of other families, otherwise we wouldn’t have all been in it, was rather the reverse. If it’s going to be war, you better be trained.

Otherwise if you shield your kids they were going untrained and they would be in the first pit. And so the attitude was its much better that you train and prepare for war if it’s obviously going to come up. And you just hope it won’t. There’s an old saying that is a very powerful one, that ‘in time of peace, prepare for war and then you might not have one.’

I understood it very well, because

my parents used to talk about these things and if democracy was going to survive. After all, you look at Europe at that time. There was no democracy in– France was a new democracy, relatively, after the Napoleonic and later Napoleonic era. Italy was not a democracy. Germany was not a democracy. Spain was not a democracy.

Okay, a couple of Scandinavian countries, but the only democratic power in Europe, real power, was Britain. And this applied around the world. Japan was a dictatorship. There was no democracy really, outside Britain and America and the associated countries. There were lots of empires which were run. The French were democratic.

The Czechs were democratic. There was very little democracy. It’s spread since World War II in a big way. And it was clear that these ideologies must be confrontations, because, on the one side, the communists set-up, which was highly

centralised, was determined to spread communism. And it was quite strong in Australia, quite strong. And in Britain and communism was thought to be a great– And it is ideologically a– But the way it was aimed to be controlled was obviously going to be a clash with democracy.

We first of all had to be, from our schools– I imagine, it was certainly in our school, you just couldn’t sit unless the headmaster said, “Yep. You’re good enough. Better swat up on this and swat up on that.” Which we did. And the first thing was an exam, an educational exam. If you passed that, then it was a selection process with an interview

to see if you looked as if you'd be– Before that, a medical exam. Half of those were not medically right. And the standards were terribly high. Ridiculously high. And then the next thing was an interview where they cut it right down to a handful and the next thing after the interview was another medical exam, which was the final one. And then

you were in.

I was very fortunate because I'd sat another exam for a scholarship to a very fine school, Guildford Grammar School in Western Australia, which I had won the scholarship and the news came, all in the same fortnight, that I had also got into the navy.

So I had to decide between the two streams I'd go to. There was no doubt in my mind what I should do.

Yes. I discussed it all and it was a decision that had to be made. There were pros and cons, but I like an awful lot of others, would rather go and train than just be gun fodder.

I joined the naval college at the end of January 1939. This is eight months before the war started.

No, I was just given a ticket. There

was only one naval officer in Western Australia I think. He was the naval officer in Perth. He might have had one sailor to help him. He saw me off and said “You’ll be met in Melbourne.” I sat in the train for four days, whatever it was, changed trains in Port Pirie, changed trains in Adelaide. Sat in a park in Adelaide for a day.

Caught the train at night. Sounds easy now. It wasn’t then, because I'd never done this.

Oh, yes. Sheer terror at the end of it, as to what lay ahead.

The unknown, I suppose. It was even worse when I got there, because I was terribly train sick by this time.

I'd been terribly sick and there was nobody there who looked anything like a sailor, you see. And I just sat at the railway station and sat on a seat and there were sparrows. Very vivid this, because I was feeling terrible and I'd never seen a sparrow because we didn’t have them in Western Australia. We used to, if a sparrow got loose in Western Australia then there was a, I think

you got some bounty of five shillings which was a lot of money then, if you shot a sparrow, which was a lot of money then if you shot a sparrow. Because they didn’t want them in the west. And the sparrows were everywhere. They were great and then a lady from the travellers’ aid they used to have. She came along and said, “Young man, you've been sitting here for half an hour.” I looked a pretty country sort of fellow. I had a topi. Do you know the topis we used to wear the school in Western Australia? The old British helmet, pith helmet.

Shorts. I was as brown as a berry and she said, “You’ve been sitting here a long time.” I said, “Yes.” She said, “What are you here for?” I said, “I’m joining the navy.” And she said, “You’re not.” And I said, “Yes, I am.” Where have you come from? “I've come from Western Australia.” She thought that was like, you know, coming from Afghanistan or somewhere. So she said, “I’ll try and find somebody who might know what you’re to do.”

So she went off, she didn’t know what to... And then the other little fellow who had sat the exam with me in Western Australia suddenly appeared on the platform. And he said, “I've been meeting the trains from Western Australia for the last three weeks. I can’t find anybody from the navy either and I want to know where to get my uniform and I thought somebody might meet you.” And so we went off together. That was great. He'd been a friend for life.

He said he'd seen a sailor wandering around at the Victoria Barracks which happened to be where the naval headquarters were. Very small in those days. Lots of people at sea. Lots of ships and things, but very little ashore. So we went round there, where somebody I thought was an admiral met us eventually. Some soldier went and found a sailor. He came along. In fact he turned out to be a writer which was fairly

low level administrative personnel and he said, “You've come on the wrong day. Come back tomorrow.” So that was the problem. Anyway I eventually said, “I haven’t got any money. I don’t know where to go.” So they fixed me up and I stayed in a hotel in Melbourne, which was an experience. I'd never been in a hotel before, so that was

an experience itself.

I wasn’t sent off. The navy of course, was one of the few avenues then,

where not only did you an excellent education and training, but you were able to see the world and get away from Western Australia. there were other ways of doing it, but it wasn’t as it is today where people just jump in aeroplanes and have their holidays all over the world and have jobs all over the world. It required a considerable amount of money to

get in a ship and go to the United Kingdom or the eastern states or somewhere. Very few people could do it, so the navy was an avenue of development of the youth concerned, of broadening their education and their life and their knowledge of the world and their ability to travel and meet

people and everything else. I wasn’t sent into the navy. I wanted to go into the navy, but it was a different attitude then as you can see by the number of people who joined the Australian AIF and the navy and the air force as soon as war occurred.

She was all for it.

So was my father.

My brother was already in the Royal Air Force. He'd left Western Australia because RAF was minute and he'd been in the British merchant marine for some years and while he went to Britain in ships

he joined the Royal Air Force. I don’t know what he thought. I don’t know what my sisters thought. It really wasn’t terribly important. It was what my parents thought. What I thought, being a selfish sort of citizen.

We had to report next morning at a certain hour and the mother of this dear friend of mine picked me up and took me there to the room where we all met and in came all the boys from all the other states. I was a very odd man out because nearly all of them had

pork pie hats and suits from schools in New South Wales and Victoria and Queensland. I was in shorts and open-necked shirt and short sleeves and a topi and nobody had seen before I don’t think, but we used to wear to school in Western Australia. And I was brown as a berry and they were all in natty gents

suiting with hats and ties, so I looked a bit strange. Nobody spoke to me to start with. One fellow came over eventually and said, I was looking out the window and he said, “Nice day?” and I said, “Yes. Nice day.” He said, “Oh, you speak English?”

He wasn’t a friend. I just met him at the exam, that was all. But he became a friend. I didn’t know him at all. It was a strange thing.

Dyke. His father was a brigadier in the army.

The college was terrible. In short terms. I should modify that a bit. You got excellent instruction, excellent training. They developed you physically very very well. You played every sport and you had to,

from boxing to hockey to rugby to cricket to… you had to do everything. You could learn fencing and all sorts of things, which were extremely good. The education, you learnt everything from welding to casting to pattern making to woodturning.

You learnt engineering of basic stuff, but nevertheless the basis from which you could progress in the future. You did navigation the whole time because navigation was then an art. There was none of this buying of a little hand thing telling you where you were. It was a great art and very much involved in mathematics. You had to work out sun sites and star sites and it took hours.

And the education was very good. It was structured for your future. And so you didn’t do music and things of this order, which some of us would like to have done. But you did everything that was relevant to a future naval officer. You know, French and all that sort of stuff. But the discipline was

extremely strong and the punishments were very severe for quite tiny little things. You got beaten a lot. I don’t think it did us any harm in the long run. Did us a lot of harm at the time.

They were so ridiculous.

It hardly bears repeating. It was the norm really. Lots of schools had a lots of use of the cane. Of course, if you'd done anything really serious it was much better to get the cane than to be dragged up before the beak and get a police record.

For young men in particular I think, a little bit of that discipline at that age is just an old fashioned view. I realise that. But nevertheless it is much better than a youth thinking he can do anything he likes and winding up with a police record at the age of 18. A lot of young men can be turned the way of righteousness

with strong discipline in their youth. So I have no worries about it. It was a nasty experience then because one got very homesick and everything, but it was I think, acceptable in the time and trained us up. For instance, one of the things we had to learn to do was,

straight away, was to be able to dress quickly. It may seem strange, but we had to learn to be out of bed quick, splash and dressed complete with tie, shirt, trousers, boots and gaiters and your underclothes, of course, in three minutes. This was all aimed at, when you were at sea things happened very quickly and if you were in because you better get up on that bridge or your gun tower or something at full speed.

So there was an aim behind a lot of the training that one had. Of course, one did a lot of things like boat work as well to train one for a life at sea and it really was a very good and practical training in many ways. Of course, one did all sorts of things like rifle shooting and bayonet drill and all those sorts of things too, to

Climbing ropes and all that sort of stuff. It was from early in the morning till– You did prep at night. You did your night school and then you were up first thing in the morning. You ran everywhere. You didn’t walk. It actually made you very fit. Probably why some of us are still here.

It was very rigorous training, physically and mentally and I've no regrets. But it was tough.

The older boys were senior to us and they had control over us as the younger ones, you see? That was part of the problem I think, because some of them were

a bit sadistic. Some of them were very good and balanced boys.

They didn’t use the cane. It was a gym shoe. That was the big thing. Yes, we all got it. Regularly. For things that were

really quite ridiculous to look back on, but nevertheless.

You just bend over and they give you half a dozen of the best with a gym shoe on the bottom. It was quite painful. Left some big bruises. But that’s all in the past.

No. No, but we looked up to them. We respected them. It was interesting you see, because they brought back, as the war was approaching, they brought back from civil life all sorts of

people who had been in the navy in World War I. Mostly ex-Royal Navy people. For instance one of our chief petty officers had been in World War I. He'd been up in Iraq in the campaign in the Mesopotamia, all that sort of stuff. And people had been in the Grand Fleet and all these sorts of people. And Royal Marines, they brought them back. All sorts of people.

So you looked up to them for their experience. And our officers, some of them had been in World War I and our commander eventually at the naval college had been brought up in Sao and he'd been around the Horn a number of times and then he'd been through World War I and he was a delightful gentleman.

He'd been a grazier in New South Wales before the navy called him out again.

No problem at all. I used to shoot at home and it was fine.

Doing bayonet drill was a bit more difficult or a little bit more different and doing cutlass drill, but no problems and I don’t think, most of the boys didn’t have any problems with that. Most of them had been shooting rabbits, except perhaps some of the city boys.

The discipline was a bit of a shock, but I knew it was going to be tough. I'd known that before I went in the navy. It wasn’t going to be a bed of feathers. So that was a bit of a shock, I suppose. Otherwise one just fell in and did what one had to do.

And the war was clearly coming up every day that passed. There was absolutely no doubt it was going to occur and then it did.

By letter. No phones, so just by letter.

Didn’t have much time.

The next thing would be on the menu to rush off somewhere or other to climb ropes or play rugby. We played a lot of rugby and a lot of sport. Of course, there were exams all the time. The navy was pretty ruthless. You had to pass everything and get on with life. You didn’t fuss around too long. You didn’t really have much time to be. You were, but–

Oh, yes. I suppose in the physical side, doing gym, which we did a number of times a week. Some of the things were quite difficult, like going up.

ropes, perhaps 30 feet up and then crossing the bar at the top and coming down the other side down the rope. If you were frightened of heights, which I was, that was a nasty experience. Most of the boys didn’t like that too much. And doing some of the things you had to do in gym, on the bars. If you fell the first time on the back of your neck it wasn’t very nice when you tried to do it again. You had to swing from bar to bar, turn

over in the air like gymnasts do. I wasn’t very good at gym and I used to come croppers. Otherwise not a great problem.

Approximately three and a half for us because we were sent away early. Yes, that’s right. And you

raised levels the whole time and you were virtually schooling as well as naval education. They combined the two and that’s why it was so rigorous and so full time. All day and into the early part of the night.

Of course, we wouldn’t’ be red blooded males if we didn’t, would we?

Almost none. The masters’ wives would teach us dancing, which was nice. Some of the boys had–

The only girls we ever saw were the laundry girls. There were some girls used to do the laundry and we used to see them in the distance walking past. Otherwise, no. except for the officers’ wives, and the officers’ daughters, there were a couple of daughters that we used to see in church in the distance.

No, it was a very serious time too. That was a big gap in our lives which we missed. Yes, that’s true.

There wasn’t one. We were sent straight off to sea without one.

No. We'd been digging trenches round the naval depot, round the naval college, because the Japanese of course, had entered the war six or seven months before and were sweeping all before them. We knew how serious it was.

I don’t know if you've heard this before, but, you see, after Pearl Harbor, I was a cadet at Pearl Harbor at the time of Pearl Harbor, HMAS Cerberus was the big training base of the navy and that was where, there were very few other places, and that was where the mass of the officers where, that were ashore and not in the fleet. The chief of the navy then,

who I think was Admiral Sir Edmund Colvin, came down to address all the officers and he addressed us as well and said that all of us would be off at sea shortly and we ought to know the truth and not what was in the papers because we'd be going into it. And he told us what had happened actually at Pearl Harbor and the disaster for the

American fleet and what had happened with the sinking of the [HMS] Prince of Wales and the [HMS] Repulse which meant that with the loss of that core of the British fleet, which it was, that there was nothing to stop the Japanese and they could not stopped before they’d taken the whole of Malaysia, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. There was no way that Singapore could be saved or anything else. He told us

that’s what the naval situation was because of course, the naval situation controlled the entire situation of the war, which is not often reflected in our histories. But there was no way that the army could be supported in Malaysia without the navy controlling the sea, because the sea was the only way you could move. There was no way the Americans could come to Australia if the sea wasn’t controlled

by them and us. There was no way you could go to New Guinea unless we controlled the Coral Sea. And there was no way that Australia could survive unless the British on the west coast, the Americans on the east coast, supported by us in our minor way, could control the seaways. There was no oil in Australia, or virtually none. The discoveries of Bass Strait and all these things– And even they were all in the sea anyway. Australia depended entirely on its

sea communications. You couldn’t even operate Port Kembla in Newcastle. They couldn’t get the iron ore from South Australia unless, and of course, the submarines tried to sink all those, and did. The German raiders were operating around the coast. And they were laying mine fields on the Bass Strait, off southern New South Wales. Ships were being sunk. The naval war was the absolute key

to the whole war. Whether you could get Americans across to Europe or whether British would survive. Whether you could transfer armies around the world to the Middle East or anywhere else. Get them back safe from Greece, Crete or anywhere else. So the loss of the core of the British fleet off Singapore, off Malaysia, he said that means there is no way Malaysia can be saved. Doesn’t matter how big the army is and the air force is. They’re finished.

And so is everything in the Dutch East Indies and we're lucky if we can hold Australia. So we were all well aware of the situation and indeed the preparation as we were going off, there were Japanese landings in Australia. As I say, we were digging trenches around our naval base. It’s hard to put yourself in that.

thought process over the situation. Although we’re a maritime country, a lot of Australians don’t’ realise it. The same sort of thing still applies today. Whoever controls the sea around Australia will control Australia if they want to. We still depend utterly for our movement of our oil, our coal, our iron ore.

Anything. And for our survival, on our sea communications. Aeroplanes can’t fly without fuel. They’ve got to come in by tankers. All these sorts of aspects. We were very alive and he said, “You keep this secret. I'm telling you all as officers. That’s the situation. And I'm not going to tell you lies. The American fleet, all of it has been destroyed except for the carriers on which our hope survives.”

Off we went after that.

The Prince of Wales and the Repulse. We already of course, knew the loss of the terrible loss of the Sydney and the [HMAS] Perth and our destroyers and sloops which had been sunk already and the tremendous battles of the Atlantic

and the battles in the Solomons which had started, and the Battle of Savo Island and the Coral Sea and of course, Midway, which was the turning point. All happened after the admiral had told us what the situation was, at least the last ones did. But we all knew the situation was extremely serious.

And the Battle of the Atlantic had not been won which was the key battle of the war, because if that had been lost the war would have been finished, because Britain would have gone and there was no way the Americans could operate in the Atlantic. The Battle of the Atlantic would have been lost. And as Churchill said in his memoirs, the only battle that really worried me in World War II was the battle in the Atlantic.

We all forget that. So we just accepted it, that this was the situation and we were going off and we just had to...

In my term, as I say, while we were waiting to join the heavy cruisers Australia and Canberra, the Canberra sunk in the battle of Savo Island in the Solomons and we were very envious

of the other half of our term who were going off to join the Royal Navy all of the world. We were envious of them because they were going to other countries. All we were going to see, if we were successful, was more and more palm trees and none of the bright lights. And no girls, just palm trees.

Yes. Because we had them coming into the college. We had for instance, survivors of the Dutch navy came to the college. A couple of them who spoke English quite well and they were with us for a while. And they’d been in the battles of the Java Sea and so on, and where we’d lost the Perth and–.

Plenty of people who’d come back and knew what it was like.

I think the worst thing of all was probably the loss of the Sydney with all hands. That was 645 men all going at once was a lot. That was probably the worst.

