Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in North Williamstown, Victoria on the 12th of July 1920. My parents were, my father was an Australian who served in World War I, my mother was a Scottish

nurse who had been a deputy matron of a war hospital, which my father had been a patient, and they married and came to Australia in 1919. My father had been in, had seen service in New Guinea before he went to Europe, to France, and contracted malaria, in 1926, he was

instructed medically to come to Queensland to avoid the recurrences of malaria, which my mother as an ex-medical person, considered peculiar. But I think, I can recall only one recurrence that he had after we shifted to Queensland in 1927, so I claim to be a Queenslander although born in Victoria, is that….?

I see. I went to. My father demanded when we came to Queensland that we buy a house that had sewerage, which was a bit unusual in Queensland, or Brisbane at that time, and he bought an old police station at East Brisbane and we lived there.

I went to the Kangaroo Point school for some years, and then to the Central Practising School, passed the scholarship exam, went to the Brisbane Grammar School for 18 months until my fifteenth birthday. My father had a business in Victoria, which he had to sell, a fire sale,

and when we came to Queensland, he was unable to borrow money to recommence a business because of the Depression coming on. And they were unable because of that reason, to keep me past my fifteenth birthday at school, so I started work on my fifteenth birthday as a junior clerk in the Adelaide Steamship company,

where I was still working when the war started. During a period of say 1935 to 1938, I got bored with perhaps doing very little, and I used to go out to Archerfield Aerodrome from East Brisbane on a bicycle, to

pump up the tyres and check the oil and clean out the Tiger Moths where people had been sick in them, and I was taught to fly. I got about 70 hours solo and then lost my license through silly flying, I caused nobody any harm, but it was not allowed to

low fly and do silly things in those days, so I lost my license and all records were expunged from everywhere. I have no evidence whatsoever to produce that I could fly. When I joined the … well, I went … mobilised the night before the war started, I had taken my girlfriend and subsequently my wife

to the girls’ GPS [Greater Public Schools] sports, and came home to find that there was a mobilisation order, requiring me to report at 10 o’clock that night to Peel Street, because I had joined the Royal Australian Artillery Militia as it was called in those days, as a garrison gunner.

I have been told that only 2200 mobilisation orders were issued, I have no way of stating that as a fact, but I understand it was true, so instead of taking my lady out that night, I chose to go to war, went to Cowan Cowan on Moreton Island as a garrison gunner, spent several months there

before we were allowed back into Brisbane to tidy up our affairs. I got home just before Christmas of 1939, went back again, during my few days of leave, I joined the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] and my papers show that I put in, that I had 70 solo hours in Tiger Moths … and

completely disregarded by the RAAF when I eventually got there, but never mind. I was told it would be many months before I would be called up for the RAAF, so I was posted to New Guinea to raise a, to form a battery up there in Port Moresby. My father having suffered for some years with a disease that he got in New Guinea, refused to

sign my papers to allow me to go to New Guinea, so I joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. A friend of my father’s who was raising a unit, 2/1st Motor Ambulance Convoy, and he wanted a drill instructor, so I became a drill instructor in the AIF, on the understanding with this man who was a major at the time subsequently became a lieutenant colonel, that should my air force papers come

before his unit went overseas, he would release me, otherwise I would go with him. Well my papers came, he released me, and I went into the RAAF in October of 1940, went to Sydney, trained there, went to Canada, we arrived in February

of 1941, I graduated in July of 1941. Went to England, August, arrived in August of 1941, after being chased by submarines, first time I had seen a big German aircraft called a Focke Wulf Condor, which was spotting for the submarines … we were in a convoy of 152 ships

many of which were sunk … it was the largest convoy at that time that ever crossed the North Atlantic. It was rather horrifying to see a boat explode and no-body makes any endeavour whatsoever to pick up any of the survivors, we thought that was a bit hard, but, however a 9 day crossing became a 19 day crossing because of this submarine activity.

We eventually arrived in England at Liverpool, put on a train to go to Bournemouth as a preliminary holding place where we spent the night in the, can’t think of the name of the place, I’ll think of it in a minute, a club in London where it was the first time I had ever seen bombing. Then we went to Bournemouth

spent some time … we were the first Australian air crew in the United Kingdom in World War II … we took great delight in asking these fellows that had been trained in Australia and who had come around by ship, around South Africa what had held them up that we’d been there for a fortnight and the war was nearly over. We had been trained on, I was a wireless operator

we had been trained on. I should go back one point and say that whilst we were on the ship coming across from Canada, we were the only troop transport in the convoy, we were attacked as I mentioned earlier, and we were able, because of our training as wireless operator gunners, we were able to operate the two guns that were on the ship, namely a

Hispanasuissa [Italian machine gun] and a Hotchkiss machine gun, and the captain to the ship tried very hard to have us awarded with the Atlantic Star, because we were in action in the Atlantic. It was refused because it was a naval decoration, so we never ever got any of that. But we had to, whilst we were in Canada, we were trained on wireless sets, I can’t recall

the name now, but they weren’t in use in the RAF [Royal Air Force], so we had to go to Cranwell College to learn the current radio sets that were in use in the RAF. Two quite peculiar things happened to me when I was at Cranwell, I was a fair lump of a fellow, and the CO [Commanding Officer]who was a group captain, decided I should

box, and the one thing I detest is boxing. But I had to fight for Cranwell, and I was very lucky that my opponent in the heavyweight division was an Australian from South Australia, who had worked his way across to England and joined the RAF. And he just took pity on me and said, “Well don’t hit me and I won’t hit you back.” but he won the fight hands down, which was fair

enough it was the right decision. The second one was because we were new boys, novel to England as Australians with our pretty blue uniforms, we had to do a King’s Guard, for King George the Sixth at Cranwell College, and we were all lined up there, about 60 of us. I was a marker, and it rained like hell when the King came, am I allowed to say that, it’s too late now, and

so they pushed us all into the gymnasium, and this other marker boy and I couldn’t get in. And the King asked me what I thought of the English weather … well he’ll never know how close he was to finding out, because I nearly told him what I thought of the English weather. Anyway from Cranwell, I went to Finningley up in North Yorkshire, and we were training on Wellingtons, and we did our course and we were ready for posting,

when we were told very excitedly that instead of going on the Wellingtons, we were going on to Manchesters, which was a very fashionable and very capable aircraft. In fact it was the biggest twin that flew in World War II … it had a, subsequently we found of course it had a dreadful death rate, engines were

no good, it couldn’t get much above ten thousand feet, and I was on the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne on the 30/31st May 1942. We were briefed to go on the second thousand bomber raid on Essen two nights later, the engine blew up and we didn’t go, and two nights later on the 3rd/4th June, we went to Bremen

37 of us, 37 aircraft and I was shot down and I was a prisoner of war then for the balance of the war. I was shot down at a place called Apeldoorn in Holland, we were on the way home, so I always claimed three quarters of the trip, instead of the whole trip. We had done our bombing

over Bremen, went to Apeldoorn where I was captured, couldn’t walk, injured my leg. I was found in a canal and it is only a few years ago that I started to think, I cannot remember having the parachute or the harness from the parachute, so I conclude that I must have been

I was knocked out when I jumped out. They must have taken the harness and the parachute off my body, and dumped me on the edge of the canal, because it had all silk in those days, and ladies would want to be very good for make dresses and all sundry things. Then from Apeldoorn, I was taken to Arnhem which subsequently became a fairly famous place years later

then to Frankfurt, or up to Amsterdam where we were put in a jail. The first time I saw atrocities I guess, was in a tram in Amsterdam where I couldn’t comfortably walk and I was hanging onto the straps on this tram, perfectly happy because it took the weight off my hip.

And these German escorts, I had four of them, were most abusive to an elderly lady that had the Star of David on her dress, and she was made to get up so that I could sit down, and that was my first introduction I guess to nice Germans. I should backpedal and say when I was in Apeldoorn, I was

taken to the Gestapo headquarters, and a private who was looking after me then, guarding me, kept on saying to me something in German, and I didn’t speak German. But the word that stuck in my mind, was he kept on saying “essen”, or for those who understand German they can laugh at this, but I didn’t know German in those days.

And I thought he was asking me had I been on the raid on Essen two nights earlier, and I just kept on, I wasn’t talking. When the captain, the Gestapo captain eventually came to work a couple of hours later, he asked me had I had, in English, had I had any breakfast, and I said no. So he turned to this little private and roused [yelled] at him, and the private answered

and I understood then that the captain said to me, “He’s been asking you for an hour or more have you had anything, did you want anything to eat.” so there’s one word in German I will never forget, “essen” means to eat. So we went to, I was taken to Amsterdam put into lazarette there because of my legs, they photographed, x-rayed my legs, wouldn’t tell me anything about my damage,

which I subsequently found out I had a broken leg, a bone in my leg when I got back to England after the war, they photographed it and hadn’t hooked up properly. And I was confronted by the CO of the fighter unit that had been based in Holland that had shot us down, he came in, in broken English and said to me “We are two men up on you.” and I said “What do you mean” … “well’, he said “We killed four of yours

and you killed two of ours.” We actually, my tail gunner, a little Maltese lad, shot down the aircraft that shot us down, and he then offered me a cigarette from the case that my pilot had, a cigarette silver case. He told me then that all that was left of my pilot was one hand in a flying glove, that was all that was left of him.

So from there we went from, down to Frankfurt am Main, but we went through Cologne, where there were, I’m told twenty odd thousand people on the railway station. And it was rather hurtful I guess, to look up at this huge glass canopy over the Cologne Railway Station and there was one pane of glass broken off, and we raided it within ten days

of when I was there. And it makes you wonder whether your efforts were sometimes worth it. However, we went to Frankfurt am Main, which was a Dulag Luft, should I explain some of these words. Dulag is an abbreviation for Durchlager which means transit camp, and it was there you found all sorts of funny things. And the captain, Gestapo captain came in one morning

to my cell, an isolation cell of course with all the heat turned up in the middle of summer, it was pretty uncomfortable, and he said, “How would you like to go for a surf at Southport?” He used to work in the German Club at the bottom of Holland Park Hill between Brisbane and Southport. From then on, of course, you say nothing. We were in this newish type aircraft, this Manchester which they thought had

sophisticated navigational equipment in it, and all he was concerned about finding out was this H2S [radar] as it was called, which we didn’t have, but nobody would believe. There were several other Manchester boys in the camp with me. After a couple of weeks of solitary confinement, we were taken then to Stalag Luft 3 in Poland, southern

Poland, well Stalag Luft 3 is a notorious place of course, all sorts of weird things happened there. One of the men I met in Stalag Luft, in Dulag Luft was Group Captain Massey who was an RAF pilot from World War I, and he’d been posted to Washington as an air attaché,

and decided it would be a good thing if he did a trip over Germany, so he knew what it was like flying in World War II. Regrettably he was in the front seat of a Sterling and he was shot down only days over Essen, but he and I each had a gammy leg. So we used to walk around the compound with an arm around each shoulder, and he said to me one day, he said, “There’s no doubt about

you colonials.” he said, “There is nobody in the RAF where a colonial would do this for the group captain.” But he as such became a senior officer of Stalag Luft 3 when I was there, and he was repatriated, he was quite elderly, he was in his 50s or so. Am I allowed to say naughty things … one of my senior officers was Group Captain Douglas Bader

at that time, and Bader was in my opinion an example of what an officer in the services should not be. He was an arrogant self-centred man, and once a week the camp commandant who was a German admiral, who had a morning tea session on Monday morning with the

senior British officer, at which various comments and complaints were lodged. And on this particular occasion, Bader was coming back from this morning tea session and saw a bicycle, and the bicycle was ridden by a German Captain Hauptmann who was a professional electrical engineer from Berlin University, he also had a degree in Engineering from Oxford and

he spoke immaculate English. And Bader just stripped everything off this bicycle that he could remove, threw them to hell west and crooked, we got no food for six weeks. Now that is my example of a bad officer. You think of your men before you do. I became a senior officer and I was the last man fed in my battalion, because I could get in a

motor vehicle and go down the shop if I wanted to, he couldn’t go to the shop, but he could. Anyway I was in Stalag Luft 3 when the great escape took place in the officers’ compound. I was in an NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] compound, and we had a radio set of course, which was forbidden by the Germans, and after they shot these 50 odd

officers, 51 officers, we got the message from the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] we were not to escape. So my mother had been at me for several months because I had nothing else to do but muck around in a prison camp, she told me it was a wonderful opportunity for me to study. So I decided to study because we had some pretty smart

fellows in there amongst our fellow prisoners, two Oxford dons, for example, quite smart fellows. All sorts of fellows, who subsequently became professors of this and that throughout the world, so I matriculated through London and Oxford Universities, did most of my exams in a subsequent camp because we were moved out. This was when I grew the beard, because the

Germans used to pinch my razor blades. And in August of 1943, we were put in the 40 Hommes HMO [Horses and Men Only] trains as they used to have, all this French rolling stock with 40 horses, 8 men and 40 no, 8 men, 40 horses where the guards used to sit in the middle section and we were in the two ends of these carriages,

no facilities, couldn’t sit down, couldn’t lie down certainly, no food, comfort stops practically nil and we went for nearly four days from Sagan up to Lithuania to a camp called Heydekrug which is about 60 kilometres east of Memel.

And I was there then for quite some time, I got out of there in, towards the end of October, August or so of 1944. This was where on Christmas Eve on New Years Eve in 1943/44, 31st December 1943, I was

exposed to one of the most interesting things I suppose, where roughly twenty thousand people were singing Silent Night in their own languages. There were two British compounds, an American compound and a Russian compound, and even the German guards joined in, terribly cold, bitterly cold night, still, you get in these areas, a rather moving thing.

We were eventually taken out of there when the Russians started to come through on their drive west, and taken down to Stalag Luft 357 which was in Thorn [aka Torun] in Eastern Poland, but we had a bit of a thrill there. The Germans took the Americans down first, down to Memel put them on a boat, took them down to Stetten, they took the young British prisoners on the same trip, down I don’t know

where they went. They go, we never saw any of those again. But we were read the riot act that Clause 7, I think of the Geneva Convention states that “Should the detaining power be, have their war efforts confused by prisoners, they were at liberty to shoot the prisoners.” So we were then put on a railway train, and we came around the corner of

the plains of Allenstein to see the Russian cavalary and the German cavalry in the shape of tanks, fighting hell out of one another, and we were rooting for the Germans, cause if we could get around the corner before the Russians pushed them back, we were right. So that’s what happened. We got to Thorn, the first time I had ever been with army people, and I had by this time learnt to speak German,

and this Hauptmann, this engineering fellow, was very helpful to me in my first exposure. I learnt it out of a book, and the first nice thing you say to a German is, “What time is it, what time is it?” “Vie spate ist is, bitte.” and he just looked at me, so I said it again, and he just looked at me. So I went over to this German captain and said, “If I said, ‘Vie spate it is,’ to you, would you know what I was talking about?”

he said, “Yes.” I said, “That fellow over there, that German he doesn’t know.” “Oh.” he said, “He comes from the Fresian Islands, he doesn’t speak German.” so there you are, that’s how you learn lots of things. But by this time, I was an interpreter in German for the camp, there was about ten of us out of 2200 prisoners who spoke German, and I was an Arbeitsfuhrer, works manager for the Germans. I had to employ

ten thousand Russians, who were digging up tree roots for the benefit of the Germans to their cook houses, etc and their big pine forests. The Germans would tell me what they wanted done, and I in turn found a Russian general, a one star general who spoke English, so I would tell him in English what was to be done and he would tell his fellows in Russian, and that was the way we worked. And I did that for

several months on three or four days a week, and I was guarded at all times by four German soldiers. I don’t know how we would have gone if the ten thousand Russians had decided to rush us, but they never ever did. Anyway, chronologically I was down in Thorn in Poland when the attempt was made on Hitler’s life about 20 kilometres away, and they blamed us for it.

It made life a bit tough for a little while and they shifted us, because the Russians were still coming through, they shifted us right over to Western Germany near Hanover, a camp called Fallingsbostel. We had about 25,000 soldiers there, British mostly, picked up, a lot of them picked up at Dunkirk, and they used to have a regimental parade, a parade in the camp.

They didn’t like the airmen very much, because we were junior service, but we could speak German. Enough of us could speak German and we were far better organised than the army would ever be, and we eventually took over the camp. There was an interesting comment in Hansard from the House of Commons,

that we were the only unarmed soldiers, or troops that had ever held a Panzer squadron out of action for 24 hours. Because we started a rumour that we were going to escape, and there was enough of us that spoke German to make a damn nuisance of ourselves behind the line, and we woke up one morning to find all these tanks with their sharp ends pointing in.

Anyway, they didn’t shoot us. But Churchill made the comment and recorded in Hansard in the House of Commons that we were the only unarmed troops, that he has ever read about, that pulled Panzer troops, squadron out of action. So we were there and we used to watch the, I saw the biggest air raid that I’ll probably ever see, the greatest congregation of

aircraft, flew over in about March of 1945. They used to use our huge camp on the top of the hill as a turning point, and this was the daylight raid by Americans. We heard subsequently there were thirty five hundred bombers and 750 fighters, and it was cold enough that they had vapour trails. It was quite interesting to watch the bombers go in, in their formations

of six, with the fighters, of course, had to slow down, they made whirls around them, so they slowed down enough to keep pace with the bombers. They started going in at eight o’clock in the morning and the last lot went in at four o’clock in the afternoon, to Berlin. On the night of the 30th April 1945,

the BBC issued a statement that any Germans mistreating prisoners of wars would be treated as war criminals. On the morning of the 1st of May, we had no guards, there were about 28,000 British servicemen with no Germans, which also meant no food. So our little

section was divided into three, the airmen and the three sections of 700 odd each, and we set off on a march, going west, we were trying to get to Lunaburgh Heath. I was in charge of one group, because I could, in the event of catching up with anybody, I spoke German. We were finally met

by the squadron of the Royal Dragoon Guards, a British outfit, who liberated us. I asked the major in charge if he could give me a pistol, and he did. Funny how things do, the CO of that unit was Colonel Able Smith, who finished up the Governor of Queensland, subsequently

I became a half colonel in the infantry. And I was speaking to him about this one night at an army function, I said, “Where’s that major’s revolver got to, was it…?” However, I only had the occasion to use it once, we captured quite a few Germans, I had a fleet of 7 Mercedes-Benz, that I had people and ferried them across the River Elbe

to Lunaburgh Heath. I eventually got there on about the 6th of May and was offered a job by a Dutchman and the Allied Military Government as an interpreter. I had a lovely little four cylinder Mercedes and he guaranteed to get it back to Australia if I acted as his interpreter. Which I wasn’t staying anymore in Germany, because

a lot of my friends had been shot down in the desert and had been in Italy when the Anzio beachhead landings took place. And they were promised the same thing, they would be repatriated in a couple of days, instead of which the Germans counter-attacked and these fellows all finished up in prison camps in Germany, so I decided to come home. So we were taken then to, the war finished of course on the 7th of May, we were on an aerodrome called Rheine

on the Dutch-German border. So eventually I was taken home on the 10th of May after all these fellows had enjoyed the end of the war party, an hour and a quarter in an aeroplane with no parachute, and I think I was more scared than I have ever been in my life, 24 of us sitting down the bottom of this blooming Lancaster, anyway

we got home. We were taken down to Brighton, I had been shot down, I weighed about 12 stone 4, I got back to Germany, back to England I was 8 stone 3. I was found to be, only to have 10 percent vision in one eye, I was sterile, so I was put on a special diet of an orange, an egg

a bottle of milk and a bottle of stout for every meal, anything I liked to eat on top of it. So I went up to 14 stone 10 in 11 weeks, blubber just soft. When I arrived home in Australia I was 14 stone 10. Then I decided having, I

went to Oxford in May of 1945, to a, at their invitation, to sign their matriculation roll. When I got home here, I got married to a little girl I left here when I went away to the war. We decided I’d go to university, so I went to

the University of Queensland for four years, one year I suppose was part time because I had to earn a bit of money. Under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, which was a wonderful scheme, lots of doctors, judges all sorts of people in Australia went through the system. Graduated after four years with a commerce degree and an

accounting degree, almost a law degree, two subjects short of a law degree. Decided to go to work and got a job in the Shell company which was an interesting one, because my father in law being the general manager of the Vacuum Oil Company. I went to, we were staying at that time in my wife’s family house, and I went to Vacuum to get a job and no body took any notice of me.

I stood at the counter for several minutes, and they just ignored me, so I walked around the corner and got a job at the Shell company straight away. I came home to tell my wife I got a job, and my mother in law was most disconcerted when I said I was going to work for the Shell company, well of course, I should have been with the Mobil Oil and the Vacuum Oil company. I did that for seven years worked for Shell, travelled all over Australia

I was in Trainee Management, which required that I be an internal auditor. Sometimes, I got tired, absolutely fed up. I was the only university graduate on the staff of the Shell company in Australia, and I just got fed up with people saying , don’t ask questions, you know the answer, you’re a university graduate, so I got tired of that.. So I was offered a job

Well I left the Shell Company because of this business of people, just being, I suppose, plain jealous, with the fact that I was a university graduate.

So I was offered the opportunity to go as a Taxation expert in the United Graziers Association in Queensland, and the head serang [boss] of that was Bill Gunn, subsequently Sir William Gunn. I did that for five years and then went with him to run a business for him

where he was, because he was flying around the world a lot, with the Wool Board and the Meat Board, he was meeting lots of overseas people with lots of money, and introducing them to Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, buying cattle stations. I was associated in, six years I did that

for him, and I was associated with such companies, as properties as Elsey Station in the Northern Territory, Tipperary Station in the Northern Territory, several in north Queensland in the Cape, Lakefield, Laura, Silver Plains, Kalpowar and Merluna Station, which at that time was the biggest cattle station in Queensland, four thousand square miles, two and a half million acres.

And I ran those after Bill Gunn was shaded out, by these various owners, I ran them for two companies, two families, ran four cattle stations in Queensland for, that was 17 years, I only retired when I was 74.

That brings right up, I lived on some of these stations, I lived on Merluna Station for example up near Weipa for four years, I used to come and see my wife once a month, pay the cheques for the other companies, other stations. But I suppose I have to go back and say one thing, I escaped a couple of times from a prison camp and I did time,

14 days bread and water. I’ve never thought I was claustrophobic, but I think I must be, because I can’t sit, I can’t work in an office unless I can see out of the office, I’ve got to be surrounded by windows, and the life on the land suited me fine, plenty of open space.

