Australians at War Film Archive

I was born when my parents lived at Rhodes, that's between Concord and Ryde. And my father was a grocer, and we lived directly opposite the school, public school, and the Methodist Church. So on my fifth birthday

I was enrolled at school, I was keen to go. And the Sunday School in the church, it was a Methodist Church so that’s where we went. We became Methodists then at that stage. But I learnt a lot there which had been a great value to me ever since. So while we were at school there we could look across and see the tow arms of the Harbour Bridge coming up together, which was quite interesting,

and we had a good time there. But when I was nine, Dad bought a farm at a place called Werombi, out past Camden, and we moved there from our time in Rhodes. And Werombi, it was a one teacher school with just over twenty students. First class in the front row, second class, and that’s where I completed my primary school. So except that

I started on year seven, and my parents arranged for me to go to South Bathurst Primary School and I stayed with an aunt in Bathurst. So I sat for the primary final again, with the objective of getting to a secondary school. Which happened to be Fort Street, and also to go to a bursary, which I also managed to get. So that’s how I spent my younger years.

Not at all, no even at the end of secondary school. I knew because of the depression my parents couldn’t keep me, and I did get the bursary, which enabled me to go to Fort Street, so I realised I would have to get a job. But at the end of my time at Fort Street

I got an exhibition, which was a free course at the university, and I got a job in the public service and I was appointed to the Premier’s Department. So I got an income, I could maintain myself, and I went to uni [university] at night. And I did two years at the Sydney Uni before I enlisted in the air force.

Oh yes. We grew beans

and peas as the main cash crop. And the prices were really terrible. There was one lot of beans, excellent beans that we sent down where what we got net, was a bill rather than an income, so it was a really stressful time. Dad had leased the grocers shop, so we had an income from which kept us going. But

we used to trap rabbits and so rabbit meat was a basic part of our diet. On Sunday’s we’d have a tin of corned beef, and Dad would cut it up so we each got one slice of corned beef. We used to eat turnip leaves, not cabbage or anything like that, turnip leaves and I grew to hate turnips actually. But it was

a stressful time. We could milk cows, we could chop wood, we could dig postholes, it was a great basic formation time in our lives. We learned to be independent and do things. When I was at Fort Street, I played cricket and football, rugby, but I was also, I won the senior high jump at one stage.

But I used to, when I was on holidays I would jump over the barbed wire fences, you know it was a great motivation to get over. And so that’s the kind of thing that I did. At Fort Street I did quite well. The highest I got was second in my year. But I was third in the year, but in my fourth year I was first in Latin, first in French, first in German and I got Baxindale’s Prize

for Literature, so I did all right. Also happened to become captain of the school in 1938, and I also think going from a little bush school to that, I feel really grateful for it.

I was boarding with my aunt and uncle in Marrickville. On Jersey Street

in Marrickville. And I was going to work and then going on to uni five nights a week in the first year. So that’s where I was, and I still remember clearly the 3rd of September 1939, when we listened to the radio and heard the Prime Minister announce that we were at war with Germany. And I realised at the age of eighteen that I was just the right age to get caught up in it.

Well, a slight feeling of sort of sinking inside. It was not good news at all. My reaction was to get in touch with my mother and get her permission to enrol in the air force and serve. She was reluctant, but

I managed to do two years at Sydney, that was ‘39 and ‘40. And then I didn’t enrol for the third year because I knew I was going to be called up. But while I was waiting on the reserve we went to Dulwich Hill Technical College and did some subjects in preparation for the air force.

On the farm at Werombi we happened to be on the flight path for the, presumably, of the training course for the air force at Richmond. And we used to see Hawker Demons and Wapitis, real old-fashioned aircraft, they’d going flying over. And also at one stage my parents moved to Camden and there was a training school at Camden, and so the Tiger Moth’s were flying over there. But I had a real

desire to be a pilot and I had no ambition to be anything else, so that’s what I was hoping for. But when you get to the air force you selected, they chose what category you are going to go into. So all you can do is just wait and hope and fortunately I was chosen to be a pilot.

How long was I thinking about it? Well all the time I was waiting to complete my two years, you know I was anticipating. But it wasn’t until August in 1941 that I was actually called up. Because I was in this number eighteen, and I thought, “That’s well down the track.” But by the time the war finished the numbers were right up in the late forties

and so on, so we were fairly early on.

Well that was just a preliminary step, you had to go through it. The other thing that I can remember about being called up finally, was the medical examination. And this has stuck in my mind ever since. One of the things they asked you to do was “To stand on one foot and then close your eyes,” and you had to stand successfully on

the one-foot for a period of time. And I couldn’t make it. I had never practiced that before and it was such a shock that I kept on falling over. And also he took my pulse and it was too high, and the doctor was in despair. He said, “Go away and come back in a week’s time.” And I thought, “Oh gosh I’ve blown it,” but I went back in a weeks time and saw the doctor. And

I had practiced standing on one leg, so I did that easily, but he took my pulse again and it was far too high. So he sort of gestured in despair and walked out of the room. And I thought, “Oh well that’s that and I’ve had it.” He came back some time later and took my pulse and it had got back down below the barrier, and so I was in. So I was really agitated at the time of that particular interview.

Before I was actually called up I had quite a lot of relatives in Brisbane. So I got on the train before I was called up, and went up to Brisbane and saw them all and thought well that’s that. But lo and behold the first place I was sent to was at Sandgate in Brisbane, so I was up there amongst them in

uniform then. Sandgate Initial Training School was an introduction to the air force. Marching, lessons, nothing to do with flying. But that was where you were assessed as to your future category. One of the things I remember about Sandgate was the commanding officer getting at all of us on parade and telling us that “There was a

certain young woman hanging around outside the gates, and if any of us got caught up with her we’d be out on our pink ears straight away.” She had VD [Venereal Disease].

Well, Dad was in the First World War, he was a sergeant in the army, and Dad got the Military Medal. And Dad was quite passive about it, Dad never said one thing in favour or against.

It was Mum who was concerned, and eventually she had three sons in the air force and we all got back. But when I left Mum had what you might call fairly normal darkish hair, but when I got back there was a lot of grey in it. So it wasn’t just the initial thing for her, it was a continuing period. So my brothers quite neutral,

and they were caught up just as much as I was.

No, that’s one of the things that I regretted for a long while, that we never asked him any questions. What we learned about our father we got from our mother, because she was able to tell us some things. The thing I remember most about Dad, he was in France and he was buried in a shell explosion,

and apparently his tin hat fell down over his face and kept some air there, which kept him alive until he was dug out. So that was one of the main things I remember about him.

I don’t think so, no.

He belonged to the RSL [Returned and Services League]

initially while we lived at Rhodes, but after that we were miles away from anywhere. But he was a very you know dogged king of person. It wasn’t easy going and he never communicated much with us. I think the idea of fatherhood now is quite different from what a lot of returned soldiers had at the time.

Well it seemed like it was mostly drill. We did physical exercise and we did lessons. We did lessons I think in navigation. We certainly did a lot of time on Morse Code. You know the dadada, etcetera. I think we got up to a speed of about

twelve to fifteen words per minute. We never used it afterwards, except night flying we used to use the Aldis lamp, they used the Aldis lamp on the ground, which we had to read, and we used our aircraft lights to send out our letter, the aircraft letter. But we just got into the

shape of the air force and we learnt to march, we used to do stamp salutes in those days. And stamp halts. And we used to go out as a whole school, and went out on the highway and went over the bridge on the highway just north of Brisbane. And when we did the stamp stop up there, the stamp halt, the poor old bridge actually shook I think, it was about the world’s worst

thing we could do for it. But we didn’t, or at least I didn’t make any close friendships in that situation. It was just a two-months period in preparation. Basic, to being in the air force.

Well the selection process went on, and I was selected to go and train as a pilot. And we were sent to

Archerfield, which is also in Brisbane. And so we got onto Tiger Moths. And Tiger Moths as you know are a fairly simple aircraft. But we got our instructor. I got PO [Pilot Officer] Whiteman as my instructor, and away we went. Familiarisation. Learning to take off in a straight line, using

the rudder and so on. And it took me a fair while to go solo, about nine hours. Some people went solo in five or six hours, but I was a slow learner. I never got happy about aerobatics. I used to try a slow roll but I never did it very successfully. I could do flick rolls which were easy. All you had to do was slow it down, pull the stick back and push your foot forward and the aircraft would go over like that. I did

spins and things like that, but I finished up below average on Tiger Moths. We did night flying as well, three hours night flying. And I could never land the Tiger Moth at night. With those aircraft as you come in on the approach and you slow down your nose is up and the tails down and you’ve got to put your head over to the side to try and see where you are heading. Well it’s all right in the daytime, but at night I didn’t have a clue,

so the instructor did all the flying. But it was good, looking around at Brisbane with all the lights on and so on.

My first flight, I can’t really remember that, the one I remember most of all was when I did my test with the chief flying instructor, squadron leader. And I landed the plane and he said, “McIntyre, where is your hand?”

And I put my hand forward with lightning speed and put it on the throttle, and said, “On the throttle, sir.” Because he’d warned me that “If I didn’t keep my hand on the throttle that I’d be scrubbed.” So I acted it out and by the time I said where my hand was, it was where it should have been.

Well it is. I think landing the aircraft is the crucial thing you have got to master. And a Tiger Moth with a strong wind, a gust it floats. There was one chap who landed the Tiger Moth and it when right over on its back. He did a really good job, and he

became a navigator actually. That was the fate if you didn’t make the grade.

Not on Tiger Moths, no. Certainly later on, but not on Tiger Moths, nor on Ansons, you know where I went on the next stage of training.

Well the next stage was at Amberley where we

flew Ansons, you know twin-engine aircraft. They were a lumbering kind of aircraft with underpowered Cheetah engines, and the Americans came in while we were at Amberley and finally took it over. But I remember this American saying to me, you know he wondered how they ever got off the ground. But they, twin-engines compared to single engines to me were a real blessing, because the engines were out there,

you could look forward, you could see the runway, you knew where you were going. And at nighttime it just transformed landing at nighttime. You could see the runway, you could see the flare path, and away you went. So I really picked up when I go onto Ansons. We started to do cross-countries as well, which means flying by yourself and following this course and going somewhere else and then coming back and landing after say an hour or so.

But the old Anson was a very reliable aircraft. It had a turret on it, with a Vickers gas operated gun, which fired about six hundred rounds a minute. And the pilots had the pleasure in your training, of getting in the turret while somebody else flew it, and spraying the ground with a machine gun bullets. Which was quite a novelty and a bit of fun actually. But while we

were in Amberley the Americans came in and, well of course that means Japan had entered the war. We had to dig trenches. It really affected us. Also, while we were at Amberley we had been fed and so on by air force people, but the army took over, and the quality of our food went remarkably down. Really was a drastic change for the worse.

But when the Americans came in, they brought in stuff for the troops like chocolate coated ice creams and stuff like that. So we could go into their place and buy this sort of thing. We had to do our own washing, one of the things I remember about that was in Queensland in the summer, I could put the washing out and it was dry in half an hour. It was great for washing.

Well, when the air force was catering there was a great container of milk, we could go up and just help ourselves to a mug of milk and things like that. Well that just disappeared. It’s a bit hard to remember the detail actually, but I think it had to do with the way the meat was cooked and that kind of thing.

Going back to Archerfield, we used to have to get up fairly early at Archerfield and we got bacon and eggs there, that’s the kind of thing we got. We never got that while we were in the army catering. But at Archerfield they used to serve the bacon and eggs onto cold plates, and with the fat the egg just stuck to the plate. You could turn the plate upside down and it wouldn’t fall off. So what we did, we

would eat the bacon and egg first and then have the cereal afterwards, dealing with that situation. I remember too at Archerfield there was a great tummy upset and in the middle of the night half the camp was out lining up at the latrines.

Well the Americans took over Amberley, and let me say without being too derogatory, by the time we left Amberley there was a line of single engine aircrafts that had been pranged by the Americans, they were obviously using inexperienced pilots. And they were putting onto these aircraft, you know single engine high quality aircraft and they didn’t cope. But anyhow we moved to

Kingaroy, the peanut place. And we were there only about six weeks because they realised that it was unsuitable for night flying, and that was a basic part of what we had to do. But Kingaroy was great, it was completely unready for occupation. Used to have little boxes for our cupboards, and we slept on the floor with the straw

beds. But in flying you could go right away from Kingaroy, miles away, and when you wanted to go back to base, all you had to do was look around and there was this great white silo in the distance, so you didn’t have to know where you were, you just found the silo and you went back to Kingaroy. It was very good. Anyhow we didn’t stay long at Kingaroy and then we were moved to Mallala in South Australia.

Because there was hills in the circuit area. Great decision.

Well we flew, the pupil pilots flew the planes down to Mallala in South Australia. Which was a great cross-country event. So we flew in formation, and the

leader, a flight lieutenant name still unknown, got lost. So we were all lost and we landed in a wheat field in a little place. And we circled the place and half the population came racing out to the wheat field where we landed and I was just busting you know to get out. And I couldn’t, a little boy was there racing around by the time we stopped the engines.

Anyway, we found out where we were, and we went on to Deniliquin and spent the night. And then the next day we took off and landed at Mallala in South Australia. Which is north, northwest of Adelaide in a really flat area. Very good, much better that Kingaroy for hills.

Still on Ansons, but at Mallala we completed out course,

and we did night cross-country there, which I think was a bold step actually. We were real inexperienced people, but they sent us out into the night, into the dark. It was blackout then because of the Japanese, and we just flew around for an hour on courses that we had calculated and finally to my great relief I saw the airfield down there and the flare path and we

landed there. But that was the kind of thing we did. Ultimately night flying and so on was basic to the kind of things we did when we finally got to England.

Yes, that was interesting. By the time we finished, our course finished on the 30th of April. And that happened to be my birthday.

And it was my twenty-first birthday on the day that we finished, and on that day I got my wings, I got a commission, I was made a pilot officer, and I got a posting overseas. So it was one of the big days of my life. I didn’t tell anybody it was my twenty-first birthday, and what my parents did back home I don’t know, but that was it. A most unremarkable twenty-first birthday.

No, I was pleased to get a commission. I didn’t get my officer’s uniform at Mallala, so I took my airmen’s uniform and put the braid around the arm. And that was it. We got our rail warrants and just got on the train, down to Melbourne, and then up to Sydney and then out home to Camden at that stage. For

a bit of leave and then we went to Bradfield Park, and that’s where I got my uniform. And we just hung around there, and while I was at Bradfield Park the Japanese submarines came into Sydney Harbour and the sirens went. We didn’t have a clue what to do, we just stood around and wondered what it was all about. And then finally of course we went back to bed. But that was a completely negative

kind of experience, just waiting. And we didn’t do anything significant at all. And then, finally of course we got loaded onto a ship.

No, just overseas. In other words we couldn’t tell our parents where we were going. Some people were sent to Canada, from Australia. But that

was to complete their training, we had completed our training. So I presume if we’d really thought about it we would have realised that we were going over to Europe.

I can’t remember that, I don’t know that we were ever told exactly where we were going. I mean the big thing was on so called secrecy. While I was waiting to go into the air force, just a recollection, the [HMS] Queen Mary

came into Sydney Harbour. And of course the arrival of a ship like that was meant to happen without anybody knowing, but I should say half the population of Sydney was out watching the Queen Mary come in. I was working in the Premier’s department still and we went up to the top of the building and we waited for the Queen Mary to arrive in Sydney. So I think theoretically our departure from Sydney was meant to be a secret as well.

But we went on a New Zealand ship called the Rimutaka. And we went straight across to New Zealand from Sydney, and how secret it was I don’t know.

No for me, no. Actually in the air force you didn’t seem to have any choice at all. I was quite passive, I just went where I was told, I didn’t initiate anything. And I suppose that was the general feeling. There were two hundred and fifty of us who got on the Rimutaka. They were all aircrew, some

were officers, most were sergeants at that time.

Well we went to Wellington and the officer in charge of our departure was a chap called Bill Radford, and I was 2IC [Second in Command]. And we were billeted in the St. George Hotel in Wellington on the second floor.

So we were very fortunate because of our positions. And the troops in New Zealand were not allowed to go to the Southern Island, South Island, but they went all over the place on the North Island. We had six weeks in New Zealand while the ship unloaded and loaded up again. And we went to Rotorua, and Palmerston North and Hamilton

and got around and saw places. We swam in the pool in Rotorua in July, out in the open air, because it was a fascinating place. And the Maori people greeted us and that was a nice time up there. While we were in Wellington, we had a massive earthquake, while we were in bed in this hotel. And it was a fairly high building,

and the whole place shock and it was pretty grim. And some of the plaster fell off the ceiling and the plumbing was affected. And Wellington’s a fairly old place, and up until that time there was places with these facades that had survived previous shocks but with this more active earthquake they fell off. It was a really bad earthquake and Bill and I were really scared.

Actually we got down on our knees and prayed, we thought we might have had it.

Bill Radford, he was another pilot and he was older and in that sense he was more senior than I was. After the war he became a pilot with Qantas, so he survived the war.

Well we

went through the Panama Canal, and between New Zealand and Panama we encountered a cyclone. And we had a pretty solid time there, the ship really had to slow down, it probably got down to three knots. And the waves were absolutely colossal, we went head into the waves, and every now and then a wave would come that wasn’t sort of head on, and it would hit the nose

of the ship and the whole ship would shudder, and the propellers came out of the water. You know it was a scary business as far I was concerned. On the way across, I used to get my watch, I forget which way you do it now, but if you point the twelve at the sun and divide the angle between the hour and the sun you get north, so I could track our way across.

But we had to do sentry watch, we had to do our turn. And because we were 2IC and so on, we used to get onto the bridge as well. So I used to go down to the bridge and stand there and look out the front and so on. It was interesting, we were supposed to do some exercise on the way but there were some quite reluctant sergeants who didn’t want to be in that,

but that was just bad luck.

Well there was always that possibility but I think we went so far east and south that we never had any sort of, overt threat. We went through Panama, that was an interesting experience. Very interesting actually to go through the lochs and the lake, and of course

you got fresh water for baths, which was good. And we spent some time in Colon I think, and we wandered around the streets there and bought a few mementos. And then we took off across the Atlantic. And the captain of the ship was an independent person. He didn’t want to go in a convoy, so we went by ourselves,

and the ship cruised at fourteen knots. Well one night we got a submarine scare, and we all put on our life jackets and went down to the lounge room. And the poor old ship got up to seventeen knots that night, we were told. It was really thumping along and shaking, but presumably it did what it had to do and we didn’t have a submarine attack. But that was the only incident on the way across. Was a fairly reasonable

crossing.

We landed at a place called Stranraer. In other words we went over the north of Ireland and then down to one of the southern most harbours in Scotland. And from Stranraer we got straight onto a train and we went through the night and so on, and finished up in Bournemouth in the south of England. And that was, I’ve got no recollection

of that at all, was just on the train and that was it, travelling through England.

Oh yes. At Bournemouth there was a reception area, and I don’t know whether you’ve been to Bournemouth, beautiful place, and I really enjoyed Bournemouth the gardens and everything were great. But from Bournemouth we were sent on another course

at a place called Lulsgate Bottom. Near Bristol. And that was a refresher course for pilots. And we got onto SP Oxfords there. Oxfords which were similar to the Ansons they were twin-engine, but far superior in many ways. They had this retractable undercarriage, which the Ansons didn’t. On the Ansons you had to wind the wheels

up, but on the Oxfords you just pushed the lever up and it was a nippier plane. But it was subject to an engine conking out on the approach to landing. In cloudy weather the engine could stop. It never happened to me but that was always a possibility. And, do you know what a spin is?

A spin is where the aircraft

loses power, it stalls and falls, but for this to happen it goes around and around. In a Tiger Moth it looked as though the world was going around, you know the world was spinning, but it was easy to get out. But a spin on an Oxford was quite a different matter and the instructor did something that threw us partially into a spin. And I was absolutely horrified, it was like lightning

had in the plane and we were up on our side. And it makes you cautious that you never get into a situation where you go into a spin that’s for sure.

Ok. Well at Lulsgate Bottom was near Bristol. And we used to fly around the area there, and one of the places that I enjoyed there was Cheddar

Gorge. We used to fly fairly close low down close to Cheddar Gorge. Also it was an introduction to flying in England. In Australia, in Queensland you could go twenty minutes and you might see a railway line and a couple of houses. But in England it was completely different. There were railway lines and roads and towns and villages, and you had to learn to

map read in those circumstances. So that was one of the reasons for doing that. And the other was of course was to get back into flying again, to get our flying experience up. And also I suppose to adapt to the weather conditions, because Lulsgate Bottom was close to the Bristol Channel, and was susceptible to cloud coming off

the channel and up the hills to where we were. I used to go to a family in Bristol, over the suspension bridge in Bristol, to a family called the Bushes who had Australian connections, and they were very kind to me there. And while we were at Lulsgate we were sent on a one-week’s course to do blind flying.

You know actually do it in an aircraft, not a trainer. I better say a word about that trainer too in a minute. But we’d take off in fog and get up above the fog and then come around on the beam. The beam was called the SBA approach, the Standard Beam Approach and there was a definite procedure where you flew down wind, across wind

and you got a signal all the time, on the right you got dits and the left you got dahs. And on the approach you got an outer beacon where you got a ‘dahdah’ noise and as you kept on going down and you still might not see the runway, you came to the inner beacon where you had to be at a certain height and you got a ‘ditditdit’ noise. And you kept on going and lo and behold you should be able to see the runway. And that’s the kind of

thing we did. And we used to have to take-off with a, you know a barrier across the windscreen, and hopefully I think the instructor could see where we were going, but we couldn’t see. And that’s the way we had to practice take-offs and so on. And I didn’t really enjoy that. But one of my strong impressions of that place, and I can’t remember the name, was Christmas time, and for the first time in my life I heard I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.

And the other thing was the station commander used to get in the queue with the rest of the bod’s in the mess for his meal, and I was quite impressed by that too. So the other training we had, which was fundamental to our later experience was the link trainer. Which was a kind of box, and was set up so you got inside the box, you couldn’t see anything,

and if you maintained the correct air speed on the instruments it would stay straight and level and it would tilt and turn. So you practiced flying on courses changing your height without being able to see any horizon at all. Except the instruments. So we did hours and hours of link training, especially in England. Now that culminated in flying at night successfully.

Flying through cloud, and we did a lot of that later on in our flying in England. So the link trainer was quite good preparation for what we had to do, and we did quite a lot of that.

