Australians at War Film Archive

Alright, I was born, near the Brisbane Cricket Ground, in a private home, the, I can even remember the midwives name, it was Sister Warricko, it sounds a bit war like. And,

my parents owned a property in Western Queensland, out near Blackall, called Tambo area, I think at the age of three weeks, my grandfather owned a house at Surfers Paradise, which was only a bit of a shack in those days, so I had my first holiday down there, we then proceeded to western Queensland where I was brought up for the next 10 years on the station. My father sold the station in the Depression, I moved to a country town called Cleveland

on the Queensland coast, went to a state school, my education up to that stage had been correspondence schools. Which came out by T Model Ford [early mass production car] - when the climate, when it was it was raining too hard and it got bogged. I got taught by my mother on occasions by governesses which had great difficulty finding me and my brother. I then went at the age of 13 I got tetanus followed by pneumonia, and in those days

most people died so that set me back a bit, so the result was that I missed a bit of schooling again, and but I did go to Brisbane Boys College in Brisbane for two and half years. The age of about 16 and a half, I went and worked for the United Graziers Association in Brisbane, in their office, and, I stayed in their employ until I joined permanently in the AIF [Australian Imperial Force], on the

eighth of May, 1940. Prior to that I'd served every two years in the militia from the age of 17 to 19 to get in the AIF I had to put my age on one year, so all my records you'll see I was born in 1920, and in '21 so I'm a bit of a freak that way. The, we used to have regular camps, but pre war it was obvious the war was coming on my

father and uncles had fought in the First War, I got an uncle killed in Gallipoli, so I did sort of went along with what the family used to do. On the eighth of May my mother finally agreed to, she sign me up as being a year older than I was, so I went into the AIF and I was quickly promoted to sergeant because very few people knew anything about military drill, at that stage, having had militia experience. I was a sergeant until, until I got my discharge to go in

the air force in October 1942. I served in India for a short time, the Middle East in North Africa for about four months, did the entire Syrian campaign. Garrisoned in Syria until we came back, had my 20th and 21st birthday by, just by circumstances of moving through the Quastina Camp in Palestine. And, came

back to Australia and we were stationed in North Queensland, I was with a unit that was to go to Milne Bay, they did go eventually, but I decided it was time for a change in an anti tank regiment, I couldn't see any future in trying to shoot up tanks in the jungle, so I thought that probably an air force career would probably further my prospects in civil life. Maybe so I decided to work on getting into the air force. I sort of knew the right people in Brisbane,

they were family connections, and the chief of the air force, or the Empire Air Training Scheme in Queensland was a bloke called Fred Chapman he'd flown in the First World War, and obviously knew his way around and he was a close family friend and he managed to get me out of the army into the air force. When I joined the air force, I went to Kingaroy, I got started there in initial training school on a

property that was old Joe Bjelke Petersen's [later Premier of Queensland] father, it had been resumed and it had a training station on it, no aeroplanes, just a initial training school they called it. The Empire Air Scheme of course was a total program scheme through your career, of training, it was universal, Australia, Canada Britain, South Africa, or wherever you trained, standard training.

I started on a course there and then I got Mumps and it turned out to be orchitis, which was a bit difficult, and they kept me in the hospital up there for nearly about four weeks I think. So I missed a course, and, and anyway I joined up with the next course, the next move was I expressed a wish to be a pilot, I did, struggled through the exams, because you can appreciate being out of school that long, Morse was, I'm not musical in any way, I had trouble with doing Morse and that sort of thing. Anyway I got through,

went to Narromine flying Tiger Moths [old aircraft used as training aircraft], got through there and, expressed a wish to go overseas, so I was drafted to, draft to go over to Canada, so I trained in Canada. I got my wings at a place called Kingston, Ontario I had an open category which meant you were suitable for flying various aeroplanes. I ended up in Britain and of course there was a great

shortage of bomber pilots, they were getting cleaned up in droves and I volunteered to go to Bomber Command which meant a lot more training as you can understand, flying big aeroplanes, flying fighters. So I did the long training and I finally got onto an operational squadron at the end of 1944. So I my operational flying in the air force was restricted to about say six months of the war where it was not nearly as dangerous as it was in the early stages.

But I can give you more details about that anyway, records and that sort of thing. I did my operations from a place called Bury St Edmonds, or Chedborough near Bury St Edmonds, in an English squadron, 218. A lot of Australian pilots and crews were seconded to the RAF [Royal Air Force] for Bomber Command and it was a good squadron and that, it had a good history and I flew through till the end of the war.

After the war it was a matter of getting shipping to come back to Australia, I, they did it on a point system, well my army service, overseas service came into it so I was fairly high priority to get back and I , we came back to Australia in about October, November 1945 and I discharged before Christmas. I could have gone commercial flying I went to one or two interviews

and the object of going into the air force possibly to go into commercial flying and I didn't do it, I had a chance to come into, Cowra, I met some people during the war that owned some property here, and they wanted me to come down and do sheep farming with them. So I decided to give that a go it was a Macquarie Street specialist, had a property here, I did that for a while and I got associated with Edgell's cannery people, and I knew the family, the Edgell family pretty well and I ended up

Working as their farm manager, for Edgell's cannery which is only three kilometres, or two kilometres from here, when the Edgell family completely controlled it, so this property belonged to them and I remember Herm Edgell saying, "Well if you will come and look after our farms, we will buy the property, this one was coming up for sale and you can live there". Well that's what happened and after two years he said you'd better buy the property so my

wife and I scrounged every shekel we could find, and we bought this place, which is quite a good property, it's 110 acres on the river, it's got irrigation licenses and so on, but the main reason to going, there was about 1 200 acres of asparagus growing here at that stage and the [asparagus] cutters were all pretty volatile types, just after the war, a lot of them were genuine ex servicemen, they got good wages if they'd work. The old Australian union system which I knew a lot of about from Brevis in Bomber Command,

was controlled by the communists mainly from 21 division in Moscow and I had about, 150 cutters I think down on the river bank when I interviewed him and of course he gave me a bit of, but my army experience came to me and I soon got them going. And I just saw the directors at the cannery and said "look we can't pay these blokes wages, you got to offer them incentive, if you pay them for the quantity and the amount they cut and the quality, and grade

it properly at the cannery and all supervise the lot" and it worked very well. Later on the unions…well, I left and of course there's no asparagus grown here now, it was a magnificent industry. And there's hardly grown in Australia at all. It's a bit sad, we're doing it, there are still older people here that, old ladies in their 70's that will cut for a few hours and earn five or six hundred dollars a week clear. And but that's ended about two years ago, so young people

it's easy to go on the dole, that type of people but they type of people around those days were, I had them in gangs of seven and you just appoint a chief of the gang and if they weren't all pulling their weight, it reflected on all of them, so they used to sack one another and I'd find out in the morning how many blokes needed replacing and I'd tie up with the CES [Commonwealth Employment Scheme] as it was then in Cowra and away we used to go.

Yeah, since 1950. I, then had a fair bit of problems with lungs; I had what they call bronchiectases, which the specialist said, I didn't go for repat or, I had good association with a specialist in Sydney, he'd been in Tobruk in the British Army and he'd won a Military Cross on, by manning machine guns when it was necessary so he knew his way around,

but he was a specialist and he said, "Well you can get a lobectomy now in Concord and maybe they'll give you a pension or you can, I've got a new type of treatment which is a postural drainage and draining your lungs every day, if you do that you can be a guinea pig". He treated me for a long time. But the thing was I had to do something else, so I was offered a job in an agent's office here in Cowra in 1953, at the end of 1953,

that was a firm called Farmers and Graziers which was an old pastoral family in New South Wales, well known and anyway after I'd, I said I'd do it for six months that was all I was going to do. And we had brought this place by then and my wife's people had property up in Boorowa which she finally inherited, so, it had to be looked after. I, I continued on

for about six months, and the manager in Cowra left so the Managing Director in Sydney rang up it was an old well known old pastoral character called George Basset and he said "We're going to make you manager in Cowra" I said "Like hell you are" I said "I'll bet the, I just said look I've got no licenses it's not possible". And he said, "Oh we'll fix that up" and my licenses came back by almost return mail, it takes, poor young fellow nowadays at least three years to get them.

So that's how things worked in those days, I did manage the branch here for 15 years, but I did take control of about eight branches in the central west for them at one stage as area supervisor. And like all old pastoral companies, run by antiquated boards of directors, it couldn't get out of the 17th century really the thing collapsed in the end and so I opened a branch here for Elders which I managed

for 10 years then I did all their property sales for 10 years, and valuing etc, on a share basis which was quite good, I did well out of it, I sold a lot of big properties and I used to get a big percentage of the commission and I spent quite a bit of that on overseas trips at the time. And then, Elders, of course you know what happened to them, there's a lot of skulduggery [underhand business] going on, I didn't want to be associated with them so I did know, I did have some association with the Ray White

family in Queensland, Ray White Stud in 19 hundred, a place called Crows Nest in Toowoomba and we did know them and I got a franchise from them in 24 hours with a young fellow from Elders who just got his redundancy, and we just sat in the main street and I started Ray White Real Estate and it's quite successful now there's about six on the staff there. You own your own business for franchises,

but I was fortunate that people knew me, when I was managing for Farmers and Graziers, I used to handle all the finance around the central west here too, so that sort of gave me a background to do it. I sort of retired every ten years from 60 onwards, to do something different. I got to this stage when I was 80 of, I didn't know what to, so I sold my shares to another partner who came in but I still retain the desk and I do valuing for mostly probate

solicitors, got a valuers license and I sell a few properties and that's about it.

Well the first, on my mother's side my first answer is in Queensland was, TB

Stevens who was cousin of the colonial architect at the time, Blackett was the famous architect, and they virtually came to Australia to do that, around about the 1840's and the family in England had been interested in wool manufacture. So, my great grandfather that he was worked for Mort, famous Mort and anyway he ended up as a wool buyer but he ended up in Queensland.

And in Brisbane in those days there was hardly anybody there of course, and he used to have his depot there and the wool buying business and he, he would have made a lot of money I'd say. He used to buy wool and the very early settlers, especially on the Darling Downs exported it to England. He had a, fellmonger works, in round in the Brisbane area, he was in the first parliament in 1859 it only lasted about

nine months I think. He also he and Petrie formed there's a suburb in Brisbane called Petrie, and there's one called Stevens, forms the first Brisbane City Council, which they had some foresight because it's still one council the whole city moved, small councils as you have in Sydney with the bureaucracy running wild, in various areas, it seems to work up there, and, so he became quite a well known politician of course.

And he was, in those days those old families were in everything. He, the old family homestead is now a girls school in South Brisbane, called Somerville House, it's a beautiful old building. It was finally sold as a girls school, too bigger family. My mother was born there, on my father's side, my grandfather migrated from

South Africa, he actually was born in Gloucestershire, in a place called Fairford and as a small boy his parents moved to South Africa, it would have been around 1848, 1850 and he grew up in South Africa and he then was in the sugar industry over there and colonial sugar sent him, asked him if he would go to Queensland in Australia which he did and he acted for Colonial Sugar

on establishing sugar in Queensland, he also got into parliament, very early days, and he, he was speaker of the Queensland house for years and

Sir Alfred Cowley and he was knighted in about 1902 I think. And when he left South Africa he, his family are contracted with the Campbells over there, they came from I think they got into trouble with Bonny Prince Charlie's [in Scotland] and had to flee to

Ireland - to Donegal for a couple of centuries but they finally went back to Scotland, and William Campbell migrated from Glasgow to Durban in 1850 he was one of the first settlers in Durban, incidentally the University of Durban had a big celebration at the arrival of Campbell's in the year 2000, 150 years. They became quite famous over there and everything. And they donated their, they virtually

established the university at Durban and now when I went over to the reunion, with all our thirds cousins and all sorts of people I'd never heard before, but the government, they just put it on and it was even backed by, things are not good over there as you know but the family always got on well with the native tribes and they speak the language to the leading members of the family. A lot of the prominent doctors and politicians again and you feel quite comfortable being in Durban with them but

it's a shemozzle otherwise, it's not good at the moment. But anyway, my grandfather must have had his eye on the Campbell girls, because after he'd been, she grew up a bit, she was a bit younger than him, he finally went back to Pietermaritzburg where she lived because William Campbell had died a young man the original Campbell and they went to Pietermaritzburg and lived and they were married there and she came back to Australia.

Incidentally on the Steven's side, the old boy the old boy had his eye on a lady who was a cousin, a second cousin I think and, he went off and into Europe for quite a while and worked for someone factories in Germany a wool manufacturing and when he came back the lady had jilted him and got married somebody else, and he made her promise that if she, if her firstborn was a daughter

she would come out to Australia and marry him. Granny Stevens came out Granny Stevens age of 19 and she came out to Australia, he met her in Sydney, with Blackett the colonial architect, and married at Blackett's home and went up to Brisbane by tugboat or whatever and established themselves up there, so she was very much younger. So it was a bit of a strange happening on the female side. And that's about all I can tell you about that.

Well my early memories are on the property on Western Queensland of course and it is really primitive I can tell you. There were no roads or my father had a T Model Ford which, you know you end up with very few people had cars at all. It, the Depression of course came on in the '30's

and it got very difficult to make, he'd been wounded about three times in the First World War, and he was never a well man and he was fairly deaf and we lived in a small homestead, the adjoining property was Inniskillen Station, which was a huge property and it was managed by an uncle of mine, for Clarke and Tate the pastoral company. And in the end Clarke and Tate bought the property during the Depression and we moved on. I was about 10 then I think or nine and a half.

But, it was, you know you're pretty isolated out there, when I first went to a school, at, it was pretty hard to mix with people.

It was pretty isolated in those days you didn't, well not ever going to school anyway, just gone to correspondence school and you can imagine going back in 1920's, late '20's it is primitive you know. There was no schools of the air or

anything like that, it just came in an envelope, every now and then, with what you're supposed to do. But my mother taught us and actually when we did go to the first two teacher school in Queensland, the old headmaster there he gave my brother and I a bit of a test and decided we both best off in the one class so I was a backward pupil in the class and he was one of the young ones. There's about 18 months difference in our age.

So anyway we got sharpened up pretty well, the old bloke used to do a lot and if you couldn't do your mental arithmetic you used to get the cuts with the cane, you'd hold your had out and he'd give you whack so that sort of brightened us up a bit. And, we went on from there, not much, nothing dramatic.

Yeah, just sort of work out, how to write to start with fishhooks and things. And I can't

really remember much about it, it's sort of elementary primary school stuff.

Did have, twice we had governesses, but the enterprising ones got to know the, the owners, the sons of the owners of the biggest stations, and they used to clear off. I think two got married off while we were out there. Some of them were English girls came out, if I remember rightly,

but the bigger properties did have governesses at times, we always went to Brisbane for a three weeks holiday every year.

Well we usually went down to the coast.

Yeah.

Yeah well I'll tell you what, we actually used to stay it his house in Brisbane which is near the Brisbane Cricket Ground,

but he had a big car, he bought it, he was an importer, he imported one of the first hut mobiles into Queensland and he, we'd go for a drive, down, he did have a house down at Southport there, the city of Southport is now and we'd go down there for probably a week, but the trip down involved two full days drive, you know you take picnic lunches and that sort of thing and if I remember rightly he,

he's two of the rivers we crossed were crossed by ferries. At Southport itself, to go, of course which is now the Gold Coast, there's an old wooden bridge there, and in early days there used to be just a punt across there, but there was no one lived down there in those days. And actually my great grandfather Stevens when he was minister for lands acquired about, 24 000 acres, of what's now, the

part of the Gold Coast, everything west of the Nerang creek, Mudgerabah the whole lot, it was all swamps in those days and it passed out of the family eventually and, you know there was no value in that sort of land, till the population grew I supposed. But it would be worth a hell of a lot of money now I can tell you.

Oh we probably go into Tambo which is about a 30 mile trip, once a month, that's about all but visit the station properties, that's about all the socialising you could do there was no TV.

Yes, yes, well, yeah, I remember Inniskillen Station, it was typical of the times it was, Damburanjong tribe there and on the property

and there might have been 60 or 70 of them altogether but five and six were the ultimate worker, they were good people, they were good stockmen, and the rest had to be fed and watered and looked after and the kids would get a bit of education, with I know properties but it's still a school and they were sort of brought up as part of the established family the property owners and they were pretty happy they could go walkabout for three months if they wanted to and it'd be

the wet season where you couldn't work anyway. But that all of course, Gough Whitlam just turned it all around and went to the other extreme.

No not really, no because we were just too far away from the station homestead we were, and he, our set up was too small at that. Yeah I did, they used to,

they used to work on the cattle mostly, but the aboriginals of course were never properly handled in the first place. That's another big story. But the, it was, when we went down to Cleveland, it was a different story because we were next to this small village, we mixed with the kids there. We were, actually my brother and I were keen on sport and we

and the sister so we played sport all the time as much as we could.

Cricket or football anything, you nearly had to make your own cricket bats in those days. I have, used to, Cleveland wasn't that far from, at least to early cricket matches I could. Even saw Eddie Gilbert the famous black fellow get Bradman out a couple of times. So,

we always keen but that mixed us up with kids.

Well he was the son of my grandfather of course and he did his jackeroo, in those days traditionally most, well there wasn't a lot of industry around there, he went to a, you know went on, set up to go to properties, he jackarooed out on various properties in Western Queensland.

Went off to the war.

He was an artillery - in artillery, he served in France, I've got a copy of the diary on the day he was finally killed, he was had half his jaw smashed and I think he was in hospital about nine months. In England, it was the same day Richthofen, the famous German ace [pilot], got shot down just in the area. He,

that's a bit of a coincidence and he died too in the about 1942 and he, my mother we lived, he and my mother lived in Brisbane at that stage.

Oh a big of a normal, good father yeah, taught us all he could. But

We were pretty short of money in those days and he used to go away and work with sugar with relatives up in North Queensland for half the year.

Yep. During the Depression years and of course during the wet season they didn't work much up there, so he'd be back, that went on for a few years.

No, none.

In those days most folks didn't, actually I haven't told my kids much. I suppose you could say.

Oh yes he was very deaf yes. And I'd say they didn't get very good treatment in those days.

Yes, she was a very stout person, yes. She was brought up, you know as, in Brisbane, well they were both brought up in sort of

you know well-to-do circumstances. My mother went to in western Queensland, she seemed to enjoy it, and she was always around, she lived till she was 88, very independent person, had her own resources, and she used to look after herself. She didn't, up till the day she died she still ran her own bank account, dealt with her own shares, that sort of thing. She went to a nursing home

in Brisbane and died there at the end. But she used to make she'd lived in her own house until about five or six years before she died. She rang up one day and said "Come up here and sell this house for me," much to my amazement. I said "What are you going to do?" and she said "I've booked into the Yeronga Retirement Village," so that was alright, Yeronga was one of the old family areas in Brisbane, and she was happy there, with the family background.

Oh, she, she was a very good, very protective, helped us with our education, managed the family affairs, when my father was away, she used to do a lot of work there's actually a photo there I think, for the Red Cross during both wars. She was always doing something, a great knitter, I've still got socks in the drawer there she knitted.

I think she was fairly conventional for her generation, about all boys was, yeah.

What were my interests, I suppose getting some education and, making some progress

in the world, one of the reasons I joined the militia, was I was getting 13 and four pence a week as a clerk at the Graziers Association and the army used to pay you in those days if you went to a camp you got so much for the weekend, I was interested in building up some finance always and doing jobs that might be of benefit. I did do some accountancy for a while

private study didn't like it of course. But the Graziers offered me a job straight after the war, I could have gone back, I could have gone got a position with them, they were good that way, they stuck with me during the war, they didn't pay me anything, some firms did and, I had, I looked up a book here the other day at about 600 pounds in a pay book when I left the services, I didn't spend it all. I was a bit mean, I used to, you could allocate your pay

to a Commonwealth Bank account in those days, or some of your pay.

Yeah that's about equivalent to Scots College in Sydney.

We were living at this small town Cleveland and I'd just had tetanus and I, it, nobody figured me to live, so it was, they didn't know what to do with me after I recovered. So my grandmother, who was Lady Cowley of course,

she had moved to a big old homestead not far from, and BBC [British Broadcasting Commission] we were related to the Phillip family, Premier of Queensland at one stage and May Phillip who was engaged to one of my father's brothers who died before they were married, but we always called her Aunty May and she never married, she gave , what is not, she and her sister gave what is now Brisbane Boys College complex up there, it's huge and she gave all the land for that, so traditionally we went to BBC,

and I stayed with my grandmother for about two years and I used to go to school from her home, as a day boy.

Oh it was alright. I used to go home for the weekend; it was only about an hour's trip on the train out to Cleveland.

Well such as they were, but a lot of them were hit by the Depression too of course. Brisbane was only a big country town in those days.

Well we were poor side of the well connected family. But everybody helped everybody else out, there was very little social services. But the community, stuck very well together, they helped out there was a system of

dole you might say, not a lot of people on it really, but there was work found wherever possible, but, the things were very cheap of course the cost of living was very low. And, there wasn't any you know any food riots or anything like that you get

in the modern world these days. But people did have a hard time, I can't remember much else, other than that it was par for the course.

Yeah, oh yes. He was younger than me, he was, he was pretty bright, he later became quite a substantial property owner in Queensland, in South West Queensland, he's retired now and

living in Toowoomba. And he had ambitions to go on the land; he kept flying for while after the war. He and John Home were a dentist, had the first flying dentist service in the world after the war, had a couple of Tiger Moths and Dick used to do the flying and John Home would do the dentistry and Dick would do the dental mechanic work and they went around to all the stations in the territory after the war. Well Dick knew his way around

up there anyway. And they did that for a couple of years and then he managed to enter a draw for closed settlement, he drew a big property in Cunnamulla district in Queensland, and he kicked on from there.

No I would have been happy to work on the land. I didn't, I got a bit disoriented after I got tetanus of course.

Well what happens is, you, in those, even today it's pretty hard to treat tetanus, although they seen to be able to do it now. You jaws lock and you have spasms where you just sort of keel over backwards. And I got a cut in the left foot and it got infected and actually the doctor didn't sterilise the cat gut he stitched me up with. And he, the tetanus wog was in that

of course. He was drunk at the time, he did it I think- typical bush doctor, and no anaesthetics or anything and he tied the sinews up the big toe pretty well, it still works. Then my jaw slowly locked, it's terrifying experience of course and then the Brisbane General Hospital they had a special ward, had to more or less a tin hut away from everybody, because apparently you scream like hell with the spasms. But it took a while

to get over that afterwards.

Oh yeah, it's a terrific pain. You remain unconscious for quite a while, took, I think, I couldn't eat or drink anything for ten days. About ten days, they'd try to feed a bit of water through your locked jaw. But, anyway, it, once I had a couple of years and put a big of weight back on, I was right. Well I got in the air force, so,

it wasn't hard to get into the army, you didn't have to be all that fit, but you did in the air force.

Oh probably did yes.

Oh mainly apprehension, you know might get it again sort of thing. And you'd get very tired. It's, you know, you can imagine all the doctors can give you properly diagnosed as tetanus, but it did stress all your muscles

and things. But anyway it's not excuse, I, everybody got over those things in those days, the worst thing was I got pneumonia straight after it because the fluids accumulated in my lungs. And that weakened my lungs probably.

Oh yeah well I would have, well I was still in hospital when I got the pneumonia. I would have died if my mother hadn't just sat with me 24 hours a day, in the hospital, and there were a couple of really good nurses there too.

In the Brisbane General Hospital, so, but she did, she just sat with me you know, when you were having spasms, they used to sponge you down, I was a problem. But anyway that's par for the course.

Oh it would have been.

Oh there was enough staff around, but it's just that personal attention, they can't sit with you 24 hours around in any hospital, no they were good in those days, very professional those nurses. A lot of those nurses went later on into the AIF, the army and services.

My sister was younger, she was three years, four years younger. Yeah, she

she married an architect in Brisbane and they did well, he's since died. He was did a lot of big jobs for companies and WRENS, and those sort of people, different stadium, football ground in Brisbane I think he designed that the rugby union stadium. And she's still alive, she's got a family.

17.

It was a bit hard to sort of mix with people, because you didn't know their backgrounds, you didn't know much about you know

culture if you want to put it that way. But, oh I don't know, you assimilate, young people assimilate pretty quickly.

I don't think we had any problems that way. Made friends and the teachers were fairly laid back in those days, as you can imagine.

The fellowship amongst the students. I wasn't a boarder; I was a day boy but the fellowship of others and other people my age. And, I liked the sport; I played cricket and football there.

Probably cricket. But I left when I was, I didn't do the final two years, two and a half years at school, so I did get in the first 11 when I was

15 I suppose, yeah. A lot of the pupils just couldn't afford to go on for the final two years anyway; they'd get their junior public and then just move on.