Yes, after I had left

travelling Australia with the Shell Company, I got bored with doing nothing, so a fellow across the road was a captain in the Artillery, so he induced me. I tried to get into the RAAF reserve, I was told very promptly I was too old, my nerve was probably no good, so I wouldn’t fly, so they offered me

a job as an equipment officer, well they didn’t know me very well, because I’m just not a quartermaster fellow at all. So this fellow across the street asked me to come and join the Militia, or the CMF [Citizens’ Military Force] as it was called in those days, so I joined 5 Field Regiment as a gunner, forfeited all my rank, and after about 15 months, I was commissioned

stayed in 5 Field Regiment for eight more years, got to battery commander, did a camp at Wide Bay near Gympie, came home in May of 1965, brigadier sent for me, and said

from the 1st of July you’ve become an Infantryman. I said I know nothing about infantry, he said you’re going to become an infantryman from the 1st of July, you’re gong to Canungra, the jungle training college to qualify for half colonel in August, so I did. Then I was an unemployed lieutenant colonel, I hadn’t been promoted at that time, I went to

a Christmas Party in December of 1964 at Victoria Barracks in Brisbane. I had employed four people, three from Hawkesbury Agricultural College and one from the Waite Institute in South Australia, as agronomists, agrostrologists or geneticists, I’ve forgotten what the fourth one was, and I got a notice from each one of them at the end of the first week in December 1964

to say they had been called up for National Service Training. And that night, yeah that night, I went to this Christmas Party in Victoria Barracks, and General Cape was the General Officer Commanding at that time, and I must have had a face like thunder, because he said to me what’s your trouble, and I told him I thought his army stunk, because of this reason. And he beckoned some brigadier over from

Canberra, and said you tell him what you just said, so I did. And you get into trouble for telling your thoughts sometimes to senior officers, but they accepted it. I heard nothing more until April 1965, when I got a phone call from General Timothy Cape who was sending his chauffeur down to pick me up for a couple of morning teas, so I went up, well he said as from now you’re a lieutenant colonel and you’ve got to raise an Infantry Battalion.

So I raised 49 Battalion, which took all the people from Queensland, Northern New South Wales and Northern Territory, into a CMF unit. The reason for all of this hanky panky with the army, was simple, if you lived within 25 miles of an established depot, you could join the CMF instead of doing two years fulltime in the

National Service Training, if you lived over 25 miles away from the depot, you had no option, and this is why I lost these four fellows that I had employed. So I finished up in the 49 Battalion with over 1300 troops in it, I had practically any walk of life that you could name, I had policemen, I had ringers from cattle stations from sheep stations,

I had school teachers, public servants almost every walk of life. I commanded that for my term, just on three years, when the brigadier and the general, new general by then, told me I had to go out and command the Queensland University Regiment, so I did for four years, and then retired from the army.

Or I was retired from the army. I went to Vietnam in 1970 as a half colonel, as what they call a commander under training, I was attached to 8 Battalion RAR, and that’s it.

My father was a naval cadet in Williamstown, too young to join up any of the services, but for some reason they sent all these naval cadets to New Guinea.

And their job was to take Papua as it was then, German New Guinea, from the Germans, which they did and after a few months of being up there, they were all taken back to Victoria, they all came from Williamstown, and discharged. By then he was old enough, and he joined the AIF, and he went to France with the Pioneer Battalion,

he was injured there, and went to hospital in England, met this lady who was the boss, the second boss, and apparently the story goes, that he was a new boy with red hair, in this queue to get a meal, and this deputy matron came along, apparently a snooty old thing, a Scotswoman

there was another military hospital, mostly with Australians not far away, they used to grab meal at one hospital, then rush over and join the queue at the other one. My mother accused my father of having done this, when he’d just been shipped into this hospital, anyway he must have convinced her he wasn’t naughty, they eventually got

married a year or so after the war finished. A strange thing I always think, my father had been a sergeant major, but he went AWOL [AWL – Absent Without Leave] to marry my mother so he was discharged as a corporal, and I never ever heard them argue in all my growing up with them, excepting on one occasion when I must have been eight or nine, I don’t

know what the thing was about, but they were rousing at one another and saying words, and I can remember my mother saying, “Remember Frank, I outrank you,” because she was a major in the Queen Alexandra Nursing Service, while he was only a corporal, so I believe that was the prefect squelch.

Very little

He used to drag me along to these Anzac Day parades, I was a little fellow and about all I can remember is them talking about the mud and the slush and the rats, so I always said I would never be in the Infantry.

No, no, well I have opinions about a lot of those things.

No, all he got was malaria from World War I, from New Guinea … he got dysentery when he was in France, which was magnified I think a bit by this malaria caper, and he never went back in line again.

Well I took up flying because I was bored silly, I was 15 or 16 when I started and I had nothing to do, I had a sailing boat which they had bought me for my thirteenth birthday

I used to sail it solo a little 14 footer. I was playing A grade hockey as a young fellow, I think I just got the idea, I used to watch, I started playing A grade hockey when I was 15. But I could see these aircraft out at Archerfield, which was only about three or four miles away.

And I just thought one day, well I think I would like to do that. I went out to sticky-beak and found that if I checked the oil and cleaned the spark plugs and pumped up the tyres of the old Tiger Moth, that’s all they were, and cleaned out the cockpit where somebody had been sick, they taught me to fly for nothing. I did that for three years, and when I was a naughty boy, so they

took my flying license from me, but it just gave me something to do.

Badly, I can well remember when I was 10 I suppose, I would have been, these people coming down and digging the

weeds out of the gutters and the sidewalks and the edges, very few roads in Brisbane were bitumen from gutter to gutter, they all had about a six feet selvedge edge on each side, which they used to get a lot of weeds. This was the basic point that my mother would make to me that you should study, that you won’t finish up like that. I think the message

eventually got through when I was about 22, but prior to that, I really wasn’t very interested, but you learn.

I didn’t do very well, I was only there for 18 months, I passed whatever I was supposed to pass, but I knew I wasn’t going to be there for any length of time.

Go out and earn some money

to support my family, would help. I got a job at the Adelaide Steamship Company on 3 months probation for 12 and 6 a week, and I gave 10 shillings of that, and I spent 2 and 3 pence on a weekly tram pass, so I had threepence a week to spend. After three months, it was lifted up to 15 shillings a week.

Just an office boy, mostly settling claims from people with damaged cargo. I used to do a lot of it in the markets, in Brisbane fruit and vegetable markets, so you learn very early how you can be offered bribes and a few

odd funny little things.

Free food, you know quite well somebody had eaten them, the wharfies had eaten them on the wharves, but they were missing so you had to pay this consignee and it stuck out like a sore toe, it was dishonest, but what could you do about it, so I used to just pay them, I learnt a lot.

I saw men pumping up the tyres, and I said how often have you got to do that, and he said everyday, and it was a bit hot and he was perspiring and I said can I help you, so that was how I got the job.

So they had about four or five aircraft in those days, that I remember, and I used to have to, see I was promoted after a month or two to servicing these things, check the spark plugs, check the oil, see the petrol limit, pump up the tyres, it doesn’t take long, clean out the cockpit after somebody had been sick.

I was taken for a ride as a reward one day because somebody didn’t turn up for a lesson, so I was just pushed in the cockpit and given a ride around Archerfield

I thought it was wonderful, still do.

After about a month or six weeks, I guess somebody else didn’t turn up for a lesson, so they said well you hop in, and they

taught me what I had to do, and went around for a couple of circuits and it might have only been ten minutes, but it all adds, it’s all experience, and I was young enough to be, to absorb the information pretty quickly then, I was only 15 or 16, that’s how I learnt.

I had no idea, it was just the thrill of flying. One of my school friends, was the son of a man who ran an airline in that, I can’t remember the name, it was only a little airline, he was in the RAAF with me too. But I think it was just the

mere fact that you could look down at all these earth bound people. I have been surprised all my life, at how many people are frightened to fly.

I have never, never felt frightened, excepting on two occasions, once when I was being brought back from Germany to England, I didn’t have a parachute, and I was scared stiff, and the second

time, which I didn’t realise, it must have been 1951, I had to fly to Charleville from Brisbane in an old DC3 and I didn’t realise that I was doing it, until the hostess came up and she said relax, apparently I had my hands so tightly on the two things on the seat, that she could

see that I was scared stiff. She sat with me and said why are you like that, and I said well it’s the first time that I’ve flown since 1945 without a parachute. Anyway I got over it, and I’ve done an awful lot of flying since, as a passenger.

Well I had an instructor who was a very nice man, taught me a lot about flying, and he was a bit of a daredevil, and I was at the stage where I was a bit easily led I suppose. And he said to me, where I go you follow me, so he was in one Tiger Moth and I was in the other. So the first thing we did was fly under the Victoria Bridge,

which was a different bridge from the one it is now of course, there was plenty of space, so he went under it and I went under it, but nobody took the registration numbers although they knew damn well who it was, nobody could do anything about it because they couldn’t prove we had been there, and I think they then sweated on me, and further up the river on one occasion near Coronation Drive

I zipped along there, which was a bit different to what it is now, and some fellow had an accident in his car, but he also took my registration number, and when I got back, that was the end of it.

50 or 60 feet, a bit low, no sense of humour that fellow at all.

I wasn’t very pleased about it, because, but what can you do, it hadn’t cost me anything to fly.

Beg your pardon

Oh yes, that was when I joined the CMF or whatever they call it, the Militia, just shortly after that.

Join the army.

February 1939, just before

I met Madam.

Went down to the depot and joined, in Peel Street.

Basically boredom, I had nothing to do. In all my sporting activities, I had achieved everything I wanted to achieve. In Hockey I had represented Brisbane several times,

I have never represented Queensland, but I had represented Australia, which is a silly thing because I happened to be the ball boy at the exhibition ground when the Indian team came out, one of the fellows, one of the Australian fellows was pretty badly knocked about in the leg, so they put me in, asked me to go on the field, and I actually represented Australian without being selected against the

Indian team that had won the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, they whopped us badly but never mind, that was beside the point.

I thought I was King of the World, went to, in my RAAF days I played for a British empire team against Surrey that was the champion county of the English hockey team

English hockey squad. Oh no, I just set myself certain goals and at that time I was a table tennis champion, because I believed that would sharpen my reflexes to make me a good hockey player, so I was a Junior champion of Australia in Table Tennis.

I think it was my mother, she had a photographic memory which I had never had, my mother had the strongest powers of concentration I have ever seen with anybody. She could be sitting three feet from a telephone that was ringing and she wouldn’t hear, and I’ve never seen, and she could reproduce I think

she almost had a photographic memory, and I’ve met two or three people with photographic memories, and its quite an extraordinary experience. One of my lecturers at university had a photographic mind, and we thought well this is rubbish, a lot of snotty nosed students, so we got an old picture of a Doomsday book, in one of the history books, and gave it to him for 30 seconds, and he reproduced in on the blackboard.

So I don’t, if people tell me they’ve got a photographic mind, I don’t say anything anymore, I’ve seen it. But I think my mother was just a, I saw how hard she worked, she became a district nurse around East Brisbane, and people would bring her two or three eggs, or a lettuce or something like that, because my father couldn’t get a job, he was unemployed for a while, and he was too proud to go on to unemployment.

And I think that was the atmosphere which I was reared, which is why I’m always thankful for the lady I’ve got in my life, I could have come back and been re-employed by the Adelaide Steamship Company after the war, because it was a requirement by law that I be, and I did for a few weeks, wasn’t it, I was getting ten or eleven pounds a week.

then I threw it away to go to the University for 3 pounds 5 a week, which meant she didn’t get too many new dresses or shoes, and I wore my air force shirts for the whole time, four years, I was at university, because they were good quality shirts too.

At a tennis, one of these Sunday afternoon tennis games, 7th May 1939

and that was it.

Playing tennis

I just thought she looked very nice, thank you. Petite and red-headed, good figure and that was it, and then I went away six months later, was away for six years.

I had little or no money to spend and I used to borrow my father’s car, and we used to go up to Mount Gravatt at lunchtime, she was a legal secretary in those days … Mount Cootha, not Mount Gravatt, Mount Cootha, and we

used to just talk, no hanky-panky in those days.

Oh no, I had no plans to do anything like that, not at 19, we were both only 19, you were only 18 weren’t you, I had just turned 19 when the war started.

I think it probably did, because we were a funny lot of people in those days as youngsters, we were still a Dominion of Britain, I for one

had been brought up in the system of the, with the British Monarchy and that was it, I suppose it got to the stage there were threats and funnies going on with Mr Hitler and Mr Mussolini and I think I saw a parade, I did see a parade through Brisbane in February of 1939 it must have been, of a march of people and I guess it was a recruiting

campaign for CMF, and I was one who fell for it, so I went down and joined up, I thought it was a good idea.

Well, it was it, I mean it was supreme, when I was a kid the British Empire was it, nobody was worth even thinking about.

I mean the King of England was a pretty important bloke in my, as far as I was concerned, he used to be on our pound notes.

I don’t particularly remember there was one, his birthday was pretty important, of course the Queens birthday still, no it was just, we thought it was important because of what they had done for Australia, I know a lot of politicians don’t agree with what I’m saying, but that’s

their opinion.

Well I knew nothing about it, other than I’d lived in Victoria and Queensland, but I just thought our laws, our habits, our behaviour was all influenced by the British Empire.

And it was run by a Monarch in England, which at that time, I thought was important.

Well, I suppose it was the getting back to what I heard my father and a few of his people talking about, what naughty people the Germans were, and I could never

quite reconcile that, with the fact that we had a German migrant who lived behind us, and he and my father were quite good friends, and I never could reconcile, how you could be fighting a fellow one day and be friends with him the next, but subsequently I did. I don’t believe in hate, I reckon it’s the most destructive thing you can ever have, but I was at

the wedding of the daughter of one of my friends in the army, and they were concerned she was marrying the son of a German migrant, and this family wanted me there as the MC, because I’ve known all four girls when they, after they were born. And he had been a Luftwaffe pilot, and they were concerned, and the Mother

of this girl told me subsequently, they really expected trouble, yet we sat there drinking beer, telling stories. He was a German boy, I was an Australian boy, I can’t, I never could follow this business about, you’ve got to hate somebody because you fought him, I mean the war’s finished. I used to play sport, do you hate somebody because you’d beaten him, or he beat you, next week you learn something and you

beat him, and that’s my philosophy.

I had taken Madam to this girls’ sports, she used to be a good swimmer, but this was athletics for the private school, a girls’ school here in Brisbane

she used to go to St Margaret’s, and I had taken her to the exhibition to see all the runners, and I couldn’t afford to take her out, so I took her home and then I went home, and when I got there, there was this mobilisation paper.

Well all it is, is a notice to say you are required to report to the depot

tonight, it was dated the 2nd of September 1939, so I reported, or I went back to tell her that I couldn’t take her out to the pictures or wherever we were going, I was all dressed up in a uniform, that I was going away, I didn’t know where I was going. The next morning, passed her place on the bank of the river, on the way

to Moreton Island, at Cowan Cowan, and I waved to her as I went down the river, and went to Cowan Cowan at 11 o’clock, we arrived there about ten, and at 11 o’clock war was declared, when I was actually on duty before the war was started.

Well, because you

sign a document to say that you’ll do as your told.

Only Garrison Gunners were mobilised, because we were the only ones that could handle six inch guns, and they did them all around Australia apparently. Whilst I can’t prove

this statement, I have been told there were 2200 people mobilised the night before war started, see North Head in Sydney was another one, I don’t know where it is in Melbourne, Portsea I think it is.

To get to the depot, and that’s it.

Well I thought

I thought it would be fun, I didn’t know why I was going. We just, we were just told we were mobilised and lance bombadier I was then, one stripe, a pretty important fellow, get to the depot with your gear, by ten hundred hours, I can’t remember, it’s written down there, so I did, you did as you were told, I found that a good practice when you’re in the army.

We heard it on the radio.

We heard Mr Churchill declaring, no Mr Menzies, declaring war on Germany, over the radio, over the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation].

We thought whacko, we’re in it. See you still lived in the shadow of what your parents or your father had done in World War I, and I suppose I was brought

up in the atmosphere that my father had been a World War I solider. I didn’t think much of the fellows that I was at school with, who’s father hadn’t been to World War I, it’s an attitude of no relevance, but.

I was taken to the Dawn Parade for years, it was just a requirement, as simple as that, I never even thought twice about it, I wouldn’t go to a Dawn Parade now, it’s too damn early in the morning. But I just went with my father, and he thought it was a good thing, so automatically I did too.

I can remember standing there as a little kid with short pants, as cold as charity, by Queensland standards. But I always went, and I would see this old fellows, one of the, I used to go to the Kangaroo Point School when I was a little boy, and on the way back from there, I went to the Anzac Hostel, which is now south, what do they call it, the University of New England isn’t it

at Shafteston Avenue, well that used to be the old Anzac Hostel, and I used to potter in there, about 9 or 10 year old, and I can remember seeing this fellow in the bath, and I thought that’s funny, why would a grown man be lying in the bath. Of course, I wasn’t a naughty boy, I didn’t ask questions like that, I went home and asked my mother, and she said because he’s got

no skin … and I said why hasn’t he got any skin, and he’d been burnt by mustard gas, and the poor devil lived in a bath of oil, and I can remember that as clear as anything, I would have been 9 or 10 when that happened. But you see, I used to see fellows with one leg or one arm, and I used to think that was a silly idea, but I found out they were all infantrymen too. .

and I wasn’t going to be in the infantry.

I was a gun layer, as a lance bombardier I was a pretty important fellow, on the six inch gun, I was very proud of the fact that my gun had been on the HMAS Sydney that had sunk the Emden in World War I, I was very proud of this, I was a gun layer, and I actually fired the gun

That’s about as much as I can say about it, there were about 80 or 90 of us down there, all mobilised the night before the war started, other than to say I was a gun layer, had fancy badges, a layers badge and a gunners badge, we were dressed up pretty professionally in those days, with all the geegaws all over it

but one stripe, but no that’s, I can remember being quite proud of the fact that I was on one of the guns that had been on the Sydney, when she sank the Emden in World War I, no relevance at all in life, but at that time I was proud of that.

From the 3rd of September til sometime

about the end of April, early May, because we were allowed a weeks’ leave just before Christmas of 1939 to fix up all our private affairs, and it was a weekend of course when we were called in, mobilised, it was a Saturday night, so we had, some of these people were married and they had to make wills and, I don’t know

but I came back and I joined the RAAF, and then was told it would be probably months before I would be called up, then in about April I was asked to go to New Guinea as a lieutenant, and I said no, I wouldn’t, I came home and my father

wouldn’t let me go, so I joined the AIF. And then the switch came that the man who was the OC [Officer Commanding] at that time, subsequently the CO of the 2/1 MAC, entered into an arrangement with my Father and me, and I wasn’t even old enough to join the AIF at this stage, I rigged my age by two months

and the arrangement was made that if his unit went overseas, I would go with it, but if my RAAF papers call-up came before he went overseas, he would release me, which happened and he did.

Well, it was a private arrangement, he wanted a drill instructor and I was one, and I wanted to go into the air force, so he was a nice fellow.

I don’t think he ever, I think he wasn’t sorry I wasn’t in the Infantry, he knew nothing about flying, I think he would have preferred that I go into the navy, but I didn’t want to go into the navy, it was too far to swim, if you get gazoonked somewhere, it’s a hell of a long way to swim, and I had been attacked by a shark at Caloundra.

all they, I’ve got a scar down my leg from a shark attack.

Well, as I always put it, I was 17 or 18 and I was halfway to New Zealand looking for a wave, which I know is exaggerating, but I was a hell of a long way out and I didn’t hear the shark bell. I’ve always been a fairly strong swimmer

and the people on the shore told me it was quite interesting to watch, I rode this dumper as it so happened, and they could see the shark coming along the wave at me, and all I can remember is something hitting my leg, which they subsequently deduced was the fin of the shark, and I’ve got about an eight or nine inch scar down my leg, so I was never terribly keen about this business of joining

a navy, I don’t like things like that.

I didn’t know it was there at all, I had no idea, I didn’t hear the bell, as I say, I was too far out, it was one of those stupid things, I could swim, I suppose and I was a couple of waves further out than most people, I didn’t hear the shark bell.

Oh yes

I could see blood running down my leg, I thought I must have lost my leg, and then of course I realised I couldn’t because I was walking, but the sea water mixed with the blood was quite a long cut, was running down, I thought my legs gone, I had to swim in.

Well I was damn glad to get out of the water, I don’t like sharks very much.

Yes, oh no, they’re a bit quick for me.

It was mostly drills, they started off a system of 24 hours on duty, 24 hours off, but of course they found the fatigue factor came into it, so they finished up, we used to be four hours on, four hours off, but they tried various shifts

and you can’t keep awake for 24 hours successfully, they finished up we used to do four hour shifts, they tried 12 and they tried 8 but they got down to four. Because at that stage, we very nearly fired the first round from a coastal Battery in Australia, when a Japanese freighter, long before Japanese came to the war

when a Japanese freighter refused to stop, but it stopped pretty damn quickly when they could see the two guns, two six inch guns, that’s all we had, swinging around, following them, and we had about a contingent of about a dozen or more naval fellows that used to send all the messages to these fellows, we were only the meat in the sandwich, if you didn’t stop we would shoot you. It was

I suppose the only thing of significance as far as I was concerned, was I became one of about a dozen who got Q-fever at Cowan Cowan, attributed to the bite from a flea being carried by a bandicoot, and I had several recurrences of that, I got that long that before the war, we had been to Cowan Cowan

a couple of times before then, I had a recurrence of it in England in 1941, and I was put in a hospital as a simple sergeant and I had group captains and God only knows all the specialists in England, and they had never seen anybody with Q-fever, it was fairly common in Australia, or used to be, and I just told them I had a high temperature for four days, wouldn’t eat anything

give me liquid, plenty of liquid, my temperature would go do and I’d be right again, and that’s what happened, and I’ve never had one since.

You just, well you just feel disoriented because of the high temperature, your body is very hot, you’re not hungry, but you’ve got to force water into yourself

that was what they told us here, but I gave blood for months at the Queensland Medical Institute trying to isolate it, it used to be called shearers disease, because they used to get the ticks off the, the sheep used to make the shearers get it, but we had no sheep down there, so they seemed to think the only reason for it, was a

tick living on a bandicoot, because there were plenty of bandicoots.

Go for a walk up to Cowan Light, and Cape Moreton Light, with a couple of other fellows we walked right across Moreton Island on one occasion, which was about four miles wide, and we found footprints on the Eastern side

and reported this, and that was supposed to be the submarine, the Japanese submarine that had been there, and a certain rather prominent businessman in Brisbane at that time, had a house on the East Coast of the island, he was interned, I don’t know that was nothing to do with us, other than we reported, and we used to shoot wild pigs, and when you stood down you just did what you wanted.

Well I guess all that we heard was of course, that they had over run Poland and they had done this, and they were over running

this, and the Germans were just winning hands down at that particular stage, occupying country after country, I can’t tell you them in sequence, for those first six months of the war, all Germany seemed to do was win.

We were so far away, it didn’t affect out lives.

We were, I suppose, hoping a German raider would come in which was a silly thought, but that something German would come in, and we’d shoot it, but that never ever happened.

Well, I suppose it boiled down to boredom again, I mean you get tired when you’re doing your duty, and you’re off and you go and talk to the lighthouse keeper, you don’t go there every day, he’s got other work to do,

and you shoot a pig or two, or you go for a walk, we were only kids basically, I was at that stage only just turned 19, I’ve got a lot of, some sporting trophies that I won there for sprinting on sand, and broad jumping and a few things like that, but that’s about what it boiled down.

