Australians at War Film Archive

Bill.

I was born at a place called Semaphore in South Australia and I was bought up in that area. Semaphore is near Port Adelaide which is the main port of South Australia. I attended school at a place called Le Fevre’s Peninsula School and from there I went to Woodville District High School, I did the Intermediate Certificate

and then I left to go to work. In those days you didn’t stay around you needed to be a bread winner. So I went to work in a shipping company in Port Adelaide and that gave me a familiarity with ships. The shipping company was representing various firms, one particular firm was Morris Motors and they’d get a shipment of

vehicles coming in and they’d hand the bills of lading over to the firm I worked with and then they’d be cleared through customs, and I’d have to take the bills of lading down to the wharfs and hand them over to the officers at the wharfs so that they could be cleared for us to pick it up. And that gave me a great familiarity with ships, so much so that over a few years I knew every ship that entered the Port by sight. That came, that was of great assistance later on during the war.

When I turned eighteen I enlisted in the air force, that was in 1940, but I wasn’t called up ‘til 1941. In 1941 I was called up and sent to do initial training in Western Australia at a place called Pearce. And three months training there took it up to December we left on a train to go to the Eastern States, I was posted back to Adelaide and

crossing the Nullarbor Plains, Japan and into the war. So when we got to Adelaide we were at war with Japan when America was in the war as well. In Adelaide I was posted to Mount Gambier to do navigation training. When I finished my initial training in Perth you were selected to be a pilot, an observer or a wireless air gunner, I was selected to be an observer

or navigator. And I went to Mount Gambier, I spent three months at Mount Gambier doing navigation training and then a month at Port Pirie doing bombing and gunnery training and another month at Nhill in Victoria doing astro navigation training. After which, that took us up to about September I think, after which, this is 1942 now

after which I was posted to Western Australia to Geraldton to 69 Squadron. I was there, 69 Squadron in those days was a paper Squadron, it existed only on paper. Geraldton was what they called a SFTS, Service Flying Training School, where pilots who came off Tiger Moths were trained on Avro Ansons, multi engine aircraft they were called in those days. And

so we were at SFTS with two paper squadrons Number 69 and Number 68. In the event of the war erupting on the west coast we were supposed to take the Avro Ansons from the SFTS set up and crew them with ourselves and the pilot instructors and become and effective squadron. This only occurred once, we were called up once for about a month and then

went back to the previous arrangement. In Geraldton apart from sitting around giving instruction in navigation to the various pilots we did case watching duties at a place called Port Gregory and out on the Abrolhos Islands. Port Gregory is about sixty miles north of Geraldton, entirely uninhabited

and we lived there for about ten days in tents keeping a radio watch and keeping an eye on the coast. As well as that there was a United States Navy Patrol Wing it was called, it was a small squadron of Catalinas, PBYs [Patrol, Bomber, Consolidated] as they called them based at Geraldton doing anti submarine patrols out at sea. And they used to send the navigators out for experience to do some navigation work for experience.

This went on until January 1943 when I was posted to Bairnsdale OTU, Operation Training Unit, on Beauforts and arrived there in January, February, started the course and then became sick with what’s called pharyngitis, a throat complaint, that grounded me from flying. When I came out of the hospital

they gave me a job as an instructor because I knew a lot about ships, they made me a ship recognition instructor. That lasted until February, March 1944 when I got itchy feet and thought I’d like to go back to the operational flying and I paraded before the CO [commanding officer] of the squadron, of the Operation Training Unit and asked to be posted to Catalinas.

I didn’t want to fly Beauforts I’d seen too many of them killed on the end of the runway. So I was posted to 3OTU, Operational Training Unit at Rathmines and I crewed up with a Bob Kagi, K-a-g-i, who was our skipper and there were a total of nine crew members. And we did three months training on Catalinas

preparing to go up north and do a task of mine laying. The Catalinas by this time were all dedicated to mine laying duty, mine laying duties. From Rathmines we were posted to Cairns, 20 Squadron at Cairns where I arrived about June. I did a number of flights escorting ships up to Port Moresby between

Cairns and Port Moresby and then we were detailed to do a mine laying job to the Palau Island in the central Pacific. And to get there we had to fly from Cairns to Port Moresby and wait till the next morning and fly through the Owen Stanleys to the other side of the Island. You had to do that early morning cause there was a build up of cloud, you couldn’t get through the mountains at low altitude we flew.

And when we got to the north shore of New Guinea we were supposed to go to a place called Hollandia and be loaded with mines. But when we got to Port Moresby it was changed for us to go to Biak. Biak had just been, well it hadn’t been captured, they were still fighting. But the Americans when they made a landing at an advanced spot, as soon as it was reasonably

secure they’d send in a sea plane tender, a merchant ship converted to a repair ship for aircraft, for Catalinas for flying boats. And that was positioned in some lagoons near Biak and we arrived there and landed, spent a day on the ship, which was the United States Navy Ship Wright, and

next afternoon we left with mines to fly to the Palau Islands, which were about eight hundred miles north of Biak. We did that job successfully, going back to the ship, spent that night there and next afternoon left to fly back to Cairns. In this case we flew over the western end of New Guinea and flew to Cape York down

the east coast of Australia and back to Cairns. We did a few more jobs at Cairns, patrol work, and escorting ships and then we were suddenly detailed, a couple of crews were detailed to form a new, the basis of a new squadron at a place called Melville Bay. And Melville Bay is in the north east corner of Arnhem Land alongside the Gulf of Carpentaria. So from Cairns we went down to Townsville

boarded an aircraft to Darwin and from Darwin we flew across to Gove, which was the air strip near Melville Bay. And we got out at Gove and then we were driven to Melville Bay itself, which is right on the north east tip of Arnhem Land. It’s a U shaped Bay facing into the Arafura Sea, which is at the top, and we were based on a little

Island called Bremer Island in the bay and our squadron was there. It was pretty primitive we were living in tents, we had to capture our own rain water off the roof of our tents and put it in barrels. There was, one of the most remote places you can imagine in Australia, apart from the north west coast.

Shortly after we were there we did a few escorting flights across the top of Australia, there was a lot of shipping traffic between Cape York and Darwin. We did a few escort trips there and then we would fly to Darwin, load with mines and go out and lay mines in the Japanese harbours. To get an idea of why this was required

if you know anything, when the Japs [Japanese] expanded, when they were finally stopped they came down, they’d occupied all of the Netherlands East Indies. And from Sumatra in the west to the west of Singapore there’s a string of islands across the top of Australia, Sumatra, Java, Sumbawa, Timor right across to New Guinea and then on the other side up to Rabaul. And that formed a barrier and the Japs

were peacefully doing all their trading and looting behind the barrier and we couldn’t touch them, the normal bombers were just battering the barrier bombing it but weren’t doing anything really effect as far as the war effort was concerned. Our job was to go inside the barrier to the various ports and lay mines in the ports, and we were eventually laying several hundred mines

a month at various ports like Makassar, Surabaya, Banjarmasin, Tarakan, Balikpapan. And apart from laying mines in the harbours with the Japanese shipping traffic going around the island, as they went around the corner of a island you tend to think of the islands up there as just being plain groups of islands but there’s thousands of them. So around the corner of the islands you’ve got groups

of little islands and the ships were going in a channel between the islands and the coast taking sort of a short cut, they were called choke points. We mined those choke points as well so the Japs couldn’t use the short cuts and they were forced out into the open sea. And in the open sea they then encountered the United States Navy submarines, so we were sort of helping the submarines out. We did a few trips to those places, Makassar and places like that then suddenly

we were detailed to go to a place called Morotai. Now we talked about Biak, a forward base, the next forward base that was occupied to the west of Biak was Morotai and the Americans did the same thing there, they landed, occupied a part of the island, erected a barb wire fence around the rest and let the Japs do what they liked in the rest of the island as long as they didn’t interfere with the air strip they put in. They put an air strip in

and in the lagoon they put a sea plane tender, and this time it was the USS [United States’ Ship] Tangier. And it was a modern ship built just at the outbreak of war, and she had a flock of her own Catalinas and Martin Marina flying boats, and they were doing patrol work in the area to keep an eye on what the Japs were doing. And we arrived and they loaded us with mines and they sent us to a place called Brunei Bay, now

if you know Borneo, Labuan is on the west coast of Borneo and Brunei Bay is part of the set up there. Labuan is the top of the bay, it’s the island at the top of the bay and it was a Japanese naval base. Now this time the landing at Leyte had taken place and the Japanese reactions were to send a fleet from Japan and from Singapore to tackle the Americans in the vicinity of Leyte Gulf, and

they got a bloodied nose there. And they limped back to Brunei Bay and I think there were four battle ships in Brunei Bay and quite a large number of cruisers and destroyers, and we didn’t know it and we were detailed to go mine Brunei Bay. So Borneo is shaped like a pear with a point to the top, we were around the top point, down the west side ‘til we came to Brunei Bay

and then we laid our mines across the entrance to the bay. And when we got back and did our debriefing the Americans were all excited, they knew at that stage that the Japanese fleet was in because it had been sighted the previous afternoon, when we were on our way it had been sighted by reconnaissance aircraft, and we’d bottled the Japanese fleet in there. And it’s been confirmed that we delayed them there for twelve hours,

they couldn’t go out to where we’d dug out mines, they would have had watching ships watching the, patrolling the entrance so they would of seen us laying the mines, probably heard the mines dropping, so they knew the channels were mined and they knew they couldn’t go out that way. But between the channel we mined and Labuan itself they’d put down their own mine field, so they

swept their own mine field, which took quite a few hours, and that delayed them twelve hours. Instead of leaving first thing in the morning after we’d done the mining they didn’t leave till late the next afternoon. And I’ve been in contact with a historical society and that delay contributed to a loss of a battle ship, the battle ship Congo. If they’d got away earlier on their way back to Japan, they would have got there safely,

but the twelve hours delayed allowed the Americans to send a message to one of their submarines to get into position because they knew the route the Japanese fleet would take. And none of this, this sub the USS Sea Lion torpedoed the battle ship Congo which sank a few hours later. And I’ve been in contact with authorities about that and they believe that we could of contributed to the loss of that battle ship. We didn’t know anything about it,

but anyway we went back to Morotai where we were debriefed, got all this information, then a couple of days later we set off for Tarakan. We laid mines in Tarakan then and then we returned back to Melville Bay. This was late in November at this stage and when we got back

we did a few patrols around the place and suddenly we were alerted, the squadron was alerted, that they had to have all aircraft available by next morning, this particular day. And we had twelve aircraft but some of them were being overhauled and they could finally come up with six, and all the squadrons, Catalina squadrons were expected to contribute at least six aircraft.

So there was 20 Squadron which was now at, moved from Cairns to Darwin, there was 43 Squadron at Darwin, there was us 42 Squadron at Melville Bay and there was a training squadron at Cairns and they pulled them into it as well, and they flew all the way from Cairns up to where we were going. So we set off, we went to Darwin first to load with mines

and I’ve got it in my diary that I kept during the war there was the two biggest bees you’d ever seen, they were the largest mines they had, two thousand pounders, we had one under each wing. And we set off from Darwin and our destination was Leyte, and we called into Biak on the way and I’m going to cough so I’ll have a touch of water.

Yes this is only a brief resume.

I was with 20 Squadron about a month and our tour of duty was nine months so I was with 42 Squadron for

eight months.

There was another one when we got to Leyte Gulf the USS Heron. People tend to think of sea plane tenders in the same

category as aircraft carriers which actively fly aircraft on and off, but sea plane tenders were only there to tend the sea planes and repair them and lift them. I’ve got in my book a picture of the Tangier with two aircraft on its half deck, lifted on by one of its cranes, where they change the engine and do various repairs.

Well my skipper was a senior flight commander and if you were lucky you got certain perks and one of the perks was to go to America and bring back a new aircraft. So we were posted to Brisbane, flew across to San Francisco down to a place called San Pedro where we picked up an new aircraft and

flew it a short distance to a place called San Diego, and from San Diego we set off to Honolulu and flew it all the way back to Australia.

When I got back, before I’d left the squadron I’d been interviewed for a commission and the adjutant wanted to know what I wanted to do when I came back from this trip, we were more or less allowed to

dictate where we wanted to go. So I wanted to do a specialist’s navigation course, a higher navigation course than the one I currently, gave qualified higher than I had and that was at Bairnsdale. So after I came back from delivering the aircraft I went on leave and was posted to Bairnsdale. I arrived there and there was a great amount of consternation when I arrived as a warrant officer because it was an officer’s only course. But they checked my paperwork and found out

that a commission was in the offering so that was alright. And when the war finished I was almost through the course, almost completed, completed the course just after the war finished.

Another twelve months, do you want me to go on with that?

Well

normally I expected to be posted to a Liberator B24 squadron as a senior navigation officer if the war hadn’t finished and seeing that that was out of question I thought I’d like to go back to Catalinas so I asked for a posting back to Rathmines. And when I got there they sent me up to Manila on a trip to bring back POWs [prisoners of war], this was some time after the war, this was

late November but there was still POWs floating around, they’d been hospitalised, recovering and still a few to come back. So we bought I think twenty of them in the Catalina, she was pretty crowded, I think at one stage we had thirty five aboard, but anyway it was pretty crowded. We bought them back to Australia and we were allowed to take them where ever they lived so when we got back to Darwin some of them lived in Perth

so we flew them to Perth. Some lived in Adelaide to we flew onto Adelaide and I got off at Adelaide and went and seen my parents and then we flew onto Sydney. And Sydney I went back to Rathmines, spent a bit of time doing various jobs around the area on Catalinas and then I was posted to 113 Air Sea Rescue at Labuan. As well as the mine laying Catalinas

there was a number, there was four flights which were half squadrons of Catalinas dedicated to air sea rescue work, a lot of them were amphibious, they could land and take off from a strip, or land in water. And 113 was at Labuan and when I got there I found out that we were dedicated to taking

the Mustang squadrons that were at Labuan to Japan. After the war finished the occupation forces were setup to, with army, navy and air force elements up in Japan. And the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] was sending up 3 squadrons of Mustangs, 76, 77 and 82 Squadron and we were to go along with them as air sea rescue cover.

I got there in December and they thought they were going to go in January, and then it was the way things always happen in the air force it was deferred and deferred, finally we didn’t get away to March, the beginning of March. And we flew up to, from Labuan we flew to Clark Field in Manila, from Manila onto Okinawa and from Okinawa we flew into Japan. And when we got to Japan it was

middle of March, weather was terrible up there, their filthy weather and the Catalina we flew pretty low and you’re in the weather all the time. Anyway we escorted the Mustangs up, we never saw them they went over umpteen thousand feet, we were down here. And sometimes you could hear them talking if they were using the frequency’s we had in our aircraft, we were carrying VHF [very high frequency] and they were talking on VHF but sometimes

the channel you had weren’t the channels they were using so you didn’t always hear them. Anyway we got up to Japan successfully and three or four days later they sent these aircraft up in groups, groups of three or four, escorted by, the Mustangs couldn’t do any navigation the pilots busy in the cockpit, they couldn’t do any navigation, they were escorted by a Mustang, the Mustangs were escorted by a Mosquito aircraft

or a Beaufighter aircraft, which would cruise at their speed and do the navigation. Anyway three or four days after we got to this place in Japan, Bofu where we landed, the next, the flight that was due in that particular day didn’t arrive and there was three Mustangs and a Mosquito [fighter aircraft] missing. So we were alerted to go out and look for them, we couldn’t go out that day because it was too late. So we went out the

next morning and we searched the Bungo Sea which is the entrance they were flying into to get into Japan. It’s got hundreds and hundreds of little islands sticking up and it was terrible, terrible area for low flying, there was low cloud the icing base was eight hundred feet, if you went above eight hundred feet your wings would ice up, we didn’t have de-icer’s so we couldn’t go up there.

And anyway it was a bad area for the Mustangs and the Mosquitos as well and we spent several hours, three or four hours searching. I was doing what’s called a creeping line ahead search and we didn’t turn anything up and it was time to return to Bofu so we turned to Bofu and our port engine blew up. And we were in a amphibious Catalina, which is heavier than a normal Catalina, we were carrying extra crew and

it just wouldn’t maintain height on one engine. So we did a control crashed, we managed to stay in the air for about five minutes and we went through a controlled crash and landed in the water which fortunately wasn’t very stormy and the aircraft sat around there. We’d sprung a few rivets, in the Catalina it wasn’t unusual in a bad landing to spring rivets, the rivets would just fly out

and you run along with a pencil and stuck the pencil in and broke the pencil off and then do the next hole so you’re controlling the water coming in, very primitive way of doing things but it worked. Anyway we sat there for a while and sent a message to the base and shortly a Mosquito or something came over and circled us and then one of our Cats came over and talked to us and so anyone knew where we were and that we were okay.

We got knocked about on the landing it got a few bruises and things being thrown around when we hit the water. We sat there for a while and then ships passed in the distance and we were trying to send them a message with our orders lamp and they were ignoring us, we found out afterwards we were in a mine field, a war time mine field. Anyway after a while a shallow draft Japanese coaster came along,

the Dajin Maru and she threw us a line and towed us to the coast, which we could see in the distance. And there was a shipping port, little shipping village there called Saganoseki, and she towed us into this shipping port and we moored the Cat in the ship and rode ashore and there was a sort of Japanese hostel in the town. It was

shipping town with houses and nothing much else it was just a village, but there was this hostel so we went through the approved routine of taking our shoes off and going into the place. We bought our own food with us because there was a great shortage of food in Japan at the time, so we were settled in and we managed to look after ourselves. Somebody stayed on the aircraft to communicate with base

and he was relieved at intervals. And then next day one of our own Cats [Catalinas] came over and landed outside, taxied in and bought us supplies and it had been decided that I and two or three others would go back to Bofu leaving a skeleton crew with the aircraft.

July 1946.

I got married on the anniversary of atom bomb, August the 6th I have no trouble remembering what my wedding day was. And after the war I went back to Port Adelaide and I got a job as an accountant with a shipping company,

carting company in Port Adelaide and I intended to go back flying to I was studying to convert my qualification of specialist navigator in the air force to a first class navigator licence in civil life, it was equivalent but you had to do a additional few little things about regulations and all sorts of stuff. But it did take a while to do it

so that was 1946 into ‘47 and I wrote to various companies asking for a job as a navigator when my licence came through and I didn’t write to ANA, Australian National Airlines, I wrote to BCPA [British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines], but BCPA was a new airline which hadn’t become active. It was formed

by the Commonwealth Governments of Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand and Canada, although Canada pulled out, and they were going to operate across the Pacific. And so they weren’t set up at that stage so they wrote back and said no they weren’t doing anything at the moment. I wrote to Qantas, Qantas turned me down, which made me angry later on when I joined them, I found out that when I’d been knocked back I had a first class navigator

licence and the navigators they were using only had a second class licence, I should have been employed with them straight away. Anyway I wrote to TAA [Trans Australia Airlines], you’re pretty naïve at this stage you don’t know who uses navigators, who wanted navigators and who didn’t, so I wrote to TAA and they wrote back and said no they didn’t use navigators but they had great pleasure in informing me I’d passed the examination, which I didn’t know at that stage.

So at that stage I wasn’t getting anywhere and the wife saw an advertisement in the paper by Australia National Airways and it was asking for people to do flight planning duties at Parafield Air Field. So my wife ran them up and said, “My husband’s qualified for that, he’s a first class navigator”, and they said, “No he can’t be a first class navigator”. So she went into see them, I was at work

I didn’t know about it, took my log book in and all the papers and they said, “Oh Christ he can have the job straight away. But it will only be temporary because were looking for first class navigators”. So I got this job at Parafield, they flew me to Melbourne and gave me some instruction on flight planning, the way they wanted it done. I went back to Parafield and spent about a month doing it and then I was called across to Melbourne to do training

as a navigator with them. And they put me on an aircraft and sent me across the Tasman somewhere and back and then they put me on another aircraft and sent me to training up to San Francisco and back to Australia and the next trip I did on my own and that was 1948. And BCPA, the Australian National Airlines were running the charter that BCPA

had, they were running a service BCPA were going to do under charter and BCPA, British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines, decided that they were going to start operating and they came into operation and the flying that I was doing with ANA lapsed, their contract lapsed. At that time there was a lot of work going on flying migrants to Australia

so Australian National Airways got in the act there and sent some DC4s [Dakota aircraft] up to Rome, we brought migrants back from Rome. And there were two delivery flights, they bought two aircraft in England, we were sent up to bring those back. And that kept us going for a while then they had some charter work across the Tasman, and then I’m not sure of the date about

1950 it must have been, ‘50, ‘51, they had an agreement with the Ceylonese Government to operate an airline called Air Ceylon and it was all Australian crew, but flying under the Air Ceylon name from Ceylon up to England and back down to Australia twice a month. Landing rights were very difficult to negotiate between governments in those days

and they were only allowed into Australia for twice a month which meant the crews had to be based outside Australia. And the basing were for one month, full crew in Ceylon and three months in Cairo. So I stayed with Air Ceylon up until 1953 and it was obvious Air Ceylon weren’t going to get anywhere because they were

still flying DC4s, I might of said DC3s but they were DC4s, and the competition was pressurised Constellation aircraft and the Havilland Comet and we weren’t carrying many passengers and it look as thought it was going to fold. So I decided I’d see if I could get a job with Qantas, and things were free and easy in those

days with the airlines, if you flying with ANA in Melbourne and you wanted, you were based in Melbourne and you wanted to go to Sydney you’d just go along and say I’d like a trip to Sydney and they’d write a ticket out and off you go to Sydney, there was no hassle at all. I boarded an aircraft and went up to Sydney, got out of the aircraft there and walked across to Qantas and asked to see the chief navigator, it turned out to be a bloke called Jim Cowan and Jim Cowan was

the chief navigator, he was also a Catalina man and I’d come across him at Rathmines so he knew me pretty well, or reasonably well. So I explained the situation and he said, “No we’ve got nothing at the moment Bill. But I’ll put you on the list if something comes up. I’ll get in touch with you straight away”. So I wandered back to ANA and got on the aircraft and went back to Melbourne and collected my car and drove home and when I got home

there’s a telegram waiting, “Job available, come and see me again”. So the next day I did the same thing went up again, had a talk with him. He said, “Well there’s a job, but it’s only for three months, I can only guarantee it for three months”. That lasted twenty three years. So I went back to ANA and saw the chief pilot at ANA, a bloke called Peter Gibbs and he said, “Oh Bill were sorry that you’re going. But on the side I can tell you it’s the best thing you can do”.