Good question, I liked geography, probably, a bit of history. Anything I could, sort of get a grasp of.

Not a lot,

no, although quite a few of the teachers were ex servicemen. The English master he was flack happy or bomb happy [one of the terms used to describe mental upset caused by war experience] if you want to put it that way, we used to call him Uncle Bugger, he was a pretty eccentric type, but there were some pretty good scholars there amongst the teachers.

No they didn't talk about it, I didn't anyway, they didn't no. They had it real hard of course the First World

if you ever been in France and seen what happened there.

Oh about 13 I think, 12 and a half, nearly 13 yes.

Well I didn't know much about it.

Not really now. I just got carted off in an ambulance up to Brisbane General Hospital.

Yeah.

Oh well I didn't know what tetanus was anyway.

No, no, just another illness. It is rather terrifying, that's the only thing about it.

It was in those days, yeah, because there was no treatment for it.

That's about it yes.

Not that I know of and I understand that's what happened.

No not really, it's a long time ago,

better forgotten. You know it was a phase in my life, but it wasn't, I suppose if you want to go back into my service in the various services, there's a lot closer goes than that even, so that, it's the luck of the draw, whatever happens.

No they had a special enclosure if I remember rightly

because you made too much noise.

Yeah, as you were recovering of course they put you in a general ward. Which was you know typical old hospitals in those days. There's nothing modern about the hospitals. The doctors were as good as they could be.

Brisbane General, yeah.

Yeah, there was a time yeah.

Just left up to you.

I was getting pretty right again.

Well once I got a job I got, about when I was, as I say 16 and a half, I think halfway through that particular year at school.

Oh yeah that's when I went to the secondary school. See I was 13, 14, 15 and 16, yes.

At BBC I was there about three years, two and half years I suppose. I, and, once I was working for the Graziers Association I joined the militia while I was there.

Oh well it, no, yeah it was alright it was good.

Well you met all sorts of people, for instance Dick Boyer was one of my bosses, Sir Richard Boyer, I remember he used to come to work and have the seat of his pants patched, that's how the Depression hit him. I mean he was the father of the ABC, really, he was a character, he had a property out at Goondiwindi in Western Queensland.

Yeah.

Oh well, it was good training, further training for whatever. It was obvious it was going to be a war anybody could see that, so it's better than being conscripted

into something, I never got conscripted anywhere, entirely a volunteer always. And when you come back to Australia from the Middle East and you see these poor fellows being conscripted, hopeless leaders and no experience, and I didn't want to be in that. It's like being in the middle mob of sheep I suppose better being the goat that lead them.

Yeah well I suppose I was in a way.

Yeah, long before it happened, yes. I used to be read all the news….One of my old aunty's said to me that one of the best educations is buy a decent newspaper every day and read it all. And make sure it's a good newspaper and of course, it was full of war stories at that stage, it was quite obvious, and history books they all set up with, economically with was setting up as the First World War did.

Very little, I don't think we had a wireless, yes we did, I used to, sit u all night with the Crystal Set [early radio] listening to test matches in England, with the ear phones on like that. But we didn't have a well we did have a wireless I suppose, yeah. But the news, it was mainly newspapers.

But the country was very poorly governed really in those days; you know the defences had run down the same as out in Britain. The, there were a lot of good leaders around, like [John] Monash [Australian First World War general] was still alive and people like that, and probably some of the top leaders in the world Monash was anyway, and every Australian kid before he posted his year 12 should be made to read Monash,

some of the books written on Monash, the latest one written is very good. Australians can do all sorts of things, but they never woke up to themselves until recently. It's amazing. I mean it's like, in England, Australian pilots would go and do a fixed, a conversion unit or to pick up crews and the drill was you didn't go along and try and select anybody, you spend about three days on the station,

wandered around and probably in my case, a navigator came along to me and he said "I've got to put a crew together I'd like to fly with you". Well that's, just because I was an Australian, he didn't know if I was any good or not I don't think. It did happen that way anyway, they did have access to your records a bit but, the Australian's achieved a good reputation in the First World War, but they did all sorts of outrageous

childish things too. But we were, just the colonial branch of the British Empire out here really, and but the talents always been here and it's just becoming more and more advanced, of course now of course the migration scheme transformed the country.

It was just a traditional one,

it wasn't, well it was more, I had more with the national feeling about Australia than most people in those days. I didn't want to be run by some, although I mean I saw quite a lot of the, when I was in England, I followed through, I went to the House of Commons for debates and that sort of thing but that was, you know finding out what happens, how the world worked probably, I was interested in how the world worked. Just naturally inquisitive I suppose.

You'd have one night a week at Kelvin, a place called Kelvin Grove. We just did a lot of theoretical training, gun loading and all that sort of thing, they had old 18 pounder guns they'd used in the First World War, and then you'd have a camp of about a fortnight a year. But as the war got closer you got called up, I was actually in camp the night war started. I've got a photo there, of the

on a 18 pounder gun on the night [Robert] Menzies [Prime Minister of Australia] declared war, you know you'd fire the shells and half of them were inert, they didn't even go off they were so old. So it's just as well, nobody appeared over the horizon for a considerable time after that. But once it started the militia we were virtually on call, we were in camp all the time, and most of the, you either got out of it,

you went around straight through to the AIF.

Oh about probably a couple of hundred and there were militia units all over the place in those days around Australia, volunteer services.

Oh yeah, probably with my background,

probably my western Queensland, I like I could ride horses as soon as I could walk that kind of thing, and on fairly big properties , so I probably find myself, probably a big more resourceful in the paddock so to speak than the bloke's born in the suburbs, and never been anywhere else. I hung around a bit.

A little bit perhaps not much, it might have been mentally tougher.

Oh well we'll be going next. Yeah, we, we had a radio, two blokes on my gun crew were twin sons of the Premier of Queensland, [William] Forgan Smith. I don't know what happened to them, but, so we did get a bit of information. Yeah well everybody wanted to accepted they'd probably end up in some form of services.

Well a lot of the dedicated ones wanted to join up as quick as they could, a big percentage joined up because they probably thought it would be their duty sooner or later. And another big percentage were unemployed people. May as well go for a whack and…

Oh well I suppose I, I'd hope to say I was

interested in the welfare of the country. That's about it.

Yeah but we were so closely tied, economically particularly the rest of them particularly in Europe. I mean everything was basically back at, oh well the justice system was still appeal to the

House of Lords [British court], the ultimate.

My family had a tradition of being British anyway, all the families did in those days, even the convicts or the ex convicts. In those days it wasn't fashionable to be a convict. Some of them burnt their records, got rid of their records, they'd regret it now because it's much more elite to have come out in chains than it is, any other way, especially the New South Wales Corp [miliary force brought out to guard the convicts] mob.

Probably we were, the police forces became endemic in those days. They're worse than the crims I think, the so called convicts. That was Australia, it was colonial outpost and still, but it was, and the war developed the American invasion during the war of course, made a tremendous difference.

Not really, no I don't think so, if anybody thought seriously about it, I mean why would you want to risk getting your head blown off. The main was you'd, you know it, I was keen on travelling I'll admit that and there was that sense of being open travellers, as soon as we got to the Middle East you can go on leave parties where we could

and we got holy places and god knows what, same in England I used to travel everywhere.

But once you lived in it for a while you settle down and that's more or less a professional occupation. And you wanted to, once you got involved to realise, what would happened, you could just, if you wanted to stay alive worked out the best way you could to become efficient at it.

Yes, I think so.

Oh well I waited till I turned 19, see the, you couldn't, you weren't supposed to, you had to sign on, that you were 20 or older to get in the AIF to volunteer.

In those days, so I waited till I was 19 and you had to get your parent's consent, but my father was in North Queensland at the time so my mother gave consent. She wouldn't give it any earlier because she said if they search the records they will find you were illegitimate too, so, she wouldn't be in that.

They sort of accepted that everybody was

doing it, I think, I think same as they did a generation before, it was the thing to do wasn't it. That's the way they looked at it.

Oh well I just signed up and I was a year older. I got into trouble when I joined the air force because I had to produce a birth certificate, so I had to reduce my age by a year.

I've got, on discharged certificates I've got two ages.

Oh for me, the militia, I just transferred across, I was the first in the, there was six of us that joined, from the militia three professional soldiers, Sergeant Majors that had full time owing, they'd been to the coronation in London actually and a couple of years before that, was six of us transferred across so we went into

a holding depot, for about a week at Redbank camp and then we were allotted to our regiment, which was 2nd Anti Tank. So I was actually in my first six in Brisbane in Queensland, there's a photo there somewhere of Chris, Chris from Courier Mail [newspaper], office.

8th of May 1940.

Yeah intensive training at Redbank

yeah, Brisbane.

Well there were people coming in from all over the place. And they, they, you know and completely untrained but they were fair dinkum [genuine] and they were mostly given drill, a lot of physical exercises, we did pretty hard training, marching and all that sort of thing and knock them into gear, it's amazing to see some of the portly sort of over spoilt, over fat

boys come in, had to know the… but I, I was a sergeant training people old enough to be my father.

Oh you bet, it was in a month I think. But because I had so much in the militias anybody that could, should instruct in any way with, was sort of singled out.

Oh I think so yeah.

Yeah I think I did although like I, I was at a disadvantage, didn't know how to handle people most of them fight until three or four years before that, but, really I got on alright, somebody the older blokes protected me for a while. That I was with sergeants who were fairly experienced some of them older than me.

I think I was probably the youngest sergeant in the regiment, but, it's only an age, I don't seem, you seem to get experience, it's been very useful experience.

Oh yeah, well he had to follow procedures of artillery and infantry training the whole thing whole works, anti tank guns

we would use in association with infantry. The artillery of course, was way back beyond the lines, but it's different form of operation.

Didn't have any, we had wooden guns and god knows what, there was no equipment. But you did it in theory and you did marches and all that sort of thing.

I could find my way through the night marches and that sort of thing when we used to go out in the scrub country or whatever. That was a bit real because probably in the background was the next Queenslander's kid. You did guard duties and that type of thing.

On the eighth of May

1942 and we embarked on the Queen Mary on October 1940. And the regiment had been knocked into gear pretty well by then. Then we went and trained in Quastina and Palestine. And that was pretty hard training and blokes were very fit because the food ration was just not good enough, but there was no, alcohol no thing,

in that respect and we tried to, we're pretty long, hours of training we trained pretty hard, the sport, they had football teams they had good football teams and. Ex professional league and you know in play all the red displayed by the red union. Well, but there were some, you know every regiment had one or two, possibly test players, and if you

got in the football team well you, the CO's [commanding officer] of various regiments wanted to have the best football team so you missed out on a lot of mundane training. You'd spend half the day training football.

No we didn't play - was just over there, no there wasn't time for anything.

Yeah about a week I think, yes.

I think it was about a week's leave.

Oh well no different to what it is probably in every day of your live that you charted.

Not really. Well I suppose there was but I mean they were committed, what they were, it depends on if you're a negative or positive thinker.

Negative thinkers probably had a lot of apprehension, positive thinkers didn't. I mean you may as well have a go at it, you can't alter the course of your life really, you try to steer it a bit.

Yeah well there's a photo of the Queen Mary there. Yeah well I do, we go down, I do a bit in Sydney came down to do my training course.

Everything looked a bit different to what they did in Brisbane, the houses on stilts in Brisbane and nice big bungalows in Sydney. The Mary was sitting out on the harbour; we went out by pilot to it.

Oh magnificent of course. About what you know, we'd expected it might be I suppose. And half of Sydney turned out when it steamed out of the heads in October. It, didn't, I saw it

later in the war and it had huge numbers of people on, but it didn't have, it might have had five or six thousand troops on it, about all, picked up some in Melbourne, no picked a convoy up in Melbourne. There was the Queen Mary, the Mauritania and the Aquitania, that was the convoy. They were all Cunard line [shipping company] ship, first class ships. The Queen Mary, the hospital, the OT [Operating Theatre]

was still a kids nursery there were toys and things in it. It was you know a polished up ship in those days, not too bad, it became a troop ship later on. It was so fast that you could get across the Atlantic, providing it did a, did exact course, it didn't need a lot of escorting; it had to bring American troops across, droves, straight across to France.

Oh I suppose it was, with a hell of a lot of blokes and, it we, I think I slept on the deck at night time. Yeah it was alright we could, I managed to get over the ship and down the engine rooms and I all that sort of thing.

Only because I was interested.

Oh pretty rough, the food was fairly rough as it always was in the army.

But it went to Bombay so we disembarked in Bombay.

Oh only going across, I had a pretty decent dose of the flu, and I was in the hospital for about four or five days we went across the Great [Australian] Bight. There was a gale blowing, a big ship used to roll a bit, it was a

sensation I'd never enjoyed before, put it that way, that's about it.

Medical? Oh good, quite good yeah, though there was one, a team of Australian nurses on board, there were four, AGH [Australian General Hospital], it later established itself in Palestine.

On the ship, I've got no idea.

Oh probably I don't know, not very many. Because nobody got really sick it was only for odd things like there was a bout of influenza going around, and I, I was a bit careful, that I got a bit of treatment for cold and flu after having pneumonia and I probably over did it a bit.

Oh yes, it wasn't a children's hospital it was just a nursery

and they converted it into a bit of a sick bay that's all it was.

Some of the bits and pieces still around yeah. They called in to Perth and then the next stop was Bombay.

Oh no, hell no, no security.

Oh not really I didn't

I mean if I knew, it if was broadcast where the Queen Mary was going, what do you think every submarine in the far north's going to do? No in the services security was a big thing. Even I been on major raids to Germany and never knew where I was going to, was in a locked up briefing room next stop was the aircraft. That's the only way they could do it.

India we went, had about 10 days up at the old English, the old pukka sahib station, Indian army station up in the hills.

Oh great, it was typical old colonial English, Indian rule, hot curries, food was good and it typical colonial British Indian.

The barracks were all old retired army generals up there, I remember the night we all marched out to parade out there, we all paraded and the regiment got pretty good by then, by then they were very regimental, and the sergeants were of course in the usual position and some old general pottered up and he looked at me and he said "How old are you son?" and I said "I'm 20" and he said "Yeah" and away he went, so I must have looked younger than.

But, we marched out with whole regimental browns [uniforms] and so on, and then went back to Bombay and got on another small troop ship.

In India, oh yeah.

Oh yeah, there was a lot of Indian troops in, Buna is a big military establishment. There were a lot of, they were very good troops, especially the Sikhs,

and there were some magnificent troops.

Oh yes.

Oh, they were dedicated professional soldiers. They loved being it, they loved their uniform.

Yep. They were the colonial style professional that's been out there for years. It was a sort of retirement area for sort of, so

there were a lot of high ranking officers that do a session in India before they finish their careers. India was well under control by the civil service.

Yeah, we could hire a, I think we did hire a taxi and went around a bit and, some of the country side.

Well it was difficult but India nearly what you see today, it hasn't changed much.

But huge populations.

Didn't have time really. We did a bit of shopping in Bombay before we went on the ship. On the way, at, up to, we went up the Suez Canal then of course and got off at El Kantara. And typical troop train to Palestine. Stinking hot.

Oh well it's still a desert climate, the Sinai. Oh no it's about as hot as you get in Western Queensland. But all that area of Palestine hadn't been developed, now it's a magnificent irrigation of waters and gardens everywhere. It was, all the camps are pretty sandy situations.

Quastina which is on the road from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and the cross roads. There was a camp just been established there so.

Yes there was Australians over there before that. It was under British Army control of course.

Well the camp was set up with what they call EPIP [English Pattern, Indian Production] tents, they were Indian army tents, big square tents. They were dug into he ground so I dug in, this was only in case of air raids you were down with other, about six foot down and a tent erected over the top of that. And they had sort of wicker baskets to sleep on, they were like wicker baskets, stretches. Eight if I remember likely

eight I think it was to a tent and it hadn't rained for two years around Quastina, an the Arabs and the Jews got together and had a joint religious ceremonies and it rained about four or five inches and just about drowned us all, soon after we got there. In the bog, in the mud, was strange. Only time the Arabs and the Jews have gotten together I think, whether that

had anything to do with it, or it's just a freak, so, climatic occasion. We used to get leave from there, I remember we went up to Jerusalem before Christmas. I got a lot of photos there of.

Oh well it's was the old ancient city. It's fascinating of course, but in those days you could get down to the, where Christ lay in the manger, down at Bethlehem so on and

it was, well the Palestine police controlled the country though after the First World War, and of courses, if you were an Australian I used to go to a few leave parties and a sergeant in charge of about six people you know so you could go anywhere. But, the doubt, it gave you a bit of an insight into religion in a way it, you'd go down into the area where Christ was alleged to have laid

in the manger and nowadays, I've been back since and there's a queue about half a mile long to get in of course. It was in its natural state and you could just go in to have a look but the were three religious groups there had control of it and they got so they were burning incense and trying to smoke each other out, you know but it was crude. You know really but all the religious places

were very professionally guarded by the respective religions. Nowadays they are just to be tourist Meccas [zones]. But that, the whole area of Jerusalem but then the you know the old city itself it's a fascinating set up you can imagine back 2000 years, it as a.

You soon adapted to it.

Oh yeah the Arabs yeah.

Oh they were just very crude, uneducated people mostly, then there was the Armenians, as you can imagine there's a mixture of crossbreeds I mean Jerusalem was conquered so often over the years, but pure fella desert Arab was pretty pure, but there are a tremendous

amount of mixture. They're a bit like if you go to, Damascus was another place where the absolutely fascinating place, because not a lot, it was pretty raw then, and it had been controlled by the Turkish Empire for so long that it was you know, gave you an insight to the old Middle East. Jerusalem was, you know the Jews were around by that stage,

I actually met Moshe Dayan [Israel military commander and statesman], the young army officer and he later became you know…Moshe Dayan was a brilliant general.

Oh yeah.

Well they were mostly hardening them up and tactics and

all of that sort of thing. There was no guns for us to play with, so we didn't get any training in that respect, we did get a little bit and shooting you know is the main thing, you know how to handle your weapons, but that was about it until we went up the desert.

About three months, we had, what'd we have

November, December, January, February, about four months. About March we went up the desert, and that was about the time March, April, May, when all the debacles were going on in Greece and Crete and we were destined to go to Greece, all year, [Erwin] Rommel [German Field Marshall] landed in north Africa when we were on our way to Alexandria, I think to get on a ship, and we diverted up to, went west up towards

Egyptian border and up to Libya. We only got as far as the Libyan border about as far as Tobruk our unit. And Rommel or course was racing across from El Aghella at that stage; there was no troops to stop him. All equipment had gone to Greece.

They didn't brief the troops nearly enough,

hardly at all. Half the time the officers and the, it was a shemozzle [mess] down there, I mean I'm comparing it with what happened in Bomber Command which is completely the opposite, see I might be a bit critical but the troops never knew what was going on and that included probably quite a lower ranking officers down to the troops. There is always plenty of rumours, they used to call them "Latrinagraph Rumours", or whatever you like.

But being an anti tank gun we usually get allotted to some of the regiments and you're no different, as protection for instance, we had about four or five days with General Wavell's caravan and he was a major general had been captured not long before that and Wavell was in control of virtually the British forces in North Africa for a while and

he didn't have any proper protection around his own headquarters, so the anti tank gun there was us. And but he was, he'd come along and have a yarn, a very short yarn. There were some brilliant staff officers at that stage, British staff officers. And they contained it fairly well, they'd move whatever troops they had around the desert all the time. They had a lot

of wooden guns they used to move and it's pretty hard for you to comprehend the generation what went on, but, it, it was got very, the equipment was the main thing, when we first went up the desert, there was a big base at , oh just not far from where El Alamein ended up. When we first went through 'Alamein there was just an old railway station there, and the lines had been blown up anyway by air raids…

So anyway go ahead, do you want to know anything about the western desert?

Yeah we went to North Africa first and then to Syrian Campaign.

Well in sequence it makes it easier to remember.

After.

Yeah well we move, are you right, we moved from Palestine across the Suez Canal to a camp near the pyramids, the giant pyramids in Egypt, and from there we, we thought we were going to Greece, we took the road to Alexandria,

There's a turn off about 21 k's [kilometres] I'd say outside of Alexandria which heads out into the western desert area, due west, unbeknown to us, we did not proceed to Alexandria we presumed we were going to Greece and we turned up to the desert, the main reason was of course, Rommel had landed in North Africa about a fortnight before and he was on the rampage there was no troops to stop him virtually,

so we headed up the coast as far as we could go, our unit got about almost as far as Tobruk. On the way up nobody knew what was going, a lot of the dust storms, the dust storms in that North Africa were most like face powder stuff and it's extremely difficult to know what you're doing. The only track was cobblestone roads and of course a lot of the vehicles got knocked

about, on the way up we picked up some Italian anti tank guns that had been captured earlier on we didn't have any equipment of our own, about a week later we did get our own equipment which was inadequate, and a lot of it got damaged and we virtually, we ended up round about, if we'd gone on any longer we'd have ended up in Tobruk and it would have been the siege in six months we were, we were quite a lot of, there were three British Generals captured

at that stage, because a lot of troops, so there, warfare in the desert evolved into more or less skirmishes, Rommel was extended with his patrols and it was just a holding campaign until the forces built up again. The main force of the Australian army was in Greece, and most of the British troops plus any equipment. Equipment was very, very short supply at that stage.

There was not a lot of air force protection, there was, on the ship on the way over we went over with the famous three squadron, Australians and they were flying Goths to Gladiators, bi-planes [older types of aircraft], and of course you can image what a Me109 [Messerschmitt 109- German fighter aircraft] did to them. The, the Germans had were doing a lot of heavy raids on placed like Malta, but they didn't do much raiding on the troops area.

We, more or less did skirmish anywhere, attached to the various British army units, individually, anti tank guns, most interesting experience I had, was my gun was attached to the Coldstream Guards for about a week or ten days, and they were the old guards outside of Buckingham Palace, pre war magnificent soldiers you had to be six feet to get in the regiment and, very interesting people, most of them had been on guards around the palace when Eddie was

playing up with Mrs Simpson [reference to scandal which occurred in the 1930s when the King abdicated in order to marry an American divorcee] of course and the usual things went on. And a very interesting blokes, they knew all the local scandals and, incidentally a great number of those blokes would have been killed in the next two years, plus their officers. They were magnificent troops, but they were you know, sooner or later they had to get killed, they were in so many campaigns. There were a lot of, there were some Indian troops with them at that stage, Ghurkhas, and they used to do night patrols, which was very interesting,

we'd go out nights, they'd have special Ghurkha knives and the Germans didn't like them at all. They were magnificent soldiers especially in the dark, they, some of them had magnificent night vision.

Yeah I was with them a few times.

They were totally dedicated soldiers and loved it. Ghurkhas are bloodthirsty beasts anyway, but they were highly trained in the old tradition of Ghurkhas,

British army.

Oh yes.

I tried to bring one home as a souvenir, but I, they didn't let me – yeah. There were knives and knuckle busters I think. We were at Sollum on the border for quite a while and they'd go out at night time and intercept German patrols, so there were no major battles at that stage, everybody was skirmishing around. Our guns couldn't

take on a German tank so we used to keep back out of the way as much as possible with the people we were trying to protect, mostly army headquarters people.

Two pounders, anti tank guns. We started off with Italian guns and then mostly we had shanghai would have been just as good. That went on, the food was terrible, it was crook, know bully beef [canned meat] in the temperature, you open a tin of bully beef in the middle of the day and the fat would run out of it.

And as a result some of the troops were getting jaundiced later on after a few months especially if they've been in Tobruk. The French, had Free French troops at a couple of regiments there, there were mixed troops in the desert, the rest the VC [Vichy] French were fighting for the Germans [Vichy French sympathised with their German occupiers, Free French were opposed] at the time that's when they were harassing Syria, that was a political war that developed of course. But the most

interesting we had a few days and General Gotz headquarters and he had that caravan that [General Bernhard] Montgomery [commander of the 8th Army] finally took over and they had fairly good communications and he did his best to hold the things together. Later on he was due for, he was to fly to Cairo when, an occasion when [Winston] Churchill [British Prime Minister] was there to take command of the 8th Army and he went in a little light, a light Sandra aeroplane with on pilot

he said, "I'll be right" and it must have been got knows what happened but he got shot down and killed see, that's how Montgomery got his appointment to the eighth army. It's quite interesting, but he'd been in the First World War and, he, I had a one of my crew was an old western Queenslander, and he was a great old scrounger he could do anything; he was typical old station owner. And there was dug outs and there was a stand too, it was always about

an hour before daylight, so old Bill used to get down in one of the old dug outs and he'd brew tea so one morning there's an awful row going on outside and it's the general, those fire down in the dug out, it should be, so anyway old Bill, we were doing everything else right and the General said "oh Australian's eh," he said "I knew all about you blokes in the First World War" and he turned around had a cup of tea with old Bill, now that's a bloke that could have had Montgomery's job if he'd have lived.

