Australians at War Film Archive

And a lot of other people’s generous support.

Well I was born in Queensland

in a little town called Kingaroy, which became more famous when Bjelke-Petersen [Premier of Queensland 1968-1987] was there rather than when I was there. I lived nearly the first four years of my life – I left Queensland when I lived there about

three years and nine months, and my family moved to Sydney – initially for a few weeks in Coogee and then we went to live at Manly and I lived in Manly until I was about twenty seven years old. That’s –

Yes I can tell you exactly when I joined the navy – on the 4th of 4th, ’44 – wasn’t difficult to remember – even for me.

Eighteen, or nearly eighteen.

No I would’ve actually turned eighteen by the time I got into the navy. When I enlisted I was about seventeen and ten months.

Yes, I trained at Flinders Naval Depot down in Victoria and I stayed there for about three months

and then I moved from Flinders Naval depot up to south head radar – I don’t know what it was called then, but it was a centre for training people in radar, which had only recently come into being in Australia.

It’d been a few years in England at that time, but it had only fairly recently come to Australia.

I had a draft to a corvette – I can show you a picture of a corvette later if

you want to see it – corvette called HMAS Pirie which was in Brisbane at the time, so I’d practically gone full circle from Queensland back to Queensland by that stage. Then after serving nearly three years aboard HMAS Pirie

I was discharged from the Pirie and got a draft to HMAS Townsville – very close to the end of the war by then, and I had about three months aboard HMAS Townsville and then went to HMAS Bataan

which was a destroyer – slightly larger ship than a corvette – about two or three times the size of a corvette.

I – the first place we went to was a short trip

across to Shark Bay in Western Australia. Then we came back to Sydney and from Sydney we went up to the Admiralty Islands to a place which was rather carelessly, I feel, place called Manus, which was

a wonderful base north of Australia, and for some reason however the government at that time got rid of the base of Manus, which would’ve been a great base for protecting the north of Australia – I have no idea why they got rid of it, but they did.

Pirie then went to the liberation of the Philippines in Leyte Gulf – L – E – Y – T – E Gulf in the Philippines. We took part in that campaign and then went up to the invasion of Okinawa where I saw

the greatest number of ships that I ever saw in my life. As I mentioned I was a radar operator and we were convoying three ships at the time and as we approached the Okinawa region I went to bed off

watch one night when there were three echoes that appeared on the radar screen. I got up in the morning, walked out onto the open deck and looked round and to my amazement I saw the whole sea absolutely full of ships. There were hundreds of ships at that time but I

didn’t have time to count them, but there were certainly hundreds of ships.

The Pirie then sailed offshore to – in the region of Tokyo. We were about three hundred miles from Tokyo when we got there, and we

escorted ships that took part in the bombardment of Japan for the last three to four months of the war.

Yep – after the Bataan

I was discharged.

Yes, 1946.

Until August of 1946.

I was offered the Commonwealth Reconstruction

Training Scheme offered all servicemen who were discharged, training in various activities. I went to Sydney University and did a six year course in medicine.

Yes.

At the Royal North Shore Hospital in North Sydney, then at the Launceston General Hospital – I had a year at each of those hospitals, both of which were

very good training. Then I – when I left the Launceston General Hospital I was offered a position in the Canberra Community Hospital, as it was called in those days, which was virtually – it eventually became the first

Royal Canberra Hospital. It was not in its present site where the so – called Woden Valley Hospital was, which then became the Canberra Community Hospital, but in those days the Royal Canberra Hospital

was very close to where the university now is.

That’s correct, yes.

No, I worked there for a year

and I was offered a partnership with Doctor Uther, who practised in Canberra Civic Centre – that’s U – T – H – E – R – F – B. Uther, Frederick Bryan Uther, and I worked with him until

I think it was about three years until I went into private practice by myself and ran my own practice and gradually built up the practice which became Davis, Dawson, Atkinson and Clyde – in other words I got three doctors to assist me

as the years went by and become partner – the four partners in the practice.

Yes I – by the time I went to the practice at the Royal North Shore Hospital I was married

and when we went to Launceston, we had our first child who was a son, and then when we came back to Canberra we had three daughters to follow the son.

Yes – six.

I – discharged from the navy in 1946 and we were married in 1953.

Yes I not only have memories of it, but I one thing that I learned to do after I

graduated – I learned to fly light aircraft and I actually flew back to Kingaroy some years later, and saw the house where – I saw the site of the house where my family lived. The house had actually been pulled down and had been – some sort of club, I think it was an

RSL [Returned and Services League] club for some years, I was very disappointed when I arrived back in Kingaroy because I had hoped to have seen my family’s home, but I didn’t. It was an entirely different home – different style of home. We had the old type of weatherboard home with the verandah at the front and back

when we lived there, and it was just an average brick house when I got back there.

Yes, yes. I remembered quite back to, I would say I had some memories

back to being about two years of age because we had the first dog that I ever had – a dog, a German Shep, not a German Shepherd rather – a – tell me the name of a few common dogs.

It was a big dog and I was only two years old when we got it. I even remember it’s name – it was called Bobby, and I was terrified of it initially, because he was a big dog compared to me. He used to enjoy knocking me over.

My father was also a doctor. He was a doctor in practice in Manly after we left Kingaroy by the time we got to Manly he had bought into a practice of a Doctor Rosebery in Manly

and he stayed in practice until he was about fifty years of age and then he had a stroke and had a series of strokes and finally died at fifty five years of age.

He was

very strict, but he had lots of reasons to be very strict I think. I asked for anything if I got – I was a very wild young boy. He used to roam the streets of Manly – on one occasion I remember my father approaching a

cinema when I had – when he had been reported that his son was standing in front of the cinema begging patrons to give him some money to go into the cinema, and that was about the sort of standard of my activities in those days.

I had several young friends and we were all fairly wild, and my father had very good reason for regimenting me as he did.

Usually with a

strap or a coat hanger or something like that – a whack over the backside or several whacks over the backside.

I remember vividly getting absolutely thrashed when one of his nurses

had been at the surgery working for him – took me to the Royal Sydney Show one day and we were – the nurse – her name was Nell Roy, I remember her quite well –

somehow or other got separated from me and I was initially rather panicked by the fact that I couldn’t find her, and logically I think at the time I did the logical thing and I still had some money leftover that I’d been given to spend at the show, and I got on a

tram and I found my way down to Circular Quay, took the Manly ferry back home and in the meantime Sister Roy had run him and said that she had lost me at the show and by the time I got home I was given the thrashing of my life,

which I thought was rather unjust because I think I’d done the logical thing to do when I was separated from her, and I thought the logical thing to do was go home and not just wander around lost in the middle of the Royal Sydney Show.

He was very keen on me getting a good education, which I’m very thankful to him for, and I think had I been – he was dux of his school – a school – he went to a different school to the school

I went to – he went to a school in North Sydney called Saint Aloysius, but he was dux of his school and he – the other memory I had – his best fried at Saint Aloysius was a person who became quite famous on the Sydney stage

later on called Cyril Richard, and my father took me to see Cyril Richard in many performances. Cyril Richard married a woman called Madge Elliot, and they became a famous team on the Sydney

Theatre Royal at the time, and I really enjoyed going to see them both perform when I was quite young, I would say probably from about ten years of age onward. Eventually Cyril

Richard left Australia and he and Madge Elliot spent their last years in London performing on the stage.

No – I can’t remember it. I can remember

the stage – remember the interior of the Sydney Royal, but I can’t remember what it looked like from the outside.

The interior was – of course to me most of my memories of the interior were in darkness – watching the stage. I can’t remember

what it – it was like the interior of many theatres in that era – nothing like modern theatres, but I remember very little about any decorations inside the theatre.

Yes, they did perform some musicals. I think most of their act had musical backgrounds – musical comedy I think it was referred to in those days.

No he – he was too young to go to the First World War. He’d – he had left school and tried to enlist in the First World War but they wouldn’t

take him because he was much cleverer than his son – he had completed his education and was ready to go to the university by the time he was sixteen, whereas I started the – my education at university well into the twenties. He,

as I say, he tried to enlist in the First World War. He tried to enlist in the Second World War but was rejected because he was too old. So he was at the wrong age at the wrong time to be able to enlist in either war, even though he wanted to.

I was – on the other hand I thought I was very fortunate to want to go to war and able to enlist as soon as I left school. I finished my schooling at seventeen and was able to enlist when I was in

a – the early stages of my eighteenth year, or I was eighteen, so I suppose it was my nineteenth year in that case.

He had a general practice in Manly. In fact the surgery where he practised is still going.

It is next to Gilbert Park in Manly.

I think he was. He was asked to be a member of many activities in Manly and

he was very highly regarded in Manly. I have no hesitation in saying that he was a much better doctor than I was. I was – even when I was in my own general practice; I had a tendency to want to take part in extra curricular

activities, such as I loved my flying; I liked a lot of other activities, and I learned to scuba dive through the navy, and I scuba dived – I flew and did scuba diving as long as I could until I finally had a

collapse on the golf course and had to have a cardiac pacemaker put in, and that I decided, I’d have to give up both flying and scuba diving when I got that – not for my own sake, but they’re both activities where you have a lot of responsibility to your

passengers. If I – or passenger – when I was flying I had to think of my passengers. When I was scuba diving I had to think of my buddy – anyone who takes scuba diving at all seriously shouldn’t dive

as a pair with the – you should never scuba dive alone. Some people occasionally do this and often risk other people’s lives to rescue them when they get into trouble, and I think it’s very important to dive in either

a couple or a group.

Well I – it was always referred to as The Village, and there was a great village spirit in Manly. I was very happy living in Manly.

I was a member of the Manly Live Saving Club as soon as I was old enough to join it, and the whole time I lived in Manly I was a member of the Manly Life Saving Club, and I had a lot of friendships there, including a very close friend that I had

in Manly – a lad who joined up – went into the air force just before the time that I went into the navy and he was my greatest buddy at that time – even though we were in different services,

and he went through the remainder of the war – in other words from the time I joined up till the time I was discharged he flew a fighter aircraft – the last plane that he used to fly was a Mustang,

which was a very famous aircraft in the Second World War – probably almost as well known as the Spitfires, and unfortunately after the war was over he was still flying Mustangs and he used to say to me, “I don’t enjoy my flying now – now that the war is

over, all the good staff for the – for servicing the aircraft, have been discharged. The aircraft are in very bad condition – they’re all faulty,” and the next time – that

was the last time that I saw him because he crashed an aircraft and was killed shortly after that, and his mother contributed that to the very bad state of servicing that the aircraft received, post war.

Peter Campbell – Peter Mortimer Campbell – I remember him very well.

At a school that he used to go to – he and I quite, I think the second

or third school that we went to was Manly Public School, but we were going to a private school before then called St. Andrews School in Manly, and Peter stayed at St. Andrews School until one morning his father dropped dead

at quite a young age – I think his father was thirty-nine years old when he dropped dead, and his mother couldn’t afford to keep him at the private school. So we both ended up at Manly Public School until we left – he left Manly Public School to get a job. I left Manly Public

School to go to the school that my father had sent me to.

Get into as much trouble as we could. Ooh – we were both very adventurous. The –

I can’t remember in detail much of what we did, but I know what it – whatever we did we were – every day of our lives we got up and went somewhere together, in fact I hate to say this but my parents

after a while became very troubled with our friendship because while we were both typical young men who used to go around chasing pretty girls, I think my family were probably rather worried that our closeness

might’ve been due to homosexuality which – if only they’d realised it was anything but, because neither of us were interested in homosexuality. We were far more interested in chasing young girls.

Because we were so close, we were always together, and I

think they were just worried in case it was – in case it was true. But it’s – it was only after Peter had been killed in his aircraft crash that I even suspected that they might’ve thought that.

Yes, my mother was the eldest child of seven children – one of whom died when he was very young – about four years of age. She had

two brothers – one of whom ended up in the Royal Australian Air Force and used to do bombing raids over Germany, and he was one of

my idols when I was a youngster – so much so that I wanted to go into the air force originally, but for – because I couldn’t get into the air force that’s why I ended up in the navy. I was determined that I was going to go to war, but I didn’t get to fly a

Spitfire as I had hoped I would’ve. My mother also had five sisters – one of whom is still alive. All the rest have died over the years.