The Prince of Wales was the other thing that really stood out because a lot of us knew that it would be extremely serious. We probably didn’t have the appreciation that we were then given by the admiral of what that meant in strategic terms. Because the navy looks on a very big field. A very big strategic field. Not just what’s happening in the hills around and so

we all knew it was very serious. And after Pearl Harbor of course, it was very serious. Nobody, there had never been carrier warfare before. Although lots of people believed that air power from carriers would overcome the power of battleships, that was very much brought home by the British and their raid on Taranto, which the Japanese had

followed and developed the tactics which led to Pearl Harbor because it was the British from their carriers which attacked the Italian Fleet in harbour, with British carrier aircraft in Taranto, that was the first big exhibition of carrier power against war ships. The first big battle.

There were other little ones, but people thought the carriers would, the power would go that way but nobody was sure.

I was a West Australian. I suppose they are more nervous there than in Victoria and New South Wales. And they were

nervous in Queensland. Absolutely. My father, we got rations together at home. When my father came on leave and my sisters were taught shooting and what we would do and so on, because it was thought the Japanese would land. And he was then in the garrison battalion on Rottnest Island with the heavy guns which had been installed there. My mother was in the observer course, sitting on the hill

reporting aircraft into the air force the whole time. People were very nervous. It was very likely. And of course, with the attack on Sydney Harbour which. I may say a lot of the naval officers prospered nightly from that attack because lots of people fled from the eastern suburbs and you could rent a house just like that, for chicken feed. And they promptly signed leases for several years and got themselves nice places

or bought houses in the eastern suburbs. Because the submarines bombarded, only had a few shells but nevertheless, it was a very psychologically effective thing and up at Newcastle. So people were nervous. Very nervous. It’s all forgotten these days, but the Brisbane line was a very real thing.

And very sensible militarily. It was everybody, politically screamed and yelled “They’re abandoning people beyond,” but it would have happened. In fact, I don’t even think the Brisbane Line could have been held. It would have been much further if anything had really happened. But the Battle of the Coral Sea turned the tide.

Fine. Great. It was what we were trained to do and we were. Mind you, when we go on board we found we weren’t trained. We were trained in all the basics, but there was a hell of a lot to learn.

We were just simply green as green could be. Except we could operate in boats. We could do knots and spices and we could navigate and we could do all sorts of things, but overall going to your first ship is a huge experience. A huge experience and of course, there were about a thousand men in the Australia. A lot of people. A lot of people.

And a very complicated organisation. And in the Australia the training of the midshipman was very thorough. An officer was in charge of us, as well as all his other jobs. They worked like... They were on the bridge all the time and action stations and everything. We were put through every branch of the ship, so we'd go down have a month in the engines. In the boiler rooms,

stoking on the sprayers with the sailors. The sailors would be in charge of us, the petty officers, the leading seamen. Down in the engine room. We would be in the supply organisation and the store rooms. We'd be in the gun towers, operating in the gun turrets. We were always on the bridge doing our watches and so on and on the torpedoes and on the guns. In the wireless offices. In

the entire ship. On the anchors. In the boats, so our training was very thorough indeed. After we'd been at sea for, on the basis of what we learnt at the college, after we'd been at sea for six months, we actually, in wartime, the biggest spur you can possibly have to learn quickly, so we knew a lot. In fact, as midshipmen we knew a hell of a lot

more than a lot of the officers who, reserve officers who joined us, and hadn’t been to sea before, but they were already a sub lieutenants or sometimes lieutenants, because we'd done everything. In the aircraft, on the cranes, everything. We learnt very fast and very thoroughly. It was a great training and the sailors knew that once

a midshipman had been on board for a while, he knew his stuff. And they knew that when you joined, you didn’t. And they were very good. They taught us. We learnt from the leading seamen and the petty officers and the chief petty officers. They put up with us because we were pretty fresh-faced.

With difficulty.

If it was very rough, I got sick. She was a big ship, fortunately, to start with, it was worse in destroyers until you got the feeling of the motion of the ship, but early, I got seasick a lot. So did a lot of people. Nelson was seasick, after all. If it’s really rough, you do. You've just got to fight it.

Yes. I never got over it, all my life. But it got less. It had to get rougher for me to get sick. But if it was really rough. If you’re on the bow of a ship and it goes up 60-70 feet and then it comes down like that, and it shudders at the bottom, a lot of people don’t stand it for very long. Some people do, some people had no trouble at all. But a lot of people get seasick when it’s really rough.

Yes. The only time I was never seasick in a ship was when I was in command of a little mine sweeper going up to New Ireland, and I think I was so worried we were going to get sunk by the waves if not by the mines, I was never seasick. And I was the only one on board who wasn’t. But otherwise I would get sick.

I thought if I get sick, we certainly will sink. So that was strange. It was the motion of a small vessel is not nearly as bad as the motion of a big one. For me, anyway.

I just used to grit my teeth as long as I could and get on with the job. And sometimes all was well, and sometimes it wasn’t, so I had a bucket at the back of the bridge which

was known as Robbie’s bucket and I'd just be sick and get on with it. Wasn’t pleasant, but it was life. I'd do my job, not feeling too good about it, but nevertheless. But was never alone. There were an awful lot of people got seasick in rough weather.

There were occasions you see, in every ship I was in it could get tremendously rough. Edge of a typhoon or a great gale of sea, so I wouldn’t single out any particular incident. That’s just life. You go to sea. Some

people get used to motion very quickly. Some people have no problem with it. Some people have a lot of problem with it. Some people just have to grit their teeth and get on with it.

To start with when we all got on board, we just had hammocks in those days. And there was a midshipmen’s study float

where you had a chest where you kept your clothes and things. And you had a hammock. And there would be about 20 of you in a small compartment, all swinging with the ship’s motion. And being young men occasionally tricks would be played on each other and sometimes people would cut the rope so that you got in your hammock and the whole thing came crashing down five feet on the steel deck, which was good to shake you up.

Then you looked round for the culprit and then you had to splice your rope again. Those sorts of things happen.

You were the lowest form of animal life, roughly speaking. And you were very much under training, but you had jobs responsibility as well.

So on the bridge you might be the assistant to the navigator or you might be the assistant to the officer watch and you do the ship’s zigzag, because you zigzagged all the time, torpedo avoidance. Or you might, for instance in the Australia, you might be at night in charge of the torpedoes, firing the torpedoes. If there was time for the ship to go to action stations, then the proper officers would

arrive to take over, but if it all happened very quickly you'd be the man in charge, in the watch. Or you might be in charge of the look out. You'd have half a dozen look outs. Make sure they were awake and that you were watching the whole time yourself, so that they weren’t all nodding at their binoculars, or you might be in the gun turret as the assistant to the officer in charge of the gun turret. Or you might be in the transmitting

station which was the computer room. We had computers of course, but not electric ones. They were all mechanical. You had to become an expert in that. Map reading in the ante area or you might be on one of the four-inch guns. And you did your watches and you had your action stations, wherever it was. Mine was, for a long time, in the gunnery control centre, the computer centre

where we had about 20 men. It was the ship’s band who were highly trained in fire control and we all wound handles to feed into these great computers, the ship’s speed and it’s direction, the enemy speed and direction and the wind speed and direction and the temperature of the magazines, the temperature of the air at various levels and the muzzle velocity of the guns and

core air temperature. All sorts of things fed into the computers and what happened at action stations was they dropped the– We were below the armour deck which was about four inches of solid steel. The dropped the hatch and you were in there. That was it, which was not a comfortable situation and in the tropics of course, which is where we were the sea water temperature off New Guinea used to get up to

87 degree Fahrenheit, so the temperature down in the ship was very high. You had forced air being blown in but we were in there for 24 hours on one occasion in some operation and by the next day, after we'd been in there 24 hours, there was about a quarter of an inch of sweat on the deck. We were all in shorts, nothing else, because of the heat and

everybody got very thin. Had a box of bully beef or something to eat. I've forgotten now. Wasn’t too nice. Rather nice to get the hatch open and get out again. But you became pretty expert at it and you were all in there together and that was that. You hoped you didn’t get hit by a torpedo. That was life.

Well, we just had this flat above one of the magazines it was, it was where people could walk through. You had iron rails that hung down from the deck head above and you fastened your hammocks on these. So you had 20 hammocks swinging.

Ten and another ten. But it was so hot and so stifling that in the tropics what we often did was drag the hammock up and just lie on the deck. Then of course, the heavens would open in the middle of the night. You'd find 20 fellows all trying to get through a little round hatch, which would just fit a human body in the top of the main hatch with the rain pouring down, everybody getting

wet through. Or there would be an alarm in the middle of the night and everybody would rush to go off to action stations and fling their hammocks down the hatch and–

She was a heavy cruiser, very well armed with eight 8-inch guns. Big shells, 256 pounds they weighed, which is 100 kg.

She had eight 4-inch guns which were the anti aircraft ones, which you fired right up, which you loaded by hand. That was a terrible job, to be a loader on a 4-inch gun. You had to duck out of the way when the gun fired or you'd be curtains. You had torpedoes each side and some depth charges on the stern. Eventually we got radar fitted.

They were very super secret then, of course and the only person who could answer– there was a red phone on the bridge which was the captain’s phone. He was the only one allowed to answer it from this secret tower we had, which would tell him what they’d detected. Nothing like modern radars, but it was a very strange thing, because it was so super secret, had to keep it absolutely quiet, that very few people knew what it was.

Our life was– we had a gun room which was a room where we ate and we had a little locker to keep our writing paper and things in, our midshipmen’s journals. We all kept journals. I've got mine now. We had to write everything that happened, confidential books which we kept locked up.

The captain would read what we'd written and make his comments and we were given projects to do. For instance, one project, a simple one, was to draw the entire ship’s compartments and all the fire mains and the electric mains and the distribution system of all the, and all the water-tight doors of every compartment in the ship.

Big job. There were hundreds of compartments. We had to know the whole ship, so we did all that. But we would be gang-buster gun drill on the 4-inch guns or we would be exercising if there was no operation going on at the time, so we'd go up and train in the turrets.

We had navigation things to do every day to take sun sights and start sights and write them all up and work them all out. We were kept very busy indeed. We had watched to keep all the time. It was usually one watch in three, but if you were in a really serious danger it became one watch in two, which was very tough. Then if you were in action, you were in action stations and everybody was closed up.

You slept where you were, if you were allowed to sleep. So it was a very very busy life. No time for anything.

I think it was probably– We would be given things to–

We had to write about everything that was going on. In our journals we had to do sketches, where we were, or ships or aircraft or anything else and we had to give our comments on what was going on in the war. It was, I think, to keep our minds alive in the bigger things, and in develop our skills at writing.

And the captain, Farncomb, was– I don’t know how he ever got the time but he read through everyone’s journal. Put some pretty acid comments in it. One of our midshipmen did a lovely sketch of a swordfish, which was a torpedo bomber. Put it in his journal wrong way and the captain wrote “Looping?”

But he was very good and they were very good comments. “That’s too journalistic.” “Journalistic claptrap. Write what happened.” None of this flowery language. Proper English. It was good. Did that for 18 months.

Yes, we were. The whole ship was informed. But there was, of course, the admiral had his secret operations rooms which

all the Intelligence and everything was in and only certain people had access to these sorts of places. Because you had to have security at that level as well. Of course, very heavy censorship in the navy. You couldn’t photograph things. You were on certain occasions, but all the officers and sailors, all mail had to be read and censored.

The poor officers had this terrible job. Be worn out having been in all the sorts of things going on, and then they’d find 20 letters they had to read from sailors to their girlfriends and make sure there was nothing in it to indicate where the ship was, or had been or was doing. That was a nasty job. Hated that. It was a chore of the first order

which nobody wanted to do and you had to cut out if somebody made a slip and said “We’re in Italy and we expect to be somewhere or other.” The censorship was very tight. This is of course, one of the reasons I suppose we weren’t allowed to keep diaries, only the midshipmen’s journal and the officers were not allowed to keep diaries.

Oh, yes.

Because the journal was kept. It was taken when we left, in with the confidential books and stacked away for many years and it was only when the naval headquarters moved from Melbourne to Canberra that they discovered our midshipmen’s journals locked away in among all the confidential books. They wrote to me and said, “Would you like yours back?” This is many years after the war finished. I said, “Yes.” And it got back. I thought it had probably been sunk somewhere.

He was known as ‘Fearless Frank’ [Captain H. B. Farncomb] was the captain’s name and ‘Ming the Merciless’ was the commander’s nickname. The commander was Commander Harrington who became eventually the head of the navy and ‘Fearless Frank’ was very taciturn and

very severe. Excellent captain. Much respected. I suppose the commander was not, he was a very very efficient officer and with the combination of the two, he wasn’t greatly liked, he was respected, he wasn’t liked very much, the commander. But the combination of the two, we reckoned we could go anywhere. The commander was the second in command

And we had a very good gunnery officer and the Australia was a very efficient ship.

He was a very good captain. The captain is almost a sort of god in a ship and particularly in war. You’re cut off from everything.

He was a very strong disciplinarian but that was fine. Everybody knew where they stood. Of course, there was a very large crew and amongst any great mob of people you get people who step over the line and do things they shouldn’t do and he was very strong in all those way. But also he was very fair and he was a very good captain. Very good tactically in

command of the ship and the operations of the ship. He was a very good ship handler in handling the ship and everybody had great confidence in him that we would survive, no matter what. This was great because his second in command was very very efficient and took a lot of care, for instance, that in the Australia he didn’t think the survival things were good enough, so he got ammunition containers from American ships and

made sure they had proper water and would float and all the Carley rafts had them, food and all the things for fishing and everything else for survival. Trained up the ship’s company on all these things. It was a very efficient ship, the flagship. Very efficient.

As midshipmen we had a quite a lot because he was on the bridge great deal of time when we were on the bridge too. We also ran messages for him and he was very hard to understand because he was very clipped and quick in his speech, but you soon rushed around and got on with it. So we observed him a lot. And we observed

him of course, in the ship handling and in the orders he gave. As midshipmen we got to know the captain well, and the commander of course, and the gunnery officer and all the senior officers because we were attached to them very often as their runner, to go and do this and go and do that and get me so and so and tell so and so. We did all this over the place as well. It was very busy.

That’s a hard question. I suppose it depends what it was for. If we had a bit of recreation it would be the

quarterdeck by the after turret. If it was doing your jobs, I don’t think I had a favourite thing. It was always interesting on the bridge. The most terrifying thing I was ever told to do, here in Sydney Harbour we came back to get a radar fitted and the commander said,

“Right, all the midshipmen, you’re going to the top of the mast and you have to look at every fitting on the mast and then write a report on the fitting on the mast and if you don’t get everything right, we’ll send you up again.” I hated heights and our pole masts were just a little short of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We could get under with a few feet. So climbing to the top there was a

terrible experience for me. But I certainly wasn’t going to do it twice, so I looked at every possible, and of course, the mast was covered in fittings of every sort. That was nasty. I was very glad to get back on the deck. Of course, the people who didn’t mind heights went up like rats up a drain pipe. Not me.

No there wasn’t really. Except I suppose if there was nobody on the quarterdeck and nothing was going on particularly, right down aft by the stern you could get a bit of peace. Or right up in the bows.

By the large the quarterdeck was the officers’ sort of end and the sailors were on the waist and on the foc’sle, by and large.

Our main operations were

in the Coral Sea as a stop to the Japanese fleet breaking south through the reefs and passages between New Guinea and the Solomons or coming across in the direction of the Solomons. That was our main role as a sort of force that held that part of the Coral Sea.

And then we were the support force and we operated from inside the Barrier Reef where we had a number of secret places where we had tanker and supply ship. And we came back there for training and when things were suitable to refuel and ammunition and everything else.

And train up to do gunnery firings and things. Then we’d be the support force for, for instance, when the first push north was taking of the Woodlark and Trobiand Islands which were in the, north of the Milne Bay. Between Milne Bay and Rabaul. Rabaul was the great Japanese fleet base where there main fleet was based.

Of course, it had tremendous airfields, about five of them I think. And it had this vast huge fleet which was based there and operating in the Solomons and northern New Guinea. We were the support force just south of the island chain for these invasions so that if the Japanese had tried to interfere we would come through and

be the support force for the marines which had taken the place. The marines were highly efficient and they had, the US Navy had people called Seabees. Seabees was a construction battalion but they called them Seabees and they were just like bees. They would work day and night in construction. For instance, I was in the destroyer Warramunga when we went into the Woodlarks,

and we took in the convoy and we stood off as anti aircraft defence and so on for them while the landing ships landed straight up on the beach. We got out of it with them as quickly as we could having taken the place because there was no air support, because it was just a bare island, palm trees. We came back three weeks later with

a follow-up convoy of support and supplies and we had fighter support from the airfield they’d built in three weeks. They were absolutely tremendous. They used the beach as a road and they cut all the palm trees down, put in, mixed coral with FFO [fuel furnace oil], fuel oil, and crushed that and spread that and used the iron

plating with holes in it called pierced peers, I think, and they were operating kitty hawk fighters with it in three weeks, which was just tremendous. And we were the support force for those and then when the push came further we did the assault on, we supported the assault on Arawe, which is in southern New Britain and then the plan was to take the–

A landing was done at Finschhafen with the 9th Division, I think, and that took one side of the Vitiaz and Dampier Straits between New Guinea and New Ireland and we did then did the big landing, the biggest of the war at that stage, from Cape Gloucester which was the Japanese airfields and things there on the other side of the strait on the end of New Britain.

