Australians at War Film Archive

I was born and bred in Glen Innes, um, in 1939. Went to school in Glen Innes until I did my intermediate certificate and then I went

to get an apprenticeship. My parents, I was always keen on motor vehicles and I had a twin brother who was very, very keen on aeroplanes, and of course we lived in the one room and we had model aeroplanes everywhere, but I was keen on motor vehicles. I went to Sydney, I had an uncle down there who said “I’ll get you a job down here an apprenticeship down here”. So I went down to Sydney from Glen

Innes and he picked me up and he said “Well I have got a mate at Qantas [Qantas Airways], have you thought about being an aircraft engineer?” and I said “No I hadn’t thought about that”. So we went and saw his mate at Qantas and the first thing they asked me at this interview was “Are you very observant?” And I and “Yes I am very observant”. So they said alright, well you are here in Qantas HQ [headquarters], and

having an interview for a job and “How do you spell Qantas?” and I said “Quantas”, wrong. So that was written all round me, and I didn’t get a job but they talked me into doing an apprenticeship course at Ultimo Tech [Technical College] in aircraft engineering, so I signed up to do a pre apprenticeship course for 12 months and it was terrific,

great instructors, great teachers. We had a Mark 8 Spitfire and a Vultivengence and all these you beaut WW2 [World war II] aeroplanes as training aids. A lot of the old WW2 engines, Ellison Engines, Rolls Royce Engines. Anyhow at the end of the 12 months pre apprenticeship, I got through that without any difficulty at all and I could have had a job with

Qantas or TAA [Trans Australian Airlines] or Ansett or whoever I wanted to go with, but I decided I had spent enough of my Dad’s money, so I was going to be independent and I joined the air force. I joined the air force at the age of 15 and I signed on for 15 years. Off I went to Wagga [Wagga Wagga] and started my apprenticeship down at

Wagga doing engine fitting as my primary trade and after 3 years at Wagga I was posted to Richmond to aircraft depot overhauling Pratt & Whitney 1830 engines which are the twin row wasp engine out of DC3 or Dakota. So 12 months there doing every part of the

overhaul right from the stripping and cleaning to the final assembly and test running. I was posted then to Williamtown to 75 Squadron they had Vampires and Sabres. That was in January 1959. I worked with 75 Squadron until about May 1961 when I was

posted to Malaya, and I went with – again working with Sabres. I was in Malaya for 2.5 years and in that 2.5 years I had 3 trips to Ubon in Thailand, I was on the first Hercules into Ubon in May 1962. We went up there basically

as a SEATO [South East Asian Treaty Organisation] exercise where the western powers thought that the communists were going to come down through Laos and invade Thailand or through Cambodia and invade Thailand, so we were there to give them a bit of a support. When I came back from Malaya it was

1963, October 1963, I went back to Richmond to the aircraft depot again overhauling engines. At that stage I started going to night school, wanting to get my leaving certificate or matriculation. I did 4 years whilst I was there going to night school for about 4 hours a night, 4 nights a week, it was a bit of a drag. I bombed out a few times.

At the beginning of 1967 I was posted to 5 Squadron in Canberra which was operating helicopters. Iroquois helicopters. I arrived there in April 1967, I was posted to Vietnam with 9 Squadron, Iroquois helicopters and came back in about April 1968.

Back to Canberra, which was unusual because most people got posted away from the squadrons which were supporting operations in Vietnam. I was with again 5 Squadron with the Iroquois and in April 1969, I was married at the beginning of 1969, and in

April 1969 I was commissioned and I had a new wife in Canberra, and off I went jaunting around doing all the various courses of commissioned officers and everything and I think the first year we were married we had 3 months together. I once I did all the officers courses, I was posted to Amberley, to No. 3 Aircraft Depot as the assistant production

engineer. I then after a couple of years with the aircraft depot I was posted to Wagga on staff as a flight commander. I had 3 years at Wagga as a trainer training apprentices as adult trainees. After I left Wagga I was posted back to

Richmond again to No. 3 Depot. In very much the same position I had before, but slightly changed in the organisation. I had about 12 months there and then I was promoted to sqdn [squadron] leader and posted to No. 2 Squadron at Amberley and as

the senior engineer for 2 Squadron Canberras. After a couple of years with them I was posted to support command in Melbourne, into a staff job and I was in charge of all the engine overhauls throughout the air force. After 18 months in Melbourne I decided it was time to leave the air force, and I was looking around for jobs and I found

a job which suited me with East-West Airlines in Tamworth, so I resigned my commission and moved to Tamworth, and been in Tamworth ever since. To this day.

Oh

well I was born in Glen Innes in 1939, I have a twin brother, we are not alike. I have two other brothers as well as my twin brother, so it was a family of 4 boys. My Dad – we always had cows,

so even at a very early age I was taught how to milk a cow and I had to go and – even in the dreaded winter of Glen Innes I would ride my bike down to the paddock and milk the cow and balance a bucket of milk and ride back. And in those days we used to do everything on push bikes.

And I had a really good life, I didn’t have any sisters to argue with.

Heaps of munitions and tanks and convoys, we didn’t live very far away from the railway line, and there was always trains heading north with tanks and armaments and guns

and things on them. We used to hear the train coming and we would rush out to see what was on it. And there were also road convoys through Glen Innes heading north. Aircraft, I can – we used to – every time we heard an aircraft we’d rush outside to have a look at it. We were quite good at aircraft recognition. We had all the books you could get in those days and you would see an aircraft fly over and you knew exactly – because we were so

interested we knew exactly what it was. What sort of capability and all those sort of things.

There were so many, absolutely so many of them, incredible, the bombers and all those sort of things. I do recall, I think it was about 1946, I would have been about 7 years of age, there was an

air force Avro Anson came over the house very, very low one morning, and we had a big pine tree out the front of the house, and it had to sort of lift up to go over this pine tree, that’s how low he was and then he went about 4 or 5 blocks heading north from our place, and we heard this crump and a big ball of flame and we jumped in the neighbours car and roared up the road

and there was this Anson it had crashed into a house, and there were parachutes and bodies everywhere. It was the first time I had seen an aircraft accident. He apparently, the pilot of the aircraft was buzzing his father’s house and somehow or other he got too low or he clipped the wires and

crashed into the house next door, and they were all killed.

No, no I didn’t know the family, I was only a 7 year old kid. They were quite some 4 or 5 blocks away. We had an aunty who lived only a few doors away from them, we didn’t know that family.

Glen Innes Primary School, and then Glen Innes

High School.

I was a bit of a rebel. All the technical subjects, I was very good a technical drawing and woodwork, metalwork and all those subjects, but I wasn’t real keen on mathematics and physics and the academic type

subjects.

Oh, I got in trouble quite a few times. No it didn’t lead me into a great deal of trouble, but it just meant that when I wanted to get on with my career I had to work very hard to get those qualifications which I should have got when I was in school.

Some of them real good some of them were a bit of a pain. I used to get in trouble with the physics/science teachers, they used to glean all over my homework book, even though I copied most of it out of my brother’s book which was ticked, all the ticks and I used to get the crosses. I was forever getting thrown out of class.

Mathematics, well I found it a bit of a drag. But that was basically because, again with teachers, if you get a good one you go along fine, but if you bad one you struggle.

I was always a very keen bike rider,

and if they had BMX [motor-cross] bikes in my day I probably would have been racing BMX bikes. We didn’t, we had old Speedwell and Malvern Star bikes and they were fairly mundane things. I never used to ride on the road, I used to ride in the gutters and up trees and down hollows and everything else rather than go in a straight line.

No. We used to because of the way the school was set up, whenever we used to have to go and do our tech subjects we used to have to ride to another campus I think, and we’d jump on our bikes and sometimes we wouldn’t make it. But I was always keen to do the tech subjects.

So, I made it most times. My other interests were, I was supposed to be following in my father’s footsteps, he was a musician in the Glen Innes Municipal Band and he was the band master and before him my grandfather was the band master and I was supposed to follow on. So I was playing

as a junior in the Glen Innes Municipal Band. I was playing the tenor horn and the cornet. Of course when I left town and went to Sydney, to further my career and education or whatever, I gave up the musical side of things until I joined the air force and then they wanted volunteers for the air force band and so I started playing the brass

instruments again. And that carried on for quite some years until I found it was affecting my career too much, because other people couldn’t see why you should have so much time off to go and toot the flute for different events, so I gave it away.

We were very close

um, until – I suppose up until the latter part of high school, we were really close. The latter part of high school we tended to drift apart a bit because we had different types of friends. My brother was a little bit more skilled in the academia than I was. He stayed at school and got his leaving certificate, whereas I opted out after

intermediate. Most of my friends were more technically minded, my brother’s were more academic.

Well it wasn’t really a farm, we lived in town but we had a paddock about a mile away from the house where we kept the cows and everything else. But the jobs we used to do. My Mum wasn’t really

a fit sort of person, because she had rheumatic fever when she was a kid and that affected her later in life. So we always had household chores. She was a very keen gardener and she always loved to garden. I hate gardening now. Because we were forced to do so much gardening when we were kids. We had to weed gardens and gosh it was terrible.

So I don’t look forward to gardening at all. Other household chores were cleaning and helping out wherever possible. We didn’t have all the comforts that you have in houses today, we’d only

bath once a week sort of thing. You were only allowed a certain amount of water, and that was a bit rugged.

Yeah, but it was tank water so you had to be careful how you used it. Be fairly frugal.

Yeah, it is

still in Glen Innes, it has moved from where it was. After my mother died, the house was put on the market and it was purchased – the property was purchased by a hostel for elderly people, and they put the house up for tender for removal and so it was moved and it has gone to a new location, but it is still in Glen Innes.

Three bedrooms.

My uncle introduced me to his mate at Qantas, he was in the air force during the World war II. And that’s his old buddy

sort of thing. He said I’ll get you a job. And I blew it.

I just wanted to get out. I couldn’t see myself going on to do the leaving certificate because my grades were too low on the

academic side of the equation. They were very good, absolutely – really good technically, but the rest of the subjects were fairly poor. So I couldn’t see my achieving a great deal because I would still have the same teachers, so I had to do something. So I wanted to get an apprenticeship.

Well heaps of technical drawings, which later on my father used to use, he was a mad philatelist and he found all my technical drawings and started cutting them up and using them for backing boards for first day covers and things like this. He

used to marvel at the high scores I was getting for my technical drawings. He’d always save the bit where the mark was and put in my first day covers and say “You weren’t such a dull bloke after all”. We used to do a lot of metalwork and woodwork and there’s all sorts of things that you make, and over the years like little tables and things like that, I don’t know where they are now.

Initially I wanted to do an apprenticeship in motor trades, motor mechanic and I think my parents were a little bit sceptical about just going to the local garage and being an apprenticeship at the local garage, so they wanted me to try and get in with one of the

motor manufacturers, and in Sydney at that time there was the BMC [Badsworth Motor Company] Morris place in Sydney, there was the – I think General Motors had a place in Sydney, and I think maybe there was another one. That was basically what we were thinking about getting an apprenticeship in the manufacturing side of it rather than just the fixing. But that all changed

the moment I was picked up off the train. My uncle grabbed me and said “You should be an aircraft mechanic”.

Oh yes, because we had relatives in Sydney and we used to go down there on holiday.

Roseville. My aunt had a shop in Roseville. That was another interesting thing too because in the 12 months

I was doing my pre apprenticeship, I was boarding at my auntie’s place, and it was on the Pacific Highway at Roseville, and as a corner store it was before all the supermarkets starting opening up and everything. And I used to deliver groceries on a push bike around Roseville and Chatswood. Can you imagine doing it today, on a push bike with one box on the handle bars?

Nobody used to lock their houses up, and you had an address and you’d go there and bang on the back door and yell out groceries, and some lady out the front of the house would yell out “Just put it on the kitchen table love”. So you would put it on the kitchen table and you would walk out. You never saw any money because they used to pay their bill at the shop and they would put their orders in at the shop, and off I would go with another box on my push bike and ride all over Sydney, and I can

remember we used to love – I think it cost us about 6 pence for a day ticket and we’d leave the shop this was when we were on holidays down there with the family. My brother and I we would always watch when the seas were coming and the old Manly ferry was getting a bit rough and going across the entrance there and

we’d get this 6 pence ticket and jump on the train at Roseville and we would go into Wynyard, and we’d get the tram from Wynyard to Circular Quay and then we’d get the ferry from Circular Quay to Manly and hope it was really rough and then we’d get the bus from Manly to St Leonards and then we’d get back on the train and go back to Roseville. And that was our outing and we loved every minute of it.

And you did all that for 6 pence. We travel just as kids without a care in the world, there was none of this mugging and things that you get today on trains.

Probably about 12, 10 maybe. When I was down there doing my pre apprenticeship, I was only 14 then.

14 going on 15.

Oh you could find plenty of parking spots for your bike. I know what Chatswood’s like today, and I know what it’s like in Roseville, because the shop was right off – on the corner where Boundary Street met the Pacific Highway, and that’s a huge intersection now.

There was no worry with traffic and they didn’t have all that high rise stuff. If you wanted to go shopping, you would go into the city and go to Anthony Horden’s and Grace Bros and places like that and Marcus Clark. They had a – we used to go ice skating at the glacierium which was just near Central Railway Station. That was great, we used to love

ice skating. We were only kids, travel everywhere.

When I was a kid. Used to listen to the radio a lot. They used to have hit parades and I loved listening to the radio – I had a diary of

different frequencies of different radio stations where the hit parades were on and the times, and I could just twiddle the dial and we had these huge aerials everywhere so we could pick up all these outlying radio stations. Also, because there was no television or anything like that, we had these radio serials that were, like Hop Harrigan and Biggles and a lot of

warry stuff, and I used to love that, as well as reading.

We had two movie theatres in Glen Innes, there was the Grand and the Roxy, and the Roxy always used to have Saturday matinees. It wasn’t bad we used to go every Saturday to the matinee. You know I think we used to get about 9 pence each, and that was 6 pence to get in and

3 pence to get an ice cream at half time. So we would go there, it was great.

Glen Innes was – I think the population has dropped a little bit. The town hasn’t changed very much, we’ve gone back to a lot more heritage colours and things

today to what they had back in those days. I can remember today, most of the young fellas will cruise up and down the main street in their cars with their loudspeakers going and all the rest of them, we used to cruise up and down the main street on our push bikes. And look for the girls. There was plenty of car parking space but not

much space for push bikes. In those days I would say most houses had a lot more people in them than what you have today, there was the bigger families and the extended families. You didn’t have to go to town, you would have your greengrocer come to the door and you’d order your

groceries and they would be delivered to your door and if you needed ice for the ice chest that would be delivered to your door and the bloke would come around that sharpened your knives and scissors and things and hawkers that they call them nowadays, but an important integral part of the town in those days.

The biggest business was MC McKenzie’s & Sons, they had a big store in Glen Innes

it’s - the store’s still there but the company is no longer there. My father actually worked there when he was in the retail business, and my mother worked there before they were married. The whole town virtually grew up around MC McKenzie’s & Sons and they had branches in Deep Water, Manilla and Barraba and places like that.

General merchants, they sold everything all the farm produce and farm machinery and stuff like that and they had groceries, they had a bottle shop. All the footwear, manchester, ladies wear, you know the whole 9 yards.

He was basically in the men’s wear department and he ended up being the manager of the department.

It was a co-ed school, so there was a fair bit of contact. I think we used to tease the girls more than anything else.

It was – my parents always thought I was going to get married young because of all the love letters they found in my pockets when they did the washing. That used to cause a bit of embarrassment, but it was more teasing than anything.

Oh, just acquaintances, I had nick names for all the girls.

Yeah, there used to be - sometimes we’d see in the – inside the theatre on a Saturday matinee, and of course the Roxy theatre they had these, on either side they had the lover’s seats. Without the centre, without the rail.

I used to make arrangements to meet somebody – you’d know where they were sitting so you would go straight there.

Oh I think they were in it too sort of thing. But it was all puppy love. Nothing ever serious about it.

I arrived down there and my uncle was meeting me, he had a beautiful big Wolseley car and my Dad never ever had a car. And I was real keen to learn to drive and things like that. Anyway my uncle met me and he had

this beautiful big Wolseley car and off we went, and he said “I’ll make some arrangements” and he took me to my aunt’s place at Roseville. He lived at Artarmon. He said I’ll make arrangements with me mate at Qantas after he talked me into it “Do you really want to be a motor mechanic or would you like to be an aircraft mechanic?” I said “Oh gee, I am easy”

“Go for aircraft”. Any rate he said “I’ll get in touch with you”. He got in touch with me and took me along for this interview, I had the interview and blew it, because – well I think Qantas had a policy in those days that they weren’t going to take anyone unless they had done a pre apprenticeship anyhow because when I did finally sign up to do the pre apprenticeship, which was a 12 months course, and that

took us into a much higher level of physics and mathematics than I had been studying for my intermediate. I was only studying general maths, and they took us into a higher level of maths 1 and 2 and it was only because of the superb instructors that I managed to get through it. So I got through it really well, the physics

and the science and everything. So that relates back to the quality of teachers that I was talking about.

Ultimo Tech, which is now the University of Technology. I used to travel in from Roseville every day, hop off at Central and walk through that tunnel and out past the old glacyerium and down there, it was good. Anyhow getting back to Qantas,

we went there and had the interview and – one thing I can remember was being picked up on that I wasn’t observant enough to know how to spell the name. And then they said look we would like you to do this pre apprenticeship course. And I knew that I would be able to get a job with Qantas if I wanted, but it was costing my parents enough to keep me as it was, and with the

wages they were paying apprentices, it was going to be very difficult for me to sort of pay board to my aunty and travel out to Mascot every day.

I think it was around about three pound 8 shillings a

week, which wasn’t very much, it was equivalent to what $8, about $8.

It was 12 months. Full time study. We did all aspects of aircraft engineering. We

studied the power plants, the air frame side of the instruments, electrical, radio and we had all the you beaut training aids there. It was quite good, it was really good quality education for that time. It didn’t steer you in one direction or the other, because they gave you a total overview,

and whilst I was there in that 12 months I also joined the air training corps. I used to travel to Bankstown by train from Roseville for parade nights. You wouldn’t get kids travelling alone on trains that distance today late at night sort of thing.

Marching around. Yelling commands at one another and marching and drill and a lot of aircraft recognition.

Because quite a lot of the guys doing the pre apprenticeship joined the same flight. I could have joined a flight that was closer to Roseville, but most of them were in the

Bankstown flight and I decided to join that one, you know mates.

There was a Mark 8 Spitfire, which was a beautiful aeroplane. Of course everybody knows the history of the Spitfire and what it did and every thing else, but one they may not know too much about was the Vultive

engines and we had one of those and they were a huge American single engine dive bomber and I don’t know for some reasons the Australians ended up with lots of Vultive engines and they were a bit of a dangerous aeroplane, they were supposed to be a good dive bomber, but they were so big and cumbersome, and they used to have lots of things

that they could hang them out to slow them in a dive. Flaps and spoilers and everything, but they killed so many people it wasn’t funny, that’s the goodies, not the baddies. I think Gen [General] MacArthur banned them from being in New Guinea. He wasn’t going to have any Vultive engines up there. They were so big inside, and they were a single engine aeroplane, that we could get half our course inside the thing.

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Basically the decisions I was making was, I would have liked to have stayed working with civil aeroplanes, but I couldn’t see how I was going to be able to live in Sydney without again calling on my

father to help in supporting me. Because you had to pay your fares and pay your board and eat as well as clothe yourself and all those sorts of things. I thought well if join the air force all that was provided for nothing and the wages that the air force were paying for apprentices was only just slightly less than what they were paying in civvy street [the civilian world]

So I decided the easiest way to no longer be a burden on the family was to join the air force, and I had already had some – a bit of experience life from being in the air training corps. So I went along to an interview and got in and off I went to Wagga. My brother who was always – who was my twin brother was always very

keen on aeroplanes and the air force and everything else, he was quite upset that I had joined the air force. Not upset as in being cranky, but upset because that’s what he would have liked to have done.

The interview was conducted in Sydney. One of those big buildings, big old fashioned buildings in the

centre of Sydney somewhere, I can’t remember exactly where it was now.

Yeah, yes, I just trundled along there and did all the various battery of psych [psychological] tests and things and did a medical and then went to an interview board with about 9, I think 9 people sitting around. Asking all the various questions about your

life, and why you want to be an aircraft engineer, and why did you want to join the air force. And to be an apprentice in those days we had to sign on for 15 years, which was 3 years of training and 9 years of service.

Yeah, it was, but I didn’t even think about it because I was so keen.

I think so, I think everyone is nervous, particularly when you see about 9 people high ranking air force, well they looked like high ranking in those days, high ranking air force officers all sitting round asking questions plus a psychologist and doctor, and that sort of thing.

They notified me, I was back in Glen Innes, and waiting on the results because if I didn’t get into the air force, then I had a second choice of going to one of the civil air lines and I was back in Glen Innes and they wrote to me and said you are in, here’s a rail warrant, get on the train and head straight to

Wagga.

Oh, they were pleased for me. Pleased for me, I think like most mothers and fathers they had a little bit of sorrow in your leaving home, particularly at the age I was – I was still only 15 years of age, and

left home and headed for the southern part of the state.

When I arrived there, we were picked up off the train. Basically what happened we went to Sydney on whatever train they put us on with the rail warrant, they had a rail transport office in Sydney at Central Railway Station, and we

all had to assemble there and we were then put on a train like a bit of a troop train sort of thing. There were about 100 of us in the intake, and not all from NSW [New South Wales] of course, but when we got down to Wagga we were picked up by buses or trucks or something and carted off to the air force station at Forest Hill. Then we were put through another

medical and chased up to the clothing store and issued with kit and they threw things at you and oh yes these boots will fit you and this coat will fit you that hat will fit you, and you got all this stuff thrown at you and the drill instructors grabbed you real quick and lined you up with all this stuff that you had and then they marched you left right, left right down the right, this is where you are going to live, put your kit away and

report over there in 10 minutes. So this was – it started right from the start.