Those are the most relevant points – oh she lived – she was the daughter of Alf Knight – Alf and Louise Knight had a property near Coonabarabran, and I was very fortunate in that

respect, because I used to spend practically all my school holidays on that property. In those days really the – go up to Coonabarabran by train or by car. When my father was able to go with us we would go by car, otherwise my mother and I

would take the train to Coonabarabran, and I learned from a very early age – from about five or six years of age – I learned to ride and I loved horse riding until I got to the stage where I went to war and I – even after I came back from the

war I was able to go to their property and – in fact in the very near future, my wife and I will be going up to the Coonabarabran area – not to – not to that same property because that

family had, as I say it was a large family and the members of the family had moved elsewhere. My uncle who had been in the air force – his wife is still alive and we occasionally go and stay at her property, which is

also near Coonabarabran.

Mmm.

She had a very bright personality. My wife has suffered from this in that

my father was rather submissive and my mother ruled the household. As a result of that I have never let myself get into the same situation

so unfortunately for my wife she finds that she is unable to rule the household.

She made practically all the decisions. My children all point out to me that

if I was as good a manager, particular financial manger as my mother was, that we would all be very wealthy. But I have never been – I – one thing that I disliked about being in medical

practice – I hated the, to hear the public talk about the greedy doctors, and they still do, and I can assure you there are a great number of doctors who work a lot harder than some of the wealthier members of the community,

and who still remain fairly poor, and I used to hate this – hearing this term, the greedy doctors, because most doctors have to work very hard to earn their living and I’m very glad now that I’m retired.

Very little – the Depression was just about finished by the time we got to Manly. In fact if there hadn’t been a Second World War I think Manly would’ve been a very – in fact the whole country would’ve been a very much wealthier place to live in.

I think we were all very fortunate to live in a wonderful country and we should – I’ve been to I would say probably nearly half the countries in the world and I’ve never seen a country that

was more fortunate than Australia.

If there were, I probably wouldn’t have known of them then, and I don’t think

I was ever as conscious of the Depression and the years that came afterwards to be really aware of the problems that were going on in many parts of the community.

We were always taught that whatever was on the table, that we must eat it all – we – I was never allowed to leave a full plate on the table. I would be in big trouble if I didn’t eat

up everything. The food in general when we lived in Manly was fairly good. When we were visiting our relatives in the Coonabarabran area it was even better because we got what came fresh off the land, and it was there –

the property where my grandparents lived was a sheep and cattle station where there was plenty of fresh meat, plenty of vegetables and

I think I was very fortunate as far as the food that was being offered.

Yes I loved surfing. It was a great thrill – quite apart from anything else I was a very keen swimmer.

I was also a member of the Manly Amateur Swimming Club, which in those days had some very famous swimmers as part – you’ve probably never heard of them, but people like Andrew ‘Boy’ Charlton, who was a famous swimmer for Manly and who went to the

Olympics in Paris I think, and one of the American towns in those days, and Noel Ryan, who hardly ever gets a mention now, but in the early days of the Second World War

when so many champion swimmers had gone to – had left Australia for, to serve overseas, Noel Ryan for some reason – I think he was rejected from the services, but he was a very

well known swimmer in those days. There were other very well known swimmers that were members of the Manly Swimming Club, but the – when I got more interested in surfing

the excitement of swimming in a surf race or just surfing for the sake of getting on big waves – I think I could still go to a – any beach anywhere and surf. There was never a wave that was too

big to take. I loved the thrill of sitting on the top of a big wave that was breaking, and sliding – I’m not talking about what most people do in the surf these days – ride a board to surf a wave, I’m talking about body surfing, which really was a great thrill to be on top of a big

wave and slide right down to the bottom of it.

In Manly – Manly there were three surf beaches and there were nearby surf beaches. There was South Steyne, North Steyne and Queenscliff were the three

main beaches, but I think the best beach of all was – sorry, was not at the Manly beaches, I think the best surfing beach close to Manly was at Harbord, or Freshwater as it was called. That was

largely because Manly beach is a very long beach and exposed to all sorts of cross currents and winds and so forth. Harbord Beach was a very narrow beach. It was a big, big beach as far as depth from the – from Harbord right down to the

water was a long stretch of sand, a long, deep stretch of sand – not very wide at all and protected on both sides of the beach by the, mainly the rocks at the side of the beach, and you got a very

good, straight roll of the surf into the beach, which I think was far better than any of the three main Manly beaches.

Right up and down the coast from

Bondi, Maroubra – places like that on the south side of the harbour, right up to Narrabeen on the other side, or even – even as far as Palm Beach on the northern side of the harbour.

No, no they would – that, on the

beaches for the surf races but there would be – there was a very good Manly Baths, which not long after the war, was destroyed by a big storm right in the whole of the Manly beach. You might remember there was a

promenade that was built in the 1930s, which went from the Manly wharf right across the whole length of the Manly beach on the harbour side, and that was always full – every

weekend it was full of visitors from every other part of Sydney who’d come across and swim at that beach. That was destroyed in a storm of some sort and Manly Baths, which were further to the east than the

Manly pool – they were also destroyed in a big storm. But it was the Manly Baths where people like Boy Charlton learned their swimming.

Well there was a walkway which was probably about

– depending on the tide of course, the tide never came up to anywhere near the level of the walkway – generally the, at low tide it might be about ten to fifteen feet lower than the walkway, but

people used to come from all over Sydney and walk up and down this level, which there was a little Manly art gallery – very, very small art gallery on the western end of that beach and the walkway went right across near the –

just to the south of that art gallery and then went right across to the – where the Manly ferry came in.

Well I haven’t been to the Corso for probably at least ten years, and I believe it has altered a

great deal since those days. But the Corso would run from where the Manly ferries came in and go straight through to the surf side of Manly. It was very popular – there were shops on either

side of the Corso, at least one pub – there might’ve been two, and then there was the Hotel Pacific – once you got across to the opposite side to the harbour the Hotel Pacific was just round the corner from

the end of the Corso.

I left Manly Public and went as a border for three years to The Sydney Church of England Grammar School, often referred to as Shore,

and after those three years as a boarder I spent the rest of my school days prior to going into the navy as a day boy taking – initially

the trams from Manly to the Spit and then the Spit to North Sydney where the Shore School was. When the trams stopped running, the buses would go right through across the Spit bridge and we’d have to get off the buses

at – approaching St. Leonards in Miller Street of North Sydney. But the buses went right through, whereas with the trams you could only take them down to the north side of the

Spit bridge. You’d then have to walk across the Spit bridge and get the tram from the other side to go through to North Sydney.

Yeah –

Yes, yes.

I don’t know – I can’t remember what for, but I can remember the number of times when I got six on the backside.

On, I remember one occasion, because generally speaking either the house master or a local house prefect would give you one or two smacks on the backside with a cane, but I remember one time when I got six of the best when

myself and another school boy had gone down to North Sydney and decided that we were going to walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and back, and of course we’d be given leave from the school to go down to the local shops, but we weren’t

expected to go out and so far away from the school, and when my house master found – I don’t know how he found out, but when he knew when I got back to the school that I’d gone right across to Sydney across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, he got me to bend over and he pulled his cane

out and gave me six of the best, and I never resented being – I was quite prepared, if I did something wrong I was quite prepared to be punished for it, but that didn’t stop me from trying to do something wrong.

Mmm.

Well I was a good student in 1938 and 1939. Everything changed then from the 3rd of September 1939 when we went into the Second World War – I was only interested in going

to the war myself and I stopped studying seriously, where I started studying the exploits of all the war heroes and I wanted to be one of them, and I had no idea that I’d end up on a corvette.

I was quite sure I’d either end up on – in a Spitfire or a Lancaster bomber or something like that, and my idea of an exciting life then was going to war.

Yes I can remember very

well – the English Prime Minister, who I think was Chamb – still Chamberlain at the time, had – no I’m sorry I’m getting a bit ahead of myself now. A little bit later than – the 3rd of the 9th of

’39 was when Hitler’s troops went into Poland, but for several days they’d been threatening to invade Poland. They had– as you know they’d invaded Austria and they’d invaded Czechoslovakia and then the next

country they invaded was Poland, and every time for a month before the war, Chamberlain for example, had gone off across – had a meeting in Munich, I think, with Hitler, and came back waving a piece of paper and saying, “We have peace in our time.”

And then he thought that appeasing Hitler by surrendering Czechoslovakia to him would give them peace, but then he realised when Hitler

invaded Poland, he realised that if they just gave into him then that they’d be getting weaker and weaker. Of course there was Churchill standing up, accusing him of appeasing Hitler all along, and Chamberlain

realised that he’d come to the stage where he’d have to do something about Hitler continuing to invade one country after the other, so he gave Hitler an ultimatum – that if they didn’t withdraw from Poland by the

following day, that France and England would take up arms against him, and he – at the time when the Second World War actually broke out, rather than just being a series of annexing

one country after the other, Chamberlain made an announcement stating that if he didn’t withdraw from Poland, that France and England would go to war with him, and on the 3rd of September he made this announcement

that so far –

I was actually – I remember it very vividly because I was at my grandparents home in Coonabarabran listening to the radio because they

said something was going to be – an important announcement on the radio at eleven o’clock, and at eleven o’clock the English Prime Minister said that, “As Hitler had not complied with their decision to

move out or to withdraw from Poland, that this country was now at war with Germany,” and the next thing was Menzies, who at the time was the Prime Minister of Australia – said that, “As England has

now gone to war with Germany, our country is now at war with Germany.”

Well all the older people in my grandparents’ house have lived through the First World War, and I remember my mother was

there, and she said, “Oh!” – She was absolutely aghast that we were going to have to go through it all again, and my grandparents felt the same way. But I was particularly aware of my mother’s reaction to think how – of course like everyone else of my

age – we were thrilled that we were all going to go to war with Germany and we were going to show the blessed Huns [Germans] or whatever we thought of them, that we were going to go to war and the war

was going to be over in a year or two, and it wouldn’t take long to beat them with the might of France and England against them. Of course we were absolutely horrified when we saw how the Germans just – the,

there were two opposing, there was the Siegfried Line and the Maginot Line drawn up as trenches were in the First World War – just opposing each other front to front, and these underground lines facing each other never came into the

conflict at all. The Germans just went round the top of them through the low countries through Holland and Belgium and just went right round the top of the Maginot Line and straight into France and straight through to Dunkirk.

Mmm.

The main change that I remember – by that stage we were all getting ready to prepare for war and I remember that the playing field at the

back of Shore School was being dug up for trenches to be put in, and the whole of the field was just one massive trenches about six feet deep, and I remember having to be one of the members who helped to dig these trenches.

No, no, no – we thought it was a lot of nonsense and we didn’t want to dig the trenches. We were ordered to by the school authorities – in particular the headmaster – got us all out onto the oval, or not the oval actually –

the oval was up at Northbridge it wasn’t at the school. We got onto the playing field that was still at the school and just dug that up, and we felt it was unnecessary – in fact we – none of us at that stage thought Australia would

ever be involved in any way. It wasn’t for a couple of years I think, when the submarine came down the coast and bombarded Sydney, and that happened at night time, and by the next day that was all over and done with, and then three submarines entered Sydney Harbour

and got through the boom gate that was put up in Sydney Harbour to stop submarines getting through, and they – what happened when the Manly Ferry went through, the boom gate had to be opened and as the Manly Ferry went through the submarines just followed them through until the boom

gates were closed again, and then they went into Garden Is – the location of Garden Island and fired torpedos at a warship that was anchored near Garden Island.

It missed the warship – I’ve forgotten what –

Yeah.

Apart from –

Well it was just an exciting incident that happened. I don’t think there – I can’t ever remember any fear in any part of Sydney – quite apart from the school. The Japanese approaching Sydney might’ve done it, thinking that

the whole population of Sydney would be in panic, but I never at any time I will say this about our country: that I never at any time during the war recorded or I can’t remember any fear of anyone in Australia or – I

I would even – even when the Japanese were in New Guinea approaching Port Moresby and preparing to invade Australia. I can never remember anybody being afraid. I think even

– even when the battles of the Coral Sea and the battles of the Bismarck, see all that was exciting to the average Australian. There might’ve been the occasional person who was

maybe a bit panicky, that might’ve been worried, but I can’t ever remember meeting anyone that appeared frightened by what was happening in the war. I think that the biggest – the biggest thing

which was close to panic, which I even heard of – I didn’t hear of until after the war, namely when my wife’s family was evacuated and apparently they – they were very

very ashamed of that. They were sent to live for some years with their relatives near Gundagai, and they were very upset that this happened. I felt that they should’ve stayed at home in school in Sydney,

and they were ashamed to have been sent out to Gundagai. But apparently when they went to Gundagai, I don’t think they’d ever lived in the country before and they found it was a wonderful time in their life and they weren’t worried about having been evacuated. They were just worried that they just might’ve been

appearing to be sent out of the, out of being part of the war effort. But I can’t ever remember any part of Australia at any time, no matter how close the Japanese got

to our territory – can’t remember any fear. I think Australia was glad to be part – when the, the greatest reaction I think was Pearl Harbour. When that happened, Australia was very angry

but not frightened that the Japanese were coming into the war. They were very angry with what the Japanese did rather than being afraid of the results of what Japan had done.