That was a big force. We went in and we did all the bombarding and the landing craft went in and the air force did a tremendous job, the US Air Force and the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] people of bombing and we took that with the 1st Marine Division and that enabled then the fleet to burst through into north

New Guinea to land wherever we wanted, provided the Japanese had been knocked out, which it was, largely. They were able to strike along northern New Guinea coast, take the Admiralty Islands, and eventually take the Philippines.

I was with the Warramunga, no I was in the Australia for the landing of Cape Gloucester. It’s hardly mentioned in the histories, but actually

strategically it was tremendously important. They soon took it, the Japanese garrison was overwhelmed very quickly. MacArthur’s headquarters used to push out communiqués claiming to have destroyed hundreds of air craft and ships and we didn’t believe any of this and the admiral

always divided everything by three and then was suspicious, even the third. It was propaganda largely. And on the attack on Cape Gloucester. He was so certain. They said they’d destroyed 250 aircraft or something and he got the fleet out quick smart, having done what they’d had to do and taken the place.

Left a few destroyers behind and the Japanese attacked with over 200 aircraft. We didn’t believe the nonsense that was pushed out. You could probably look at the old papers and see 250 odd Japanese aircraft destroyed. Lot of rubbish.

Yes, it was. It was on Christmas Day.

Boxing Day we landed, I think, in 1943 and then we withdrew. Other ships took over and then I was sent off to England at the beginning of ’44.

We were all the time in the Coral Sea and we supported these other ones that took place before that and we were in Milne Bay and the destroyers would be sent out to attack on the south coast of New Britain and so we were really ready

all the time and operating at sea. We were of course, very concerned about submarine and air attack. But not actually until we were ready with the amphibious forces, not actually pushing forward. We couldn’t until the major part of the Japanese fleet had been largely neutralised in the huge naval battles

in the Solomons, which nobody reads about now. Last year they were running the battle for Australia but they didn’t ask, as far as I could see, many naval people about the thing. The key to the survival of Australia was, not just the battle for the Coral Sea which enabled the New Guinea campaign to take place, but was the huge battles in the Solomons. The Americans lost four big aircraft carriers in World War II. They lost three of them in the Solomons.

That includes the Coral Sea. They lost eight heavy cruisers and they lost five of them of the eight in the battles in the Solomons. They lost 28 major war ships, something like that. So did the Japanese. The losses were just colossal. The middle of the Solomons is called Iron Bottom Sound, because the Solomons were a very key strategic area.

If the Japanese had consolidated in the Solomons– they took it initially and the Yanks pushed them out, they would be in a position to cut the lines between Australia and America, because they could then push on to Fiji and places quite easily. It was the great naval battles which set the scene for the eventual push forward. MacArthur wouldn’t have been able to stride ashore through the surf in the Philippines if it hadn’t been for the United States fleet.

I was in charge of one side of the 4-inch guns, the secondary armament and our job was– the fleet was lined up and this was the Australia and the [HMAS] Shropshire our two heavy cruisers and we had,

the Hobart had been torpedoed and she was still being repaired, and we had [HMAS] Arunta, Warramunga and we had about two American cruisers, I think it was Boise and Nashville. Might have been Phoenix and Nashville and the Phoenix of course, was a very famous ship. We were all a bit sad when she was sunk. In the Battle of the

Falklands, she was the Argentine flagship. Anyway, we were very chummy with the Phoenix. We were all lined up, steaming along and about ten American destroyers and rocket ships and everything, landing ships and then we opened fire. I think it was six in the morning. And my job was on the side we were firing, was if we spotted anybody on the shore firing

back at us, to engage with the secondary armament, if it was in range, which was the 4-inch guns. So we were all ready. Four 4-inch. My job was on the binoculars, which directed the 4 inch which way to go. But I was a bit of fool because we were all warned of course, and you knew when the guns were going to fire because a bell went “Ding ding” and that was the signal

from the transmitting station for the guns to fire and of course, when the 18 inch guns fired, all eight of them, the ship moved sideways about six inches. Choong! Even though she was 15,000 tons or something. Also there was a bit of flash from the guns. I was so intent on my job,

I was looking at the shore, you see, that I didn’t hear the fire bell go and the next thing I knew, I woke up on the deck. The ship had come and hit me. I had two lovely black eyes and I couldn’t see because I'd got a bit of a flash from this thing. And everybody was saying, “Where are they? What’s going on?” And here I am lying on the deck. Wasn’t very good. Wasn’t a very good start. Wasn’t very popular. I got up again. Got my black eyes but that was all.

I never got wounded other than my black eyes. Then we bombarded the airfields and gun positions. All the rocket ships came in and then the Liberators came over at a very low level and they opened their bomb bays and we just hoped they wouldn’t let their bombs go on us and then they let this go this enormous bombardment from the air as well. Over the top of us.

The whole place was lit up with gun flashes and explosions ashore and all the landing craft went through the middle of all this lot, poor old marines rushed up up the beach. Reported back they were very pleased we'd done a good job before they got there, but it was the biggest landing of the war then. We landed a whole division which is 20,000 men I suppose.

We had aircraft everywhere. Hundreds of them and we were in the middle. It was very interesting. Very noisy, lots of smoke, lots of explosions, lots of flashes, lots of noise and confusion. We weren’t confused, it was all fully under control in the ships and we bombarded certain positions and swapped target to other positions

and so on. All the arrangements went tremendously well. The approach was a bit tricky, a lot of reefs and of course, lots of places weren’t charted in those days, so it was a big force and it all came in from different directions. The landing craft had to go in certain directions and we came in from another area and it was all super secret obviously

so the Japanese didn’t know. And there was a bit of shooting during the night. People thought we'd been discovered. We hadn’t. Then we all got there on time and the right places and it all happened. We had boiled eggs I remember, for breakfast, and we reckoned they’d been boiled in the First World War. Somebody coming up with a tray of these bloody

boiled eggs, which you knocked on the side of the ship and peeled the shell off. Horrible. So then we withdrew to [(UNCLEAR)] and other ships took over and so on. Poor American destroyers took over, got sunk.

It was all a great success overall and we went on through and next one.

We wrote it all up, with the plan of the operation and we wrote what happened and a general description of the action,

we all had to, in our journals. It was a very big operation. There must have been 100 ships at least involved, I should think. The landing ships and the rocket ships and all the destroyers and the mine sweepers and the survey ships beforehand and the big cruiser destroyer force that was the main

bombardment force.

The admiral, Admiral Crutchley was in command of the whole of the naval force and there was the American general with the landing force and there was the American admiral, I think it was an American admiral in command of

the amphibious side, which we provided a couple of ships. And I think that was the command system. I was only a midshipman, so I'm not absolutely certain of the whole thing. But of course, you kept wireless silence except locally, in your local area, with the communications between the ships which you couldn’t hear very far. But otherwise by and large, it was wireless silence.

Just receiving information from shore and everybody operating in accordance with the instructions of where they had to be at what time and when ships, of course, ran into each other, I don’t mean physically, I mean met each other, and you'd challenge them and they had to reply with the right answer on their lights, which were directional. Each

group coordinated with themselves on local very short range radio. The whole thing was coordinated fine. The air force knew what the plan was. Where they had to bomb, and that we were going to be there and not to bomb us as the Japanese, as the Americans did in the Battle of the Coral Sea. They bombed the Australian task force.

No. There weren’t. We thought there was when I was in the Warramunga. There was a great, I was on the bridge one night, there was an enormous explosion aft, and a vast column of water and I thought the stern had been blown off. The whole ship lifted up. One of the signalmen who was a survivor from one of our ships sunk in the Mediterranean, yelled out, “Grab your lifejackets, boys. We've been torpedoed.”

We calmed him down. It turned out we had depth charges set to 50 feet on the stern on the racks and we'd just done a turn on a zigzag and a bib wave had come up, much higher than normal, and had lifted a depth charge out of its thrower, which had gone straight over the stern and had blown up at 50 feet, just clear of our stern.

Apart from our American liaison officer who was blown out of his bunk and landed on some broken glass from something that broke, nobody was hurt. He thought the stern had been blown off, but it hadn’t.

Bit of laughter. We checked the whole ship to see everything was alright and it was. She was well built. Certain other precautions were taken to see

this couldn’t happen again. But normally you had to have it like that so that the depth charges could be fired straight away.

I suppose I was impressed by the whole thing. We were at action stations for

about 24 hours, I think. Approaching, during the operation and during the withdrawal. I think the intensity of the operation was very impressive because there was a lot of ships and a lot of air craft in great waves coming over. Just as it was starting, I think, the Japanese flew 24 bombers, flew past us.

A couple of dozen bombers, and we thought they were going to attack, but they didn’t. They flew on and they bombed where we'd landed and pulled out before at Arawe. I think after the war they investigated this. I might be wrong in this, but this is my impression. That there was one of the incidents where the Japanese navy commander of these attack air craft, although

they’d seen the– their instructions were to go and bomb Arawe and that’s what they did. Which astonished us, because there wasn’t the flexibility. The Japanese were not as flexible. Our fellows would have said, “Right. Forget that target, we’ll go for the ships.” But they were very rigid. Did what they were told, come what may.

The whole thing was impressive. From second to second you were wide awake. There were a couple of big shell splashes off our, some way on one side, and it thought, “God, we’re now going to get a few shells back.” But that was all it was.

Yes. We came down for a very quick refit here. Suddenly to our amazement we turned right instead of left and went south. Great were the rumours. What on earth were we doing going south? When the war was north, or the part we were involved in was north.

And we went through the Bass Strait and we went through into the Bight and then the captain got on the loudspeaker and said “You’re going to see a sight that you’d never see again in your lives. We, in another half hour, the biggest ships in the world, five of them I think it was, will appear over the horizon,

and it’s the return of the 9th Division to Australia. We are in charge of the escort.” And sure enough, there was the [HMS] Queen Mary came up and the [SS] Ile de France and the [SS] Queen of Bermuda and the [SS] Nieuw Amsterdam and the [SS] Aquitania. The slowest ship was the Aquitania; she had four funnels, vast liner.

Bigger than the [SS] Titanic, I think. Her speed was 23 knots, so the speed of the convoy was 23 knots. That was very fast for a convoy. And we had an escort which grew and we went round the south of Tasmania because of mine fields the Germans had laid and there was a concern about these ships. We only had

tropical clothing and we were emaciated and thin from, and we were yellow because we'd all had Atebrin for months, so we looked a bit like the Japanese ourselves actually, very very yellowish. And we were so cold. I’ll never forget it, how cold we were. Went round south of Tasmania, came up

to Sydney with this vast convoy and there was boom gate of course, across the harbour. The boom that had to be opened. They only open it one ship at a time, so we had to circle for five hours to get the ships in. And I was on the bridge and the admiral was absolutely horrified because the security had been so bad, because all these things were kept highly secret, the movement

of these things. What had happened, a ship had been peeled off the convoy in Perth and another one I think, in Adelaide, and the soldiers had said, must of got back and the cliffs were lined with people. And the admiral thought, said, “God. If that number of people know that these ships are coming in, so might the Japanese, and they might be watching to see their sons

blown up off Sydney Harbour.” We had a big escort, but they were very vulnerable. Slow speeds, steaming off Sydney, these great ships. Anyway one by one, took five hours. They got in. The Japanese didn’t know. If they did know they didn’t have any submarines near enough to do much about it, so all was well.

Yes, but she got off in Fremantle.

No. I knew she was in the Middle East but I didn’t know she was– I knew she’d been attached to the 9th Division.

Lots of them. I think

the rigidity of our dockyards, which was unbelievable. The division of responsibility between the various trades. We dashed back into Sydney to get our first, I think it was our first air warning radar. We were at a buoy here and the thing had come on board in a barge and the fellows had got it on board, and

The commander sent, I was the midshipman of the watch and he said, “Go and find out why no work’s going on.” So I sent along to the dockies who were going to fit it, and they said, “Mate, we've got to drill a hole up the mast and that can only be done by a certain trade.” I think it was, can’t remember. I think it was a boilermaker had to do it through metal.

And I said, “Well, can’t anybody do it? We’ll get the shipwright. He’ll do it in a couple of seconds.” “Oh, no, mate. Can’t be done by anybody in the navy. Got to be done by so and so. Got to get a boat, go over to the dockyard and find one of these trade, who’s available and bring him back.” I said, “That will take two hours.” You couldn’t believe in wartime the– we just couldn’t believe it in the navy, these

sort of problems. The Americans couldn’t believe what our set-up was. There was another of these things that the government of the day just didn’t tough, anything to do with. The strikes in the yard, the strikes on the wharves, these sort of stupid problems which were terrible from our point of view. The war was really going on.

We might get sunk next morning, but they couldn’t care less.

I was just walking from Garden Island over the Burma Road which was being built to build the great dry dock and you went across and it was called the Burma Road because it was all mud.

You had to walk round to get to the city, over this causeway. You had to go past the Bells and the Caruthers, the pubs. You were in uniform and a lot of the dockies there were fairly anti anybody in uniform. I don’t know what it was, but they were very hostile. And people got beaten up there, yes. I nearly got filled up one night.

Fellow asked me for a light and I said, “Sorry, I don’t smoke.” He didn’t believe and he was going to fill me in. We had a lot of instances, where we came into Brisbane to get ammunition and this was when the war was really very serious and our sailors worked all night, ammunitioning with live ammunition. I was midshipman of the watch, midnight. There was merchant ship just astern of

us loading bombs to go up to New Guinea and they were inert, without their detonators or primers and being rolled onto nets, 500 pound bombs and then lifted in. And it was taking about 20 minutes a net, which we couldn’t believe. And there was the team of six. There were two fellows working the net and there were four fellows playing poker and these fellows were getting danger money per hour,

which was only a little less than what our sailors were getting paid a day. And this was the sort of remarkable dichotomy between the people who were fighting the war. Not everybody of course, most people were doing a tremendous job, but there were elements that– A lot of us were very concerned that our government did nothing in any of these issues

of the wharves and the dockyards.

We didn’t get much. The commander was very severe,

so we only came back every three or four months. We were one day on, one day off in harbour because we kept watch in the harbour as well, all through the night. And the day off, we worked all during the day time, but we had from 4 pm to 6 pm was our leave. As we berthed at New Farm or somewhere, or Hamilton Wharf in Brisbane, it would take you,

if you went into the city, an hour to get there and an hour to get back, so you had five minutes walk round and you had to get back, so it was really, effectively, no leave at all. But then after we'd been on board for about a year, he suddenly said that midshipmen could have leave every night until midnight. We all said he must be in love. It was very nice

that there was a church organisation that invited us off to play tennis, if we could get a Saturday in the daytime, which occasionally occurred, and that was very nice. We played tennis, otherwise we just looked around and went to a museum or something. Had a drink of something and a meal perhaps.

We were not exactly well paid. I think our pay was about five bob a day. Five shillings a day. Fifty cents plus inflation.

We had an officer who was in charge of us, yes.

This officer was our, he was called a snotty’s nurse and he was in

charge of the midshipmen, so he ran what we did and organised, and kept an eye on us. We had a sub lieutenant in charge of the gun room, so he was very close to us, because he ate with us and knew everything that was going on. So it was a very close organisation.

To a degree the snotty’s nurse would propose to the commander that the midshipmen would do X, Y or Z. The leave was organised and our watch bills and the duties and all those sorts of things and when we moved from one division to another and our journals were kept and everything to do with our lives really, were organised by the

snotty’s nurse and the sub lieutenant was in charge of the gun room so a lot of the orders came down through him .

Yes. We had a fine snotty’s nurse called Lieutenant Duret, and he was the observer of the aircraft. We had of course, a Walrus aircraft. He was on the bridge a lot with us. He was killed unfortunately

afterwards when the Australia was hit by kamikazes. He was a fine officer. In fact, we had a lot of fine officers. Some, one or two were Royal Navy, nearly all of them Australian.

On the whole on the big ships, the cruisers and the destroyers were manned by regular officers and the smaller ships, the corvette minesweepers and all the patrol boats were manned by reserves. Now there were a few reserves on board.

There are a few different types of reserve in the navy. There was the reserves who were ex-merchant navy and we had some of them in the big ships because they were already very skilled in navigation and ship handling and so on and we had the volunteer reserves who’d come off the beach and done officer training, officer schemes, who were very good officers and who had a great

entrepreneurial skill. They were mostly in the little ships. We had specialist officers who were radar officers and people who– and cipher officers who were reserves, and lawyers who were reserves, but otherwise nearly, would have regular– I think the relationships were, among the officers, pretty good. It depended much more on the individual than whether they

were a reserve or not. But it was generally felt that you had to have a lot of naval experience and had done a lot of naval courses to be in the bigger, more powerful ships with the more modern technology. It was a question of training as much as anything else. Some of the reserves rose to command destroyers and things like that. And some of them after four years of war they learnt just as much as the regulars. They were very good then.