It was unreal, you know, just one of those coincidences.

Well it started about an hour before daylight and you just, you did whatever, if you were patrolling, you know with anybody you just went with them, you'd find the site you were going to the best position. But in the desert it was you know sand ridges and very little timber,

great range, temperature range, at night time you'd nearly freeze you, in your coat and at day time it'd get up to you know 40 or 50 degrees. And dust storms were crook. But, nobody really knew what was going on of course, not even in the, the big thing that happened later on was the old British Army establishments in Cairo were still running things from Cairo.

Once Montgomery got out there, he established his headquarters right near the front line, always, and he and he went through Cairo and he sacked half the old staff officers and sent them home to England in droves and put in his own people out there and that transformed army command in the Middle East there was also a very good appointment by Churchill or [Admiral] Cunningham to do that, all the naval stuff in the Middle East and the air force. And Montgomery had the air force commanders and the naval commanders

all in his, virtually on his staff, high ranking, representatives, so for once the coordination started and Montgomery was a brilliant organiser in that respect that he put the old fashioned, the old traditional, hopelessly incompetent systems aside and he did it pretty quickly too. Just one incidence I did know, there was a, new ADC [aide de camp] came out, just fresh

from Sandhurst, arrived at Montgomery's headquarters and Montgomery said "Who are you?" He said, "I'm so and so, your new ADC", He said, "You were mate", he didn't say, "You mate" he said, "You were" and just walked off. And of course the poor bloke went back to England the next day and Montgomery's own appointment was made, you know that was, the old traditions still running a war that was 100 years, you know beyond what the thinking was back in a lot of headquarters in those days.

Well it wasn't in total disarray but it was, you can imagine one bloke in Cairo and one bloke a ship in the Mediterranean [Sea] and all running their own little wars, or their own big wars, or trying to, the central command was not sufficiently centralised on the spot.

I wasn't a general I was a mere sergeant, but that's what, I mean everybody was a general in the army from the lowest cook,

could tell you what should be done, but it was an observation.

It was quite obvious, this specific incidents, there was never any proper intelligence coming through. I probably got all that sharpened up later on, I realised, it's hindsight I'm saying I'm saying, a lot of it is, because Bomber Command intelligence

was unbelievable, it, it, nobody and, there was great shortages of equipment and, the was officer in London was running things, strategically over all like the Greek campaigns and all that sort of thing, Singapore, you name it, and it wasn't coordinated enough and of course when the American's came in it got even worse.

But they muddled through in those stages and of course later on it became much more efficient. The air force were pretty good because to get anywhere in the air forces you had to, well first of all, in active side, you had to fly, get your feet off the ground and fly well that pruned a lot of people out, they couldn't they didn't get any commands. Not really, not in the actual operational command.

But anyway later on of course we were, the build up in the Middle East had, the Germans had taken Greece and Crete and it looked as though they were building up to invade Syria, the Vichy French of course were on side in that respect, well the Vichy French ran, or the French ran Syria post the First World War, under the Treaty of Versailles [treaty formed at the end of World War I] and they were well

established in Syria and the Germans had, the French Foreign Legion by the way went over to the Vichy French, the whole lot of them and they garrisoned Syria, well they were amazing blokes you know they were what you read about in the novels.

Well a lot of them were black troops Senegalese, just professional killers, soldiers, and big Arak drinkers, they would them up with rum or arak and that helped a bit.

But they were well disciplined, there were a lot of misfits in the officers you know, probably criminals, and, a lot of them are criminals and then there was, they mainly garrisoned Syria, plus German troops, not a lot of German troops. So that when the, it was finally decided that the allies better move into Syria, before the Germans occupied it and that's how it all started.

Mostly done by Australian troops, the whole history is in that book over there. And a few New Zealanders and three or four, or a number of British units. And, a few air force units, the air protection was very sparse at that stage there was not a lot, you, and, later on the air cover covered every trip that we did, in a massive way, whereas in those days

there weren't enough planes around to do anything, virtually we were cleaned up quickly our worming forces on the other side, but we assembled again, we came across the Suez Canal.

From North Africa finally.

In our own vehicles, we had our own equipment and we had our own guns mounted on the back of vehicles at that stage and all these back up vehicles, the regimental back up,

a regiment comprised an anti tank regiment about 800 men at that stage in four batteries.

Yes we were then, once we were pulled out, in that stage in movements and that sort of thing, but once we got, once we got back into battle areas, we would not be, we'd be under the command of Coldstream Guards, anybody. That we were allotted to, the

protection, that worked alright although professional soldiers but we knew we were going to Syria, we knew we were going to Palestine, we didn't really know but it was quite obvious we were heading up near Turkey, so at that stage it was doubtful that Turkey was neutral to the whole war, and it was, you know it was possible that there were going to be problems up there. But it was to counter the possibility of the Germans occupying

Syria, which was, would have been a key occupation of course, with Rommel in North Africa and a foothold in Syria, they could have squeezed the Middle East right out Suez Canal and the whole works wouldn't have been a problem, but fortunately they got very heavily involved from Russia at the time and as time went on and the next winter that came on, of course the big huge German losses in Russia, like Stalingrad and so on, like subsequent it was the Syrian's campaign.

But the Syrian campaign was done in three sectors, it was the coastal sector and the centre sector and the, sector along the, what is now Iraq.

Yeah but I'll give you an outline. Now our, four, six anti tank guns I think were allotted to a column that went up the centre.

And the Golan Heights are rugged; we staged in Northern Palestine at a place called Narlisle, which is a Jewish kibbutz, we camped out there and I think we had about four or five days there but the kibbutz's were, like once the child was born they were virtually reared in the kibbutz's, I think they still do it but it was just up the north end of the Sea of Galilee. And you know very biblical and all that sort of thing, the,

I think where we camped there were some beautiful Australian gum trees, huge trees that had been planted after World War Two, and whoever the agronomist was who planted them made sure they were disease free and they still are. A lot of the eucalypts in Syria, Palestine are better looking than the ones out here because they don't get all the diseases out trees do.

No, on no, we just camped near it, or at night time we visited their homes. Or their whatever it was.

Oh well, there were people from, Jews that had escaped from Italy from Europe, most of them were fortunate to be alive, there is not a, probably a couple of hundred of them in the kibbutz had come off that ship at Hereford that turned over on it's side and a lot of them drowned there. They, very philosophical about what happened, they'd lost al their relatives and all that sort of thing, they were pretty gloomy sort of people as you can imagine.

They'd come to the promised land and glad to be alive and still, it was very early days for Jewish settlement, well you've been there you know what it's like now.

Well as I say, Moshe Dayan was a member of that kibbutz for a short period, and you couldn't get a more devout Jewish Israelite than he was later, brilliant man, absolutely brilliant.

Oh I just remember

talking to him, he was only an ordinary foot soldier then, and the Egyptian, the Jews were smart they joined the allied cause and they started to raise their own troops, and that's what put them in the position post war to do the Arabs over. The, though they very subtly got control of all of the infrastructure, the kibbutz up there at Sea of Galilee was handy because if you go up there today you'll see that all water the fresh water

that's pumped out of the, out of the sea is staged on huge storage tanks on the mountains and it gravitates all over the country from there, so if the Arabs play up too much at Gaza they can turn the water off on them anyway. You know they haven't got a chance the Arabs, they haven't.

Yeah well probably saw that, they got no hope, they're completely outdone. But they had all that in the back of their minds then,

don't worry about that. They've been arguing about that holy land for what 2000 years haven't they or more, so they didn't miss it. And their voice, even in those days they probably got a lot of York [ie American] finance, New York Jews and so on, which they do now. When I, last time I was there which is a few years ago, there were something like 21 billion dollars had been poured in from New York other than you know the United Nation loans so, that's how they've got such a tremendous grip on the country.

They are bright people. I am personally am an Arab sympathiser not a Jew sympathiser, because the, they were, I got to know one Arab pretty well, he came back to Quastina he was the same age as me and I was, I was in charge of the guard at the camp he used to steal everything the Arabs he could over night, and, so we had patrols going around the camp every night and I was the sergeant of the guard,

soon after I arrived there and I got to know this bloke he was a, a local, Muctar, Muctar Anserfar and he, we worked out, he could hardly spoke any English and I had a little bit of Arabic and a few translators around, we were born pretty well the same day so all thieving stopped while I had my week on duty and he was you know, a very intelligent bloke but no, probably hadn't had any education.

And he lived in mud huts, all that's changed of course.

Oh yeah, well it was problem, it was insurmountable, who the hell would ever sort it out. The only time really in my opinion it was every properly sorted out was between World War I and the end of World War Two and the British mandate went in, the British were great colonialists and they just build a Palestine police point and all the major hills around the country and

threatened anybody that didn't obey the law, which was pretty commonsense law for both sides and they were impartial as far as I could see and when of course once it changed, so much politics came into it. We're not fighting a war, we're fighting politics at the moment, but it may be of interest to know that, that was my opinion, even at that age I could sort of comprehend that.

Well I'd come from a political family background perhaps, there was always a bit of politics in both sides of the family way, and there was old British Colonial stuff if you want to put it that way. There wasn't any more colonial than the state, the state government in 1859 in Queensland. You know there was, the, I didn't, I was never indoctrinated into that background, anything else but it was there I suppose, I took an interest in it.

Well then we headed up towards Syria and we crossed the border at a point right up in the Golan Heights and where you often see nowadays, there's always trouble there. I, we went through there I think I was with the leading troops, and I captured the custom code written up to the day on the border and I've had it here for years and I

cannot find it, they want it down the memorial because they haven't got a, they've only got a very small section on the Syrian campaign there. And it was amended up to date in French of course and anyway we then proceeded and fought our way up to Marjayoun which is mountainous country and there was several battles up there that went on for about 40 days roughly.

Well, yeah, I, there six anti tank guns went up there attached to the infantry that were there and artillery we used to bloke at D file, so there were quite a few tanks there, the French had their own tanks, their Reynold tanks which our guns could handle, they'd pierce them.

Yeah, yeah. They were French Army troops but the most of the Foreign Legion were infantry blokes.

And, the main skirmish we had, we'd been there about a week was when, the French counter attacked and they were driving their own forces back out and my gun and three others were blocked into D files, we lost the two forward guns their crews, most of the crews were killed on the two forward guns. My gunman managed to block, we blocked,

about, we knocked about five tanks out, according to war history which was just over open sites at a distance from here to the ramp up there, and, fortunately the first couple of tanks caught fire you can imagine we had these tracer things, you aim through your telescopic sights, and you could follow the flight by tracer, so anyway, we blocked the, there's a bit of a description of it,

we got mentioned in dispatches and it's written up,

Oh well it was just a gunnery engagement, it, we, there'd been a lot of losses up forward, there were troops killed and so on, this is before, the Cutler episode, that was a few days later. And the France reoccupied a lot of the country that had been taken, including there's a big fort at Marjayoun,

so we occupied that. They did a tank attack down D Files, and there was a lot of, it would have cut off a lot of the troops we had up forward, in the mountains, there you get, the only way of transport, unless you walked you couldn't get guns and things, and on the main tracks, and there were two guns forward of me and they were cleaned up by the, they were, three of the crews

escaped on one. And there were two guns sighted to, I was given a map reference by our troop commander of where to go, he got an MC [Military Cross] afterwards, that this is how things happen. Anyway, we put the, the gun, we did handle it pretty well I had a really good crew and we were old bushies and we fired about 70 rounds into tanks and things and we blocked D File up for about an hour and a half and a lot of

the regiments, a lot of the troops escaped from out of there, got out, that was the main thing there but, the, old Bill Bowman was my gun layer, he was, oh, half, he must have been in his 40's then and I'm a 19 year old sergeant, I'd just turned 20 then and he was one of these old bushies, he always rolled a lot of cigarettes, every time we'd fire a round we'd block a tank, and, he'd, they used to gather their strength and work

out new tactic, he rolled another cigarette, he ended up with about 20 ready made cigarettes stuck around the platform of the gun. But he totally calm, no trouble at all, you'd think he was shooting kangaroos. And, and they were very high velocity gun and, but, they just, we'd routed them out with them to just about darken the infantry started to come around to cut us off, the Foreign Legion, well there was several, bullets went through the back of the truck, one just

missed the back of my shirt, made a nick, I thought this is, so we finally withdrew, so at this stage, most of the troops had got a way and there was a divergence see at that stage, too, the French had captured some of the American aircraft in Greece and changed the roundel, the RAF roundel was reversed to the French roundel and these things were flying over and we thought they were our own aircraft and they started bombing us. Anyway there was a Beaufighter gun back behind us and they chopped one

of them down, so it blocked things for a while and it burnt of course as it hit the ground. And we finally got out of that predicament and drew back about five of six kilometres and the force was reorganised then. And then, our, the rest of the time there we were used for the same sort of purposes. We never got any real close combat like that again, we were a bit lucky to get out of that one.

There was plenty of noise, you know, artillery was firing all the time, both sides of us and they make a lot of noise, the anti tank guns, they make a noise, a very high piercing noise, it affects your ears, you can't, you can hardly hear for a couple of days after an episode like that. And the darkness came of course and you know, we assembled in there, but from then on it was mainly

blocking up D files and then the allied side attacked again, and [Arthur Rodan] Cutler established himself up in the Merj Ayoun, he, out gun at that stage was pretty well up in the forward area and I remember him coming along with a cove called Clarke, Captain Clarke was the main artillery officer and they were a happy pair of blokes, you know they were rearing to go, so away they

went with the signal officer and they established themselves I the fort but finally the fort was retaken again and Clarke was killed, and Cutler got out of it, and, he still operated the artillery which was a long way back behind the lines but signals, by - the wires laid along ground actually, the old signal system and he did a fantastic job and blocked the thing but he was

he was an amazing bloke, he didn't seem to care much, he later lost his leg down at Damour on the coast, but that's where [at Merj Ayoun] he got his main citation for his VC [Victoria Cross].

I used to see him on Anzac Day occasionally and he was lucky to live, there was some pretty good nurses in the 3rd AGH and the 2nd AGH that looked after him. He got gangrene and but he turned out to be a very good Governor,

a good bloke.

Only there just in that particular ten days perhaps that's all, then he moved on to a different area. I had a cousin there that was killed at the same time, he was in the our unit,

A cousin of mine, yeah, he and Cutler were pretty good friends. But you didn't, look everything moved so quickly,

you know you didn't see one another a hell of a lot.

It just worked. I don't know it worked. System worked, did most of it, the actual, you had to use your own initiative what you did and who you shot at and so on, and made your own decision. We did have, we did have troop commanders and all of that sort of thing, but it was pretty difficult for them to

keep up with individual guns. The sergeant more or less did it and, we, there were quite a lot of decorations there, there was the VC of course and my old Major Rickard got a DSO [Distinguished Service Order] with he did he was in the First World War, and he was mad. My troop commander got an MC and,

Oh, gave me a map reference yeah, but he did perform, in other areas too.

But it didn't do him any harm our shoot up, because it was the major one, the major effort. It wasn't that he didn't deliberately get out of it, he liked to keep, there was plenty for him to do in other areas you know. but, the, it went on, the food was shocking, I lost two

blokes off, out of six mainly with, they both got crook with diarrhoea and dysentery and dengue fever and that sort of thing, and I got a bloke, he was a reinforcement, I got two, one of them was Bob McCarthy who later became a famous rugby union player, played for the Wallabies [Australian rugby union team] straight after the war and he also wrestled Big Chief Little Wolf in America after the war, and he owned the Budgerigar Pub later in life in Surfers Paradise and he was a character,

and the other bloke was a cove called Donger Davis who's actually a crim and he'd, he used to work, you wouldn't remember this but before, years ago there was as famous boxing promoter called Jimmy Sharman who's son of course is now in the film industry and so on, you'd know him, he used to go all around these country towns with a boxing troop and Donger could fight a bit and Donger would come say to Cowra,

I don't know if he ever came to Cowra, but say Tamworth or before the annual show was due and he'd beat up all the locals in pub brawls and things around the town, of course when Jimmy Sharman came to town, Jimmy would have his show fighter out the front old Donger would be there, "I'll take him on". Herds up all the locals and fill the tent every time of course, that was Donger, Donger's occupation before the war, but he was a hell of a good thief and he used to pinch food for us from the local Arab farms from all over the place and we,

we had pigs and god knows what you know.

Oh we got, we supplemented our diet a bit.

But Donger ended up, he ended up in gaol in Jerusalem the last time I heard of him. He did get back to Australia and I never did find out what happened to him.

Oh he, he went to, he played up with a lot of Arab girls and he was always getting drunk and disorderly he was

just out of control when he got drunk, he had a bad record so he went into the British army gaol in Jerusalem and when the unit came back. I think they picked him up and he came back to the unit somehow or another but I never saw him. But he was a character oh geez, he was a good soldier though, he was quite, you know fearless. And his nose was pushed nearly right angles to his face and Donger Davis.

Oh Malaria and the Lebanon Belly. Unfortunately we stayed in Lebanon Valley quite a while after the armistice more or less garrisoning the place, and dengue fever was bad there and diarrhoea it advanced to nearly the dysentery stage. It was quite a lot of what they called yellow jaundice then, and it was hepatitis,

I forget if it was A, B, C, or D, whatever. It wasn't, most blokes recovered from it alright, I actually got it, about three months later and was in hospital about three weeks I think, but I got over it.

In back, we were garrisoned up above Tripoli in the mountains in the Lebanon mountains and the doctor was just out of university I think the regimental doctor,

And I think he thought I'd been out with a lot of bad ladies, Arab ladies but anyway, your urine gets so thick it's just like yellow treacle, and it's very, very painful, finally he decided I needed sending on and there was another bloke had it too and we ended up in a long about two day trip in ambulances and trains and so on back to, Rehovot, which is just out of Tel-Aviv, beautiful little village, and, we there was no treatment for that

either you drank a lot of water and no food, and enemas.

Yeah and enemas, enemas, as soon as you got there you got enemas. That's all, hot soapy, sunlight soap.

Oh I had Dengue fever.

Yeah I did have a touch of it that stage and a big of diarrhoea.

And nothing else. Plenty of orange juice, beautiful Jaffa oranges.

Yeah, well,

got better, took a while I think I was in the hospital, there was several blokes from Tobruk there too, they were, and most of them were ex sergeants too, strange to say. They were a good lot of blokes.

No it was Australian, 7th AGH unit Australian unit. And Australian nurses, I met an old nurse at, up at Narrabeen pharmacy the other day that was there, I haven't seen here since then and that's 1942.

And she's, she tells me she's 88 now and she runs around down the Cutler division at Narrabeen House, she's got everything under control. She's a character.

Oh, probably, there was wounded there too, but there was, they were separate, they were casualties, only casualties, I can't remember. There's be, the hospital would have been capable, they were all in tents, and dug ins, they

probably could have handled 1000 patients if there was that many but there was a special, for malaria, bad malaria cases, Dengue or hepatitis were in separate divisions.

Oh they were quite a lot of wounded from Tobruk were coming back but they were going to other AGH's mainly around, probably around Cairo and Alexandria.

There weren't a lot of wounded in that time, there was another hospital up at Jerusalem at that time too. Another AGH Australian, those Australian nurses were very highly trained, they were, before the war they had to do a lot more training than they do now in the wards and everything else, and they had to, they used to do three years before they came sister and most of them used to do a couple of years in hospitals before the army took them, so they were tremendous nurses.

And a lot of the doctors were all young doctors that later became pretty well known in their professions in Sydney and Melbourne afterwards. But of course they had plenty of chance to experiment on blokes too. But the casualties in the, where nothing like they were in the First World War, they were just killed two or three thousand people a day in places in the big battles, these were much more mobile, especially in the Middle East, there were a lot of people killed there of course especially around Tobruk and

[El] Alamein.

I went to, I got back to the regiment, but I went to a camp where there was, a staging camp where the recruits were just coming from Australian, and I was only there about a week I think before there was transport getting up into Syria till the wheels moved and I got posted back to my unit, but I should have taken over my troop at least as senior sergeant, which I was when I got posted, but I did the troop commanders job because our troop commander didn't, he finished you right…

Oh right, he finished, he had other duties to do so I had the troop in Merj Ayoun and which was an experience, because you know I met up with fairly senior officers at times because I was the only bloke with any ink or two or three of them. Anyway I had expectations that I might have got a commission in the field but the Australian army had a practice of training people back here in Australia and sending out here to reinforce the units in the Middle East, which was a hopeless scenario, absolutely hopeless and the blokes didn't respect them and the experience is 80 percent of the battle when you get into those situations. And anyway I've, I was at this training camp and there was some pretty undisciplined you know rough end of the army ready to…

That's why they have a lot of turmoil to this day I think. But when you got out and it sort of out towards Damascus, you got a lot more Muslims, and, Damascus was a fabulously, you know place, for a tin of bully beef, I, there's a book's here somewhere, that's probably worth quite a lot of money now that I think I swapped a tin of bully beef for it, they were starving, you know that sort of thing. I didn't go in for the sort of commercial trading that much, but I sent it down to my mother and she handed it onto my wife and I think my daughter's got it. But that, things were very difficult for the, those sort of people emerging out of the medieval times of the Middle East and you can imagine what happened, when smart New York Jews took over the show, which is what's happening, virtually in a way.

And oil commercial interests and all this sort of thing. The, they're a great conglomerate, or mixture of tribes in-breds, or I wouldn't say in-breds, but they, they were very volatile people and religiously complex. But Damascus was, I was in Damascus with a leave party just after be about July I think, 1942 just after Syrian

campaign finished, I had a leave party of about six blokes and we were at the Galle Face Hotel, I think on the verandah when the Syria was granted its independence by the British government and all these old tribesmen came in with on camels with their swords and their traditional, some of them had fabulously wealthy jewels all over them and it was quite a scene and it went on all day and there were about four Australian nurses and we had six Australians witnessed this scene and that was

the celebration of the, of Syria getting it's independence. So those were the sort of days that was in the Middle East you know incomprehensible now. I've seen photos of Damascus on television, you just wouldn't know it, it was just a very ordinary wog, sort of an old time city.

It was, one I remember anyway.

The malaria was still fairly bad in those areas at the time; you know there weren't healthy people.

Oh yes to Australians because Australians had a very good reputation after the First World War, the virtually liberated them from all sorts of problems, and did it again. No the Arabs liked Australians, the Jews did to of course for protection. Oh they liked the British troops but

the Australians were more free and easy the British laid down the law and bang that was it, they're more like the German attitude.

Well we were virtually in and out of attachments of British units all the time.

In Syria we worked separately as an Australian unit, because we, we built the garrison, northern part of Syria, up past Beirut.

And up as far as Latakia, which is on the Turkish border because of the expected invasion from paratroopers, but it didn't come off fortunately. The war advanced and there were Russian fronts all opened up, and [Adolph] Hitler [German Chancellor] gave it away and concentrated on doing the Russians over during the winter which he missed out on of course, that's where he was fatal.

Yeah, well it was, primitive equipment in the sense that the gun was only mounted on an open 30 hundred weight Chev [Chevrolet] vehicle, you know what a 20 foot tray is like on, and every time you fired a round the thing used to bounce up and down, so, to get your sights settled

you couldn't fire too quickly, you know you couldn't pop off two or three a minute and the crew, the gun layer is there with the telescope, the sergeant controlled the whole operation.

Yeah, and you'd stand just to the left of the gun layer, there was a bloke on the other side would pour the ammunition in, there's a gun down in Canberra war memorial. And he'd, it used to eject the shell case and then

he'd put in another, shell in, and you could do that, probably take you about 30 or 40 second.

Oh the actual missile itself only weighed about two pounds, but it's solid steel, and it had a little cavity in the back of it which was full of magnesium, so you followed the line of flight. In the night time it was magnificent scenery. It, you followed the line of flight and it made it easier for the gun layer.

Then there was the driver in the truck, that's, what's that Sergeant, that's four people covered, that's four and two other odd bods, you know to fill in various duties around the place, there was all sorts of things, that have to be done like, well maybe digging a slit trench to, or gun in placement to dig the truck in or whatever, and they were also interchangeable, everybody could do everybody else's job. My 2IC [second in command] was a cove [bloke] called

Jack Lewis who, after the war became general manager of General Motors Acceptance Corporation, you know. Extremely intelligent top business man, those were the sort of people, and he was quite a bit older than me, but he came in as absolutely raw recruit, soft as butter, and he did his training and came good.

No the target would be chosen by overall commands, unless you were, I mean if you're out on your own and there was no overall command, in other words you were in a skirmish situation, well you just, you knew what the ultimate aim so you just did your best to fit in with the pattern of what was going on. You'd make decisions in our set up,

like artillery guns couldn't move a whole lot but 18 pound infantry was set, but we were sort of much more mobile in the respect that we were expected to use our own initiative to some extent more than fixed operations were.

