Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in 1923 at the Women’s Hospital in Paddington. My mother and father were both immigrants from England. At that time they lived in the inner city area and eventually as I grew up we moved up to Lidcombe.

In Lidcombe I finished up going to the Commercial School and then to the Parramatta Intermediate High School where I passed the Intermediate. Things were such that work was on the agenda then. At 15, I was at work as a junior clerk in a meat business. I eventually finished up going to the abattoir site as a junior salesman. However, I

knew that wasn’t the life I wanted and I eventually went into the accountancy field in the inner city at a place called Olden’s near the University. At seventeen and a half I decided, having seen a movie which was very coincidental…which I’ll talk about later, called Target for Tonight and I decided it would be a good idea to join the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force].

I was only seventeen and a half, so I was in what they called “The Reserve at eighteen to be called up”, and when I turned eighteen in December 1941, the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbour, so I can assure you there was chaos down at the RAAF base in Woolloomooloo, and they didn’t want to see me for some time. Eventually, I was

called up in June 1942 and attended Bradfield in 29 course. After training there I was selected as a pilot and went to Temora where after 13 hours I finished up having a small accident with my Tiger Moth, upsetting the instructor. I went through a scrub test and of course I failed that. It was horrific.

Then I was re-categorised as a navigator. I came back to Bradfield Park and eventually was on a boat to Canada and went to 2AOS [Air Observers School] in Edmonton where I got through the navigator’s course and on our way we called into New York and Halifax and then left on the Queen Mary for England in August 1943,

arriving in Brighton and then in Brighton we were based for awhile. It was a PDRC [Personnel Dispatch and Reception Centre], and eventually I was posted to an AFU [Advanced Flying Unit] in a place called Bobbington near Birmingham where we familiarised ourselves with the English countryside and more navigation training.

The training never seems to stop at all in the air force. From there we went to wing as an operational training unit where the crews were all formed up. It was quite an extraordinary situation where they poured all the navigators, bomb aimers, pilots, wireless operators into a big hall and you had to find your own crew. Nobody told you. Fortunately,

one of the people who was on my course in Bradfield at that time was a chap called Wal Cryer and he had gone through his various training places and finished up at the same time as me there, so we sort of decided we’d go together which was very fortunate for me and then we picked up our bomb aimer Jeff Jones, and our wireless operator Tony Adams.

From then we did our training and we finished up going through the various courses and we finished up at the conversion unit at the OTU [Operational Training Unit] and flew in Wellingtons which had been a very successful bomber. The pilots had to convert to four engine bombers and we went to another training unit. It was there we met our engineer because we required an engineer

to monitor the fuel and other things. He was another English chap. So we then formed our crew. We had four Australians, two English gunners and an English engineer. Then we were posted to our first squadron, the 149 Squadron which was then based at a place called Laken Heath, and it wasn’t very long before they transferred us to Methwold and that’s where we did our tour. A tour consisted of

quite a varied form of operations. We started off on Stirlings, a very sturdy and successful bomber. But it had problems. It couldn’t get up much above 12,000 feet and as the war progressed flak became very intense and we weren’t able to get up high enough to avoid the flack. So we had lots of heavy losses and they converted to Lancasters.

But in the interim period we flew Stirlings. We did trips supplying the underground down in the lower parts of France and on other nights we did mining off the coast and eventually we converted to Lancasters and started on main force bombing with other groups. That was in 3 Group. But then they decided they had a blind bombing device which

they would give to 3 Group to be their modus operandi, and we were selected as the crew to use this GH [Group Heavy] bombing device. So we did our tour from then on mostly on daylight raids bombing the German synthetic oil plants, with the occasional night trip to make up numbers on main force bombing. We finished our tour in December ’44, and

the crew split up. I was posted to the GH Training School because I had experience with the GH bombing device at an airfield called Feltwell which was just adjacent to Methwold. Feltwell was a permanent old style base with brick buildings and that’s where the coincidence of my seeing the movie Target for the Night came in because when we

were given our room it turned out that in the air force you had RAF [Royal Air Force] women on the stations that did things for you, and at this station they had a permanent group of civilian servants if you wish, and this dear old man informed me that he looked after the bomber pilot that was in Target for the Night. It was filmed at that station. So it was quite interesting.

After a period of three or four months – as you know the war came to an end on the 8th of May, and I finished up there and we did some interesting trips just before I was posted back to Brighton for repatriation. We did…we took ground staff people on trips over to show them the terrible damage. Even

six or eight weeks later, smoke was still coming out of places like Essen. It was devastation…the whole of the valley. Eventually in September ’45. Prior to that I had been awarded the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] and with a friend we went to Buckingham Palace and were presented to the King and he gave us the decoration which was all very exciting. Eventually

we came home in October ’45. I was discharged from the air force in January, and in order to get back into some sort of normalcy I went back into the work I had been doing. The people there gave me the job back if you wish. I wasn’t terribly happy in that role. I contemplated going to university which was very open to us. We got very good opportunities

to go to university. But something else beckoned. I joined Qantas as a navigator and flew Lancastrians for 18 months, in which time I met my wife to be. I decided Qantas [Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services] wasn’t the place to be and left Qantas. Then I found myself

in another dilemma, what to do, and I joined Jansen, a very well known sportswear manufacturer as a sales representative. I was with them for 25 years and became a…not a senior executive, but an executive in the sales division. They eventually, due to American ownership, who were fairly unhappy with their position in Australia decided to close the business down,

which they did and I became a manager for the new company which took on the licence. I stayed with them for another 10 years until they decided that wasn’t the business they wanted to be in any more and I was given early retirement. Not wanting to go out into the field and do nothing, I found some friends and got into the fashion agency business.

I stayed in that until a couple of years ago. I was working right through until I was 76. And here I am.

Well, I was born on 16th December 1923, and my father had been born in Middlesbrough, North England. He left home quite young. He had an unhappy life and became a member of a sailing ship at a very young age. He was 14. Eventually

coming to Australia in the early part of the century in 1905 and became a…well he worked in country places in Queensland and eventually when we moved to Lidcombe he had his own little business of being a window cleaner. He had his own little business and that kept us going through the Depression. Things weren’t very good during the Depression, but there was always food on the table.

Mother had been born in London and in 1916 in the middle of the war, the Australian…I don’t know if it was the Government, but they required people to come here and go into service. And as she had been working in service in London, she came here in 1916 and eventually they met and they were married in 1922.

That’s more or less how that all was.

Oh, I was born in the Women’s Hospital in Paddington and my family at that time lived in Alexandria. My father was working as a cleaner in McDowells

which doesn’t exist any more.

In the period in the middle ‘20s, he bought a small established business which existed in the middle western suburbs around Ashfield and Strathfield. It was, in those times a privileged area. It was quite a wealthy area,

especially Strathfield. And even in the Depression when work was very difficult to get, he had no problem in maintaining his living.

It was like the owners of Peter’s Ice cream, most public servants. Croydon was a very big public servant area, you know, bureaucrats in the State Government and people like that. Legal people.

Those sorts of people. And shops in Burwood, he used to do the shop windows as well.

No, no. They were houses. He had his ladder and he had

bucket of water and a chamois and he became…how would you say, a part of the family if you wish. He would have customers who would give him morning tea and afternoon tea. In lots of ways he had a very happy type of existence. He quite enjoyed it.

It wasn’t very profitable but …

There were other children at the school I went too

who were living in tents on Marne Park in Lidcombe which is now a big factory area. They couldn’t afford the rent and they were living in tents. They would get the soup kitchen for their meals. I don’t think a lot of people realise just how severe the Depression days were on the average family. There was over 33% unemployment. There was no such thing as social service. They got a dole which was a small handout of

food, certain items of food. Otherwise they were given say council work. If there was any work digging ditches. It was a pretty terrible time.

Yes. They couldn’t pay their rent.

I think

just the general feeling of despair that a lot of people engineered. Like children going to school…we played marbles and we did all those sorts of things. I became friends with some of the boys who lived in these tents and they didn’t seem to be terribly fussed, but you were dealing with boys who were only ten and eleven years of age. But gradually as the ‘30s developed, the Depression lessened and by about 1937, ’38

things had started to improve. But all I can say was that there was just a shortage of money. Nobody had anything.

Yes, I went to the Lidcombe Public School Infants. The Lidcombe Public School. Then I went…I wasn’t…because of the very few high schools that were existing at the time, the opportunity to go to a high school was very selective

and I think my academic qualifications…although I was intelligent, I don’t think they were as high as they wanted for that. So I went to the Lidcombe Commercial School which was like a lot of other boys who came from the outer western suburbs…places like Fairfield, Auburn, and was given a commercial type of education. I finished it off by going to the Parramatta Intermediate High School for the last year

for the Intermediate Certificate which in those days was considered an important academic achievement. Not many people went to High School to do the Leaving Certificate. Very, very few.

Oh book work. Short hand and general…otherwise English, Geography, History and that type of

thing. A bit of emphasis on doing business type studies. If you could call it that.

No, not a prestige thing. It was something you needed to have in order to get a position. I mean if you applied for a job and you didn’t have the intermediate certificate, you didn’t have much of a chance. I applied for several jobs, obviously in chartered accountant offices and

things like that, and obviously I didn’t have the background that they wanted and eventually I was chosen by a firm by the name of A.J. Bush & Sons who had their offices at Homebush, and they exist to this day. It’s still a big organization. It’s a family run business. For awhile I worked in the office at Homebush and then eventually I decided I was material they could use

in the wholesale meat business, so I went up to the “Meat Hall” they called it at the old abattoir, which is now of course the Olympic site.

Well it was a big open space. There were resting yards for animals. For sheep and cattle.

Very large open spaces there. It was a very big site. The original offices are still there. I think they’re part of the Olympic office set. Very nice brick buildings, if you’ve ever been there you would have seen them. Palm trees around them. They were the offices. I did quite well in that business and I was quite highly regarded by the company.

I was just a developing youth who was involved in a lot of social activity and I used to get quite a lot of…shall we say, frowning looks from some of the girls I was going with at the time, that I was in this particular business. So I thought, “I don’t know about this, I’m going to get back into the other world”. Which was rather foolish but that’s what you do when you’re 17 or 18.

Oh I think just the fact…well perhaps it was in my own imagination, whether I could compete with some of the other boys who were going out with them. I don’t know.

No. No I think it was just my own perception that…it was a bit of a rough business too. A bit of a rough business.

Well I suppose what came to the fore after I got into the sportswear business with Jansen. An individual entrepreneurial attitude. I could stand on my own and develop business connections. At a very young age I was given a special division of the meat business out there.

I was told “This is your area, you look after it”. At 17 it was quite a lot of responsibility and I was well paid for it. So I don’t know why I ever left it. In fact after the war I was in touch with the Bush family and they wanted me to come back and work with them. I was highly regarded there and they were very nice people, but no, like a lot of young men, social aware if you wish.

I’ve got no idea. But I would say it would be something in the vicinity of maybe 10%.

Oh, I think it was their academic ability and parental ambition for them. I mean my parents had not had a very good educated background and I think they felt that I had done quite well, and going to work was the obvious choice…at 15.

Well, I’m speaking with hindsight now. At that time in my life, at that age, I hadn’t considered those things. It was just sort of axiomatic that at 15 I was going to leave school and go to work. But those, and if I think about the boys who left Lidcombe and went to Parramatta High School, and friends of mine who subsequently went to Parramatta High School, which was a co-educational

high school, it was very selective and they were all people who had ambitions and did achieve quite well.

Parramatta High School. Yes, and of course they learnt languages there. It was a full academic course. I don’t know how many

there were, but there weren’t that many.

Well my mother was a very gentle lady. She had grown up as a young woman in London and been associated in nice houses as you know if you have ever seen Upstairs Downstairs[television series set in Edwardian England]. The type of world she would have been involved in.

She spoke in a very gentle way. She was well liked by her friends. My father was what you would call a “Hard doer”. He was a good man who had had very little education, practically none, but he was highly regarded wherever he went as a human being. He was a good honest man.

I have a sister.

A younger sister.

But we had no family to our knowledge, so we were just one little unit of four people. I never had any opportunity of having any family organization if you will. It was just mostly through friends of my mother’s. My father was very much involved in his own little world of the garden and his work.

Well there was no connection with them either.

Well I was in the Church of England Fellowship and we used to meet other relative groups in places like Mossman, Brighton, Strathfield, and of course I was

becoming involved with people who probably had much better backgrounds than I had. I mean I wasn’t…and I hope I’ve never been snobby or even reverse snobby with things like this. I’ve just taken things as they come and fitted in where I could, and that sort of thing…but it did mean that the world was opening to a different view of life and things that I would have been

associating with my own family.

Music, theatre. I developed an interest in going to concerts and ballet and those sort of things which really I don’t think boys in the area where I was living got involved in. But it was all to do with mixing with a wider group of people. I went on camps

with them. They were pseudo-religious if you wish. The young people didn’t really get terribly involved with the religious part of it. It was more fun, walks, hikes and concerts and things like that.

Oh yes, and I still have. I’m still reading and looking at books that I…I mean I keep on…

I think that life is one continual pathway. You’re always walking along a path and you keep your mind open and pick up information wherever you can.

Well I went back into a cost accountancy role in G.H. Olden’s which was a very large motor body builders and engineers at that time. They were situated across from the university at Glebe.

Interesting enough they moved out some years ago and it’s now the Coroner’s Office…you know, in that place.

Yes, part of it is. Every time I go by I’m reminded of…you see the trams used to run down Parramatta Road during those times. There was always trams…and getting out at the university. And that really was something I had a longing

to be part of and I used to spend my lunch hour wandering around the university and became quite friendly with some of the other students. We’d meet and have lunch together. I’ve always had the feeling that I would have liked to have gone to university, but I know with my makeup I would never have made a good student.

I would have done Arts/Law.

I don’t know, more the Arts side, I think. But as life unfolded I’ve had a very happy and successful life in the world I became part of. There’s no residual lack of respect for myself over it all.

Until I went into the air force, that would have been about 18 months. I spent a lot of time bush walking. Again, I formed a relationship with a group and joined the Sydney Bushwalking Club and went away with people like that on hikes and I enjoyed that. I’ve always been a very social animal. I like mixing with people

and sharing…particularly physical activity. Not formal activity if you will, like a football team or cricket team, but in a more loose form. For instance I was part of a racing crew on the harbour for 27 years and that was my great love, sailing on a Saturday.

Yes. The skipper of the yacht became a personal friend. He wasn’t when I first met him but he became that despite the quite wide disparity of things. We became quite good friends out of mutual self respect. He passed away two years ago and I decided I just couldn’t find any desire to go sailing with anybody else.

That’s right. I used to hire my equipment from that place. He had small office in George Street in a building on the way down to the station. He had two small offices and he used to hire out packs with frames. They were quite

the thing, to have a pack with a frame. Plus the fact that he used to make up all kinds of tin foods and dried foods. He was quite exceptional in what he did.

I don’t think so.

Maybe. I can tell you this.

The publications that Paddy Pallin put out had quite strong emphasis on as far as tins were concerned – “Bash em, burn em and bury em”.

Yes. So I think whilst there was no…there was an implicit feeling of bush protection. We protected what we saw. It wasn’t done

in an evangelical attitude.

Mostly the Blue Mountains. With my Sunday group we used to go up and down the coast. Down to Burning Palms, and up to Berowra Waters. It was an informal group. If we were going to go we would meet under the clock at the Central Railway Station at 8 o’clock on Sunday morning, and away we’d go.

With those people, I’ve often regretted not having elicited their names or having photographs of them because they were wonderful people. They were a group…they were all maybe two or three years older than I was. But gradually there was the attrition of the war people joining up and that sort of thing. So I think it eventually disbanded, and after the war I never thought much about it because I got involved with other things. But as time went by

you start to look back and you think “What a shame I didn’t pick up those connections and see how they all were”. A bit like the Church of England Fellowship. I just…the church became quite an anthema to me after the war.

No. Not really. I was a choir boy and of course being a choir boy you became terribly involved in the mechanics

of the church. Always being at every service, and I quite enjoyed that. But I think maturity brought its own sort of attitudes about religion.

Umm. Disbelief actually now.

I think it was the fact that it was never related to the real life that we live. It was in another world if you wish and I suppose that’s why they try to…in those times. I mean now people are more involved in social activities

like keeping people…being involved, say like the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence and things of that nature. As far as I was concerned I couldn’t put up with the unctuous piety of the church if you wish.

Yes that’s correct. I was born and bought up

and confirmed in the church.

It may have done, I don’t know. It was just that I became impatient with that sort of attitude about life. I mean, I quite enjoyed, and I still do if I go to any sort of service or wedding or a funeral and there’s hymns and singing.

It’s always a lovely part of the church. And my trips overseas, we’ve spent a lot of time in churches and it’s most delightful to hear an organ playing. But it was the unctuous sort of attitude about the hereafter that I found I could not cope…I could not cope with that.

Not as such, no.

I did have associations with people in the groups I was with. There was one…you’ve reminded me of one circumstance which didn’t last very long. I won’t go into that, but some girl I met on a holiday down in the (UNCLEAR) Green Valley which you can’t do anymore. That’s been flooded of course. There were a series of boarding houses down there in the 30s.

A friend of mine and I went down for a week’s holiday and there was a group of people there…mothers and daughters and we all got on quite well and I started taking this girl out but that didn’t last very long. I started to feel there was an ulterior motive behind the mother and the daughter, entrapment if you wish.

Not at all. I won’t go into it any further but Helga knows all about it.

She thinks it was unbelievable.

I was reminded a little bit later by a letter that came which sort of verified what I had been suspicious of. I was advised that she had just become engaged.

He was a very honest man and he had a very strong view about tolerance for people and he also developed in me an attitude of looking at different questions with an open mind. One of his

favourite ploys was to start a conversation at the meal table, saying that “Might is right”. Well having dealt with might is right and him taking the opposite view, a few days later he would twist it around and say that “Right is might”, and he would take the opposite view again. So we had these continual discussions about whether might was right. Because he had knocked around a lot on

ships and in the cane fields and all those things, he had mixed with a lot of different people, I suppose he understood that underneath it all we’re all the same and he had that tolerance and I grew up with that understanding, and I’m glad I had that because it helped me all through my life. And that’s how I view life anyway.

I don’t…I think he was very strong about it yes. He used to fire me up.

I became quite passionate about some of the views and he would keep it going.