But in the initial time it took time to learn, but they were very, very good in all the smaller ships where their initiative was very– In a way in the permanent officers, their initiative was more channelled. It Western Australia there but it was more channelled, whereas the reserves could think more widely and weren’t so concerned about the King’s Rules and Admiralty Instructions which was what

ran the fleet. So they were a very, very valuable addition and did a splendid job.

Not really, no. Then it was very much the same. The officer-sailor relationship was different. It was still very rigid in the RAN, the

split between officers and sailors and the discipline thing was very rigid, but it wasn’t as rigid as it was in the Royal Navy. And the relationship was a bit different. Our fellows had a tremendous amount of initiative, and ability really. They were better, I think, educated in– I don’t mean by mathematics

and all these sort of things. I mean they were more practical men. Much more practical than the Royal Navy fellows, on the whole. With great exceptions, but I think the people who came into the Royal Navy from all the big cities in England were not as practical fellows as the sort of sailors we got in the RAN, who a lot of them were country boys.

There weren’t many, for a start. And if there were, they were kept quiet and the petty officers and the leading seamen didn’t report it. Say, there would be a scuffle somewhere or other. Because, you know, this happens in life. Or somebody gets sorted out behind the boiler front. If it became a very serious thing between a couple of fellows,

then what would be organised would be a grudge fight. It would be reported into the machine and so the commander would say, “Righto, four o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Both of you on with the boxing gloves. Get it out of your systems.” So they’d build a boxing ring. There would be seconds, and there would be the umpire and the rules were told. And then they’d have a couple of rounds at each other.

And shake hands afterwards. It worked very effectively. They could hammer into and they did. One fellow or the other might get hit about a bit and the fight would be stopped, or else it would be a draw or whatever. It was a very good system. The navy developed these sort of things over hundreds years and after the grudge fight, usually, although they didn’t like each other, that was it.

The gambling was not allowed in the navy. It went on, no doubt. Sailors can organise things, but, officially it was not allowed. I don’t know.

All midshipmen did their destroyer time

about four months as part of their training before going up to be an acting sub lieutenant so they did the big ships and the destroyers. We all longed to go into destroyers, because they were smaller ships, you had more responsibility. You had a smaller crew so you got to know people better. They were in everything. The destroyers were jacks of all trades, maids of all work. So there were in– if there was a big action like Cape Gloucester, they were in there bombarding with

everybody else. They’d be chasing submarines or they’d be landing people. Destroyers were very flexible and our tribal class destroyers were the most, as powerful as any destroyers in the Allied fleets. They had six 4.7s and two 4-inch, plus Bofors guns and Oerlikons and they were very

very well armed. They had torpedo tubes and depth charges and they were very fast, 34 knots and so it was very exciting ships to be in. We longed to go to destroyers.

You didn’t have gun turrets, as such. The guns were open gun houses. It was a different level, really, of

operations. The jobs didn’t vary so much, but there were far fewer officers, far fewer sailors. You had more responsibility. You'd already done some time at sea, and war, and that’s a quick learner, so you had more responsibility and it was much more fun.

Oh, yes. She was very happy and she had a lot of fellows who, a lot of

the sailors were very highly intelligent and able people. People came out for instance in the Warramunga, we had people who became chief justices and governor of Victoria who were sailors in the Warramunga. It was a very high level of fellows in many areas. A lot didn’t want to become officers, which was one of the strange things in World War II. A lot of people who should

have been officers wouldn’t become officers. They wanted to stay with their friends. Which was a pity because sometimes you perhaps may be better than the officers they had.

Our

ships were designed for the North Atlantic, British ships. No air conditioning. There might have been an old cold room. They were very hot. And the engine rooms, the temperature would be up to 150. It was very tough on the stokers, in particular.

The heat was one of the worse things. I suppose the other thing was that, the more successful you were, the more palm trees you captured, the less bright lights you saw. Whereas in the Mediterranean it was the other way round. If you did go in anywhere there were no facilities of any

sort, except in the American bases in the Solomons where they, in Espiritu Santo where they built a huge naval base where they had officer’s clubs and sailors clubs. But I think it was the lack of female company was one of the biggest things and the fact that if anything did happen you’d have probably got yourself beheaded. Nobody was at all in two minds what would happen if you were captured. That your chance of survival would

be very very small. If you were captured by the army you would, the Japanese army, you would certainly be finished. If you were captured by the Japanese navy you might be alright. That was different. If you became a prisoner your chances were very low. I had a friend, for instance, who was in an air, who was at school at me, who became a pilot in the RAAF and he was a cause celebre, a Sergeant King.

And he was shot down north of New Guinea there. Got onto an island with his crew, but a couple of weeks later, the Japanese arrived and lined him up on the beach and chopped their heads off. These things were– they were a terrible enemy the Japanese.

We knew a certain amount because when we– First of all there was the press and the radio and so on, and survivors who had come back and told their stories and that would be in the press. And it would be broadcast. Then of course as we went forward, then the natives would tell their stories and it would come back through the machine

and so people knew pretty well. They knew for instance, that nobody heard of any of the prisoners the Japanese had taken because I think it was a couple of years before they allowed the Red Cross to– I don’t know. Knocker White can tell you, before communication came through. Nobody knew who had survived and who hadn’t. This was very different with the Germans and the Italians.

If we ever survived being sunk and got ashore, somewhere or other, well, you’d probably die anyway if they didn’t find you, and all those sides were not nice. The survival side as rather nasty. The combination of more palm trees, no bright lights, no women and a nasty end.

It was not a good combination.

It wasn’t dealt with. That is the first point. I think the second point is that of course, the captain’s tried to give what leave they could when they did get in somewhere, but there was always a pretty frantic event because repairs had to be done on the ship; and the ship had to have ammunition installed

and all that sort of stuff so leave was difficult when you got in. But that couldn’t be overcome. The other questions couldn’t be overcome. The heavy temperature and the heat and the lack of facilities and what would happen to you if

you did get sunk or captured. A long swim from the Coral Sea to Queensland.

I've never really thought about it. We knew we were men and we knew girls were girls

and I don’t think– Sex was, it’s interesting. There’s tremendous emphasis on everything sexual today. Well, there clearly was emphasis too, and people talked about it and all the rest of it and there was a great thing in people’s lives and it’s position in life has never changed. But the emphasis has changed. It was one of the big

factors in life. Survival was more important. Life itself was– I think it was more in proportion. It’s a terribly important part of life, but nowadays it’s concentrated on to such an extent. Every little aspect of sexual relations is broadcast and on the films and on television and

it’s overemphasised, I think to the detriment to the community as a whole. It’s a hugely important thing, but it’s a natural thing as it is in every animal kingdom and it can be put out of proportion. We were young men who hadn’t experienced, most of us,

that sort of side of life and looking forward to it. It wasn’t– survival was much more important.

When the sailors get into port, naturally enough, they’ve been starved of female company, so naturally they’re very

keen on female company. I think that’s the world over. Every nice girl loves a sailor and every sailor has a girlfriend in every port. That’s what they say. It’s a lot of rubbish of course, but nevertheless there’s an element of truth in it. Sailors, yes, head for the girls. You know that marvellous story about the boys, don’t you? Why is a ship called ‘She’?

You ought to look it up. It’s a lovely poem about why a ship is called ‘She’.

The one before we had a proper Christmas lunch in the ship. Right through.

Oh, yes.

The youngest seamen on board dresses up as the captain and acts as the captain for the day. That’s a tradition. He doesn’t of course, take command in the real sense, but he acts as the captain and inspects the ship. Sometimes the captain goes down– certainly I did when I was the captain of the Sydney with a senior sailor who is the coxswain, a very senior

chief petty officer. We did all the washing up for the sailors, which was– they got a bit of a surprise. A lot of washing up for 600 sailors. That sort of thing happens. In other words, it’s used a day of great levelling. The officers, except for the officer of the watch, who is running the ship, you see, but by and large,

the discipline moves the other way, is let go in an understanding way. You know that the ship’s got to operate. That happened. For instance, when I was the gunnery officer of the Sydney, in the Korean thing, we got in, it was Christmas in Kure, in Japan, and so along came one of the sailors

and I was dressed up as a bandsmen, because they looked like Royal Marines, we had a Royal Marine uniform for our band then, so along came the bugler and said, “Sir, you've got to do sentry duty this morning.” So I was the gunnery officer responsible for all these things, so I dressed up as Royal Marine and he marched me down the gangway to do sentry duty on the wharf. All the ship’s company looked at this. I was this chief bastard on board, you see, being the gunnery officer.

The gunnery officer was always the worst fellow on board you see. So about 600 sailors looking at us, a thousand from the Sydney and all the Royal Navy sailors in the ships opposite all looking at me being paraded up and down doing my sentry job. I did it very smartly, with the young bugler giving the orders. So that sort of thing happens and that’s a tradition and it’s good.

Yes. We heard about it at sea. The murder, you mean?

Yes, that was a very famous case in the RAN. No doubt there was a bit of homosexuality, but the attitude in the navy and to society as a whole, was very strongly against anything like that, and in ships, it ate the heart out of a ship. It was something that you just simply could not allow. In this case

Of course, these two, I think he was a petty officer, he might have been a leading seamen, had decided that enough was enough. But these two fellows murdered him on the upper deck and threw him overboard, but not before he had– I wasn’t there, it was before I joined. But the court martial was held and they were sentenced to death. And the admiral was going to hang them in accordance with the

laws of the navy. But the government, under Mr Curtin said, “No,” they weren’t to be hanged and so they weren’t. But unfortunately they were let out rather early, I think, out of jail. But yes, it was a famous case in the navy.

I don’t know. We certainly knew about it. The ship of course, was full of it. They all knew about it.

Yes. Murdered the fellow who was going to put them in. They stabbed him on the upper deck, but he was

a physical training instructor or something, and he fought on for quite a while, and yelled. People came, but they caught the two murderers. The officer of the watch. I knew him. He was still on board the Australia I think he was the principal control officer. You have two officers on the bridge. One who fought the armament and everything to do with fighting the ship and one who did the navigation

and the officer of the watch operations and who altered the course. The story in the Australia was that he did a very sensible thing. As soon as he heard of the murder on the upper deck. They’d found the blood and stuff, he ordered all the bathrooms to be closed immediately which they did. The gendarmes rushed round. This is what we heard in the Australia. So the fellow couldn’t clean himself.

The two couldn’t clean themselves. They were found guilty. That will all be in the records if you want to chase it up. It’s all in the public domain, court martial.

Not really.

It was a very– no doubt there was some. A lot of people– But I never heard of, at that stage, later in the navy I did, of any such incidents. I certainly never came across it myself.

All the fellows with me were all red-blooded women chasers, if you know what I mean.

After that I was sent over to England in a merchant ship.

We were just, reserve officers were with us. About 20 of us in this merchant ship, sent to England. We went off to do our courses. They went off to ships. Got on with our courses in London. That was in early ’44. I think we got there beginning of April ‘44. That was

a lot of bombing going on at night. Then the flying bombs and the V2s.

All our course went together. All of us who trained together and a number of reserve officers who were posted to go off to join the Royal Navy, because we were producing a lot of officers.

There were some hundreds in the Royal Navy in various places.

We arrived and it was in Liverpool and we were put on a train straight away. Liverpool of course, was battered. Buildings down all over the place, but nothing

was going on the moment we arrived. We were put in a fast efficient train straight down to London and spent the night in the Nuffield officers’ club. Lord Nuffield was the head of the Austin Motors Company and he had donated vast sums to build a club for officers and for sailors in various places in London.

You paid one and sixpence a night to sleep there and it was in the middle of London. You slept in dormitories, about 50 or 60 a dormitory. But it was marvellous and you had all the facilities there and you could go out and enjoy what nightlife there was in London, which was exciting in one extreme and perhaps exciting in the other extreme depending on who you met.

Then we went down to, we were sent on leave and reported to Australia House. That first night we were in the Nuffield club, about ten o'clock all the guns opened up and London was surrounded by them and then the bombs started falling. I of course, woke up with a great start and wanted to jump under the bed because the building was shaking. There were about 70 other officers in there. And a couple of them cursed and swore and

turned over and I thought, well you can’t be a wimp and get under the bed. They were all used to it and couldn’t care less, you see. So I shivered under the sheets and hoped we weren’t going to get, be the ones that were the rubble in the morning. Then I got up and caught a train, I was on leave by this time, caught a train down to Brighton. We were held up on the way down

because of some bomb damage, but we got down there. I had an old grandmother who was still alive who was fairly aged and my mother was there because my brother had been, was thought to be dying. He'd developed tuberculosis in the air force in West Africa so he was in Midhurst Hospital and they reckoned he wasn’t going to come out of it. TB [tuberculosis] was a killer in those days.

So she had packed up the farm, left it to my other sister who ran it all on her own for the rest of the war, and got herself a passage in a merchant ship. She was missing for five months. We didn’t hear from her. Took five months. There were some very strange things. The ship she went down and joined was one of the ships, when she got to the wharf - only got 24 hours notice, you stand by.

They tell you, “Twenty-four hours, you've got to be down at Fremantle Wharf.” She whipped down when they went and caught all the buses with her little bag and the ship she went on board was one of the ships that my brother had sailed in. It was a very slow old ship and we didn’t hear till five months later when she made it. A number of ships had been sunk in the convoy in the Madagascar Channel. They’d been all up round India. She was in the slowest ship

which is usually the first to go, but it didn’t. Spent the night on the deck by the lifeboats, life jackets on every night. So she was over there trying to look after my brother. She met me on the station. I was able to phone up. There were buildings down all over. One of the bombers had unloaded his bombs on Brighton.

She’d had a terrible night. Their building had been hit. All the front was knocked off. She was fortunately in a higher room at the back and there was a pilot, one of the German aircraft hanging in a tree outside, by the parachute. Plane had crashed nearby. Boy, this was quite an introduction to a different world from Australia.

Of course, the rationing was tremendously severe. So we all had, sailors were issued with it on leave so as we could give it to our hosts. The little bit of butter you got every week, you could give to the host. Different world.

The flying bombs were another thing. I was in the first raid and I was in Brighton and there was this tremendous noise. The people started running into the street to see what it was. Sounded like a very low flying air craft, but it didn’t have an aircraft engine. It pulsed, voom, voom, voom, like that. It wasn’t brrrrr. And so nobody knew what it was. Rushed out and there’s this little airplane flying over with this

vast tail of flame coming out of the rear of the pulse, going quite fast. And all the people in the street rushed into the buildings. Didn’t know what it was. And it flew on to London, then they came over in mobs. First of all I was at Greenwich to do courses there and they used to come over in several at a time.

One morning, the painters were, scaffolding all round it, Wrens [WRNS – Women’s Royal Naval Service], were painting the hall, all held up by scaffolding and we had, on the top of the building we lived in, sandbag enclosure and Wrens used to keep night watch there with a loud speaker. And one morning we got up, in the shower, eight flying bombs approaching, so all the sirens go and everybody shot through, but we didn’t. I finished my shower and

then the little– called her the girl with the golden voice and she on the speaker and said, “One flying bomb shot down, seven more coming.” And they had a ring of balloon barrages, which is a great big balloon with a cable, all round the south of London. Two thousand or something, on the principle the flying bombs perhaps would fly and have their wings cut off. Well the people who were underneath the balloon barrages didn’t like this very much,

because, phshsh, on them. But anyway they had them. And of course, a ring of anti aircraft guns on the coast and inland and then they had fighters in between. I watched the fighters chasing them once. Great explosion in the sky and ended up being aircraft. We had them all round where we were at Greenwich on the east coast and the west coast. They were very big explosives head, about a thousand pounds and when

they hit they would knock out a whole square. The whole block would be flattened. They were very powerful weapons. But at least you knew when the engine stopped that that was the time to take cover. We were doing navigation there and so the studies had to go on, so all this would be going on. We'd hear these things coming and the instructor would be going on about some half flog [(UNCLEAR)]

and then we had a drill. As soon as the engine stopped we all dived under the tables and sometimes it came straight down. Very quickly. Sometimes it drifted on if it was going a bit faster. Some poor fellow up in the north of London and some poor people caught it. V2s were much better. You didn’t know they were coming. If you heard the bang, you were alright. They just knocked a huge red hole.

Yes. Because they opened up all the tube stations and they put three tiered bunks all the way through and people had their own bunks. Thousands of people lived underground in the night. Mostly at night, but also in the daytime for heavy raids.

And of course, the ambulance services and all that sort of thing were just simply tremendous. Great friend of ours who was the wife of Captain Robertson who was in the Melbourne in the big collision. She was an ambulance driver with the Fannies through the Blitz. She’s still alive here. Tremendous lady. Difficult, pain wrenching job.

They weren’t of the intensity that they had been earlier in 1941 because by this time the Royal Air Force was pretty well on top. I don’t know how many while I was there, but there must have been most nights. We were quartered in Portsmouth

doing our courses, we were quartered in the Royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert. Beautiful yacht. She was moored in the Portsmouth Harbour. So these things would come down with a great wallop because the bombarded Portsmouth too, with them and you didn’t fell anything and it was lovely on board there.