Oh well, whether you stayed there too long and just got cleaned up or whether you did a strategic withdrawal without

being up for cowardice or something, you know you had to get the balance between the two, what was the best interest of all concerned, if you want to put it that way. Once, in this particular situation where the citation are there it was, well it was getting dark and we were going to be cut off within a few minutes by infantry all shooting at us, with and they started with mounted machine guns so it would have only been a few seconds and they'd have cleaned us up anyway, so you may as well save the day and get out.

We'd done the job virtually anyway and that was just a decision. In those situations, like it was, it was very similar to flying, if you were in Bomber Command you did your briefing before you started you got the very best briefing you could get with met, you had hundreds of people in your station backing you up, you know, the very best they could do, the best air operating could do and you took off to go to say wherever you were going to, say an

oil refinery, you had your set course to go on, because you all did that because for mutual protection for a lot of reasons you had to be coordinated, the target had to be marked, and you had to be over it in a certain time frame, well but if you got shot up or whatever, you did, once you left the ground the captain of the aircraft was it, he tried to achieve his objective, he did anything else in the meantime, within reason, you know for instance you could lose a motor an bomb a secondary target and come home.

Whereas you didn't have to, you could drop your bombs in the North Sea and come home if you wanted to. They don't, so the decisions in the army and with situations were fluid, we're back to the sergeants quite often. In Tobruk the sergeants nearly ran the show because most of the officers got killed, or a lot of them did or got wounded or. And then there was always, the blokes, it's a funny think with blokes,

once they get under a certain of pressure, there are a lot of people you would think would be brilliant they'd be hopeless, the poor old slugger and the no hoper like Donger Davis and those, they were brilliant, they came good. I don't know what it was but they stood the pressure, in other words they acted pretty normally, never panicking, panic's the thing that kills a lot of people, tremendous lot, and that goes back to training a lot.

Well I didn't seem to panic.

The, it's way you are built. There's nothing you can sort of achieve by sort of by training. But, it's, common sense, if you want to stay alive you don't panic eh, number one and also it's positive thinking, "How's a way out of this?" If you're thinking about, a lot of these businesses these days get this incredible training and they're all spending half their time worrying about what their opposition's

doing. Forget about them, because the percentage of time you're wasting on worrying what the opposition's doing, you may as well devote it to your own cause and you leave them for dead. It's an old, pretty common sense really, isn't it, and that's the attitude of a lot of Australians in those days, you know we're here, we may as well make the most of it or get out of it. But you must remember there are only…there are vast periods of boredom in the army

or the services, even in the air force you know at the time. We went on troop ships, convoys or whatever, doing nothing and the boredom was unreal. So you went firing around all the time, firing anti tank guns off. They were very brief periods.

We knocked out three and

two more possibly, well disabled anyway, and the first two the crews would have been, everything would have been knocked out, because I say the shell went in and didn't pierce the other side and it would have hurtled around inside with the magnesium in the tank blew up virtually, so, but probably the crew might have got out of the last two or knocked the tracks off.

That was about 1000 yards, 700 to 1000 yards. They were still passing the armour at that stage,

once it got much further than that, they had a pretty flat trajectory for that, there was huge, high velocity and after that of course the, you had to range for the fall, the downfall a bit. But it was, there wasn't there were no great mathematical calculations about it, it was just a calibrated gun site, in the artillery there's all sorts of mathematical calculations, because you're hurling missiles from out of sight, three or four miles away

onto specific targets.

Wherever the most vulnerable parts were around about level with the tracks. And belly of the tank but they because, tanks became you know million, two or three million dollars each, and you know with armour and all. These were fairly primitive tanks, as all tanks were, they're terrible, I wouldn't get in a tank. I went on a Bren

carrier once and that was bad enough.

They were Reinhoff, Reinhoff Mark 3 I think, there's a couple down at Canberra. And out at Mitchell [reference to Australian War Memorial collection]. They had armour, pretty thick armour on, the First World War they been a wow [amazing], and nothing would have pierced them. But you could knock them out with a directive,

about an 88 millimetre shell from an artillery weapon.

Yeah, completely open there, in those days it was, yeah.

No, well there's a bit of a shield in front of the gun, so no there wasn't. Got a bit, just towards the end,

it was a, about a point five, I'd say, might have been from a tank, missile went through one of the ammunition boxes and went through two or three of the shells, an through the cordite and it never went off. Well it didn't hit the fuse anyway, cordite's pretty inert when it's not, unfused.

You know but that was par for the course all the time for infantry, we weren't in it a great deal of danger a lot of the time, only in skirmishes like that. Sickness was a lot of problem, particularly after Syria.

Oh yeah I suppose it was, probably was yeah. It, was, yeah, because if you made one mistake you were done, probably,

so, whereas the rest of the three or four weeks whatever it was, you had more time to work out what to do. That was just lightening thinking all the time, about an hour I suppose, an hour and a half to a couple of hours. It was like flying an aeroplane that's been damaged. What do you do?

Yeah, right, I arrived up there and the CO was a cove called Colonel Monagan who incidentally when I met this old nurse the other day she said what happened to that Bull Monagan, he was CO. And I said, "He died at Surfers Paradise years ago", she said "Thank god for that". Anyway he was, he was a character, but he did send for me, he said, "Look I'm sorry about this but

I'm going to introduce you to your new troop commander". New troops to take over - it was four guns and 32 blokes in the troop you see. And I didn't expect to get a commission to do it but I thought it'd be at least the senior sergeant and anyway he introduced me to a gentleman who hadn't even enlisted when I left Australia, in the AIF he did, he did some militia training, and of course he hadn't, well we had two campaigns up our sleeve by that stage, he was a bit silly.

Totally green, yeah, yeah. And as far as he knew, they be normal peacetime procedures, or normal training manuals. But, you know there was a lot of sergeants placed in the same position that would got a of them got commissions after they came back to Australia, I suppose I could have, but I had no ambition to go to Melbourne and be trained by some staff officer how to carry a commission in the AIF I can assure you. The commissions in the air force

you got them, you got them overnight if you deserved one, that was it, bang. And in the First World War that's why a lot of Australians were so well led, that's, the, promotions came through the ranks quickly, even the commissioned ranks. But it didn't happen in the Second World War, and there was, "Oh well it's history now", there were negotiations made with the army board in Melbourne

and the replies were then that it was deemed advisable for political and other reasons raised, organised and trained reinforcement officers for the AIF for the Middle East and send them there - from Australia. So that was the thinking of the army command in Australia, it was like the old air board, I doubt it ever got out of Melbourne now, the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] air board, during the war.

Oh well we just went an carried on,

but later it was a bit embarrassing because the troops would do anything for me, but they were a big resentful about the troop commander. They were a bit apprehensive that they might have to go into action with him. But they'd have found some means of disposing of him gently. And the sergeants would have taken over again, he'd have got diarrhoea or something. Or I don't know he might have been, he might have come good too you don't know, but he was a good bloke really but he was, well

he, I didn't like him much naturally but because he'd, you know he'd take advantage of, you had to carry him, or not only me there were three other sergeants there, but I was the senior sergeant you had to carry him a fair bit. And, he'd be the first to take any credit for himself with anything worthwhile, he was that sort of bloke, you know. But that happens in life anyway all the way through, I didn't bear any great grudges about it,

but I, it was another reason why I didn't want to go and let him kill me in New Guinea, in some jungle patrol he, we shouldn't have been anyway. And of course I could have easily got to another unit or anything else, but I'd had enough of the army once I got back to Australia.

Well of course the process was that the Japanese had come into the war, and,

the Australian troops in the Middle East, some of the Australians were, our unit was destined, I understand for Rangoon to get in the defence of India. But [John] Curtin fortunately, the Australian Prime Minister at the time, and I think [General Thomas] Blayney I think had a big influence on it, insisted that the Australian troops come back to Australia, but we were, we, that was after the fall of Singapore, we were on a troops hop heading for

Batavia actually to go back to the AIF, and on our ship we had troops who's equipment was on another ship and vice versa, we had equipment for the second, second pioneers for instance on our ship, when we landed in Adelaide an the troops were already in gaol in Batavia [now Jakarta], you know that's how disorganised things got. We were very fortunate, we got tied up in a Jervis Sea naval battle and a small Indian

troop ship and captain cleared out he headed back in the words of the historians, he cruised the Sea of Bengal 'til admiralty picked him up and sent him to Ceylon [now Sri Lanka] where we went. So he saved the day for us we were very lucky we could have been taken prisoner there, without firing a shot.

A regiment they call it.

Probably 18 months, sorry probably about two or three months, we were still garrisoned up in, the Turkish up at Latakia mostly and Tripoli. And the Lebanese area, the Lebanons. But when we finally decided to send back it was January 1942 it'd be,

we made out way down to the Suez Canal and got back on a troop ship there.

The Mauritania, Aquitania, to Bombay, and then we changed ships from there to this little Indian Troop ship, the SS Egra, there's a photo of it there. And we finally arrived back.

Well we were pretty aware we were going somewhere to Singapore, in this area, and so much so that I managed to go ashore with four, oh about four Australian nurses were there, incidentally one of them went down with the Centaur later on when the troop ship was sunk outside Moreton Bay. They wanted to do some shopping, so I escorted them ashore on

one of these little Indian bum boat things off the ship.

No to Bombay to do some shopping, and, I still got them here somewhere, I bought as many maps as I could find of the Dutch East Indies and Singapore area, out of shops, because I reckoned that they were the British were done in that area anyway, and if there was, there was always in the back of your mind is escape business, I know it's a glamorous procedure about

escape stories, but a lot of people did escape too, that's better than being a prisoner of war and getting choked to death anyway on the Burma railway. But, they never had a chance most of those blokes at all. So, anyway,

Yeah and then we headed off in convoy for Singapore, and then of course we were diverted, Jervis Sea Naval Battle the

British three major battle ships or three major ships and the Japs has complete control of everything by that stage, the British were completely defeated. I mean you knew that from history anyway.

The Egra was, we never had much food, it got back to Ceylon but somehow or another we didn't get much provisions and

I know as we're coming back to Australia we lived on, somehow or other it had a cargo of gorgonzola cheese on it. You wouldn't believe it and, and those hard old dog biscuits they used to give to the Indian troops, and we lived on that gorgonzola cheese and dog biscuits for quite a while. And just as an aside, after we got married, my wife, my dearly beloved wife about a month after we married, and she bought me especially, we'd been in Sydney,

She's an ex nurse in Sydney during the war and she brought me some special cheese and it was ruddy gorgonzola cheese, I couldn't eat it. And, anyway we finally got back, called into Perth and picked up a bit of food there and finally disembarked in Adelaide off that ship.

What his decisions were, I don't now what they were. Nobody, he was under the control of the admiralty, they might have told him to break convoy or whatever, I don' think he did anything that he shouldn't have done. I think it got to the stage where it was so obvious that there was no point in him getting sunk if he went on a bit further and got engaged with where the main battle area was, and he used his own initiative he, and he got fairly well

clear of air raids I'd say and we just went in the Bay of Bengal, no one on board really knew what was going on, our troop, our regimental commander probably did, but apart from that, he'd be getting his orders from the admiralty and finally there were a lot of ships probably there were other ships around at the time, they were trying to reassemble them and do something with them, and Ceylon was the logical base to get back to. It was crowded with shipping

so if the Japanese carried on and raided Ceylon god knows what would have happened in the subsequent battle, and if we were India, I'd say it would have been lost.

No, no the Egra came back to Australia, to Adelaide. That's where we, where the wharfies [wharf workers] were on strike and wouldn't load supplies for, ultimately destined for the Kokoda Trail, nice country.

Nice people.

Well we went up, they set us down of course, to a camp called Sandy Camp, it's the name of the town isn't it, North Adelaide. The big feature there was plenty of beautiful food. And it was pretty sandy a pretty rough old camp,

but we then got, oh we were there for a while and we moved across to, by train to, right up to the Queensland border, Tenterfield. Took about two weeks I think, and but we did, where did we stop, we got leave somewhere, we got about a weeks, ten days leave that was around about April, and,

we got, all got leave in Brisbane from our unit.

Oh just went home, saw the parents, because I'd been away for two years, or coming up to two years and, then went back to the unit and we moved. We must have stayed somewhere, I can't remember…

We went, oh I know we stayed at the Tenterfield

and had our leave from there and then went back there, and all the equipment was there and half the regiment, only half went in at the time, got about a week off.

It did and I went back to my old school, there's a photo there, I think about 12 of us went back to our old school for Anzac Day. So, but Australia was still terribly lethargic about the war even then, although they did,

unbeknown the Japs were on the way in the Solomon Islands, the Battle of the Pacific finally came off, heading this way and of course the army command panicked and started Brisbane Lines [defensive line in case of the invasion of Australia] and all of that sort of thing. Which you now you probably read about in your history, another book on, the young fellow in Brisbane who the Yanks shot he was a, I knew him well, he was one of our drivers. The Battle for Brisbane, that book was published virtually.

Oh you felt it at the time, there were no air raids out there, Australia was nowhere near a battle.

Darwin had been raided but that was all. Oh well you didn't want to see your country raided particularly we were hoping they'd wake up sooner or later, but of course the, America came in and [General Douglas] MacArthur [Commander in Chief, Allied Land Forces] virtually took over the Australian operation, the Australian government, the whole lot.

And the Yanks [Americans] came in then in great droves and they were you know they were hopeless troops, really, that came out other than the professionals. The airmen were good on the air craft carriers, fortunately, they were very good, and they blocked the Japs in the critical areas.

Well they had an Anzac

Day service, and we were given a luncheon, and that was about it I think.

They didn't ask us to no. oh we did privately to a lot of kids, we knew, no we didn't, we weren't, I don't think we were asked, you couldn't say much anyway. We were pretty security conscious, we didn't know anything, we didn't want to admit

we didn't know what was going on anyway.

I stayed with my family, we lived near the school at that stage.

Oh it was good, yeah. Artie my brother was there, he was in the air force, he was an operational squadron up at Laidley near Ipswich, that stage flying air cobras, American Air Cobras and my mother always

knew what he was up to because he, if he was doing a patrol out over Moreton Bay to a slow roll [manoeuvre with the aircraft] over the roof of the house on the way out. She'd, that's Dick, that's Dick, anyway.

Yeah, we settled in around Kilcoy, up around Caloundra area, and we were

there until I got in the air force actually. And, and we did a lot more training there and we got a lot, we got more equipment and better equipment. But our unit, my unit would have gone to Milne Bay with, with the defence of Milne Bay.

Well I went down and uploaded them on the wharves, yes we got jungle training, yes. I we get, the units were getting pretty well trained but it was futile with anti tank guns in the jungle. They made us wharf labourers, a lot

of really good troops at once stage, you know secondary duties around ports and things. And some of them did infantry work.

Oh when I was in camp at Kilcoy, and because the air force base was, by this stage I was acting as

sergeant major of the unit, only as a sergeant, I wasn't a warrant officer, but I did have access to a motor bike and a leave passbook, I could get myself a days leave so I went up and to the air force base at Kilcoy, at Laidley I mean, at Laidley and, I made negotiations to go up in a flight with my brother in a Wirraway [aircraft].

Well I didn't

want to just walk out of the army and join the air force and not, I wanted to know could I stand well, a dive bombing for instance, the force of gravity as you pull out you black out, and I'm in the back seat and he's in the front seat and he was pretty hard to get my brother to black out, so I said, black me out a few times and he did and see how I come out of it. And, I decided I could physically stand a bit of pressure,

I wasn't worried about other side of it.

Well I'd had [enough of] the Australian Army in a way.

Well, it was okay but there was a great influx then of militia and all that sort of thing and I wanted something new to do I think that's mainly what it was. But without,

I was disillusioned, I was in the wrong sort of, unit if I, I didn't want to leave all my old mates in the unit and just go and into another unit where it might have been a bit more action. I wasn't keen on action in the jungle anyway. I thought I could do something else and I, it, I was more of an open in the desert or something like that in North Africa, much more than I'd ever be in the desert, in the jungles.

Also, I, I was thinking of my future life, for a career, air force I knew that if I learnt to fly, I always had ambition to fly as a kid, really some reason or other, because [Charles] Kingsford Smith [pioneer aviator] was some distant relation of the family. We always followed his fortunes and I remember my old uncle taking me out to meet him just before he took off the Pacific and the tail end of that solo flight he did remarkable. So I was interested

in the air force so my brother was too, and in those days it was much more exciting than being in the army.

Yeah. Well if I didn't pull it off I could have been an air gunner anyway. Or a bomber, I would have been a good air gunner, mid upper gunner. So I had

that background, I would have been, well I would have been a good gunner because I was trained gunner, and it all would have helped them out. As it turned out I got a magnificent gunner for my crew, afterwards when you're not filming I'll show you his record, he did a first tour and he nearly got killed, including the raid on Peenemunde on the Baltic when they killed most of the German scientists who were developing the atomic bomb. And he did the second tour with me so

I got a, a good mid upper gunner was vital in the, when you got into especially fighter attacks and so on, because the pilot couldn't see everything that was going on around him and he's sitting up a turret, he had a three 60 degree view and he also had exceptional, he had above average night vision, we used to get tested, and I didn't know, I had good vision of any description but I came out with exceptional night vision

so between us we could see all sorts of things that were pretty vital to pick up quick you know.

Nothing to lose no.

Yeah. Oh it was becoming a sort of occupation by then, services.

Oh yeah. Well I proved what I wanted to do, you can imagine

I'd never been in aeroplane in my life, and to go dive bombing straight off. I mean Campbell obviously thought I was a silly bean and better off staying in the army. And he was the CO, and, in those days those blokes had unlimited authority with weapons of course and Wally Campbell he was a brilliant bloke, he ended up Chief Justice of Queensland and Governor at one stage I think. But he was only an air force bloke at that stage and I'm pretty sure he was the CO then,

if he was the CO it was, it was something you could never do today, you know if you want to get into the air force in the middle of a war, you go and get your young brother to take you up in a test to see if you're any good at it. It's a bit unique I think, if I may say so.

Oh only when you're pulling out, it's the forces of gravity forcing the blood away from your brain that's all.

Oh just as you pull out a few seconds, depends on how long you pull the stick back. But flying bombers you didn't get to that situation, where you put that much steer on the aeroplane, the wings would probably drop off it, but I did train on fighters in Canada so, I did, used to go dive bombing myself in the end.

Well I started, I knew the, well the Commanding Officer for all the air force was the Empire [Air] Training Scheme in Queensland, in fact he lived not far down the road, he had a daughter and a son the same age as my family and we all grew up as kids together or not as kids together but as young adults. And, I went to see old Fred, I got a bit of leave from the unit and,

I suppose I had a few days leave and anyway I went to see him and he caught us in Brisbane and told him my problems and he said I'll see what I can do, and I went direct to the top, I didn't go through any normal channels at all.

He said I'll help you. And he arranged for me to do the preliminary exams, you know the written exams about maths and science and all that sort of thing, I don't think I

passed them property, I might have, and anyway, I, it took a while, because the army weren't releasing anybody with my experience in the Middle East, they weren't doing much with us, that's what delayed, I suppose I waited a couple of months.

Yeah, and also I got the training manuals and things under there and I used to study them up when,

well I had plenty of time at night time when we were doing army training and me and another bloke studied and I got in quite a while before he did. And finally if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have passed the first ITS [Initial Training School] stage, but I could have remustered as an air gunner, I was going for a pilot. Nearly, I say 80 percent of the blokes went into aircrew wanted to be pilots, but by the time you got on ops, it was like race horses, only about 80 percent of then ever

got on operations really one way or another. After redrafting, because on the Lancaster crew, there's only one pilot and six other people so that's seven to one to start with. But, the, anyway I, I went up to Kingaroy and, I was a bit fortunate there too, in fact a couple of my instructors were coves who

enlisted in the air force they taught me at school. And, and I got quite a lot of help on the side and the other bloke who was just about as disadvantaged as me, or as behind, you can imagine these blokes just coming out of school, 18 year olds, they were brilliant at all this stuff and Morse [code, a communication system], you had to learn Morse, and I had a lot of problems with Morse because I'm not musical at all, and anyway, I finally go through the Morse exam, and

I did get through the other exams but the only other person was, when I first started, was Bill Brown the cricketer, who was pretty famous even in those days and we had a cricket team now of course Bill was the captain…

From Kingaroy I was posted to three, out to the, a training station at Narromine New South Wales.

No wait a minute, did we go through Kingaroy.

Kingaroy, I finally finished the course there, but I had another hold up in that I got Mumps followed by orchitis, and that, I was actually in hospital for four weeks for some strange reason, must have been pretty crook, so that missed about five or weeks training, I went back a course and a half about. But,

anyway I finally got through there and I got posted to Narromine which was a Tiger Moth initial training, ITS, three ITS it was called, Initial Training School and aircraft were Tiger Moths and Narromine is not, in the centre of New south Wales. And I commenced flying on Tiger Moths, while you were doing this flying you did a lot of ground subjects as well. The Tiger Moths were very interesting, it was summer time and

with the heat convexed and everything else they used to fly all over the sky, but you couldn't really get hurt in them unless you did something fairly stupid. There was always, some of those initial stations I went to within the first week I seemed to attend the funeral of some of someone who got killed, there was a lot of people got killed in training as you could imagine.

Not really. But, they kill them on the roads, I suppose P Plate [not fully licensed] drivers.

I think there's about eight or nine student pilots in the cemetery in Narromine which would be over a three or four year period. It wasn't too bad, I had a, a terrible instructor to start with, I sort of picked him, he wasn't, he was scared, well who wouldn't be scared of student pilots, but there was four of us he had and none of us were doing any good so I paraded myself to the CO of the station at the time

and said that I wasn't satisfied with the instructor and told him and so on, so on and I got away with it and we got a new instructor and we proceeded quite well, but the four of us were, we didn't get a good start, we were getting a few hours up more than we should have had, you are supposed to go off solo after about eight hours, and we were getting pretty close to the limit and in those days there were a lot of aircrew trainees coming through and they could afford to scrub [remove] anybody that

was suspect in any way. So, anyway, we got, I got a new instructor whose name was Lindsay, Stan Lindsay, who took me out to a little satellite aerodrome and he said, "Jeez, you're as rough as hell" he said, "But you better have a go". Well there was nobody else around, it was a little satellite out in the plains and the big relief was that the procedure in Tiger Moths, the

instructor always sat in the front seat and the pilot in the back seat, if you landed, the instructor, you only had speak through one of these speaking tubes it was difficult to hear, anyway he roared into the [communication] tube, "You better get going" and with that he, they used to undo their own control column which is a stick and throw it out to the side, you know kind of gesture, so I was never more relieved in my life when he threw the stick out and away I went and anyway I struggled around and

from then on I was pretty right. Another story is that Stan Lindsay was flying the Viscount that went into Sydney Harbour years ago and they were all the passengers were killed, it's the only major accident that's every been round Sydney. And he was dead unlucky he was flying a commercial liner and hit a line squall and the wing broke off it. You wouldn't remember it, but when the Sydney open, big enquiries at the time. But that was my instructor.

It'd be 30 years ago I suppose, the Viscounts when they first brought out the commercial liner, airliner, it came back about 1966 or '67 I'd say. But that's another one of my mates disappeared strangely. Anyway, I finally got through Narromine alright and I asked for a posting overseas.

I was categorised fighter pilot, not that that meant much at that stage, I had a bit of leave, and caught the Matsonia in Sydney, no I went down to Sydney to get on a boat and then immediately got to Sydney got sent back to Brisbane to pick up the Matsonia because it had picked some American troops up. And we went across the Pacific on the Matsonia and there was about 20 Australian

trainee aircrew on board, and we were, our minder was a cove called Nylon, he was an ex wrestler, tough little bloke and we called in at New Zealand and picked up a lot of Americans who had been at Guadalcanal, the battle line, some of them had gone a big flak happy, they'd gone off bomb happy, and some of them putting an act on and some of them genuine, real crack up case, and he said, "If you want I could get off all duties on the ship" and I said, "Alright that suits me"

He said, "You can feed the bomb happy blokes." So I used to feed the, poke their food in through, they're in cages a lot of the, or enclosed areas, so I had an easy trip across the Pacific and it went to San Francisco, caught a train up to Vancouver in Canada and from there we went across, finally end up near Edmonton in Ontario at the edge of the

lakes, and we, a training school there, we were flying Harvards which were equivalent to the Australian Wirraway [aircraft]. And I had a pretty good run there, about four months I suppose, we used to get leave occasionally which was near Detroit, get on the fast train and go to Detroit for the weekend.