I couldn’t for the life of me see,

we were highly critical of the people who had put the guns in, because whilst you can rotate them 360 degrees, you couldn’t elevate them to get over Mount Temple which was behind us, the biggest sand mountain in the world, and we reckon the Japanese or German or something could sit out in the Pacific Ocean and bomb us, or shell us, and we couldn’t retaliate … and we weren’t considered very nice people

when we pointed out that you couldn’t shoot that way, the mountain was in the road.

Just told us to shut up and get on with our job, like most hierarchy, you’re not supposed to ask questions like that. We could not have fired over Mount Temple, we could have, there is an arc of 20 or 30 degrees, we couldn’t have fired, oh no, you’re not supposed to ask questions like that.

No, I realised why we were down there, we were there as the first line of defence … other than that, there was just a job to do.

Well I did it with this arrangement between this officer and my father as a drill instructor, because he wanted a drill instructor and I was available, in a way I was available, and the pair of them made this deal and I wasn’t even old enough to join the AIF, I had to put my age on two months to, because you had to be 20, and I

was his drill instructor as a corporal, and that was it.

I just said I was born on the 12th of May, instead of the 12th of July, you didn’t have to produce any documents in those days, you might have to now I wouldn’t know.

The 1st Motor Ambulance convoy, and he was a doctor this man who had

this arrangement with my father, he finished up the commander of it in Greece and Crete. A lot of them were captured there anyway, so I might have been a prisoner of war anyway. That was a set arrangement, I was his drill instructor and lost my voice, didn’t I, with the Redbank Bark, as they used to call it, when the dust and fog came off the Redbank

River, in fact everybody up there lost his voice, and that is where I understand the origin of the term of “URTI” came from, upper respiratory tract infection, because nobody could talk, with the dust and fog we all lost our voices, and you look a bit of a dill as a drill sergeant when you can’t say anything, or no-body can hear you if you do say something.

About three months.

March and lift their feet, straighten their backs, put their chests out, all the things that drill instructors tell people, there’s no rifle drill of course, because of the medical thing you weren’t allowed to have rifles, it was mostly foot drills.

I had a pretty good voice in those days, there was no problem, I was only talking about I suppose 100, 120 people when I left, it became a much bigger unit later, it was still a major one when I left with an officer commanding, but it became a big unit subsequently, afterward, but I’ve got no idea

it was, I was long gone before they went overseas.

You didn’t need to be, because as a drill instructor you got up their whiskers yourself. I mean you had the camel walkers, do you know what a camel walker is.

A camel walker is the fellow that puts his left hand out with his left leg, and his right hand out with his right leg, you had to tie them, and then release them so that they went the opposite way, when you walk it’s your left arm and your right leg, camel walkers are funny people, you came across quite a lot of them.

Because the army

in its wisdom or otherwise, makes everybody do basic training, and the object of that is very simple, that you react to an instruction and if you don’t spontaneously react to an order, you’re probably dead. I subsequently had a perfect example of that, when I was a battery commander in Brisbane

after the war, and my commander asked me to go to Ipswich and straighten it up, there’s a battery up there, and they had all become a little bit inbred. And they didn’t like Brisbane people, they still don’t very much, this was 1961 or thereabout, and he asked me to go and straighten them up, and I drove my car into the depot at Ipswich, and these fellows just looked

at me, and nobody saluted me, nobody said good-day to me, so I went into the office and called for the battery sergeant major and said get them on the parade ground, I will walk out of this office that had three or four steps out onto the parade ground, I will walk out there and give an order, and if 50 percent don’t obey my order, they will

do foot drills for the next month. So I walked out of my office and said hit the deck, and they just stood there and looked at me, so they did their foot drill. If you don’t react to an order, you’re dead or the odds are that you will be, so you react, you’ve got to, and after 12 months of that, when my CO wanted me back in Brisbane, they raised a petition that they didn’t want me to go, but prior to that, I’d been the Brisbane

fellow, the foreigner, all the queer thing, like any of these small towns, they don’t like foreigners, strangers.

No, none at all, because we were all in there as volunteers, and we were in there for a purpose, I can’t always explain necessarily the purpose, I don’t know how other people

thought in those days, but I think most of us were exposed to the British Empire concept, and we all believed it, that’s about the best description I can give.

I just got a letter in the mail one day, to say report to Sydney on such and such a date, there’s the rail warrant from Brisbane to Sydney, and that was it,

So I went.

I thought that was pretty good. I went over to South Brisbane station, got on a train and finished up in Bradfield Park in Sydney.

She wasn’t my wife then, I just said tat-taa, I’m off to the war.

Oh hell yeah, nothing to do with me.

I think it’s a silly past time, I still think it is when I see them on television, I don’t think you achieve anything by crying.

No, I didn’t then and I don’t now.

Well, I can’t see the point of it, do something about it. Some woman weeping and wailing because a tree fell on her house the other day, what the hell, how was that going to shift it, get someone in to chop it up, get rid of it, crying is not going to mend it, I don’t understand that mentality at all.

You’d be surprised what a nice fellow is, I’ve got about ten letters there, I was dead for six months, six weeks, missing believed killed, you’ve got no idea what a nice fellow I am, old school masters, people that knew me, I’m a nice fellow, then I turned up alive, didn’t get any other letters. I was surprised at what a nice fellow I was.

We’ll show you letters.

You just go overnight, we weren’t like a lot of the young people today, no drinking in my time. Oh no, we were there for 10 or 11 o’clock, I forgot now, in the morning, and arrived in Sydney at 6 o’clock or so, the next morning, and

they came and got us in motor vehicles and took us out to Bradfield Pask, we were all lined up in alphabetical order and given your name and you had all this gear, and you had to go and put your name and number on it, and your name on it, and that was it.

We had a blue uniform, we had a summer uniform

as well, we had two blue uniforms and blue shirts, and a summer uniform and khaki shirts, and three pairs of everything, that were kept with the big uniform.

I thought it was pretty good, yes, we believed I think, most of us, there were 72 of us on my course

and 71 graduated from Canada, 38 were killed, out of my 71 that graduated, 5 of us were prisoners of war. We thought we were doing something worthwhile, I don’t know whether anybody else thinks that way, but I’m sure I did.

They wouldn’t train me as a pilot, because I had lost my flying license, and when I explained to them what I had done, they said no, you’ll kill yourself. I almost got re-mustered in England, where this old group captain wanted me to fight for him,

he allowed me to go up in an aircraft, I went up with an instructor then I was allowed to go solo. There was a car coming down the Great North Road, so I swooped on it, when I got back it was his car, and he said you’ll never be a pilot in the RAF, you’re mad, he said as a pilot you’d kill yourself. It wasn’t very long after that, when a New Zealand fellow Cobber Kain

was in the RAF, short service commission fellow, he killed himself in a Spitfire by flipping it just after takeoff, and the wing hit a flagpole and that was the end of him. That groupie was an air vice marshall at the end of the war, when I landed in Dunsworth, back from England, he said I saved your life Gaulton, … I said how do you work that out Sir … he said if I’d

let you fly, you would have killed yourself, you’re mad. So, that’s why I’m alive apparently. Low flying, what the hell, see we used to have a lot of fun, my pilots’ family lived in Leeds, and when we were down in Lincolnshire at Skellingthorpe, we used to have, he and I used to have to do a night flying test everyday, I

used to test the radio and fire all the guns, and see that everything went, and he used to wag his wings over his mothers’ place and then come home again. During the harvest in May, they had all these stooks of hay and all these Land Army girls used to be there chucking up the hay, and we used to come down pretty low and blow it all to hell, and they’d shake their first at us, I reckon it’s a lot of fun, you had a hell of a lot of fun

flying at 50 feet, as long as you don’t run into a lamp pole, or something

Just a spontaneous reaction, to give him a fright. Instead of which I didn’t know until I got back that he was in it, and he said you should have woken up, there is so little petrol in this country at this time, any car on the road is a staff car, which it was of course, I didn’t know.

Oh they just told me in Brisbane when I joined up, I would not be a pilot.

They offered me anything I wanted, I didn’t want to be a navigator because that’s only playing with figures, so I elected to be a wireless operator gunner, I thought that would be, you’d see more fun with that.

Well I can’t think of anything more boring than sitting in an aeroplane working with figures, at least with a radio you can listen to something or with guns, you can fire then. A navigator, I didn’t think there was much of a thrill in that at all, but I offered anything other than a pilot, so I elected to be a wireless operator.

They must have thought I was a nice fellow, I don’t know.

But they said I could be a navigator or a wireless operator gunner, W Op AG.

Well we didn’t learn much of that in Australia, all we learnt in Australia was morse code and army regulations, air force regulations, we didn’t even do any gunnery in Australia, primarily all we learnt

was some morse codes and regulations, when I got to Canada, we went to the first school in Winnipeg, and it was there that we learnt radio work and a hell of a lot of theoretical stuff about radio, and we went to a gunnery school for a month, a gunnery and bombing school, but

we only used the gunnery part, in Mossbank in Saskatchewan, then we got our stripes and four days later we went to England.

Well mostly morse code, I would say, and how to behave yourself and salute people,

discipline and marching, we didn’t do a lot of marching, which was again getting back to discipline.

Well we were put on a boat called the Aorangi, a New Zealand boat, from the New Zealand Shipping line, we went to Auckland and picked up

we had a couple of hundred, we had two groups on ours, navigators and wireless operators, we picked up a group in Auckland, and we had a Maori Prince because all the people were there singing a Maori farewell as he went … we went to Fiji, were as I mentioned it was 118 degrees, God it was hot … a day and a

half out of Fiji we were sunk, according to the radio, I saw subsequently in a book some years ago, the Aorangi was sunk 27 times I think it was, but it was tracked back, this book said, I’m presuming it was valid, there was a Nazi sympathizer on a radio station in Auckland

and he knew when the ship was leaving and he knew how long it would take to get to Fiji, and he announced or he told someone on some radio frequency where it would be at such and such a time, and it was reputedly sunk, German raiders or several Germans raiders in the South Pacific, but I never saw them, we had to divert, we were

bound for Honolulu, we didn’t get there, we had to divert south because of the threat of German Raiders, and we hit the coast a long way down in America and went up the coast to Vancouver, within American territorial waters, I don’t know the relevance that had, because America wasn’t in the war then, but that’s what we did, so I missed seeing Honololu that time.

Froze, we got off the boat ten days after we had been in Fiji, and the temperature was pretty damn cold, they put us on Canadian Pacific Railways to go to Winnipeg, we stopped at Banff, some fellow got out and slipped and broke his arm on the ice

And they wouldn’t let any of the rest of us out then, that was probably the right thing. We went across to Winnipeg and the sergeant there, Canadian, made us stand on the railway station in Winnipeg, where it was officially 33 below freezing, and the fellow next to me said your ear has split and I’ve still got the scar

from where both my ears were frostbitten, because we had no gear, there had only been one course ahead of us that had gone to Montreal, and we were not dressed for these, we had no gloves, we had silly little bum-freezers, pardon my French, but that’s what they were called, these silly little flying top coats and ordinary field caps, we didn’t have a clue how to look after ourselves.

There was quite a number of our group, seven or eight, who finished up with pneumonia, we just didn’t know how to look after ourselves. This sergeant subsequently went to either one of our instructors, he was a drill instructor and a couple of our fellows were commissioned at the end of the course, we were all sergeants, we were only LACs [Leading Aircraftsmen] when we got there, so he could tell us what to do, but we all

became sergeants and these two officers, and we used to make this sergeant carry messages from one to the others, and if he didn’t salute these two officers, look out., and the Canadian CO the wing commander, thought this was funny. He made a mess of you when you got here, but you got him. A silly childish thing, but we didn’t like that fellow.

Winnipeg, there was an old deaf and dumb school and we always said they put out the dumb out and put the deaf in, or the other way around, took the deaf out and put the dumb in. There was 72 Australians and 72 New Zealanders on the first course in Winnipeg, and I forgot the number of it now, the schools, and we were really taught

the theory and the practical side of wireless, morse code mostly, you had to qualify as a radio operator, you had to do 18 words a minute, and I was one of those that got quite a bit higher than that, I got up to 25, and we had an instructor who was the equivalent of a PMG [Postmaster General’s Department] man here

who used a different sort of key from the one we had in the air force, and he could send something to 40s, it just sounded like a canary whistling, they recorded him of course, we couldn’t record it of course, we had to read it. We did that for four months and an awful lot of drills, and all this

air force rules and regulations, then went to Mossbank in Saskatchewan, we went back a couple of hundreds miles, and then a month of gunnery, shooting droges as they were towed by somebody else, then came back and graduated both schools, I was second in the wireless school and I was third in the gunnery school,

and the two fellows who beat me in each case, were commissioned, both killed very quickly too, in England. We got promoted to sergeants, spent four days then on leave in Montreal, went to Halifax were we had to

present ourselves in Halifax at a certain date, got on this ship and went across the Atlantic, north Atlantic.

Not very good, the Frenchmen in Montreal we didn’t get on with them at all. Another fellow and I, three Frenchmen one night tried to fix us up down an alley, but they didn’t know that we learned unarmed combat, we gave them a belting.

I don’t like French Canadians, I’m sorry, but I find them objectionable race.

Well we go lost, Sam went down a street to try and get to the hotel walking as you do, and got lost, and these three fellows thought they would take us down because they knew we had money, but they just made

an error in judgement … three against two in most instances, they’d win, but we’d done a bit of unarmed combat at that stage, a lot more in England, but we could look after ourselves, so we gave them a hiding and told the cops where they were.

Very well, very well, they thought we were not a bad bunch of fellows. And in particular, we demanded that we be allowed to use, wear our summer uniforms on the

first of April, so the Canadian CO allowed this, and of course then, the weather went backwards again, it got as cold as hell, and he said well you asked to wear summer uniforms, you’ll wear them. So we had to put up with them, we did it on Anzac Day and we asked for a march, to be allowed to have a march, and a lot of people, Canadians joined into that too.

And we were very well received, because we were mostly big fellows, you know I was exactly six feet in those days, and only one fellow taller than me, but I would say there would be nobody less than 5 foot 9, and we had a peculiar march, RAAF had a straight arm swing in those days, and when you get 72 blokes with their arm out straight

it looked pretty good. And we asked for a pipe band, which is the best thing you can ever march to, better than a brass band anytime, I think anyway. And we did, were well received in Winnipeg as a result of that, we were pretty popular people. But most of the ones that I’ve spoken to about that time

didn’t get on the with the French at all. It was a language in Manitoba, in Quebec, a lot of French Canadians there, a lot of the road signs were in French, but you were more or less told if you didn’t understand what they said, you were ignorant. Well in Canada at that time,

was a Dominion of the British Commonwealth, the British Empire, what the hell did the French have to do with it. Anyway that was the only particular episode that I had, and those fellows were a bit sick and sorry by the time we had finished with them.

Yes.

Well we had just done a parade, I’ve got a picture

there that I can show you, at the parade when we were handed our wings by some senior rank fellow, and we finished up with a Wing and our sergeants stripes, and a hand gripping lightning, which was the wireless operators’ badge.

But my actual, the ribbon that we were given in those days, had AG in it, air gunner, as well as this business, they subsequently became a “S”, signaller, but that was years down, I found out about it years down the tracks. When I got back to England after Germany I saw a fellow with an S on his shirt, and wondered what the hell it was, it was signaller. They were a bit superior

they considered to air gunners.

Well pretty, we felt top of the world, we satisfactorily graduated from the course we set out to do. Oh no, it’s a sense of achievement, we graduated and that was it.

Well, we were

because poor old Britain was getting a bit of a hiding in those days, and London in particular had had a few nasty raids, and we wanted to get over there and see what we could to do help them. So, poor old Britain was on a, see Dunkirk had occurred by then, well and truly, and we just wanted to go and do what we had signed up to do.

Well we were on a ship called the City of Delhi, and we didn’t care for it much when the, some members of the crew told us, that every City ship which was owned by, the line was owned by Sir John Ellerman, every City liner that had crossed the North Atlantic

on its first trip in war time, had been sunk. And the most famous one of course was the City of Benares, which had all those refugee children going from England across to Canada, and over five hundred of them had drowned. And one letter writer had just come from Singapore, with a whole lot, or several people who had bailed out of the East and were coming back to England.

And it was on its first trip across the North Atlantic in war time. And we didn’t think very much of this when we were told, that we could well be sunk. I suppose the only claim to fame we had, five of us ran the crown and anchor school [gambling game], and the captain had to stop it because we finished up with all the money on board, between the five of us. And one woman in particular,

she was most upset, some Englishwoman, because her husband had lost all his money on, to we colonials. But we had the money, we kept it all right. When I got to England I banked over a thousand pound sterling, from running the crown and anchor school. If you ever want to play crown and anchor, be the banker, because you’ll win.

Who was going to confiscate it?

No, no we had no commanding officers, we were all, the whole lot of us were just sergeants, we were on the boat. We had nobody looking after us, we were supposed to be responsible people, but the captain in fact stopped gambling on the ship, but by that time we had all the money anyway, all the available betting money.

No, I just walked into a post office

In England, and banked it. I suppose, I never even thought twice about it.

Yes, at that time it was the largest convoy across the North Atlantic, 152 ships, and we were the only troop ship

in the whole convoy, we were plum in the middle of it. We had a lot of Canadian corvettes looking after us, and whilst we were in Nova Scotia in Halifax, we saw a lot of English sailors, and we found they were, one of them was from the, one was the Prince of Wales, and the other

was the Duke of York. And Duke of York I think it was. Anyway, we didn’t see them the whole crossing of the Atlantic, until we got to Liverpool, and there they were there again. And we said where have you fellows been, and they were what they called horizon escort, they were just 20 miles away and you couldn’t see them over the curvature of the Earth. So we reckon they were just

on a, on a fishing trip, but they were in fact on duty. Duke of York, no Prince of Wales was one of them.

Oh yes. We were scheduled for a nine-day crossing, and in fact it took us 19. We went away north of Iceland

in the convoy, and we were shadowed by a Focke-Wulf Condor, a great big flying boat it was, a big boat, a big engine. And he apparently was directing the U-boats onto this convoy, and we were just lined up about ten rows of ships, but I don’t know how many long it was, 12 or 14 long I suppose. But several of them were sunk, blown up

and I remember thinking the poor devils, they were miles from anywhere, and when we asked who would save them, they just said, that perhaps some of the escort ships might pick them up, but none of the ships in the convoy was allowed to stop. I didn’t think, I thought that was a good decision I didn’t join the navy, it’s a long swim from the middle of the Atlantic.

Well, it’s, to me an unnatural feeling that you don’t go and try to help somebody. But there was nothing we, as individuals could do, I was surprised that nobody went to try to look for survivors. But they might have done without my knowledge, but we were told that the, none of the ships in the convoy would be allowed to stop to

pick them up because they immediately would become targets. And possibly the escort vessels would pick them up. But its not easy to see a thing blowing up, I wouldn’t know whether anyone was alive or not, but the thought came into my head, and there were several of us asking this question, what happens if there were survivors. It was too bad.

There was a hell of a lot of smoke and flames. One in particular was, we reckon was ammunition and the other one we reckon was aviation fuel, or fuel, it was just a poof, it’s not a very pleasant to see things like that. But we were a long, we would be half a mile , or even three quarter of a mile away.

Well you hope to god they don’t blow you up, which they didn’t thankfully, small mercies.

Well at least we, my feeling was, at least we got here at long last, it wouldn’t be long before we were fighting somebody, which was completely untrue of course, but that was the feeling

And we got there in August of 1941, I didn’t fly out over England, outside of the United Kingdom until I think November of that year, when a lot of aircraft had gone down on the first raid on Berlin, they had run out of petrol on the way home, and they had gone into the North Sea, because of a bad met report

And we were sent out to look for them. In old Wellingtons, in Whitleys, I think I was in Whitleys for one of the trips, we just went out to find them in the seas. But the feeling was that we’re here, we’ll be fighting the war soon, but that wasn’t true.

Oh yes, the machine guns

We were firing at the Condor. We were trained on machine guns that the naval contingent, members of the naval contingent and Royal Navy fellows, didn’t know how to work. And these were mounted on the wings of the bridge, and one was a Hispanasuissa, and the

other was a Hotchkiss. And we knew how to shoot them because we had been trained on all sorts of machine guns in Canada. So we actually fired them at this Condor and I don’t know why he turned away, but he turned away, he didn’t come over us. And the captain tried very hard to get us the Atlantic Star, but no go, it was a naval decoration, and we weren’t in the navy.

Well, we went down from Liverpool by train and stayed the night in London, I can’t think of the name of the place we stayed down there, it was some club, doesn’t matter anyway. So we stayed overnight in London, and London was bombed

that night, not very close to where we were, but London was bombed. And the next day we were taken by train down to Bournemouth, which was, pretty snooty, well we were the first Australians, we were the first Australians in England in World War II as a group. Then the fellows who had been training in Australia arrived about a fortnight after we did. Of course like all servicemen, “Where have you been, what held

you up, the war’s nearly over,” but that’s just chiacking, that’s par for the course, still happens. But we were in fact in England a fortnight before the ones who had been trained in Australia, and we let them know it too, you know childish behaviour, but never mind.

Well it relieves the pressure a bit, doesn’t it.

You know, it still happens, where have you been. It happened when I went to Vietnam, you know, “What’s taken you so long to get from Australia.” It just, I think, relieves the nervous tension a little bit. But I didn’t think much of this business of being bombed, I didn’t think there was any future in that.

We didn’t see very much

on that occasion, we were transported in vehicles and buses. It wasn’t until we got on leave that a lot of us saw these places had been bombed, you know, Southampton and London. But subsequently the one that really got our backs up was Coventry, but I was in a squadron by this stage, and we went across

to Coventry and picked up a lot of house bricks and brought them back to the squadron, and used to drop them out the chute as when went over Germany. Well, we got into trouble for doing that, you weren’t allowed to do that, it was naughty. But if a house brick hits you from ten thousand feet, you don’t tell the story very often. So we used to, we substituted empty beer bottles and they make a hell of a noise,

when they’re coming down. But we were stopped doing that too, naughty boys do that.

Well no, it’s not in the Geneva Convention or something, I don’t know. I can tell you something that the Germans used to do with empty beer bottles to us, too. I’d missed the bus one night and I was walking

back to the squadron, just outside of Lincoln, and I couldn’t not work out where this noise was coming from. It’s, the noise was everywhere, and I reckon it was a beer bottle that had been dropped by a German bomber, and it’s a frightening noise, because. I’ve had it explained to me by scientists since, but it’s got, it spins and it’s got the bottle

that makes the noise as well as the vortex made by the spinning of the bottle, and it’s a frightening noise, you’ve got no idea where it is. I would reckon if that whacks you on the head, you’d be dead too, it goes about 120 miles an hour I know, but that’s fast enough for me.