‘75, so I joined Qantas and I flew DC4s straight away and then they had Sandringham flying boats and I flew those and Constellation aircraft then they got the Super Constellation and after the Super Constellation they got the Electra and the Boeing 707. And I flew those until 1975 at that stage

they were winding down the 707s and they were being replaced by 747s they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse so I got out.

We’ve got one boy Peter, Peter is a Down Syndrome unfortunately. He’s now forty four years of age and he lives in Hornsby, he’s got his own flat which he shares with somebody else and

he’s got a job collecting trolleys at Gordon, one of the big supermarkets at Gordon. I often wonder about Peter, he’s a lovely fellow and he’s very self-confident he can look after himself. But when I was in Japan they took us on guided tours of Hiroshima and that was still radio active and it makes you wonder.

Right.

A place called Peter Head, it was near Semaphore just one of the suburbs.

We weren’t a wealthy family by any, my father was a stevedore [person employed to load and unload vessels] on the wharf and in those days, when I was growing up it was the Depression days and there wasn’t a great amount of work around certainly wasn’t a great amount of money. I can remember on one occasion, people were very honest in those days, you could walk out of your house and leave the front door open and nobody

would go in, and they had an honest life. I remember my mother crying on one occasion, the baker had turned up and she didn’t have money to buy a loaf of bread, and she told the baker she couldn’t take the bread and the baker gave her the bread, I’ve never forgotten that. I went to school and I had a great interest in cricket, I became quite a good cricketer at one stage but the war

interfered with that. But when I finished primary school the teacher sent a letter home to my parents saying that I ought to go to high school. In those days you didn’t even, you didn’t go to university that was out of the question, there was no question, nowadays they can, kids do their HSC [High School Certificate] and try and qualify for university, nothing like that in those days, you didn’t even

go to high school in a lot of cases. But the teacher was quite insistent that I ought to go to high school ‘cause I seemed a bit bright mathematically. So I went to high school and I acquitted myself reasonably well, passed the Intermediate [Certificate], ‘cause once I got that qualification that was as high, as much as you needed to get a job,

a reasonable job. So I then went to work to bring some money in and that’s when brings you up to when I enlisted more or less.

See I was pretty young in those days and you don’t really remember too much about it. My father as I said was a stevedore, worked

with intermittent, didn’t have much money. Later on he did get a good job with a shipping company as a supervisor on the wharf due to his experience. But when we grew up there was, I was farmed out to my grandmother at one stage for several years, so that she could look after me and support me, that was one member of the family didn’t have to be fed sort of thing.

She lived at a place called Sandworth which wasn’t far from Peter Head and wasn’t far from Semaphore. In those days you did an awful lot of walking, whenever you went anywhere you walked not like it is nowadays days every youngster got your own car. But in those days you walked, you walked tremendous distances, probably the reason you’re fairly healthy I suppose. But we had a reasonable, my mother had been at one stage a

school teacher in the early, before she got married and she helped me out. It was a funny sort of family life you read and hear a lot about loving families nowadays but it wasn’t like that in those days, it wasn’t an unloving family but there wasn’t any obvious appearance of love as they’d interpret it now days.

The family looked after you and times were pretty harsh, I lived in a pretty harsh area around there. My name’s Bernard, but that was a pretty tough neighbourhood and Bernard wasn’t a name to have in my neighbour… and by means of fisticuffs [fighting] I managed to encourage people to call me Bill, that’s where the Bill came from.

Well my names Eneberg, it’s my father’s name, he’s Swedish, but on my mother’s side, my mother’s name was Mildred, she came from a family called Mildred. And George Mildred was one of the first people ashore when South Australia was settled. He arrived on the Big Rapid,

which was the first ship to arrive in South Australia. South Australia was founded by a company called the South Australian Company, it wasn’t settled the way it was in Sydney this was founded by a company, they sold shares and you bought shares in the company and that entitled you to a grant of land when you came out. That was in 1836 so my ancestors go back to there and back to England before that,

on my mother’s side. And Port Adelaide they called it Port Misery in the early days it was a pretty poor area to found a port, it’s a nice little tidy port now but in the olden days it wasn’t much. And it was a fairly flourishing port in my time, there was a lot of wheat

loaded there, I can remember the forests of Windjammers [sailing ships used to transport cargo between Australia and Europe between 1920 and 1940] along the river with all these Windjammers in there, picking up wheat to take to England. Steam trains, people wouldn’t know what a steam train is now days, horses and carts and drays in the main street of the port. And as I said wherever you went

you walked, even pre war very few people had their own cars.

They were pretty rough. There was a lot of ethnics, you wouldn’t call them ethnics I suppose, foreigners around, there were a lot of Swedes

a lot of Fins. My father was a First World War veteran, he came to Adelaide in 1900, about 1906 and jumped ship, he and his brother they were both together on a ship they jumped overboard. Literally jumped overboard and swam ashore

and made contact with a local pub that they’d been told could look after them and they were put up in the pub and they got themselves jobs. And then when the war broke out my father decided he’d like to join up, so when he went along to enlist they found out he was a deserter from a ship and they said, “Oh no you can’t you’ve got to be an Australian, but we’ll give you the option you can become naturalised”.

So he became naturalised and he went overseas with the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] and he won a Military Medal for gallantry on the Western Front. And then he came back and married my mother in 1920 and I arrived in 1922.

He was a bit of

a rascal I suppose. He used to tell you about being on a sailing ship where you were sent up high in the rigging to pull the sails and that sort of thing and they used to get sea sick and the bloke above would get sea sick on you down below, don’t know if it makes much difference pouring with rain anyway. But he had a fantastic story

he came from Sweden as I told you and my uncle left home before him and went to Norway and got on a ship and went, came out to Australia and then came back again. And my father was just coming up to eighteen years of age and they had compulsory conscription in Sweden and people didn’t like it very much so my uncle,

my father’s brother, decided he’d try and get my father out of Sweden. So he got him out of Sweden and bought him out to Australia and that’s how he came to jump ship in Australia. He left Sweden, he went back to Sweden after the war in his uniform and looked up all his family. I’m still in contact now with some of the relatives in Sweden.

No not really he was pretty easy going really. But he wasn’t well educated and he could, he spoke English with a little bit of an accent, not much but he couldn’t write English.

She was a very honest woman, very straight forward, straight laced you’d say. She had very strong ideas on church and things like that, it’s hard to build up a picture of her I suppose. She was

sort of distant, but in those days most parents were distant, it was the way things were in those days, there a lot closer now days I think. And that’s come about because of the change in society I suppose, things are entirely different. She was,

she and her sister embarked on a few enterprises, shops and things like that, trying to make the extra pound, shilling and pence but not very successfully. And I had quite a reasonable childhood I can’t complain about it.

I’ve got a brother and a sister, or I had a sister, she died a few years ago. I’m the eldest, my sister was the next and my brother lives in Queensland now, he was the third one, I was born in 1922, he was born in 1928. He’s retired, when I went to high school it was, he also

did the same thing he went to high school and acquitted himself very well. And he had quite an interesting career he ended up as a manager, a state manager for General Motor Acceptance Corporation, before he retired in Queensland. And the odd thing about it he married an Elaine Morris, her maiden name was Morris, my wife’s maiden

name is Heather Morris, no relation whatsoever, but both the same surname.

I would have been nine or ten and I think I was probably there with her for about three years, something like that.

I can remember it because while I was with there the 1932, ‘33 test matches were on so that makes it ten years.

You just accepted it, I suppose it was an adventure, I don’t recall any reaction at all to it, it just happened.

It wasn’t unusual in those days people were farmed out quite often like that. You would quite often meet your friends or go to their place and find there was an apparent stranger in the house, the same sort of thing happened there. There was I can recall, this was after the war of course, there was an awful lot of disabled people walking around too from the war. There wasn’t any

disability assistance in those days, you just put up with it.

Well the main house when I was living with my family, two front bedrooms, a lounge,

and another room which made into a bedroom. My mother and father had the top bedroom, my sister had the other one and Alf and I had this spare room, which had been the original kitchen but it had been turned into a spare bedroom and they’d built an attachment onto the back of the house, which was a sort of dinning room.

Not a very wide one but just attached along, it was almost, well it was a fenced in veranda and that became the kitchen. And there was a shed outside and the bathroom was in the shed, no sewerage, pan arrangements.

The shed outside was corrugated iron,

the house was half brick and half wood. We lived in a number of houses of course, we did shift around a bit but that was our principle and that was the one where my mother and father died in.

Oh once again there wasn’t a great amount of money and it cost money to get there, there were fees various sorts, train fees, there was fees for books, the school had a

free book arrangement, books handed in from previous classes. And if you couldn’t afford the books you went on this free list and I had to go on this free list to get the books. I always found it very demeaning, I’ve never forgotten that, second hand books, free. But apart from that I

enjoyed school. I was in a Latin class and I learnt Latin, I did like it I ended up in these classes. And I learnt Latin from, an elderly women taught it and she was strict, very strict and, but I passed the examinations in Latin. I had another teacher physics teacher he was very strict

so I passed physics, had a science teacher and he was hopeless and I just scraped through in the science, he was hopeless as a teacher. And I think physics teacher taught maths as well so I got on alright there. And I came out with a reasonable pass. I took up cricket at that stage, when I was at primary school

I was a very enthusiastic cricketer, but there was no way I could get into the school cricket team because that went to the more conspicuous pupils, like from the money classes you might say so there was no way. When I got to high school you got onto the cricket team if you were good enough and that was the only way you got in, and I was quite good at cricket. And after I finished school I

played cricket with the local grade side, Port Adelaide, but I was doing alright when the war started so I had to give it up. After the war I went back but the gap of five years was too long.

Yeah, would have been fourteen.

When your in port anything you have to, you get a bill of lading from a shipping company to say that that goods that your, that’s being sent out to you is on this ship. And you have to take this bill along to the customs people and they assess what duty

has to be paid on it. And similarly if you’re sending things away you have to draw up a bill of lading and present it to the shipping company for them to stamp to say the stuff’s on their ship. Anyway stuff that, as it came in you got it cleared through customs and there were other charges, wharfage charges and other things, they had to be paid. You arranged for them to be paid then you took the bill of lading to the wharf

where the ship was, and there was an office there, official office, you handed this bill in and your cargo was then cleared, ticked off as being cleared. And then you set a carter along with an order to pick up that particular cargo and they’d deliver to whoever it was consigned to. As I said that gave me, I was travelling, I wasn’t stuck in an office

I was travelling around the wharfs all the time so I became very familiar with the ships. I knew them all by name and I’m a bit of a history buff, historical buff and I’m often reading through where such and such a ship was sunk and I knew the particular ship, knew the name of the ship, knew the name of all the liners.

Well the roads in those days, there weren’t a great number of footpaths, you had some of them, even the main roads were bitumen, they were pretty rough roads and it wasn’t heavily motorised. A lot of the, leading up to the war,

a lot of the traffic was drays pulled by horses. Port Adelaide was a, if you’re aware where it is it’s up the Spencer Gulf from outside, it’s some distance up so a ship which was going from say Perth to Melbourne or Sydney had to detour up

and it became uneconomical. A lot of ships went through to Melbourne for instance and railed stuff, so it got to the stage where it died and when I left, and I’ve been back in the 1980s for instance, the place was pretty dead. It’s changed a bit now with containerisation but that will change again now with the opening

of the train to Darwin I suppose, a lot of the stuff which would have gone into Port Adelaide will come down by train now rather than ships. But there was as I said in the early days there was Windjammers and there were visits by the Australian Navy at odd times. I remember destroyers in the river being moored alongside the wharfs,

we’d go and have a look at them. I got to know all the local ships, there was a shipping service from Port Adelaide to Kangaroo Island and there was another one Port Adelaide to Port Lincoln and they were cargo passengers, they used to carry a few passengers. So I got to know them fairly well, there was one ship was a regular passenger ship, the Mulcra, M-u-l-c-r-a, Adelaide Steam Ship Company ship the Mulcra.

She went around the ports, out of, no I think she went to Melbourne, she used to have a regular trip to Melbourne and back and I knew her very well. And I got a surprise when I went up to Leyte Gulf on one of my jobs that she was in port there, this was during the war of course, and for some reason I’d thought she’d been sunk as a lot of ships had been. But

no she was there, I went aboard and said hello to the crew and they invited me to have a cup of tea, had a bit of a yarn with them, and so I knew all the local ships. There were a number of ships laid up, we used to go, this is when I was with my grandmother, the Port River was very close. I remember I made a boat, you took a piece of galvanised iron, you hammered it

flat and you bent it up into a canoe shape and attach to two to a post at either end and you corked it so the water wouldn’t get in and you’d launch yourself off in the river and you were going to drown if the thing filled with water, but it never seemed to, we didn’t go very far anyway. But this was quite near to where I lived and right alongside where I used to board my little canoe and go on the river

there was a ship laid up and it had been run aground and it was a passenger ship. I’m trying to think of the name it wasn’t the Karata, Korodah, some name it started with K, and it had been laid up. It was fun to sneak aboard and walk around inside and have a look at it, providing the watchman didn’t catch you. And that was right alongside a slip called Fletcher’s Slip

and when my ancestor, or one of my ancestors George Mildred, came out in 1836 his brother who was a manger with the South Australian Company bought out a paton slip. They were building a new state, a new shipping port and you had to have somewhere to pull the ships up and overhaul them and he bought out,

you’ve seen the things where you run a thing up a rail with a boat on a tressell and pull it up, he bought out something like that and that was sold at Fletcher’s Slip originally, which was right alongside where I was doing my swimming and gallivanting around. When I was staying with my grandmother.

Bicycle, yeah a bike. It wasn’t a great distance, it didn’t take that long from Peter Head to Port Adelaide. But that was the popular means of transportation, everybody had bikes.

Cargo yes, and every week, yes just about every week a boat would call and we called it the mail boat. It was a passenger liner and it used to bring the mail from England and it would be, oh ships like the O’Ryan, Strathnaver, Strathaird, Strathmore,

Orontes, Ceramic, a lot of them were sunk during the war. And once again as I said I became familiar with them, it was quite a thing to go down and see a ship taking off. They used to throw the streamers ashore, somebody would get hold of the streamers and there’d be hundred and hundred of streamer, people hanging onto

them as the ship pulled out. Then we had the local coastal ships which came up the river that was the big ships, big liners were at what’s called Outer Harbour that was the entrance to the Port River, there was a harbour, they had moorings there, but smaller ships come up the river itself. And there was a weekly passenger ship and it would be the

Manoora, Manunda, Duntroon, Westralia maybe the odd other one and they were taken over during the war and became merchant cruisers for a while and then assault ships or hospital ships. The Manunda was a hospital ship, she was in Darwin when Darwin was bombed. So I was very familiar with the ships.

At my parents, Peter Head.

Oh everybody went dancing, there was Saturday night dances sometimes, Friday night dances, which you generally walked to, it was quite a distance away. In the local areas, that was the popular thing in those days there was no TV [television] or anything like that of course.

Well Semaphore was the beach front, there was always a dance there during there during the weekend, sometimes during the week. Semaphore as I said was on the beach a number of popular beaches along there, Largs Way, Semaphore, Glenelg, can’t think

of the others now, Swansea I think was one.

That’s right there was two in my day, one was called “The Ozone” and the other, that was actually seriously enough The Ozone Theatre was the Semaphore Town Hall, it had been farmed out to the picture people, and the other was the Wondergraf [Wondergraf Picture Palace]. But their names have changed now,

those were the names in my day. And that was popular of course you went to the pictures pretty regularly, pictures and dances.

Oh I had my usual run of girls who, nothing very serious,

there weren’t any I was head over heals in love with or anything like that, just casual acquaintances you’d take to the dance. I had two very good friends that I used to go around with in those days Frank Hannon, he died and Leo Flatly who I haven’t been in touch with and I’m

surprised to find over Christmas he’s in a nursing home in Adelaide. But they were two very good friends we used to always go around together to the dances, picture theatres.

Oh popular

waltzes. The dances were mixtures of what we called old time and modern, old time dancing was waltzes and things like that and modern dance was the slow fox trot and similar sort of dance. I preferred the modern type dancing but generally when you went to a dance it was a mixture.

Oh yes generally four or five piece band.

Oh yes I drank quite freely in those days. Yes

I used to, if anybody queried me I used to tell them that I’m old enough to go to war I’m old enough to drink, so I’d probably started drinking when I was eighteen. And I drank a fair bit right through my life until fairly recently, not even fairly recently, till some time back. But during the war of course you did a lot of, whenever you could

and even after the war. You get in from a flight and the first thing you would do is knock over a carton of beer somewhere or other and then you’d flake out.

No I didn’t take up football, no. I played golf after the war, played quite

reasonable golf, so did my wife.

Yeah you always followed your popular local team, Port Adelaide was a very big foot, Australian Rules football team. You sort of attached yourself to it, you barracked for it. But

I wasn’t that interested in going to watch it really, like people now days they rush off to watch the football, I never had the inclination.

Oh thirty six to, four or five years.

Oh they were quite pleasant. I started work at twelve shillings and sic pence a week, a $1.25, which was reasonable in those days.

It was in a building in Port Adelaide, Port Adelaide was a lot of old buildings, there still in Port Adelaide in fact it’s almost become a heritage town now, and the walls were twelve inches thick, made of stone, and great solid doors.

And cause the people I worked for were called Smith Shannon and Company they also stored things as well, a lot of the stuff that came off ships couldn’t be sent directly to the people that they were consigned to you import it into your store and stored it there. And that was quite good business, charged a certain rates

storage, and it was, I think the building if I recall now was three stories high, oh very solid, very solid walls, very solid floors. And it’s probably a heritage listed now I suppose. I read recently, my brother sent me a cutting that they had

more or less turned Port Adelaide into a sort of heritage town and there promoting it that way.

What?

They started, I think I started at 8.30 and finished at 5.00,

I think half an hour for lunch, that’s about nine hours, only five days a week no Saturday. Because one reason being is your dependant on the customs house, where you had to clear things, well that only opened five days, they weren’t open Saturdays.

When I went to school used to walk down to the, from my house at Peter Head, walk to the Peter Head Station and catch the train up to Woodville. And I can remember on this occasion the station at Peter Head was an island station, the tracks run along both sides of it, and there was a fellow used to bring his child to the station every morning,

and he was a Jew, I think I knew that because he wore one of those funny hats the Jews. So I knew he was a Jew, this doesn’t come into the story actually, but he used to bring this child to the station, leave him on the station and then turn around and walk back. And he must have been hard of hearing perhaps, he used to, no he wasn’t wearing a Jewish hat he used to wear a bowler hat,

but I knew he was Jewish for some reason. I think it was the 8.20 train heading for Outer Harbour came through as he walked across the line, it flashed through and then it was gone and all that was left was this bowler hat moving around on the other side,

taken this bloke with him. Yes I’ve never forgotten that.

Probably about twelve, I didn’t get any counselling for it like you do now days, everything like that. I just went, you took it, your pretty hardened I suppose, I’ve been bought up that way, I was fairly hardened

you just took it for granted. You went and caught your train and went off to school, just mentioned it when you come home, mention it when you got up to the school I suppose. Yep.

Yes.

Yes he was a bombardier,

a trench mortar bombardier and they were operating stokes mortars and the stokes mortar is a great tube about this high and you drop the bomb, bomb shaped thing down the opening. When it hit the bottom it detonated a charge in the bottom

of the bomb and blew the bomb up. And depending on the angle it would go a certain distance. And on this occasion I know it was very cold because there was ice everywhere, it was in the citation, and for some reason the explosives weren’t, the explosive charge didn’t function properly in the cold, and the, they

must have had it a very high elevation like that so that it didn’t have to go very far before it dropped. And the bomb in the mortar went up and didn’t go very far and started to come down, and he rushed forward and caught it in his arms, because it would have detonated when it hit the ground and blow them all away. And he was recommended for, there was a bit of publicity in the papers later to be recommended for a VC [Victoria Cross],

but that wasn’t so. He was recommended for a DSM, Distinguished Service Medal, but that was changed to Military Medal. The reason for that was in the Great War [First World War] there was so many acts of bravery a Distinguished Service Medal had a pension going with it, and if there going to award a DSM to everybody for a brave act the country was going to go broke in pensions. So they introduced

the Military Medal and there’s no pension with the Military Medal, they saved themselves a lot of money, so he’s was down graded to Military Medal. But that was the story and it took a lot of time to find that out, I finally got it out of the records down in Canberra, the citation. But it wasn’t easy to get the records are in a bit of a mess down there apparently, anyway did

finally able to locate them.

Never told me anything, just made a reference, for some reason they had a slang for these trench mortar bombs, they called them plum puddings I don’t know why must of have a meaning for something but didn’t make, didn’t have any meaning for me of course. Apart from that he never talked about his, except saying

how cold it was and how uncomfortable they were with lice and things like that. But actually about the fighting itself no mention.

He was a fierce member of the Returned Soldiers League, the RSL [Returned and Services League]. And I when I joined up and later on

I went to his RSL club and most of the people there were Military Medallists, surprising how many there were, Military Medal, medal without a pension.

Oh he always went to Anzac Day, came home rather worse for wear on every occasion. He always went, as far as I can remember, with one of his colleagues who

was, he’d saved his life when this, when he grabbed this bomb, he always went with that bloke. And that bloke in later years wrote to the papers with the story he claimed he should have got the VC.

No, no Dad used to go off, disappeared Anzac Day and we’d wait for him to come home, very late

at night generally. That was the day of the year the big day of the year.

Oh you read books, aviation was very popular you read books on aviation. That’s why I joined the air force

cause I was interested in aviation. There wasn’t the proliviation of books now, that you have now a days, there was only a handful of books of that type. They used to appear every now and again. And just before the war it became very popular to start producing historical magazines,

were dealing principally with the First World War.