Still one of excitement. I know some of them were a little bit apprehensive, a little bit frightened, didn’t know exactly what to do. One fellow I think he was a bit of a mummy’s boy, and

she said now don’t you wear anything until it has been thoroughly washed, and all they had were coppers and so he threw everything in the copper boiled it and his woollen uniform came out the size of a barbie doll’s, it had shrunk and all the blue ran.

Well for the first year of training you

do a lot of drill instruction and rifle training and generally being an airman. And knowing all the requirements of defending yourself and being able to go on parade and spit and polish and all that sort of thinking before you start learning your trade. Trade was basically for the first 12 months was

general fitting, which was filing and hack sawing and hammering and welding and chiselling and all those sort of things and then the second and third year, you specialised in blur trade. And I went on to engine fitting and specialised in that, and the first engine they started teaching you was the old Gypsy

Queen engine out of the Tiger Moth. No Gypsy Major out of the Tiger Moth, and that’s a 4 cylinder inverted air cooled engine. Had to overhaul one of those, strip it all down, overhaul it and put it altogether and put it in a test stand and run it. And then you gradually go from the

basic type engine which was the Gypsy Major up into the more modern engines which were final overhaul phase was on the Rolls Royce Merlin engine a Mark 33 Merlin out of a Mosquito Bomber. We also had the early jets there which were the De Havilland Goblin and the Rolls Royce Derwent engines the early jet engines.

Fairly rough. We lived in dormitory type barracks, I think there were about 16 people to a hut, we had 8 beds down either side, there’d be a hut with an NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] in a little private room at the end of the hut.

But we were all just in a dormitory type thing. And it used to get so cold because we didn’t have any heating or anything, no cooling or heating, and in Wagga it’s cold in winter. So we used to put the newspaper under our mattress, and we didn’t have enough blankets. We’d use our great coats and everything else to try and keep warm.

The summer time wasn’t too bad, because you could always get out of the heat. The food was reasonably good, except you always had to line up, we always used to get our mess duties as well. We’d have to go on – we’d be on a roster basis, and

you’d have to go and work so many hours in the mess and clean up the rubbish and clean down tables and that. But the food was alright, fairly bulk cooked and that sort of thing but you’d line up with your plate and they’d go dollop, dollop, dollop and you’d eat it. We were all hungry kids and we’d eat what was put in front of us.

The things that I remember a lot – we used to – because there were 3 courses or 3 years running at once down at Wagga, like the first year and second year and third year, and when you got to the third year, you had privileges because you were the senior intake. And they used to push in the meal line – push into the queue and we’d always be – when

you are in the first year you’d be shuffled to the back. We’d have to wait longer. And, we’d also, on a Monday night we’d have what we called panic night, we’d have to clean all our quarters and dig the gardens and paint the rocks white and have your kit all clean for inspection on Tuesday morning. Your boots had to be polished and everything had to be spot on. Of course you’d be doing your own panic and

one of the seniors would come along and they’d grab you by the collar and you would have to go and do theirs and then after you had finished theirs you’d come back and finish yours and things like that. That was sort – today they call it bastardisation but it was growing up as far as we were concerned, because when we got to be seniors we did exactly the same thing. So it was part of the respect for authority I think. There

used to be – if you fell out of line there was blanket tossing, and running the gauntlet and different things like that, but only the weakies complained. If you fell out of line you’d take your punishment, it was part of the line.

Dobbing someone in, being caught in an area where the seniors have said this is a no go area for the juniors. Things like that, in town even. We even had rumbles in town, because there was a bit of a bodgie [gang] element in town, they always wanted to have a go at the air force or the army. We had the army

camp at Kapooka. And the air force and the army used to get along fairly well. We used to have sports competitions against the army quite a lot, generally we respected one another’s turf and if there was a rumble with the bodgies and the civvies [civilians] and the gumbly gumbly boys, and things like that.

The army used to help us out. They hated it as well. There was a bit of tension in Wagga in those days between the forces and the civvies.

For the first year you were allowed in town on a Saturday afternoon only. In the second year you were

allowed in town on a Saturday afternoon and a Sunday, and then the third year you were allowed in town on a Wednesday night, plus Saturday and Sunday.

You weren’t supposed to be drinking at all. In the third year they managed to sort of – some hotels were –

this is where the third years drink, and nobody else dared go near them. When they are in town. Of course they were - I am not quite sure what the drinking age was, I think it was 18 it may not have been, it may have been 21. But by the time you were in third year you were well and truly 18 years of age. Even for the younger ones like myself. If we wanted a drink we used to

get some old drunk outside the hotel to go and by us a bottle. Most probably sit under the bridge and have a drink.

Run the gauntlet is where they get wet towels and they line up and you have got to run down between 2 lines of fellows with wet towels and knots tied in the end of them and they wack the heck out of you.

Oh it didn’t leave too many bruises but you hurt for a while. Yeah.

Blanket tossing is where – it’s a bit like the old fireman, mattress type thing or blanket type thing, and they used to grab it and they’d get behind there and keep on tossing you in the air, and you would keep on getting higher and higher and higher.

It was a bit of fun for a while until you got too high, and if they pulled the blanket away you used to fall on the ground. Yeah.

We were broken up into flights and each flight had their own

corporal drill instructor, and we had a Pommie [English] corporal, who was World war II sort of guy in the RAF [Royal Air Force], Jimmy Lee in the RAF. He wasn’t a bad sort of a bloke, like all drill instructors they have to be fairly

on the ball. I think he only knew 3 names in the whole flight. I don’t know how many – there was probably 20 plus in the flight, but he only knew 3 names, Martin, Clark and Cox. We always used to get caught for doing things that we shouldn’t be doing. We were always in trouble.

Talking in ranks, not snapping to attention, just general things. Acting the goat, trying to make the drill instructor look a bit silly.

Oh you might have to run around the oval 4 or 5 times with a 303 above your head. Your arms get fairly sore. Get puffed out.

I was still very excited about it.

At no stage did I resent the air force life or the discipline. I used to try and make light of it, make fun of it. I remember once – only once did I ever get

punishment for doing something wrong in the air force, and that was I was awarded 7 days confinement to barracks for gambling, and I was playing Pontoon, and I wasn’t supposed to be doing it. It was only a very small amount of money, we had no money. And I was winning at the time we were caught. I know that when I wrote home, and told my Mum that I was

awarded 7 days confinement to barracks for gambling, my photo got turned to the wall. So the punishment from home was worse than the air force punishment. Yes.

You used to get leave twice a year in mid winter and also Christmas break. The train trip from Wagga to Glen

Innes was woeful. It used to take so long and you were travelling in those old box carriages, no air conditioning or anything and they were steam engines, and you put your head out the window and get an eyeful of cinders and things like that. They used to take so long. I think it was 17 hours from Sydney to Glen Innes and about another 8 or 9 hours from

Wagga to Sydney, so it was a long trip and you had to repeat it and go back. One year they did decide they were going to fly everybody home, and they must have had a bit of money in the travel fund. And it was a great trip because I flew from Wagga to Sydney in one of Reg Ansett’s

Convair 340’s. It was a marvellous aeroplane for those days. And this was before Reg Ansett became real big and bought out – got control of ANA [Australian National Airlines]. And from Sydney to Glen Innes I flew on an East-West Airlines Lockheed Hudson which was a converted World war II bomber, it was marvellous, great, real pocket rocket. And then from Glen

Innes back to Sydney on the return trip I flew on an East-West Airlines DC3, and then from Sydney to Wagga I flew in an Ansett DC3 which had the old Wright Cyclone engines. That was my first flights in commercial aeroplanes,

I had been previously, I had been in an Oster we went out to have a look at De Havilland Dragon and old DH89 that pranged [crashed] at Narrandera and we flew out in an Oster and had a look it and flew back.

Oh I loved it, yeah, I liked flying.

Oh, tremendous different because most of those old airplanes like the Hudson and the DC3 were un-pressurised so they had to fly below 10,000 ft. If you were in the weather, you can’t climb above it and even get down on the deck a bit, but they don’t like doing that.

Commercial aeroplanes, so you just bundled along with the weather and they are good in good weather, and they are not so good – and the air conditioning systems didn’t work real good, they were just sort of ran air and stuff like that. The Hudson was an exciting little aeroplane, you had to step over the main spar as you walked up the aisle of the thing. And the

DC3 is still a very legendry aeroplane. Still flying, still going well. You were asking about what we did on leave from Wagga. Well as I said earlier on, my parents never owned a motor car and all I wanted to do was drive a motor vehicle. And

so when I had been in the air force probably, I had been an apprentice for 6 months or so, maybe a little longer, saved a few bob [some money] and 5 of us decided we were going to buy a motor vehicle in partnership. So off we went to town, I had a learners permit, a friend of mine from

Queensland, he had his driver’s licence, so we were right. And others, there were another 3 in this partnership, and we found this old car and I think we paid one hundred and – it was a 1934 Dodge Sedan, we paid one hundred and sixty pound from a car yard for it, and we drove out in this thing and I had never driven a car in my life and I am driving, up the main street of Wagga, and then we

were heading out toward the base of Forest Hill and I am driving along, and I went to – I knew all about changing gears, because I had practised that in my sleep. But I couldn’t practice the steering of a motor vehicle in my sleep. Anyhow this Austin A40 was in front of me, and was travelling too slow, so I had to

overtake, so I put my hand out the window to overtake and I reefed on the steering wheel and I went straight across the road and I went over the bank and then I went over the bank and then I reefed back this way and I got round him. It was a bit of a fright for me and a bit of a fright for him. Any rate we continued on to the base and then we all took turns

in learning to drive this motor vehicle. And then came the time for doing a licence test and myself and a mate Bruce Patterson, both went into the police station at Wagga and we sat down with this policeman and he asked a few questions, and he said righto now let’s go for a drive in your car, and out we went and we hopped in the car, and I

was driving first and I drove half a block down the road to the intersection turned left, drove the full block in that direction, turned left again and he said “Stop”. I stopped, Bruce Patterson took over driving and he drove the rest of the block and parked back in front of the police station and we both got our licence. He issued it on the spot. So – and then there used to be arguments, the 5 of us

all wanted to drive at once. One would be steering and one would be changing gears, and one would have his foot on the clutch. It was real fun. But gee we learnt a lot with that one hundred and sixty pound Dodge car. Sold it before we left Wagga, and then we went on our separate way. But we had to have permission, we weren’t allowed to do those things unless we got permission from our parents. “Is it alright for your son to have

a motor car?”.

Whilst you were in Wagga as an apprentice, so we had 3 years there. I would have been 18 when I left Wagga.

Oh, got some money, we had some back pay sort of thing. So the first thing I did when I left Wagga was we had

leave to go home and I bought a 1939 Plymouth. As soon as I got back to Glen Innes I went round to the used car yard and bought this Plymouth and had that for a few years. Had it painted in this really iridescent green, it was a grey colour and I had it painted in an iridescent green colour

and called it the “The big green shiny”. But yeah, so I spent my holiday pay and all the back pay we got and everything from graduating, on a car. When I was in Glen. I went down to Richmond and started life as a sort of – we were still under our apprenticeship, we didn’t get our certificates,

our apprenticeship certificates until we had done 5 years. So there was 3 years of real intensive training and 2 years on the job type of thing.

The first year was at Richmond yeah, that was overhauling aircraft engines and propellers, we had Pratt & Whitney 1830 Twin Row Wasps, and the Pratt & Whitney 1340 single row wasps, going through

the depot at the time. The twin rows were used in DC3s and the single rows were in the Wirraways, and we also had props. For both DC3s and Wirraways as well as the they had the Neptune’s. The PTV 5 Neptune bombers at the time, and we were doing the props as well for those, in the prop shop at the depot.

There’s a heck of a lot in

overhauling the propellers because they have all got to be – the blades were hollow and there was a lot of corrosion because these things used to fly over the deck over the sea and everything and we used to have to do electroplating with zinc plating to stop the corrosion. You had to put the rubber boots on them, de-icer boots – they’ve got a – like a number of cams in the hub, and they have got a big piston that changes the

pitch, reverses and gee you have got to be careful when you don’t get your fingers caught in there, they’d just chop them straight off. And we used to have to overhaul all that. Everything has to be measured and make sure it’s within tolerances. Then you have to balance the thing, and spot on balanced.

There would be big vibration would go through the aircraft big vibration and they don’t like that.

In those days, DC3s they had lots of DC3s which were the main transport aircraft in those days. They had Mustangs Meteors and Vampires, early Sabres

the early Sabres, like most of them were at Williamtown like the jets at Williamtown.

We’d had visiting jets when we were at Wagga down there, but they had to stop them landing at Wagga because the grass was getting in the intakes of the old Vampires, that tumbleweed type grass and that umbrella

grass that blows round everywhere. It was getting sucked into the intakes and causing the old engine to have a bit of an angina attack, so…

I was the lowest airman rank you can get, AC, air craftsman. And after you had been an air craftsman

for 12 months and passed a promotion exam you get to leading aircraftsman which allowed you to wear a little propeller on your – and then you had to do more promotion exams to get to corporal, etc.

Well we had 12 months at Richmond, which involved doing every facet of the engine overhaul

from the stripping and cleaning through the inspection bay through the cylinder bay until you get to final assembly. They had repair bays where we did minor repairs and final assembly then run them in the test tent. That was a 12 months structured type thing and then we left

Richmond after that 12 months and I was posted to Williamtown and my posting actually was to 78 Fighter Wing, and we turned up at Williamtown and there was no such thing as 78 Fighter Wing. And nobody wanted to know us. So Williamtown and we’ve got documents saying that we were supposed to be there

and we would front up to the different orderly rooms and they would say no, this is not 78 Fighter Wing, 78 Fighter Wing is in Malaya. It has gone to Malaya. And we don’t know what to do with your people, and I wasn’t by myself, there were a number of us. Don’t know what to do with you, come back tomorrow. So it took us normally when you arrive on a base,

your clearances where you got to go round and get cleared from the medical section and the barrack section. And all these sort of things, and they take this document and they put it on the books sort of thing. And the pay section, that’s most important. It takes about a day, if everything works well. But it took us between 2 and 3 weeks to get cleared into Williamtown. Because nobody wanted to know us, so we would front up to an orderly room in the morning and

say “We’re here to get cleared in”. They would say “Oh, we don’t know what to do with you people come back tomorrow”. So off we’d go down to Stockton Beach or somewhere and we’d spend, and it’s middle of January, so we’d spend all day on the beach and we’d go back the next day and front up to another orderly room and that took about 3 weeks, but we had a lovely holiday. Until finally they decided that we couldn’t go to Malaya where 78 Wing was

because we didn’t have any Sabre experience and they were only taking experienced fitters. Now, there are two avenues of being a mechanic in the air force, being a fitter in the air force, one was through the adult scheme and the other was through the apprenticeship scheme. Now the adult scheme was for guys that were maybe

motor mechanics or can be bank johnnies [bank tellers/workers], past the age of being an apprentice. They join as what they call, they do their basic training which is sort of rookie training, bashing the drill square and learning how to use a rifle. And then they get some basic training in the mechanics of the chosen trade they are going into and then they

go on to a unit where they do most of their training on the job and they are called mechanics, and after a period maybe 3 or 5 years as a mechanic, they are then posted for a conversion course and they then become fitters, they go back to Wagga and they do this conversion course and then they are graduated as fitters. When they took all the sabres over to Malaya

they only took fitters they didn’t take any mechanics. Now and also in the signing out of aircraft to sign as an engineer doing the job on an aircraft, the mechanic wasn’t allowed to sign always had to be a fitter. Now, we were told that because we didn’t have any – we were fitters, because we went

through the apprenticeship scheme, where you graduate as a fitter. We were told that we didn’t have any Sabre experience therefore we couldn’t go to Malaya therefore we had to stay at Williamtown and we were internally posted from 78 Wing to 75 Squadron. And 75 Squadron was 99% mechanics, because all the fitters had been posted to Malaya with the other squadrons, and all the mechanics that were with the other squadrons were posted to the

75 Squadron. So there was this wealth of experience on the 75 Squadron that had grown up with the aeroplane and new the aeroplane and everything and a wealth of experience but couldn’t sign for anything and we hadn’t seen the aeroplane and we didn’t even know which end sucked and which end blew. But we had to sign for the work that these other fellas do. Interesting experience. And in a lot of cases you

only got sent to your conversion course on the COs [Commanding Officer] recommendations, so if you were a real good mechanic they didn’t want to lose you, you wouldn’t get a conversion course. And the ones that were no good got sent straight away and there was terrible animosity about that. Thank goodness they fixed it up, not long after my experience with them, and they started streamlining the situation a lot.

So the better blokes at least got their conversion course, they weren’t held back.

What with the Sabres? We had to learn not only with the Sabres but with the Vampires there as well and Vampires were training aeroplanes. But all the newer aeroplanes went to Malaya, the older ones stayed in Australia, and a lot of them needed modification

and – but we were learning a new aeroplane, and they were a great aeroplane except they were hard to work on.

Mainly because the aircraft was designed for an American engine and they put a British engine in it and the panels where you are supposed to have access to the engines were not in the right place. Different engine there, you would have to have double jointed elbows and things and you had to have, eyesight at the end of your fingertips because you couldn’t see what you were doing, you had to feel.

But a marvellous aeroplane though. They performed like nobody’s business. Great aeroplane.

End of tape

It’s a probably it was the best of the variant of the Sabre that was produced. It’s an American aircraft it was the first of their swing wing fighters that went into production and of course

they had a really good record in Korea, but the Australian version – it took a while for the Australians to decide they wanted a Sabre. They did, and they built them locally and they redesigned them with a much larger engine than the American Sabre had. Instead of having 5,800 lb of thrust you had 7,500 lb of thrust and that

involved enlarging the intake so that the thing could get more air into it. They had to put a wedge into the intake so that the Sabre has now got – the Australian Sabre has now got a larger intake so that the intake had to be enlarged so that the aircraft could suck more air and the

at the same time the American Sabre didn’t have enough fight power. It had 6.5 machine guns and the Australians wanted more fight power than that so they put 2 x 30mm Aidan canons instead of the 6.5 machine guns. So it was a radical redesign, but the aircraft possibly

was the best version of the Sabre that was ever produced. Certainly it had the best climb, performance, top speed was not all that much better, but it could out-climb just about anything with the extra power that it had. Surface area was much the same as most Sabres I suppose, but the

guys liked it that were flying it and you know they were a reasonably reliable aeroplane. Probably the nose wheel problems we had early on were one of the worst things that happened to them. Caused a few major accidents, and the aircraft just turned out to be a good aircraft.

Well the maintenance varied considerably, the normal type of maintenance had been for turn around, maintenance was refuelling, rearming, put more oxygen in the thing and send it up in the air again. Without having external tanks and everything, the aircraft would only be away from base

for about 40 minutes and it would have to come back and have another drink. We used to get quite annoyed about that and you were fairly busy and you might have 8-12 aeroplanes, all requiring fuelling and there was what 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different fuelling points along the thing and you had to cart this heavy hose along and squirt fuel in. At the same time you would be doing that, there would be an

instrument guy running around with cylinders he’d be recharging the onboard oxygen supply in the aircraft. Another fellow would be running around with a container with a product called isoproponitrate (IPM) for short, and it was like a liquid cartridge, it was the starting fluid for the

starter which would then crank up the main engine and with the mono fuel once it reached 150 deg C [Celsius] it didn’t need anymore oxygen and it burnt in little starter motor canister on the front of the engine and it used to wind up to about 44,000 revs and that would couple down to about 2,500 revs on the main engine and that’s how they started them. It allowed the aircraft to be self

sustaining if it flew away from base, what the early Sabres used to have to have electric start and you had to have a huge generator to start them, and you’d get 4 starts before you needed another fill up of IPM.

Well the Avon engine

was built with most of the controls on an accessory – most of the adjustments on an accessory type gear box that was slung below the engine. And in the installation say in a Canberra bomber you just had to take the whole cowl off and there was the accessory gear box.

In the Sabre that just didn’t happen because the aircraft wasn’t designed to have a panel that you could take off below the engine in that area. So if you wanted adjust the fuel pressure for instance, you used to have to hop up in the wheel well and then reach at full arms length down beside the engine to where the barometric pressure control unit is

(the BPC). And that was the only way to get at it and to adjust the fuel pressure you have got the aircraft running at maximum power with chocs underneath it and bouncing around all over the place and you have got your head up in the wheel well reaching down beside the engine trying to watch the gauge that is dangling down below the aircraft and the thing is ready to take off and you are trying to twiddle this thing and you

can’t see what your are doing. And if you want to adjust the bleed bands because the engines have got 6 blades in them in the compressed section when they are at low RPM [revolutions per minute] the pressure is too efficient and it creates too much air and so you have to bleed some of the air off, and they have a number of bleed belts, and if you want to adjust the cut in and cut

out – rev range for the bleed belts that was another job that required special tools and special agility to be able to do it as well.

Well there were quite a number of different trade groups working around the aircraft. We’d have

um, the number of trade groups. You’d have your air frame fitter that looks after the basic air frame and all the hydraulics and undercarriage and flight controls etc. You’d have your engine fitter and he has to look after the

prepulsionary part of the aircraft, the engine and the starting system and anything associated with the external gear boxes etc. You would have an instrument fitter, and he looks after all the instrumentation in the aircraft. All the instruments, as well as the oxygen supply to the pilot. And another thing that I forgot to mention, the air frame fellows also look after pressurisation of the

cockpit. Then you had the radio fellows and they look after all the radio equipment and the radar. And the Sabre had a gunsight radar, that only worked with the gun sight, it didn’t work like radars do today with weather and all that sort of thing. And target acquisition can do that. And

then there was the armament fitters and the armament fitters looked after all the bombs and rockets and guns and whatever you had to carry around. They were the basic trades. With the mechanical ground support equipment we had motor transport fitters. Looked after all the ground support equipment. And they were the people that basically

were around the aeroplanes. Motor transport drivers, driving the tankers motor transport fitters looking after any mechanical gear that you were using, and plus all the other trades that were around the aircraft and then of course there’s the pilots and they have safety equipment, helmets, oxygen mask, parachutes and things like that. And there’s the safety equipment

section and safety equipment fitters that look after all that side of the things. But I don’t normally get around the aircraft unless they are removing or replacing things on the ejection seat. And that was another thing the armament fitter looked after, was the ejection seat because it’s got a big explosive unit.