Well nothing, we weren’t at Bournemouth for very long. I can’t actually remember how long we were there, it was only a matter of a week or two, we had then to be sorted out, what our qualifications were. I remember it was determined that what we learnt in Canada on the radio sets, was no use in the UK because they had been phased

right out a number of years earlier. So my particular group were all sent to Cranwell College, well Cranwell, of course, is the RAF school, and everybody in the RAF used to go, like Point Cook in Australia. And we went to Cranwell and learnt how to use Marconi radios, which were in all the bombers. I think one of the funny ones there was

from Cranwell, a signal was sent wanting two 5 foot 6 gunners, well there weren’t any Australians who were 5 foot 6, you couldn’t get into the air crew if you were 5 foot 6, too little. But it had been mutilated in the sending to two 6 foot gunners, another fellow and I were picked out because we were six footers, and sent down to London,

to go on Bolton Paul Defiants, as night fighters on, for the protection of London. Of course when we got into the turret, we were supposed to go as gunners, or radio operators and gunners, we couldn’t get our legs in, couldn’t get our legs on the stirrup, because our legs were too long. And then it was found that they had sent two 6 foot gunners, instead of two 5 foot 6

gunners, so we were sent back again. That was one of the first foul-ups I ever came in the services, we just couldn’t get in the turrets and that was all it was about. I’m was glad of that, they were nasty things, an awful lot of them were shot down, they were in the defence of London.

Well they were nice sets, they were highly coloured, they had

red knobs and blue knobs and white knobs, big knobs. It was just a question of indoctrination, you did it and you were told a frequency and you had to set it up, and here somebody was sending morse and you had to write it down. It was a combination of becoming familiar with the equipment, as well as improving your speed at morse, and that was about all we did

when we were at Cranwell, five days a week, we didn’t work at the weekends for some peculiar reason. But that was all Cranwell was, to top us up, to make us capable of being posted to a squadron where they used the type of equipment we had been trained on.

I was posted from there

about eight or nine of us went to an operational training unit at a place called Finningley, in Yorkshire. And it was the home of Viscountess Lascelles, the Princess Royal, King George the Fifth’s sister. We were like rats as soon as we got to this place, we went through it to find a

good bedroom, there were had 84 bedrooms and no showers. We picked, we got a good bedroom, and then we went into Doncaster and told the RAF officer there that we wouldn’t go back until they installed showers. So that was the first time they had encountered Australians, but they put in the showers for us. And I found out subsequently, that Lady Able Smith,

it was her home, she had been born there, Finningley Hall, you know the Governor’s wife in Queensland here, years ago. So with 84 bedrooms, plenty of evidence of a sitz bath, but no showers, but we got the showers put in, they didn’t, it was the first time they had encountered Australians, they didn’t think much of us.

I think they were awfully pleased the service people, the RAF people, were awfully pleased to get all these trained troops. But as a general statement, Australians were, had to live down the reputations that their fathers had made in World War I. Very few people had had much to do with Australians. I’ve got a

a little cup there which I’ll show Naomi [interviewer] later, she’d like to see this I’m sure, they used to put a notice board up when we were up at Bournemouth, five Australians for high tea, so we had nothing else to do, so we had the high tea. This place we went to was in Hove, a pretty snooty place, like the Gold Coast is to Queensland, very snooty, and this quite elderly

lady, had been engaged to an officer in World War I, who had been killed and she was still single. We had our high tea and she had one of those china cabinets, and I was looking in the china cabinet at his little cup and saucer that looked like a toy set that my sister had. So she said to me,

do you like that, I said yes, it’s a bit like my sister’s got. She said well I don’t think she would have one like this. But she said, you can have it if you’d like it, well I said no I don’t want, so she made me take it, so it was left in my gear because no-one else wanted it, they thought it was a doll’s cup and saucer, when I was shot down, lost everything else practically. And I had it looked at it when I came back to Australia, and its ceramic number

is four, it’s a George the Third cup, so I’ll show it to you later, it’s apparently very valuable. But no as a general statement, the English thought we were odd sort of fellows, cause our daddies had been a bit wild in World War I, the girls were told not to have much to do with these Australians, they were pretty naughty boys.

I suppose for the first few months, when I came back to, from Europe, the Americans were the ones that had the reputations, we were the snowy headed boys, the Americans had the bad reputation. It was quite interesting that, difference of three years, what a difference it made.

We got some of this business of being colonials, but not a great deal because most of us were big enough to look after ourselves, and if you stand up to somebody and tell them to pull his head in, unless he’s bigger than you, he generally does. We didn’t tolerate this, but then again, we didn’t go in big groups, you see there were only

ten Australians in the squadron I was on, we were spaced around pretty well, but those who had Australians in their crews, were very pleased to have us. We were considered fairly skilled airmen, you know, my little, my, my pilot was on his second tour,

and he came from a very wealthy English family who made Heaton coats, Heatonia coats, which are pretty high faluting things apparently, not that I’m into the fashion world. But he picked me and said you go and pick the rest of the crew, but not the pilot, I’ll pick the second pilot. So I went along and I talked to all these fellows, and I picked the crew,

which was not a bit uncommon. We went to visit, my little tail gunner, who I pushed out, he was the only married fellow in the crew, he was Maltese, we went to Malta a few years ago to see him. But that was the way my pilot did it, there was no suggestion of familiar and status, as far as we were concerned.

Well he must have just thought I was a nice fellow, and he reckoned if I was, could pick them, they must be good, and so I did.

I went across and talked to them and asked them what, what they did, what school did they go to, what sport did they play, I had my own

measuring stick if I can use it that way, and if they fulfilled it, they were all right.

Well people that I could be compatible, and the strange thing about it, without asking, because it’s not my business and, I’ve never considered it relevant, out of the seven, the pilot got me, so I had five

to pick, well four to pick, he said I wasn’t allowed to pick the second pilot, so I had a navigator and three gunners to find, I picked these things from various stages, where do you come from, what do you do, and I picked everybody excepting one who was a Protestant, without asking the question. Peter was, little Peter Buttigieg he’s the Maltese fellow, he was

RC [Roman Catholic], he used to sit in the back turret, and when he got a bit excited he used to say his prayers, and we would all tell him to shut up on the intercom. You know, he’d sing, and he taught me, what was that Spanish love song, wasn’t it, we used to sing that because he also lived in Gibraltar. “I, I, I Jean Contentora”, I don’t remember all the words now, but once upon a time, I knew

that all in Spanish, didn’t have a clue what it meant, but it was a Spanish love song, apparently. I hear it sometimes on the radio.

Oh I don’t know, I’ve no idea, he was an RC, I couldn’t understand him, he was talking Maltese anyway. But he used to tell us, he was saying his Hail Mary’s and all sorts of things in Maltese, we just believed him, we used to tell him to shut up, we had more to do.

No, that’s what I say, nobody, I have never found, other than perhaps in the CMF after the war, I have never found that religion was a factor, until I’ve encountered it after the war. I don’t consider that anybody’s business but the person involved.

It had no affect on me whatsoever.

No, in my crew no – if they did, I never, ever heard of them, so no. A lot of the airmen did have superstitions, but there were none in my crew. We were just, we just rolled

up and did our job and hoped for the best. We were all coming home to go to my pilot’s wedding, the morning we were shot down. We were slotted for 3 o’clock that afternoon to go to his wedding, we were killed at 2.32am, they were all killed, fellows in the front end were, so we didn’t get to the wedding. But he told us not to jump out, he’d get us home, well, we’ll see you in England,

the whole starboard wing was on fire, there wasn’t much sense in hanging around.

Very good, well we didn’t, that was one of the things the RAF is very strong about. They didn’t like you actually going away on leave with a member of your own crew, and while we were on training

at the OTU [Operational Training Unit], and on the squadron, not that I had much squadron time, we used to fly at night for six weeks, then we had to have a weeks’ leave, and we’d just be given a leave pass, and members of the crew would be given a leave pass to go somewhere else. You could nominate roughly, someone would say to you where would you like to go this time, and you’d say Inverness or Lands End or Wales or somewhere or other, and you’d get a leave pass.

But you weren’t allowed to go with a member of your crew, they wanted you to all to get better yourself. You see, that was on medical grounds, that they considered that when you had reversed your life for six weeks, you were entitled to a week off. See we didn’t get much sleep, because you’d get home at say three or four o’clock in the morning, you might miss your breakfast, but some coot at eight or clock or nine o’clock or so running up an engine,

down the road, well that would wake you up. So you lived an unnatural sort of life. And that was a medical decision, six weeks and you had a week off, on your own.

Other than for night flying, exercises for pilot and navigator more than anybody else, we used to fire the guns occasionally

but I used to do the radio. I used to listen to the German, the Germans had three radio stations, they used. They bombed in a completely different way to what we did. They had three master stations, one in Norway, one in France, one in Holland, and one in France. And they used to fly along a beam, and two beams they would intersect, they dropped their bombs.

Their approach was quite different from ours, and we used to listen to the, use those things, I used to get a bearing and give it to the navigator, so he could do his navigation. Oh, there was a fair amount of co-operation, but see where I sat in the aircraft, the astrodome was above my head, and I used to often times take a shot,

with a sextant for him, and he’d plot it all on his hanky-panky stuff. But most of it we did by radio beams, because you couldn’t see the stars very often, it was a bit cloudy over Europe.

Oh no no, it was only to get a bearing, we knew were they were.

And we had direction finders, and you’d line up, you’d know the one on Norway, you’d know where it was, in round terms. So you’d spin the thing around, the needles dropped, you’d read the bearing and tell the navigator.

Oh, we used maps and read the ground, we didn’t have any. In the aircraft that I was in, we didn’t have

any of this sophisticated navigation equipment at all. Our means of navigation was to read the ground.

Well I was in a Avro Manchester, which was a twin engine measured 90 feet wingspan, 70 feet fuselage, it was the biggest twin that flew in World War II of any nation, I understand. It had

two Rolls Royce engines which were subsequently found to be defective. Initially it was recognised as an engineering masterpiece, it was 24 cylinders, 4 banks of 6 in an X construction, 24 hundred horsepower. It was found a cylinder

liners that they could just pick up and replace like a Vanguard motor car after the war, which was copied from the Manchester. They found they weren’t working because they were silver, silver cylinder liners and they were melting. So they made an alloy, I’m not up in the medical, metal game, but when I got my first

flight in a Manchester they were 1750 horse each, and then they were governed again to 1400 horse, which meant that our ceiling with a six thousand pound bomb load, was about ten thousand feet. And when we went over Cologne for example, on this first thousand-bomber raid, everything else was above us, and no bomb hit us, thank goodness for small mercies.

Regrettably it – as it says in the official book of the AV Roe Company – it had a limited operational life, and then of course they put an extra 11 feet on each of the wings, and put four good engines on it, and the Lancaster bomber was born, and it was a good aeroplane.

But other than flying back from Germany in one, I, I don’t know anything about Lancaster – identical fuselage.

It was my way of subjecting myself to some discipline, you can become awfully lethargic when you’re a prisoner of war if you let it. A fellow of mine who is dead now, lived in Tamborine, he was, we got tired of going up to see him, because I was the lucky one

I studied while I was in the prison camp, I got a university degree, he could have done it, thousands of other people, I can show you a book, how many, how few actually did it, but that was my way of filling in my time. If you wanted to write, twiddle your thumbs or play chess or play cards, I made up my mind that I was going to have a shower every ten days. Now you tell that sometimes to people who are God-fearing Australians,

particularly Northern Australians, not southern ones particularly, found a lot of them didn’t bathe very much, Tasmanians and Victorians I’m talking about. But then I’d continue the conversation, I used to do it by getting out of bed as soon as the barrack room was open. The jet was a two inch jet of cold water out of a tap, standing on ice, you had to put your wrists and the back of your neck under the water first,

then you’d hop in, have a quick shower, dry yourself and hop back into bed before the parade was called. Now that was my way of mental discipline. Now I didn’t expect anybody else to do it, that was their business. But I did it, and a number of people who said I was mad, well I didn’t go mad, I stayed sane. One friend of mine who disappeared, nobody ever found him,

was an Englishman called Grimson. This fellow spoke immaculate German and he, I saw him go over the fence, well I was one of those who was a spy this particular day, the cockatoo on the corner, and Grimmy came up, dressed up as a German and asked for permission from the guard to go over the fence, which he got. And he walked over with his ladder,

the plank wouldn’t fit across the barbed wire, so he spoke to the German, went back to get another plank, and that was the last anybody ever saw of him, he went to Warsaw. Now he was the chief of the escape route in Warsaw, and I only read the book not long ago, didn’t we, I did anyway, where his brother is writing, a younger brother, they never knew where Grimson went. Now he was an interesting bloke, we used to

sleep in double decker beds, when they got tough, three deckers, but he slept on the upper deck, and he had a clock on the wall above the head of his bed, that went backwards, made out of an army plate and knife and fork, and it went the wrong way. But he had a mirror on the foot of his bed, and the Germans used to come in, and say stupid man, well I wonder who was stupid, he didn’t have to twist his head, he just looked at the mirror and he could read the time.

Now see that’s eccentric, is it. Well we thought Grimmy was a pretty smart fellow, I can tell you he was to. But you see, I would have been, I don’t think I could done what he did this day with the ladder and plank, and the barbed wire was, I don’t know, six or eight feet apart, I can’t remember now. But when he got up with the ladder, put the plank, right beside the posten box, and put the plank across it didn’t reach.

So he said to the guard I better go and get a longer one. So came back and there was a longer one there, so he went back, and put it up again, and up he got, pulled up his ladder, walked down and was then out. Now that’s a brave man in my opinion, who can have two goes at the damn thing, game enough to do it once, but how many people spontaneously would think, I better go and get and other plank, and did it.

He led the escape mob in Warsaw for 12 months or more, then he just vanished. It was only written up in a book I read not so very long ago, his brother is asking where he is. Everybody accepts the fact that he is dead, but nobody can say when, how, it’s probably in one of the ghettos in

Warsaw, he probably lived in the ghetto.

Well, the pilot, as I mentioned, came from a very wealthy English family, are you familiar with Hestonia Coats, well that’s his family. Well, he was the third generation at that particular time. They were pretty well-to-do people, he was a really aristocratic Englishman,

and a nice fellow. The second pilot, we used to change them, but his particular one was a flying officer, a pilot officer, whose brother was a group captain, a very senior RAF man, I think he was on his first overseas, his first trip.

I’d have to look up my book to say who the navigator’s name was, I can’t remember that. And there was a little Cockney boy was the front gunner, the mid-upper gunner was a Scotsman, regular army, air force fellow that none of us really liked very much because he couldn’t speak English very much, and he was a bit too snooty for us, he was a regular. I pushed him out of the aircraft because he wouldn’t

jump, he wouldn’t jump. I got my tail gunner out because he was married, little Maltese boy. The next fellow, he wouldn’t jump, so I pushed him out and he didn’t speak to me again. A photograph there of him standing talking to a third person, but he wouldn’t talk to me, he used to talk to the third person.

Because he was ashamed of the fact that he,

he wouldn’t jump. We had a term for it, freezing on the hole, well he freezed on the hole, I had to throw him out. I found out subsequently that he was 21 the day he was sent to Dulag Luft to Frankfurt. The Germans gave him a little bottle of beer and a little British Red Cross cake, which he

didn’t know was British, so he told them everything they wanted to know, which as a regular he shouldn’t have done, you say name and rank, finish. But he made the misfortune, or he had the misfortune, that one of the fellows masquerading as a German, was a British secret service agent. And I was told very authentically, that when this fellow got back to England after the war, this gunner

of mine, he was put in jail for seven years, so the wheel turns. It’s a very interesting exercise about how people can pass themselves off as something you don’t expect. The last thing in the world I expected, somebody to walk in and ask me if I wanted to go for a surf at Southport, the last thing in the world I expect anybody to do, and this was a general Luftwaffe captain. I mean when you are sitting there,

you know what the hell is going to happen to me, you’ve been on your own for hours, in a cell, solitary confinement, and somebody walks in and says how would you like to go for a surf at Southport, sport, I can tell you, it gives you a bit of a surprise. And he worked at the German club at the bottom of Holland Park, it used to be, it’s not there anymore, at the bottom of Holland Park Hill, as a waiter. He knew Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne better than I knew them.

Because he had worked as a waiter at the German club. So every now and again you can come up, somebody can come up with a thing that just slows you down a little bit, because all we were supposed to say was name, number and rank.

I just, I didn’t say anything, I was so surprised. I didn’t answer him. But he’d made his point. He had shocked me.

I mean when you’re on your own like that for a couple of days, and you’re in a little room, 10 x 8, I suppose. And they turn the temperature gauges, it was in June, and they turn the temperature up, so you get a bit thirsty after a while, which is what they did to me. And others I guess. But it surprises you, and sets you back on your heels, and you just think well I’m not allowed, I’d better not say anything.

Now was that what you wanted.

First raid you ever do was a leaflet raid, as they call it.

No bomb, you chuck leaflets out, propaganda.

What did they say, don’t fight anymore, or. We did it over Lille in France, and it was in French, I don’t know. You know, stand up against the oppressors, I suppose it said something like this, I’ve seen it from the other side, I’ve seen German

propaganda. Our first raid was on the city of Lille in France, a leaflet raid, and we were mighty glad to get home, because we had no trouble. The second raid was a bit more interesting. We went to Nantes, near St Nazaire.

And our target was a series of sheds on wharves, because St Nazaire was the, and Nantes, were the rest spaces for the U-boat crews, when they got a week off or whatever it is, they came and rested in these barracks, or they were sheds on these wharves.

Three aircraft only were sent down, Manchesters, because in silhouette they are almost identical with the Messerschmitt 110. The only difference being the Messerschmitt is about half the size, but its pretty hard to say if the thing is at five thousand or ten thousand feet in the dark. So if you see them, just, and we had to fly between Le Havre and

Cherbourg, each of which was a 110 Luftwaffe Squadron. And we had to join the circuit in one, I’m not quite sure which one, Le Havre I think it was. And we did a couple of circuits, and then just peeled off and went and bombed Nantes, and again this is in Hansard. Somebody when we got down there, instead of pushing the air force

alarm, air raid alarm, pushed the light switch. And we were credited, these three aircraft with killing 2800 U-boat crew that night, it is in Hansard. Because they were running like ants, and we just came in one after the other, and dropped our bombs, and killed 2800 U-boat crew.

Well, they’re dead,

somebody won’t sink a ship that I’m on. So that was that, and then we came back and joined the circuit with the other ones and just flew home to England, and no-body fired a shot at us, you’ve got to be cheeky sometimes.

Oh yes, depending on the type of raid, on those two

particular raids, we were, we were, all, the whole crew was briefed. And you’d get what you call a briefing of an hour or two before takeoff. What the weather conditions would be like, what the moon’s like, what aircraft you might encounter, foreign fellows, general conditions about what you might find, what height they recommend you go in at.

You know, don’t come below a certain height, because you might run into some of Luftwaffe in their landing circuits, or something like that. Then you go and have, after that, you go to the, and have operation supper. At the given time you hop in the back of a truck, and some girl drives, some WAC [Women’s Army Corps], drives you out to the aircraft, and you all peel

out, and put all your gear on, and.

Well your parachute, mainly. We had the rest of it on us, but we’re dressed. But one thing they had on my squadron, and it had it in writing, so it’s easy to check up. Airmen will refrain from urinating on the empennage [tail assembly], because it is a lot easier when you’re all dressed up,

with all this stuff, if you’re not careful and you urinate, you splash your feet and when it gets up there, you get a bit cold. We used to do it on the wing, on the tailplane, and the urine used to cause a bit of deterioration, so it was a sign, airmen will refrain from urinating on the empennage. Lots of people saw that, and I read it in some books, too. But that was

the way we went, and we did the aeroplane and away we’d go, and get down there, we’d wind up the engines, and everything OK, and you’d get down, get the green light, and away you’d go.

I can only say, in my case, no. I’m, I’m

I’m a positive sort of person, I was always looking to coming home. It never entered my mind that I wouldn’t come home. Even when we were away, left Australia. I always in my mind, had made up my mind that I was coming home. I don’t know whether other people think like that or not, I’ve never really discussed it with anybody. But I was quite definite I was coming home.

I’m not trying to be silly when I say this, I was never conscious of anything like that. When I got into the aeroplane, I had to make sure my batteries were working, my, all my wireless sets were working, I had three of four to deal with. And that was all I was interested in, getting down, sitting

down and turning these things on, and making sure everything that worked. Other people were doing other things, cocking the guns, and seeing that the bullets were there for the thing, and the navigator was seeing his pencil was sharpened. We all had something to do. But, quite frankly, it never, the thought never entered my mind that I wasn’t coming back.

We used to tease the hell out of him for that.

That was his, that was his way of doing it. He’d been brought up that way, pray and somebody would look after you, well that’s OK, that’s his business. Somebody did, he lived. Nice little fellow too.

Well mostly we had heat tapped off the motor, but the coldest I’ve ever been, was minus

57 degrees, when the heating broke down. And that’s cold let me tell you, that’s cold. You touch metal and it just about takes your skin off. But I didn’t have so much of the, most of mine was Bakelite anyway. But that’s the coldest I’ve ever been, we dropped down very quickly. See most of my time was flying at ten or twelve thousand feet, because of the engines.

Primary to listen at each half an hour, each half hour, to the signal that was coming out

of the command, to tell us if there was any enemy aircraft that had been reported by somebody else. Primarily to give us weather information, because England has shocking weather compared to what we’re accustomed to here to here, I guess. And one of the great dangers was, taking off and not being able to get back to your own aerodrome because of fog.

And we might have to be diverted to somewhere else in the United Kingdom, and that was one of our main things to listen to the radio, and that’s in fact what I was doing at 0230 hours, was listening to the broadcast from group headquarters, to say that we could land safely in our own drome, when I heard all these bullets ricocheting around, and we were shot down.

I didn’t even know anybody was there, because I was on the radio. But I found out a couple of minutes, when I had taken a message and I got onto the intercom, and all sorts of funny things were being said.

Well, my own crew, you know, brake, port, dive and all that sort of business, and I knew that the noises that I had heard were bullets, and I was

concentrating so much on what I was listening to, that I brought the jacket it’s been thrown out now, that I had an ordinary jacket on, it was June, it was pretty warm. It was an incendiary bullet went through this way, and burnt a hole in the front of my jacket because I was leaning forward. And I didn’t even know,

you know, you don’t, you don’t feel a thing like that, its going so quick anyway. It was only when I got back onto the intercom that I heard them saying brake, port and drop and all this sort of stuff, that I knew there was something funny going on. It didn’t take long to find out then. Is that what you mean, they used to give us up to date information, primarily about weather.

I could show you a picture which is a lot better.

No, I can’t. I sit right behind the main spar, and quite a substantial row of

radio sets are in front of me. Transmitting, transmitters and receivers, and a key of course on a table. It is very hard, if I could show you and then I could try and explain it. It just, it would be three to four feet high, the radio set.

Is that sufficient for what you want. And the antenna of course was outside, trailing antenna from the wingtip back to the tail-tip each side, and there was a direction finding loop in the little astrodome above my head, which is where I could turn it around, and say that is where the signal is coming from.