Yes.

Our headmaster at the time was a man by the name of LC – Leonard Charles Robson, and the headmaster was a great inspiration to us because every morning that we were paraded before we

went into school, there was always the whole school was lined up outside the school on the parade ground, and Mr Robson got up in front of the whole – all the school boys

and he gave a very concise description of what’d happened in the previous twenty four hours, and I learned far more about the progress of the war from him than I ever did from reading the newspaper, and never at any stage did he seem anything

– he was a very religious man, but his attitude was that our God is going to save us from these wicked people.

I should’ve been, but I wasn’t as – I, my

religion was rather spoilt for me at that stage, in that I had to come from Manly to North Sydney every morning just to get to school, and in those days transport was interfered with by the war effort, and on a few occasions

I arrived at school late because the transport had been held up by things that’d happened as part of the war effort, and on numerous occasions I was punished for not getting to chapel before school started, because of what had happened to me owing to the war effort,

and I got so annoyed at being punished because I couldn’t – no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t get to chapel, that it effected my attitude to religion at that time. To my mind the greatest thing was our

own individual contribution to the war effort and to me that was far more important than whether I got to chapel or not, and I was turned off chapel for – we had a beautiful chapel at Shore, in fact my wife and I were

both married in that chapel, and I look back on it now and think, “What a lovely chapel it was.” But to be punished because I couldn’t get to that chapel in time turned me off religion for a long time, and I

never really got back to the approach to religion that I would like to have got back to.

No it wasn’t necessarily military transport, it was just that the trams or

buses just weren’t able to get through the traffic on time. They weren’t running and every school boy on the bus or tram or whatever we were on at the time – every school boy would be aware of the fact that we were supposed – there was

no excuse for not getting to school on time. If we, and the answer would be if we got to school and said, “We were held up due to transport,” well you should’ve left earlier.

Yes.

Yes, no, no he actually got into the army and he used to go on army exercises where they would go into camp – I can’t think of the name of the camp now –

I think it was Ingleburn, but he used to go into camp for training, but he wasn’t allowed to be part of the service that would be, say going overseas to wherever it might’ve been at the time – Greece

or – they had two, they had the Australian Infantry Force or the AIF [Australian Imperial Force], which were mainly the volunteer for war service, and the other branch which was known as the militia, which

I – I’m not quite sure what the militia did at the time. I think they were just the stand by troops in Australia who would’ve defended Australia if Australia was attacked, but who weren’t being sent overseas, and my father had tried to get into the AIF, but he wasn’t accept, but –

and the main reason why he wasn’t accepted is that too many doctors had gone overseas – younger men who had enlisted, been accepted for the services and the civilian population was very short of doctors and there were people

getting sick with serious illness all over Sydney and they couldn’t get a doctor because they were too short of doctors.

Yes.

I was a part of it when the war started, but then the air training corps started and I left the cadet corps and joined

the air training corps because I was so keen to get into the air force at that time, and that interfered with my education a great deal because I was far more interested in what I was doing for the air training corps than what I was learning at school.

Well by and large a lot of things that we didn’t want to do – marching up and down the parade ground, learning how to right wheel and left wheel and all that sort of thing, which took up a big part of the, of any part of the services,

even the air training corps. But occasionally we were taken out to Bankstown aerodrome, which was in those days part of the air force. It wasn’t a – as Bankstown is now, just an aerodrome, it was part of the

air force, or to Richmond which was even more so, and we used to love these trips out where we would actually were able to get into an aircraft, and on one trip to Richmond we were actually taken for a flight over Richmond, which was a great thrill for we youngsters. But by and large it was just to see the

aerodrome.

An Avro Anson, which could just about get off the ground and do very little else – we didn’t loop the loop or anything.

I tried to

join the air force. I was rejected and I tried – I went back about a dozen times and reapplied and every time I was rejected and finally one of the medical officers that had examined me rang my father and told me – apparently he

knew my father, and told him not to let me keep coming back because I would be rejected all the time and it was just being a nuisance, and my father did what I – in those days I had, when I was about three years old I’d had whooping cough – the whooping

cough had left me with one of the big complications of whooping cough – it’d left me with very bad sinuses, and I could’ve got into the air force as ground crew, but I didn’t want to be sitting round servicing aircraft, I wanted to be flying aircraft, and

they wouldn’t allow people who had a history of any infections of the sinuses to go into the aircrew. So I then went to the – actually there’s quite an interesting thing happened in – between

I then tried to join the Americans – there was a big American presence in Sydney at the time, and I went to – they were at the Grace building, and I went into the Grace building and applied to have a medical to get into the American Air Force, and I was

examined by – I remember him quite vividly, I can even remember what he looked like – American officer called Major Jack, and Major Jack interviewed me, and said, “So tell me why, why are

you applying for the American Air Force? Why don’t you apply for the Australian Air Force?” And I said, “Well I have applied for the Australian Air Force, but I was rejected.” And he said, “If you were rejected from the Australian Air Force, what makes you think that you might’ve been able to get into the American Air Force?” And I said, “Oh, I thought maybe the standard wouldn’t be as high.” And he said, “Oh my God,

it’s much higher!” He was horrified at the thought of anybody thinking that the standard for the American Air Force was lower. So I didn’t get a chance to even talk any further.

Yes, yes – I was reject – as I say I could’ve, and I can understand it having

done medical training and now I have no problem flying – as I say I have a private pilots licence, but to have flown in aircraft that were manoeuvring that would suddenly be up at, say twenty thousand feet and then have to dive

down to five thousand feet or whatever the manoeuvres were, rather than just straight and level flying, would’ve been impossible with the sinuses in the condition that they were then. I even had difficulties – the sinuses were so

bad that I even had difficulties just talking and the pressure would build up and not be able to get away. But as I say I’ve had major surgery to the sinuses since then and it doesn’t affect me at all now. I had about three or four major operations to those sinuses.

Ah he was very annoyed and he didn’t want me to go back. I did once – I didn’t tell him though that I was going, to the American Air Force for example, but he was one

– one of his relatives had some contract with the navy and knew that the navy were looking for volunteers, and he said, “Look forget about flying – it’s not a matter of going to the war as far as – you’re not being rejected for war service. You’re being rejected for your health –

for health reasons, for the air force specifically, but you could go on board a battleship and have no problem as far as your health is concerned with the navy – why don’t you try and apply for the navy?” And once again I got a little bit of a reception like Major Jack or Colonel Jack or

when I first went in to apply for the navy. I went into the naval recruiting office in Loftus Street in Sydney, and they said, “What’s your medical history? Why aren’t you in the army now?” Because everyone was conscripted who hadn’t volunteered

I said, “I didn’t want to go in the army.” “Well what did you want to go in?” And I said, “I actually went into – applied for the air force, but I wasn’t accepted for that.” “Well what – if you, if you weren’t accepted for health reasons in the air force, what makes you think that you could get into the navy?” And I said, “Because my father is a doctor and he’s told

me that the health reasons that would stop,” because once again they came back at me and said, “You know what makes you think that if you were rejected with the air force that you could get into the navy?” And I said, “Because my father’s told me that the reasons that I was rejected wouldn’t effect me on board ship,” and they finally accepted that and I finally got into the navy, and

I had a – I was telling you about Peter Campbell earlier – Peter Campbell never even got out of Australia in three years in the air force, and then was killed after the war flying aircraft that he shouldn’t have been flying, and I on the other

hand – I had probably about one of the most interesting wars than most people that I know because we were interested – we were involved in so many interesting fields of the war outside Australia.

Well she was – she, she was utterly against me even, apart from the sinus business, she was against me going into the air force. She had the impression that aeroplanes just fell out of the sky. She – under no

circumstances did she want me to go into the air force, but she was much happier with me going into the navy and she provided one of the best parts of my war service actually. One of the –

one of the major problems about being away from Australia at sea was the fact that we couldn’t go to the letterbox and pick up a letter every day and we couldn’t even get a newspaper, and probably the most welcome part of

your whole service life was when you got somewhere where you could get mail. Now that – whether it meant that you got into a port and mail could be easily delivered to you, or whether you were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and you came alongside a ship which would have mail from home on board and that

mail was transferred onto your ship – whatever the reason it was really a red letter day, literally, when you got mail at sea, and nothing that ever happened to a sailor at sea was ever as welcome as getting mail.

Yes.

Very little because we got – when we got to Flinders Naval Depot, which was the place we were going to, all our possessions were packed back into our suitcase and we were issued

with our uniforms, so anything that we packed had to eventually go back home. So we were warned to take as little as possible. They didn’t want huge, overflowing suitcases that have to be disposed of and sent back to Sydney.

By train – went by train to Melbourne and then by – it got onto another train that went out to a place called – I can’t remember whether it was Frankston or Frankton, which is very close to the Flinders Naval Depot – when we got off the train and

we were marched actually into the depot, and that’s where I got my first surprise to see what a huge place Flinders Naval Depot was – it was almost like a small city, you know, it had its own canteen and its own post office and store, and you could buy practically anything

in the depot that you could buy in the civilian life, and what you couldn’t buy there, you wrote home to Mum and said, “Send me something or other.”

My father, being a doctor, warned me about venereal disease,

but then so did the service anyhow, and there were notices all around the place – just like there are even nowadays in most toilets.

Oh I remember him sitting me down and telling me he wanted to have a talk to me, and telling me practically everything that I

already knew. But I didn’t specifically know what particular venereal diseases were. For instance I didn’t know the difference between syphilis and gonorrhoea, and things like that – which he was able to tell me, but which in those days I didn’t

believe I’d ever go round with anybody who had syphilis or gonorrhoea.

Yes, yeah – but once again as I say he didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know, or though he probably thought he did.

No she kept out of it. She just told him to go ahead and tell me –

just passed the buck.

Yes the first thing that we learned – nothing to do with ships – first thing we learned was how to march and how to form, well what I had learned prior to

getting into the navy – what I had learned with drill in the Shore Cadet Corps or the air training corps, was how to form fours and so forth, but then in the navy you didn’t form fours anyhow, you formed threes. You had lines of threes, and you learned a whole lot of

drill that really wasn’t necessary apart from being a back up to discipline, and being able to parade in Flinders Naval Depot and put on a good show of marching. But it had nothing to do with the war effort.

We then learned sub sections like gunnery, torpedos and we didn’t get out of that sort of set up, which would be good for the training of an able seaman who would end up firing guns and so forth, but very little use to a radar operator.

That’s what I chose, yeah and I chose it partly because I knew that the radar school was in Sydney not like in Flinders Naval Depot, and I was quite keen to be close to home and the school

was originally at South Head, but once we’d finished our radar training we, and this is where being a naughty boy came into it again – going back to my favourite character – I learned

when I left the radar school at South Head, we – and even when I was training at South Head we spent a lot of time at Balmoral Naval Depot. Balmoral Naval Depot was where we virtually lived, and they

went – we were taken by, you know a landing vessel across to Watson’s Bay and would march up the hill to the radar school. But we didn’t live there, we didn’t sleep there, we didn’t have our meals there, apart from

lunch. But breakfast and dinner and our sleeping accommodation was all at Balmoral Naval Depot, and after my radar training had finished and I was still vittled, as they called it, at Balmoral – every day we would fall in

at whatever time it was – eight or nine, can’t remember, AM – would fall in and then we’d be dismissed and we’d be put onto silly little chores like going round and sweeping the gutters or something like that, until it was time to knock off in the evening

and go and have our meals and so forth. It was virtually a waste of time to me, and I found myself and one other sailor – I can’t remember even who he was. He was, oh it could well have been a fellow called Brian Hayward, who I

knew when I was in Balmoral Depot, but what we did – when we were scouting round cleaning gutters in Balmoral Depot, we came to the perimeter fence and we found a hole in the perimeter fence, so what we would do, we would get

into – when we got up in the morning we’d get into our good going ashore clothes, we would put our overalls over the top of that, we’d go to parade in the morning and when that’d finished and we made the appearance of going to sweep gutters or

whatever we were supposed to do, we’d go to the hole in the fence, we would go through the hole in the fence and take our overalls off and just go off ashore for the day, and that – that was the way we spent the time that we had left ashore in Balmoral Naval Depot

while we were waiting to go to ships – to be posted.