Quite good, because you would be strapping the pilots in and pulling them out and all that sort of thing, and you get to know the

pilots fairly well. In the American air force they work on the old crew chief type situation where they have a crew chief assigned to an aeroplane, well we didn’t and that crew chief did just about everything. We didn’t do that, the Australian air force didn’t

assign people to aeroplanes. Like the American air force even the pilot had his own aeroplane. Had his name on the side of it. Well that didn’t happen very often in the Australian air force.

It wasn’t too bad, it was a bit isolated from Newcastle

because there was no bridge across the harbour and there was a vehicular ferry and a passenger ferry that used to go across from Stockton to Newcastle. And so it was a great area to be away from suburbia sort of thing and there weren’t too many people on that side of the harbour. You got down there like Port Stephens, Nelson Bay today and it’s all built out

the prices are through the roof, they were dirt cheap when we were there. Um, Williamtown was great we used to like it you could go – was only 5 minutes from the beach if you wanted to go down to the beach. In your spare time and that sort of thing.

There were a few cases where aircraft – they had problems with the starter system when they were trying to start them, and the starter system had – with this IPM it was – it had a controlling unit like a fuel injection control unit, and it would start off with air purging

and the cylinder would be purged with air, and there would be a certain amount of fuel that it would squirt in, and then the ignition would come and then it would fire and the fuel would keep on pumping in, it wouldn’t need anymore air. Fuel would keep on pumping in until the whole engine started and the whole thing shut down. They had some problems with carbon build up in the starter motor and it would block the little drain holes and

when the purge went into the starter motor it didn’t purge it completely and there would still be some residual fuel in there and then it would pump more fuel in and the ignition would hit and it would have too much fuel in it and it went boom and it would blow a big hole in the front of the aircraft. We then had to start doing a check on how much fuel was being drained out of the starter

motor to see whether these little holes were being blocked with carbon. And to do that you had to disconnect a lead on the igniter box so you wouldn’t get any spark and then you would have to have someone press the starter button in the aircraft and someone underneath where the exhaust comes out on the bottom with a beaker and we used to have to catch the amount of fuel

that was coming out of the drain hole and measure the amount of fuel, and there had to be 125 ccs of fuel. Or millilitres. And sometimes the bloke underneath with the beaker would be waiting there to get the fuel and they would forget to take the ignition lead, the low tension ignition

lead out of the igniter box and the thing would go whoosh. And blow the beaker to smithereens and all the rest of it. So we did have a few little incidents like that. Another incident we had was as you know oxygen and oil, oxygen and grease, oxygen and oil just don’t mix – it’s an explosive mixture straight away. And there was an

aircraft next to me, and I was refuelling one and the one next to me was being topped up with oxygen, and in the front of the aircraft built in around the nose are hydraulic accumulators and at the same time there is an oxygen charging point. One of these hydraulic accumulators had been leaking and it had leaked down on to this oxygen charging point and when they plugged in the oxygen

it fired up the bottles that recharge this system and the whole thing just blew up. The nose came of the aircraft and the battery went up about 50 ft. You know the aircraft burst into flames of course, and we are right next door with a tanker full of fuel trying to fuel another aeroplane. So we panicked for a while. We did have some

rather nasty accidents. We had 3 accidents which were fatal accidents with Sabres. In my time there where all 3 incidents of pilots had tried to eject but the canopy had taken their head off before the ejection seat was – and they went in with the aircraft. The ejection seat was on the Sabre

was designed by North Americans and manufactured the aircraft, and it was a fairly crude sort of ejection seat compared with the British Martin Baker ejection seat which were with another jet aeroplanes. In that if the pilot wanted to eject he had to take his feet off the rotor pedals and put them on

stirrups – on steps on his seat, he then had to lean forward and pull a handle on the side of the seat up at a certain distance, and that ejected the canopy which went backwards, and then he had to sit up straight and pull his spine up and pull the lever for the rest of the distance which would shoot him out. And

in all 3 cases the pilot when he was doing the ejection sequence didn’t lean forward enough or something and the canopy as it went, hit him on the head and took his head off before the seat went out. They were doing some tests on the amount of travel of the handle on the side of the seat, the amount of travel of the

handle before the canopy was initiated – the canopy jettison was initiated. Nobody knew exactly how far the handle – whether you pulled it up that far, that far and they were trying to work this out. And we had all the aircraft

virtually grounded and they were doing these tests on them. And the initiators for the canopy or for the seat itself are on the side of the seat, you pull the handle and these things pulled air and they fire of the cartridges. There’s one in the canopy and one in the seat. And they were doing these

tests and measuring the distance these things had to go up and there was a particular armament NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] who was kneeling in the seat facing aft, and he was doing these tests he had fellows on either side of the cockpit handing him tools etc. The canopy at this stage had been pushed back and they were doing these tests and apparently he must have

kneeled on – there was a big red ribbon of safety pins in the initiator who must have pulled one out, and pulled the lever up and the seat took him up in the air, it blew out of the aircraft and dropped on the ground and he was facing after kneeling on the seat, it took the tools that the fellows were handing him and everything, and he went about 40 ft [feet] I suppose or more in the air, and as he came down tumbling his

feet hit the leading edge of the Sabre and it just speared him head first into the tarmac. He was dead. Those things happened, shouldn’t happen. They changed the design of the aircraft after that so that – they took the jettison

gun out of the canopy, so there was nothing there and they modified the seat so that there was a big bolt in the top of the ejection seat and this big bolt would go through the perspex and shatter the perspex and so the seat would go through and you didn’t have to get rid of the canopy you would just blast straight through the perspex. That was a improvement as far as the

pilots – they didn’t know how far to lean forward and how far to pull the handle, they didn’t have to worry about that, they could now just sit upright get their spine in the right position for ejection and pull the lever, and everything happened. And then they thought that it was a dangerous thing not having the canopy ejection gun in there because if the aircraft

crash landed or came in an emergency situation and your canopy was jammed shut and it was on fire you had no way of getting out. You couldn’t break the canopy or anything. We did a trial there and we had an aircraft, I think it was the one that the battery flew out of and the oxygen thing. And the

pilot –we put a pilot in and said “Now pretend you are wanting to get out” and he started to push on the canopy and he couldn’t do a thing, and they had all the film crew around taking photos to see if you could escape from the aircraft if the canopy was jammed and you didn’t have an ejection gun. After struggling and

standing up belting it and doing whatever you can in a confined cockpit, and he got a bit of a silly look on his face and he pulled a big hammer he had smuggled on board, and he started belting it with a hammer and it still didn’t break. So they had to put the ejection gun back in for the canopy. But they put the control for it way down between your feet so that you had to lean well

forward to operate it. So the normal ejection sequence was still follow the bolt through the canopy and if you were stuck on the ground – because if you fired the ejection seat when you are on the ground you are dead, because it didn’t fire you high enough in the air to use a parachute. If you had to lean forward you could pull this lever right down between your feet and fire the thing backwards.

They were just some of the instances. Another very, very sad case was a friend of mine off my apprentice course was sucked into the intake of the Sabre and killed. He walked in front of it when it was operating at full power and sucked down the intake. Because from the nose of the aircraft to where the start of the engine is about 18

ft and he went all that distance and was wrapped around the front of it, it was running at full power. Poor kid was killed instantly. One of the worst engine changes I have ever done. And that was put down as death by misadventure, but the pilot was equally to blame. He shouldn’t have been running at full power where he was.

From January 1959 to May 1961.

Couldn’t get there quick enough.

Yeah, disappointed we didn’t go there originally when we were posted there with 78th Wing. So to finally get there be it what 2.5 years later, it was good.

It was great. I got posted to Malaya and within the air force, they do things a bit different to the army. They take a whole regiment and ship them en masse. But in the air force in a posting situation you might only get 3 or 4 people at a time transferred

somewhere and another 3 or 4 are coming home sort of thing. So there’s no big mass movement of people. And I got my posting orders to go to Malaya and I had to report to the transport officer at Central Railway Station, and I had been on pre embarkation leave up home in Glen Innes and I had sold my

car and all the other things I had to do.

For the pre embarkation leave? 3 or 4 weeks. So I said goodbye to everybody in Glen Innes and went on the train down to Sydney and I think 2 of my brothers were down there at that stage, and they sort of met me. And said

“We’ll come with you to where you are going”. And we were going on an Italian cruise liner from Sydney to Penang. Took 14 days in this Italian cruise liner. The Flota Leura Line NV Sydney.

Oh, it was terrific. I reported to the rail transport officer,

or the RAF transport officer at Central Railway Station, and he said “Your car is waiting for you”, and there is stretch limo waiting near the station and I jumped on board that and it took me down to the ship and they said “You are in cabin such and such on A Deck” the promenade deck and all my mates were down to about C or D Deck. I had this big cabin, full berth cabin all to myself. And I thought this is terrific

first class. And any rate, we got stuck into things and the ship starting sailing towards Malaya, we called in to Brisbane, and we went on to Singapore and then to Penang. 14 days and it was just full of tourists sort of thing, except for a handful of air force guys.

I was getting a bit sick and tired of having this beautiful big cabin to myself, so I invited one of my mates from about D deck up and he moved out of his digs [accommodation] down there, and moved up with me, and about 3 days later they had a big emergency on board the boat, and they had this search man overboard drill and everything else because

they had missed my mate from his cabin, he hadn’t – he moved and he hadn’t told anybody. So we had a great time.

It was just like a cruise liner, so they had girls and bars and all the – there was a big liner. Just like going on a sea cruise.

No, not that I can think of.

Oh, just a few clothes and plus your kit.

Your kit is all your uniforms and things like that. As a single man, you are always restricted to what you can carry sort of thing. So we tend to leave things behind. You don’t accumulate

things.

No. No. All your tools are provided. You don’t have your own tool kit. That used to be the way in the air force and then they found that they were having lots of problems with people leaving tools and things – they were having problems with tools being

left in aeroplanes and not accounted for. So they then designed what they called composite tool kits and these composite tool kits were huge shadow board type kits. And you had to – if you were working in the aircraft you had a special tag to show the aircraft number and you had your own identifying tag and when you took a tool off the shadow

board you had to put your aircraft number and identifying number to say you had that tool and you were working on that aeroplane and when they did a check of the composite tool kits in the afternoon, or before the flight they had to account for all the tools. If there were any missing they go “Bloggs, where’s that tool that you had out there on A3?” You had to go and find it. No one went home until all the tools were on that shadow board. And that

way they stopped tools being left in aircraft and of course a tool being left in an aircraft can cause a serious accident. Put the panels on and everything else and that tool is left rolling around and gets stuck under a control cable or something like that and the aircraft goes out of control.

Well the start of the first impressions were on

Singapore I think, because you could smell Singapore about 27 mile out to sea, it was filthy. Open drains, open sewers, horrible. Filthy dirty but we couldn’t get ashore quick enough to race in to the markets and buy something real good. You know at the right price. And I think we were all ripped

off. But nearly everyone turned up with a transistor radio. The only transistor radio “Look what I got” “How much did you pay for it? I got mine for so and so”. We were all ripped off by the cunning merchants in Singapore. But the Poms were still very active around Singapore in those days,

because they were still part of the British Empire sort of thing. Malaya had got their independence in 1957 but Singapore hadn’t. They were my impressions of Singapore.

Oh yes, there were still the pure boxes and things like that around. There was a fair sort of naval presence there because they hadn’t long

gotten over communist terrorist type incidents they were having before. I think that finished in latter part of 1960 I think. We were there May 1961, so it was less than 6 months later, so there was still a lot of activity. Then we went to Penang, and we disembarked in Penang and went over

to Butterworth and got into our quarters at Butterworth, single quarters, and got to work and Butterworth was a great place. Didn’t take me long before I purchased a car, and started travelling everywhere. I bought a 1949 MGTC [British sportscar] Roadster, I only wish I had it now it would be worth a fortune. But I paid

equivalent to AU£90 for this MGTC. And then later on I traded it for a Volvo, when I heard that they were starting to bring Volvo’s into Australia, there was one agent bringing them in. I wanted to do a lot of rallying so I traded the TC in

on a Volvo 122S and went rallying.

Yeah. Yeah. I loved playing around with motor cars, still do, except my body doesn’t. Yeah, so we had a great time. We were operating Sabres out of Butterworth,

there was also Canberra bombers there with 2 Squadron, in Butterworth, they had Dakotas there for freighting. For anything that needed to be freighted around the area. There was a transport flight. The Poms also had some anti aircraft missiles, bloodhound missiles

and they had some transport aircraft there, um, old Vickers Valettas transport aircraft. Down in Singapore, the Poms had Hawker Hunters and Gloucester Havilland’s. We used to do quite a lot of exercises fighting one another, theoretically you know, exercise type fighting. I

remember once one of the greatest bloopers I have ever seen in the newspaper a Pommie Hawker Hunter got in trouble and the pilot ejected out of it, and the Straits Times, which is the English paper produced in Singapore and 2 inch type on the front page had “PILOT SAFELY EJACULATES FROM CRASHING AIRCRAFT”. I only wish I had have brought it home.

But then again you throw things out when you are travelling light.

Don’t like it. It really hasn’t succeeded wherever it has supposed to have been put. It hasn’t succeeded, instead of

putting everybody on a level playing field sort of thing, it creates this class system of its own. So even in China today there’s – you know there are very impoverished people there and rich bureaucrats. What would you say?

Corruption and stuff like that, it doesn’t impress me at all, it doesn’t work.

Oh yeah, it doesn’t work at all, it hasn’t worked it might be alright in theory, but it just doesn’t work.

In Malaya? Terrific, wonderful place for dining out and all that sort of thing. If you wanted to go to town for a haircut, lovely little girls cutting your hair and they cut each hair singly, they don’t grab a handful,

it takes hours to have a hair cut. That’s why I have got no hair left.

End of tape

Eat a lot of the local food and things like that, particularly Chinese or Indian and things like that, particularly some of their curries. If we were partying, say if we were over on Penang Island and partying there,

you go down the esplanade late at night, they would have these machan carts, ‘machan’ is Malay for food and they were little four wheel carts with little metho burners and things on them, and they had woks and they could cook anything, and we used to like to get stuck into their satay sticks, probably cat or dog or monkey, or you wouldn’t know what you were eating, but they were

beautiful. Particularly after you have had a few beers and everything else. We used to do that sort of thing. Sometimes, because I was in a car club in Malaya, we would do a lot of rallying and meet some of the rather wealthy Chinese people there and you would go out to one of the big fancy restaurants, and you would have a big steamboat, you know what the steamboat dish is, you have all the ingredients around and

you just keep on putting it into the stock and it’s got a fire in it burning away. We had have the steamboat dinner and be drinking cognac the SOP Cognac, great way to live and at the same time there was still a lot of British influence in the rubber plantations and everything and they always had managers living in the bungalows on these rubber plantations and you used to sometimes go up to one of the rubber plantations

and play up with the…

It’s all these trees, with little cups hanging underneath them, and have all these indigenous population there running around cutting bits of bark off and making it drip down a bit more and old twan basa, twan being boss basa being big, twan basa he was the

Pommie manager of the plantation and then you get twan kitchie, twan kitchie was the boss little, kitchie being little. They had Aussie and English school teachers over there too, because of the defence force’s need for the schooling for their kids. And these teachers were mostly

single girls, and they enjoyed the company of other Pommies [British] and Aussies [Australians] and all the rest of it. It was always a good crowd you mixed well over there.

They were great, great. Many times we rode push bikes down staircases and things. Square wheels on the bottom.

Basically beer, wine and spirits. Never ever saw any hard drugs, I think there it was too early for that.

No, we had enough of our own. Alcohol. Yeah, and smoking cigarettes were

cheap.

A lot of beggars and unfortunately some of them find it a great way of life to be a beggar, and so they deliberately deform their children, break

their arms and bind them up and things like this, so they can become beggars too. It’s a bit sad to see it. There’s a lot of that. Those that want to get ahead and want to work I suppose can, but it becomes a way of life. There was always plenty – I don’t know whether there was always plenty of work because we weren’t

looking at that from their side of things. Malaya and Singapore and places like that in those days, there always seemed to be plenty of things to do, which were labour intensive. They didn’t have lawn mowers, so they used to have these scythes, big sharp knives on sticks. And they would cut the

grass that high. There would be 50 or 60 of them in one great big area, and they would all be swinging these scythes cutting the lawn. On the roads, they always had a fellow on the back of a truck telling you when to overtake. Now he sat on top of the load and looked around, and told you when to overtake. So things like that, they were labour intensive

jobs going to keep the population going. There was a lot of fishing and people catching fish and things like that. Whether that employed everybody I don’t know.

Not a great deal, only those that were on plantations and things like that. Or those that were in the

motor club or the yacht club, because I was a member of the yacht club as well. Those that were working on the airfield, because we employed a lot of the indigenous population to work on the airfield.

It was the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Butterworth Yacht Club, and it started off as a bit of a social type club and it had been

going quite some years before I got there, but we employed two barmen at the yacht club, it was the only place in Malaya where they had draught beer, because we had it specially imported from Darwin, from the Swan Brewery. And we had draught beer there and if you wanted to drink anywhere else you had to buy the local beer.

The local beer was always Anchor or Tiger, and then the imported beer was always the VB [Victoria Bitter]or Foster’s or something like that. We had draught Swan at the yacht club. We used to go down there quite a bit. The other place on the base where you could drink was the Naafi [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute], the Pommie Naafi. And they only had bottled or canned beer there.

There was a fair bit and we had power boats there, I was in partnership with a power boat and we used to do skiing and fooling around and all that sort of thing.

That was the RAAF Butterworth Motor Club and I was also a member of the Penang Motor Club and we used to do a lot of rallying and hill

climbs and motor sports, before it got to expensive, when it was still very amateurish. But I went in one big rally and won a class it was the North Malayan Rally run by the Penang Keta Motor Club it was, but it was about 11 hours of driving and terrible weather. Monsoonal

rain all the time but we won the class there and that was most enjoyable.

We used to work 5 days a week and have your weekends off basically unless there was some exercise going on. Always used to be charging over to the island, because to go to Penang Island you had to use the ferry to go across there.

There was always, most of them were the married fellows with their families living on the island. It was only the single fellows that lived out of Butterworth. In the single quarters. They had an Australian hostel, where the marrieds and their wives and children could go, this was a sort of social centre on the island.

Fair bit yeah. They all had Amahs and gardeners provided for them. Depending on what the Amah was like, when you were with them whether you ate hot Indian curry or Chinese or Malay, some of those Indian curries were terribly hot. But all depended on what sort of Amah they

were given. Most of the families lived very well up there because coming from Australia where you had to do everything for yourself as a wife, and look after the kids, up there they had the Amahs and the gardener, and a lot of the women were terribly bored, and the kids learned to speak Indian or Malay before they learned to speak English because they were always with the Amahs.

Then they would come back to Australia after a few years up there and the families couldn’t settle down, a lot of them. Because they were out playing bingo or they couldn’t settle down at all, caused a few problems.

Yeah. I needed a bucket of water beside me.

Yeah. We used to have a great time. I remember driving down to Singapore one time, we travelled all the way from Butterworth to Singapore and they were opening a new Volvo agency down there and we were invited as guests. And went down there and it was back in the days of The Beatles

and real pointy toed shoes and stove pipe type trousers. The Malay toilets are all flush with the floor. They maybe flushing toilets, but they don‘t have a bowl to sit on or anything, they squat. And you have got two foot pads and you had to squat. And

I got a really bad case of diarrhoea on the way back and driving along to see where might have been a decent sort of a toilet and you roar in there and because of the fashion of the day you had to take your shoes off and your trousers and everything else before you could do anything. It was terrible. It ended up – we booked into the Federal Hotel in Kuala Lumpur went up to this restaurant

which was on about the 7th or 8th floor top of this Federal Hotel. There was a lady who came up to me with the evening meal and I ordered a poached egg on a piece of toast, and she said “What’s your problem?”, and I said “I have got this problem with diarrhoea” and she said “I’ll fix you up”. She was an English lady who had married a

Dutch pilot, and they were in Java when the Japs [Japanese] attacked Java and he was killed and she was interned for the duration of the war and then she stayed, she was more Indonesian than she was British really. She stayed in Indonesia after the war and was running a restaurant and all the rest of it

until Soekarno [Indonesia’s first president] kicked all the Dutch out of Indonesia. So she went across to Malaya and opened up this restaurant, and she knew all the herbal remedies and everything else. So she fixed me up. I was drinking green and ginger Chinese tea and all sorts of different things. But it worked because she knew all the herbal remedies and I’ll never forgot that.

She told me the story. In the course of fixing me up about her Dutch husband, pilot and all that. She didn’t want to go back to Britain. Because she was interned with all these other Indonesians.

Very little. Very little, we didn’t have to wear uniform and it was a policy of the forces at the time, not to wear uniform when you were on leave.

In case somebody wanted to have a go at you because of your uniform otherwise you just looked like a tourist.

Because they still had communist terrorists floating around.