No we didn’t radio at all, because that told people where we were, anybody on the ground listening. They knew where we were if they were close enough. No, we never ever sent a signal, excepting when we were going down. I sent a signal to

say we’d been, we’d been attacked. And then, as it was going down, you turn the key down and it keeps on broadcasting until the thing hits the ground, and of course, then they know where it landed, crashed.

Well we used to hear him in the prison camp.

Well the Germans used to let us

hear Lord Haw Haw, we didn’t take much notice of him.

Well he used to tell us you British are a silly mob, and you colonials ought to know better than to fight for Britain. Everything was very anti. He used to speak in English.

A pretty educated Englishman. A well educated Englishman. Oh yes, he,

I suppose the best we could say, we didn’t take any notice of him. We used to haw haw when we heard him, and annoy the Germans. It was very hard when Hitler was on the, on the public address system. We used to have to stand to attention and listen to it, and you didn’t know a word, well we, didn’t know very much he was saying. He and Churchill are probably

the only people I’ve ever heard speak, that could get me worked up when I didn’t know a word that, that Hitler was saying.

Well he was, he was stirring up his mob, he was going to knock the Russians off, or knock us off or knock somebody off. But the way he could speak, he was an amazing orator. Same as Churchill, he just lifted the English people every time he spoke publicly. But I’ve never forgotten the first one I heard of Hitler,

and he almost had me convinced and I had no idea what he was talking about. It’s quite, it’s interesting, Mussolini apparently was the same, I never heard him. But it’s dreadful when you don’t know a word a man is saying, really I might have known five words, he can build you up. I’ve often thought when people talk about this mass hysteria, I know what it means. It’s not,

it’s not difficult to understand it when you’ve experienced it, and I didn’t really know what he was talking about.

I’m sorry, I missed.

Only, to make us behave and look, stand to attention and listen, which we weren’t doing

very much. But I, that they were told to make sure we listened, and that was a zone, that was their job, like automatons. German minds, and what I know of it, is a one-track mind. If, I was in a peculiar position because I was an interpreter, a dolmacher, and my man used to tell me

what was going to happen, and we were having a search, they were looking for maps, looking for compasses, or money or whatever. And if they were looking for maps, you could leave a compass there and they wouldn’t touch it. They were probably the only people I’ve ever encountered, that had an exclusively one track mind. It was interesting to watch. We used to try it every now and again, we’d been told

that they were after maps, so you’d could leave money there, and they wouldn’t touch it. It was an extraordinary experience, that. I must show you a photograph that I have here, where the censors were very, very strict and I’ve got a photograph of my wife that I got an aunt of mine in England, to chase up, and she eventually got it for me, and sent it to me. And the Germans

have taken a piece out of one corner on the front, and almost the whole of the back off, looking for silk map, that used to be sent to the boys as escape maps. And they were pretty hard. The Gestapo used to raid us, I suppose, search us every month or few weeks, and

most of the Gestapo fellows that I came across, they were little fellows, five and a half feet to the big ones. And we were forbidden to have a cigarette lighter or a fountain pen, I don’t know why, but we were weren’t. But of course, both of them run out of fuel fairly quickly, so I never understood the point. But they used to search us every now and again, and I had a cigarette lighter that I used to

keep in my pocket, with my handkerchief. And of course, as soon as we were out and due to be searched, you’d put your hand in your pocket and palm the cigarette lighter and hold the handkerchief, we used to have to stand like this. Well I’ve never seen a man so humiliated, as one fellow who was jumping trying to catch this handkerchief, and he couldn’t reach it, and of course as he jumped I pulled it up a little bit each time. And he started to climb up my body,

so he could catch this handkerchief, and the rest of the 2,000 fellows laughed at him, and he got down, and just left me. It’s a very, it’s very interesting you learn a hell of a lot of things about life, when you see a man who has been publicly humiliated and couldn’t take it. He backed off, rather than pursue, and all I had was an empty cigarette lighter.

It’s a very odd experience to see that. And to have a man jumping to try to catch your handkerchief, to grab your handkerchief, it’s a funny thing. One of the things I’ve always said about my time, about my time in camp was that you learn about a lot about human life, and

I was one of those, I’m I’m just a dyed-in-the wool optomist, nothing ever bad is going to happen to me and that’s it, where as I saw other fellows, well I saw several die, because they couldn’t take it. If you’re interested I’ll show you, which you can’t put on your, well you could but I don’t think you could photograph it, extracts from various

letters that people received. I don’t know the recipient, nor do I know the sender, it used to be filed in such a way that just a section of the letter be shown. And you know, one that just springs to mind, is from a fiancée, a girl in England to her fiancée in Germany. I’d rather marry, what is it, I’d rather marry a

1943 hero than a 1939 coward, so I’ve married your brother. Or another one I’m having a baby, so the Americans are going to send you 200 cigarettes a month, from somebody’s wife. The rate of divorce amongst RAF personnel was extraordinarily high. I’ve got one there from a girl to,

to a fellow and I think she was engaged, I’m not sure, I can’t remember, but she got tired of waiting, so she married his father and signed the thing Love Mum. I mean I’ve got all that, I’ve got 20 or 30 of them there, and you wouldn’t believe how cruel people can be. And one of the ones we, I, I speak to some of the other prisoners occasionally about it, to get a

reply to a letter was four months, five months if you were lucky. And one fellow wrote and asked his girlfriend, I think it was, what the balance of his bank account was. She wrote back and she said guess. So he’d have to write back again, but four or five months had gone in that period. One asked for a

pair of pyjamas or something like that, what colour do you want. It’s surprising what people say.

They were all up on a noticeboard. We used to put them up on a noticeboard. I never ever got any silly letters, but if you did, you folded it so it was just that strip you wanted somebody to read was up there, and we used to copy them. I’ve got 20 or 30 extracts there.

Ones that somebody else thought were funny. It’s surprising the number of fellows that I know, who used the letters they got at prison camp, as grounds for divorce when they got back to England. I don’t know what, but that happened. One girl, we used to always say was a real anti-Yank job, where this girl wrote to her husband,

said I’m having a baby, and the Americans send you 200 cigarettes a month. Well that was the currency you see, you used to send a couple of hundred, my wife used to pay money to a shop, Finney Isles in Brisbane, and they’d transfer that to somebody in England, and they used to send me a couple of hundred cigarettes a month, that was the currency. Ten cigarettes for a loaf of bread, was the

going price.

Oh well, they meant everything. I was allowed to send two cards and four letters a month, that was our limit. Or was it the other way around. I don’t know, I’d have to look. But they’d be months old when you got them, but they were still meant, they were, you were still alive, prepared to write to you.

Well, a couple of them hung themselves on the wire as we used to call it. The prison camp, all the ones I’ve been in, are large compounds with two layers of barbed wire, perhaps ten, twelve feet high, six or eight feet apart, with tangled wire in between them. And about 20 feet away from the fence, was another, a warning

fence which was about two feet high. And if a tennis ball, or if we were playing cricket or football or something, and it happened to go over there, you weren’t allowed to cross that without getting the permission of the guard, in the guard box, crossing box. And if he says OK, you could go across and get the ball, as long as you picked it up and ran straight back again. Well, these fellows used to just not ask for permission, walk over and just hang

onto the barbed wire like this. And of course, they fill them up with lead, and they used to get lead poisoning those fellows, they were dead. I saw two or three do that, I’ve got a photograph of one, one’s funeral here, was a propaganda job.

A German, I’ve got half a dozen photographs of the Germans gave as, to show what nice fellows they were, when somebody was killed in the prison camp, they give him

they gave them a military funeral, he was the only one that I ever heard of, but I’ve got the photograph there. Johnny Shaw, one of the fellows in my compound.

He walked up and hung himself on the wire, so they filled him up with lead.

Yes, he got a letter.

I don’t know, never ever saw him, probably his girlfriend was pregnant or something.

That happened more often than not, a lot of times.

Oh, not really, we just thought they were fools, so. If you saw the contents of them, and I really meant it,

it’s worth reading them, to show just how stupid people can be. And en masse, the public is stupid. And that’s not a, that’s a statement made from a fair bit of experience.

No, not at all. One of these letters says,

I’ve got a cousin living in somewhere, if you get a chance, go and visit him. I’ve just seen the film such and such, what sort of films are you being shown. They had no comprehension, no comprehension whatsoever, of what was going on, and they were just across the water, cause they had no reason to know.

I’ve always been amazed at just how little people know of a prison camp, and the closest I think to ever been shown, was Stalag what was it, 17 or something, it was on some American show, don’t take any notice of the American way of Stalag Luft 3, it’s a lot of hooey. Colditz Story was all right, it was made in Britain.

But Stalag Luft 3, don’t take notice of that pile of rubbish, it was made by the Americans, they’ve got no idea. But Stalag 17, I think was, somebody said to me, you mean there were fences like that around you. People just don’t know, that was in Australia, I’m talking about. Very few people seem to know what they look like.

Beg pardon.

I was on the squadron and we didn’t think that was a fair thing, that we should be fighting the Germans, when the Japanese were going to attack Australia. About ten of us went down from the squadron,

New Zealanders too, mostly Australians, and requested that our, the clause in our Empire Air Training Scheme thing, be activated, that we were, didn’t want to fly with the RAF, we wanted to take discharges and go home. We were told very smartly that that wasn’t on. But he admitted, he admitted to me,

years later, that it was the greatest pack of lies he ever told anybody. It was Dickie Williams, Air Vice Marshall Williams, air commodore, air marshall or something he was, chief of the air staff. But he told us lies, he, that there was no aircraft that we’d been trained to look at, the equipment that we’d been trained on, wasn’t even known, heard of in Australia. And he admitted to me in

about 1970, just as he was retiring as the chief of the air staff, that it was one of the few things in his service life, where he told absolute lies. So we just went back to the squadron and flew on, but they probably never heard of aircraft like we had out here anyway, out there.

Oh I don’t know, it was just that we couldn’t see why the hell we should be fighting against Germany, when Japan was going to attack us. And we were trained, so why not come home and fight against the people who were going to take your own country. The Germans weren’t going to attack Australia.

Huh, when you’re a sergeant, you do as you’re damn well told. There’s nothing

very much you can do. We had our say, we were shot down, his argument was reasonable, that up to date equipment, we’d been through, a lot of us had been through this business of being taught in Canada with one type of equipment, and when we got to England, it had been out of use in England for years. Well, I don’t think the RAAF was up to scratch that much, I don’t know.

But we were told it wasn’t. I know they had no aircraft like any of the ones we’d flown in. So there wasn’t much point really. Anyway, he talked us out of it.

Well we had, I served under an odd set of circumstances, plus all of those in my time. Almost

just short of two years, I’ve forgotten whether it was March or May of 1943. But as I said earlier on , I arrived in August of 1941, and we were seconded for flying duties to the RAF, which meant that they had no administrative control over us whatsoever, practically no disciplinary control over us. And our liaison with

the RAF was through Kodak House in London, where there was a nucleus of RAAF personnel, headed by Air Vice Marshall as he was at that time, Richard Williams. And I never ever served under the full control of the RAAF, because it didn’t take over, the RAAF took over control

for disciplinary and all other purposes apparently, in about March or May of 1943. I was just seconded for flying duties. It was a bit difficult, apparently, so I’m told, a highly technical argument, a legal argument, that they had no disciplinary control over us whatsoever. So that’s all I know about it.

Well I happened to know one fellow quite well, who was charged with that. In many instances, it could well have been true, I don’t know, but this fellow, a German, the son of a German migrant,

who came out to Australia after World War I, he was a Brisbane fellow. And he was, he’d been promoted, he was a one at this particular time, he had done a tour of 30 trips, he was well into his second tour, I think he only had one or two trips to go, to complete a second tour. And he was put with a green crew,

who had never been over the coast of England, or not over Germany. And he took exception, he said he wasn’t going to go on a trip like that, so they charged him with lack of moral fibre. So he said all right I’ll go, and he finished up in a prison camp. Now I think in that circumstance, that was a wrong charge he wasn’t frightened, he was quite

prepared to go with a qualified crew. But the number of people shot down on their first trip, was quite extraordinary. One of the fellows, one of the two that was commissioned off-course with me, he went down on his first trip, the other fellow went down on his third trip, I think. I did well, I went down on my fourth trip. But green crews were highly, well they didn’t know what to do. And this poor fellow,

he was on his fifty-eigth or fifty-ninth trip I think, and I never ever felt that he should be charged with lack of moral fibre, because it wasn’t that, he was quite prepared to go with somebody to fly.

I think by the time we were crewed up, we were all fairly well clued up at that stage. From then on, it’s only a question of dodging the bullets if you can. Well we did it a couple of times, but we missed out on the third and fourth of June. We saw plenty of flak, but you dodge it.

It’s only a question of taking a punt, because most of the big German towns were surrounded, but not a circular, it’s a square box of anti-aircraft fire, which when you came anywhere near the target, they just sent it up. Well it’s a box, you have to go through two sides, to hit the target. Well that was a punt you took.

Flak, I’m not terribly sure, we were hit a couple of times, but I never ever thought flak would do you as much harm as a fighter would do. So I haven’t got much experience, but we went through flak on more than one occasion, we got lost one night and we came over London, and the blooming London defences opened up on us, we weren’t hit at all.

I don’t know how good flak is, I’ve always thought flak was a deterrent rather than anything else.

I was saying, I didn’t know. Flak we never every worried about, I never ever thought twice about it, because it missed.

And I, when were attacked, I was taking the 0230 broadcast from base, I didn’t even know we were being shot at, until I heard some noises, because I heard the ear muffs listening to the radio broadcast, and it was only after I had taken the thing to say it was clear to land at base, at our own aerodrome,

that I got on, I switched over to the intercom and heard all sorts of excitements going, you know, brake left and do this, and do this, and I realised we were being attacked, I didn’t know.

He flipped it, then he tried to blow the flame out on the motor, starboard motor, starboard wing, it was all in flames,

and he never ever pulled it out. We were headed at 11,000 feet and he tried to blow it out, well I got my gunner out at about a 1000 feet, chucked the next fellow out about 700, I got out at about 500 feet, I could see the ground. And it just went straight into the ground, well shallow dive straight into the ground. I can show you a photograph of where

it hit the ground in Holland. We reputedly missed a house by one metre, but I don’t know about that.

Yeah, I reckoned I had better get out of here, as I’d had it, was the only thought. I don’t like fire, and there was a sheet of flame underneath the aircraft and I knew I had to go through that, so I did.

But I knew if I didn’t get out, I’d be killed, so I got out.

Yeah, it knocked me out. I could see the ground so I pulled it very quickly, I didn’t wait for any of this three seconds business. It hit me under the jaw, I had a chest parachute, hit me under the jaw and knocked me out, which probably saved my life. I landed in the canal and that probably helped too.

Well, because I was, I didn’t stiffen myself to hit the ground, I was unconscious. I was unconscious for about an hour. A big Alsatian was licking my face that brought me around. But I was just absolutely limp, which the medical people tell me probably was a good thing.

Because

I knew I jumped out at about 2.35 or 2.36, and it was daylight when I came to, about 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, that was the only way I could tell.

This dog was licking me, and I asked for a doctor.

Oh yes, the fellow was with him, he turned out to be a collaborator. He took me to the doctor on his

bicycle, then went and told the Gestapo. So the Doctor asked me, he spoke English, he asked me who brought me there, and I told him that fellow who was 6 foot 5 or 6 foot 6, with an Alsatian and a bike. Nobody said sorry. If I’d got to the Doctor, without, almost with anybody else in the village, I’d have been home in England in a week, because they used to land on the dike wall, pick them up and

fly them home. Not with that fellow, he was a collaborator and the Gestapo was there quite quickly.

No, other than he was, no I don’t. All I can say he put me on his bike and took me down to the doctor.

Huh, well I’d just come around from being unconscious,

I don’t really recall very much, other than I wanted something done with my leg. And the Doctor was about the only thing I could think of, and it’s the common word in Dutch and German and a lot of other languages too, so he took me to the Doctor.

Well, he told me he thought I had a broken leg, a broken foot.

But he gave me a small glass of whisky. But I’d barely taken that when the Gestapo arrived. So, then there was nothing anybody could do for me. They took me to Amsterdam and I couldn’t walk. They took an X-ray and wouldn’t tell me, because I couldn’t tell them, they didn’t believed me that this H2S, this fancy

navigation thing, I knew nothing about it, I’d heard about it. A doctor, when I came back to England at the end of the war, told me the bones overlapped, they weren’t joined properly, so that’s, I assumed that was a broken bone.

Well the first poor devil was trying

to ask me did I want any breakfast, saying essen to me all the time, when his boss came, the captain, he went up his whiskers and then asked me if I’d had any breakfast. I thought at that stage, they weren’t unreasonable people, but I found out later that that’s not true.

Well, I thought they were. They didn’t, find, I suppose, too many prisoners in a little town

like that was. But later on in Amsterdam they got a bit rough. There was a man there that we used to call the “Guts-kicker”, if you, he was a private, and if you didn’t stand up and salute him when he came in, he’d kick you in the guts. And he had big boots and it hurt. And one of the things the Americans asked us towards,

when we were talking to some of Americans towards the end of the war, anybody that we wanted manhandled. And two or three of us had been through this fellow in Amsterdam, and suggested if we could trace the “Guts-kicker”, it would be a good thing if he was kicked in the guts, so I don’t know.

No, only when

only when the CO of the fighter unit came in and told me, we are two up on you, we have killed four of your men and you have killed two of ours, I had no idea. I didn’t even know where the other two were at that stage, if they were alive.

I think that they were trying to get information out of me, I had none to give them anyway. No, some of the, some of the, most of the Gestapo were more intelligent excepting the one, the little ferrets as we used to call them, they were nasty little pieces of work, little fellows. I

As far as I was concerned, the Germans themselves were more afraid of the Gestapo than I was, and they used to tip us off what the Gestapo was coming to look for, on these searches. But they were much more afraid, and they had good reason to be, because they had a wife and family. If they had family, well the Gestapo fellows weren’t the nicest of people, apparently. But I had no fears on that count, because my family were here in Australia.

Well they didn’t threaten me, what was the point. I mean, there was nothing to threaten me with.

Oh well, what you can, you can’t stop them if they want to beat you. No, I was never manhandled that way. I was left hungry and thirsty, but a lot of people consider that a self-inflicted wound, because I had

escaped a couple of times and got picked up, so you get 14 days bread and water. Self-inflicted wounds, you take it.

Well they took me to the town jail, which was a huge building,

put me up on the second storey. They took me down to the Amsterdam Lazarette, as they call it, the hospital, to take an X-ray of my leg, and then brought me back and put me in the room. I could see out of the room to a canal, and used to watch the German soldiers and the Dutch girls. And other than that, they used to ask me questions,

every now and then, in the middle of the night. I was only in there, I can’t remember, only a few days. But again, I took my wife back to see, a few years ago, ten years ago. And all I could remember were these huge doors, that looked like Church doors, 25 feet high I suppose. And I asked for permission to go in, to show my wife the cell that I’d been in. Eventually the

deputy director came out of the place, and he spoke English, and told me the major narcotics jail for Holland, and would be very inadvisable for me to go in, because it was full of drug addicts. So we went round the other side to where the canal is, that I could see, and I pointed, was able to point out the room I think I was in. But, no,

I would say, I would say that they didn’t mistreat me there, except for this guts-kicker, I don’t know whatever happened to him.

Well I could see them canoodling and doing things they ought not to have been doing.

Well I didn’t think much of this at all, they were supposed to be on our side. But that’s par for the course, isn’t it.

You can’t stop this male and female caper. I think, to tell you a funny one about that, when we were in Heydekrug in Lithuania, see it’s easy to be critical of these people who live in these places, because if they’ve got family, they can be blackmailed. And this was what was happening in Lithuania, with the, Lithuania girls were good looking

girls. And this particular commandent of this camp, he was a major, and he used to parade around with one of the nurses, the Lithuanian nurses from the naval hospital, around our compound on a Sunday afternoon. And we had to stand to attention and salute him. So six of us one day, decided that we were going to fix this fellow,

so we all made bikinis out of two handkerchiefs, with a slip, only half a reef knot on one side, and we were naked other than, excepting for a cap. And he came along with his lady, one of the fellows, we had spotters telling us what was happening, so we just said “Achtung” and we all stood up and saluted, and of course, our bikinis fell off and he never came back again with a woman. So what could he do, he

couldn’t shoot us, he was outside with his woman. So we reckon we won that fight, and that was written up in one of these books that I read a year or two ago, I was one of the six who did that.

Oh well, what could he do, he couldn’t make a fool of himself in front of the woman, could he.

Well he had to catch us, he didn’t know who we were, when you see six blokes, with a

with a cap on, and nothing else, you’ve got to be quick, haven’t you. He’d have been 30 yards away from us, 20 yards anyway, oh, he had no hope. We’d have a shot back and hid, no he could never pull it.

Of course it did, you scored a trick.

See, one of the things that the Germans used to say, and why they ever did this, I don’t know, I suppose. I’ve tried to reason it, I only said to my wife the other day, we were talking about some correspondence that we got. When you were captured in Germany, the guard would say to you, “Pour vous la guerre est finis”, “For you the war is over”, in French.

Now I can only assume that they used French, because pre-World War II it was the international language. schoolboy French, anybody could understand that part. They used to say to us in the camp, you know, England kaput. And we’d all say, “No, no, nein, Deutschland kaput.” You know England’s had it, Germany’s had it. They used to have one of their

marching songs, “Wen wie gegen England kommen”, When we come, Nach London kommen, when we march against England, when we come to London. So we just used to say, we used to just transfer the words and make it not England, but Deutschland, and not London but Berlin, but a lot of us could speak better German than they could, so we used to sing it, they could never catch us doing that, they could hear us, but they couldn’t catch us.

One fellow here in Brisbane, he’s dead now, he worked with the Amalgamated Wireless of Australia before the war. I understand, I’ve not seen this, but I understand from other who have claimed to have seen it, we had dixies, food dixies, and this one was an Italian one, and in the bottom of it, about two inches in the bottom, he had made a crystal set,

on the BBC frequency. Then he had put a, got a bit of metal and soldered it on, with the paper, silver paper that you get in cigarette packets that you can make into solder, and he soldered this thing so it was waterproof. And you could put food on top of it, and two little wires would run up to the two hooks on the side, where the handle was, and all you had to do was put two crocodile clips and you could listen

to the BBC, and just take it off and nobody was any the wiser that it was a radio set. But I understand that is in the British War Museum, but I have not seen it, but I saw the set. And you’d never know, all he did was miss out on a couple inches of food, or water, or whatever. But, poor old fellow he’s been dead for a while now, hasn’t he. Merfyn was his name. Roy Merfyn.

But he was an apprentice with AWA [Amalgamated Wireless Australia], so a lot of ingenious people around, I can tell you.

Oh no, I was one of the ones that knew. He lived near me, and I knew, we used to have people out watching to see if there were any Germans when he was listening to the radio broadcast. And we’d take it from hut to hut, by

people, who’d memorise it and go and tell someone. It was a pretty highly organised thing, I can tell you, there wasn’t any malarkey about it. They used to give us messages, you know, keep your chin up, and that sort of thing. My wife used to tell me it won’t be long now. In all her letters, she used to say, I don’t know

how the hell she knew, but, she was right eventually.