It was fantastic in Detroit with, there was a few Australians in, wherever you went around the world there was always some Australians sometimes

I think checking their positions and the forward company had one or two Australians, and they had formed what they called the Anzac Club which any Australians on leave if you reported in, they'd look after you for the weekend well you could end up with any of the big families or, and, you'd have a pretty good two or three days leave, they'd never let you pay for anything, which is handy, we never had much money anyway. The only time we had a bit of surplus cash, I played a game of football,

against an RAF team at, in Toronto and, at the end of the game we got paid 10 dollars each, a real big union game so professionalism came into Rugby Union in those days, a lot earlier than it did in the other game. But for 10 dollars American you could go a hell of a long way. But, the course was good there,

the conditions were very good, the Canadians had excellent quarters, and good instructors, good aeroplanes.

Harvards, they were similar to Wirraways. An old relation popped up and it happened to be Air Marshal Tom Cowley who was Chief of the Empire Training Scheme in the whole of Canada. An air force Marshal who had flown in the First World War with some of the famous pilot.

No he wasn't , he

was a Canadian branch of the family. When that Cowley split up from Gloucestershire they had the quarries at, and they were contractors to Wren, the Wren, the St Paul's Cathedral and a lot of the buildings in Oxford and the quarries all gave out in about 1830, 1840, the migrated all over the place. They went to Canada, South Africa and India so there was a relation that popped up, I had an old aunt who had, kept track of them all and she used to let me know

if I was going, who I would run into, it was handy in England too.

Well first of all to fly a much more advanced aircraft and secondly for the gunnery exercises, bombing exercises and tactics you know, the useful things they teach you in the air force. Mainly teach you to fly, they were fairly aerobatic, they were good things to do

aerobatics in. If you can do aerobatics fairly well it gives you a lot of confidence. And, the, they were a good trainer who grew up, in those days, they used them as fighters but of course Zero's [Japanese aircraft] mowed them down out here.

No, the, the course, I think there was about six or seven Australians out of, I

forget how many, 20, there'd be about six or seven Canadians and about six or seven New Zealanders and we had two or three coves from, Norway, two or three trainee pilots from Norway, they'd escaped and so it was a pretty mixed lot.

And they, you know they were a fairly elite sort of people, most of them they were good company.

Well they were all pretty well educated people and they were in it for the, they'd, you know you were getting to the stage where got people more likely to end up as aircrew pilots. The scrub rate again there was, I suppose about 20 percent of the course was scrubbed at Narromine it'd be about 30 percent. So, they

got whittled out, and those people who didn't make it on a course as remustered as navigators or whatever. Bomb aimers a lot of them and they were handy because if you got a bomber who had flown a bit, he would flew Lancasters where there's only one pilot, well you got your bomb aimer to hold it up in the air for you, couldn't land it or anything, but if you had urgent necessities down the back or something like that, you can imagine, nine, nine and half hours sitting in the one seat you couldn't move out of. It, you got the urgent

call of nature occasionally. But that never happened to me, my crew always had a bit, big old paint tin they used to supply me with. But the, the station was very good surrounds, very good feed, the food, and it was on edge of Lake Eyre, and we used to do a lot of exercises out over the lake which was handy because you got the idea of low

flying, the depth of perception flying over water is different to, slightly different to the land, and you know anything low level if you, if you did fly low level, well you'd had a big of training over the water.

Yeah, first week there was a funeral. I think that was the only one while I was there. A few stories, the next intake that came were all British blokes, Fleet Air Arm, and the

Harvard had a few gadgets on it, when you were coming in to land, you had to make sure you dropped the wheels, you had a lot of things to think of you know gauging your approaches and all this sort of thing, and if the wheels weren't down when you throttled back, it used to throttled back it used to blow a clackston and this horn used to go off, awful, dreadful noise and so you realised something was wrong and you'd suddenly remembered your wheels, and throttle forward and go around again and drop your wheels, and of course it'd be all marked on your record too, and there was, as we were

leaving the station, we were all in a bus leaving out, there was one of these Fleet Air Arm Pilots they've got in the course behind us, to land and he did a belly landing and they've, they used to catch fire pretty easily because you came in at about 120 knots, and anyway it did a belly landing and we all said "Oh geez, he's finished, he's scrubbed" and years later we had a aircrew reunion here in Cowra and the British Air Attache came up, or naval attache

and I happened to be Chairman at the time, and we had a few ex high ranking RAAF blokes here and the British Embassy used to send somebody and I sat next to a bloke and we worked out he trained in Ontario, I said, "Oh jeez, you weren't the silly looking clot who came in with his wheels up and did a belly landing, were you" I said, "I'll bet they scrubbed him" he said, "You're looking at the bloke" and it was him, it's a small world.

Anyway he got away with it and he landed as a regular in the navy as a pilot in Fleet Air Arm for years.

Yeah, I got a good category, which meant that I would be suitable probably I nearly went onto flying boats or something like that, but there was a lot of trained pilots by the time we got over to England which was,

would be about early November 1943, there was a lot of pilots going into pool by then, but the Bomber Command casualties were horrendous, that's probably the time you're talking about your [the interviewer's] grandfather would have got shot down, end of '42, '43, '44. And I had sufficient category to go on bigger aircraft and I volunteered to go to Bomber Command.

I don't know

general all around ability I suppose. Some blokes, hair brained blokes were better suited by themselves in a fighter, where there wasn't much, you know they didn't had, they didn't have the responsibility they had to do sort of pilot a larger aircraft, navigation and all of that sort of thing. So, I ended up volunteering to go to Bomber Command after waiting for about two or three months for some sort of posting.

No, you stay in England, it's Brighton. The Metropole and The Grand I went back there years later and you'd hardly know them except it'd had just been bombed, it was when Mrs [Margaret] Thatcher [Prime Minister of Britain] had just, I think the conservative government had just had a meeting and it'd been bombed, but they were pretty grubby pubs at the end of the war, but they, quite good again now.

To Brighton,

we landed at Liverpool.

By ship. From Halifax in Canada again on the Aquitania and the reason the Aquitania could do about 32 knots and if she was going down wind, from west to east in Atlantic cove, god knows what speed she'd just slide along the great waves really and it went unescorted, which is at the height of the submarine scares. It went right up around, near the ice,

fringe, ice fringe, you know about the ice fringe. And picked up a convoy on the way up north east of, north west of Scotland but it had about 12 or 13 thousand troops on board, and most of them were Americans and Canadians, a lot of them were from the prairie country and had never seen the sea and they all got sick. It was unreal, you couldn't you could hardly walk along he corridors of the ship.

And you'd see them race out, when they first started getting sick and of course they'd go to the wrong side of the ship, spew into the gale and of course it'd all come back you never saw anything like it. Anyway, I teamed up with the Norwegians, there was three of them, and just four or five, there was only about six of us in that shipment, and we got away up the bowels of the ship somewhere, we were right, but,

it didn't mostly our crew didn't get sick of course you know.

We were used to it yeah.

Well they were, the America was in the war of course by then, then well and truly and os were the Canadians. And they were just troops going over there, a lot of the Americans were, quite a few of them were black troops, they were service units you know, building up bases in Britain, you know, massive bases for their

Air force, oh yeah.

Oh a lot of them were, associated with the air force they had air bombers, flying fortress, aircrews, not aircrews but service crews, so anyway we landed in Liverpool, and it'd had been bombed pretty well, it was desolate. And, and imagine what you goes like in war time in December, it was getting pretty grim, fogs and smog everywhere.

In those days every one of those chimney pots you see in Britain used to belch coal fires and by the time the factory coal fires got going and the winter smogs, Britain during wartime was a pretty desolate place. Plus the fact it was the height of the food shortages, and so that was the introduction to Britain and we went down to Brighton it wasn't too bad down there, and I got a bit of leave and I had relatives in two or three places around Britain. One of them was,

a family up in Staffordshire, a fairly well known old family and a cousin of my grandfathers he was in his 80's and he was married to one of the Maysfield, and Maysfield was a, his brother in law would have been the Poet Laureate at the time. So they had a good set up there and he was an old colonel in the First World War but one of, other relations, Owen Day, made all the dyes for Wedgwood, the pottery

people, you know the factory at Stoke on Trent, and so between these two places I got used to spend a bit of leave at times, I met the Wedgwood family, you know the pottery people, those sort of people.

Well they coped like everybody else all on the same strict ration but he had, his factory had a high priority because he used to, he used to get submarines brought

some supplies out from Sweden I think it was of special stuff to make flares or search lights or for a magnesium flares for all sorts of weapons and things, and he had a high priority for, and so he had all his workers there and he was able to keep the factory going.

Hmm, just the dyes, Wedgwood used to buy the dyes for the pottery; there is an old family business that's been

going for a couple of hundred years I think you know, as old British businesses did, it's all closed down now. But then I, I'd have to get me log book down to tell you where I went next. I went to various training stations, I did fly some Tiger Moths around for about ten days on station down near Stonehenge.

Oh just to get a few hours in. I

volunteered to do some work up at Kodak House which was Australian headquarters, in Kingsway in London. And there was a lot of, there was a strong room there with a lot of pay books in it, they were all from dead blokes you know and they'd never been sorted, they'd thrown them in and thrown them in, you know there were heaps of them so I volunteered to put all them back into alphabetical order and everything else. That took me about a week. But it, that was quite good, I liked my ten days, maybe a fortnight

there, because you could go to all the plays in London overnight, the Strand Theatre for instance had been bombed, but that team that ran Arsenic and Old Lace was still going there, it was, you know in these old bombed out theatres they professional actors all kept going, and there was a lot of quite famous actors.

Arsenic and Old Lace was a good one, and No Sex Please We're British I think was on at that stage those sort of ones. But Arsenic and Old Lace

was just down from Australia House, so it was easy to get in there.

Oh no I wasn't a bomber pilot then - I was in training yeah. No well, yeah, well it was something to fill your time in.

Not a lot but some of them did it.

Oh anywhere they could collect them back to the base, some of them had bullet holes in but, you know but they'd, blokes very, that was strange, some of them were damaged or water, and some of the blokes must have carried their pay books, because they did move around a lot, but most of them were blokes, that their pay books has been collected from their kit after they'd been shot down. But it was just one of those things nobody wanted to touch them probably,

not, the clerks around Kodak House weren't terribly keen on it anyway. There was one just before D-Day [allied invasion of Europe in 1944], but I was, I was pretty well forward in my training by then, there was a services team, got a cricket team going with Keith Miller [Australian cricketer] and Karma Dear and all of those sort of blokes. So I managed to get out to the cricket just before D-Day there was a match and I sat down and the,

Lords Pavilion, I got a pass into there and there was two blokes came and sat beside me and one of them was Patsy Endron the famous cricketer, I didn't know who they were at the time and the other one was Sir Harry Trouford, Lord Mayor of London during the Blitz [on London], and they took me to lunch and I gave the card to the Bradman war memorial, the Bradman War memorial at Bowral, and, you know I'd meet all sorts of interesting people like that. The Australian uniform helped a bit.

Oh I don't know they

were friendly towards Australia, I got a pass into the House of Commons at one stage. And we listened to them debate all day but unfortunately Churchill didn't turn up, but as I walked outside the door, the leader of the opposition was a cove called Sir Arthur Greenwood, well as you, there was a coalition government Labour and Conservatives but they had an opposition he was not a Labour man, he was the opposition leader and he hadn't, and, later he, Aster,

we were on, outside the House of Lords it was then because the Commons was closed down, it had been bombed and they grabbed me, hello Aussie how are you and I chatted away to, Lady Aster and you know the program on the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] I said to Alma, "Oh cripes I met her" and she's, "Oh bull you haven't" and, it is funny how you just sort of ran into people.

Oh the uniform, the uniform helped a bit, Australian servicemen, didn't matter

rank, didn't matter, no it didn't matter much. There were a few places you could stay at London. I actually I got a commission soon after that, and I was a member of the Liberal Club. I stayed two or three times, I still go the card there, and I was a member of the Liberal Club and I stayed in a room a few times where Eric and Gladstone [British Prime Minister in the 19th century] used to stay when he had his mistress down the other end of the corridor, during the parliamentary sittings

she used to get ensconced in there. But it was strange they'd wake you up early in the morning with a cup of tea and a slice of white bread and butter, for morning tea before you went and had your bath.

The Liberal Club.

I don't know how I applied for membership for that but I got in anyway I think because the Queensland Attorney General, Queensland Agent General's office, but it was a good place to park yourself if you were on leave.

I had a commission just before I went on operations, got appointed a pilot officer and about a week later I was made a flying officer and that's the rank I stayed at.

Oh well it was I suppose, I should have got a commission in the army by that stage. Oh no it didn't matter much, rank didn't, if you were, pilot was the rank you wanted

because you were the boss no matter what rank you were once you left the ground. But it was, you got a few extra privileges, got a bit of extra pay too of course.

When you work it out, we were flying you know captaining aircraft, Lancaster bombers, got the equivalent of seven pounds a week. So, that's about 20 dollars Australian nowadays I suppose. Nobody got paid much.

Seven shillings a day I think. Australian shillings yeah.

Yeah. I trained at various stations in Britain, it's all sort of there, and I trained on, I had to learn to fly twin engined air craft, and I did that at a place called Cirencester in Gloucestershire

and a small village called Bibury, beautiful old English village where some of the inhabited houses are still there and they were inhabited in the year 900. And, we, I did conversion on what they call Oxford aeroplanes there, twin engined planes, I played my last game of football in Cirencester as a representative for Colonies against the 7th Airborne Division, that went behind the lines

on D-Day, I didn't know who we were playing but I just got there and the chief flying instructor said "we got have a colonial in our team", he said, "It's only the station team, it's not" and I said, "Look I haven't had a run since I was in Canada you know" and anyway it turned out when I went to get changed into my gear, the, all the players were bods around the station, PT [physical training] instructors and they were all, most of them were ex professional rugby league players.

And of course you played rugby union and you can imagine what the seventh airborne team was like, they were ready, took everything on, and I played break away and I only lasted about five, I lasted on my legs the whole match but I remember I got hit about the first five or ten minutes and that was the end of my football career. I was sharing a room with Reg Ellis who was the left arm bowler in the Australian cricket team, and he said, "You're mad, I'll be nowhere longer than you", he was a staff pilot there and he said, "You want to give it away"

so we threw all my gear in the garbage tin outside my room and that was the last game of football I ever played, you couldn't do both. But, it was good country and it wasn't far from where my ancestors came from in Fairford in Gloucestershire. So I got a pushbike and went down there one day, cycled about five or six miles found the village and there was no Cowleys left there, there was only one left there

and he was a sort of half baked electrician and he was the village nut. He was the only one there, the church windows had Cowleys in them and all that and the cemeteries had Cowleys but there was only one bloke with the name of Cowley and he didn't know where he came from. He was so unintelligent he hadn't even been called up for war duties. So, that was the end of my visit to Fairford. I went onto other stations, the next aeroplanes I flew were Wellingtons,

which were retired bombers and Lancasters came in, that's where you first got crewed up you got a good crew. You had five in the a the crew of a Wellingtons, they were twin engined planes and they were, on the training stations they were adapted for service still so had they been needed we could have on, regional thousand bomber rain on Cologne had quite a few of them. I didn't do any operations on Wellingtons.

Then, a next move was onto what they called a conversion unit which was on Sterling bombers, and fortunately the, the had a cockpit check about week on the station and they were replaced by Lancasters mark two which were, they didn't build many of them, they had a radial engines in, only for low level flying, but they were a beautiful plane to fly and to train on

and I was lucky I got an instructor who had just come off Pathfinder Force [elite navigational unit used by Bomber Command] and he'd, he was fairly, couple of decorations, he could really fly so.

He was a Pathfinder Force pilot who was declared redundant and they did, some of them went out instructing or to advanced flying stations, so he, he, you know instructed the crew pretty well,

flying, at that stage I had on gunner who wasn't performing and I managed to trade him and get the one I got who'd already done a tour, he was the gunnery instructor on the station.

Not really the gunner he wasn't up to scratch, so they just transferred him somewhere else, I don't know what happened to him. He, you couldn't, the crew, crewing up, bomber crews was quite a strange business,

my crew all came to me unknown to me, I'd never seen them before, normally you, you know you pick your men and that sort of thing, it happened the other way around. But, and they only knew one another either, there was a, navigator came from London, he was a landscape gardener, the wireless operator was actually an Australian from Adelaide, there was, the mid upper gunner was from Yorkshire, the bomber

came from Lancashire and they both spoke entirely different languages in those days, the flight engineer came from Wales, from Cardiff, and the rear gunner came from around Bury St Edmonds, so they were you know they were a mixture, but it's amazing how quickly crews bonded together, they had to, to help survival I suppose.

Oh yeah they all bonded together very quickly yeah, but they were, they seemed to like having Australian pilots for some reason or other.

Oh, I don't know what it was really, Australian pilots were much more likely to buck the system if the system wasn't exactly what it should be. You know there was some stupid things happened at times, that you didn't like to get involved in and if you knew your way around the traps you could probably straighten things out a bit, put it mildly.

Then we went, we went to, at the end of 1944 we went to two one eight squadron, posted to two one eight squadron which was based at near Bury St Edmonds small village called Chedborough. When we got there, they'd put some new equipment in and we went away and did a course for that, it was for blind bombing, the first time blind bombing had been done.

It was called GH equipment, it was radar stuff, a series of coordinates, by this stage D-Day, they'd the RAF base had some bases established in France and part of Belgium and Holland and you could bomb in ten tenths clouds without seeing the ground. So I did a special course and the drill always you got above ten tenths cloud at about 20,000 feet and had yellow tail fins, and that one I can see,

see the stripes on it and, anything around you would formate on you and as we dropped out bombs, they dropped theirs too, this was mainly for oil refineries and things. So we did, we did 21 ops [operational flights] between there and when the war finished. And,

Alright well,

we did quite a few in daylight, above ten tenths cloud or in cloud, but mostly above ten tenths cloud, which was on oil refineries and at this stage the German fighter force was not nearly effective as it was, so if you went say to Naurath, it could get pretty good cover from long range fighters from Britain that carried extra drop fuel tanks, which protected you quite a bit from German fighters, also there were plenty of fighter planes around with standard

of German pilots, they were getting slaughtered, a lot and of course the standard was falling off. The, the night operations were of course, you took off into the, probably just on dark, and you'd come back just about daylight you know the next day, so you were on your own on those and you had to do your own navigation and everything else.

Well first of all on the station itself the crew, the stations are all dispersed because of bombing during the war, ours wasn't bombed, got hit by a V2 [German flying bomb] rocket I think while I was there, that's about the only thing but there was quite a bit of bombing early on, two or three years before that so the station was very dispersed. Station life was on the edge of a village which is like being in the village partly.

The crews, aircrews were all in separate quarters, they did look after the aircrews because they spent a lot of money on us and it's just, they were, we got a priority in any life saving things going on. Each station had its own hospital and but our station was a two six forty acre farm belonging to the old Duke of Bristol and it had been converted to emergency airfield. The base station was Stradishall a famous

British station of course pre war and, the, the runway was, there was one runway just on 2000 yards and one 17 50 yards, the 2 000 yards was alright, it was long enough at times, the other one was a bit short and it had a bit of a bump, had a bit of a dip in the middle. And there's a great story, I didn't see it happen, it happened before I went there. The British, Amy Johnson, the British aviatrix they used to do delivery services

from the factory to squadrons, and there was, a Lancaster got busted up with a bad landing there and the crew and the pilot put on a hell of an act, and the CO said "right you get the next new one", the next new one arrived about three days later, and it landed with only one pilot in it, did a terrible landing, and anyway it, the CO of the station and the pilot went out to abuse this pilot and it was quite a short person who got out

and she had two cushions behind here, and she'd taken out with her and they said, "Why the hell did you", she's still in all her flying gear, "Make a landing like that" and in a female voice she said, "I didn't know you had a dip in your bloody runway" and it was a woman pilot.

Oh it was very unusual flying a Lancaster in, but they did do it a few of them, Amy Johnson flew into the Thames, she was lost, or they think she did. That's one of the stories that,

the squadron just after it started there, the famous runway. But anyway to get back to the, the set up at the station, there was pub of course, a village pub, the usual village things and briefing room was a Nissin hut which had all the maps on the wall of Europe, and when you went to briefing the first thing you did was look at the map and saw where the red tape went, it went across wherever your course was, I got a course there

I can show you later, on a Berlin for instance and which meant you had a bad raid or a good raid or a reasonable raid or whatever. Everybody'd be biting their fingernails.

The red tape would show your course, and the course, I mean if you're going to Berlin, it's a long trip and who wants to go to Berlin if you can go to a short trip in Paris or somewhere.

Oh well probably the more you started to concentrate.

And all the crews would be in there to the briefings, and the room would be locked before, the doors would be open and the respective crews would go in and the doors would be locked, this is for security of course. Target would be declared, all the briefings would go on, the navigation blokes they meteorology people and the, you get as much briefing as you could and the pilots would get

briefings on the colours of the period and all that sort of thing, a bit complicated. The colours of the period would be, the German, see mixed up in melees around the target the, it was hard to identify aircraft and if you knew what the German, we had the ultra system, ultra code had been cracked by then and to the RAF used to get the German night fighter pilots briefings and we used to get them at our briefings as quick as the German night fighters would get them.

So if you got an attack and you fired off their colours of the period, the fighter pilot would say oh it's one of mine and he'd leave you alone that's if you're quick but they, the wireless operator had a pistol, loaded with cartridge of the period and he'd ping his off if there was ever an attack, it looked like an attack it never happened to us really, I don't think we ever used one. But they did, they were effective.

Oh just after Dunkirk.

It took a while to work the code out, they did it at Bletchley [Park] but I mean that's history, there's great stories written about that, but it is a great help of course, well of course the British knew a lot of what was going on in German high command all the time. Ever knew about Pearl Harbor I'd reckon but they didn't let the Yanks know because they wanted to bring them into the war. There's a lot of stories about that too.

At a fairly high level really.

Well traditionally the army have been killing one another with stones and bows and arrows and spears, the air force is modern technology wasn't it, that was the big difference. It also was,

you met a different type of person you might say, in the army you met you know people that were, sort of ground dwellers as they used to call them, in the air force, once you get in the air on your own, you seem to have a different outlook on life, perhaps, it was more adventurous put it that way for young people.

The, the systems of leadership in the army weren't always necessarily the best leaders, because it could, on the ground you could get away with all sorts of things, in the air to become a aircrew man, or gunner or pilot you had to perform in the air and that's it, otherwise you weren't there, you didn't get a start. You get some job driving a truck around the station. That was a difference of course,

so you were with people who knew more about their business than probably the average person in the army did. The leadership in the air force was extremely democratic in a way because the best man, especially on the RAF on the bomber stations the best man and the most experienced man on the ground was the leader and that was it. There were blokes, Australians, leading RAF squadrons that weren't bombers

but could have started as sergeant pilots but ended up as squadron leaders, simply by process of elimination and by that process of elimination although they were probably lucky they were also good, good at it, they had to be. And they became the leaders, that sort of thing didn't happen in the army. The army had tremendous periods of boredom whereas in the air force you were always moving around and always something new going on.

The modern air force today of course is a great technical affair, you have to be very highly educated and be way above average in maths and all of that sort of thing and science and whatever. Plus you find the average pilot in the Australian air force today is very, rather an exceptional type in a way. He's got the ability to fly, you know to do all the old basics

and also be a, almost a scientist, or an electrical engineer whatever you like get up to a high standard, because the, all the electronics and the radars and things are, you got to be pretty bright to operate them especially when you're airborne. The army still plods along in some respects and, the army, you,

you knew you had much more chance in the air force of pre determining your short term destiny, if I could put it that way, in the army you never knew where you were going. In the air force if you were on a squadron at least you knew you were going to fly to Europe and no where else for X number of operations at least and you came back to a base every night, which is almost, oh well, compared to the army was almost like a civilian set up. We even had a batman [an officer's servant], a pilot,

if you had a commission. On the station of course, in the army there were no women in my day, on the RAF stations, the girls who drove the for instance the crew buses, were all manned by English girls, most of them were girls of 19 or 20, that actually could have a drivers, could drive a car, and they used to take the crew buses we had about eight on our squadron and traditionally you could go to a briefing and get in the aircraft

but from the briefing room to the aircraft the girl who drove you out, she was boss if she told you to get in the bus quick you'd get in it quick. It was a tradition and this, you know 18 year old girls were part of the act, they'd wait all night for the crews to come back if the crews didn't come back they'd worry you know it used to take a bit out of them. They'd do it seven days a week at the height of you know especially in winter time it's bitter in England

and they're incredible sort of people in a way they were dedicated what they were doing. A lot of flying control people were women, some, if you'd been an actress on the London Stage or had any training a lot of English girls could pitch their voices up very well. The communication by way of radio telephone in those days was fairly crude, and I nearly all the stations I was on had always had WAAFs [Women's Auxiliary Air Force] on the RT [radio transmitter],

they'd been given instructions of course, but they didn't' have to make vital decisions by they did the transmission and the receiving and they set up landing patterns and all that sort of thing, became very good at it, it was a privileged job for them which meant that some of the better or well educated work place girls probably got jobs fairly quickly. But they were just WAAFs in, same as anybody else, same as cook WAAF or anything else,

there was no extra privileges for them. The stations and cells were a, the fitters and turners and electricians all those people were all pretty good professionals out of civilian life because the Merlin [aircraft] engines were about 18 hundred horse power, 16 50 I think ours were, horse power and they were massive big engines. Beautiful piece of technology and of course all the wiring

in the aircraft, it was only a flying bomb bay, really it was pretty primitive sort of shed to put all this gear in, and they were all of a pretty high standard, they all took an interest in what they were doing they took an interest in the aircraft that they, strangely enough there were some aeroplanes always seem to come back, that's one over there of course, the one in Canberra [War Memorial] is another one, and there's a few of them did 100 ops, whereas the average number of ops was say about 14 I'd say at the most,

before they were pranged somewhere or other or shot down or whatever. The ground crews took a great personal liking to their, well they loved their old aeroplanes, but they worked under pretty bad conditions, you know, in the middle of, especially on satellite stations, weren't many amenities. The,

there'd be about, I think there was on Chedborough about 1000 person, 11, 12 hundred personal there, and only about 20 crews so it took a lot of back up. You know the bomb dump people and met people and, so the aircraft were pretty well, as well serviced as you could get them it took 2150 gallons of fuel if a Lancaster was doing a nine hour trip.