I used to ride my bike out to Parafield Airfield and if you were lucky you might see an aeroplane there, very rarely, and if you did see one

it was quite often towing a glider, we used to practice gliding out there, but there wasn’t much activity. And it was a long way to ride a bike too.

You really didn’t have any, there weren’t many avenues open to you.

There wasn’t much you could dream about. All you looked forward to was trying to get a good steady job somewhere. You didn’t have a chance to build up any ambition that’s why the war probably saved me, if it hadn’t been for the war

goodness knows what would have happened.

It stirred an interest in ships themselves, I used to read up about ships and their histories. Like you read up about the Titanic, then you’d read up, that was a major ship of course but all the other ships had histories of some sort

and you got to know the shipping lines. You saw the odd shaped ship for instance, I mentioned one call the Ceramic, she had three masts which was unusual for a ship. She was a First World War passenger, and ships were built by companies and they built a certain type of ship, as I said the Ceramic

was a three mast ship. They came from a generation of three mast ships going back for half a century perhaps, where the first ships built had three masts and that sort of continued on. And you had the Orient Line ships, there all very similar, the Strath Line ships were similar, you could tell a ship. During the war for instance

they were all grey, I could tell a ship by just what it looked like having been familiar with them. And I got interested in naval ships, developed and interest in naval ships, so I could recognise them and that came in very handy when they made me a ship recognition instructor.

Oh none at all, you rarely, you didn’t really, you didn’t go aboard a ship, you were at the wharf and the ship might be moored there but you didn’t go aboard it. I did, I can recall seeing Japanese ships in port and thinking to myself how clean they were, they were very clean ships for

some reason. Whereas the ordinary British Tramp Steamer was dirty and filthy, rusty, the Japs seemed to take a pride in their ships.

Yes.

Oh I was a cricketer,

I always looked up to Don Bradman as a sportsman. And probably some of these compatriots, but in other sports I can’t think of anybody, I took a bit of an interest in tennis playing I suppose, Harry Hopman was a popular tennis player in those days. Politics you didn’t know anything about, you just knew

who the Prime Minister was, you’d have a bit of an idea who the Premier of your state was not always, you just weren’t interested in politics.

Not really no, no nothing, not that I can recollect. What your asking is was there anyone

I admired, not really.

Very little, you didn’t know much of what was going on at all. You got to remember I was young coming up to the war, I was eighteen

in 1940, the war started in 1939 so I was seventeen there. So 1938 leading up to it I was sixteen, pretty naïve, all your thinking about is going to a dance or playing cricket or something like that. You weren’t, see it’s all a matter of communication, now days you’ve got communication you’ve got radio and TV [television], newspapers and all that sort of stuff, there was nothing like that in those days.

We had a radio set but we only just got one before I joined up, so you could say from practically most of my junior life there was no radio contact. Newspapers, we didn’t get a newspaper at home, we got one of the weekend but day to day

no, so you weren’t in touch with what was going on.

Yes they were very popular, used to take an interest in the picture shows if there was news reels on, they gave you an inkling about what was going on in the outside world. But even then they didn’t give you that much information because you’re only exposed to them once a week perhaps

when you went to the pictures.

I can remember, it’s rather interesting, I can remember the Prime Minister Mr Menzies [Robert Menzies] saying, “We are now at war with Germany”. And in later years, or after I thought to myself how can we be at war

without it being a decision being made by parliament because parliament wasn’t sitting. I thought to myself Menzies couldn’t stand up and declare war. And it was only in later years and recently this is, I’ve done some research and it comes about because of a piece of paper called the Treaty of Westminster. But it goes back to Federation

and I don’t know whether I’m boring you here, in the Federation Bill in 1901 where Australia got it’s independence as a Commonwealth from Great Britain, instead of being a number of individual states became a Commonwealth there were some provisos in the agreement with Great Britain. One agreement was that Great Britain would act for Australia in foreign affairs,

external foreign affairs, we did not have the right to make our own decisions in foreign affairs. So when the First World War broke out Great Britain declared war on Germany and as part of the British Empire Australia was automatically declared war as well. And that was the same situation with World War II,

the British Empire declared war on Germany and England declared war for us and Menzies was just making a statement of what the British Prime Minister had stated. And as I said I only found out how that came about, up to World War II Australia had no voice of it’s own in external, foreign external affairs.

Oh without a doubt one hundred percent behind sort of thing, oh yes. It was still the old country, home, all the British descendants that had come

out here, they still had allegiance to England. Oh yes it was the thing, we were supporting Great Britain, we were supporting England, supporting the British Empire. I changed my view since then. But that came to a head during the war when we found out this business of Britain running us wasn’t working out so they put a bill through parliament where we became

totally independent and we had our own voice.

Well I wasn’t fighting for King and Country I was just interested in another career, it was the thing to do. It was exciting, this waving the flag that didn’t come into it at all and I think most of my compatriots they were that way, it was the

thing to do.

Yeah.

Well one thing that encouraged me was about that time they introduced national service and everybody had to do three months in the army. And when I turned eighteen I was going to be eligible for call up in the army, I didn’t want to go

into the army so I decided I’d take the step myself so I joined the air force.

No, too much water out there. It’s silly when you think your flying over it most the time in an aeroplane anyway.

Oh you can say that again.

Well it was entirely new, nobody knew much about it, it was an air force and that was it, they flew our planes, you joined up and if you were lucky you became a pilot. And I had no thought of joining up in anything but in a fighting capacity

which later on I thought, when I ran across some of my compatriots at high school, when your at high school you sort of looked up to people, there was the head prefect and all that sort of thing, they seemed to be better than you, you sort of looked up to them. When the war started they joined up, yes they joined up as accountant and things like that, they weren’t at the sharp end like

I was, they were way back pushing paper. It was quite an eye opener. ‘Cause a lot of people were called up, got trapped that way, they called up into the army for do national service and then they ended up in the AIF. As I said I decided I was going to do it my way and I joined the air force.

Strangely enough it was my own decision, because the two friends I had they weren’t interested in joining up, they both ended, one ended up in the army because he went in national service and Japan entered the war while he was doing his national service and he never got out, he was stuck in there. The original idea, you did three months and then

you went back home, but when Japan entered the war that went out the window. And the other chap he was a apprentice electrician and he had no reason to leave his job to join up, but he did actually later on he joined the navy. So one of us joined the navy, one the army and one the air force.

They weren’t very, Mother wasn’t very happy about it, my father

didn’t mind but Mother wasn’t very happy. And later on towards the end of the war my brother joined up, he falsified his papers in some way and my father found out and pulled him out, I think he might have been under age or something but he had me going to war he didn’t want another one.

I know my mother was very concerned but I don’t know about my father. I sort of disappeared into the air force and most of the time they didn’t know where I was. See I was flying Catalinas on mine laying duties and this was very hush hush, we weren’t allowed to talk about mine laying. I’ll come to that later on but it was a very hush hush operation. So they didn’t know what I was doing,

all they knew was I was flying aeroplanes somewhere they didn’t even know I was in operation, on operation service.

No things weren’t like that in those days, you made your own mind up, sometimes you might have been encouraged by somebody but in my case no I just decided I was going to join up and that was

it.

No you learnt that later on.

You went in and filled out forms of course and then did a medical, see whether you were okay. And then they said, “Well go back home,

we’ll call you when we want you”. And of course they were flooded with applications, just about every other person wanted to be in the air force apparently, so they had a great stack of people that applied. And I was amongst them and I had to wait until, 1940, just after March 1940 when I enlisted but it wasn’t until September ‘41 that I was called up.

They gave us a bit of training, there was training available, we could attend classes once or twice a week learning certain basics, principles of flight and navigation, not a great amount it was very basic stuff. Nothing like I learnt when I got in the air force but enough to know what was the sharp end and what was the blunt end sort of thing.

Oh once you’d been signed up by the air force you were okay, they couldn’t touch you.

Yeah they went along as normal, they knew I’d joined up and they were actually enthusiastic about it. Those were the days when my boss

was a First World War bloke and they were running around practicing with broomsticks as the home guard sort of thing, so he was quite enthusiastic about me joining up.

Nothing initially and then some

some cargos used to come through on a different ship to what they were originally sent out. A lot of them might have had water damage things like that, as thought the ship they’d have been originally on had been damaged in some way. Some cargos didn’t turn up of course, the German raiders were operating in the Pacific Ocean knocking off

ships and there were a few ships mined off our coast. And then they started to appear painted grey, then they started to appear with guns on the stern. And then they started to appear with mine sweeping prod

on the front, on the bow of the ship.

Yes, streaming paravanes.

Yeah you saw, occasionally you saw naval ships in there. There were some mines laid in Spencer Gulf so we had some mine sweepers

in the port at times carrying out mine sweeping duties in the Gulf. And you’d occasionally get some naval ship or rather passing through but not a great number because it was out of their way, there was no reason for them to be there unless they were on mine sweeping duties.

Yes you wouldn’t say that they were running around actively waging a war or anything like that things just went on there wasn’t any blackout or anything like that. There was shortages, petrol shortages, a lot of cars and trucks were going around with gas contrivances

on them to operate by using gas. A lot of the cargos were coming through with Defence Department cargos, DOD, Department of Defence, a lot of the stuff consigned to the army.

But as far as a war feeling or anything like that there wasn’t anything that noticeable, not like it was later on.

I had to front up to Adelaide, I went and filled out all the paperwork of course, and then had

a medical and I can recall the Doctor said, “Your blood pressure’s too high. Go away and lay down somewhere”. So I found a corner in the room and lay down for a while, came back and he tried it again and he said, “Oh you’re okay, just a bit of excitement”. Then they sent me home and they said, “We’ll call you up”. I’ve forgotten what they said, it wasn’t very long afterwards, fairly shortly. I was called up and

sent in by passenger train across the Nullarbor [Plain] to Perth.

No, your in civvies, carrying a suitcase of some sort. You got to Perth and you got a bus from the station, they picked you up took you to Pearce and they filled you full of needles, the first thing they always did, and then they

filled out all the paperwork again and then probably the next day you were fitting out with a uniform.

Oh it’s hard to recall now. Probably underwear, spare shirt I suppose and seeing I was travelling toothbrush and toothpaste and all that sort of stuff,

socks. You were told what to take, how much you’d need so you’d be carrying a basic amount. The moment you got your uniform and were equipped bundled it all up and sent it back home.

I remember that the overcoat was the thing that

created the greatest amount of interest because you’d seen people wandering around, the ground staff that got in early they were fitted, they were equipped with overcoats that only went down and covered the posterior and that was about all, very, we were horrified we were going to get these overcoats. But no we got brand new full length overcoats

and the blue, blue uniform and the cap with a strip of white in the front which indicated you were air crew under training. Pair of heavy boots, solid boots your feet got sore wearing the damn things until they softened. What else was there?

You got two lots of uniform, you got a summer uniform as well, a lighter one. Oh a hat, hat fur felt was another thing you got, that was the way it was written up in the, what you signed for, you signed for a hat, fur, felt, hat fur felt, the things you remember, that was the same sort of hat as the

army wore, felt hat. And that’s about all I can think, oh they gave you a few basic things like boot polish and stuff like that.

Dark blue, whereas the RAF [Royal Air Force] in England they were light blue.

I’m not sure when we got our equipment, they gave you overalls because everyday training you walked around in overalls. Things like water bottles and things like that, no you only got those when you went up into active service.

No there was only the basic uniform as I recall, can’t think of anything else, oh a gas mask you got a gas mask.

Pearce was what’s called a “permanent station”, it had been built pre war so the barracks were good whereas later on you were in a lot of prefabricated stuff, but the barracks

at Pearce were good. I remember one of the things you noticed at night were these little red lamps at the highest point, you always have that on a aerodrome, indicates the highest point around for any aircraft flying low. But we’d never seen anything like that before so it was unusual.

Fair way out, you got leave every now and then they provided a bus to take you into Perth. Pearce is near a place called Bullsbrook, I’m not sure how far out it was, as I recall it was North of Perth, probably thirty or forty

miles, because after the war I flew out of Perth a lot and passed it on the way.

Everybody’s singing out, “You’ll be sorry”, to us, that was the popular thing. You could hear these people singing out, “You’ll be sorry”, and you felt pretty sick for a while ‘cause they jabbed you with all these needles

and when you recovered from that the food was good, condition were good, climate was good, it was pretty healthy life.

They gave you basic, the basic principle of flight, why an aeroplane flies and all that sort of thing and then basic, certain amount of basic navigation. Because at this stage they don’t know what your going to be used for. They gave you gunnery training,

how to strip machine guns down and assemble them and you went out on the rifle range and fired off 303s. You got some actual practice with guns, did a lot of drilling for discipline purposes and the only time in the air force I attended a course on gas,

an old instructor there he was First World War he was instructing us on gas. He was pretty good too, what the gas mask was made of and why it works and how it works and what gas was used in the First World War, and lovely little names like Bromine, Benzyl, Cyanide, Chloropicrin, Phosgene, used to roll off, and then mustard gas and all the other gases and that was the only time I got

in my five years in the air force that I had any instruction on gas. I carried this gas mask around for the rest of the war frequently loosing it and having it chased up and returned to me but never used it fortunately. And what else did we do, they gave us lectures on health of course, hygiene.

One thing they used they had open air toilets and they used to sprinkle the open air toilets with white powder of some sort, I’ve forgotten, might have been flour or something like that, and then in the cook house they used to line up some meat on a platform on a tray or something, and before you knew where you’d see the flies sprinkling this white stuff

over the meat. They’d come from the toilets and that was one way of teaching you hygiene. Oh and they taught us the Morse code and taught us signalling. And while we were there they had a squadron of Wirraways or so called fighters, they were only training planes, and a squadron of Lockheed bombers

and there was quite a few were going on at one stage and these planes were rushing out and taking off and coming back and that’s when we learnt that the HMAS [His Majesty’s Australian Ship] Sydney was missing and they were rushing out looking for her, they never found her. So we were exposed to aeroplanes then, we never got near them they were on the other side of the airfield somewhere.

But we did all this training though, so by the time we left there after three months we had a fairly good basic grounding, knew a hell of a lot more than when we started.

I’d say they were a wonderful crowd, we came from Adelaide, some came from Perth of course and I think some came from other states, but moulded in well together, surprisingly well. You got on,

it’s amazing you wouldn’t be able to do it now days I don’t think, but you got on terribly well. Probably similar to the way that got on in the First World War. You made a lot of friends, unfortunately you didn’t keep them for very long because you were separated, later on you were posted all over the place and you lost contact, but while you were with them, oh they’re a

wonderful crowd.

Not a great amount, I know there was one bloke I can recall was a school teacher and he was compared with us fairly elderly and he had a couple of children, we couldn’t understand why he joined up, but anyway he had. Another bloke I knew was a Western Australian, he was a bushman. I had occasion to be out be out driving, or not

driving but in a truck, being driven in a truck while they were chasing rabbits and he with a .303 [rifle] was knocking over rabbits on the run from a truck, he was a fantastic shot. And there all, a lot of them had their little idiosyncrasies, nothing wrong with them you knew them that some bloke was a funny bloke, some bloke had, or this bloke had a very good shot as you knew,

some were very good swimmers. And none of them were noted at all they were just average people.

None, none whatever.

Yes well you realise that let’s say there were a hundred people in the

course, there only going to be about thirty pilots so you chances are one in three to start with and then little things come into it. I couldn’t drive a car so I’m not able to manipulate things the way you do in a car, so anybody that could drive a car would have a better chance of becoming a pilot than I would for instance. And there were other reasons so

I was graded to be a wireless air gunner I found out later on but as I said, good mathematics, they changed it to observer. Now the observer was a rank, sort of a rating that went back to the First World War when they were flying biplanes over the Western Front, the bloke at the rear was the observer, he did the navigation, he did the bomb aiming and he looked after a machine gun.

And that’s what we were trained to do, we were trained to do navigation, bomb aiming and machine, so we were still observers. Later on in the war they trained people specifically to be bomb aimers and specifically to be navigators. But I was one of the early ones and qualified to be the 3. Later on my badge was an “O” badge, observer and later on I was wearing a “N” badge for navigator,

‘cause they weren’t reissuing the observer ones, if you lost those you had to wear the other one.

Yes we were trained, well the bombs were hanging on the wing, ah the mines were hanging on the wings and they were dropped like bombs, you had bombs out there too in the same way. But up

the front in the bow I had a apparatus up there where I could select port or starboard bomb or mine and drop them with a toggle switch, so I was a bomb aimer from that point of view. If it was bombs you’d be dropping them using the bomb sight as well, there was a bomb sight up the front as well, so I was qualified to use the bomb sight to drop bombs if we were dropping bombs.

But with mines you did them a different way, you didn’t drop them that way.

It wasn’t really competitive, you did the examinations and that was it, you helped

each other with the examinations as well, so you didn’t keep, if you knew the answers, not that you told them the answers in an exam but you got together nutting things out, working out what the answers should be and things like that. So there wasn’t any competition that was it was just the way ‘the cookie crumbles’ [things turn out].

I thought it was good. You did a lot of grumbling of course, but it was reasonably fair.

You always grumbled about something or rather, you grumbled about food, you grumbled about doing route marches, you grumbled about some of the instructors perhaps, just normal

grumbles. Sort of grumbles you’d have in school I suppose.

Parade ground drill I suppose, everybody would say, not that I minded it that much it was some sort of fascination in being a group of people that could be ordered to turn right or turn left or turn around and all do it in unison. It’s sort of an achievement

you didn’t like it very much. The thing you didn’t like very much was the route marches, they used to take you for a damn long way and when you got there you realised you had to turn around and go back again.

Oh I can’t say that I blotted the copy book at all really, I was never up on any charges. And

air crew were generally pretty committed they generally didn’t blot their copy book very much. The ground crew probably more but they were under a different type of discipline, they had warrant officers that were, WOD, Warrant Officer Discipline, they could always find trouble with any damn thing,

so they didn’t have a very good time. But the air crew generally behaved themselves and never really got into any trouble. Quite a few of them were drunks of course but that’s normal in any occupation in the services I suppose, when I say drunks they drank an awful lot, but I suppose I did too at that stage.

We used to go in on leave very couple of weeks I suppose, it wasn’t that often and the facilities in the town were very good, there were hostels where you could go in and spend, you got weekend leave so you got probably two night so you’d want somewhere a bed for a couple of nights. And there was always somewhere you could eat cheaply for freely, or for free.

And there was plenty of amusements, dances and things like that to keep you occupied. And you could go on trips around the area. A local RSL club, I went along there and I had an interest because my father was in the 32nd Battalion in the 5th Division

in the First World War and the 32nd Battalion was a Western Australia Battalion. I made some enquiries, but I didn’t find out anything, because I didn’t know much, I found a lot later on about my father, I didn’t know much at that stage. And I remember we were invited along to, by somebody, to the calling of the Melbourne Cup at the Tattersall’s Club, I’ve forgotten what that was,

it was something to do with the rating of the horses, horse’s odds for the cup. It was quite a big function at the Tattersall’s Club, we were just invited along as member, oh by members as visitors. Aside from that I can’t recall much except as I said

around that area Pearce was very flat and these route marches were very long.

Oh for some reason or other you thought you were doing your

bit, it wasn’t loyalty to the King or anything like that, I suppose it was doing your bit for Australia, that’s the way you looked at it. You felt you had an obligation, I don’t know why but you felt you did.

To some extent yes, I wasn’t in the army of course, but I was following in his footsteps in that

I was in a service in a war. There’s a lot of people did that, a lot of people who I associated with their father’s were in the First World War in some capacity or rather so it wasn’t unusual.

Yeah.

Oh we were very popular, very popular, they were leaning over backwards to give us a good time. But that wasn’t unusual, it was just the way Australian sort of looked after each other I suppose.

I suppose to some extent you excepted it, not, that’s not creating the right impression, you weren’t gold digging or anything like that, it was just normal you were part of the big show sort of thing.

Yeah

we were yeah but you didn’t have much time. I never formed any permanent associations over there.

In what way?

There were army on the airfield

I think they had Bofors, anti aircraft guns stuck around somewhere and you saw the army about the place but there wasn’t that much in Western Australia, the Japs could have walked over the place if they wanted.

We didn’t know much about it, just that she was missing and to tell you the truth I can’t say we were struck to any great extent by it being a disaster. You sort of accepted that sort of thing happened in war. She had six hundred and forty five people aboard which were

unaccounted for, but you sort of didn’t know there was six hundred and forty five, you just, there wasn’t nothing in the newspapers to start with, not at that stage. They didn’t get into the newspapers till later on and we didn’t see newspapers either, that was the other thing.

Yes we went back, we’d come across on a passenger train but going back, I can’t recall now if it was a troop train going back or not, at that stage, could have still been a passenger train, because I made two trips later on and they were troops trains. So when we went back

about half way across I think it was a place called Rawlinna, one of the stations, we learnt that the Japanese had entered the war by bombing Pearl Harbour. We didn’t know where the hell Pearl Harbour was, we just knew the Japs were in the war and the Americans in as well and everything was going to be rosy. And then when we got to Adelaide we heard the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had been sunk, so things weren’t looking too good

then. And then we, I think I had a few days leave and off it went to Mount Gambier.

I don’t think there was anything I noticed, nothing noticeable really except when I was at Mount Gambier all the news seemed to be bad news there. ‘Cause

the Japs were wining everything and then Singapore fell. I remember we were only getting information second hand from one of the instructors from the radio in the officer’s mess. And he came in one day and he said, when the Japs were pressing Singapore he said, “Oh everything will be alright they’ve turned the big guns around and their shelling the Japs”. I thought to myself, “Gees there

on their last legs if they’ve got to use the big guns, they haven’t stop them with the other stuff”. And then Singapore fell and then a squadron of American fighter planes arrived, Bel Air Cobras they were and they were rookies, we were rookies to and so were they, they hadn’t

had much more training than us and they were flying these Air Cobras but they kept us entertained. ‘Cause it was a big grass uneven airstrip and our Avro Ansons [fighter aircraft] could lumber off without any trouble but the Air Cobras was the latest state of the art thing with tricycle undercarriages. And this tricycle undercarriage didn’t like our aerodrome and they kept busting the nose wheels and wrecking them. Kept us quite amused,

seeing one of these things come in to land and putting the nose wheel down and nose wheels folding up and propeller screwing the ground. I often wonder why they were at Mount Gambier, they were only there for training purposes, it seemed to be a long way away from the action to send to South Australia to Mount Gambier.

