Australians at War Film Archive

Yeah, the whole seventy seven years. I was born in Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania in 1927. Early days are a bit hard to remember of course but I started school in 1933 at Launceston Grammar School.

I was there until 1945 at the end of the Second World War. In that time it was pretty full of life and my mother and father looked after me pretty well, and educated me to a reasonably good standard. Launceston Grammar School was good to me, I learnt to play footy, row, tennis, cricket – all those sort of things, and ultimately when I left school at the end of the war, I did continue to row a lot with the

Launceston Rowing Club. Then I became a coach. Lots of sporting activities, played a bit of amateur league football for Launceston, and in ‘48/’49 I was stricken with pneumonia and pleurisy and I was in hospital for several weeks after that, when it was decided that I should go to some warmer climates, which was up in Queensland. I was employed by the Shell Company ultimately

in 1949, and they went to Rabaul in New Britain with Shell Company, as I said, and I was an assistant depot superintendent. We did aviation refuelling, looked after the depot – thousands and thousands of fuel oil drums. That was an interesting life, it was just after the Second World War and it was interesting to look around at the devastation in the town and the amount of material

that was there after the Japanese were forced out of the place, or forced to surrender. So, I joined the air force when the Korean War started in ’50 when I was in Rabaul, and when I came out of there I went straight to Number 8 Flying Training School at Point Cook. That was twelve months of intensive flying training, and from then on they were a bit short of

pilots and aircrew up in Korea at that time – things were very hurried up in those days. Went through the operational training unit at Williamtown for three months, and then up to Korea and I did the last six months of the Korean War, so I had a pretty comfortable war, you might say in that respect. I did forty nine missions in Korea, over Korea, as opposed to Jack Murray who did three hundred and thirty three missions, which is quite

a lot in two or three tours to do that. Anyway, I had what you might call a comfortable war. Everything’s ok in air force flying and operational flying and that sort of thing until you get hit – it’s alright until that point you might say. Life in Japan was pretty nice and easy in those days, and after that I came home and I became a flying instructor for two years, and I was based here at Uranquinty in New South Wales.

That was not an elementary, an advanced flying training school, and let’s see, nineteen months actually I was there, and then I went down to Antarctica. I spent twelve months there on secondment to what was known as the Department of External Territories in those days. We stayed the whole year – it was the first time anyone had taken two aircraft and a hanger and wintered right through the Antarctic experience.

We were very lucky we were able to keep both our aircraft in tact. Used up all our fuel, we did about seven hundred hours of flying between two pilots. I came back from that and I went to Williamtown onto the 75 Squadron, back onto fighters, and I was there for about eight months or so and I joined Qantas. I was with Qantas for about six years and that wasn't quite my cup of tea, and I

got back into commercial aviation, and ultimately I became general manager of Solomon Island Airways Limited, based on Honiara in the Solomon Islands. We formed and airline called Solomon Islands Airways Limited, and it was pretty hard work in the early days. We had to open up lots of airstrips and all that sort of thing. Get better aircraft and get the

maintenance schedule working well. Ultimately it became a very fine little airline and in profit, but after two years they had to retire out of the flying scenery, only because the old eyes and ears were starting to deteriorate rather badly. Of course as you know, the Solomon Islands went really bad in recent years, and they had the revolution up there, and it was a pity to see that happen really, because it

was just starting to go and have an economy of sorts, and that’s ruined now. But all the time I was up in the Solomons I enjoyed it immensely. I was awarded the MBE [Member of the British Empire] while I was up there, for services to the Solomon Islands, and the people of the Solomons. I went to an investiture at Buckingham Palace for that, which was very interesting. After the Solomons I stayed in Sydney

most of the time. I kept going back to the Solomons for a time, to relieve and do flying training for the fellas up there, and indorsements and ferry and that sort of thing aircraft out of Australia to the Solomons. But I did a bit of part time flying on floats out of Palm Beach for two and a half years, and I even did one right around Australia for a thing called Pelican’s Progress, which was done by Bob Raymond, who is dead now – poor old Bob died.

It was Reg Morrison a great photographer – you’ve probably heard of Reg – who did that. Ultimately I didn’t fly much more after that because my eyes were really bad then, and I had to give it away. I spent most of my time involved in a bit of charity work and a little bit of involvement with air force association work. Until now, I’m aged seventy seven and

I’ve got a life that’s pretty comfortable still, and I reside here with my wife, and the family are all grown up. I’m a grandfather of five, and here we are talking to you fellas.

My father was one of three brothers. Alec, aged twenty one died very early in the piece – he was the eldest brother. Col and Dad went to the First World War – Colin was in the 12th Battalion and landed on Gallipoli and then went to France and ultimately he lost his leg through battle there.

Col died around sixty-five I suppose. Dad was in the Light Horse, the 1st Light Horse, and he saw action all the way up through Palestine, it was called in those days, and into Syria, through Beersheba – you’ve heard of Beersheba no doubt – the big charge and everything up there. He ended up in Damascus and came home at the end of the war out of that area. He started a

carrying business in Launceston, he had four or five trucks at one stage, and he was in transport and I got to know vehicles pretty well, of course. I learnt to drive pretty early in my life, went to school – we’re talking about my father at the moment. He was in a position where he was able to then, the three members of the family, my two sisters and myself, to

private schools. He continued on in the carrying business, in the transport business until he was about sixty five. He sold the business and he retired to West Launceston, and he was a great gardener, and he gardened on for the rest of his life, and he died at the age of eighty seven I think it was, when Dad went. He was a

firm character, he was heavily involved in RSL [Returned and Services League] matters in Launceston, and did quite a lot. He was the secretary of the branch in Launceston, and he was involved in many, many organisations too. He almost became a councillor on the Launceston City Council at one stage. Missed out by a few votes there. But he was in everything, as far as road transport, Red Cross, you name it

he was involved in it – oh and the football club, he was the president of the Launceston Football Club at one stage. That was Dad.

Not that close. He was firm, very firm sort of a person, but we got on quite well. No, I was never that close to my father but close enough, you might say.

Yes, he was. And through being in the Services and he played footy very well, he was involved in football clubs. I followed in his footsteps a bit there, but I could see I didn’t want to be involved with him in the business, which he would have like me to be in, but I could see that that wasn't quite for me. So it was there that I started to break away

and it was because I was sick and had to go north, with the pleurisy and the pneumonia, that I then became involved with the Shell Company and then up to New Guinea, and then the Korea War started, so I sort of escaped right out of the family environment that way, but it wasn't forced on me or anything.

Oh yeah, only a little bit,

but only the funny things – he liked to talk about the funny things. Like I remember he was with his mate one day, and they were both on horseback – I’ve forgotten his name now, of his friend. He drank all the water that he had in his canteen before about eight or nine in the morning, but he was able to get half a bag of oranges, and he ate oranges all day. He said he was in such a state that night that it was very laughable.

You know, that sort of stuff. You can imagine him being on a horse and very dry, and seeing a bag of oranges by the side of the road, and he gets them and eats the damn lot of them. Little things like that – times in Cairo and he was a great photographer, and he had one of the first of the bellows type Kodak cameras, and he took that with him everywhere he went. He had a little business running at one stage, he told me, where he’d take all the pictures out in the field –

incidents that you’d see from day to day in the horse lines, or wherever they might be. He’d get them down to Cairo as soon as he could and get them developed and processed, and then he’d make a big sale in the next week or two when they came back. It’s hard to remember all the things he used to tell me, but they were usually the comical things.

Yes, I’ve always been that way inclined. I think – I was in the school cadets of course, for about four or five years, and they were through the war years mainly – I turned eighteen at the end of the Second World War. But I used to enjoy the cadets at school, and I became the best shot in the cadet corps, and won [what] was called the McLeod Trophy,

which I don’t have in the house here because it still stands in the dining room at the Launceston Grammar School, with my name etched on it somewhere there – you know, that sort of thing. But I enjoyed the cadets and military stuff, in fact if I had been a couple of years older I think I would have joined the army during the war. I wasn't inclined towards the air force at the time. At school we had half a dozen fellows doing extra work, maps and so on, that sort of thing through

the (HSC [Higher School Certificate] the training corps UNCLEAR) and they were heading towards the air force, and I thought, ‘God, I’ve got to do all that work just to become a pilot’ sort of business, you know. So I didn’t think that much more about it, because I could see that the war was running down and I was going to be eighteen, and that the war would be over and I'd miss out on that. So I forgot about that for a while, but I always had an interest in things military. In fact I love marshal music, that’s pretty good.

Mum was a great old lady, she was very Victorian. She was one of two, she was Ester Boyd, and her brother Jack was in the First World War. He was in France and he got right through, he was wounded quite a few times and he made it, one of the lucky ones, and he came back.

Mum married Dad in – you’ve got to think now, John – in 1922 I think it was. She was one of those grand old ladies, very prim and proper, a very stately, good looking woman. She brought us up pretty well I think. I had two sisters and she thought the world of them, and me. I was the

middle one. She was involved heavily in the Red Cross in the Second World War, in fact she was almost eight hours a day at that from time to time, you know, she was that sort of woman. Everyone loved Mum. She was just out of (a bowl of treacle UNCLEAR).

Yes.

Probably more so than I was my father, put it that way.

Oh yes, I think so. I was educated reasonably well, and she made sure that I towed the line, as it were. More so than

Dad, he didn’t seem to bother that much, not as much as Mum. He did bother but Mum was always there to make sure I did my homework and all the other stuff, you know. And she could cook like hell too, she could make the best scones in Launceston and that sort of stuff, you know. She was a really great lady.

Launceston was a small town you might say, but very industrialised.

In fact I was only talking to a friend of mine the other day and we were comparing notes on the things that we don’t do in Australia now, that we used to in the old days where we had woollen mills, where we used to scour wool, and we used to spin wool, and we used to make woollen products from the same product. Waverly woollen mills I remember made the best woollen blankets in Australia. We have foundries and in fact, the railway

workshops, well they could make a whole train, those railway workshops. They don’t do that sort of thing anymore, in fact during the war it became an armaments factory more so than a locomotive manufacturing facility, or rolling office facility. They were making shell cases and turning out various other components for weapons in the railway workshop. That was the sort of thing that was happening in Launceston. It was a good

go ahead little town industrially. There were only forty thousand people in the town when I remember it. It got to fifty only twenty years ago. Hobart was always the big town in Tasmania, it went to a hundred thousand people. It was a small well put together little town, in fact we had ships coming in and out of Launceston in the early days, ten thousand tonners [ships] coming up to Launceston, which meant that they

dredge the river quite a lot to tame the river. It doesn’t happen now, it’s almost sheltered right up.

Oh yes, a lot of that. Everyone tended to know each other, it was one of those towns. It was probably about as big as – what’s the population of Bathurst or Orange these days? I’ve forgotten now, but it was a bit bigger than Orange I suppose. Forty, about forty thousand people in Launceston when I was going to school.

Yeah I did. There were odd times when I had a few little problems academically, or you get six of the best from the headmaster, or things like that. But that didn’t hurt anyway.

General subjects, I went through the whole lot. We didn’t have the subjects available in those days that you have now.

You have a choice of probably twenty or thirty subjects when you go to the HSC, but in those days it was usually up to about ten. Three maths, and always English of course, geography and economics and things like that. But I did HSC level and passed in six, and that included economics, geography, chemistry and physics and whatever there is, there must be another on somewhere, I can't remember what it is.

But usually you could get through by studying no more than eight subjects, let’s say. But I was average, I came out average, and I used to love the sports side of it. I used to always be at footy, I played in the first school eighteen in football. I rode in the head of the river, and I could play a bit of cricket – I was never a good cricketer. Not too bad at athletics, I

used to do pretty well in the long distance side of athletics, eight eighty a mile. I enjoyed school.

Oh yes, it was a boarding and day boy school. I was a day boy, I only lived about four of five k’s [kilometres] from school. I used to spend a lot of the weekends up at the school with sport and other activities. No, I had a lot of friends at school.

Yes, it was round about the early ‘30s I remember going out to the Western Junction, which was Launceston airport. It was a flying school in those days, and odd aircraft would fly across from Melbourne

to Launceston – no runway, it was just grass. It became an elementary flying school in the Second World War, but earlier in the piece, just before the Second World War I remember Dad taking me out to the Western Junction and I had a flight in a Fox Moth it was called. Charles Martin, he was an ex-First World War pilot, I remember he took me in this aircraft, and

had a joy flight around the airport and back again, only twenty minutes. That was about the start of it I think, but I used to make lots of model aircraft, and two or three of us – in fact you’ll probably see there’s lots of model aircraft out over the top there, that I put up there for my grandson, he likes to come and have a look at them. But I used to make lots of model aircraft in association with a good friend of mine, and we’d make soaring gliders and eight foot wingspan and things like that.

That was good but as I said I didn’t get the opportunity to join the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] in the Second World War, but I was always very keen.

Then once the Korean War started that was the golden opportunity. I did learn to fly before I joined the air force. I got to about commercial standard with minimum hours there. It was in the air force that I really learnt to fly.

Yeah.

Well it was a little bit of each probably. If it had been just to fly every weekend at the aero club, yeah that would be fine too, but we weren't thinking about conflicts until about 1939,

probably not too may fellas were – until the war started and we provided lots of pilots, which you know, in the Second World War. I think we all started to think of it. Anyone that was interested in aviation used to think about conflict flying, aggressive flying. But no early in the piece I learnt to fly for flying’s sake.

No, we were lucky in that respect.

Dad was able to keep his business going. Transport is a thing that was always there, like food and provisions and things like that, there’s always transport to be provided to the general public. He was able to get through quite well, he was able to afford to send us all to private schools, so we were comfortable. A lot of people weren't in those days, but he used to help a lot too, in

that respect, with his vehicles. He was able to provide free transport for various benevolent associations and things like that, and reduced rates. I can remember that. No, but I didn’t notice the Depression much, I was a bit young – that was about ’32 so I was only four, five, six, years old.

Not much, even though I went to an Anglican school, no I wasn't affected that much by the church – in fact now I’m a non-believer, you know, I’m that sort of person. Never had a great impact on me.

Apart from stealing fruit from the neighbour’s fruit trees and doing all those sort of things,

I think back the aircrafts tend to be the major one. Never got into stamp collecting, I didn’t have much time to do anything else, other than things that I did at school, with the sport and the weekend activities. The cadets we’d have field days on the weekends and things like that. But I used to swim a lot, I used to walk miles to have a swim in the swimming hole, or up to the swimming pool at the First Basin, as we called it in Launceston, which is a very fine area.

I don't know if you know the town or not, it’s all fresh water up in this particular place, and they have a very fine swimming pool there. I used to like to swim, and I’d go a long way to have a swim. Horse riding, no. My sister was the horse rider. And my other sister was the bush walker. I didn’t participate in the bushwalking.

Oh yes, pretty close.

Valerie, she’s seventy eight now,

one year. And Betty was three years younger than me, she’s still alive, she lives in Launceston. My other sister is in New Zealand, married.

I don’t remember that much about

what was developing. I used to hear my parents talking, and Dad being an ex-serviceman, he used to mention it from time to time. But I was not quite at the age where I fully realised what was going on, perhaps, but I can remember in 1939 the day the war started. That was in Europe of course. I can remember that, that about two or three weeks later, one morning Dad

walked in with his local paper under his arm that he usually had delivered. He said to Mum – I can hear it in my head quite vividly, he said, “The Frogs have capitulated” or words to that effect, which was about the end of things in France, and when it started there. Things went on and on, and I can remember quite vividly the day that Hitler moved on Poland, and Russia

I’m sorry, that was the one. I can remember that day quite well, it was a Sunday afternoon and it was big news in the papers the next morning. There were points in the war that I can remember quite well, and I used to follow the progress of the war quite a lot in the newspaper, with the maps in the newspaper, and watch from day to day how the frontline moved east, or the frontline moved west. Particularly in the African conflict, with the 9th Division in North Africa.

I used to be very interested in that, and the naval actions in the Mediterranean, and of course the Battle of Britain stuff was right there too, to be watched. And as you know, that progressed over a period of a couple of months and it was an interesting action, really when you look back at the Battle of Britain. It was reported very well, even with communication in those day, they were able to get the news

out pretty quickly, very quickly in fact. It hasn’t improved that much I don’t suppose now – other than the fact that you can see it all in vivid colour as it’s happening.

Oh yes, we always had the radio there, and what news there was to be had was always the same as what you’d see in the paper the next morning, or vice versa.

Yeah, I remember that – not exactly what he said, but I remember the time that it happened.

It was pretty tense really. Dad was a bit disturbed by it all because he’d been in the First World War. I’m not too sure what my reaction was, it was sort of ‘This is not good stuff.’

But then mobilization and all that came, most of the young fellas around town started to join up. The head driver, Col Davies joined almost the next day, and he went down to Brighton camp in the south of Tasmania near Hobart, and he did all his early work there, and the next thing he knew, he was in the 9th Division and he was heading towards Egypt. He went through

most of the action up there. And then all his other drivers ultimately ended up in the services, and of course he was always looking for new men. So the average age became higher, or they were not suitable for military service. I can remember all those parts of it. The air raid precautions, things like the Red Cross, and Mum working for the Red Cross. And there was the Comforts Fund, it was called the Comforts Fund and everyone got involved in that.

Lots of activity in that respect, even down in a place like Tasmania, which is pretty much out of the action, there’s quite a lot of support coming out of Tasmania in that area. There were two or three army camps down there and there was the flying training base at Launceston, at Western Junction. There was a naval facility in Hobart, a pretty minor one, but I remember going to Hobart one day in the middle of the war to see the Queen Mary

I think it was, arrive there. It was all a big secret but all of Tasmania knew that the Queen Mary was in Hobart, and it was there with I don’t know how many troops on board. It was forced down there because of a bit of submarine activity up the east coast of Australia and in other parts, and I think it just decided to lay low there for a little while. There were streams of people heading to Hobart to see the Queen Mary.

Oh yeah, that was pretty general I think. Probably more so in Tasmania than in other parts of Australia. It was very, very British in those days, you probably know. In fact, some of the songs that we used to learn in school and were taught to sing in the early days, were very pro-British, pro-Empire sort of thing – “The Land of Hope and Glory” stuff,

you know, that was there. It was pretty obvious in most schools I’d say. Most children could sing a British oriented song, more so than “Waltzing Matilda” perhaps. It tended to push that line more so than the Australian line, or the Australian composed songs, or music.