Very good. As far as one of the

first things that we were issued with were hammocks – even before we got on board ship we were in hammocks in the depot and we had hooks to put our hammocks on and we were taught how to latch the hammock up every day when you took it down off the hook and put it

in the bin, so in many respects it was very similar to being on board ship. There was one way in which it was rather different and that is that when we were posted to corvettes, we were posted

to ships which were built to have a compliment of about ninety people on board. Now as the war progressed and Asdic [Anti Submarine Detection Investigation Commission, sonar device] – that’s the, you probably know what Asdic is – this is to detect submarines under water, and radar came on, you had to have people on board who could run the

Asdic sets and the radar sets on board. So initially about an extra ten people came on board to the corvettes, and then when the radar also came about an extra twenty people, so ships which were built to house about ninety people eventually ended up with about a hundred and

ten or a little bit more, on board. That meant that the original ninety odd sets of hooks to put a hammock on board weren’t enough to accommodate everyone, so what I found when I’d – when I first joined the ship when I

was new to the ship, obviously I wasn’t – unless a lot of people had left the ship also, I wasn’t going to have a hook to put my hammock on. So I eventually found that the best way to have somewhere to put my hammock – not to hang my hammock, but to put my hammock was to wait

until the evening meal was over and the table was cleared and spread my hammock out flat on the mess deck table. Now it was rather different sleeping under those conditions than the conditions that I learned on board, or in the naval

depot. I didn’t just have somewhere I could hang my hammock, I had firstly I couldn’t – even if I was dog tired, I couldn’t spread my hammock out until after the evening meal was over, and then when I got onto rather than into my hammock

on the mess deck table, it was alright in harbour but when I got onto the stage for instance of crossing the Great Australian Bight with the corvette tossing and turning – corvettes had the

reputation that they would roll on wet grass, which gave you some idea of how they behaved in the sea – particularly in rough sea, and I’d get onto my hammock on the mess deck table, I would put a hand on either side of the mess deck table and I would spend the whole night going

like that trying to instinctively grab the table when there was a heavy roll. There were two things that disturbed you: one is when you almost fell off the table and you’d have to grab the edge of the table, and the other thing was, and in many ways this was even worse – when the ship was pitching,

when it would go right up and then come down with an almighty thump like that, and you’d swear that when you hit back onto the mess deck table, you’d swear that the whole table would collapse. It was just like a crash hitting you in the stomach, and try and get a good night sleep when either of these things were

happening – either when you’re grabbing like that or when you’re going up and pitching – it wasn’t easy, so you had to train yourself to an entirely different type of sleeping pattern when you’re at sea, than the pattern when you’re either in harbour or in a depot.

I couldn’t remember it in the morning, but I’m sure I did.

Not half as much as I got up to in Balmoral Naval Depot. It’s – Flinders is a – it’s a bit different to being in the middle

of a big city where Balmoral was, and being miles away from the nearest, as I say Frankton or Frankston – I can’t remember what it was called, was just a little – it might be much bigger now, being on the – one of the main lines from Melbourne, but in those days

there was no reason to break out of depot, and I think there might’ve been the occasional person who had a girlfriend in Frankton or Frankston who might’ve ducked out of depot – found some way of getting out, but there was never any reason for the majority of sailors there to

try and get out of Flinders Naval Depot. Practically the only things worth doing that there – there’d be an occasional movie show in the depot, there would be a bar and there would be a canteen and if you wanted to have something to drink or

get any extra provisions outside the meal hours, you’d virtually have to stay on the depot. There wasn’t much reason for trying to break out of Flinders Naval Depot.

Well

by and large, pretty good for all the things that mattered. You would find that people who wanted to play the wag, that you could occasionally get away with things.

But the – actually I had two lots of naval discipline in Flinders Naval Depot: one was when I was a trainee initially for becoming an ordinary seaman who would

probably get to the rank of able seaman at the height of your career, and the other was when I – post war when I had graduated in medicine I went back into the navy as a naval doctor, and initially I went

back as a surgeon lieutenant, which was the rank that you got when you had extra qualifications such as a medical degree. I followed that for some years in the naval reserve, but

eventually I worked my way up to being a naval, a surgeon lieutenant commander, which to me was the exalted rank that I finally got up to, and by that time I was in private medical practice. I didn’t have much

time to have retained my rank as surgeon lieutenant commander or higher. I would’ve had to go into the navy at least once a year every year, and I as it was, I found it difficult to get a week off away from my practice anyhow, let alone spend a week off

not away – going down to Flinders Naval Depot again.

There was the couple that I mentioned – the gunnery course, the torpedo

course and the strange thing about the torpedo course – you expected that you’d be shown what a torpedo was, shown how to take it apart and all the bits and pieces of torpedos, but in actual fact, being a torpedo man eventually on board ship was very different. The

torpedo man was virtually one of the electricians on board ship – that’s practical, apart from when you were actually in action and having to launch torpedos. They weren’t very easy, the – you’d be more likely if you came across

enemy forces, you’d be more likely to be using depth charges, which would just go – roll off the back of the ship until the ship was about a hundred yards away and the depth charge had sunk down to its pre – calculated depth, it would then explode and you’d see a

huge spout of foam go out on the surface. But torpedos weren’t used very often because they were difficult to launch from a corvette. You could fire them off out to the side of the ship but I can’t remember actually

in action every firing a torpedo off a corvette. I could remember depth charges going off on numerous occasions.

Ah, I’d probably find it better if I had a bit of scribbling paper to show you what –

Well the radar screen – there were two types of radar screens.

The radar screen that I went onto when I initially went onto corvettes – you’d be in a very little cabinet – a cabinet roughly about – a little bit bigger than the width of this chair and about the same distance or a bit

longer – when you went into the cabinet there’d be room for two of you to sit down side by side, and in front of you there would be a screen which was virtually luminous with a round front

and when you switched the radar on and got it operating, on this round front there’d be a little luminous line going across, and I don’t know whether you know the principle of radar, that you’ve got a transmitter which sends out a beam into the distance until it strikes a solid object – going

across the surface there are two types of surface radar going across, which would come back, be reflected off ships on the surface, and there was another type which had a much bigger type of aerial on the mast of the ship, which would send

impulses up into the air which would come back and be reflected back off aircraft. So basically there would be the type of radar which would send echoes back as they were called then – when the surface radar, for instance,

would hit something, it would be reflected back so that the distance of the object away would be calculated by virtually half of the radar going out, hitting the object and coming back to you, and you would then be able to

calculate what that – how far away the object was from you. Now that was the original type of radar that we would have on board ship, on corvettes. Then later on after I left the two corvettes – HMAS Pirie and HMAS Townsville, I went

onto a destroyer – HMAS Bataan, and that had an entirely different type of radar. That was called a PPI, or a planned position indicator, which – in which you’d

look down on a much larger surface. The radar screens on the corvettes were about that size. The screen on the destroyers was roughly about that size, and you would – the echoes that came back onto that screen were such that they would

give you a plan of everything that was around you, and you would see as the name indicates, planned position indicator would have you in the centre of the screen and all the echoes that came back to the screen would be spread out round you, so it would be virtually almost as though you were up above the

area looking down on a plan of everything that was around you, and that’s what we had to teach ourselves how to recognise everything. With the corvette’s screen like that you just get a trace going across, which would be luminescent rather

like a bright green glow, and you would be where the edge of the screen started and then the trace going across the screen would be large enough to get everything that was

where the echo would go out and be reflected back to you – maybe in some screens you might be able to get a trace that would go right across the screen and come back – that might be three hundred miles away. Other

echoes would be much closer, maybe you’d get an echo from something particularly depending on the size and the density of what the echo hit, for instance you could get a

tracing that would go across, hit a solid ship and come back, and it would look like this: it would be like a flat surface and then a spike, and where it would hit something solid like a ship. That spike would be quite prominent. It would go up

and take up – if you had a screen about that size, it would go up about, depending on the size of the ship and how far it was away – it might be about an inch high. If on the other hand you got an echo from your periscope of a submarine, it would be much smaller and much fainter.

It would be just like a little spike, which might be an eighth of an inch high or something like that, and you’d have to be able to differentiate that to the ordinary greenish glow that was going straight across the screen. The – you referred to that background glow

as the grass, and that’s exactly what it looked like – it looked like very short grass going right across the screen as a straight line. But the spike you referred to as such, as a spike and that’s the sort of echo that you’d get back from a ship, and you’d have to learn to differentiate all sorts of things

would occur – anything that would bounce back – a tracing, an impulse that went out and was – hit something and came back at you, would be referred to as I say, the background would be the grass; you’d have a spike, you’d have all

sorts of things that you’d learn to – for instance I had one occasion when – I don’t think I told you this –

Yes – one rather unusual example: we were on watch one night – myself and my partner, we

would go in two’s and you’d do half an hour looking at the screen, and then your partner would do half an hour, and the whole watch would be four hours, split up into half hour breaks between the two of you. Now I was operating one night and I said to my partner there – he

was also Geoff, a fellow called Geoff Woods, and I said, “Geoff there’s something strange going on here.” There was the background grass and then there was a whole clump as though that somebody had poured fertiliser on the grass and it’d grown very high, and instead of

the line going – can you see that? See the line going across and just a little bit of a jump like that, there was a huge sheet going up and down like that, and I said, “I think that must – the only think I can interpret that as being

is a huge storm, and we’d better keep a track of that and see whether it’s coming closer or further,” and after a while I saw this appearance on the screen – instead of being about a hundred and fifty miles away, being about a hundred miles away and coming directly towards us,

and I walked out onto the upper deck and I noticed – this was up in the tropics by the way, and as often happened at night time in the tropics – rather than sleeping below decks, many of the crew would take their hammocks up to the upper deck and lay them out on the upper deck and go to

bed on the – lying on their hammocks with the nice cool breeze blowing and very comfortable on the upper deck, and I went out and there was the whole of the focsle deck covered with sailors asleep, and I said – I came out and I said, “Look, I’m sorry to disturb you

all, but you’d better not stay there too long because I’ve worked out that in about an hour and a half there’s going to be a huge storm. It’s coming directly towards us, but it will hit us eventually,” and everybody – having disturbed them all like that, they all

said, “Ah you silly radar ratbag. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, there’s not a cloud in the sky.” It was a beautiful tropical night, but as I say not a cloud in the sky, and all that was going to approach to us was about a hundred and fifty miles still away, and

as they all complained and said, “You couldn’t have got a nicer night or a nicer night to be lying on the upper deck,” so I went away and I came back and I called out again, and disturbed them and said, “Look this is now only about half an hour away from us and it really is

going to hit us,” and they all once again looked up, saw what a beautiful night it was, told me to go to blazers, and I went to blazers, and I came back in half an hour – saw everybody scrambling out of this huge storm which was pouring down onto their hammocks, and they’re all trying to bundle their hammocks up and get below deck, and

they did it in a matter of seconds. But they apologised after that.

Oh if you’re alongside

the land it would be – you wouldn’t recognise it as anything apart from – I can’t remember very often being close to a large mass of land,

but if you’re talking about an island some miles away – once again it would be just a straight – the so – called grass would go along and then it would just rise up into a solid shape and go along and come down when you got away from the

actual land. On that – that’s on the radar trace. On the PPI or the planned position indicator, it would look like what land looks like on a map anyhow. It would be just circles or the shape –

it would be like looking at the shape of land on a map where it would go around the limits of the land as it would appear actually on a map.