My father had joined the army in 1916 and I’ve seen his discharge papers. He was discharged because he had varicose veins and flat feet, so it meant he

wouldn’t have been much good. So he was discharged. He used to tell me about the meetings at the times. The conscription issue was very strong and how women would be there handing out white feathers to anyone who wasn’t in uniform. He was very much aware and he made me aware of that. Later on at school we’d have the

Empire Day activity, which we don’t have any more. It was the 25th May, I think. We would all gather down the park and there would also be returned soldiers there and we’d always sing the hymns like Lord of our Fathers and all that sort of thing. There would always be speeches about it and the boys at school that I was with, their fathers had fought in the war and they had this little returned soldiers’ hall in the park at Lidcombe

and they would go off into that. There was no poker machines or anything like that. I would go sometimes in there with them and see these men that were very strong RSL [Returned and Services League] people. More to keep their…the way they had been together they wanted to stay together. They didn’t like the idea of any outsiders intruding into their little world

which nobody understood really, did they? I mean the people who suffered during the First World War…how could you tell people about war in the trenches?

Yes that’s right. He encouraged me to join the Lancers. That would be early in ’38. I was about

15, 16…no it must have been early ’39. And of course the war wasn’t really on the front page at that stage. I mean rumblings were taking place of course in Europe and I used to go to the meetings at the Barracks at Parramatta, but my mother wouldn’t sign the papers. She said “You have to be 18”.

Looking back on it I’m glad because if I had joined and been accepted I would have been in the war right from the jump and God knows where I would have finished up.

He was a man called Mr Pateman. He was a veteran from the First World War. I think he enjoyed it because they used to have a bar there. They’d…I think he

would spend…after the parade and whatever else took place there…a happy hour at the bar.

That’s correct and Parramatta Senior High School was right next door.

Target for Tonight.

Yes. I think it showed the sort of group, the crew feeling. These people setting out on a big adventure which in those days it was because bombing wasn’t coordinated as it was later under the Pathfinder system. They virtually went off and did

their own thing. They’d do their route. They’d do their own trip which in lots of ways meant that the whole attack was rather ineffectual. That was why it had to be reformed. I mean they had these planes flying over Europe on their own and hopefully dropping bombs on something. But the impression it gave me was of a great adventure and I thought “Well if I’m going to be in the war, that’s what I’d like to do”.

Oh yes. Of course.

Not a great deal because the newspapers, you must remember there was no television. Radio was the main medium, and newspapers. I suppose at that stage I was 16 and at work and enjoying my

bush walking and things. Nobody around me was joining up. Admittedly some of my friends were in the army and it occurred to me that things were happening.

I can’t recall whether there was any great discussion about that. I think they would have been like

everybody else. They would have discussed and thought “What a terrible thing that we were being involved in a war”. But I think the war was a very important event in the sense that it was a war quite unlike any other war. The First World War was a war of imperial claims by both the protagonists,

wasn’t it? Whether Germany was right or England was right. But it didn’t have the involvement of this hateful Nazi regime which by that time was starting to become quite apparent.

Well it was a war that should never have occurred. Anyone who has read a great deal about it

would realise that. It should never have happened. It was a chain of events and once they set them going nobody seemed to be able to step in and stop it.

I can’t really say that anything specific came into it. The movies

started to reflect that. Perhaps it was movies which started to have more of an impact than anything else because there would have been Hollywood movies which would have shown Nazis in rather bad…Conrad Veidt for instance used to place the role of a Nazi officer. All of these activities in places like Argentina. I can think of movies which involved things going on,

spies, and that type of thing. And of course, once it became apparent that something terrible was happening to people in central Europe. The Jewish question, I think a lot of the Hollywood studios started to focus on those sorts of things.

And newsreels of course. I’m sorry, I overlooked that. The Movietone News was a very strong visual…

I can see lines of Australian soldiers rounding up the Italians outside of Bardia. I can see them in my mind now. Very strong images of the Australian activities in North Africa. And of course, I can remember going out on the ferry to see the first contingent going out on the Queen Mary in March ’39…1940 I’m sorry. That was amazing.

I mean, the war started in September and the Australian soldiers were going off to Egypt in March 1940.

I suppose…yes, I suppose it was strong images of exciting things happening if you wish…at that age when you’re 16. Sydney wasn’t a very big place,

not like it is today. I think a lot of people were very interested in what was going on.

Yes it did. Firstly it was one of things that stopped me going into the air force when I was 18. I mean that was a very strong thing, but it started to have the impact because friends that I had known at school

had joined the army into the 8th Division and that’s where they were involved, and some finished up as prisoners of war and never survived. So I was very much aware of that, and at the same time, because of the involvement of the Japanese and the war, they started conscription for the Australian Army, not for the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] but what was called in those days

“Choccos”…chocolate soldiers…which I think was an unfortunate name to call these people. And I was actually called up for enlistment in that, but having been a reservist in the air force, I was able to dodge that. But I did get called up and went to a military hall, a drill hall at Homebush and went through the examination.

Yes, yes. All of that.

Well, that was a bad thing to say, dodge. I didn’t dodge anything, but I didn’t want to be in the army, I wanted to be in the air force, and being actually in the air force reserve (I had evidence of that), and was accepted.

On my 18th birthday I presumed that I would be accepted into the air force, so I marched down to the recruiting centre for the air force in Woolloomooloo. So I asked to be…I reported and said “Here I am, Jim Bateman looking for his position in the air force…don’t you want me?” Anyway they said, “I’m sorry

we’re terribly busy, things are all up in the air, come back later…or we’ll let you know”. And that’s what happened.

Until June ’42. That was just on six months. Some of my friends were a little bit more cunning than I was. They used to report down…the call up was usually on a monthly basis, and they would report down there on say a Saturday morning.

They worked out that there would always be someone who might be sick or didn’t turn up, and they used to roll up there anyway and if the draft was short of anybody they would get in quite a lot earlier. However, but in a turn of events, I met Walter Cryer in a kind of small way in the hut where we were at Bradfield Park and that led me to

selecting him to be the pilot of our crew, that I was with and he was 27, he had been married and a very conscientious and capable pilot and a good choice. So all those events tied together.

Well you attended

Morse Code training. That was at the VNTS [?] Centre in the Patterson building in George Street. To improve our maths I was supposed to go to Granville Tech [Technical] College certain nights. However, not being terribly mathematically minded and not thinking that I would be needed, I didn’t go to a lot of those meetings and I was criticised for that. I was told

that “I should have gone to those classes to improve my maths”. However in the end it didn’t affect my situation.

It was a year.

Oh no, no. There was nothing like that. There were no meetings or parades or anything.

It was a kind of a …well in the first place, in the six months leading to when I was 18 involved just improving your educational standard.

Well the group which went to the events, the Morse training, I think the room would have held about 30 or 40 people.

The classes at the Granville Tech I can’t recall, but probably the same number there. But I didn’t go there very often.

Yes, that was a very big day. To become a member of air crew, as you would remember…

taking place before the events of December ’41, it was really only fighting in North Africa or over Europe and because the numbers required were I don’t suppose that many, they could be very selective about the person or the ability of the people, or the physical health of the person,

so those tests that day were quite stringent. The medical tests were quite stringent…the psychological and the…IQ testing that they gave, and if I remember rightly that was quite complex. However out of it all I was accepted and I was suitable.

Not a lot I don’t suppose other than the fact that it was quite a shocking thing to happen. We were well aware of that and the events that took place subsequently like the sinking of the British battle ships off Malaysia [Malaya], and eventually the

fact that the Australians were coming down through Java and escaping if they could. It was all well understood and publicised.

I suppose in lots of ways, because of your age, you didn’t take a lot of notice of…I mean, they were going on around you but they weren’t making a very strong impact on your attitude. If I was older I might have been…I was more wrapped up in the life I was living…enjoying life and looking forward to getting into the air force and whatever that would lead to.

Only the fact of the excitement and the drama it created in Sydney. It had a tremendous psychological effect.

I think the vulnerability! The fact that Australia was so far away and yet these people could put these little submarines in our harbour and destroy a…and of course that was all hushed up.

It wasn’t made known how many people were killed on the [HMAS] Kuttabul. It was just as bad as the shelling. I mean there was shelling at Bondi Heights. There was a great evacuation of people to the Blue Mountains, I understand. Housing properties became quite cheap in the seaside areas. But other than that…I remember they fortified Bondi Beach so walking

along for a Sunday stroll if you wish, there were all these Australian soldiers entrenched along Bondi Beach with rolls and rolls of barbed wire, so it made you quite aware of what was going on. So I don’t think we were desperately scared, not like the events that have transpired since 9/11. I mean there’s a concentrated sort of awareness of

terrorism which is being built up all the time. Whereas then, I don’t think anybody thought of an imminent evasion but it created the thought in the mind that things could happen.

Well yes. It was interesting.

No, no. I hadn’t. You were put in huts in alphabetical order and of course B Bateman and C Cryer was in the same hut. And other than the fact that he may have slept in the bed over there, I didn’t know him that well. He was a lot older than me and he’d go home on the weekend, we’d go home on the weekend. But I knew him because I used to be on parade with him,

had physical culture with him and all of this sort of thing. So I knew him and as soon as I saw him again I thought “Well, what do I do?”

That’s correct, yes.

No, no.

No, no, no. That wasn’t until we got to England and in the Operational Training Unit.

Oh no. There were many things that happened between Bradfield Park and that.

Well first of all you went through a programme of physical education. Quite strict, to build your body. Marching and the normal sort of induction

into a military unit. Marching and learning how to fire a rifle and that type of thing. Then of course classes and subjects that were relevant to the air force training, plus all your shots and …then you went through a series of checks on your suitability for whatever air crew you might have been

able to achieve. In that event I was categorised as a pilot, but it could have been say because of my eyesight I might have been categorised as something else. That’s where that took place and then from there people were sent out to different training places.

I went to Temora which was a EFT, an Elementary Flying Training School and we were being trained on Tiger Moths.

Yes, well…early in the morning just after dusk…dawn I should say…a bit like the dawn patrol in the First World War. You went down and the instructors were all lined up. You would have your flying suit…of course Tiger Moths had open cockpits…no radio communication

of that kind. You had a voice tube between the instructor and the pupil, and there you were. Then you would get into your seat and the instructor would tell you what to do. “I want you to do this or do that” and away you’d go and do your best to do it.

Oh yes. There was a procedure in training

which sort of solved the problem about who was in charge with the plane at that time, and it was a case of saying, “Handing over” and the pilot would give you control…because you had dual control. Then you would accept by saying “Taking over”. So it was a handing over, taking over, handing over, taking over back to the instructor. Well, we used to go out to a satellite drome [aerodrome]

for circuits and landings…circuits and bumps (because they were bumps), and you’d do the circuit. I had reached the stage where I was hoping to go solo…about 12 hours. Some went solo at 9, 10 hours. But anyway I was going to solo and until this event occurred we were coming in to land at the satellite and somehow or other there was confusion

about who was suppose to have control of the plane…whether it was me or the instructor. I presumed it was the instructor and the instructor presumed it was me. The procedure of handing over taking over had somehow got confused and there we were coming in at about 200 or 300 feet and nobody was in charge of the plane. It was in landing posture and of course when it hit the ground it just ploughed along on the propeller and

the undercarriage crumpled and we bumped our heads and thereupon there was a great deal of excitement. The instructor was very angry with me and the result of that was you were then put on what they called a “Scrub test” with the chief flying instructor…commonly known as a “Scrub test”. If you can imagine what it’s like to be put up with the chief flying instructor and be told to do things,

well you would freeze. So I couldn’t do anything, so that was an horrific experience.

Oh, I was because it was the last thing that I expected because I presumed…now going back all those years how can you remember, but I presumed that he was in charge. He had given the plane over to me…I had given it back to him from doing what we were doing…

…it wasn’t clear. I had difficulty with this instructor. He was a very difficult person. He resented the fact that he was teaching pupils to fly. He wanted to be away doing other things. He had been doing it for a year or 18 months and he wasn’t the best instructor. Unfortunately I got him rather than someone else.

Oh yes, definitely because in my log book which I’ve got, not that it’s mentioned in that, but one of the tests of your coordination was doing turns. You would spend time with the false horizon using the rudder and the …to do turns. And then you did your spin test which was when the

instructor would put the plane into…and you had the job of getting it our of the spin. It was a procedure which was quite simple but you could be destabilised by it and get yourself mixed up. But I was quite competent at that and quite competent at turns and I had no reason to expect that I wasn’t going to get through until this event at the satellite took place.

Oh very soon. I think next day or the day after.

Very, very low. Plus the fact that the talk was “That’s it mate”. It was just a formality. You’re going up with him. He has to do it. But very few people came back after that test with the chief instructor I can tell you.

There was a whole group of us there who had gone through the same experience, and you must remember there was a very big supply of applicants to become pilots, so they could afford to pick the quickest and best learners out of the group. There was an attrition…I don’t know what percentage,

say it was 25%.

Yes, they did. But I’m not making any excuse about that. What I’ve often thought is that if I had really had the stuff that pilots are made of I would have immediately assumed and taken over, and even if I had overridden the instructor’s situation, just taken over and handled it, it wouldn’t have happened and I would have done something but

I didn’t. I was completely sort of complacent if you wish.

Well shortly after that…after hanging around the place and being treated like…whenever you drop out of something, everyone gets on with their life. They’re getting up early in the morning to go on their flying tests, everything that you’re not doing, and the group of us who were

scrubbed were hanging around the guard room or doing guard duties or that sort of thing, and shortly after that I had an interview with one of the educational instructors and he suggested to me that that would be a good idea. “What do you think about that Bateman?” And I said, “Alright, that will suit me”. So that was the next step. We were transferred back to Bradfield Park -

the Embarkation Depot where we were for quite a while, in fact they had us going out on work parties while we were there. Some of them, one of my friends, there was a time when a ship came into Sydney Harbour with leaking drums of poison gas and the wharf labourers refused to unload it, quite rightly. But that didn’t stop them from sending

down a party of air force trainees to unload it. Whereupon these boys were stuck in hospital with mustard gas burns.

Yes. They broke out in blisters. Oh it was terrible thing. They were in hospital…not for a long time. They didn’t get a very bad exposure to it but any amount at all was absolutely disgraceful

that they would send air force trainees. I didn’t do that. I finished up going to some warehouse helping to unload stuff and doing stuff like that. But that’s what they did during the time we were hanging around waiting to go overseas. They sent you out on little work parties.

One came overseas with me.

I don’t think so. I go to the Opera House concerts a lot and this particular man, I used to see him there. I often wanted to walk up…this was many years later…and say “Do you remember me?”, but you don’t do those sort of things. Some people have an aura around them and you can’t penetrate it. So that’s what happened to him. He….

…there was a few of them who went to hospital. Some stayed longer than others.

Yes, they sent us out on these work parties to various jobs.

Well I suppose at some stage in that period. We had no idea where we were going, but I think it was obvious

because we were in the Empire Air Training Scheme and Canada was the main training centre for air crews. Not the main one, I mean in Australia as well we had air schools, pilot training school, wireless operator schools here but I think they had so many schools in Canada that they kept the supply up from Australia and New Zealand. I was training with New Zealanders

as well.

No.

Oh I think they accepted it as something I wanted to do. They didn’t give any resistance to it. They were quite proud of me when I eventually turned up in uniform.

I think they accepted that it was the sort of thing I should have been doing. There was certainly no attitude of “You shouldn’t have done this. Why did you do this or something like that?” No, I think they accepted it was something I wanted to do and they supported me, yes.

I think I was interested in having an overseas trip.

Some of my friends in Bradfield Park…and I think if I hadn’t been categorised as a pilot and had that sort of vision of becoming a pilot, I might have done what they did. Some of them were offered a trip to Canada in that early stage of Bradfield Park rather than doing anything in Australia. They might have been categorised as pilots but they knew very well that if they went to Canada they would not have been trained as pilots

and they wanted to get on their way.

Which?

Oh there was pilot training in Canada as well. Quite a lot of Australians were trained in places like (UNCLEAR) and places in Ontario. I’ve forgotten the names just off hand, but they had all the schools there, but they also had them in Australia and …

In what way?

Oh yes, ok. It was suddenly announced to my absolute surprise. On the Sunday prior to leaving on the Monday

I had spent the day at Manly with a girl I had met during that warehouse work. She was a WAAAF [Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force], a lady airman. We just had a nice day out at Manly and sat around looking at the moonlight over the water and eventually coming back to Sydney and it was too late for me to go home, so I went and stayed at the air force hostel in Goulburn Street. So in the morning

I report to Bradfield Park, not having gone home and I was told “You can’t leave the Park because you’re going overseas today”. So my poor mother and father had no idea and fortunately there was a girl in the dental section who I was friendly with and she was prepared to go and tell them, which she did. But that day we then packed up. We were all more or less ready all the time because we didn’t know when the trip would take place.

And down we went in double decker buses down to Woolloomooloo Wharf which has now been converted into a hotel. The buses drove up the middle and the ship was waiting and we marched on board. It was an American troop ship which had been an Italian cruise liner in its former life. There were about 250 of us I suppose and a party of marines and away we went.

Because of the submarine menace we were escorted out across the Tasman by about four destroyers. Then the ship went to Pango Pango and picked up a lot of very sick marines from there and then from Pango Pango we went to Hawaii. In Hawaii we had two days which was great. We were able to walk around the town and do things. We picked up a whole cadre of American soldiers going back to America,

probably on their way to Europe, to England. The boat was overloaded. It was completely packed out, so much so that we only got like two meals a day, morning and night, which was quite common in those days. Then we arrived in San Francisco in…I can’t remember the date in February, but it was a cold miserable day. We were very disappointed when we arrived. We were told by the senior officer who met us that we wouldn’t be getting

any leave in San Francisco, which was the normal thing. After a trip you would usually get three or four days leave to have a look around. The Americans were very generous. They would roll up with motor cars if they knew there was anyone like that. They would take you out. I had a heap of letters from my friends who told me what a great time they had had in San Francisco.

Well I suppose it’s the closest you can get to a plane of the First World War vintage. It was a bi-plane

with as I said before an open cockpit. I think its top speed was about 68 miles an hour. It was an ideal plane for training. It was very exciting for me because it gave me visions of dawn patrols in some of the famous movies with Errol Flynn. There we were bright and early in the morning, all lined up, and it was quite chilly out at Temora, so you

had a flying suit on and it was all quite exciting thundering down the expanse of the runway…there was no runway, just grass ground. Then eventually easing back and feeling…it was an experience. I had never driven a car because my family didn’t have one and I never had the opportunity anyway of being involved with anything like that. It was so exciting and the lovely feeling of being way up in the sky

and doing these turns. I really enjoyed that…the skill of coordinating your feet and your hands in keeping this plane in a turn which was exactly correct. So that was all very exciting. And then there was the nervous side of the landing, and now looking back there’s sadness about the mistake I made, not knowing what the event…

and how it would have changed if I had taken over and shown a bit more initiative…what would have happened, I don’t know.