Well, I think it was a bit more isolated and from the early days of course, it was very British. The founding of Hobart and Launceston and all the early explorers down that way were British of course, as you know, and it tended to stick to it. There was the penal colony at Port Arthur, and they were all ex-Englishmen, Irishmen. Quite a lot of them remained in Tasmania.

All the governors and the officials of government, they were all British of course, and there was the land of gentry down there of course, whatever you call it. There was a lot of that down in Tasmania, and it remained that way until probably the Second World War. I wouldn’t say they were landed gentry, but they were very similar to that – they had very, very fine houses on the property. There was a lot of that.

I think that was expected, more or less, and New Zealand, Australia, even South Africa to an extent. Yeah, I think all the colonies were there when they were wanted, as it were. Yes, they were – probably more so than they would be now. In fact, I think things are going in the opposite direction.

Well, it was a bit of each I think. As I got a little older I began to think that yeah I’d love to be involved, only because of patriotism I suppose, not for any other reason. What was the other part of the question, I forget now?

I think there was a bit of each. The romance of it all, yeah there was a little bit of that. We all

think that it would be very nice to be either trained up to fly an aeroplane or handle a Bren gun in the army, or even to be on board a navy ship. One of my Dad’s drivers was in the Mediterranean on a destroyer early on in the piece, and he used to write letters to us from time to time, and I remember those. I thought, ‘Oh, this seems pretty good, I’d like to be involved in that sort of thing.’ The other part, the fear and all that,

well I was always a little bit fearful of the outcome of the war, like a lot of people were. Mum and Dad used to talk about it, but particularly when the Japanese came in and Darwin was bombed, and we had the attacks on Sydney Harbour. It became a bit more fearful, and working out what we’d do, whether the whole of Australia other than Tasmania might be occupied by the Japanese,

and we’d all be down there as an island fortress. There was always that fear of what could happen, hoping that it wouldn’t. But particularly after the Malayan campaign and the British were pushed out and the guns were pointing in the wrong direction, and the Warspite and Ramillies I think it was, was sunk up there, and the South China Sea [Probably means the Prince of Wales and Repulse]. Things were pretty grim in those days, but yes it was there, there was the fear but I think,

we were in the cadet corps and we all thought it would be good if we got straight out of this and into the army now. But we were all lads of fifteen and sixteen, it was just a bit too early. You had to get your parent’s consent and all that sort of thing to join up, as it was called in those days.

Well as I said my mother was terribly involved in Red Cross activities.

Oh, they had a headquarters in town, and it was called the Red Cross Shop, and it was a piece of property that was donated to the Red Cross right in the middle of Launceston, and they bought and sold things, they distributed all these cakes for sale, and they made money for the Red Cross. They did things like providing services to hospitals,

making devises to wind bandages, winding wool off going into balls so that people could knit gloves and balaclava helmets, and all this sort of thing. She was flat strapped there at times doing that. You had to take your turn being officer in charge of the shop on a particular day of the week, and on that day we had to get mother into town and she’d be the boss cocky in the shop for that day.

But it was all sales of cakes and various other items, and they had a big room out the back where they used to produce various items like the ones I mentioned. They had some of the men making bandage winders, and various other wooden devices for the hospitals. Things that they didn’t have in the hospitals in those days for army

personnel that had been wounded, and were starting to flow back into town and to the Australian general hospital, and things like that. They didn’t quite have all the gear that they needed, they had a fair flow of wounded coming back to Australian in those days, even though they brought them all the way from the Western Desert of any other place, but they tended to come back to the Australian hospital system, and they had to be accommodated somewhere. So there was all that sort of activity to try and accommodate all that. But they worked

hard some of the ladies in Launceston, and all over Australia for that matter. They pitched in and did their bit. I got involved in the air raid section of it in Launceston – I can't remember what the name of it was – Civil Defence, and I was a messenger rider on my bicycle, and I had a blue armband. They had practice air raids, and everyone had a slit trench in the back of their yard in those days, but they’d quickly fill up with water – I remember that pretty well. But on a particular day they’d have a practice air raid in Launceston, and sirens would go. The place would black out and we’d have headquarters in every suburb, there’d be an air raid warden, we all had a steel helmet – pretty heavy for a bloke about fourteen or fifteen. We would have to ride probably five k’s from this particular headquarters in the suburb, to the central headquarters in Launceston to deliver a message by hand – because all the phones were out you see, they were supposed to be out. We didn’t have all the radio communication and all that sort of thing, but we had all that sort of activity going. Civil Defence it was called, and I got involved in that at one stage. But all that sort of stuff was on at all times. You had to learn how to put out an incendiary bomb – everybody had a sand bucket and a shovel and all this stuff.

Militarily there were none, really. They had this name ‘Civil Defence’ that covered air raids and things like that,

a la London during the bombing in London, you know where the bombs run down, the fires start, houses become blown apart, people getting injured, and all you have to do something about it. That’s what it was all about. Put out the incendiary bombs, everybody had a bucket and scoop and all that sort of thing around, to be able to deal with fire hazards in that respect. But there was no military defence of Launceston other than the army camps that they had, and they were there

virtually for training purposes only, like the elementary flying training school at Western Junction, which was purely training. There was nothing really aggressive or a form of defence that you referred to.

That’s interesting, it had been thought, and I think the government thought

in those days, that there could have easily been an invasion of Tasmania. That train of thought was evident at one stage, I seem to remember. But it was about the time when they thought that the Japanese might invade Northern Queensland, or even further down. But it was thought that perhaps it could happen in Tasmania somewhere at the same time. Not as much as probably Northern Queensland.

There was some sort of preparation being made for that, although we could never see it on the ground in Tasmania.

No more than you would expect in those days. In fact I don’t know that we had a lot of propaganda. Not like the stuff you were seeing in Europe in those days, I know there

was real propaganda in Germany and Italy, and even Russia. They were adept at it probably, but I don’t think we had the propaganda persisting in Australia like you’d see in Europe in the days of the war. I don’t think the press was favoured at all.

We all hated them in those days. All the stories were starting to trickle back about what was happening

to the fellas out of Singapore, and other points where they captured. They weren't held in very high regard, I can tell you.

Only what you heard in those days, which wasn't a lot, but I don’t think it was a form of propaganda. I suppose some people would say it is. But we knew they were bombed but

how much or how many times I can't recall at the moment, but I have read stories in recent years that we just didn’t know what was going on at Darwin. Perhaps to not make the people afraid of what could happen to them a bit further a field. That could have happened, I don't know, but I don’t think we experienced the propaganda that we talked about just before.

What, at school?

Wherever.

Oh, during the Second World War? I think we were always kept pretty busy at school, but you could still have a lot of fun. Just the usual old things, it’s hard to recall any particular incidents, but you know, you’d always be into stealing a bit of fruit, and throwing water bombs and doing all the naughty things at school that most

people do, it was all pretty average stuff really.

I had a couple of girlfriends when I was at school but I don’t know I was a lady’s man. I had a couple of nice girlfriends when I was going to school, and went down to the Ladies College and all learnt to dance in those days. We used to look forward to Friday afternoon at Mrs. Booth’s dancing school, and all the girls would come along, and all the boys would come along. The girls would all sit down at one end, and all the

boys would sit on the other end, and then Mrs. Booth would say, “Now look, you’ve got to get out and form partnerships so that we can get on with this dance training.” It was a bit like that, but you learnt to dance in those days. I don't know whether people learn to dance or not these days, do they? You just sort of pick it up as you go along do you? Yeah, well it was a bit like that. That was fun, I used to enjoy that, but we’d have sporting events, and

some of the girls schools would come along and have a look and cheer for their favourite boyfriend, or whoever it may be. We played rules football and there was always athletics, and head of the river was always a big weekend down there too, much the same as it is up here in Penrith. All those sort of things, but yeah, I had a couple of girlfriends.

Etiquette? Well at the school I went to, and I think in most schools, there was a lot more respect for the teachers, in those days than there is now – as I see it anyway. Oh yes, we’d attend school – not in a suit but usually in slacks and a blazer, and always with a tie, your school tie on. And you’d have to wear your school hat or school cap

when you're off the school grounds, in the bus or in the tram. Of course if one of the old boys of the school saw you without your hat on in the main street of Launceston, you could get in a lot of trouble, it would get back to the headmaster, you see. But there was a bit more discipline in school in those days.

Oh yes. Well very small things to tell you the honest truth. If your work

wasn't up to standard persistently, sometimes if you were told to do a certain thing and you didn’t, disobedience. Or if you were caught out of bounds when you shouldn’t have been, sometimes it could happen. But it would happen very quickly and frequently in those days. But usually it was only administered by the headmaster.

Oh fair, I’d say it was fair.

I don’t know what you fellas think of it, but I wish there was a bit more of it now.

Yeah, it was just due to overexposure to the weather, and getting a bit tired – row, row, row, and I was in too many crews – and it’s a bit cold down there. I went sailing immediately after a regatta,

the last regatta of the year in Launceston, and I was out in this boat this weekend, and it was very cold I remember. On the Monday I didn’t feel very well and ultimately I was diagnosed with pleurisy and pneumonia. So that kept me out of action for about five weeks, really. Things like pneumonia and pleurisy in those days were a little hard to control, they didn’t have the antibiotics and things that they have now. So I was told

not to work with my father, who had the trucks, as I told you. That involved heavy work at times, so that’s when we decided a friend of mine, Bob McHearn his name was – he’s dead now – we decided to go up the east coast. That was in the middle of the old coal strike in ’49, and we were having power strikes, and there was no beer and there was no this, and there was no that. So in 1949 we ended up in Brisbane,

and this is when I became employed by the Shell Company and I took a contract for two years up in the islands.

Pretty rough. That was the first time I’d been up there of course, but the local people in Melbourne and Sydney, Brisbane, they were all complaining because they couldn’t get coal, they couldn’t get this, they couldn’t get beer.

Pubs would be out of beer by about midday and all this sort of thing. That’s when Chifley [Prime Minister] brought the troops in, and they were having troubles on the waterfront. It was bad news around ’49, and actually I was pleased to get out of Australia then. Brisbane wasn't as bad as Sydney, I seem to remember, but I was very pleased really to be able to escape from all of that and go

up to the Pacific Islands.

I was pretty young and I’d never been involved in anything. This was the first time that I’d been outside of Tasmania, to tell you the honest truth, and up the coast.

You get exposed to all these sort of things, but I couldn’t see that it was going to cause any improvement at all to anyone in the country by everyone going on strike, it was pretty stupid. The coal miners were out and having troubles on the wharves. I can't remember what it was about at the moment, probably working conditions. But there were a lot of shortages too in those days, that could have triggered it a little.

Maybe it was an aftermath of the war, a sort of one of those things that was hidden after the first few years of the war, but it started to come out in those years around ‘48/’49. I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth, I’ll have to read a few more books on the cause of the troubles of 1949. I know it was a pretty bad era, particularly when they had to get the troops in to

try to straighten things out, which is one of those things in Australia that don’t normally happen.

Nothing. Only that the Russians had occupied North Korea right at the end of World War 11 to be able to get their foot

in the door in that area up there. That’s about all I can recall. When the peace was signed up there we had lots of Russians in North Korea, and all around that particular, in Manchuria and Korea. And the Americans and the British in Japan and to the south. But no, I didn’t know a hell of a lot about it in those days.

Well we weren't too sure. Bob, my friend, he like advertising. He was right into this advertising business and his aim was to be able to get into an advertising job either in Sydney or in Brisbane. I said, “Right, that’s fine, I’ll see what I can do’ because I thought I’d stay this way for a year at least, and then I could probably go back to Tasmania and do something else. But this business of getting

involved with Shell was appealing, it meant that I could go further a field into warm climes and that’s what happened, and that appealed to me at the time. So I didn’t have any great target as far as a full time position was concerned in those days. But what I did was appealing, and it all worked out well ultimately for me.

It’s always been an isolated place, Tasmania. It still is in some respects, but you didn’t have the domestic airlines operating in those days. There were a few touchy old flights across Bass Strait, and they lost quite a few aircraft into Bass Strait in the early model aircraft. It wasn't

the way to go, there was a shipping service across the Strait probably once or twice a week, but to go from Tasmania to Melbourne, the other side as it was called, the other coast of the other side, that was a big deal, it really was. It as like going overseas on a cruise ship to England or something. It was a bit like that, so you were isolated, and imports of fruits and vegetables and that sort of thing –

well not vegetables but fruit that you couldn’t grow in Tasmania – that was looked on as being the sort of highlight of the week, when all the fresh fruit came from Melbourne, and things like that. But you didn’t have the communication, and it was isolated. To go from Tasmania, say to Melbourne or Sydney or to Adelaide, or to wherever in Australia, that was a big deal.

Just by chance.

We were in Brisbane and we had a couple of bob to spend, and we lived in a couple of boarding houses, and I looked in the Courier Mail and there was one morning, there was this advertisement for, they wanted two people – one for Moresby and one for Rabaul to do fuel management duties in the installations in those two towns. It involved aircraft refuelling

and how to control fuel stocks in depots and all that sort of thing. So I had to do about a months training at Bowen Hills with Shell, and onto the plane and up to Rabaul. It took three days to get to Rabaul in those days, it wasn't one of those direct services to anything like that. You had to fly through Brisbane and Townsville and Moresby and Lae, and ultimately into Rabaul on DC3 [bomber] type aircraft.

Oh it was the challenge, more or less. I thought it sounded good, in the tropics and the waving palm trees, and I think also it was the fact that it was the headquarters of the Japanese military in the Second World War, in that area over there, and I thought well, ‘This could be very interesting to have a look at all of this.’ And it was, it really was.

Rabaul was a really beaten up old town. It had been bombed to blazers by the Allies and it was a fortified town. It had air raid shelters two foot thick all around the main street, going down underground, tunnels dug into the hillsides to conceal military supplies, and even hospitals and factories and all that sort of thing.

Lots of ships in the harbour sunk, and around the beaches. Landing barges everywhere, broken aircraft, rusty galvanised iron – there was a lot of that. But not much was left standing after the war in Rabaul. The only two places that I can remember were still there, was Burnsville old building, which was just a concrete shell, and the Commonwealth Bank. There wasn't much left of it either, other than the strong room

which was standing right in the middle of the building, if you can understand it, and no building left around it – just the strong room. Things like that, there was nothing. But it was a town that was rebuilding, and I didn’t get there until ’49, 1949, and that was four years after the war and not much had been rebuilt other than tin shed type constructions. But the wreckage of war was very evident around Rabaul, and it was heavy stuff too, like

floating cranes and workshops. But the amount of materials that the Japanese had there, it was awesome really. They lost it all, and it was the greatest waste of all time, as I said, but they even had tunnels that would be up to four or five hundred meters deep, long, straight up from the beaches where they could tow loaded landing barges, and all that sort of thing, to get them away from the bombers.

Military airfields, there were four around Rabaul built by the Japanese, but broken aircraft everywhere. But rusted ships all around the shoreline were the first thing that you noticed when you went into the town. Plus the active volcanoes.

Oh I had a lot fun there. It was pretty rough,

the quarters were not good at all, you lived in probably a tin shed with a bed and a cupboard, and that’s about all. You slowly improved your own accommodation – the first place I went to was provided by Burns Philp who were the agents for Shell, and it was just a tar paper lined construction of beams and studs and things.

And shutters opening out which you could close at night, or when the rains came, which were pretty up there when it did rain. But that’s about all, no mosquito wire, mosquito net. Common bathroom arrangements, and a common mess. But it was all pretty frugal stuff, it really was.

Quite a lot, all the

technicians were Australia, and the public works department as it was called, looked after power, water – they must have had tank water, that’s right. There was a bit of water laid on, I don’t know from where, but there was water laid on, there was a small dam up at the back of the town. Road construction was constant, built on pumice and not many sealed roads, only about two sealed streets

in the town. It was always a bit dusty. It was pretty, pretty poor in those few years, but we had a lot of fun though, and what you see is what you get with Rabaul in those days.

No, not one.

A little bit, yeah. I don’t recall ever seeing any Japanese in the town at all. Other than probably if – I can't even confirm this, a Japanese ship coming into port, I can't even remember a Japanese ship coming in to port, or even seeing a Japanese businessman in the town in those days.

Yeah, I think there were a few around that I remember.

Well we used to work five and half days a week, you know, every Saturday morning, but I used to play sport – whatever was on. I had a motorbike up there, which was a Japanese copy of a Harley Davidson, and the Japanese Army built these things. It had an outfit on it, and it had a two wheel drive and an axle under the outfit

under the outside wheel. They were powerful things, and you could roar through the Kunai grass and up and down the hills in this thing – we had a lot of fun. But we used to have swimming parties and a lot of tennis, and walking over the bush picking up the wreckage. There was a hell of a lot of that, but that took a lot of my time. We had a few boats from time to time, we’d get out around the harbour and one of my mates had a VJ [Vaucluse Junior] sailing boat, and we’d sail around in that.

Yeah, a bit of social activity in the town and there were two clubs there. A bit rough but they were clubs. Yes, it was good fun just being in that place and making your own fun, really. It was different too, that was the other thing, to anything else that you could experience in Australia.

Not much, only the mail.

I don’t recall telegraphic services, they could have been there, I think they would have been at government level, but that wasn't available in the form of telegrams and things like that through the post office.

Oh, it was good, none of the things that you see now, they were not interested in those days.

Everyone had a job up there, you were sent up there with t job, that was ok, you were an ex-patriot. But the local people were all as happy as Larry, they always finished, they were all back to their own villages, they had their own gardens going and plenty of native food. They were able to buy things in trade stores, what trade stores there were. They weren't allowed to drink in those days, they were still in that prohibition era

that went on in New Guinea until about 19 – what year, late ‘60s I think it was. But they were all as happy as Larry. There weren't that many of them in the town unless they had a job. In fact, they had to bring labour in from the main island of New Guinea to provide the labour that was required on New Britain, particularly around the plantations, and for the government of the town who

employed quite a lot of native labour, as you can imagine with all the work that had to be done. The ex-patriots were the technicians in the town and the nurses and the doctors and the people that ran the oil companies, and refuelled aeroplanes and did all the other work, the builders and that sort of thing.