No, not at all. We went from there to a place called Westcott, near Aylesbury. 11 OTU,

an OTU means operational training unit. And we flew Wellington aircraft there, which was a medium bomber with a crew of five. And it had two turrets, so we had two gunners. And at the OTU [Operational Training Unit] we picked up a navigator, a wireless operator, a bomb aimer and two gunners, so we became a crew of five. So then we trained as a crew, this was

beginning to get ready for operations. We did bombing by day and by night. And we did cross-country’s, we used to take-off from Westcott and fly out to Aberystwyth in Wales, then up to Conwy. And we used to bomb the bridge at Conwy, which may sound strange but it was all done with infer-red cameras. They had a transmitter on the ground at the bridge and we had a film in the plane

which picked up the message from the. And that’s how they knew whether we were bombing successfully or not. So we learnt to fly around at night, and we encountered searchlights and you know that type of experience. And we flew in some terrible weather. The Wellingtons we had were underpowered, they had Pegasus engines, and in flying in

cloud they were subject to freezing of the air intake. In other words the ice would form on the intake and the boost in the engines would start to go down, and so there were two little pumps that you had that would pump alcohol into it and dissolve the ice and the boost would go up again. But it wasn’t a very comforting kind of arrangement, especially if you were flying out over the North Sea, which we did occasionally.

But well it was a transition from a relatively small plane to a medium bomber. And later on I became an instructor for flying Wellington aircraft and they’d upped the power of the engine from about nine hundred and fifty horsepower to about sixteen hundred. And they were a wonderful aircraft to fly, they were really fantastic.

Well it was really, we still had our separate instructions as pilots and bomb aimers and so on. But learning to be a crew was a matter of doing it, being a crew. So we did say bombing practice and I would be instructed by the bomb aimer, you know,

run up to the target. I would start the run up and then the bomb aimer would take over. And the standard procedure was, if you wanted to go to the left, he’d say, “Left, left.” And it was “Right, right,” so you knew the difference. And “Steady steady,” and bomb door open, and so we’d go on, straight and level, over the target.

And then he’d say, “Bombs away” when he dropped the bombs. We did drop little bombs. And then the bomb doors would close, and we’d go through all those kind of rituals. And the navigator of course, on cross-country’s, well all the time he was telling me courses to fly and so on. I don’t know what the wireless operator was doing. But he was listening out, and the aircraft used to trail an aerial and

I guess you had to pull it in before we landed. And the gunners did their training separately. They would do actual gunnery practice on a drome. Pulled at a place where they used to go to. And all the time we were doing lessons as well. In air and ship navigation and that kind of thing. And I did quite well there, I’ve always had a

sort of an ability to do class lessons.

Well that was one of the silliest things I think that I ever encountered in the air force. Nobody matched the crew. We were, all the different categories were put together in one of the hangers, and they just milled around and formed a crew. Like somebody came up to me and said

“Would you like me to be your navigator?” And that kind of thing. And somehow there’d be some left over and you’d have to get one of them. But a friend of mine, an Australian Micklejohn, he had already palled up with another officer from New Zealand, so they worked some of it out beforehand. But it was a real haphazard kind of procedure. And how

they could have done it otherwise, I don’t know. But they didn’t allocate, it was self-allocation. And my navigator, a New Zealander didn’t turn out very happily actually, and when we got on operations I lost him and got another navigator.

He was taken off, yeah.

But I’ll come back to that. But once again we were learning to fly in European conditions. Bad weather, strong winds, and there was some terrible weather that we encountered. Because I was doing that training in the Christmas period, December, January, February.

Well the next step in the process was to a conversion unit. In other words we were going to convert from twin-engine aircraft to four engined aircraft. So we went to a place called Waterbeach near Cambridge which was, what did they call that? A con unit, conversion unit. And it was a massive change to go from a Wimpey [Vickers Wellington] which was fairly close to the ground to one of these

gigantic four engined aircraft. And I’ve got a photograph I’ll show you later on, how big the Stirling was. You could stand on the other side of one of the standard blocks of buildings and look over and these things were up there. And the escape hatch at the front of the plane, if you were on the ground, was so high off the ground that if you ever had to get out of it

you couldn’t drop down you had to go down on a rope. It was about twenty feet off the ground. Really big plane. And we did only a really short time on those, to convert to those. But they had four Hercules engines, and they were radial engines. And the torque was really, T O R Q U E, was really something. And it used to swing the aircraft to the right, and that meant when you took-off you had to

open up your starboard engines in advance of your port engines, in order to keep the thing straight. Because the rudder on the Stirling was up there out of the slipstream, and until you got up speed to rudder wouldn’t work to help you get control over your forward direction. So you’d open up on that side, and that meant you got down the runway before you got full power on the engines, and that was what you had to contend with on that plane.

And it was also subject to what was called tail wheel shimmy. In other words when it landed the tail would go like this. And it happened to me once, and was the most frightened person I think was the tail gunner who was right above the shimmy. And he was sitting in there being shaken from side to side. One of the big advantages to the Stirling was that the

controls were electrically operated. In other words the flaps went out gradually, beautifully. And when you brought them in they came in slowly, and once you turned the knob you didn’t have to worry about them. Whereas in Lancaster it was quite different, it was something you had to keep doing taking them off in bits. But the Stirling was, once you got it in the air it was a nice aircraft to fly. You could,

it had a wheel about this big and that meant that you could go like this, you got a tremendous amount on leverage and you could lift the wing with a Stirling up and beautifully up she’d come. Whereas on the Lancaster later on you know, it had a little wheel like this and trying to get the wing up was really hard work. So we did that and that’s they way it was at Waterbeach. Not a very

great process, but nevertheless we moved from two to four engines.

Finally we got to the squadron, so that was the last step before going on to

actual operations. For some reason I was selected to go to a Pathfinder squadron. Normally recruitment for a Pathfinder squadron was from other Bomber Command stations where crews had got experience and so on, and they were selected for Pathfinders. But I got to a Pathfinder squadron straight away. Number 7 Squadron at a place called Oakington near

Cambridge. And they were flying Stirlings, so I was still on Stirlings. And that’s where the tension started to come in actually. 7 Squadron was the first RAF [Royal Air Force] Bomber Station to get Stirling aircraft, four-engine aircraft, for operations over Germany. And in the mess there was a photo of Winston Churchill

standing there while the first Stirling took off for operations over Germany. And 7 Squadron is still an operational squadron in the Royal Air Force. So it was a notable squadron and it was an RAF squadron and most Australians went to RAF squadrons. There were a number of Australian squadrons but most Australians were scattered

around all over the place. And my crew included two New Zealanders, and the rest were RAF. And 7 Squadron was a mixed squadron. We had Canadian flight commanders, and New Zealanders. We had two Americans who joined the RAF before America came into the war. So that’s the kind of place it was and

it was a permanent air force station. Nice buildings, you know good mess, and good place to sleep and so on. Then I started operations.

Going on ops [operations]. The key word was ops. I mean people talk today about missions and that kind of thing, but it was always ops, operations.

Well for pilots they had to go on second pilot trips on operations, leave the crew behind, and go with an experienced crew. So I did three second pilot trips. And the first two were on Berlin, which Berlin was the big city, you know the ultimate target. And the first trip I did was with an Australian pilot,

chap called Donaldson. And we flew out and there was [UNCLEAR] out over the English Channel and I could hear them talking, the navigator and the pilot, and someone said, “Skipper, we’re crossing the Dutch Coast now.” And I looked out and there was tenens cloud and I couldn’t see a thing and I discovered for the first time that they had radar

which could read the ground. It was airborne radar. It picked up coast, it picked up towns, it was a marvellous arrangement. Because it was a Pathfinder squadron they needed it. And so we went on but one of the engines packed up and we had to turn around and come back. That was my first op. So we didn’t gain anything very much from it. The second time I went with a chap, a Canadian to Berlin

and this time we got there, so I had that experience of crossing a heavily defended target. And when we came back we came close to Hanover, and we were the only plane there, we must have drifted of course and they were shooting at us, and that was pretty scary because the flak coming up and so on. And at that time I said, “God, am I going to die before I

get to my twenty-second birthday?” I remember that. And we got back ok. And the third one, the group captain flew us to St Nazaire in France, and that was a relatively easy target. We regarded French targets as fairly easy compared to Germany.

Well they weren’t so heavily defended, and the night fighter

weren’t so heavily dense and so on as they were when you went on Germany. St Nazaire was a submarine base and that was the idea there, they weren’t attacking the French at all. The poor old French suffered I think, but St Nazaire was where the submarines were for the Atlantic. Finally I had to get in

and act as captain as the aircraft. And it was on our fourth op and it happened to be on St Nazaire, so I went there again. We went as a crew, we found the target quite ok, and it’s very hard to describe your feelings. But there was the flak coming up, and you could see the shells bursting in the smoke in the sky where the burst and the search lights.

And it’s the kind of thing where you say you are really stupid, you are mad to go in there, this is a stupid thing to do but you had to do it. And so we did it. On the run up I had an experience which I had never had before, and which I never had afterwards. I don’t know if you could imagine what it was, but my knees started to knock. My knees were just going like this as we did the run up, and we got

through all right without any trouble, and so that was our first op. Now the trauma on the bomber station was when you woke up in the morning, the first thing you needed to know was if you were on ops that night. And if ops were on then I used to go around with a kind of sinking feeling you know, then I used to go around with a sinking feeling because it’s a very dangerous kind of occupation. And if ops were not on then I

would think “Well, I’m going to live for another day.” All the time on the squadron planes were being lost. We might have an op where we didn’t lose any on our squadron, but then we might lose two. And all the time after an operation we’d listen to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] and they’d say, “Our bombers were out last night attacking so and so. Forty of our aircraft are missing, or sixty of our aircraft are missing.”

And that’s the way it was, so it wasn’t a very happy kind of situation to be in. And that’s why it was stressful to say the least.

Oh yes it certainly did,

there were times when we were briefed to go on operations and the weather was you know, not entirely satisfactory. And sometimes you’d get out to the plane and a CO [Commanding Officer] would come out and say, “It’s scrubbed.” Cancelled. And that’s where you got release behaviour. Sometimes you know people would drink a lot, sometimes we’d go out to Cambridge and go to the pictures or something like that. But there was always

a release behaviour when we were briefed to go. Later on we were briefed to go to Italy, to Milan. And Churchill said he was going to bomb the Italians out of the war. Well we got briefed night after night, but there was cumulous cloud over the Alps, and ultimately it was scrubbed. So we, I think probably five nights we just got out to the planes, and five nights

we just went back to the mess and all kinds of reactions. I remember one of the Americans at a party we had in those circumstances where he drank too much, poor coot, and he had to be carried out of the mess. And some of the parties were quite interesting. I was a

teetotaller actually, so I never got highly involved, my mother gave me permission to join the air force so long as I didn’t get involved in drink. She was a staunch Methodist at that stage. There was one of our flight commanders I think, who used to get up on the tables and do a Hitler act. Which was very enjoyable. He used to get up and say, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” and all the blokes would

call out, “Sieg Heil!” and salute. And that’s the kind of antics that went on. I heard of, I think it was our mess, somebody came in on a motorbike, driving around in the mess. So, relief of tension was it.

No, not at all. No, all you had to do was not drink,

it was a very simple procedure.

Wouldn’t have a clue on that. But obviously some people would just have a beer or so and be quite reasonable about it. Others just went over the, the ones that went over the reasonable line were quite limited really.

In regard to the air force generally that was so. It was called lack of moral fibre. LMF was the key word. LMF and I didn’t encounter anyone on the squadron who was subject to that, but it might have happened. What happened if anyone was LMF, was that they were taken off operations,

they lost their aircrew bevy, they lost their rank, they were treated as dirt almost. So there were lots of pressures not to be LMF [Lack of Moral Fibre]. But later on when I was an instructor I encountered a pilot who unfortunately went into that category. On the downward leg as we were doing our training, doing the landings and so on, he said, “He couldn’t see the,

the aerodrome,” and he got that far as a pilot and I don’t know, I just had to report that and he disappeared. But I went on to do thirty-two operations on that first occasion. Are you interested in a couple of them?

Well one of them,

we were briefed to go to, it was either Mannheim or Stuttgart, but we got off course well and we finished up at a place called Karlsruhe, which is a bit south. And we got caned in searchlights at Karlsruhe on our own. We just dropped our bombs so that we could have a chance of getting out of it, and we did get out of it. But that night we’d been briefed to come back low level in the moonlight,

which was pretty hazardous in itself. But anyhow we were also briefed to come back following the course of a river from east to west, so once you got on it you knew you were heading in the right direction and then turned north to get to England. Well we came down and picked up a river and we followed it, and we ran right over a heavily defended area, close to the ground and were obliterated

with search lights and they were shooting at us, and our gunners were shooting at the lights. And we came safely through it, and then we progressed along the river and lo and behold before us appeared a big city. And we’d followed the wrong river, we’d followed the river Seine and we’d come out over Paris. And I could see the Eiffel tower in the moonlight and the river and so on. And they started to shoot at us as well, so I gained

height there and we flew back over the channel and were about to land safely. Well I came down to land and then we realised we’d been hit because one of the tyres had been shot up, the left tyre, the wheel. But we didn’t ground loop or anything like that and the undercarriage stood up to it, and we finished up out on the middle of the aerodrome. And that’s how

we got away. But unfortunately that’s how our navigator was taken away from us. They blamed him for our departure from the track. I’m not so sure that it was him, it could have been me. Because when we got into Germany, into heavily defended area we used to weave, we called it. Which means you didn’t fly straight and level because that made you a sitting duck for night

fighters. So I used to go down to the left and up to the right and that’s how I progressed over Germany and so on. And it was jolly hard work, I mean if you did that for two hours towards the target and then two hours away from the target you used up a lot of energy. But I used to figure if I was doing that and there is no plane out here just

flying straight and level and I was a German night fighter pilot, which one would I go for? Now I didn’t want to put it onto him, but I certainly didn’t want to put it onto myself, and so we were never attacked by a German night fighter. And that’s the way it used to go and once again, we went to Hamburg five nights, one after the other.

Hamburg was really knocked out as a consequence of that. One night on Hamburg we bombed in a storm and a lot of aircraft really got into trouble that night. And another night we flew over Hamburg at about eighteen thousand feet and I could see all the smoke from the asphalt burning down there, and that night about forty thousand people lost

their lives because of the fires that were started. So Hamburg really took a beating. Another night we went to Peenemunde in far eastern Germany. And that was a very significant raid, because that was where they were developing the V2 projectiles, and the night fighters were very active that night. We had in our

plane a thing called “Boozer,” on the screen there. And it had red lights and white lights. And if the pink light came on you knew that you were being followed by radar from the ground, which meant that you might encounter searchlights or that they might be directing flak on you. And if the red light came on brilliantly you knew you were actually in the radar

beam, so you took evasive action. The Germans had the fuses in their anti-aircraft guns were set to a height, so they burst at a height and then scattered shells. And the idea was to, for the shell to burst lower than the aircraft so it would spread and have a greater chance of hitting. And so if you knew you were being shot at then the

action to take was to lose height so hopefully it’d burst above, and also to change direction, so if they thought you were going to be there, you would actually be there. So that was evasive action and we were all drilled in that. With the search lights they had a master beam which was radar controlled, and I’ve seen the radar controlled beam coming towards the plane.

The natural reaction is to say, “Let’s get out of here and go that way,” but the thing was you let it come close to you, and then you turn and flew through it. Now all the mechanisms on the beam were taking it that way, but once you went through that way it would have to stop and go back and that just gave you away. But I was combed twice

in searchlights, but you know this was the value of going with an experienced crew and learning these kind of things. What to do when these things happened, and I did what I knew I ought to do and I got away with it, which was great.

Well it, no it wasn’t. It was something that you picked up on the squadron. The other thing that was vital really was to stay on track, and that’s why the Pathfinders had a great advantage. I think their losses were generally lower than main force. The, we had H2S [Radar], which meant you could map read, you could pick up a city there and you could get your distance from it

and you knew you were on track. And when you got close to the target you could alter the range of the H2S and if necessary you could bomb on radar above cloud and so on. So being in the stream was very important, if you were out there by yourself, you were likely to get in trouble. I should say too about the Pathfinders that in the early

days, Bomber Command was almost completely ineffective, and so under the leadership of an Australian, Don Bennett, the Pathfinder force was introduced. And we had what they called Target Indicators or TIs and the idea was that the Pathfinders who supposed to be, and I suppose were more experienced would drop the target indicators on the target

and so instead of main force aircraft milling around and trying to find it themselves one by one, the Pathfinders found the target, marked it with target indicators and then all main force had to do was fly across and bomb visually if they could, but certainly on target indicators. So the first target indicator that went down was a red. So you’d be flying along in the dark and

the darkness would be broken by a red TI [Target Indicator] going down, and that was the start of the raid. And I think myself that one of the most spoken phrases in Bomber Command was, “There goes the red TI,” because we knew it was on and so did the Germans. So all you had to do was head towards it, you didn’t have to navigate or anything, you could see where you were going. And that enabled hundreds

of aircraft to go over the target in half an hour. They could put you know four hundred aircraft over, sometimes six hundred, you know just all going in the one direction, and dropping their bombs without having to identify their targets in the first place. And so the outcome of that is really great success for the air force but terrible for the Germans. And when I’ve reflected on this later on,

I’ve thought about say some Germans in a particular town or city, seeing the red TI come down. And if they knew the significance of it, what a hellish kind of thing it must have been for them.

We went to a place called Wuppertal one night in the Ruhr. And it was ninety per cent destroyed in one night. Mostly by fire. They dropped high explosive bombs and then the other

aircraft coming on dropped in sundries. The place just burned down. And that’s the kind of thing that happened in Dresden too, later on near the end of the war.

Generally speaking when I got back, and there was always these officers waiting to interview you, what were they called? They wanted to know how you got on, what defences were and that kind of thing. I felt quite sort of, almost pragmatic about it. We had an occasion we were really

followed quite closely by a night fighter and I didn’t say anything about that when we got back, but some of our crew must have, because our little white light was coming on you know. And the chap beside me would say, “There’s the white light.” So they must have spoken about it. So that’s the kind of this, I was still fairly unemotional about it. But reflecting on it

is what I have done you know, much later in my life. Thinking about the Germans for example and the disaster in, as for them. And I am a minister, and I’ve had the opportunity of preaching in a number of cathedrals and talk about it. And I can in a sense, I won’t say sympathise

but people do ask me “How did you feel about what you were doing?” Now that I think about the Germans and how they were suffering, I mean they started it and they got it back, but as far as I was concerned at the time, we were under attack ourselves. Our main concern was survival. We weren’t thinking about the people down there, we were thinking about ourselves because

we, if we didn’t take care of ourselves we were going to be shot down, we were going to be killed. And that’s the way it was. So when you survive, get back, and I used to head for completing six weeks, so I could go on leave. I used to say, “I hope I get through those six weeks,” we’d go on a weeks leave and then I’d come back for another six weeks, and then great hope was I’d survive another six weeks. And then finally I began to hope

you know, I was waiting for clearance from the squadron, which I finally did.

Yes, well Milan we regarded as a fairly easy target. Now when we went to the briefings they’d have the map of Europe in front of you, and the course to take was a red tape with led, varied around

and finished up and we knew what the target was going to be. And so we reacted differently to different targets. Like Berlin we’d kind of sink down in our chairs, but Milan wasn’t so bad. And I went on a few trips to Milan and the big thing was flying over the Alps in the moonlight and seeing the snow and so on. It was really a wonderful experience. And the first raid on

Milan, it was, it was fairly poorly defended. But the second time we went, I think the Germans had re-enforced the defences and it was quite a different proposition. But it was just a kind of interlude in there. But southern Germany was not a good target. A long way to go, and one of the worst raids in the war, on Nuremberg in 1944 meant that the RAF lost ninety-six aircraft

in one night. Well, when you think ninety-six four-engine aircraft in one night. I mean if we lost ninety-six planes in Australia we’d be grounded for years, wouldn’t we? But yeah.

Oh it is a long way. The longest trips we did was about eight and a half hours, like Berlin. And sometimes with Berlin we’d go in more or less direct,

other times we’d take a different course. And one night we came back from Berlin, we flew north over the Baltic, up between Denmark and Sweden, and out through the Skagerrak and then over the North Sea on the way home. So it was great. I hated searchlights in Germany, but when we got close to England we could see the searchlights in England moving around,

and it was completely different, it was a real welcome home kind of thing.

I think we realised that the Germans were a tougher proposition than the Italians, yes. The Italians

at an early stage in the war sent some of their planes to attack England, and they just got wiped out. I think they were relatively inefficient, and relatively not so determined as the Germans were. The Germans were very efficient, their night fighters were deadly, they really were. Their ground defences were aggressive.

Well I got to the squadron in March and finished in October. But with the Pathfinders they had two kind of aircraft to do the marking. One was Mosquitoes, but they had a limited range. They would go to the Ruhr and they would do the marking there most

successfully. But for the distant targets like southern Germany, and Berlin and Hamburg they couldn’t reach. So that’s when the four-engine aircraft came in like Lancaster and Stirlings. But also this actually counted the climate over there. In summer in England with double summer saving time, you couldn’t get to darkness until about eleven o’clock at night

and then you only had about four hours darkness. And so the raids had to be short, because you flew in the dark. And then when winter approached, the nights got a lot longer and you could take-off at four o’clock in the afternoon. And later on when we were instructing we’d have to hang around and wait for darkness before we could practise night flying. But in the wintertime you could take-off at four o’clock and be finished

by eight o’clock at night, so it was the weather or the climate that really determined what kind of aircraft we used and so on.

Oh yes. When we first went there, our crew were just learning, so we went on

bombing raids as an ordinary bomber. But then as we gained experience, we became what was known as backers up. And we dropped green target indicators. So we didn’t find the target and mark it, we just came in and every two minutes a TI would go down, so that the main force would know where the target was. So we were backers up. And then we qualified to be markers,

and then we could drop red TIs. And so that’s the way we progressed. But there was always the primary blind markers, which was a very elite sort of crew, to initiate a raid and so on. And then later on they had master bombers who would fly around and tell the main force planes which ones to ignore and which ones to bomb and that

kind of thing. So it was a progression. The other progression that I made, as I went as a second pilot I got to the stage where I took new pilots, and they became second pilots in the planes. And I was amazed when I looked back over the records how many second pilots I took. So they must have had a certain amount of confidence in me.