Yes, well there was a wire in front of the cockpit which you lined up with the horizon. The instruments in the cockpit if I remember rightly were

the airspeed indicator, which told you how fast the plane was going. I think there was a turn and bank indicator, I can’t remember that too well, but wire on the front was where you…you see, you had the rudder control and the joy stick control. The rudder control controlled the ailerons and the joy stick controlled the direction you were taking the plane,

so you would balance a turn and keeping the wings all correctly postured and at the same time using this wire as a guide against the horizon keeping it lined up. It was quite a complicated thing but once you did it, it was something you did automatically. I found it very easy.

I think I was more aware of Australia, not the Empire as such. Although we knew

England was at war and as Mr Menzies said “England is at war and so therefore we are at war”. I think it was…you had a feeling of family I suppose really, but it was the Australian Air Force that I was conscious of. I mean later on of course when we went to England and were part of the RAF [Royal Air Force], well there we became part of the English system.

Not all Australian air crews went to Australian squadrons, you see.

That’s correct, we were.

Yes. But I don’t think that was a conscious sort of attitude. It wasn’t

indoctrinated if you wish. I think you were more conscious that you were in the RAAF. But then of course as you travelled and went through the Canadian experience and the English experience you realised you were part of something larger.

What happened next?

Well they marched us down to a ferry because we had to go across to Oakland which is the other side of San Francisco Bay. That was interesting. We went past the famous island of Alcatraz and when we got to the other side there was a lot of American Red Cross handing out sandwiches and cups of coffee to the Americans who had just arrived on the ship with us and they were generous.

They gave us that and then we went down to the train and got to the train to go to Vancouver which happened to be an overnight trip. We arrived in Vancouver in the morning and I remember we had a very nice breakfast. They gave us a very nice breakfast and then we had practically a full day in Vancouver and we all sort of scattered like school kids out of school and found our way down town. I remember going to the

YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] where there was an indoor pool. Other people did other things. The older ones always made for a bar. I wasn’t in that sort of drinking situation at that time and it didn’t bother me at all, but a lot of them would make a bee line to where they could get a drink. Then we piled on the train to go to Edmonton. That was a fascinating trip. It was the most beautiful journey through the

Canadian Rockies. We stopped at a placed called Jasper…got out there and tramped around. We stopped at several places. One particular place was memorable because we got out…the train stopped and we all got out and tramped around and of course it was in February, so there was a lot of snow still around. In fact I think the snow lasted to the end of April. We started throwing snow balls at each other…

I don’t know if you’re aware but if you hold a snow ball in your hand it gets rather icy. Anyway, I heaved a snow ball at someone and it missed the person and hit one of the train windows and smashed it. But anyway we covered that up. We got on board and no one knew who did it so away we went.

Yes, these things happen. Anyway, eventually we arrived at Edmonton and they put us in

to a like… a show ground situation, just somewhere to accommodate us until they sorted us out. Some went to different places and our group of which there was about 35 or something like that went to the Air Observers School, Number Two School at Edmonton which wasn’t far away. So we went over there.

It turned out that there were only so many in a flight and the first three Australians, A.B.C. …Bateman, Cohen and Bowden. Bateman, Cohen and Bowden were put in with the New Zealanders, in isolation and the Australians were in another flight. So we didn’t have a lot of contact. They’d be flying at different times to us. Sometimes we used to see

each other around the place, but essentially I was more involved with the New Zealanders and the Canadians. The Canadian were generally a lot older. They were men in the late 20s and early 30s. The New Zealanders were about the same as us, and I became very friendly with a New Zealander and we became quite good chums. About half way through the course they started to select people who weren’t perhaps doing as well as others and those who weren’t doing as well were

sent off to a bombing school to become bomb aimers. After a few problems that I had I eventually graduated at an average level, I suppose.

Well I think I went through a psychosomatic stage. I was getting the flu and they couldn’t discover why I had the flu or colds and

they referred me to I think it was a psychiatrist down town. Anyway, after being interviewed and listening and going through that experience…they couldn’t find anything wrong with my health otherwise, there was a Red Cross hospitality centre in town and we would have coffee and things like that. I went in there and got one of the women to steam open the letter

which was going back to the camp from the psychiatrist or whatever he was. I presume he was a psychiatrist. Anyway, it went on to say “I was psychosomatic about this and I was worried about…” after failing as a pilot I was worried that I would fail as a navigator you see. I didn’t want that to happen, and yet some of the work was just a little bit on the edge for me.

Some of the maths was just on the edge for me and …anyway I sealed it up and took it back and it gave me a lot more resolve to…I mean, if I was dying I wouldn’t report sick and I got on with it and…We had two Canadian instructors and one of them, I would say he would have been a school teacher before. He was

a flight lieutenant and the other was a flying officer who was actually a graduated navigator who was given the job of training instead of going off to…he probably would have gone off to operations at a later date. Flight Lieutenant Lee, I didn’t get on that well with him. He used to say to me, “Well Bateman you’ll be lucky if you get through sort of thing…”, which wasn’t

encouraging. Anyway I remember we had our graduation dinner at the local hotel. We had a big splurge and booze up and that sort of thing, and he said to me, “I didn’t think you’d get through. You surprised me”, and I said …“Ok”. So next day we had a big graduation ceremony in the big hall there.

There were quite a lot of us and we were given our wings, and then we went off on our leave to New York.

Oh yes. I did. I could see what was going on…that I was finding an excuse not to confront some of my training difficulties

I suppose.

Well it pointed out very clearly that it was something I had to come to terms with and do something about.

It was. Oh yes, it was. I had achieved something. That’s right.

Because quite a lot of the people who were training as navigators were either older…there weren’t too many young ones. I think most were in their mid 20s and the Canadians particularly, there’s photographs I can show you…they were quite old. We called one “Grandfather”. He was 32 or 33 or something. Old.

Oh I suppose it’s like anything that you’re part of something. That you’ve achieved something and there you are, you’re all together. You’re one of them rather than being an outsider, an outcast. I don’t know what I could have done…I mean, if I had failed

there I would have been categorised out and gone to be a bomb aimer and that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. I’m not going to denigrate bomb aimers. They had a serious job to do. But it was a different type of work to what we were doing. Once you learned the skill of using a bomb sight, which was more of a practical thing, and air gunnery, that

was it. Whereas the navigation course had a lot of subjects like meteorology and charts and…not just practical navigation of knowing what to do. You had to know the theoretical stuff which was fed into that. Especially astro…taking astro. See we were involved at that time

in navigation by astro navigation, but taking shots of the stars and the moon and the sun for instance. And the working out of the mathematical solution of all those things going through tables. It was…once you got the formality of it in your mind it was easy. I didn’t have any trouble with that at all. But it was the theoretical side which

we also had to pass. Although that wasn’t that serious. Later on when I was navigating with Qantas I had to pass a First Class Navigators Licence…that was quite different and that was something I didn’t achieve.

It was called the Avro Anson. It was a bomber that…a two engine bomber that was actually the RAAF's

standby in the 30s. They had quite a few squadrons of them in Australia, but by that time they had been denigrated to a training role. It was a two engine plane with just one pilot and as a navigation trainee there were usually two of us. One would be doing one thing and the other would be doing something else as part of your training programme.

Photography, we did aerial photography. Map reading.

Oh understanding the way the weather is formed. Fronts. Weather patterns and isobars and the technicality surrounding a weather chart, so you knew what was

taking place when a front goes through…the way the wind will change from one direction to another direction. All those things which were very relevant to air navigation because air navigation really revolves around finding the wind. If you don’t know the wind then that’s the end of the day because it’s the wind that effects you. An enormous plane like the Boeing 707, the wind

will blow you off your course…albeit at the speeds they travel at, but not so much the Avro Anson at 100 miles an hour, or a Lancaster at 180. I mean that’s all they did.

Oh yes, it was. It was a lot more technicality in it than a pilot. A pilot’s training was practical

training of the physical ability to control all the…they also learned about instruments and they learned about weather like we did, but they didn’t do it as deeply as we did.

Yes that’s right.

Well it depended on…I mean this is a different subject to what we’re talking about now…maybe you want to talk about this another time…

but I can explain that more to you…in its initial stages being a navigator is just taking the plane from A to B, but that later on because of the way technical developments took place, navigators had other responsibility and as you alluded to, bombing and things like that.

It was part of the sort of ethos that you knew that because people were being trained in a difficult experience, that it was logical that there were going to be a lot of accidents. You didn’t contemplate them yourself, but they were going on around you. I explained earlier talking about two Tiger

Moths colliding over Temora and the crews being killed, and the awful funeral which took place. That was my experience of it. In Canada…

In as much as the sadness of it. I can see the wife of one of the pupils at the funeral. We had a proper

military funeral if you like, from the camp. We all marched through the camp, through the town to the cemetery, and the wife had to be restrained. She wanted to jump into the hole. That had an effect. I had never been to a funeral before in my life. That’s something that impinged on me. Then like everything else it just goes into your subconscious. But

subsequent to that the other experiences were in England and a couple of very horrifying experiences of accidents that took place. One of our trainees at the AFU [Advanced Flying Unit]at Boddington where we went after we arrived, he was killed flying into Mount Snowden which is the highest peak in Wales.

Whether it was his fault or the pilots fault we’ll never know, but he was a good friend and he was killed there. At the same drome one day, a Lancaster bomber for whatever reason came flying across at a very low level and exploded just on the edge of the field. We raced out and some got out and some didn’t. On another occasion at our heavy conversion unit where we learnt to fly the …

…where the pilot learnt to fly four engines, some of the crew and I were coming back on our bikes from somewhere and out of the blue one of the training aircraft suddenly blew up alongside us as we were cycling along in a farmer’s field. And we had other evidence

from our own knowledge of what took place. There were a lot of accidents particularly coming back from a trip. England was notorious for fogs and planes would be diverted which we were a few times, and in the diversion often those planes might run out of fuel, or if they were badly damaged, they had a special aerodrome on the edge of

the English coast where you were sent to if you had serious difficulties. Many planes blew up on landing there.

You were always very pleased when you got back. I’ll say that, yes. The planes were well serviced and looked after

there was no question of that. But because of all the other factors, the weather, the pilot’s ability…I mean we had great confidence in our pilot, but a lot of pilots were not as good and you could tell that by the way they landed the planes. So we were very fortunate, but it was as you say, not a nerve racking

experience, it was a feeling of satisfaction and joy when that plane put its wheels down and you knew you were back home.

Yes, we had leave and we all took the train across to…

which was a wonderful experience. And I was very friendly with a girl there and her mother. I used to go there as a family situation. They came down and saw me off. I’ve got a very nice picture of them. Then we got to New York and we had a lot of good times. We went then from there to Halifax in Canada where we were in a camp until transport could be arranged to go to England.

We were there for probably 3 weeks and we used to do different things.

Yes, it was that sort of relationship but it didn’t develop into anything more than… I suppose I was a bit

ready to mix with other people later on, which I did. But we were very good friends and it was a nice relationship we had, in a family situation which was very good.

I don’t know…I suppose if you think about it, whilst you’re training, maybe you don’t have the glamour you have when you’ve got a pair of wings. I don’t know. I’ve never thought of that. But from that experience on you are a graduated air crew member with a wing and I suppose that’s when your self pride might give you more self confidence

about your ability to woo the girls. I don’t know. But I think it was just the fact that it gave you more status and things like that. With my friend in Edmonton I don’t think it would have made any difference if I had had a wing or didn’t.

Well we were…

…we used to wear our uniform which was a bluey sort of colour. They’ve gone back to it again. For a long time they didn’t have the blue uniform. But whereas the RAF and the Canadian Air Force and the New Zealand Air Force, all had this sort of grey colour but ours was a definite blue and we were called “Blue orchids”. Oh yes. And I think being in the air force, particularly in Australia

we were treated by a lot of the army boys as being, if you wish, a bit sort of feminine or less than masculine. There were all kinds of ways of doing…as an air crew trainee you had a small white piece of flannelette in your field cap you see which nominated you as air crew. So everyone was very proud

about that. You weren’t just ordinary ground staff. In one camp in Queensland some of the young blokes in the town got a bit sick and tired of these air crew people coming in and taking over the girls. They put around the story that “Those people with the white piece in their caps have got venereal disease”. That’s true.

Well that didn’t last for long of course but that’s what they used to put around.

I wasn’t at that camp but that was what I was told. Yes, I suppose eventually when you get to England and you’re part of the air force and you are what you

are, I guess that would have carried a bit of weight if you had thought about it. I don’t think we did really. I think we sort of…air crew had a bit of aura about them. I don’t mean that in a boastful way, but I think it was because of the type of people they were selected from. Generally speaking they were more get up and go types. I mean there’s a lot of academic types,

particularly as navigators and people like that. There was a joi de vivre [joy of life] amongst air crews which communicated itself to wherever you were…it was generated amongst…particularly when they went to the pub. They’d…they were generally highly intelligent people.

Attractive people and I think that certainly gained a lot of feminine support…certainly in England. I can say that with a lot of experience.

It was certainly, and it was very hot. Accommodation was almost impossible. It was in August and it was so hot. A terrible climate. We had these heavy uniforms on. We finished up being allocated…or getting into a hotel. They had…American people were very good. They actually came out to Australia years ago

at the invitation of air crew people and admittedly when we got to New York we knew where to go. They had a little office and helped us get accommodation and social activities. Anyway, it finished up we got into this hotel…I think there was about four of us and there was just one bed you see, so it was a case of two in the bed one night and

two the next sort of thing. Then they arranged outings…we finished up going to Long Island on an occasion to an actress’s house…I can’t remember her name now…but they made their house available. They had a big swimming pool and they put beer and hot dogs on for us. It was that sort of thing. Then we did a lot of going to shows, like Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe

and I was mad about jazz at the time…I still am. I went to quite a few…there was one street, 58th Street I think it is, or 48th Street…anyway in those days there must have been about 20 little bars with jazz going on. You’d walk out of one and into another one. So there was that sort of thing.

Then in the hotel there was a …what would you call them, like a social welfare group. I think they were Jewish girls…I’m sure they were and they sort of acted as hostesses and they would have a meeting in the afternoon and they’d do things like musical chairs and that sort of thing. Anyway I was lucky. I finished up winning the musical chair competition, so I got two tickets to a

nightclub…the Cococabana Night Club. It was quite a place. So this girl came along with me and we had quite a good night. I went out with her again a couple of times. Yes, it was quite a good week in New York.

Oh yes. For instance we were on the ferry to go to

see the Statue of Liberty and these two very nice American matrons were talking to us and they said, “What are you doing for the weekend? Well come out to…Jones Beach is one of the most social beaches on Long Island and we’re having a party out there and we’d like you to come.” We didn’t go, of course. I think we were doing other things, but that was the sort of thing that was happening all the time. Wherever we were Australians were very well liked and there was

great hospitality. It was a bit like the Americans being in Sydney years ago. I don’t think it’s quite the same now. I think things have changed, but in those times they were very appreciative of the fact that we were…shall we say, interesting people and wanted to know us.

Yes

I can. There was this trumpeter, Eddison[?]. What’s his name (I’ve got some CD’s). It was the Onyx Club and they had this group there who had this trumpeter…Eddison. Anyway, that was a jolly good night. We were drinking daiquiris…I don’t know if you know what a daiquiri is? White rum and lemon and we had a few of those.

But they were a dollar each which was a lot of money and we didn’t have that much money. Anyway, we had these girls with us and we had to shout them drinks. It was bit of an expensive night. Australians aren’t very generous, you know. They like to get shouted things.

I’ll never forget it. Priceless. The Onyx Club, I can see it now.

Then we went to Bill Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe. That was quite a thing. In those days that was quite a nightclub. There would be these high kicking girls. And I went to the famous theatre in New York which they still have…The Rockettes. These girls are about six foot one or something with legs right up to here. Yeah, I went to the movies there. We got around.

About a week, yes. We didn’t miss much.

I think like everything. We might have been running out of money and all these girls came down to see us off on the train and it was probably a good thing that we left at that time. Things might have developed. I don’t know.

How do you mean?

Well, I don’t know where they came from, they might have been there when we went there. I can’t recall that. We were with a couple of American Navy fellows who we chummed up with and somehow or other we just walked in and joined this group. I think that’s what happened. These girls from the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] who looked after us

they took us out to where they lived on Flatbush which…we went to the house. I can remember now, the father was a taxi driver and he wanted to know why she’d brought all these Australians back…she was just being hospitable. Then we all decided to go to this little nightclub in the local place and there were all these boys who were obviously the boys of the group.

They wanted to know why we were there. It was a bit…not tension, but we’re not going to buy them drinks…that sort of thing you know. Anyway we got through that alright. There was no row or anything but things didn’t always go as smoothly as you think. Then we went one night to Coney Island on the Big Dipper and all that. You know, we didn’t miss much.

Have I? I don’t know if it’s as nice now.

My daughter and grandchildren have been to New York a lot and they love it.

Oh no. I used to write to the girl in Canada for awhile. That went on for a while and in fact I would have liked to have gone home via Canada to see if there was

any residual feelings and that, but she had moved on. She had gone to university and I think that was all over if you like. It wasn’t that sort of romance really. But the others in New York…one girl wrote to me a couple of times and I just can’t remember just which one that was. But it wasn’t a case of sleeping with anybody or anything like that,

it was just going out.

Yes, yes. One experience…you talk about jazz. I was walking through Broadway one morning. I don’t know where the other boys were. I must have been on my own and I could hear this jazz coming out of this building and I walked up these couple of flights of stairs and there was this big band rehearsing. I don’t know who they were but I just sat down quietly in a corner and they didn’t worry about me and they kept on rehearsing

and it was wonderful. It really was. And another occasion, they have these taxi dance stewards in New York. Well the boys had all finished somewhere and I was wandering back to the hotel and I saw this sign, “Taxi Dancing” and I thought “What’s this?” So up I go and it was all dreary…I mean if anyone ever tells you there’s a lot of glamour about some of these places, there’s not. They’re dreary. Anyway there was this Negro band

playing…I can see it now, Feed Kitty in front of the band, and you bought tickets at the door. You got so many tickets for so many dances. Anyway there’s these dreary sorts of 30 year old women. I had a couple of dances and I was invited to go home and I thought “No, I’m not going to be involved in that thankyou”. So I said “Good night, goodbye”. But it was an experience.

I’m glad I saw what those sorts of places were like. It was quite official. There wasn’t anything wrong. It was typical of New York, a taxi dance. People used to pay to have a dance.

I think they have them in Hong Kong, or they used to anyway.

Oh no. You paid the establishment and they would pay the ladies.

They would be paid…on a percentage. I don’t know, and they’d be in a little group and you’d go over and pick the one out that you thought you’d like to dance with. It was like that and then you’d give the ticket to her that you had bought.