Oh yes, several. Mainly

in offices or wives of government officers up there. Married couples on plantations, oh yes, there was quite a good balance of women in the town.

Two years.

There was evidence in the papers and what you'd hear on the radio that

things were starting to deteriorate pretty badly in that area, and the middle of 1950 when war was declared it was noted, and then all of a sudden it happened and we had quite a number of ex-servicemen in the town who fought in the Second World War. Quite a lot of them volunteered immediately and they joined what was known in those days as K Force [Korea Force]. They were one of the first battalions that went up to Korea in the Australian Army,

to reinforce the blokes in the occupation out of Kure. But I can remember half a dozen of them they joined up immediately, even though they were on contract. They were released, they were allowed to go.

Well that’s when I made an application to the air force for pilot training, aircrew training.

Well my thoughts, and I think quite a lot of the blokes had much the same thought about what was happening, and that was that it was going to be bigger than Korea in those days. It was going to be the communists menace as they called it, and it was going to creep down through Asia – there was evidence in Indochina and other places. That was the feeling I think, that if we didn’t join now, you would be

required to later on.

Well I had that inclination towards aircraft and flying, and I hadn't flown at all other than joy flights and things at that stage, but it was the service that I chose at the time.

Oh that was no trouble, it was in the form of a letter, and it was responded to within a few weeks, and I indicated that I would be back in Australia in about six months time, I think it was, and they said, “Well, we’ve got your application here but you’ll have to renew the whole thing when you get back. But it’s on file, but it’s not at the head of the list or anything like that” because you still had to be interviewed.

I came back on leave in the middle of ‘49/’50? The end of ’50, and I signed up at Archerfield in January 1952.

From then on I did a full year of flying training, the whole of ’52 at Archerfield at what’s called the elementary training school.

Down to Uranquinty which is the advanced flying training school, and that continued on into Point Cook for another three or four months, and that’s where you graduate. At the end of ’52 we proceeded to what’s called the operational training section at Williamtown, where you start to fly Mustangs, Vampires, that type of aircraft, and posted up to Iwakuni in Japan.

In north in the Meteor at that stage, the Meteor fighter, and over to Korea, and I spent the last six months of the Korean War in South Korea. Three months of it was in active service, the other three was the three months after the war finished up there.

I’d already learnt to fly,

as I said earlier. It’s different, it was the first time I’d been exposed to real discipline, to any service discipline, but it wasn't that bad. I was able to accept discipline, perhaps more so than some of my mates. They didn’t like it at all, but I got through that with no trouble at all. It was academic,

mainly academics at Archerfield. It was about twenty hours of flying on Tiger Moths, and after three months when that finished we were sent down to Uranquinty into the advance flying stage onto more Tiger Moths and Wirraways – a heavier type aircraft. No, it was easy enough to adapt to and I didn’t have any bother with the discipline of it at all. I was able to handle the ground subjects pretty well.

Oh yes.

Went in as aircrew, we all go in as aircrew. There were only five of us went in at Archerfield as aircrew, on the way through some fall by the wayside for various reasons, until when you pass out at Point Cook – you either pass out as a pilot or a navigator, or you could for various reasons end up doing other duties like radio, gunnery.

What else is left, I’ve forgotten what else there would be in those days.

Physics, administration, aerodynamics, navigation, engine handling, one or two others. Things like health.

How to make a grease trap. All that sort of thing.

It was firm but it wasn't over the top by any means. No, it was firm and it was out of bed at six and all that sort of stuff, but if you started to falter, well you were up before the CO. Because

everyone’s keen, everyone is so keen to get through that you don’t bite your copy book if you can help it.

Uranquinty, near Wagga.

That was more flying. That was pure flying down there, and more ground subjects of course. Much the same choices of subject as – we don’t have choices, we had much the same groups of subjects. Mainly to do with flying now,

you're through the physics and all those basic things you learnt at the other school, but you're into pure flying then

Yes, there was an element of that too, yes.

Yes, well at Archerfield I was up at the head of the flight grading, you might say up in the first four out of about seventy or eighty.

But then you start to come back through the field, a bit like a football ladder you know, half way through the year you see the Swans start up here and they're starting to trickle down to there – which they proved last week. But I was in the middle there in flying.

Well that’s exactly what they did. Well elementary aircraft was a Tiger Moth, it was a two place aircraft with the instructor sits in the back seat and the pupil in the front seat, and he talks you through the sequences, you pick them up as quickly as you can and ultimately you learn to fly to the satisfaction of the instructor. You have to make certain grades all the way through, otherwise you will fall by the wayside and you're out.

You go back to Civvy St [civilian life] then. That’s all it was, and much the same in the heavier type aircraft. You have an instructor with you and if he feels you can handle the sequence on your own, he’ll let you go out in the aircraft – this is after you’ve been out on your first solo of course. Until ultimately you can do almost anything out on your own without any trouble, and you get better and better and better at it. You don’t become an ace, but you're good – a competent pilot, and that’s what the air force wants.

But it wasn't particularly hard if you were adept at that sort of thing. Some of the blokes struggled a lot more than others, in fact others didn’t make it, and they were a scrub out and you go. You can only do what you can do.

Oh yes, a bit of danger in most things that has got wheels or wings.

Yes, I’ve been asked about this sort of thing before, but it’s all part of the job. If you're part of the air force or army, or navy, you could have your ship sunk out from underneath you. In the army you could have a mortar bomb land right beside you. But it’s much the same in the air force, everything’s fine until you get hit, you know, or the engine stops or something like that.

Oh yes, there was a few accidents, a few forced landings. I did a forced landing at night once, at Point Cook, we had a few forced landings. We had one or two blokes get killed at flying training, in accidents on the ground and in the air. I got caught with an engine failure at night in Point Cook and I was very lucky, a very lucky boy. I was able to land from six hundred feet into a swamp.

It was only the aircraft had landing lights on it and they worked that I was able to land on the water and walk away from it. That was the only one I had in the air force of any great note.

That was a Wirraway. I’ve got a picture of it out there if you want to have a look at it. Yes, it was all part of the job, that sort of thing.

Yeah, all Wirraways at Point Cook.

I used to enjoy flying Wirraways, I always said if you can fly a Wirraway you can fly anything. They were a bit on the touchy side at low speed, and landing you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball. No they were good, I used to enjoy them. They weren't particularly fast, by any means, they were considered to be a front line aircraft at the start of the Second World War over in Rabaul for instance, where they

went to later on. That didn’t work out to well in the early days, and the air force was very quickly issued with other types of aircraft until the end of the war we had the mighty P-51 Mustangs, which was considered to be one of the best aircrafts that was built during the war. We still used them in Korea, although I missed the Mustang phase in Korea, I actually flew them in Australia and then they went straight on to America.

But it was a good plane the old Wirraway, I used to enjoy it, and there’s still a few flying in Australia now.

Everything that they knew in those days, on fighters, but that’s what it’s all about. Once you go to an OTU [Operational Training Unit] you're taught everything that the air force knew at the time about air combat.

Both in offence and defence, and how to dive bomb, and how to rocket, and the gunnery too, because all the aircrafts were armed either with machine guns or cannons. You were taught all these aspects of aerial warfare. But air combat, you were taught air combat.

Some aircraft fly better than others, as you know, in air combat. We were on Mustangs, they were good up to a point but once the jet like the MiG [jet fighter] and various other aircraft were designed, they became old hat and they were just not up to the task. Even the Meteor when we had a mission up in Japan, it was known that they would not be up to standard of the MiG 15, and

this was proved early in the piece, and ultimately they were withdrawn from upper level aerial combat to ground attack, and the MiG seemed to be a very good aircraft for that.

Oh, it’s way up there, it’s a different level all together. You go from air cruising speeds to about a hundred and seventy miles an hour, knots, to something like three

hundred knots, you know, that sort of thing. But an aircraft that could fly up to forty two thousand feet, that would be about surface ceiling, you could operate effectively at thirty thousand feet – which a Wirraway, or a Mustang could never get to those altitudes unless you had two stage super chargers and all that sort of thing working, and then they couldn’t fly very successfully at those altitudes either.

Yep, that was more or less a foregone conclusion if you put your name down for fighter, you would almost certainly go to 77 Squadron in Korea. They were a bit short of pilots up there towards the end of 1952. You know

this, that we lost about forty pilots in Korea, that’s quite a lot really when you think of the size of the squadron, one squadron only and the length of the time of the war. They were running short, and early in the piece they drained the air force of pilots to fill the ranks, as it were, in Korea, particularly after the war started and they had to have some relief. People had to be spelled and we

lost quite a few pilots in the early days. So those ranks had to be filled, plus the rotation and all this sort of thing, so they found that the pilot strength in the RAAF around ’51 was starting to deplete rather rapidly, so they had to be filled.

Correct, yes.

No, that didn’t occur until 1957.

No, I didn’t.

Oh, this was after I came back from Antarctica.

No, I hadn't even considered it.

I’d just come back from Rabaul and having leave in Tasmania, and I was having a ball actually, learning to fly. Every time I got the opportunity, I’d go out to Western Junction, but there were girls around the place, but I didn’t have anyone in mind at that stage, as far as matrimony is concerned.

Oh yes, the social life up there wasn't too bad. A little bit restricted, most of them were married in the town. A few young ladies worked with Burns Philp, and some of the other Australian companies up there. We used to enjoy life but I never got committed at all, at any stage.

I don’t think that they were overly concerned about it. Mum could have been but she didn’t show it. All the time I was in I think she had concern, and she used to voice this to her friends at times I think, but I never knew about it then. It’s only in later years that I learnt that she was a bit concerned about it, particularly when I was in Korea. It was

unfortunate too, talking about when I was going to school in Launceston, I am John Seaton and there’s another John Seaton that was going to Hutchins School in Hobart, and we used to play football against each other from time to time. He joined the army, he went to Korea and was killed, and it appeared in the Launceston papers one day, that John Seaton was killed in Korea. For God’s sake, she was very concerned, as you can imagine. It wasn't a headline thing but it was there, it was published,

and until that was sorted out it was quite a worry for her. She always had these little problems, and Geoff Stephens, a young bloke from Launceston, he joined the air force before the Korea War, and he was killed at (Mustang Station UNCLEAR) in Korea actually, and Mum and Dad used to enjoy going out with his parents prior to that. They’d known them for years, Mr. and Mrs. Stephens, and there was always

a bit of concern about Geoff, and then I got involved in the same thing so the two ladies used to put their heads together from time to time. Geoff got killed and then I’m up there the follow up, so I think she had a few concerns about it all, yes.

He wasn't as worried I don’t think, but I was never there, I never heard anything about it. He’d have some concern I’m sure, but he wasn't as worried about things as Mum. All mothers used to be the same.

No, I just said, “Dad, I’ve put my name in hopefully to be selected for aircrew” and I was, and he was very pleased about all that at the time, but he didn’t show anything other than that other than his pleasure at the fact that I joined the services. But I never detected any great trauma – oh, that’s not the word,

any great concern from him about me being in the services. Even he having been in the services himself, I think that sort of made it easier for him.

I think so, yes.

Not at Williamtown at the OTU [Operational Training Unit] stage, we didn’t go out much at all, we didn’t leave the base up there. You had plenty of opportunities when you're training in Victoria and New South Wales and Queensland. But the OTU you're a bit busy and at the end of the day, you're looking forward to having a quiet night, having a couple of beers in the mess and

probably go to bed. Because it was all pretty whiz bang most of the time, you'd be doing ground to ground rocket fire and you had gunnery, and all that sort of stuff, but it was high pressure, so that didn’t concern you too much.

Oh, when I look back on it, it was a lot of fun.

Even thought it was pretty hard work – for instance, we were on Vampires towards the end, we were doing range work with rockets and guns. You're doing something like half a dozen forties a day, you come back and re-arm and off again, and it was pretty hot too, up at Williamtown. The sweat used to be pouring off you in the plane, in the Vampire you were little, tucked in on a nice hot day, and the airmen

refuelling and arming the plane – it was a rather intense couple of weeks. It was all reasonable high pressure as far as the actual flying, and the organisation and things, because they were in a hurry to get us up there. As I said before they were a little bit short of pilots.

Not that I recall. No, we never had any problems. I think the duty of training for the

medical side, they get that sorted out pretty early in the piece. When you first go in you’re analysed pretty intensively and they can find out what your stress levels might be, and what’s the maximum and what's the minimum perhaps, if you could express it that way. By the time you’ve graduated from a pilot’s course, I think the air force know what you can do and what you can't do.

Yeah, I think they’re all pretty simple that I can recall. When I say simple, I mean straight forward, like putting square things into round holes and things like that. Similarity of numbers, and ultimately half a dozen of you would be thrashed out in an open paddock and they’d give you a piece of three-by-two and a couple of bits of rope, and this is a river and you’ve got to get across it without getting wet, and all this you know, that’s all to do with leadership.

That sort of stuff, but just by comparing notes the instructors sitting down in the common room, would compare notes, they used to work out who was going to pass through the whole business and out the other side as opposed to the one who’s not. But I seemed to be able to handle that, every one that I know handled it pretty well.

Yeah, well I was able to handle whatever they thrust upon you.

Well they’re natural, there are those that are really natural. It’s hard to define that word, it’s often used in air force talking about the blokes. They say, “Oh, he’s a natural.” I don’t think

anyone is natural, if it was natural we would have been born with wings, really, I suppose. But some take to it quickly and others have to train themselves up to be average or above average, that’s what it boils down to. But I was always classed as just average or a little bit better than average in all my reports. So how good that is I don't know. It all depends on the

strength either side of average, doesn’t really, if you're average at the side of the curve.

Yeah, in the training days we used to play football, not at competition level but in the service

we’d play Rules [Australian Rules], Union [Rugby Union] and a bit of League [Rugby League]. I was encouraged to play a bit of Union and League because I could kick a football being a Rules player. But we used to play at the agricultural college in Wagga from time to time. Not much training before hand, we’d just throw a team together and go and have a social game of football. That was good, I used to enjoy that, but never at competition level, or on the roster or anything like that. I used to

enjoy that, but we used to do a lot of sport while we were training. Two or three times a week there would be half a day almost, devoted to sport of some nature. But there’d be times when you'd just go for a run in the evening or if there’s a flight or a group you’d be told to run five miles up and five back, and all this sort of stuff. But you were pretty fit, because you had to stay fit.

In the air force, yes. Very strong in fact, some of my best friends are air force ex-service, and had a beer with one of them last week, you know that sort of thing is happening now. Don Pinkston was my best friend in the air force, and he got shot down actually while I was in Korea, and he was in as a prisoner of war for about

only about two months I think it was, and he came out. It’s on the tape.

No, there was never that restriction in the training days really, other than that you were required to stay on base for five days. It was only on the weekends when you'd be available for the weekends, you know. But no, that was never a great worry really.

From time to time,

particularly up at Wagga there a place up there called the Tennis Club, and that was pretty popular with some of the fellows, we used to go to the Tennis Club, and that’s about the only one that I can recall. If you weren't playing some sort of sport on the weekends, you would be in Romano’s Hotel having a few beers, or you might like to go to the Tennis Club on a Saturday night. But nothing really organised in that respect because you're only in town for three months, really, and then you're off

to Victoria to be re-based down there. And then you have to start the process all over again.

We always had movies on base but I don't think I can ever recall going to the movies off the base. There was always a movie theatre on the base in those standard air force camps, they were all very similar in those days. They had a picture theatre, and it was

a sort of a large lecture hall, it was an auditorium and it had a stage on the end and they had concerts in it, but it was the picture theatre really, and they had movies a couple of times a week.

No, it was just your normal run of the mill movies, yeah.

Well early on it was only Tiger Moths and Wirraways. That’s all the air force used for elementary training and advanced training, and you went on to the Mustangs and the Vampires, and then ultimately went on to whatever type they wanted to issue you with when you went into a squadron. That’s about the way it went, but in those days it was just Tiger Moths and Wirraways.

Oh, I used to love them.

Everyone loved the Tiger Moth, but they were always pleased to get inside a cockpit out of the wind. It’s always good to advance you know, into bigger and better aircraft, you might say. Not that the Wirraway was a modern top line aircraft in that respect, but it was more powerful, you could fly faster and you could do a lot more with it.

At the end of the Point Cook graduation period,

when you get your wings, as they say. Then you start to move onto squadron service, you could go from Point Cook in those days, onto a heavier aircraft like a Lincoln – a four engine bomber, or some other type aircraft like that. Or even DC3 [bomber] Dakota type aircraft, or you could go into the fighter world, which meant that you stayed with a single engine aircraft until you get up to Japan on the Meteor, which was a

twin engine aircraft. At the end of your training you could be allocated to a squadron, posted to a squadron which could have any type of aircraft.

I went to fighters, I asked for fighters and that’s what I got.

Yes, straight on.

Oh, I loved it. I think it’s one of my favourite aircrafts now. It seems to be

the favourite aircraft of most people who were fighting jocks. They like the Mustang, yeah.

Well it’s a lot in the appearance of the aircraft, you know, it just looks like a fighter aircraft. But it had power, it had speed, it had good armament on it. It was, and armour plated for the pilot too, and that sort of stuff.

Much better than other types of aircraft, but it was a good, fast, powerful. It could absorb quite a bit of battle damage. I don’t ever have to use it on operations at all, but most of our early days in the 77 Squadron in Korea, it would absorb a lot before it fell out of the sky. That was a good aeroplane.

Yeah, just after the Mustang, because the Mustang into the Vampires, the first of jets. It’s the only one we had in those days, it was a little thing, it was quite a fun plane really. It’d do all the things that were required of it, it was armed pretty well with cannon – four cannon. You fired rockets off it, carry bombs, but it was pretty small, limited. It was designed at the end of

the Second World War, and it didn’t go much further than that really, in that period of time while the Vampire was on, the Americans were building some magnificent fighter aircraft like the Sabre. And it had already gone through the Lightning stage and various others, and then they came up with this magnificent Sabre which we would of love to have had in Korea.

For various political reasons we didn’t get it, even though the South Africans did. So there were lots of aircraft around, but the development of aircraft in those days was pretty rapid, but we tended to trail a little bit. The RAAF did and the requirement stage, and we didn’t get the aircraft that we could have used in Korea.

Training? We had eighty four I think it was, we started at Archerfield and at graduation we only had about thirty, I think it was. There’s a picture out there of the group at graduation, about thirty.