It started off being on the maintenance squadron where we doing the heavy maintenance on the Sabre aeroplanes. And that was when I first arrived there in

May 1961, and I suppose I was there 12 months doing the heavy maintenance which was quite distinct from flat line duties. See you had 2 Squadrons, there was 77 Squadron and 3 Squadron that were doing – operation squadrons and there was the maintenance squadron in support for them. If one of their aeroplanes needed heavy maintenance they took it straight to the maintenance squadron

so we did the heavy maintenance, and the guys down at the fighter squadrons they just did basically turn arounds and anything that could be changed fairly quickly like component changes they would do. Anything requiring a large check or heavy component changes came to the maintenance squadron. I was there for about 12 months and but in April

1962, the 77 Squadron was doing an exercise to the Philippines they were doing a navigational exercise flying from Butterworth to Clark Air Base in the Philippines and return and I was volunteered to be on the

staging party in Saigon for their return trip. Through Saigon in April 1962. And so we were transported to Saigon and we had a 48 hour visa and that should have been sufficient to get all the aircraft turned around at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon

and on their way to Butterworth and then we fly out. We were billeted at the Continental Hotel, Continental Plaza Hotel in downtown Saigon, right near the Cavalier Hotel where the Australian Embassy was and up the road was the President’s Palace and I thought in contrast to Singapore and everything else that Saigon was the

cleanest and prettiest city I had ever seen in Asia. Penang and it was very nice. The women were neatly dressed and there wasn’t a great sign of any warfare going or anything. The streets were clean, there were no beggars anywhere. Anyhow

one of these aircraft went unserviceable on the way back and it had a pressurisation problem which meant that it couldn’t fly high and couldn’t pressurise its long range tanks so it wasn’t going anywhere until we had it fixed and we had to get parts and stuff. As our 48 hour visa had expired, we had to move out of the Continental Hotel, which was nice and luxurious and we moved in

with Embassy Staff in their flats and I was with an army sergeant who was working for the Australian Embassy in an intelligence role. We were only just down the road from the President’s Palace which had previously only just been bombed, they were trying to kill President Diem and a couple of rebel air force pilots bombed it with bombs and napalm and everything else and I have got some beaut photos of the bombed out palace.

Any rate we had to be smuggled in and out of Tan Son Nhut in embassy cars through back gates, because we weren’t supposed to be in the country. That was quite exciting, cloak and dagger [spy] stuff. And it was whilst we were at Tan Son Nhut airport fixing the aircraft that we did start to see a bit of the war that went on, because there were American

aeroplanes everywhere. They were flying in and out, but downtown Saigon you didn’t see a great deal of it. So after we got this aircraft serviced and got him in the air we flew back to Butterworth and I suppose it was less than a month later, again being a single man, they always grabbed the single guys because they didn’t have to worry about the family or anything, I was volunteered to go to Ubon

in Thailand and I was on the first Herc [Hercules] that went into the place, landed on this bare air strip, we had a few tents, we had to put a tent to live in, and get ready to receive these Sabre aeroplanes that were going in the under the auspices of SEATO, which was the South East Asian Treaty Organisation. The idea was that they thought that the Pathit Lau [?] would

invade Thailand through Cambodia into Thailand. The Pathit Lau were the communists in Laos and they were linked in with the North Vietnamese and all that sort of thing. When we arrived there the Royal Thai Air Force had a few T6 Harvard Trainers. They had this beautiful big concrete runway, and the Thais were only operating these little

piston engine trainers off it and we arrived with these roaring Sabres and the squadron was in fact 77 Squadron, but because they weren’t allowed to be supported out of Malaya, Malaya being an independent country in that part of SEATO so they had to be supported out of Singapore so they said there was a brand new squadron reformed in Singapore and all they did was get some black paint and paint over the squadron insignia on the tail

and call it 79 Squadron instead of 77 Squadron. The aircraft had to be armed and ready to go at any time, but we couldn’t keep people off the runway because there were no fences around the air strip and there were roads that went across it and the water buffalo that used to walk out on the runway when we tried to operate aeroplanes, so we all had to line the runway, the cooks and medical orderlies

and airmen, and anybody that wasn’t doing anything had to line the runway and to keep these people off until such time as the fencing went up and we moved roads and to go round instead of across and things. I remember one Hercules take off, this Herc’s lumbering down the runway and we are all lined up and this dog barked at this water buffalo and this water buffalo charged out in front of the

Herc and the pilot just pulled back on the yoke and he went up in the air and he flopped back down and missed the buffalo and then he continued his take off run. But eventually they got it all fenced and yeah, we started operating out if in 1965, the Yanks [Americans] had Phantoms in Ubon in Thailand operating and bombing Vietnam out of Ubon.

We still had Sabres there as a sort of combat air control in case the Phantoms were chased by Migs out of North Vietnam.

I was there for, initially for 3 months at Ubon and that’s when we were setting up our camp we were living under canvas our working area where we prepared the aircraft, it was all

under canvas, we had our living quarters on one side of the air strip and the working environment on the other side of the air strip. The Thais were building a new control tower, as it was at the time they were operating a little jeep with a radio in the jeep and they were talking to their aeroplanes from the jeep. We were doing fairly similar sort of things. We had a bit of an incidence

when at about 3 am in the morning they had an American radar station, it was on the far side of the air strip. And this American radar station saw what they thought was about 38 helicopters. Not far away from the air field, so 3 am in the morning we were all told we had to go and get our rifles, bullets and get the aircraft

in the air and this sort of thing, and there was a mad panic. In the dark we all got onboard this truck which happened to be an old tip truck with a steel tray and 2” of slime in it, and the driver was a panic merchant and off he roared with us all in the back and all you could hear – he’s roaring off as people are loading their ammunition

into the rifles and cocking them and you could hear this click, click, and rattle, rattle. Because this bloke took off at such a rate of knots we all slid down the back of the truck into the slime, we were all standing up trying to hang on. When we yelled at him he put the brakes on and we all slid forward and then people were dropping rifles, and eventually we got over the maintenance side of the

air base and we are getting the aircraft ready for flight, and that means sidewinder missiles, all guns fully armed and cocked, all maintenance pre flights done, all aircraft properly fuelled and everything. And I was 18 ft down the intake of a Sabre with a torch, having a look at the condition of the

compressor on the engine and a warrant officer, who wasn’t an engineer I might say, walked past the front of the aircraft and said “Where’s your rifle?” I said “Over there, not down here with me”. “Oh, you have your rifle with you at all times”.

Quite a bit, you know, quite a bit. You had to be able to defend yourself

I have qualified on just about every weapon the air force had. Small arms, pistols, small arms, all rifles, Vickers, machine guns, Owens, Brens, 303s, SLRs [self loading rifle], M16s. So you know, but all that we had was this great panic situation where they thought

the helicopters had landed. In the middle of it the orderly officer which was over the over side of the strip where our barracks were, we’re trying to get these aircraft ready to fly in a hurry and everyone is running around in a state of panic. Over where our barracks were, suddenly there’s a huge fire over there, we all thought Christ

they’ve already arrived and we are on the other side of the air strip, see. That added to the confusion and the panic, but what caused the fire was the orderly officer decided he was probably an admin type bloke or something, he decided he was going to refuel his jeep, so he took it into this little tank type depot where they had the fuel and he is putting fuel in his jeep and he decided

that he wanted to have a look at how it was going and he held this hurricane lamp over real close to have a look at how he was fuelling and the whole lot went up in flames. And that was what we thought was the enemy arriving. And after all the panic dies down and we got the aircraft in the air and they came back and said they couldn’t see anything. When all the panic died down they said now we have got to hand all those rifles and ammunition into the

armoury they couldn’t find half the ammunition because it had rolled out the back of the truck. It was panic complete. It happened so often. So any rate that was the first trip and then we had another one of these starter blow ups at Ubon too, and it ended up with the starter buried in the ammo [ammunition] bins and they were full

of 30 mm high explosive ammunition, and there’s a big fire going on, we got that out and then they were the things I remember the most. Ubon town itself, it sort of came alive when we got there, all these businesses suddenly came into town.

It was rather flat, Ubon even though it is not that far north of the equator, it’s inland a bit it’s near the Mekong River. It’s rather flat and dusty, and it gets very, very hot in July and cold in January sort of thing.

We had an outdoor movie theatre, and you used to have to – if you wanted to go to the movies you had to go with a blanket and everything else at night time to keep warm. But that was the first trip. I went back to Butterworth after 3 months, so that was May, June,

July. Yeah. I went back to Butterworth and I went to 3 Squadron instead of going back to the maintenance squadron, I was doing front line duties there. Around about Christmas 1962 early 63 I went back to Ubon again for another 3 months and at this stage they

had some more permanent quarters, they built some huts, dormitory type huts instead of tents. The town had grown up a bit and there were more facilities in the town. The bars and things had set up to cater for the Hook-ta-lie [Vietnamese term for Australians].

Like most

Asian towns, if you wanted a girl you could find a girl, if you wanted to go to a bar you could find a bar and things like that. It all depends on what your preferences are and what you want to do.

Of course. One of the first things you get educated in the um, when you are in the

forces, it’s one of the first things you learn about.

Oh yes, there were lots of cases, there were some rather exotic forms of venereal disease that came out of Thailand, that’s for sure. Yes. Some that they hadn’t seen before, according to the medicos.

Yeah. So any rate, in Ubon it improved a bit. They had these um, - I used to love going to town and racing the samos [cyclos], like rickshaw type things, only they are peddle power and we would go out the front of the base and there’d be 4 or maybe more 5 at least samos all lined up,

and you would be with a mate and you’d say right I’ll give you a race to town, so we’d check the physical fitness of the driver, the rider, check the mechanical status of his samo until we start going and we’d offer him more money to beat the other fella. Ride him like mad, peddle like mad. They were dirt roads. And they were built for the

average size Thai person, fit two in the back and the driver in the front with a great long chain going back. But for Aussies two was a very cramped job and it was a bit heavy on the rider, so we used to have one each, and all we used to do is we’d get in and going round the corners in the dirt and dust and you’d sit one side and just at the apex of the curve you’d throw your weight the other way and put him in

a big oversteer and the tail would slide out and he’s peddling away. And the tail would come off the wheels. I used to love doing that.

No. No. The only accidents we had was when we tried to ride them ourselves and you couldn’t control them because they had a mind of their own. Fixed drive on both wheels, and of course you are steering and if you have got a weight off balance and that sort of thing.

You would head for the monsoon drains and of course we’d not try aligning them until we had a few syrups sort of thing.

The town of Ubon, 5 or 6 miles I suppose. On flat ground they used to peddle that alright. Roughly.

3 months. The other interesting thing is in Thailand, we had a number of air force issue push bikes sort of thing and if you wanted to go anywhere you could grab a push bike and go for a bit of a ride around, and to do that you had

to have a push bike licence a rider’s licence, with a photo on it and everything else. I have got some photo licenses I have still got in my collection all written in Thai and everything. After that little episode in Ubon, still with the Sabres and still much the same. I don’t think we had

too many incidences, we had a few incidences where there appeared to be some sort of communist insurgents near where we were based, but we had airfield defence guards and that was their job to look after all that. We just fixed the airplanes.

We used to have briefings you know might happen 10 mile away sort of thing, but we were briefed if anything happened. They kept you aware.

Well if there was signs of infiltration of communist like picking up intelligence and things like that, counting planes and movements and things like that, that’s all part of intelligence and we try to stop them getting in. Anyway when I went back to Butterworth, I went back into the maintenance squadron. And I suppose I was there in the maintenance

squadron till round about June 1963, and again sent off to Ubon may have been about May 1963, round about that time. Sent off to Ubon for my third tour and it was

much the same. With the improved conditions in Ubon we had servants that were in the huts making our beds and much better than living in tents and cleaning your boots and things like that. The Thai girls would go round and clean your boots and your tents and that sort of thing. The food was much better and we had better conditions as far as the theatre, we had a roof over it. So you could sing in the

rain and watch the movies.

No, not really. I think my last 3 months there I took sick and had to be medivaced back to Butterworth, so I went back to Butterworth and was admitted to hospital in Butterworth and then eventually I came back to Australia in

October1963.

I had swollen testicles, a hydro seal, and they sort of crippled me a bit.

A week I suppose. Eventually they had to operate back in Richmond in about

1965 they operated and fixed it up.

The time was up, it was a 2.5 year posting and I had done the 2.5 years and I was glad to get home. Things that I was looking forward to most was ice cream, good quality milk, because

the milk is all reconstituted and doesn’t taste very nice. Ice cream, milk, strawberries and things like that. And a good steak.

End of tape

I went back to Richmond to No. 2 Aircraft Depots. Back into the engineer’s overhaul department and engines again and this time I was basically in the

final assembly area for the twin row Wasp, the RA30 Pratt & Whitney’s and also building up what they call quick change units for the wind shear which had a little Pratt & Whitney 1985 engine and all the associated gear that made it a quick change unit for the wind shear.

Whilst I was there which from October 1963 to the end of 1966, I went to night school to get my leaving certificate and I did a lot of car rallying and racing around.

Because I wanted to

further my career in the air force and as an engine fitter the promotion was very slow, you virtually had to wait for somebody to die before you got promoted and I wasn’t real happy with that so I decided I was going to try and get along a bit quicker and not just wait for the normal promotional process things to happen, which worked out later on.

Very tough. I found it very hard to motivate yourself to keep going, particularly if you wanted to have a beer or go out or do something, it was “No I have to study”. If there was something happening, a party somewhere, it was very hard.

Just determination I think, mainly.

And also to get to night school we used to knock off [finish work] a little bit early so that we could go down and have an evening meal and get changed out of your greasy overalls and get dressed and be up at tech at night. It caused some animosity in the work place because you were going off to night school and get ahead of the others.

It did cause some friction, problems.

Oh yeah, and the senior NCOs [Non Commissioned Officer] that thought that one day you might be their boss sort of thing.

Oh, I knew it was happening, I knew there was a bit of animosity there, but I said “Oh well,

you don’t pay my wages. I am going to do it”.

It was fairly good except I was always trying to be ahead of the pack and some of the pack were bludgers, didn’t want to work too hard, and so

they resented anybody who wanted to move ahead a bit. The NCOs it was a cushy job for them, they just loved to sit back and take things easy. I wanted to get things done.

In the early 1960s, we knew it was going on, we knew we had advisors up there helping the Vietnamese in the army training scheme and

I think it was in about 1964 they starting sending some Caribou’s up there with what they call they RAAF transport flight, and some of my mates were posted up there, from the depot and we knew it was certainly going on, but you just had to do your job, and a lot of the bits and pieces that we were overhauling were supporting

the Caribou’s in Vietnam anyhow.

After Richmond, I was promoted at the end of 1966 to the dizzy rank of corporal and I was posted to 5 Squadron in Canberra which were operating the Iroquois helicopters and

I went down there and got stuck into it down there. On arrival in Canberra, after doing my clearances and all that sort of thing, I went and saw the senior engineer officer and he said “I want you to go straight on to an Iroquois introductory course you have missed a few days because it’s already started, but you’ll be okay you’ll

catch up. So I went on that introductory course I ended up being dux of the course with a pass mark of 100%, the first and only time it’s ever been done, and they couldn’t understand why a person who came off Sabre jets could do so well on a rotary wing course.

I was just so keen, I had read so much about the aeroplane and everything and as soon as I knew I was getting posted to helicopters, I didn’t know anything about them. So I was just swatting [studying] and knew just about everything I needed to know by the time I arrived there without going on course. After that I was sort of selected, and might sound like I am

bragging a bit, but I was selected to be their chief course man, when we went to Vietnam I sat on a course, because my boss had a bit of an argument with a Yank [American] who said “I have got a bloke that could beat any of your blokes”. So I went on a course of an aircraft

engine that I had never even seen, and I was dux of that course too, so he won his bet.

None. I had a real brief experience when I was with 2AD [Aircraft Depot] after coming back from Malaya, I was sent down to, well basically I was employed in the engine overhaul area, I was sent down to rebuild

the only remaining Sikorsky S-51 helicopter in the RAAF, they were a very old piston engine helicopter, and I helped them rebuild it, only over a few weeks. Then they had to do some test flights, some tests with it. And after doing the test flights they did some winching trials with concrete blocks.

And after they finished with the concrete blocks they decided they needed a human guinea pig and I was the human guinea pig that got winched up in the helicopter. So that’s about the only experience I have had prior to that.

Well basically it was getting to know the aircraft, and of course at this time, 9 Squadron were in

Vietnam with the Iroquois helicopters and 5 Squadron were the support Squadron. So everybody that went to Vietnam on a 12 months rotation, you didn’t stay there longer than 12 months. And the policy was that once you had done a tour of Vietnam you were posted to a unit, which more than often precluded you from doing a second tour.

So, 5 Squadron was the support squadron for a feeder squadron for 54 Vietnam, the pilots and engineers, crewmen and all that, so we were all virtually being trained up to go to Vietnam. Normally, you would spend about 12 months with 5 Squadron before you went to Vietnam, I only spent 4 months,

and I was in Vietnam in April, I only got to 5 Squadron in January. We didn’t have very long there at all, just mainly doing all the maintenance on the Iroquois helicopter. After doing the initial Iroquois introductory course I did a more advanced course a flight fitters course and

became dual trade to do the air frame as well as the engine work. Then I was posted to Vietnam.

Great aeroplane. The Iroquois was a safer aeroplane than say the old Sikorsky’s because it didn’t have a fully floating

head, or fully floating rotor blades. The rotor blades on a helicopter are designed so they flex up, and they have to do that so they can fly, or they don’t go anywhere if they don‘t flex up, because the moment you are flying forward, the blade that’s coming around and going forward is travelling a lot faster than the blade that’s going backwards.

And therefore the retreating blade that’s got a tail wind and the advancing blade has got a head wind, you get different lifts on the blades. So the old idea was just the one with the most lift just flap up in the air a bit, but that was a dangerous idea when it came to try to

glide an aircraft, like the helicopter, when you glide you have got to keep your rotor speed up otherwise the blades just flap up and they cone right up and just drop out of the sky. If yo have an engine failure you have got to keep your motor up. With the Iroquois being a rigid rotor it didn’t have that flapping problem. The way they cured the advancing blade

lift versus the retreating blade lift, was that they changed the pitch on the blade as it went round to a squash plate and the advancing blade would drop off some pitch and the retreating blade would gain some so that they balanced out. The faster you went the more the squash plate had to counter act the difference in lift.

The Iroquois was a very safe aeroplane provided it was maintained correctly and provided it was flown correctly, and that means that from the flying side of it you didn’t need any cowboys. Because a cowboy will kill you real quick in the helicopter. So you had to have fairly sensible

pilots, who knew the limitations of their aeroplane and flew within the design envelope of the aeroplane. Maintenance you needed switched on guys that could do the job, knew what the critical parts of the aircraft were and could do the job properly. And maintenance, like every day maintenance was very critical of the aircraft because they are

operating in such a hostile environment with dirt and dust stuff blowing round them all the time. You need to keep the lubrication up to them and all that sort of thing.

The Bravos which we had initially in Vietnam, I think carry I think about 7 troops.

You had 2 pilot seats and you had 4 across the back of the aircraft and then you would probably get a couple on the floor you didn’t need seat belts you just sat there. Later on the H-model and the Delta model Iroquois which we got had a greater carrying capacity because they

arranged extra cabin space around the transmission instead of having it blanked like the Bravos. The engine power went from round about 1100 hp [horsepower] to about 1400 hp and the larger main rotor blade.

Yeah, the aircraft basically was designed to operate fairly low down and at sea level type thing but you could I think I have been up to about 11,000 ft in the Iroquois helicopter. They start to get a bit gasp up there. Not so much engine-wise, but lift on the rotor.

When they are design a helicopter, they design it so that it can hover at a certain adit. We have to talk about within ground effect and out of ground effect. Within ground effect means you are about 10 ft off the ground sort of thing, you are still within ground effect, but if you get out of that – what happens within ground effect is that you get a back wash off the ground the rotor thrusts down and you get this rising air and it allows you to carry

out a heavier load within ground effect. Outside of ground effect you lose that backwash lift and an aircraft might be specified and could still hover out side ground effect at say 8,000 ft with a full load depends on the design of the aircraft, design of the helicopter. In Vietnam a lot of the gun ships we were operating with these American gun ships at the time.

Were so heavily laden there was no way in the world they could even hover at 2 ft with the skits 2 ft above the ground they just couldn’t lift that, they could hop along the ground like a grass hopper. Around about say 15 mph, 15-20 mph [miles per hour] they would get what they call transational lift which

increases the lift, it’s the fact that the whole thing is moving forward and not the fact that it is relying on the down thrust of the rotor it is starting to fly a bit like a conventional aeroplane with some lift off the forward speed, and so these gun ships sometimes even the door gunners would hop out and these things would bounce down along the more or less down hill.

At Nui Dat they had a bit of a pad there, a grass pad, and they had a bit of a downward slope there, and it bounced down the slope trying to get to transational lift and the gunners would jump on to the skids and climb back in and these things would be locked in the air and it was quite marvellous to watch them sometimes, trying to get airborne.

Well

the basic control is that you have a cyclic stick which controls the – if you imagine the helicopter’s hanging under a spinning disc and the cyclic control controls the handling of that disc, so if you tilt the disc forward the helicopter will fly forward and if you tilt it to the side the helicopter will fly

sideways. Tilt it to the rear it goes backwards. So that is the cyclic stick that controls what that disc is doing. Eventually like you tilt the disc the helicopter goes underneath it and then as it goes forward the helicopter eventually takes up the same attitude as the disc. So that’s basically the main flying control. If you want to go around the corner you just

poke your cyclic over to one side and the disc tilts and around you go. Fuselage catches up and follows the disc around. The thing that makes the helicopter go up and down is the collective pitch, which is a lever on the side of the seat, you pull that up and that increases the pitch on the blades, push it down and decreases the pitch on the blades, collectively, and the

helicopter goes down. And at the same time on the collective you have got your throttle on the collective and it’s like a motor cycle throttle, wind it on and the old engine increases, and normally the most modern helicopters there is a – you can have full throttle at flat pitch and as you pull in pitch on your collective there is an automatic control that

goes back to the engine and it increases the power so you don’t have to worry about creeping on more power, it’s coupled with your angle of your blades and the power that is required. And the other control in the helicopter is your rotor peddles which is same as the rotor peddles in a normal aeroplane. Except they control the pitch on the tail rotor and if you didn’t have a tail rotor

the old helicopter would spin around under the disc and you wouldn’t get anywhere. It counter acts the torque and the more pitch you pull in the more power you apply to that, those rotor blades the more torque you have got to counter act and less done with the rotor peddles and the pitch on the tail rotor.