Largely information that you have round, you would know generally speaking wherever we went, we were going in a convoy, and we would have the positions

of the – where a ship was going to be in relation to you, it was either going to be ahead of you, behind you or to one or other side of you, and you’d be told what position you were going to be in the convoy and you’d just keep that. To give you an idea

of what the variations could be, I remember when we were going to invade Okinawa. I was on watch, I think it was the middle watch – that was midnight till 4am,

and I was on watch and our convoy was surrounding us and I had one ship out to the right, one out to the left and then the ships that we were convoying – one about forty give degrees out to the right and the other one

about forty five degrees behind us, and when I went to bed that early morning, that was the position of the ships that were around us and that was – those were the only ships in the sea in relation to us. I got up in the morning and even before I went

onto watch, I saw a tremendous difference, that instead of having three or four ships around us, as far as we could see in the distance, behind us – the whole sea was absolutely full of ships – packed in as tight as possible, and these were the ships that were going in to

attack Okinawa, and then when I went back into the radar cabinet, you could see all round when we swept the area we would pick up each ship individually as the radar aerial turned around, and

wherever we turned the aerial there were numerous ships on the screen.

I can’t remember that. There was

I remember with aircraft you could, there were signals that would come back from an enemy or not necessarily an enemy, but something or other friend or foe was the terminology that was used. You could get a signal back from a friendly

aircraft that you wouldn’t necessarily get back from an enemy aircraft. But you could tell which were your own. Whether you could – I can’t remember how we would tell what the – I think you could tell whether it wasn’t your own, that you wouldn’t be getting a friendly

signal back. But you could differentiate between the two.

It wasn’t easy by any means, but it wasn’t all that difficult for – there were two categories. There were the radar operators like

myself and then there were the radar mechanics, who virtually had to be in a position where if necessary they can take the whole radar set completely to pieces and put it back again, and those radar mechanics were very much further trained than we were. They would probably have a years training whether we would

only have a matter of a few months.

Yes they did. Radar sets were like wirelesses were before transistors came in. They ran on valves. Do you remember – probably don’t – a valve looked a

little bit like an elongated light bulb and occasionally your radar sets would break down – that was the main reason for having a radar mechanic on board, and he would have to be somebody that knew – I mean you or I could operate a television

set or a wireless without knowing anything about how it works, but if it went wrong we’d have to call in or take our radio or our television to somebody who could fix it.

Well when we finished our initial training at Flinders Naval Depot, they gave us the option of either just

going onto ships as ordinary seamen and being promoted over the years to able seamen and petty officers and things, or they said, “We have several courses that are available for people that would like to do them, and we require people

particularly in these courses,” and one of the ones that they said they particularly required people for was for radar, and I knew nothing about radar at that stage, but an uncle of mine who was very interested in the development of radar, and he told how it had been so vital for

the – both in the Battle of Britain –

I can’t even – I think it was one of these friends of the family who’s called uncle, that sort of thing. I can’t even remember who he was. I can’t even remember what he looked like, but he was certainly interested in how a radar was

used in the Battle of Britain and he recommended it as likely to be a very interesting part of seamanship to do.

No, the, they always kept on needing

more radar people of course, as people were, as conflicts occurred and more and more people were being killed, and there were quite a number of vacancies. So I just tried it and found that I had an aptitude for it and that I could understand

it and it was about as far as I was going at the time, so I just decided might as well do it.

I found that I was approaching a part of the naval life that I had no idea of, and I was just fortunate that I picked it up fairly quickly. We learned to look out at radar screens

and interpret what we saw. They showed us, for example what the plain screen with the grass line looked like and what it looked like when it got echoes back from various things, and then they also showed us what was at that stage, just coming in these PPIs,

or planned position indicators, but when I first went onto corvettes they didn’t have those on board – just the plain screen.

At Balmoral Naval Depot.

Oh yes we’d have I think something like two out of three weekends off for example.

What do most sailors do? Chase the ladies usually. I had quite a number – Balmoral wasn’t far away from Manly so there were quite a

number of friends that I could look up – male or female – preferably the female.

There probably were but I wasn’t interested. There was a Her Majesty’s Australian establishment

called Johnny’s, where most of the sailors who lived away from Sydney would go and hang out – largely to get the grog that was available there I think. But I wasn’t particularly interested in going anywhere but anything that was associated with my Manly

haunts, for instance I was very keen – my second favourite sport was swimming and I wanted – whenever I could to go, either into the surf or into the Manly Baths. My favourite sport probably you wouldn’t realise it because I don’t show any of

the marks of it, but my favourite sport was boxing. I was the open welterweight champion of Sydney University in 1947, and I used to love boxing. I thought it was a great sport. I did quite a bit of boxing while I was in the navy – particularly on board our ship. We had – one of our stokers was

a keen boxer and I used to use him as a punching bag, or vice versa, and we both improved our boxing that way.

No because we only boxed as a form of recreation. In larger

ships there would’ve been, but I went on one larger ship which was Bataan, which was only roughly a little bit bigger than twice the size of the corvettes.

Yes.

Well I had one occasion

where in Port Adelaide one of our crew members was always looking for a fight. He was always getting into fights, and he got into a blue where a fellow nearly twice his size took him on and

he was giving him a bit of a hiding and I made some comments from the sideline, virtually enquiring after how he was going, and he chipped in – he made some remark like,

“Oh it’s all very well for you to criticise, but you can stand off and give criticism but you’re not getting involved,” and I said, “Oh.” I made some remark back that I wasn’t criticising him, and so he said, “Well why don’t you come and do something about it?”

And he got me into a fight with a chap about your height, which is quite a bit taller than my height, and he – I’m sure had he been bloody minded about it, he could’ve given me a real thrashing. But he didn’t. He toyed with me for a while and then we separated

as good friends. But I could’ve been in a very awkward situation on that occasion, but fortunately with most people round about my own size, I could hold my own very well.

Well if they weren’t too drunk, the average naval person going around with his friends or with his girlfriend or girlfriends were tolerated very well. There was also an American

serviceman’s establishment, which I think was in Hyde Park or the – I’ve forgotten he name of the street. The street that goes past David Jones – I think the street itself was called Hyde Park too, but there was an American

serviceman’s establishment there, and a lot of them used to get into trouble – particularly with Australians and Americans opposed to each other. Gosh – he’s – no intention of letting up has he?

I think so!

Very good between the American serviceman and the Australian women – not so good between the American serviceman and the

Australian servicemen, but by and large if they left the women alone they were pretty well tolerated. But the trouble is that they rarely left the women alone.

I liked them, particularly once we got away from

Australia into the islands I had quite a number of American friends and we used to enjoy being close to American ships because we’d get invited to functions on the American ships, such as they’d have movie shows on their ships, which we never got. We never had

– I don’t mean shows that we never got, I mean that we never had movies on our ships, and if we were in some, in the Admiralty Islands, for instance, and we were anchored there,

we would frequently be asked on board when there was a show on, on some American ship. We quite enjoyed going to – I found I had a lot of friendships – not only with Americans but with English ships that were anchored close by. There was a supply ship called

HMS Tyne, for example and I developed a few buddies on board HMS Tyne, and one in particular was a young lad of about the same age as myself, and in the English navy they have a tradition where at midday every day when they’re away from their home land

– particularly in the Pacific, everyone on board ship was given a tot of rum and I had a friend on HMS Tyne who didn’t drink and didn’t get his tot of rum. It was given to him but he never drank it, so he’d come over,

hand it over to me and said, say, “Would you like my tot of rum?” And I said, “Would I ever!” Because it was lovely – the rum that was issued to the Royal Navy was very good quality. I think it was all Jamaica rum, and I used to thoroughly enjoy my friendship with that particular chap who’d pass his tot of rum over every day. I thought he was a

great bloke.

I never drank heavily at any time. I think I drank more when I was in the navy than any other time in my life, but in those days I used to – apart

from that odd tot of rum I would usually only drink beer and on only one occasion did I ever drink beer heavily and that was because we were allowed a quota of one bottle of beer per person per day that we were in the tropics.

That was what was supposed to happen – we were supposed to be just handed out one – the crew members were supposed to line up and be handed out one bottle of beer per day. But the whole time we were in the tropics that was never issued to us because we hardly ever had enough rum on board to give an issue, or enough beer, rather, on board to give an issue.

But when we got back to Brisbane the Admiralty in all its wisdom decided they were going to give us one bottle of beer per day for every day that we had been in the tropics. Now we never got anywhere near that ration, but we ended up with a – just a whole lot of

beer was brought on board the ship and we ended up with about a dozen bottles of beer each. Now what happened then was we were told by the captain that he didn’t mind what we did provided we did one of two things: either kept it on board and drank it on board, or took it ashore and kept it

ashore. But he wasn’t going to have drunken sailors going backwards and forwards across the gangplank carrying their bottles of beer with them. He said, “You can either take it ashore or you can leave it on board,” and we were issued with this issue in cases of

twelve and what we had to do – what we had to decide then was are we going to split open our case and drink it every time we came on board, or are we going to take it ashore somewhere and store it, and we decided we’d go to one of the local freezing works and put our

– keep our beer ashore and drink it when we felt like going ashore or when we got leave to go ashore. But what we didn’t realise was that when we got to the – each of the two or three freezing works that we went to – as we had each opened the cases that we

were taking there, they wouldn’t touch them because they said, “If we put this in our freezer, it’ll all be gone in twenty four hours,” Said, “The workers in the freezer will just get it and take a bottle each per day or whatever they’re going to take, or take the whole lot in one go.” So we decided we have to do

something with it and we went to a very nice little park alongside the Brisbane River and three of us sat down beside the Brisbane River and opened one bottle after the other and polished off what

we could keep on board, and as people walked past us we gradually got the odd friendly person who’d come and join us. I remember we had one soldier who had two pleasant young ladies and one from another service, I think it was the

air force, but however we ended up with quite a crowd alongside the Brisbane River and two policemen came walking along and you know they’re all, “ Oh ’ello, ‘ello, what’s going on here?” sort of thing went on, and we explained that we’d just come back from overseas service and we’d been issued with this beer and we couldn’t take it back on board, so we wanted to finish it

off, but there and then and within about ten minutes the two policemen came and sat down with us and we had a very nice convivial party, which as far as I was concerned lasted while the beer lasted, and one of my friends who has his

photo in one of these albums actually – he’d made quite a friend of the solider that I mentioned, and when we’d finished drinking all our beer, this soldier somehow or other got hold of one of his buddy’s uniforms and my friend put this soldier’s uniform on

and was taken into the other soldier’s camp and arrived back on the ship about one AM, so I was quite happy to drink all the beer that I had – that I was entitled to, but my friend Murray wasn’t satisfied with that line. He was happy to go and share the soldier’s beer as well,

and that was rather typical of what we were like when we first got back from the tropics anyhow.

You’d have to know the person or be lucky in your approach. You wouldn’t just walk up to a pretty looking person and say, “Would you like to come out with me?” Or something like that. I would say more often than not you’d get a knock back. But if you were

lucky enough to have a chance to talk to the person first and become rather friendly, I think it depended a little where you were. I’ve found that I had more success in friendships when I was in either Sydney or Brisbane than I ever did in Melbourne.

I found – I don’t know why – probably because a lot of young sailors were coming out of Flinders Naval Depot and a lot of the women there were not – didn’t feel terribly kindly towards youthful sailors. That’s the impression that I got. But if they had a sailors who was a

friend, I think in Melbourne they would probably have been just as hospitable as they were in Sydney or Brisbane.

I haven’t the faintest idea. I didn’t have to wait terribly long. I would say after I’d been down at Balmoral, a month or two – something like that. Everyone at Balmoral was waiting for a draft to a ship somewhere or other. There were a few people in Balmoral

who were determined to stay in the depot if they could, for the rest of the war if they wanted to, and they became more or less attached to the depot and most of them were bludgers by and large. I would say nine tenths of the people in Balmoral

were waiting to get a draft to a ship and those that weren’t, I didn’t particularly want to know anyhow. For instance there was one chap who became the bookmaker. Every weekend he ran a book and people went round and betted with him and if you were interested in horse racing,

which I was slightly, I might’ve been more interested in having bets with him. But my father was very interested in horse racing and for a while he was a big winner on race meetings out at places like Randwick or in Melbourne – Caulfield

– Rose Hill, places like that, and if I had a Saturday off when he was going out to the races, he’d often take me out with, or my mother and I – he’d take the three of us out to the races. He was quite a

gambler. He used to do quite well; in fact on one occasion he won three thousand pounds on one horse, which was quite a sum of money in those days. But he went on gambling and my mother used to get very annoyed with him because while he started off quite wealthy with his gambling, he very soon gave it

all away – as a lot of gamblers do.

Dogs. I never gambled on anything apart from horses, and even then I very soon realised that there are very few poor bookmakers.