There were a lot. I don’t know how many there would be. It was virtually raids every night. This intensified a bit before the invasion, but the V2s and the flying bombs went on all day and night. Sometimes a lot together and sometimes odd ones. But the people were just marvellous. Just marvellous. They just took it as part of the day’s life. Absolutely unbelievable.

In Greenwich, which is in London and in Portsmouth and outside Brighton. When I was outside Brighton, my brother had by this time recovered, and was flying again on air-sea rescue in the Channel. I used to fly with him sometimes because he was just nearby.

The first thing would be the sirens would go. Most people took to the shelters. Some didn’t. They got so bored, “Not going to hit me.” And then all the guns would start up and then there would be explosion all over the place. Fire and truck

and ambulances. Fire trucks and all the things that go on.

Yes. Can’t remember where. And I was underground a number of times on the Underground when it was going on. The flying bomb raids, no, I was never– I got caught in the bath one day.

We were quartered in the girls school, Rodean Girls School in the south of England and on the downs nearby there was a home for the blind. And the downs are a range of hills and this stuck up on the top and of course, the flying bombs only just skimmed over the top because they went north of this little range of hills. We often watched all the anti aircraft guns firing at them as they came over.

Sometimes with success and sometimes without. The St Dunstan’s Home for the Blind was for blind people and the navy had taken it over. It was all glass to get enough light in as possible. My room was on the top floor which is eight floors up and I was having a bath one day and the siren went because we had some Wrens in a sandbag enclosure on the top and they had to press the claxon if they thought a flying bomb was

going to hit the building. And the claxon went off so I leapt out of the bath but I had nothing on. I thought, what do I do? If I run out, if the thing hits there’s going to be glass everywhere and I’ll just be filled with glass. I'm not going to go eight floors down, I've got nothing on. Really, the best place for me is to be back in the bath. So I jumped back in the bath. And this thing came past. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It missed the building by about 20 feet.

The girls were just slightly wrong, but that was fine as far as I was concerned. The whole thing was shaking with the powerful jet engine. The windows and things were shaking. And a vast plume of fire went past the window of my bathroom by my bath. I was very glad to be in my armour plated with water all over me. Just nose out, watching.

If you were permanent navy you had to do all these courses in all forms of warfare. You did navigation, you did torpedoes, anti submarine stuff. You did gunnery.

You did gas warfare and all these sorts of things. You did a flying course. A whole range and you did them in different places. While down at the Dunstan Home for the Blind we were doing torpedoes and anti submarine work too. All the permanent officers had to do it and that took six months. Usually it took a year, but in wartime it was cut to six months. Very intensive.

So at the end of it you were qualified to be the anti submarine officer of a destroyer or the gunnery officer of a destroyer or any of the seamen specialisations. You came out as sub lieutenant because you'd done all these courses on top of your sea experience. In fact, as it was wartime, you were fairly experienced by the time you

finished that.

I was ashore all the time.

There weren’t many, but I went with my brother, flying. There was always sport, you could play tennis and things.

That sort of thing and you could go into Brighton and perhaps go to hop if you were lucky. There was a bit of nightlife. It was a bit hard because there was no transport, so it was quite a way to walk, four or five miles. But I hitched a lift one night. A tank stopped next to me, while they were preparing to go into France

and the corporal lent over to me and said, “Sir, would you like a lift? There’s nowhere to sit except astride the gun.” So I sat astride the gun. Went back, great on the Sherman tank. Got back to St Dunstans and he dropped me off and I thanked him very much and he said, “Goodnight sir.” A couple of days later a notice appeared that, “Officers of the Royal Navy do not ride astride on the guns of

tanks. This is not appropriate.” Somebody had seen me. A funny life. It was wartime.

No. That was no no. I'd have been finished if I was ever adrift, other than

through enemy action or something. We wouldn’t, any of us. If you were deliberately adrift and you were caught, if you were an officer it was probably the finish or the start of the finish.

Very, very little because we were flat out doing courses. There was very little. But you could at dances and things, meet them if they were there. But they did all sorts of jobs.

One day I went for a walk after our course at HMS Exeter and there was a small boat base on the end of the island and a motor gun boat came back in and as I was walking along and it was shot to bits. It was in a terrible mess. It had been in night action with the E boats. And on the wharf was a great crowd of Wrens. There were about 100 with an old shipwright in charge of them, a man. A navy shipwright.

The ambulances were there and they took off the dead and the wounded and all the rest of it and the surviving crew were taken ashore somewhere or other and these girls swarmed on board and there were girls of every qualification. Guns, to mend the guns. Engines, everything. They worked away, acetylene torches and everything else and I came along two days later and it was ready for sea again. They were absolutely marvellous, the Wrens.

They were great the jobs they did.

It was terribly efficient and it was very determined. Nothing would stop it. It was, we felt, the greatest fleet in the world.

And with the best officers and men. The Americans in fact had much better equipment later on. They went ahead technologically, much faster and they were better in the carrier warfare because the Royal Navy hadn’t gained control of its aircraft until the year before the war. Most regrettably the Royal Navy was fighting with biplanes,

when they were being attacked by an enemy with first class world beating aircraft. Messerschmitts and things. They Royal Navy was well behind in carrier warfare. Not in the tactics, their operations, because they did things like the attack on Taranto, but in the aircraft. And we knew that this was so, because they’d only had really a year or so to get, and there was no way they could rely on–

Aircraft didn’t come up to world standards. Because the priority had been very low for naval aviation which was controlled by the air force. Rightly so in their views, because the priorities were the air defence of Great Britain, the bomber offensive and the fleet came down the line. But from the navy’s point of view, priority one would have been the air defence. Depending where you are, you have a different priority in life, don’t you?

This was one of the unfortunate divisions of responsibility. So the naval aircraft were pathetic compared with the enemy aircraft. But the Royal Navy as a whole, was a very efficient machine.

Yes. I think the discipline in the Royal Navy was harsher than ours. And it was more, it wasn’t quite as flexible. The relationship between the sailors and the officers was more divided than it was with us, although ours was pretty divided. But the Royal Navy was even more so. That was a big difference. The ship I was in, I was only in one Royal Navy ship.

The sailors would terribly drunk whenever you went into a port you'd get an awful lot of drunks. Terrible. We got a few. Our fellows weren’t pristine. They were great chaps and they let their hair down, but the Royal Navy, boy, we'd have 20 or 30 who would be paralytic at night. Fights and goodness knows what. Terrible to be the officer of the watch.

The uniform was the same as the Royal Navy so no-one knew we were Australians unless they got very close and looked at our buttons. We didn’t even have ‘Australia’ on our shoulders. There was no difference. You didn’t know somebody was an Australian naval officer or otherwise. We all wore the same. Except for our buttons and nobody was going to look at your buttons.

We were very proud to be Royal Australian Navy. That was fine. But as far as the public was concerned, they didn’t know.

With difficulty. It was a difficult environment. But she offered to work in a factory somewhere, building balloon barrages, those sort of things. She looked after my older brother as much as she could. She went back to Australia later, so that was life.

We got in touch because I hadn’t seen him since I was a little boy because he'd been away. And I went down to the airfield and there he was. We took on from there as if we'd never been– it was all terribly simple. He'd say, “Right, jump in the back,” and we would go off. I got [(UNCLEAR)] in half an hour and off we’d go.

It was very interesting because of the build up for the invasion of France was going on. There were hundreds and hundreds of ships. Portsmouth was absolutely stacked with ships and we were the first reserve of officers. They expected that we'd continue our training. They expected very high naval casualties in the invasion of France, so we were a great big reserve to fill the billets of the fellows who had been knocked off.

But the casualties in for the navy were not high in the invasion of France. It’s interesting. They managed to hold the U-boats out and they managed to beat the aircraft off and it was a very very efficient operation. So we were never called on. But some of my friends were, who were in the term above and they manned landing craft in the invasion. I’ll give you the name of another one who can–

who was a flyer as well, who you ought to be interviewing.

He got over it enough for the Royal Air Force to put him back flying air sea rescue, but unfortunately he was–

He'd joined the air force in 1938. When I used to fly with him, he told me there were 48 had become pilots with him in this course and there were only two alive in 1944. He was one of them. But he was killed just before the war finished. The Royal Air Force casualties and our AAF [(Royal) Australian Air Force] casualties which were the same,

were very high for the air crew.

He was in command of a flight with his squadron which was up in an airfield in Beccles in Suffolk and

somebody had been shot down coming back from a raid and he was sent out to try and find them. It was reported that German long range fighters had been seen in the area, but nobody knows. He never came back. Interestingly, his crew– The crew was three. He had a co-pilot. The co-pilot was another Western Australian

who was in the RAAF and he'd been a motor cycle speedway driver in Western Australia and my brother used to get his bicycle and cycle down the speedway track about eight miles away down Midlands or somewhere and watch this fellow, who was one of his idols, and all those years later he was his co-pilot and they were killed together.

I was in the Mediterranean, in Greece.

We were operating in the Aegean to try and stop the communists taking over Greece and to keep the Germans under control so they couldn’t use the Dodecanese Islands for operations. They were virtually–

We stopped all movement. They just existed, were cut right off. That was a very interesting thing because we took the surrender, which was the last surrender of World War II on board my ship, HMS Kimberley and a British army brigadier who was in charge of the soldiery around that part was then our captain

and the German general, who was a general called General Wagner, came out to surrender in a captured British motor gun boat. I took the only photograph, with my little box brownie camera, of the surrender. It was the last one of the war. Years later when I was an admiral and I was in London,

and I went to call on the head of the German staff in NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation], it was lieutenant general called Jurgens Brandt and I wanted to raise certain things with him and I was ushered in. He spoke very good English and in our conversation he told me he’d been in the German commandos and had surrendered in

Rhodes, so I said, “Oh.” And I told him what did he surrender in. He said, “Yes, I was the captain of that motor gun boat.” And I said, “Well, I was in charge of our boarding parties. We were warned about how this boat was captured.” He said, “What did they tell you?” So I was about to tell him and we had to finish the discussion because somebody else– He had a queue of people.

Some months later he was promoted to command the whole German armed forces, so I let some time go by and then arranged to go and see him again, because I wanted to sort out this rather important high level defence matter which Germany. Soon as I said I was coming he was delighted and I was ushered in

and he said, “Now tell me what did they tell you?” I said, “They told me, this is what happened.” “It wasn’t like that at all.” He told me the story of how he’d captured this gun boat, so I said, “When I get back to Australia I’ve got a photograph of you surrendering.” And so I got back and found the little photograph and I had in my command the navy photographic section. The chief petty officer in charge looked at this little photograph. He said, “I can blow that up sir.”

And so he blew it up, big picture. And there he is on the bridge of the– Another German officer, with the Weimar. So I got a German speaking wife of one of my officers German, a friend of mine and she wrote for me. I said, “Now I want you to write, ‘To remind you of your one and only naval command’.” I sent it off to him. He was the head of the German armed forces then and I got a lovely letter back. He was delighted.

Strange isn’t it? Coincidence all these years later.

HMS. Yes, Royal Navy. She was a British ship. Lord Mountbatten had a squadron of K class destroyers, about eight of them, and he was sunk in the [HMS] Kelly. All the others except two were sunk. The two remaining were HMS

Kelvin and HMS Kimberley. Churchill had a very great understanding of history and all those sort of questions of tradition and so he said, “I want the Kelvin to take me to the north and south of France invasion and I want the Kimberley to take me to the south of France,” and that’s what happened. So the ship when I joined it had just recently come back from that and the ship was full of stories of Churchill

on board.

Oh yes. They were full of story that he had– The commander in chief was on board of the navy, for the invasion of France, of south France, and the story was an interesting one, because the commander in chief told our captain that when they got up there

and the shore batteries all started firing at the fleet, which was just about to do the landing, that Churchill would always certainly turn and tell the captain to go and bombard shore batteries. And he said, “My orders to you and you’re not to leave this channel, you have to stay here.” And when it all happened, that’s exactly what occurred. When the guns started firing Churchill said, “Go and knock them out.” And the captain said, “No sir. My orders are to stay in the swept channel of the mine field sweep.”

So Churchill turned to the admiral and said, “I suppose they’re your orders to find safe sea?” And the admiral said, “Yes, sir, they are and he has to obey them.” Which was good and strong of the admiral. Churchill stumped off the bridge and it was very hot, I think it was June, hot in the south of France and there was no air-conditioning so he sat without anything on in the captain’s cabin and he loved brandy so he had a bottle and we had South African

officers on board and they had South African brandy. I don’t know how they got it, but they did. So he loved South African brandy and people brought all the signals in to him, were astonished to see the prime minister without a stitch on and the bottle of brandy, reading all the signals and doing his stuff and he’d been loaned a book by one of the South African officers and anyway, he stumped off when they got back to Naples and he was still in a very bad mood having been overruled at the front.

When the South African officer was given back his book he opened the fly leaf and I saw it, and there it was. “The book was much more interesting than the battle, Winston S. Churchill.” Great thing to have.

First of all I was the gunnery man, gunnery control officer, which was my main job

and I ran all the ship’s administration. I was the ship’s office man. And I ran all the secret publications and I was the communications officer, all those sorts of jobs. Later I was the navigator.

You had a lot of them. Codes and secret tactical instructions and all that sort of–

There were a lot of various books which you use which were secret. Naval warfare has to be very secret in many things and the question of communications and things are of the greatest importance. You don’t want the enemy to know what is being planned, where ships are or anything else.

You have certain ways of disposing of them depending what they are and you have to have that all ready to–

Yes. If I was still alive.

Just as the gunnery control officer, to control the guns

and so on. I was a junior fellow at that stage of course. I was only a sub lieutenant and that was my role. I wasn’t the actual gunnery officer, there was an officer senior to me, but I was number two.

We had six 4.7 inch guns, a crowd of Beaufighters guns and we had–

she wasn’t quite as well armed as the Warramunga, with same type of guns between turrets, and torpedoes and depth charges. She was a similar sort of speed. Similar sort of ship but not quite as powerful.

We were sent up to, straight away, into among

the German-held islands to stop all movement etc and then we bombarded every now and again and did things like that and varied where we moved so that we weren’t surprised and we had to avoid the mine fields and things which we knew roughly where they were and we liaised with the Greek authorities, with the Greek Commando Brigade we had there operating as well and with the locals in–

There was a lovely little island where we had a drill because the Germans used to take it when we were away so the bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church. The drill was, when we arrived on the scene, if all was alright, there would be nothing on the church. If the place had been occupied while we were away by the German forces, he hung out a red carpet. Very simple and very effective.

We had a Greek liaison officer on board. They were very brave men, very brave men, and all these things were done with us with them because we couldn’t speak Greek, other than hello.

The Germans held very strongly a number of islands. They held Crete,

Rhodes and a number of the smaller of the Dodecanese Islands, Kos and Leros and they still had big gun batteries on some of the islands and they had quite powerful army forces, but only a few ships that had a few guns on, but not war ships. They had only slight aircraft so we weren’t under great threat. But they had a lot of minefields and we knew we had to watch that. We lost a number of minesweepers there

at that stage, but we never got into any serious trouble.

There were mines virtually in all the channels that they had done. We had swept certain channels so we knew where we had swept. We didn’t’ think they had the capabilities to re-mine them locally and at the same time of course, Greek

fishermen got blown up here and there so we knew there were mines in other places. And we knew that other certain channels had been mined. Other wise it was a question of luck. Wherever we went we used our sonar the whole time to try and pick the mines up and we were very good at it. I was the anti submarine officer on board, so I was in charge of all that.

In fact, we got caught in a mine field one day and we had a lot of troops on board and we had to stop and with pinpoint accuracy, exactly where the mines were around us and the captain managed to manoeuvre the ship back out again.

We were going to land them on one of the islands. I think the

war had just, I think it was the day after the war had finished and I think we were taking back one of the German-held islands.

Yes. It was an Indian battalion we were taking to do the job.

He was a lieutenant commander. We had two captains, because the captain changed while I was there. The second captain we had

was there for most of the time while I was there, he was a very famous man with a distinguished service order which was very rare for a lieutenant commander and in one of the big convoys that had gone through to Malta only one tanker which was badly damaged holed by torpedoes had survived and he had lashed his destroyer to it and taken it into Malta. I think it was a tanker called the [USS] Ohio

which saved Malta really because it had aviation fuel for the fighters, without which it would have been very difficult and he was a very famous and delightful captain. Very good.

Very closely. I was his anti submarine officer to start with and mines were the particular worry but also possibly submarines but none ever appeared. I was his communications and

all his books and things and I ran his office which was just one Egyptian/Lebanese writer, and me. We had 320 men so it was quite a job the administration.

I think right from the day you joined the navy we were, I was keen to go on as far as I could. But when the war finished of course, we were under terrible pressure because there were lots of reserve officers in the ships

and indeed some of the permanent officers were resigning and this caused great personal anguish. Everybody was talking about the university degree they were going to, and there was a reconstruction and there were courses you could do and the government paid for it and people had been approached to go to various firms and the sky was the limit.

So it was a very difficult period for a lot of permanent officers whether to stay or whether to go.

Well, obviously it was a consideration, but I didn’t particularly want to leave. I was very happy to go on as far as I could.

The interesting this was when Turkey came in the war. That was another interesting side and we were then allowed to use Turkish harbours. Marmaris is a harbour to the south of Turkey and we put a Free French tanker in there.