Oh no, we used to get the actual BBC broadcast of the news, ten minutes of it. And sometimes they would slip in a little thing, you know, keep your chin up, or something like that. We used to signal. Another thing we used to do when the bombers were going over, we used to up a chimney, send morse

signals to the bombers, and the Germans knew it, because they could see the thing flashing on the bottom of the bombers. But they could never catch us, they had no hope in the world of catching us. We used to say G’day boys, how you doing.

Hey.

Well just a torch up a chimney and it would flash, and you could see it. There were all the chimneys. In Germany, you’ve got funny looking things, what an opening each way,

I suppose our chimneys are, I’ve never looked here. But you could see flashing. And you’d just see it from the bottom, just a flash, and send out morse signals.

Well no, we knew when the Arnhem campaign was on,

the paratroopers, and they had to finish up after a couple of weeks without telling us it failed. Oh no, they used to tell us that, see the Germans used to give us the news all the time, where their brave soldiers were pushing the Russians further back. And the only thing that used to intrigue us, was why are you coming west, they could never answer that. Because they were being told they were winning, where they were fighting further

into Germany. And we used to say well, you can’t be right both ways, but they were told, their propaganda was that they were winning and that was it. I mean, Blind Freddy could see that they were getting done, because they were fighting closer and closer to Germany.

Well they used to say they didn’t understand, nicht verstehen. Oh no, it’s just very handy, if you, if you,

if you don’t’ want to understand something, you don’t understand. Every now and again, we would have a hate session on for something the Germans had done, and I had been talking to a German the day before, asking him how his kids were, and the next day, I just say, don’t understand, nicht verstehen, and he used to shake his head. And he’d come back a day or two later and I’d talk to him again, because we had the hate session off.

They used to stop water every now and again, or do something we didn’t like, and we’d just go on strike, wouldn’t talk to anybody. I don’t know who won, but.

I was shocked, it was a very flattering experience when you don’t expect somebody to know your country, when you are in the middle of an enemy country, and he shook me and I just didn’t say anything. But he knew Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne better than I did, because he had worked in the German clubs in each of the cities.

And he knew, he had worked in the Brisbane club at the bottom of Holland Park Hill.

No, no, no, we’d already found out that in 1938, Hitler and his merry men had offered any expatriate German, a one-way ticket back to Germany, it didn’t matter where he lived. And we had Yanks, we had New Zealanders, we had Australians,

we had all sorts of people, that got the one-way ticket back to the Fatherland. And, oh no, it wasn’t a bit uncommon to hear some guard, “come on boys get out of bed”, in Brooklyn America. Why, a hell of a lot of them came from America. And we started to ask questions why, and we found they had all been given a one-way ticket free back to the Fatherland in 1938.

So, that’s where they got a lot of their interpreters.

No, they were bad ones to talk to, because they, we knew they could understand it. We didn’t talk in front of them either. And the Germans every now and again would plant somebody. We had a plant, a fellow who came from, claimed he came from Murray Bridge,

in South Australia. I wouldn’t have known, but we had a wheat farmer who lived in the east of South Australia, who did know Murray Bridge. And if ever we were suspicious of anybody, we never ever talked to anybody, unless we could satisfy ourselves that he was from where he said he came from. There were only 36 Australians with me, 35 others

plus me, and you wouldn’t get a word out us, we wouldn’t talk about anything, until we had proven that you were the fellow you said you were. And this fellow claimed he came from Murray Bridge, and Ian Milne was the farmer, he’s dead now too. He knew Murray Bridge, because his wife, or his wife to be, came from there, and she was a school teacher there, and he knew what the, little town

looked like, it was only a little place. And we found out in a very short time that this fellow didn’t come from Murray Bridge. But it’s a fair punt if he came from Alice Springs or somewhere, it’s a fair punt, that you might get away with it. Oh no, they used to plant people on us, but he was one that we caught very quickly.

Oh I don’t know about paranoia, we were just, we were,

just out to see they weren’t going to put anything over us, as much as we could. We had one cove that came in, and he was well written up many times, he’s long dead now too, APF James, APF James came into the prison camp, Stalag Luft 3, he was a fighter pilot, and his eyes were

red raw, it was supposedly the glycol when the, when the hydraulic system burnt his eyelids. And I saw him one morning, rubbing pepper in his eyes, I think cause he only slept a couple of beds away from me, and I thought this was funny. And then he saw, noticed that I had seen him, so he made it his business to get me outside, and tell me just to keep quiet, please. Now he had fought

in the, he was in the RAF, and he’d been in the Spanish Insurrection in 1936 or whenever it was, and he knew the German commandant, who was called Colonel Turtle Dove, and the relevance of that escapes me, I don’t know what that was about. But he was, in fact, this James, was a secret service agent, and had been parachuted in, and he was eventually

repatriated, because of his eyes, they could do nothing for him, but he took back a wealth of information about it. I was at Oxford University just after I came back to England, and there he was as a Doctor, Doctor APF James, Lecturer in Psychology. His father was the moderator of the Methodist Church in Australia, but Alfie James was eventually caught in China, spying again, and he was killed.

I know lots of funny little fellows.

Well they were, they showed a bit of compassion. They were letting people go that lost a limb, they were repatriating them through Portugal, until Douglas Bader came in with no legs, and they just said well it’s too bad, if a man with no legs can fight against us, a man with one arm or one leg,

or one eye can shoot against us. That fellow we knew up in North Queensland, he had one arm, he flew bombers and fighters with one arm, I suppose you only need one arm to fly an aeroplane, you only need one arm to drive a motorcar.

They don’t. They didn’t know, he got it from Colonel Turtle Dove, so he told us.

But they repatriated him and he went back to London with a wealth of information apparently. I didn’t see him for over two years from when he got out of the camp, was repatriated until I saw him at Oxford, and he just told me to shush, and he’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter.

I was taken

through Cologne down to Dulag Luft, at Frankfurt on Main, an interrogation camp. Every airman was taken to Dulag Luft, every allied airman, not American, well I don’t know what happened with the Americans, I don’t think they were, I don’t know. But all the RAF people, went to Frankfurt am Main and Dulag Luft, Durchlager Luft.

Well that’s Dulag Luft which is an abbreviation of the German, meaning durchlager, which is, transit camp is the true German or English translation

of it, and it was an interrogation camp where all RAF personnel that were shot down, finished up there. It didn’t matter where they went down in Germany or Europe, they finished up in Frankfurt en Main. There were a lot of pretty skilled operators there, and strangely enough it went two ways, there was a fellow,

who was dressed up in a German uniform, who was in fact an RAF Intelligence Officer. But I read this only since the war, and how in God’s name he got away, perhaps he went there in 1935 or 1931 or something, I don’t know, but I always thought that was a brave man that can be underground for, he must have been for

years, because he’d need a pedigree. But it was a peculiar place, we were put in smallish cells, I suppose they’d be 10 feet by 8 feet. I was there about the tenth or twelth of June, in the middle of summer. So they put the heater up to full heat, wouldn’t give me anything to drink

or eat, asking me questions that I honestly didn’t know the answer to. But they were interested, terribly much, in this navigation system, which was on the four engine aircraft, but not on mine, not on the Manchester. It was an interesting place, but I was only there, I can’t remember, I wasn’t there for terribly long, it might be a week or something like that, but they just worked out that I didn’t know what

they wanted to know. Then I was sent to Stalag Luft 3, in Silesia, is that.

No, well, I have never experienced torture as such, other than when it was as hot as hell having a heater up to full temperature and not being given anything

to drink. And I was telling one of the doctors that was in my unit, one of my company commanders, what I used to do when I woke up in the morning was rub my handkerchief on the condensation. And if I wanted to urinate at all, I urinated into my handkerchief, and used to just wet the lips, and that was the way I beat the system in my mind.

Because there was no liquid in the true sense of the word, liquid, and my body expelled very little through urine because I wasn’t putting any liquid into it. But it was enough to be able, to allow me to wet my lips.

Well he just walked in and asked me if I wanted to go for a swim at Southport, which I think the intention of that is to put you off your balance, he

sure did. But I didn’t answer him.

Not, not as far as I was concerned. Most people who went through Dulag Luft don’t talk much about it. No, I can never say that other for the guts-kicker who was just a nasty piece of work,

nobody every mistreated me in Germany. But I was one day talking to a fellow that I didn’t know was a plant, he was a New Zealand plant. And we were supposed to always give respect to all these Germans, it didn’t matter what rank they were, and this fellow kept his guard, kept on telling this fellow, take your hands

out of your pocket and it was pretty cold. So I took my hands out of my pockets and he didn’t, and I said to him look you better get your hands out, he’s going to make trouble for you, and this fellow didn’t, and he shot him, right beside me, carted him away, he was dead as far as I was concerned and I was shunted away by another guard. But, in fact, he was a plant, we

found out later, who’d been in New Zealand, and when he was shot, it was, what do you call these stuff, in these shows, when they press like that and blood comes out and he had coloured fluid in there. But, I thought he was a legitimate New Zealander, but he wasn’t. But no, I can’t ever say that I found they mistreated me, I don’t know

of anybody else that was mistreated.

I didn’t think it was very funny, I did as I was told. I was a coward, I walked away when the fellow said walk away, I walked away. I mean, there’s no sense in case he shot me too, I didn’t see the sense of that.

One of the other prisoners told me, who knew who he was, but he hadn’t told anybody else.

The New Zealander apparently didn’t bother to tell anybody else, funny fellows New Zealanders, but anyway.

Went to Stalag Luft 3 in Silesia, it’s the one were the Great Escape, the Wooden Horse took place and the Great Escape took place, it was a fairly notorious camp. And when I was there, there was only two compounds, there was an officers compound

and an NCO’s compound. And then there was the Germans, I was told I was there for 12 months. But so many officers were being shot down, they had to cart us off somewhere else, so they took us to Lithuania and just made our compound, and apparently another compound into another one, just for officers. But we finished up, the NCO’s finished up in Lithuania, in Stalag Luft 6.

Like all the prison camps I was in, it was an area which had been cleared in a pine forest. And as I’ve said to my wife, I’ll live almost anywhere, but I will never live anywhere where there is a pine tree, because the wind blowing through a pine tree has just got a noise that I can’t, can’t take. And,

we used, they used to clear perhaps two or three acres in the middle of a pine forest, and we were in there, in the cleared bit. And every camp I was in, was in a pine forest, except in the last one. And we used to have to dig up these roots to make our fires, sometimes we were allowed to, that was what I was doing up in Lithuania, when I had

the Russians working for me, but that’s basically what it was. There was a cleared area of about another 50 or 60 feet, outside of the wire, to the edge of the forest. I was in a tunnel for example, in Lithuania, I was number forty-two, and they dug this hole and

we were all in it, ready to go, and the thirteenth man for the superstitious was caught. Because the guard decided to urinate in the paddock, and he was about 10 feet away from the exit of the tunnel, and of course the heat of all these people in the tunnel, was just coming up like a little fog. So he decided there was something funny about that, so he

watched this fellow come out, so he grabbed him, and the rest of us were all pushed backwards. Quite amazing what came out of that tunnel, at the blunt end as we called it. There were workmen and there were welders, retired businessmen, and some good looking girls, and the Germans just looked in amazement. Because a lot of these Northern Hemisphere women, fellas, they are not bad looking blonde

females when they do themselves up, particularly to Canadians and some of those people. I never ever did my anytime for that, we were shifted shortly after that, so that’s two weeks I owe them. I always consider that half the escape, that all the other twelve were captured very quickly, Lithuanians put them in, never mind.

Well, if you walk down the street with a man and a woman, who’s going to stop you and think you’re a prisoner of war. You don’t have any women in the camp. Oh no, you come out as a married couple, walking down the street, parsons, we had a couple of parsons, all dressed up as parsons. Oh no, it was quite amazing, the Germans just shook their heads, they were all pushed back into the camp, into the compound.

Pardon.

You could buy it from the guards, get the guards to bring it in for you. Marvellous what you could do with fifty cigarettes, if somebody hasn’t got any. Wasn’t nearly as difficult as it might sound.

No, they used to bring it in to us.

But they wouldn’t be telling anybody else.

Oh no, for ten cigarettes, it was easy to get a loaf of bread for ten cigarettes. Bits of wireless set, that was one of my jobs, to get parts for the wireless set, I might have to pay 20 cents sometimes for a valve or something, always brought them in. Because we weren’t reluctant to use blackmail. So if you came around to talk to me, I’d offer you a cigarette, or a cup of tea.

And you’re off duty for five minutes or ten minutes, and I’d ask you, have you got a frau and kinder, so out would come the photographs, like the Deutsch, very proud of the frau and the kinder. And after ten minutes, you’d say I want so and so, and it always came in. Blackmail, pure and simply, but they were more frightened of the Gestapo than we were.

And we were at war. Any means was a good means.

Oh no, if there was, I never saw any. There were two or three that I used to talk to, but they only talked to me because I let them have cigarettes. They made no compunction about it, it was a business deal.

Oh no, I wouldn’t have thought anybody would be, I, certainly not with me, and pure and simply business.

Well, my wife used to spend money here in Brisbane, and somebody in England used to send them to me, and my aunt in England, would send them to me. I ran a crown and anchor school, and I had tens of thousand, hundreds of thousands of cigarettes. That’s the way to make money, be the banker.

Because if they got caught smoking English cigarettes, they would be in all sorts of trouble. They might sneak one, but they wouldn’t sneak a handful. Oh no, that was a bit dangerous.

You mean the mail coming into us.

Oh well they used to pinch my razor blades. Oh I don’t think they were terribly, I mean a razor blade is pretty hard to check. Some of the pretty soaps used to be, I used to ask for Lux soap and things, from my mother, because I could get a dozen eggs for it, from a cake of Lux soap. But they would never touch anything like that, they might pinch a pair of sox every now and again.

Oh no, they weren’t stupid these fellows. They were a bit frightened of being caught by somebody else, not by us. What’s that. Oh yes, that’s censoring, I don’t know whether you got every letter I sent to you and vice versa. That’s the question you’re really asking. I don’t know.

Well I decided that to escape from a prison camp I had to speak German, now that’s was completely false, but I believed it was necessary.

So I decided to learn to speak German. Every opportunity I had I practised. And the first man I tried it out on was a Fresian Islander, who didn’t speak German. He spoke a queer language which was half Dutch and a bit of German and a bit of English. Then the Great Escape took place from Stalag Luft 3,

when they murdered 51 officers, one of them my wife’s cousins, and Churchill in his news broadcast, told us not to escape. So I decided to take my mother’s advice, and study. And there were any number of classes being held there, I mean you could study almost anything. I decided to

matriculate, to study for matriculation through London University exam. I could have taken Oxford but the class were full. But they were accepted, they were reciprocal. And we used to sit there like little schoolboys and learn our lessons and do our homework, and then eventually the papers would come through with the International Red Cross, and we’d sit in an examination

room, under proper supervision, and write the exam, and it was all sealed up and taken back by the International Red Cross, back to Switzerland and then sent to England, or wherever it was required. And that was the way it worked. We had some remarkably good teachers, had some very clever fellows.

Well, we had two Oxford Dons for example. You don’t get a Don, a Doctorate, not. See to be air crew, you had to be under 31 years of age, because it was too dangerous for anybody over that, apparently. That was a criteria in the RAF, once you were 31 you couldn’t be air crew. I’m sure there were cases we had one in the camp, he was 57, but he was a pretty high-faluting

Lord too. But we had all, coves in their early 30s, or late, late 20s, who were Oxford Dons, and they’ve got an awful lot of information. A fellow who taught mathematics, for example, finished up as the Professor of Mathematics at Toronto University. A lot of people had got a long further in it, they’d gone up to matriculation stage, or

even first year university when they joined up, and those fellows could teach you a hell of a lot, if you’re prepared to listen. So I selected Maths and German, English and German, two types of Maths and Economics, which would have fitted me to go to almost anything. When I came home, I could have gone to,

by adding Chemistry and Physics, I could have done any subject, any, join any faculty of any university in Australia. But I reckoned three years was enough, but I extended that to four. I wasn’t going to spend six years trying to get a medical degree, cause I had no money. And family growing, so

I decided to do a commerce degree, and I did a couple of others on the side, an accountancy certificate, then my commerce degree I took a lot of law subjects, and only got, I could still go, no, I’m not allowed to do it now, you’re got to do, you only allowed a maximum of four credits. If I’d done it then, I’d have only had to do two more subjects, and I’d have a law degree, but I never did.

Oh we used to go everyday, for an hour or two, and up until the exam time. We might start two or three months before the exams. And we were good schoolkids, we used to go along, sit there, listen and learn.

It was very helpful, and I could write back and say I was doing as I was told, to my mother.

She was right, education was worthwhile as far as I was concerned. If I had come back and gone back to the job that I had, I’d have been lucky if I’d even got senior clerk, or something like that, I had no qualifications. But in the prison camp, I took an accountancy certificate, an English one, matriculated, and then came back here and went to university, and

took, I had six sets of letters after my name, at one stage, because everybody wanted us to join up everything. So university degree and almost a law degree.

Well we had very basic ones, but these fellows who’d done all this stuff, they knew it in their head. I couldn’t do it now, but 30 years

ago, I could have taught you mathematics from just what I knew in my head, but I couldn’t do it now. I could still teach you to navigate though, no problem, because I was a navigator instructor, in the army.

Oh very few did it. Very few could be bothered with the boredom. This is what I meant, when I said

that it affects people in different ways. I’m an optimist, I’m a confirmed optimist. So when I had the opportunity, I decided to take it. Now other people just considered that stupid. This fellow at Tambourine he used to say I was lucky, well he could have done exactly the same as I did. But certain people accepted a challenged, or seized an opportunity,

I did, and its never done me any harm.

How was my German?

Well, to begin with I was pretty poor when I couldn’t even get a man to answer what the time of day was, he showed me his watch, because somebody else went past. We had what we called Kriegie Deutsch,

and Kriegie Deutsch was like prison language, that you have in prisons here apparently, or anywhere. But it was a mixture of several different languages. Now Naomi would appreciate this one, if you asked the time in German it’s “wie spate ist es schon”, in Kriegie Deutsch, it was “fish paste.” Danke schon is thank you very much in German, in

Kriegie Deutsch it was donkey chain, and we used to have, and see when I kept asking this fellow “wie spate ist es”, somebody walked past and said fish paste, so he pulls his watch out and shows it to me. We could talk a language, a new prisoner had no idea what we were talking about, if we were talking this Kriegie Deutsch as we called it. And it was a queer, we might have French words in it, or Russian words, I mean dobra, dobra we used to use, Russian or Polish,

Dobry wiecur, good evening, in Polish or Russian or whatever. But over a period of time, I decided to try and make myself speak better German, and I made it my business to talk to some of these officers who spoke better German and very good English too, better English than I spoke, this old Professor.

And then the International Red Cross asked me to interpret for them, well they speak Swiss or Swedish and English of course, very few of them had three languages. But they all had their own language, of course, plus English at least, and I used to have to translate that into German for them. And I was also one of 12 racketeers, as we were referred to, amongst the 22 prisoners, 2200 prisoners.

We were the only ones allowed to speak to the Germans to buy bread or parts, the Camp Commandant was one of them, he spoke immaculate German, he used to work in Hamburg. But the other ten of us, had to all learn it in the camp, and, it just comes. I woke up one morning thinking in German, and that was when I had the game sewn up from then on.

When I used to have translate as I went along, and I woke up this morning thinking in German, and I never looked back.

The only thing was I was allowed to keep my log book. They used to pinch other people’s log books, but they allowed me to keep mine, because I’d earned it. It was just one of those peculiar things,

when they came to look through my gear, they used to leave the book alone. So that was about the only privilege I got.

Well I wanted the book. Oh no, well I was trying to learn the German, the language, hoping that it might be of some value to me. I wanted to go, if I could manage all this matriculation business, I had to do a foreign language in those days, they don’t bother anymore

at universities. When I went to university you had to do a foreign language plus your own, they don’t ever bother to do either now, but that’s not my business. I reckoned I could speak enough English to get through, all I had to do was learn a lot of poems and a lot of plays in German, which I had an old lady at Sherwood, a German lady, she translated it all into English, well a lot of Goethe’s poems’

into English for me. Plays that I had to learn and I learnt them all in English, so all I had to do was translate the first line, and I could write the rest, I knew what it was. It’s cheating, but that’s the way you pass exams.

Yes.

Well, I got out two and a half times, but I was caught

very smartly, because I couldn’t speak good enough German. As I mentioned to you, when I was asked how was I, I answered in, in Berlin German, instead of Pomeranian German, I said I was well, instead of being good. And I was captured very smartly, they just said where’s your permit, and I didn’t have a permit, so I was back in jail.

I just walked straight out, the gate was open, I don’t know what the guards were doing, but there was nobody on the gate and I walked straight out. And I got into more trouble with my own people, than I did with the Germans. I only got 14 days bread and water with the Germans, but my own people really roused at me because I didn’t have any plans, mine was just a spontaneous act, I just walked straight out. And they roused at me, because there is an

escape committee you’re supposed to get approval from the escape committee. But I just saw there was nobody on the gate, the gate was open, so I walked out. And that probably made the guards more vigilant for the next week or fortnight or month even. So that might have destroyed somebody else who had a plan worked out, I didn’t, I just saw there was nobody there so I walked out.

Oh, they roused at me, told me not to do it again, and you know, if I wanted to escape, ask for permission, and they would help me, they’d give me money and they’d give me ausweiss [travel permit], and they’d give me everything else, but don’t do it spontaneous like that, because all you do is ruin it for everybody else. They gave me the rounds of the kitchen.

Oh about 2 miles, I was recognised on the railway station. And the next time,

I walked away from a shower party, but it was organised and I got about 50 miles away, when they asked me what, how old I was, and I told them the wrong thing, so I was very smartly shunted back from that too. If you didn’t have an ausweiss, you were in trouble.

Hey.

Well, where we used to be taken out for a shower, 50 men to have a hot shower.

We had a fellow, a little fellow in the middle, hiding. But it was organised on this occasion, so I disappear, I stayed in the shower, and the 50 were marched back. 51 of us went out and only 50 came back. The 50 went through the gates and that was all right, I stayed in the shower and then walked out. I was caught two days, I think I was away.

I hid in the daytime, and walked at night. But I had food with me, and taken from the camp. I wasn’t a good escaper. You’ve got to plan a lot further ahead than I ever did. It was one of the few occasions when I’ve done something without reconnaissance, proper reconnaissance, thought the thing through properly.

I would have been all right, we were all right up in Lithuania because we were going towards the Russians, and they were on our side supposedly. In the other places, we had to get to Switzerland, I didn’t get there.

No, not until this fellow said where ‘s your ausweiss. He’s a policeman, he asked for my travel permit.

You couldn’t move in Germany more than a few miles, a few kilometres away from your home, unless you had a pass. I didn’t have a pass.