But they did some strange things

in war.

We didn’t know much about, we didn’t appreciate how good they were. ‘Cause we’d never been told, there was well know furfies about they couldn’t fly aeroplanes because they all wore glasses, things like that.

Whereas they had some of the finest aircraft in the world, but we didn’t know about that, it was only later on when we started to find out what was happening up in the Island that the realisation set in.

Well we were part of what they called the Air Training Scheme, certain amount of training in Australia and then they were sending the bulk of the people to Europe or the Middle East. But when Japan entered the war they started to do their sums, they found out we had no navy of any consequence, no army of any consequence and no air force of any consequence so they thought we’d better start stock piling in Australia.

So I think of my course they only sent about half to England the rest were retained in Australia. Hopefully, well the realisation was Australia was going to be a combat zone and sooner or later we were going to get some aeroplanes hopefully. That’s what actually happened but it took a damn long time.

Well I never, we always thought of course we’d go to England, and the ones that did go, most of them didn’t come back. But I don’t know they had any particular thoughts you just went along with the way the cookie crumbled sort of thing.

Well we had two aircraft, the Avro Ansons and the De Havilland Dragon, DH84 model, it was a terrible aircraft, it was a biplane. When Donald Douglas was building DC3s, they were still building these damn biplanes in England. And it was an awful aeroplane, it got in the air and seemed to shudder along

and I got in one on one occasion and when I climbed in the back door there was a parachute in the road, and I realised it was the pilots parachute. So being a dutiful trainee I picked the parachute up and took it up the front to him, he said, “Sling the thing down the back. If anything goes wrong with this bloody thing, I’ll never get out of it”, that’s how confident. But the Avro Anson, that was a lovely training

aircraft, AGI as we called them, they were reasonably comfortable. They had two quite good engines, reliable engine, didn’t have much of a performance but it was an ideal as a training aircraft. And we did our navigation training in those days, it was

pretty pitiful training because you had maps of the area and lots of railway lines, or reasonable, there was railway lines going from Boarder Town right down to Mount Gambier and railway line going from Bordertown onto Adelaide and back to Nhill in Melbourne. So wherever you did your navigation you come across a railway line, so if you got in any trouble you could follow the railway lines. And you used to, laid out

procedures you went from A to B to C and back again, it was pretty elementary navigation but we were elementary navigators in those days. But you slowly build up a bit of experience and finally the day came when you graduated from Mount Gambier.

In those days it was called pilotage, you went from, visually from point A, well it’s known as pilotage, you went from point A to point B and you kept a plot of the directions you were flying on a chart so that when you got to, from point A to point B, when you got to point B you could work out what sort of a wind effect you’d had and you’d use that wind effect to work

out a course to go to the next spot. And then you’d turn around and possibly fly back home again using that information you got on that leg to work out what direction to head so that the winds, making allowance for the wind, and you’d end up back where you hoped your destination was going to be. And you did a number of short flights, the first flights you did was the familiarisation, they just flew you around with a map and you looked at the

map and told them where you were. Well that’s a railway line there and there’s a road going off there it’s got to be so and so, or it’s got two roads coming into it something like that. That was familiarisation then you did longer and longer trips and towards the end you were doing quite long trips, all in daylight, you didn’t do any night flying.

No this was just basic navigation, recto flying sort of thing.

I just walked into an aeroplane and off we went had no trouble at all, I wasn’t fearful at all, it was a big, oh not excitement,

it’s a new experience, it’s surprising really it didn’t bother me at all. A lot of people were fearful of getting into an aeroplane, if I knew then what I knew now about aeroplanes I would have been a lot more worried. But the DH84 was the one we didn’t like.

Yeah, yeah

it was a new experience. Previously everything I’d done had been on the ground, this was a new experience. The pilot would call you up and say, “Wind the undercarriage up”, or “Wind the undercarriage down”, and the lever, it didn’t drop automatically you had to wind it up or down, I think it was something like two hundred turns.

Oh there was no conflict at all you just got on, well pilots were mostly bored they’d been doing this every day for goodness knows how long, just climbing in another aeroplane being told by somebody. If they got into a bit of trouble they’d point out where we were, because they knew the area like the back of their hand, where we were trying to do it scientifically.

Well the pilots did their training on Tiger Moths and then they graduated to a SFTS, Service Flying Training School where they converted to the Avro Anson and did a course and qualified as an Avro Anson pilot. And then they were quite often posted to places like

Mount Gambier as a station pilot sort of thing, just to fly the pupils around. Some of them were posted directly to Beaufort OTU, but they could only take a limited number at OTU so the remainder were posted to these other places as trainee, as instructor pilots.

Yeah.

I spoke to somebody when I had the phone hook up and they asked about accidents, no there weren’t any accidents there apart from the Air Cobras. No we didn’t experience any accidents, there were accidents at some of the other training stations. There was one occasion where an Avro Anson came in and landed on top of another one, because he couldn’t see the other one underneath

and odd things like that. But they were pretty reliable aircraft and there weren’t any, no incidents at Mount Gambier while I was there.

No, no, I don’t think, they had quarters somewhere on the other side of the aerodrome. Aerodrome’s a pretty big place normally, even

small one like Mount Gambier. To get from one to the other you had to walk, it’s a long way to walk around an aerodrome, you’re not allowed to walk across the air strip, you’ve got to walk around it, so the perimeters pretty damn big. But no we didn’t have any contact with them at all, anyway they were almost, they would have all been commissioned, the pilots, so they would have been in the officers’ mess. They would have had to have

some ground maintenance people though, I don’t know where they were, we never came in contact with them.

Port Pirie, and I did bombing and gunnery training on Fairy Battle aircraft. That was a single engine plane, Rolls Royce engine plane

it looked something like a Spitfire [Supermarine Spitfire bomber] if you stretch your imagination. But it was a day bomber it was called in the RAF, they had a lot of them at the outbreak of war and they went to France with the expeditionary force and they got slaughtered by the Germans. They had a one gun firing forward and one gun firing aft

and the Messerschmitt just made hail, so they were all grounded, or all withdrawn from active service. And they sent a lot out to Australia and they used them for training. And we used them for bombing and for gunnery training. In the bombing you got down inside the thing on the floor, almost underneath the pilot, there was room there and you had a hatch with a bomb sight in it

and you’d been taught the theory of dropping bombs and what to make allowances for and all that sort of thing. And you went up with a certain number of bombs and you had the selector box there and you selected your bombs and you had a toggle switch and you guided the pilot up to the target and then dropped the bomb. You come back and did it again from different direction until you dropped, oh maybe 4 bombs.

Because you carried a couple of people and there’d be another bloke would do the same thing. So that was your bombing practice and you did it at various heights and you did low level bombing and high level bombing, you got a bit of basic experience in bombing. And then we did gunnery as well and you had to load your guns in the armament section, you’d go along and get your machine gun

and load it. It was rather like a Lewis gun it had a pan on the top, it was called a gas operating gun, we called them “go guns”, Vickers GO [Gas Operated] guns. And they were pretty pitiful machine guns and you stuck that out the rear of the aircraft and somebody flew alongside towing a target, drogue, and you fired at this target drogue. And your bullets had paint on them

so that if all your bullets were yellow for instance they could count the number of holes that were yellow in the drogue and work out your score. And then that was straight and level gunnery but then they did diving gunnery and all sorts of wobbling around. And that was pretty uncomfortable, most of the people got sick doing that, so when you landed you generally

paid one of the ground staff ten shillings, or whatever it was, to clean out the aircraft. So that was your gunnery training.

It didn’t bother me at all, a lot of people did suffer from it though.

Oh it’s in the log book somewhere, I think I was just average, nothing exceptional.

At Bags, that’s what we called it bombing and gunnery school, no there weren’t any real problems there either. All the training places I went to, with the except of the Beaufort OTU and the Catalina, all the others were relatively trouble free.

I’m sure it was the right choice, I didn’t envy the army and I didn’t envy the navy, I was quite happy in the air force.

I was quite happy as a navigator yeah. I never regretted not being a pilot, I was quite happy. A navigator you always had

something to do, your pilots sitting up the front got bored, and the gunner more or less the same too he’s not doing anything, whereas with a navigator your achieving something, your seeing where your going.

I think it was the coldest place in Australia, we were there in winter time, my god it was cold. We used to go up at night and do

astro training, you had a section, it was pretty primitive stuff you couldn’t do much because to do the navigation properly you’ve got to sit down at a, on a nav table and plot where your going and then do astro fixes and it take a fair distance and a fair amount of time, you didn’t really have that. You’d be up there with somebody else and he’d be taking practice

star sights to, a lot of the time there was a lot of cloud around and you mightn’t see much anyway. It wasn’t a very fruitful course but you acquired enough marks to pass out anyway. I can always remember coming in at night and landing, they used to have goose neck flares, flame,

you used to land along this strip of flame. And they used to have a light, special light illuminating the runway as well, it had a name, I can’t think of the name. But you’re only there a month and you learnt to use a sexton but

you hadn’t got any real practice in but you qualified, you knew how to use them and that seemed the main thing.

Astro? That kept me going for the next thirty odd years. I loved

astro [astronavigation], you could find out where you were no matter how bad the conditions were, those stars would tell you where you were.

No.

Yeah.

Well it’s a bit, your sextons

everybody’s familiar with a marine sexton, the aircraft sextons a different thing, it’s a box with a number of mirrors in it. And you peered through and eye piece and the mirrors gave you a reference to a bubble, there was a bubble in there, and you got your bubble in the centre of the view and you manipulated your mirrors to bring your star, or sun or whatever, into position so it was

exactly behind the bubble. Then you took a number of shots, that had a trigger, which you trigger for about, you might of taken ten shots, later on they had clockwork mechanism and it ran for two minutes, and that gave you a altitude of the body. And if you had two or more bodies in different directions

to give you a ninety degree cut when you put in on the map you had a position. If you imagine a lamp post like this with a lamp on the top, high up, and you get a certain distance out from the lamp post that the angle is thirty degrees, you could use a sexton to measure it,

if you walk around that lamp post you’ve got a circle and anywhere on that circle it’s thirty degrees and you can draw that circle then. And if you’ve got another lamp post somewhere else you do the same thing and you get an intersecting circle. And if you happen to be standing at one point and you’ve got thirty degrees on that, thirty degrees on that, where the two circles intercept that’s where you are. That’s not a very good illustration but it gives you

some sort of an idea. But I loved astro navigation. I started off with hand held sextons and when we got into the super constellations we had giro stabilised periscopic ones, you didn’t have to hold, you just put them up through the top of the aircraft and they came up out of the top of the aircraft like a periscope. And they were fantastic and accurate, you weren’t wobbling

around you had a graticule, told you exactly where you were pointing. So much so that you shoot, you could shoot the planets in daylight, Venus and that in day light. Because you can see the planet Venus in daylight if you know exactly where to look, and with our periscopic sexton you could get exactly on it and you’d line it up and there it would be, bright as anything. But you try and stick your head out of the window of an aircraft and see it, you wouldn’t see it.

So the periscopic sexton we used later on were fabulous.

Yes.

You’ve got to be methodical, that’s one of the first things, you can’t be slap dash.

You can make mistakes and you can’t mistakes. A lot of the early navigation we were doing you had to make the calculations by hand, and there quite complicated calculation. You had to double check them and you had to know whether they were giving you the answer. Because sometimes it’s obvious to a well trained person that the result is wrong, or conversely the result is right. So you get a feeling

you get a feeling, if you’ve taken three star sights and you’re not happy about one you can tell by experience and feeling which one’s wrong, or wether their all wrong. ‘Cause one of the big problems I mentioned earlier was having the correct time, if you hadn’t got the correct time they can give you a misleading result.

You had to be methodical and patient and you had to know your job to, that helped.

Once I got onto a decent aircraft, which the Catalina was, you could get fantastic astro results in a Catalina which you couldn’t get in other aircraft.

I mentioned earlier about an Amelia Earhart they were trying to do astro in her aircraft and it would have been, wouldn’t have been hopeless but would have been very difficult. Because you’ve got to be able to observe the stars properly and easily and that’s difficult to do it you’re doing it out of the slit on the side of an aircraft, such as a pilots window or something like that, you need a decent view. In the

Catalina we had massive blisters down the back, I could get in the blister and I could see the whole sky and select what I wanted. If you were restricted in anyway, as I said, looking through a small window you first of all mightn’t be able to see the star you want and there are times when you get an unfriendly sky, the stars you need to be in a particular position

aren’t there, because your sky revolves of course. You need a star out there for instance but there’s no stars out there, now what am I going to do? You’ve got to make shift with something else. And using the hand held section, you can only use bright stars because if you use a less bright one and you’re interfered with cloud you’ll start off on the less bright one and the cloud interferes and you’re still looking and you see a star again and you finish up, you find that you’ve started off on one star

and finished up on a different one. So you need a bright star, so that rules out a lot of stars, you’ve got to have a bright star and you’ve got to have them where you want them. And sometimes if you’ve got an unfriendly sky you haven’t got those stars. But it didn’t make much difference in the Catalina because you’ve got the full field of the view, I could select whatever I needed. And later on with more modern aircraft of course there was no problem.

Yes well normally I could get a position within about ten miles, ten nautical miles, an area of no greater than ten. But if you start off on one star and finish up on the wrong one you find you finish up a hundred miles away, it’s obvious so you never

do that. Also taking a star out of the beam of an aircraft isn’t advisable because the motion of the aircraft affects the bubble you’re trying to line up, little things like that. Once you got your course knowledge sort of thing, you got to play it by ear, eliminate the marginal ones and set off with the better ones.

Avro Anson.

Not a great, out of the side window, the problem I mentioned to you, you got the side window and you haven’t always got the star you want. And in addition to that you’ve got to use both side of the aircraft too because you can’t get the stars you want on one side, you’ve got to open the hatch on the other side. And you’re

done up in flying kit because it’s damn cold, damn uncomfortable, your results aren’t that good. So you get a tick for trying.

Yeah

only ‘cause mathematically inclined yeah. You could add up and subtract whatever, without making mistakes, precise, you had to be precise. If you didn’t have an aptitude for mathematics you wouldn’t be any good as a navigator.

Yeah finished, we were there for one month.

Yes there were a certain amount of mathematical examinations you had to do to qualify as well as the practical stuff. They’d give you a paper

which says you’re going from A to B, you’re flying such a such a course, such a such a time, you do a, you take a sight on three stars and you have to work out those and plot the position. So if you got that wrong you’re not going to pass the examination, so you had to work it out properly.

Oh I fared pretty good. As I said

I got the results somewhere in my log book, but forgotten what they are now, well enough anyway.

Yeah.

Yes we were posted to 4PD, Personnel Depot, and given a bit of leave while they decided what they were going

to do for us. As I said some of them further posting to the eastern states or onto Europe from somewhere anyway. And the rest of us, there were, apart from navigators there was pilots and wireless operators and they posted them all over the place. A group of us got posted to Geraldton.

I’m not sure what I felt then. I’m, now days I’m glad I didn’t I’ll put it that way. Whether I wanted to do in those days or not I don’t know. It was all a big adventure, I’d been

taken from Peter Head and I had been to Western Australia and goodness knows where else I was going and it was all a big adventure, so they posted us to Geraldton, to a paper squadron, 69 Squadron. And they did this all over Australia, they had these paper squadrons all over Australia hoping, setting up squadrons, hoping there’d be aeroplanes later on. Just the fact

of war that we didn’t have aeroplanes at the time. If there’d been a sudden influx of suitable aircraft, well they would have activated us at Geraldton for instance or Point Cook or wherever they had these paper squadrons. But we arrived in Western Australia and they had to do something with us. Most of the time we didn’t do much at all but the navigators did a bit of instruction with the pilots, helped them with their

navigation. The radio operators crewed the training aircraft that the trainees were taking out to keep them communication. And then they used us as coast watchers, out on the Abrolhos Islands for a week and ten days I think it was, or up where I was at Port Gregory. Now Port Gregory sounds very exotic, it was nothing, it was just a fishing village,

and indentation on the coast, there was no, there was a wharf of some sort there, there was no port, it wasn’t a port. There were some old convict ruins near by and I think between Geraldton and Darwin we were the only armed force, four of us there with 303s, that’s all there was there to

stop the Japanese. They could of landed anywhere along that coast there, they’d have trouble when they did land because there was no water but we were the only things between the Japanese and Perth, four of us with 303 rifles. Anyway I left there in January when I finished. But in the same month, I don’t know if there was anybody up there, but a Japanese submarine shelled with place, goodness knows what for, there was nothing

there, it shelled the place. But I notice in the stuff that I accumulate over the years the Japanese had a map of the west coast of Australia and they had Port Gregory shown, so they must of thought there was a port there.

The pilots, first of all we needed aeroplanes, if there

was an emergency we were going to take the aeroplanes from the training crowd there, the 4SFTS, Service Flying Training Squadron, we were going to take their aeroplanes. The instructor pilots were going to be the captains of the aircraft, we’d be the navigators and the radio operators and we’d form a squadron of active Avro Anson bombers. And we were

going to take on the cream of the Japanese Navy as it came down, after doing over Pearl Harbour we were going to take them on if they came down the Western Australia coast. We were activated on one occasion for one month and we went back to the normal situation of a paper squadron and the aircraft went back to training. They fitted us out with two bombs

and the bombs were relics from the First World War called Coopers bombs, they were one hundred and twelve pounders. And we were suppose to arm ourselves with these two bombs, as I said go and take on the Jap Navy. But they found that wasn’t a good idea because the explosive in the bombs was weeping past the hole in the front of the bomb where they put the detonator in. And explosive is nasty stuff when it starts to weep, it crystallises,

if you touch it with a finger it would blow up. So they detected this weeping of the explosive and they thought this wasn’t a good idea we won’t use these one hundred and twelve pound World War I bombs, we’ll forget those. So we were never armed with bombs. There was a United States Navy Patrol Wing, as they called them, sort of a squadron of Catalinas in Geraldton Bay,

oh in Geraldton Harbour and they were doing patrols out to sea and we were sent along to get experience, that’s where I first met the Catalina. We were sent along to do navigation experience, and it was good it was about a ten hour flight, five hours out into the open sea and then five hours back again. It was quite an experience and quite a challenge to come back in the right spot, which I managed to do.

And that was using astro and other means, drift, taking drifts and things. And eating the Yank food, they lived high in the hog the Americans, their food was good aboard and they were quite nice blokes. And I did quite a few flights with them building up experience which came in handy later on and of course that’s where I got my love for the Catalina.

Well first thing having been flying Avro Ansons and things like that it was a big aeroplane, the other aircrafts you couldn’t walk around in our other aircraft, not properly walk around. This thing had four bunks in it, you could walk from one end of the aircraft to the other along the catwalk in the centre. It had a huge navigation compartment with a

navigation table as big as that table there, whereas in most of the British aircraft, Beaufort and thing like that you had something like this size to do your navigation on. You had a massive navigation table and the American radio, your on one side of the, portside of the main cabin and the radio operator, American radio operator was sitting on the other side sitting at his radio set with his typewriter in front of him, typing

out everything. It was one of the amazing things, oh the other amazing thing was when we boarded the aircraft they bought their bomb sighter aboard a sparely bomb sight, highly secret. And the bloke that was in charge with the job of brining it aboard he had to wear a .45 colt side arm, he had always to be armed, if you carried the bomb sight you had to always be armed. And as I said this typing

away with the typewriter in an aircraft. They lived differently from us, but they were nice people they knew we were trying to do our best and they showed us how to use the bomb sight for drift taking.

Well when you’re in a aeroplane the wind has and effect of blowing you sideways,

and instead of going straight ahead like that you’re going at a bit of an angle. With the drift sight you’re looking down at the sea underneath, the white caps and you’ve got two lines in your drift sight and you’ve get a white cap and it might go across like that. So you turn your bomb sight until the white cap goes straight down, between the two lines

and that’s your angle that your aircraft is drifting to port or starboard. And it might be five degrees, so you’ve got five degrees of starboard drift and if you’ve got no other way of telling where you’re going you’ve got your compass heading, is lets say heading west 270 and your five degrees adrift, your actual track that your going is 275. So you’ve got a bit of an idea where you’re going, left or right. And then if you

take a sun sight or a moon sight or something else that helps to confirm it, but that’s called taking drifts. See the effect of the wind, ships have it too but in that case it’s current, the current pushes the ships sideways and it follows a different path than it’s heading.

No they were the people that went up, out of all the people in the squadron, a normal squadron had twelve aircraft, not sure whether we were allocated twelve, might have only been six. Let’s say it was twelve, your crew was your pilot, navigator and radio operator and gunner 3, so you’ve got a thirty six personnel.

But for the coast watching they selected anybody, not the pilots but amongst the navigator and the radio operators. Well we had to have a radio operator because we had a radio, so they generally sent two navigators and two radio operators. But the squadron itself could have,

if it was twelve aircraft could have thirty six people.

Just out of town as I recall, I think it was a bit south of Geraldton, not very far away anyhow. And we had there two other aerodromes, but they were only what we call satellite

aerodromes. You operate in the main aerodrome and then you might decide that one of the pilots needs practice in landings and take offs so your sending out one of the satellites to do what we call circuit and bumps, taking off and going around and landing and doing that sort of thing. They were called Kojarena and Georgina, silly things you remember. Kojarena now is one of these

high in the sky places, this great massive radar domes there, American set up. And don’t recall much about the town itself we used to go in there on leave. I do recall the beer was terrible, it’s the worst beer in Australia, I think it was called Globe beer,

but of course you drank anything. But some beer was worse than the other and that was one of the worst in Australia.