No it

wasn’t played so much in the navy as you could go to certain places where two – up schools were organised and a lot of sailors did bet at two – up, but it wasn’t a navy organised

experience. It was organised by members of the public who – as with a lot of people, could see the sailors coming and would try and take them down, and I kept out of it as much as possible.

Yeah, tombola was played in the navy. I never played it myself, but it was played at Flinders Naval Depot, for instance, quite regularly. But I never played it myself. I hadn’t been particularly interested in gambling apart from a very short time with horse

racing and that was largely because I saw some very good horses racing – Bernborough was one, who was a champion that I was lucky enough to go and see racing at Randwick Racecourse.

I was imagining that I’d be drafted to something like the HMAS Canberra or HMAS Australia or something like that – both of which were county class cruisers, and very much in the news. But you heard a lot about them in the news and

you heard a lot about the engagements they took part in, but I think in the long run I think the people who went to corvettes got on better than most you – because you were a closer knit group of people – had, you had more likelihood of having good friendships on corvettes, or in corvettes, I should say.

Well when I first joined the Pirie, I got quite a shock because Pirie was in dock in Brisbane and I – when I arrived in Brisbane from Sydney

I had to get a taxi to take me to the wharves and then nobody seemed to know where Pirie was. Eventually I found it, and came on board and found that more than half the ship’s company were away on leave and the half that remained behind had to do all the work of a

full ship’s company. So there were only one or two people on board who were interested in looking after a new arrival, so I was a little bit disappointed when I first went on board, but after a few days on board most of the people who remained on board were quite friendly

and very, very quickly a matter of a week or two and I knew practically – wait there I’ll just –

Oh yeah.

I can’t remember. It was someone that – someone that didn’t stay there very

long who was probably waiting for a draft himself, but it’s nobody who I remember as one of my close friends on board Pirie.

Not really. Not as there would’ve been say on board

a cruiser or some larger ship like that, but you didn’t need that sort of thing on a corvette because very quickly you got to know everyone and you either got on well with everyone or you didn’t, and there were very few people that I can ever remember coming on board ship who didn’t get on well

practically straight away.

Yes.

Well as far as working in was concerned, being an ordinary seaman or an able seaman

there is a difference between that which a lot of people wouldn’t know the difference between an ordinary seaman and an able seaman. An able seaman was just somebody who became more and more experienced at the work of a seaman until eventually you could apply to go before the captain and he’d give you a test on

your knowledge of seamanship and the big difference then when you learned, when you rose from being an ordinary seaman to being an able seaman, it was that you got six pounds a week more pay, so it was a very important moment in your life. What was the question again?

Right. Well as I say the ordinary seamen and the able seamen by and large worked anywhere on the ship. You would – the two things that you’d do most of as you’d probably expect with a metal ship, were chipping

rust off the ship and keeping the ships side painted, and that would be – that would account for probably two thirds of the work of the ordinary seaman or able seaman. Then you’d have work on the equipment around the ship – keeping it in good working order, make

sure that all the lifeboats were fully equipped and things like that, and also work to make sure that the interior of the ship was always clean and tidy, and there were times when that was quite a difficult job to do. For instance for a young member of the crew coming

aboard, and I saw this happen on several occasions – when they were working below deck in a ship which was very – which was sailing in very rough seas and pitching and tossing heavily, you would

get very quickly they would go green in the face and be very ill below deck. So where possible with new members joining the ship, they like to try and keep out in the open air as much as possible. But a lot of their work was involved on things that were

below deck, and –

I got – getting seasick doesn’t half describe it. I had – the first trip that I did at sea I went from Brisbane to

Melbourne, which is a very short trip, and that was OK and I thought the rest of my time at sea would be – I was very slightly seasick on that trip. But then we did a trip when we left Melbourne, we were going to Fremantle or Fremantle as I believe they pronounce it, and

I was unfortunate enough to do my second trip at sea – the trip to Fremantle, on one of the roughest recorded trips across the Bight. At least one ship capsized going across and they lost ten men at sea. We didn’t capsize because corvettes were very seaworthy.

They were very rough but they were very seaworthy, but we had mountainous waves coming at us. There would be times when the ship would roll a bit to one side to the other and in a part of the ship that was known as the port waist, there was a deck above us, a deck below us and then you

could go into the inside of the ship straight in front of us. But there was a huge, or appeared huge gap at the side which was called the waist of the ship and there were times when the ship would roll and the waves would be so high they’d come and cover the whole of that and you could look up and just see the translucency of the sea was all you could see

on either the port or the starboard side of the ship –

Yes. The sea was probably – it was probably one of the biggest storm that they ever had, and it took

us ten days to go across from Melbourne to Fremantle, and apart from just leaving Melbourne and just arriving at our destination, practically every moment of that trip was one of the roughest trips that – and I went through typhoons and all sorts, and tornadoes in the

south west Pacific, and none of them were ever as rough as that. It really was an initiation into seasickness that absolutely immunised me from – I was never seasick again for the whole of my sea time. So that was one good thing about it. It wasn’t much good getting that immunisation but

certainly I became a – you had to become a good sailor otherwise you didn’t survive.

Oh I did for that week across the Bight, but once I got ashore there and started enjoying West Australia, and the west is – I don’t know if either of you have been there any time, but it’s a lovely

place – in fact my wife and I went for a trip over there just over a year ago and I still like the west. If I ever lived anywhere but in Canberra I think I’d like to live in the west. I like Sydney very much, but I don’t think I can ever remember a place that I liked more than the west.

By and large there wasn’t – I was so sick for those ten days that just about all I was doing was lying on a wet deck not even able to get up. I would go down at mealtime

– I couldn’t stomach any meal to eat except – but what I could do – I could go – we had little radiators on the side of the ship and I could put a piece of bread on the end of a fork and I could toast that piece of bread and put a bit of butter on it and keep that down, and as a result of that I got the nickname

of Toastie on board ship, because the only time anyone in the crew ever saw me was toasting a piece of bread. But fortunately that particular period only lasted going across the Bight. As I say I stood up to some of the most savage

seas that you could imagine and never, ever felt seasick again.

I thought the food was reasonably good. Everybody always complained about something, but I don’t think I ever had to complain because I thought – I’d heard stories about how food at sea could

be bad, but we had no weevils in anything or anything like that, and the food was particularly good whenever we got into a new port. When we’d been at sea for a couple of weeks and most of the rations were getting old, it mightn’t be quite so good, but you can bet your life that the first thing that happened when you got into a new port, is you get very

fresh provisions on board. You get nice meat, nice vegetables, yeah. I couldn’t criticise the navy as far as providing good food where they could, and often of course we were so far out at sea that they couldn’t provide that food. But whenever we got in, where they could provide it, it

was good.

Yes – fresh water was no problem, we could make our own fresh water.

Yes, the engine room would do that. They’d get water on board and condense it or boil it up and condense the

steam into water and it – clean water had to be provided for the engine itself and it – there was no problem in making more for showers and drinking.

By condensing it,

boiling it and condensing the steam into water.

No I wasn’t at all. That was all done by the engine room.

Next trip was up to Shark Bay, which is about half way up the west

Australian coast, and we virtually had to turn and run from Shark Bay because a report reached us that a large flotilla of Japanese ships were sailing down the north west coast and there was some much larger ships than

ours in that contingent. So we went straight back to Perth, or to Fremantle. There were no ships in Perth itself, but Fremantle is the port for – in the same way that Port Adelaide is the port for Adelaide.

We never heard of anything more. We heard a rumour. That could well have been just to start people talking or of course we could only talk among ourselves. Everywhere in those days there were notices would be ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, and you didn’t talk about

anything when you went ashore that had to do with your service life.

Shark Bay.

Shark Bay – I think it was just a navigational exercise. I can’t remember being involved in doing anything when we got there, and we were only there for a couple of days, but I,

I remember years later probably twenty or thirty years later when I used to fly light aircraft, I flew up the West Australian coast and flew over Shark Bay, and Shark Bay is a beautiful area viewed from the air. If you’ve never seen it,

go there sometime and thoroughly recommend it. It was a most picturesque area. Far more picturesque looking down on it than being in these bays themselves.

No. I don’t think we were ever told why we – the next time

we were told what we were going to do was when we had got back across the Bight and back to Sydney, and even then we weren’t told until we were actually out at – in fact as far as I knew I had met my parents the morning we left Sydney

Harbour – I’d arranged to meet them and go to Randwick races with them, and I was just able to get onto them and say that, “We’re leaving harbour, and I don’t know where we’re going,” and what we did was to sail out of Sydney heads, turn north and then get told by the captain on board ship what was

going to happen, and to be told that we were going to the Admiralty Islands and told where the Admiralty Islands were, and then when we got to the Admiralty Islands we were told that we were going to the Philippines.

I had done something naughty. One of the – one of the lady friends that I had at the time, I had written a letter to her which I thought was quite an innocent letter. I had mentioned that I was very tired from – we’d been ammunitioning ship and getting ammunition on board and having to carry it from

the top deck down to store the ammunition, and the next thing I knew I was on a charge for revealing military secrets, and I was given thirty days stoppage of leave and that was practically the whole of the time when I was in Fremantle. So

I saw about four or five days – I’ve seen it many times since and I think it’s very nice.

I wasn’t innocent. I had written that letter and it was pointed out to me that if that letter had fallen into the wrong hands –

mind you I think it was greatly exaggerated. I don’t think there was anything there that anyone could ever have regarded as dangerous talk or anything like that, but our skipper at the time was the person that had to make the decision, and he said that – and I’d

been told all sorts of yarns about people writing dangerous things in letters and told that you’d be taken out – off to a firing squad in some cases. So I was quite happy just to get a warning and stoppage of leave. But I was very sorry that I missed out on the chances to go ashore in Fremantle on

that occasion.

Well that captain, I only had – that was about the only time that I met him when I was on board and he left the ship then when we got to Sydney.

I can’t remember. I’d have to look that up. But I remember the next captain that we got – he was so different. He was a person called Ben Travis. I think – I don’t think his name was Ben at all, but there was an English author known as Ben Travis,

and I think he got the nickname of Ben after that author, but Ben Travis was so very different. The captain up to that time was a part time. He’d only gone in during the war, in other words he was a reservist, and not all that confident, but Ben Travis

was not a RAN, he was RN. He was from the Royal Navy. He was co-opted by the Australian Navy, and I think he was put on board the ship to knock us all into the right shape, because largely, I think it was largely

because we were going into the tropics and they knew what would happen after we got to the tropics. They already knew that we’d be going up to places like the Philippines and Okinawa and so forth, and he had to be above average to

take part in all the things that we were going into. He had one fault, which a lot of Royal Navy officers had and that was that he liked the grog too much and his steward used to often

tell us yarns about how he was in his cabin and practically paralytic at night time and how much the steward said that because he didn’t like him or what, I don’t know. But we got reports about how he was – every second night he would be practically paralytic. But he was a good –

he was a good navigator, a good sailor and the other fault that he had was that occasionally he was seasick. By that stage I felt very proud because I’d got over my seasickness and the skipper hadn’t.

Well in actual fact the captain has very little to do with the discipline on board ship. The person who has the most to do with discipline on board ship was the person who was known as the buffer. The coxswain and the buffer were the two men on board

ship who were – and the buffer more so than anything – he was a chief petty officer and he could keep any member of the ship in line and it’s just too bad for you if you got in his bad books. I fortunately – I got

on very well with him and I still get on well with him. I meet him at naval reunions and he’s a very nice chap, and I still send him a Christmas card. But – and not only that he also came from Manly, which was rather fortunate – or Seaforth actually, and my wife came from Seaforth

too.

Yes, the next person who was replaced was the first lieutenant before the captain left the ship – the first lieutenant was a very popular person and it just so happened when Ben Travis left the ship,

that Lieutenant McKenzie, who was the first lieutenant, took over and he was the best captain of all. I met him for a very short time after I was discharged. We both ended up at Sydney University at the same time, but I only saw him once or twice. I don’t know whether he gave up his course or what, but

I saw him there and he was a very good – I’ve got a photo of Lieutenant McKenzie in the album there.

He was very fair. He was a very good seaman. He was never drunk, never sick – he was just about the perfect captain really.

You couldn’t fault him.

I think he was replaced after I left the ship so I have no idea what happened to him. He was still on board the ship when we got to Tokyo Bay. He was still onboard the ship I think when the ship was decommissioned. The ship was

eventually sold to the Turkish Navy and was sailed over to Turkey.