Oh yeah. They had any amount of them. Again, I wasn’t well enough equipped.

Well, really I hadn’t asked enough questions about what I needed.

It was a spontaneous thing, and I told them what I was going to do was walk away from the shower party, and I think I was being taught a lesson because I did it the first time, and was ill-prepared, non, completely unprepared and I think I might have been taught a lesson the second time, so that was fair enough.

14 days bread and water,

in the solitary, solitary confinement. I tell you one funny thing about showers though. We were in bed one night, and suddenly a contingent of bloomin’ Germans came and dragged us out of bed, about 80 of us. Marched us out to this shower block, stood us around all the windows, and in came these poor Polish girls.

I don’t know how many of them there were, 30 or 40 or 50 of them. And they walked into this hot shower block, with no water running, made them strip and then they turned the hot water on, and all the windows became opaque with the steam, from the heat and the steam. So we just, we weren’t allowed to turn away, we had to look. The object being, of course, to humiliate these girls. And of course, it

backfired, because all the windows became opaque as a result of this steam on the windows. So we just told the Germans, Deutschland kaput, you lose again sport, and there was nothing they could do, because they would have to go and wash every window, wipe every window, it wouldn’t work anyway. Every now and again, they tried to make things a bit rough. The Geneva Convention says there should be no military establishment within three miles

of a prison camp. Every prison camp I was in, had something within three miles. Working on the principle, if they won’t bomb them, they might hit us. There was a huge, huge Hitler youth camp just down the road from us. They come out with their spades all polished up, they were good soldiers too, these little fellows, 15 and 16, and when they turned 18 they gave them a rifle. But before that, they had little spades, little shovels.

And they could do their foot drill, and salute and do every other damn thing you could think of, that you can do with a spade and not a rifle, oh, well, they were nasty little people, nasty.

What was the interaction, what.

Oh yes, they used to give us a bit of curry. We didn’t understand, nicht verstehen, no speak a Deutsch.

It stops the conversation, because none of them could speak English.

Their training.

Oh, they used to consider us pretty inferior sort of people with their tone of voice. They didn’t, it didn’t do them any good, because we didn’t talk to them, didn’t listen.

Oh I wasn’t even there. I was up in Lithuania when that took place in Silesia, in Poland. Oh no I only know about it from what I read. It was months after I left Stalag Luft 3 before the Great Escape took place.

We used to be taken in a cattle truck, mostly French, had written on the side,

40 hommes, 8 chevaux [40 men, 8 horses] and they used to have a middle section, for air I suppose. The Germans used to sit in that, 4 or 5 guards, and we were compressed into a little area, about supposed to be 20 men, there might be 30 or 40 of us in there, no room,

you couldn’t lie down, and they used to shunt us away from place to place. Three or four days like that, it used to take us from Poland up to Lithuania. You’d get a bit hungry, no, no toilet stops whatsoever. You were degraded completely, no food, no water.

And we lived. It’s a slow process, you have to stop every now and again to let military trains go through. We stopped somewhere, I don’t know where it was, but there were again, German, Russian, Polish girls in it, and we were right beside it. One girl drew a little heart, and she wrote I LUV U.

Well they were going to Belsen or Auschwitz or somewhere, to be gassed, poor girls. There was nothing you could do about it.

Oh yes, we could smell it, when we were at Stalag Luft 3, we knew which way the wind would blow. Ravensbruck was one way, and I can’t remember the name of the other, we could smell them being cooked, being burnt. The north-wester was Ravensbruck, I think.

We could actually smell them being burnt, like a crematorium.

You could smell, I knew what the smell was. Any flesh if you burn it, gives you the same smell.

Burn a piece of steak, well that is the smell.

Well, we knew where the camps were,

we knew where the, we weren’t far from Auschwitz, we just knew they were cooking them, you could see the smoke anyway.

Oh yeah, we didn’t like that much. We talked about it, but there wasn’t much else you could do. We were powerless. We were always thankful they weren’t our own people, they were somebody else’s people, Russians,

Polish or French or something, mostly Poles, Polish Jewesses.

Well, we didn’t think much of anybody who did anything like that. We certainly didn’t appreciate what they were doing, but none of our guards would, was involved. And they would, they used to get just as upset as we did. I mean, if Naomi would tell you if she was in Germany, the Germans are very conscious of his wife and kids.

And if you talk to them for any length of time, they always pull a photograph out of frau and kinder, they were kinder that were being killed, and they didn’t like that, I mean they are not all nasty people. In fact, I’ve made the comment, that other than two or three, I never, ever encountered a nasty German. There were some, there are more Australians that I reckon were nasty people,

than there are Germans, but you get these little corporals that are made captains, and they’re too big for their boots, and you can find them in Australia. Go to some of these councils and see how you get on, it’s not unusual

So our engagement is now broken. Darling I hope you are staying true to me. September 1943 to a prisoner of war, of April 1943. What would you like in your first personal parcel? Now, you’d hardly believe it.

Well here’s one. “My dear, I am enclosing a postal order so that you can buy yourself some chocolate. You will be surprised to know that I am getting married soon, but you can look forward to a happy reunion when you come home. It will be too bad if my Husband doesn’t agree, because I am going to see you anyway. If he is away, you can stay at home,

if he is at home, we can go down to my mothers and not tell him. We can give the family five shillings each to keep their mouth’s shut.” And now from the sublime to the ridiculous, “Your mother came down to see me last week,” POW wrote asking for his bank balance, six months later came the reply, “guess.” He made a guess, and six months later came the reply, “wrong,

Guess again.” Wife to POW, “I am going to Kent in two weeks time, do you mind? Write and let me know.” From a girl in the US, “I have a grandmother in Germany, have you met her yet?” “Hope you are going easy on your pocket money over there.” Letter from a fiancée, “Darling, I have just married your father, love mother.”

Wife to two year prisoner of war. “Darling, I have just had a baby, but don’t worry, the American officer is sending you cigarette parcels.” It’s dreadful really, isn’t it.

In 1943, “I’m glad you were shot down, before flying became dangerous.”

And another one in 1943, “sorry you were shot down so early in the war.” And then the fiancée wrote, “I would rather marry a 1943 hero, than a 1939/40 coward, so our engagement is now broken.” It’s hard to believe, isn’t it. Here’s a POW wrote about radio, “I don’t know what the thing is.”

His mother replied, “I asked the Red Cross but can’t send you a radio.” To a two year POW, “congratulations on joining the armed forces.” 9th December 1943, “I’ve brought another two ducks, so we can have a great feed for Christmas.” “Darling I hope you are staying true to me.”

Pardon.

I tried to keep a story, that’s where I was shot down, for example. And these are just bits and pieces I’ve picked up since then, see I wrote that in German script.

My name, RAAF 404669, POW 502 Deutschland.

And there’s my continental tour, as I call it.

When I was shot down at Apeldoorn on the 3rd of June 42, Amsterdam, Luftwaffe Lazarette, in Holland the 4th and 5th of June 42. Amsterdam Watchtower in Holland the 5th of August. Dulag Luft, Frankfurt en Main Germany the 9th til the 15th of June. Stalag Luft 3 Sagan on the 16th of June 1942,

14th of June 1943. Stalag Luft 6 in Heydekrug, on the 16th of, took us three days, 16th of June 43 to 16th of the 7th 44. Stalag Luft 357 in Poland, Thorn, 17/7 to 9/8/44. 355, or that didn’t change. Fallingsbostel from 11th August to the 8th of April, 1945.

Left the Stalag, marched to Kittlitz, 38 miles south of Lubeck, passing through Soltau, Munster, Bleckede, the River Elbe crossing, and Wittenberg, 180 kilometres. Liberated by a Royal Dragoons Armoured Column on the 2nd of the 5th. Drove to Lunaberg, passing through Ratzenburg, Molln, Buchen and Lauenberg, another Elbe crossing 100 miles. Transported to Sulingen,

another 100 miles, to Amsted another 110, went to Rheine Aerodrome, seven miles. A Lancaster landed an hour and 50 minutes at Dunsford, and I went on a train to Brighton on the 10th of May, 1945. That’s my continental tour. But you see, these are the fellows that were killed.

I’ll have to read it over, see what it says here. John Heaton was the pilot, he’s only a coat man, well he’s dead. John Steen was a co-pilot, he’s dead.

Sheen, he was the navigator, he’s the fellow who’s brother it was, the doctor that spoke to us, and I never ever got the letter. He invited us all to his home in England after 50 years, Peter went.

And there’s Thomas, there’s an odd thing about that. Those are the four killed, these are three who survived. Me as the wireless operator, Johnny Farquhar the mid upper gunner, and Peter Buttigieg. When we went to take photographs of the, where they were buried, these three are together and that fellow is not there. There’s another grave,

and young Stan Thomas. And I said how come that’s like that. And when the aircraft, he was a front gunner killed in his turret, and when the aircraft exploded, and they found his body five months later, wasn’t it, three kilometres away, and they buried him in October, so the other fellows were buried in June. But it exploded and blew him three kilometres away.

It’s quite interesting some of this.

Well most of it,

Most of it was acting as either an interpreter for the International Red Cross people who came in from

Switzerland or Sweden, which I did for two years. And when I was in Lithuania, I was an interpreter, I was called a works manager, arbeit-fuhrer. And I had to put ten or twelve thousand Russians to work, under directions of the Germans, and it was a silly damn set-up really.

The Germans would tell me in German what they wanted done, I found a Russian who could speak English, a one-star General, and I used to tell him in English what the Germans wanted done, and he, of course, would tell his mob in Russian. And they were digging up the roots of the pine trees, to find fodder for the German cook-houses. So most of my translating was,

either doing that job when I was in Lithuania, or translating for the International Red Cross people. And I had a letter which I gave to the Dean of the Faculty when I went to the University, thanking me for my efforts for two years of interpreting, for the International Red Cross, and I gave this to the Professor because he wanted to read it, then he went and died,

and everything was lost and I haven’t got the letter. But that primarily was what I did. My day to day job was buying stuff from the Germans, I had a few contacts for such things as a loaf of bread, ten cigarettes. But my job primarily was to get parts to make radio sets, and that meant wire,

or crystals, they were all crystal sets that we had, like I can buy in a hobby shop just a bit of crystal with a few bits of wire. That was my prime job because I supposedly understood enough about wireless, which I didn’t, I didn’t understand how that actually work, other than I know it’s a fixed frequency. And, but that was basically what I spent my time doing.

I was one of ten who were allowed to treat with the Germans, I was a highly. The prison camp circumstances in which I lived, was probably the most democratic society I will ever see. There was a camp leader, there was a sergeant, there were ten of us called racketeers, there was an escape committee of about seven or eight people,

and everybody in the camp did as they were told by those people, no argument, you might grumble about it, but there was no voting, no pig frigging around. And when we got into the army camp, the army of course, outnumbered us about eight or nine to one, ten to one, there was 25,000 of them and 2200 of us, and they woke up very, very quickly, that we were the ones who could

handle the Germans, they couldn’t. And they gave all their power over, and a British RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] handing power over to a simple sergeant RAF, was a big move. But this simple sergeant RAF had worked for a shipping company, was stationed in Berlin, in Hamburg before the war, and spoke absolutely perfect German. It’s very interesting to work with people like that, now

Dixie Dean is his name, I’ll show you a picture of him.

Oh yes.

The way I looked at it, we were at war with the Germans, so whatever we did, we were entitled to do, because we were at war with them.

I frankly used blackmail a lot. Now the way I used it, was to was to inveigle. I had two contacts, one was a sergeant, a feld webel, and one was a first class private, gefreiter. Now those two in particular, I worked with, and I’d inveigle them into my hut, and give them a cigarette, or a Red Cross biscuit,

and a cup of tea, Red Cross tea, and then I’d tell them after they’d been there for a few minutes. I’d ask one, the sergeant in particular, how’s his wife going, how many kids has he got, which I knew, because he’d used to pull out his photograph, you know the way the Germans do, always got a pocket full of photograph, here’s frau, kinder. And you’d keep them off-duty for five minutes, and say now I want such-and-such.

We’d tell the feld webel and so, in it would come. Now it’s dirty, it’s blackmail but we were at war, and we wanted the bits. I never ever felt anything wrong with doing that. I think they knew what we might have been up to, and the interesting thing that always appeared to me, was that

the German soldier was more frightened of the Gestapo than we were. And the Gestapo used to come in and raid us every month or six weeks, they would tell us what they were coming in to get. Again, I say to you, you probably know this, the Germans to me are a one-tracked minded person, and if they were looking for compasses, you could leave a map and they wouldn’t touch it. But the main things they were after were compasses, maps

money or civilian clothes. And if we knew they were after one thing, you could leave the others out and they wouldn’t touch it. Now I don’t know whether that’s clever, but that’s what we did. We had a couple of big tunnels going, from our compound to the NCO’s compound, and we used to put the dirt in the ceiling.

And then it got too heavy, the ceiling wasn’t strong enough, and it was bowed and a bit of dirt fell out, so we were in trouble. So what they then did, was drove a horse with a cart behind it, all around the compound, of course, eventually it fell in, and they found the tunnel. The Wooden Horse thing, my grandson told my youngest son, that grandpa must have

been pretty fit. That I happened to be over in the officer’s compound where this thing was being used, and I actually vaulted the gymnastic horse, which was the horse, the wooden horse. So they used to walk out with two men underneath it, and cart this out, and these fellows do their turn turtle and jump over it and do all sorts of things, well I actually did it one afternoon for about half an hour, when I was over there

again, my German. I was also overseeing John Heaton’s brother who had been shot down, and I was given permission to go and see him, because I knew I could tell him something about his brother, not much more than that he was dead. But see, these are the things, but I had no compunction about using blackmail, if that’s what you call it, I suppose it

boils down to simple blackmail, cause they were my enemy.

Oh, they detested the French, I’m only going on heresay, but they absolutely detested the French, because

the Germans and the French never have liked one another. I mean, the British don’t like the French very much and vice versa, too. But some of the stories I would never say, I would never say them because I don’t know whether they are true. But some of the stories that these German officers used to come back and tell us, things that were happening in the French camp, I don’t know whether they were true or not, but they weren’t very complementary, I can assure you.

Beg you pardon.

Well I’ll tell you one that was told to us, and don’t blush when I tell you this. But they have had a bath, we never ever had a bath, we had showers, the French had baths. Two officers told me this particular story, including this professor, that the Germans used to catch a fly, annoy their penis to the extent that it was coming out of the water, and put the fly on the head,

and let it walk around. Now two officers told me that story, and they had nothing but contempt for the French, they reckoned they were morally defunct. Now I can’t vouch for the truth of one officer who I would believe, told me that story, and another officer confirmed it some time later.

But apparently there, a lot of homosexuality amongst the French, again its hearsay.

Well, I’ve been asked that questions many times. I have never known of any in the camp that I was in, any of the camps that I was in. And the closest it ever got, and whether this is true or false,

there were two British sailors, brought in to be, batmen for the officers, and they disappeared. And I asked my sergeant friend one day, what happened to them. Oh he said, they were caught being naughty boys, and they’ve gone. Now that’s the closest that I ever heard, and I’ve been asked that question several times, particularly by medical people.

I think out of curiosity. You see, you put a whole lot of men like that together, there’s got to be, there’s got to be somebody with a warped mind, but I can quite frankly say I never, ever encountered any. And none of the people that I said to, said it to, my friends in the camp, they never heard of anything like that happening. Which is a rather unique situation, when you get

a hundred, a hundred and twenty fellows doing everything that human beings do in the sight of one another, nothing untoward happened. I’ve often, I wouldn’t say this on things, people mightn’t like it, I’ll tell you when we stop.

Oh yes, yeah

We had a mass, like the mass showers, we had a mass toilet, that had rows of 12 seats and built over a cesspool. And the Germans used to come and empty this cesspool once a week, or three day, whatever it was. And some of the naughty boys used to make a little sailing boat out of paper, and light it, put a candle in it, and it would go along under the seats, and my gees,

I can tell you, you’d jump off the seat in a hell of a hurry. Oh no, that was quite commonplace, see that was their way of, of amusing themselves to use that terminology.

We used to have concert parties, and a friend of mine, he’s dead now, he used to live at Lowood. He was a

good looking young fellow and was dressed up as a girl. And I’ve got the words of this play somewhere, I couldn’t tell you where, it’s somewhere here. And, but he was dressed up as a girl and after the show had finished, he and I walked down to the toilet together, to urinate, and I’ve never felt so embarrassed in my life, here was a girl beside me, because he was dressed up as a woman, he’s dead now poor fellow.

But.

Oh we used to make up rude things for people to laugh at. Even the Germans used to, the officers used to come to them, those that could speak English were the ones that would came to them. I always remember one of the jokes was, there were two bulls, the old bull and the young bull looking at all these cows. And the young bull says to the old bull, come on, lets run down and fix them.

And the old bull says no, lets walk down and we’ll fix them all. And this brought the house down. There was nothing very dirty about it though. You know, I’ve told that joke many times since, but that’s the bull at the gate job isn’t it. The young fellow rushes in, the old fellow takes his time and gets the lot. I mean, there’s nothing, that happens every day in life. Oh no,

its, we used to do plays, you know lots of fellows would know enough about Macbeth, to do it. Oh no, pretty fair spattering of highly intelligent people, I can tell you.

The Germans used to lend them to us. They’d borrow them from the some of the girls, the uniforms. Mostly they were nurses things, that were a bow

or two put up, and, some of these fellows looked all right. I remember one young Canadian fellow, there was a girls part he got, he was a little blonde fellow, and he was a little tubby and he even had breasts, if you could have them when you were hungry. Oh no, it was, we had our own ways of getting around things. We even had fellows write plays, one of the most intriguing fellows that I met,

and he’s sitting here too, I’ll show you something he put in my book here, the first prisoner of war in World War II, was an LAC [leading aircraftsman] flying with an officer, squadron leader. And they were shot down on the first air raid of the war, by the RAF at Willemshaven. And the argument always was, which of them was the

prisoner first. But the strapper was. Now that fellow was in the regular RAF, he came from County Tipperary, no education, considered himself lucky to have a job in the regular air force, and whilst he was in the camp, he learnt Spanish fluently, he wrote

several concertos, which were taken by, or sent back to England by the International Red Cross. We even had letters saying that we heard Larry’s concerto in the Royal Albert Hall in London, and he went back to become an extremely wealthy boy. Now he took advantage of the circumstances, but he was a nice cove,

but I’ve got a thing in here, he can’t paint, he can’t write, he can’t do anything, but he can give you the best wishes of the oldest of the old kriegie, shot down in Willemshaven on the 4th of September 1939. But you see, they didn’t all sit on their backsides. The ones we probably didn’t like, most of all, were the South Africans, because a lot of them still had the Boer attitude in them, they were anti-British,

several of them pimped on us to the Germans when we were building tunnels. So the Germans eventually took the South Africans away from us, I don’t know where they went. One of the fellows I felt very sorry for, was we had a padre, he came into the camp, an Anglican padre, he came from the Channel Islands.

And he came in and did his best, we found that he was pimping to the Germans. We asked a question or two, the escape committee, I guess did, I didn’t, his wife and family was still in Jersey, which was all occupied, the Channel Islands by the Germans. So he’d been sent there as a German plant, and you can’t get down on a man for that, he’s got his wife and

family under the enemies’ control. No, you’ve got to know what, how many sides there are to a coin, before you start criticising.

Well other than the ones I came out. I’ve got two memories of the Russians, all of which were in Lithuania, which was the only place I had any. I had all

these fellows working, and they were like ants the way they used to go on. Four Germans used to guard me with rifles and bayonets against this ten or twelve thousand Russians. What would have ever happened if they’d rushed us, God only knows, I think we would have been wiped out. The second one is, the rations from the Germans was one fifth of a loaf of bread per day.

Ours was given on a fatigue basis, that one man from Hut 56 would go, 100 people in there, so you’d get 20 loaves of bread. And he brought it, and he gave 20 loaves of bread to the room chief. But the Russians, they used to march past the cookhouse, in

fives, because the Germans always operated in fives, I don’t know why, but they did. And the one nearest to the cookhouse would be given the loaf of bread, and that was for his four mates. The bloke in the middle was dead, and the other two had him under the elbow, marching him along. And they had a big cesspit, with slack lime in it, just down the road a bit, and when they got near there, they just pitched this fellow in and that was the end of him. I saw

that done several times, no problem, no smell, the other four got an extra loaf of, slice of bread, that’s life.

No.

Oh, only, only when I was an arbeit-fuhrer and we were digging up these pine roots, pine tree roots, that was the only time I had anything to do with them.

As I said, four guards guarding me against ten or twelve thousand Russians, they’d run or trample over us, there was nothing anybody could have done, it never happened, so that was all right.

Oh no.

Well, I wasn’t friendly towards them, I used to be picked up,

they’d come to the door of my hut, and look for dolmacher [translator, interpreter] and out he’d go, and away I’d go. A friend of mine in Bowen, he’s still there, he’s two or three years older than me, he always saw that my food was kept for the night meal. And he and his wife were just down here a couple of weeks ago. But he’d be 86 or so, now, he’s one of the old fellows. I was

saying to his wife, that he used to do that, years ago he told me that. That he always saw to it, that I was never hungry when I came back, that I didn’t miss out on a meal. And that is what I consider a nice fellow. Oh no, they all knew that I was doing it with an ulterior motive. See, I used to take out a loaf, a cake of soap every now and again, and would come home with a dozen eggs.

Oh no, they knew what I was doing.

Well they were just digging up these things to keep the furnaces going for the Germans, their cook houses and things. I reckon it was a lousy job, every now and again. Quite often, it was a silly damn thing, they had it was a wooden presser with a great lever on it, which was a fulcrum.

And they’d break something, and you’d hear machina kaput, there’d be no work for an hour or two while they mended the machina. Oh no, a lot of fellows had a lot of fun, I think.

No, we were taken out from Lithuania, away from those, the Russian camps, when the

Russians started to move westward into that part of the world. I think the Germans didn’t want the Russians to release us, so they took us down into Poland. And that was where we watched a tank fight, which was between the Russian Cavalry and the German Cavalry,

and we had to get around the corner of, on the plains of Allenstein. And they had taken the Americans out by boat from Memel, while down to Stetten or somewhere. They had taken the young British prisoners down from Memel, by ship. We were told, if we, under the Geneva Convention, Clause 9 I think it is, 7 or 9, if the detaining powers, through prisoner of war activities, interfering with the

pursuit of the war, they may be shot, and they read this out to us. So when they put us on the train then, and we had to get around the corner, and we could actually watch these tanks charging one another, almost like cavalry, on the plains of Allenstein, and we for with Germans to keep the Russians back so we got around the corner, so the Germans won that particular little bit that time, for a while, and we got around the corner into Poland.

Just not far away from where Hitler was, where an attempt was made on Hitler’s life. They tried to blame us, but it had nothing to do with us.

Well, we got little or, less food than we had become accustomed to.