Well it wasn’t bad jazz but by about one o’clock in the morning these people were getting a bit tired and sort of…the place wasn’t buzzing or anything like that.

It was on its last legs, I suppose. Anyway.

Haven’t you. Well…

That’s right.

I can’t remember exactly but I think it was two or three weeks because while we were there we did quite a few things. There was a camp

along the coast called “Camp Sunshine” where they had a kind of a place where we could go and spend a few days away from the camp because there wasn’t anything to do. While we were there they had the election. The famous election where Ben Chifley was elected [actually means John Curtin, August 1943] and we voted. I’ll never forget that. Not that we knew much about what was happening but they had voting for us there.

No at the camp. They came out with…of course there was quite a few Australians there. There were quite a lot of people waiting to go to England, not just us.

No. No, I just don’t remember why I voted how I did. I can’t remember except for my background. It was the first time I voted.

But the Camp Sunshine had great fun. We went there and they had a setup where you could …they had old houses on an island and we had a row boat to go across to the island. One of my friends was a sailor from (UNCLEAR). He had a …as a boy he had his own sailing boat. They had a little sail boat there and he said, “How about coming sailing?” So we sailed right down this big bay and when we got to the other end it was too late

to come back so we finished up going ashore and some people there very kindly put us up for the night. Then we sailed back the next day. I mean, there was no problem about discipline or things like that. Then we went back to Halifax and were there for I think a couple of weeks. We went into town quite a bit…it wasn’t a big place but there was

a big stadium there where they had concerts. Concerts of all kinds and we went to that a few times. Some of the boys played football. Went out drinking some nights.

Well what I remember of it. With the Queen Mary…I mean obviously it must have been a very deep water port because the Queen Mary came in to pick us up and there were the obvious facilities for boarding a ship. Down town they had some nice restaurants. We went to a restaurant there. I remember having lobster a couple of times because lobster was quite cheap in that area. Went to the pictures a few times. It was a reasonable sized

town. Not a big place, but reasonable and the camp was close by. It was hardly any distance at all, you could walk into town. In the camp we did do some things. We had an interesting decompression test where they put you in a chamber and they gradually reduced the pressure so people could see the reactions of people when the amount of oxygen

and the…you get what you call an oxyio which means you don’t have enough and you get quite silly before you go out of it. But before that you get light headed and it was all part of learning to make sure we always kept our masks on because we had to have oxygen. The planes weren’t air conditioned or...we had an oxygen mask which we used to use.

In the chamber?

Oh yes. Yes there were still courses. We did courses there. It might be aircraft recognition and things of that kind but nothing serious. I think it was more of a filler.

That’s right.

It was one

big crowd of people. There were 15,000 Americans plus us. We graduated as sergeants. A certain percentage graduated as officers, not many. I think about two or three graduated as officers. And of course the difference between an officer and a sergeant became quite apparent then because they had accommodation in a special part of the ship and we were in another part of the ship. In fact we were allocated I think

four or it may have been six to this cabin which meant…the idea was, there wasn’t enough beds on the boat to accommodate everybody so there was this continual movement of people going up stairways and down stairways. They’d spend one night on deck at the top upstairs or in the cabin at night. So we came to an arrangement where some would sleep on the bed and some would sleep on the floor.

We didn’t want to go with this business of going up and down the stairs all the time. When you went up to the deck, up the top to see what was going on there would be this movement. And going to eat, you had two meals a day in this vast, beautifully appointed old…I mean all the good furniture had been taken out and there was just benches if you wish. Benches and bench seats and you

sort of got served food. But all the decoration, all the art deco stuff was around the walls so you could see what it would have been like originally. Then they had on the top deck wholesale food. Like you could buy tinned peaches. But you couldn’t buy one, you could only buy a case so what we’d do, we’d all gang together and buy a case of this or a big box of chocolates and we’d share them out. The days went very quickly.

It only took three and a half days to go from Canada to England.

No. It had anti roll mechanisms on board. But the memory I have of this trip was the groups of people moving up and down the stairs because we had 15,000 Americans

and just us, which was probably three or four hundred airmen.

Oh we didn’t really get together. On the deck the Americans would be walking around over there and we would be with our friends. I don’t remember even talking to one. There was no need to. They were there and we were there.

But they abided by this business of sleeping up on the deck one night and sleeping in a cabin the next night. You must remember it was summer. It wasn’t cold. It was August 1943. We got to England in early September, I think. Yes it was early September that we got there.

Well yes, we came to Greenoch in

Scotland. The ship moved up…that was quite interesting. The ship came up along through the big estuary to Greenoch and we were welcomed by…there was I think aeroplanes…fighter planes came alongside us earlier on and then there were other ships which came along as we came up the English coast.

Then we piled out and boarded a train for Brighton. The train went direct to Brighton. It didn’t stop anywhere…I don’t remember stopping anywhere. We got to Brighton in the morning, it was overnight, and we got to Brighton in the morning. I can see us all marching down from the railway station…you see they had sequestered all these beautiful hotels that they had on the waterfront at Brighton and we marched through Brighton

with our kit bags and our duffle bags. The English people didn’t take any notice of us because we were pretty common. There were a lot of Australians in Brighton for a long time. Anyway then we got to our accommodation in the hotel, which was pretty basic. Just cot beds and that sort of thing. No furniture. And then eventually we got our trunks.

You see we all had a big metal trunk we were given which stored most of our stuff. That eventually came off the ship and caught up with us. In the duffle bag you only carried your immediate needs like change of underwear or whatever.

Not really, no. Well I didn’t get the opportunity to because of the way it all happened. I don’t know what I would have taken. I don’t think it would have been much. I might have taken a photo of my mother and father. I don’t know. But I didn’t get that opportunity.

My life’s been a sequence of missing this and not being there for that, and I don’t know if it’s been good or bad, but all kinds of funny things have happened to me. I mean there’s pictures of the course…if you want to go through my book….the course in Bradfield Park. There they all are but not me because I was doing something at the time. Either nobody told me the photographic thing was going on

or I didn’t listen or I was doing something else and I couldn’t be bothered. I can’t remember.

Yes, they’re all there but me.

Oh yes a bit.

Oh well, there wasn’t a lot to do really. They filled in our time by doing aircraft recognition.

Marching up and down. We went and did skeet shoot…you know firing at clay pigeons. Just generally getting us familiar with being in England and getting ready for the next move on. We had interviews and leave. We had leave. We got there…the group I was with,

we all figured wouldn’t it be nice if we all went to the Lakes District. Somebody came up with that idea. So we got our free pass in the train and off we go. We had to change trains at Birmingham and we got to Birmingham and they said “Well, you go to this accommodation office and they’ll fix you up there”. So we go there and they said, “No there’s no accommodation in the hotels in the various places in the Lakes District,

however there’s this place in the area, Bromwich or close by where you’d be very welcome. This lady will put you boys up.” “Ok”. So we decided that was a reasonable option, so we get there and there’s about six other Australians there as well. You mightn’t be aware but we used to get ration…

if you went on leave you got ration coupons. All food was under rationing. So naturally the lady of the house would say as soon as you arrived, “Have you got your ration coupons with you?” “Yes, here they are”. She put us up (she was a bus driver) and I don’t know what her motivation was…whether it was just that she liked young men around the place or that she got the extra food, I don’t know, but

we didn’t do much. We made our own arrangements. So we gradually wandered around and we went to the local big park and that was interesting because there was a balloon site there. As you know they had these balloons being flown all over these industrial cities. The balloon site was quite a separate hut in the middle of the park with no fence around it, and it was manned by about three WAAFs.

They were in charge of the balloon. One was a sergeant and two others. Anyway we spent a very happy afternoon getting to know the WAAFs there and we finished up taking them to the pictures and various other things and so that was another move along the road …social engagement if you wish. Sergeant Rita Turner was her name. That all came to an end.

Oh, I got a letter in the mail one day written in purple ink and that sort of warned me off as well.

Well I sort of presumed that anything written in purple ink was rather…you know, dramatic. I spent…actually I spent…I went away after I got to Bobbington. I got in touch with her again and I went down to a little place called God-lem-er in Surrey where

I stayed at another house. I didn’t have accommodation and this lady down the street said, “Oh yes you can come and stay with me…”, anyway we went to different places. We went on bus trips down the Downs and things like that, but again I sort of felt that there was something closing in on me and that was that.

There were other things in the letter but…

you could call it purple prose, I suppose.

You could say that yes.

Oh no. No I’ve had a few of those. No, she was just expressing how she felt about things and I think she had had an Australian boyfriend who had been killed before,

and that was par for the course. I mean, there were a lot being killed at that time. Ten thousand Australians were killed in the RAF in England. I don’t know if you knew that or not.

Yes that was what it was all about yes. Yes growing up

was part of it for most of us I think. The experience of being out on your own and doing what you wanted to do, doing what you liked and no…see the air force didn’t impose much discipline on you. You didn’t have much discipline, parades or anything like that. As long as you were there when you were wanted, that was all that mattered, whereas the army was a totally different thing. They were always under some officer control or

whatever as I understand it. Anyway that was another interesting experience being in Birmingham. As it happened, it could have happened anywhere, but when we got back to Brighton we were posted to an Advanced Flying Unit which was just outside of Birmingham at a place called Bobbington. So we were there for about four or five weeks and for the first time getting on with

our proper training. That was going up and doing navigation around the English countryside which was quite different…particularly map reading. In Canada, where we were in Western Canada, once you left Edmonton all you had was…it was a bit like being in Australia…railway lines with grain elevators on. They’d be separated by about five or ten miles, a little village of maybe six houses,

lakes, a river. But that was about all. It was just absolutely mind boggling when you looked down on villages, roads, bridges, fields. So you had to learn how to map read, because map reading… whilst in Bomber Command later you didn’t use it a lot because you were up so high, but

it was important that you understood the landscape. So that was part of our training. Not just all map reading because we used other methods of navigation as well. But map reading played a big part of our time at Bobbington.

Well they would have posters with different aircraft shapes on. How to recognise them from this angle or that angle. In Australia it was mainly Japanese bombers…Mitsubishi’s and Zero’s and things like that. But in England of course it was ME109’s and ME110’s and 117’s [Messerschmitts]

and all the German aircraft t, so you knew them if you saw them. I think really… I think a lot of it was just filling in time stuff because I can’t see what real value it would have been to a navigator, or any other…I mean for a gunner, yes. He had to tell the difference between what a Spitfire looked like and what a ME109 looked like because that could be quite important.

No, we didn’t get onto that until we got to OTU

At Bobbington (or Halfpenny Green actually). They were Air Speed Oxfords and Ansons. They were the same as what we had been training in in Canada. I’m sure they were Ansons as well. Much the same aircraft.

I think just navigation generally. Learning how to fit in with the English way of things happening. The air force and all of that.

I think if I got my log book out I could tell you, it’s just over there. But I think about six weeks.

Well then we went to a place called Wing near Buckinghamshire which is closer into London and Wing was war time airfields…I think it’s gone back to fields now, I’m not sure. But grass runway. There was no formal strip there and we lived in dispersal circumstances like

huts down there with a central spine of the mess and showers up here. Then for a while we went out to a place called Little Horwood where the pilots did circuits and bumps and things like that. The navigators were back in Wing doing…they had all kinds of more sophisticated equipment to train us with. We learned about Gee and we learned about

artificial…like a pilot doing something in a …you know how pilots are trained in a capsule and the thing reacts like that. Well, we had a similar thing for navigators which projected pictures on the wall and you had this projection and you worked things out from that. It was a lot more sophisticated training.

We had to specialise in astro-nav, and one of the most dangerous times I had in the air force was going up with some of these other trainee crews. The trainee crew would be going off on a cross country at night and they’d pile in about four or five navigators to go and take practice astro sites. And these crews weren’t fully trained. They were just getting together and one night

we were flying with this pilot. There were arguments and he didn’t know where he was and the next minute we were flying into the [barrage] balloons. See the balloons used to let out a squeaky noise. They had a special thing in the radios which gave you…when you were near balloons they gave out this squeaky sound, you see. And there was this sound coming over and all of us…we’re in the aircraft down the back, nothing to do with the crew.

Nobody’s telling us anything…it was very dangerous, I thought. Then the pilot came back from Little Horwood after doing his circuits and bumps and then we started doing proper crew training. The bomb aimer doing…we’d fly to a range and he would do bombing practice with practice bombs. We’d do long cross countries. In fact some of the…sometimes

the OTU crews went on operations. It could have happened to us and I think on one occasion we were going to go on a trip but it was scrubbed. But quite often, if you see the records, you’ll see that so many OTU aircraft were lost on operations. They made the numbers up.

Oh yes.

Someone

on the internet wrote his diary about …and they published his diary on the internet and it was almost exactly what happened to us. I’ve got it there, I’ll show you. We just all arrived in this hangar, different categories.

This is at Wing. We had just arrived or within a couple of days. I think it was the first day after we had

got into our huts and things. And over there on my right is the pilots, over there on my left is the bomb aimers, over here are the wireless operators (although our wireless operator had been picked). He turned up later. There was just the three of us that met up then. And I saw this person I knew as Walter Cryer. I thought “That’s Wal Cryer, I’ll go over and say hello to him and see what he thinks”. So he looked at me and

I said, “What about it Wal?” And he said…but that’s what happened which was very fortuitous because it all turned out very well. And Jeff Jones the bomb aimer fitted in too because he was an older person. He was 26 or something like that. I was to turn 20 at Wing.

Oh there was a lot my age.

There was but there were a lot of older ones too. But having that experience around you gave you a nice feeling. Tony Adams was the same age as me and when we eventually picked up our gunners, they turned up there a little bit later on. One was older. He had been in the air force before he remustered as an aircrew, and the other

was a young chap. I think he was only 18 when he went in. So Harry Sue was only about 19 when he was flying with us.

That’s right.

Well it just seemed what was …

…the way it was done. You just accepted it. This information I’ve got out of the internet, the Bomber Command thing, this diary, says exactly the same as what I’m telling you. The only difference was he talks about having sandwiches and cakes and tea and coffee, and I can’t remember that. Maybe they did but I can’t remember. Perhaps he wrote about it the same night. But that’s exactly what happened and

it was a case of chance of how you found your crew, and on that depended your future because some of the pilots were very young and inclined to be rather…not so conscientious. We knew of several crews like that and they didn’t

make it. They didn’t survive. Now for what reason…lack of discipline? You had to have a lot of discipline. Things would happen and you had to be prepared to do what you were told by your captain. You were allowed your own input, and I did. I put a lot of input in, I can tell you! But not just that, the atmosphere.

A lot of them used to talk and chatter on and that was very, very bad.

Oh yes. You wouldn’t have said “Cowboys” in those times because that wasn’t part of our vocabulary but I would say they were just ratbags. Absolute ratbags.

I mean some of the things they did and how they behaved.

I think it was just their general casual attitude about things. They didn’t set any standards of behaviour. I mean they drank a lot. I can think of one particular crew that comes to mind…maybe I shouldn’t talk about them…but they were a very poor crew and they didn’t survive.

I can’t say, but I think it was just the general sort of atmosphere they created around themselves of inefficiency and lack of sort of self control and things of that kind. They were led by the pilot

who was erratic. You got to know about people and how they behaved.

Yes, yes. Drinking, playing up. I mean we all had a few drinks, and mind you at that age a few glasses of beer and I was as silly as a wet hen. I mean we didn’t drink heavy because the English beer wasn’t very strong anyway.

It was what they used to call (UNCLEAR) “Beer and high spirits”. It was a wish to relax so we would have a few beers and be as silly as a two bob watch. But that was…but they used to go on and on and on some of these boys and they weren’t disciplined. If I can explain that. Our crew…our captain didn’t have us marching up and down. I don’t mean that.

I mean the self discipline that comes out of self respect. Everybody doing their job and respecting the other person for doing his job. That was the atmosphere. And that was created because of the person who was our leader. That was very important and that was for the very successful crews right through. I mean a lot of them might have been the best crew in the world and they still got shot down but

that gave you a bit more chance.

I can give you experiences on our trips. I mean, the respect the pilot had for me, although I mightn’t have had a lot of respect for myself. I’ve always been very unconfident about my ability to perform. That was my biggest worry. I

wasn’t worried about getting killed so much. That didn’t cross my mind as much as “Would I be able to do my job properly and carry out the duties I was supposed to do for them?” That was…my conscientiousness, that was my biggest problem. But I was respected by him. On one occasion…you see

your Gee Box which was the main navigational aid we had at that stage…some other crews in five group would have had things like H2S [radar] and Obo and all these sorts of words, but at that stage we only had Gee which was a very good navigational aid. It was very restricted because the Germans used to jam it but even so it was still there.

But if you didn’t have it that wasn’t any excuse not to go on a trip. On this occasion we got on board and the next thing I know…you switch on everything to test it and go through that procedure and clouds of smoke are pouring out of this and the wireless operator said “Look at this, it’s going to blow up any minute”. So we switched it off and that was the end of that. So there we were, we were going to take off any tick of the clock on our trip

and the weather that night was very bad. It was raining at the time and we flew through a front. That’s getting back to the idea of the front with changes of the wind one way and the other. There was also a lot of cloud which meant I wouldn’t be able to use astro navigation. To cut a long story short, I said to the skipper, “I don’t think we should go”. He said, “Well we can’t get out of it

because of the Gee Box”. I said “Well, this is the point. We’re going to fly through two fronts and we’re going to do this and do that, and if you want my opinion we shouldn’t go.” He thought about it and he said, “Well, we won’t go”. Then we had a problem because the all up weight of the plane was such that we couldn’t land…by this time we’re up in the air anyway, we had already taken off and getting ready to go on our way.

We had to fly out to a special zone. There’s a special zone in the North Sea where you used to drop bombs to bring the all up weight down because we could never have landed with the load of fuel we had and the bombs. Then we had to find our way back. It was a terrible night and anyway when we landed a couple of hours later he was called to account. “Why didn’t you go…?” and

anyway they accepted the reasons, and that came because…they accepted it because he had a good reputation. He had all that behind you and he took my advice. Whether or not the worse thing could have happened to us, I don’t know. But to me it wasn’t worth taking that risk. See that’s when you have a good leader who makes a decision. Now that other crew they would have said, “We’ll be right

ok”, so they get over there and they don’t know where they are and off they stream. See the night fighters used to pick aircraft that weren’t on the stream.