And then what we had to do was the Germans had a lot of big shore guns on Rhodes and it was a very narrow strait to get through to get to Marmaris, so we would go up and down patrolling all day and then suddenly we'd go onto full speed and before the German gunners could open fire on us we were through. We hoped. And they were usually basking in the sunshine and thinking the war’s coming to an end so we made it.

The Turks were terribly suspicious. It’s a different world now because of tourism and so on, but I'd never been in an environment ever like it. We got into Marmaris. We felt first of all they were going to fire on us when we came in, which was very difficult. But the minute we got in and people fled in front of us. I went ashore with another officer to arrange something and

people ran off the streets and the kids screamed and looked at you behind curtains and if you looked at them they pulled the curtain quickly. It was a nasty feeling. There was no– And I put it down to World War Two and they had been of course, an enemy then, and the memories perhaps of Gallipoli and all these sorts of things. But they were terribly suspicious and it wasn’t a nice

atmosphere at all. I don’t think they really wanted to come into the war, but I think their government decided that they could have a voice at the peace treaty so it would be a good thing to join the allies without actually having to fight the Germans which is roughly what happened so we just used the port and it was very interesting. The kids would all scream and yell and run away. They’d been told terrible things about we wicked monsters.

I went ashore there, I had an afternoon off in Marmaris. Another officer and I went up a valley. It was pretty hot and bare, but there was a stream and there were some little boys catching tortoises in a pool. We went down

and they screamed and jumped up and ran and so we got in and rolled up our trousers and took our caps off. We were in full uniform but unarmed and we started to try and catch them too. So we smiled at these little boys and said, “Come on. You get down the other end,” and indicated and they did. The little girls hid behind the trees and looked at us all the time. So we all caught the turtles and by the end of this we were great friends. That was a lot of fun.

Kids are the same all over the world. But it was nasty that they’d obviously been told that we were awful people.

They weren’t bad. They were very long necked turtles and we caught a couple and gave them to the kids to take home and eat or whatever they were going to do with them.

I think everybody knew the Russian armies were approaching Berlin. The British and Americans were already over the Rhine. But it was obvious from, I think, the beginning of ’43 that the war was over.

That Germany really couldn’t recover despite what they were putting their faith in, which was all the series of V weapons and if they got the atom bomb it would have been difficult. And the new submarines were a terrible danger which we had nothing to cope with the speed of the new German submarines if they’d come in in numbers with crews, because they had lost so many. They lost so many U-boat crews they didn’t have any experienced people

left. And the new jet aircraft the Germans introduced were going to wreak havoc and the anti-aircraft missiles which they had produced in 1945, the Wasserfall and so on, against the bomber squadron, so the Germans put their weight in this new technology, faith. But it was obvious to all of us from the beginning of ’43 that the war was over. It was a

question of how long it would take before the Germans gave in and the Japanese came in. Because the might of America was coming on stream everywhere. It was enormous, the industrial capacity of the United States in replacing their losses and turning out thousands and thousands of tanks and lorries and ships and they were turning out merchant ships in 29 days

from lane kiln lane to commissioning. Liberty ships.

Didn’t matter. The reefs of the Pacific were well marked by Liberty ships which had gone aground. The problem was producing crews. So they had a training school for officers and they would do

one cruise as the second in command, one and then they’d be the captain. All over the pacific they’d run aground, didn’t matter. They had so many. The Liberty ship was a war winner, as was a thing like the jeep and indeed some of the aircraft.

Not between Russia and America. It was more–

The Americans, or at least this was our reading, that Roosevelt on the whole seemed to trust Stalin more than he did Churchill. Which is strange, but that appeared to us to be the scene and the British understood because the Russian agents were in Greece and they seemed to understand the situation much more, that in fact, the Russians

were determined that communism would take over Europe and then the world. This was our view and I think it was right. And I think it was Fulton, Missouri speech in 1946 when Churchill spoke about the Iron Curtain, that was the real start of America beginning to realise that– Then there was the Berlin airlift. They actually couldn’t talk to the Russians.

The curtain was coming down.

To my level it became apparent in hindsight.

But it was very clear on the ground that what was going on, the terrible things that were happening, people strung up on lamp posts. It was a terrible scene in many ways. We had to do the best we could to retake Greece for democracy and it would be a democratic country.

This is what we did and we knew that the Greek people were behind us. I nearly got captured by the ELAS fellows. I suppose I was on one occasion. I was in a boarding party searching kikes and we went into, on a Sunday for a rest in a bay on Cape Matapan, and there was an old castle on the hill

and the captain of this, he was a New Zealander, New Zealand navy, patrol boat and I'd been loaned from the Kimberley with this boarding party, so he said, “Why don’t we go and have a look at the castle?” And I said, “Great idea.” Been cooped up in this ship for weeks, so off we went in our little boat with a petty officer. We were unarmed. We were in uniform. We thought

It was very remote from the big cities. “She’ll be right.” And when we pulled up on the beach two fellows stepped out with submachine guns and they were of the Communist army, ELAS forces. So we indicated that– Offered them a cigarette. They wouldn’t have one. They weren’t pointing the guns at us, which surprised us. And we indicated we wanted to go up to the castle and we thought, well, we’ll play along with it.

So one went in front, one went behind. We went up this trail. Got to the top and they knocked on a door and the old man came out who was their father and there was a great hole in the middle of the castle and that was where they’d been bombed by the Luftwaffe in ’41 and we indicated through the phrase book we wanted to have a look around. So he showed us round the old castle and then these two, we all

chatted and these fellows didn’t seem at all offensive or anything else. So we thought, well, thanks a lot. We indicated we had to go back to the ship and he bowed and we said a couple of words of Greek, of thank you and these two, one in front, one behind with their submachine guns, took us down the path to the road and they were his sons. And we then realised what was happening, was the Communist forces,

ELAS forces were conscripting everybody into the ELAS forces and these were a couple of conscripts and they didn’t want to be communists and they held the boat and we got in and shoved off. We had a number of occasion in villages when the villagers all turned out and cheered and gave us oranges and the last thing they wanted was what was going on in Greece.

So we got a great welcome wherever we went, despite all the propaganda and the leaflets which were going about, which were absolute lies about us. It was an interesting part of the war, that wrap up in its own way.

We heard it on the BBC [British Broadcasting Commission] all the time so we knew all the time and of course, we knew it from

the naval signals that came in to tell us what was happening. But we heard the BBC all the time. Got the news bulletins, which were pretty accurate from our own observations. I think the BBC was pretty good on the whole. No doubt there was some propaganda in it, and all of Europe listened to it on secret radios.

We only took the islands, the German islands. The rest, the Greek government had been a government in exile and they were taking over the towns as they became freed but a lot of the towns we went to, we were the only force was the navy there an the rest was held by the ELAS forces. But

they didn’t dare touch us. We didn’t touch them before we got the forces to do it.

With great jubilation. But of course, as far as ours was concerned the war with Japan was still going and they all knew that they might be sent there too.

Yes. That I would go back when the war in Europe finished. It was very clear that the war in Europe finished before the war against Japan.

It was obvious to us in the navy or anybody who thought, and to the senior command,

that when the main strength of the Japanese fleet was destroyed at Midway really, that the American training and production machine was such that they could replace their losses and build up and the Japanese would not be able to and it was clear that the American submarine campaign, which was very efficiently

run, they were very good the American. They were designed for the job, air conditioned beautiful ships, beautiful boats compared with the British ones for that type of war, very long range, very well commanded and run and very elite corps, the American submarines. They were ranging up and down the Chinese coast and they were wreaking havoc with

one of the keys to the Japanese operations, which was their merchant shipping. By the time that the war in Europe finished, the American push across the central Pacific was in a very advanced mode. I've forgotten the actual dates. They had taken many of the island areas in the defensive

ring that Japan had taken and the American fleet was striking at– Although the Japanese had far more aircraft, many times the number of air craft the American fleet did. Because of the concentration of the movement of the American fleet, they could take out one lot of air bases before the other air bases could reinforce it. And the next couple of days later they’d take out the other one. So the mobility, combined with the concentration of great air fire of the American fleet, was

such that the Japanese just couldn’t cope. And despite having a much stronger, on paper, strength of air craft in the various airfields. In the navy it was obvious to us it was a matter of time, that Japan didn’t have any way of recuperating. They may inflict great damage which they did from time to time, or partly did.

They weren’t rumours. It was so. I would have been involved if I'd still been in the British fleet, or indeed if I'd joined an Australian fleet in the last push. The fact of the matter was, that having taken Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and the American fleet having destroyed the last strength of the Japanese fleet, the American

and British battleships were bombarding the coast of Japan. Naval air craft were ranging from end to end and the US Army Air Force with its huge Super-Fortresses, was bombing all the cities all over Japanese day and night, with a tremendous weight of fire power and that the invasion would take place. What we all considerably feared was the

Japanese would as they had in Iwo Jima and Guam and everywhere else, and Okinawa, would fight to the last man and that the casualties would be enormous. The kamikazes were already there and that the Japanese casualties would be several times ours but our casualties would be huge. So the invasion of Japan was not looked upon at all, as they’d die every last man for the emperor.

And when we went into Japan I remember in the Hareema dock in Kure, there were arranged, I think it was about 60 midget submarines and they had hundreds of fast patrol boats packed with explosive heads just to go out and ram whatever they could and they’d be kamikazes alright. So

there would have been considerable concern. There was no doubt that we would win in our minds, but that the casualties would be very high. So the dropping of the nuclear bomb that happened while we were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, was a marvellous thing because we'd finally convinced the Japanese that not only did the Americans have this weapon, but use it. And far from what

I read with almost disbelief the people here in Australia and in England saying what a terrible thing it was to have dropped the atom bomb. It was one of the changes in history. It was that example of what would happen that brought in the balance of deterrence between Russia and the United States. As far as we were concerned in the armed forces it saved

millions of allied casualties and millions and millions of Japanese. And although it was terrible to think of 60,000 people being killed straight off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was nothing compared to what would have been had the war continued. Far from what a terrible thing, most of us saw it as the most marvellous thing. It saved so many lives and then with

the great deterrent to stop World War III. If it hadn’t been for that, World War III would have been on on several occasions. First of all in the Berlin airlift, second in Korea and third in the Cuba crisis and I think people who say, “What a terrible thing,” they should have been there.

With great joy. It was great, and what’s more we were diverted. Instead of going non stop from Liverpool to Sydney with 4600

sailors, reinforcements, in this very small ship, and the conditions were so terrible. We got into Colombo harbour to refill. We weren’t going to let anybody off, just to refuel. And 400 jumped overboard, sharks and all. But then when the atom bomb dropped we diverted for 24 hours into Fremantle and of course, that was great.

So my parents got a hell of a shock when I turned up.

Only for a few hours. I made it, yes.

Yep. My father had been discharged from the army then, because the army was winding down. The AIF was still active, but the huge armed forces that Australia had produced

were being disbanded. So he had a job in Perth and he got a bit of shock when I turned up. I had a sister there. The other one was in New Guinea. Jean was in New Guinea who we met. And the other sister was there and she thought I was a boyfriend of hers because I was in uniform. Got a bit of a shock.

Yes. It was very interesting because the submarine campaign against Japan, when the war finished and we came into Fremantle, it was a huge submarine base, American, British and Dutch. We came in and there were 40 submarines had come back in off patrol.

Tremendous.

I went to Hiroshima to see the–

Where the atom bomb, where the worst one had dropped, and I went to Nagasaki too. I went to both places. But in Hiroshima it was just flat except for the few crumpled remains of a few buildings and there was molten glass and everything like that. There were lots of people picking among the ruins to get bits of mike and stuff and

air craft canopies to make into souvenirs for the allied soldiers. The Japanese were quite remarkable. We'd thought that when we went ashore in Japan, if we stepped off the main street we'd get our throats slit. But you were safer in Japan than you were in Sydney. The emperor had said, “Don’t touch a hair on the head of an allied soldier,” and they didn’t. It was a remarkable experience,

Japan, and they beavered like anything. They worked so hard to recover and a lot of them worked for us. We had a lot of prisoners of war who were in groups who cleaned bilges and all sorts of dirty jobs in the ships and it was an absolute eye opener to see and to see all the caves in hillsides where they’d put their

factories and even all sorts of military equipment so that they could withstand the air raids. They’d virtually gone, burrowed underground. Huge caves everywhere. Tokyo was mostly flat. People talk about the atom bomb, but the damage in Tokyo was tremendous and to see that was a sight.

There were so many things. We were employed on the Korean patrol off the coast of Korea because the Koreans were trying to get into Japan because conditions were better in Japan because of the occupation. The emperor was a MacArthur, the Emperor of Japan. What he said went, even though he wasn’t of course the emperor, but

MacArthur brought in all sorts of things and money poured in and Japan. Lots of orders were placed in Japan. The Korean War broke out, Japan took off. Lots of Koreans were trying to get across into Japan and the Japanese didn’t want them and MacArthur didn’t want them, so we were a patrol of Two Australian, two British, two American, two Indian destroyers in the Straits. It was a terrible time because

unscrupulous people smugglers operating who would fill up with Koreans in a port in Korea, demand more money when they got to sea and then they would murder them all in the middle of the night. Throw them overboard, wash the decks down, go back for another lot. So we were after this lot. We used to lie in the big fishing fleets, sort out who was fishing and who wasn’t, because they used to try and hide in the fishing fleets. Interesting.

Yes I suppose the most remarkable thing was the way

when the emperor spoke and told the Japanese people that these were the conquerors and that the war was over and they must not do anything to harm any allied soldiers. The way in which the Japanese people absolutely obeyed what the emperor had said had a personally very remarkable experience there. We were in the western part of Kyushu, the southern part of, and this was

early 1946 and I went, we headed off and off we went on patrol with another officer to walk up the mountains at a remote beach. And we went right up the mountains. We passed a couple of ladies carrying a honey pot which was the human

excreta that they put all over the paddy fields, on a very steep sided mountain with a very narrow path, that was quite an experience, trying to flatten oneself against the mountainside. They went past and that was fine, we sort of whiffed away the smell and that was fine, we went on our way. We got down to about 5 miles in there and we came, the paddy fields in there, there was great

stand of thick big bamboo that the Japanese had. We emerged through this in this little narrow path and onto a wider track and then we found there were about 30 peasant farmers cutting the rice. And they all had scythes and they were cutting away. And one of them suddenly pulled up and he saw us, and they all came out of the paddy field with their scythes

towards us. We were absolutely horror struck at this because we thought they had lost their son and things in Okinawa and Iwo Jima and here were two allied unarmed fellows in those remote area. That we were facing our maker. My fellow officer said, “Lets make a run for it.”

And I said, “No, we couldn’t possibly get away.” So we walked straight ahead. They came out of the paddy field each side, and to our absolute astonishment, they laid their scythes on the path and they bent down with their heads in the dust, hid their heads on each side. And we walked across their heads like conquerors. And I said to my companion,

“Whatever you do don’t kick them in the heads, mind where you put your feet.” And we very carefully went across to the far side, they all got up and bowed, picked up their scythes and went back into the harvest. Unbelievable, we went on our way and eventually got back onto the ship. Strange events.

It was extraordinary but it was at the same time very moving. But this influence, divine worship of the emperor so he had a very, very strong, he was a great unifying force of Japan. And the industry of the Japanese tremendously impressed us.

How hard they worked, how willingly they worked. And the speed with which they mended things and do a lot of things. They were building later, they were building houses for the army occupation, our own soldiers and so on. And the houses went up quick smart, beautifully built. And whole gardens, they would dug up trees which would be 20 feet high. And dig around them

with a bowl and lift the whole tree onto the back of a lorry and plant a whole new garden overnight practically.

Well such as the, the

attitude of the Japanese was so friendly, and it became friendlier as time went by. It was a remarkable experience. They didn’t speak, almost nobody spoke English. So if you got on a train there was always a compartment your could get into, the Japanese you would ask them things but they were very shy and would put their heads down and laugh because they couldn’t really answer

what you were asking where to go. So it was difficult to find your way around. But they were just simply so nice. And quite the reverse of what we had expected. And yes, Japan is such a beautiful country.

I was up there several times, on and off form 1946 to 1962.

I went up there a number of times, I can’t remember how many. First of all in the occupation then in the Korean War, three different times there. And then I was up there in, I went back in 1962 with a carrier group, the Melbourne escort on a good will visit to Japan which is one of the most interesting things I have done. Because I went back to Nagasaki first of all to have a look at the atom bomb. The scientists had

said nothing would grow for 30 or 40 years. We couldn’t find where the atom bomb was dropped the second time because it was all built up and there were great parks and in fact the trees looked beautiful, fresh and. I went to Hiroshima and there, instead of the waster land that I had seen was a great city of one and a half million, with sky scrapers and no evidence whatever, and people had gone back and nature had

rain had fallen and the winds had blown and, yes, there were terrible things with people who had been so wounded and burnt in the attack. There were all those aftermaths, but the people who were living there didn’t seem to suffer any effects whatever, they were great cities.

Yes it was a bit scary in its way. We only had one foot six freeboard and they put so much equipment into us to be able to pump out a couple of thousand amps through our tail to blow up these mines. And we had a very small crew, there were only two officers so we were very, very tired in this little ship just steaming at night and so on. We got a very bad gale in the Coral Sea going across to Port Moresby.