Absolutely. Always – we dropped bombs and TIs. The bombs would drop off in a string, they never just went off all together. There were switches and they would go through a process and drop a string of bombs, but the TIs would go down in that string. The

other thing was that those TIs were detonated to explode, they were a kind of flare at a certain height, and altitude height. So they would burst at about three thousand feet, and they went down as a bomb. And if for some reason one of those flares got hung up and you came down under three thousand feet after it was bombed you were in real trouble.

I don’t know that it ever happened, but I think it might have. You’d blow yourself up in other words. The other thing with Lancasters was that as far as I know in Bomber Command every Lancaster that went out carried a four thousand pound bomb. And depending on the distance you were going in would be surrounded by five hundred or thousand pound bombs. But basic to it was it a two ton bomb actually, a great

big bomb like a cylinder. And that’s what really.

It was in the central part of the bomb bay. Now you may know they finally got up, they got to twelve thousand pound

bombs and I think once they got a twenty thousand pound bomb. So the Lancaster could take it quite easily. But it was called a block buster, and this is where once again later on in my life I reflected on it, you cannot drop a two ton bomb without doing you know, a tremendous amount of damage. And that means people’s lives. So every four thousand pound bomb at least must have

had a devastating effect. And looking down as you approached the, to run over the target, you could see these big flashes going off down there, all the time as each aircraft unloaded these big bombs on the German town or city.

Well that’s a good

question because when you were on the bombing run, I told you about weaving, you had to fly straight and level you were a sitting target. And there were night fighters around in the area and so on, and it was the flak was coming up all the time. So you had to just sit there and hope for the best, you couldn’t in a sense help yourself. So you flew straight and level and the bomb aimer would say, “Bomb doors open,” and the bomb doors open the lever,

and you know directions up to the target. And then he’d say, “Bombs gone” and you’d say, “Bomb’s gone,” but you still had to leave the bomb doors open because we had a camera and you had to wait until the camera flash which went off with the bombs, went off, and that illuminated the target when your bombs were going to fall and it took a picture. So that back in base when you got there, they knew you’d been there for

one thing and they knew how you went. And one of your great objectives was to bring back an aiming point photograph, where you could see in your photograph that that was where you were supposed to have dropped your bombs. But just sitting there like that, the tension was here – I am a real sitting duck. Soon as the camera had operated, close the bomb doors, and then you could if you wanted to take evasive action. One of the things that I

haven’t mentioned was, later on I was doing that, and I started to turn north to get away from the target. And another Lancaster went over the top of me, he was just there. You know I could hear the roar of its engines, and one of the crew said, “That was close” and it really was. But we got back all right, but when we landed and on the way I wondered “What might have happened?”

That aircraft had hit one of our fins, and turned the top of the fin over, so we were that close to a mid-air collision. So there was always something liable to go wrong.

That’s

a question to, of superstition really, because a lot of us became superstitious, and somebody would say carry a knife in his flying boot, or carry something say, as a memento. And one of the things I used to wear was a blue scarf around my neck because all the time you know you are looking, searching around coasts of enemy aircraft and so it stopped my neck rubbing up. And there was one night when I

didn’t, I forgot to pick up the blue scarf. And I thought, “Oh gosh I forgot my blue scarf,” but I just shrugged my shoulders and got away with it all right. But there was a lot of superstition. I used to pray, I don’t know that I actually prayed for survival, but every now and then I’d think about god, and you know there it was. I was one of the rare

people who went to church occasionally, but members of my crew used to go with me. Which was quite interesting. I used to go to a Methodist Church in Cambridge, and I thought about them too, because nobody, and it’s strange from a Christian point of view that nobody said, “Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?” or anything like that. We just went there and walked out and went back home again. Which I hope I would never do actually.

In October I decided that I’d had enough and I went to the squadron commander and said, “I want to leave.” Theoretically, I should have kept on going in Pathfinders, but I just had this feeling that I must stop. And so I arranged to stop and they were quite happy for me to go. And I got my clearance,

I was cleared as an above average bomber pilot. But the crew of course they had to finish as well, and one of the problems in Bomber Command was that you’d been together as a crew, you’d been through all this together and then when you finished I went there, somebody went somewhere else, we just broke up, and we were never a crew again. Some of them went back on ops and I did again later on too.

Our rear gunner went back fairly quickly, he was shot down and finished the war as a prisoner of war. He’s still alive in New Zealand. And my bomb aimer, George Harris, he went back on ops and he was shot down and killed. And I had the task I suppose of going to see his parents too, and

they would not believe that he was dead. I was quite convinced that he was, so I felt hopeless in the situation. And I don’t know what happened to the rest of them, but we were scattered to the four winds.

Yes. In

1943 main force crews might fight, finish as low as twenty-two operations. So in a sense I’d done more than my fair share at that time. There was never any question raised as to my eligibility. It may have helped the fact that I was Australian and I was on an RAF squadron, but no it was never queried. I don’t feel guilty

about that either, because I lived, I lived to fight another day as well.

Well as soon as I left the squadron I was posted to an operational training unit as an instructor, which was the common procedure. You were called a screened pilot. And that’s when I trained to become a flying instructor. So I went to

this particular operational training unit, and they sent me on a short training course. And I used to fly with pilots and crews you know on circuits and bumps, cross-country’s. And finally I was sent down to Lulsgate Bottom again, where I started off, because it had become a flying instructors’ course. And I did a flying instructors’ course, which was quite

substantial, on Oxfords, and I became qualified to see another pilot solo night and day onto the aircraft. Which I have always regarded as quite an achievement really, a positive kind of thing to have done. Well then in due course I was posted to Lichfield as an instructor. And

Lichfield was an Australian operational training unit, all the aircrew who went through there were Australian. And it was a great place, you know if you wanted to check out Australians they generally went through there, and then some of them went onto Australian squadrons as well. But at Lichfield I joined what was called “The Circuits,” because there was a group of us who did circuits and bumps basically. So that’s

where you got a crew and you took them through from go to woe in their training. And that was you know quite positive and a good experience. And I really learned to fly you know, learning things by experience is fundamental, you can learn the theory and all that sort of thing,

but you learn so much more while you continually, it’s the training for teachers, I suppose it’s the same in all kind of situations. And I became very fond of the Wellingtons, it’s a great plane to fly, used to fly single engine. And one of the joys I had with the Wellingtons was doing what’s called a glide approach and landing. Now in these heavy aircraft you keep your airspeed up and if you cut your engines off, you’ve got to go down like this

to keep the airspeed up with full flaps. And I used to take pleasure in showing the pupil pilot what it was like in the glide approach and landing. And on Sunday afternoons where we used to go at times, there’d be spectators out, you know from Derby, all watching these planes and going down, like going down in a lift and then flattening out, it was. So that was a really great experience.

Also meeting people. One of my pupils was a group captain, you know, I was, I forget what I was at the time, but I had him as a pupil.

Well it was, I was most interesting, I don’t think it was awkward, but he came with me so that was all right, it was up to him. And but he’d been on Coastal Command, and on Coastal Command it seems to me that they bring the plane down in stages you know,

go down and then flatten out a bit, and then do that again and then finally hit the water. Well he was doing that in the Wimpey, it was almost hilarious as far I was concerned, I could hardly stop myself from laughing at this procedure. Anyhow he went solo and that was that.

I have no questions at all about the adequacy. I think our training in Australia was excellent, and I’ve always respected the Royal Air Force. They had good equipment, excellent training, you know they did things really well.

No doubt about that. Well no complaints, none at all.

Well I’ve thought about that, why it wasn’t included in the curriculum as it were,

that it wasn’t. Hopefully I suppose the procedure as second pilot flight did something to mitigate that. But once again when I went as captain of an aircraft I think I had a basic knowledge that helped to see me through. There is no doubt that in the early stages of being

a bomber crew, you were I think more susceptible to enemy action. In knowing what to do. But even the most experienced crew in the world, with the way that the flak came up could get hit with a shell. So there was a bit of what you might call luck even in your survival. Yes you couldn’t anticipate, and the Germans

occasionally did what they call “A box barrage,” they weren’t aiming at any particular aircraft, they were just filling the sky with flak that you had to fly through. So you couldn’t do much about that except plough on and hope for the best.

No, I didn’t, I can’t recall that anyone ever said to me anything about coping with that. I remember that I went on leave once, and I stayed with a family that was connected with a family back in Australia. They looked after me very nicely. But I think they were a bit worried about me, I think I was subject to a bit of stress and they were really concerned about me, but I wasn’t really concerned about myself except that it was impacting

on me at that time. But I never had nightmares or sort of lie awake thinking, I always slept quite well.

Well I think I just had a conviction that “I just ought to stop.” All the time

on ops I was afraid, I think you can put it that way. And I think everybody else had fear, we lived with fear. There’s a book I’ve read it’s called, I think it’s called The Eighth Passenger, it’s the eighth person in our crew of seven, and it’s fear. Was there all the time. You lived with fear because you knew it’s happening all the time, it could happen to you.

When I was at Lichfield, I did a lot of flying, I did more flying on Wellingtons than any other aircraft, and I finally finished up as a flight commander. And so I had the privilege of being squadron leader a senior officer and I enjoyed that too. It did mean though that you were in an administrative situation rather than a flying situation.

So whereas I’d been accumulating flying hours, I only got you know two or three hours a month which was pitiful really.

I did about a year on operational training.

Yeah.

Well I was all of 44,

I was on operational training, it was a year. And then early in 1945 I decided I’d go back on the squadron. I should tell you that my wife was a member of the Women’s [Auxiliary] Air Force at Lichfield, and she was in flying control. And I’d fly around and use the radiotelephone, and she was on the radiotelephone in flying control. And they were quite nice young ladies down there,

and this one in particular I thought, “Gee, she sounds pretty good.” And when I was flight commander and I would regularly go to flying control at nighttime. I was in charge of night flying and of course I met her face to face, and that’s how it all started. There’s a book on the shelf over here, of the experiences of war brides from England who came out to Australia. And her

little stories entitled The Voice Over the Radio. So when I talk about this, and my wife I tell them about the voice over the radio and how it led to the fact that I finally married her.

Yes I did.

One of the things that we heard at

the time was that if we did a certain number of ops or were still doing ops in England, and we went back to Australia we wouldn’t have to go and fight against the Japanese. So I thought, “Well, why not, I didn’t have any great desire to go and fight the Japanese,” so I thought, “I’ll go back and get some more ops under my belt.” So I rang up the squadron and they said, “Straight away, yes please come.”

So I did and I went as a squadron leader. And on Pathfinder Squadron you know there were stacks of wing commanders and other squadron leaders, so it was nothing unusual. And I picked up a crew who had had a bad experience with pilots. They lost a pilot who gave it away and abandoned them as a crew.

And then the pilots they got were just odd bods and not really member of the crew, a pilot would come along and take them on an op. Now this crew was one of the most experienced screw on Bomber Command. I think one of them had done over ninety operations, and all of them had done over at least fifty ops. They were a gem crew. And they needed a pilot and so I was it. And so that’s how I think it all fitted together,

there was a need and I filled the need. I don’t know what they thought of me really, never really developed a close relationship because I was only there a short time and then the war finished. But we did a number of ops together, and two of them were Australians and we have a Pathfinder Association in Australia and I belong and they belonged. One of them was a

chap called Brian McLennahan who was highly involved in television and radio and so on. And he died some time ago. And once again because I’m a minister I took his funeral. And then Eric Denning was my rear gunner and he was a regular member of the Pathfinder Association

and he died and I took his funeral too. And I scattered his ashes around the trees at RAAF Richmond. So there’s been some sort of sad follow up to those relationships.

That’s a good question too because it had changed completely.

Instead of night flying you were doing daylight operations with fighter escort. And we went to Kiel and that was most interesting, because you could see what was happening. Over a fairly limited target you could see the bombs and the sides of the cliffs falling down into the water and the smoke from the fuel supplies coming up, it was a submarine base.

And we went to a couple of other places, not greatly remarkable. But we also went on a daylight raid over Hamburg, and flying over clouds, and the bomb stream there, we really could see it. And I looked ahead and I could see some fighter aircraft there right at the front, and I thought, “Great, that’s our fighters up there on the job.” But it turns out that they were not our aircraft, the were the German fighters, and they were their jet aircraft, the Schwalbe,

and they shot down eight bombers. So when I saw, realised what was going on, I was a little bit outside the stream, I went over and mixed myself with it too. But I did feel strange flying in daylight, it was so different. But then I did one night operation and that was the one on Potsdam where we had that minor collision

over the target. That was almost a critical occurrence.

Told you before, yes.

Well it’s a question of exposure. I think the Bomber Command operated at night as a defensive procedure.

You can’t be seen, that all changed with radar of course. But when the Americans entered the war with the air corps and flying fortresses, they were devastated. They believed that they could fly in daylight on German targets and French targets. And because of their armament with all their gunners and.50 machine guns they could defend themselves.

But they couldn’t. And they were shot down in large numbers and almost exterminated really. And then that developed the idea of fighter escorts, and one of the planes that became available was the Mustang. Which with long range tanks was able to escort bombers on long distances into Germany, and that’s when the air war over Germany really started to change.

And the Americans also had their own aircraft, but basically the Mustangs made the difference. So the fighters, you never saw them, but they were up there in a defensive situation. And in the later stages of the war it became a battle between the fighters, and that’s where the Allies won air superiority. Which meant that for quite a long while before

the end of the war the bombers could go virtually unescorted. So they did, and they backed up the invasion forces on the ground and did some terrible damage with you know the oil factories or whatever they’re called.

The, our bombers like Lancaster. Well we had three turrets, two guns in the front I think. And a mid upper turret, two guns, and then the rear turret with four machine guns. And I think in some cases they got cannons in the turrets, but the four machine guns were Brownings,

and each gun I think could deliver about eleven hundred bullets a minute, so with the four guns they really sent out a spray of bullets. But in the daytime the Germans fighters had cannons, so they could stand off and they could shoot bombers down. A British aircraft was no, had no ability against the fighter. And neither did the American ones with their heavier armament

really, the fighters could decimate them. So they really did need the fighter escort. The fighter, needed a fighter to defeat it.

I think the last operation, we, I’ve forgotten the name of the place, but we flew over cloud and couldn’t see the target

but I know that nearby was a prisoner of war camp for our troops, and we had to be very careful. I don’t know whether we dropped on radar or not, but it was a bit of a fizzer. When the war was over however, before the war was over, we the Allies made an arrangement with the Germans that they could fly

and drop food to the Dutch people at Rotterdam. So in the daylight we went low level over the North Sea and over Holland. It was great looking down and I could see German soldiers on the ground. And we flew and they dropped food at Rotterdam, and we Pathfinders dropped some target indicators. Still I can remember one chap there came running out and when we dropped our TIs

he changed course and ran back as hard as we could go. But interestingly enough some years later in Burwood, I was having my hair cut in Burwood, and this chap had a sort of foreign accent, so I got chatting with him, and I found out that he had been on the ground in Rotterdam while we were dropping the food from above. The next thing we did was take our ground staff over Germany, again low lever over Germany,

so they could see what had happened as a result of their efforts as well as ours. And we flew over acre after acre of broken down building and walls with no rooves and so on. And that’s what they saw. But what impressed me most of all was flying over the fields in Germany where people were out hoeing and doing their agricultural things. Now if you’re like me, if an aircraft flew over you

at five hundred feet I’m sure you’d look up, I can’t resist it. But these people didn’t look up. They just went on with their heads down, and I thought later still in light of the fact that Goering had said, “No enemy aircraft is going to fly over Germany,” while this was intended for the benefit of our ground crew, it was a most humiliating experience

for the Germans. Here we were almost flaunting ourselves low level over Germany. So that was that one.

I was on the squadron, but in the closing stages of the war there was so many aircrews around that on Bomber Command it was hard to go on an op actually. So I

only managed to go on five operations in the time I was there, some months. You had to take your turn, you weren’t in a sense needed. But I should also mention that I did this picking up of prisoners of war in Brussels, and Brussels airfield was one that had been heavily bombed by the Allies, and the runway had been patched up. And I remember that it was one of the roughest runways

that I’d ever landed on. But I felt a bit sorry for the POWs [Prisoners of War], they were Brits and we took them back to England in a Lanc [Lancaster], which had no protection from noise, you know they must have really suffered.

Well they’d been in prisoner of war camps in Germany, and they’d been sort of mustered into Brussels, and there they awaited their transport back.

On the squadron, we knew the war was over, I mean we’d flown over Holland before we knew the war had ended and it was quite apparent I think to people in England, or Britain that it was coming to an end. And while there was all this wild excitement down in London, and people jazzing around in the various squares and so on, it was very mild and almost quite

a normal existence on the squadron as far as we were concerned.

No, I don’t actually. Sorry about that. But I know and I’ve said it to, and I still say it, for me personally there was a great sense of relief that I had made it. You know sort of “Thank God I’m still alive, and I’ve made it and

I’ll be going home,” you know. So there was, relief is the great word, rather than celebration as far as I was concerned.

No, I didn’t. There was always the possibility that you might go, I forget the actually date but it was probably sometime in April.

And ops were still going on.

I should imagine just hanging around. I haven’t mentioned to you, and I’m not sure if it was in this period or earlier on. I had gone to sick quarters and we had a med flight

on the squadron as well. Mosquitoes that used to fly out over Germany unarmed, you know to check out on the weather. And one of the crews was flying around low level and they hit a tree near the sick bay, and I was quite close and this darn plane hit the ground and there was a great massive flame you know, and it just burned up like that.

And I just ran for my life and sheltered in the guardroom. And that was a sad experience, and a real lesson against unauthorised low flying. But yes.

No, not at

all. It was, I think there was the realisation it was coming to an end, and in a way anti-climax, you know you just had to wait. As soon as the war was over we were posted too, so we didn’t hang around. Do you want to hear a bit more about after that?

Well I was posted to a post called Gamston which was a

holding unit for all Australian aircrew, you know there were hundreds and hundreds of them. And so they were gathered together at Gamston at the RAAF station there to wait. And I was in charge of the holding flights, so I was theoretically in charge of hundreds of Australian aircrew. And they had to wait for shipping to get back to Australia.

There was a holding unit and a dispatch unit, and there was another Australian in charge of the dispatch unit, Keith Eddy, and so we used to send them off on leave. We’d give them ration tickets and send them off and get them to come back every now and again, to make sure they were still alive an in touch. And as needed they would transfer from the holding unit to the dispatch flight, and then the dispatch flight,

I was in charge of the dispatch flight on one occasion. They’d ring up for a train, this was an unusual experience to ring up for a train and then the train would come nearby, load on hundreds of Australian aircrew and take them down to Brighton, which was the embarkation centre. Then they would go down to Southampton and get on the ships. But that was interesting, and during that time is when I got married to my dear wife.

And that was a very peaceful actually.

Well in due course I arranged my departure from England, but I should say that while I was still at Gamston I got the invitation to go to Buckingham Palace to have my DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] presented by the King. I thought, “Oh well,

I’ll take it.” So my wife and her sister and I went to Buckingham Palace and went through the procedure there. Which I’ve always valued, I thought it was a good experience to have. The King planted my DFC on my chest shook hands and asked me “When I thought I was going back to Australia?” Standard question, I suppose. Then in due course I went to, down to Brighton

and Vic came down, my wife, and we stayed in a private hotel there, rather than the, what they provided. And waited for a ship, and I went and visited some people who had looked after me during the time. My purpose in going at that time, was to get back in Sydney in time

to start up at Sydney University. So I got onto the Stirling Castle and the edges of the channel were freezing, and there was fog. And the Stirling Castle was operating on one engine, and I can always the captain of the ship saying “Well, let’s get the hell out of here.” Because it was really bad news for the weather and we took off on one engine, and

there were quite a lot of, it was a twenty-six thousand ton ship, so there were lots of people on it. Can’t remember much about it except that half way across the Indian Ocean they stopped both engines, I don’t know whether you’ve ever travelled on a ship, but always there’s the thud thud, there’s the noise of engines and the screws. And dead silence with the engines off, it was quite amazing really,

but they didn’t stay off for long. We came through Suez Canal, by the way, so I‘ve been around the world by ship through Panama and through Suez. And we got back to Melbourne and travelled by train up to Sydney and the family was waiting to meet me, and I got back to university and I still hadn’t been discharged, so I turned up at uni on one occasion in my glorious uniform,

and from then I merged into civilian life. I went back to public service and I worked in the Treasury instead of the Premier’s Department.

Well it was so ordinary, you wouldn’t believe it. We came up from Melbourne on sleepers, you know a whole team of officers in this coach, and the sleepers were

a wire mesh thing, which folded up against the windows in the daylight, and just pulled down with a thin mattress on it. So that was our sleepers. And we got into Central and I think our family must be a reasonably unemotional kind of mob, so I just went and lived with the family at Woollahra. They

lived at Woollahra at that stage, and they had a bed for me, and it’s amazing. Nobody asked me any questions really, it’s most unusual when you think back on it. I think they were glad to see me. But Mum had the other two sons and they were still alive, one in the air force in Papua New Guinea, and the other one in, he went to Canada as a pilot and

he got sick over there and he was one of the last Australians to get back to Australia. So I had no trauma at all in departing the air force and in getting back to what you might call civilian activities. Which I think was a great thing. I had these things to do and I got stuck into them straight away. And my wife arrived in August, I got there in January, she arrived in August

and that really started things going again. I used to miss her quite a lot actually.

Well I used to write air letters and I got regular letters from Mum. Not from anybody else. We got

parcels from Australia, from the Red Cross, and they were good. They enabled us to stay on flying, to take a tin of pineapple, you know, and the people in flying control a bit of pineapple. And when we were married Mum sent dried fruit over, so we had a wedding cake that was made in England, and that kind of thing. We had the regular contact. While I was in England

my grandmother died, I had a lot to do with her, and also one of my brothers died, he had diabetes and he got pneumonia and died. That was when I was at Lulsgate Bottom, and fortunately that day I had the day off, I wasn’t flying, and I just got on the bike and went

away by myself, got it over in one day. And then went back to normal.

No that was a younger brother, I think he was fifteen when he died.

I think generally that most

Australians in England wouldn’t have been sort of actively missing their family, I don’t think I was. I just settled in and there were plenty of things to do. They had a great system of holidays there, people who were willing to take Australians on their leaves. So I went down to Devon a couple of times. I had a place near Aylesbury and I went there a number of times.