Just to start with, there was a lot of checks had to be done and all of that sort of thing, so they worked around the clock a lot of them, some of the fitters had about half a day a week off or a fortnight that's about all, otherwise they'd be virtually on duty or on call on the station. They were blokes in civil life were good technicians, the British are good at that sort of thing.

The food was reasonably good it was standard rations, if you were going on operations, you used to get bacon and one egg, on our station was a tradition and if you happened to come back you got bacon and two eggs. So, bacon and eggs were you know prize food, that was the standard of food you got, all sorts of junk from America and bully beef [canned meat] and that sort of stuff. The food was

severely rationed. The, that's about roughly about what happened on the stations.

Oh no we mixed with the ground crew it was, rank didn't work out like it did in the army, he pilots, aircrew would mix with anybody.

Just because you had a commission it didn't make any difference, you'd go and have your, on our squadron you could quite often go and have your, a post, after an op, if you had a commission you didn't go to the officers mess you'd just go to the sergeant's mess and, or, whatever they'd have interchange night outs with the aircrew or the commissioned people. There was a difference between the commissioned, the messes in, but not a lot, not the same as on an army

base by any means, there was no ceremonial dinners and all of that sort of thing it was all business. The sad part about it was, the crews, there weren't many wiped out while I was there but when they were it was real bad, there was the crews getting wiped out and their gear had to be collected and disposed of and letters written to parents. I've got photocopies of two or three letters Gibson wrote to a bloke who I knew who was on the

damn buster raid and his crew crashed, and you know, it's just a sort of standard letter but it's signed by Gibson and he'd written it himself and the CO's they're, those sort of people had a pretty tough job writing time after time to console nearest of kin. But see the, the statistics in the bad part of the war were fairly

horrendous, the average for the whole war was about a third of the crew wiped out on Bomber Command, that's for the whole war, well when I was flying it wasn't anywhere near as bad, it was probably, only just, I'd say two thirds at least survived quite easily. It, the, but at the height there was nearly two thirds wiped out I should say, died.

But it would have dropped off to about a third, the average I think for the whole war was about a third. There were still crews being lost right up till the end, but sent on raids that probably weren't necessary and, bad weather, bad weather got a hell of a lot of them. Collisions over the target areas, bombs dropped on one another from above.

Oh out of 20 crews, I think there's probably about four or five, that's 25 percent you could say. But before that of course it was the other way around it was about 75 percent.

Not really no you expected it. Not really. For instance, like the night Mackenzie was lost, like I knew that crew very well, I flew with them on and off.

And not long after they just disappeared and they weren't heard from till 50 years.

Oh yeah the whole station supported the aircrew. Yeah, they did in an unobtrusive way, you wouldn't know they were supporting you but they did. They didn't run around saying you were great bloke and all that sort of thing,

if you did, if you taxied an aircraft off the runway and bogged it, you were the greatest clod in the UK, you know that, but you'd expect that a bit of give and take. If you did something knocked the aeroplane about unnecessarily they didn't like it at all.

It was actually it was for me, it was quite an experience, I was quite pleased, I was, it put a different outlook on life in a way, yeah. You, you didn't think about what you were doing in a way you only had to kick the rudders over the target and you missed Joe Blow on the ground and you hit somebody else sort of thing, you know you couldn't think

about that sort of thing. A lot of the targets were in built up areas, the oil refineries weren't too bad, they were pretty specific. But at this rate, I'll probably just give you a run down on in Berlin. Was just a raid to wipe a suburb out. Right at the end of the war for please Mr [Joseph] Stalin [President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; now Russia], you know well - that wasn't nice.

Yeah, were going to cop it, yeah.

It happened all the time, Dresden was the worst one, that was another one was arranged at Yalta [conference between American President FD Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin] by Stalin again. It was just an inferno, I'd say 60, 70 thousand people killed outright in about 20 or 40 minutes I suppose. Because the aircraft went across, straight across targets really quickly, you were

briefed to do it, that's where tremendous danger was over the target itself, not only did the Germans pump all the flak up onto the target, you know they knew what, once, once the Pathfinders marked a target they knew the course roughly the aircraft would come in at and they used to just fire all this 88 mill and just into the air with time fuses on to burst between say 18 and 20 thousand feet. So you saw all these little twinkling lights and you couldn't do anything about them you just flew through them and hope it didn't hit you.

The first drop I ever did was as a second pilot, I did two as a second pilot, and it was a daylight in dense cloud and there's a lot of flak around and an 88 mill that had a time fuse on it, it went through, it didn't explode it wasn't a percussion fuse, they all, most of them had time fuses on, it went clean through the tail plane and left a nice hole like that, and it missed the elevator engine by about that much but it knocked the tail plane off, but it never exploded. It, because it was on a

time fuse and it probably bust about 200 feet above us, so there is, that was, that was where the luck, there was luck in that. But the rest, the experience and a bit of skill helped a hell of a lot after you'd done two or three ops. And a good crew, give the pilot a good commentary.

No.

No, no. I didn't, I don't think any of my crew did. They probably hoped I'd stay alive and stick to the controls that's about all they hoped for.

They were, you must, pilots got a big of glamour out of this, out of Bomber Command for instance, but it was the crew that flew with him that were the brave people. I mean they weren't, they weren't aviators in a sense,

they were bank clerks they were all sorts of people that were, and they just had to sit there and stick with it, I mean the tail gunner. Every time I felt like touching the rudders up front, the tail would go down like that. Fore and aft are natural movement, he had no idea what, which way the plane might go at any stage, ever, and he's looking backwards out of the thing. The outside air temperature anything up to as low as minus 40 in an electric flying suit and four machine guns in front him, Browning machine guns.

And he couldn't move, he couldn't get out he couldn't do anything; he had to stay there for the whole flight. Unless you let him out over Britain or something but you couldn't let him out during the peak of the war, at my stage towards the end I might have let a crew member move from his position once or twice, but it was always rogue night fighters around, even right up till the end and once, quite a lot of aeroplanes were shot down coming into land back in Britain at one stage. By rogue fighter pilots and they were good German

good pilots too, excellent pilots. Some of the German pilots got up to 70 or 80 kills, that's a lot of aeroplanes.

Well the only time I knew it

was a political ploy or a political murder job, was Berlin and it was the last raid on Berlin by Lancasters, at just before the war finished, it was unnecessary, I knew the political set up , it was arranged at Yalta, we'd been briefed by an MI5 [British secret service] group. Anybody, any Australians on the group were briefed about the common term, about what Russia's post war activities were going to be. The Iron Curtain the

whole lot, it was all arranged at Yalta. And of course the Churchill got done by, Roosevelt sided with Stalin. Who was probably the greatest cold blooded murderer, he and Genghis Khan, Hitler the lot thrown in Stalin was worse than any of them. And, he wanted to spread communism and they wanted control of as much of Germany as possible. They got, all East Germany

they got down as far as Dessau. And they wanted Berlin, the posh suburb of Berlin it was like raiding Bellevue Hill in Sydney virtually you could see Brandenburg Gate in the flares that was the only point I think that night that was offset well and truly that so that you let the bomb landed somewhere else. And it knocked Potsdam about badly, all historic buildings and, it was a lot of people killed that night for the simple reason they never had any

air raid on the place. They weren't, like the centre of Berlin was hammered, the people, it was par for the course, every night there was something came over. So there was a lot of people killed, unnecessarily of course. But that was a deal that had to be done, and we, well the only time we, we only knew an hour before we took off anyway, or an hour, say two or three hours before we took of what was on. And the big warning was that, be careful

if you bail out and the Russians pick you up, we carried special identities, identifying ourselves as allied pilots, or Australian pilots. Or RAF pilots, I think the RAF blokes had them too, not only pilots the whole air crew and the Russians at that stage, they grabbed, they were sorting out the, this is what our intelligence told us, they were sorting out prisoners of war as prospects to go back to their own country to form cells, communist cells as we had out here.

They named the Australian zoo as Communist at that stage. I wouldn't like to repeat what they said, it'd be in released files by now after 32 years, the Potsdam agreement, half of it's never come out I'd say for sure. But the philosophy was, I mean Karl Marx said this, get at the kids at school, get alcohol and drugs into hard core democracies, get at the unions, get at the minority

groups like aboriginals and so on and it all worked after the war in this country. It didn't work to any extent where it did any damage that it could have done but even in Britain, see they had a radical change in government just after the war, Churchill got diced and all the old Socialists went into powerful positions in Cabinet, and they were as weak as hell. And of course that's when it all drifted away.

Anyway that's politics, we're a long way off your subject, I'm getting diverted.

Oh anybody has to work at it in those days because you did fly the things; there was no gadgets to help. I never flew an aeroplane with an automatic pilot or landing lights, so you land in the middle of the

night without landing lights, just with on the line of a runway lights, they looked like candles, they were, so you worked the angle out, and you did three point landings as well, you didn't reel them in. You had to get them just high enough above the ground so when the stalled the flopped nicely on the ground without bouncing out of the sky. In other words the perfect landing in the Lancaster was, or any other aeroplane in those days was only a few feet off the ground at the point of stall, so you had to get your air speed back and keep it straight.

The Lancasters were good to fly if you couldn't fly a Lancaster there was something wrong with you. Once you got to that standard, there was a lot of gear to look after in it a lot of controls and that sort of thing, but apart from that it was very aerodynamic.

Through training I had a few close calls, yeah, mainly through bad weather, and getting lost,

or not always, had great difficulties in navigating, especially in Britain in the middle of winter on training flights and things. No I , well I did it, normally but a lot of crews were lost in training, I didn't have much trouble I know one night we went down to Lands End on cross country going up the coast

heading north somewhere towards Scotland on one leg and I ended up over Belfast and turned into Ireland, Dublin I mean, not Belfast, I was that far off course, and the whole crew was nearly asleep and I was as dopey as hell, I'd got off course and the oxygen had failed. It's a delightful feeling when the oxygen fails at 20,000 feet, you can just quietly, you know, fade away, and

fortunately somebody woke up and checked everything and it came back on.

Yeah you feel great. And the crew reckon I was swinging along like this, and what's wrong with the skipper, but they were half stupid too of course. The navigator used to control the oxygen supply, he'd gone to sleep I think or he'd got dopey. But that's about

that was one thing, we could have sailed on into the Atlantic and..

Oh just got the oxygen going again. Got back on course, he got a few fixes, by that stage the G equipment was working well in Britain you could get fixes in the air. It wasn't being interfered with over Britain then, the Germans used to be able to jam it over the continent of course. There was a lot of direct navigation done, DR navigation, for instance the

winds could change dramatically, and this trip I was referring to, to Berlin, we came back against a head wind of about 120 knots, it was unreal, reduced to ground speed, by about 100 knots an hour and it, and that wasn't predicted and instead of taking about seven hours, we took about nine hours 40 I think it was all the way but we did off course the navigator had problems.

He vomited, and inhaled his vomit so he was out of action for about two and a half hours and I flew it on his chart here, which only had the courses that's all it had. But the bomb aimer was handy, he got a few fixes and the wireless operator got his gear going and it, it worked alright.

Oh radio fixes, yeah.

No, devoted the time to thing to keep the thing going, no not really. No.

Having been in the Middle East for 18 months and all the holy places I was about as religious as I might have been, I'm a bit sceptical about religion,

I'm not an atheist, but I'm a bit sceptical about it. I don't, I mean the old days when if you were Catholic or Presbyterian, or Church of England, they all used to running their own empires and which ever one it is, doesn't make any difference if you're on one. I think I had two Catholics and a, a god knows what a heathen and me and then two or three others, didn't make any difference, nobody ever mentioned it. It's the same in the army, religion went overboard pretty well.

But I respect anybody who wanted to, maybe the crew said a few prayers, they reckon the probably did, so they probably helped me.

Oh pretty well yeah, or normal, normal ability I did an average assessment on Lancasters, but I was fairly ordinary, but you must remember that also we were

When I say ordinary, ordinary in that field, but you were categorised out of a big field to start with. Probably only about 10 percent of the original blokes that joined the aircrew they were flying the Lancaster for instance, there wouldn't be that many, or ever flying anything else operationally. They were all, aptitude was the thing, same as anything, I mean you got your aptitude for what you do, you wouldn't like to be something else that

some mundane thing would you. It's not that you like it you do what your natural aptitude is, what you're born with I suppose.

I found it, yes. I, actually towards the end I was enjoying the flying, very much so, especially when I was started dropping food supplies to starving people and bring prisoners of war back.

The first five had, yeah. We put another one on later, with another rear gunner.

Not much on the station, you probably go to a lecture

together, you go and have a look at an aeroplane, you probably pick up an instructor, the pilot wouldn't have flown that particular aeroplane, which is a Wellington and you'd all go up together first up with an instructor.

No way.

Oh after the flight you might, yeah, oh yeah. But you didn't, you didn't hear a story about people getting onto the grog before they took off, it's not on, first of all

it affects your eyesight, alcohol I think it does, I was lucky I had exceptional night vision and above average ordinary, I can still read what you got there without glasses, I'd just need them for this fine thing here. My writing's never been very good anyway - and the writing on there. So I was lucky with my eyesight, but no I, the parties at times on leave and time were pretty wild I can tell you, real wild. Especially

I mean we weren't all saints I can tell you.

Oh just letting off steam. Also people got to a high standard and the big thing was the let down afterwards for a lot of crews, I never went the full distance by way of a tour, but I'd have wanted to go straight on something else, instructing or something, it's like, we had a crew fished out of the north,

out of the channel, one day, one night, and they were lucky to survive they were in the channel for quite a while and the water's awful cold there. And the pilot did a real good ditching and the dinghy and they got into it, the seas weren't too good but and they were finally picked up and they were back flying within a week, that's the best way to cure the, of curing the stress.

Yeah, matter of fact one of them come out here and worked in Cowra for quite a while after the war. Another one wrote to me until the day he died, flight engineer came out to see me three years ago, two years ago, he did a painting for me, it's inside, not a bad artist. And the rest of them are all dead, as far as I know. I lost touch with the rear gunner, I think he got on the grog in a big way after the war and he probably died fairly young.

And the navigator I don't know what happened to him, he was a landscape gardener in London and I lost touch with him I couldn't find, nobody could find him for me. But that was most of the crews kept in touch with one another.

They were in a way, yeah, it was strange. The Yorkshire,

my mid upper gunner came from Huddersfield in Yorkshire which is very Yorkshire-ish and he was from a humble background, I think his father was a train guard and he was a bit radical in his political views, very bright, he was a magnificent gunner, and he established a business after the war of car deliveries from factories and so on, and did very well, he went, he retired and lived in Tenerife,

and he wrote to me once a month nearly, I never keep up with him and if I went over there I'd have to stay with him, otherwise there'd be terrible trouble. But he, he, then Bob Davies who actually came out here and worked for Edgell's for a while, I got him a job in Australia he was here for about four or five years, he was, he came from Newton Le Willows, in, you know next to,

not Yorkshire, what's the next… Anyway he lived about a hundred miles away from where Norman Poet did and he spoke, his language was quite you know different. The London accent of course was easy to pick up. The Welsh accent was a bit hard and the Bury St Edmonds accent was almost English, you know ordinary Australian.

Oh not a lot, you didn't sling a lot of instructions around, of course the SP [standard procedures] didn't tell them, they knew all the drills, you didn't talk to the crew that much. You didn't ring up every ten minutes and say how you going down the back mate, in the rear gunner's turret. Other than to tell them to keep a bloody good look out,

keep him awake, they used to get a bit drowsy. But only one pilot too was a bit of a problem, because the Americans and so on had up to three pilots on their planes. Always had two at least, which mean that if a pilot was badly injured and he couldn't fly well the crew were done. They might be able to, the bomber could have,

my bomb aimer could have flown it straight and level for quite a while. Got it over Britain and bailed them out or something like that. But there was a lot of crews probably like, pilots didn't seem to get hit that much, I don't know why, because the German, any fighters, you hear the stories about how they used to shoot the tail gunners out, well that's all bull, tail's down the back it's only a small target. The, I've trained on fighters, you aimed at the wing roots

between the fuselage and the wing roots, the fuels tanks are there, controls are there, everything is there. And that's, I saw quite a few blow up and that's where they all used to start to blow up from or burn from, around the fuel tanks.

Yeah the concentration was the thing. I did Kiel on Monday night, and we sank the Admiral Scheer [German ship]. My crew claim we got it, the photo used by the newsreel in Britain. It was one gigantic flash and blew the side out of the ship, the German battle ship and lit up all of the Danish Peninsula that's how big an explosion it was.

But anyway a number of aircraft probably hit it and then the next night we were briefed to go to somewhere and then the next night back to Kiel again and that's when I flew this aeroplane, came back on three motors, no it wasn't another one on three motors and then I think I went to deck out, by the Friday, that was five days was three trips and the concentration was starting to get a bit hard by then, and it was only about oh, three,

probably 20 hours, actually airborne, but you must remember the briefing went on, the debriefing and all that sort of thing, and you didn't get a lot of sleep in between, but the pilots always had, were supplied with Benzidine tablets which you could give you crew if you thought they needed them, I never got any and I took one once, and we were coming back from Berlin without a navigator and I was starting to get a bit drowsy. But they woke you up alright but you couldn't go to sleep for about 24 hours after them either

geez they were pretty powerful.

It was a bit hard to settle down after, yeah. Yeah well it's remarkable how quickly you could get to sleep after a while, you got used to it, professional.

Oh, by the time you got out of the aeroplane, got back in, got your gear off, and debriefing might take 20 minutes, half an hour,

a few debriefing things there. Pretty quick.

No you go and have a meal. You probably wouldn't even have a drink and then you go to bed, you had to be, well most of us had push bikes, we'd ride around the station, half a kilometre here and there. I had a car but I didn't use it for that sort of thing. I, most of us had push bikes or the crew bus, the WAAF would drive you around that picked you up one WAAF usually

looked after two or three crews, so she'd get them in and put them, these 19 year old girls bossing everybody around. The one we , she still writes to me about three or four times a year, and she runs the squadron association, and she even gets the Battle of Britain flight Lancaster to fly over on when they have their annual meeting every year. It's unreal, she goes to Germany and

identifies all these unknown graves, and she was just an ordinary WAAF driver, she married very well after the war, and she built up about four or five businesses around East Anglia there and in drapery businesses I think they were.

Oh yeah, they just it was, they were, there was no segregation of

the WAAFs on the squadron really. If you went to the pub they'd go with you.

Not a hell of a lot, not close relationships. No it was pretty hard on them because, if a girl was you know seen out regularly with a bloke and he got killed, she didn't, it wasn't terribly nice especially if she took on with another bloke and he got killed too, nobody would go near her she was a bad omen. It was pretty hard on them that way.

Oh I used to play a bit of golf; there was always odd golf courses in Britain. And there was always clubs available at the pro shops, and members would leave their clubs for use of people like us. I was associated for quite a while with a cove, Bert Nigh, he was a well known professional after the war. And I used to play with him quite a bit and that was in America and Canada and we were in Britain when I was training, waiting in Brighton and places like that. We played a bit of…there were all these I don't know you'd go and have a good sleep sometimes too of course. There was always something they did give you a lot of leave if you weren't flying, it wasn't far down to London.

You'll probably find this conversation, if you do other aircrew blokes, you can refine it down a bit, make it a bit easier for you, bit of a format, yeah.

No on this particular op in Berlin.

Only that one.

But on other ops, we did carry for instance, I've got false photographs there, I've got my copy still. The Germans confiscated all film and occupied countries like France and Holland and Belgium, they had underground systems going as you know, that rescued, a lot of allied airmen got rescued and got back through Spain and all sorts of thing, not a lot but some did, but the big problem was getting them

identity passports, or identity certificates as the Germans had I forget what they call them, and so we used to carry our own photographs and we carried in a battle, in our jacket, it fitted in around your ribs here and it had fishing lines the currency of the country you were flying over, little, we, the, our collar starch had little compasses in them and bits and pieces, our flying boots you could whip the top off

and they became ordinary shoes, so that you could make yourself into a civilian reasonably quickly, we always carried those, and you carried the currency of the country you were flying over, and of course you had to hand it all in as soon as you got out of the aeroplane, got back to debriefing.

I can't remember but it was reasonably substantial, you know it'd last you a week or so, and you'd give it to the underground anyway once you got established in the proper underground system.

But unfortunately the rations. See, the MI5 had the traitors, the poofter traitors there that were, that were betraying secrets in the latter stages of the war straight to the commandant, they systems they had.

The commandant in Moscow or the KGB [Soviet secret service] whatever you like, it went through the political division which is the commandant, and with result that a lot of the underground people

were betrayed and tortured and killed by the Germans before the war finished, so I've got an interview there from a great friend of mine who did bail out and joined the Resistance in France and went and fought with them. And, and his story's unreal, he got away with it, he got a passport and he learnt to speak French pretty quick and he joined in with the French underground until the end of the war. Now that sort of thing happened.

Well we were briefed on, Stalag Luft was the main centre in Germany where allied aircrew were interrogated because they did know more, especially aircrew had to, aircrew had to be briefed reasonably well to be able to do the job, so they were more likely people to get information out of than anyone else. So Stalag Luft 7 had it's, I think it's Stalag Luft 7, there is a number of Stalags

and I think it was number 7, was interrogation centre where allied airmen or British airmen would go and get interrogated and we were told the methods they'd probably use, and most of the interrogators there were blokes who had been to university in Britain before the war and the Brits all knew them and they knew their particular talents at interview and all that sort of thing. You'd get the odd lecture and things like that as you went through on your courses.

Oh mainly subtle, for instance they'd say, "How's your mother? Robina Catherine Cowley lives at so and so in Brisbane" straight off you know, that sort of thing. You'd say, "My god you know what's going on". They had amazing, you know how meticulous the Germans are with records; they'd get as many records as they could on allied aircrew that they could work on. It was all very subtle, they didn't threaten to screw your head off,

but they did threaten to, under the Geneva Convention [international agreement] they weren't game to torture pilots. They shot quite a few, or aircrew, they shot quite a few, and of course a lot of that was accounted for at the end of the war, those particular people that got home anyway. But, if all you, you were taught to say my name is so and so, my number name and rank is this and that's it. And they'd work on you they'd probably give you a bit of, you know

treat you well for the first day and, bit of grog and, but the big thing was, that they'd put you in cells with, or might have known or seen somebody pretty well and they'd put you in with him and then you'd start talking about, and you know in an atmosphere that appeared to be secure, you'd start talking and of course they're all bugged. And they'd, they'd be very nice to you for a while, there is all sorts of

little tricks. But after a while, they ones they called the hard core they weren't going to get much off they'd be transferred to the prisoner of war camps somewhere. Some of those prisoner of war camps were pretty nasty too, especially out on the eastern front. They, I saw a lot of those prisoners of war, I flew one lot, 24 back from Reims in Germany of course, in France I should say and some of them had been knocked about a bit, they were still lousy some of them. You know they were

fairly, people that were, they weren't Russian you know, peasantry by any means, or well they were aircrew most of the, some of them were aircrew, paratroopers from the Arnhem landing, the Arnhem landing.

They were British. Some aircrew used to carry say side arms like a revolver or so on but that was stupid, if you let bail out of a parachute

and land on the ground in some village, well and you'd just bombed the village, you couldn't blame the village if they had any excuse whatever to shoot you. That was crazy, they should have banned that but some of the yanks did, but of course they copped it. We never did.

No, no.

Yeah, just, how did your trip go, and mainly , and did your course…the navigators chart would be there, I'd often look at that and there'd be a debriefing officer, a reasonably ground staff officer, maybe a couple of WAAFs would look at the chart and check it and see what happened.