Fortunately not. There was nobody

– we had one sailor who was a nice young boy and he’s the sort of person who would’ve been a target for homosexuals had there been one homosexual on board. But there wasn’t, and that’s one thing I can say – I was very proud to be able to say that I was

on, or in three ships in the Australian Navy and there wasn’t one homosexual on any of them. But I have heard of other ships that had homosexuals on board. There was even one case where one of them, I think murdered one of the others and threw him overboard during that era, but fortunately he wasn’t in

our ship.

There was never a reported case of venereal disease on board any of the three ships. I’m sure that venereal disease in the same way that it existed with the

army and the air force, I’m sure it occurred among sailors, but I think most of them knew that they had to be careful.

I don’t know

when you can say that trip really started. From the time we left Sydney we went to Admiralty Islands, if you like to call that the second trip, and from the Admiralty Islands we then went up to the Philippines to take part in the – in fact I have a medal

for the liberation of the Philippines.

Admiralty Island I think was just a staging place where it was already known in naval headquarters that we would be going to the Philippines and eventually to the invasion

of Okinawa. But at that stage of course we had no idea we were going to go to Japan. We only went to Japan because as part of the ships that were bombarding Japan, we eventually ended up going into Tokyo for the surrender. All that happened so quickly. One minute

we were getting news, and of course the thing that made it all happen so quickly was the dropping of the atomic bombs – the first we ever heard of an atomic bomb. Nobody had ever talked about it until they were dropped, and then we were so close to Japan at that time that every ship that was in that region

was virtually designated to go into Tokyo Bay once the surrender had occurred.

I am very scared.

Once again I think

virtually being put into storage ready to go further north. I don’t think we, we virtually did nothing apart from going ashore a couple of times when we were in the Admiralty Islands. Wasn’t long – I think we were only in the Admiralty Islands about three to four weeks.

Yep – we went into Leyte Gulf, which was a very, very famous part of the Philippines. In fact shortly before we got to the Philippines the battle of Leyte Gulf has been recorded in many places as the greatest maritime battle since

Trafalgar. I only saw that a few weeks ago I think. I wasn’t aware of it being that important, but apparently it was.

After the battle, not – we didn’t get there for the actual battle itself, but the main role we had was

just clearing up, and we were very close to the offshore, I think I probably have a photo in the album of this too – the offshore part of Leyte Gulf, and we actually went ashore and you know, looked for Japanese hiding in

dugouts and things like that. There were not only dugouts close to where we were ashore, there was an old Spanish fort – all that area of course the Spaniards were there long before the Americans, and there was an old Spanish fort, which as a lot of old stone buildings had

carvings into the wall. One of the carvings had the date 1550, so it was a lot older than we were.

No, we were being sent ashore to look for Japanese who were hiding in dugouts and places like

that ashore.

Yes, yep.

Well nothing happened any of the patrols that I was one. We just had to go around carrying a rifle and looking in case, as you probably heard with a lot of the Japanese – when they are on the losing side they’d get into

dugouts and stay there for months – in fact numerous ones weren’t found until many years after the war and they’d been staying in parts of the Philippines and other areas where they didn’t even know the war had ended.

Oh well mainly just going round and seeing empty dugouts where maybe a Japanese had been hiding for some time until they’d managed to get away or been captured by other troops who’d got there before we had. We saw a lot of – that area was very humid and there was

a lot of overgrown jungle around the place, and we had to scout round and try to find if there were still any surviving Japanese. I didn’t see a single Japanese ashore on any of the trips that I went on, but –

No, no – nothing – we were just looking for them. You remember that the Japanese had been defeated for weeks or possibly even months before we even got there, so they were just a thing of the past as far as we were concerned – unless we found any, we didn’t.

No. They probably did a few weeks earlier, but not in the few ships that got there at the time we did.

Leyte Gulf.

No, but I’m sure that had I been scuba diving then and known where to scuba dive there would’ve been a lot.

No – anything like that wouldn’t stay very long in a tropical place like that. It would all disintegrate very quickly.

No – none at all, ceased. A lot more

aircraft movement round Okinawa than – ah probably a few weeks earlier in the Philippines there would’ve been, but by the time we moved on and we didn’t strike much in the way of aircraft movement until we were practically at Okinawa, and then of course the sea was so full of aircraft carriers

that there were planes flying everywhere.

No. We did a little mine sweeping work after we came back from the tropics and we did some strange sort of – I don’t s’pose this would still be classified, I think I can mention this:

the Pirie went down to – what’s the bay north of – just north of Sydney?

Pittwater, yes – that’s right yep – we went down to Pittwater and we started doing some strange thing. We were virtually being

chased by torpedos. Fortunately I don’t think they had any warheads on them, but we were going up and down Pittwater and they were firing torpedos at us that were – that would pick up the wake of the

ship and not like the sort of torpedo in which done with the ship side – on and a torpedo goes straight through to hit the – one side or other of the ship, this was torpedos being fired into the wake of the ship, and the

torpedo would pick up the wake of the ship and turn on to our track as to where we were and then come after us, and I think as far as I know that it would then go under us, because nothing ever hit us. But that’s what we were doing, and we were never, or the ship’s

crew was never briefed onto what exactly – the captain might’ve been told what the basis of that was.

Pirie, yep.

Yep, Mmm.

Yes it was all convoy. Our main job was

each corvette in the convoy would look after three or four merchant ships, tankers, supply ships – things like that, and we’d take them to wherever our destination was.

No we were never attacked by submarines. We had an incident before we went up to

the Admiralty Islands where – not the radar, the Asdic picked up a ping from what was thought to be a submarine under the ship – just outside of Sydney Heads. But that was never confirmed and nobody would ever tell us what it was

that we pinged. They feel that it could’ve well been a wreck, because there were quite a number of wrecks around Sydney. But we definitely got an Asdic pick and a ping – I should say – and there definitely was something underneath us.

Yep.

Yes I – when

we were going anywhere into action I was just below the top deck. There was a staircase that went up from the mess deck up to the top deck and I was stationed at the bottom of that, and I had to receive ammunition

that was passed down or ammunition that was being passed up because the – that picture that I showed you with the four inch guns, with the – I’ve forgotten his name – Johnno at the back of the gun, was practically directly above that staircase, and I’d

pass it up the length – I think I used to have to take about two steps after the ammunition got to me – had to take about two steps and then I could pass it up to the person at the top of the staircase and he in turn would pass it to that person that position that Johnno was, and he would load it into the breach of the

four inch gun. So it had no specific name. I’m not – a named, an ammunition provider or anything, it was just a matter of knowing where the action station was so that as soon as action stations were called I had to go to my post and we all had to go to our respective spots unless the one thing that I would have to go to if I

was – if my post was – my radar post, I would have to go to the radar cabinet, but we’d each be in turn to go there in the same way that the – whoever was operating the Asdic – that would be his post to go to at

action stations.

Yeah –quite, quite apart from our routine work, we would be allocated either a similar working, for instance if I was allocated the

radar spot –

If I was allocated to be on duty at radar when action stations came, I would go there. But if I was allocated the spot to pass the ammunition up then I would be at the foot of the staircase that went up

to the four inch gun.

Yes it was just a matter of opening the radar cabinet door and going and sitting down with one – there would always be two of us on radar post. I would be one of them and my partner Geoff Woods would

be the other person.

Well that would depend on – once again you’re talking about at action stations. It would be a matter of passing the information that we got from the radar – we had a voice pipe that would go straight up to the bridge and if we

saw anything that appeared dangerous or whatever significant was happening we would have to report it to the bridge.

Just plain language: “Suspect vessel on our starboard bough at

one eight five degrees,” or whatever it happened to be – just reporting virtually whatever was happening outside the ship that could – anything that could effect the ship or: “Aircraft identified at

two seven zero, approximately thirty five miles,” or whatever it happened to be.

Not very often. Usually it was when we were reported to go to action stations at places for instance, it

happened approaching Okinawa practically every day when we were offshore in Japan, but that was about three hundred miles off, so it would only effect us if anything was reported, say aircraft approaching or something like that.

Yes, you’d be on for four hours at a time and eight hours off, and that would rotate each day. One day I’d say do the morning watch, the next the afternoon watch and the next the middle watch, or

the dog watches – the dog watches were two hour watches. You’d be the first on and the last on watch.

Just continue whatever the particular –

Well the usual thing – say it would depend on what you were doing. If for instance you’d be on the middle watch and you were going to do the morning watch, at 4am the person who – the second person who was on the middle watch, as I mentioned before, there would be two people on each watch, and the person who wasn’t

actually operating the radar set at the time, would go down and give the person a shake who was next to come on, and then he’d go back up and sit next to his partner again waiting for whatever else happened.

It’s a

long time ago. I think at the time eating was very important, but I can’t specifically remember. I think we’d come off for instance, the morning watch and immediately would be relieved, say thinking of

the morning watch going from 4am to 8am, I think it was, and we would then be late getting to breakfast and then – wait a minute, just think of another time which would be more like –

these things happened a long time ago. I’d go off – the afternoon watch for instance, to be relieved by the people

taking the dog watches, the first, the first dog watch would be four till six I think, and we’d finish the afternoon watch at 4pm and then we’d just have to wait round until hopefully the meal started – usually about 6pm,

but usually fit that in between the dog watches and the afternoon watch. The cooks were very good. They would always try to time the arrival of the food at the table and we would have people on mess deck duties would have to go and get the food from the galley and take it and make sure

that it was on the table by the time people came off their watch to go on – to have their meal, and then you’d have to try and time that to fit in with when your next watch was. So it was rather a complicated arrangement between getting off watch, getting to your meals and having people bring the meals into you.

Usually read was the – I suppose there would be people who would play various games – for instance there were quite a lot of card games were played – poker and things like that. I never played poker. I was always a bridge player, but not on board ship but later based in the post war era I

learned to play bridge, and I far preferred – this is contract bridge of course, I far prefer to play contract bridge than I would any other card games.

Quite a distance away. We were

on the upper deck, which the radar cabinet came off the upper deck just directly below the bridge, so that we could actually speak directly to whoever was on duty on the bridge, and the Asdic was below the best mess deck, so

there would be at least one full deck separating the Asdic and the radar.

All the reporting was done to the bridge as far as reporting what was happening on the radar set. As far as anything else was concerned as far

as – who I reported to would depend on what I was doing. For instance I would report to the bosun’s mate if I was doing cleaning work on the upper deck. There would be a person in charge of every operation that went on in the ship, so you’d know what your allocated task was and

consequently you’d report to that person. As I mentioned before, the buffer was probably the commonest person that I would report to when I was off watch and on the upper deck doing work around the – keeping the ship tidy and clean. The bridge would be

who I’d be reporting to if I had reports from the radar to pass on.

No, I had a very good rapport with the buffer. He was a very nice guy – very helpful, always – always helpful

to come and see new people on board the ship – young people, even after I was a very experienced person on the upper deck I would see the buffer going round looking for people who didn’t understand what they were doing and try – he was a very – probably

one of the most useful men on the ship. His name was Ken Cunningham, and Ken was very liked and very respected for his ability.

Yes, very.

I think it virtually comes down from

the senior officers, it goes down a chain to the petty officers and then the petty officers would be happy, provided they have a good crew. So it’s a bit – you could have somebody who was a bastard above you and

a person who was, for instance a good officer, but not very efficient. Wouldn’t be respected as much as a person who was a very efficient person, but not easy to get on with. Anyone who interfered with the

efficiency of the ship was always regarded as better off ashore.

No. There was, I believe, in the

incident that led up to the so – called mutiny on board the Pirie. The skipper was subject – I can give you a book to read about this if you want to.

No, no. There might be an occasional person who had been on board the ship at the time who might say, “Oh well, apart from what happened at the mutiny – ” or something like that, but they wouldn’t dwell on it. Nobody was ever particularly worried by the fact that there’d been a mutiny in the ship, because practically all the so-called mutineers,

in other words the people who were picked out by the captain at the time, had been sent to jail – unjustly I might add.

No. Exactly, exactly.

No, no, no – this all happened after –

Oh yep, yep.

No, not after the Philippines, after Okinawa.

After the Philippines we went to Okinawa. From Okinawa we went offshore Japan.

The day that I got up and saw

the ship, saw the sea full of ships.

That as far as – before I went on watch – I didn’t see this initially on the radar – before I went on watch

I went up for a breath of fresh air and was walking around the upper deck and I couldn’t believe what I saw – every direction I looked in as far as I could see there were ships of all sizes – everything from battleships and aircraft carriers down to corvettes and practically motorboats – very

small motor patrol boats I think they used to call them in those days.