Oh yeah loved it. Yeah. Great aeroplane.

They were designed so you could maintain them fairly easily too. They were a well designed aircraft with – they were the sort of aircraft you could maintain in the field. I have done some component changes – we had to change a main gear box, the main transmission on an Iroquois at a place called

Iritali [?] in Irian Jaya and we had no equipment there at all, we had to rig up A-frames and the natives came out of the bush to help us they weren’t wearing any clothes, they had spears and all sorts of things. Tubes under the penis and I think the first man to go to Iritali was a Dutch Missionary in 1939.

They are still living in the dark ages there.

Probably the fact that they had to be hand flown all the time, they didn’t have any auto stability like the modern aircraft, it wasn’t equipped for

flying it far type – you could fly them at night, which we did quite often but they weren’t an all weather aeroplane, and in a bad situation they weren’t equipped for all weather flying.

Basically in support of the army at Nui Dat. We used them initially as troop transport and also for medivac and we used them to put SAS [Special Air Service] teams in to designated areas where they wanted to get some intelligence to operate behind the lines. And with retrievals. Later we got our gunship

capability. We managed to rig something up we got from scrounged bits and pieces. Then the air force approved some of the aircraft being made into gun ships and they called them bush rangers.

They didn’t have their own aircraft.

The army had a little Bell 47 reconnaissance helicopter, a little bubble type aircraft to carry two people. But they didn’t have any troop transports and at that stage the army was restricted as far as their aircraft were concerned, they could only operate single engine fixed wing aeroplanes in about the size of a Cessna

or these little Bell 47 helicopters. All these other aircraft at that time were operated by the air force.

Yes. The American system is different in that the American Army can operate – they operated numerous sorts of helicopters and so did the air force

and so did the marines. Also, the American Army operated fixed wing aircraft up to the size of say Caribou’s and the old C123 Fairchild. But he enlarged them that’s the US [United States] Air Force operated. I think that our experience in Vietnam

with the army even though the air force provided them with a really good service, a lot of the army heavies etc wanted to have their own aircraft to control, and that’s one of the reasons why in latter years all rotary wing assets were transferred to the army from the air force.

Yeah. Again we did it quite different to the Yanks. The Yank army, they recruited people straight off the street and threw them straight into a helicopter and the only thing they learned to fly was helicopters. Whereas in the air force and with our current army, they were operating current helicopters, all the pilots had to go

through fixed wing training and get fully qualified on a number of aircraft before they were transferred to helicopters and they had to do a conversion to helicopters.

I think the advantage is that they have a better all round knowledge of leadership, particularly those that have flown some very fast aeroplanes

like PC9 or something like that and then they can get on to an Iroquois and it is as slow as anything. About 120 knots and that’s full speed. They have a better appreciation. Like one of the pilots we had in Vietnam, because we were running very short on pilots they offered

retired RAF pilots from Britain short service commission in the Australian air force. If they retired and picked up their pension from the Brits [British] then they paid their way to Australia, looked after them, gave them a commission Flt Lt [Flight Lieutenant] rank and a lot of them ended up as chopper pilots to keep our Vietnam commitments going.

It takes a long time to train pilots. One of these guys, he was a real gentleman he was, he had previously been a squadron commander flying English Electric Lightning’s, they were supersonic interceptor with two big Avon engines, they climb from zero to 60,000 ft in about a minute or so,

and they were really fast aeroplanes well he was squadron commander and he pulled the pin and took early retirement they were allowed to do that at age 38 they had to make their mind up whether they would stay in the RAF or pull the pin so he did that came out to Australia with his family and got commissioned in the RAAF

as a flt [flight] lieutenant and was on choppers [helicopters]. He said it was great because he didn’t have to wear a great oxygen mask and G-suit and every time he went round the corner he wasn’t blown up with a G suit and he liked it. There you go. And he hadn’t flown helicopters prior to that, he was just on fighters in Britain.

Well, it was good because we knew we would end up in Vietnam or those that didn’t, didn’t really try.

It was great you got to get there and

you know, it’s part of the deal that’s why you are in the air force. You weren’t conscripted. We were there voluntarily, that was our life. Some of the guys back when the Korean War was on, they were very, very sorry they missed out on the Korean War. I was a bit young for that sort of thing. Anyhow you couldn’t stop me from getting to Vietnam.

The problem with 5 Squadron, we might get on to this when we get back from Vietnam, the big problem was that 5 Squadron was a feeder for 9 Squadron and 9 Squadron had all the experience and 5 Squadron was losing all their experience.

Later on when I came out of Vietnam, I was one of the few that got posted back to a squadron where you could do two tours. Because I went back to Iroquois on 5 Squadron. And we had some very nasty accidents, purely through the experience and skill levels being drained out to feed Vietnam all the time. And then those skills and experience going

elsewhere. And the squadron was trying to operate with an establishment of personnel that wasn’t geared up for this 12 month rotation, and therefore every 12 months just as a guy was getting up to speed he was gone. There would be a new person, new recruit and this was in the supervision

as well as the guys that were doing the work and after a series of nasty accidents they had to virtually double the establishment of the squadron. So there was initially some experience there all the time.

No, I only spent 4 months there that’s how critical Vietnam was.

Just the normal means, you just suddenly get told you are off to Vietnam, here’s your dates and everything else. And when I got to Vietnam we were having a lot of problems in Vietnam there were guys up there that had done their 12 months and they were waiting to get home. And we had aeroplanes there were falling out of the sky everywhere through engine failure, so we didn’t have the luxury

that we had back in Canberra of having the luxury to do an engine change and then put the aircraft on a run up pad and tie it down so it can’t fly. Which we didn’t have that luxury, so every time we did an engine change the moment you started pulling any power or anything you were in the air flying. You’d have to do readings and put it down on the ground and do some adjustments and go

again. I got my nickname out of that.

Biggles. I was in a green suit flying all the time doing adjustments.

No, no we used to go with the pilots we weren’t allowed to fly. Engine fitters basically can run – we are trained to run every aeroplane like Sabres and Vampires and Hercules and that sort of thing.

But there’s one aircraft that you weren’t allowed to do any engine running with and that was a helicopter and that goes way back to the early 1950s when an engine fitter tried to start one up in the hangar and ended up putting it through the roof. One of the old Sikorsky’s so they banned them.

They dreaded it, they didn’t like it at all.

But my Mum kept on sending me Christmas cakes and things and all those goody parcels. So they accepted it.

Not really because I think even though I was just a newcomer into the squadron, and that was because of my promotion to corporal, to the dizzy ranks.

I palled [made friends] up fairly quickly with a great bunch of guys, and they had been there for some time previous 12 months or more. And then we went off to Vietnam together, so there wasn’t a great deal of jealousy or animosity or anything like that.

Oh yeah. Again you had the pre

embarkation leave.

I don’t know, I think I had a few days in Sydney at Pats parents, she came down from – she was teaching at Coffs Harbour at the time. Then I had a few days at Glen Innes with my parents and then off to Vietnam.

That was a good trip too. We didn’t have to go on a troop ship or plane or anything else, we flew from Sydney, this is on a regular BOAC 707 service out of Sydney to Singapore via Perth. There was only about a dozen of us on board that were air force, the rest were all

just all tourists travelling. So we travelled in civvies [civilian clothing] we didn’t have to wear uniform, and flew over in this BOAC 707 to Singapore, overnighted in Singapore, PAN AM [Pan American Airlines] from Singapore to Saigon the next day. Then we really landed in it, we had to get in a Caribou and fly

as mobile cargo in the Caribou from Tan Son Nhut to Vung Tau. That’s what you have in the air force when you fly Hercules and Caribous, you are mobile cargo, you walk on, walk off yourself you don’t get carted on and off.

It had cleaned up a lot, Lee Kwan Yu was running the joint, the Poms had been kicked out

and he was getting things ship shape. Open sewers were covered and they had painted clothes on all the nudes in the Tiger Balm gardens and things like that.

Oh dreadful. Saigon was filthy, full of military

equipment and people making money quickly. Everything was chaos. Saigon was just a very, very busy military city sort of thing. Something like Tan Son Nhut airport in 1962, I think Tan Son Nhut airport only had about 2 or 3 active runways. And there were 9

when we got back there in 1967. 9 runways all handling aeroplanes, different speeds, different controls, some worked some didn’t. Today you hear about the air traffic controllers and people complaining about air traffic in Australia and how dangerous it is, you should be out there. The only radar directed at the heavy

and commercial. The fast jets and the commercial and the big heavy freighters they were the only ones they were directing, but you used to have direct them around artillery and all sorts of things that was happening, and thunder storms and the rest of us flying in caribous and helicopters and things like that you had different runways that you had to just look and see, and if you could get in front of somebody in the queue you would. Watch out he’s

going to cut you off.

End of tape

I think the moment we got off the PAN AM 707 we were quickly shuffled, with our kit and everything else on to a Caribou and flown to Vung Tau and then we were grabbed and taken to our barracks, chuck your gear here and that’s going to be your bed

get your overalls on and come to work.

I would loved to have been there back in the days of French rule, because it was like the French Riviera and it was the holiday place for all the French that were living in Indo China,

French Indo China, and it was a big holiday resort for them, they had all those little café type kiosks all along the beach. It must have been a marvellous place. But when we were there all those places were still there but you know the Vietnamese were running things and they weren’t interested in

any of the rather laid back holiday resort it was the town where they lived. There were French villas, beautiful French villas all along the sea front and as a matter of fact that’s where we were when RAAF transport flight first went there, there was just a small bunch of guys they occupied two villas, one was what they called Villa Anna,

and that was where the officers were quartered. And the other villa which was a block or so away, that was where they set up the mess and the cook house and the engineers from the original transport flight were housed there, but as the population of the air force grew, they had to have other areas. They still kept

their messing and everything else in the villas and the officers still stayed in the Villa Anna, which was down in Vung Tau, but heading out more towards the airport was a big American base built just for accommodation where just rows and rows of dormitory huts and that’s where we were housed. We used to have to travel by truck for

all our meals into downtown of Vung Tau. Have our meals and travel back to the airport or to our quarters which was about half way.

Oh, I forget now. It used to take us about I suppose 15 to 20 minutes to drive from the airport into town, but that was on

you couldn’t get up any speed at all because of the traffic and all the rest of it. We had this great big truck, it was designed to carry missiles. Big 6 wheel drive Diamond T American truck and instead of having a missile on the back, it had this great long tray with seats, and we used to run backwards and forwards

about 4 or 5 times a day in that truck into town. If anybody wanted to wipe out the squadron, a kid with a hand grenade could have done it by just lobbing it in the back of the truck because we used to only leave a small nucleus called the duty crew, at the air base, to look after any incoming aircraft or outgoing aircraft, whilst we had our lunch or breakfast or dinner in the evening.

So that was a bit frightening.

We knew when we were told the VC [Viet Cong] used Vung Tau as an R&R [Rest and Recreation] centre we knew they were there, you couldn’t point your finger at them, but you knew they were using it as a rest area for their own people.

There was always the possibility that if they wanted to, they could wipe us out real quick. So we used to hear the stories of helicopters flying low over a field and there’s a girl with a typical Vietnamese straw hat on and an oxen and

next minute she has got an AK-47 [submachine-gun] and shooting at the helicopters sort of thing.

There was a fence around, because this was an American base, a lot of Americans there. And we only stayed there for probably the first 3 or 4 months until our own barracks were built at the airport.

We still had all our messing and everything else was in at the villa, but they were building our own barracks and messing, slowly coming on at the airport. Until finally there – it was after I left, nearly everything was relocated back out at the airport, so you didn’t have this horrible drive into town all the time. Even the

officers moved out with their – for their accommodation as well, they had their own mess for the senior NCOs mess and the other ranks mess.

Just basically keep the aeroplanes flying. I did spend a bit of time whilst there as the NCO in charge of the maintenance control

section. Which was basically all paperwork but it had to be done. As a corporal that was my job. As well as get out on the aircraft and fix them. We had quite a number of occasions there where we worked 6 days a week, and you

had one day off. And on that day off and during lunch breaks and things like that, we had what they called a duty crew, and you would go on duty crew for a full week and you would do all the night shifts, lunch breaks and that sort of thing plus the day that everyone was knocked off, and after you finished your duty crew you get 3 days off. We used to look forward to our duty crews, because you get

3 days off and if you wanted to go for a bit of a trip around the country. The only way you could safely do it was by flying. You would hitch a ride on an American aeroplane or an Australian aeroplane and go off somewhere.

I didn’t try hitching around too much, I went on a couple of cooks tours with the Caribous when they were doing the supply, what they called Wallaby Airlines. The Caribous flying around all these various air fields.

And I had done a few of those, but it wasn’t overnight stays anywhere. I would fly out in the morning and back in the evening. But it was good to see the country, even if it was from high up or low down or whatever. But on the duty crew one time we had an aircraft that developed a massive fuel leak on a landing zone which was

being mortared the night before. Dropped some SAS blokes in and they were about to pull out when they discovered this massive fuel leak. So I was sent up there to fix it and soon as I got there, I determined that the fuel leak was coming from a broken ‘O’ ring on

fuel disconnect on the main fuel line – disconnect on the engine bed itself any rate. The pilot who was flying the aircraft Iroquois agreed to take me up there I gave him the ‘O’ ring and he put it on his finger like a ring. And I said “Go back to base and get me one of those” I had an alternative plan to get this aircraft out if we needed to. Break the rules

a bit but we had to get it out. And this pilot came back with a full fitting, he had the hose and coupling and everything else, and he wagged it out the window of his aircraft and he gave it to me and I just grabbed a pair of pliers and pulled the ‘O’ ring out of it and put it on the aircraft I was fixing. And he shut his aircraft down, he should have kept it running. Because if mortars started coming in that was our way

out. You should always keep one airplane running, but he shut his down. If he hadn’t been able to start we would have had two aircraft and two crews there. Any rate he jumped out of the aircraft and he came over to me and he said “You are supposed to fix the whole thing”. I don’t tell you how to fly your aeroplane you don’ tell me how to fix them. He jumped up and down and ranted and raved and I put this ‘O’ ring on and connected it up took me about 10minutes. We

switched it on, there were no fuel leaks and away we went at any rate. This pilot decided he wanted to make a federal case out of the whole thing when we got back to base, so I just told my side of the story and he got wrapped over the knuckles very severely for telling me how to do my job. We could have got out of there without the ‘O’ ring but I didn’t want to do it but we could have if necessary.

Some people yeah. Some people couldn’t handle it at all, a lot of them were on the old uppers and downers, the Valium and things like that.

I don’t know, I wasn’t interested. If they couldn’t hack the mission, they went down to see the MO [Medical Officer] and the MO gave them a pill, that was their business not mine.

Oh yes, some of them were quite ratty. Some of them were. We used to relax a bit, we had often entertainers and all that sort of thing, Little Patty, Col Joy and the Joy Boys, they organise shows and we had quite a

good mess type arrangement. This was later on when we were consolidating more on the airport, everybody together instead of being scattered all over the place. And we would buy a show and it was all ranks, officers, and everybody would go along to it and even some of the Yanks would come and visit us. Because there were plenty of artists touring Vietnam.

And you’d buy these shows $400 a night always big money. Most of the mess’ had big money because when we’d finish work the duty crew would take over and you would go to the mess and have a few beers and so there was plenty of money there and because they were buying everything duty free it was very cheap. One big problem we had was

the Vietnamese women that were sort of working on the base as cleaners and things like that, in and around of the cookhouse, or the mess, and we had to make a policy if you emptied a bottle of Johnny Walker or spirits you had to smash the bottle because if you just threw it in the rubbish bin, the Vietnamese ladies used to pick it up and put it in their bags and off with them into town and they would sell the

empty bottle to a bar, and the bar would fill it up with their own home brew with alcohol and it’s sitting on the shelf, and you would think you were drinking Johnny Walker and it wasn’t and there were quite a few nasty poisonings and even some deaths with the Yanks with rubbish being put in so called Johnny Walker bottles or Vodka bottles and things like that.

We weren’t so much aware of the infiltration of the Viet Cong, except for the time of the Tet Offensive because that was horrendous, we were there for Tet. We weren’t under normal circumstances, we had to be very, very careful with all our supply convoys and things like that. The Jeparit, one of the ship’s

seconded by the navy to take all the ammunition and canteen stores and food from Australia to Vung Tau in Vietnam. And the Japarit was just a big supply ship, and they’d unload it at Vung Tau and they’d then have to transport all this stuff up the highway to Nui Dat, and it was surprising the

amount of stores that were lost between the unloading and the arrival because of – we don’t think it was – it was more theft than Viet Cong. There was a tremendous amount of theft going on all the time, that could be anyone doing the thieving. There was a real big black market

getting back to the convoys, the convoys had to be fairly heavily guarded to stop the theft. They used detectors so they used to have a lot of armoured personnel carriers army and things like that helping with the convoys. With the black market there was a tremendous black market in trading of spirits and tobacco and money

particularly green back [American dollar], so we weren’t paid in American currency, we were paid in what they called MPC military payment certificates which was just useless paper money, but it was a currency used on base. It wasn’t supposed to be used off base, you were supposed to use the Vietnam currency if you were going to town, and going to one of the

bars in town and things like that. But MPC was used within the American bases at their canteens and their PX [American canteen unit] and things like that. But there was a black market in trading MPC, anybody in town you give me MPC, they liked the American Green Backs, MPC, they preferred that before they preferred their own currency. And

a lot of that money, American Dollars, the black market and the exchange rate was so high, mainly because they wanted as many American dollars as they could get to ship up to North Vietnam. So that North Vietnam could buy things on the open world market using American currency.

Quite good, yeah,

um, a lot of people used to – because you didn’t know who was the enemy, a lot of people used to have problems with them. I didn’t find them all that bad. There were the Catholics and the Buddhists, basically between the locals. Most of the people that fled to the south

were Catholics and quite religious, and they couldn’t stand the communism at all. They didn’t want to know about communism. We had girls that looked after our barracks, cleaned our boots and made the beds and dusted and polished and did al the things that we didn’t like doing, whilst we were fixing aeroplanes. And they were great kids.

They used to joke with us and carry on, only young girls. They were very staunch Catholics, and you could have a joke with them and all that sort of thing.

We had the armed forces

broadcasts and everyone up there had a stereo or a transistor or reel to reel tapes. We all had those sitting beside our beds. We used to listen to all the propaganda, we used to get briefings just about on a daily basis. And the Americans were very keen on body count. And I think the body count was quite often exaggerated.

Oh the Americans exaggerated how many dead Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars and that sort of thing, it was quite often exaggerated, but we didn’t know it at the time, they would say “Oh yes, we’ve got al these KIA’s [Killed in action] and everything else. We had quite a few incidents fairly close to Vung Tau airport where we were, saw a few nasty

accidents there too, but one case where they decided they were going to build this – the Australians decided they were going to build this mine field and fence it off to stop the Viet Cong infiltration to a certain area and they fenced off this area and put all these mines in and this was one of the most one of the worst mistakes anyone made in Vietnam,

but they put this mine field in and they put the big wire fence up to protect it, and you know and this was going to stop Charlie [the Viet Cong] cutting across this area. About 11 kms long and once the Australians did it and they asked the agreement was that the RVA, this is the Republic of Vietnam Army the RVA was going to patrol the fence and

make sure everything was maintained and that the Viet Cong weren’t cutting holes in it and all the rest of it. Well the RVA didn’t do the job they were supposed to, the Viet Cong cut holes in the fence, managed to lift the mines and then replanted them for Australians troops to walk on and there were so many cases of

our blokes being booby trapped with our own mines it wasn’t funny. So the results were the poor buggers, the aeroplanes would come back full of blood and body bits and empty shells and we’d be cleaning them out and horrible. Because they do a lot of dust off, a lot of evacuation, particularly our own guys.

Then the Yanks decided they were going to – the long high hills weren’t very far from the air field and they were going to bomb the long highs very heavily with B52s, and then drop this nausea gas in which would infiltrate all the bunkers and holes they had dug in the long high hills and Charlie would have to come out because it was so

nauseating, and they’d be able to get the troops on to them then. Unfortunately the wind blew straight from the long high hills over our air field and we were all going down with vile nauseous, it was terrible.

Well you just felt so sick and weak, you were sick, you were weak your eyes were watering all the time, you could hardly scratch yourself. It lasted about 24hours, and we were getting a fairly

diluted form of it to what old Charlie would have got up there in the hills.

We had a fairly good working relationship with them, they were a bit gung ho [quick to take action without thinking of the consequences], some of them

weren’t all that well trained but basically if hadn’t been for the Americans we wouldn’t be here today, so I can understand the slightly different attitude to us, they think that America was the centre of the world and they hardly

knew of places like Australia or Vietnam before they hit, you know “Where’s that?” I remember when we were in Vietnam you were allowed to apply for R&R it was one trip you had a number of R&Cs which was rest in country, but you could have one R&R which was a trip out of

Vietnam for about 5 days, 5 or 6 days I forget how long it was now. And there were places, like Bangkok or Manila in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, places like that for R&R. I applied for – when I knew Australia was going to come on the

list, and so I said I would like to have my R&R in Australia, because Pat and I were engaged at the time and it’d be good to get home and see her. Any rate the first R&R flight from Vietnam to Australia I won a seat on it. It was a bit of a lottery there was 167

people on board the PAN AM 707 of which 25 were Australians of which 5 were air force. I was one of the air force guys, and it just came out of the hat, we just put our name in came out of the hat and so I was on board this first flight and I thought this is going to be great I will be able to have a beer and all the rest of it you know it was a dry flight [no alcohol available] all the way. 167 Yanks all dressed up

with all their medals and everything else and there was orange juice because we were landing at Mascot and we were all in our tropical garb and it was the middle of winter in Sydney, we landed in Mascot at 6.30 in the morning and the American Ambassador Ed Clark was going to meet the aircraft and welcome all these Yanks to Australia on the first flight. And so they

wanted everybody to be sober so there wasn't an ounce of alcohol on board the aircraft and I thought this is good we have got a 3 hour stopover in Darwin so we could make curfew the next morning, we’ll get stuck into the grog in the Darwin airport and it was closed. Most upsetting I had been through Darwin many times terribly upsetting not to be able to have a drink and then these Yanks said

when we got to Darwin they handed out these brochures on the NT [Northern Territory] and a lot of stuff about aboriginals and their artefacts and this Yank sitting beside me said “Hey guys how do you guys get on with these black fellas of yours?” I said “We get on famously they have all voting rights, they can go into any of the clubs and pubs and all this”. “Goddamn I

didn’t know you guys were so advanced”. Any way we got to Sydney and the aircraft landed there and we all had to line up in the freezing cold in our tropical uniforms and we were handed little toy Koalas each and Ed Clark made this big speech and then we were allowed to go on our way. Wasn’t bad.