It’s whittled down to less than half, from what it started out to be.

I don't know what it’s like now, I think they selected more intensively probably this day and age. A pilot on aircraft these days needs to be a computer whiz, really, I believe. So he’s more or less guaranteed a job

before he starts, really. There’s a bloke that goes onto a Mirage, or a Hornet – a Hornet is the one I was thinking of. He has to know all about modern computerisation and all that sort of stuff, and he’s almost got to have a degree before he starts flying. But he’s almost guaranteed a position as a pilot once he goes in, it’s almost at that level.

Whereas before, you were sorted out down the road, as you progressed.

That is from Point Cook and in the advanced flying, but before you go through the OTU stage you mean?

Yep, on that type of aircraft yes. Although they would have been way behind in performance to what you were going to meet in Korea. For instance, you wouldn’t expect to take a Vampire into Korea and fight a MiG 15 – it was like that. But the Meteor was slightly different kettle of fish,

although it wasn't quite up to the task, at that altitude with a MiG. That was proved early in the piece, and we were restricted to attack for that very reason. The aircraft we had was admittedly very good at ground attack and I think that’s one of the reasons that they hung on to it – although there wasn't much else available for us at that stage. Because the Americans didn’t have any Sabres they were going to give us, but I think at a political level back in Australia,

I mentioned to you earlier about Mr. Menzies, and the government at the time was ‘Buy British’ – that was their thinking. I think they thought it would be nice if they continued to buy British, which wasn't quite what the air force wanted.

I think there was, with we fellas up in Korea. It’s interesting about the Sabre, I mention the Sabre because we’d asked for the Sabre – not me, the air force

had asked for the Sabre, but the Americans I believe, said that they didn’t have enough to sell to the Australians, but they had enough to sell to the South Africans. I don't know why, maybe they got more oil and diamonds from South Africa, I don't know.

Oh, I’m sorry did I say – Gold, and diamonds, they don’t have oil in South Africa.

Oh yeah. We received weekly bulletins when I was at the OTU, in fact we’d sit down with various officers and discuss it, and they’d talk to us about tactical reconnaissance, and what the fellas found last week that was knew, and all those sort of things.

And various differences and modes of attack. Yes, we were very up to date about all that.

I don’t think I ever thought that it was about to end when I left.

You could see that it was going to end very soon when we were up there, but then we had a couple of false alarms. I think we had two false alarms about ceasefires and things while I was there. That only lasted a day and then it was back on again, so it was back to the aircrafts and away, and doing what you were doing yesterday. That happened once or twice. But when I left Australia, we didn’t really know how long it was going to last.

I think we were all hoping that you’d do your hundred missions and come home, sort of thing. But I only got forty nine missions in, and it finished then, but they said, “No, you’re not going home. Everybody’s staying here.” The whole of the American force and the South Korean force, and for everybody there it was business as usual. Where you weren't flying over the line to do a strike, the next morning you’d be training, you do more training.

No, that didn’t worry me. That was easy to say, but I don’t recall that there was really, not. I don’t even recall that any my mates over there had the same feelings. Just hoping to get over there as soon as possible.

Well it was a foregone conclusion, you knew that you would be endorsed on this Meteor aircraft, as soon as you hit Iwakuni, and that only takes about two weeks. You know that you’ve got a booking on a plane to probably be at Kimpo on a certain date if all went well, providing that it wasn't poor

weather at Iwakuni and you couldn’t get the aircraft off the ground during that particular part of your training. No, it was only a couple of weeks of endorsement and then off you went, so that was a foregone conclusion.

Oh yes, that was the only aircraft we had. The 77 Squadron was based on Iwakuni as far as maintenance and those things were concerned, and if

ever an aircraft had to be changed, as far as testing maintenance was concerned it was flown back to Iwakuni. The base squadron was at Iwakuni, you see, that was for 77 Squadron as I said. Real headquarters was over there at Iwakuni, but you were based over at Kimpo or wherever you had to go in South Korea, whichever airfields you based on. In the early days in the Mustangs, you didn’t know exactly where you were going to be the next night really,

you could be not based so much, but spend tomorrow night at an airfield further down the peninsula when you could easily have been based at Kimpo or Pohang or Pusan, or something like that. It all depended on the circumstance because things were very fluid in those early days. The frontline was moving up and down pretty quickly, and things changed quite a lot. But they always had that base headquarters back at Iwakuni.

We flew up on Qantas, they had a regular service up to Tokyo. On particular days it would stop at Iwakuni if it had service personnel on board.

Only five of us at the time, at that particular time, yeah. You could go up singly as an individual. This particular occasion five of us went as a group.

Yeah, I thought it was a fun thing. Off on a trip around the world, boys, like being in the navy. No, I was pretty keen, very keen about the whole thing.

Yes, we’d heard a little bit about Japan and how it had been bombed. Iwakuni was a base which was not too far from Hiroshima – whichever way you want to pronounce it. It was atom bombed and it was next door to you there, and we thought we’d go out and have a look at Hiroshima while we’re there, and probably get up to Tokyo

and look at the place if you had enough time. Yes, that was an interesting aspect of it, and as far as recreation was concerned. Hiroshima was interesting, it was just a desert really when I saw it. You were taken in a bus, if you had to go over to Kure to the army establishment just on the other side of the base where we were, at any time. You’d all go in an air force bus or an army bus or something like that. The train ran right through Hiroshima.

It was doing that every hour, or half hour or whatever it was. Nobody worried about radiation or anything like that in those days, it was only in later years that people got a little bit more worried about it, the old Hiroshima. But it was there for the eye to see and completely devastated. But that was right next door, so it was sort of a tourist attraction in those days.

Well it made you think a little bit, but we knew that it was, that we were pretty sure that we weren't going to be atom bombed over on the peninsula, although General MacArthur thought it might be a good idea in the early days to stem the flow of Chinese into South Korea. But it entered your mind I suppose, but we were pretty well assured that there would be nothing like that again. It was one of those things that you could do without really.

Quite surprising, yeah. I didn’t think that one bomb could do that much damage. That was only a little one.

No animosity as far as I was concerned. We used to treat

them with respect, it was their country again, even though it was occupied. They were hard working people, and a lot of people in the base were Japanese employed by the air force, the Americans and Australians. So I didn’t have any axe to grind with the local people, I think all those that were there at the time, it wasn't their fault. They were all youngsters really, anywhere between eighteen to thirty. But there were a few

engineers, Japanese air frame fitters and other technicians that had been in the Japanese air force in the early days of the war, and they were re-employed again by the Australian Air force, the RAAF, in hangar work. They were only allowed to work on some of the menial tasks like aircraft cleaning and polishing. Some of the jobs that weren't associated with

flight control, and engines and that sort of stuff, they kept them away from that. I think that they were still in the mind that they could do something to an aircraft which wouldn’t assist us in our flying capabilities.

Not much, no. We did go into town at Iwakuni from time to time, have a few

beers in the local place, wherever it might be. It was a bit touristy old Iwakuni, if you were up there at the right time of the year, which were in April, that’s in the cherry blossom. It’s a riotous time in Iwakuni at the Kintai Bridge, and all the Jap’s have a great time, it’s sort of a national day down there at the cherry blossom festival. The banks of the river, there are nice parklands on the banks of the river, it was a pretty fast

flowing mountain stream really, and they’d have picnics and sit there and drink sake and eat up big. No, they were good times, we used to enjoy it. We only went up there once or twice during the cherry blossom festival. There was a lot of that, but we employed girls in the mess as waitresses, and they’d come and go onto the base. They didn’t live on base,

they come and go to do breakfast, lunches or whatever they were employed to do. Ladies in town, well you had to be pretty careful around the town that – you know, if you’re going to ask me about some of the obvious things, well I think we’ll give that a miss, it’s one of those things that’s all very private. I’m not saying one way or the other if I got involved in any of those things that you had to be very careful of.

Yes and no. Some places you’d walk into to buy or purchase something, yes, if you’d spend a yen there. But in others, just being on the street or walking into an area that was not commercial, and asking them a question, perhaps they

couldn’t care less if they answered the question or not. There was a still a bit of animosity there, particularly in the older people I’d say. Yeah, you had to pick and choose the places you went to. We never had any real trouble with that, I think as the years went by, it mellowed a lot. We mellowed towards them and they mellowed towards us I suppose, over the years.

A little bit, yeah. Not that I went to great lengths to read a lot about the culture, only what was explained on tours and what you see for yourself, and learn a little bit about Shintoism, and Sumo wrestling and the stuff around the place. They had lots of little shrines around the place. We spent a couple of days in Kyoto once while we were on a break,

and went up to Kyoto and went to the theatre there to see – I’ve forgotten the name of the group, but to have this presentation in Kyoto. So that was very enjoyable, that sort of stuff, you could look at all the national dancing, national costumes and all of that sort of stuff. It’s in profusion around places like Kyoto, which is one of the places, that’s the old national capitol, I think it was, Kyoto

if I remember rightly. No, it’s an interesting part of the world. I didn’t study the culture of Japan overly much, I just took it as I saw it and enjoyed it.

I didn’t drink much sake, it was always Australian beer. It didn’t appeal to me, nor the food much, the Japanese food.

I still don’t eat Japanese food down here much, now and again I might. If it’s cooked – I don’t go for raw fish much. Sukiyaki I think was the cooked fish – we used to go to one little place at Iwakuni where they’d do steak and fish while you squatted around a little table. That was good, I used to enjoy that, but some of their food I didn’t

get very interested in.

It was a big place actually, it was an old Japanese installation and it had many hangars, big hangars which were pretty rusty and they were a bit worse for wear over the years. But it was also the headquarters for some of the Kamikaze pilots when they did their training

apparently, so I believe. But it was all Australian and RAAF after they came from Bofu, which was down Kyushu Island, and moved up to Iwakuni. The Australian Air force had control of the whole place, and then the Americans came and they took over Iwakuni and the RAAF became lodgers. That was ok because we still had plenty of space. The quarters were good. The Japanese Air force used to live

reasonably well and they built very good accommodations for their men. Rather big buildings with separate and double rooms, common bathrooms with plenty of hot water and very clean and well run. Good gardens around the area, big buildings and nice dining rooms, and was very comfortable. No, they used to do it pretty well apparently the Jap’s did, when

they were in power, power particularly in a well established air force place like Iwakuni. There were others too, but Bofu was much the same I think, I was never down there but from what I hear from some of the blokes, they had very big quarters there too. Well heated, they were well heated, and spacious, I suppose.

No, I always had single rooms. Quite big rooms,

there would always be an extra bed if ever they got over crowded, but you had your own room at Iwakuni. It stayed your room all the time you were in Korea, and you came back again. It was always there for you when you came back on leave for two days every month.

No, we didn’t have time for all that sort of stuff when you went over to Korea. I arrived over there the day before Anzac Day, and we all attended an early morning service – it wasn't a dawn service, it was a morning service out in the parade ground. It was very quick and I was in the air by about lunch time doing my first flight over North Korea. So it was pretty quick because they didn’t have time for all that sort of thing. But it was pretty frugal – well that’s not the word I’m thinking of –

basic accommodation in Kimpo. Old MASH [Mobile Army Surgical Hospital] type tents, you’ve watched that old show MASH have you from time to time? One of those four man tents, that’s what you had to live in, an army stretcher. We used to eat with the Americans, about half a k [kilometre] down the road was a bit of an inconvenience, if ever you wanted to go to breakfast or a meal of some nature, you had to go down to the American mess. We had our own

little aircrew club in our little camp group, and that wasn't too far away. But it was pretty basic accommodation in Kimpo.

Two weeks. That was when you did this endorsement phase onto the new type aircraft, the Meteor.

Oh it was ok, it’s an easy aircraft to fly. It was a very good ground attack aircraft, we didn’t get to do any aerial combat or anything, not much aerial combat training – A) you didn’t have much time, or you didn’t have any aircraft to deploy against – even in training mode. Aerial combat in any aircraft is very similar really. If you can fly the aircraft well, a turn is a turn and a roll is a roll. It’s just a matter of getting to know the aircraft before you start to employ tactics. But we did a lot of rocket training off Iwakuni, there was a little target island just off the coast. And a new thing called ground controlled approach, we had to learn that in the instrument roll and the aircraft. It was controlled by Americans at the end of the runway and …

The pros, well I didn’t

fly it when it was first issued to the 77 Squadron, that was when I went into aerial combat at altitude, say thirty five thousand feet up on the Yalu [River], where they mixed it with the MiGs. They took a pounding up there really, we lost a couple of good fellas there and had a lot of aircraft shot down. No, I wouldn’t say a lot but quite a few shot down. One or two bailed out and taken prisoner of war. But it was not a

good competitive high altitude fighter compared to a MiG. So for that reason the MiG would out turn the Meteor. It was faster, even though it didn’t have the armour plating on it that the other aircraft had. In some cases they didn’t have radio, I believe. But the Meteor didn’t compare to a MiG at high altitudes as a pure interceptive fighter.

But the Meteor was restricted after we took a few losses and it was proved that it wasn't as good as the MiG, and it was restricted to ground attack. It was an excellent rocket platform, it could carry sixteen sixty pound rockets on a Meteor. It had four Oerlikon twenty mill. cannons on it, which was good also in ground attacks.

So all the time I was there, the forty nine missions I did were mostly ground attacks with rockets, napalm and high explosives. Not often we’d have to use the guns, we’d finished truck strafing, road strafing, locomotive strafing – there wasn't much left on the ground to shoot at there in that respect with cannons, but there was still plenty to rocket in the way of installations and assembly areas

and that sort of thing. So the intentions were good in the Meteor but they didn’t live up to its expectations at altitudes as an interceptive fighter.

Well, as I said it was a good platform. It was twin engine which gave it more reliability

and in ground attack you take a hell of a lot of shell fire and small arms fire, and all that sort of thing, and it would take a fair bit of battle damage too, the Meteor would. But it was a stable aircraft and for that reason, you had time to sight up before rocket attacks, and gun attacks and all that sort of thing, without the aircraft wandering around all over the sky. It was a

good, stable platform. It was fast enough for that sort of thing, and in and out of a dive you could get away pretty quickly. But it would have been used at high altitude right through the war if it had been that little bit better, that’s all. But it wasn't as good as the MiG.

Well performance. Not so much in power,

it wasn't a matter of power – it had a reasonable amount of power with its twin engines, but it didn’t have the turning radius, a MiG could out-turn a Meteor anytime. It was smaller and it just didn’t have the aerodynamics of the MiG compared to the Meteor. It could turn around, it was more agile in the air, that’s what it boils down to.

It is yes, it was a little on the big and heavy side, it was a heavier plane than the MiG.

Oh it was good, it was quite good in that respect, but as you said, you mentioned the word it was heavier, which it was. There was a lot more of it that you had to drag around in the sky. I think the best interceptors have got most of the power, what were in the main fuselage too, and with a pair of engines – one on either side, it upsets the

performance of the aircraft in rolling the plane and things like that. Even though it’ll roll and that, but it makes it heavier in control in that altitude.

British aircraft never had a high level of comfort in the cockpit. I’ve flown one or two of them

and from what other fellas have said it’s always the been similar, they were very squeezy, you know. But it was just adequate, but compared to the American aircraft, they had a lot more space and they were more comfortable. But we were never overly concerned about it. You’d only ever be in the thing for an hour or so at a time, an hour and a half maximum, so it wasn't a great worry. It was only in case of an ejection in a Martin Baker seat if you bang out, as we say, that you’ve got to make

sure that your legs and arms were in here somewhere before you went, which is what you do anyway, but you had more chance of flailing arms and things. It was a little confined in there, particularly in the Meteor the thing called the radio compass, which had to be installed in the aircraft when it came to Japan. The tucked it right in underneath on the left hand side there where you could hardly see the damn thing, and you had to use a reflector mirror on it to see

the frequency being shown to you. The only way of seeing it was in a reflector mirror and then it was backwards. All those sort of things.

Yeah, it was designed in the Second World War.

No I don’t think it was modified over much, they had earlier marks of the Meteor and it was improved a little bit, but I don’t think the basic Meteor was altered over much. It had Derwent motors in it, two Derwent motors in it as far as I know all the way through. The aircraft didn’t alter in size in any way, they altered the shape of the nose of the aircraft,

the tail fit on it was altered in shape. That’s about all but it was still a good basic gun platform right from the word go.

Not a great deal, no. Our issue Meteor was the mark eight, still only had two VF [Voice Frequency] radios in it – one was a spare.

IFF – Identification Friend or Foe, that was basic up there, and the radio compass that I mentioned down here, that was mandatory once they started to operate from the fifth airport. They insisted that the Meteor have an automatic radio direction finder.

Oh it was standard in most fighter aircraft they issued you. Earlier on, the Vampire that we had up at Williamtown didn’t have an ejection seat in it. It was only after I’d finished on Vamps and come back from Korea that they had started to install the Martin Baker seat into Vampire aircraft. So things moved slowly you might say.

I’ve never banged out of one, quite a few of our blokes did, but you train for it. Your taught what to do, but I’ve talked to fellas that have and it all happens so quickly that if you’ve done everything correctly, it’s just your initial bang out, and your exposure to the airstream.

Yeah, normally you'd have your feet on the rudders, but you'd have to remember to take them off the rudders and take them back into platforms just in front of the seat, like that. And then it’s a matter of getting rid of the canopy, pulling the handle, off goes the canopy and then you pull the blind over your face, which is also

an ejection switch, and that fires the cartridge that bangs the seat out. That’s all there is to it really. Then everything happens automatically – the shoot envelopes automatically, and you float gently to the earth. The seat comes away automatically and just left there swinging in the silk, just like you would be doing in a normal parachute jump.

Yeah. Although there could be aircraft now that have explosive rivets on it or something like that, where you just press a button and it bangs out – that would indeed be the case for most modern fighters, I’m not too sure. But this was manual ejection. If you forgot to do that, you’d still bang through the Perspex and you could injure yourself a little bit that way, with flying Perspex.

Oh yes, it’s pretty basic stuff. There isn't much you can teach, except that legs, arms and blind over face, pull your goggles on first if you remember all that sort of thing. That’s what the blind’s there for, to cut down the airstream over your face when you first come out. You come from zero up to say, four hundred knots, it’s a sudden shock to the system unless you’ve got some sort of protection. It would be advisable to have your goggles down, and

the curtain over the front, the blind over your face.