And they were very kind to me, they were a very well to do family with a great big house and a great big dining hall. And they had a butler and all kinds of things there. And I remember one night, they had a son who was in the air force, and we went up to the local pub with my gunner from New Zealand. And we were coming back, and they’d had a few drinks, and it was pitch black and we were on bikes and

coming down the hill and they were shouting and yelling. And the butler, unknown to us was coming back up the track and he got off the road when they were coming, but when I was coming along silently he got back onto the road and I ran into him. Poor old butler, I wanted to give him some money, you know but they wouldn’t let me. So that was that place. And then I went to Scotland a couple of times, and the family there looked after me

nicely. I went in the summertime and we were out on a boat fishing for trout on their lake. And then I went in the wintertime and I was out on their frozen lake learning how to skate. So there was all these diversions. I went to Shropshire too to another family. So especially the family at Birmingham family however, who had connections with Australia, they were the most sort of motherly

and fatherly people, and they were in a sense representative parents and everything. Mr and Mrs Middleton.

I think I’ve got some of the letters somewhere here. But pretty benign things, you couldn’t

talk about anything you were doing really. The main thing was to let them know you were still alive and thinking of them.

Oh yes, that’s right. I don’t know whether any of mine were censored, you’d never know that. But I would never have been breaking the rules, I don’t think. I’d mainly talk about the weather and still flying

and that sort of thing, but no detail really.

That's absolutely right, and I think it was for most Australians. I can remember on the farm learning of the death of King George V and feeling personally affected by it, as a kid. You know we were British as well as Australian. And the national anthem was God Save the King.

And when I was at Fort Street as the captain of the school I used to get up on the podium and say repeat after me, “I honour my king, I salute my flag,” you know etcetera. So we were British to the core. I think Australians realised that there was a great power of evil abroad in Hitler and Mussolini and so on, and the way that Hitler performed

by his invasions around Europe. And the way that he had deceived Chamberlain and tore up the piece of paper and that kind of thing. We realised he had to be stopped. Now in my later experience, when you encounter hostility, you can run away and give in, you can fight and resist, or you can sort of mediate and try to settle in without fighting. Well the Brits tried

that, Chamberlain tried and it didn’t work. They were never going to run away, so they had to fight. And we realised that we were with them in that fight. And it’s interesting that most of the Australian people who enlisted in the forces volunteered to do so, and they wanted to do so. And we were quite willing to go to England and the soldiers were sent to the Middle East and went through North Africa and so on.

And there was a different sense of compulsion I think with the Japanese coming down, we were defending ourselves, and that was a different kind of situation I think where any Australian would want to be in it. But we wanted to be in the other one as well at the time before Japan came into the war. So that’s the way we were.

No, we were still in training in Australia when the Japanese came into the war. I remember seeing a fortress at Archerfield with all these bullet holes in it. They’d been shot up by the Japanese. We had to dig the trenches. But in a way I suppose we were just passive,

we went where we were sent. And the government decided we should still go to England, because if we’d stayed in Australia we wouldn’t have had planes to fly. And it was seen as a World War I think, so that’s the way it was. I never had any resentment about being sent to England, no. And I never heard anybody else say, “Why are we going here when we should be here?”

Oh well, I think we were interested, but in terms of say hearing somebody say, “I wish I was back there,” I can’t recall that. We were so involved in where we were, and being in Britain was really a great experience on

the whole. When I look back on the war, I think of it, for me, and thousand and thousands of Australians it was a great event in their lives. It really was. And when you think of it, it’s really something tremendous to have been through and have lived through with all the kinds of experiences that you got. And for me, I mean I was a senior officer with

responsibilities, and at one stage I was acting station commander. Our CO, he got out of the car and didn’t put his brake on and the car ran over his foot. And so he was incapacitated and I was the most senior general duties officer at the time so for about a fortnight or so I was the station commander. But they made sure I never had any decisions to make. But yeah.

It was no trouble actually. I had the motivation of getting back into, what you might call the harness. Especially the university course, I’d done two years, I had two more to do and I wanted to get stuck into it and the only thing I remember about my discharge was that I used to suffer

a bit from and, got, blocked up a bit with a cold, and in England I had this experience, they push a great big needle up through your nose and wash it out with water because you can’t fly with blocked up sinuses and so on. And that’s the way they did it, it was ghastly business, you could see the needle coming you know. And when I got to Sydney

I had some trouble and I went to them and this doctor, and I only regard him as a stupid man, he did one and I survived that all right and then he went straight ahead and did the other one. And I just fainted, I just couldn’t take it, the sight of it you know. Anyhow, and that’s, I got recorded as having chronic sinusitis. But it soon disappeared in normal

conditions.

Well, it was a quite interesting and valid procedure. I did much better as a mature age student then I did before the war. It was hard going because I was working

in the day time, but I got a credit in statistics I know, and I got a high distinction in accountancy. And I won a prize, and I was really tickled pink about that. So I enjoyed that, I made the most of that before my wife arrived and when she arrived of course it got a bit harder. But our first child was born after I had graduated, so

I escaped having that kind of responsibility as well.

To my studies.

Well for my long-term living it was a great experience and I think back and I think you know I did it. I lived

through this and you know I survived it. And while I might say you know god’s hands on my life and so on, nevertheless there is still a sense of personal achievement that I, this is how I went, this is what I managed to do. So I think a lot of Australians would feel this is a great event in their lives. And if you want alternatives

it is hard to find I suppose, you know, lots of things have been tremendously significant for me since. Like going into the ministry and things like that. But it was a great experience, and I got that experience of responsibility and being in charge of people and leadership and dealing with difficulties and facing up. The other thing I learned was

the meaning of courage. I think some people think of courage as being brave you know and this is what you do. But courage is about being scared of what you have to do, frightened, but still going ahead and doing it. That’s what it’s about.

Oh yeah. I mean I indicated earlier that it was a kind of madness to fly over one of them targets,

but they did it. Just bit the bullet and did it. I will, I don’t know whether I should say this but I guess I’d better, I did hear of people who used to drop off a big bomb over the North Sea, so they could go higher so they would feel safer when they cross the target. I used to go through target at about eighteen thousand feet. And a lot of them used to try to get through at up to twenty-five thousand feet, where they felt

they were safe from the anti-aircraft fire, which they were, and also perhaps from the night fighters. One night I was flying behind a climbing Lancaster with the Merlin engines. And I could see these eight red, eight red really intense spot which was the red hot exhaust pipes of four Merlin engines. And I thought, “Gee, they’re a sitting duck if a night fighter is flying along he’s

really got them in his sights.” And I thought, “I’m not going to do that, I’m not going to climb like mad, I’ll go through at eighteen thousand feet.” And perhaps I went through and there weren’t too many around me and the fighters were a bit higher up, I don’t know, but that’s the way I felt about that.

Well I could understand it, yeah.

Oh well, I don’t think anyone would approve of it. The crew would have to you know keep it quiet, I don’t know how it would have been known, got known. But that’s the kind of thing one did hear about. They still went and did what they had to do but

in a way that was really what they were supposed to do.

I suppose cowardice is running away from what you are supposed to do and giving in to your fear. Yeah. And that’s quite understandable, I mean there are plenty of issues I suppose even subsequently

where I’ve quit doing something, either because I didn’t want to do it or I felt it might cause complications. We can all get involved in that. And sometimes in my experience it is better to run away and let things be rather than run in there with all guns blazing, stirring up trouble rather than stopping it.

Oh I would

think so, yes. It’s as long as they didn’t sort of avoid the total issue, yeah. I think if they’d avoided the total issue they would have got short shrift. And that’s again one of the reasons why I think, why we had to take a photograph of where we’d been. I used to think “Well, to show how well you did or how badly you did.”

But nevertheless, it always identified the fact that you had been to where you were supposed to go. And you could see fire you know and all that kind of thing on the photograph. That was you know, a strong motivation.

I never heard, I never heard. The ramifications of delivering a good photograph was that it was put

up so everybody could see you’d hit the aiming point.

I really liked flying. And quite a number of pilots after the war considered to going say Qantas, and that Bill Radford I spoke about, he became a Qantas pilot. But because flying was so much associated with warfare that took

some of the shine off it. And my wife solidly refused any idea of me going on flying after the war. And one of the reasons why I went back to study and work. But I still really enjoyed flying, I don’t know coming up out of cloud into the blue sky above, fantastic. And landing in

fog or, a lot of mist and so on. The sense of achievement you get down and you land safely. It’s an enjoyable procedure as far as I’m concerned, but it’s the warfare side that knocks some of the shine off it. I go on a flight every now and again now. My wife

still has a sister in England. And when we took off in a Lanc or a Stirling we’d climb at five hundred to a thousand feet a minute, which is pretty steady going. You know you’d take off and then you’d gather a bit of speed and then you’d climb. So now when I get into one of these jets that surge down and then they take off at an angle like this. If you did that in an old Lanc you’d be dead in about ten seconds, it would just

stall and just drop down to the ground. And so I sit there and agonise until it levels out a bit and I feel a lot safer. I needn’t worry I know that, but still that’s something I still carry over from my time in the air force. My grandson, or one of my grandsons is a pilot in the air force. And he’s flying four engine aircrafts. He’s based from Edinburgh down near Adelaide, and he’s

on Orions and he’s in the Gulf area at the present time. But thanks goodness he got there a few days after the conflict ceased. I guess he’s having the time of his life up there now in the Orions. They fly around mostly over water, surveillance. And we’ve been inside one, my wife and I, and there are all these screens and so most of the crew sit there gazing

at these screens. Well I couldn’t imagine that that would be anything but a terribly boring kind of activity. But he’s a pilot, so he’s all right.

Well there’s a real, to me there’s a real exhilaration in doing a steep turn you know, and just throwing the aircraft around. We

used to do fighter affiliation with Spitfire aircraft, you know, in the daylight. Just practise stuff. And the fighter would come in and you’d do a turn instructing, you know instructing like I said with those glide approach landings or doing a flapless landing, you know, where you’d come in at a high speed and race along the runway and then you open up and you take off again. It’s a skill and it’s a valuable

skill. It’s something that you can enjoy, well I did anyhow.

Oh no, I wouldn’t think so. I think I can say straight out

no. We flew to war and it was the war that was the dominant theme. When we flew at night, a lot of people would be unaware of this, in the dark there is always a horizon. If you’re above cloud with the stars, if the stars start moving you know they’re not moving you know the aircrafts moving. So you can fix on stars and you can fly straight and level on the stars,

and you can fly straight by fixing on a star. If that star moves you know it’s the aircraft. So you don’t have to rely on the instruments in those circumstances, there is a kind of light there, which is really great. And over in England the great star was Polaris, the North Star. When you flew east towards say a German target, look out and say Polaris is there

on your left, so you know you are heading in the right direction. But more importantly when you’re coming back, when you’re heading home Polaris has got to be on the right hand side. If you look out and see Polaris then you know you’re going west and basically you’re heading in the right direction. So the stars were a great source of comfort too and strength.

Well, I told you about that one occasion

and I used to go to church. After the war, I had made a promise to god “While I was over there that if I got out of a certain situation I would truly give my life to him.” And after we were married and we had our three kids and the oldest boy was old enough to go Sunday school, so I took him to Sunday school and he would stay if I stayed with him. So you had the

picture of me sitting in the mess hall with the little kids for his sake. And then he grew brave and he would stay in the Sunday school if I stayed outside in the car and he knew I was there, and that’s where I met the local rector of the church at Enfield. And we’d had our three kids baptised in the Church of England. My wife was Church of England, and he more or less sort of said to me “Would you like to join the family in that regard, and be confirmed?”

And I thought about it and said that I would, and in doing so I realised somehow that was god catching up on the promise that I had made. So I went to the confirmation class, and went through the procedure and he used a little card at the end of it where you’d agree, “Do you agree with this? Yes, then tick it.” And then he got down to the bottom line, which was you know, “What are you going to do about the Lord Jesus in your life?”

And I took me a couple of hours pondering that one because I realised its implications, so finally I gave that the tick too. And I wondered what had happened how my wife would feel about this, and how it would affect us all and what it might mean for the future. But I did and I’m glad I did. I think when the confirmation service took place

there was a Bishop there called Bishop Hilliard, and he was a great preacher, went a bit too long sometimes but he told us about a boy that he had confirmed. And he said to the boy you know “Why do you want to be a Christian, why do you want to be confirmed?” And he said, “Well, when I thought about what Jesus had done for me on the cross I felt couldn’t say no.” And that’s the way I felt and still do.

Well, it was the start of a real change in lifestyle. I became involved

in the local church, I became the churchwarden, I even became the trustee of a cemetery, which was quite a unique experience. Finally, I went into theological college Moore College, and that was after I’d done, first of all I’d finished my university course and I was in the treasury. And I went into the budget branch of the treasury and I finished up

as an inspector in the treasury, which was I thought quite a worthwhile occupation. And then my former boss in the Premier’s Department sought me out and persuaded me to become his personal assistant in one of the joint coal board mining companies. A big mining company with operations in Singleton and Wallerawang,

and I did that. And he was a director on the other joint coal board company, so I’d go along with him and I’ve attended a few board meetings in my life. And then I became the secretary of the company and then that was that. And then I felt this call to the ministry. My father thought I was a bit haywire. My boss certainly did. But my wife

took about a year to make up her mind that she would be agreeable to doing it. And then finally we finished up at Moore College and we lived at Surrey Hills.

Well, after two years at Theological College, so that was in 1959, my first year in the ministry. I did all right in my theological training, normally

it was a three-year course but I did two because I had a family and we had to support ourselves and I had a degree as well. And I did quite ok at that. And my first year after that was at Ermington, which was part of West Ryde, and so I sort of worked myself in there and roped the people in too.

Then I was invited to join the Board of Education of the diocese. So I got involved in completely different work. It was fascinating, I worked in Castlereagh Street before I took this step, I was secretary of a company on one side and about three years later I was secretary of the Board of Education on the other side of the road in the same block. And I didn’t have any educational qualifications at the time

but I became involved in human relations training, which is adult education stuff. And I did, any experience yourself of human relations training? Group life laboratories and counter groups, that kind of thing? Well, I got heavily involved in that and I became a trainer of other people. And then I became a trainer of trainers, which was, I really appreciated that.

But it meant meeting with people across the board as far as denominations are concerned that’s from go to woe. Catholic Church was involved and so on. And it took me to Queensland and to South Australia, Victoria, and I finished up down in Melbourne as Director of Christian Education in the diocese of Melbourne. And while I was there I became the Executive Chairman

of the Australian Council of Churches Commission on Education. Which I think was a courtesy shown to me because I was an Anglican rather than because of what I could do. But while I was there I went up to Papua New Guinea to do training up there, and I got a taste of what it’s like to live in those kind of circumstances. I went to a place called Agura, where they had a cathedral and I preached in

the cathedral there. I saw the first PNG [Papua New Guinea] person to be ordained as a priest in the church and I went to Port Moresby and stayed at Han Lambada, that’s a village out over the water. And I did training there. And one of my great recollections was the dogs, because people up there in the Solomon’s and Papua New Guinea have got no respect for dogs really.

And these dogs used to hunt in packs around Han Lambada and empty garbage tins and fight and I’m a fairly mild kind of person really on the whole, but I used to lie in bed listening to the racket and think “If I had a machine gun I’d go out there, I’d fix those blooming dogs.” Anyway I didn’t. And shortly after that I came back to Melbourne of course and I saw this advertisement for a headmaster of a

national secondary school in the Solomon Islands, and in the meantime I’d been to Monash University and got my education qualification. And I got this conviction that that’s where god wanted me to be. So I got in touch with the missionary organisation, with the bishop, and he persuaded me to be the chaplain at the school rather than the headmaster. And I wasn’t convinced, but I said ok. If that’s what father lord wants me to do that’s what

I’ll do. So he went back to try and get a Solomon Islander to be the principal of the school but he didn’t succeed. So I got a letter out of the blue saying “Would you please come as headmaster and priest as well?” So I got the job of chaplain and headmaster in one go. And that led us up there for five years, and my wife and I regarded that as one of the highlights of our ministry. It was a national

secondary school, it followed the curriculum of the Cambridge Overseas Certificate, which was a Cambridge University syndicate. And was a widely used curriculum in Africa, Asia South Pacific and so on.

I didn’t encounter any difficulties.

No, I just I think I’m, pragmatic is perhaps the word, I don’t get greatly emotionally disturbed.

In my survival?

Yes, well I think

it was, it’s a kind of being at peace about things that happened rather than sort of a conscious awareness that I’m living by faith or something or other. Just go ahead and do things and trust that it will be ok. Because I guess that’s what trust is about, you go on into something, you don’t know what’s going to happen as you keep on going

down the track. I mean that’s true for all kinds of people. So I think one of the big factors which was a test all the time was my dear wife. I mean going into the ministry, she trusted me to come out to Australia, which was a big thing for her. She really missed her family, so she got married to me and did that and she agreed to go into the ministry. And then she had to face up to going up to the Solomon Islands.

After we were married?

Oh yes, well that was a bit tricky because she was a corporal and I was a squadron leader and never the twain shall meet sort of thing. But her parents lived in Birmingham, which was pretty close to Lichfield. And so

she would take off and go there, and I would take off separately and go there, and we would sort of, perused our relationship. And when we came back to the station she would go in separately from me, but apparently everybody around the place knew what was going on, but there it was. I had a disagreement with the officer in charge of flying control at one stage

and after the war they had a big party back at Lichfield and I was not invited to attend. Even though I’d been, I suppose a fairly significant person. It’s interesting, we got a letter from our son John who’s over in England at the present time, and he went to Lichfield just, less than two weeks ago. And went to the heritage museum

there and he wrote back a little note saying “Who should be looking out at me from this photograph from Lichfield but one Squadron Leader K. McIntyre?” So he’s just gone over there and visited that place and its amazing how the two have come together, to see my photograph over there, after I haven’t been over there

for sixty years. I think I’m digressing now but.

Oh, he wanted to change the system. We had to have our, all the time aircrew had to keep a log, a record of their flying, and the times. Days, times where they went and what they did. And he wanted somehow to change the system, so that we couldn’t ring up

and get the times of flights from flying control. So this was absolutely ridiculous and I protested to the CO of the unit and he either persuaded or ordered the flight control officer to provide the information. And he never felt happy about me thereafter.

I don’t know why he wanted to do it, it’s so obvious because flying control was the only place that actually records the times. What’s the point of recording them if people don’t have access to them? I don’t know what his purpose was in doing that, but he tried to do it and didn’t succeed.

Oh it certainly was, yes. Just to be able to see at close range the effect of the bombing, the devastation. I’ve spoken a number of times about war as such, as a great evil. And in the Second

World War apparently about fifty-five million people lost their lives. And not only the loss of life but the destruction of property and that kind of thing. It’s a terrible business, and part of my awareness of that is actually seeing what it’s like down on the ground, and for a German person seeing the red TI come down and knowing that

this is what was going to happen. Must have been a shocking thing. There’s a book called Bomber, quite a thick book about German people and their experience of being bombed. And that’s a pretty ghastly kind of evidence of the experience of people who hid in cellars and you know saw other people lose their lives and

so on. War is evil, no doubt about it. And of course it happened in England with London and Coventry and so on.

Well, unfortunately they were down the back, and they had to go through the agony of the noise too, I suppose. They would have been in the

turrets and the observation tower on the top of the plane and so on. But they got off the plane before I got off and I never had a chance to talk to them actually. Which was a pity, I think the ground staff often get neglected in sort of tales of the war, we talk about our great heroes who got DSOs [Distinguished Service Orders] and things like that.

But the ground staff, it was a total effort. And the ground staff would have to work on the aircraft out in the snow and things like that. In the Middle East they’d have to go out and work on red-hot aircraft out in the desert, and it wasn’t a very nice kind of existence.

Fairly vague,

one of my disadvantages when I first went on ops was that I was an officer, and the rest of my crew were NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers]. So they lived in my quarters and I lived in mine, and it was very hard to get together. There was a barrier that was there. We used to go into town, into Cambridge, or we used to get on our bikes and go to Ely and look around like that. But there were difficulties and it was the same with the ground staff.

I sometimes think now that I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to relate to the ground staff, but I didn’t. I remember one time I was desperate to go somewhere and do something, and I borrowed a bike without authorisation, and when I got back there was my sergeant in the ground staff looking for his bike. He was very kind to me but I think he didn’t like what I had done. I don’t blame him.

But there it was. ‘Chiefy’ they called the chief person in the ground staff crew. They looked after us very well, cleaned all the windows, you know the maintenance and so on. Never had any trouble.

I didn’t think it was an air of

superiority, well certainly not for me anyway. It was difficult to get into a relationship with them, their lives were so separate. We were doing things while they were doing things. I suppose some aircrew might have met with them down in the local pub or something like that. But generally our crew didn’t do that,

if we went to go we’d tend to go to the flicks in Cambridge.

Oh absolutely yes, that’s right. Just take for example the guns, they’d have to be loaded up. And they’d load them up with all these great long line

of bullets that would go through the machine gun at high speed. The other great thing that ground staff had to do was wrap up our parachutes that we carried with us. There is a story going around about an American who bailed out in Korea and he survived because of his parachute, and finally met up with the man who folded his parachute.

And a great meeting, but I never had that experience, but that was a vital thing, and lots of the air crew owed their lives to the fact that their parachute were properly packed. And then of course the engines themselves, the maintenance, the fuelling, putting the bombs on correctly. They had to be armed in a certain way so that when they fell off the arming veins

would rotate and they would arm and then they would detonate. If all of that didn’t work it would have been a total waste of time, so it was a total effort. But so often as I think of it, a failure on the part of some people to recognise what was done for them, for their own survival really.

No I didn’t, I don’t, I’ve never tried to catch up with the ground staff. I think it would be extremely difficult to do so. But I have had contact from English people who’ve had say relatives in the air force, I’ve got quite a

number of letters from England, and we have the Wings publication of the Air Force Association, and every now and then you see a letter from England asking somebody in Australia “If they have had any experience with this person, or flying this aircraft,” you get in touch, well I’ve done that a number of times. And on one of those there was a kind of contact with one man who’d been on our ground staff, but

it was difficult to follow it up.

Basically they were all English, there were a lot of Irish too. On one occasion my wireless operator was sick or something or other, and I got another wireless operator who was a broad Irishman and I couldn’t understand it at all. I said to him “If you want to get in touch with me write it down.” But

my crew had Northern England people, Geordies, and they’re a bit had to understand as well. And there were all sorts and conditions of men, I think is the statement.

Not as far as I knew.