Good.

Didn’t muck about saw Pat, and the families and then I had to go back after about 5 days head back. Didn’t get involved with anything much, just raced around from one place to another. Rush, rush, rush. And then back to Vietnam. Got back to see a couple of Chinook helicopters

collide on the ground and people get chopped up, I don’t whether you have ever seen it, the Chinook helicopter is a big twin rotor helicopter and they taxi with their nose up in the air at times, with just the back wheels on the ground. There was one running on the side of the taxi way and this other one got a bit close and their rotors interlocked and bits of rotors broke off

and they just went across the tarmac cutting people in half, torsos bouncing on the ground, horrible.

We got a couple of mortars and rockets on the airfield it was a bit frightening, we had to launch as many air planes as we could, they all went up to

Nui Dat and basically Vung Tau was a maintenance base and we launched the planes and went up to Nui Dat and sat on the pad up there until the army had a task for them. And then if they were doing a medivac or a dust off or anything like that, the aircraft would then pick up the patient whether it was an extraction from jungle or whatever, pick them

up take them to the field hospital which was on the base itself at Vung Tau. On the airfield. Take them to the hospital there, and the bodies would be taken out or survivors or the injured would be taken out to the helicopters and then they would come back to our flight line for a clean and a rearm before they went back to Nui Dat. So we didn’t see too much of the bodies but we used to see the aftermath.

There was a bit of that that went on at the Tet offensive so I can’t remember too much more except it was pretty hectic it was go, go, go and nobody slept until it was all over. And we were getting reports from Saigon and that was – Saigon and places like that really copped it and we weren’t as bad off.

Oh, I can't remember now. You might get an hour here, and an hour there. Maybe a couple of hours sleep, then you're up again, back at it. Particularly trying to keep as many aeroplanes serviceable as possible.

We had quite a lot of small arms fire. The way to fly in Vietnam was that you had to fly right

on the treetop at 120 knots, or you had to fly above 3000 feet. Anywhere in between was a danger zone, because that's where the AK47's could fire into the helicopters. Above 3000 feet altitude, the bullets just didn't reach you. On the deck, on the treetops, doing 120 knots, you're travelling so fast, and there's so much noise, wok-wok-wok

noise they just cant get an idea where you are it’s reverberating around them so you are quite safe right on the deck. We were putting SAS troops in to LZ [Landing Zone] or something like that, we used to have the aircraft with the SAS team in it on the deck right at 120 knots another at 3,000 ft talking to him and telling where the LZ was, rocking

along, he can’t see where he’s going, this other fella is directing him. They drop the troops in and then pull out real quick and fly away so they don’t give the position away where they dropped the troops in. With hot extractions we used to do the same, they’d let off smoke if there was a hot extraction, they’d fire a flare, if you have got an air craft up high that could see the moment

the flare was lit and the other one down below directing him around. Sometimes you had to winch them out, sometimes if the pad was big enough to get the helicopter in on.

We lost a couple of them through engine failures, where the engines just quit and they had to because of the erosion of the dust, the erosion of the compressors, we had to

modify them – that was one of the first things we did when we got up there, was modify them all by putting on dust particle separators and modified intake filters and things. But the aircraft – one of them had engine failure and he had very little choice of where he was going to land, he had auto-rotate and autorotation is keeping the whole rotor spinning you just cut off all the torque to the rotor and it will keep

spinning as long as it has got 127 rpm [revolutions per minute]. You can glide a fair distance and you just pull in pitch and you convert that kinetic energy into lift and it just lands nicely. In the middle of an ammo dump. He had to be a bit careful, so we got a bit bent and we got a new helicopter from the Yanks, and if we lost the aircraft they just gave us another one. I don’t know who paid the bills but this one was a Delta model, which is a slightly larger

than the Bravos than we were using, it was our first Delta model. We had sent it on a test flight L…. Henry was flying it and he was flying around doing the test flight and suddenly it ran out of fuel. One of the gauges hadn’t been calibrated properly and he thought he had plenty of fuel remaining and it just stopped and sat it down nice and gently on a mud flat, and it was sitting on this mud flat, nice, no damage done to the

aircraft at all. The Americans sent a big Chinook over to pull it out of the mud flat and carry it home. It wasn’t far away from Vung Tau. They picked it up and carted it over and they were putting it on our flight line at Vung Tau and the downwash from the big Chinook helicopter stirred up a lot of dust pilot of the

Chinook lost all visual references of where he was so he just pressed the button and jettisoned the load, brand new helicopter that had only flown once and had been landed nice and gently on a mud flap suddenly fell about 30 ft on to the tarmac. Bits skids and we had to fix that one, we got it flying again. Without too much trouble, a few skids and other

bits and pieces. But there were a few of them that had to be replaced up there, we had to put a Charlie model tail fin in a Bravo which is a later model one that had a bit of a curve in it to take a bit of load off the tail rotor because the other one was damaged fairly badly. We ended up with a few Delta models.

There was one case there, I remember we had these rescue hoists on the aircraft and they have got a cable and it goes into a drum and you can lower it down into the jungle and pick people up they have got jungle penetraters and we were pulling a soldier out of the jungle on the hoist and the cable broke for some reason and the poor old soldier dropped to his death.

So there was a mad enquiry then as to what would have caused the cable failure and all our hoists had to be inspected and if necessary new cables put in them and that sort of thing. And the only place we could do them was a ship, a floating factory called Corpus Christi Bay and that was in Vung Tau Harbour, and it actually you could overhaul just about

anything off an Iroquois helicopter had test stands the and they had engines running and he had 3 helipads on it, 2 in the stern and one up in the pointy end. And we were taking the hoist out and the Yanks were inspecting them and giving them a clean bill of health and we’d take one and put them on the aircraft and take another one back to them, and we were ferrying these rescue hoists out to them and this particular pilot he landed

the right on the stern – one of the stern helipads and hopped over the hoists and had a new one on board the aircraft to take back and for some reason he decided he was going to hover sideways off the side of the ship, instead turning round and flying off, and as we sort of hovered sideways off the side of the ship, still pointing the way ship was

going we suddenly fell down the side of the ship, because half the rotor was in ground effect and the other side wasn’t and we fell down the side of the ship and I thought this is it, in the drink as sure as anything and he just picked it up before it hit the water and flew away. I bet he doesn’t do that again wrong technique. You always turn around and fly off. So that was a bit frightening.

First of all we had to put armoured seats in them and they were Kevlar type armoured protection around the pilot and co-pilot, and that was about the only armour they had and the other ones were door gunners which you don’t need in Australia, don’t need them. Door gunners and then we started working on our own

gunship out of bits and pieces we could pinch and borrow and there were always good trading over there if you could barter, get something that somebody wanted and then you could barter, start of with something simple and end up with something grand. Just by swapping if you could.

Like if I could have got a little air conditioner that goes in the window, I could have come home with my own helicopter. Simple as that because I had a deal, bartered the air conditioner for an F100 pick up, pick up for a yacht, a yacht for a helicopter.

Very good actually, there were a few pilots that didn’t get along with very well because they were a bit snotty nosed and greater than thou, but most of them fitted in real well with all ranks and you had to have harmony with them

otherwise you would never get the job done. You can’t have a ‘them’ and ‘us’ type situation, you had to respect the rank but that was it. After the job was done we could go and have a beer together sort of thing.

No we used to

work very hard in Vietnam. As a matter of fact it was quite good, as I said when your roster came round to do duty crew, we looked forward to that because you got that 3 day break at the end. And being a corporal I was in charge of duty crew shift and I had another

mate, we shared a hangar with 35 Squadron with were operating Caribous. And used to try and line our duty crews up and we were in charge of the duty, like the corporal was in charge of the duty crew and we would pick our cress and we had a very good working relationship whereas there was one of each mustering on each duty crew, but we were working the same times, like the 35 Squadron, and Caribous and the choppers 9

Squadron, and if we could line our duty crews up together we used to help each other, if they were having a really rough time trying to get a Caribou serviced we would rush in and help him. And vice versa and it worked out fine, and because we had picked our crews each, we had the guys that were willing to get in and have a go. And at the end of the duty crew, the 3 days off we would just party for 3 days.

And we did that, we didn’t have to go anywhere, you could buy Aussie beer very cheaply at the canteen sort of thing, or through our messes and then we’d go and we would go around some of the American warehouses and swap a bit of beer for a great bit case of prime fillet steak and that sort of thing and then we would draw our rations and we’d get a jeep trailer and we’d load it up with beer and we’d

have our box of 150 steaks and all our rations and we’d just go down to the beach for 3 days and sleep on the beach and unwind that way. It was great.

Oh yes. They’d be working and they’d sneak down after work to see what we were doing. And join us, but we had a good crew and it worked fine. But

unfortunately that mate of mine that was with 35 Squadron, he’s dead now he passed away I am not quite sure what his injuries were but he was pretty crook when he came back.

Everybody used to enjoy having a beer and all the rest of it but I

don’t recall too many cases where it was abused or alcohol abuse or where people were unfit for work. We used to play hard but always up bright and shiny the next day to go and do your job.

Didn’t see any of it. Didn’t

see any of it. It might have happened with the grunts, sorry army and particularly with the Americans but we didn’t see much of it at all and we mixed quite a lot with the army guys particularly the SAS because the SAS guys had a relationship with 9 Squadron, because we were the ones who would pull them out of the shit if they were in the shit

sort of thing. But if they were cornered by old Charlie, 9 Squadron was always to the rescue.

It was a funny thing that the Caribou aeroplanes always had to have an annual compass swing,

and to swing the compass you had to drive the aircraft round on different points and use the land compass and verify the one you’ve got but there was just by chance there was too much metal in Vietnam, PSP [?] and stuff like that, we couldn’t swing compasses in Vietnam we had to go to Butterworth and it used to take about 4 or 5 days to do a compass swing in Butterworth

and the Caribous used to fly down there and empty virtually with a bunch of guys on board and that was our R&C [Rest and Convalescence] and we’d come back loaded to the gunnels with stereos and everything we could get, and it was convenient that there was too much metal in Vietnam to affect the compasses.

Yes.

Most of the time.

Went shopping, went round all our old haunts and saw all the old friends we still had, a lot of them were Malayan citizens, particularly all the old car club people and things like that. Getting back, talking about Vietnam and taking the Caribous

to Butterworth to do a compass swing, reminds me of the cunning we used to maintain the Sabres when we were in Ubon. We weren’t allowed to maintain, weren’t allowed to support Ubon operations out of Butterworth because Malaya wasn’t part of SEATO, it was fairly hard to swap aeroplanes over between Ubon and Butterworth.

The aircraft had to come back to Butterworth for heavy maintenance we could only do medium level maintenance in Ubon. So they had a Canberra bomber programmed to do a navigation exercise over Thailand and they would get all the diplomatic clearances and everything like that and they’d have it so the Canberra could take off from Butterworth fly up over

Thailand and then return to Butterworth. But unbeknown to them, there would be two Sabres tucked in real close underneath the Canberra so there’d only be one radar image. And the Canberra would fly all the way to Ubon over Ubon he would drop down low, the two Sabres that were coming up to replace the two that were coming back would land and the two that had to come back would tuck in under the Canberra and he climbed to height and back to Butterworth.

That’s the way we swapped our aeroplanes about without anybody knowing about it. There are ways of doing things. Like getting and R&C in Butterworth when you need a compass sweep.

In Vietnam? Only by air, basically.

It was too dangerous to travel on any of the roads, you could go into Vung Tau itself from the airport and a few of the people have driven between Vung Tau and Nui Dat and all around the places, but only in military vehicles and I wasn’t interested in travelling in military vehicles I used to travel everywhere by air.

We knew a fair bit, we weren’t too impressed with Jim Cairns and Tom Uren [Australian Politicians] and all those Labour goats that were out the front of the marches, that didn’t impress us at all. We weren’t too impressed with Jane Fonda and her ilk. Getting money and sending it to North Vietnam.

We just thought they were a bunch of idiots. And the Greenies didn’t impress us either.

Only what I saw on television, I didn’t see too much of it, I didn’t see any demonstrations around the airport. Probably too early at 6.30 in the morning, for them. Got to

have their little sleeps after living on a floral diet. So I didn’t see any of it. Saw a bit of it when I finally came back home though.

Quite O.K. We were there to do a job. Do it and then always

believe that you do the job and if you want to complain, complain afterwards. Do the job first.

Oh, no, not really corporal Level 6.

It

wasn’t bad, I didn’t complain about it. My biggest complaint about what we were paid was when we were in Malaya because the married person in Malaya doing the same job got such a huge allowance plus all the servants and as single person living in the barracks we only got about an extra 5

shillings and 7 pence a day or something, that was our additional allowance whereas the married guys were getting something like £1.3/6 or something. They were getting that as an additional allowance plus they were getting all the other benefits. That caused a little bit of a problem, but not much. In Vietnam we were all basically, it didn’t matter if you were married, single or what, we were all living on

base. At Butterworth the marrieds all went home at 5 o’clock because they had their free bus and whatever to take them back to the island and if there was any extra work to be done, the single guys had to do it. We could be working until all hours of the night, and still be on deck first thing next morning. You are supposed to get leave in lieu for overtime, but we never ever did. We did a lot more overtime than you’d get leave in lieu for.

But in Vietnam, we were all in the same boat, no-one had their wives or girlfriends close, so everyone had to work together.

Well it just meant that we had a lot of work to do, it meant that we not only had to change all the engines on the aircraft because they were

so unreliable you didn’t know exactly how much damage had been done to them. And they could quit at any time, and as well as that we had to put these dust particle separators on. Which was a modification which – it wasn’t – it was reasonably well engineered, but it took a lot of mucking about to get it to work right. Mainly because it was a rush job and all the documentation hadn’t been produced properly, it was

done by the Americans and they’d probably have a specialist team to go out and do this, but we were doing it ourselves with kits supplied by the Americans and we didn’t have this specialist team to do it and so we had to do it ourselves and work through the problems.

We had a number of them, we

had one helicopter that took quite a number of AK-47 rounds up through the nose of the aircraft and up through the floor, the pilot was flying and actually a round came up and sliced through the laces on his boot, and then smacked into the back of the instrument panel and smashed all the instruments. I think at the time he was doing a

winch extraction and he was taking ground fire, and he had somebody on the winch, and all his instruments went haywire and there was stuff flying everywhere. There were some slight flesh wounds, I don’t think there was anything serious. But they ended up bringing the aircraft home, but the instrument was completely shattered. Another incident – and of course once the aircraft gets home you have to put instruments and new panels and

things in them. Another one was a round went the side of what you would call a B pillar, between the doors and there’s a big electrical loom and it cut through all the electrical leads, so all the electrical services were lost in the aircraft, the intercom and it hit the door gunner, he had a flack jacket on, but it went through the outer skin through

this huge electrical loom, through the inner skin and then hit the door gunner in the chest in his flack jacket. Just stopped it and it burnt a hole on his skin, didn’t penetrate the skin, just left a burn mark. But it shot him from one side of the aircraft to the other. But they were lucky, no-one could communicate with them and they didn’t know what they were doing the four crew and everything was just going off the clock because of the loss of electrical power. They got that one home as well.

Another one had the tail rotor shot off. Rotor drive shaft shot out and so the tail rotor stopped and normally that’s serious in a helicopter, but he was flying fast enough to keep directional stability, because the fin on the back will give you that directional stability as long as you are going fast enough above about 90 knots I believe. And so he flew it all the way back to base and had to do an auto rotational landing. Cut the power drop the collective and

glide in. You won’t spin then. And plonk it down on the ground. And they are all taught that how to do an auto rotational landing it is just part of the training.

Just with a patch. We had the aircraft metalwork trade up there had bits of aluminium and stuff and just put a patch. There are set ways you can do

patching and everything else. As far as the looming was concerned, the electricians just get in there and cut the length of loom off and join all the wires up with another length of wires and joiners. So that you don’t have to rewire the whole aircraft, that would be a horrendous job. And you are back in business again. It doesn’t take long to fix them up. The actual helicopter

is basically a failsafe design, they should never ever get old. The helicopter itself because you can replace all these bits and pieces it’s like having the same axe all the time but it’s had 3 new heads and 4 new handles, but it still the same axe. So to speak.

Well they had daily inspections, pre flight inspections, daily inspections and then

there’s a C check and a D check and a E check and of course we did the heavy maintenance in Vietnam, we didn’t swap them over. Just like we did with the Sabres in Ubon. So we were doing heavy maintenance as well, and that is take the engines out and pull tear down and hot air inspections and replace all the parts that are needed as well as we may have to replace complete rotors and things, but they weren’t all that difficult to

maintain. The checks, a pre flight inspection normally was done by the duty crew they were early in the morning, and they did most of the pre flight inspections which is a walk around the aeroplane, check all the fuel levels, and fluid levels and a bit of a grease in vital points, you might have to get up and do a bit of a grease and just check the general

air worthiness of it. A daily inspection which is a bit longer is done on a – even though they call it a daily inspection is done once every 24 hours sort of thing. And then there’s the C check and the D check and I can’t remember exact intervals they came round but they would have to go into the hangar and you might take a full day in the hangar to do a C check and then maybe anything up to

a week to do the larger inspections.

We’d have to take all your drive shaft bearings out and replace them and things like that, and you might have to drain all the oils in the gear boxes and maybe inspections on the power plant

on the transmission, depending on the hours they’ve operated and etc.

It didn’t affect the aircraft too much, a lot of the pilot safety equipment had to be kept in an air conditioned environment, certain

avionics and radios and things like that had to be kept in an air conditioned environment, some of the instrumentation if you were working on that you had to it in as best possible clean room conditions that you could get and maybe a laminated bench to work on it, but the rest of the aircraft was rugged enough to be worked on and

operate in a tropical environment without too much difficulty.

No. Not that I know of. Some of the pilots had their favourite aircraft. Some of the pilots were a little bit on the flamboyant show-off type person, you know look at

me, look at me, look at my chrome bullets and my tied down holster. Things like that, some of them were show offs. But they were the ones that probably weren’t the most proficient of the pilots. The ones that were proficient didn’t need to show off.

No you flew what you were allocated for the day,

if you were asked to do a certain task and that was the aircraft to do it, it was yours. Take it.

We were very lucky we didn’t have very many losses, we certainly – I think there was only 5

air force fatalities. No I am sorry, after I left Vietnam I think there was a helicopter crew that was lost up there. But I think there were only about 5 fatalities I think. There were 2 Canberra – there was a Canberra crew that went missing in action, they still don’t know what happened to them. There was another Canberra crew that were

shot down by a missile, there was a cook that was stabbed by a Vietnamese policeman and killed. And I think there was a helicopter crew, I am not quite sure, I would be able to find out if I looked through my books, but I am not quite sure.

Any rate the American losses were much higher than ours, I think the Americans flew into hotter situations than we flew into, our crews flew into some fairly hot situations, but the Americans because they were operating in much larger areas and places, probably had higher casualty rates than we had. And I think our guys were probably better trained than the Americans anyhow.

We certainly maintained our aeroplanes better than the Americans maintained theirs. As far as percentages and things I don’t know.

The American Army were operating the helicopters, and they

treated them a bit like trucks. So they just didn’t have that TLC [tender loving care] that we are trained to give to the aircraft because they are more – the Americans operate on a certain loss rate and as long as they stay within that given loss rate everything is hunky dory. Whereas our loss rate is zero, as soon as we have an incident or any

malfunction we want to know why, we just don’t say it’s within the limits sort of thing.

I think we did a great job keeping the aircraft flying, particularly in the conditions they weren’t the best conditions to

work in but everybody hopped, and as I said we didn’t have too many people who were bludgers and on the uppers and downers and Valium and things like that. And so if you had a job to do you got in and did it, and get the aeroplane serviced and get it on line. That’s what we were paid for. And I think our guys all pulled their weight [did their job] fairly well.

Just a couple of days under 12 months. I was short by about 5 days or something on the 12 months tour.

Um, we everyone was looking

forward to their final trip home. We all had FYGMOS which we coloured in a FYGMO was an acronym for [Finally You Have Got Marching Orders] and the FYGMO was in the shape of a woman, and there were little parts with numbers starting off with 100 and ending up with 1, and you know

where that was, and we’d colour them, we’d start 100 days before leaving and you would start colouring in your FYGMO. I sent one to Pat my fiancé and colour in and she started to relent. Silly woman. She started off at number 1 or zero whatever

it is I can’t remember now.