This was a war time squadron. It was at a dispersal area. We were across a main road in a rabbit warren type of thing. In fact it’s well recorded about it being a rabbit warren. We had these huts

in the middle of some trees and in actual fact I was a bit disappointed because a lot of my navigator friends had been posted up to the Australian squadron, which was further north in Lincolnshire, Binbrook and Waddington, and I was left wondering “Why we finished up coming to this place?” I don’t know…in the back of my mind has always been the thought that

Jeff with his connections in the permanent air force and who had come to England may have done it. I don’t know. Anyway this was a dispersal aerodrome and we were flying Stirlings and our operations were supplying the underground in what they called SOE [Special Operations Executive] into France and other places dropping supplies to the underground. That was on

moonlight nights and on the other nights we did mining. As an introduction, our first trip was a mining trip off the Frisian Islands and I won’t forget…as we were loading on the bus and all the girls in the mess came out to wish us good luck, and out at the hardpan where the aircraft was we were told that “This was the aircraft number that Flight Sergeant Middleton had flown and to take care of it”.

So that was interesting.

Yes. Flight Sergeant Middleton was awarded the Victoria Cross after an operation on the 28th November 1942 when they were bombing Turin in Italy and the plane was very heavily and badly damaged. It limped across. He got it back across the Alps. He was very badly injured.

He had lost an eye and had lost a lot of blood and the plane was in very bad shape. But anyway he got the plane back to the edge of the English coast and got most of the crew out, but two did stay with him and they went into the English Channel. So that was the end of that. But he was very highly regarded because of that.

Well it gave us a

sense of history that…a feeling that we were going to look after it because we wanted to look after ourselves, but it gave us a sense of interest in what we were doing, that we were historically involved in what had taken place quite a long time before. I mean the war had gone on for so long really.

I think generally most crews had little things. I mean every person had their own little, what would you call it, idiosyncrasy about things. Some would have special things that they would take with them. I didn’t have anything like that, but I did make sure… we had a locker down at the main block where all the officers were,

where we would stow our flying boots. We would undress…we would take our shoes off and put flying boots on and…depending on what the trip was going to be like, whether you wanted an extra sweater or something. You’d put that on and I would make sure that whatever I did I did in a routine. But some people had little things that they would take, yes.

Just that I would put things back and

got things out. I would usually take that out first and that second and made sure I did it all in a sequence.

I think it was a kind of a reassuring feeling that you do it the next time and that sort of reminded you that here you are, you’re doing it again and you’ll do it again tomorrow probably. So it gave you a bit of reassurance, I think. Mystical.

Well, it was a single operation. I mean the mining trips were sent off to different places. There was no major

attack. With a bomber attack there might be three or four hundred aircraft assembled and meeting up and flying to one place. This was, you’d take off and go into the wide blue yonder over the sea or over the Bay of Biscay or something like that. And you were on your own. You flew fairly low to avoid radar detection and

this trip was given to us as more of a familiarisation trip because the next night we did do a long trip. One of the moonlight trips down into France where we dropped packages to the French underground. The first trip…there was no consequences. It was a very quiet trip. We just carried out our duty. We got to where we thought we

should be. When you drop mines in the sea you’re never too sure if you’re in the right place or not, just close enough. We flew back…neither any flak or anything else. So it was a very simple quiet operation.

Oh yes, there was tension because it really was the first time we had ventured out away from the…I mean in the cross countries that we had been doing in our training, we did sometimes go across parts of the corners of the North Sea and the Irish Sea and somewhere like that. But not right out over towards the Dutch coast and

we had to follow lots of procedures which we weren’t associated with before. We had to make sure we carried out those procedures properly. For instance they had a special radar device which was called IFF [Identification Friend or Foe] and whilst you were over England you would have it switched on because then the radar detectors in England

would know that you were a friendly aircraft because of the message it sent out. But you certainly wouldn’t want it on when you were flying out towards the coast or over Europe because night fighters could home in on it. So you had to be sure that you switched it off and then switched it back on again. So there were all those little procedures that were part of the job that we were going.

Ok. Well the first thing you do is go and get your parachute. You’d get a parachute which is a clip on

one which you would clip on to your harness. But you wouldn’t have it on all the time. You’d have it stowed in a little rack or on a hook in the area that you’re in. In my case the navigator’s compartment. Then you go to the briefing room and in the briefing room all the crew were assembled. In our case, I can’t remember that night but there wouldn’t have been too many because it was only a small group going mining.

At the same time all the various specialist officers, the bombing leader and the navigational leader, the wing commander, the meteorology department would be there to tell you what was happening. Then you would be shown the route that you would be taking. After all the general discussion…it’s more appropriate to talk about that when you’re talking

about a more serious bombing raid because it was more complex. However…

Yes, only that…well in the case of a bombing raid, the same would apply except that they would have a map on the wall of the area where…a map of Europe with ribbons showing the various legs that you’d go on. The idea was

that they’d direct the legs, the different legs that you’d fly on away from known flak centres. They’d be marked and you’d mark them on your chart with a red area, so if you could help it you wouldn’t fly anywhere near there. They would point that out…“Be careful of this area, be careful of that area”. And they would have this journey taped to the target and they’d describe what they expected to get at the target. In our case later it was mostly

oil refineries (we’ll probably talk about that again). But in the case of bombing an industrial area what they expected us to attack…a steel works or in some cases it was only the civilian population, but that wasn’t…it was never highlighted that we were just bombing that, but in any event that was sometimes what it was. Just a raid on the city to destroy

the…and cause complications with the people, so they couldn’t get about their duties.

No, that wouldn’t ever be mentioned. It would only be mentioned that “We were flying to Cologne and this facility there…the bridge over the Rhine or…” you’d have that sort of…I don’t want to be too cynical about

what took place because it was all done with great and careful calculation all the raids, because they would have cost a lot of raids and a lot of effort. They were mostly worked out but sometimes there were raids you could question. Whilst we’re on this I’ll just mention one. We had only just been made into what they called

a GH Squadron. It was a blind bombing device which had been developed some time ago and was gradually working its way through our group. Various squadrons got it, but not all squadrons did because it was still with the manufacturer and also they couldn’t have too many sets because it put too much strain on the system. The system couldn’t operate with too many sets being used. So we were selected

as one of the crews, and our squadron was to use the GH device. Later on we used it to great effect, but this was the first raid that it was properly organised as a group effort. Number three group of around about 150 aircraft. We had only just had a new Air Vice Marshall appointed as the Leader of the Three Group. A man

called Air Vice Marshall Harrison. He was wanting to know the effect of GH bombing, how accurate it was. And so more or less a virgin target was selected, and they selected Bonn which really was a university city, and to my knowledge at that time didn’t have very much industrial apparatus to be bombed.

He wanted to select that target because they would know then how much damage was caused by the GH raid. In the event, it was a daylight raid and it was reasonably successful. The whole of the town centre, the medieval centre was destroyed. Beethoven’s house was saved by some very active

people, which would have been a tragedy if Beethoven’s house had been bombed. And that was that raid and as far as the war effort was concerned I don’t think it would have shortened the war by one minute.

Well at that time I didn’t know that. It’s only subsequently reading the internet notes on Bomber Command’s history which I’ve been getting

over the last few weeks, that this came to light.

Well, looking back in hindsight I can’t understand how these things were allowed to happen, but when you consider other things that took place, well that was just one very small thing. But as far as we were concerned, we understood at our briefing that it was an important

target and they would have described what they hoped to achieve, maybe a railway siding and that sort of thing, because that was a very important part of bombing activity, destroying infrastructure, railway marshalling yards and that type of thing.

Yes. To show…well they knew it was effective, but to see just how much damage it would have achieved…for his own information.

Well it is and I could spend a lot of time talking about other targets but I think that would be going too far off the track. But I could mention

quite a few targets and I don’t want to get into that.

Well after that the…all the detail would be completed by the various group leaders and that would then leave the navigator, myself, to work out the flight plan. In other words to put into my

log all the details, the legs, the different places, the longitudes and latitudes etc, and then plot it out on my navigational chart and work out the times it took and ETA’s [Estimated Time of Arrival]. Usually it was a matter of working back from…in the case of a serious bombing attack, from the time we were set to be there…we were set a particular time to be there and really

we were expected to, even after flying two or three hours, to be there within one or two minutes of that time. So what you would do, you would work backwards from all the forecast winds that were given to you from the Met Report, what time you had to be at various locations to get to that point at that particular time. And if you didn’t get there at that time, if you were late or early, I would come in for a very serious criticism.

I can show you in my charts what the navigational leader would have said if I was two or three minutes late or early. Anyway, but then I would work all the detail out and having done that the crew would have gone out on the bus to our aircraft and they would have done the various tests. All the various engines would have been run up and the gunners would have been firing their guns into

a sand pit to see if they were all functioning correctly, and then when I got on board the plane we would be all settled and we’d take off.

Yes that’s right.

It was a very large aircraft. It was built by people called Short Brothers in

Northern Ireland, or designed by them. Their previous designs were flying boats. In fact the big flying boats which used to come to Sydney after the war, the Empire Flying Boats were built by Short Brothers. It was very roomy inside. The navigator’s compartment was quite large. It was quite cavernous the plane itself. It carried quite a large (I don’t know if you want the technical details) but I’ve got all that technical detail. How many

kilos of bombs it would carry. It was a very effective machine, but because of its wingspan and the engines, it wasn’t able to operate much higher than 12,000 feet. In the early part of the war that was acceptable, but as the Germans improved their flak guns, it became necessary because the losses were getting too severe.

Apart from night fighters, flak was a very serious problem for the Stirling. So better aircraft like the Lancaster and the Halifax were developed and they were in the pipe line anyway, and eventually they replaced…our squadron was the last squadron to actually operate with the Stirling. But it was ideal for things like mining and flying on these long trips supplying

the [French] Underground because it was a very stable aircraft. You could get the plane down low and it was a very, very stable aircraft. The skipper Wal Cryer loved flying it because it was very…the only problem was landing it. It had very stilt like legs, undercarriage. Very high and very…not fragile, but spindly. If you weren’t careful you could have an easy accident landing or taking off.

Doing a ground loop or something like that and the legs would collapse. That was quite common.

Yes, it was a desk of about three feet by four feet. Something of that size. I had a comfortable seat and I had the Gee Box, which was one of the main navigational aids we had, which had a cathode ray tube

fitted into the wall. Its equipment was down on the floor. I had an astrograph which kept plotting and transmitting to the chart, if I wanted to use that. I had a storage place for my navigator’s bag. A light and of course the whole thing was blacked out. I had to have a light

on to work, whereas if you were flying you couldn’t have any lights being seen.

No pencils. Very sharp. I used to use about a 4/8 pencil which was hard and didn’t require sharpening very often, and if you saw my work on the charts you’d see why. They were very fine pencil lines and very

easy to read.

Well, I would bring out the maps and charts, then we would have the topical survey maps, which were like coloured maps with towns and villages and rivers and roads.

That was a separate sort of chart. The bomb aimer would also have that, and I would have my Doulton computer which was the important little computer which was to work out the various details.

It was a metal box with a ground surface so you could write with a pencil on the surface with a 360 degree compass rose

on it and then you would trace on it the various things. You would be working on the wind and the course and it had on the back various gauges. If you wanted to find conversion tables, temperatures or something else, it was all those sorts of things. It gave you a pretty quick calculation. It was quite a useful device really. It was necessary.

Then I’d have spare pencils and I would also have taken on board my sextant because I would hope to use the sextant sometimes. Generally speaking it wasn’t used because it wasn’t possible to do it sometimes because of the cloud and that sort of thing.

The sextant. To take astro shots

you used a sextant and every aeroplane had a little astro dome on the top. A little plastic flexiglass with a hook and you’d…because the sextant was quite heavy. It had a motor which gave a two minute series of shots, automatic shots because an aircraft has a surge for about two minutes. It goes up

and down, and that would mean if you were taking a sextant shot when the surge was on the lower part you would have a different reading to when you were going up a bit. So they evolved a two minute motor which took something like a hundred shots, automatic shots. By lining up your star and your bubble in your sextant you’d get…and then that would be averaged out. So your reading would be the average of say

100 shots which accounted for that surge of the aircraft.

Well that’s a navigational device. It’s like the sextant that you would have on a ship. An aeronautical sextant was a much more compact and different designed piece of equipment with mirrors in it that you would focus on the star and you’d get a reading and then you’d have to sit down and

with all your tables work out where you were. It was quite complex. If you were very fast you could take a shot…you would usually try and take three shots. Well that was six minutes and allowing for gaps in between, maybe eight minutes, and then plotting it would take you maybe five minutes or six minutes to plot. So you were looking at about thirteen or fourteen minutes finding out where you were.

Yes, it is but that’s how long

it took.

Well, we didn’t use the sextant much because the Gee more or less…but we always carried a sextant in case we needed it. We could always use it. I flew for Qantas after the war and that was the only navigational device we had, a sextant. So all the navigation between

here and India was done with astro navigation.

Oh yes, the other thing I didn’t think about was we were always given our little package in oil skin. If it happened to fall in the water it wouldn’t get wet.

In it would be currency for the countries you might be flying over. It wouldn’t have German currency in it, but it would have French or Belgium or Dutch currency, and also concentrated food like chocolate and malted milk tablets, and then there would be Benzedrine or some other pain killing drug in the package. That was given to you and when you came back you handed it

in because you had quite a lot of currency actually. It was designed so in the event of you bailing out or you crashed and survived, you’d have this amount of money to work in with the [French] Underground, to pay for things and all that.

Well it was. They had evolved. We had all kinds of things…

I mean, don’t think it’s funny but we had for instance, the stud we wore had a small compass in the back of the stud so if you landed you could tell…it wasn’t a very accurate compass but it did show north or south. In the same way in your flying boot you had a small knife, so you could cut the top of the flying boot and be left with a shoe. In other words, if you were somewhere

in a French town or walking somewhere in Germany even, you wouldn’t want to be seen with your flying boots on. You’d have a shoe, so that little knife was provided to cut the top of the boot away. There were all those things. Some of our buttons again were little compasses.

No, the stud.

We don’t wear studs anymore, but we used to have shirts with separate collars. Like my shirts all had separate collars and to keep the collar on we had a little collar button.

Well I mean it was to give the pilot instructions on what course to fly. How much time it was going to take, so he was aware at what speed to fly at. It was all according to the flight plan. Not so much on a mining trip because you weren’t coordinating with other aircraft, but

on the major bombing raids and a lot of the other squadrons, that’s all they did. You had to be very accurate and if you were running early you had to find ways to lose time. There were ways of doing that. You would work a dog leg out, a little dog leg which took two or three minutes and two or three minutes back and then you were back on your course again. So that was your responsibility. You had to be on time at the place you were going.

That was your responsibility and you were the one who told the pilot what to do. Essentially. I mean he had control of the aircraft. He was the leader, but the navigator was the one who was entirely responsible for getting the plane from A to B and achieving the result and bring it back.

They were in the bomb bay.

They were stored in the bomb bay and the bomb bay would be opened and the bomb aimer would have an electronic button and he would push that and drop them into the water. Just the same as a bomb really.

Well that’s very interesting. We had an SOE, you may not be familiar… but SOE was the British equivalent of what they called Special Operations Executive and they were responsible for dropping agents into France and supplies. It all sounds like, what would you call it, “Cowboys and Indians” but it really

was a very serious….Nancy Wake was one of the famous heroines. We would take canisters and we had an Army SOE operator on the squadrons and we weren’t supposed to know what was in them, but essentially they would be all the supplies that the resistance group that we were supplying would need. All kinds of things.

Speculation can be made about a lot of things but they required…see a lot of them were living out in the country. They weren’t in houses or towns, they were living in bush situations if you like. Not tents exactly but something like that. Or else they would be in the towns and they would need guns and ammunition, maybe gold, money. All kinds of things. So we would

on moonlight nights we would fly at a very low level. The route was usually designed so that you would have reasonable easy ability to map read, 150 feet or something like that just above the power lines. The bomb aimer would

tell me where we were. We might have crossed a bridge and a railway line, I then would look up my topographical map and transfer the latitude and longitude from that onto my navigational chart. We worked together on these trips. The bomb aimer would do the map reading from his bomb bay and he saw lots of interesting things. Things like the French cars on the road

would flash the “V for victory sign…” you know, dit dit dar with the lights. They knew who we were and what was going on. So then we’d come to a major observation point that we could locate like a crossing of a bridge on a river or a road and at that point there would be a timed run to take us to the field where we were going to drop

the supplies. Then we’d arrive and circle and expect a Morse code torch signals. If we got that signal we’d drop the supplies and if we didn’t, which we didn’t on the first trip, and fortunately for us we had our wing commander…the wing commander in most squadrons would go with a new crew on a trip. Sometimes it was

disadvantageous to him because quite often they’d get lost on the first trip. The wing commander would go with an inexperienced crew. It happened a lot. But anyway this wing commander, his name just escapes me for a moment, but I know it very well, he came with us and we located the site and we spent over half an hour circling and waiting

for the people to arrive. They didn’t arrive so we bought the packages back. But the next night we went out and we were successful.

Yes we all had…we used to have a leather helmet and on the helmet in the front was the oxygen

mask and if we were flying above seven or eight thousand feet we would certainly have the oxygen on, and the aircraft wasn’t pressurised. Everyone had their individual oxygen point. And also a microphone. So the microphone was in the same piece of equipment as the oxygen mask with a little switch on it. So if I wanted to talk to the bomb aimer I’d say “Navigator to bomb aimer, or Geoff it’s Jim what do you…”, some crews were more formal than others.

The pilot may insist on it being navigator to pilot, but with us it was a case of Wal and Jim but everybody respected the silence required so there was no conversation. It wasn’t a case of saying who you were going to take out the next night. We would only deal with the subjects that were happening at the time.

None at all. Not on our plane anyway.

Well so you could map read. You had no other navigation aid at that height, so you could find your way into these places. They were quite

long trips. The areas were generally down near the Spanish or French border….I mean Swiss border. So they were quite long trips. They were six, seven hour trips. Yes they were moonlight because of the ability to map read and locate the places. Bombing was a totally different thing. You would go as high as you could get on bombing raids.

Well I guess we could be unfortunate and fly over a German flak battery, but we had those marked. The major towns…our course as I explained before was always…the planners always tried to direct the different legs

past known large concentrations of flak guns, but that wouldn’t mean that you might not find some stray one, or at the dropping site it could be, and it did happen a lot, that the Germans would have information that this happening and they were at the site with flak guns and …

at that height, 150 feet, you were a sitting duck. You wouldn’t survive. So there was that risk.

Certainly it was,

because from the moment you took off to the time you landed, you were busy. Either just doing the navigation…there were periods when you might have minutes in between where you could look out the window and see what was happening, but not for any length of period. And that was good because it meant that your thoughts were concentrated on your work and

you weren’t thinking about other things that might be happening around you like flak going off and things of that kind. Like the tail gunner or the mid upper gunner. They were virtually, apart from swivelling their turrets around and occasionally letting everyone know they were still there, that was all they did, unless they were attacked by a fighter.