I think there were Australians in ground staff, there is a man on this village here who was on a Spitfire squadron, which was an Australian squadron, he must have been in England. But there was also a 10 Squadron which was Sutherlands, which went over there to collect their planes to bring them back to Australia, but the war broke out and they stayed on as part of the Royal Air Force and there were Australian

ground staff involved there. But generally speaking they were British in the broad sense of the word. I can remember on one station listening to this chap speaking with a beautiful Scottish accent, it was so melodious, it was fantastic. And then on another occasion listening to a chap, and thinking he must be French the way he’s speaking, he was speaking

English. But he was Welsh. You know you met all kinds of people.

Oakington.

Well the buildings were two storey brick buildings, so we were comfortable. Hall officers

had a batman or a batwoman, so they’d clean your shoes and make your bed and that kind of thing. But it was shared, I mean nobody, maybe the group captain had one just to himself, but they would do a roll of officers and do that. And they were largely invisible. We would have things to do, we’d have breakfast and go off somewhere to the flight and so on,

and then they would come and take over. And as far as the food was concerned, as officers we did quite well, especially on squadron. They used to grow tomatoes, and we used to get flying meals, before we went on an op we’d have a meal before we went. And often it was bacon and egg, and eggs were rare as

hens’ teeth [very rare] in England. And I used to think to myself, give them an egg and send them off, a bit cynical. But at Oakington in the afternoon when there was no flying we had tremendous afternoon tea meals at about four o’clock. Somehow they got access to all this tinned fish, tinned herrings and things and they’d just pile it out.

And you could have bread and this fish. And on another station on one occasion we had the choice between chicken and fish, you know. And I don’t think that ever happened in the sergeants’ mess, that kind of thing. They had catering officers and I suppose the catering officers make a

coup every now and then and come back with something. So compared with soldiers who went out there and stayed there and put up with the conditions there. We went out and did our fighting and so on, we came back to a nice bed and good meals, and medical care on the spot and that sort of thing. We were very fortunate really.

Well I suppose all I can say was that it was part of life at the time. We were in it and you just did it and accepted it. But I’ve heard of some stories of people in other services, you know like people in Tobruk for instance having to survive under bombardment all of the time. And relying on a naval ship coming up from Alexandria

in order to get food to eat and water to drink. No way did we have to put up with that.

I would think fairly neutral.

We didn’t mix. I can’t remember really encountering anybody in the British Army, certainly in the American army. When we were at Lichfield we had an American base there. And we got invited over there with Americans and the Americans were far better off than the British were in terms of payment and their conditions and so on. But

I have no recollection of personal encounter say with British officers or British personnel in the army or the navy. But I think once again, as far as me as a person is concerned, I don’t think I would feel superior or inferior. I do feel a bit inferior

here at times in the air force, because there are some aspects of ex-serviceman’s life where the army seems to be the dominant theme. And you know the media seems to think of ex-serviceman as army and they talk about soldiers, but they don’t talk about sailors or airmen. But that’s just my pride and prejudice I suppose.

Oh they were very cordial. That was quite a big base there for the Americans, and our CO, who was a group captain station commander, he had good relations with them. And he went over there on one occasion and the outcome was that we were invited to

do a fly pass, while the CO over there, the American CO was presented with this big medal by some visiting American. And so they were all lined up and we did our fly pass, and the group captain rang us up from the base to congratulate us, and thank us on behalf the Americans. Strangely enough I was at the phone,

and when I knew it was the group captain I stood up, it was the way I was trained. In his absence I still stood up while I was speaking to him. But the relations were cordial, never got to any depth of course. Didn’t have the time. But the two Americans on our squadron, one of them Angus, Gus, was one of the finest people

that I met in the air force. He was an American and while we were there he changed out of his British uniform into the American uniform and also got American rates of pay so he was far better off than his colleagues round about him. But he did his time in the Pathfinders, and then he went onto flying Mosquitoes at night, flying night fighters. He was a very committed person,

I hope he survived the war.

Yep, I don’t even know his surname. He was Angus, Gus.

Oh they joined up before the Americans entered the war, because they had a sense of the rightness of doing so. They were very motivated people, they saw a need and they did something about it before

their government did.

No. It wasn’t but they were there and they were on the job. And I suppose they were glad to transfer from the RAF uniform to the American uniform, but they never did. There was one occasion just remembering now, where some American aircrew landed at the station

where we were, and they went into the officers’ mess, the officers, and they were lying around on the floor, which was something that we never did. Made themselves at home, and I was intrigued by the way they ate their meals, cut everything up and then laid down the knife and used the fork. Quite different from the Brits and the Australians, much more relaxed people.

Well I think the big change in terms of flying was the nature of the countryside

and the complicated map down there that you had to check up with. But in terms of the people I felt quite at home, never had any difficulty at all, and we’ve been back to England because my wife still had a sister there. And I can wander down the street, I know people, I know the shops and the big thing for lots of Australians is how many pence

they’re going to get for the Australian dollar. But it’s great, I think there’s a great similarity in our cultures and so on. So no troubles. And when I was in England during the war, you know just go to a home and I could live there with the people and so on.

No, I don’t think so. I think there I was and there it was and the two of us got together. I think a lot of Australians got married to English girls. Stacks of them. When my wife was coming out from, no, when I was coming out from England

we passed a British ship taking British ships to England from where they’d served. And they wanted to know you know why there were women going out to Australia and when they found out that they had been married to Australian and were going out, the British troops moved to the other side of the ship, they didn’t really approve of that.

But there was no trouble, I think a lot of English people didn’t understand what those women were going out to. Like the dunnies [toilets] out the back, and all kinds of things which were quite unfamiliar to them. Say living away from the cities, and even when we moved into our house at Enfield we had a, the man came and collected because you didn’t have the sewerage on.

Was a bit rough.

Well I think, I just felt quite at home. Nowadays, when we go to England as Australian citizens we are second-class people.

Going through the entrance, we see people from Germany and our former enemies and so on who, in the European Union and they just walk right on through without any restraints. But we go through the hoops. And I think “Here we are, we fought for England and so on and now we’re treated as strangers” and I don’t really like that. But we have had some good experiences, my wife

uttered a few words and was identified as English and a lady has come along, an official and said, “You come down this way.” But I still think it’s a bit poor, but the Australians changed the system as well. My wife automatically became an Australian citizen because she married me during the war, she had three Australian passports and when she went for the fourth

they wouldn’t give her one, which was absolutely ridiculous, but still. So then she had to become an Australian citizen and go through all the motions, even though she had been recognised as one for years and had three passports. But England reciprocated, so we’re on the outer in that sense as well.

Oh, no problem.

I preached at St Luke’s in Concord some time ago. It was a Remembrance Day or and Anzac Day service. And I met this chap who had a bit of an accent and so I spoke with him, just got to speaking with him somehow, and found out that his father had been a fighter pilot in the German air force. And it doesn’t bother me, I never hated Germans. No

way, I was never aggressive about Germans as such. I had to do what I did and I did. I met a German down in Castle Hill at a Probus meeting and he was talking to the people there about his experiences in the German air force and so on. And I don’t find any resentment or anything like that.

No, I don’t. I never felt any personal animosity, but I think what we were about was opposing Nazism. And I never encountered SS [Schutzstaffel] or Gestapo [German security police] or anything like that, so I

could find out how I really felt about it. Some of the things they did were truly horrific, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s up to them I think to feel ashamed of themselves and to regret what they did. But lacking personal opportunity to meet with them, but I think I could quite happily travel around in Germany now. I’ve been in France and Austria and Italy and so on. But I never

got to Germany. I’d be intrigued to see some of the place where I had been.

Well, as far as my father was concerned, his father was Irish, born in Ireland, baptised in Ireland and married in Ireland. His name was McIntyre and he married a Miss Moore.

And I don’t know when his father died, but his mother remarried to a man called Ness. And they came to Australia and lived in Brisbane. So, no it must have been still a McIntyre because he had a brother called Bill McIntyre and another one Alf McIntyre and so on, and then had had a sister whose name was Ness, so there was a bit of a mixture up there in Brisbane. So Dad moved from

Brisbane to Sydney, and there he met my wife. Sorry, my mother, and my mother was the daughter of a Mrs Sutton, and the Sutton preceding her we understand might have been of convict descent, so I don’t know whether that’s a good thing to claim or not. It’s not so bad these days. But the lived in the Lithgow area,

and one of them was a baker and the three sons he had became bakers. And they set up an establishment in Bathurst, so I’ve been there and gone out on the Baker’s cart and see them throw the flour in the oven to make sure it was hot enough. And so they came together and Dad had been in the First World War. They married after he got back and then they had six children, one

of whom died during the course of the Second World War. My elder brother joined the air force, and he was in Papua New Guinea as a radar radio person, and he was at Milne Bay. And I think it affected his life ever after. Also he worked in the coalmines at Budergerang and he was down by himself working at night as an electrician when an earthquake took place. So he was underground in an earthquake.

And my younger brother Alf was a pilot in the air force but he didn’t get further than Canada. My sister became a missionary in Papua New Guinea for thirteen years, and also a nurse. And my other brother Laurie, he was ordained as well and he’s been a minister in Perth, Tasmania, New South Wales. He was

the Dean of Newcastle Cathedral for a while. So we’ve had a reasonable religious input into our family that’s for sure.

Well I hope we’ve all be responsible citizens, but we’ve never got really involved in civic matters. My youngest son John, who is the Rector of Redfern,

was the citizen of the year in the South Sydney Council area, so he’s had a real involvement in civic affairs, yes.

Well, when I was a child there was no great distinction between being of the Empire and being Australia, the two were associated. Like we sang God Save the King, etcetera. But as far as any influence on me that I was aware of that came from Ireland or England, I’m not aware of that at all. It doesn’t appear to be in my background, I’m Australian.

And when I was in the air force and I had my Australia’s up on my shoulder, that’s what I was. And I’ve travelled around in Europe on these tours. Where you get together and the Americans sing a song and we sing a song. I was always glad to be an Australian. So I’m Australian and I’m not Irish.

Yes, well as a child he was always a bit sort of edgy and nervous, but he’s been that way ever since. I’m sure it’s made him just a little off what he might have been if he hadn’t had the experience. He is now a widower, he lost his wife some time ago. He lives by himself, he’s quite strong in his mind, but physically

if you compared him with me, I’m pretty good and he’s a wreck. He really is. Now whether that’s due to Papua New Guinea, I don’t know. But he’s finished up quite a different person to what I am for example and I’ve got a feeling that PNG had made a contribution to that.

Yes, the three of us, that’s Jack,

myself and Alf especially, we were a trio. And when we went out to the farm from the grocery shop at Rhodes, we all went to school together straight away. And the next brother Arnold, he was a bit behind, and the youngest brother Laurie, well he was a little kid ten years younger than us. He wanted to go with us and we rejected him, he wasn’t with us. But the three of us, the elder three we

really stuck together very well.

Yes, that’s right.

That was after I came back from the war actually. She was quite a bit younger than I am. And then she had of course to finish school, she was still at secondary school when I came back, and then she did her nursing training, and then she decided

she would go to PNG.

No she’s Anglican, she worships in the St Stephen’s Church in Penrith. I don’t know whether to say this but I’ll risk it, she doesn’t like the way it’s done in the Glenbrook Church where she lives.

Oh defiantly, yes. I think living on the farm made us young adults more early than if we had stayed in the city, I think. We had work to do, we picked peas and beans, we got the cows and milked the cows, we chopped wood. All kinds of things we did. I used to do washing up

and you know help Mum as well. And I think we really got a measure of independence and internal strength by having responsibilities. And when I look at some of my grandchildren now who don’t have responsibilities, it seems to me they’re missing out on something in their lives.

Oh well there’s tremendous difference, I think. I mean education, and television, and computers and so on. It is completely different from when we were on school. And I wonder, I’ve been involved in education, and I wonder how much a reliance on a computer is going to affect the capacity of kids to really reason and think,

when in so many ways they can press a button and get what they want without having to think about it.

Well I think people rise to occasions, I’m getting philosophical, yes. And I’m

sure in the context in which you live and your background experience, the situation of war would have changed as well, and you would have fitted in to that as you had to do. I mean these things compel you to be what you have to be really for your survival and the survival of others. You’d make it.

Ok, well to get into the public service, the state public service of New South Wales, you had to sit for the leaving certificate of that time, and you were judged on the results of that. And then you applied for a public service, and of those people who applied for the public service

I was sixth in the state. In the exam results, and I was interviewed by the Deputy Head of the Premier’s Department, and he asked me to join the staff there. Now I don’t know how he selected me but he knew I had been captain of the school and I’d had responsibilities, and I guess he found out a few things, and then I joined.

And when I first went there I was the dispatch clerk, which is the lowest form of existence in the public department. And I did that, put stamps on things. And I remember while the war was on I sent some second-class mail which should have gone by sea by air, it must have cost about twenty times more than it should have. But then I became a search clerk, which means files, new papers coming in,

put the papers on the files and so on. And then I became a clerk to register on the records, so I used to index things and make the records on the cards. And then from that I was asked to go to the cabinet section. And so when I was nineteen or twenty I was a member of the cabinet’s section of the Premier’s Department. That started me, if I had stayed on doing

that I would have been going to Parliament House and participating in the public service activity in Parliament House and so on. So I think that was, you know, quite some thing as far as, I didn’t realise that at the time, but looking back on it I suppose it was unusual for somebody who was nineteen to get into the cabinet section. Well then because I was in the Premier’s Department, and Bertie

Stevens was the Premier, he was an old boy of Fort Street, and I was an old boy of Fort Street, and it made a link so that he knew me and that was that. And when I was in the air force I got a letter from him, from the Premier’s Department, and I was called out to the front of the parade. “413230 McIntyre fall out.” And they gave me this letter, because they must have thought, “This might be some important information or something.” Actually, it was just a letter saying, “Good luck and go

on your way.”

Oh yes, there were a number who enlisted. I don’t know whether anybody would have been restrained from enlisting, maybe the head of the cabinet section, of the heads of the departments would have been. But if anybody else had a real yen

to go into services I think they would have got there.

To go into the air force?

Not at all, I made up my own mind.

Well when war was announced I had this

feeling, which was a depressing feeling really that I was just the right age to get involved. And I made up my mind quite early that I wasn’t quite old enough and I was half way through I think a year at uni or something like that. So it was sometime ahead that I decided that’s when I will take that step. And I still had to get my mothers approval as well. I think Dad wouldn’t have worried because he was an ex-serviceman, so it

probably came about over a period of time. And the finality of it depended on the circumstances, the time was ready to do it.

Oh no, we all joined up after the war, and he was only fifteen months older than I am, and I can’t be sure when he enlisted, but it would have much about the same time.

No, he wasn’t in aircrew. I was in aircrew and he was involved in radio and that kind of thing and I was looking forward to flying.

Well, we’re all in it

together. We were all aircrew, we were all AC2s [Aircraftsmen] and we were all doing the same courses of instruction, navigation, Morse code and so on. And I don’t know how they went about deciding myself. We all had to have the same capacity for seeing at night and that sort of thing. Maybe they based it on achievement in the lessons we did and so on. Maybe

they had, I guess they had some access to our backgrounds and so on. So we were completely unaware of what would happen to us, we just waited to find out. It was good news when I found out actually.

As far as I’m aware most people thought they would like to be pilots but only a

certain number were, the rest went to different schools like nav [navigation] school or that kind of thing.

Yes, I think there was a real sense of disappointment for some of those chaps, they really wanted to be pilots but they had to settle for being navigators. But once they were in they were in and that was it,

so I don’t think I ever discussed it with anybody. I didn’t even know until we got to the next school, flying school, who had got what.

I don’t think there was a stigma, once we got to Bomber Command, it was a crew effort ultimately. But I still think

and I’ve written something about this recently, that the pilot was the captain and because he was at the front and he could see what was going on, it was he who had to make the basic decision and control the aircraft, because if he didn’t do that, flew it properly and take the necessary precautions nobody would get back safe. But on the other hand he needed what the bomb aimer could do, and what the navigator could do,

it was not a solo effort. But the pilot was justly I think the captain of the aircraft, making final decisions. Like, if necessary saying “Bail out.”

I don’t think I had a sense of failure

or even anticipation of failure. The time when I was most likely to fail I think was when I was learning to fly the Tiger Moth in the early stages, because it took me a bit longer than the other students, but I got there. So I just went on and that was that. I got there.

I was never very confident at aerobatics, which does require a measure of skill. Its judgement and doing the things correctly, which somehow I wasn’t as relaxed maybe as some pilots who became fighter pilots where you turn upside down and do this and that. But I wasn’t quite so comfortable with that. But on the other hand to be sort of steady and to

fit into a situation where you didn’t have to do fancy things I think was a great asset anyhow.

Yeah well, that was at the end of the elementary flying school. Some went form there and went to either Narrandera or one of those single engine-flying schools.

And I went to Amberley on twin-engine aircraft. But that’s when the decision was made, but once again how it was made they never told us. But I think it had to do what I was just saying earlier, confidence in doing certain things or a lack of confidence in doing certain things.

Yes. The CFI [Chief Flying Instructor] squadron leader was with me, and somehow he found out that I had landed the plane on one occasion with my hand not on the throttle. Which you know, which is absolutely essential when you’re flying a plane because if you have to go around again and open up the engine your hand had got to be on the throttle, so you can do it without finding it.

And when I landed the second time he said to me, “McIntyre, where’s your hand?” and I went like that and said, “On the throttle, sir,” because it was actually, I got it there before I replied. But I just made it otherwise, who knows what might have happened.

Well I must have, I don’t know. The hand wasn’t on the throttle, that was the big thing.

Well I suppose there was the normal tension, that this was a time of testing. But I don’t think I was unduly worried, no.

Oh absolutely,

who was I to question it anyhow. No I, I had a good instructor. So I didn’t question the system at all, not at all.

Course 18. 18. And I thought that was pretty late down the track but it got well up into the 40s I think before the war ended. So

it wasn’t too bad.

And that meant that aircrew enlisting in the 18th course were on operations in 1943. And others came in you know much further down the track.

Well the big question was at the time when Japan came into the war, where should our personnel go?

And at that time there weren’t sufficient aircraft, there weren’t sufficient resources for people to remain in Australia in the air force. And we’d made our commitment as a nation to the defence of Britain too, and we saw ourselves as British as much as Australians, so once again I just had a kind of faith in the system that I just went where I was sent

and I didn’t question that. We just in a sense did what we were asked to do. And I know I’ve heard that there were people who questioned the wisdom of that, but at the time in the circumstances I think the wisdom was that if these people were going to be useful in a war situation, being in Australia wasn’t the answer. And I think it took a long while too for the Australian Government to battle with British

to get the army people out of the Middle East and back to Australia, and we were well and truly over in England by that time.

Didn’t make any difference to me. I think at the time I would have been oblivious to what was going on really. I read the life history of Curtin fairly recently and I learned a heck of a lot

that I didn’t know, because I was over there while all this was happening in Australia.

I was at Archerfield when they entered, but it took quite a while for that to make its impact. I mean the Japs didn’t come immediately down to PNG. They came reasonably quickly but also in a sense relatively slowly, it wasn’t immediate.

Well that doesn’t bother me. It could be argued that because the Americans were coming in against the Japanese,

it was even more sensible to send some of us overseas where there was also a great need.

Well I actually encountered them more at Amberley, which they finally took over. And we had very little to do with them actually. It was just, we’d see them marching around, or some of us thought strolling around.

And we got into their canteen and got a few things, but beyond that nothing very much. But also the observation that I made of a whole line of single engine aircraft that had been crashed by the Americans and the realisation that their pilots flying those were not as experienced as they should have been. I mean you don’t prang aircraft easily if you know how to fly them, but you do if you don’t know.

That’s right, that reminds me. One of the things we did was called aircraft recognition. So images would be put up on screen and we had printed matter, we had the outline and so we had to

learn aircraft recognition. And as to what they were I can’t remember, but I think the ones we would have focussed on most were German aircraft.

No, not at all. Aircraft recognition was not about that, but you would know if it was this kind of aircraft, if it was a single engine aircraft then it was

a fighter and so on. The first German aircraft that I ever saw was in Sydney Harbour, because it was a Dornier, it had been used by the Dutch in just up there to the north. And there it was a Dutch aircraft but it was a German plane. I identified it immediately as such.

Not at that time at all. We were still in the early learning stages. That was really a subject started in the operational training units when we got over in England. Operational training included that kind of thing.

Not in the early stages. Escape in the wider sense of course was getting away from the enemy if you got shot down. And this is jumping well ahead to being in England and on ops. We had photographs, and little maps and there were little things that we could carry which were meant to be aides, and I’m very thankful that I never had to use them.

Every time we flew we wore a parachute. Pilots were fortunate generally because the parachutes that they had, they sat on. And you were strapped to your parachute so if you had to get out, the only impediment was it was hanging there behind you and impeded your progress. But the other members of aircrew had their parachutes strapped to the wall of the aircraft, they had to get them down and put them on. And they put them on the front

of themselves, see they clipped on there. Whereas ours were behind, so as a pilot the parachutes were immediately available. And of course for single engine pilots they turned them upside down and dropped out, it was essential that the parachute should be there before they have to do that.

No, we, I have no recollection

of that at all, I think we just had to trust the luck actually.

Generally and over a period of time Australians adapted extremely well. There was a great similarity between being an Australian and being English. We arrived in

Stranraer in Scotland and then went down to Bournemouth. And I found Bournemouth was a beautiful place and no problem at all. When we went down to our first station at Lulsgate Bottom, there was no sense of being different really, from our point of view. We just fitted into the scene really, at least I did. I think my main difficulty was the cold actually, which was not personal, it was just the circumstances.

No, not at all. I might have been aware of some people that you might call upper class but I never felt any distinction. Australians were really welcomed and recognised. And I have a friend who was a navigator,

an Englishman and he had an Australian pilot, and he came out to Australia and I’ve heard him speak about how Australians were respected in the air force.

No, I have no experience or recollection of that at all.

I didn’t know anybody in the navy, but as far as people are concerned the air force was very highly regarded.

After the Battle of Britain they couldn’t help it.

I think we must have but I can’t remember at this stage. I’ve preached at a number of Battle of Britain services and I’ve done a bit of research about it so I know a lot more about it now than I did then.

No.

No, but you remind me that in the Royal Air Force that in most squadrons there was a total mix of people

from the different places. And on our squadron there was Canadians in leadership positions, New Zealanders and so on. But the only one who was absolutely different was a Pole, a Polish man, who was a pilot. And he got the immediate award of the Distinguished Flying Cross. We had a special parade while the AOC [Air Officer Commanding] of the group came along and presented it to him, but I didn’t really know him.