Well it was a funny thing that it was when I was at Richmond around about 1966 1965/66 and a friend of mine

there was also an ex air force apprentice, a bit junior to me, he was working at the air craft depot. He was in a very bad car accident, he was driving a VW [Volkswagon] that overturned and fractured his pelvis and a few other things, and he ended up in Liverpool Hospital before being carted off out the RAAF Hospital at Richmond. And he

had a fiancé who was a school teacher at Coffs Harbour and actually his fiancé and Pat shared the same flat. I had to contact his fiancé and give them the message that my mate old Josh Gordon had been transferred from

Liverpool Hospital to the RAAF Hospital at Richmond. So I rang this phone number at Turramurra which happened to be Pat’s parents place, and spoke with Bev who is Josh’s fiancé. And she said “What are you doing for the day?” and I said “I am doing nothing, I am halfway in town getting my car serviced” and she said “We’re heading in town we’ll pick you up while you wait to get your car serviced”. I said “O.K.

what do I look out for?” they said “Look out for this Morris Major Elite that will be boring down the highway” and so any rate I was waiting there and this Morris Major Elite came boring down the highway and Pat was the driver, and I knew Bev but I didn’t know Pat, she was just the flatmate from Coffs Harbour. So I jumped into the car and we roared over to Sydney,

Pat’s parents were going to New Zealand on a holiday and they were going to do some duty free shopping. So we were in the car and we went across – they picked me up from Artarmon, they had come from Turramurra. And we were in the city in Kent Street or one of those streets and Pat said, “Oh I have left my wallet at home, you’ll have to get out and I’ll meet you at the duty free shop in Castlereagh Street”. So we got

out and Pat turned around and roared back to Turramurra to pick up her wallet. So we are waiting at the duty free shop in Castlereagh Street, for this woman to turn up again and she arrived in a terrible fluster, and said to her dad “Can you lend me some money to pay for the taxi” He said “What have you done now?” Any rate she had driven all the way back to Turramurra,

found her wallet, picked it up, hopped in her car and driven to St Leonards and decided to park at St Leonards rather than come all the way to town, and then she would get the train to town and a taxi to the duty free shop. She left her wallet in the car at St Leonards. So she had no money and she had to pay for the taxi. Then she had to borrow money off her dad so she could do some duty free shopping for herself for her

dad to take to New Zealand and bring all the way back for her. I said that woman must be a real scatterbrain. That’s how I met Pat. She could drive a car and I was organising a car rally for a social club and Pat was not a bad sort of a car driver, so I talked her into going on this car rally. It ended up on the banks of the Hawkesbury River somewhere.

And Pat went in this car rally and ended up winning the women’s prize for the best woman peddler. And then we sort of camped for the night on the river banks of the Hawkesbury. And that’s how I met Pat.

We got engaged, we virtually were

getting – we promised before we got engaged to see Vietnam out. Pat still was a teacher at Coffs Harbour and I was an airman in Vietnam and still wanted to be engaged on my return. So we got engaged right after I got back and we got married in January 1969. About 18 months later.

We corresponded fairly frequently. Pat was a sort of a night owl she could stay up all night working and writing and doing assignments and things. I could never do that I used to get up early in the morning. She’d be writing a letter to me and her flatmate at the time was another

girl teacher. She used to attack the letters with red – she’d be marking books and she’d attack the letters and she’d either give me big red ticks or write some smart thing on it. So Wendy – we are still very good friends. When I got back from Vietnam and we’re back into the squadron,

if there was any exercises going on, we always used to over night we’d be flying helicopters to Rockhampton or something like that. And so if possible we’d overnight in Coffs Harbour and we’d have the Coffs Harbour welcoming committee. And Wendy, the one who wrote over the letters and scribbled on them, she was part of the Coffs Harbour welcoming committee and so was Pat. As soon as the helicopter was heard, they’d

straight out to the airport. Anyway Wendy ended up marrying one of the chopper pilots. And went up to Vietnam a bit after when I was up there, and he came back and he had a career in flying and we are still good friends.

Didn’t have a great deal of worries, we had a great deal of trust in one another. That was the main thing. She started doing car maintenance courses and all sorts of things whilst I was in Vietnam, and then she started maintaining everyone’s car and pulling points out and plugs and things.

Yeah.

You hear of it and see it, a few guys were rather distraught about what was happening.

A heck of a lot of that. You had to be very careful. I wasn’t at all interested in – because you just had to –

there were so many prostitutes that were sympathetic to Charlie the Viet Cong, and you would hear some terrible stories.

Razor blades inserted into the vagina so you could get in but you couldn’t get out. That sort of thing. Do I need to go any further?

There were. I used to find that the worst blokes that chased the prostitutes were the guys who were already married, not the guys that were single. The guys that were already married, hadn’t really had a

life, they were chasing it all the time. They were the worst drunks, the worst of everything. Probably got married young and hadn’t seen much of life and suddenly they’re turned loose in a land of milk and honey sort of thing, with lots of bucks in their pockets and they were uncontrollable. Whereas the guys who had spent a bit of time being single

and had been there and done that, and been around the traps a few times, were far more sensible.

It was a Qantas flight, and of course the Qantas boys are now recognised with medals and everything for

flying what they call Skippy squadron flights into Vietnam. It was a good trip. There was a fair bit of alcohol available on the aircraft, a stopover in Darwin for a while and then into Sydney early morning. And then they turned the aeroplane around and flew somewhere else. We were all let loose.

I can remember everybody waiting at the international terminal in Sydney for us and it was good. Good to be out of there. It was a bit hard to get on board that flight because we had a flight out of Vung Tau in a Caribou early in the morning, probably 7.30, 8 o’clock or something. And

that took us to Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon, and then we were locked up in a place called Camp Alpha in Saigon and you weren’t allowed out of that until the time of your scheduled departure. So that you couldn’t get lost in downtown Saigon. And Camp Alpha was the pits [was bad]. It was an American sort of transit base, and they put all their bad grog and soft drinks and everything they

couldn’t sell in their PX [American Canteen Unit] canteens, it was all at Camp Alpha where you were a captive audience. They had Lone Star Beer there which had a big target on the base of the carton, and I reckon they should have used the base of the carton it for target practice before they took the cans out. It was foul Texan grog. They had horrible soft drinks. But it was interesting getting out of Vung Tau. A story that will probably have to wait

until the next tape because it will take a while to tell it.

End of tape

Well going back in Vung Tau I was very friendly with a service policeman, an air force service policeman and we used to do what you would term shore patrol. And there was always an American, a

Vietnamese and an Aussie, in their jeep just riding around doing shore patrols. And I used to just to fill in time would go on patrol with them. And they visited all the outer bounds areas and all the brothels and that sort of thing and all the bars. It was a good way of seeing how different people lived, and how they played up, and we always had a Vietnamese guy there because he spoke the local lingo, and

to talk to any of Yanks or arrest any of the Yanks and the Aussie to tend to the Aussie blokes. Nearly air force type, because the army had their patrols and the navy had their patrols. This friend of mine, this service policeman, when I was leaving Vietnam it was normally a party night, the last night you were in country.

And so we were partying on fairly well and these barracks that we had were two storey dormitory type barracks and most of them were two storey and a staircase and the staircase was made out of timber with wooden railings and everything. Anyhow they decided they were going to play a little trick on me so I couldn’t get on that Caribou to get out next morning.

Grabbed the service policeman and grabbed his handcuffs and handcuffed me to the rail on the staircase on this barracks blocks. So there I was I was handcuffed and I couldn’t do a thing. Everyone else had gone to bed. And I am there – how am I going to get out of this? I started to kick and everything else and eventually I kicked the rail apart, and got the handcuffs off but I was bleeding all over where I had been

struggling. And I went up to the spot where the service policeman was living and he was snoring away in his bed and I found the keys to the handcuffs, took them off and I handcuffed him to his bed, which was a steel bed, and I put the keys in my pocket and I came back to Australia still with the keys to the handcuffs in my pocket. Teach you to lock me to the – but I had skin off all over, particularly around the

wrists and everything. Where I was handcuffed to the railing. I made the Caribou, I got on board. Then I was down into Saigon and my experience at Camp Alpha wasn’t real good. I was glad to get out of there and on board the Qantas flight home. And everyone’s there to welcome you home. I had my car

stored in Glen Innes. I am not quite sure whether I flew back or went by train. Went back to Glen got my car out of storage and started to hit the town for a bit of leave for a while and then Pat came over from Coffs Harbour, and we had a bit of time together and I had to go back to Canberra didn’t I? I was posted back to 5 Squadron. So I loaded up my

car and drove back to Canberra, and I think one of the first things that happened was I was round near the Prime Minister’s Lodge and there was a demonstration in the middle of the road with moratorium bastards sitting in the middle of the road, and so I just put my car into first gear and went through the middle of them. They were bouncing off the bonnet and I got in trouble with the local law then for doing that.

But I saw red [got angry] as soon as I saw these dole bludgers living on a floral diet sitting in the middle of the road, when they should be working.

They were moving too quickly, they were getting out of my road. I wasn’t supposed to do it. I had to stop there and let them be boss.

Naughty, naughty, but when I said I had just got back from Vietnam he said o.k.

Oh yes. We actually sprayed Agent Orange ourselves out of helicopters and the

Agent Orange was used quite a bit around Nui Dat and areas they wanted to defoliate and what better way than to spray it out of a helicopter.

Well it’s a bit like using Roundup or any of those herbicides it works the

same way, everything just dies and the weeds fall off. The grass just dies and all that sort of thing.

Depends on the concentration. If it is really high concentration it works really quickly. I don’t know I didn’t spray it on any of the jungle areas. I didn’t spray any of it myself. I just came into contact

with it through being in the helicopters because the spray drifts in everywhere.

Yeah, you’ve got to wash it off and everything else. See they used a lot of it, it’s a sort of a liquid, treacly type liquid, and they thin it down. But when it comes in a big drum it’s like treacle and you mix it with

water so that you can spray it. Depends on the ratio that you mix it at.

That’s where the army base was and they wanted to have certain clear areas so that if there was any movement of personnel in those cleared areas they’d know, they’d be able to detect them.

Most of the Agent Orange the Americans used was on the Ho Chi Minh trail trying so they could see what was going up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. But in other selected areas they certainly used a lot of it just locally to clear certain areas and then they could have detection equipment there to see if there was any movement at night.

No. Not in Vietnam.

Didn’t see any napalm, the only time I have seen napalm was at demonstrations or on movies and things like that. But I have seen it demonstrated at air shows and different military shows where they have shown

what napalm can do. But I haven’t seen it used in anger.

It just spreads out and it’s a jellified liquid that just bursts into flame. It’s like a big jelly and it just spreads out and goes up in flames. I saw the results of it when I was in Saigon. Where they bombed the

palace, the rebel pilots bombed the palace. The Americans were quite upset with these rebel pilots because they didn’t follow the American training doctrine of bomb the building first and then put the napalm in. They put the napalm in first and then bombed it, and of course the napalm just burnt on the outside of the building and the bombs just blew the fires out. So the

Americans were quite upset about their training and not being followed. I suppose the old president who was in the palace thought it was a good idea.

I found it hard to put up with the moratorium people and this

living on a floral diet and drug taking and dole bludgers. I found that pretty hard to put up with.

Everywhere you go. You’d find – and I think we are paying for you to live like that with their – the hippy type attitude they had. They didn’t want to care about anything, they just wanted to

smoke pot [marijuana] and eat flowers and eat daisies or whatever. Yeah.

Well, basically I went back so there was some nucleus of experience with the helicopters, because this was when they were doubling the strength of the squadron. They suddenly realised that, actually it was a little bit before that, they suddenly

realised they needed some experience back in the squadron. And we’d had 2 or 3 fatal helicopter prangs. At least 2, I think there may have been 3, where the helicopter main rotor had parted company with the rest of the helicopter and chopped the tail boom off and everything just fell in a heap. And of course everybody on board was killed.

And they were trying to work out what caused the accidents, and it was a fairly serious sort of a situation because all of the accidents happened in a training environment. Flying the aircraft, learning to fly in training. And it was I don’t think there were too many

instructors that were in the fatal accidents, I think they were the pilots not long after they were given their right to fly solo sort of thing and they were flying around together. In a solo attitude. And it appeared by all – in the – that the main mast had snapped

and the disc had come off and come back round and cut the tail boom off and the fuselage just falls to the ground. And it was done either by hydraulic snatch what they call a hydraulic snatch where the hydraulics suddenly lock because everything is powered by hydraulics into the squash plate and tilting your disc and everything. The Iroquois can be flown without hydraulics

some of the early models had single hydraulic pumps and the low ones had twin hydraulic pumps in case of failure, and it can if you have got two pilots, fly them manually. But it’s a heavy work load. So they decided instead of just having a pilot and a crewman which they used to fly initially, in a non combat situation. Combat situation was always two pilots.

They would always have two pilots in case of hydraulics and actual loss of hydraulics and we did all sorts of tests on the hydraulic oil and we did a spectromatic oil analysis and we analysed every bit of debris that may be in the hydraulic systems. We had hydraulic test cart where you could take this hydraulic test cartout and you could plug it on to the aircraft and you didn’t

have to have power to the engine to the hydraulics because this thing can do it for you. And they said that that test cart was contaminating the hydraulic systems. And we put all new filters and we checked out the test cart and said no there’s nothing wrong with that it can’t be contaminating the rest of the aircraft systems. The air force was at a bit of a loss as to explain these

incidents. Accidents. So they completely went through the whole maintenance system of an Iroquois helicopter and they’d do super de-service which was a major service only done by very experienced people and at the same time we would do a full manual

check to see if we were doing everything in accordance with the manuals. And that they were correct in accordance with the manufacturer’s requirements. And we would do all proving at the same time and make sure we were using the right tools and the right equipment. So I was one of the workers on this super do service, being one of the most experienced

guys. And the service was being supervised by staff officers that came out of support command and ops command they were the supervisors and we were the workers. Everything was being done and double checked and triple checked. We were probably

into that super deservicing by about 3 weeks or so, Pat and I had been married, we were married in January. This was in around about March/April somewhere about that. And

we had been living in a little flat in Queanbeyan and I had been allocated a married quarter, and I had spent all week end moving furniture from my flat to this married quarter in Canberra itself and I remember I was filthy dirty, I didn’t have a clean pair of overalls I arrived at work late

and I was arrested straight away and told I had to go and see the CO [Commanding Officer]. And I thought what have we done? I marched into the COs office and he said “You were late for work”

I said “Yeah, I have just moved into the married quarters and I am running late and I am dirty and I haven’t got clean overalls and I hadn’t done any washing or anything”. He said “Well we won’t worry about that now because you have just been commissioned”. I had to go home then because I couldn’t work on this aircraft anymore because I wasn’t allowed to. I was a commissioned officer and you are not allowed to work on an aircraft but I could supervise.

And um, I went home, Pat was sitting in the lounge room unpacking boxes. I said “You don’t have to do that anymore” “Why?” I said “You are a lady now”. So um, that was a moment in my life. Really was.

We’d only been together – married for about 2 months I think. I got sent off to all these different schools and things and I took about 3 months together that year.

What’s that?

I was sent to Point Cook in Victoria and learned how to become a gentleman.

I had to do a knife and fork course so you don’t drop your peas on the floor. You have to know all the Ps and Qs [manners and etiquette] and that was rather interesting. Being a very experienced airmen and suddenly arriving in a training situation with a

lot of guys that are straight from university or straight off civvy street. They are being commissioned without any background. A mate of mine and myself we ran rings around these guys. They didn’t know where they were going. We had years of experience probably, I would say about 30 years of experience between the two of us.

The way we used to play up, we used to tease them and get them into trouble with the instructors. They had some funny ways down at Point Cook of assessing people. If they wanted to assess your leadership abilities, they’d give you a really responsible job and see how you would handle it within the course. So

we had to go on a bivouac [camp] towards the end of the course, and they picked 3 guys out and this bivouac was to last 3 days, they picked 3 guys out and made them camp commandant for 1 day at a time and we had a camp which was near where Harold Holt [Australian Prime Minister] died near Cheviot Beach, it was in a

valley on the Portsea Peninsula. We had all these tents down in this valley and the staff were to act as the enemy and try and infiltrate our camp and the camp commandants were to set all the rules and everything else, and the staff used all sorts of communist tactics of loud speakers and broadcasting all their propaganda

“You Aussie swine whilst you were fighting the war other blokes were making love to your wife”. Anyhow we were – the camp commandants had a big briefing of all us students and said that if the staff raid our camp you are to say the word, the magic password of the day was

magpie, scream out magpie and everybody runs to the outside of the camp and let the enemy infiltrate the camp and then we come in from all sides shooting at them. I thought this is good, shoot your mate on the other side of the circle you know. This is real good. That was the camp commandant’s decision you see, and I thought ooow. Real good. I also knew that when we have this exercise up on Cheviot Hill, we were to defend it and the staff would be

trying to take Cheviot Hill from us. But they would be using blank ammunition and thunder flashes, and we had nothing. Just say bang. So my mate Mick and myself went to town and bought all the biggest bungers we could buy, in those days, and I went to safety equipment section and I got all the old time expired flares.

And I had this arsenal, we weren’t going to be beaten by this mob. They reckon they know everything. At any rate, being officers and gentlemen, we were invited down to have drinks with the staff at Pearce Barracks, which is an old army barracks on Portsea Peninsula, and our camp was about half to three quarters of a mile away, walk over the sand dunes and go and have drinks with them. Mick and I

were the last ones to leave naturally, after drinks and it was night time and we were walking up over this last sand dune and there was this camp laid out below us, in the valley and a bit of movement there and I thought oh well, we’ll see whether magpie works, and I grabbed one of these flares out of my pocket and I shot a big double red over the top of the camp. Well you should have seen them “Magpie, Magpie, Magpie”. Every

direction and we rolled around on this sand dune laughing our heads off. Until next day when I got called up in front of the chief instructor, because the air sea rescue saw the double red go up and thought there was a ship in distress. So I was a naughty boy again. But it didn’t affect my career at

all. Another instance on this bivouac – we had a course mother who was an English teacher in uniform, of course, and taught us how to write properly and to speak proper, as well as eat proper and do all those things. We are up the top of this Cheviot Hill in our little defensive position, and I could see the course Mum

crawling up the hill the way they do it with the rifle across their arms in the dark, in the dark and laying low and crawling towards us. And I thought here comes course mum, and they’ve got all the ammunition and we’ve got nothing. So I grabbed the old flare again and I wasn’t going to get caught by air sea rescue this time, so I shot it right down low right beside him and set the grass on fire.

The hill went up in flames, and of course old mum was jumping up and down. I got in trouble again. But I graduated. Oh no you have got to do those things, that’s life.

Yeah, Pat stayed there I was off on these courses, I had to do my knife and fork course at Point Cook

and then I had to go to Wagga and do an engineer officers basic course and Pat was teaching at Campbell High at the ACT [Australian Capital Territory] at the time, so she had to stay while I was doing these courses. And in that time she was also playing representative hockey for the ACT against New Zealand

and she tore all the cartilages in her knee so as well as having to look after everything for herself, she had her leg in plaster for ages. Because they had to whip her cartilage out and she’d lock herself out of the house and have to break in through the laundry window with her leg in plaster and things like that. So we had a couple of weeks together

between courses and then I went off to Wagga and then after doing the course at Wagga I got posted to Amberley in Queensland. Pat’s still in Canberra and she had to finish the year of teaching, and I had a flat already arranged up in the Ipswich area, and Pat did the removal by herself sort of thing, and got it all

arranged and came up and joined me and we soldiered on from there. But in that first 12 months, because I was at Amberley by about October I think, she had to finish, so it might have been a bit earlier, so it might have been September, I’d had all the courses and just a few weeks between courses and postings, to see her. We only had about 3 months together in that whole 12 months. And then Pat joined

me at Amberley and she got a job teaching in Queensland, but because she changed from one system to another education system, she loses all her seniority, and that happened so many times it wasn’t funny. From Queensland back to NSW [New South Wales] and she started to teach in the NSW system again, and then we went back to

Queensland and then she started to teaching in the Queensland system and then we went down to Victoria so she was losing all her seniority. Wherever she went she lost seniority and had to start in a new system. I don’t know whether she taught in Victoria, kids might have been growing up enough for her not to. Keep her occupied.

Looking back on it I enjoyed working on the Sabres, because they were a challenge, I wanted to get away from Sabres, I wanted to get away from fighters that were coming back for a drink every 40 minutes. I wanted something you could send away and they would be away all day sort of thing.

Helicopters weren’t any better than fighters, they have very short duration or endurance, they didn’t last very long but at least they could be maintained away from fixed base sort of thing. But the Sabre was probably the one I enjoyed the most, because it was the biggest challenge. And the posting I enjoyed most I

think was when I was at 2 Squadron with on the Canberras. The Canberra was a good aeroplane they were the lady of the sky and everything, but I enjoyed the job. I was a senior engineering officer.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I firmly believe that,

not that I had any of my really close relatives that were in the services. My Dad built air strips in the Darwin area in the early days of the war. Then he had fly home because my mother took very ill. But he was with the civil construction corps building the air fields round the Darwin area.

And my uncle was the one who was in the air force, but we weren’t all that close.

Possibly, um, when I came to Tamworth, when I joined East-West Airlines, I decided I would go marching

on Anzac Day. Up until that time I hadn’t marched at all really. So I started marching here in Tamworth and I joined an association, a Vietnam Veterans’ Association up in the Blue Mountains. Even though I was still living in Tamworth. Go down to Sydney every Anzac Day, that was good while I was still with the airlines, because I could go down and back in a day and it didn’t cost me anything.

I’d just jump on board the aeroplane and go down there and march, and see me old mates and come back.

Yeah in a lot of them. Some of them are still having trouble getting over PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder]. It’s good

now that the Vietnam veterans have made it so that it was never recognised. PTSD was never recognised as being an illness. They used to put it down once upon a time as shell shock, and just gone crazy, schizophrenia. They used to have all sorts of funny names for it. Um

these manic depressants, and things like that. But the Vietnam veterans became very – it’s funny how – they weren’t welcomed home, they weren’t welcomed into the RSLs, the RSLs were First World War and Second World War and they were diggers [veterans] that had been overseas, they didn’t want to know anyone who hadn’t been overseas. They didn’t want to know the Korean [War] veterans.