So they had tons of time to see what was happening and perhaps worry about it. But I was busy and that was good. I could keep my mind on my work and very rarely I would look out. Sometimes the bomb aimer would say “You better look out”. I would look out through the black out curtain and there would be coloured lights…the lights that the Pathfinders would drop

and flak coming up in bursts, and I’d think “Well…and fires down below”, and I’d think “Well, that’s enough thanks” and I’d go back into my little darkened room again.

Well not all the time but at certain times, certainly. Some flights were very risky

and there were certain times when they would be well aware of what the options were and whether things were…especially the pilot because later on when we started doing the GH raids, the necessity to achieve good results, the pilot had to fly on a steady course, steady height, steady speed

over a period of nearly eight or nine minutes and that could mean that with all kinds of flak coming up that he couldn’t jink or you know…alter course, because that would have destroyed our whole ability to be accurate about…with the bombing device. It required you to fly around the arc of a circle, in other words

he was altering the course about every two minutes about two or three degrees at a steady height and steady speed until we came to where I decided that we dropped the bomb and I would push the bomb tip. So the navigator under the GH operation took over practically the whole of the work involved. The bomb aimer was not eliminated, I mean that wasn’t the idea

but the GH equipment required that the navigator had the screen where all the pulses were lined up and you knew that was where you should fire the bomb.

Originally, it was decided to go into this because of Blind Bombing. It could be very…and it was very accurate if it was carried out properly.

And it was decided to take it up, but it was hoped that the trips were planned on the day when there would be 10/10th cloud over the target below you and maybe clear sky above resulting in…when you went to a target the Germans would fly up flax in a box, just in a box above the target.

They would pepper the sky with their flak and you had to fly through that. But if it happened that it was a clear day, in other words it wasn’t cloud underneath you and the flak gunners could see…they could predict it. If they could see you they could predict a single aircraft and they could fire at that one aircraft and that was very dangerous.

Well it was incorporated into the Gee system. The Gee system was a method of navigating by getting the distance between the aircraft and the transmitting station on a cathode ray tube with different stations and

plotting the accurate details from the cathode ray screen onto a special chart and then transferring those details to your navigational chart and then you knew where you were.

Yes, the Gee Box and that was being used from very early in the war and became possibly the most important navigational aid

the RAF ever had. But it had very serious limitations because the Germans were able to block the signals by creating grass on the screen and as the time wore on there was only a certain part of the enemy country you could fly into and get accurate Gee results. When the allies had landed in Normandy

and gradually progressed through France, it enabled them to set up these mobile transmitting stations for GH and they used the same box as the Gee Box but used different switches.

Alright, well it was a small screen of about eight inches diameter, like that, eight ten inches diameter with knobs below it. And by tuning…you had two lines, two dotted lines. The aircraft had its own blip, its own signal which was on two lines, a blip. And the signals

from the stations which were being used, they had their own blip and in some cases they were coded so you would know which blip was which. The blip would blink twice or three times, so you knew which one that was and you knew which one the other was. And then when you wanted to make a fix to find out where you were, you lined up your home…the aircraft’s blip with those blips.

And then by flicking a switch you froze the detail on the screen and by reading the serrations you could work out what the details were from each line. Then you’d plot that on, as I say, on that special chart we had all the curved lines with all the detail on it, and you would transfer the longitude and latitude

on that chart to your navigational chart.

Exactly, providing you were accurate in your ability to read the screen and get the precise…I mean that was important, that you got the exact figures and you could assess that it was 8.9.3 or whatever and plot that accurately and transfer the plot accurately.

And that’s where you would be. But because of the fact that the Germans were jamming, it meant sometimes that the usefulness of Gee was very good in the early days, perhaps in early 44, early 43. But as 1944 evolved and we went through the allies being in Europe it did improve. It became very accurate.

Well it was using the same box and cathode ray tube but with a different system of signals. It was based on another navigational device called “Obo”. I don’t want to go too much into that because we never used it, but Obo was used by the Pathfinders. It was very accurate and it was highly secret at the time

and it was a totally different method. The Obo system had operators in England who measured the distance electronically from the plane to them, and they would transmit back to the aeroplane where they were. We had the GH system and we had that built in for us to use. We used that ourselves. It came to be a blind bombing device.

As I said, it enabled us to bomb through 10/10th cloud extremely accurately. The accuracy depended very much on all of the qualities that were required, like the air speed, the height, the straight and level flying, all had to be done precisely.

Because how it was designed, the target on the ground was…the place on the ground was taken as the target and from there knowing the trajectory of a bomb or bombs, and the height you would be at, they would work out the official position in the sky where you would release those bombs. Now providing they would work it out

on the speed of the aircraft so the trajectory of the bomb at that air speed would fall in a certain arc, so you had to be at the position in the sky completely accurately for the bomb to hit accurately. The accuracy could be down as fine as 70 yards.

Well

it was entirely…well hopefully you did it every time, but at the last moment something might have happened to cause the aircraft to slightly…I mean there might have been a flak burst that caused the plane to swerve. But in our case every aircraft carried a photographic camera and that worked on the basis that when the bomb was released the camera would flash and you would see where the bombs landed. So

those films were printed and they would have those targets assessed for accuracy or otherwise. Mind you it couldn’t be assessed if you were bombing over cloud, but certainly in the clear day light. And a lot of the pictures that we had taken showed extremely accurate results.

Ok. I have a technical book here which can tell me exactly. But it’s like a lot of the air force things. It was a code for something.

Yes, that’s it. It was also being used by the Americans, so it became quite general as a blind bombing device.

Yes, Gee was a separate thing, but they were able to use the same screen and same piece of equipment with both operations. So when you finished with GH you switched that off and you returned to the Gee system.

Yes, it was a kind of a beam. You didn’t fly on the beam. What you used was…you used it to establish a position which you plotted on a specially designed chart.

Well it was to start off with. Like everything, in practice it was very simple.

Oh yes. I had sort of shown the crew…the crew would be quite astonished sometime with our cross countries and training that I would say “We were going to arrive at a certain place at a certain time”, and that would occur. So their confidence built up in me

and that gave me confidence. But it was always a challenge because with every piece of new equipment that came along, I had to master it. And it wasn’t until you felt you have mastered it that you were really able to feel that you were doing a good job. Excuse me for interrupting, but it was a continual learning exercise.

We had a navigational leader who would mark your logs and if there was anything deficient you would be counselled about it and asked to make sure you got it right. “Do you want any help? What’s the problem? Are you finding difficulty or something like that?” You weren’t left to sort of sweat it out as it were, you were given help and it was very important.

Well I can only say this. Talking to my skipper, who I see very often. We were talking about this the other day and I said something about the crew and he said, “Well everybody in the crew did a wonderful job and they were all ideally suited

to fill the position”. He assessed that way back then but he still says it and still believes it. It was a case of having confidence in each other. It was important that everybody did their job and you felt confident that they were going to, under circumstances carry out their task.

Well, we were in touch with the English members and one of them came out four years ago and we had a wonderful time with him. He’s unfortunately passed on and one of the gunners passed away a bit before. The English engineer is still around. With the Australians, we’re all here and we see each other regularly. Often.

Yes, we…some crews would and some crews wouldn’t. I was a bit of an individualist and I didn’t always want to go to the pub. Our crew found a pub with a very happy arrangement. A husband and wife and a daughter. They had a small pub about six or seven miles away

from the aerodrome. We’d cycle…we all had bikes and we’d cycle there and they would often put a supper on for them and I’d go frequently but not every time they went. We had a station picture show and I’d go there or write letters home. I was a bit of an individualist and liked to do some of my own things. But as a rule we would do things together. We enjoyed each others company.

Well it’s a bit hard to say. But we were…how can you say. The pilot was the most important person and all the crew were under the circumstances. The wireless operator, he did a wonderful job. I mean I don’t want to go too much into some of the things that happened because that’s another story, but he was extremely capable in his role and the gunners were certainly capable in their roles. And the bomb aimer was certainly…his results were certainly very good.

But I think because we had the real…how can you say, the real care of the aircraft in terms of where it was going, it did give us some sort of an aura which I think made navigators feel that they were a little bit special. I don’t think they felt they were any better than anyone else.

But we were in a little world of our own. With the pilot, it was a technical job. He flew the plane like you drive a car and he was competent and he was also a good leader. He had to be a good leader. But the navigator had access to all this other information and it was a little world that the others didn’t really understand that well. I suppose that made them a bit special.

Well if we had been in another group….a lot of the aircraft had another navigational device which was H2S and I don’t want to go into that, but that was a device which again required…in a lot of aircraft there would be two navigators. One working the H2S which was a form of

radar, picking up on a screen the ground underneath and by understanding the way the scanner revealed what was below and interpreting what it was, whether it was a river or the edge of a big building or something, they became very expert in H2S, and that was a special system which was placed underneath the aircraft, and it would scan underneath and it was very helpful.

It did have disadvantages because night fighters could hone in on it but…however our Group didn’t have H2S. There was something like nine groups in the air force with about 150 to 200 aircraft and they were all managed separately and generally whilst they did the same work, would be operating on different targets at different times and you’d be given different equipment.

Most of the Australian squadrons, the individual Australian squadrons in 5 Group were considered by everybody to be the prestige group. They seem to get all the new equipment. There was a favourite of Bomber Command, Bomber Harris. He had come from 5 Group and became head of Bomber Command. 3 Group was not the orphaned child, but

it was left a bit late for most of the things. We got the Lancasters late, then they gave us the GH which was the device that was…it was very important at that stage of the war because it was used for specific targets such as the synthetic oil plants, and they did a very good job in attacking. And in fact, in the latter part of the war

October, November 1944, we would have bombed mostly oil refineries. And that was very satisfying because we knew we were bombing a military target. I mean if the bombs did fall outside the target area and damaged homes or other things, well that was just unfortunate. But the intention was to be extremely

accurate and just destroy the oil plants.

Oh yes. Some places required…the Germans were very expert in repairing damaged equipment and quite often you would go back to the same target three or four times because the first raid wasn’t effectual or it just wasn’t destroyed, but eventually it would be destroyed and that was

a very important factor towards the end of the war because it restricted the amount of petroleum that the German machine had. They had to curtail their flying operations and their tank operations, and the whole of the war. See earlier on they got a lot of their oil from oil wells in Rumania and Russia. But in the end they had to rely entirely on synthetic oil which was made from coal.

Yes. It’s recognised that 3 Group played a very important role. We weren’t the only ones who bombed them. I mean some of the other groups did too, but we were given the specific task of doing that work because of the GH equipment, which I say was very accurate. It was reasonably safe,

I mean some raids there would be only one loss out of 150 aircraft. Sometimes there might be six out of 120 or five out of 100. Or something like that. So the losses weren’t great, but there were losses.

Yes, alright. We converted to Lancasters in September 1944. We had finished with the Stirlings. The first raid was a very important raid according to the records I’ve now got. It was called Operation Hurricane. The American Air Force and the RAF bombed Duisburg in the day time with

quite good results and they decided they would continue the raid into the night with the RAF. I think during the day something like 1200 aircraft bombed Duisburg and in the night I think it was something like 900 to bomb it. And we were on the night raid. We were on the …the first time we were on a Lancaster with all the different equipment. We had trained on it but there were certain

technicalities which we hadn’t managed before. Anyway the raid took off and we were well on our way and one of the tasks that was given to me…there was a switch on the navigator’s desk called the “Master switch”. The master switch was the electrical control of the bomb equipment which had to be on if the

bombs were going to be released. It was my task to put that switch on. Anyway, we were having a bit of difficulty with the timing. I knew that our timing was…we were early and in lots of ways, from the crew’s point of view that was good because it meant the target was quiet. If you were there before the raid, early in the raid the Germans hadn’t woken up that there was going to be a raid on, they hadn’t put everything up at you.

Anyway, we arrived at the target, we were early. I was severely criticised for that. The bomb aimer lines up and said “Bombs gone!” Well, because the master switch hadn’t been put on by me, the bombs didn’t go. Now our pilot was a very conscientious man, and I’m not saying

what crews would have done or would not have done, but a lot would have just let the bombs go immediately. I mean it was only a fraction of time before the realisation that this switch hadn’t been put on. I still feel…we had an arrangement. Someone is going to mention this, but I say this was never mentioned, and anyway that’s all history now. But the thing was, a lot of crews would have said, “Alright,

let them go now”. But our skipper said, “No, we’re going to go round again”. Which meant that we were going to do a big circle and come back into the Bomber Fleet which was just arriving because we had been early and it was quiet. Immediately, we started on that everything started up. We were coned by search lights and this was where the rear gunner was very, very competent.

They work with the pilots and give instructions about which way to dive and that the aircraft had to dive this way and dive that way to shake off the search lights which had coned us. The flak was coming up at us, very close to us. You could hear it actually. And then we had to find our way back into the stream. Well, that was dangerous because all these aircraft were coming and you’re coming back in at the side of them. Anyway that’s what we did and

we bombed about one or two minutes late. That eight or nine minutes was a pretty horrific time. It was the worst time that we had and I felt very bad about it because I suppose it was…although nobody ever said so, I personally believe it was my fault and I’ve often wondered about that. So we got home quite safe and sound, but it wasn’t a very good trip.

Oh, it was terrible. In those minutes doing the big arc coming around and coming back into the bomber stream, you knew you were coming back into the bomber stream because the air is very disturbed. You see, the aircraft going through the air create a lot of vibrations and waves in the air stream and you knew very well that you were back with them because

the air was very bumpy. And in that period a lot was going through my mind I can tell you because I started to think, “This is it. This is the closest we’ll ever get to…” because when you’re coned and you’re getting flak fired at you, you’re extremely lucky to survive.

Well I think…there was a lot of soul searching and post raid conversation about that, and all that sort of thing, and I suppose we did think “We were very lucky”.

I don’t know if that was in our minds. No, I don’t think we ever had that thought. Well I didn’t anyway.

I didn’t…I might have been saying a little prayer in those minutes from that point. I felt very, very bad about it obviously, that because of this…I mean the fact that we would have bombed some minutes early, I was severely criticised by the navigation leader later. My log reveals that. But that wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to you,

but it would have been a terrible thing if we had been shot down because of me. But anyway that’s in the years that have come between then and now, our crew at our gatherings and get togethers, we see each other so often. That’s been all thrashed out long ago and no blame has been apportioned to anybody. That’s the way it is.

Well, I naturally felt responsible and I also felt that the arrangement I had made hadn’t been carried out, so who was right about that I don’t know? It’s a matter of opinion and perhaps at this stage of life it’s not worthwhile covering that. It’s all passed long ago.

Yes. I mean it was an awful experience coming back from that raid because of the guilt, fear, and I think everybody in the crew were extremely glad they got home because it was a pretty tense moment. I mean you couldn’t get a more tense moment in any of the raids than actually being shot down. I mean that’s the end of it but we were pretty close to that and it was not a good feeling.

Oh no. I mean that was one of those things that happened. You must remember it was the first night we had done a raid with the Lancaster. We were all new to that and

we moved on from that and the next trip, which was very soon afterwards. I can’t remember how long, but it might have been two days after, well that was all put to rest after that.

Oh yes. Well we moved on and nobody spent any time with what ifs and that sort of thing. It was all over and done with after the raid. We used to examine the aircraft after a raid and there were about 25 or 30 flak holes in the aircraft, but they

weren’t big ones. They were only tiny flak holes, but we were peppered.

On the ground they would have a battery of search lights in different places and they would have them

so placed that one beam would come up and another would come up from another way and three beams would all intersect and you’d have this rather bright spot and as the aircraft dived and tried to escape from that grasp if you wish, so the search lights would try to follow you. And the flak on the ground was predicting itself on you rather than just firing.

See, normally they would fire straight up in the air over the target but if they had the opportunity they would predict the flak on aircraft individually and that was very accurate.

Well it meant that the pilot had to dive this way and that way and the aeroplane…you can imagine a large aeroplane like the Lancaster being put into a dive. It was quite a business. And the rear gunner played his role by telling the pilot

which way the search lights were following. He would say “Dive port, or starboard” and then eventually “Pulling out” after we got away from them.

A totally different aircraft to the other one. A rather brutal and aggressive aircraft, whereas the Stirling was rather if you like a docile looking

aircraft. If you look at the pictures you’ll see that. But the Lancaster was a rather vicious looking aircraft. It was painted black and it had a lot of features about it. It could sometimes get up to 20,000, 25,000 feet. It was very powerful and carried a lot of bombs and it was a very successful aircraft. It had a few problems. There was a main spar where the wings went

either side of the aircraft and the spar went across inside the middle of the aircraft and to get to the front where we were you had to climb over this big spar which was about two or three feet. That was a nuisance getting over that but once you were over that the facilities were very compact. I had a good navigator’s table, and the wireless operator sat behind me. Then the pilot, the bomb aimer and the engineer had

his own seat. So we were all…five people in a very nice little cockpit area and the gunners were in their positions.

Oh yes, our aircraft. We called our aircraft “C Charlie”. It was the letter C and our wireless operator’s brother was a war artist who happened to have been in England at the time and he came and visited us

and he painted a chariot on the side of the aircraft. A lot of the aircraft had that sort of thing. If you look at the American movies you’ll see Memphis Belle and this sort of thing. But everyone had something painted on the side of their aircraft. We just made C Charlie. We called it Charlie’s Chariot.

Well Boadicea who was the famous English

way back that fought the…she was an ancient Briton who fought the Anglo-Saxons. Do you remember your history?

She was a very important person Boadicea

Oh she was. Her chariot had knives on the wheels and all that sort of thing.

No, not necessarily. One of my friends had a plane at the time. There was a cartoon character called the “Little King”, you might remember him. A man with a big fat sort of body. His aircraft was (UNCLEAR) and he had the little king painted on the side of the aircraft. That’s one I can remember.

The RAF had in their Bomber Command… they had it broken up into Groups, one, three, five, eight, seven, and they were all formed obviously to have some geographical location where the planes were based…East Anglia

or Yorkshire and then they had a decentralised command, so it was efficient that they had that sort of management. So Three Group was stationed in the East Anglia region around Cambridge, north of Cambridge near the Wash and it was one of the earlier groups formed in the war. 149 Squadron which was part of Three Group

was a squadron formed at the latter stages of the First World War and continued through the 20s. It was disbanded…I have all the history here and I don’t want to go through all that but it was disbanded several times and then reformed, and it actually carried out the first raid of the war at a place in Germany, Brunsbuettel which was a navy base.

In terms of operations it carried out the most Stirling operations and it also had over the whole war, not periods, it had the greatest loss rate. 149 Squadron had more losses for the five years of the war than other squadrons which had more during specific periods. 149 Squadron had the highest. So it was an old established squadron and it was equipped originally with Wellingtons and then

Stirlings and then later it came onto Lancasters.