Then you'd report, where you thought , first of all did the markers appear to be visible or was it ten tenths cloud over the target of over the route, what were the flying conditions like, all those questions. If, did you fly straight and level after you dropped your bombs, because you had to fly straight and, 4000 pound it took X number of seconds to fall from 20,000 feet to the ground, you always let it go last, because the

terminal velocity a 4000 pound ground dustbin was less than the conventional bombs in other words you didn't let the 4000 pounder go first because the others would catch up with it on the way down, couldn't fire it off. And, so it'd, you used to try and fly straight and level, we had a camera in every aeroplane which was primed to go off every X number of seconds after the 4000 pounder left the bomb bay. But, that, naturally

if you were, if it was programmed to 20,000 feet and you'd got into trouble and you'd let the thing go at 18,000 you might be forced to, 90 percent of the camera flashes didn't work, I've got two that did, or three actually. But it was pretty hard to fly, for the crew fly straight and level after the bomb. Bomb aimer gone 'Boooom' in his best Lancashire accent, that's where he came from and you flew straight and level, every second seemed like a

about a, you know about four or five seconds, or six seconds you flew straight and level, give the camera a chance and then of course you'd duck and weave all over the place, you didn't have to do it but it was nice if you could. And then the debriefing if you got a good, you got a good photograph it was a great help to the target planners for the next raids. How much damage estimates and all that sort of, it was all correlated back at Bletchley, which is out of London. You probably know where that is, the whole village was taken over by

Bomber Command, that's where they decoded Ultra actually.

Yeah, well they could pitch their voices up. You could probably do it; your voice would go over the RT pretty well.

And their pronunciation was really good, their elocution was good. The, you can imagine with four motors going all the wiring in the aeroplane, possibly the aeroplane's damaged and the top, radio transmission equipment we had there was all sorts of statics and, it made a hell of a noise, there's only a thin skin between you and the outside atmosphere, it wasn't like modern day airliners. No pressurisation. So there

was a hell of a noise all the time going on. And it was pretty hard to hear.

Yeah they could pitch their voices up. Yep, much better than the male voice, the decimals were there.

They had the decimals worked out; you know they could pitch their voices up. After a while they just did it naturally.

None of the top level, I mean Vera Lynn [famous actress] wouldn't be there, she was singing for the, Churchill all the time. Those sort of people but bit parts actresses and girls that had, you know, a bit of elocution school or something like that. The better, not to say the better class of girl, but the girls with a bit more advantage over the average girl, and had a fairly high pitched voice.

No they volunteered, they got conscripted into a factory or something if they didn't join up, they were all, most of the eligible age people in Britain were conscripted into something, army, navy, air force, factories, coal mines. They even sent the university students down the coal mines for a year at one stage. No WAAFs would, they would volunteer, most of the top girls on our squadron, the bus drivers they all volunteered; they couldn't get in quick enough. I think they had to be 18 to get in.

Marjorie, she was 19 and driving a school buses, and she, oh they developed personalities and they were pretty important people driving these crews out to their aeroplanes and bringing them back again. Well they were the last people to see a lot of people alive.

Yeah it was, very unusual. But, once they got used to it

they formed a bit of a core, you know they took their job seriously but they didn't, you know, I wouldn't say the were larrikins, but they, you know they give you plenty of cheek and so on, they were free to, you never argue with a WAAF, a WAAF driver.

Boss you around, they loved it yeah, and they knew they could get away with it. Well it was nice seeing a female when you

got back instead of some grubby old mechanic.

Well first of all this is a raid, our squadron did on Dessau, which was way down, it was about a nine hour trip,

It was well down, it went behind the Russian Zone [of Germany] after the war. And you tell me your grandfather was on that road as a pilot, now he's bomb aimer would have been issued with a chart, bomb aimers chart like that, which endeavours to portray what Dessau would look like at about two o'clock in the morning with search lights and, it's a profile of what the city could possibly look like on a reasonably clear night, it was of some assistance to the bomb aimer. This is the one that I,

as you tell me, your grandfather went on the same raid which is a bit strange anyway. But it, that we should be discussing this, but it's amazing how you run into people at the same place at times. That would have been the chart that would have been given to his bomb aimer, it had some assistance, like I don't know whether that comes out on the camera or not. The other thing is this, at the end of the war on

the night of the 14th and 15th of April 1945, the last Bomber Command raid by Lancasters was made on Berlin. Now this raid was, one that was arranged at Yalta, at the last conference with Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill when everything went wrong with the Russian influence at the end of the war, Stalin got away with everything he wanted. The Iron Curtain

the spread of communism throughout the world and one of the conditions at Yalta for the allies had to perform the Russians had to do certain things too, was to bomb a suburb of Potsdam, in Berlin which was virtually equivalent to bombing an undefended target and one that had not been bombed during the war because there was no reason, it was a civilian area, it was high class old ancient buildings

and god knows what but typical communism they had to, they wanted, Stalin's philosophy was to belt anything down of that nature, but, and our squadron put on about 12 aircraft that night out of about 120. It was a long trip, should have taken about seven hours, and this chart is a what they called a captive aircraft's chart, the navigator had all his charts, the pilot was so busy

he couldn't leave his seat, he couldn't do any actual physical navigating while he was airborne but I always carried one of these charts because it gave a course that we were roughly going to fly the heights and airspeeds, and the rest of the briefing came from the navigator, this one started, I think probably, probably just about after dark on the night of the 14th, and, we, we started

from just about Cambridge near, was near our airfield and we flew on a course of straight down, straight over the top of London, and the course is, in those days you never went straight to the target naturally because the Germans, we hoped there was no leak in intelligence they didn't know which target we were going to until we got fairly close to it, for instance we could have gone to Frankfurt or a number of other places along the way. So, you, you change courses on this particular night we would have

changed course one, two, three, four, four times before we got to Berlin, and the same thing when we went home on a different course, I think we changed five, so that the air speed at that stage, we climbed to 15,000 feet by the time we got over London, we went across France at only 9000 feet because the weather was very bad, we climbed up to 20,000 feet by the time we got to Berlin.

And then on the way home we came back at much the same heights. The outward trip was, was nasty weather all the way, I hardly saw my wingtips I was flying on instruments nearly the whole night and it was nine hours 40 so I was a bit fatigued at the end of it. The, we, the war was nearly over, over Berlin it was reasonably clear

and you could see all the Russian guns firing, the big massive advance was on, on the, onto Berlin, and about probably 70 or 80 nautical miles around us there were huge gun flashes of Russian artillery, advancing on Berlin. We got over the target area and the master bombers call sign was Zip Fast, he'd called up to say Zip Fast calling and to confirm your course onto

target is as briefed, or there could be alterations because the wind directions and all of that sort of thing. They got it pretty good in the end, he'd have hit a mosquito probably the master bomber down below pretty low level and he was on HF, which was the high frequency radio. And, that's about the only notes I've got there, the course in, the course in was oh seven oh true, not magnetic, true course, and that was on our compasses, and direction indicators. There was a POW [prisoner of war] camp

just north of the track about 40 k's outside of Berlin, a huge POW camp which is marked, so we didn't, no spraying around there. That would have been marked much more comprehensively on the navigator's charts. We got over Berlin and the, we picked up the markers okay did a normal bombing run and the 4000 pounder refused to leave the bomb bays and what had happened is the electrical system

on the, the catches that held but big bombs were heated so that, because otherwise they were the ones that froze ice all around underneath there was ice under the aeroplane. What you call clear ice which is like concrete. So the bomb, the 4000 pounders hooked up in the bomb bays the bomb doors open which is not what you want. So I tried to shake it out, I dived around from about a couple of hundred feet and pulled back hard on the stick and, probably did a couple of hundred

knots, and but it, nothing happened, the mid upper gunner got the aircraft axe, and he chopped two little holes in the floor of the aircraft and chipped the ice away, in the mean time I did a big orbit around the main city of Berlin and there was hard, there was no flak that night, hardly any, they just layed dog, or they wouldn't open up on a single aircraft. And they were getting pretty beaten up by then, Berlin, they bad trip that night was the bad weather and then we finally came out at

210 knots, which is, that's nautical miles per hour which is a fair bit of speed and about, oh the navigate me the first course to turn which was two one oh, which is the course on the compass and dropped down to 9000 feet to go home because to get under the weather, that was the was the weather forecast, the weather at that stage, it didn't matter if we were at 9000 feet or 29,000 it was just thick.

And anyway with that he, the next thing I know the Wireless operator's calling me saying, "Charlie's passed out", well Charlie was the navigator. And anyway the, the flight engineer and the wireless operator got him back onto there was a couch just behind the, near where the wireless operator was and put an oxygen mask on him a clean one but he hardly any competency, he was hopeless for a while, so he was out of action, he got oxygen alright

and I flew on this chart supposedly, all the way, I thought I was going back to Britain all right. Ended up way down here [indicates] somewhere, le Havre and finally we picked up with some other gear we had, the French coast, and anyway, it was what they called H2S scanner; it used to throw a map of the ground underneath back at you, and anyway I just followed the French coast back up and Charlie came around again about here.

Oh it was still dark. Oh yeah, very much dark. Came back to, finally got a fix of just about over the, oh the English Channel and then got back on course which was up to Reading, turned at Reading, and went back to the squadron. When we got there the weather was crook [poor], and it, a ground was, we were getting short of fuel too and it was getting pretty hard to get down.

And the cloud base was only about 600 feet and I took a risk and I just went under it, and it was reasonably clear and it was, oh it might have been getting just near daylight, but it wasn't a nice trip. Because you're murdering civilians, it was bad weather and it was purely a political job. Well it was, politics was going oh, I hated communism, always did and that's why I joined a particular, I joined one or two organisations when I came back to Australia I can tell you.

Underground organisations, at the time nobody knows much about, but we were briefed and told who the leading communists were in Australia before that trip. And the, thing about it was that had we come down -- we were given these special aircrew, we were bombing Potsdam, and without a doubt Russian intelligence officers were doing the job for Stalin and they

no off us a bit. And then they'd offer all sorts of privileges to be re educated to when you were repatriated to get back into your own country as a cell.

No, if he bailed out, the pilots very seldom got out anyway, but if you bailed out now the Russians would treat you very well and they were just murdering anybody at this stage, the Russian troops were peasants and…

No, no because I never landed there. I saw what went on back in the services back in Britain. The, they were pretty; of course France was riddled with Communists. And then the British had gone Bolshy [Bolshevik – sympathetic to socialism] you could hardly blame them after what they went through pre war days; you know they were, the hierarchy the Lord system and so on. But the

services were getting infiltrated and they thought they were good Labor people you know socialist government, socialist was the thing.

But you knew you weren't bombing an open target. I didn't bomb it with the big bomb actually, mine would have landed back in the realms of Berlin, so I didn't feel terribly guilty except that the small bombs went down and,

the 500 pounders.

Well it wasn't it was assisting the Communist cause, in fact …

Well the Russian objective was to promote as much chaos in the western world as possible and that introduces,

makes the introduction of Communism much easier, you already had it in France.

No, no way. Been court martialled, I mean you only find out about it about two hours before anyway, it was a bit of a worry. Everybody was suspicious about the Russians by this stage, as you know they were absolutely lauded…they never were. . They had

long term objectives.

I think there was probably about 48 or 50. Oh you mean on the ground? Oh well it's on the figures I've got there about six or seven thousand. And there's the injured ones too of course, on top of that. It was an open target, they hadn't, they weren't used to, Berlin was massively bombed, but there were reasonably legitimate areas bombed

but this was just a suburb. And they weren't used to air raids they were used to air raids over the main part of the city but they obviously didn't take the precautions they should have a lot of civilians. They wouldn't have expected to be bombed; I mean what was the point in bombing them, no logic in it.

Oh right. He was on the back to back Dessau, which

your grandfather would have been on that night. It was a crew that I flew with as a second pilot once, you could when you went to the squadron do one trip if you wanted to as a second pilot with an experienced crew which I happened to do with him, it was a night trip on somewhere or other, Frankfurt I think and, they were a very good crew and they were just about finished their tour and he,

he ended up getting shot down after he'd bombed, first of all our, our run in that night was, it was a pretty nasty one in that we got caught in a, my crew got caught in a master beam between Magdeberg and Brandenburg, about 20,000 feet and there were quite a lot of fighters about that night because the Germans had woken up, just about roughly we were going to Dessau and all the fighters

from Berlin, the raid wasn't on Berlin and by the courses they'd picked up on their radar we were going somewhere like Dessau so the were ready, and we got caught in a master beam between Magdaberg and Brandenburg. Now the master beams the Germans had invented a radar system called the Wurzburg and there was Giant Wurzburg and it worked particularly well between those two towns which was a defence belt for a lot of industrial areas and further south.

The search lights would get onto one aircraft and then if they were quick they'd get the, the master beam would get on it too, so you might end up with eight or ten search lights and the master beam must coning one, it was like a moth going in the lamp and they were hard to get out of because the German flak [anti aircraft] guns, the 88 millimetre flak guns were all coordinated with that particular radar on search lights. So they all,

you know you might get 40 or 50 guns firing at you, they couldn't miss in the end, I mean I've seen blokes just hosed out of the sky. But if you were quick, you'd do some violent moving.

Violent, we used to call it a corkscrew, but you had to do it on instruments because it was at night time in a fully loaded aircraft with bombs, so I forget which way I went first, but the mid upper gunner called out, corkscrew starboard I think it was, which meant I went down to the right and

pulled the stick back and I'm doing about 300 mile an hour by the time I got down, you'd roll over, come back the other way still coming down and then climb up, you had a hell of a lot of airspeed and you could go up and you could play with up to about 2000 feet that way. Which meant that the radar wasn't as good as it is today, it was just miraculous didn't had a bit of a problem following you, well it followed you around the first time but it didn't the second time and we lost it. But a big help might have been the bloke above me,

about 2000 feet above me and he shouldn't have been at that height anyway, but I think it reflected on him, the beam him up but he would have been well he would have been reasonably safe at that height because the flak couldn't hardly reach up to 20,000 was getting around it's limit. And, we got out of that, and on the run into Dessau which makes you think a bit, you know, in hindsight, with a wind finding aircraft which means their wireless operator and navigator were sending

winds, pre determined winds calculated off the dead reckoning charts of what the winds were and they'd be transmitted back off the main force on the way home. That's for navigational purposes, because an aircraft drifts all over the place in the air, it is never in still air. If there is a wind coming from the starboard side. Or recorded, at so many knots, you can calculate how much. In other words, it's two courses you fly one's your natural course it's on your instruments

and the other one's the track you actually make over the ground and they're never the same. So, anyway we did get a hold up up here and what happened was, the 4000 pounder became loose in the hooks, with the violent flying I did, aerobatics you might say and I didn't know, and I never dreamt that the bomb bays would be strong enough to hold it up and it was loose in the bomb bays and fortunately the

fuses weren't, had that much cable on, they pulled the plug out of the fuses and if it had come out it would have windmilled on it that would fuse the bomb and you'd only have to blow on it it'd go off. It used to fuse itself on the way down. And anyway we're lined up, and I see the weather isn't terribly good there's a bit of, quite a bit of cloud and you couldn't see the markers terribly well but we reckoned we identified them, opened the bomb doors which was about,

30 or 40 seconds, maybe 40 seconds before we were going to let them go, the bomber aimer was ready, it'd be more than that, it'd be nearly a minute we were going to do a real quick run in, and the old Lancaster dropped, jumped 200 feet in the air, and the bomber aimer says in his best Lancashire accent, "So and so, Cookie's gone skipper" and it just crunched out and went. So that was a bit of luck it never went off in the bomb bays in a way. Then, of course we flew across the target and dropped

the rest of the bomb, but on the way out we were, I think 17 or 18 aircraft shot down by fighters and Mackenzie's crew turned out to be one of them never returned to squadron that night, or the next morning.

He was the bloke on our squadron and he is also the fellow whose remains were finally identified about a year ago and he crashed near a little village about 140 odd miles, nautical miles from Dessau but that area

all went behind the Russian Zone up until, or the crash of the Berlin was all and his crew were just written off never heard of again, up until about, or only about a year ago, there was, the villagers reported to the Russians that they buried a Lancaster had come down in flames and they'd buried the remains of the crew in the village cemetery in one grave. And it wouldn't be very much to bury anyway and anyway

there was a British War Graves Commission in later years since the Russians have become friendly, the Russians are very cooperative and they, they issued the names of seven crew that were alleged in this aeroplane, it was finally checked out and they weren't the right names and later on the war graves commission went and examined the grave and one of the, one of the executors of the, or the big brass of the war graves commission, found a disk laying near the grave itself.

And this was an identity disk that one of the gunners had worn, it had fallen off his body when they buried him apparently and anyway we checked it back with the RAF and it turns out it was, he was a gunner on two one eight squadron and the, all the villagers remembered the night the plane went down and it was identified and it was Mackenzie's crew, so we're still picking them up. In Holland they're still getting then out of the Zeiderzee, out of the mud. And the crews went down and

the mud sealed over and some of the bodies are in reasonable condition still, they sealed right off. When I was in Holland in 1980, the, they were still fishing a few out then. Anyway that's the story of Dessau, but that's just an ordinary night raid on…

The European war was the big one for us. I was on the squadron, we'd lost a

lost a crew about a week before that, going to do an unnecessary raid down near Berchtesgaden, it was, Berchtesgaden, he only crashed on take off, he was another good friend of mine, I'd have been flying the aeroplane if he hadn't been in it.

It cut a motor on take off and was heavily loaded and just didn't make it off the ground. Nearly, he dodged the WAAF quarters, did a hell of a good job, and got out and up an open paddock before it crashed, and the whole thing blew up and there was nothing, hardly anything to bury.

But we were still on the squadron and, that's, we were, I went down to London a couple of days later and stood outside Buckingham Palace with Churchill and the Princesses [Elizabeth and Margaret] and everybody else, like everybody else, it was quite interesting, the whole of London turned out of course. But Churchill was on the balcony with the king, with old Mary and the two Princesses.

They didn't, they weren't bad lookers in those days either, 18 year old I think the eldest one was. So that was, that was it, and I went back and I did, oh I did some more, we'd done some food drops by then.

I went back and did, I did one, the first one was ever done on the 28th of, 29th of April, the Germans had still occupied quite a large slice of Holland.

Montgomery went through Ardennes area there and cut it off and German Commander in Holland was a, he was one of the worst of the Nazis [German fascist party], he was the first man hung after the Nuremberg trials and the Dutch were in a big, like the Rotterdam and the Hague and the major cities tremendous number of people just dying of starvation. So the RAF decided that they'd try and drop food in and they decided they'd decided they'd do it before the war,

Armistice, the armistice was on the 8th of May and the first food drops were done in, late in April. Our squadron, being the old special duty squadron was one of the squadrons do the food drop. So we practiced two or three weeks before, came back from a raid somewhere I think it was on Kiel or somewhere, and the next day the, it's, the

squadron commander said, "You'd better book an aircraft out and go low flying with sandbags". And he said, "On the target area" he said, "Fly as low as you possibly can as slow as you possibly can". I said, "What the hell's going on?" and he said, "I don't know but I guess we'll find out" and it was practising for dropping food. So eventually on the 29th of April after negotiations had been carried out with headquarters, with the German commanders and [American General Dwight D] Eisenhower said "Good",

The Germans promised that if Lancasters went in on pre determined course and didn't vary, and dropped food, they wouldn't be shot at, well it was terribly hard to convince Bomber Command crew's that would happen and finally the weather was too crook for about the first one or two days, on the 29th we did the first trip and my aircraft was U Uncle which was a good old aeroplane, bit like that one, that lighter box, we knew it was going to get back somehow, it'd

been bashed up several times, and, and resurrected but it, we did the first food drop and the war was pretty crook and we actually flew across France at about less than 1000 feet and it was quite strange flying over enemy territory, France was occupied, or not occupied by Germans then but once we hit the Dutch coast flak comes from everywhere, like and we flew past and waved at the flak gunners nothing happened but we'd dropped over, got over

Rotterdam and the Germans had blown the dykes that area of Holland is below sea level and there is sea water in the suburbs of Rotterdam and some two story houses had nearly up to the first floor level, or second, mid floor level and the all, the intelligence had leaked that the Dutch knew that there was something on, and, I'll tell you

every able bodied citizen in Rotterdam was on the roof of buildings or in the streets and you could see them it was like I was talking to you, so close we were, you know, as low as you could get, a couple hundred feet, a big plane like that it took a bit of flying actually. And, anyway, I did the first run in and I think I was credited with being the first bloke that actually dropped there was about a 50 or 60 Lancasters dropped behind me, the same day dropped up at the Hague and the, the, it was in

panniers with, with the canvas thing underneath and all these, that was bully beef and all of that sort of thing. And it, you fired them the bomb aimer fired them, we just did a normal bombing run, fired the thing and only one pannier went which meant we had two more. And the instructions were, the briefing was you did one run and came home. And my mid upper gunner said, "Oh skipper we can't do it, we can't do it", and I said to the crew, "Alright are you prepared to risk it" and they said, "Yeah" and I went around again. And the second time I went around

we were fired on of course and I dived down from about 600 feet and pulled back hard on the stick and the second pannier went and it, I remember seeing some of the things, there's a hell of a lot of glasshouses, you know tulip houses and things, seeing all the stuff crashing through and, anyway with that stage, we were fired on you know small arms fire and they'd cut the rudder and the elevator trims of the Lancaster and fortunately the trimming tab went one way, if it'd gone the other way we'd have drive straight into the ground, you couldn't have stopped it, but it did a violent climb and being, they were pure manual control by cables weight, nothing automatic about them. So, the aeroplane's going up and I couldn't do anything about it, and of course it would have stalled and just rolled over and just gone into the ground, so I did a bit of freakish flying I kept pulling back on the motors until the until the plane was nearly on the point of stalling and I get the stick forward and I…

To try and reduce the flying speed so that the, I had enough strength to push the stick forward I the slip stream, the trimming tabs, the object of those

Is to the control of the aeroplane because you can't physically push the trimming tabs, or, the elevator and rudder trims had gone and there were those little trimming tabs on them, they're vital for, on those type of planes there weren't automatic trims and you had to trim them with the special wheels in the cockpit as part of the flying procedure. And you had, once the air flow was reduced to near stalling speed which might be say 100 knots, and you could actually

push the stick forward but any speed above that, of course, the aeroplane couldn't be controlled. So that happened then I was stepping down from zero feet to 800 feet a couple of times and on the way up the third time I said to the crew, "If anyone wants to bail out, go, go, go" I used, that was the thing and the bomb aimer came back, he looked and he swore like hell and he said, "Bit so and so close to the ground skipper, I'm staying with you"

And the others all decided to stay, anyway with that the, mid upper gunner and the engineer climbed down the back and I was sort of kangarooing across the sky, it was a bit difficult for them they got down the back and worked out what was wrong and the air gunner laid on his stomach and got the broken cables in his hands, he had his gloves on of course, his flying gloves and the cables about as thick as your finger, so he had to wrap them around his hands, and

he controlled the elevator trims and the rudders of course were slurring a bit, but I was pretty quick I still had the trims on the O runs which were which are on the rings, so I put the starboard wing down a bit I think it was and that counteracted the swing from the tail. They got that big tail blade on them the big fins. So that fixed that problem and he and I flew the thing back to the squadron on Britain, at pretty low level all the way because the weather was stinking bad

and I wasn't game to get in cloud and, because that makes flying even more difficult. Anyway we got over Britain and it got reasonably clear and I got up to about 10,000 feet going across the channel, and did about four or five landings, because once you altered the throttle setting on those big motors, all the trimmings on the aeroplanes change, the flying attitudes change and everything else so you had to know what was going on. Or we had to know, you had to learn to fly it from down the back trimming wise. So we did two or three landings about