It probably would’ve been about – at a guess I would say probably about

a hundred to two hundred miles south east of Okinawa.

There were no specific orders to me. As far as I was concerned the next order was to go on watch when I was –

when my next watch was due, and of course that was very interesting because I wanted to see what all this looked like on the radar. It was quite dramatic. There – radar echoes all over the place in every direction we turned the aerial

there’d be radar echoes.

No, no – well it just gave us the information that we were surrounded by a great number of ships. What would’ve made it rather useless

would have been if we’d got a message that, “It was suspected that there were enemy ships within the surrounding ten miles,” or something like that, “Please give us a bearing on any suspect ship.” It would’ve been very hard to do that because how any

ship could’ve got in among that massive shipping, I don’t know. But fortunately no such order was – ever came.

Avoiding a collision with the large number of ships that were close to us – that’s all we could’ve

done. It would’ve been no point in saying there were five ships forty miles away from us, another six only ten miles away from us, and the next thing you hear and feel a loud noise when we’d had a collision. We did actually have a

collision at sea on one occasion when our skipper was getting supplies off a tanker or a supply ship – I can’t remember. The ship much bigger than our own and the two ships were running parallel to each other, transferring material

from one ship to the other, and because the two ships were close sending material across, you couldn’t – there was no way you could get packages across on the bosun’s chair if you were too far away. If you were a mile away from the next ship

you wouldn’t be able to fire a line across far enough to be able to transfer things. So you had to be within a reasonable distance, and if you get too close then the two ships that are likely – that are parallel with each other and likely to be too close get a drag – the side of the

ship acts like the wings on aircraft and suction is created as water passes past the ship and we did have one occasion when the ships were so close that our two ships did actually have a slight collision. The wing – say if that was our ship and

that’s the ship alongside, the wing of our bridge actually bumped the wing of the, and I think I have a photo of that in somewhere in one of these albums. But I’m not sure which one, but I’m sure I did get a photo of it.

Just to keep to whichever designation we were given and then proceed to just in other words virtually hang around until you were told where to go, and the next thing that we were told to go was to head north and we headed north until we came to a set

position offshore of Japan when, which I think when we first got there it was about three hundred miles east of Japan.

Just to keep convoying other ships, like tankers, supply ships and so forth, until we

were virtually the whole time we were anywhere was virtually to be there and keep a watch out for enemy aircraft, enemy shipping and so forth.

There were no appearances of ship, and surprisingly –

well not surprisingly really when you realise what was happening in Japan at the time, but no – we weren’t attacked by any aircraft or anything like that.

Yes, yes.

Well we

expected we would be convoying ships that were actually bombarding and invading Japan and putting troops ashore – none of which ever happened of course, and we were very surprised when we were suddenly told to go into Tokyo Bay.

No. The first news that we got of the bombs was when they actually exploded on the Hiroshima or however you like to pronounce it – Hiroshima, whichever way it goes, and Nagasaki, and we heard directly after they’d been dropped,

and the next thing that we heard very soon after that – within a day or two of hearing of the first atomic bombs going in, we were just suddenly told that all hostilities had ceased. We had an English ship alongside us – I think

it was passing mail to us or something like that, and they were all cheering and saying, “The Japanese have surrendered!” And then the next thing – the next piece of news we heard after that was an announcement that the ship’s course is now

set for Tokyo Bay, and we didn’t realise then how close we were to Japan. It was only when we actually started to steam into – that was in the evening and by morning we were practically at the entrance to Tokyo Bay.

Well so many people have told me since the war ended that the atomic bomb should never have been dropped on Japan, and

my reaction when it was dropped, was great relief – because I can assure you if they hadn’t dropped the atomic bombs, there would’ve been millions of people murdered in an invasion – and that’s what we were all expecting – that an invasion would follow

the dropping of the bombs, or the invasion would’ve happened at that time anyhow whether the bombs had been dropped anyhow, and that the Japanese would never have surrendered readily following an invasion – that they were all prepared to fight to the death, and I’m sure they would’ve. They were quite fanatical

by that time.

Well the first time there was any celebration was when we got the news from the British ship alongside us, that the Japanese had surrendered. I think that

that was the important factor, and everyone was greatly relieved then that they hadn’t become involved in bloodshed between, or further bloodshed between the two nations.

No, no

nothing like that –

– nothing like that. I think they were all – to a certain extent while they were well aware of the fact that the Japanese had been asking for what they got, there was a lot of sadness that so much life had had to be

sacrificed to reach that stage. But certainly there was relief that there wasn’t going to be an invasion.

A strange feeling – we sailed into Tokyo Bay – there were already three or four ships

standing by in Sagami Bay, which was a bay which was actually just outside Tokyo Bay, and three or four ships had arrived. I think one cruiser and two or three destroyers. I know Bataan was one. I think the Shropshire

was another, but there were several obviously identifiable Australian ships waiting outside the entrance to Tokyo Bay, which came straight off Sagami Bay, and as we sailed past them we were all just relieved that we would be

going into Tokyo Bay with one exception that there was still just that sneaking feeling, “I wonder if this is genuine. I wonder if we’re not walking into a trap.” There were still people who felt that was possible. But I don’t think we – I didn’t believe that it would’ve happened, but when people mentioned this, “Are we going into a trap?” Or, “Are they

fair dinkum?” I couldn’t help wondering.

No, we were so far from anything. I can describe that there were a great number of ships spread around Tokyo Bay, but we actually – we didn’t sail into

Tokyo Bay on the day of the surrender. The surrender was signed, as you know, aboard the Missouri by Douglas MacArthur, and that actual surrender was the following day when the ships had all got into the bay, and then the scene – I can describe that scene. It was one of the most

memorable days of my life. I was – the whole ship was given the day off. I was sitting up on the folksall of Pirie and I looked into the distance and I couldn’t believe what I saw. I thought I had spots in front of my eyes. There were just a whole lot of tiny little spots scattered right across

the horizon – seemingly motionless, almost like flies suspended in mid air, and the next thing that happened was that the sound reached me and gradually increased, that there was just a buzz to start with and then gradually getting louder sound, and then the next thing that happened was it was quite obvious that these spots

on the horizon were gradually increasing aircraft – increasing in size as it approached us, and then the aircraft finally reached us – it took quite a while to reach us, and right up to about ten thousand feet high, about every five hundred feet was

another layer of aircraft. It went right down. A corvette is a pretty small ship and you don’t look down on much – you look up to most things. But there were planes going past us that were so low that I could look down on the planes that were going past, and it was an incredible piece

of navigation to fly across Tokyo Bay, avoiding each other and avoiding all the shipping that was in Tokyo Bay – I think it was a brilliant show and I think it certainly must have made the Japanese very glad that they had surrendered when they did because thousands of aircraft went across Tokyo Bay that day.

Well it was rather different from the time of getting in –

The next event was the following day – the day after the surrender ceremony, which we didn’t see the surrender ceremony at all, that took part on the Missouri, where General MacArthur

was signing the surrender ceremony. However we knew where the Missouri was – some distance from us, and we could imagine what was going on there. Then the next day we weren’t told about anything that was going to happen, but it was a very memorable day to me because we were all just sitting around

wondering what was going to happen – if anything was going to happen, and an escort carrier – I don’t know if you know what escort carriers were, but escort carriers were merchant ships which had been turned into small aircraft carriers by Henry Kaiser [American shipbuilder], so that

the Americans wouldn’t have to spend billions of dollars to build one aircraft carrier. A lot of small aircraft carriers could go around the Pacific with landing and taking off decks

put on top of merchant shipping and they were given the name an escort carrier because they used to go around escorting convoys that had shipping which was too valuable to be unprotected or just guarded by the odd corvette

or something. These were virtually mobile aircraft that were being moved around on the decks of small carriers which were just large enough to carry maybe something between about five to ten aircraft on board, and

one of these was called HMS Speaker, and HMS Speaker was doing a tour around every ship in the fleet and as they went round the word came across that they were all carrying prisoners of war who had been

released from Japanese POW camps and put onto these aircraft carriers and were being taken out of Tokyo Bay, and as the HMS Speaker passed us, we could see that there were numerous American sailors dressed

in immaculate white uniforms – up to the end of the war they’d been dressed in khaki’s, but they’d changed into their immaculate full time naval uniforms – the tropical uniforms as opposed to their blue uniforms, and they were standing alongside the most raggedy

bunch you could ever – I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it without being emotionally involved, but they were standing alongside a bunch of men in ragged garb – every piece of clothing

you could imagine and they were the ex – prisoners of war who’d been released onto the ship to be taken home, and as the ship went past I was moved to this emotional stage where I had to say or do

something, and I thought everybody would think I was silly because I started singing Waltzing Matilda, and every member of our ship’s company joined in with me, and I didn’t feel half as silly, and we sang the whole of Waltzing Matilda as the ship went past us, and then

as we finished a very British voice came over the loud hailer, “Righto, chaps, three cheers for the Aussies,” and the whole of the ship’s company of HMS Speaker gave us a cheer as they went past, and I think that was probably the most emotional part of the war for me, and

seeing these men who’d been locked up in a Japanese – in fact one of my friends from Manly had died just a few days before that happened in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. He was the son of an English doctor, oh sorry – son of a Manly doctor who was a colleague

of my own father – a man who was well known in the sporting world, called Roy Minnett and his son Peter Minnett had died just before the surrender, and I only found that out when I got home. But

anything that ever happened to me during the war – nothing moved me any more as much as that day. I’m sorry – I hope I haven’t spoilt your tape. It – nothing has ever happened in my life since then that moved me so much as that day,

and I doubt if anything ever will now. I think I’m getting too old to be that emotional.

Well it was a wonderful moment in my life, and Michael, thank you,

and Chris [interviewers], for allowing me to share these memories with you.

No. No we just saw – it went round the whole fleet and then went out of Tokyo Bay, and we didn’t go

out of Tokyo Bay til the day after.

No didn’t go ashore in Japan. I was still nominated as part of the occupation force and sent a certificate for that, but the only part of the occupation that I took part in was in Tokyo Bay itself.

Oh we weren’t far enough up to see anything of Tokyo itself, but we were just offshore from Yokahama, which was further down the bay, and what we could see of Yokahama was very similar to the scenes you saw in Nagasaki

and Hiroshima – just the shells of buildings everywhere, because long before the atomic bombs were dropped, Tokyo and Yokahama had been given a very heavy going – over by American aircraft.

We returned home shortly after that. We went – this is so long ago I can’t remember the name of the place, but I think it was Moratai on the way back. No I’m sorry – we called in briefly after we left Tokyo Bay we went back

to part of the Philippines – just to stop and refuel and continue on our way, and from the Philippines we came back via Moratai, which we only once again just called into very briefly. I think once again just to

refuel and then straight back to Australia.

Yes, yes – yes we all got leave when we got back to Australia.

A little bit like what, it was just like for me here – very emotional

and they – I felt sorry for my sister because I got all the welcoming treatment. I have a very – I’ve been very fortunate with my family. There was only my sister and

I – we were the only two children of my parents and I’ve had a son and three daughters myself and I’m very proud of them all, as I am of my wife,

as I am of my little dog. Charlie is another one of our family. The dog has had a lot more

in its favour than the computer ever did and I got rid of the computer after a short time.

I think the war

to me, made me feel very glad that I went to the war when I did and not like those poor people in the blitz. I thought the Europeans and the English had a

terrible war with a wonderful outcome of course, but I think we – some of our population particularly those who were prisoners of war, had a terrible war. But I think that I was very proud to be

in the navy and contribute something towards our victory, and I think there were a lot of people who suffered a lot more than we did, and I

feel so sorry for the people who suffered under Hitler particularly and to a certain extent the Japanese, particularly the prisoners of war.

Anzac Day is the most wonderful day of the year to me, and I

wear my medals very proudly on Anzac Day, and we had a recent corvettes reunion here in Canberra – a reunion of all the corvettes societies in Australia, and I wore those medals very proudly during that reunion.

I would say if you have to go to war to defend your country, by all means do so. But I would like to see the day when wars weren’t

necessary, when things could be solved peacefully. I don’t feel that going to war ever really solves anything for anybody apart from the victors, and causes terrible misery on the way.

No, I think you’ve both done a wonderful job and I’ve enjoyed being interviewed by you both.

Thank you Michael and thank you Chris.