Prefabricated huts, normal type of prefabricated hut that was in general use. It’s probably a standard type of hut used everywhere in Australia I guess, I think the army used something similar as well, and the navy.

Oh Geraldton was good, very pleasant. A little bit north of Perth, Perth’s generally pretty good, you got some storms from the Indian Ocean at times but the weather generally was pretty good. That’s the reason they, in most cases they situated these training aerodromes

where the weather was good.

Oh there were a few activities there, there was a cricket team, I managed to play cricket for the

base there against the local sides. Then there was leave, you got leave into town, I don’t think, I think we only ever got day leave there, I don’t know that we got night leave so there weren’t any dances or anything like that. Some

recollection of course are hazy and some aren’t, as I said I’ve been writing my memories in my diary and that’s bought back a lot of things, but some things just don’t come back.

Yeah I don’t know why that happened, a lot of funny things happened in Western Australia around that

time, I’ve been reading various military publications, “Reveille” and things like that and there’s been talk of something going on at various times but they don’t seem to fit in with my times. There was a report of a Japanese landing of some sort between Geraldton and Perth, that could only have been from a submarine sending a patrol ashore or something.

But the times that been recorded about these events don’t fit in when our one occurred, so I don’t know what it was. There was a big event though where a United States submarine had noticed some Japanese ships, naval ships coming through some of the straits, you had Lombok Strait and Bali Strait. There was a number of well know straits going through the Netherlands,

East Indies which were noted waterways for passenger ships. And a Yank submarine up there on patrol noticed it and reported it and down in Perth they thought it could be the Jap carrier fleet making a move down the coast or something like that. So they evacuated Fremantle, they had a submarine repair ship at Fremantle with a submarine, so they evacuated

them all around the bottom of Western Australia to Albany for a period, but nothing eventuated. But that was one of the big events.

No you didn’t have much of an idea at all.

You didn’t know very much, you had the radio of course you could listen into the news and that sort of thing. But they weren’t telling you much on the news anyway.

No I don’t think so, when they shelled Port Gregory they probably got a bit worried.

But I lost the train of thought, I had something. They shelled Port Gregory but nobody knew about that, that was suppressed, the information was suppressed, nobody knew that had happened. I found that out when I was researching the Sydney that that had been suppressed.

So they were, they were a bit economical with the truth in those days and they didn’t tell you much of what was going on. ‘Cause most of the truth was crock, it was bad. People don’t appreciate what a dreadful state we were in then. When the Japs entered the war there was a squadron of Wirraways at

Pearce, they were useless, they were not an attack aircraft. We had two squadron of Hudson Bombers, one at Pearce and the other one up in Malay where it got chopped up, so that only left one squadron back in Australia. And we had two squadrons of Catalinas over in Port Moresby area, that’s the only fighting aircraft we had, that you’d consider to be fighting, with any potential,

and they weren’t going to stop anything. And when you go north of Geraldton, along the coast right along to Darwin there was nothing. I was in a number of places around there during the war and there’s nothing there, the Japs could have come and landed anywhere there. But as I said there was, they’d be in trouble because there’d be no water,

they’d have trouble going anywhere from there. And then from Darwin across to where we were at Melville Bay, same thing, lots and lots of nothing, I don’t know whether you’ve ever been up around those areas. Between Geraldton and Darwin now there’s quite a few popular spots, now but there weren’t in those days.

Well you weren’t aware of what was going on, you couldn’t dredge up any enthusiasm for anything ‘cause there was nothing to be enthusiastic about.

No you just went along and hoped that things were going to work out alright. I’ve thoroughly researched a lot of things since the war, in recent years, but none of those things we knew anything about in those days. And I think the general Australian serviceman

was in the same boat. Even later in the war when I was in active operation they didn’t tell us much then, what was going on.

I don’t really know what we did up there.

During the week we were kept busy with squadron activities of some sort of rather and then there was the patrols out to sea and then there was the periods at coast watching duties, so they took up a bit of time. And then there was a bit of sporting activity. I remember I was, they used to make us duty pilot,

I wasn’t a pilot but you were in charge of the airfield and it was just a term for the position, duty pilot, and I was out Kojarena, this small satellite on this one occasion. And I remember it was hot and there was a diary there and we had to report in at certain times, sign the diary, I think, “1200 hours bloody hot”, “1600 hours

bloody hot”. And the warrant officer, WOD [Warrant Officer Disciplinary], called me in to the office, “What’s this?” He couldn’t say much about it I said, “It was bloody hot”, he was critical about the way I was writing up the diary.

And nothing was going on and the Avro Ansons going around and around, nothing seemed to be happening. You’d finish up for the day and go into the officers’ mess and drink that damn Globe beer, not the officers’ mess the sergeants’ mess, I was in those days. And grissle

and grumble about the heat or something like that. No you just performed as though it was just another chore you had to get done. You weren’t actively jumping up and down trying to win the war or anything like that.

Yes, yeah

they’d been on course with me, some of them, not the radio operators of course, they’d come from a different spot, different place. But no the navigators that were with me they were, they’d come off my course. And most of them were from Adelaide.

Hmm?

Well first of all we knew they were there to help us, we were grateful for anything. And they’d had a bit of a hard time

too because I did some research on the crowd that were there and they’d been up in the Philippines when the Japs entered the war and they got knocked about up there and they ended up back in Geraldton with what aircraft they could get out of the Philippines. So they’d had a pretty hard time, I didn’t know that at the time. They didn’t talk about it, they were there doing a job.

No, no the moment we returned from the flight there was a truck or something from Geraldton to take us back straight away, they just deliver us in the morning and pick us up after the flight.

No, no, what do you mean by pleasure?

Not really. No there wasn’t anything like joy flights.

The postings

somewhere in Melbourne an Air Board, somebody there was looking after all the personnel in Australia and my name came up and they decided well we need somebody for Beaufort OTU and they probably had a seniority listing of when you joined the air force or something like that. So my name was on the list and a group of us over there were notified that

we were off to Beaufort OTU at Bairnsdale. It came as a bit of a surprise but at that stage when was this, I got there about ’42, yeah probably there about six months I suppose

and then the posting came through and across I went across the Nullarbor Plains to, by troop train to Bairnsdale. I think I probably stopped off at Adelaide and saw the family, bit of leave.

No.

Bairnsdale was a Beaufort OTU and it had a bad name. Just a few months prior to us arriving there the CO decided

to do something about the moral problem. He put on a full dress rehearsal of the aircraft there, Beauforts and Hudsons, a fly by and a fly over that sort of thing and invited people from the town and all the air men from the Bairnsdale base, lined them all up and had this fly over and knock dive down. One Hudson came down

and the wing fell off and that didn’t do a great amount for moral, left a bit of a bitter taste. Trouble with Bairnsdale was you had a relative high performance aircraft in the Beaufort and they were taking people off of Avro Ansons a nice slow docile aircraft and sticking them into a high performance aircraft

and a bit too much to cope with. And people made mistakes on take offs and landings and there was regular crashes on the end of the runway or the approach to the runway. Oh there were more people killed at Beaufort OTU than up in the islands I think. And I was in there with, in one of the prefabrication huts when we started our training and

one of the pilots took off with his crew and he lost an engine after take off, at night and he saw, he tied the aircraft up, prepared for a forced landing, saw water underneath and put the aircraft neatly down in the water thinking he’s in Bass Strait, which is just off the coast from Bairnsdale. And then they launched the dingy and

got out and jumped in the water to go to the dingy and the waters up to about here, there in Lakes Entrance, they’d dropped the aircraft in the lake. Then another bloke that was there, he was a god case, they had to invalid him out of the air force because pilot he took off, and they used to go out to sea, in Bass Strait and drop a flame float, or a number of flame floats and come around, do

low level bombing on it. Well he was doing that and he lost an engine and he had a hell of a job getting back to Bairnsdale. Apparently they only just scraped back, wrecked the aircraft when they landed, he was a gibbering wreck and they had to invalid him out. So it wasn’t all roses at Bairnsdale, that’s why I got out of it while I had a chance.

Not all beer and skittles no.

Well they had to make certain dispositions at the time, they were doing the best with what was available. They were setting up a

basic framework which they could build on later on hopefully if we got any aircraft. See the 69 Squadron, if they had been able to get better aircraft later on they could have formed a squadron with better aircraft. Say B25s or something like that, even Beauforts I suppose. But the aircraft weren’t available and we were only getting drips and drabs in Australia, most of the

aircraft were going to England, apart from what the Americans kept for themselves of course.

They were roomy, plenty of room in them.

Well I found out later on, after flying a considerable amount of time in them,

that the engines were probably the most reliable engines around at the time. They were a good safe aircraft, the engines were Pratt and Whitney R1800s and R1830s actually and they were a good reliable engine, never let me down during the war, they did after the war but that was a different matter.

Well first of all I mentioned earlier they were high performance aircraft than the people converting them were used to and they made mistakes. Also OTU aircraft are usually hand me downs from operational squadrons. As you replaced your

aircraft with newer aircraft in the operational Beaufort squadrons the aircraft that were replaced would have been sent south and they always ended up at OTU. And they weren’t the most reliable aircraft going by the time they got there. They’d had, they weren’t worn out but they’d seen a lot of wear and tear and maintenance may not have been as good as

it ought, should have been, might be the other reason. Up in the islands in the squadrons maintenance was at a top level, because the people doing the maintaining were directly responsible for the owners of the aircraft which generally only one crew. Back at OTU they didn’t have an empathy with the crew members themselves they were just servicing aircraft

and they also didn’t have the best people doing the service. They were doing the job as best they could but they could have had better people, but this was war time.

Which one?

Yes it had a tail problem. One crashed off the coast of Western Australia

it was something to do with the controls to the tail, tail plane. And there was an inquiry into it later on and they believed they rectified it but there was always a suspicion that all wasn’t well with the tail.

Well I wasn’t flying the aircraft I was only instructing so I was not in direct control of what was going on so it didn’t really affect me at all. It’s just that I knew that these aircraft crashes were happening and it left you pretty dissatisfied.

Well the first thing you saw of an accident was a great heap of smoke, reaching to the sky from the end of the runway. Then later on you’d find out who it was and what had happened. It was generally, a lot of the problems were landing, some of them were take offs. The Beaufort wasn’t a particularly good aircraft if it lost an engine on take off.

Most war time aircraft had very little performance on one engine, it was only years after the war aircraft was designed they had to be able to fly satisfactorily on one engine. There’s a question there of satisfactorily, during the war they didn’t fly satisfactorily. And the Beaufort was one of them, even the Catalina wasn’t that good.

At OTU it wasn’t real good, on the other hand most people seemed to think it wouldn’t happen to them, that was an attitude you had. A bloke that had gone in was just stiff and hopefully you just kept your fingers crossed and it wouldn’t be you next time.

On ship recognition, so I wasn’t really connected with the actual operation of the aircraft.

Well the Japs had, when they took the Dutch East Indies, they had a lot of water born traffic, freight

ships, ships were freighting stuff oil tankers, moving stuff about within the islands to keep their outpost supplied, taking stuff from the islands to send back to Japan. Most of the stuff you encountered initially was small cargo ships, round about a thousand tonnes. The bigger ones were much further back,

but the local stuff was smaller stuff and that was the sort of stuff you’d encounter on the other side of the barrier of the islands.

Well when I was instructing most of the people instructing didn’t know the sharp end from the blunt end, that’s the way things were there ‘cause they never had any requirement to know anything about ships. So I started off, I had to start off

pretty basically and instruct them on the basic of what to look for in a ship. From overhead you can always, if you’re experienced you could tell how fast a ship was going by the wake it left behind it. And a lot of your sighting of ships you put in a position report, they needed to know what sort of ship it was, where it was heading and how fast it was going so you needed to

know a few basic things. The Japanese helped a lot by, they built a lot of ships to a standard design, in other words a lot of their ships looked the same, you could say oh that’s a ten thousand tonne freighter or that’s a five thousand tonne freighter or smaller. And the Americans bought out a recognition chart and you only had to know about a half a dozen ships and they’d fall into a certain

class, prior to that every ship that was seen was a ten thousand tonne ship. So they were absolutely murdering in theory the number of ships in the Japanese Maritime Marine but they were way out. They were probably exaggerating the size of the ships by two, reporting them as double the size they were.

They bought in a simplified chart system and you could refer, well once you had, you could memorise the ship and you could refer it by a certain classification. They used the phonetic alphabet, you might report a Fox T Able, that meant it was a ship of say five thousand tonnes or something else, could be a ship of a one thousand. And

their reporting then and their sinkings became more accurate. And the ship recognition classes I was trying to instruct people, trying to inform them of all these differences so they’d be able to report them accurately. You started off by showing them and telling them about the ships of the Japanese Navy, all the battle ships and that sort of thing. Well

they were never ever going to get anywhere near a Japanese battle ship so that was a waste of time. So you concentrated on the merchant ships which were the ones that they were going to see mostly, with the occasionally destroyer possible. But that was my job and as I said most of the people didn’t know anything about ships at all so anything you’re able to tell them was of assistance.

What our own ones?

Not really because when you encounter them it was generally in your own waters, you weren’t very popular if you started bombing your own ships.

There

weren’t certainly any classifications with our own stuff because we had a whole rig moral of ships and they didn’t fit any classifications at all.

Oh just developed a fever and I think I went into a coma at one stage, they wheeled me into hospital and diagnosed that it was pharyngitis,

which is a pretty nasty throat disease. And I’m not sure how long I was in hospital, it was several weeks I know that. But when I came out and the doctor ran the rule over me I was unfit for flying so they grounded me.

They made me a ship recognition instructor.

Yeah.

No that was after.

I don’t know I got a bout of temporary madness or something, I decided I wanted to go back onto operations which was where I was originally headed when I was taken sick. But there was no way I was every going to climb

into a Beaufort having seen all the accidents around the place. And I went to the CO and, asked to be paraded in front of the CO, which was granted and I told him the story and told him I had experience on Catalinas and I’d like to be posted to Catalinas. And he said, “Okay, will do”, and that was Wing Commander Bill Gearing, who died as an air commodore about a fortnight ago at the age of ninety three. He had quite a distinguished war career.

But anyway he agreed to the posting and as soon as it came through off I was, off to Rathmines.

Rathmines is on Port Macquarie and there’s a lot of indentations into the side, into the lake itself.

Lake Macquarie and a lot of indentations there and one particular place near Toronto, the island of Toronto was suitable for a sea plane base and they built this base there. I’m not sure whether it was there pre-war or after the war but all the flying boat training was done there. You need to think, at this point

to know about what happened to the Catalinas. After the Japs entered the war they were used for bombing raids up on the islands, they weren’t very effective night bombing raids, they were only pin pricks. And there was a very clever fellow in the Royal Australian Navy a Lieutenant Commander Carr and he’d been in England and he’d seen the effect of night mine laying in England by the Germans, and later by ourselves. And he

came up with the idea of dedicating three Catalina squadrons entirely to mine laying. And he talked it over with the United States Navy and they thought it was a grand idea and they set it in place, instead of bombing the Cats devoted from then on to mine laying. And it was a highly secret business, we were sworn to secrecy,

when we went on leave we weren’t allowed to tell anybody about what we were doing, so my parents didn’t know what I was doing, so it was very hush hush. And when they had three squadrons operating we used to go across from Melville Bay to Darwin, we’d send a half squadron across there of six aircraft, and they would be sent out

over a period of a week doing a couple of operations to places like Makassar, Balikpapan, all sorts of odds spots on the other side of this island barrier. Six aircraft doing two trips, that’s twelve trips and we’d carry two to four mines, say average three, that’s about thirty six mines. And they had three squadrons doing it each month so there was over a hundred mines being dropped and laid all around the

place, and over a period of years it starts to mount up. That’s twelve hundred in a year. And these were nasty things these mines they used to, they were shaped like a torpedo and bloody long things about ten, twelve feet long and you used to drop them from altitudes of two hundred to eight hundred feet, they had to be dropped very low. Before

we did a flight I’d learn the target and I’d get a large scale map of the area and I’d have to plot where the mines were going to be dropped. The navy would tell me where they wanted them dropped and I’d plot how to get there and how to drop them. And the way we did it was we’d select some point near where we wanted to drop the mines that was conspicuous, it might be a small island, and I’d run a line from the small island to

where there going to be dropped in the channel, work out how far that was, work out how long it would take at the speed of one hundred and ten knots in the Catalina, which was the speed we dropped at, and I’d have a time after we passed over this datum point when the mines would be dropped. So I’d steer the aircraft onto the datum point tell the pilot go, and he’d go on a certain heading and the radio operator would start counting with a stop watch and when he got to the

necessary dropping time the co-pilot would pull the jenison toggles. The reason he was pulling the jenison toggles and not me at the front, is I had what they called a “Mickey Mouse board” up the front where I could select the mines to drop and then toggle them. But the mines every now and then hung up, which wasn’t make you very popular with the rest of the crew because you had to go round and do it again, and you had a lot of unfriendly people on the ground firing off guns at you. So

we decided we’d change to jenisoning them, so the moment the time came for the mines to be dropped the Co-pilot would pull the jenison toggles and the mines would float down. Some of them had parachutes which slowed them down, not like an ordinary parachute that would drop that way, it was mainly to slow them down, so that they’d hang behind the aircraft and if they went off in the water,

they wouldn’t be under the aircraft when they blew up, as they did occasionally. And as I said we dropped some of them at two hundred feet and some up to eight hundred feet and you had to drop them in a channel in a certain depth of water and there were a lot of considerations, but it was up to the navigator to do that, plot all that out. And we started to conduct this mining programme from Darwin,

we went to Surabaya which is the furthest we could go to the west. And to do that we had to do that from and advanced secret base, place called West Bay. And we used to fly over there from Darwin refuel and set off for Surabaya, which was as far as we could go. Surabaya was about, a round trip of one thousand nine hundred and fifty miles, that was the maximum we could do on our tanks.

And that took about eighteen hours, so the maximum was about eighteen hours of flying.

Yes, it’s a flying boat of course and the first one came out about 1934 I think, ‘33, ‘34 that was called a PB. That was the American code or letters for Patrol Bomber and it was called a PBY, Y the third letter, Y was the name of the manufacturer code, allocated a manufacture,

Consolidated Yolti [?]. Later on we bought an aircraft back and it was a PBB, Patrol Bomber B, B for Boeing, Boeing had built that one. But PBY was the first one and they went PBY1, model 1, 2, 3 and just coming out to the outbreak of war the Americans had bought out the PBY5 which was the last. And at that stage they were ready to stop production and

finish the PBY5 and concentrate on something else. But when the Japs entered the war there was such a demand for the Catalinas they continued producing them. And I think they produced more Catalina flying boat than any other flying boat ever built. And the aircraft itself was a boat shaped hull, long wing with two engines.

On the water it sat fairly deep in the water, it had a nose turret up the front where I used to guide the aircraft onto target, we had two Boeing, Browning machine guns, thirty calibre .30 machine guns in the turret. In the actual front of the aircraft where the nose touched on the

water there was a medal blind which you could wind down, waterproof blind, and wind that down and it revealed a plate glass window and you could look down and do bomb aiming through it. You had to make sure you wound it back up for landing otherwise you had a hole there, that was the front part. Behind that was the two pilots, one on either side

sitting high in the aircraft. You’ve seen aircraft where you push the throttles forward to start the engine, in the flying boat, the Catalina, the throttles are on the roof and all your control cables went along the roof, so your throttles right there. Then there was a bulkhead behind the pilots and then the main cabin with the navigation station on the left hand side where I did all my work and the, on the right hand, starboard side

was the radio operators position. And then you had another bulkhead and then you had oh I’m not sure what you’d call this, you had another cabin and then you had the blisters behind that. So you had the navigation and the radio operators part and then a bulkhead, then a cabin behind that was immediately underneath the wing, it had four bunks in it and a little ladder

going up to the top of the hull. And the top of the hull there was a little mounting that went up to hold the wing and the engineer used to sit in this little section, he had a window out either side, he could see what was going on, had the engine control in front of him wing immediately above him. The wing had, flying boats you must have floats otherwise the wings going to go down in the water,

not balance it would be able to go down in the water one way or the other so you’ve got to have floats to stop the wing going down in the water. The floats in the Catalina were on the tips of the wings and they folded down, and on take off you lifted them up and they became part of the wing tip. And that was the centre section with your four bunks. In there you also had an auxiliary power unit, a little motor driven engine for providing power

and generated a bit of power and you had a stove there as well, and you could cook meals in flight. And the bulkhead at the end of that opened out into the blisters, you had two blisters at the rear end of the fuselage. And these were windows, they were bulbus window, and you could lift them up and roll them across the top. I’m trying to think of some comparison,

but you had one on either side. In these blisters there was a heavy machine gunner, half inch .5 machine gun, one on either side. And then you had another bulkhead going back towards the tail and little doorway into the rear part of the aircraft and a little hatch on the floor, which took a thirty calibre machine gun. So you had two machine guns up the front, light one, one underneath

pointing out the back and two heavy ones on the, fairly good armament actually. And the .5 machine gun that was a bloody good gun, machine gun, bloody good one. And dotted around here and there you had parachutes stowed away which you wouldn’t have much chance to use cause we always operated at low level. Not an ideal altitude for jumping out with a parachute.

We had two fuel tanks one on either side of the centre section of the main plane and they held seventy hundred and thirty US gallons each, so there was a total of one thousand four hundred and sixty US gallons. As I said the aircraft sat in the water so that when you started up the engines, which were Pratt Whitney R1830s, same engines as were in the DC3s.

When you started that up the aircraft, you couldn’t get the aircraft off until you got the hull out of the water, and your pilots needed to be big people cause there got a control in front of them and they used to rock it like this. Full power and you’d rock the aircraft trying to bounce the nose up and down to get it out of the water to break the suction. And then once you’d done that, which

could take a while, you’d be up on what they called the keel with not much water underneath and when you built up enough speed, which was sixty five knots, about seventy miles an hour, she’d take off. But it was quite hard work getting her in the air when you were fully loaded, a smooth sea, glassy seas was no good you couldn’t get it out. Quite often you had the crash boat circle around in front of you

to break the water up, or even at time you might have another aircraft do the same, do it for you to break the water up so you can bounce the nose of the aircraft against the waves to get the leverage to get it out of the water, and as I said pilots needed to be pretty hefty people. I don’t know how our bloke at 20 Squadron managed there because his name was Atti Worney, he lives up at Toronto, he had only one leg,

he lost a leg to a shark attack up in Cairns, and then went back flying again afterwards. But how he had the strength to manoeuvre I don’t know, although you didn’t use your feet that much, kick your rudder around, your mainly trying to push it back and forward. But different from a land take off where you just straight ahead.