Unless you were the leader you didn’t have to worry about it too much. If you became parted, you were on your own then. Usually you operated as squadron that could be a full sixteen aircraft formation, or

it could be an eight or a four or even a pair. But if you became separated you have to know where you are at all times and be able to take over the navigation part of it, which is map reading basically. Then with an automatic radio compass in the aircraft you could get back home. But there was a lot of radar around in those days, and you could always call for heading back home. That’s about all it was,

but if you're in weather it’s a different matter all together, you’d have to be on instruments and then hopefully you’d be able to let down on the direction finding equipment that you had.

Yes and no. We had to operate visually most of the time on strikes, you had to be able to see the ground and see what you were going to strike. Then on the way back you could

get in among clouds perhaps, but then you'd have to tighten the formation up then, and then you'd all fly close together and then you're in the hands of the leader of the show, at that stage. You’d all let down together and you join the circuit together and you break and land in the procession of sixteen aircraft. So if you were not a leader, you just follow him, and he’s the one responsible for the navigation, that’s what it boils down to.

Oh, he was just a good map reader, that’s all. He could call for headings on the radar. After a strike it was just a matter of pulling up and reforming, and then to into formation sixteen, eight, four, whatever it might be, and all go home the same way.

Well the leader gets you to what's called an intercept point, and that’s the thing he’s aiming for, which is a point on the map. You go to a lengthy briefing before you leave and there are published pictures of your target. If you understand, the whole of North Korea would be photographed from north to south everyday

by the reconnaissance people – the American reconnaissance people. And from this they would publish photographs, which were overlapping, they could do the whole of North Korea in one big photograph as it were. And from this they can detect where anti-aircraft positions are, where they’ve moved to from one day to the next, or the shape of a village can change overnight sometimes, when they might put half a dozen T-34 tanks underneath the grass huts overnight. And overnight the

hut looks a bit different, or you can see – well we don’t, but the bloke that does the photography can see the train tracks running into it perhaps. So you know what you're looking for, and that’s what the leader’s looking for, so he’d proceed to this intercept point, as it’s called. It could be the confluence or it might be the junction of two rivers, so you will not assemble there, but he will fly you there accurately, and then

it’s just a matter of all the sections turning in and diving onto the target. So you do that in a procession as it were, and loose your rockets or whatever armament you’ve got on at the time, and pulling up and re-assembling and proceeding back to base. It’s all pretty simple in structure, but while all this is happening you just hope that you don’t get hit by anti-aircraft fire,

that’s about all it boils down to.

Oh I see, well from the time that you roll in, you can see the target. You must be able to see that target down there, and from the pictures that you’ve had at the briefing, it compares favourably with what you were briefed on. You have a thing called a gyro gun sight, it’s a stabilized thing and

it can compensate for movements of the aircraft and the roll and pitch and all that sort of thing. Not too much, but it can take a lot out of it, and no shimmy and shake or anything like that. It’s just a matter of holding your target in the gyro’s sight and it’s important when you do a strike of that nature that you don’t have any slip and skid on the aircraft, the aircraft had to be flying accurately, otherwise it can upset the flight of the rocket or whatever you're carrying.

By about two and a half thousand feet you must be able to then release, and then start to think about getting up and out. You can't leave it too long, I think we had to be out by fifteen hundred feet, with the Meteor if I recall correctly – otherwise you get right into wither and ground fire at times. The other thing is that a few people have flown into the ground, they have sort of gone a bit too far,

and they didn’t get out in time, and they’ve ended up hitting the ground. Or you could hit your own rocket blast explosions on the ground, that sort of thing. You had to get out, I think it was you had to release at two and a half, or no later than fifteen hundred, that was the extreme. I could be completely wrong here, it’s hard to remember exactly what those minimums were.

They would fly as true as you aim the thing. They were good, yeah.

Not at once no, it was eight, and then on the second press you let the other eight go. With napalm you only ever carried eight and that’s just the one press and away they go. But they were pretty accurate too.

Oh yes, there would be a little bit of that but not enough to really upset what you're really aiming to do, it would have to be a massive explosion or something on the ground. Usually when you hit a target with a high explosive rocket, it makes a fair sort of a bang, and a blackish explosion with dust and all that, but it would never envelop the whole of the village of

say a dozen huts or houses. Sometimes we had to strike big warehouses or troop barracks that were usually pretty big, but we never had that problem.

Oh you’d pull two or three G in a Meteor. We didn’t have G-suits at all so you had to be very careful of that. Quite frequently you’d grey out

and things get a bit sad and you can't see too well. But once that starts you tend to ease off a bit – I’ve never blacked out of an aircraft, as the expression goes, but I’ve greyed out a few times. With the onset of grey, you know you’ve got to do something about it, otherwise you will black.

I don’t think I’ve ever had the experience where you get disoriented – it could happen in broken cloud probably. Once or twice I remember doing strikes through broken probably two eighths of cloud, and you could lose the target in the wispy cloud or something like that, that’s what you refer to, is it something like that? Or

just being disoriented through G forces? No, that would never happen in a dive – you get stabilised in a dive at a fairly high altitude, wings level and you're in an attitude that’s going to remain much the same until you release the armament. So you should never ever be disoriented I think in a strike like that.

Yeah, a

squadron is usually sixteen aircraft which is four sections of four, and that four is composed of two pairs, of a figure four. There’s a leader and his two man and the three and the four man over there. That’s the way we used to always operate, usually with sixteen. Sometimes eight or even a four, but mostly sixteen. So you fly in a battle formation

on the way to the target, which is a loose pretty much extended formation. When you get to the target, the first section would be out here on the way in, he’s the first to roll in, and then this one over here rolls in, and then three and four, or whatever’s next in line, they come in behind. So you’ve got section one as you might call it, section two, section three, section four, so you form an extended line on the way

into the target. So it could a bit like that, you see. It can move around a little bit. You're sort of on your own until you pull out and then you’ve got to find where your mate is on the way out again. Most times you can find him pretty quickly and then you reform up again, and it’s the same old battle formation on the way out. When you get back to base, you have to tighten it up, and you get in pretty tight in what we used to call a pansy

formation, which is tight wing tip to wing tip until you join the circuit and then you pitch out and you get line the stern again and go around the circuit and land line the stern. Usually on the way in you're in a battle formation it was called, it was a loose formation, and this way you could keep your eye open for other aircraft, like a marauding MiG fighter or anti-aircraft flak. Quite often on the way in

you'd have anti-aircraft exploding to one side, or above or just below you – hopefully not right in among you, but they had radar controlled eighty millimetre guns, Russian built, Russian operated I believe in the early days up there. But when we see one of those we have to change headings really quickly, otherwise he might just fire the next one onto

the line that you were taking. And the first one, his first sighter exploded beside you, so you don’t muck about and stay on the same heading all the time. Once you get that sort of thing happening around you, you’ve got to gig around and change your heading, otherwise you might just take one. So you'd have that sort of thing happening on the way in. Not often, but you could have an aircraft strike from above. If you're out in battle formation, you can

have your eyes open a bit more, your not concentrating on close formation, so you’ve got your eyes up and you can see, and also you know where your mate is at any stage, and you're not going to run into him. Anti-aircraft was usually a thing on the way in, and on a roll into a strike, once you get down to say, less than about five thousand feet you can expect a lot of ground fire.

Oh yeah, you have to know where the preceding aircraft was there. Usually you could see him or the last two right in front of you, at the one side or – usually just to the one side like that. You can see him, he can't see you but you can see him, and he can see the bloke in front, so it was never a big problem. I don’t recall ever having a aerial collision, a mid air collision at all.

No, it wasn't a big problem.

Well you didn’t know anything about it until you copped it I suppose, if you can imagine a whole battalion of troops laying on their back on

the ground and they’ve all got a rifle, or a weapon of some sort, and they're all firing, there was an awful lot of shot in the air at any one time. That was the thing you would see on your aircraft from time to time when you got back. There might be a ding here and a bullet hole there, but you could be unlucky and you could take one in a very unfortunate position, say right in the engine or the end take or some place that’s pretty critical.

No, not a lot, just except that they might be firing at you. No, those sort of things don’t tend to worry the pilot I don’t think. You're a bit busy doing what you have to do and that’s the last thing in the world that you want to be worrying about.

I never used bombs. We didn’t used bombs much on Meteors,

in the early days in the Mustangs they used them quite a lot I believe.

Strafing, I only got involved in once or twice, I was mainly rockets, but strafing attacks, that’s where you’ve got to keep your eyes open for hills and anti-aircraft fire and all those sorts of things, because you can get sucked in with strafing, more so than

rocketry or dive bombing. You can get far too low, and with strafing you can get very low indeed, and you get explosions in front of you – for example a train with ammunition on it or fuel, and it blows up your face. So you’ve got to be very aware of those sort of things. But it’s more difficult than rocketry, you have to be more accurate and fly the aircraft pretty well, but you're also low when you're doing strafing. You're down

at tree top level sometimes, and then you can fly into a valley and find that it is very difficult to get out again. These problems are associated with strafing.

It was always there. I never actually saw a MiG,

but we had two or three instances where we had to break because it had been reported that a MiG at four o'clock or wherever, and you’d break immediately. There were cases where MiGs have gone through the flight, even on their way in the rocket attacks, even down half way into say North Korea. It wasn't often that the MiGs got down as far as the

border or into that area, that southern half. They didn’t come down there frequently but there was always the chance that they could, and indeed they did once or twice.

Eyes. That’s all, nothing else.

You would all be moving your head around quite a lot, in fact all the time – that’s what you were expected to do. Because this could happen

and you might be the only one who sees an incoming aircraft, and you're the one who can call the break, but you have to say, “Break left, break right. MiG at so and so,” so that the bloke up front, the leader, knows exactly what's going on. You can't just call a break without some sort of reason. It isn't often that it happened, well it didn’t in my day. But it could happen.

Not this way, we had one behind us. We didn’t have rear vision mirrors as I recall. I did see one in a plane once and I couldn’t work out where the hell I was, what was going on back there.

But there was a blind spot in the Meteor because the canopy, the rear end of it came down to a bulkhead, as it were. So if you could look around, which was very difficult with a Martin Baker seat behind you and all that, you’ve got this damn bulkhead arrangement right behind you. No, that was the only blind spot of note, of course there is that wing area which you get with most aircraft, unless you're sitting

well up front. The Meteor canopy area was ahead of the wing itself, but if you wanted to look down just behind you there, it was impossible, you to look straight into the engine cowling and the wing, which pretty big on the Meteor on either side. That was a blind spot, yeah.

You would say, “Break left,” “Break right.”

Where the fellow was. You're not going to turn away, it’s best to turn in. Then again if you get into trouble it all depends on the manoeuvrability of the aircraft that you're flying, too, you see. Those are the things that have to be computed pretty quickly up here.

Yeah.

Well, as I said it all depends on the position of the aircraft – usually he wouldn’t be on his own, he would be in a pair, too, so you could only turn one way or the other, and that would be the best way to turn under the circumstances. Then you had to sort your stuff out from there, you really can't expect to turn and it’s all over, that’s where the aerial combat would start.

Oh, well you'd have to get rid of all your rockets for a start, that’s where you're at a disadvantage at any time if you were attacked by a fighter of some sort. But he’s got the advantage of height normally, he hasn’t got all that weight to carry around. But you'd have to get rid of all your armament for a start – that is your external armament as much as you can. Then

you’d have to start to nut things out pretty quickly really. So he’d be at an advantage, a distinct advantage particular if you hadn't seen him, and that happened in the Second World War a lot – the bombers in Germany would be raked by fire even before they knew what was going, or they were attacked where they wouldn’t even see the aircraft that attacked them.

Oh, it improved it considerably. It becomes a lighter aircraft and it will roll much better too. Any aircraft, once you get rid of a bit of weight, it will fly much better.

That was a pretty easy old plane really, as far as it didn’t have any idiosyncrasy of a Wirraway. The point of a stall in a Wirraway you could spin out – not out of control, but you could very readily. At low speed on certain aircraft they are very, very touchy at the point of a stall,

and they can flick roll, they can drop a wing, as we say. The Meteor it didn’t have that tendency. Quite a lot of modern aircraft now tend to stall straight ahead, they do a sloshy old stall, and you’ve got all sorts of devices on it now that tell you you’ve got to stick, stick wobblers I think they call them, and there are various other devices that sound when the aircraft is at the point of a stall and you can do something about it. But not on

the early model aircraft, you could stall them it’s a bit too late and the next thing you know, you're spinning. But in the case of the Meteor that wasn't the case. You could splurge into the ground in one if you were too low. When I say splurge it’s a stall straight ahead, and if you were too low and you pull out too quickly, and there’s a hill coming up in front of you or something like that. That happened to a couple of blokes where they hit the ground, they splurge into the side of a hill.

It didn’t drop a wing and snap away.

Simple flying suits, cotton flying suits mainly in the summer time. In the first couple of months that I was there we were using the ordinary cloth and leather helmets, which was the standard issue. Then it became

mandatory to wear a hard hat, a bone dome as they were called. They were pretty cumbersome sort of a thing when you first put them on and wear them. The suits, no they didn’t come until later on. We never had them on the Meteor.

Normally it was just the flying suit of some nature – there were probably

six or seven different types, that it wasn't mandatory that you wore the same coloured flying suit, or the same model flying suit at any stage. You'd have that and the gun belt, and then you'd have your life vest over that, which was deflated and pretty slim. Then you sit yourself in the aeroplane – oh

you’ve got your pockets full of maps and escape innovation gear and all that sort of thing – a few flares and little bit of food maybe. There was a water bag attached to the parachute in the Martin Baker seat. You had a helmet, oxygen mask and that’s about it. Once you got in the aircraft and got yourself in the Martin Baker seat, you're strapped in

and there you stay until about an hour and ten minutes later when you get back, unless you pull the blinds and bang out.

Oh yes, always.

Oh usually a Smith and Wesson .30. One of the fellas had an American Colt .45 which they’d acquired – they were a bit heavy and cumbersome. The Smith and Wesson was a little lighter but if you're on the ground and

I don’t think they’d be an advantage to you, you know, if you’ve got the power of the North Korean Army bearing down on top of you, it’s not going to be very good.

Oh quite a lot. It came into escape and evasion business, the ‘E & E’. You just hoped for the best really, I mean if you can still walk when you strike the ground,

whether you came down in a parachute or you force landed the aircraft, you’ve got to think quickly, ‘Where am I? Am I going to be captured? What am I going to do?’ So you could probably escape and get back to the frontline if you were near enough. But then the case of one or two of the blokes that got back out from either being a prisoner of war or

picked up by helicopter. They were very lucky they were picked up quickly, but they could see army personnel bearing down on them more or less you see. So it’s just a matter of being quick. But then if you landed in a very remote area you could survive for days and weeks probably. But not often I can recall a case where someone had actually been shot down way up north and walked out and stolen a fishing boat or something,

and escaped that way. But Guthrie who was shot down, he was a prisoner and he escaped twice, and they almost got away on one occasion. They had picked up a fishing boat but after being adrift for about a week, they got this boat apparently, and out on the water and then they found that they were on an inland – not an inland, sort of a coastal lake that had a causeway built

across the mouth of where they thought that they were going to go to and get out to the open sea, and they were recaptured pretty quickly after that. You had all those problems but I don’t recall anyone ever escaping from a camp or from a forced landing or anything like that, and being able to walk right back.

Well it happens pretty quickly, if you get hit and you bail out

for instance, like a mate of mine that lives down here, Cec Sly, he was in a Mustang and he was hit, bailed out and he was only about no more than fifteen or twenty k’s north of the front line, and he was able to hold off a platoon, or section of troops for about half an hour or so. But once anyone bails out, the leader or whoever saw

you go, quickly lets the authorities know that you're in the silk and on the way down. The Americans were good at this, and they had their helicopters based all around the place around the frontline, and they could get there quickly but if there were a lot of troops there, it was very difficult for then to land, you know if the ground fire was pretty intense. Then in the case of Cec, one helicopter got to him and it got shot up so bad that he had to get out before he touched down to get Cec. Then about twenty minutes later they…

Oh, two weeks.

Well auto based at Iwakuni was 36 Squadron, a transport squadron, RAAF. They had about eight or ten DC3 / C-47 [transport aircraft] type aircraft there, which were used principally to carry all the supplies for the 77 backwards and forwards from South Korea. In the early days up there they were doing a sterling service too, the 36 Squadron did any evacuation

from Hungnam when the Chinese came into the war early in the piece. They made a rapid advance down the east coast and 36 moved into action, the moved a whole squadron overnight out of Hungnam down to Pohang, and every day they were flying supplies like arms ammunition and spare motors, personnel, medevacs [medical evacuations] out

and anything of that nature, you know. They did damn good work up there, they really did. The 36 Squadron, they carried things backwards and forwards.

Well I was sitting on a bag of potatoes down the back there, freezing cold. Just a bit of apprehension probably, wondering what the hell it was going to be like, but that’s about

all.

Yes, Lloyd Knight was a friend that came over with me. We were on the same flying course all the way through. Lloyd now lives down in Melbourne and I see him from time to time, he’s still alive. We were the first two out of the five that went over to Iwakuni initially and then John Pingston and Athol Frazer and Royal Navy Bastion came in behind us.

Kimpo. The American Air Force, the Fifth Air Force was their principal base in South Korea, when things stabilized on the parallel. It was big, it had one runway only and the 5th Air Force were the mainly Sabres

who were on the far side of the airport from us. There were a few photo reconnaissance squadrons, also in the area, but they didn’t have that many aircraft. It was principally Sabre squadrons on one side and the 77 on the other, and the tactical reconnaissance was over there next to us too. But I don’t know how many thousands of fellas were on Kimpo at the time, I haven't got it written down, nor could I estimate.

It was a was a big set up, and we lived with the Americans virtually, as far as rationing was concerned. We ate in their mess but we had our own group of huts and flight huts and all that sort of thing. So we were quite independent other than the eating arrangements.

In 77? Oh, there wouldn’t be more than about a hundred and sixty, probably, something like that. There would have been about two dozen pilots at any one

stage – sometimes less. In fact earlier on there were less, that’s why the big hurry up was on when we left. Airmen, oh probably about a hundred airmen there, the technical fellas, a bit of transport, that’s about all.