10,000 feet and worked out I'd come in without any flaps, down at all, which mean I was going to touch down at about 140 or 50 knots, which is pretty fast. But the runways at Chedborough were only about 2000 yards, that was enough and I came back over the squadron and called out, called up for permission to land, I wanted a priority landing but I said I'll hang around until you get everybody else down, and of course the little WAAF on control said, "You're, our

call sign was Brides Smile by the way, "Brides Smile Uncle what's wrong with you now?" and so I said, "Well I haven't got any rudder or elevator trims and the gunners hanging on, is trimming the aircraft down the back, everything's safe, we can get in I'm sure." so there's silence of about two or three minutes, nobody came back to me, and she finally said, "I'll put the station commander on," the station commander was a great old bloke, a cove called Brotherhood, and he was a senior air force commander and he'd been retired from farming,

oh from flying, I should say. And I'll tell you a story about him in a minute too. He, there was another deadly silence, he said, "Stand by you uncle" and when the WAAF came back she said, "Group Captain Brotherhood's says your course to Woodbridge is zero, zero, seven I think it was, proceed there, and then he came on and he said, "The war is almost over, we've had enough crashes here, we're not

going to have any more", so Woodbridge was the famous up in Yorkshire where they used to burn, it was especially for crashed, for badly damaged aeroplanes, they had everything. They even had what they call the Fido, you might have heard about that but they used to burn a lot of fuel and lift the clouds enough to for aircraft to get down to land. So anyway we proceeded up there it was just about dark by this stage which was making it a bit harder to fly and there was a howling gale blowing from the north, almost, the runways ran east west

and for some reason or other this gale was coming from the north, up from the Scottish Highlands of the North Pole or somewhere. And, which made it very difficult to do a cross wind landing even. So anyway I ran around there and of course the flying control blokes were all used to crashed aircraft and there was always very low grade procedure. The bloke on the control I found out afterwards had been ADC for the Prince of Wales when he came out to Australia

pre Simpson days. And of course he was an absolute larrikin but the type of bloke you needed you know the high pitched English voice and he said, "Oh cruise around old chap, when you're ready to come in let us know". Well the let us know business was of course let the alarms go off and the ambulance all started and the fire engines, it was a great sensation going down the runway, lining up at about 150, 60 knots see all of the vehicles start up. Anyway I put the thing down; it bounced a couple of times,

And the crew reckoned it was one of the best landings I ever did so they were happy and we taxied around to the dispersal area and the last thing you did before you shut the motors down was, you always kept the starboard, I think it was the port engine going and because the bomb doors and the hydraulics and all were connected to it and the last thing you opened was the bomb doors, anyway the flight engineer shut the port engine down and opened the

bomb doors just before he shut it down and a third of the food supplies dropped out on the dispersal and a third of the supplies never got to Rotterdam, it was a funny ending. Anyway, we go back it was a bit of a hair raising trip, it was a bit unique and it was my, they gave it to us as an op, the food drops weren't called as operations, they would have been local ordinary flights, but they gave us this one, to all the crews this day as an op, because we didn't know whether we were going to be shot out of the sky at low level or

anything else. So we got that trip and it was my air gunners 20th op, which gave him 50 ops in Bomber Command, which and he got an almost automatic DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross], and he got a hell of a good citation for hanging onto the rudder trims anyway. And it was quite appropriate really, and the outcome it was, we went to the mess and I think we ended up in the sergeant's mess and the shocking food and a cup of tea and

about an hour later this, one of the crew buses from squadron arrives, our CO had sent it straight away and the, we ended up driving, oh about two hours through the night down through the midlands there and I sat in the front with the WAAF and my poor old crew sat in the half open vehicle in the back and to go back to the squadron, so that was the end of the day. And it, we did, three days later this aeroplane here was

one that I flew to Vassal, where Montgomery crossed the Rhine, and it was Q Queenie I was flying and we bombed Vassal, oh about daylight one morning just before Montgomery had crossed the Rhine at Vassal. And we, coming home the motor, its port engine got damaged so we came back on three motors, and it was then afterwards,

they put a new motor in it or doctored the motor up and flew it to one of the base stations where they pensioned the aircraft off and it was to be a reserve aircraft, and, it, this was three or four weeks of course before the food drops, so, my aircraft got damaged on the first food drop, so I took this spare and they brought Q Queenie back onto operation, but, it, it was in the base and they fixed it up with a

reasonable motor, and I flew it two days later which is the basis of this, the artist used for this painting, into the Hague and dropped food there, so Q Queenie went back into operations. But it did 84 ops and it was featured in, the whole, it's authentic, all the debriefing and things are on the back

and it was that print there which is in the frame, it was, it was, it was quite a famous aircraft, so I finished up with two old aeroplanes I've wrecked. The next, we did two or three more food drops, we dropped about three to four thousands pounds of food, English pounds, each time, and it had a tremendous, I found out afterwards,

in 1980 I went to the Bomber Command reunion, and my wife, we had quite a lot of sheep, a couple of thousand sheep were being fed in the big drought here at the time and my wife managed to the property we had out over near Orange, and I went off to the Bomber Command reunion, my air gunner got me an invitation and old Harris [Air Officer Commander-in-Chief, Air Chief Marshall, Sir Arthur Harris] was there and Churchill's grandson and all the famous people, and Vera Lynn sat on the table next to us and sang most of the night and it was quite

quite a good evening with all the old famous blokes but one German fighter pilot was there he shot down about 80 Lancasters and this is 1980 of course, and I stayed at the Liberal Club, I went and tried them out with my old wartime card anyway they let me in. Anyway I rang her on the phone, rang my wife and we had friends in Holland, my daughter had been very friendly with the Termoll family, pretty well known people and he'd been in

KLM [Dutch commercial airline] for years, flying commercially and they'd been out here stayed with us, and I rang them up and he said, "What the hell are you doing in London?" I said, "With the Bomber Command reunion", he said, "Could you come to Holland urgently?" and I said, "What do you mean?", he said, "It's a week of celebrations on in Holland, it is the 35th anniversary of the first food drop, they want to feature the death of Anna Frank [Jewish Dutch girl, whose family attempted to hide in Amsterdam during the occupation and whose diary was found and published after her death] and he said be a bit of a change in Queens," and I said, "Well that's about all" I said, "Anyway what's that got to do with me?"

He said, "Well there was one Dutch pilot who flew in the food drops, he didn't do the first, but later in the week he did and he was a pilot in Bomber Command and he died a fortnight ago and they're not looking for a pilot who did the first food drop." And they hadn't contacted the RAF or anything else it was because well it was a tentative sort of thing and they had contacted another bloke who flew the same day; he was the senior intelligence officer at NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation]

forces, they contacted him and he dragged himself up, he'd been a navigator on the first food drop and his, and his bomb aimer and so it was decided the Dutch pilot would do the job with these two RAF blokes so I substituted the pilot and I've got a card from his sister in law the other day. Anyway the Dutch pilot had died, so I substituted for him it was unreal. I went over to Holland, of course I was met and I was a guest of the Dutch government for a week, the Bürger-Meister [mayor] at Rotterdam, and

I stayed with the Termoll family and as you can see from the front page of the Rotterdam News two days running and it was great to be in the celebrations but the Dutch minister who was a woman, Schmidt Mears I think was her name, she was the Thatcher of Dutch politics at the time, extremely bright woman, and I said, "You know what are you doing featuring this?" she said, "Well we got to realise it could happen again" and she went like that towards the east,

meaning the Russians of course, they were having problems with their communism at the time. She said, "The Dutch people have got to be made aware it could all happen again" and she was an extremely strong woman, she was unreal and spoke several languages of course. But anyway they provided me with a secretary from the Bürger-Meister's office; she took me all around with the Termoll's. The aero club turned an aeroplane on, I had to do a ceremonial take off in the, in a light aircraft off the main runway at Rotterdam and I hadn't flown for years,

anyway I got it off the ground, and he was the chief flying instructor of the aero club and he had a farm up at the Hague and so we go up to the Hague and flew all around his piggeries and everything else. And the airways were cleared for this flight; I could fly at any level I liked around Holland. Anyway that flight went on for about two hours over the dropping zones and the whole works, and the second day I went and did it a second time and, then the third day was the Wednesday when all the official celebrations were on.

And there was the official presentation of stamps and everything else was done off the balcony at Rotterdam the old town hall, which is one of the few buildings not destroyed by bombing raids early in the war and the huge crowds, television cameras the whole works, and we were all out on the balcony, I was asked, the Termoll's escorted me, plus my secretary of course,

and about an hour before the ceremony started the Bürger-Meister sent an urgent message, he would like to see me in his office. So I went up there and he said, "We got a huge problem here, we've got a bloke under arrest in the office here, and he's got the most amazing story," he said, "We can't work him out, he's a Canadian he's Dutch born and he's got an amazing story." So I went in and of course there was about six heavies there, and several intelligence people,

and the Minister and the Bürger-Meister and I said, "Well, you know what's the story?" he said "I picked it up, I picked it up." And I said, "You picked what up?" he said, "The little parachute" and it suddenly dawned on me that the WAAFs in the parachute section had made a little parachute and put their cigarette ration and their chocolate rations for the week in this little parachute, they'd collected from some of the other girls around and there was quite a substantial parcel and I'd forgotten all about it but,

it suddenly dawned on me, I'd completely forgotten that something like this did happen, and I said, and I said, "I can't just remember it" and he said, "Oh you must, you must the note, the note" and I said "what was on the note?" and he said, "It had best of luck, best of luck from R Cowley, U Uncle and his crew" and that was HAU Uncle and that was the plane I flew, and I said, "Well it's got to be right". Anyway he was invited to all the dinners he got a write up in the press,

and but it was a freakish sort of thing and after the war he was a 14 year old boy when it happened, the family wouldn't let him touch it for about four or five days, finally his little sister ate too much chocolate and did a lot of damage to her because they were starving. And after the war he migrated to Toronto in Canada and became the Ford motor dealer, the main motor dealer in Toronto and he was the Chairman of the Lions Club in Toronto and the

Lions Club at the Hague for the official celebrations had a reciprocal arrangement with the Lions Club in Toronto so he was representing the Canadian Lions Club and he was in Holland when this press article arrived about three days before and he read about it and he hurtled down to Rotterdam to meet me. So it's a strange story but it happens to be true and there's evidence of it anyway.

Yeah, it's one of those one off stories you don't often hear about. Anyway I, I'm trying to, I think he died not long after that, I wrote to him a couple of times and he just didn't, I haven't been able to contact him, not that there was any need to but it was a strange story and it went over pretty well with the Dutch too. But I'm a, at dinners and things I sat next to a woman who, looked as though she was, she would seldom out of a beauty salon, she looked about 25,

she was a mother of twins and a single boy and her husband was a judge of the International Court of the Hague, she'd been a key member of the underground, she was17 when the war, when the Dutch was overrun by the, and she was a very good linguist and she escaped to Britain and she was trained by MI5 I mean she'd shoot you at the drop of a hat if she had to, and she was trained by MI5 and she was such a good agent that they occasionally dropped her in submarines off the coast.

And here's this woman you'd reckon she'd never been out of a beauty salon in her life, a beautiful woman, not very big. Anyway there were people like that there, there was one of the women leaders of the underground and she'd been tortured and all her face was disfigured and she'd been invited to the do, but I might, they had a special stamp issue that I'll show you later on, just over there of the first food drop that the three of us had to present

to the nation, which we did and they commemorated the death of Anna Frank, the author, you probably know about her and she, she had a special stamp issue too to commemorate her death. So we presented those to the nation as well and I've got the endorsed copies there from the Minister. So it was quite a day. Quite an unexpected, I leave

here, everything for my wife to look after, and I end up on the town hall balcony at Rotterdam. Quite unexpected of course.

So I had a week there as a guest of the government, the three of us did and I kept in touch with those blokes. The bomb aimer ended up a fruit merchant in the markets in London. The navigator of course ended up a top intelligence agent; remarkable

that particular crew. And I still write to one of them and the other one's died I think. But, the Dutch five years later did it in a big way and they invited crews out, representatives from the squadrons , 2 or 3 thousand ex- aircrew that did airdrops. There was something like 10,000 tons of food dropped in a hurry in about less than a week when these, and the Americans got in on the act too. And it did save a lot of Dutch lives, we did two

more after that, but they were fairly uneventful, they were all on the Hague. But it was great fun flying across Europe at low level, and on the Dutch coast where all the flak guns were still there, the crews were there, after about the third or fourth day they just stood to attention at the gun crews when they saw Lancasters approaching and they shot out of the sky god knows how many Lancasters, hundreds probably. And they all drilled the Germans in their uniforms, all standing to attention for the 88 mills, and we flew across just

above, you know , a couple of hundred feet above them.

The last flight I ever did, I was captain of a Lancaster, you right, it was to pick up some prisoners of war, it was only about a week after the first food drop, they were assembling them to a place near Reims in France and there was a big old German airfield there and there were prisoners of war coming

from all over Europe and to get them home a Bomber Command decided they'd fly them back they could fit 24 in a Lancaster, you can imagine jamming 24 bodies in a flying bomb bay, but anyway, plus your seven crew and we were still fully armed at this stage. We had, we had the, we always we had four, six, eight Browning guns and with all the ammunition still on board so that impressed the prisoners of war quite a bit I don t know what we were going to shoot up, everyone had surrendered by then.

But of course my crew delighted in it and we, and I was only able to do one trip because we got grounded after it. We picked up 24 and the were, I think there were two who had been captured at D-Day, there were several that had been, one would have been a glider pilot and dumped at Arnhem and some of the troops were at Arnhem, some of them had just been ordinary people picked up, and walked. But every 24 had a senior

officer to go with them, there were 23 people and the senior officer. This particular senior officer with this lot was a Brigadier General, red tabs and all and he'd been a staff officer and he'd obviously had a reasonably good war, he was beautifully dressed and the old plummy pommy accent though, and my mid upper gunner, being a bit of a rebel and a very experienced gunner, he was, it was the gunners duty, the mid upper gunner stood outside and allocated the, each aircraft were

given cards from one to 24 and he was given a card and number one went right up the front, you stowed him up with the bomber and up in the nose, the next one went in the gun turret up the front and so on, but the best seat of course was beside to the pilot, and I forget what number that was, number five I think, but this Brigadier General pushed himself to the front and he said to Norman Bolt, "My man you will see I sit next to the pilot," well that was like waving a red rag to a bull,

my man fixed him and he said, "Righto sir", he said, "Just hang on" he said, "This will be your ticket number 24 and I'll see that you get aboard properly". So alright the whole crew's loaded and the only seat left was on the Elson, that was the toilet at the back, it was one of those dumb toilets, half the time you used to get thrown out over Germany and anyway, he, he said, "I will not sit here" and Norman Bolt said, "Well you will sit there, it's the skippers orders."

I didn't know anything about it at this stage he said, "Something will be said about this" and he put on and Norman Bolt said, "You sit there", so he waited until we got airborne, and he, he, because it was a nasty strip and it had those metal runways on it, matting and you know if you blew a tyre on it, you know you were gone. So I got the thing airborne and I'm about five minutes off, heading back to the UK and he rings up and he says, "Skipper, we got a bit of a problem down the back"

and I said, "What's going on?" and he told me the story, and I said, "My god, how is he now?" and he said, "He's settled down now" and I said, "What did you tell him?" he said, "Well look sir," he said, "This skipper of this aeroplane's a bloody difficult Australian", and he said, "What's more he's captain of this aircraft and he can do as he bloody well likes and he's instructed me for you sit there until we get back to Britain." And that's what happened, oh geez, he got his revenge on the, on the old pre war brass hats and he got his DFC about a week later,

for his other trips. But it was a funny ending to a gunner's career. That crew did an incredible number of ops, night after, nearly night after night, and most vital targets, Peenemunde and all of that sort of thing. Those, he did, they did 30 ops when very few of them survived, one of them was on Peenemunde when it blew up the German scientists at the research scientists on the Baltic.

I did 20, 21, and 30 was a tour, and I did four or five

food drops and things like that and that weren't counted.

The war had finished. Well yeah the Australian government withdrew Australian pilots on RAF squadrons, or some of them, which was stupid, I mean the aeroplanes were there to fly and prisoners of war were waiting to come home. There was two or three, it was about three pilots there grounded, because there, there wasn't anybody there to fly the planes at that stage, they soon got relief crews in.

Oh probably four or five at the most at various times. At, and then we had a lot of leave and so on, but that was the end of my career as, except that I did do what you call a cooks tour, and this is another set of strange circumstances, with a cove called Colin Veitch, who was an English pilot with an English crew. And his flight engineer is now the chairman of the

218 Squadron association, and it's quite a prominent association and he and this artist come from the same village in Wales originally, the artist now lives in Spain and apparently does a lot of work for the RAF and he wanted to do one of the food drops, so he got this, this Ron Jones to give him all the paraphernalia he could get on food drops, and he, they he selected this aeroplane because it would have been the oldest one on the first food drops and he went down to air ministry

and he got all the data on it, so on and he produced this, this painting and he gave a couple of prints to the squadron and they sent one out to me. I had to, I donated to squadron funds about 100 English pounds, and, and I got it framed recently and, that's how that happened, that was Queenie of course that I flew in it's last op when it went into the record books,

it's last live op, food drop wasn't counted as a live op.

Ah, yeah, fair bit of leave, see that was the eighth of May and I didn't got a ship until the October, early October, came back on the Andes. 21 days, pretty fast trip through the Suez Canal. I got home

Earlier than most people because it was worked on a points system of overseas service and I had two years on the RAF, air force overseas and nearly two years in the Middle East and in various places out of Australia and so I was about a four year bloke and I got, I was one of the first ones repatriated. Luckily got home fairly quickly, but it was good in Britain post war, you could, I did an agricultural course in Wales a few things like that.

I had friends and people to come and stay, I had a good time generally. But the time had come when you just had to get back and have a look see what was going on in Australia obviously and also you had to think about what you might do for the rest of your life.

Well it was in a way because you had unique comradeship with other people on a different plain, I mean you come back and talk to some bloke who'd never been out of a

town like Cowra in his life. It's a bit hard, you know you didn't have a lot in common with them for quite a while and you didn't know what had gone on in your own country and you didn't know, well you hardly knew which side of the road to drive. You had been away for so long and the interim back, and I was back quite a while it didn't make a lot of difference, you didn't think about Australia much. I had worked for the Graziers Association, they wanted to give me a position which would have ultimately an executive position with them

but I didn't want to go back and work in an office, the last thing I wanted to do. And I had an opportunity coming down here, I had two opportunities I went, did go for an interview with KLM the Dutch airlines and I could have got on with them, or with the new Australian airline which was TAA [Trans Australian Airlines] had just been formed. One of my friends did that and he ended up doing about 23,000 hours with them and Qantas and he lives in this district now.

He had a pretty good career but it was terribly boring after a while flying civil aircraft, I mean we were used to beating up things and the Australian regulations were shocking, you know still 17th century thinking. And the civil controls got very good afterwards and we've had an extremely safe flying record, I can't knock it, but just post war it was very mundane and very hard, in a DC-3 [aircraft] flying, you know a mob of passengers across. If you happened to turn around at the watch tower

at Mascot you were grounded for life, your career was over in a hurry. So it just, having wanted to fly commercially or do anything with aeroplanes one reason why I just switched I never did it and I had a chance to come down here on a property and I didn't have much money at the time, I couldn't invest it in anything myself, with a Macquarie street specialist who I'd met during the war and his relatives had a big cattle property up at Narromine and a few days leave

I used to help them muster cattle and all sorts of things, because their sons were away at the war and that sort of thing and he had a property down here and he offered to share farming agreement with it down here which I ended up taking up, and which I only did for about three years with him and then Edgell's the cannery people here, were in quite a big way in those days, there was, about 1500 acres of asparagus grown here in this district, so I took over the running of that for three or four, three years.

And so as I'd go and work for Edgell's they went and bought this property which is 110 acres here on the river, just below the cannery, it's quite a good place, it's got water licenses bore licenses for irrigation and so on, and in the end it wasn't quite big enough for Edgell's operation for Asparagus had lots of fairly reasonable size areas and I used to handle the asparagus cutters in the cutting season and they had probably up to nearly 200 cutters here at one stage and they were a pretty rebellious lot

at times. But we managed to get a system going where they were paid on quantity and quality so it weeded them down to the ones that were fair dinkum, and used to, worked in gangs of seven and they'd prune themselves is one bloke wasn't pulling his weight they'd sack him, I didn't have to, made it a lot easier with Communist unions on the flourish in Australia. It worked for quite a while, well I was there for about three years and it just after I left the unions beat it and it killed the industry,

there's no asparagus here at all now. No canning of asparagus in Australia, Australia was famous for it's asparagus at one stage.

Well I was still young, I could have gone back commercially operationally, if I'd have gone back I would have wanted, that was, really the question is I've never thought of it this way before but

what you're saying is that they flying the type of flying, I still liked flying but the type of flying was, all I could do was not the sort of flying I would like, I would have liked to do intensive flying. I wouldn't have gone, probably wouldn't have wanted to go on operations again, because I was, well I got married in 1949 and I certainly wouldn't have liked too, but I got crook too, I had quite a bit of lung trouble, and it took a few years of treatment to fix that up.

It was form of bronchiectases, in one lung which partly collapsed at one stage. But I was very lucky, I got a very good specialist in Sydney that treated me, he'd been a medical officer in the British Army in Tobruk and he knew all about ex servicemen and I could have gone and got an operation on my lung which would have removed part of the lung, but by physio and all sorts of postural drainage

and things, it developed a section up again that counteracted, so my lungs are as good as anybody's for my age now but it took about 10 or 12 years, but I was still able to work while I did it and I got out of the farming business and I went into the stock and station agency which suited me because I mixed with all sorts of people, from the roughest to the you know the tops in the business world really. Without naming names I, did quite a lot of business

with Rupert Henderson, a completely controlled the Fairfax family and the Sydney Morning Herald [newspaper], total dictator. I was on his personal phone list, I'm on personal phone list for like Brian McGuigan winemakers and those sort of people, I was I don't do it now. But, and then I went right down to the asparagus cutters the shearers, station hands and I was in the sale yards twice a week selling livestock mixed with all sorts of people.

I got drive up to Coonamble and buy stock there, by word of mouth you know, thousands of sheep never, no signed contracts, take delivery three, four months later on agreements only in notebooks, it's quite strange you would never dream of doing it nowadays. The company I was with, I only agreed to go for six months and just for their local set up here and then they appointed me manager and I, and I think I told you before

that my licenses came almost by return mail, I never did any exams for them and I've still got them. I did do a lot of valuing for the local solicitors under the Stock and Station agents license and when they brought in registration there was a clause in the legislation which is still there that allowed grandfathers of the day, that is people who had been stock and station managers for years and been acknowledged valuers to get registration that's restricted, I could have got it open but I couldn't

do industrial buildings in Sydney, so it's restricted to rural properties and houses and all that sort of thing. And for, for 30 or 40 years I've been doing valuing for probates for the solicitors and this sort of thing and I still do to some extent. Most of the valuing is done by contractors now, by big firms, and I'm not in that group, the indemnity you have to pay, it would be more than I could ever earn in one year anyway, you know you're talking 30 and 40 thousand dollars.

It's crazy with all these loony solicitors around, they'll sue for anything. And the fact that people buying up properties now haven't a clue what they're doing most of the city people, not a clue but they know smart lawyers around the city if anything goes wrong, so you've got to be careful what you do.

Oh well I probably got pretty ruthless with people for sometime after the war I can tell you. I got involved in a lot of things here, I was President of the RSL [Returned and Services League], I got fairly outspoken at times, I got on peak committees, I, I did get a bit outspoken about a lot of things. I, shook the town up a bit

and they didn't seem to mind in the end. I think I can say I'm pretty well known now, I walk up the street and the little kids that I, or people I know were little kids and are now nearly grandmothers and you know say, "D'day Alf, how are you?" And that gives me a lot of pleasure, I'm glad I did it. But it changed you as a person; you weren't going to be fooled around by idiots any more, whereas I could have been pre war, the way people did things,

and I didn't have to be fooled around and I knew how to handle them too of course. I did a lot of finance in the central west here and in different areas, quite a wide area, Orange and Bathurst were big towns and I used to finance a lot of people and their livestock by word of mouth. You wouldn't believe it and no one ever let me, if anybody, you might go out to say West Wyalong and you could always find out about people it was easy and you lend them money and you know you know a few thousand pounds, which was a lot of money in those days,

to buy livestock and, against a promised wool clip or a promised resale on the lamb, and I got the reputation that it was no good trying to borrow money from farmers and graziers while I had control of the finance, because once someone let me down once that was the end and they never got a second break. And that was a good principle to live to, I handled pretty good sums of money at one stage. There was a lot of problems with one branch down the Riverina at Jerilderie and

it was a tremendous lot of, I did six months on a search with the CIB [Criminal Investigation Branch] on that one.

and we traced out a whole lot of sheep stealing at the Farmers and Graziers branch the manager must have been crook. There was 137,000 sheep misappropriated all together in total and by geez it counts, god knows what. And, I acted for the company and the company directors were as weak as hell, but I only agreed to do it on the condition they gave me a letter to act in the interests of the shareholder, which means the directors couldn't interfere with me. Under the corporate laws it

was then, it was a bodgied up law of corporate company anyway, and I got advice through the CIB, from Crown Lawyers officers how to do it so I had the directors in the bag too, to get it done. The company survived but it soon, it went under later. I then opened a branch here for Elders in town and it did 10 years, ran it, established it, 10 years as selling properties on a share basis commission basis.

And then I sat in the main street with one of the junior clerk from a Ray, from Elders and we called ourselves Ray White and got a franchise from Ray White immediately when they were opening up in New South Wales and it's been, if I may say so very successful. Got a good business in town, there's four women there and all married, and two blokes with young families, they're all going well. And I potter in and out,

they put up with me.