Well at Rathmines that was important you had to get a good skipper. Now I wanted somebody with experience and what happened is they used to send a crew up north and the co-pilot would spend six months flying around on operations, then they’d post him back with all that experience to form his own crew. So I needed, not always, so I needed somebody

that had that experience and Bob Kagi was, had that experience and also he’d been flying with a well known pilot up north, a renowned pilot. So I figured that much of brush off to him a bit so I managed to entice him to take me as navigator. And I was a bit of a catch in some way because some of the navigators turning up had only just come off course and they had no experience at all. I had some experience in Catalinas and

I had more than the normal amount of flying hours up, so I could be considered an experience navigator. So he grabbed me and I grabbed him and then we sorted out the rest of the crew between us, that was just finding somebody you were quite happy with and everybody was happy with. And you had Bob Kagi and a co-pilot, our co-pilot was Arch Portellis, you had

me the navigator, you had two radio operators, that’s five, you had two flight engineers, seven, because on the long tours of duty they rested, the poor bloody navigator didn’t but you had the extra, seven. You had somebody to look after the guns and armour, that’s eight and somebody to look after the aircraft itself in these out of the way places, a fitter, so you had nine altogether.

The armourer would operate one of them, the fitter would operate another one and the radio operator would operate whatever one, that would be sorted out whoever were going to operate the three. I was up the front in the front turret normally and if we had to use the guns up there I operated them.

None but, not that’s wrong

you did get some relief, I’d position the aircraft so that for instance I’d work all the way to the target and then about half way from the target back again I’d get the aircraft into position, on track, where all they’ve got to do is practically point ahead and there going to hit Australia. And I’d got into the bunk for one or two hours and the co-pilot would do the navigation, or keep an eye on things, and then he’d give me a call and I’d come

back to work and take a two or three star fix and find out where we are and then point it in the right direction if it had to be changed.

Oh we did training, we used to fly out, I don’t know whether you know the area of the coast? There’s two islands way out, or reefs called Middleton Reef and Elizabeth Reef, we used to fly out to them, their uninhabited

quite often drop bombs on them at night. Then there were some local islands we did gunnery practice on. I remember, I’ve got it in my book, we were doing high level bombing and gunnery practice this day on a little island off the coast around here somewhere, uninhabited it had been set up as a target. And I did the high level bombing drops and practice bombs on the island

satisfactory and then we came down to do low level strafing of the islands with the machine guns. And I was in the blister, I was suppose to be able to coordinate an attack if a fighter planes was attacking us I was to tell the skipper to turn one way or the other, so I was in the blister. The other people who were normally in the blister they were at their positions and one of the crew members was sent up the front to take my two machine guns.

He got up there and I left the bomb sight in position which interfered with him getting the machine guns. But he sort of tried to get around it but he couldn’t fire off any rounds and he came back and told the captain, and the captain told him to get me and get me up the front to fire the rounds from the front gun. So I got up there, got the bomb sight out of the road and then waiting for him to line up on the island,

and when he made the pass at it I opened fire with the guns, except they didn’t fire. So I had a look the cartridge links weren’t connected up, so I spent a bit of time connecting them up. So the next time he came around and made a pass I had another go and the guns weren’t safe, the skipper at this stage is getting a bit annoyed, he’s not getting any noise from up the front. And the third time I managed to get the guns

firing and fired off rounds. But there was a bit of a post mortem about that, naturally it never happened again. But these are the little things that happen sometimes, have a humorous side to it.

Mines underneath the wings, what they called hard points, specially strengthened point underneath the

wings, in the case of the Cat, take bombs, mines, bombs or torpedos. They hadn’t thought of mines but they found out that they could take a torpedo, bombs, depth charges or torpedos, and the mines was roughly the same size and weight of a torpedo so they found they were effective for carrying mines.

Black.

Yeah.

Mainly because they were flying at night, you don’t want a white aircraft flying around at night. No they were all painted, ours were always painted black. I don’t know at the beginning of the war they may have been a different colour but I never saw anything but a black Catalina.

Well

maintenance wise let’s see, engine wise no problems, those bloody Pratt and Whitney engines were bloody good, they saw me through the war, I’ve got to thank them for a lot. The other things was structural, the aircraft leaked, not greatly but every now and then you had pump the bilges out and sometimes it sprung rivets and you had to do something about

that, but not seriously. It had to be flown very carefully on an operation with full tanks. You had to get the aircraft in a attitude which was called over the hump, if you had the aircraft going along like that pushing the air in front of it all the time you lost air speed and you burnt too much fuel, you had to trim the aircraft so it flew slightly nose down, so you were tucking the

nose in. And the first thing you did after you took off and levelled out was to get into that position. Now sometimes you couldn’t do it, centre of gravity might be wrong and you couldn’t get the nose down, but that was one of the things you did when you load, you had to make sure that the centre of gravity was such that you could do that. Generally speaking that would be because you had some weight, more weight in the aft cabin than should be

there and you could do something by getting around it. So that’s the thing you had to go, you had to get it in the proper attitude for flying. We were very interested in fuel consumption, if you burnt too much fuel you didn’t get back home. And it was my job, I had to monitor the rate we were using fuel and I knew the rate we were using it now, say so many gallons an hour, I could forecast what it was going to be like by the time we got back home per hour. I could

get an average and that would give me an average time for empty tanks, and I’d keep a religious eye on this empty tank time. I’d be monitoring it all through the flight and it would vary slightly, it starts to stretch out, you’d get a bit more as your calculations became a more refined. But it was very important to know that empty tank time. The other important thing was you set off from Darwin in

late afternoon, you had to make sure you didn’t cross the enemy coast in daylight because you’d get shot down. And also you knew, you worked out what time it was going to be first light coming back, so when you got to the target you kept an eye on this last time, the time you had to be back. And you had to time to leave the target that you had to get back so you’re not in daylight over the enemy territory on the way back. And if,

when you’re over the target or approaching the target it’s looking bad you’d abandon the job and go back, and you kept a very religious eye on that. So that was two things you need to know, when you were going to be back over the islands and also when your going to run out of fuel, because we didn’t carry much in the way of margin.

About half an hour we were allowed, and you could get pretty close to that.

But if you had a good flight engineer and a good pilot trimming the aircraft you could make fuel.

Well fully operational carrying mines, it was about one thousand nine hundred and fifty miles, and that was nautical miles, and that was about eighteen hours flight time.

You could lean it out and get a bit more out of it.

It was one of the popular things, you had to be very wary, you could reduce the power on the engine but you had to make sure the engines didn’t heat up, you were watching the fuel gauges and the cylinder head temperatures and other temperatures and fuel pressure, that was the engineers job. That was apart from the navigator I suppose and the captain the flight engineer was

the next third important person.

Very safe.

Because if anything happened you could put down in water, that was one thing. Maybe the principle thing, in a land plane you had that problem, if you tried to put a land plane down you’d always certainly,

almost certainly nose it in with a chance of loosing all the crew.

We never had any great problems in that regard. We lost a number of various aircraft during the war from the various squadrons, but a lot of them the crews were recovered because they took their time, they had adequate time to

get clear of the enemy and to get down in the water and get a message out, and they were able to send somebody out to pick them up.

We had small dinghies and life jackets, everybody had life jackets which were a bit of a nuisance sometimes. I was up the front on one occasion, over the target, and inadvertently triggered my off,

the damn thing, the CO2 [carbon dioxide] bottle filled the life jacket and it was, jammed me in the turret until I could get rid of the darn thing. But those were little things you put up with. And as I said we had dinghies, I’ve forgotten how many, how big they were. I’ve got a picture of the one aircraft being evacuated in my book showing the dinghy,

you could get about half a dozen people in it.

Yeah we had parachutes, most of our work was low level though, which meant that if you bailed out you were unlikely to do it safely. And being a flying boat, even over land you’ve got a better chance of getting a flying boat down than you have a

land plane. Because if you try and land a land plane in rough ground with the wheels up it’s liable to nose over so you’ve got to land it belly up and it’s not much different from a flying boat then, you’ve got just as much chance of getting a flying boat down. And has happened on occasion where they put a flying boat down on land without greatly damaging it.

I was only with the 20 Squadron for a short period a month or so. But when we went to 42 Squadron we were allocated our own plane, which we very rarely flew and somebody was shot down in it, somebody else was shot down in it, that’s the way it goes. But we were supposed to have our own plane but it didn’t always work out that way. When you’re going on a job

your plane could be unserviceable so you’d grab somebody else’s or some other plane. But in theory you were suppose to have your own plane.

No we were wearing, you could call it jungle clothes.

Long trousers, you had to wear long trousers because of the mosquitos, Malaria, so you always wore long trousers never short. You wore boots, there was an example of somebody bailing out of a fighter plane somewhere up in New Guinea and getting down okay and had to walk a hell of a long way and he was wearing flying boots, and he lost his toes I think because of gangrene

got him. So we wore army boots, army putties too for some reason, long trousers and khaki shirt. Because if you ended up down in enemy territory you wanted to blend into the jungle if you were trying to get away anyway.

Oh everybody wore it, from the CO down, yeah.

No you didn’t wear your uniform. While I’m looking you might have another question.

Hmm.

Oh our name just come up. The skipper possibly had something to do with it, he was a fairly senior, even though he was just off course again, had experience that might have had something to do with it. But

they were just looking to allocate somebody to form a new squadron, so they allocated twelve crews from all over the place. There was 20 Squadron, 43 Squadron, they probably lost a couple of crews and the others probably come up from down south, from Rathmines OTU.

No I went from 20 to 42.

No we came down to Townsville by train and then aircraft to Owen and then Darwin. We flew to Gove near Melville Bay and then picked up by truck and taken into Melville Bay. Had to erect our own tents when we got there, “Here’s a tent

go and erect it somewhere”, it was pretty rough.

Oh that was just a transit we posted down to Townsville to a transit spot, transit station or whatever, and as soon as they had an aircraft available they put us on the aircraft. It was just passing through.

It looked like the end of the earth. Looks like the pictures you saw of Mars the other day. There were a lot of Aboriginals around and you saw them now and then, we were on a little island so they had to make a detour to come and see us. But there was a mission station nearby

and this mission station was run by a Fijian gentleman, I can’t recall his name now. He walked around in his bare feet, and he had the biggest feet you’d ever seen, you’ve no idea how big they were and he was a big man. Now a drum of petrol weighed about three hundred pounds, he could lift that drum up and put it on the tray of a truck, just a straight lift three hundred pounds. Quite a nice

bloke to, he was running the local Aboriginal mission, Nhulunbuy, you may see it mentioned. There’s a town there now days called Newlenby, up in the north east corner of Arnhem Land.

Oh you’re going to Melville Bay, we didn’t know where it was. They could have said you’re going to Darwin, we knew where Darwin was. Melville

Bay we didn’t have a clue.

We were going to Melville Bay to form 42 Squadron. It had been selected, it was a pretty good place for a sea plane base if you take into account the lack of amenities. It was a suitable bay, plenty of room for take offs and landings and apart from the fact there was a shortage of water and we had to have water bought in, if we couldn’t get it ourselves. ‘Cause

during the wet season it rained pretty heavily up there and so you generally got enough water that way. You had your own power, had a dynamo running to provide power. But a boat arrived every now and then with food, fruit and vegetables and meat and stuff. Used to have to go down and help with the unloading of it. And

it was a pretty spartan existence, it wasn’t too bad, pretty healthy there was nobody going down with any problems except being bitten by creatures in the water and things like that. Oh the other danger was the fish traps, we built fish traps so that we’d have a diet of fish, we got plenty of fish in these fish traps. And then part of the job of the duty officer, I was a warrant officer but that made me duty officer

even though I was non commissioned. I’d go along at night with a group of the airman and get the fish, at low tide, except the crocodiles thought it was a good idea to do the same thing too, so we changed doing that at night and only did it in the daytime. ‘Cause there was salt water crocs there. But we had a picture show there.

One occasion there there was a hell of an explosion and we were near the wharf, my tent was, and there’s ammunition going up everywhere. So went down to see what it was and there was a little, it was actually a yacht, pre-war yacht passing through, motorised yacht passing through had caught fire and it was carrying a few guns for armament and the guns, the ammunition went up

and finally the thing burnt to the water line. And it belonged to Jack Davies, remember Jack Davies the radio bloke, he had a yacht and it was taken over by the navy and it belonged to him, went up in flames. I don’t know what the navy would have paid him for it, but yeah a little bit of excitement like that. We had some Bofor guns, they used to start the anti aircraft practice without telling you to, and they were very close to where we were.

It’s surprising the nips never came and attacked us, we never had an reconnaissance planes overhead so we were pretty close to go over where near fighter planes would go, might of kept them away. But it’s a wonder they didn’t sneak some aircraft in sometime to do us over, but they didn’t. We were very close to the Aru Islands and they had bases on the Aru Islands.

Mine laying.

Mine laying, all the Catalina squadrons were dedicated to

mine laying, we didn’t have any mines at Melville Bay, we had to fly to Darwin and they had a mine depot at Darwin, they’d load us with mines there. Or sometimes on one occasion we flew directly from Melville Bay to Morotai and the Americans loaded us with mines there. See we either loaded mines in Darwin, if we were going to the Sulawesi Islands or Balikpapan or any of those places we loaded at Darwin.

If we were going up the other way we, the Yanks quite often loaded us.

Well first of all, the first time we encountered them was when we arrived at Biak, at Windy Island and the USS Wright. And then the action moved further west to Morotai and when the Americans took Morotai they put a sea plane tender into Morotai Lagoon. And we flew up to Morotai Lagoon and

stayed on the sea plane tender and they loaded us with mines and we went off to mine Brunei Bay from there, where the Jap fleet and so on. I touched on that earlier, do you want me to go through it again?

Yes well it was something that was developed by the Yanks, they did

all around the islands, all around the Pacific, whenever they occupied any place, made a landing and occupied, you only made a landing and occupied a place you had air cover over. You had fighter cover over the top of it to protect it while you were doing the landing. So the place was protected but you didn’t know, the fighter planes there was a limit of their range they couldn’t go any further west in this case, and you wanted

to know what’s going on further west, what the Japs were doing there. So they put in a sea plane tender with Catalina flying boats and they’d send them out, sometimes in daylight sometimes in night, to strategic spots further out to keep an eye on the nips. Then as soon as you’d secured Morotai, for instance, you bought an airstrip then and then you’d bring your fighters in and you send them out to a certain distance and that’s the next

landing point if you want to go that way, because you’ve got air cover. You must have air cover, you couldn’t make the landings without having air cover over the top. And that was the idea of the sea plane tenders, a temporary reconnaissance availability to have a look further west, have a look at the enemy. And in our case we came up and they were able to fix us up with mines

to go mine laying, so it all sort of fitted in.

Well from Darwin and further west, West Bay

we mined Makassar, Parepare in the Sulawesis, Surabaya in Java, Balikpapan in Borneo and a number of smaller places which we, Laoet Straits and Telalora Straits, little places that people wouldn’t have heard of. But when we went up to Morotai we were

closer to the inside of this island barrier, we only had to fly west to get in it. From there we mined Balikpapan again, Tarakan, we could mine Brunei Bay we could mine Mindanao in the lower Philippines, so we had a reaching into the Japanese occupied territories.

Well all the places had anti aircraft

defences, most of them were defended against high altitude aircraft and had pretty big guns. That didn’t bother us because we were way underneath, their firing up at ten or twenty thousand feet, we’re coming in at two hundred feet, we were worried about smaller guns like forty millimetre Bofors, but in particular twenty millimetre guns which are very easy to use, you could hose with twenty millimetre. And they were more danger to us than the other

guns. And to give you an illustration we mined Makassar, and Makassar had a break water parallel to the coast, inside the break water was the harbour. The only way we could lay mines in the harbour was to come in directly at the break water, jump the break water and drop the mines inside, and the nips naturally they had their anti aircraft guns on the break water. So we came steaming in, hoping they were asleep, and generally they were for the first,

because we didn’t make much noise, generally they were for the first aircraft but the ones following were the unlucky ones, they use to cope the flack. But we weren’t an easy target to hit, it’s night don’t forget, it’s dark, were black, something’s flying around and their not sure where it is. So in a lot of cases they’d just fire the guns off anyway and they got some of us at times but not as many as you would think.

Oh goodness no, oh no, no. Entirely blackout. I was, did we get onto Brunei Bay or do you want to talk about that one or what have you got?

Yeah

Brunei Bay I touched on before. Brunei Bay is on the west coast of Borneo, it’s a pear shaped island pointed at the top. We left Morotai and it was our longest trip, one thousand nine hundred and fifty miles, as far as we could go. Over the top, around the pointed top, down the left side, the western side to the entrance of Brunei Bay and then we laid our mines in the entrance. And I can remember

this now, even though my book refreshed me, we came down the, Brunei Bay is a bay like that but the top part here is Labuan, sticks down and makes the channel there. And we came down over Labuan and I’d selected a datum point to pick up and from the datum point we were going to run in and lay the mines at a certain interval. And when I saw, came up on the datum point I’m up the front in the open

cockpit, were doing a one hundred and ten knots, it’s pretty windy in the open turret. And it’s pouring with rain and I lost sight of the datum point, I couldn’t see it and I told the skipper he’d have to go around again. So he circled around again and when he came back again there was a great flash of lightening, there was a lot of lightening, and I just saw the datum point under one of the wings. So I told him to kick it to the left and go onto the heading which

he did and we dropped our mines. And I’m absolutely saturated up the front, anyway we turned around then and flew back to Morotai. And when we got there the briefing officer and the intelligence officer they’re all excited because the Japanese fleet was in Brunei Bay, they’d just come back from a mauling at Leyte Gulf. And they were in there

and we’d blocked them in, they couldn’t get out. But between the channel we blocked and Labuan Island itself they’d put their own mine filed in. So they swept their own mine field with their own mine sweepers, which took them quite a few hours and then they went out that way. We’d delayed them to twelve hours, but now that the Yanks had been listening to the Japanese wireless transmissions and they knew they were

about to leave, it was a decoding business called “Ultra”. They knew they were going to leave and when they were going to leave so they alerted one of their submarines, USS Sea Lion that he probably had traffic coming his way. Because they knew that the ships were going back to Japan from Brunei Bay and there was only route they could use for various reasons, I won’t go into, there was only one route they were going to use

which was going to take them past the island of Formosa. So the USS submarine lay and wait, or got into position and was lying in wait when the two battle ships came, no I think there was three battle ships, came waltzing past and he put a torpedo into the Japanese battle ship Congo. And it went on for a little while but

about three hours later it sank. And they were then told by historical origination that they think that the twelve hour delay contributed to the sinking of the Congo because if it hadn’t been delayed, if got through twelve hours earlier the United States submarine would not have been there. So I feel that I contributed to the sinking of the Congo. Well we got back and the Americans told us all about

this and the next day we had to mine Tarakan, which was directly across the water from, in the direction of Borneo, it’s on the east coast of Borneo big oil island. So we arrived there and laid our mines and there was all sorts of fires on ashore, where the Americans had been bombing the place and somebody suggested we go and have a look. And I said, “Yeah I’m okay”, I was on the intercom.

I said. “Yeah I’m game”. and the skipper checked the blisters to see if it was okay with them and there was no reply, somebody said, “They probably jumped overboard when they heard you suggest it”. But anyway we did go and have a look but didn’t get into any trouble. We went back to Morotai and then we flew back to Melville Bay from there. We fiddled around at Melville Bay for a few weeks and then the order

came through that all the aircraft had to be serviceable by the following day. That was impossible because some were having engine changes and things like that. But they had six aircraft that they could put together. And this came about because of the, the Commander and Chief of the United States Navy in the Pacific, Admiral Horsley. He’d covered, with his navy, he’d covered the landing at Leyte, now General Macarthur wanted to land at Mindoro

Island, which was half way between Leyte and Manila. The Philippines are thousands of islands on the east side, you’ve got Leyte on the west side you’ve got Luzon with Manila as the capital, half way in between in the inland seas of the place there’s an island called Mindoro. It’s within fighter cover from Leyte and Macarthur had planed on landing there. Admiral Horsley

was to cover the landing with his navy but he wanted, the Japanese Navy that was in Manila Harbour was going to interfere when they found about it, he wanted them bottled in. And he, they’d done a survey and they reckon if we could lay fifty mines we could bottle all the Japs ships in Manila Harbour for a certain period. So we didn’t know about this we were just told that

we were going to Leyte, so six aircraft from 20 Squadron at Darwin, six aircraft from 43 Squadron at Darwin, six aircraft from us and six aircraft left from Rathmines. And there was another one, there was twenty five aircraft altogether. The odd one was to lay anti radar window, radar interference stuff over the target and the other twenty four were to lay mines.

But we didn’t know about that. And we got up to Leyte Gulf and we landed in Leyte Gulf and you’ve never seen so much shipping, the place was absolutely chock a block with ships. But we landed there and we were billeted ashore on a little Island called Ginamock Island it was a mud Island. You sank almost to your knees walking around, we’d been used to the coal islands, this was a mud island.

Anyway we were briefed and we found out the target was Manila Harbour, nobody had told us about that. I remember the Americans when they found out we were doing this job some of them came and shook our hands, not excepting to see us again, because Manila was the most heavily defended spot in the Pacific at that time. Anyway we took off, we’d carried two huge mines from Darwin for this job, biggest mines we’d ever carried,

two thousand pounders. And we took off and made our way to Manila Harbour and Manila Harbour is shaped like a bay, coming down from the top there’s Bataan Peninsula which the Americans put up a

defence when the Japs entered the war but the Japs over run it, Bataan Peninsula. So we came up the west side, we weren’t going to go through the entrance to the harbour because we knew that would be heavily fortified. We went up to Bataan and crossed Bataan Peninsula and came down inside and came back down to the entrance and laid our mines there. And then we turned around and flew back out, out the same way. And twenty five aircraft we only lost one aircraft, and

he’s never been found we don’t know where he went in.