But I know that there were Polish pilots who were in Fighter Command and they were a group together and they would have maintained their own identity. But I’ve forgotten this chaps name, Redinko I think his name was.

Well, I never really met

them, I can’t comment.

Well, they would have had a squadron in Fighter Command I think, yes. But they were isolated bodies in Bomber Command.

I wouldn’t say

I was aware of that, it was just the situation in which we fitted. They were there, we were there we never questioned one another, we just got on with it.

Not at all, we were in an air force culture and it was same for all of us. So

the only difference that I would have been aware of was this man came from New Zealand and this one from Canada and so on. And there we were. I never made any distinctions in my mind. On our squadron where there were two hundred and forty aircrew, forty were Australians. And I don’t know how the others were represented.

Well it was an advanced flying unit, and AFU and it was close to Bristol. It was on a range of hills or maybe minor mountains which means that when the cloud rolled off the Bristol Channel it could wipe the airfield out in terms of its use. But we flew Oxford aircraft, Airspeed Oxfords and the purpose was

for us, not having flown for months, to get back into the air, get familiar with being pilots again, and also to start to deal with the flying conditions in England as compared with Australia, and they were quite different.

Oh absolutely. An advanced flying training unit.

Yes, well I suppose all I can say was entirely satisfactory. The facilities there were fairly crude, in that the signalling, we didn’t have radio telephones, we relied when we were night flying, on an Aldis lamp down there flashing our letter, which gave us permission to come down and land. And the runway would have been

lit by flares, and that’s not a great help when night flying. But once we left that scene, if you would like me to go on with it just to compare it? The airfield systems in England were absolutely fantastic. They had a perimetre of lights and you flew around the lights. You didn’t have to find out what to do, and the lights led you around to what was called the funnel, so you just followed the line down,

and then it lined you up, the lights lined you up on the runway and then there was two lots of electric lights down the runway, so it was as clear as a bell. So you were just going down and down and on the side there were flight path indicators, one on this side, one on that, and the colour on them amber, green and red, and amber, green and red. But they were offset, so when you, coming down

you could be on the amber on this side and the green on this side, which would mean you were on the high green. So you would drop down further and you’d get two greens and that was the flight path that you were to follow. And you would just keep adjusting your throttles to get down. But if you got a bit low one of them would come up red and you realised you were getting a bit low, and if you got two reds you knew you were in a bad position. So the flight path indicators were a marvellous invention and it just

made it so easy to fly at night.

On the ground at the end of the runway.

Yeah that’s right. So Lulsgate Bottom, going back to Lulsgate Bottom didn’t have that.

It certainly did and there were a number of occasions when we came back from ops

and all of that was switched off and we switched off our nav lights as well which was a pretty dangerous situation. But when we were over the airfield coming back from ops say or operational training unit, we were given a height to fly. So as we came back from ops we’d call up when we were at a certain distance and we’d get a height to fly, so we would then get to the airfield and then circle the airfield and then

one by one the planes were brought down five hundred feet at a time. So the lowest one would go in and land and then the flying control would call down the next aircraft to the circuit and then move the others down five hundred feet. Well we could do that while there was intruders about. But, which means we were stationary, they weren’t landing aircraft. So we were all buzzing around, and how they did it with intruders was up to them.

Well, we didn’t have to do it on the Oxfords because it was a dangerous procedure, but we did learn how to do it on Tiger Moths, and they were easy to get out of the spin. The spin means that the aircraft is stalled,

so you’ve gone to a low speed which won’t maintain its flight and then one wing drops and the other one comes up and the aircraft goes down in a spin. And looking down on the earth it looks as though the earth is spinning and the plane is stationary. And the way to get out of a spin is to put your stick forward which means your nose goes down, which leads you out of a stall position. You gain speed and put rudder on the opposite

to the spin. And on a Tiger Moth as soon as you did that, you got the speed, you came out and then you just came out in level flight. But on an Oxford, with two engines, somehow it was a vicious little aircraft. And I’m glad I never got into a spin, but I did have one occasion where you might call an incipient spin where one wing went up and fortunately for me

the instructor was in charge of the plane and he got it out of that before it could develop into a full spin. I hated those kind of vicious spins. On a heavy aircraft, like a Lancaster when it stalled it just went whoosh, you know it just sort of dropped a bit. I don’t know if you could spin a Lancaster, it was the lighter aircraft as far as I was concerned.

Yes, they were in the Royal Air Force, but also for light communication. I went on a holiday down to Devon from the Operational Training School, where I was an instructor. And got into the Oxford and I was dropped off down in Devon somewhere and so on. So it was a very handy little aircraft on a station to have one where you could do that kind of thing.

Bristol.

Well, I did go to Bristol a number of times, and somehow, I can’t remember how I had a connection with a family called the Bush family, and they were connected with Australia. I think they were involved in cattle or that kind of thing.

And they took me in and looked after me to a certain extent. In order to get there I had to cross over the suspension bridge in Bristol, which is one of the features of Bristol. Looking down into the valley of the river which is, that river forgotten its name, is one of the great tidal rivers and ships can go in on the high tide and then they have to get into a dock

and stay there until the next tide to enable them to get out. They have to wait for it to come in again, it just empties, it’s a really violent movement of water. The Bristol Channel. But apart from that I don’t remember much about Bristol.

Well I suppose I did. Flying around was a complete change, this was my initiation to flying in England, and the difference from Australia was quite significant. In terms of weather and as I said that cloud could come in and you had to get down quickly before it got blotted out and I always achieved that. And also the

multiplicity of roads and villages and towns and so on. Compared to Australia it was over populated and hard to identify. As you flew across you know they just kept coming up, you didn’t have time to identify that one because another one was on the way. But the big towns like Stevenage and things like that you could pick them out.

Well,

if I may diverge there, once we got onto larger aircraft like the Wellington and the Lanc and so on, they all had a thing called Gee. GEE. Which was a great navigation aid. It was based on intersecting radio beams, and the gee set meant that the navigator could just get these beams intersecting on the set, however it worked, and he knew precisely

where he was. It was so accurate that coming back to say our airfield, the navigator, he wouldn’t say to me “You’re over the airfield now,” he’d say, “You’re over the end of the runway now.” It was so precise, and therefore it was a great aid and you knew where you were absolutely. We used it too when we went on ops and it only had a limited range because the Germans jammed it and that

made it useless. What they used to do when we were on ops was they would arrange to change the frequency at a specific time. And the navigator would set up the machine for the new frequency, so that when it happened at that time he might get a reading before the Germans could jam it. But in that way it became really unreliable, really you couldn’t use it beyond a certain distance. But when you were coming home and you got back over

England, well then it came into that kind of use again, it was fantastic.

Well, we didn’t actually

become involved in that. We were just there participating in it. The British I understand developed radar, which was to detect oncoming aircraft. And the German developed it too. They had two basic radar systems, one was the Freya which was the big one the long range. And the other one was the Würzburg I think, which was allied to

guns and searchlights and that kind of thing. And that meant as soon as aircraft took off you could be aware something was going to happen over there, and the Germans could be aware of it as well. If you went below a certain altitude then you weren’t so easy to pick up, so on some occasions like bombing the Mohne and Eder Dams they flew low level over the North Sea, and they got close before they were detected.

But that was the general system as a defensive arrangement. But then on aircraft itself, we had two things allied with that. Because aircraft coming back at night can’t be identified visually but they are all picked up on the British radar system we had to have a means of identifying ourselves as not enemy aircraft. And they had a thing called

IFF. Which is Identification of Friend and [or] Foe. So we had our IFF switched so that when we got close to England they wouldn’t shoot at us or send a fighter on. Or if something didn’t have its IFF on, or didn’t have IFF well it was discerned as an enemy aircraft. Now one of the troubles with that later on was of course that the Germans picked up the frequency and therefore they could

make use of it for their own purposes. And also with the airborne radar for navigation purposes the H2S that obviously made a transmission, and it was a great navigational tool. We could identify cities, we could identify the target, even if there was tenens cloud, but the Germans picked that up as well. And as soon as British

aircraft took-off to go on a raid over southern Germany, that means they’d start over France, with all the H2S switched on, the Germans knew exactly where the stream of aircraft was. And it took the air force a long while to come to their senses and to say to the outgoing aircraft “You must not use your H2S, you got to go on dead reckoning.” And then of course they’d get well into Germany

before they could pick up the stream by those means. But the airborne radar H2S was a fantastic thing, it was so accurate by the end of the war. It picks up railway lines bridges, coast lines towns and so on.

Well, I think they were, but

it had to do with improvements rather than radical changes. And it was, on the squadron the navigators would meet as a group and do their thing in the briefing, and the bomb aimers and so on. So that they’re the ones that knew what any changes were and the pilot in a sense was oblivious to that. He just, they did their thing and applied it

and we did ours.

It was.

Well, I was absolutely grief stricken, and as I said earlier, I had the day off and just got on my bike and rode

away and did my grieving and got it over in that sense in a day. And went on from there. But it was really bad news.

No, I don’t think so. I think what I would have done of course was write back to Mum and Dad.

Well I think my younger brother Alf was still in the army at that time, and then he transferred later to the air force. And my brother Jack, well I think he would have been in Papua New Guinea at that time.

With them? No and they didn’t write to me either. I think we just relied on Mum as a channel of communication.

Well, I don’t think it was. My main concern would be to let her know that I was still alive, that I was still doing something that she could think about or pray about or that kind of thing. But you couldn’t say anything about really what you were doing. But it was just I suppose a family thing, you kept in

touch by writing, which was the only means that was available.

Yes we were.

I think by the time we were involved the idea of a rotating crew in Bomber Command just did not exist. There was a strong objection by some crew to picking up odd bods, if they lost a member to sickness or something they weren’t mad keen. They had to have somebody else, but they didn’t like swapping around, they liked to go as a crew.

But in terms of rotating I had no experience of it, I didn’t even know it happened.

Well we knew one another, we had to trust one another. It was I suppose you might call it “A fighting unit.” We had a unity because we did all the things together in the plane. So

we trusted one another, we didn’t know how the other one would perform. And there was one occasion when I had a wireless operator who was Irish with a terrible Irish accent and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Well, I suppose if he’d been in our crew on a regular basis I would have done something about that, so I did know what he was saying.

Waterbeach, yes.

Oh, while we were at Waterbeach and on the squadron we were at Oakington, which I think even closer to Cambridge. Well we used to Cambridge quite regularly. We used to go into the flicks, cinema whatever they called it. And I can’t remember any films that we saw, but we did it, it was the social thing. Maybe three or four of us from the crew. And

every now and again on a Sunday we might go to church on Sunday night too. But one thing I remember was going to Cambridge in the daytime on just a trip, and we got to the river Cam, and it was April and they decided they would go for a swim. And they would have thrown me in if I hadn’t gone in, so I dived in. But as soon as I hit

the water I was on the way out. Swimming in April in a river in England is a stupid thing to do. And we also did a bit of boating on the Cam. I can remember, I think it was near King’s College, there’s a bridge over the river there somewhere. I’ve got these vague recollections of being in Cambridge. We’ve been back to Cambridge a number of times you know since we’ve been married and going back to visit in England

and I know a lot more about it now than I did then.

No, not at all. No, we knew that this was where the university was of course. And I think at that time there would have been very few universities in England, but Oxford and Cambridge were the two notable ones.

Well, they were a really awesome aircraft. Could you get that blue book over there? That, not the blue book, that’s the one. I must show you this because it demonstrates what sort of an aircraft the Stirling was. You can see

that lady there who was a pilot flying that plane. And it’s awesome I mean, a Wellington that bit there would be somewhere about her shoulder level. And this was almost twenty feet down there, and a long way down, and the aircraft was very hard to control.

But we did it, I mean I think we had been well trained as pilots and we knew the basic things to do. But it had these Hercules engines with a great amount of torque which tended to put the aircraft to the right on take off, so you had to open up the starboard engines to keep it going straight. And then finally you got up enough speed for the rudder to work, because it was sticking up out of the top out of the slipstream, and then you opened up fully

and away you went. That was in great contrast to the Lancs which had their rudder in the slipstream and as soon as you open up the throttles you got rudder control and you didn’t have that problem to the same extent at all. But they were really big and they were designed to carry a lot of small bombs actually, like a lot of incendiaries, so they had a long bomb bay down there, but they didn’t carry the big bombs like the Lancaster could do.

But I think that gives you some idea of how formidable it appeared when you first got into it and looked down the side you know, and you had to get up and go.

No I don’t, no. I know that there were some occasions when they were very difficult to land, I remember one night coming in and landing and I held off too high and I must have dropped about six

feet onto the runway. And I was amazed that the wheels didn’t go up through the wings really, but it survived.

No, I don’t think so. I think I’ve said because they had electrical controls you would just turn the button and the flaps would go out, and then you turn the button the other way and the flaps would come in

slowly. Now when you’re flying that’s great, because say on the Lancaster or the Wellington you had a hydraulic control. And you’d push the lever down and the flaps would start to go down, and it was a rapider process and the attitude of the aircraft used to change and you had to trim, push the stick forward. But worse still taking the flaps in,

you had to take them in in jerks and let the flaps off bit by bit. Whereas as I said on the Stirling turn the button and it did it slowly and you adjust as you flew along with the Lanc. There was one occasion on the Lancaster where I must have pushed the flap control just slightly below the middle position where it should have been. And as we were going along the flaps built up pressure and the flaps just

suddenly went out like that. And I wondered what the heck had happened because the aircraft just stood up with the flaps out, and then I realised what had happened and pulled it back. But the Stirling had quite a lot of advantages in flying.

I

had done about fourteen ops on Stirlings when the squadron changed to Lancasters. All we did was I got in the plane with a chap who had already flown a Lanc and sat there while he took it off, and then I got in and took it off. So the transition was very simple. The Lancaster as I said with the rudder controls operating almost immediately was easier to take off. It landed

more easily, it floated well and then went down. In the air it flew higher, would go higher, it would go faster, it would carry more bombs and it would use less fuel. And it was a superior aircraft without a doubt, and I’ve said on a number of occasions I wouldn’t be sitting here or standing here if we hadn’t switched over to Lancasters.

And Stirlings were made obsolescent for bombing well before the end of the war. And also when we first went onto Stirlings they had hydraulic controls right through to the flaps and even the throttle controls, so that every now and then on a Stirling you had to pull the engine right off and sort of pump up the hydraulic system. Now when you’re on ops and you’re putting you’re engines right off, that’s highly undesirable.

Ultimately they changed it to cable control, so that you didn’t have to do that. But I did have an experience on a second pilot flight where the captain of the aircraft, the group captain didn’t pump up the hydraulic system and when we landed we had to feather an engine and the two engines were racing madly because the throttle controls wouldn’t work. Those older Stirlings really had difficulties.

They were taken off. They weren’t obsolete in the fullest sense of the word because then they became towers and so they were used to pull the gliders over Arnhem and that sort of thing. And they also used Stirlings for well sort of secret service work. They’d fly low level over France and

drop supplies and do that kind of thing.

Yeah, well it happened while we were there of course. We didn’t have anything to do with it, but I suppose it’s quite well known now from seeing the films and so on, the process they followed of low flying at night, and how they knew what height to fly over the water

and so on. But it must have been and it certainly was a highly dangerous operation flying close to the ground with reasonable heavy defences so that as you flew along straight and level, and straight and level is not a desirable way of flying a bomber generally over Germany. Then you were a siting target really, and a lot of them were shot down, but they did make a real difference.

There were yes, I think one of them was a chap called Shannon, but I’m not really familiar with that.

No.

Yes he was the AOC of the Pathfinder force, which was introduced to improve the efficiency of bombing in the Royal Air Force and

he had a great reputation. He was one who had flown a plane called the Mercury across the Atlantic Ocean, solo. And the plane, the Mercury was attached to the top of a large plane and the large plane took off with the smaller plane on top, so that it didn’t have to have the energy to get a heavily loaded aircraft off the ground, so it was in the air and then it took off and flew across.

And he had some reputation too in terms of navigation. So he was you might say an ideal choice for somebody to initiate a new strand. And he worked out the system of marking the target with target indicators, the reds, the greens and the yellows and so on. And that was the course that was set for Pathfinders that so improved the efficiency of bombing and so

improved the terror situation for German cities.

He was an Australian. And some years later I belong to the Pathfinder Association in Australia, in New South Wales, and his wife, who was a widow then came out to Australia, and we had a special service in St James in King Street where I was asked to dedicate

a plaque to the memory of Donald Bennett. And that plaque is now at the RAAF Richmond in the Pathfinder room. So I met his wife and we had, it was an international meeting of the Pathfinders, people came from other countries and we met I think in the Menzies Hotel and the church service was part of that and I gave the address as well.

Oh no, he was a member of the Royal Air Force, he was well and truly in England. I should think by the time the war began. But there were a number of Australians in that category.

The second pilot on those occasions was a passenger, in a learning situation, having nothing to do with how the plane was operated, but I remember too on the second one that I did the pilot said to me “You take it,” so I was doing the weaving as well and doing that process. And that was when we got over Hanover and were at great risk of being shot

down. But apart from that I was a passenger. And later on when I was reasonably experienced, I’ve checked on some documents I’ve got from England and I was surprised because I’d forgotten how many second pilots I took for their learning experience too. Very interesting.

No, there was only one pilot and normally the bomb aimer or the engineer would sit up beside the pilot. Once at take off the flight engineer would sit next to the pilot and the pilot would operate the throttles, and when they were fully up the engineer would take over and hold the throttles up and turn the knob that kept them from sliding back.

He would operate the pitch controls when you changed the pitch and so on. So he was there and I would operate the brakes to stop the wheels rotating and he would lift the lever to bring the wheels up into the fuselage. And we’d go through the same kind of drill when we came into land. But then sometimes he’d be down in the back looking at the gauges and engine control and the bomb aimer would come up from the front and sit

beside me, but when we got close to the target obviously the bomb aimer would get down in the nose of the aircraft.

Oh, it was definitely a learning experience. I mean the first I thing I learned about was the existence of H2S, which was the navigation aid, which was completely secret up until that time. And then just

to see how it felt you know flying over Germany in the dark and seeing search lights. So that when you went as captain you weren’t seeing it for the first time, you’d seen it, and you could see how it was going across a target with the searchlights and the flack and stuff, and realise what you were in for. I’d say it was one of the most rapid learning experiences

I’ve ever had in my life to see you know just what it was going to be like. But also the idea of the weaving, you know going like this for a long time, so that you were always a moving target. And also what to do when you were being combed in search lights, that kind of thing. So it was a great learning experience.

The Boozer, it was on the dashboard there, so it was apparent when it came on but it had red lights and white lights. And the red lights, one was a pale red and the other was a bright red. And the red lights were about ground radar, the Freya beams or the Würzburg beams.

As they approached the aircraft then the light pink came on and you knew that you were likely to be picked up. But if the red light came on then you knew that that radar beam was on you and therefore it was there for a purpose which might be that a search light was going to come up or that they were going to shoot at you, so you could take some evasive action and get out of the beam. Which probably meant

losing height and gaining speed and changing course. So that was great. And I never really got caught, even though I knew I had been in a radar beam. Now the white light was for airborne radar on German night fighters, and that was the greatest blessing of the lot. Because the

German night fighters would come up behind, you couldn’t see them, even though the weaving process meant that it was also possible to look under the plane. If you just flew straight and level then you couldn’t see down there but if you tipped over then you could see underneath, so this was happening all the time. But they came from behind, directed by their ground control, and then they would switch on their airborne radar

and close in on the bomber. And get underneath them and then shoot, and close to the end of the war they had their guns pointing upwards, they didn’t have them pointing forwards so they just had to get underneath and fire up at the bomber above. And they were tremendously successful, but when you had Boozer, when they made that step of switching on their airborne radar you knew there was a fighter there, and the tendency

was of course, when you knew there was a fighter there, your evasive action became more vigorous, you know you realised you better do something about this. And so I would, on one occasion I remember going to Peenemunde, the white light kept coming on and finally I just turned abruptly to port and went out that way and he missed me, he lost me. And I

sometimes think, well I suppose I threw him onto someone else, I hope that person survived. But a simple manoeuvre sometimes at night was all that was needed. But sometimes if the fighters got close there was violent action, but I’m thankful I never had to go through that. I’ve seen a German night fighter just there, you know disappearing into the blight and I just turned and followed in for a while you know, in case he

turned around and tried to follow us. But, when we were over Munich in southern Germany I’ve seen night fighters in the air, and just ploughed on our way and nothing happened. But close to the target with all the light you could see other aircraft very well.

The worst one was the JU88, which was a twin engine

aircraft. It had you know good speed, and it therefore carried a crew of two very successfully you know, the pilot and the operator. The gun operator. JU88. I think they might have used single engine aircraft from time to time, or even regularly but it was the JU88, which would be more likely to be operating over towards

England. You know when you’re crossing the North Sea that kind of thing. Long range compared with single engine fighters.

Oh there is no doubt about the efficiency of the German air force. Not the slightest, yes. Not that I ever met any but they were well trained and they were enthusiastic or determined I suppose is the word.

But I guess there would have been amongst them those that were scared in the job they had and mightn’t have been so aggressive.

None at all. No. I think we just recognised

that the pilot was with the plane and it was the total situation, which was the risk to us, which we had to get out of.

Not at all, not at night, you didn’t. The British did develop a system of, I think it was called Serrate, which was a bomber flying but not on operations and it had a lot of radio

in it which tried to bamboozle the German defences by saying to their fighter pilots you know “The mist is closing in you must come down,” and giving them wrong directions and that kind of thing. But they also had a British night fighters, Mosquitoes probably, flying in the stream as well in the hope of shooting down German fighters. But they ran a terrible

risk because if you saw a mosquito there and you started to fire at it you just wouldn’t know what you were shooting at. You would assume anything, so I don’t know how they got on.

I don’t know much about that, most aircraft were parked at dispersal points, and it was only when they were serviced and so on that they went in to the hangers.

Or for repairs, that kind of thing. So our relationship with the planes only meant getting onto a coach and being driven out to the plane and getting off, and this was even when we went on an air test in the day time before an op at night. And so the ground staff were out there with the plane, and you’d get off and get in. And then when you landed, flying control would know you landed and the coach

would come out and take you back. But I don’t know that I ever got into a hanger even.

Two that was in the early stages the Stirlings and later on the Lancs, and the other was the Mosquitoes. The Mosquito flight for the weather. They were a remarkable aircraft, and they were so

fast that without any armament they would fly out over Germany to check out the weather and they could outfly the German aircraft by putting their nose down and going flat out. With their two Merlin engines. And I don’t think that any were ever lost while I was there from that purpose, but I did mention that one of them illegally low flying hit a tree and that was the end of them.