Which was an experience and a half because all the lights failed and we were more underwater than above, waves coming right over the top of us. And we were well battened down, and the one stoker we had on board, everybody was terrible seasick except me fortunately. And they engine room door which is on the upper deck had slammed and the lock had broken and we

couldn’t get into the engine room. Anyway the engine kept going alright there was no problem. The next morning we lowered him down on a rope through the skylight on top of the hot engine, to try and open the engine room door from he other side. But they were very worried in the frigate that was with us because they had lost all contact with us in the night and with the other two pevy. That was bit concerning but

we survived. And then we got on with the mien sweeping, In among all the Japanese ships that had been sunk up there, and the miens and aircraft and ships.

Well the Anzac and the Tobruk were two battle class destroyers being built in Australia. And it was decided that their armament would be the latest armament developed in Britain, which is twin 4.5 inch turrets. A new type of turret that could fire at aircraft as well as bombardment surface ships, very high angle gun. And the very latest fire control, probably in the world at the time. Which was a

huge computer system which had a thousand, approximately, thermionic valves. It was all electric and electronic. If you take the law of averages of there is so many valves, when it was working it was very, very good and when it was not working it was bad. And it had an emergency system which you could use. And we had the very latest computer for bombardment and surface fire which is very

accurate. And we also had the latest secondary armament, a stag gun mounting there which are twin Beaufighters gun which had a radar set which searched for aircraft guns and it locked onto that aircraft, made all the adjustments to the guns, and you just simply fire them. And this was way in advance of anything we knew of anywhere else. The Tobruk was first fitted, it did all the trials

and gave us the experience because I was the only one in our ship who had seen these turrets before. And the only one that had fired the anti aircraft guns and so on. So we had a huge training task and we had very little manuals or information But the Tobruk had done so many trials it was able to help us a great deal. And the navy decided to send us up to Korea where we found we were the only ship in any navy then that

had this sort of advanced equipment that could lock onto aircraft with both its main armament and on its secondary armament, all at the same time. So we were very advanced in gunnery. And in fact the building of these two ships was a huge technological advance for Australia because the turrets were built here, the torpedo tubes were all built here in Australia. The

big anti submarine mortar that we had was built here in Australia, the engines were built here. And all this stuff was built in those days in Australia. And so it was a vast technological jump that was made in the introduction of those ships and really brought the RAN into a modern electronic type world. And the navy advanced from that sort of base with all that was learnt in that.

Very big advance in our ship and in our technology.

Yes well we got up there and we were then sent in shore in the inshore forces bombarding shore batteries and troops concentration and bridges and trains and all those

sorts of things. So we ranged up and down the coast with other destroyers or forces, and our first bombardment was tremendously successful and we blew up a gunning placement which blew the top off it. Which surprised some of us but it was a very interesting and exciting time. Sometimes we were then sent out to the carrier group

to be on the escort of aircraft carriers, there was always a British aircraft carrier, usually British off the west coast, and the American carriers off the east coast. We ranged right up to the Russian border on both coasts. So we were well north of where the army was, north of the border trying to interdict and stop the trains and the supplies coming down from China to the enormous Chinese army which was

a million odd men on the front. And at this the integral forces seemed to be quite successful. The carrier forces covered the whole of the northern Korean peninsula by day and the air force also took part at day, but very much at night also. Night bombing was done usually by the air force. And during daylight nothing moved. But at night they repaired the bridges and moved trains out of tunnels

and all this sort of stuff. And moved their transport about. But it must have been very, very difficult for them. Their great construction battalions in the villages to rebuild the bridges. So we knew the trains would be running by about one in the morning and that’s why we would be all ready to knock them off. We usually missed but sometimes we hit.

Well you developed all sorts of techniques to, because we could see where they were in the tunnels, because as they stoked up, they were old steam trains, the steam and the smoke had to come out of somewhere so we looked out of our best binoculars terribly closely. At the entrances of tunnels to see if we could see any smoke coming out in the late afternoon. If we could we knew there was train ready to come out at about 1 o'clock.

Yes

I was the gunnery officer in charge of all the armament. And of course I was bridge watch keeping officer as well and I was the operations officer in charge of the ships operation. So I did the liaison with all the other ships involved. The second time we were usually in command of the coast because we had a captain then, Captain Gatacre who is a very famous

Australian officer who became an admiral. And he was extremely experienced. He’d be in the operations officer in the Battle of the Savo Islands and then the Solomons and he was the operations officer for the admiral while I was the in the Australia in World War II. And he had bent the navigator of HMS Rodney when she was involved in sinking the Bismarck in the North Atlantic, he was very experienced.

And he was usually in charge of the inshore, all the destroyers and frigates operating on either coast, I was his operational officer through all that. So that was a very interesting time. We had one very remarkable incident. We were bombarding up the coast of east Korea on the east coast right up near, about half way up from the front. And an American aircraft from the carrier

was shot down. And we could hear what was going on in another part of the thing, we could hear what was going down you see. He always try to make the sea if they could, carrier aircraft, and the made it. He was a bout a couple of miles of the coast, that’s all, about a mile. But it was right up near the Russian border and we were the nearest ship so we decided we would go and pick him up. There was no other way there, there were a few helicopters in the American fleet. But

they had new technology and they couldn't possibly go that distance. So we went at full speed for several hours up until we got up there. And then we were all ready for shore batteries to open up and we found this fellows, the squadron flew around bombing anything that moved while we went up, and they shoed up where he was. And we had onboard a Royal Australian Navy pilot who was doing his time in destroyers

to get his watch keeping ticket and to become in the command system of the navy. And he was very fine fellow, he was a Scotsman who had come out to Australia to join the navy, and he was there for training. So he was put in the boat to go pick up this chap, we stood off a little bit further out. Ready to open fire if the shore guns hit and all that. And

it was November, terribly cold. And we thought this fellow was frozen, but he was in his life raft and he wasn’t hurt. So we picked him up and then we gave him some rum and introduced him to all the officers. And he came to this particular officer who was a very famous fellow of our called Danny Buchanan. We said that this is Lieutenant Commander Buchanan, you see, and he suddenly yelled out, “Not Danny?”

And Danny said, “Yes.” And he said, "You should know me I was your radioman in 1942 when you were training in America for the Fleet Air Arm in Pensacola.” Isn’t that amazing, it was his crewman, we picked him up. And he had 13 days to go, he was married with a couple of kids, and he was in the US naval reserve. And he’d been shot down twice already, this was his third time. And

He had only 13 days of service to go and he would be sent back to America. So the captain said, “You are in the Royal Australian Navy for 13 days.” And he turned and said to me, “Now you see that we don’t go near that carrier, we are in helicopter range you see.” And that was alright, we were in shore group so I fixed all that. And 13 days later we told the USS Boxer we were ready hand him over provided they gave us the ransom. And the destroyers always demanded a ransom from the carriers

for a pilot picked up. We didn’t have any ice cream but the carriers had lovely ice cream, the American carriers, so the [(UNCLEAR)], over came the helicopter with this huge, about 3 foot high and a couple of feet wide, can of ice cream underneath, great bag, and that was loaded onto our quarter deck. And then we hooked up Lou Phant was his name, him onto the hook and away he went back to America. Really enjoyed the ice cream.

The American carriers were very good like that, they said, okay. Keep it.

Yes it’s interesting that all those years later you pick up the man who had been his air crewman.

Oh very strange, a number of other ones that I had that were very strange. So there we are.

Well we had a considerable difficulty keeping the main part of the advanced technological side of the equipment going. Because there was spare problems and so on. But we

usually managed it for 90 percent of the time at least. Btu we always had the emergency system, so that we could use everything in an emergency which worked. So we, operations we were fine really, overall. I suppose our main concern there was, although there was always a danger of air attack we used to see the MiG 15s of the North Koreans which were thought to be piloted sometimes by the

Russians or Chinese. And the Chinese were flying high above us but they never came down to attack us. But the main concern was the shore batteries and the mines. Because there were mine fields, they used to lay them from sand bands at night and a couple of sand bands were caught with mines on board, not by us but by one of the Canadian destroyers.

Thy were the main concern, particularly the shore batteries, but and of course we landed landing parties and north Korean marines to do all sorts of activities, blowing things ups and getting information you know, all that sort of stuff went on. We held the offshore islands, stopped any invasion of North Korea from those islands. Which we held and we rescued pilots and

son on. And we had always with us a flying boat on the west coast which used to be sent straight off to try and pick people up. We would otherwise. So there was all that sort of stuff. And we used to do bombardments there at night. We went up in the Yalu River one night, while a tremendous air raid was going on near Antung one night, that was, we had some

targets to bombard which we did. That was right upon the border. But we always had a, aware that the Chinese might expand the war and bring in their naval forces from the west. But they never dared because it would have been all out war between America and China so they never did that. So they restricted the war to the Korean peninsula. Strange situation

merchant ships British and so on were going into Chinese ports while a full scale war was going on. British forces and the British fleet just across the way of Korea. Very strange, but and of course while we were there MacArthur was fired by Truman, I think it was Truman. And that was a terrible occurrence. But I think it was the

he was most concerned that his army was having great casualties. He held on the 38th parallel and wasn’t allowed to do what he believed he should do to finish the war. So it became a question of the president versus the commander in chief and so it was, overall a sensible thing that MacArthur went. Otherwise we’d be at war with China I think.

Full scale war with China. but that’s a long time ago and historians may say differently, but that’s how it was.

Three times, twice in the Anzac and once in the Sydney.

Well in the Sydney we were always

way out at sea in the carrier. And doing flying operations, just as we had during the war but without dropping anything or taking anything. But we were kept right on our toes ready to start again at the drop of a hat. So we practiced the whole time to keep the aircraft operations efficient. And well we were ready all the time then. The navy was

still absolutely there on the spot. As were the other armed forces, it was just that nobody was shooting. While talk was going on.

I met her when I was doing my trials for the Anzac, when she was building. And I was down at the naval depot at Cerberus, and I met her at a ball one night, which was very nice. And we were married when I came back from Korea the first time. And I want with her for long and we went away again.

And well then we’ve been together ever since. She has had a tough life because I’ve been away and she had all the kids to look after and didn’t know anybody really. And when we came up to Sydney and I had no relatives this side of the continent, and didn’t know anybody ashore. So it was a very difficult life for Pat but she withstood it.

Being busy breeding little Aussie children and grandchildren ever since.

We got married in Melbourne, in a church there in South Yarra, at St Johns. And that was a great day and the sailors was determined to find out where the gunnery officer was having his honey moon so that they could make sure that he was suitably disturbed.

And I went to great lengths to make sure they didn’t discover where I was going for my honey moon, so that was good. This is a long time ago. We had a marvellous ships company in the Anzac, oh great fellows, yeah.

Well they were, nothing was too difficult.

And they were full of initiative they were very well trained in many ways. And they were just a marvellous team together, really marvellous team together. Nothing was too difficult for them, no complaints, they got on with the job. Among the officers we had four of the officers, we only had about 10, became admirals eventually.

And so we had a good team there the ward room worked very well together, the engine room worked well together, it was great ship.

Well a big ship is very different to a little ship.

You don’t get to know everybody in a big ship. I had a good team in the gunnery world of the Sydney and that worked very well. And we had a great ships company in the Sydney too. But it’s very difficult the bigger you get the more compartmentalised it is really. And you don’t know people in other divisions and so on, whereas in a small ship you know everybody. And they know you. So

it was a bit different. And the coronation crews were a remarkable thing because they took a lot of officers out to make cabin accommodation available for New Zealand army and air force and navy. All army and navy. And to make room for the coronation contingent which is selected from all over Australia. And we had one squadron of aircraft and we had to train every body up for street lining and

all the marching and everything else. And we had to keep flying. And we had very few officers so it was a very busy cruise. Very interesting, very interesting. But very difficult. And to have VCs all lined up tipping the flight deck, we didn’t have sailors to do so they had to do it. They were great, all pulling yarns and doing their tipping away. And we

had some very famous men on board. We had all the navy’s, George Crossman who was a great man who were mostly divers, who had dived on the mines in the North Sea in the German coast and the Dutch coast. And rendered safe mines which had never been rendered safe before which were booby trapped, all within mines a couple of feet under. Incredible men. And the ones that survived.

A lot of fine fellows.

the only interesting thing, this is really nothing to do with war as such. But one of the things that fascinated me was the migration of the birds. The flight out of Siberia as winter is coming on

about Octoberish, in millions. And they go down, particularly the west coast, and the islands off down the coast of China and all over the place. And so we would detect these mobs of duck and the things coming down on our radar. and we used to go to action stations because it looked like aircraft. They gave such a big echo, until we discovered the speed they were going and

so on. And I realised they weren’t and then would come these enormous mobs of duck down the coast. Great sight to see. Of course it was so cold, the Yellow sea freezes over. And although we weren't there for the worst part of the winter. It was terribly cold when we left. The second time. The Tobruk which relieved us, she was

in sort of pack ice and terribly, terrible cold. But that was interesting just how, that’s the feeling you get, you look at the chart and see minus 45 degrees centigrade in Siberia, how people live there, I don’t know but they do it. So that was interesting. And of course the Koreans in those days wore their traditional garb. So you

would see the old men walking around with a black hat on, a long robe and their beards growing from the sides of their mouths down to the ground. The longer the beard the more eminence of the gentlemen concerned. It was, that’s all gone of course, but these were remarkable sights to see.

Well the sea is interesting, there is a bond between all seafarers. In some cases its strong, in others its perhaps week, in war its still there to a degree, by and large. Most navies and there are exceptions of terrible barbarism

at sea. But by and large there is a rule on the sea that you pick up the survivors, its done by everybody. So this, these aspects, and it happens certainly wherever you go. And of course we got on very well with the people who speak English, but we also got on very well with everybody else. Because there is this sort of, you are all facing up to the elements, which is your first enemy.

Or friend as it may be, and there is a bond amongst people they are separated from their families and they’re out there, and they sort of understand each other. And navies can work together very, very well, if they aren’t completely ideologically different, like the Soviets or something like that. But there is never the less a background of this.

But the US Navy we got on terribly well in the World War II and the Korean War itself. The American ships were dry and our, for the officers were not dry. And we had, in harbour, we had alcohol in our messes... On the other hand the American ships had the latest movies straight from Hollywood, and they had air conditioning, they had ice cream.

So we formed considerable bond. I am talking the about the USS Phoenix before which was particularly bond ship with Australia because we were with it so much. and we got to know people on board the Phoenix. And the Nashville too. So if we were in harbour, we also had sailing boats too, they didn’t. So we used to sail over and get a couple of our officers off and we’d have some beer

and a bit of food. And they would come down in immaculate uniforms because they had laundries which we didn’t have, all that sort of stuff. Strip off as soon as they got in the boat and we’d sail off to some island and have a party and take them back. And they would invite us to dinner with the latest Hollywood film. But there was a very different attitude in the US Navy. Ours was a

ward rooms was a sort of club. You went in there all the time, you all had meals in there, you played cards and you chiacked and you had a drink and things. The Americans much more in the ships that I was in at least, used their, they were more in their own cabins. They used their mess not as a club, but more as just somewhere to eat. And that was a difference in the sort of, we found that a great bonding if you have it

as a mess. Same as the sailors down below. And there were those differences of course. The technologically they gradually got extremely advanced. And the Americans their ships were spotless and they had equipment that didn’t leak oil or anything like that. A lot of our equipment worked but it leaked a lot of oil with a lot more messy, and not so clean. And they, there were a lot of differences like that.

Well you know that was of course not quite accurate. But you are in a position of very great control and very

great responsibility. So the captain and this has happened all through history, has to try and be the judge and the commander all at the same time. And it’s important that you are not seen to favour any particular person or group. As opposed o anybody else

so that you are the sort of ultimate in the confines of the ship, the ultimate sort of reference point, is particularly strong in war time because the communication, and indeed in the early days because communication with shore were, oh you couldn’t use them in war time. Because you gave away where your ship was. And nowadays of course communication

is so much more advanced with email and telephones and but that’s all comparatively modern. But the captain had a position of aloofness really. And you would be invited, you never could just walk into the ward room, of the ship where your officers were. You had to wait until they invited you on some occasions. Would you like to come and have a drink or something.

So it was very lonely position of captain. And you had a multitude of problems, whether it was a personnel problem of some sort or another, or an operational problem or all those sorts of things. And a lot of reporting you know you had to do, of course, what you said about people had a big effect on their future careers. So there were lots of responsibilities and

you had to see that people trained properly and come up the ladder. And you had to take a pretty broad look at things at the same time you, for instance I was sent up to, one of the first ships to break the ice in Indonesia after the Sukarno era. Well we had to go into Jakarta and then

that was difficult enough just on its own because of the problems of operating the port there. But you know there were the questions of calls on all the, you always wherever you went called on the governor downwards and the authorities one sort of another, mayors and so on and you had them back on board and you entertained for dinner. And you had

be careful what you said and you had to play a sort of minor diplomatic role. But it was quite important and the ships were often used, well were, and I imagine they still are, I don’t see there is any difference, to break the ice in particular diplomatic situations. I was the first ship also to go into Colombo, for many years,

from the Western navies. Because that government had forbidden the entry of any British or American warships, for some years. That was in the bandaran [Banda Sea?]. And I went in and asked to go and they accepted, I was astonished by the reception we got. But there was important diplomatic aspect to welcome people

and to be acceptable and to say the right things, and not upset any feathers and show that we weren't all six headed monsters. So and your ships company you had to brief very carefully, so they didn’t go and have a fight outside the local mayors office or something. And so these diplomatic aspects of the navy are often forgotten but tis a good way of breaking the ice.