Yeah you don’t all take off together though, you can’t afford to in the darkness be all over the target at the same time. So you’re staggered by fifteen minutes or half an hour each, you take off after the others so that you theoretically arrive that time apart when you get to the target.

Except some are faster than others and some are slower, and you end up getting there at the same time anyway. But you’ve got twenty five aircraft fiddling around in the dark and hoping to Christ you’re not going to run into one of the other people, which we didn’t. But one bloke came back and had to land out at sea because he’d run out of fuel and they got fuel out to him and he took off

and joined us in Leyte Gulf. Atti Wourn who was the CO of 20 Squadron when I was with it, he hit a tree somewhere during his approach but he got away with it, and there were a few others got shot up but we only lost one aircraft. And when we got up there the Yanks couldn’t do enough for us, they fuelled us straight away and then they

gave us all the food we needed to go out on this trip and we came back, it took four days for us to get refuelled, because we were no longer an emergency job see. They had plenty of other emergencies on their hands, four days before they got around to refuelling us.

No we didn’t, we didn’t see a thing. Some of the others, we were probably the first in, I think we were first off which gave us a bit of

and advantage. But the place was lit up like a Christmas tree too, it’s a wonder they couldn’t see us against all the lights, there was no black out there was light everywhere. It’s alright if you’re interested in admiring lights but we had more important things to do. And from there we flew back to Melville Bay.

Manila Harbour’s a big circular harbour, Manila is right on the far right hand side. At this entrance is Carador (Sp?), that’s where the main entrance is and we laid our mines there. There wasn’t any, there was a lot of shipping activity, a lot of ship all lit up on the water we could see them, so much so that we took a avoiding action to avoid

them when we left, went around and went up north and made our way out trying to make ourselves as inconspicuous as we could, and we got away with it.

Well no I’d had a map of Manila Harbour, I found a starting point for the aircraft to come over and at that point

I’d tell the skipper we’re on datum and then the radio operator would start counting off the seconds on a stop watch and the co-pilot had been told when to pull the jenison switch to drop the mines. And at the appropriate time he pulled the jenison switches and the mines left the aircraft and landed in the channel that had been selected for them. And these were tricky little things they had a device in them that if you

tried to sweep the mine you could send a ship over it seven times before the mine would blow up. So if you’re trying to sweep it, you send a mine sweeper over it and nothing happens you think, “Oh there’s no mines there”. Or you send it over twice and you think, “Oh no we done it twice, there’s nothing there”. So you let your traffic through and five ships later a ship suddenly goes up. And they start to think, “Christs there’s mines there let’s start sweeping again”. And

they do the same thing and some of the other mines are still lying there.

There were occasions were the mines, but they’d blow up hitting the water. One aircraft, I never heard of any aircraft getting lost that way, one aircraft came back with most of the fabric

missing because the Catalina wasn’t an all metal aircraft there were a lot of fabric parts on the wing, and all the fabric was blown away. But I don’t know that we ever lost any, although some of the ones that disappeared it could of happened to. But they were nasty things they were magnetic mines and at the end of the war we were laying combination magnetic and sound mines, they listen in as well, acoustic mines, they

were nasty things. And one of the first things they did at the end of the war was grab all the Japanese mining experts to find out how they swept our mines or whether they swept them at all. And I think they found out they couldn’t sweep them.

They were magnetic acoustic, British ones, two thousand pound British mines.

Well the mines are on the bottom of the sea. You tend to think of ships being torpedoed with a hole in the side, if something like a mine goes off underneath it breaks the back of the ship and the ship just crumbles up. Very effective and two thousand pound mine is bigger than any torpedo, so

do a lot of damage. They make a big dent in a battle ship.

The idea was to lay the mines to block the harbour itself, prevent any ships getting out of the harbour. The moment we done the job the Japs knew the harbour was mined and they shut the harbour, nobody in or out. And that was

shut for thirty hours which was all Admiral Horsley wanted, by that time they were solidly ashore on Mindoro Island starting to build an airstrip and everything. And they reckon, it was shut for thirty hours. So that effectively nobbled any chance of the Japanese reacting to the landing.

Oh it was very satisfying particularly when you think of how frightened we were going in there and it was so successful afterwards with a loss of only one aircraft. We expected losses of, wouldn’t have been unusual

if we lost between five and ten aircraft we thought. We were expendable, it was so important it had to be done.

Yeah, oh in those days you used to think you were immortal, you didn’t dare think of anything else. It happened to other people but it’s not going to happen to me, you sort of develop that mentality.

Looking back on my life there’s a lot of turning points. For instance I got sick with pharyngitis at Beaufort OTU, if I hadn’t I would have gone onto Beaufort OTU and very good chance I might of got knocked off in training or up in the islands. There’s been a number of other occasions, after the war I could of joined BCPA

but I didn’t and one of the BCPA aircraft went in, with a full crew, into San Francisco, I might have been on that. There’s a lot of insistences during the war if I’d gone the wrong way I wouldn’t be around.

No, no.

I don’t know that any of them were particularly superstitious. The idiot of a co-pilot was a bloke called Arch Porteal, he died a little while ago. But in going to the target you’d hear him singing over the intercom, “I like aeroplane jelly, aeroplane jelly for me”, he had this ditty he used to sing.

Little things like that. But no I wasn’t superstitious apart from the ordinary things like not walking under ladders and that sort of thing, that everybody observes.

He was, no he was a normal bloke. He recommended me for a commission at the end of the course and

put a good word in the ear of the CO and the CO approved it and I was made a flying officer then, oh pilot officer rather, finished up as a flying officer.

Not sure?

He was pretty steady, he would do what I told him, that was another thing. We were coming across Bataan Peninsula to go into Manila Harbour and we were between two bloody great hills, and there was a bit of cloud around and he knew we were going between these hills. And he had faith in me that I was taking him the right way and suddenly

a bit of dark cloud, and it looked all in the world like a mountain in front of us, and he probably thought to himself, “Christ Bill’s driven us into a mountain”, and start to turn the aircraft, but it was only a bit of cloud. And I screamed out to him, “Don’t leave this course”, so he maintained the course and everything was alright, so we had faith in each other.

The job we did to Brunei Bay where we bottled up the Japanese fleet, turned around and came back again. Once we turned to the top of Borneo we were up about ten thousand feet, and it’s so much cooler up there of course. And before we take off I always used to, I used to carry some beer with me on the trips, and there’s always water

in the bilge of the Catalina, so I used to stick a bottle in the bilge. So when we got back to Morotai of course I used to, well we all did it, we pulled this beer out and drank it before we were picked up, and we had a nice cold beer.

Well if the Americans were supplying it, it was wonderful.

If it was the Australians we got bully beef, if it was the Americans we got chicken and ice cream and stuff like that, you didn’t get that out of Darwin, on the trips we did out of Darwin, it was good old fashion army food, nothing to write home about.

Yeah.

On board Tangier itself? You’re subject to American Naval discipline in that you got used to American ways. They used to sing out at times, “The starboard light is lit”, that means you could go on the starboard side of the ship and have a cigarette. Or they’d say, “The port side is lit”, you’d go to the port side of the ship and have a cigarette. And then

at nights they used to have a picture show on the, what they the “fantail”, the rear end of the ship and there was always a picture show at night, plenty of ice cream, which was free and the food was free as well aboard ship, and good quality stuff as I said not what we were used to. And the Tangier was what they called a “C3 merchant ship”, standardised merchant ship the Americans

were turning out at the outbreak of war. And she was at Pearl Harbour during the raid on Pearl Harbour and she survived that. There quite a modern looking ship. And she had a big crane right down the stern which was capable of lifting a Catalina, a Catalina empty weighed about one thousand seven hundred pounds, it was capable of lifting a Catalina or even a Martin Mariner, which was even heavier. So it was a pretty

decent size crane. And of course it was loaded up with all sorts of ammunitions. Occasionally the Japs raided at night and we were stuck down in a lower deck, they used to shut all the doors. And the thing I found out about being on a war ship, so she was technically a war ship, was that

those steel bulkheads are hard, you hit them with your head their bloody hard. And wherever you went you were going through one of these bulkheads and you hit your head some time or rather. But we enjoyed being aboard the ships, very hot though, were trying to sleep in the daytime and it was pretty warm. And when we left, after the Brunei Bay job

the Japs raided Morotai airfield, I think it was three days after we left, and they cleaned up an Australian Boston squadron, they wrecked just about every aircraft, wrecked or destroyed just about every aircraft, so much so that they couldn’t re-equip with Bostons, they had to re-equip with Beaufighters.

No in this particular occasion there was another squadron there, there would have been 20 or 43 Squadron, I’m not sure which one. Because two squadrons laid mines in Brunei Bay when the Japs were in there, our squadron and one of the others.

Let’s see.

Yeah I’ll tell you about one from Darwin,

we were going to go to a place called Laoet Straits, L-a-o-e-t, Laoet Straits from West Bay. So we took off from Darwin loaded with mines and it’s about three and a half hour trip.

Oh before we took off we went to briefing, we were briefed where the target was, and then the navy blokes would be there and talk about the mines, which mines we were carrying,

what altitude we had to drop them at, speeds etc, and where they had to be dropped. And I’d get a large scale adroitly chart and plot out on the adroit chart exactly where the mines had to go, and exactly where I’m going to start the mining run, and the heading that the aircraft has to go on to make that mining run, and a number of minutes before,

number of seconds before we dropped the mines. And that occurred before we left Darwin. So when we left Darwin we were loaded with mines and we know where were going.

No.

You just know the mines, you’ve got mines aboard and there armed. They had a tricky little device, there was a hole

in the side of the mine which had a hydrostatic valve in there, and when you dropped the mines the pressure of the water operated on the hydrostatic valve and armed it, and from then on the mine was armed. To prevent that happening they used to fill the hole up with a soapy sort of material, so that when you dropped the mines that stuff had to dissolve and took several hours, I’m not sure how many hours for it to dissolve, before the mine was armed. That was another thing they built into it.

Then as far as the mines were concerned we went out to the aircraft, the mines are sitting there the Armourers had pulled the pins out of them and there all ready to be dropped.

We checked the fuel of course, that’s the important thing, you checked the guns to make sure their armed, you didn’t fire them of course. I’ve got to check

the time, make sure I’ve got the correct time. The pilot goes through their cockpit drill and check out the andirons and elevators and all that sort of thing. And then the flight engineer winds the engines up, they’ve got to be turned over a certain number of times before you try and start them. Otherwise with them sitting there, being a radial engine

the oil drips down to the bottom cylinder, and if you don’t rotate them and get the oil out of the cylinder when you start the engine up your liable to blow the top of the cylinder so they’ve got to be turned over. And then you’ve got two blokes down in the blisters, maybe only one, and they’ve got drogues out of the side of the aircraft to help you to

turn the aircraft. If you want to go to port for instance you throw a port drogue out and it pulls the nose of the aircraft round. So you’ve got somebody there and you get certain signals on a hooter from the captain when to pull the drogues in. And when that’s all done and off, you start the engines up, taxi out and select your heading that you’re going to

take off on. The mines themselves, you asked earlier, they’ve had safety pins pulled out. The loading of the mines are done by the Armament people. There was one occasion I learnt of where the mine fell off and the armourer panicked, the mine fell into the water and he jumped into the water too, for some reason he thought the

mine was going to go up and he was going to be safer in the water, which it didn’t do. But in Darwin there’s a twenty six foot tide, so when the tide’s going out the waters going at a fairly decent pace, he jumped in the water and we never ever saw him again, the crocodile probably got him. Anyway you take off, we were taking off from Darwin to West Bay, our secret base on the north western coast. Took us about four hours to fly

there then you landed, you took off in the morning and you landed about midday, a bit later, had something to eat and then late afternoon we were ready to take off. We had to delay our departure so that we didn’t cross the Japanese territory in daylight. Then we crossed the lower barrier, lower barrier islands, into this inland sea beyond that and across to the Sulawesi Islands and the Laoet Straits were

on the, one of the corners of the Sulawesi Islands. And we made our way across there and I found the datum point and put the captain on the heading and then we dropped the mines, and I was up the front and I saw the two mines drop off the wings and I’m very pleased with myself and I look over the bow and I can see the wakes of ships underneath. About that time the skipper

saw them to and I grabbed the intercom to warn the skipper, the skipper put it into a hard left turn and threw me off balance and pulled my earphones out, my earphone jack out and started up my lifejacket. The lifejacket went off as well so I’m in a mess up the front. But anyway we recovered from that and just as the skipper saw the ships wakes underneath the anti aircraft fire

started to come up. And it’s very pretty when you first see it, all these coloured lights coming at you and then you suddenly realise there going to hit me and then they suddenly drop, there almost there and they suddenly drop. It’s a very frightening experience. And we circled around and came back again and there was full moon and we got on the right side of the moon where we could see down moon, and we could see this convoy of four ships, two corvette type ships

and two big merchant ships. So I made a bit of a quick sketch of them and we took off back for base and I told the, at the briefing I told the briefing people who were very interested to learn that the Japanese were using that route, which meant that they were going to keep mining it. And before

that we crossed the barrier again and then I took my astro fixes and pointed the aircraft in the general direction of Australia and had a rest. And then that was the trip we were jumped by Beaufighters. It was just after dawn and suddenly an aircraft jumped us, the Japs were noted for sending

four planes out for just this reason to jump unsuspecting aircraft. So the skipper put her into a nose dive down to the deck but by the time we got there we recognised the aircraft as a Beaufighter. And what had happened is one of our aircraft had gone in, or made a forced landing and they’d send an air sea rescue aircraft out to recover the crew and the Beaufighters

were suppose to be escorting the other aircraft and they saw us and thought we were, but we sorted that out and then we continued on and they went on their merry way.

Oh ordis lamp, we flashed a message to them. You had identity letters of the day, to start with you flashed those straight away. Anybody that didn’t know what a Catalina was

was pretty stupid but you never knew, you never know so you made sure. But yeah and then the radio operator got on the blinker to them and their radio operator came back and confirmed what was going on and they set off for where they should have been. Apparently we were close to where the other aircraft was. We’d

heard him calling during the night that he was in trouble but we didn’t know what had happened to him. And then we got back to West Bay and landed, had something to eat and refuelled and back to Darwin and were debriefed at Darwin.

Significant sleep, oh good twenty four hours.

You got very very tired. I used to doze on the nav [navigation] table, put my head down and doze and tell the radio operator that he was being relieved at N force by his mate, tell him to wake me up at such and such a time. They were very noisy aircraft, the Catalina, none of these war time aircraft were sound proof so all was very noisy inside and you had two bloody great engines not

far apart, away from you. And I used to get around that by putting a bit of, screwing up a bit of paper and sticking it in my ear to deaden the sound. When I got back to base on one occasion I was complaining about I didn’t seem to be hearing properly, so I went along to the medical centre and the orderly there stuffed my ears full of mercurochrome, and

said, “That will fix it”, which it didn’t. So a few days later I went back to see the doctor and he had a look and he said, “Oh very interesting”, and he got a pair of tweezers and he started pulling out these pink pieces of paper out of my ears, I’d stuffed it completely up with sound proofing paper.

Well you’re in a

noisy environment, you got used to it and didn’t take any notice.

The intercom was quite good. American intercom was, but the British intercom was pretty poor, but the American intercom was very good.

Well you’re all

suppose to be on duty unless you’re having a rest so every now and then the bloke in the blisters would check with the Captain. Well the radio operator he might have something to say that he’s been listening out or something like that. The engineers is always talking to the captain so it’s quite a bit of activity going on on the intercom.

No you always, you always had a code. We didn’t communicate with each other to start with. You see pictures of fighter planes talking to each other on VHF, we didn’t have VHF to start with, we couldn’t communicate

with each other by voice. We could communicate by WT, by Wireless by Morse, Morse code if necessary, that’s only, you’d be using HF frequencies [high frequencies] for that. But direct communication no there wasn’t.

Oh the crew on the RT?

Oh if you were in the blister you’d say, “starboard blister”, or, “port blister”,

or, “flight engineer”, he’s going to be up in the flight engineer’s position. You wouldn’t have a tail gunner in position. If I wanted to talk to the skipper I’d generally wander up and talk to him, sometimes I might talk on the intercom, except when I was in the front turret, I’d be using the intercom then.

No I don’t think I can think of anybody else. There all pretty quite people, they did their jobs without complaining. There was Arch Porteals he was the aeroplane jelly bloke.

Alan Wilson was the flight engineer, he was about the oldest of us. Bruce Laurence was the second flight engineer, he’s still alive, he’s not too well. He joined Qantas afterwards and I met him again in Qantas. Alan Wilson, flight engineer,

Pat Ramsey was the radio operator I don’t know what happened to him, he was quite a good solid bloke. No I can’t think of any idiosyncrasies or traits with them.

Well there wasn’t much

socialising, at Melville Bay we had a swimming pool, did a bit of socialising there. Had a beer in your tent on occasion with the, you got a beer ration, a couple of bottles a week I think it was and you might socialise, have a few drinks in your tent with somebody. Occasionally we got a bit of beer in the mess, a keg of beer perhaps and we’d go along and drink that. But

there wasn’t much in the way of socialising, a lot of us read a lot, I read a lot of books and so did a lot of the others. But no you wouldn’t, nothing that you’d call real socialising. You got, you had your friends that you’d pop in on, I don’t know that I, I was in a tent with Alan Wilson the chief engineer,

somebody else I’ve forgotten who. And the rest of the people they were in other tents. There wasn’t, apart from swimming, there was no game activity of any sort. Oh we did go across to Gove airstrip at times to play cricket against the people over at Gove.

They used to put, the airstrip wasn’t in use so they put a wicket up across the airstrip and you’d play cricket. And if you were fielding off the airstrip on either side of the strip it was all red sand, dirty red sand. After the war it turned out to be bauxite one of the richest bauxite deposits in the world.

Yeah that was about our, the only activity we had there.

Yeah.

You weren’t allowed to talk about anything about operational matters, you weren’t allowed to talk about the squadron you weren’t allowed to talk about what aircraft you were flying, there wasn’t much you could talk about. You could talk about,

well you weren’t even allowed to talk about where you were, so there wasn’t much you could say. You could just discuss mundane things, ask how things are going back down south, or mentioned something you might of heard on the news or something like that. But as far as the squadron activities no you weren’t allowed to talk about that at all.

Got a fair bit of mail, there was a regular

DC3 just about every day into Gove brining all sorts of thing, people, but mail of course.

Oh various acquaintances, various girls that I’d met at various places in Australia.

Not a great number really.

Not really, no. I mislaid my gas mask and somewhere or other and that followed me around the traps for a long time before it caught up with me. So if there’d been a gas attack anywhere I would

come of second best, you had to carry the damn thing, it was part of the uniform.

Let’s see, you would go away for a week, you’d probably do a couple of flights

from Darwin in that time. Because each flight took about three days by the time you went to where you’re going, position yourself and come back again and recovered. So you’d be away for a week and you’d come back and you’d have a week maybe ten days off and do it again. I think I did something like twenty six operations

in the nine months. But they were long distance operations, when I finished the war I had a lot of hours up, more hours than most people, but that was because we were flying such long range missions in Catalinas.

A lot of them were to out of the way places that nobody’s ever heard of and you wonder why the hell you were going there anyway. It’s rather interesting that after the war I went to Labuan and I did a bit of flying around the area and I ended back at Makassar, one of the places we’d mined.

And I got talking to the port commander, this is in peace time, who was a Royal Australian Navy lieutenant commander I think he was. And we were talking about the mine laying and he said, “Oh yes Makassar”, this is about six months after the war finished, he said, “Makassar is still partly blocked up and Parepare”, which is another little port further north. He said, “That’s completely blocked up still”.

After the war of course you couldn’t immediately sweep these places it took a while to get around to it. But our mines, we put an awful lot of mines into Surabaya, we must of closed that. They got a lot of feedback after the war from the Japanese and they said how much it had interfered with their operation. So it was a far better idea to do mining than

it was to do the pin pricks that they were doing with bombing, which wasn’t doing any real damage at all.

If you find it necessary to save or defend yourself you’ll use anyway you can,

including land mines. And this rubbish about banning land mines will never ever happen because the bloke that’s getting the short end of the stick if that’s all he’s got left to him he’ll use land mines. They are a nasty weapon I’ll agree. Theoretically you’re supposed to keep a map of where you put the darn things but nobody bothers to do that.

I think we got badly shot up at Makassar on one occasion and Leyte Straits we got shot up there. Most of the rest of the ones we were very fortunate. It was the sort of operation where you could get away with it, the places weren’t

that heavily defended, you were running interference, you were interfering with them. As distinct from Manila which we thought we’d get into a lot of trouble and we didn’t. Brunei Bay was, we thought that, we didn’t realise the Jap fleet were in there, we were horrified to find that out afterward. And Tarakan

it was easier places that turned out to be the most dangerous.

Yeah we were fortunate in that we got a few holes in the aircraft on occasion and that was it. Some of the other blokes they weren’t so

fortunate they got tail planes shot off, one bloke had a microphone shot out of his hand. One bloke, the nasty thing about anything happening to you is that if you fell into the hands of the Japanese they hated air crew and they’d generally bayonet you to death, there was no Berlin

Hilton for us if we came down, we were under no illusions of what was going to happen to us. And it was a pretty filthy war.

I’ve never forgiven the Japs.

Our people, well you try to outrun them if you could, get out of the place. But

they said, “If it’s going to save your life tell them anything they want to know. Don’t lie to them but tell them anything they want to know, because whatever you know is out of date already anyway, it won’t help the Japs”, so we were told that. The people that did end up in the hands of the Japs were almost all killed. I only know of one

that did survive.