Well, Bomber Command was one of the sections of the RAF. They had Fighter Command, Bomber Command, Coastal Command which was involved with flying boats, tracking down submarines

flying many long hours over the Atlantic tracking down submarines. Fighter Command is self explanatory. They really saved England in the Battle of Britain. Then there was Bomber Command. And then there was also Transport Command. They were the ones that brought the aircraft that were manufactured in America or Canada across. They were really civilian pilots. My son-in-law, Allan Taylor’s father,

P.G. Taylor, who was an original Australian aviator was in Transport Command.

As far as I know.

Well, they certainly were in Coastal Command, because Number 10 Squadron was actually re-equipping with what they called the Empire Flying Boats when the war started and the whole squadron was there and they remained there

throughout the war. That was 10 Squadron. They were based somewhere down in Wales. In Fighter Command of course there would have been Australians in the RAF who joined pre-war. Members of the RAF and they would have been in the…and of course in Bomber Command there was actual Australian Bomber squadrons which…I wouldn’t say they were completely Australian. I don’t know, some crews may have had Canadian, New

Zealanders mixed up with them, and there would have been RAF ground staff as well. But they were operating as Australian squadrons.

No, that didn’t…I think when I look back on it, you’re so full of your own

share in what you’re doing that that’s all you can focus on and we were concerned that we were going to Canada to train and then we were going to England and eventually get into operations. The whole process took such a long time. That was where we were frustrated. We continually got diverted. At one stage we had finished at OTU and we thought we were going straight to

the conversion unit where the pilot learned to be a four engine pilot, we went to what was called a Battle School. It was only for about three weeks and that was going to a place in the middle of the woods. In fact it was in the area, the same station where we finished up as a squadron at Methwold, unbeknown to us. What we did there was run around throwing fire crackers

at each other and hiding in the bush. You know it was sort of a stop gap thing. But what it meant was there we were, another three weeks and we thought “We’ll never get…” in fact we always thought that the D-Day raids were obviously on their way. The operations were on their way and it just so happened that on D-Day, I don’t know if I mentioned this, but

operational air crews had six days leave every six weeks. We didn’t get days off otherwise. It was all accumulated into those six days. Well, just before D-Day we went off on six days leave not knowing that D-Day was going to be on the 6th of June. So, we missed out on that. But in the event maybe we were fortunate because 10 Stirlings flew over France dropping dummy parachutists and that sort of thing and they lost two.

So that wasn’t good.

Yes, at that time the spire had been taken down because it would have been too dangerous for aircraft taking off and landing, but the tower below the spire was there. On misty days you could always identify it

because the area around Methwold was extremely flat. It was in the Fenland. I don’t know if people know what the Fenland is, but it was originally swampy and they drained the swamp into drains and ditches and lifted the land up, rather like Holland in lots of ways. It was very prone to fog and bad conditions.

This church was a visible landmark that we could identify.

It was. It was certainly.

Most of us had graduated as sergeants and after a six month period of that you became a flight sergeant which was a crown above your three stripes. A little bit more pay and that was what

most of us were. But as you progressed along through the period of training, you could apply for a commission. In fact our skipper and bomb aimer did apply for a commission by the time we got to the squadron. So they were commissioned. I can’t recall now whether the other Australian Tony Adams and I thought about it or not. But in effect when we went to the squadron we were flight sergeants.

But around about October the navigation leader said to me, “You should apply for a commission. Why don’t you?” I said, “Yes that’s a good idea”. I applied and was eventually interviewed by the Group Headquarters; the senior officers of the group interviewed you to see if you were a suitable person to be a commissioned

officer. And I was commissioned a pilot officer.

Oh yes, that’s right. It was quite a different world. You…one advantage, not that I thought it was a good idea at the time, was that you had a woman, a batwoman who did a lot of the donkey work for you. Took your washing to be done and if you wanted your shoes cleaned. I refused to have anybody clean my shoes. But that’s what they were there

for. Our assistance. Officers had…I think army had batmen, but we had batwomen.

Well, I didn’t mind the idea of them making our beds in the morning and doing the washing, but I thought cleaning our shoes was a masculine task and kept that for myself. But they were all very nice girls and we were all very friendly with them. It didn’t extend beyond that though.

Well, I can’t remember exactly what took place, but certainly I was under a bit of a cloud myself. I felt that I had somehow put the crew at a great deal of risk.

But that feeling didn’t last long because we had to move on to the next operation. So I didn’t have much time to feel self pity or…you know, lack of confidence. You had to move on. Nobody…none of the crew made any comment really. All we did was talk about what the trip was like, and yet you know…

I’m stealing some of my own pilot’s thunder now. He didn’t think that was such a bad trip. His worst trip, which I wasn’t…I mean I was aware of it because being the navigator I couldn’t get air speed and I couldn’t get lots of details that were necessary. We were going to Wilhelmshaven and over the North Sea we ran into an air pocket which meant that we were freezing up. The…if you’re flying in a zone, which is very cold

with a lot of moisture in the air and you’re flying at a certain height, that moisture on the plane converted to ice. So the instruments would all be frozen and actually he flew for two or three hours really not knowing if he was flying upside down or what. He said “It was the biggest nightmare of his experience”.

Because your instruments were all frozen. You

have no horizon at night and his instruments which show whether you’re straight and level or whatever... there’s certain instruments you have, they were frozen. As his air speed was. He had to judge his speed by the engine revolutions and…the compasses were ok, they weren’t frozen, but the pitto tube which gives you your air speed certainly was, so we could only guess by the revs that we were doing,

a hundred and sixty or whatever.

It was. It was.

Well, it resolved in that we thought we got to Wilhelmshaven. We flew over the area. There was flak coming up. But because the pilot was not sure of where we were he felt it was his duty not to drop the bombs

and to bring them back. And that resulted in him being under very severe criticism because it was pointed out to him when eventually the next day they said, “Well, what happened, your bomb load is still there? Why didn’t you drop your bombs? Don’t you realise that if you had had a bad landing you could have blown us all up?” So he got very seriously criticised about that. But he did it in a conscientious way. He didn’t feel it was a good idea to drop the bombs where he didn’t know

where they would be dropped.

Well their view about bombing was near enough might be good enough. You never bring your bombs back. On another occasion, a trip we aborted going to Essen, we didn’t drop the bombs. We had to fly out to

the North Sea to drop our bombs because we couldn’t have landed otherwise.

Well that was another thing. It certainly wasn’t common but there were crews who weren’t enthusiastic about doing their job. There was one that was found to…because they had left their identification “Friend or foe” on

this particular aircraft was tracked over the North Sea doing legs that allowed them to use up the time that was required to fly to whatever the target was; the navigator faking his log; coming back and then being asked, “Where have you been? You didn’t go to the target did you?” So that did happen, but I don’t know how often.

They would have been very severely disciplined. Like we had a crew on our squadron which was “Lack of moral fibre”. They were taken away. They didn’t leave them on the squadron. If anyone refused to do a trip they were taken away immediately. They didn’t want any infection to spread.

Well they went to…the RAF had a penal camp in the middle of England.

I can’t think of the name of the place now. But they went there and would have been disciplined. I don’t know how long the discipline would have lasted. But…they weren’t shot or anything like that, but they were treated as not being suitable to be involved with other members of the air force.

They had just refused to fly on a trip.

They just said “We’re not going to go. We’re not going to do it.”

Well, bombing trips. Like a soldier at the front deserting. Same thing. They might have had a good reason for it, but we didn’t know what the reason was because we never got to know. I know the name of the captain. The skipper was a man called Redman, and I knew him. But it was just one of those things… “Oh where’s Redman? He’s not here. He’s gone up to…”

…I just had the name right on the tip of my tongue and it’s gone again…where they had this penal camp.

No.

No. Oh no, I think what you’re referring to is something quite different. Our engineer had been an engineer mechanic on Malta

and Malta was subjected by the Germans to very, very intensive raids during 42, 43. In fact they were raided almost on a daily basis, and his aerodrome was shot up many times. So he was not very happy about the German enemy if you wish. In any case he was our engineer and this subject never really raised its head very much except that I knew

his background. Anyway, one night we were coming back from a trip and when we got back he made the comment, “Well, that was a bloody good job, we killed a lot of Germans tonight”. And I said, “Well, we didn’t really go to kill Germans, did we? We went to bomb whatever it was you know.” I can’t remember what trip it was now. So one thing led to another and

it resulted in a bit of a punch up. But anyway it was all settled the next day. Wal Cryer came and said “We can’t go on like this”. So we agreed to sort of not talk about that type of thing any more.

Oh yes, I did. So much so that my wife and daughters visited him in 1977 and the first thing he said was, “See that!” He had a little split in his lip…he said, “Do you know who did that?”

I said, “I don’t know, it might have been me”. He said, “Yes, it was”. Anyway it’s all been put to bed. But that…the tension was such after raids that quite often there would be this period of stress. Now how it sort of showed itself in other crews I don’t know, but we dealt with it very well. But this was just something…I think I might have been under stress and I just reacted.

In my view we weren’t there to kill German people. We were to bomb industrial targets and that was why later when we did these oil refinery raids I felt much happier about what we were doing.

It was from about the middle of October when we converted over to the GH system. We still did other raids

but not very often.

Yes, I think that contributed to it no doubt. But I perhaps had a rather quixotic view that we weren’t there to kill Germans as such. I mean it was quite ridiculous really because that’s obviously

what we were doing. Whenever you bombed a place, someone was killed. But I didn’t like to confront the issue and to be proud about it.

I can’t recall that really. I can’t recall that. But subsequent to all this as the years have rolled by and evidence has come about

the bombing raids over Germany. Some were very effective and some were just a waste of time. Such a lot of life and the actual bombing…it’s been analysed that really it didn’t contribute to the war’s situation at all. In some cases but not as much as the losses that were involved. What has to be

remembered is that at one stage the only action taking place against Nazi Germany was the bombing of them, because otherwise nothing was happening. So they carried the war and kept the Nazis on the hop.

Yes, I can talk about that one.

Oh well, it was an absolute disgrace that

we ever…I have a friend who was actually on the raid and he’s been ashamed ever since about what actually happened. And my partner’s cousin was killed in the raid in Dresden. I’ve been to Dresden three times myself and I’ve seen how the damage has been…how the important buildings have been completely repaired and…

But the loss of people which was a result of the fire storm which took place…it’s said that something like 40,000 people died that first night. It was crammed with refugees from the east who had come pouring in. It was February the 17th or something like that [actually was 13-14 February 1945].

By that time the Russians had moved well into Poland and were almost on the borders. So there was all the Silesian Germans and Germans from East Prussia and… The allies said it was an important rail junction and it was being used as a base for troop movements, but that wasn’t true.

Nothing. The raid was hardly mentioned if I remember. It was only subsequently when the war historians started to tease away all the things that happened, then it was regarded in the light that it now is. It was a big aberration.

Well obviously you knew that if you were bombing a target, such as Cologne or Stuttgart…I’ve been to Stuttgart several times and it was raided quite a few times. I mean the factories were all interspersed with residential houses.

In fact the internet records I have of the bombing describes very, very accurately the results of the raids. How many houses were destroyed.

I didn’t because I was too busy. A couple of times I looked out when we were coming over the target

but in the night raids the aircraft would be at something like twenty and twenty two thousand feet, so all you’d see, and pictures have shown that, the incendiaries would have lit up the streets so you’d see streets lined up by the incendiaries but you wouldn’t see anything else. And the daylight raids on the oil refineries, well I never saw anything of that. But other than that, I don’t think many air crews really,

really came very close. The only ones would have been the Master Bombers that flew at something like a thousand feet directing the attack. They were the real heroes.

No, he didn’t. It was only subsequently. I think they were told that “It was going to be a large marshalling

area for the German Army to reorganise itself”, where in fact that wasn’t the case. It was stacked with refugees. And besides that there was some sort of unwritten law that nobody was going to bomb Paris and no one would bomb Rome, and nobody was going to destroy those places. Dresden was the most…shall we say, baroque city in

Europe. Its buildings were…and they’ve been restored, a lot of them, not all.

I never went to Berlin. That’s the short answer. I think had we been on the Berlin run, I suppose we would have done it. I mean you don’t say you won’t do anything. I’ve been to Berlin so many times in the last few years I’ve seen the results of what

took place. And again it’s just remarkable how the restoration’s been done of the main artistic and important objects….the baroque buildings there have all been restored.

That’s

alright. But they’re all the things in my mind that have always been there. I’m not ashamed to admit them and if I talk about them openly and they’re on record that somebody said these things well I’m quite happy about that.

Oh there’s been so much written since the war. There’s been analysis made…I’ve seen the books and you can see the analysis of what actually happened. And in

a lot of cases the Germans had restored those factories back in such quick time. It was amazing. But the oil offensive was important because they couldn’t replace that. They couldn’t replace that. And I mean, it was vital at that time. I mean the war was over practically but it still had a bit of a way to go.

Yes. That was…I think I mentioned that on the

first trip about the aborted sortie that we had with a (UNCLEAR) trip that we didn’t proceed with.

Yes, I mentioned that because the weather was such and on my recommendation we didn’t make that trip, and the skipper analysed it and agreed and his reasons were accepted.

Well, it was the biggest issue. In the first place to navigate an aircraft you have to know the wind. That’s the…in those times. Maybe today it doesn’t work like that because you’ve got SatNav and GPI [Ground Plane Interconnect] and…but in those times for you to be able to go from A to B in the air, you had to know what the wind was and how it affected you.

Whether it blew you that far or this far, and what speed it reduced your airspeed by. So finding the wind was the biggest task the navigator had. But because of the weather most of the time you couldn’t use astro which was very accurate. It was a good standby. Gee was extremely restricted over a long period because of the enemy jamming and other than that there wasn’t a lot you could do.

You could use beams but they weren’t that accurate. So what happened, the Pathfinder Force developed a system whereby using the Obo navigational device some aircraft were nominated as what they called “Wind finders”. And with this device they were the ones who would say “Find the wind” and it was broadcast. At a certain time that wind velocity and direction would be broadcast to us…

…not so much to us because we didn’t do a lot of those trips…but you would get the broadcast wind velocity. But again it was never very accurate and that point was very importantly shown in the biggest loss raid that the RAF suffered over Nuremberg in February 1944 when the wind…they didn’t get the correct wind velocity broadcast,

they became disorganised and 97 were shot down. The night was a clear moonlight night and the night fighters just had the most wonderful time shooting them like sitting ducks. That was because they were disorganised. The aircraft were all over the place. So you can see, that was just one example.

Well I don’t think it affected the main bombing force if they were going on a bombing raid. But it certainly affected the special duties trips because you needed moonlight. I think the people who flew into France in those small aircraft, they needed moonlight. You need moonlight to be able to see where you’re landing.

There would be no bright lights.

No, no. Not us, but for those agents who were flown into France. You asked me about moonlight…they’d need moonlight for that. But bombing raids, no it wouldn’t really matter. But it would be better to be on a no moon night because the light would be…there was one book written called No Moon Tonight,

which was a very interesting book about the RAF. Obviously night fighters could see you a lot clearer on a moonlight night. But then that wouldn’t have stopped Bomber Command sending a trip because of a moonlight night.

Yes, certainly. I mean

the German radar would certainly not be effective at a low altitude, so if you were doing certain operations flying low would be a very, very good idea. We did but that was for map reading purposes as well. Not so much to avoid the German interception. You needed to be low to map read. But otherwise the inclination of most bomber crews

was to be as high as you could get, because the higher you could get even though it meant breaking your flight plan or your instructions…you see you were ordered to fly at a certain altitude, so that the bomber stream didn’t overtake itself. See, if you’re flying at a thousand or two thousand feet high, you actually go faster at the same air speed than the plane…because the

air is less resistant. The higher you get the air is less dense so you go faster. And of course some Lancasters or some aircraft there’s always going to be one in a number that is better able to fly higher. If you are in one of those well you’d make use of that height because the higher you were the safer you were.

No,

it was supposed to be used at times when there was 10/10th cloud so the German flak…I mean flak was really the big problem at that stage of the war. The German fighters as such were really out of the question. We were actually given air cover anyway. We had aircraft covering us on the daylight raids.

Yes, and the fact that they had no fuel and…I mean the night fighters came up occasionally and caused a bit of havoc

but after D-Day the German fighters weren’t a big problem. So it was flak and if you…the fact that GH was a blinding bombing device it meant they were able to predict, and the Met Department would try and predict…I mean in actual fact if we had flown on days when it hadn’t been predicted to be 10/10th cloud we

would have flown as many trips if they had said it was 10/10th cloud because it was very inaccurate. They didn’t have a great deal of information gathering from Europe.

Well it was in a night raid if you were flying and getting attacked. But the GH raids, on the GH run…I mean after the GH run had been completed

it didn’t matter, you could take evasive action. But in that period flying the arc of the circle at a certain speed and a certain height to achieve that theoretical position up in the sky that I mentioned, well you couldn’t jink. You couldn’t take evasive action. It would have destroyed the whole thing, so the result of that was it was a very dangerous situation.

Well, that was done as late as possible in the whole operation because having the bomb doors open, even though the amount of metal was not that thick, you know it wasn’t that much, but it still helped to protect pieces of red hot flak hitting

the…see, most of the…the main bomb load was the four thousand pound cookie. It had a very thin skin and a piece of red hot flak would explode it. So everybody kept their bomb doors…and apart from that it reduced your airspeed and all those sort of factors.

Yes. We would open them at the very last moment. In fact in those GH raids…not all aircraft would have the GH equipment

and we would have two or three other aircraft fixed on us and they would watch us, and as soon as we opened our bomb doors, they’d open theirs and they’d bomb when we bombed us.

Yes, I think it was controlled electronically. So, it was just a switch which allowed the clips to release the bombs.

There would be incendiaries. A package of incendiaries…smaller bombs made of phosphorous, I think. They’d float down and cause all the fires. But generally in our raids we didn’t have incendiaries. We would have armour piercing 250 pound or 500 pounders. So the bomb load could be a cookie, that’s 400 pounds and six 250 pounders or 500 pounds. It just

depended on the load, the amount of petrol we would need and that was all worked out. But I can ensure you we had an all up load in the poor old aircraft…it used to stagger over the end of the runway and we were always pretty pleased when it did eventually get up. It sort of…you know.

That was in those GH attacks. We had Mustangs and Spitfires.

They would come to a certain point and then cover us over a certain area and then they’d disappear.