Well I don’t know originally that they were, but originally there were an all-purpose aircraft. I mean sometimes they were certainly used as night fighters, they were used as bombers, and they were used for special purposes like weather and so on. But towards the end of the war, in the later stages, the Mosquitoes used to go out every night to Berlin

and they could carry a four thousand pound bomb. So they would go out at a height, which was difficult to intercept, and out of the range of guns and in bad weather, and night after night they could get the sirens going in Berlin and drop their bombs. So they were a tremendous sort of terrorist set up really and they were very successful in low

level bombing. They were also used by master bombers on raids flying around and directing the heavy bombers in the way that they should drop their bombs. So they were a very versatile aircraft.

I don’t think they would have dropped incendiaries, but you’ve just reminded me too that they were used for the Oboe Pathfinder task.

Which meant that they flew on radio beams out over say the Ruhr, close targets, and they could drop their markers with an accuracy of say a hundred yards, with that particular system. But that was what the Mosquitoes did too, so they made a tremendous contribution in that regard.

No, the Pathfinders were in Bomber Command. Bomber Command was divided up into divisions so, or groups, so there was 1 Group, a 3 Group which was Stirlings originally and then became Lancs, there was certainly 5 Group. And then we were in 8 Group, which was the Pathfinder group, but it was all Bomber

Command. So there was the general oversight of say Bomber Harris as the AOC, Commanding Bomber Command, and they had their Headquarters fairly close to London. And that’s the way it operated so there was, the orders for Bomber Command would come out from a central thing. And the Pathfinders were just part of the total operation.

No. In the early stages it was a Bomber Command squadron, it got the Stirlings first of all Bomber Command. But then when the this bombing had been going on for some time when they introduced the Pathfinder system, and 7 squadron was chosen to be one of the original Pathfinder squadrons, so from then on its

activities changed to include path finding. And once it had that role it didn’t operate as an ordinary bombing squadron. So much so that in the course of the summer months when the Mosquitoes could mark the targets on the short range targets, we stayed on the ground. I think in June, because I was still in a learning situation, but in mid-summer I might have down two operations in

a month. And sometimes different from where main force went. We went a couple of times just on our own, oh one was Brunswick, Brunched, just for the experience of using the airborne radar and so on. We did that by ourselves. So we never operated once we became Pathfinders as an ordinary bombing squadron.

No, the Mosquito was used on short-range targets because of the limitations of the so-called Oboe system, the radio system could only go a certain distance. But they could go to Berlin no trouble at all when they were operating

as bombers rather than as Pathfinder aircraft. So it was the system that limited them, not the aircraft itself.

They were designed as a bomb. It was a flare. And I could mention that the bombs and the flares were put on the aircraft in a safe way, that if they were dropped as they were they would not

explode. So that meant that there was a vein, rotating vein on the nose of each of these things, and there was something which down like a wire or something, which stopped the vein rotating once the bomb doors were opened, but then when the bomb dropped away that pulled out the stopper, and the vein rotated and the bomb aimed itself and the flare aimed itself on the way down.

Yes, I had my aircraft. ‘C’ Charlie and it was one of the aircraft that had the Boozer in it. So when I went on leave and I knew that somebody else was going to fly it I used to hope and pray that Sea Charlie was still there when I got back because the Boozer was such a great asset. So that was the plane I had.

Well certainly a sense of ownership in that it was allocated to me. I don’t know about pride, but I suppose it was allied to the idea of pride, yes. But certainly ownership, that was my plane, and while somebody else could use it as far as I was concerned, I did it with reluctance.

Well, the Bomber Command losses were extremely high always, but in 1943 when I was operating first, the losses were very bad indeed to the point where some main

force crews were finishing their ops at say twenty-two, twenty-four rather than at thirty. So that there would be a supply of experienced crews going back to the Operational Training System. Overall, I’ve got the statistics somewhere but, as far as the Australians are concerned in Bomber Command, I think it’s two or three per cent

of all the enlistments in the Australian Defence Forces they provided about twenty per cent of the losses. So it was, I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to the War Memorial at Canberra, but you go to the far end from the entrance and on the right hand side there are all these people who lost their lives in Bomber Command. And it’s

quite amazing really how many were lost. Now the worst night in Bomber Command they lost ninety-six heavy aircraft with seven men in each, but it was quite regular to lose two or three, or for Bomber Command to lose forty fifty, sixty aircraft in a night. So of the two hundred and fifty men who went across on the Rimutaka from Australia, we gathered that only about fifty

managed to get back to Australia. So at a certain phase there is not the slightest doubt that of every four men who went in as aircrew in Bomber Command only one came out alive. So it was a deadly situation.

My awareness was quite acute. I was always, whenever I knew I was on ops I felt

uneasy. And it’s interesting, you get into the plane and as soon as you got going you lost your fear, you just kept on doing what it was. And even when I got to the target and I could see the guns, the smoke and the searchlights and you knew the fighters were around, I was still afraid in a certain sense but it didn’t stop me doing what I had to do.

But you lived in fear, no doubt about it, and that’s why some people were extreme in their drinking and so on. And if an operation was put on and it was cancelled, there was release behaviour, people realised they were going to live another night at least.

From our squadron? We would usually send out about twenty. Most squadrons would operate up to twenty aircraft,

but,

Well no, well at nighttime you didn’t rendezvous, you were all on your own. You couldn’t formate or form into a group, but for Bomber Command as a whole it was quite regular to say four hundred or five hundred aircraft to go out in one night. And you know, so they had to get over

the target in about just under half an hour, they’d all do it. It must have been hell for the German all right.

No, we were all Pathfinder. It was a Pathfinder squadron. See if there was a raid lasting half an hour there would be primary markers who would go in and drop the red TI, and then every two minutes there was aircraft allocated

to keep backing up, dropping markers so that the target was always marked throughout the duration of the raid. And there were other Pathfinder squadrons as well, so there was a scope of doing more than one target at a time too.

Timed on. The raid was timed to start at zero, you know a certain time,

and the primary markers would get there just before 0, it might be 0 –3 to get it going. And then when we were backing up we might be there at 0 + 12, and that meant that we had to be there at twelve minutes into the raid to drop our markers, and that’s the way it went. I’ve always though it was a great achievement to say go over five hundred miles in the dark, over Germany with the equipment that we had, and bomb on time, which we generally

did. But that’s the way it was.

Oh, they were all around us but you couldn’t see them. Sometimes you could see them when they were shot down, you know you’d see a battle going on and you’d see the tracer and you’d know there was somebody over there being attacked by a night fighter and so on. And you’d sometimes see aircraft caught in the

searchlights as well.

Well it did happen, but the other hazard was, say there were aircraft going over the target at twenty-two or twenty-five thousand feet and somebody like me going through at eighteen thousand feet, this happened, I wouldn’t say regularly but reasonable frequently, that the bombs falling down

would hit the aircraft underneath and the bomb would go through a wing or something like that.

Well you’d instruct the crew to bail out and do the best themselves. The rear gunner, all he did was rotate his turret, open the doors and then fall out backwards. So he was on the spot to get out. The mid upper gunner had to

get out and find his way to a door or an escape hatch. And he had a long journey, and also the people inside, right inside like the wireless operator and the navigator and the flight engineer, they had to get out of here and down the front hatch and that was quite a journey for them. The bomb aimer would normally be down there and he’d open the escape hatch and he’d fall out straight away. So he had a privileged position. And the pilot of course was

there to hold the aircraft until they could get out, so he was the last one out.

Well that was a basic responsibility to make it possible for the crew to get out before he took off.

No, never. It’s amazing,

some people got into a lot of trouble and some people didn’t. Well I mean we had flak through the aircraft and that kind of thing, and we had that minor collision over Potsdam and no doubt we’d been at great risk but we always got back safe and sound.

Well they were on the staff of the squadron as intelligence officers, and they used to brief us, somebody from the intelligence people would brief us at the briefing. To go out on raid and tell us what they knew about the defences and this and that and things to look out for

as far as the target was concerned and the route. And then when you got back you always had to go to an intelligence officer for debriefing and he’d ask questions about what you saw and how you got on and so on. And members of the crew would make their contributions to what they saw and what had happened. And presumably what they did with it was they collated it all

at the end and made some report.

Oh well, they were part of the system, I’ve never queried their existence. I suppose it’s a normal expectation that having done all that that somebody would take a bit of notice of what you’d done. But I think I’ve said before that with the photograph, which you had to take, it was evidence of the fact that you’d been there

and it was also evidence of how well you’d done according to what turned up on the photo.

I think we might have had our photo put up once or twice as an aiming point photo. But sometimes, I always believe in the principle that accidents can happen. It’s true in sport and all kinds of things, and I think it’s true in this.

Not to my knowledge. But I don’t know what the weather people did, they might have taken photographs at times. And I’m sure there was a lot of reconnaissance that went out to identify targets, yes. Especially at the time of the invasion

along the French coast and so on. That would have been checked out time and time again. The German defences.

Not at all, no. I think they’d be mainly Mosquito aircraft.

Well, we always had a meal when we got back, we had a drink. Then we had the

debriefing, then we went to bed. It was as simple as that, and I never missed any sleep. I guess we were pretty tired you know. Sometimes, like a trip to Berlin would take eight and a half hours, and you’re just sitting there on the seat all the time. Some people used to have trouble having a pee, but I never did. I know one chap who did, but you could carry

a bottle you know one of those things, and that was the way it happened. I don’t know how the rest of the crew got on, but we had a Nelson down the back if they wanted to use it. But apart from that you sat and you sat and you sat.

Later on really,

you might be aware of it at the time, but we came in over a period of time and you immediately be debriefed and be on your way. But the big question was you know the next day “Was anybody missing?,” and then the next step was to listen to the radio to see how many aircraft overall had been lost. So many aircraft are missing.

No, I never participated in anything like that but if a crew was missing then there were members of the station staff who had the job of packing up their belongings and so on, yeah. And I think it would have been the squadron commander who would communicate with the family.

No, it was always if you closed your ears and your eyes you could be oblivious to what had happened.

Well, I think accuracy was always a basic issue. I've never felt any sense of wonder or questioning whether I dropped my TIs in the right place or not. We just assumed that we’d gone over the target and we certainly did, and we must have hit something. No, I never felt

any troubles about that.

Well, they were suppose to be good navigators, and but the thing was done on a crew

basis, because the navigator’s no good unless he’s got a comparable crew. So it was a unit but in my case the first navigator I had was deemed to be unsatisfactory, so he was sent somewhere else and I got a new navigator. As a matter of fact the next navigator I got, he finished his time on the squadron and then I got another navigator after that. And then when I went back the second time I got another navigator

so, but that’s the way it went.

Oh some people might have had it, but I think I was surprised I went there but apart from that, if I met up with some folk at the club, the Boomerang Club down in London I don’t think I’d say, “I’m a

Pathfinder and you’re not.” No way.

Well, that’s a real hypothetical question, isn’t it? I suppose if we’d been selected to drop an atom bomb we would have just done it. But we would have known we would be specially briefed, we’d be aware of what we had to do and the responsibility and so on. I guess the Americans who did it felt the same. They had to do it,

and they might have regarded themselves as privileged in some way. What they thought about it after they knew how many people they’d wiped out, I don’t know.

Well in my experience I never dropped anything more than a four thousand pound bomb. The

special one, the dam busters, they were the people who dropped the twelve thousand pound bombs. And they had specific targets like submarine bases or viaducts or the entrance to tunnels, and in a way they didn’t think they were out there to blast thousands of people to death. So I think they would have been just quite happy to get on and did what they had to do. With the twenty thousand pounder

I think it was a one off but that’s not guaranteed. But I did here that the plane that took it, a Lancaster was so stripped of everything else to keep the weight down and when it managed to get off the ground it took a long time to, you know it took a very flat climbing path because it was really struggling to get into the air. So I think they might have felt they’d rather not have been selected

to take it.

Especially, the responsibility of making sure you dropped in the right place, just imaging dropping it in the wrong place.

I think one thing about fear, it has a very detrimental affect on you. I learnt too that even though you are afraid you can overcome it. And that’s why I defined courage as being afraid but still doing what you were supposed to do. It’s not the only factor in courage of

course but it is a major factor. Overcoming fear in order to do what you are required to do. And it can apply in all kinds of situations. But sometimes I can still be afraid of something you are not sure of, and it can ruin your sleep, it’s great to be at peace.

No, I’ve never exposed it to anybody, so I don’t propose to do it now.

You’re asking the wrong question.

No, I think there were times throughout my time over there where I was so thankful I was still alive, you know I’d got through that and I was in a new phase, which had a positive aspect to it. So I was quite intrigued to be an instructor, and I really welcomed the opportunities to do further training as an instructor. So I did three things,

two group courses, which were fairly short like a week each. And a full time course down at Lulsgate Bottom where I became really a qualified instructor.

Well, first of all to be able to fly successfully, adjust your speeds and engine controls and that kind of thing. But it’s the patter

to describe what you’re doing and to be able to communicate what’s happening to a trainee pilot. So the patter is part of the process too.

Well, good take-off and especially good landings and flying

to speeds and on course and that kind of thing.

Yes, you could ask the same question about driving a car I suppose, what’s a good driver and a bad driver? But it’s a matter of achievement, how you go and

what you’re able to do. But you need to know how the aircraft operates, how the controls operate. What you can do, what you can’t do. That kind of thing.

Yes certainly. And that would be based on performance actually. How they went take off and landing. I remember one night I was with a crew, and it was night flying. And this pilot let the speed of the aircraft get back to about ninety miles an hour. It was miles an hour then. And that’s almost fatal. And I yelled out to him you know “Do you want to kill

us all?” And we landed ok because he got the speed up again and I just got out and left him to it. So he’d had the responsibility of knowing he’d had to do it. So you can be aware of pilots keeping the correct speed and doing the right things and so on, yeah.

Well I don’t think so, in the Australian air force there were people who had been

farmers and teachers and all kinds of people, all sorts of conditions of men, and they became very good pilots. So it’s a matter of, so often in so many things of being sensible about things, you know using your brain and not being stupid and not being reckless. And I’ve seen some reckless pilots too that I didn’t want to fly with. Like low level flying and doing steep turns

near the ground, it’s absolutely stupid.

A good leader? Well I’ve done a lot of thinking about leadership, and a good leader I have questions about that in a way, it’s sometimes

a matter of a kind of charisma where you can encourage people to do certain things. But so often effective leadership is a matter of consultation with those who you are leading so that you don’t just stand there and tell them what to do, but you consider what is going to happen. Especially in terms of change. The basic principle of change if you are a good leader is to consult with the people who are going to be affected by the change, before you actually decide what to do. And I

think in terms of a crew that principle applies too. You don’t just say, “This is what we’re going to do full stop,” you talk about it.

I don’t think that I can remember doing it that way. I think I was, I’ve never been a kind of a bossy

person. There were occasions say at Lichfield when we got snow on the runway and we had to clear the snow off, and I didn’t say to my blokes “You go out there and do it,” I went out there and did it with them. And I’ve always adopted that kind of stance.

I don’t think that way, I think I just did things and I did it a way which related to our relationships, one or the other.

No, I can’t recall that. I can remember sometimes when I didn’t operate absolutely properly, well properly is not the right word but successfully as a pilot. Like you know a bad landing or something like that. But I don’t remember anything of that kind.

Oh no, I think I’ve still got the handouts. There was a considerable amount of information to be taken in about engines, speeds, various aspects of the aircraft. And when you change to a Lancaster you got a book about this thick with all the technical details. Obviously you didn’t have to know the lot,

because it covered all trades and so on, but you really had to know what you were doing, and you had to know how the controls operated like finding out about that flap control and how inefficient it was and so on. But you had to know about the aircraft. And one of the other things you had to know about was called airmanship, which was you know. You can drive a car, but then

you drive a car in certain conditions and it’s that aspect of flying a plane, being careful in the air and landing and operating it wherever it is. And what you do before you get in and what you do when you get out and so on.

No, I think it was person to person,

I mean I was instructing a pilot. So he sat there and I sat here and then he sat there and I sat there. So he had to be able to fly the plane from the right hand side as well as the left. But you’d watch what he did and you’d just speak to him, or make suggestions or encourage him, or say, “That was good” or something. But he had to demonstrate that he knew what he had to do

with the plane in order to fly successfully, and that was your job, to make that possible.

Oh no. All the time say at an operational training unit where this mostly went on they had to attend classes in navigation airmanship and so on. So it wasn’t left entirely to the instructor.

No, I didn’t do any classroom teaching, no. I think that would have been a good idea actually if they had done it to get experienced pilots talking to them and answering questions and so on. On a group basis but it never happened.

Yeah, and making sure the plane was safe, you know.

That it was being flown safely because sometimes when they started off they’d be a bit rough.

Lichfield was an Australian operational training unit. And I think probably the great bulk of Australians going into Bomber Command went through Lichfield, they would go from there to the Australian squadrons or somewhere else. But most,

I still, in my log book I’ve got pages from somebody else’s log book that has been photocopied where I’ve got the names of other Australians that I still meet around about. And there’s one of my fans, a chap called PO Williams, he still belongs to our association and he says “I’m the best

flight commander he ever had.” You know, it was a great situation. We used to have a bit of fun in the flight office, we used to have these little stoves, and coal was the fuel. And they’d drop the chimney, had a hole in them and they’d keep dropping the coal through the hole so that it built up beyond the stove and the whole thing would get red hot. And we did certain things like that.

And there was some clowns who would drop a bearing pistol cartridge down, and the darn thing would go off too, so we had fun.

No, not at all. I think totally, overall we were left to our own devices.

No. I sometimes now wonder in my head about people coming back from action overseas and they’re counselled and that sort of thing, it was completely missing from our experience.

No.

I can’t remember doing that kind of thing, it would have been helpful at times. But in many cases once you did say a period of an hour with some

pilot, you got out and you went somewhere and he finished going off solo. Or sometimes he’d get out any, somebody else would get in, so they would go over there somewhere and we’d go down to our place, we never had that opportunity of interacting. So it was probably a lack in the system I would think.

That’s right.

Because I wanted to get married and I didn’t want to go hiving off into strange lands and so on. I thought, “I’d get it over,” so in a sense I could get on with it.

Oh no. At that stage it looked

as if the war was you know, in the process of finishing but there was no time limit that was apparent. So I was going back. And I also didn’t realise that there was so many aircrew around that it was hard to get an operation to do. I mean the anticipation would have been that I would be doing you know two or three operations a week, and you’d get a heck of a lot in, but it didn’t happen.

How strange it was after the night flying, I felt dreadfully exposed. Then once you got into it and saw that it was possible, well then I think I just relaxed into it. But it was vastly different to flying by yourself at night in the

dark. Here you were along with other aircraft, a whole stream of aircraft, and in the daytime you could see what was happening. You felt, well at least I felt exposed to the possibility of fighters much more than otherwise. I was probably wrong because they were pretty bad at night anyhow.

The Mustangs were a major force yes, in

escorting. With their long-range tanks and so on.

I’ve got a couple of videos there of the RAF at war showing all the bombing that was going on with twin engine aircraft. Like Bostons and that kind of aircraft in the daytime over France. And that was absolutely

colossal and quite separate from Bomber Command. I think it, I forget what command it would have been, but it wasn’t Bomber Command, I don’t think. But that was another factor going on, but generally it would be a shorter range than Bomber Command was doing.

Yes back on Lancs.

Oh the day operations on Lancasters occurred in 1944 in association with the invasion. And they certainly made a major difference with transport and attacking German forces you know in woods and that sort of thing. But then Bomber Harris reverted to bombing cities and so on and that’s

the way it was in the closing stages of the war.

No and I don’t think I ever had any conversations about it. But all the time I would have felt that it could happen, I mean that’s what fear’s about. You’re

afraid that it could happen. There was no guarantee you were going to come back. You knew you were at risk.

Well I think the news generally, the invasion was succeeding. There were some obstacles like Arnham Land and so on. But generally

the Allied forces were moving closer and closer to Germany or into Germany. And the Russians were on the move. It was apparent that the Germans were heading for defeat, it was a question of time. You didn’t have to be an expert.

I can’t remember much about VE Day. I think

on the squadron, I think I said before that because things were slowing down all the time, we’d been over Holland in daylight dropping food before the war ended. In a way we were just standing around and waiting for it to happen. So I can’t remember any violent reactions. The one thing I can remember at that stage was they brought in a professor from somewhere to talk to us as a group of officers about

getting back into civilian life. That’s a pretty good indication, isn’t it? That the war’s getting close to an end.

Well I knew that I wanted to get back to Sydney and go back to Sydney Uni and get back in my job here. And I timed my departure because I was able to do it, in order to do that.

I, that professor by the way was, I think from Lancashire or Yorkshire and he spoke with the appropriate Lancashire or Yorkshire accent. And I thought to myself, out of my ignorance and listening to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] people on the radio who spoke with a pukka BBC accent, you know, “You don’t have to speak that way to be a highly educated person.” It was a real on

the spot learning experience. I thought, “In a way I was a bit snobbish actually.” It’s very hard, it’s very easy to judge people on the basis of how they speak, but it doesn’t always indicate who they are or what they are. But that’s just something that came out of that, that bloke.

I think as I recall it, a sense of doom. This was a terrible thing that had happened. It’s just ghastly, it’s terrible, that’s the way I view it, and I still view it that way.

Oh no, I don’t think so, I wasn’t reflecting

on the method, I was thinking on the outcome. But then I also and I still think that say on Hamburg I was on a raid where forty thousand people got killed in one night, and there’s not a great deal of difference really. Certainly the principle.

Oh yeah.

Certainly not in the same way I reacted to my wife’s voice when I was instructing. I think the main feeling is you know

we’re back, we’re in contact with base, and it was always. The radiotelephone operators were always women, so it was getting back into an accustomed situation, but not an emotional thing in terms of the voice or the person but it was the total situation where I suppose I was relieved and glad to be back where I was in the circuit area.

Oh absolutely, yes. It was a great system. I was saying to somebody else today, I’ve forgotten who it was, just how keen women were to be efficient. And it was great to be delivered out to the aircraft by a woman driver. Or picked up by a woman, they were nice people.

I think so, yes. She was aware that there were women who were might, you might call slackers or something. In it without any great altruistic purpose. But she had some great friends in the air force. She was one of the early birds, she enlisted

in 1940 when they weren’t really organised, and she had to have bars, tin bars on the floor and all kinds of crudities, which shocked their sensibilities and so on. But she finished up as a very trusted person.