They didn’t want to know the Malayan veterans from the Malayan CT days, the old Cottage Territories, Malayan emergency, they didn’t want to know them. They were real wars, and the old diggers in the RSL movement have got a lot to blame, have to accept a lot of blame as to why their ranks are thinning now, because they wouldn’t

welcome people that had been in the latter wars. And that’s wrong. The Vietnam veterans because they weren’t welcome to be in the RSLs, went and formed their associations and became very militant. And because they were all young, a lot of them were conscripts that came from very well educated backgrounds they started

to lobby the repat [repatriation] system, and they have got a lot of things accepted now that were never accepted earlier. They have got counselling services that go round and help people. The Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service is doing a wonderful job and all the benefits that they have got for themselves are now flowing the other way to the diggers from the Second World War

and I don’t think there would be too many left alive from the First World War, some of them are getting benefits now unless it had have been for the Vietnam veterans jumping up and down and doing what they did because the weren’t welcomed home and weren’t welcomed into the Anzac tradition of joining the RSL. Most of the

RSLs now you will find are being possibly run by ex Vietnam guys. And boosting the organisation. They have got a lot to answer for those old diggers that didn’t welcome us home.

Yeah. But we came back in – being in the air force, we came back in little small dribs and drabs.

So there was never a whole battalion coming home like with the army. I think the army felt it more, because the army and the navy, they either had a whole battalion or a whole ship’s company used to march up the street when they got home. But the air force, we just come back in little pockets. And so very rarely did the air force march as a unit. Because we were too small, so we didn’t

have a tradition of welcome home.

In what other services or what, how do you mean?

The air force is very – because we were virtually on a two year cycle, a two year posting,

every two years you were posted to a new unit. And you know you are always packing your bags and moving and starting up with a new group of friends, and it became a very close circle of people, you knew people in every base. Whereas in the army, they might only know people within their own regiment. But we knew people all round Australia, in every base, because we kept this

movement and one minute you were working in this machinery and the next you were over here on something totally different. Like the last ten years of my married life in the air force, the last ten years we lived in eight different houses in three different states. That’s how often we moved. It’s incredible. When we finally moved to Tamworth and we bought this farm

my wife said to me “Don’t you dare move me again”. We were sick of moving, and it was bad on the kids, when we moved here it was great. But you know, as I was saying, my experiences with – after Vietnam with Iroquois we went to, we took 2 Iroquois to New Guinea, we took them

up in a Hercules a couple of Hercules and we pulled these helicopters out of the back of the big Hercules and the native New Guineans said they call a helicopter a Jesus Christ in their pigeon English and then they couldn’t understand this big bird giving birth to a big bird, when you pull it out the back. Quite

lovely people, but I wouldn’t go to New Guinea today if you tried to send me there, because the whole nature of the place has changed. There was the Australian pilot who was flying for Papua & New Guinea Air Lines was shot the other day in Mt Hagen. Just – somebody wanted his money. And he had flown from Cairns to Mt Hagen and

parked the aeroplane and went to an ATM [Automatic Teller Machine] to get something money.

Well, I had had twenty three years in the air force and never been south of the Murray, and finally they sent me to Melbourne to do a staff job and I reckoned with my experience and rank and everything else

I should be still back on the squadrons where it counted most, rather than flying a desk or pushing a pen and signing vouchers. The staff job was not very rewarding and I put up with it for 18 months and I looked at the rest of my career and I could see that the way the air force was going was that I would be spending

90% of my time doing staff work either in Canberra or Melbourne and I didn’t want to live in either place. And I didn’t want to do the staff work. I wanted to be more with the nuts and bolts where I would be interacting with people to get the job done rather than working in a semi military civil occupation talking with bean counters [financial people] and bureaucrats and pushing bits of paper around.

I did the night school and that was basically to give me qualifications to a diploma in aircraft engineering. I bombed out [failed] on a couple of subjects at night school,

so I didn’t end up being selected to do the diploma in aircraft engineering, and instead I was posted to 5 Squadron to learn all about Iroquois helicopters, and from there it led to Vietnam and back to Canberra and on coming back from Vietnam, I decided I was going to apply for a commission direct out of the field

sort of thing. So I put in an application. And I think it was – and I went through the nausea of all the psych tests and the battery of examinations and interview boards and all that sort of thing. Then it was some 5 months later that it happened. I was called into the office. The people on the base knew the week before

that I was game to be commissioned. But no-one was game to tell me, or to have a clean pair of overalls and be at work on time. That’s just the way the cookie crumbled [it happened]. And then I went to sign for my married quarter and they suddenly said “You’re not supposed to be in that married quarter, that’s been allocated to a Corporal”. All these different things. So, a little bit of explaining.

I was thrilled to bits. It had taken me – the engine fitting train was a very slow promotion, so if I had have been – when I was a corporal, if I had have been in the instrument trade or one of the other faster moving trades I probably would have been a flight sergeant.

That was one of the reasons I started going to night school, because engine fitting was just a case of waiting for someone to fall of the perch [die] before anyone got promoted. So as I said it took me something like fourteen years to be a corporal and six years to get from corporal to squadron leader. So maybe corporal is the most important rank. It took the longest to get.

I always had a good rapport, probably that was one of the things that was frowned upon, but I was a more of a people person than a systems person. I didn’t like playing the system I liked using and getting people motivated to do the work without having to use the system and the rank to get it done.

Some of them turned out to be quite good, some of them are in fairly high positions now. It all depends on the person. I am a great believer in doing any job requires 90% common sense and 10% specialist knowledge. If you haven’t got the 90% common sense, you might as well

give up the ghost [give up the job]. 10% specialist knowledge is easy, you know you get that, experience and everything else, but the common sense is the most important thing in all walks of life, so many people lack it.

When I went to

Amberley, first up, my posting from the department of air was to be OIC [Officer In Charge] Sabre servicing flight at Amberley in 30D, no doubt based on my previous experience with Sabres. When I got there my CO which was Group Captain Compton, said

“You could run that hangar standing on your head, I have got another job for you”. And he gave me the job as assistant depot production engineer. Because the wing commander that was the production engineer was on his swan song and about to retire. And he wasn’t too interested in getting things done, so he needed a – I was put there to get things rolling and getting things done. Even though the wing commander

might have been putting his feet up. That was the reason I was put there. Then the wing commander for some reason or other left that job and I virtually did as a little boggy pilot officer, I did the wing commander’s job, and it was well recognised the CO would not give me a

higher duty allowance, but he certainly gave me a good report annually, and when I left that job he gave me a tremendous report which helped me further my career. When I left Amberley, after a couple of years I was posted back to Wagga training apprentices and adults, in charge of

one of the training flights and I had a staff of probably a dozen people. They were all NCO instructors with a warrant officer, and I ended up as the OIC – the flight maintenance – I have got to remember the name of it now, maintenance training flight which brought everybody together from the various trades, the instruments, the

air frame, the engine and we put them all together in sort of a pretend squadron environment so they would learn how to interact with one another and do servicing on aircraft. I also had to run the flight line as it was at that time, for visiting aircraft.

Basically that cleanliness is next to godliness. Everything had to be

clean, you had to account for every nut and bolt you put on the aircraft or took off the aircraft, you weren’t allowed to drop anything on the floor like a split pins or a wire or anything. It all had to be accounted for because that debris that you leave lying around can cause accidents and deaths. Because it becomes a foreign object and you get foreign object damage to aeroplanes. We had to teach them all the paperwork, you’ve done the maintenance and now do the

paperwork. The job’s not complete until the paperwork’s done correctly, to sign that aircraft out as being fit to fly. And basically the old common sense, safety first, don’t do anything silly around aeroplanes they’ll bite you. That was it. You know.

I think they looked up to me in a

sense, I’m a bit of a fatherly type rather than a dogmatic disciplinarian, because some of the other flight commanders were exactly that type, they used to rule with a big stick and they were not very well liked. I had no problems with them and I used to mix with them all, I was in charge of their motor cycle club and things like. Mix with them,

with their bikes and their cars and a bit of motor sport. If you get a kid interested in a hobby, I don’t care what sort of hobby it is, but if it’s motor sports or cars or bikes, they are not going to be out causing problems in other areas, because they’re hobbies are going to be taking up their spare time. And they’re not going to be in town getting drunk and everything and all that sort of thing that brings bad vibes everywhere.

After Wagga it was back to 3OD. I think the F111s [jet] came in early at Amberley when I was there first. I had another job because the F111s were put on hold and

weren’t going to be delivered. They were supposed to be delivered in 1968, and they weren’t going to be delivered until something like 1973. So when I was there in the early 70s, I was also made officer in charge of engine overhaul squadron. To do all the F111 engines. We had 17 brand new engines for the F111s, we had no aeroplanes, but we had these

17 spare engines. Our task was to pull one engine apart completely, and then pretend to put it through an overhaul cycle and rebuild it and run it in the test stand and it was called a tool proving exercise and a manual proving exercise as well as all the new buildings that were designed to handle it. So that was one of my jobs as well as being the assistant depot production engineer.

We had very small staff working on that. I had some funny things happen there, but I don’t think we’ve got all day to talk about it.

We were back at Wagga, from Wagga I went back to Amberley, back as the OIC maintenance management flight. By this time I was a flight lieutenant

and I was running all the maintenance management for a large depot which had responsibilities in F111 DC reseal which is causing a lot of medical problems nowadays for blokes that were doing it. We had all the airframe work on numerous aeroplanes, we had a big paint shop, we had the F111

engine overhaul right from the start to the finish, all the test stand for engines, we had the Chinook maintenance, we had Iroquois maintenance there, and I was in charge of basically the maintenance management of all those areas and had a small staff there. We had to stay within

budget and get things done on time. I suppose I was there 12 months. 197 – I am not quite sure, 1972, ‘73 ‘74 in Wagga, 1975 at – as OIC

management flight, and then I was promoted to squadron leader and posted to 2 Squadron Errasenger [?] .

2 Squadron was great. We had probably one of the oldest aeroplanes in the inventory, the air force inventory, the real lady of the skies, we had a good crew of people,

great CO, some of the pilots were a bit uppish, most of them were good fellas. I used to go along to their briefings every morning and say “Now listen if you are guys aren’t doing anything constructive come down to the hangar and ask questions and look at the aeroplane, and you may learn something that will save your life one day, when you are flying these aeroplanes. The more you learn about the systems and

what makes them work the more you talk with the engineers, the happier and safer you are going be flying them”. Quite a lot of the pilots took me up on the offer to come down and talk, because the troops liked to talk to them too. Some of them were too uppish, too big time to do it. But basically they were all good. We used to do a lot of deployments, with the squadron, we used to have to do – the F111s couldn’t go

anywhere without a back up rescue aeroplane, so the Canberra’s were always on stand by to support F111s. They were the fancy aeroplane at the time. They used to start them up and blow all our bits and pieces out of the hangar and I used to fight quite often with the boss of the F111 maintenance people. But we had detachments that

went to Jakarta for at least 3 months of the year. I would try and change our troops over every month so that you didn’t spend 3 months away from home but you had a month away and you could buy your goodies duty free and have a bit of a break and get home to Mum and mow the lawn again. And it worked well. If you take them away for 3 months you find that there would be some tension in the married quarters. So we would have 3

months tour in Jakarta doing photo mapping, we used to have to take all our own equipment our labs all our gen sets to provide our own power, our own vehicles to travel around in. We did everything ourselves, and our communication we built our of, we duly rigged stuff out of the Canberra for communications because you couldn’t rely on the control tower. So we had a little arc

34 radio set powered by a trolley rectifier powered by our own generators with a blade antenna on the hangar roof which we put up there off the back of a Canberra. We even took our own refrigerator and washing machine with us. So we could keep our beer cold and wash our overalls. We also had in the photo labs we had to have air conditioning to keep the photos pretty and nice and of course the Indonesians wanted to look at our

photos to see what we were taking. We used to keep all the safety equipment gear in the air conditioned environment where the photo lab was and that sort of thing. Everything was air transportable. Put it in the Herc [Hercules].

We were photographing Sumatra, all of Sumatra, it was to produce maps that were very accurate maps, and this was part of our defence aid

to Indonesia. And of course we got copies of the maps as well. But, it all started off instead of using the old theodolite up on the top of the mountain, they had geo servo [service] stations which the army servo unit had put out on the ground and they put panels, big marker panels around the geo servo station and that geo servo station was accurately fixed to a position on earth by a satellite. They

then photographed the panels of the geo servo station using a wild RC10 camera put in a Plater supporter military aeroplane and that would photograph everything at 10,000 ft so that we had a picture of the area, we knew the location of the geo servo station we had the panels around it which showed up on the photographs. And then there would be a Beech

Queen Air type aircraft which had a very accurate laser altimeter in it the radio altimeter and it would fly tracks across the area to be photographed and it would measure the heights of all the mountains in a slice, a bit like a cat scan you would see all these

above sea level. And then the Canberras would fly at about 33,000 ft up and down tracks photographing all the – and they would just fly for hours and hours and hours flying at 33,000 ft. They had to maintain within a half a mile a track. There’s no autopilot in the Canberra. So it was all hand flown and they had to stay within 100 ft of a designated altitude. 100 ft either way,

plus or minus 100 ft which was fairly hard on the pilot and the navigator. The navigator and the pilot, the nav [navigator] would be using a pen sight through the floor of the Canberra so he could see where he was going, and a big wild RC10 camera sitting in the bomb bay. Just taking photographs one after the other. And then all this information and the developed photographs of the terrain type thing and the photographs of the

geo servo station panels are all shipped in a Canberra and go through a big computer and out come these maps which are accurate to within a metre, say step 1 metre that way and you would step into a creek because you know it’s accurate in distance you might be in a river. We found that some of the rivers were 20 mile out of position, things like that from the old survey maps.

The old Captain Cook type navigation. But it was really accurate and we had a great time doing it. Lived in downtown Jakarta in a hotel which from the outside looked very luxurious but if you had have looked at the wiring and everything else, it was the pits the wiring was hanging out of switchboards. The maintenance of things in Jakarta

were terrible. Broken down Russian aeroplanes. War ships that were only painted on one side and the other side was full of rust. Broken aeroplanes. They used to wheel migs out of the hangar and put them on the flight line, and wheel them back in the hangar, they never flew they were just show ponies [for show]and things like that.

Well, the changes were that to get the job done particularly in an operation squadron you had to be a bit of a fighter, you had to be able to go and

talk to senior officers and con things out of them which they weren’t really to give you to get the job done. Or if someone’s blowing their exhausts straight through your hangar and all your flight controls are banging up and down on aeroplanes and things you had to put a stop to it somehow or other. You only got that through determination,

your rank and your ability to convince somebody there is another way of doing things. Like I would go and see this other officer that was much higher ranked than I was, he had the fancy machines he had the F111s. And I said “Well if you can’t move the aeroplane I have got a tug and a few troops we’ll go and move it for you. So that it doesn’t blow through our hangar” “That’s alright we can run our own tugs and things”.

You might want something out of the stores, the equipment store. That you can’t get, but if you have a beer with the guy after work in the mess and say “Listen we’ve got a bit of a problem we think we can solve it together”. Nine times out of ten it will succeed. But you have got to have that bit of rank, experience and rapport with other people, and it takes

a lot of effort to get there and you don’t get there by belting your head against the brick wall. Like when we went to Biak with the Canberras. We went into Biak we were doing exactly the same thing, photographing and we were operating the Canberras, the army we were already there

they were set up they had their routine they worked between 8 and 5 normal office hours and they had heaters in the shower blocks, because this was a bare base, something that the Dutch left on Biak Island at Mockner [?] Airfield. Nice shelters for the aeroplanes but nothing else, and we were living in these funny little huts

that the Indonesians built. But if we wanted to do our job we had to be up at about 3 am in the morning. We couldn’t wait for the army to light up the heaters and get the hot water going, so we had to make our own arrangements, we were up at 3 because if you didn’t get the aircraft into the air and photographing by about 5 in the morning you didn’t get the job done because the cloud came in at about 7 and some of those areas we wee trying to photograph had never

been seen. Because there was always cloud cover but we found if we were early enough we could beat the cloud, but we had to be up early. The pilots had to have a shave and all the rest of it, before they could go flying. And wear oxygen masks for hours on end and fly at that altitude. So we rigged up our own generating sets to get us power early in the morning, we got a few electric jug elements and made up

out of a tin can and a jug element and we went pinched a hand basin off the Indonesian guard house and we got a 44 gallon drum and we made a bit of guttering and we got a starter cartridge and deloused it and put it down as a downpipe for a bit of rain into this 44 gallon drum and we flogged a bit of pipe and put it round the hand basin, so we had power, had running water, we had mirrors a bit of shaving cream and we got this horribly unsafe

thing that boiled water and gave us hot water for the pilots. And we did things that way, and we got the show on the road and got the job done in record time. We couldn’t wait on the army, the army thought we were a bunch of pansies and all the rest of it because by 10 o’clock in the day we were knocked off and hanging around our own little mini bar and we had our own

grog supply and everything and they were still working. But we’d been up since 3 am in the morning. And every time we were getting a bit low on our beer supplies and we had to get a part sent from Amberley etc, we’d send the Canberra up AOG [?] part aircraft on ground, and they’d fly this generator or whatever we want. We’d have to request it by telex and we knew our telexes were being monitored.

So if we were getting short on our beer supplies we would have a miss spelt word in the telex we’d cross out with four X’s. They’d get it back at base “Oh they want some more grog” so they would load the panniers that go into the bomb bay where the bombs go, full of grog up she’d come, only problem was we had to wait for it to thaw out before we could drink it, it was all frozen. That’s how we used to operate. You can’t get that experience

by going to university. They don’t know those tricks. Because of my rapid promotions as well as others, the officer rank structure started to look like a fir tree instead of a pyramid and the only way to correct this fir tree was broaden the base and when they

decided to broaden the base was going to be very costly and they were going to have a lot more officers than they needed, but there weren’t enough of officers to keep this fir tree going and a lot of it was brought on by having equivalent ranks having civil servants in Canberra and Melbourne and places like that. If a public servant was doing a job there and you had to have equivalent

ranking air force officer or army officer beside him sort of thing. They decided they had to downgrade some of the established positions and in operational command where all the sharp end of the air force was in operational command in the engineering branch, they would downgrade all the squadron leader positions to flight lieutenant. Which was one rank lower and that would get over

this fir tree. Which meant that I was out of a job because I was over ranked for the position. I reckon that’s where they should have kept their experienced officers. Instead of that I was posted to support command which is a logistic support sort of thing for the operational side of the air force. I was posted to an office Cordell House where I had a wing commander sitting beside me.

I was a squadron leader and I had a wing commander sitting right there I could touch me and a group captain down the corridor, and all we were doing was shuffling bits of paper because support command didn’t downgrade any of their establishment. They needed all those high ranking officers, which was a lot of bull as far as I was concerned. We needed them in the sharp end. Because of that I was very

put out by certain higher ranking officers that created all this and I didn’t like it at all and I went down to support command I did my job down there for 18 months and finally decided there was a better life than fighting the traffic for 40 minutes each way in Melbourne and sort of looking at the rest of your career being either in Melbourne or

Canberra. I looked around and found another interesting job at Tamworth.

Oh yeah, but yes and no, I loved the air force life and I loved the commanderies and everything about the air force. No regrets about leaving because I still stayed with the aircraft industry, only it’s a small industry. A lot of guys in engineering in the air lines, we

had a lot of contacts, we had a lot of contacts with the air force but now I have lost most of those contacts, but I kept tabs with a lot of my mates and they went on and got to higher rank, but I looked at it in

two ways. I could take early retirement without too many penalties at the age of 40 or if I got promoted the retirement age for that rank went to 45 and as like squadron leader retirement age was 42. Wing commander was 45 and then group captain was something like 47.

The longer I stayed in the higher the notional retiring age came to be and as it was, when I retired I only lost two years of my superannuation, whereas if I had’ve got promoted and taken early retirement I would have lost more of my superannuation because you are pulling the pin [leaving] early. So I came out with a better pay packet.

I don’t know maybe I should have a beard and a Harley [motor cycle] and long hair. Maybe.

I think a lot of it is yeah. We have all got ear rings and nose rings like the bull and

long hair. I know a lot of Vietnam vets [veterans] that are very nice people and doing famously, they are doctors and psychologists and specialists and lawyers and the head of the state RSL is a Vietnam vet.

Yeah. Yes. Because

if you are with a good bunch of guys, you can have fun anywhere. If you are with a good bunch of guys and you get on well with them it doesn’t matter where you are. I think some of the guys at Colditz Castle must have enjoyed themselves playing tricks on the Germans because they were with a good bunch of guys. But if you are a loner and have to have happy pills and things like that you don’t enjoy it wherever you are, you can be sitting on a beautiful beach

and you are still not happy because you’ve got to have happy pills.

No I didn’t. I wished I had’ve gone but I was crook [sick] at the time and decided not to go and we are at the stage now where I don’t particularly like

crowds and I don’t like many organised functions and things like that, and I am getting a bit crotchety about noise and too much yahooing. But after talking to the guys that went to the Welcome Home Parade I wished I had’ve been there. I have been to the dedication of the memorial in Canberra, and the re-dedication. The re-dedication was a total

flop [failure] compared to the dedication. And as I said after many years whilst I should get the chance to get the cheap air fares and even after East-West [airlines] ceased to operate and I still had contacts in the airline system and I still had contacts in the airline system and we had local operators operating and we used to get a cheap flight down to Sydney and back, but now it’s getting very expensive to go down there for 1 day, particularly if you miss the flight and have to overnight somewhere. Like I’ve

done.

I reckon it’s an honourable profession, it really is. If I had my time over again I would join up again. I don’t know whether we have Dad’s Army anymore, but

it was fun. You always remember the good times. There were some horrible experiences and some traumatic things that I still keep on dreaming about, but um, yeah, it wasn’t bad. I do get a bit emotional at times. But I can always go and sit under the pepper tree with my dog and reminisce. Listens, wags and not its tongue.