I think most of us became a bit nervous, because we were in a pretty uncivilised part of the world. I think we were, we were frightened on one particular count, in particular, that the Cossacks were, had frightened the German soldiers very badly,

mostly women on their horses, and it wasn’t at all uncommon to see a German with his ring finger chopped off. And I asked one on one occasion why, and he said my ring wouldn’t come over the other way, so they chopped it off and took it this way. And they took all the gold and all the watches, and things like that. And they were, the German was fairly frightened of the Mongolian

hordes as they called them, they were women. And I think that infiltrated our thinking a little bit too, lets get as far away from these mob as we can, because they no speak the English, and why stick your neck out. I don’t think they would have read Australia on, titles on our things, they wouldn’t know what we were talking about. So, I was very glad always, when I got further in.

First of all at Thorn in eastern Poland, and then right across near Hanover, we were in a fairly civilised country, just south of Lubeck.

It was a big camp with twenty-five thousand or more army camp there, army people. And only two thousand or twenty-two hundred we generally say, of us.

No, they didn’t talk to us at all. But as an interesting thing if you ever get the chance, I don’t know whether its still there. There used to be a Japanese prison camp set up, a German one in

the War Museum in Canberra. And my wife and I went down there some years ago, and I stepped up and put my hand across the thing, and broke a beam, which caused a bit of a consternation. But I showed her a thing we used to call a blower, and it’s a small forge, only that long that we used to make out of milk tins. And you used, they used to give us three minutes to boil up enough water to make a cup of tea. And I can tell you, you can do it.

We had these little things, we used to go like this, just a flame. I pointed this out to my wife, and I broke the beam, and of course, there was a guard there in seconds, and I didn’t realise, I broke the beam, I made all this noise. And I said, well that, I was just pointing that out to my wife, what that thing is, and he said what is it, so I told him, he hadn’t known, so I got away with it. We got a fright that day, didn’t we. But we used to have these

little blowers, they were about that long with a bit of board, made out of skim milk tins, about that size, and you’d make, off the end you could make a wheel, and wind it with a bit of string, and away it would go, like a blacksmiths forge. Well there’s one in the, used to be in the War Museum at Canberra.

In a moment.

11th August 1944 til the 8th of April 1945.

Well, at Fallingsbostel we had the army there,

but we, it didn’t take very long for the army to wake up, that we could speak German and we could handle the Germans better than they could. And two major things happened, at Fallingsbostel, this is where we took a Panzer squadron out of action, by threatening that we were going to escape. Because they knew a lot of us spoke

German, not, nowhere near as many as they thought. And we woke up one morning to find all these Panzer tanks with the sharp ends pointing in, and that’s in Hansard, in the House of Commons. They were amazed, as Churchill says in the House of Commons, that unarmed people pulled a Panzer squadron out of action.

Well, see they couldn’t afford to let twenty-seven or twenty, thereabouts thousand people loose behind the lines, because the Americans were just down the road. Well they were British, liberated me.

Oh for Christ’s sake, we were prisoners of war.

But they worked on the principle that it was a morale booster, they’d been captured at Dunkirk, so they’d been there for a long time. But we couldn’t see, I could never see the value of doing that, I’d rather white-ant the Germans than put on a parade like that. But the Germans understood it, because they are a bit prone to wanting parades too.

I suppose I would have to say, that people became more anxious that they were going to, whether or not they were going to survive. Because we’d come a fair way down the track at that stage, and we knew that these fellows were just up the road.

Would they get there soon enough. So I suppose, and we got less food, no mail, very little mail in the last few months of the war. I suppose it was one of the few times I got a bit anxious, I wonder if I’m going to make it, I’ve done it so far, and haven’t got long to go and lets do it. Because we used to say we’ll be home for Christmas, we never nominated which Christmas.

So were going to be right eventually. I think that would be what I would have to say, we were concerned that we weren’t going to make it, whether or not we were going to make it.

Well, we could be caught in crossfire, or we could be bombed. See we finished with our twenty-two hundred fellows and we were

split up into three groups, 750 each roughly. Each with a German speaking fellow looking after them, or two or three in each group. And a very good friend of mine came from Adelaide, John Shierlaw. He was with a group that was shot up, by, the story we were told by a Canadian squadron leader flying for the RAF,

shot them up and killed about 38 of them. And they had their sheets up saying that they were, white sheets, but John Shierlaw was one of those killed in that. So you had a bit of trepidation. And then we were told, whether it was true or not, I couldn’t care less, it didn’t bring John back, that the squadron leader went back, and when the film was exposed, he went and hanged himself in the toilet.

Because you don’t get big bodies of 700 people wandering around with white sheets over their heads, unless they’re unarmed, friendly sort of people. But he lead his flight in, and 38 of them were killed.

Well it was decided our camp leader, Dixie Dean, we would try to go west and cross the Elbe and get to Luneberg Heath, where the headquarters of the British Army was. And he believed that the best way of doing it, was in three groups each roughly 700 people. So we set off marching

west along the Hamburg to Berlin autobahn, was the one we were on. And we were met, a whole, my group was met by this Royal Dragoon Guards Squadron, a few tankies, a few tanks. This fellow gave me his pistol, so I arrested subsequently a few Germans, a big brave fellow.

Fleeing from Hamburg down to Berlin, because they could get through at that time, because the Russian army hadn’t got far enough west, and the American army hadn’t got far enough East. And the Hamburg to Berlin autobahn was still open, and they were hiking down this thing trying to get into Germany, and basically down into Bavaria apparently. And we stopped them. And when you put a hundred fellows on the road,

you’ve got to be pretty good to get a car through, and we just stopped them, arrested them, handed them over to some Americans there, as prisoners of war. I know in one lot, there was one general amongst them. And took their cars, I finished up with a fleet of about seven Mercedes, including these open ones that Mr Hitler used to run around in, and put fellows in them, put the fellows that were a bit weaker,

and shunted them across the Elbe. And I eventually drove myself across, I had a little four cylinder Mercedes, and in the middle of the pontoon bridge, a German fighter came to straffe the vehicle, but because it was a pontoon bridge, and it was right low on the water, he couldn’t get his snout down low enough to shoot at us, otherwise he’d have run into the water. So he was shooting, the shooting he did, went right over our heads, by feet.

And we got across to Luneberg Heath. And then after these various places that I spoke about in that book, but I ended up at Rheine, on the border of Holland and Germany, where I was flown back to England.

Well the BBC made the comment on the evening news session on the last day of April, the 30th of April, that any German mistreating a prisoner of war, would be considered a war criminal. On the morning of the 1st of May, there was no German left, we were on our own.

So we then, with the committee that operated, the democratic state as I mentioned, decided that we would march in groups of 700. What happened to the army, I don’t know, had nothing to do with me. Our decision was made with the air force only. I have no idea what happened to those twenty-five thousand army fellows. But we decided we’d march to,

across the Elbe and get to Luneberg Heath. Well we never ever did, we finished up in Holland, on the border of Holland, but we got home from there.

Huh, that’s were the old air vice marshall met me, he’d been my CO at Cranwell College, and he said I saved your life Gaulton. And I said how do you work that out.

Well, he told me I would have killed myself trying to fly. But he was quite a nice fellow. We went to Dunsford, his counties of England, from there down to Brighton, where I stayed for quite some time. The 10th of May I think we got to Brighton, and I didn’t leave Brighton until

well into June, the end of June I think it was. In the meantime, I was eating what I could get into me. This diet of an orange, an egg, a bottle of milk and a bottle of stout, Guiness stout per meal, and whatever I liked to eat on top of it, I just put on, I went from 8 stone 3 to 14 stone 10 in eleven weeks. When I arrived in Brisbane on the 29th of July,

I think it was, in 1945, I weighed 14 stone 10, blubber, baby fat.

Have I been.

No, no, no, finished by then. They all got full over the two days, and we got back the day after they were all full. We were lucky we had to find a pilot that, a pilot came who wasn’t drunk.

I wasn’t going to get pranged on that bit. See, I didn’t get back to England until the 10th of May, when all of these parties had taken place.

It was, we weren’t back in civilian life. When we landed at this aerodrome, I can remember being manhandled by women, who had puffers. I don’t know whether

they must have thought we would have all these nits and fleas, and God only knows what, they were puffing up our sleeves, down the back of our necks, in our hair. And then we were told we could go now. Then we went to Brighton where we got completely re-outfitted, all our clothes re-issued.

Well we went on a ship called the Andes, it was a round-bottomed thing, it used to go to the River Plate in South America. It was the tail end of June, or perhaps early July, I think it was early July. The 29th I got back here, wasn’t it, 28th we got to Sydney. So it would have been the 30th of June or 1st of July, we set off in the River Plate

ship called the Andes. Went through the Panama Canal. Ran into a storm just to the west of the Panama Canal, where I happened to be on the bridge, and the captain logged 50 foot waves over the bow of the ship, we were taking them green and throwing them straight over the bridge, like glass. And we finally came to, I got up very early to see

the ship coming through Sydney Heads, then I was nearly home. Saw my cousin in Sydney, then got on a train and we came to Brisbane, to Clapham Junction wasn’t it. And Madam was there to meet me, we were put in a cavalcade, then of motor cars and driven through the streets of Brisbane, we went to

Sandgate wasn’t it. We were read the riot act by some snotty nosed adjutant, I had better not say that. A big fat fellow who would never have passed the medical in my time. Told us we had to take down our Australian ribbons, Australian badges, our ribbons, two ribbons that we had, I had five overseas ribbons. He told us to take all those down,

that they were not applicable in Australia. An error of judgement that he made, he gave us a leave pass for 180 days, and we never saw him again, and my uniform still had all these things on it. You can see a picture of it there, so I kept them on. I don’t know who the hell he thought he was. And then he, twice we have been, I have been called, this group there are about eight of us.

Not one of us had been overseas for less than this, we had all, we had this five years stripe on, which didn’t really mean what it said, because some of it was double time. He called us Jap-dodgers, and the fellow with me, the officer, was a flight lieutenant, Les Dixon who played cricket for Queensland, he’d been my captain at school when I was at the grammar school. And he asked this

squadron leader, what he meant by calling us Jap Dodgers. Every one of us had flown out of England, before the Japanese war started. And this fellow said, you were all a gutless lot, you all knew Japan was coming into the war, so you shot through overseas, which I never understood the reasoning behind that at all. Then I was talking one day on the

telephone to a man at the Veteran Affairs’ Department, or Repatriation as it was then. He told me the same thing, he called me a Jap Dodger. The error of judgement that he made, was my father was 3IC [third in command] of the Repatriation Commission in Queensland, so I told him so that fellow didn’t have a job the next week. I don’t understand how the hell we were so smart, as simple sergeants, that we knew that the Japanese were coming into the war,

a year and a half after we left, I mean how the hell would we know, but that’s what people tell you.

I got married, that was the best way. And then I had to get my discharge. I got married on the 1st of September 1945, and I went to Redbank in January to get discharged, I don’t know why I went to Redbank, but we had to.

They took an X-ray, and it was no good, the plate was no good, it came out blank. So the next thing I knew, I had to find my clothes and report to Sandgate, to the hospital, so I did. To find that I was put in a room in the hospital down there, with seven other fellows, one of whom died that night. And I asked why was I here.

And I was told I had TB [tuberculosis]. Well I said, I haven’t got TB. They said you have got TB. I had to spit into a sputum bottle, so eventually a nurse came in, so I grabbed her, not very hard, but I grabbed her and said now, I want to be taken to another place, and have another X-ray taken. So,

that was arranged and I was taken to Greenslopes. Yeronga, was it. Anyway, there was some other girl there, a sergeant in the AWASs [Australian Women’s Army Service], that my sister-in-law knew, or my wife knew and she said, you’re all right, she said we’ve been looking at these reports, and there’s nothing wrong with you. She said your sputum should be tested. So they took another X-ray, and then they told me the first one was no good, it was negative,

all blank, so I was cleared and I was released, and I wasn’t very pleased about that, but never mind.

I was

the commanding officer of the Queensland University Regiment, and certain officers were selected, I don’t know how they were selected, to go and do a two week course in Vietnam. And General Hassett was the general officer commanding here, at that time. And I said you’d be far better to send two captains, it wouldn’t cost you anymore, than I would

never see first line action again. And he said yes, but you did that, people would think you were scared. Well I said I don’t want to go particularly, so probably I am scared. So he said, well you better go, so I went. And I was attached to 8 RAR [Royal Australia Regiment]. Just about the time to come home when there was a Tet Offensive up there, and I was put back another

few weeks. During my time in Vietnam, Adrian Clunies-Ross was the 2IC of the Battalion at that time, now a major general in Canberra. He reckoned I saw a hell of a lot more service than a hell of a lot of people in the battalion, because I was going around doing things all the time. I did a lot of flying, because Colonel Butler who was the CO of 6th Battalion, wouldn’t fly.

So I was given his helicopter, I did a lot of flying in Vietnam. We were almost shot down on one occasion, an intelligence officer wouldn’t believe the pilot. The pilot put me on the phone, and I explained what I could see, I could see these two Viet Cong shooting at us. So they sent out a patrol, and eventually I was just got back to land on the air strip,

when this armoured vehicle had gone out to have a look. You could hear the shells hitting the outside of the tank, so the intelligence officers said I think you might have been right. I knew I was damn right, I could see the fellow shooting at me. But that was about it. I had a lot of, I had a lot of activity, a lot of

variation in my activity in Vietnam, for the very simple reason that a half colonel in a battalion, where the boss is a half colonel, is just a damn pest, and I hadn’t been there for an hour before the rumours started, oh this must be the new CO. Well, I didn’t like that, so I went and did other things.

Officially, it was

called a commander under instruction. I had to go there as a battery commander, a battalion commander, and learn how a battalion behaves in action. I was just an observer and nothing else. No authority whatsoever, I was just supposed to hang around in the CO’s pockets, that was about the strength of it.

Well, I finished up observing all kinds of things, like going on an RAAF bombing of a couple of positions, I went out on patrols with 8th Battalion, and I was on, this cordon and search, Xuan Loc. I did a lot of infantry stuff,

I went out with the Artillery, I was a fairly free agent because of having a helicopter, I did a bit of Infantry work as well, but I kept it in the background.

Well, only when I walked back on my own. I thought afterwards that was a bit risky, and a bit silly to do.

But when I was out with the Yanks, don’t take kindly to them, they’re not trained like Australian soldiers.

Very poor. I’ve had three instances with the Americans. One was in the aircraft where the fellow tried to get me air sick, when we were leading into the Canberra’s to bomb, that was a waste of time which I pointed out to him.

The second was when I went out on patrol, a major leading a patrol of eight people, which would have been a corporal or a sergeant at the very most with the Australian army. Eleven miles we had to walk, he had the Walkman in the ear, a rifle over the shoulder and a cigarette in the mouth. After about four or five miles, I said well when are you going to go into battle formation major. Oh plenty time yet, colonel. A little bit

down the track I got sore legs, so I walked back unarmed, all the way back to headquarters on my own, which was a pretty silly thing, when I think back on it, I don’t know whether I was in danger or not. The third time I was most unimpressed, because I mentioned earlier on, I was a battery commander in a field artillery. I had been at the general’s briefing in Saigon,

and I knew that an American battalion was going into action. And the rounds had to be on the ground as a preliminary bombardment at ten hundred hours. Now I’d been an artillery officer, as I said, and I knew you pulled the trigger a minute or so, whatever the time required, to put the rounds so far, before ten hundred hours, so the infantry knows,

there is a barrage ahead of them. And I walked into the command post, this American command post to find the captain with his feet up on the table, smoking a cigarette, reading a book, a novel at about a quarter to ten. Time went on, and nobody was taking any notice of anything, and I said to this captain, when are you going to put rounds in the ground. Oh he said, the computers’ down, we wont’ be able to do it.

I said have you told the infantry that. Oh no he said, they’ll bloody well soon find out. So I wasn’t a bit impressed. In the Australian army, that captain would have been court martialled. I mean you tell somebody if the blooming thing, the computer doesn’t work, well do it in your brain. I never ever had a computer, and I put plenty of rounds in the ground at a given time. So I was not really impressed by the Americans in Vietnam.

I can only repeat, I suppose, what the politicians said, that it was, the purpose of the exercise was to save the South Vietnamese from the Communists, North Vietnamese etcetera etcetera. I can’t make, I don’t know enough about the history, the background of Vietnam, to make a more

intelligent comment than that. I just accepted it for what it was. All I can say is, that the Americans got one hell of a hiding, which really didn’t’ surprise me. The Australians I thought did a pretty fair job in Vietnam, they didn’t get too many hidings, they got one or two, but not too many.

I was very surprised at the amount of hard drug taking, that I saw amongst American servicemen. Taken to one camp, as I think I mentioned, where there was 15 000 I was told, all on hard drugs. Which would have made a major social problem when they got back to America. I was told there were six Australian soldiers on hard drugs, and they had already been sent back to Australia.

I thought it was a peculiar situation, there didn’t seem to be any organised fighting, as I could see it, you had to get permission of the Vietnamese to go and cordon and search a place, which I thought was damn silly because they would tell their mates, or tell somebody. But other than the political line that was taken,

at the time, I accepted that because I didn’t know any different.

Well the only comment I can make about that, is just to repeat perhaps what I’ve already said. It seemed to me to be disorganised. I was accustomed to a fairly organised war in World War II.

Well, we did raids when we were required to raid, we knew when the moon was full that we would be on duty for four or five nights in a row. Because that was the way we bombed, the bomber moon, the moon, the bomber moon as they called it, because we didn’t have good enough equipment to do anything else to navigate, other than to look at the rivers, and the bridges that cross it, in the moon, it was pretty, or a lot easier.

I couldn’t understand what was going on in Vietnam, perhaps I wasn’t in the picture enough. It was too disjointed for me. Little groups seemed to be doing what they were supposed to do, I’m sure they were told to do it, that didn’t seem to co-ordinate with anything else. Now, I may not have been in the full picture, so its unfair to make a comment, but the difference to me, one was organised,

the other appeared to me, to be disorganised. Whether that’s a fair criticism, I don’t know.

I saw very little of them, I was required, because I was the senior officer on the group that I went up with, to write a report when we came back. I wrote a report, as I saw what happened,

in my time there, and a certain brigadier from Canberra rang me up and said I couldn’t say the things I had said. So my response was that it was the truth as far as I was concerned, it was what I saw, and my report stood. But I, I used such terminology when I was going from Saigon to Nui Dat,

by road, that along the side of the road the thing I have never been able to understand, and I still don’t, how these South Eastern Asian people, and I guess Indians can be put in it too, can wash a white shirt in dirty water, muddy water, and get it out as white as they do, I still don’t understand that and nobody has ever told me how they can do it properly, I’ve heard all about this thumping business. But I wrote in my report, that I saw them

urinating, defecating and fornicating beside the road, and that was what I was told I wasn’t allowed to say. I said, you told me to tell the truth, I told the truth, that’s what I saw. I said if you don’t like it, scrub the report.

I thought it was ill-founded, because if a man goes out to stick his neck out, and possibly getting killed, I reckon he deserves to be supported.

I was very surprised at a lot of these anti-Vietnam things. And I had the honour, or the dishonour, of being the only CMF [Citizens Military Force] depot in Australia, taken over by anti-Vietnamese people, they took over my depot at St Lucia there was some little popsie there, that had, a Vietnamese, they used to call her Vietnamese Mary, she even had a Vietnamese hat, I suppose you can get them somewhere else. I could never

understand, they got into my depot and they wrote nasty things all over the walls, and destroyed a lot of the maps I brought back, so my fellows could have a look at them. I don’t understand what their thinking was, they burnt one of the vehicles. The general in that day was General McDonald, here, and so I told him what I would do, and he told me to go home as I was a citizen, so I, the

regular army would fix it. I said I’d use a fire hydrant, and I would roll them up into little balls and I would make them pretty uncomfortable, which the Germans did to us in the prison camp, but he wouldn’t be in that, so they fixed it up in their own way. I really can’t understand why people are so anti those who did go to Vietnam, because the Vietnamese bullets were just as hard as the ones they used in Germany, or Japan or anywhere, they still kill you.

I don’t see the point of the argument at all, I never have.

Two more years, two and a half years.

When I got discharged. I’ve never, never

said that I didn’t enjoy most my service life. I certainly didn’t care for the prisoner of war part, but it was a good lesson, it gave me an opportunity that a lot of people wouldn’t have. I took advantage of the opportunity, it gave me a better life, subsequently. I was able to give all my children a good education, and they’re all got tertiary educations.

I’ve lived a pretty good life, I don’t like being in a small space, or I suppose I have to admit I’m claustrophobic, mainly because I was in isolation, solitary confinement a few times. I enjoyed my time, as both as an artillery officer and an infantry officer.

I met a lot of nice fellows. Most of my CMF time was in National Service time. I joined just after National Service started, and I finished just before National Service finished. I met a lot of nice fellows, I met a lot of bludgers, but that’s the system.

I don’t know that I could say anymore than that. You know, it’s nice that I have some of the fellows, that were my juniors, one’s Chief Justice of Queensland now, a lot of them are well up, and they still say g’day to me, so I couldn’t have been too bad.

I’d say that is the only one, if it can be attributed to that. I’m not terribly sure it can be, because when we were flying we were told if we went down in to the North Sea, a submarine would pick us up. Well I was always a bit hesitant, I won’t go into a submarine tied up at a wharf, because I just don’t like being under water. Whether that’s claustrophic,

whether that started it, I don’t know. I don’t like to be in a set of circumstances where I can’t see out, see a lot of fresh air around me. So whether, I’ve never had anyone medically tell me I’ve got something wrong with me, I just don’t see any reason to do it.

Only the one where they turned the heater up,

I didn’t like that much, didn’t like that much. But if I got a hospital I always get a private ward, as long as I can see out.

I’d have to say, I suppose, the last couple of months of prisoner of war life. It was very uncertain. We started to

march towards Lubeck, which was a free town on the Baltic, and got diverted very smartly by the Germans fighting. No, I didn’t care for the last couple of months. I reckoned I’d gone far enough, that I was entitled to get home, and I wasn’t sure.

I suppose almost, that you can take very few people at face value. The veneer of civilisation is extremely thin, as I’ve told my children every time. Some of the smoothest talkers are the roughest rogues.

One of the nicest blokes I met in a prison camp, was a member of the Glasgow razor gang, a real tough. And I’ve never met a kinder bloke to anybody who was down in the dumps a bit, and he’d cut your throat, the Glasgow razor gang were pretty tough boys. But, I think overall, I still say that the majority of people are reasonable people.

I learned a long time ago never to confide in people, a lot of that’s in business days too, where you tell somebody something in confidence, and before you know it, it’s been mutilated and used against you. But I’d say the major lesson I learnt from prison camp, was that the veneer of civilisation is very thin.

Money doesn’t mean anything in those circumstances, it’s you, and that’s the start and end of it.

I hope that somebody may listen to this someday, and perhaps there might be an element of wisdom in it. I feel

that I’ve had a very good life, I’m lucky to have survived the way I did. I married a good woman, my kids have all been good kids, I’ve never won the Lotto I wouldn’t mind it, but I’m not going to starve. But if somebody one days gets

some possible benefit from listening to this, good luck to them. And thank you for all your attention.