Sixteen, was the maximum when the full squadron is up.

Yeah, well you had all of your flying gear with you when you arrived, and there wasn't much involved in it really, because you just stepped out of the Meteor over at Iwakuni, and basically step into the same aeroplane in Kimpo – a different number on it, that’s about all.

Briefing, into the plane, slightly different radio procedures to get used to. They had a busy control tower there. A few procedures there that were a bit different, not too much. The first trip I did there was with a fella by the name of George Hale, he was a Tasmanian also. He took me on reconnaissance right up the east coast of

North Korea, just as a pair – he was leading and I was following him around, and just pointing out all the points of interest like anti-aircraft positions and the names of the harbours and where the rescue people were based. The Americans had rescue helicopters based on some outlying islands, and on permanent ships off shore and that sort of thing. So you got to know all those procedures and where they all were. Then you get a bit of

a lead yourself and with your map, you're doing a lot of map reading at this stage to learn what’s on the ground below. Then back, and the next morning we were off again, and we did the other coast, the west coast in a similar manner. Get to know it, and the next day it’s into action. Then I did another forty nine missions after that, all active missions in North Korea.

Yes. Down to the flight hut and be there at a specific time, not late, and get your gear on. Sit down,

and one of the first briefings would probably be from one of the American weather fellows who would tell you what the weather conditions were like in North Korea on that day. It wasn't too bad either, they had very good contacts up there you might say. You'd get through that, and tell you about contrails in the sky, persistent contrails could be expected, and the cloud cover – any other information that might be interesting for if we were going to do

rocket striking. Then there would be our own intelligence fella, he would tell you a bit about the target, distribute some photos and he might say that there was a new flak battery just been established here, and you'd mark that in on your map, because these things used to move around a little bit. With their zero photography and stuff that they had, they could pick this up pretty quickly. The Americans thought it was pretty high tech – it’s

better now of course. So you’d have an intel briefing, and the best way out if you get shot down on the coast, where to go and all that sort of thing. If you didn’t get catched, so all that over, and the bloke that was going to lead it has a few words to say, we’ll do this or we’ll do that. Everything is pretty much as it was in the training manual there,

once you get to the target, everything is very similar, you get to that intercept point and then you roll in. But after the intelligence briefing it’s at a particular time, you always had a time to take off, because there were so many missions coming backwards and forwards, that you were in a slot to leave at a particular time at the end of the runway. So you had to get to the runway as a squadron of sixteen, to take off at say ten thirty or something.

So it’s out at the plane at the appropriate time and you start up, check your radios, make sure they’re all working. He leads out and away you go, sixteen aircraft taxi around the perimeter track, and in fours you line up. Two there and two there, and (depot UNCLEAR) the signal and away you go, there’s all these screaming jets and hot bitumen and stones and things right around the plane. You could

have eight or sixteen rockets on. So the first four go and then the next four line up – actually there were times I remember when we had the whole sixteen on the runway at one time. But in hot weather it could cook the bitumen up too much, with all those aeroplanes and the jet blaster if I remember the procedure. Anyway it wasn't long before you were in the air and you all form up in that battle formation that I told you about. You climb to altitude, which on the way was twenty five thousand feet, and that’s

where you start to rubberneck and look for things, and flak and other aircraft that is not friendly. Then he gets to that intercept point and in you go. That’s about the way things go. If you were there in the midwinter, you'd be in your immersion suits - I think I mentioned it before, but it was a rubber suit that clasps very tightly down here, and you’ve got

boots that seal up against water, and neck ties around here. The only part of you that would get wet would be your hands and your face. So if you're unfortunate enough to be there in the middle of winter you wear an immersion suit. Most of the time it would be a normal cotton flying suit and a hard hat, or early on the cloth helmet or the leather helmet. That’s about the procedure.

Most times I had – everyone had an aircraft allocated to them. I had one, number 734, which I flew most of the time, but you couldn’t always do that due to serviceability and things like that. So sometimes you’d have a different aircraft, but most times I flew the same aircraft, yeah.

Yes it was a bit like that. Even though you say it was your lucky plane and that, it was one of the oldest planes that was there. It had a pretty good history, it had a couple of bullet holes through it that had been patched up by the previous pilot. I got a few myself but they were nothing to worry about. 734 was always pretty faithful to me and I never had any problems with it.

Yes. When you first get there you have an aircraft allocated to you and it’s on your charge, as we say in the service. That is, everything that you have that’s ever issued to you by the air force was put on your charge, and you're responsible for it. If you lose it you pay for it, sort of thing. But I don’t think they’d ever expect you to reimburse the government for an aircraft that you lose. But it’s on your charge, so when you leave the squadron

it’s signed off and put on someone else’s charge. All that happened, but prior to a mission, you would proceed to the hangar or the workshop area and you’d have to sign a book called an E 77, which was the maintenance book attached to that aircraft. It would tell you the history of what it’s done, what’s been done the day before and who filled it up with gas, and who did this, it’s all signed out.

You accept it as being serviceable and you sign it out and off you go. When you come back you might put in any unserviceability that you know about on the aircraft, like it might have a shrapnel hole you think here, or the left engine doesn’t work too well. So you put that in and away you go, then they’ll fix it up while you're down at the mess having lunch or something. But there was just a little bit of that stuff, the administrative side of it.

But you had to be responsible for everything you're issued with, including your aircraft.

Oh yeah. I mean you have to be, you have to trust everybody really, if you could. Yeah we always trusted the mechanics, or the air framers, the armourers, the lot. They were all very good at their job.

Oh yeah, most of the time I was there you get to know them all by name. Not always when they dispatch you in the aircraft, and it could be a different fellow up there with you, it could do your (UNCLEAR) stuff for you. They usually start the aircraft with a battery cart and they do that and wave you off. You got to know them pretty well

and they were very professional at their jobs.

Oh yeah, even though we didn’t eat in the Australian mess we did have our own clubs – there was an aircrew club, and there was the other ranks clubs as we called it. It was best to have an aircrew club because you could talk over a mission at the end of the day, and we had camera guns in the aircraft too, and at the end of the day we’d

get all this 8 mm stuff out of the camera up on the bar. They used to be able to develop the film pretty quickly and they’d string it all together and you could see all your strikes. So you'd film the fellow in front of you all the time with this thing, and when you rolled in and armed your guns and all that sort of thing, it would start the camera and it would film the whole of the dive down onto the target. You’d see the strikes from the previous

aircraft, and the bloke behind me would take my strikes – all this sort of thing. So you could talk about that in the bars or wherever it was at the end of the night. So that was what we called the aircrew club.

Yeah, a little bit like that. Even though you have a formal debriefing after, that’s the first thing you do while everything’s fresh in your brain, if anything went wrong or maybe someone got shot down or something. “What happened? Did you see him hit the ground or did you see him bail out,

what caused the prang [crash]?” or whatever, you know. So you go through all that quite frequently, debrief and you say, “Well, no problems. It was a good mission” and all that sort of thing, and off you go. But it wasn't always as simple as that.

No, unless – well in the case when poor old Don got shut down, he was my mate and we all go out together, and when you come back he’s not there. That’s a bit hard to accept at times, but you have to get over it pretty quick.

Sometimes twice a day.

Sometimes only one, and then there could be one day in between. It all depends on the requirements, and the amount of crew available and that sort of thing, yeah. It was not cut and dry that you would fly at eight o'clock in the morning of the week, or anything like that, like flying as a pilot with an airline. You would be put on the roster for today and you could do two missions, or you might only do one, and none the next day.

It was a higgledy piggledy sort of a thing.

Yes. Everyday the squadron would be on what’s called an item in the gig standby. The item one was at dawn, an hour before dawn, four people would be in their aircraft ready to go. This was in case the airfield was

going to be attacked in some manner by the North Koreans from the air. You were ready to scramble, you were in your aircraft and ready to go. So you had the dawn one and the evening one too, an hour before and an hour after dusk. They were the item gig scramble standby, or whatever you wanted to call it. Then you're relieved of that, and during the time in between was the time when the major missions

were flown.

Yes. Sometimes there was a twilight, that’s all.

Yeah, only single pilot things, and I can only remember one or two where one fella was testing bombs and decided to do some night bombing, I think it was.

All authorised stuff of course, but I can't remember what the other one was. It was probably in association with the Americans. But we didn’t do night missions because you couldn’t see the ground, and we were ground attack. Quite often though, the Americans flew night – in fact there was one squadron up there where that’s the only thing they did, was to do night reconnaissance. They’d look for headlights on the road and anything of this nature so they can

get some sort of interpretation of what was going on on the ground at night, which was the only time the North Koreans would move around, was at night because during the daylight hours they used to get hammered to hell. Anytime they showed their nose above the ground.

Oh, I got off pretty easy, there was only

two or three times though – not me so much found it, but aircrew fellas walking around the plane after, they’d find a few dings here and there, or a few bullet holes, that’s about all. But I got away pretty easy on that. Others had their engine half shot off and bring the aircraft back with one motor, and one, Philip Monaghan he had to force-land on an island in the mouth of the Han River, and luckily he pulled it off on a gear down on a hard sand bank.

36 Squadron, the one I mentioned before in the DC3s, they were able to fly an engine in with two or three technicians and they changed the motor on the sand bar, on the flat, and he flew it back out again a couple of days later. He was lucky, but he got flak damage to his motor. That was happening quite regularly, where aircraft were damaged pretty badly but

in my own case I got away pretty easily.

Yeah, well as I said they’d be all army installations on the ground. Never ships, we never attacked a ship in my time. I never had any aerial duals, but it was all ground stuff where you’d attack perhaps a train,

the mouth of a tunnel, troop concentration, tanks and assemblies of many troops supposedly concealed in a village. Sometimes industrial sites, they were pretty well hidden, industrial sites for obvious reasons. They could have been repair facilities for trains or army companies.

That sort of thing.

Yeah, as I said there were normally four place American issue tent, rectangular with a door at each end. Potbelly stove in the middle which usually heavy oil fired or something like that.

We had camp stretchers, anything else that you could build beside it, like a bedside table or a place to put your knick-knacks. You only had one bag of gear, I think we only had a steel cabinet, a steel trunk. I’m not really sure about that now, if they were at Kimpo or not when we got there. But you usually went over there with just one kit bag with all your other gear in it,

which was a change of clothing, stuff that you were not going to use on a normal day to day basis. But you had power on, a hundred and ten volte American power, which was a bit on the feeble side. A potbellied stove, and there you lived. You made your own table up, whatever you needed to make it a bit more comfortable.

No, I just kept it down to a minimum. But you had to be prepared to bug out, as the expression was

at any time, and it was a matter of being able to throw everything into a tin box or a sea bag and into a plane and go, and leave the other stuff there for a freighter to pick up if you could. We didn’t have to move at any time, although we had a couple of scares. We actually get to the plane, they’ve packed the gear up and have to get down to the fighter ready to go, and the whole thing is called off. The first time we found that it was a practice run, and the other one

was when there was a big bust out on the line, only a month or so before the war ended, and there was a bit of a scare on there I remember. But we were ready to go at a couple of hours notice.

No, I don’t believe in those.

No, none of that.

Yes, oh we got on well together. They always did right through the Second World War and right up to the Korean War, they were good. We used to sit with them at table, and no trouble at all. We would enjoy their evening mess facility too, in their club, and they even had a few poker machines in there in the club. We’d have a drink with them and play the pokies

if you wanted to, so it was all quite comfortable in that respect.

I can only ever recall there ever being one form of entertainment, it was a stage show, I think it could have been USO [United Service Organisations] people I think they called them. They’d bring entertainers out from the States [United States] and it was in their mess, but I think we were invited but I think we thought we’d leave it all to them because it was their mess and we didn’t, I don’t think so

we didn’t go anyway. We had some Australian entertainers come once or twice, to Kimpo. Stage personalities, I just can't remember the names at the moment, but I remember being entertained on one occasion by a group of about four or five. Music and funny stuff, it was quite good. Twice I think that happened in my time.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that somewhere? I did, yeah. I was just trying to think of, while I was talking to you I was trying to think of her name. Eileen Gower I think her name was, have I got her name down there?

So, not a bad memory. Yeah, it wasn't until she was in the club with us later on, that on the program –

it was a roughly typed out program, and it had all the names of all the people, and I thought, ‘I know that name.’ So I introduced myself after a while and she said, “Yes, I know you. I know your family and all that.” Eileen Gower, I remember it quite well. But there you are, she went into entertaining over in Melbourne, I don’t know if it was at the Tivoli or where it was, but it was one of the Melbourne theatres or in the circular end there somewhere. Thanks for reminding me about that.

Well quite a few of us used to build models and powered models. You could buy very good little model aircraft engines and things like that over in Japan. There was always a demand for that sort of thing, so just to fill in a bit of time we used to do that. I built a couple while I was there and various others did too. That occupied a bit of time. There was always netball,

and that was about the only sport around the quarters. We used to kick a football around a bit when we got the opportunity. Athol Frazer and I used to love our Aussie Rules, and used to kick to kick around with the Americans and they just couldn’t get used to the shape of the ball. That was a bit of a worry. There was always something to do if you wanted to get into athletics.

Oh those, they happened over the years.

When I was up in the Solomons I used to see one or now and again, and I’d buy it and put it together, and I had quite a lot of them on my office desk, or just on a sideboard beside my desk. I ended up with about twenty four or so there, and I put them all in a box and brought them home with me. That’s what’s left of them, but my grandson likes to see them now and again so they’ve been up there for the last six months, gathering dust.

Oh, they were kits too. You could buy the kit, that was the only way we would do it. Otherwise the big slabs of balsa wood and cut it on site and all that sort of thing, that was difficult so we used to buy kits, which were pretty easy to procure in Japan. They were just starting to get industrialised in Japan and turning out all sorts of things like that. Toys and models and components for models, cameras – they were right into cameras and

binoculars. They started to get into heavier stuff and they were starting to build cars. The cars that were out in the streets in the early days were taxis, I think it was. They were a pretty rough old car but they got a lot better at it as you know, as the years went by.

Yeah, I bought a hand made – a pretty much hand made Mamiya 6, and it was nearly up at the top of the line in those days.

I had that for many years, but you could see the hand made bits in it. As a cottage industry they would get all the parts made out in the villages and around the place. There was a lot of artists and technicians left in Japan after the war, and they can do this sort of thing very well. They made a good camera, Mamiya did.

Quite a lot.

They were made principally with discarded soft drinks and beer cans and all that sort of thing. It was a big market for that in Asia after the Second World War and while the war was on in Korea. All the people in South Korea were pretty much destitute. They didn’t have any materials to build a house with, let alone toys. But once they got themselves into some sort of makeshift house, they could start a cottage industry

in making replicas of various things. But they were good tinsmiths in this respect, but they were still making good toys in Japan with beer cans, that I recall in the days that I was up there.

Yeah, as far as I can recollect, yeah. You could buy a toy down here sometimes I think I remember, and if you really opened it up and looked inside you could see ‘Budweiser’ written across the side.

No I didn’t. I usually bought a few things like (not crystal their machines UNCLEAR) and nice stuff that the Japanese used to do very well. Hand carved stuff – I’ve got a few bits and pieces around here somewhere, I don’t know where they are. But they were just starting to do wood carvings, and they could do lacquer work very well.

Inlaid lacquer work and that sort of stuff. I used to buy a few things like that for my Mum and members of the family.

I can't think now, but they used to get cans and open then out and solder them together to make a piece of tin this big to help line their house, or to form a wall of a house. They were great scroungers, and first of

all they had to build their accommodation and then they could start to think about other things. They would utilize an empty can or a fruit can, or anything bigger. That was good value, sort of thing. But particularly anything off a base, the Americans used to get a whole lot of stuff in four gallon cans like that, sealed dry vegetables and things like that. They were good value as far as empty cans were concerned.

You weren't allowed, you had to be authorised. The only time I ever got off base, would be three or four times when you could ride shotgun, as it were, with the man who took a truck into town to the stores at the NAAFI [Navy Army and Air Force Institute] or wherever, to get supplies for your own use. Like in the clubs, Coca Cola, ice and sometimes eggs

and anything like that that you could cook up in your own room or in the club, you know, little things like that. But there are always things like extra clothing and boots and issue stuff like that which had to be procured from the NAAFI place in Seoul. So three times I went with a driver, but they always had to have an extra man on that truck just to keep their eye on things, and you're always armed when you went in.

They were pretty adventurous at times, you had a lot of children hanging around trying to steal things out of the back of the truck, and that sort of stuff.

Oh, in those days I thought, ‘Gee, it’s taken a pounding.’ Which it had, and I’ve got pictures there were only about five big buildings left in the middle of town. I was up there a couple of years ago and I took these pictures back to some of these people from the KVA

who asked us there – the Korean Veterans Association. I showed them those and they can recall seeing pictures like that and they were very pleased to see them again. As opposed to what’s up there now, everything’s so new, and it’s a booming economy in Korea as you probably know. But where there was only one makeshift bridge over the harbour when I was up there, and it had been bombed twice and fixed up again by the Americans. There are now twenty-two bridges over the Han River, I think is at last count. At the end of

every road there’s a bridge now, but in those days there was only one bridge and it was taken out two or three times during the war. But it was knocked about badly. No it was just a shot up old town in those days.

Not that many, a lot of children around. There weren't that many people because there was not that much to buy really. There was no reason, they were mostly

back out in the country trying to get the rice growing again I think. It was all blown to blazers during the war, and they had a big refugee problem in South Korea. They had to get them all re-established again. No, there weren't that many that I recall. There were a lot of children, there was a lot of children around.

Yeah, other than the house boy that you’d have come in on base,

they had a few licensed domestic staff who were able to help out around the place, and if you were lucky enough you could call the house boy and he’d come and do your laundry for you and clean the place up. He’d go and do a half a dozen tents for half a dollar a day, or however many wan it was, the local currency. But that’s about all.

Not much, no. Very little. Unless you got one that had been to school before the war or something at an English speaking school, but I don’t ever recall having one that could speak the language reasonably fluently.

Only nurses, Red Cross people. No,

we didn’t have anything like a WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] or anything, the Women’s Civilian Air Force, or anything like that there then. There were nursing personnel over on the other side, but we didn’t see much of them. Our own nurses used to come through from time to time on the 36 Squadron aircraft, taking out wounded or anything of that nature. They were not based there,

they were transient people.