Then things and diplomacy can move on from there. With all these sorts of roles, the captain had to be able to do all these things.

That’s a very difficult question. I would say if I was egotistical I suppose that I’m sure that I made any major mistakes.

I had a couple of tremendous dramas, for instance when the HMAS Vendetta, the brand new Deane class destroyer, early in the morning we were in refit in the dry dock with all the, you know, plates of the bottom and the sailors, somebody put the engines on the wrong way and the Vendetta and she came forward at high speed through the dock wall, the case in, and one girder built in 1858 or something, and

in the dock in Williamstown held and went right back 13 feet, and then Niagara poured over the top, if that girder had parted we would have had 3,300 tons of Deane class destroyer and plunging on top of my hundred odd men. And it would have been a most first class diaster because she was 40 feet up.

And we had a number of instances like that, not like that but where things were a bit difficult, but I suppose I survived as a captain so people couldn’t have thought too badly.

Oh I think it son your mind all the time, that what you are doing can cost lives. So what you tell the fellows to do and how you operate the ships, and circumstances that you say, yeah we will do this or we wont, are all very important. And when you’ve got, in a war of course, it’s very much that their lives are on the line. On the other hand if you don’t do anything you don’t win the war. So

you’ve got to weigh up, you can’t always do so, you are told you are going to do X, Y and so on and you do it. It may be a disaster for the ship or it may not. So but if you have the control yourself well then you have to weigh up all the factors in involved. And you had to take the risks.

Also in peace time you had to take risks to train people. So they can do things in war. So there is a balance, its matter of judgement. And sometimes one judges wrongly.

I think you’d have to ask my sailors they’d tell you much much better than that.

Perhaps someone else’s. But I have always believed that you had firm tram lines, firm rules. And that everybody knows that if they step across that rule then they will get hit. But you put them as wide a path as reasonable so they can enjoy themselves in between those rules. So

I suppose some would say that, I don’t know what they would say, I think you’d have to ask them, but I think I was probably fairly tough in some direction but I hope that I wasn’t unfair.

Well I think

the nickname I know best was the one that the rest of my term called me when we were first at the naval college. It was in an English lesson and we were having opposites you see and the master who was teaching us said, “What’s the opposite of gaffer?” Well you see nobody knew what a gaffer was, I didn’t know what a gaffer was. And he said, “A gaffer is an old man.” So the entire class looked around at me and

from then on I was gaffer. Because I think I was a fairly serious youth, probably, I wasn’t a very good laughing fellow, not a good sense of humour, but that’s how it goes.

Oh I think the

I was always pretty serious but I think probably as the years go by one gets less serious. Doesn’t matter so much.

I can’t remember I’m sure there was some fairly, not sure about the Anzac but I’m sure earlier than that. Til I to a bit more wisdom I think I got some

probably fairly scurrilous names and that probably not a bad thing. I was in the Bataan I was sent for one day and I was executive officer, the second in command had left and so they made me second in command. But I was only 20 and that s a very young age to be in that position.

I don't think I did the job very well, but I was in that job several times when various things happened with the change in command. And I suspect I had a few nicknames then which were not at all, all that laudatory. But they still asked me to the patron a few years ago which I was for some years, of the association, so maybe it wasn’t too bad.

I never thought of it in those terms, I think you think of doing your job the best your possibly can as the captain and that’s it. And yo just hope that form that will flow respect. If you know your job and you have been properly trained and you are firm and far and so on. You hope that respect will follow.

If you don’t have too serious personal defects everybody has got some defect, but not too serious, I never thought in terms of respect of my crew as such, I though in terms of doing the job properly and being a good captain.

Well I wasn’t much involved in the Vietnam War. I had some, on the personal basis, some doubts as to the wisdom strategically. Of the Americans going into Vietnam at all. and I had that from before it started. So I didn’t think it was a wise move. But as regards to the war itself I wasn’t very

directly involved. I was in the strategic reserve [Far East Strategic Reserve] based in Singapore. In case the war spread. In case China came in and all the rest of it. And it was the American ships, the guided missile ships which were used in the Vietnam War, the Vendetta went up too I think, but that was all, and we in type 12 frigates weren't involved except to take the Sydney in and out.

So that wasn’t a great involvement. I mean we were on a war footing when we picked her up and we escorted her and took all the precautions in case things should change, and we should find some rear attack or air attack or if the war suddenly changed. And in Vung Tau we had to be prepared to be attacked by divers and by air attack from the shore with mortars and so on. So but apart from the fact

that sort of thing on the Vietnamese coast, and when we were en route to Hong Kong all those sort of things, when we were all ready to go. We didn’t take a really active part in the Vietnam War. Which well, as I say I thought it was a strategic mistake to go into Vietnam. Expose ourselves to the tremendous might of the land power of China eventually

On the Yarra. But earlier I was in, I was in the naval headquarters trying to man all the new ships. And in manpower at the start of the Vietnam War, then I was

yes, I was in the Yarra then all through that time. And I didn’t, then I commanded the Sydney. The war was just finished and we took the Sydney up there but the war was not on any longer.

We took it up to the Far East.

No the Melbourne was the flagship. We were in charge of the training squadron, so we trained people. A lot and we were developing this amphibious support capability. To move the army and support the army. We had

of course our landing craft and we had helicopters from time to time. But we were not the flagship. Later or in fact earlier the former fleet staff had been on, we had been on our own and just on the training side of the navy at sea. And lifting the army.

Well yes see the at that stage the RAN was very powerful. We had the Melbourne which had the only in flight refuelling in Australia, the Skyhawks could re-flight each other. We had

excellent attack aircraft in the Skyhawk. We had excellent anti submarine aircraft and the long range trackers which could be off radar. Very good anti submarine aircraft. We had the newest anti submarine aircraft in the Melbourne. And the Melbourne, though she was small, could strike at very small range, small number of aircraft but she could do it. And she was guarded by

or escorted by guided, we had 3 guided missile ships for the latest standard missile system with all the technology that went with it. They were excellent ships in those roles, in bombardment. And we had a tanker so the Melbourne could go as a group after all there were no missile systems anywhere else in Australia they were only in the fleet, no in-flight refuelling expect in the fleet.

And we were looked up, as a nation that could really contribute to the task force, small though the carrier maybe, with all its support, very good defence. Because our frigates were as good as any in the world in anti submarine warfare with our air car systems and very long range sonar systems, big limbo anti submarine mortars, and torpedoes and so on. So the RAN was

well equipped and well respected as probably in the first 10 navies in the world. Then, the removal of the carrier of the thing knocked the centre out of the navy. Because the navy for all those 20 or 30 years had built around the carrier from ’48 onwards. So for 30 odd years. So you were left with escort ships

and the capability, small ones, which was reduced by getting into the Sydney before that. So it was very different in that way, it was a powerful force. And well, it hasn’t really got the punch back yet, in any form. The submarines of course, well we had the submarines then

which were Oberon [class] which are the best submarines conventional ones, in the world, very quiet, very efficient, very good weapons systems they were fitted with. So we had a very good navy. And that changed with the getting rid of the Melbourne, it really knocked the centre out of the navy.

Yes well that was great. I had been in the joint staff in Singapore very much involved in the planning, the British plan of the defence of the Far East. And all the sorts of things that were involved and the team I was in there was responsible direct to the commander in chief and the head political figure, commissioner general for South East Asia and we border directed them. So I was very much in the thick of

inter service planning and so on there. I had done a number of course before involving, of course I had to have experience in war time, US Marines and a little bit of our army, not much with our army. And then I was in the defence staff in Canberra, I was in the joint policy staff which was doing inter service planning, for long range defences. So I was delighted to be able to work with the army and

developing amphibious role with the Tobruk which had just commissioned as well. So that was going on very nicely until the government decided to pay off the Sydney which occurred with 24 hour notice, which was a bit of a shock to the system. The amphibious side came back again, these two [HMAS] Manoora and [HMAS] Kanimbla which had done marvellously in the

Gulf and in the Solomons and so on. And it’s a capacity to, which I think the army greatly appreciates and which enabled the Timor operation to be so successful. And without it the army really couldn't be lifted. You can do a lot with airplanes but you have to have an airfield at the far end of all the fuel and things. Awful lot of equipment that you can’t and the volume of equipment is great great that you simply couldn't do it by air.

So these, this re equipment of the navy, amphibious capabilities was very good.

Astonishment. Because of the capability it gave the navy. And the army. It meant that the capability to move the army had largely, not entirely because we still had the Tobruk

but largely disappear.

Well we were the training squadron of the navy but we were developing this role to operate with army.

Oh that was terrible 24 hours. We had to decide whether we could go to see and have a paying off or not, which we couldn't. And it was a very

difficult time. And of course everybody’s careers were up in the air. And all the sailors didn’t know what was going to happen to them, whether they were going to get posted to next, or their families or, you know, what would happen to us, where we would be sent, you know, that was all pretty dramatic. You usually get 6 months notice or something to do something like that. So that was all a very, a very

nasty period of my life I’d say.

Well I don’t say everybody will agree with me, but an island exposed like us to the south of the great land mass which is extremely populous and therefore

can be the centre of strife between nations which might or might not involve us, but could well involve us because of our tremendous trade and links and so on. An island that doesn’t have the capability itself to control the area in which it lives, which is the ocean around it. Runs a very great risk. The

people don’t think about it, but the other day, the fault at the Kurnell refinery, and within 48 hours the government was talking about petrol restrictions. A few years ago there was tanker problem. And we were on petrol rationing in 24 hours, even and odd days and all that.

If the ships stop moving ore around Australia the steel works stop. If the ships stop moving the fuel and bringing it from overseas and where it is coming from, although we had got some ourselves, most of it is in the Asian. our great reserves of oil and gas are in the northwest shelf, slightly lesser extent in the Bass Strait, in water. And

in the north west coast, exposed areas, and if Australia doesn’t keep a powerful navy, it will not only be able, not be able to defend itself, but would very much as it had in the past on others to defend it. And it wont be able to take a meaningful part in operations which it may see fit in the future to do. Like Timor or like

I won’t go into what might happened, which is not often what you need. And of course Australia has been looking for a long time develop a threat scenario to develop forces against it. Well that is a waste of time in my view except the little things of having to help the islands and so on. Australia just needs a robust force which is flexible enough to use in any situation in its defence

or is called upon or feels that the government ought to take part in. Like we have just done in the gulf and Afghanistan and so on. And an island must look to the oceans around it. It doesn’t matter how you control them, if you think you can do with airplanes alone, okay, if you think you can do with ships alone. I don't think you can do it with either alone, you need the air power and you need the sea power and you

need the army. And all it’s got to be balanced and properly equipped. You don’t need a huge army in an island situation, you need an army that’s well equipped, efficient, a reasonable size. So I believe Australia should look very closely as it did in 1913, or 1910 at the ocean around it and be properly equipped. As long as we control the ocean borders

that’s our frontier. Then we can control Australia. And we have to watch the development of naval power, to be in the Asiatic land mass, not that they are going to be hostile they might be our allies. But we must always bear in mind that the friends of today could be the enemies of the tomorrow, you can’t tell the future. We would hope that the United Nations will get some teeth and some determination

and provide a world which is free of wars and, but I wouldn’t put my shirt on it.

Well I think it inevitable, that there will be war. I think in certain cases it will be inevitable that we will be dragged in.

Or will go in because we see it in our best interests. You can never tell how wars spread. And I think the Untied Nations is not organised as a force which is capable of dealing with the crisis involving military power. Or needing military power. You can pass as many resolutions as you like in Untied Nations but the people the resolution has been passed about

just simply take no notice, toss it into the waste paper basket, you are no further advanced. You have become a talk fest. So until that changes and I’m not about to say how it can change, but until the world shapes up to some world organisation which is based on democratic and on a very

pragmatic approach to world problems, a just approach to world problems. Then countries are going to be armed, must be armed and there will be war. So much as one may hate war and the best way to avoid it is to be prepared. And if you are prepared there probably won’t be a war, because people say I wont take him on he’s a good boxer. But that fellows never been in a boxing ring in his life, he wouldn’t even know where his fist are, we can knock him over

and pinch his keys and his BMW [car].

Well I think it had to be fought. Had to win, the situation really was that if Germany had over ran Europe which it was doing, under Hitler and his organisation

which was tremendously powerful in military power and in scientific power and capabilities, America would have then, whether America would have survived or not I don’t know. But she, Hitler was an enormous power. And we had to win or democracy would have been, if not knocked out, right under the most, it would have

allied the maritime power of Britain perhaps part of it would have been captured and all, we had to fight and we should have fought earlier but we didn’t have the means because democracies never take action on their defence until its almost too late. So you suddenly find them looking around the museum for guns to put on ships. Or they are running around trying to get airplanes built as fast as possible

because they haven’t got anything to take on the Messerschmitts, only a couple of squadrons. And you know, the politicians then had to buy time. People them criticised Chamberlain. I think he bought time, he knew that Britain was in no state to defend itself. And then he’d have time to get his aircraft factories going. And so I think perhaps sometimes he is misjudged by history. Politicians find themselves in a democracy in this situation, they are faced with, without options.

It think World War II was absolutely necessary and I think the world is better for it. Out of it we got the United Nations, not a perfect organisation, in many ways incapable of dealing with things. But better than nothing. And out of it we got an unfortunate and yet a fortunate thing, we got super power rivalry which is so strong and balanced that we had a sort of

stability. We had a sort of stability. We are moving to an area now where people are getting nuclear weapons all over the place and into an area of not such stability. But the answer is there will be more wars. And its no good crying in hindsight and say how terrible, how terrible, if we want to survive we must be prepared.

Not quite sure.

That’s a terribly difficult question because the, ones future was not in ones own hands. Luck plays a tremendous role, the people you serve under, who train you, who report on you, or get promoted are tremendously important factors.

The situation that dictates get sent to A or B at a good time or a bad time, or a hopeless situation or situation that you can do something about, its not, there is a famous admiral who wrote a book

As luck would have it. Whether you call it luck or you call it fate or the good lord or whatever, there is a great element of life which is not in your control. And you must make the best of the situation you are in. I was a fortunate being under some excellent captain. We had some very fine officers in the RAN. And I was fortunate

not all the time but here occasions where I was fortunate, I was a fortunate, most of the way along.

Well I think I am very pleased that I finished my career without ever having lost, that I am aware of, a sailor in any ship I was in.

Any mob of sailors that I was in charge of in the gunnery world or anywhere else. So I was very pleased with that because the navies are inherently dangerous places, they are dangerous. If you’ve got a carrier charging around you’ve got a couple of thousand men perhaps and you’ve got or at least as full as the Melbourne, 1200 men and you’ve got several hundred in the destroyer, they are full of explosives they are full of fuel

and they are moving around with enormous kinetic energy. So if things of wrong you are set for a huge disaster. There is almost nowhere else that that can happen except in the sea. Two jumbo jets is the nearest you can get to having a crash and get a lot of people. But it’s still a number involved, in say a big American carrier which is 5,000 and

so that’s lot of people. So the scene is set always for something like that, when you are in a big ship. And I was always lucky, I had good officers and I don’t say I slept at night, because as a captain you have always got one ear open for a change in sound and so on. And you really don’t sleep soundly because you are called

and you have to up and out and switched on quick smart. So I was fortunate.

Well as people look a long time down the track I think I will probably say that I’ve just said, that a country like Australia must not

assume because everybody perhaps likes us today as people that this will always be so. That forces will arise which we have no control and we must be prepared to defend ourselves. If necessary without any assistance

go as far down that track as we can. But also we should keep in mind the tremendous importance of allies. Particularly as in Thucydides, Corcyra [modern Corfu], an island of Corfu delegate to Athens said, all those hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, that the greatest thing in the world to prevent anybody else having a navy is you were an island. [Corcyra and Corinth: first naval battle in ancient Greek history 665 BC].

Well you can’t do that, so the next best thing is to have the best navy in the world on your side as an ally. If you are a small island like Corfu. In our case it stands out for some generations yet, the allies that we most need are the great naval powers, that first is the Untied States and secondly Britain. And we must

have this in the forefront of our defence consideration. And while not kowtowing to anybody else while being our own bosses. We must bear in mind the tremendous importance of when the chips are down that these great democracies with their powerful maritime power are behind us. And we must be our own men in dealing with Asia, we must say what we think, in the most diplomatic pleasant way. But we mustn’t allow ourselves to be browbeaten by anybody. At the same time we mustn’t go out of our way in any way we should try to avoid defending people. But we should in all this we got to make anybody that comes to Australia, Australians first and their own passed and culture second. And keep their past culture of course, but they must be Aussies first. If we ever give up that we will not be able to defend Australia.