We didn’t know much about it at all as a matter of fact, surprisingly, the government knew about it, they suppressed it, they didn’t tell anybody. The American submarine sunk a Japanese ship with a lot

of our Australian prisoners aboard and recovered quite a number of them and they got them back to Australia and they were more or less put into isolation, nobody was allowed to know what had happened. They were frightened that if the Japs learnt that we knew what they were doing that things would get even worse, but we didn’t know about that at all.

Yes they didn’t talk about their experiences, they were very quiet, didn’t say a word.

Yes.

Well there was always aircraft being sent, ordered from America and the Catalina

Department, squadrons were always after new aircraft. We were sent across, we boarded a converted Liberator Bomber at Handley and flew to Noumea onto Fiji onto Canton, Honolulu and then onto San Francisco.

And from then, San Francisco we bussed down to San Pedro through Hollywood and picked the aircraft up. It was painted in English colours, “arctic white” they called it, it wasn’t a black Catalina, it was a white one. It was originally suppose to go to the RAF for operation in the Artic, but under Lend Lease it was

reallocated to us and it still had the English registration JX648, not an Australian registration at all and it was all white. We picked it up and it was the latest model PB2B2, PB for Patrol Bomber, Number Two, second model and B for Boeing, built by Boeing. And it didn’t look like the normal Catalina it had a very high

tail, much higher tail. It had a few other differences and it had what was called centre metrical radar, the latest type of radar, we’d been carrying primitive original British radar on Cats in operations. But this was the latest model centre metric radar. It differed in radar in having what it called “PPI screen”

where the thing, index rotated and painted a picture, whereas the old ones just had what’s called an “A scope” and it just gave you a blinker up a centre line, a bleep up a centre line. So this had the latest radar and the worst compass system I’ve ever encountered.

At one stage out of San Francisco we were thirty degrees off course, flying on the main compasses. So we abandon the main compasses and went back to the original magnetic compass. The new compass was a special type auto sign compass and it was very tricky and things went wrong

with it. It was, gave us a lot of trouble all the way back to Australia, but we got back alright.

No the radio operator handled that.

At that stage the people were very friendly, never been there of course, so I didn’t know what to expect. I know they paid, if you donated blood they

paid you $10 for it, so we donated blood in mass. Very friendly, they couldn’t do enough for us. I remember one old lady when I got onto a tram car and she saw the Australia things on our shoulder she said, “Austria, I didn’t know they were on our side”. I said, “Australia Madam”.

But oh they couldn’t do enough for us and compared to Australia you’d hardly know there was a war on because there wasn’t any shortage of anything. We caught up with our headquarters people in San Francisco and they said, “You’ve got to go along to Massey’s”, or some place like that, “Ask for

Mrs So and So and she’ll fix you up with nylon stockings, half a dozen nylon stockings each”. Nylon stockings of course were unheard of in Australia and they’d only just come out in America. So we duly went along and got a stack of these nylon stocking to get back. And when we got back I didn’t have any one to give them too, until

I got down to Bairnsdale to the staff nav course and I met Heather and so I said, “Do you want any stockings?” And she said, “Oh yes”, very casually. So I gave here these stockings, which she barely looked at because war time stockings in Australia weren’t crash hot and she thought I’d given her a pair of war time stockings. It was only when I left her and went away again that she happen to casually look at it and she stored them from then on in a glass jar.

Yeah.

Oh everybody had a car of course, there was no shortage of cars over there. There was no shortage of petrol really, although there was suppose to be but there wasn’t apparently. They had fantastic road system,

we landed not in San Francisco but inland, two or three hours inland by road, and we went back to San Francisco by Greyhound bus and we’d never seen anything like a Greyhound bus before. It was sort of royalty on wheels sort of thing, grand bus. And then when we got to San Francisco they sent us down to Hollywood by

Pullman train and that was another thing never sort of encountered these luxurious, the luxury of the train, Pullman trains, seen pictures of them in the, pictures of them in the pictures but never encountered anything like that. And, but everywhere you went they wouldn’t let you put

your hand in your pocket, they insisted on paying for everything for you. The fact that we were Australian we seemed to get a special deal.

Yes it is a quick one. First trip mine laying we did we went to Port Moresby and then onto Biak and up to Palau, but when we landed at Port Moresby we spent the day there and there was a court martial going on, an American court martial. A captain of one of the aircraft had been court martialled for shooting

one of his crew members. And what had happened they’d been out on a trip over somewhere or rather, might have been Rabaul perhaps and they were badly shot up, they lost their hydraulics so they couldn’t put their gear down. It was a Boeing Flying Fortress which had under the fuselage turret, and this turret had been damaged in the clash with the Japanese fighters and it couldn’t be

moved, it needed hydraulic to lift it up. But it was out of position, it had to be facing forward to be lifted up and they couldn’t get it into position and they were going to have to land without any undercarriage. And the captain ordered one of the crew members, just prior to landing to shoot this bloke in the turret, in the under turret, cause he was going to get squashed. And he had to be court

martialled under the regulation and I never found out what happened about that. I heard that from somebody else to, but once again not what happened. This bloke had to make a decision to have this bloke shot, it would be a frightful thing to be faced with. Otherwise when the aircraft flattened on the ground it was going to squash him, kill him anyway but not a nice way to go.

Bairnsdale.

I was at a place called Eagle Rock I think it was or some name like that. When we learnt, we learnt of the dropping of the atom bomb

at that stage. All we knew was that the Americans had dropped a bloody great bomb on Japan and there was suggestion it could end the war, and we said, “Oh yeah we’ve heard that before”. And then a few days later they dropped a second one and sometime after that

the war did finish. And we got a certain amount of relief out of that because it meant I wasn’t going back on operations again, which I was bound to do if war hadn’t finished. But the dropping at the atom bomb that didn’t strike us as very important at the time, we didn’t realise it could finish, we didn’t realise what a weapon it was. And I completed the staff nav course and then I was posted back to

Rathmines, went up to Manila and bought some POWs back and flew them back to Australia. Distributed them between Perth and Adelaide and Sydney and then ended up back at Rathmines again. And sometime after that posting came through to go to Labuan, now that the war had

finished about five or six months, five months before the RAAF was being run down, people were being demobilised so the squadrons would loose people and they’d have to be replaced if there was anyone around. So the 113 Air Sea Rescue at Labuan was short of navigators so I was posted up there to join the CO of the

place who lost his navigator who had been repatriated. And so I arrived up there and I found out that our job there was to fly around Borneo on various tasks, such as taking money in to reopen the place and things, the banks to reopen things like that. Bring Japanese war criminals back to Labuan for trial,

all sorts of odd things. Searching for missing personnel and that went on for a while. Our primary task was going to be to escort the Mustang Squadrons of 76, 77 and 82, the three squadrons that were going to Japan as part of the air component of the occupation forces. And that was suppose to be imminent, it had been imminent for a long time apparently

and it remained imminent until the beginning of March before we finally got away. And the whole troop of the three squadrons set off from Labuan and flew to Clarkefield in Manila, in the Philippines and there was no reason that they couldn’t all travel at once because there was plenty of places to put

down if anything went wrong. So they all arrived at Manila and after a day or so they all headed off to Okinawa, and we were flying at low level, air sea rescue over, in case they had to make a forced landing in the water anywhere, which didn’t occur. Then we took off from Okinawa and from Okinawa

they were sending the aircraft in groups of three with an escorting navigation aircraft, they’d have three Mustangs and a Mosquito or a Beaufighter doing the navigation for them. They were flying in a loose formation. And we arrived with our mob, didn’t see them, but we arrived at a place called Bofu and landed and our mob had arrived before us, the ones we were

screening. And three or four days, they kept coming in everyday but the weather was pretty lousy sometimes they couldn’t get out of the Okinawa and had to turn back. But finally three or four days later one of the formations turned up missing, three Mustangs and a Mosquito. And nobody knew what happened to them, nobody had heard anything so we were ordered to go out and look for them.

And our aircraft A24104, a PBY5A, amphibious Catalina, and we couldn’t go out that day it was too late so we took off the next day and we went down through the Islands that they’d approached. They’d come through Bungo Strait, it’s a big strait leading into the inland sea. We went down there and

we had a rough idea where they’d gone missing and we did as what is known as a creeping line ahead where we went back and forwards over a certain area to try and see if we could see anything. The weather was shocking, the icing level was eight hundred feet, which meant if we went about that we’d get ice on our wings and we didn’t have an de-icing equipment so we had to keep it lower than eight hundred. We had a heavy aircraft being an amphibian, which was heavier than a normal aircraft,

normal Catalina and we had extra crew aboard for the search. And we’d been out about four hours or so and then we turned back, heading back to Bofu and our port engine blew up. And we frantically threw out everything that we could throw out to lighten the aircraft, which didn’t help at all we still kept going down. Once you lose an engine you put extra power on the remaining

engine to keep you air born, but you can only do that for a certain number of minutes if you’re using the extreme power which we were doing, otherwise your other engines going to blow up. So after about five minutes we decided we had to put her down in the sea. And we put her down in what’s described as a controlled crash, everybody inside that wasn’t strapped in was thrown around, including myself

and the aircraft sat down okay and sprung a few leaks which we looked after. And we just sat in the water waiting for something to happen, which sent a message back to base and shortly after we landed in the water, within a half an hour there was a Mosquito aircraft over the top checking us out. And we passed a message to him that everything

was okay, apart from being down in the drink. And then a little while later one of our Catalinas came out, overhead and made some enquiries and then flew back. We sat around waiting for something to happen and in the distance a lot of ships passed, including naval ships which we signalled and nobody took any notice. We found out later on that we were in a unswept mine field, war time

mine field. After a while a shallow draft Japanese coaster came along and must of known the area well ‘cause he didn’t see to worry about the mines, and he threw us a line and towed us to the coast, which we could see some distance away, about seven miles I think it was. And he towed us to a fishing village called Saganoseki and dropped the tow at the entrance and some boats

came out and threw us a line and towed us in. When we got in we went ashore to see if we could find anybody speak English, we did find somebody I think, and somewhere to stay the night. We found a, what you call a Japanese road house I suppose, had accommodation but didn’t have any food, we had to bring food off the aircraft. Things were pretty scarce in Japan at that time.

And they put us up in this little road house place and we left somebody on the aircraft to communicate with the base in case there were any messages coming through. The next day one of our Catalinas turned up and taxied up to the entrance and was towed in, and they bought some supplies for us. And it was decided that some of us would leave and go back to Bofu, and I was one of the ones

there was two or three others, about three of us. So we climbed on the Cat and they towed the Cat out of the entrance of the harbour and we started it up and off we went and landed back at Bofu. And we were there for a while, I think about a week or more, week or ten days and an Indian sloop, small Indian war ship called HMIS

Sutlidge, Her Majesty’s Indian Ship Sutlidge, arrived at the Saganoseki and towed the Cat to a place north of Bofu called Iwakuni. Iwakuni was a former war time Japanese naval base, naval airstrip and sea plane base and they had concrete ramp going down into the water, which they could tow our aircraft up

put it on the hard standing to repair. And I think within forty eight hours the Australia Air Force had a new engine up for us, and it took three months to get the other bits and pieces that had been blown off, replaced. So we sat around there for three months before we finally got the aircraft flyable again. And in that time all sorts of things went wrong, battery, the battery went flat

had to be rebuilt, our nose tyre went flat and we had to jack the Cat up quite a distance to get the wheel out from underneath the aircraft and repair the puncture. And then when we landed the aircraft we had to dump fuel from one of our fuel tanks to lighten it. And it had a spring

loaded valve, allowing the fuel, when you pulled the valve allowed the fuel to leave the tank. But the, when it did it the spring was damaged and wouldn’t return to it’s proper position so we couldn’t close that tank off, which meant that we couldn’t put any petrol in it.

They tried to repair it, the valve was inside so they had to take a hatch off the top of the wing to get inside the tank. And the senior flight engineer went in, and that was Noel Sheraton in that case, and he went in the tank and tried to fix this valve from inside.

He was unable to do so, the tank still had residue of fuel in it, which caught in the little cracks and things inside the fuel tank. So he was breathing fuel while he was in there and he died later on of a lung complaint, which is probably caused by that. Anyway we sealed it up again and decided we’d fly the aircraft back to Australia, on one tank,

which meant that you only had half the fuel you needed, you could only fly half the distance, half the maximum distances. So we made our way back to Australia landing just about everywhere. We landed at Okinawa then Clarkefield then Semai I think then Timor, Darwin, Cloncurry, Charleville, Cairns and finally got back to

Rathmines. And that was late July 1946 and climbed out of the aircraft, applied for leave pass, ended up back in Adelaide and I was demobilised, towards the end of July.

And I got married on August the 6th. Where do we go from here?

Yeah.

It was popular to take newcomers like ourselves to have a look

at Hiroshima, Hiroshima was still radioactive. You might recall, I don’t know whether you do that in later years, not so long ago they made a film in the desert in America somewhere that had been used for atom bomb test and the star of the film was John Wayne

and the director was Rick Powell. And there were a number of other high profile people who all died of cancer. Anyway getting back to Hiroshima it was popular for everyone to have a look at Hiroshima and as I said it was less than twelve months since the atom bomb had dropped, so the place was still dangerously radioactive. And I mentioned earlier that my son was born a Downs Syndrome, I don’t know whether that

was because of some interference with my genes or not. But I can’t help thinking about it. Hiroshima had been flattened, there were a few concrete buildings still standing but there weren’t many concrete buildings in Hiroshima before anyway. Most of the place was a typical Japanese wooden buildings and they’d all caught fire and been levelled.

The thing that amazed you, I’d seen damage, bomb damage places elsewhere in the Pacific where you’ve got large lumps of masonry and broken walls lying around, there was nothing like that at Hiroshima. The debris was so small you couldn’t understand it, little pieces, not large lumps at all. And the Japanese themselves were quite docile,

they’d accepted they’d lost the war and we never got to know them so you can’t tell what their feelings were like. There was a great shortage of food starting to appear, I think it got worse after we left. You had to feel sorry to some extent. But

Hiroshima itself you’ve seen that it was unbelievable.

I wasn’t tempted, no I didn’t, but I can understand it. It would be quite easy to pick up something and say it came from Hiroshima and it could still have been radioactive. No I didn’t do anything like that.

We arrived at Iwakuni and Iwakuni, Bofu where we started off from where the Mustangs arrived was a RAAF Base, Iwakuni was a RAF Base, Royal Air Force. And we were unattached nobody owned us and we were in a wonderful position, we didn’t have to salute anybody or report

to anybody we were just stuck there and nobody wanted us, nobody knew who we were, nobody worried about us. We used to eat in the RAF mess, the food wasn’t bad, drink their cheap NAAFI [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute] beer and we had a fairly pleasant time the three months we had there. You could go

go and sight seeing quite freely, there was no charge you’d just arrange to be put on a train if you wanted to go to a certain place and off you went. One chap went to one place and the station master said, “Don’t go into the waiting room there’s a corpse in there”, and

thought to himself, “Oh I won’t go in”, but he’s curiosity got the better of him and he went and had a look and it was a little old lady in there with a ticket in her hand sitting in the corner quite dead. And if you died on railway property with a ticket the railway had to bury you, so somebody had an aunty or granny or somebody on her last legs so they took her along to the railway station, bought a ticket and put it in her hand.

Rather sad I suppose.

Well it was only the one and they didn’t have anything to say, they were very quite, didn’t talk about it at all. And of course I didn’t get

much of a chance to talk to them because I was busy up the front of the aircraft navigating. They quite often came up and said, “Where are we?” And, “Where we going?” And, “How we going?” And things like that, but they didn’t talk about their experiences at all.

Manila. They were from Japan,

they’d been in Japan and I think they’d been in hospital in Japan recovering. And then they’d been bought down to Manila for us to evacuate.

We took them to Darwin, from Darwin we took them to Perth, some of them lived in Perth and some of them lived in

Adelaide where I came from, so from Perth we went to Adelaide and we spent two days in Adelaide, and I went home to my people and the POWs that were getting off there got off and the ones that weren’t were accommodated somewhere and after two days we took off for Sydney. Arrived at Sydney and handed them over to the people there.

They didn’t talk about them, a lot of them were like that. I knew one after the war and he wouldn’t talk about it. They’d been through some frightful times. They’d talk amongst themselves but they wouldn’t talk to outsiders, just the way it happened.

Yes I met her, I don’t know I went along to a dance with a couple of mates and according to Heather when I walked through the door she said, “He’s mine”, or words to that effect,

that’s what she says. Anyway I met her and then I started to take her out while I was there and we became engaged before I left. I think I went all around the world and had to go back to Bairnsdale second time and got trapped.

Well her father was a bank manager, I thought he owned a bank but he

didn’t.

Very interesting, Makassar was very interesting because I’d been to Makassar a few times laying mines and

was very interesting to learn the place was still partly stuffed up with mines and that Parepare further up, which we’d done was also still unusable. But thinking about it it was easy to understand, there wasn’t any coordinated effort at that stage, it was not that long after the war, the Dutch were running the place, they had to

get equipment to do it. Nobody seemed to know how to lay the mines, I never heard anybody, nobody seemed to know how to sweep the mines. I never heard at any stage after the war from anybody how they were able to sweep them. The British swept them from the air to some extent, they flew an aircraft over which, and had a power supply in the aircraft

transmitting radio signals at certain frequencies to trigger these mines off. And that was to some extent successful but not a one hundred percent so I don’t know how they got on. We mined Saigon, that was another place that was mined later on, not in my time and they laid mines there and closed that up. It would have been interesting, I must

get on the internet see if I can find anybody how they did go about those, sweeping those mines. I’ve got a naval web site that I visit quite frequently and talk to people, I’ll put a question in there and see if I can find. These sort of reconciliations tend to trigger off little questions like that,

that you follow up. I got onto the Australian’s At War web site and I found a story in there which is in my book, but I didn’t know who the fellow was and I found out in there who he was and I’ve been in touch with him and he was very interesting to talk to, that was only last weekend so it’s fairly recent, I’ve still got to write to him.

Curiosity, we went back when conditions weren’t very good. Makassar for instance, no Dutch person went out at night, they were liable to end up very dead, that was the feeling in Indonesia in those days.

When we were on operations we had a talk from somebody, some Dutchman, they said, “If you’re forced down in Japanese occupied territory in the Netherlands East Indies, don’t approach a village ‘til you’ve had a good look around and found out who the head man is and then make your way, in some way contact the headman and he’ll look after you, cause they’re all loyal to Queen Wilhelmina”.

Like hell they were, the first thing they would have done would have been to turn you in, but this was the information they were giving us and that was pretty evident when we were wandering around Indonesia later on. As I said Makassar was a dangerous place for Dutch people after dark, they were hated there. I went to, that was Makassar I said, I went to a place called Banjarmasin, bottom of Borneo a Dutch

place and we went along to this Dutch blokes house and his servants, when they came through the door had to get down on their hands and knees to approach him, that’s the way the Dutch treated the locals, you can understand why they were so hated. Yet when I went to another place in Borneo, the British part, there was a local resident,

and he invited us along to dinner that night and his attitude to his servants was entirely different, they were on a friendly basis and he dressed up in a bow time would you believe and a dinner suit, and he are we in jungle greens. But he was representing the King, it was entirely different the way they treated the natives there, the natives loved them in Borneo,

the British, but not in the Dutch part.

Exact date I can’t think of at the moment but it was late July ‘46. Something I should remember, I think it was about a fortnight before I got married, so that would put it in the last,

within the last ten days of July.

It was a bit shattering actually you felt like a loose wheel, that’s why I went back flying. It was entirely different, once you got back flying your in the same sort of, similar environment to being in the service. When you got to Qantas

it was exactly like being in the service, Qantas when I joined it was run like the RAAF. Most of the senior people were RAAF people and they ran it the same way as they’d run the air force, but that’s another story.

I don’t know if I changed, I never regretted it, I

was one of the lucky ones, there was an awful lot of people got disabled various ways, got killed. But to some extent I had a charmed life, I was one of the lucky ones.

You were a lot more self assured when you came out the end. Your very timid when you went in first of all, you didn’t know what you were getting in to, everything was new

but you learnt as you went along. And then you did things yourself, you had to do things yourself so you became self confident.

A sense of belonging to something I suppose, you always had

that feeling you belonged to the air force and when you were discharged you were separated from that. That’s the way I felt anyway, I think so.

Oh I don’t know, the aircraft I flew up in Japan was A24, 104. The air force has got hold of an old aircraft and they’ve remodelled it down at Point Cook and it gives you a great amount of pleasure to think that they’ve put that number on it, the one down at Point Cook is A24, 104, it’s not the same

aircraft but it’s been remembered as an example of a Catalina which is rather pleasing. Oh I loved the old Catalina, I think everybody, most people loved the aircraft they flew providing it was kind to them and the Catalina was kind to me. I flew a lot of other aircraft late in civi life which I liked very much

but I’ll always remember the Catalina. Made some very good friends, it looked after me, never let me down, apart from after the war. But I always think of those Pratt and Whitney engines, Jesus they were reliable.

Achievement, I started off practically knowing nothing and I ended up as a very senior navigation officer, pretty highly qualified with the highest qualification that was available to navigators. Made me a little bit

angry when at the end of the war I tried to joint he permanent air force and was refused. And years later when I was flying, in Singapore at the time, I ran into one of the members of the course I was on when I did my navigation, specialists navigation course. And this bloke had stayed in the air force, he’d failed the course, he still hadn’t passed it and he was the squadron leader navigation officer. And there was I

with all the qualifications and they knocked me back. Still if I’d stayed in the air force I would have ended up in Korea and you never know what might have happened up there.

That’s a big ask. I’ve always tried to maintain integrity in my life. I’ve never really let anybody down, that was something you might have learnt during the war I suppose when you relied on other people. Unfortunately you don’t see a great amount of it now days.

Australia is changing I’m rather sorry to say. And you can take that as my epitaph if you like.

Oh we’ve covered an awful lot, it’s triggered off a lot of things that I’ve been able to add in and I’ve enjoyed it.

It’s taking a long time isn’t it?

Yes, in future years hopefully somebody will read it and learn something about what went on, myself, in my case and the other people you’ve interviewed.

It’s a good idea, I like the idea of it.