No, that’s right.

Yeah, they would come on base at infrequent intervals, and they were always very welcome, and they would be there with the tea stand and anything like that. Or if they could help with

mail, and they’ve have a few things to give out in the way of chocolates and – not so much cigarettes because there were always plenty of cigarettes on issue. But they were there from time to time, yeah. I think they did most of their work with the army up on the line with the battalions. We were pretty comfortable there compared to the army.

Oh yes, you could do that quite regularly. Mail outs were almost everyday when a plane came in.

My parents and others in Australia used to get letters from me from time to time, but it didn’t take too long. I think you’d get the incoming much quicker than the outgoing I think, if I remember rightly. That was no trouble.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think I said that earlier. Yes, you were up to date, every time you went to a briefing you knew where the frontline was, what was going on and what had happened yesterday, to where the action was. It was only towards the last couple of months that we could see that it would finish sooner or later because they were starting to have prisoner exchanges. Then we had a couple of false alarms

and they were still talking up at Kaesong [in October 1951 armistice negotiations moved to nearby Panmunjom], and those meetings went on for eighteen months I think it was. But in the end you could see that it would have to happen soon, and it would be the end of the line.

Oh we felt pretty elated about the whole thing. It meant that you probably weren't going to lose any more pilots.

That was good in a way but you still went on flying, just as though nothing had happened, except you weren't going to fly across the line today, you were just going to train or do some weapon work on the range or something after this. We still kept the planes flying for many hours, not quite as many hours, but quite frequently.

Yeah I think so, I’d done forty-nine missions, and I was hoping to get it to fifty. And you get the odd one that’s done ninety nine that’s hoping to get to a hundred. But you know, that’s pretty usual of anyone in the air force if they're on active service.

(UNCLEAR)

End of tape

Rotation of crew, yeah. With pilots you would do twenty eight days, say a month, on active service and they you'd have two days off.

That was two days back at Iwakuni for R and R – rest and recuperation or whatever it was called. Then back into the action again on the fourth day. So day one, fly over on 36 Squadron – sometimes it could take all day by the time you left wherever you were going to depart from, and by the time you got in to Iwakuni. Two days off and then return much the same on top of a bag of potatoes or something. Oh, you had

everything that was available in the base, you could go for a trip out of town if you wanted to, if you could find an organised tour is the best way to get around, or find a cab. Go for a run up into the hills around Iwakuni. It was a bit restricted in that respect, you wouldn’t be able to take a train trip say, up to Osaka or Kyoto, or even up to Tokyo. It was a bit too far to go, you weren't allowed to do that anyway. So you had

two days back there.

Well around Yokohama and Tokyo of course, they were fire bombed right out up there pretty bad, and Nagoya of course was bombed. Hiroshima was bad, but Iwakuni as far as I can remember

and detect, was not harmed very much. In fact the main street of Iwakuni was still the average Japanese front shop type of street. They’d have little bars – not too many of those, beer bars and a few entertainment places along the way. Lots of music and things like that, lots of gift shops. The average house wasn't harmed around Iwakuni if

I remember rightly. I think they fared pretty well, but it all depends on the location of the village, how they fared. Quite a few of them were bombed and burnt but I think Iwakuni got out of it pretty well, even though it had a big airfield adjacent to it. But I can still see these houses along the main street, and they looked as though they could have been there for a long time.

All the way through the Second World War.

I think watch out for the pick pockets, and that sort of thing, that was about all. No I don’t recall hearing much about that, I never had any problems, I can't remember any of the fellas having any problems at all about theft or muggings or anything of that nature, around town, or

retribution or anything quite like that.

Yeah, I think you're going to get that anywhere there’s military, you get that in run down places like Japan was in those days, there wasn't much control medically. In fact half the time – if they had to be hospitalised, put it that way, I don’t think they’d be able to find a place to go to.

That was all scrambling to get up to scratch again. Oh yes, there was a bit of VD [Venereal Disease] around but we never had any up our way, I don’t think, that I can recall in the air force or even among the 77 Squadron blokes. There might have been the odd one or two there you didn’t know about. It wasn't rampant.

The war was over, and they were on our side virtually then, you see, but I suppose you tend to mellow a little bit as you get older don’t you, normally you do. But I didn’t have the hatred – if you could call it hatred during the war, I think the average Australian didn’t have a lot of time the Japanese, particularly after the prisoner of war business. Time’s a great healer, I suppose, and that’s what happened in my case.

Well you could be with them all day if you wanted to, they had their quarters adjacent to the majority of the aircrew. But you were mingling with them all the time during the daylight hours, if you were down on the flight line

or you were about to go on a mission or something like that, you mingle quite a lot, quite extensively. But they had their own quarters, we had ours so you didn’t mingle that much in the evenings or after you’d had a few beers at night, it was usually have a few more beers and go to bed. That’s about it, but we didn’t mix that much in each other’s mess, put it that way. But any other time yeah, it was just mix, mix, mix.

Oh, it could get out of hand at times, but you had to keep your eye on it, you really did. We had our bar in the aircrew club, and the airmen had their own, and it was open – I don't know the hours, but never during working hours in the daytime, but it was only in the evenings after work as it were.

The appropriate authorities, the officers were responsible for the airmen, they had to keep an eye on us like an orderly officer had to keep his eye on it and keep it well policed. We never had any big problems with the booze up there. It was good, it was quite good.

Oh yes. I didn’t smoke myself but you were issued with a can of fifty, it might have been a hundred,

every week. Round cans – WD and HO Wills, and Craven A and all those brands that were around at the time, and about two cakes of soap. Our hut was practically lined with full and empty Grave and A cans. But there were a hell of a lot of cigarettes around if you wanted them.

A little, yeah. Because you

had to keep your eye on the house boy when he came. Most of them were pretty honest but every now and again some cigarettes would go missing and soap and things like that. But it wasn't good soap, it was issue stuff, and you’d buy your own soap in the NAAFI store, the English or British stores, or you could buy it in the PX [postal exchange – American Canteen Unit] which was the American ones, which was much better quality soap. Which is what we used to do, but the issue stuff wasn't

too good, so there was always a lot of that around – we didn’t mind them stealing the soap.

Exactly the same, the same sort of tent, the same issue stretcher. The food was the same, no there was no great difference there. Unless they imported their own stuff into a mess, you know, they might bring in a box of champagne or something. If they were able to

bring in a little bit of extra stuff in their own aircraft, well and good, but that was a little bit difficult.

Well we didn’t have any really, because we flew different types of aircraft on different types of missions. We lived in different areas so we didn’t get mixed up

as far as maintenance was concerned or anything like that. No they were was no competition at all because there was no need for it, nor was it available.

Oh they were pretty good pilots, they were. The American pilots were well trained, very well trained. They had good equipment and were trained very well.

I can't recall. I had an idea you were going to ask me that, and I tried to think about it but I can't recall. I think there would have been a bit of trepidation there, mainly to try to do what was expected of me I suppose.

Not that I couldn’t handle the flying and what I was supposed to do on the job, but to make sure I did it right and didn’t cause a lot of strife for the rest of the blokes. No, I don’t recall but I think that’s what it would have been anyway, if there was some trepidation there.

Oh you do them all competently I suppose, it was a habit forming thing.

Aiming to bring out all the good habits, not the bad ones. Yeah, you start to get more comfortable with the aircraft and the mission and the type of work that you're doing. You have to get better all the time.

Yes just towards the end there was a bit of a bust out on the central part of the line, I think it was towards the cease fire, and the Chinese and North Koreans were trying to establish as much territory as they could before the thing was signed up. There was a big breakout right on the central sector, right in front of the Australians actually.

No, the Hook was a different thing all together, but this was a major breakout and it was all hands on pumps sort of business, and we were flying quite a lot of missions every day up there and looking for targets of opportunity which you couldn’t find because most things happened at night on the front and on the central front there, as you probably know. We were there mainly

looking for supply movements and troop movement and that sort of thing. That more or less was in support of the Australian troops on the central front there, but not necessarily. It’s a different war all together to what you'd see say, after D Day where you’ve got thousands of troops trying to advance to the opposing forces and you were trying to shoot the hell out of the opposing forces, which could only be half a k away. That sort of thing didn’t

happen as far as aviation is concerned in Korea. Other than in the early days, in the days of the Mustangs when things were really mixed up down there in South Korea, particularly near Pusan towards the end of the North Korean advance into the south, the Mustangs were doing a lot of ground support. In those days, but later on it wasn't quite the same.

No they were all pre-planned operations which would be hundreds of k’s behind the line sort of business and mainly to do interdiction stuff, get into supply facilities, trains, trucks, anything you could find. Or to bomb out static installations like tanks camouflaged, an industrial

site if you could find it, or troop concentration or things like that.

Oh yeah, you'd have a little bit there. You’d say, “Oh, God, yeah that one wasn't very good!” and all this sort of thing, you know. “Gee, why didn’t you keep your wings level?” That was the sort of thing you’d hear over the bar.

Oh, bottling up a train, yeah. I never got involved in bottling up a train, but that’s what they were doing in the early days when trains were moving around in daylight hours. As the name implies, you could bottle him up in a tunnel, or you could bottle him up say by bombing the track down here

and then doing it at the other end, and then you could take your time to strafe it and really get rid of it, eliminate it. But one of the tactics I believe would be to wait until the train gets in the tunnel and then close both ends, that sort of thing. Bottling up.

It was pretty sad to see that sort of thing because that was one of the big things that happened in the European war, particularly on the eastern side. There were little children running around by the thousands with no parents. It was the same thing that ended up happening in Korea too. In fact I mentioned earlier on that there seemed to be a lot of young children around in Seoul looking for a handout of some sort, but not too many adults,

who were perhaps back trying to get the rice to grow somewhere on the old farms. Or, living in the shanty towns somewhere, but there were a lot of kiddies around, and it’s always unfortunate in war that it seems affect the children more so perhaps than the adults. Homeless children, and there was a hell of a lot of them in the world.

Well the old cliché, you're there to do your duty. You're a permanent member of the air force and you're posted to a squadron and that squadron’s there on active service. You do what they ask of you because that’s your duty. That’s your duty, so you do it.

Yes. I think I mentioned that before, that was one of the reasons that I did join when I did, and I think just about all of us did. There was a communist threat at that time, and it was a valid one I think, but perhaps not so in recent years. But in those days it was pretty valid.

Well I never saw him really, but well they were there, and they were there in their numbers too. More so than we were at any one time. American firepower and expertise as far as engineering is concerned I think was the thing that hold them off and won. I think the Chinese could see that there wasn't much in it for them after a while

and they probably thought they made a mistake going in when they did, I don't know. They had many men there doing nothing, they may as well have men in there doing something and feeding them back there where they were. I’m not too sure about that, the political side of it. But they had many men on the ground, they really did, and they had numerically more forces than the Americans or South Koreans, but there was more technology associated with the Allies than there was

with the North Koreans and the Chinese.

Oh you have to hate your enemy, yeah. It is a different sort of a hate – it’s sort of like going into a boxing ring or even playing a game of footy – you hate him while it’s on but after it’s all over it’s always a different matter.

In those days they were all gooks I think we called them. That was common usage for most Asians I think in those days. One of those names perhaps you wouldn’t want to use now, it’s not PC [Politically Incorrect] – uncorrect. Politically Uncorrect – Incorrect.

Yeah, that would be the common word to use. Often you’d say Chinese or North Korean, but common usage of the common enemy – there were two countries you were fighting up there, the Chinese and the North Koreans. Various other words that you hear now about Asians, you didn’t hear them up there.

734.

No. Oh, the decoration – you could have something written on the front of it. Like we had a Welshman on secondment from the RAF [Royal Air Force], and he had a leek on it, a Welsh leek.

Very appropriate there. George Hale, he was from Tasmania and he called his aircraft ‘Hail Storm’ – things like that. Some put them on, and some didn’t.

I had one ultimately there and it was called the ‘Old Launcestonian’ because I came from Launceston. Yeah, and that was written on the front. That was taken off when I left and someone else got the plane. I don't know who

and they put something else on to probably.

No, it wasn't allowed. But it was common practice in the Second World War, particularly if you were an Ace fighter pilot, it would be good to see all those swastikas on the side, or something else, or bombing missions on a Lancaster.

No, that was not know, we didn’t shoot down that many MiGs. Probably in the 77 we only shot down four or five MiGs, total.

A hundred missions, or six months in and out. Sometimes that was exceeded, or depended on how hard you could appeal to the commanding officer, to get that extra ten or fifteen or something to beat someone else. But usually it was a hundred and you were out. You could come back on a second run if you wanted to I think, but not normally. Jack Murray, the one I mentioned

he came back twice and got in three hundred and thirty three missions in two goes – I think it was two. But he was hungry for flying apparently but I don’t think it did him much good health wise he wasn't too good after all those, I seem to recall. But most of them only a hundred missions or six months, whichever came first.

No, there wasn't really.

I think most of the fellas had a lot of common sense about these things and they were not there waiting at the door half an hour before everybody else, you know, hoping that somebody was sick. No, it wasn't like that.

Yep. A lot of singing

squadron songs and all that sort of stuff. The had a record player, and I think they just invented the 33 and the 45 speed disc. We had all that stuff there but I don't know that it was played all that much, only if it extended on into the evening. But usually after work at night, if you could call it work, you’d assemble there at about half five, six and have a few beers and then you'd all have to get down to the American mess

then to have your dinner. If you wanted to go down, which you normally did because it was the only source of food – regular food. Then you could come back to the club if the CO [Commanding Officer] said that’s ok, if you're not flying tomorrow, you could have a few beers tonight. That’s the way it operated. We’d invite the Americans over every now and again, and they'd do the same for us. We’d entertain them until about ten or eleven o'clock at night, and ‘watch you're P’s and Q’s’ and they used to enjoy that,

and we used to enjoy going down to their place. It was pretty good in that respect, there was some good evenings.

Oh, they'd been written by amateurs, I’ve got a whole book of them out there. Some of them were not very nice and some of them very bawdy, some of them were a little bit politically incorrect. They were good fun if you could get half a dozen fellas around

who can remember them all.

Yeah, a few like that. There’s one that we used to sing quite a lot called “Cruising down the Yalu” and I don't know the tune of that. I can sing it but I’ve lost the tune, I’m not too sure whether it was an old tune that had been revamped. “Cruising down the Yalu at (four ninety pur UNCLEAR),

I called up my flight leader, ‘Oh save me, save me Sir’, I’ve got six flak holes in my wings, my tanks are out of gas. ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday. I’ve got six MiGs on my ass.’” And all that sort of thing, but I’ve just forgotten whether that tune has been revamped from somewhere else or not.

Yeah, that’s typical content. I was at a do, it was only a few weeks ago – my daughter is a member of the New South Wales Parliament, and she had a bit of an evening for members of the 77 Squadron on there, and there was a presentation to Buster Brown and Dick Cresswell, and quite a few of the old bods [bodies] of the 77 were there, and one of them – he has a beard now and a large moustache. His name

is George Turner and he lived at Bowral, and he was there and it was all pretty formal stuff. We weren't even having cocktails, it was all cups of coffee and stuff, and George said, “John, we have to sing a song.” I said, “Alright, George.” I didn’t want him to but there’s no stopping George. So he said, “Let’s have a party, let’s have some fun. Let’s a party, the 77 Squadron’s on the run”

that’s the way it goes you see, and then it’s “Break left, break right streamers on the wings. Snap roll, slows rolls, we do everything.” and “We are the joy boys from old Kimpo, hello, hello, hello” and that’s the start of the pantomime you see. George and I sang it, it was good, it was rather fun. Everybody enjoyed it, even at a formal thing like that.

Oh, yeah. Not every night, but only on a special night if a fella was going away or something like that. Finished, or he was off to a birthday party perhaps.

Yes, exactly.

Oh yes, you would always know, it was up on the notice board about mid-afternoon, you knew whether you were going to be flying or not.

But usually the club was open every night, sometimes there would be more attendees there than others. It wasn't abused, it was a good little club.

Oh a few of those from time to time, yeah. That would have to happen wouldn’t it.

What they're called now I don't know, but the Boat Race, that’s pretty common, have you heard of the Boat Race. They were pretty common ones and they were the ones that did most of the damage – that was the principal one I think.

A lot, particularly with our role it did. Then if you had fog,

fog inland. You might not get fog in Kimpo but you’d get fog inland. You could have blinding rain inland and none at Kimpo. When a monsoon is on up there, usually the whole of the peninsula goes out. I can recall one period where we didn’t fly for ten days. It was pretty devastating really because all sorts of things happen on the other side in that time. They move their ground troops around and artillery and anti-aircraft positions are being moved and you wouldn’t know about it.

You couldn’t photograph it, it gets very worrying. We had the aircraft on the ground for ten days and in the end the boss said, “Look, we can't just leave them there, we’ve got to start them up and take them for at least one run around the perimeter track of the airfield.” I remember this day, we started up every aircraft we had on the ground and in one extended line we taxied them all way around Kimpo and back. We had to drive them out a little bit, because it got to the stage where it was starting to

effect the systems and the electrics and things like that. A good run like that would clean it out. Then the next day I think the sun came out.

Oh yes, you don’t want to leave it out there doing nothing, even though they had engine covers and covers for canopies and all that sort of thing. It’s pretty humid up there over the monsoons as you probably know, it’s almost a hundred percent humidity. It gets into everything, in the tents and

around where we lived you know, it was pretty bad, and fungus was starting to grow everywhere – it seeps in.

It all depends on how it’s handled and whether or not it takes any battle damage or not of course. But under normal circumstances it would go for hundreds and hundred of missions, and that’s been proved even in the Second World War. Most of the Meteors up

there got through the whole of the two years they were there with not a great deal of trouble. It was only battle damage really that would cause the aircraft to malfunction or to fall apart, which one or two did unfortunately.

In a way, yeah but I think a few of us were. One or two perhaps were elated that – well we were all elated – it’s hard to explain. It’s a lot of fun being associated with a good war, particularly if you're flying. I don't know about the army blokes, I don't think they look at it the same way. But it’s very difficult to explain, you are elated that things finish in a way,

but it’s very exciting though doing a trip like the ones that we used to do.