Generally speaking through the more active main force bombing period, 30 trips was the nominated number and the loss rate the way it was, it was very difficult for people to finish a tour if they had done 30 trips because the loss rate was so high. As it worked through 1 to 44, and the trips became less dangerous and

the losses were reduced, so the air force decided instead of 30 trips it would be 35 trips. In the event…my skipper did 35 trips and there are reasons for that. Different times we weren’t on the spot when the trip was nominated. The British Army and the American Army wanted the Germans bombed in a place called Falaise, Falaise’s Pocket. They went down to the local pubs and rounded up crews. They made crews

out of anyone they could find and went across. I didn’t go on that. I was away somewhere else dancing. Then some of the smaller trips and air sea rescue, most of us had to do an air sea rescue occasionally where some bomber had been flying back and ditched because of damage. They were maybe in a dingy and we were sent out to see if we could

find them. That involved flying backwards and forwards for hours on a special route. You were just flying a short creeping line if you like and flying very low, probably 100 feet. We did two of those trips and they were both unsuccessful. We didn’t find anybody. We never heard what had happened either. But that would have only counted as one trip, not two.

Some of the French fly bomb sites were only treated as maybe not a full trip.

Yes and the level of danger involved. Although aircraft were still lost. I mean I can show you the records. Sometimes maybe three Lancasters were shot down. But so the increase was made to 35 trips. The skipper was declared “Tour expired”

and I think they looked at us and said “The crew is expired”.

Yes, it is.

Well it was a wonderful aircraft to fly. I didn’t fly it but I mean it was a wonderful aircraft to be in. It was very powerful. You felt part of a very powerful weapon if you wish. The Stirling

as I said before was almost a sort of modest and subjective type of aircraft. The Lancaster made a very strong mark on everybody. It looked what it was. It looked evil and sinister.

Oh well, the results showed that the Lancaster was a very powerful bomber. It was after they developed the Lancaster that the

bombing raids became very successful.

I don’t know about that, because the trips we did in the Stirling were different sorts of trips. We had the mining or we did the SOE trips and occasionally a short bombing trip to Le Havre…we bombed Le Havre a couple of times. The German Army were holed up there and they couldn’t

seem to get them out so we bombed them out. And we did those trips and that meant we just flew over…although they still lost two or three aircraft every time they went there. It was very good in defence even in the worst circumstances. Yes, I suppose you could say we were happy to be in the Lancaster because we could get up to 18, 20,000 feet and that gave you a sense of security. And it was a very powerful and very well performing

aircraft.

No.

Oh no. Those aircraft would have been the small aircraft like the Lysander…you know little small high wing monoplanes carrying two or three people. They had to land on little tiny

fields.

No, the containers we dropped to the Underground, the Resistance I should say, the Resistance, they were long containers, that’s maybe what you’re referring to. But they didn’t have parachutes. They would just fall and obviously break open.

Yes. Or they would recover them if the ground was soft. I don’t know how that worked. But it was a system they were using so it must have worked. But they didn’t have parachutes.

Well, it was a neutral country and if you happened to be anywhere near Sweden and you had to land, I think

it would have been a safe haven. They were interned, but I don’t think they were treated very badly.

By the Swedes. Sweden was a neutral country.

Well, because they were…well when I say interned I don’t think they were locked up in goal, but they were kept under close surveillance, as far as I know.

Oh yes. A lot of aircrews would have flown to Berlin or Rostock along the Baltic Coast. There were a lot of very important German naval dockyards and factories along the Baltic Coast at Rostock, Stettin, and even as far as Koenigsberg which was the longest trip most aircrews

ever took. Coming back from them if they were damaged then quite obviously you would bail out over Sweden or try to land there.

Well, I don’t think you did.

Yes that was it. Well it was something that affected my attitude about a lot of things

for a long time. I’ve come to terms with it now but there was nothing I could do about it. It just so happened I got up in the morning, this particular morning and I had a sore throat. I could hardly swallow. I had a very high temperature and I said “I’m going to sick quarters”. That might have been about eight o’clock in the morning. I wandered into sick quarters and they immediately put me into bed with tonsillitis. Later in the morning when the battle order came out

our aircraft was nominated to go. Wal Cryer’s birthday was the next couple of days, a day or two later and I think he wanted to finish his tour before his birthday or have it all over and done with. So they picked up a spare navigator to do the trip and when they came back from the trip they were declared “Tour expired”, which meant when they landed…it was a long trip that trip. They went to a placed called Magdeburg

which is just south of Berlin. Again, it was an oil refinery. Yes, so they were met and they were having a happy time congratulating each other and having a few drinks and I was laying in bed in hospital. So it was one of those things. But I was a bit upset that I could have actually…but I didn’t know the trip was on, so it wasn’t a case of avoiding it.

If I had known the trip was on I might not have reported sick.

Yes, because I felt somehow…well first of all there was this factor…well not immediately. I’m not talking about the first few years after the war. I was settling down and getting things done, but time went by and we would have these reunions and I would often think about that. I would think, “I’m sorry I missed that”. They would talk about what happened and

of course, the bomb aimer’s wife was a transport driver on the squadron. She used to drive the transport trucks to the air crews. They were married sometimes in ’45, and we see a lot of her at our crew get togethers. She’s quite a close friend actually.

No, not at that time.

He was looking at his log book and thinking of that long period when I was away when I had my appendix removed back in June. I was away for about a month. But I’ve checked through…I did an exercise of what was going on in the squadron and not a lot took place. I don’t want to bring it all up to him and say “Well, nothing much happened then”, but he said, “Looking back on it, it was very frustrating

to be hanging around for so long not doing much”.

Yes, that’s right.

I mean not a lot happened. I was in hospital and then rehabilitation for about a total of about a month and so the result of that was they didn’t go on any trips. They might have done circuits and bumps or something like that. But they didn’t do any operations.

Well I think…I can’t answer that. Maybe there were no spare navigators. What used to happen, the squadron leader…the senior officer had a crew and they didn’t go on every trip. They only went on nominated trips, so that crew was available to act as what they called “Spares”, and that’s what happened. Flight Lieutenant Lees

was the squadron leader’s navigator. He might have volunteered and said “I’ll go with you Wal”. He knew Wal, so he might have said “I’ll go with you, Wal”. I never got into that. I never discussed the mechanism. And it was all forgotten very quickly. I mean the English components of the crew disappeared. I never saw them again for many years. I did write them Christmas cards. One of them disappeared completely. In fact we thought

“He was dead”. He just sort of went back into his life. In the end Wal Cryer thought “We have to find out about this”, so he got a newspaper in Manchester where he lived to say “Where is Harry Sue?” and they actually published a headline which said “Where is Harry Sue? We are looking for you”, and out of that came people,

his brother and someone who knew him and he had just settled back into civilian life, and I think forgot about everything.

There were three English and three Australians…four Australians, yes. So we were the main component of the crew. When I say that I don’t mean their tasks were any less. We were the strong group if you wish.

That’s correct. I was moved to an airfield close by. A permanent airfield…when I say permanent airfield, they were the ones made of bricks and mortar. They were very comfortable. And that’s where a very interesting event took place. There instead of having WAAF batwomen, they had civilian servants to look after the officers and

this old gentleman, he was a very nice man. And when we arrived and were allocated our room, he came and said “I’m going to look after you gentlemen”. And eventually after a bit of time, I used to talk to him and he said “This is the place where they made the film Target for Tonight, and I looked after the Skipper of the aircraft that was actually filmed.” So it was like completing a circle. There I was, all those years before

excited to join the air force because of Target for Tonight, and then I go to the place where it was actually filmed and sort of became shall we say a bit closer to the whole circumstance.

It was yes.

It was yes. At that time he was a flight lieutenant. Later on it became a training drome for various

different things like fighter affiliation or whatever.

Well, I don’t know what you mean about that. But…

Ok. Well what happened was, I was on leave in London actually and I was talking to one of the English members of

Feltwell who had just left Feltwell and had come down, and I think I had been away for a few days. He said, “Jim you’ve been awarded the DFC”. I said, “Oh that’s interesting. That’s good, isn’t it?” He’d seen the envelope, which I still have which had my name and the DFC typed after it. What happens you get those honours passed on and so that was good, and

I was proud of that. I wore the decoration not only for myself but the crew, and then subsequently I found out that Wal Cryer, our skipper was awarded the DFC. I’ve often wondered and I think other members probably wondered why I was given that preferment. It took a long time before I came to terms with it. I just accepted it. People would ask me and I’d say “Well, it came with the Weetbix or something like that”.

It wasn’t quite true, but I also thought “They might have just said so many navigators and so many pilots”. But when I look back now and read the GH raids, I think I was responsible for that period that was quite dramatic and I could have foreshortened the run somehow or changed things…I wouldn’t have done it of course but

maybe they assessed that that was a period under a lot of stress and I was carrying out my duty properly. Maybe it was that, I don’t know. After I finished being an instructor at Feltwell which took me to about early May when the war was over and we were eventually after that…I was there for a while at the station because the aircraft were then used

to ferry the ground staff members to show them the terrible devastation of the Ruhr. So we would take a load of ground staff people, office people, mechanics in an aircraft and fly around the Ruhr, Essen, Duesseldorf and they’d be sort of rubber necking out the windows to see what had happened and at that time there was still smoke coming up from a lot of places.

I think it was just to…after all those years and those people loading bombs and carrying out all the duties and not being…being isolated from what took place. Just to show them just what did happen.

Yes, to involve them in the feeling that they had contributed to that.

Anyway, so we did a couple of those trips and eventually I went down to Brighton awaiting our repatriation. While I was in Brighton another navigator, a friend of mine, Russel Martin had also been awarded the DFC and we had been on the trip to Canada together, we had trained together and we were quite good friends. He said, “What about it, I’ll get in touch and see if we can get our investiture

at the Palace”, and I was agreeable and that was eventually achieved. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the letter that gave me that invitation. Then I contacted some English people that I had been offered to see during the war. I had the opportunity, so I thought “I’ll go and see them”. I stayed there and said, “I’ve got an invitation and you can be guests if you like. You can come.”

So they were very thrilled about that, so we went along to Buckingham Palace and eventually after all the admirals and generals had been awarded their decorations, the air force came on the scene and I think we were the most humble of the lot. We were very close to the end of it and King George was a very charming man. He was very friendly.

Oh very

little. I suppose “You’ll be going home soon”. I said, “Yes thank goodness, or whatever”. But he maintained a very firm handshake all the way through, from the first to the last. They had the Guard’s Orchestra playing in the anteroom there. The Peagoods, the couple I knew in London, were very thrilled about it all.

So that was that and eventually time moved around and my name got on the draft back to Australia.

Well we travelled to Greenoch again…I’m pretty sure it was Greenoch we left from. We travelled back on a ship called the Dominion Monarch, which was a very nice ship. It was considered the best motor ship

in the world at that time. On our way we were going through the Mediterranean of course and we called in at Suez and there we picked up probably a couple of thousand New Zealanders. Some of them had been prisoners of war in Germany. We already had some Australian ex-prisoners of war from Germany. They had been there all the time from the North African campaign…and other soldiers had fought in Italy because as you’re probably aware, the New Zealanders fought all the way through

to the end of the war in Italy. So there was quite a lot of New Zealanders. We became quite friendly with them. What happened was, as we appeared to be arriving towards Perth, we did not go into Perth. We went down the south, across the Bight and we thought “Hello, surely we’ll be going into Melbourne”. We didn’t go into Melbourne either. All the experts were wrong again.

We went to New Zealand. The New Zealand government was very concerned that some of these fellows who had been away for three years, had been prisoners of war, that it was only right that they should get home as quick as possible. We didn’t have an argument with that. The ship actually went to Littleton in the South Island and unloaded a lot, and then we went to Wellington and we eventually came back to Sydney. So we had a bit of a Cook’s tour.

Yes. That was all very, very nice. My parents had been invited to Bradfield Park. We got off the ship in Walsh Bay and piled onto double decker buses and came to Bradfield Park and my mother and father and sister were there to meet me. It was all very nice. They were very pleased to see me and we

got home in the afternoon and…yes.

Yes, well I should have been de-mobbed a bit earlier, but what happened…about almost 12 months to the day I got another attack of tonsillitis. Anyway I was taken into AGH [Australian General Hospital] at Concord and had them taken out. So

there was no imagination about the attack of tonsillitis before or after. But it was a pretty bad attack and when you’re older it’s not a good thing to have. So then I…I met in the hospital…that was interesting. There were all these ex-prisoners of war from Japan…a lot of them had been taken in to recover their…a lot of them as you know

were very, very underweight and were in very poor health. There were quite a lot there and that was very interesting to meet some of those. There were a couple there, a couple of Englishmen, RAF people and they had had some problem with their knees and they were going down to Jarvis Bay, which at that time was a rehabilitation place. It was a holiday place. It was still a boarding place where people used to go on holidays but they had one section where the RAAF had a rehabilitation

unit. So I said “I wouldn’t mind going down there” and some complaint doctor gave me the order to go down there for a few days or a week. When I got there I was severely criticised. They said “What are you doing here? You’ve got tonsillitis”. Anyways, we had a few days down there and that took it on to Christmas and then in January I was discharged.

Where did I meet her?

Oh yes. It was 1945, the beginning of 1946. I went back to my old employment at G.H. Oldings. I thought that would be the thing to do just while I found my way. I wasn’t going to stay there but they were pleased to have me back and they were very tolerant too because

sometimes in the afternoon I’d disappear about three o’clock and go with a couple of ex-servicemen up to the pub and not come back. That sort of thing. It was quite common. A lot of returning ex-servicemen took a while to find their normal feet. Then I contemplated trying to go to university and in the end I dismissed that idea. And then I heard on the grapevine that Qantas were recruiting, so I applied to that.

So around about May ’46 I started with Qantas. Qantas at that time were using war time aircraft, an old flying boat…the Empire Flying Boats and a converted Lancaster which was called a Lancastrian. It was the Lancasters we had been flying as bombers. Converted to a civilian aircraft it seated about 12 people on the side of the aircraft.

There was one steward, navigator, radio operator and two pilots, and we used to fly from Sydney to Darwin, to Singapore and to Karachi in India. And then British Overseas Airways would take the plane from Karachi. So we’d spend a few days in Karachi and then we would come back to Singapore, or Madras. We would often stop at Madras or Calcutta depending on the weather. So we might stop at those places, but we wouldn’t stay overnight.

We would just refuel. Then I used to fly in the Flying Boat. We used to go in the flying boat up from Sydney to Bowen in Queensland and then Darwin and then to Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies. While we were there the war with the Indonesians for freedom was taking place. Surabaya was quite a dangerous place. Flying into Surabaya we had to be very careful where we flew because we would have been shot at by the Indonesian

freedom fighters. And of course the Dutch at that stage were on their last legs there. Then we would go to Singapore and stay at Singapore. Then the British Overseas Airways would take the flying boat over and go to Hong Kong and we’d come back in the Flying Boat. That went on for about a year and I met my wife dancing at the Trocadero, which was

a very nice place to go to in those days. We were compatible and we eventually decided to get married. At that time, as a war time navigator we were granted a second class navigator’s licence which I had and that enabled us to fly. But the Department of Aviation insisted that the requirement was the First Class Licence, which

was something that we had to get and that meant a lot of very heavy study and examinations. Qantas were very good about that. They employed an instructor and they put all the navigators into a class for about three weeks where they force fed us what we had to do. The maths side of the whole thing was just too

much for me. I couldn’t cope with it. It was almost two or three year university level… I won’t go into all that. The other subjects, the maps and charts and the navigation, I passed those but I didn’t pass the others and of course Qantas had no…I wasn’t the only one, there were several others, they offered me a job… in those days there were called “Traffic officers”. It was a very small company,

it wasn’t a very big company back then. I thought, “I don’t know about that”. I was getting married. I didn’t have a job. I had plenty of money because I was well paid at Qantas. The pay was…compared to the pay that other people got was very good. Exceptionally good. I was going to miss that. Eventually I settled and got a position with a very good company which

doesn’t exist anymore, Jansen Australia Limited which was out on Parramatta Road Lidcombe. I remained there for 25 years, through various vicissitudes.

Well I suppose first of all it gave me maturity. At 22, I was a mature individual and ready to settle down. I was married at 23. Whereas these days I think at 22 or 23 the people of that age are quite immature, generally speaking. I’m generalising. So I was quite mature and like all of

us I was ready to settle down. And most did get married at that age. Some were married already. I mean quite a few were married already. Wal Cryer was married before he went away. I think after that, apart from maturity I think it gave me a better focus on what I wanted to achieve and self confidence if you wish. Because from that moment on self confidence was a very large part…

I was in the sales field. I was a sales executive and I found that very rewarding and very interesting and I was very successful at it.

And pride. We were all very proud that we had served. To be able to present yourself to someone and say “I was in the air force and this and that”,

it gave you status. I don’t think that was upper most in my mind, but casting my mind back I would say that was what it did. I mean most ex-air crew achieved…a lot of them went to university and became doctors and lawyers. A lot became accountants. I don’t know of any who didn’t make a great success of their business lives.

Well, they’re close personal friends. We used to gather together. The skipper had a holiday house on Hymes beach on Jarvis Bay and for many years we would all gather there for three or four days over the Anzac period and get together. The wives all knew each other. He still has the place but we don’t go down there so much. We meet and have a barbeque

on Anzac Day - until last year when unfortunately he had a very serious operation and that changed that. So maybe next year we’ll have a barbeque. And this year was the same, he had a repeat of the same operation. But he’s well now and he’s happy. But I joined the same Probus as him and the result of that is that I don’t only see him monthly, but we also have a barbeque once a month

and we have outings once a month. I’m the outings officer and so we see a lot of each other. And the wireless operator lives at Roseville and we see him, not quite as much, but if there’s a dinner on we’re always together.

Me? I don’t belong to the RSL. No. I joined it after the war but I found

it wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to spend much time.

Oh I think it was that sort of place where a lot of people still wanted to fight the war and they had extremist views about everything. I think the RSL is very extreme. An extremist organization. Very right wing. It was not something I was terribly interested in.

No, my association is the crew. I mean aircrews were not like military units. It became a very close knit unit. I suppose because we lived close together and we’ve been able…see a lot of people, the pilot may have come from Perth or may have come from Queensland and it was difficult for them to maintain the close getting together,

which we’ve been able to do.

Except our bomb aimer. He lives in Queensland and until recently he would come down and join us, and they’re always asking us to come to Queensland and stay with them. And we did that sometimes. When John Fox came from England. He came out for a week and we all went out on the houseboat for a week with the wives and it was wonderful. And that’s because we all have so much understanding of each other.

I think it was the aircrew experience, otherwise I don’t think our paths would have crossed.

I don’t think so. I think you’ve covered it all pretty well. I think you’ve got me to open up on a lot of subjects that may be best left unsaid, but

let’s say that I was very fortunate. I was with a good crew and the following years have indicated that because we’re all such good friends and we respect each other very much. The wives, the same.

I appreciate your whole approach and the toleration you gave me to expand my experiences.