Well I can’t speak for her but I’m sure that was so, I mean women started to do things like be mechanics and all kinds of things that they never really got into beforehand. And I think they made a marvellous contribution. And

their marching and their enthusiasm for some things was absolutely fantastic. I mean we used to march, well I think but the women were so almost [UNCLEAR] about being perfect and so on.

No, I don’t. I remember that there were men who took advantage of willing women in the air force.

You know on a sexual basis that was something that happened.

Oh yeah, sexual activity yes, there was some of that that went on.

No, I don’t think so just exploiting the opportunity. Some people were willing both ways, both sides. Which I think was a pity but,

No, not at all.

Oh, our relationship was important to keep circumspect, yes. That’s why when we left to go to her home in Birmingham, we’d leave separately and we’d come back separately

and yet as I said, and she was aware lots of people knew what was going on, but nothing was ever said about it.

I don’t think so. I think it just sort of happened. There were people, lonely people in certain senses away from home and at the right age to become committed to a particular person and that’s just what happened.

It was yes. I think for some people they might have thought, “Yes, if I don’t get involved now,” excuse me I have to stop again.

Well, I think it was entirely likely to happen. You know you get people thrown together, living in a risk situation. A desire for some relationship and so on was inevitable I think. And it wasn’t exactly that for me, I didn’t look out for somebody to get

involved with, it just happened.

Oh yes, I got on very well. They had, her sister had married an Australian pilot and he had been lost on operations in North Africa, so they’d had a fair bit. And because they’d had that marriage they had had other Australians who had gone out to their home. So

they were willing to welcome Australians.

Oh absolutely, yes. I mean just saying “Goodbye” to the family. There were instances of young women getting to the side of the ship and not getting on because they couldn’t face up to leaving their family.

And that might have been where they were fiancés rather than married women. But it certainly happened. And that separation has always got to produce a trauma. So it was a great thing, say for my wife to do, to abandon her family and to go thousands of miles away and just to do that, to live there.

Before their wives, yes.

Well I don’t know that I knew any others particularly at that time in that situation. But I really missed my wife, yes. But I was going to lectures at night at the university and working in the daytime.

Living with my family. I got through it, but I was still really glad when she arrived, put it that way.

No, no I didn’t. I mean we wrote to one another as well.

They had an overseas war bride organisation. She used to go into town and meet with others and she had quite a good friendship with a couple of those ladies. And it still exists, and that’s how that book, you know The Voice Over the Radio came into existence. They gathered together again a couple of years ago and they were invited to write their own story, and their own story got written and they put it together in a book

and so on. But they haven’t met for some time. But there’s still that about it. And it was very good organisation after the war.

I think I was almost as remiss as my father was at that stage. But at that stage of course we didn’t have any children, so it wasn’t a question of telling the kids. But since then I have produced some material and we have given our three children, they’re all over fifty now, photos of us at the time. You know I’m in uniform and so on. And I produced a cassette

tape with one of my talks on it about my experiences, and they’ve got that. Whether they’ve used that with their children I haven’t asked. I’m not game to ask in case they haven’t, but I hope they have.

No, not at all. I think I may have mentioned that I have talked in quite a number of Probus Clubs for

example and in other situations about my experiences in the war. And the theme that I have developed is from cockpit to pulpit. In other words it just brings all that out as the major theme and then just some of the consequences for me afterwards.

Oh I think what I leave out is a fairly simple aspect of it, because I made the commitment for whatever, but it was a serious situation. No, I wouldn’t find any difficulty in discussing anything else.

I think I felt I was back in a fairly normal situation. The family had moved from Camden to Woollahra to a fairly small house and that had its difficulties. But I think I just settled in. The main change came

when Vic arrived from England in August of that year. And we moved over to Manly and stayed in a hotel for a while and then we boarded in a room in manly, and then we got a little flat in Haberfield and then we bought a house in Enfield. But that was when the main changes started to come in. Otherwise I was living at home, I was going to the uni, I was doing

my work and waiting for her to arrive. While it was in a sense unusual there was a sense of normality about it.

No, I’ve been back to England a number of time because she’s still got a sister there, but I feel quite at home in England when I got there. I wander down the village and I know people there and we’ve been all over the place.

We’ve been to Wales and Ireland and Scotland, and we’ve been to Northampton and Northumberland and Devon and so on. But I’ve never felt I’d like to live here. But I have felt if I did have to live here I could do it all right. Quite happily, but I always make the reservation that the best time to get out of England is November, if you stay any longer than that you’re going to get into trouble is all, too cold.

Well I think it’s hard to assess yourself just like that as to how I have changed. But there is no doubt about it that I had changed. I mean I had gone from being an AC2 to a senior officer and I’d had quite a lot of

responsibility and I’d done lots of things, which obviously impinged on my character. But to say that I worked out how it all happened is beyond me, it just happened.

Well, I would think about exercising responsibility, to be

a reliable person. To be thankful for things that happen which benefit you and so on. But I suppose too a general feeling that I can do it. In my work in schools I have put forward the theme of saying “I can and I will.” You know and the two

go together as a basis for achievement.

I suppose the best of times was over in England and going on leave and meeting friendly people who cared for me. And going to Devon and up to Scotland and Shropshire and flying too in great aircraft. Not on ops but just the opportunity to fly. I don’t know whether you’ve wanted to be a pilot or anything, but it’s a great

ability and I sometimes wonder if I could do it now if I had the opportunity. But I remember one of our Governor-Generals used to fly when he was over seventy. But flying is a fantastic experience as far as I’m concerned, just to get up there and to do steep turns you know and no slide or slip, very good. Doing a good landing.

I remember I did one landing at night the best landing I did in my whole flying career, I was instructing at an OTU and none of us knew whether I was on the runway or not, it was such a beautiful landing. And I said, “Are we down?,” I couldn’t figure out whether we’d actually put the wheels on the runway or not. And that’s a source of pleasure.

The worst landing I think was

in strong wind in a Stirling where as soon as the wheels hit the ground the plane bounced up in the air, and I had to go around again and have another go. And finally I just sort of hurled it down and let it do what it wanted to do. And I thought the people in flying control would be saying “Gee, he doesn’t know much about landing a plane,” but that was bad luck. So it was a bad landing.

Well it had to be during the operational times. Because there was always that sense of fear and anticipation of disaster and so on.

Well there wasn’t to me, when I got back

about half a year after the war had ended I think people in Australia had got over any sort of enthusiastic reaction to returning servicemen. When we got back nobody said, greeted us at Melbourne, and there were hundreds of us on the ship, nobody. You know John Howard now goes and shakes hands with people and so on. Nothing like that. When we arrived in Sydney it was only the family who were waiting to see us. So there wasn’t any

waving of flags or any reaction of that kind.

No, I don’t think so. I don’t think we expected it. In light of the kinds of things they do now, you know oh gosh. Counselling, they’ve been a way for a short while and they get counselled when they come back. Nothing like that was offered. But we did get CRTS. The Commonwealth

Reconstruction Training Scheme. I didn’t really need it because I had a free course at Sydney University, but it bought my books and things like that. And a lot of ex-serviceman really benefited from that. Some of the chaps I knew wanted to be doctors when they got back, so they got a free course in medicine and things like that. So that was a great welcome really to get into that kind of thing.

I don’t think I thought along those lines. I never said, “Thank you” to the government.

Well, I think I’ve always been well treated and I believe now as a pensioner, a Department of Veterans’ Affairs pensioner, we are treated extremely well. I’ve got a gold card because I served overseas and I say

and I believe that after my wife my gold card is my greatest asset. I go to the doctors, I go to the dentist, I go to hospital, I go to the chemist and you know it’s a marvellous thing. And with the State Government, we get free registration of the car and we get wonderful travel, we’re going up to Lismore shortly, a free trip first class, there and back twice a year.

By the government, I think ex-servicemen are treated extremely well.

Oh with Bomber Harris really as the target. Which is our common phenomenon now, you look for one person to load it onto. But that’s a fairly recent thing I think. It came out when they put up a statue

for Harris, you know somewhere in London. And then it was, that became the object of attack. And obviously there are reasons for people thinking that way, because that’s the really bad part about a war, that people get killed. But when you are in the circumstances at the time, you don’t think that way, there are other reasons for thinking the way you do.

Well, I think I felt that I did not agree with those people. And I’ve heard since as far as Harris was concerned that the targets like Dresden wasn’t chosen by him, he was given a range of targets which he could attack and then he had to select from that. But the ultimate responsibility was the

government and not Harris.

Well, when we were in England last we saw a film that the BBC had produced about Bomber Command and I thought it was pathetic actually. You know I’m biased but they chose a rear gunner and a bomb aimer to be the main spokesman as to what the,

what Bomber Command was on about. And I think, and I’m convinced that it should have included a pilot, because it’s the pilot out the front who has to make the decisions and everything. So when I hear about a gunner talking about a Lancaster going down at four hundred knots and then climbing up until it’s standing on its tail, I just cannot

believe that kind of stuff. It’s absolutely ridiculous, but that’s what they put into the film. Second class. But you see I’m biased of course.

Well, I don forget a lot of things, a lot of detail. Some things stand out, I mean I can think when I went down

to Devon I went down to a dance and I won a little stuffed doll because I had joined in a dance where when the music stopped, you stopped and I survived it. There are little things that stick out in your mind, and there are other things where you think “Oh gosh, I wonder where I was then?” And so on. But I remember a lot of it.

Oh well, I don’t think so, because it’s a matter of

recollection as to how I felt at that time. And I don’t think I would think now, I wonder how I would feel about that if I went through that now. I don’t think that way, I just remember the way it was.

I think that my wartime experience, but particularly

my association with the services and ex-servicemen has been of great benefit, yes. It’s given my opportunities and understanding, which I otherwise would not have had.

Certainly and I had the opportunity of preaching down there in the chapel on Anzac Day. The Anzac Day

Sunday service and those people, a lot of them my age who, most of them involved in the Second World War, they are so interested. It’s been a great experience for all of them, and just to live as civilians through the Second World War. And so they respond really well. And I know in a sense the kind of things that can be said, I speak out of my experience.

So I think that’s beneficial too. But also I’ve been in Legacy, because I’m a member of Legacy, then the Legacy branch I belong to then decided to organise two services a year. And I’ve been invited to speak at Anzac services with the RSL. But one of the main things has been because I’m involved in that,

that I get funerals. Now I don’t know whether you think I delight in funerals, I don’t. But I get asked to do funerals of widows of ex-serviceman, and ex-serviceman including two of my own crew. And it’s a great opportunity because once again I can relate to the person who’s involved. And so it has been quite an important aspect

of my ministry. Now that I’ve retired. Not so much when I was young and active and so on.

Oh yes. I’m sure of that. And see we have a group of men who organise the Anzac Day services and they get speakers, and next

year I’m going to be the speaker at it, and there is a esprit de corps or something amongst ex-servicemen. I went to a Legacy meeting on last night down in Parramatta and meet with ex-servicemen and so on. And so there is a real, I won’t say brotherhood, but a real link that exists because of that.

Well I think they are important. I belong to the Pathfinder Association and we meet from time to time, we march together at the Anzac Day march in town. You know there is a real link there,

and at Richmond we’ve got a room, the Pathfinder room with mementos in it and that kind of thing.

Do you belong to a union of ex-students at a school or anything? Oh well, some people like that kind of thing.

But it’s good to get together anyway, you’re like minded in many respects, quite different in many respects. But there is a common bond there from past experience.

I don’t think we talk about, I don’t talk about my experiences in ordinary conversation with anybody,

unless they ask me a question. But you may have had some experience where a group of people got together and did certain things and when they meet and they go back and talk about it. Well-being in the services during the war was a great experience and a great event in the life of a person and it’s almost inevitable that when they get together they are going to say something about it, so they do.

Briefly, no, we realised there was a certainly inevitability about it. And when I left the Americans had just come into the war and the

direct threat of the Japanese wasn’t as evident as it later became. So I think we went, well I went not so happily but without any great reservations.

I did not feel that in the slightest. I thin Australians were greatly accepted over in England, and we made a tremendous contribution to the defeat of the originators of the Second

World War.

Well we were spoiled as officers, I think. We always shared the services of a batman or a batwoman, and we had good food, good beds. If we went on an

operation when we got back we had you know good accommodation and we were looked after very well. If anything went wrong medically we had instant treatment and so on. So we were well looked after over there. But I speak as an officer I don’t know how the sergeants got on, but I think they had a reasonable time as well.

Oh, we had a game of cricket once, and stumped a

county batsman. I played rugby, but we didn’t do much in that regard, that’s for sure.

Well in order to fly a plane you had to be very conscious of the qualities. And with the Stirling I had my, some reservations,

in terms of its operational capacities. With a Lancaster I’ve said a number of times if I hadn’t changed onto Lancs I wouldn’t be alive now. So I had great confidence in the Lanc. And on the Wellington on which I did more flying than anything else in England including as an instructor, they were a great plane to fly, I really enjoyed flying Wellingtons. So I was quite happy.

Not at all, they were mixed in very well. And on our squadron we had people in responsible positions who were Canadians, New Zealanders and so on, and Australians. So we were right there. I think Australians were highly regarded.

Well, I think you could only regret that that happened, I think that they must have regretted that they’d done it because they sewed the wind and they got the whirlwind in return. But that was a terrible thing to do, and in turn it was a terrible thing for us to do back to them, but in a way there was an inevitability about it.

I’ve never head that but if it was an accident initially, they kept it up and they kept it up for a long time. And they went to other places like Coventry and Manchester and they bombed near Derby on the channel towns and so on.

Yes definitely, especially after the war when we flew low level over parts of Germany and saw what destruction had been done.

What was a worthwhile tactic?

Well I didn’t and we didn’t have any say in that. We did what we were briefed to do and what we had been ordered to do. That’s what we had been trained for. I don’t think we really reflected generally on what was happening because of what we were doing, we just did it. And

our main concern in many ways was our own survival, because the loss rate was so high and we were always at risk. We were fighting for survival as well as carrying out our orders.

The fear I held was that I might join those who had already been lost.

And I think that was a sensible attitude to take. I suppose it kept you alert and doing the most you could in order to avoid becoming a loss. But there were lots of things you couldn’t do about it.

No, I don’t think I was fatalistic. I just did it, I didn’t have a sense of doom, but I had a

sense of risk really.

I don’t think so, I think we just had a common relationship, we had a common task. And I think I was the kind of person who could move from one situation to another and not get terribly worried about it too.

Over in England the civilian people in encountered were always very hospitable. They took us in they looked after us, and many of them seemed to live a reasonably normal kind of life. Except for the struggle

that many of them had to get supplies of food. You know they had to wait in queues and things like that, you know there were shortages. But there was extreme generosity. I can remember having supper at night with a spam pie, and things like that. They went out of their way to look after us, but they had to struggle themselves. My wife talks about her mother standing in queues for fish and then moving to another queue to get

something else and so on, but they endured it.

No, not at all.

No, no.

That might have been true in Fighter Command, I don’t know, but we never had, or I never had any sense of the pilot of that plane or this plane,

it was an enemy aircraft. And flying at night you never had any sense of identity with another plane. We knew they were there but I never felt any sense of identity.

Well I think we did, I think we completely disregarded French opponents. That was a matter for

in a way secret service activity once the war got really under way. But as far as the Italians were concerned I think we did regard them as fighters and aircrew and so as, probably shouldn’t say inferior, but that kind of thing. And when we went to Italian targets like Milan we didn’t have a sense of apprehension as great as when we went to Berlin for example.

Well, when we were flying on operations there was all the fear and the wondering what the outcome would be, so that was the main consideration. But it also became a tremendously important question in terms of flying

say through clouds and storms and making sure you were on the right course. You were always concerned about you know, the behaviour of the aircraft. Quite apart from being shot down by enemy action. And when we weren’t flying on operations, basically I enjoyed flying, I thought, “It was great.” And especially when I was instructing and I had to demonstrate some aspects of landing

and so on. Like glide approached and flapless landings, all very stimulating.

No, but for example we flew back over the North Sea with an engine feathered. Three engine

and you lost a bit of speed and so on, so that the performance of the aircraft was always a matter of concern. And flying in icing conditions which happened to me once over the North Sea. We just entered a cloud and all vision was completely obliterated and the aircraft just got covered in ice, I mean what you do then in terms of flying is tremendously significant. And a bit scary too.

Well the stars when you get above cloud they are always there and there is always a light about, it’s not absolute darkness. When you’re below the cloud you can get absolute darkness. But above the stars are there and you can see the stars and they’re there and they are a great

guide to how you fly the plane. Because it’s the idea that if the stars appear to move you know it’s not the stars, it’s your plane and therefore you can correct. Therefore you can set your sight on something in front of you, which is the stars and fly the plane with confidence. And then too like Polaris, the North Star. When it’s on your left,

say when you’re going out to Germany you know you are heading in the right direction, but far more importantly when you are coming back and you’re travelling towards the west and Polaris is on the right hand side you know you are going in a westerly direction. And that is a great comfort because compasses can go wrong, they can topple and so on, so it was a general confidence thing to look out and see Polaris there on the starboard side.

One of the things I used to do was play patience. When we had been briefed and we were waiting to go down into the flying, the flight office I used to play patience. And that’s where superstition comes into

it too. If I got it out I’d think “Wow I got it out, that’s good.” Somehow it sort of gave me a boost of confidence. And we used to as a crew get on our bikes and go out together somewhere, and the other times we would go to the cinema and things like that. But other times there were always things to do like flight-testing, and there might have been things

we had to do from an air force point of view.

We never let it affect us very much, we just had to accept it as part of being there. I remember when we were training on Stirlings at the con [conversion] unit one of the Stirlings crashed in the circuit area and we could see it burning on the ground. But we just had to go on doing what we were doing,

it was part of life. And even when say two crews went missing in a night, you couldn’t let it affect you. There were some crews that arrived on the squadron and went on an op, never even saw them before they were gone. But you couldn’t let that affect you. I suppose in a sense it was a selfish thing, you were so concerned about yourself that you couldn’t be worried about anybody else.

I don’t know whether that was true or not., but I think there’s an element of that in it.

Spotlighted? I suppose they mean combed in searchlights. That was really something because there were millions of candlepower that was put on the plane. You had to keep your head inside the cockpit, if you looked out you’d be blinded. So you fly solely on instruments, and

you have learned the tactics to be followed and you do them, and once you’re doing them I suppose you just hope for the best, you keep on doing them. The main tactic of course was to fly away from the defended area so that you got out of range as soon as possible. Some people used to dive and get up speed but generally I think I was more inclined to climb because they expected you to dive, and I got out of it twice.

No, I never thought along those lines.

Yes, well I went to Papua New Guinea for a month. And we landed at Port Moresby and I stayed at Port Moresby for a short time and there was some evidence in the harbour there of the enemy activity. Which had to do with shipping

I think, a sunk ship. And then I went to a place called Agura where there was no evidence of the war whatsoever. We were quite close however to Milne Bay, that’s very, very near to Agura. But back in Port Moresby we stayed in Han Lambada and there was no evidence of the war there.

So in terms of the war, no great impact. When we went to the Solomon Islands however, which was a great theatre of war. The airfield there, the Henderson Airfield was originally an American airfield, which the Japanese had captured, and the Japanese were hanging on to it when the Americans claimed it back.

There was a lot of evidence of the war, you’d go around in Honiara and you’d see little signposts “This is where the American say 4th Division was held up by the Japanese on such and such a day.” There was an area where there were bombs, unexploded bombs, with a notice up, “Unexploded bombs,” you didn’t go in there. You could come across the wreck of some armoured vehicle just lying around. When we flew across the

strait to the north of Eduardo Canal on Ironbottom Sound you could see the ship sunk in the water. And there was building work going on where we lived in a village away from Honiara, and as they dug up the foundations they were digging up bullets and things like that. So there was plenty of evidence of the war in the Solomon Islands.

Oh no, it was in the seventies.

Well it was, actually the main hospital, the General Hospital in Honiara was a General Hospital and it was called Number 9 by the islanders because while the Americans were there it was Number 9 Field Hospital. And they still call it that. And so that building, the

general structure was taken over from the Americans. And the population highly respected a man, Sergeant Voozer I think his name was, he appeared at Anzac Day services and things like that wearing his medals. And a lot of them had been involved in some way. I don’t think they talked about it a great deal but when it was the appropriate occasion they would talk about it, and especially Sergeant Voozer,

it would appear was a symbol of our time during the war.

The main influence in the Solomon Islands was British. It was a British protectorate. And during the war, before the war the British had a major controlling factor in the Solomon Islands,

and especially on one of the islands, Gaila, was the capital, Toroniara or something I think was the capital. And the capital later became Honiara on Guadalcanal, but this was on another island, and that was subject to hostile action by the Japanese. And so I’m not quite sure what the question was again.

Well they still, I used to wonder how the spirits of the Americans would feel with the great Japanese influence, there was in the Solomons by the 1970s with their canneries and tuna fishing. Also, however groups of Japanese used to come back to the Solomons to revisit the battle scenes,

and I think, whether it’s true or not to see if they could get any bones of their forbearers and things like that. And the Solomon Islanders just shrugged their shoulders and got on with it. I think they were glad to be independent from the British, but the British however left them in a really good state with an education system and organisation. And the poor old Solomon Islands have gone backwards and backwards ever since then.

But they have a good regard for Australians, this is worth noting actually. When they had disasters like a major earthquake or cyclones, which they were subject to, the Australian government somehow appeared on the scene. A Hercules would land and discharge a helicopter and the helicopter would go around and do rescue work and all kinds of things. And a lot of the trade in the Solomons was with Australia.

An Australian ship coming up and bringing groceries and all kinds of things. So we felt as Australians that we were highly regarded in the Solomon’s.

Oh no, I don’t think so, not at all. We had a job to do, I was headmaster of the school and that was my main occupation.

While we were there?

No, I didn’t no. Once again I suppose I’m the kind of person if I’ve got something to do

I get on with it, and that’s what I major on.

I think the last thing I’d like to say is about my wife. Now she’s a great acquisition. We’ve been married now for fifty-seven years and

we go back occasionally to England. We have her sister coming out here in a few months time, but I think that was a really wonderful outcome for me, a kind of bonus for being over there. I probably could have got myself a very nice Australian wife when I got back but I’m glad she’s around, and that she’s had her experience in the air force as well. It’s a

good thing that we’ve had that common experience and that we met the way we did, so I thank god for her. And of course our kids that she’s produced for us too. Three of them, they’re all over fifty now so.