I had a very comfortable way, out it that way, as far as living conditions were concerned, and I didn’t get hit, as I said earlier. It’s all good stuff until you get hit but that’s when the trouble starts. Just like insurance – everything’s ok until you have to

make out the claim form, and that’s where the trouble starts.

Six years. That was the usual short service internship, I think it was called in those days. Six years.

Oh no, I was quite prepared for that.

I would have stayed forever probably, I don't know. But I was a bit older than the average pilot in the air force and I couldn’t see that I would ever make more than flight lieutenant before I’d have to retire. See, in those days if you got to a certain age with a certain rank you had to go, and in my own case if I were a flight lieutenant I would have to leave at the age of forty five or something like that, which was not very good, you wouldn’t call that a permanent position. So that’s one of the

reasons I left. But I was then prepared perhaps to go, if I had of been younger, to stay in, which quite a lot of my mates did. They got right through to air rank and one or two of them became chief of air force and that sort of stuff. They were a bit younger and they opted to stay in. It can be difficult if they take you away from flying and you get a ground job, and there’s some dreadful

occupations they can post you to being a general duties pilot. Those sort of things have to be considered, but I came out when I did for several reasons – mainly because of the age reason, and the prospects of promotion.

Well I don't know about that but they used to call us knuckle heads.

No, I don't know whether we were the aristocracy or not. It depends on who you talk to – if you’re talking to one of my good friends Geoffrey Michael, he’s always been bombers and maritime. Now he wouldn’t take to that very well at all. He thinks that Lancaster bomber pilots and Neptune pilots and others are the rock stars and the aces.

Oh yeah, I suppose after the Second World War and during the Second World War it was the glamour job. The hot shot fighter pilot business, particularly in American Air force and the Mustangs in Europe towards the end of the Second World War. That was the way to go.

No, you didn’t have any of the individual combat or anything like that,

that occurred during the Second World War, and the First World War and the Second World War – that’s all a thing of the past really.

Yeah, three months.

Well, as I said before we continued to train and operated most days of the week when we could and it was always a lot of upper air training to be done, and out on the range.

Gunnery and rocketry, using up old stock of ammunition and things like that. But no, it was business as usual, other than actual combat.

Just say that again will you?

Oh yes, it’s to keep the competency up to a particular level. Otherwise you get a bit dull, you don’t want to go for a couple of months without firing a round. It’s good to keep your standards up.

I wasn't there when it was broken up. I was

rotated out after six months – I hadn't done a hundred missions, I did forty nine. I was rotated out after six months, which was the norm and I was home before Christmas. Others replaced me, and they kept the squadron at Kimpo for some time after that. Then it was moved I think down to Kaesong. No, not Kaesong, a place down on the west coast of South Korea. It was physically relocated out of Kimpo and down the coast [Kunsan].

And they were there for another six months to a year, and then the squadron was brought home. They put all the planes onto an aircraft carrier and brought them home. That’s when it was broken up and people didn’t necessarily get transferred to other squadrons but they kept all those pilots who were there at the end in Korea, and they got based up in Williamtown.

Oh no, I was

instructing by then, I came home and they decided I’d make a good flying instructor apparently. So I ended up being a flying instructor for the next eighteen months, two years.

Oh yeah, it’s a bit of a blow. It’s a change but I would have preferred to have them all back or to be with them all back here again. But after we all came back, one of them,

‘Pigsy’ was shot down and I came home with Lloyd Knight – the bloke I went up with – and Athol Frazer came a bit later on, and he went into instructing too but in a different direction. So there was a split, once you got back to Australia, postings as we called them the people down there at Melbourne at Air Force Headquarters, they sent you to all these different places. I didn’t mind being a flying instructor but I would have preferred to be on a squadron somewhere.

Just for leave, yeah.

Oh everyone was pleased to see me. A few parties around town. It was a lot of fun, but I had too much leave – I had three months leave on my card I think after two years, or eighteen months of having no leave at all. So I only took about six weeks of it up at Launceston and I went up the coast, I bought a new car in Launceston

and took it over on the boat to Melbourne. Continued on up the coast and around Victoria a bit and looked up a few old friends, and ultimately I was posted up to 75 Squadron at Williamtown. I stayed in the air force then on the 75 Squadron until the end of 19 – I’m losing track of the years – where were we, ’60. Excuse me, 1957,

and I decided I’d like to Qantas, which I did and I was with Qantas for six years after that.

Yeah a little bit. I was coming out of Korea and that life there into one of home cooking with mother in Launceston, you know it’s a bit of a shock – not because of the cooking or anything, it was just a different mode of living.

End of tape

Well it all depends on the type of mission

you're doing of course, it can be an intense sort of an operation if you can use that word. And it depends on the task ahead, on the amount of flak you’ve got to get through and the ground fire and the weather. So if you combine say, two of those it’s obviously going to be a bit more demanding than if you're doing two that are in bright sunshine and no clouds

and a straight out operation. So it gets a bit demanding. In the early days of course, with the Mustangs flying up there, from the books I’ve read and the blokes I’ve talked to, they were doing anything up to three and four missions a day when they were in based in South Korea. They’d be in South Korea all day and fly back to Iwakuni at night at the end of the day, before they established themselves over on South Korea, they were pretty demanding days. But they were flat strap all the time.

They’d refuel, re-arm at Pusan for perhaps or any other strip that they could get to. Do another mission, get back and perhaps arm up again do another job, and then at the end of that one fly back to Iwakuni, or if they had enough gas that was. So that was demanding, but just doing say two missions a day in a Meteor – one in the morning, or one straight on top of the other, wouldn’t perhaps be as demanding as in those early Mustang days. But it depends

on the load of the operation, whether you’ve been flying every day of the week before, but in all, you only do your hundred missions, as I said before and at the end of that time they consider that you’ve had enough and it’s about time you had a break. As opposed to civvy flying where the regulations used to be a hundred hours a month, I think it was. Once you’ve done a hundred hours in a month, you had to stop when your thirty days were up and then you could start all over again. But that

was a little more easier to handle. Some operations fly longer hours, for instance an air (and agriculture UNCLEAR) perhaps, and things like that where they really cram the hours in to get the job done. They probably exceed the limitations, but operations like that we were handling in Korea. They can be a little bit demanding at the time but that’s up to the commanding

officers to be able to detect that people might be getting a bit battle weary, and give them a break. But it depends on how many pilots we’ve got available to do the jobs too, that’s the other thing. So does that answer it roughly?

No I never did. We were only flying at the maximum probably when I was there, I wouldn’t fly more than two missions a day, you might fly three hours

or something, no more than three hours a day. But it was always pretty short and sweet those things. You’d be in and back say within an hour and ten minutes, or a bit more perhaps. You’d only have about an hour and a half gas in a Meteor, under those circumstances, without wing tanks on. So it had to be done quickly, but it’s not that demanding really. There were times though when it could be.

No, I never did. That’s getting into the realms of being over confident, isn't it. No, I never found it but there could have been one or two up there who were that way inclined.

No, I never got into that area at all.

Yeah there were a few of those. One that really concerned them up there – oh there was a bit of malaria around, and things like that.

They had to spray Kimpo quite regularly with aircraft, large aircraft, they really poured the DDT [Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane] all over the place to keep everything under control. That was for mosquitoes and bugs and things like that that spread dengue and malaria and whatever. There’s one, I’m trying to think what it is, there was an outbreak of it when I was up there, and three or four American Marines died all within a week, I think it was. I’m trying to remember the name of it now. That caused some trouble

and they were able to get it under control. I can't recall the name of that particular fever, but every now and again those sort of things could happen. At Kimpo itself it was sprayed quite regularly with DDT.

No, I kept pretty fit all the time I was at Kimpo. There’d be odd

coughs and colds around the place. Once I had a bit of a cold in the head and I shouldn’t have been flying, I should of seen the MO [Medical Officer] and had myself grounded for the day. But I did this mission and on the way back we had to get down very quickly, in a rapid decent formation through cloud. I knew it was happening in my sinuses there and all of a sudden in the decent my sinuses burst, and blood poured out my nose and filled my oxygen mask up.

I thought. ‘Oh, hell!’ I’m trying to maintain formation there and of course pulled away from the fellow just out here, and I had this dreadful headache and blood pouring from the front here. Anyway, I got onto the ground and when the airman got up the ladder and had a look at me he said, “Oh God!” and immediately ran down and rang the doctor up and got the doctor down. They pulled me out of the thing and there’s blood all over me, and it was found that I had this rupture up here. That

grounded me for about three or four days, that’s all. That was the only thing that concerned me up there as far as sickness was concerned.

No, it’s the only one I can recall. No doubt it’s happened before, but it’s a bit disturbing when it happens at the time, with all this blood pouring around. And then your oxygen mask which is sort of filled up the microphone in there, which is just inside your oxygen mask there.

It makes for a rather garbled transmission.

I can't recall anything just at the moment.

Oh, yes I think so. I went up and did what I had to do, and most of us came home again. There were a few unfortunate ones that didn’t. Yeah, that’s about how I felt, you feel as though you’ve achieved what you wanted to do.

No, in those days it was a bit like after Vietnam. A lot of people didn’t know where Korea was and they didn’t know a great deal about the Korean War. A few people who had been in the services before and people in the RSLs [Returned and Services League] knew a little bit about it. Quite a lot of people didn’t know much about the Korean War at all.

Oh it didn’t worry me too much. If I thought about it a bit more years later, I would have or should have been a bit more concerned about it, but that didn’t worry me that much.

Well it’s interesting that you ask that,

I joined the RSL as soon as a came back and I was accepted with open arms, but there was an attitude in the RSL in those days from the older blokes, “Oh, he’s just been to Korea” sort of business, “That’s only a police action.” That sort of thing, you know. It was that sort of attitude in the RSL still because they were still chokers with First and Second World War fellas in the RSL in those days still. They didn’t know

that much about Korea or the action was there, even though they knew there was a war on up there, as opposed to people that didn’t even know it was on. We all went away in dribs and drabs, and we all came back in dribs and drabs. We never came back as a full squadron and marched down the street or anything like that. No, it didn’t disappoint me, but I didn’t go home and expect to be paraded down the main street of Launceston or anything like that.

I didn’t mind talking to people if they asked me about it. All my friends knew where I’d been but not the general public.

Oh yeah, not so much to talk about it, but to keep in contact with them. One or two of my mates came down and we spent a lot of time together in Tasmania. We did a tour of the island in the car once, I remember Don Pingston, the bloke who was the prisoner of war, he came

out and he was home by the time I got here. His brother and another mate of mine from Sydney, and we did the grand tour of Tasmania in this little Morris Minor car that I’d bought down there. That was a lot of fun, things like that. I had a couple of air force blokes come down and we spent a bit of time together in Tasmania. I did much the same in the break at the end of the break in Tasmania, I did a bit of travelling around over on the Victoria and New South Wales side.

It was a different climate all together, coming out of Korea and then getting immersed in the Apple Isle almost overnight. It was pleasant and all that but it was a little quiet.

Oh yeah. Nothing dramatic. While I was over there I got the posting for Sale, where I had to go to the Central Flying School and

learn how to be a flying instructor, and that the start of two years of instructing, including the time at the Central Flying School.

No, not at that time. I can see that to be married in the air force for me

was a bit on the difficult side, and for your partner too. They post you hear there and everywhere, and you always tend to be looking for a house to living in, and getting established in one and then re-established on the other side of the continent sort of thing. That didn’t appeal to me much, but I knew that I would get married eventually. I didn’t know who to. It wasn't enough I went back to Williamtown in 1957 and I met Barbara, she’s a Newcastle girl.

We were married eighteen months after that.

Well I was inclined to want to stay in the air force but it was when I went back to Williamtown after another two years, that I could see that my time in the air force was going to be limited, whether I wanted to stay in it or not.

That’s when I decided to go with Qantas. I didn’t have really grand plans at all in those days. I knew that I could fly an aircraft adequately and I’d be in aviation for the rest of my life, but as to where and what I was going to be flying or doing, was another matter.

I was posted down to Richmond to do all the formalities to leave the air force. I was a little sad I thought, it was a little sad after six years. I was moving on to something else and I tended to look forward to things like that, and moving onto something different. For instance if I go away for a trip or a holiday now, I don’t really want to go back to the same place twice, it’s a

bit like that. Even though my wife likes to go up to Nelson Bay and sit down there every year at the same place and enjoy the beach, and all that sort of thing, I can't come to grips with that. I’ve got to go somewhere else I think. It’s a bit like that probably in all of my employment over the years, that’s why I’ve had such a range of occupations in aviation, over the time I’ve been flying.

No, they were so short and looking for pilots, and there were only six hundred pilots in Qantas in those days. It probably success, but now I don’t know, it’s a pretty large number. But they were expanding too, that was the other thing. George Hart and myself, and Wayne Stephens, and probably six or eight of us at the same time went into Qantas.

But I was only in Qantas for six years, it wasn't my cup of tea. I thought it was a bit boring, the flying, and we were on the early model Boeing 747 and it was very boring, to be quite frank about it. I like to be on lighter aircraft and on command, so I decided to leave and I went into general aviation – ah, into commercial aviation, for about another six or so years back here,

and then I got this job as a general manager and chief pilot of Solomon Airways. That’s a different area again.

I used to do the Western Division, it was called in those days. Sydney through as far as London, that’s where the aircrafts would turn around and come back. I used to go as far as Rome or Cairo, and we’d sleep there and turn around and come back. The English crew used to come down

and take the aircraft on the last leg. They were based in London. That was for about a year or so and then they put me on the Eastern Division, which is from here to the States. Sometimes as far as New York or up to San Francisco, down through Honolulu, Fiji and Sydney. And then we opened up to Hong Kong and Tokyo, I used to do that quite regularly on the eastern run,

or the far eastern run. I was on that every week, I used to do that, almost. Every ten days I used to be known as the Hong Kong Kid, or something like that. We used to go up to Tokyo and slip off there for the day and turn around and come back again.

It was fairly similar actually in a way,

when you're flying you had to be pretty disciplined when you're operating on an aircraft that size, of course. You had to absorb a fair amount of training which you were expected to demonstrate when you're flying a company aeroplane out on the route. No it was ok, it was a good form of discipline the. We’d be out for two weeks and be home for two. It was a different regime all together. By the time you went up to Rome and back, two weeks were gone, would slip by.

You’d stop off at Singapore and Karachi in those days, a couple of days in each place. And up to Rome or Cairo and the same thing, and by the time you got home again two weeks had go by. Then they'd make you stay home for two weeks with a bit of ground training in between, like on a shipping later or something like that nature, or a training simulator. That filled up and on Monday off you'd go again and commence the operation all over again.

Well when you first became appointed, say, after your training onto the type, you started as second officer, and you slowly worked your way up to first officer, and then onto captain many years later, you see. So you had to go through the pecking order so you could get

yourself up to the top. Then it was the captain that had responsibility for them, but the three of his other officers too, you’ve got a certain amount of responsibility there. Yes, if you're a captain on an aircraft in those days, a hundred or more passengers is a big responsibility. But it’s more so now with three and four hundred passengers. It’s a hell of a responsibility really. They get payed well, but they’ve got a lot of responsibility.

In those days it would take almost forever, and in my case and the younger they become as captain, the longer it was going to take for a young bloke coming up behind them, of course. It still had a lot of World War 11 pilots in Qantas who had been on Lancasters and Catalinas and things like that during the Second World War. They were pretty experienced fellas and they fitted in pretty quickly, but see they were the aged

ones that eventually had to retire out after another ten years or so, and that’s about the time when I came in. They were scrambling to get more people in, but I was a bit older than the average bloke coming in so I could see that I could be a bit limited at Qantas too. But it wasn't my cup of tea as far as flying. It was dreadfully boring, but others found it to be quite aright. They liked the trips around the world I suppose, but living in and out of hotels.

It’s boring flying and that didn’t add up to me so after six years I gave it away.

No, first officer.

’58.

Yeah.

Alright, ok.

Well I was instructing up in Uranquinty in ’55 and about the middle of the year there was a routine order came out that they were seeking a pilot to go to Antarctica. They put all the requirements in and all that sort of stuff. So I applied for it but I would have been due

for posting at that end of the year anyway. So I did and nothing happened as far as I was concerned because they had already appointed one young fellow down at Point Cook. He’d been out of the college and he was an instructor down at Point Cook, and he was going to be the second pilot. But unfortunately killed himself, he flew into a fence. So I’m next on the list, so overnight I’m appointed to Antarctic flight with Doug Leckie, who was the squadron leader boss who I went down with.

So here I am, I’m straight out of instructing at Uranquinty on Friday night, and I’m down at Point Cook on Monday morning. I only got about four weeks to get endorsed on the plane, on floats and wheels, it was a Beaver [flying boat] aircraft. Get all the kit organised onto the boat on Boxing Day and heading south.

Yes, oh hang on, where are we? No, that was the first time I’d been exposed to Beavers, when I was in the air force. I had a lot of experience later on. I’ll tell you more about that later.

That was Tiger Moths and Wirraways. They were basic trainers.

Good, I enjoyed that. It was a brand new aeroplane straight out of Canada, made by de Havilland, and it came to Point Cook with wheels, skis and floats, and you couldn’t do any ski operations obviously down when we got down south. But I got endorsed on that in next to no time, and on floats, it’s good, I enjoyed that. It was reasonably simple flying until you get down to Antarctica, it’s a different kettle of fish.

Oh only a couple of hours flying.

Yes, I was there for a total of four weeks I think. I was there right through December, and we departed on the ship on Boxing Day – December ’55.

Well it was just a matter of being endorsed on the aircraft, on floats particularly. Astro-navigation took up a bit of time, pretty simple astro-navigation. Navigation in Antarctica is a different kettle of fish, and the polar regions than anywhere else in the lower latitudes.

Because of magnetism more than anything.

Down in Antarctica you find that the magnetic compass is practically useless because it’s inclined to point all over the place, and it’ll change heading forty five degrees in five minutes, (UNCLEAR). So you just have to use grid navigation – I won’t bore you with what it’s all about, but astro-navigation was being able to use to the

sextant so that you can determine the position anywhere on the surface on the earth from the stars, the sun and the moon, as you probably know. That’s what that was all about, and in conjunction with that, navigation – normal navigation, you should be able to find your way around Antarctica.

Yeah, two years before they opened up this base at Mawson, which was the Australian base in Antarctica, the only one at the time. It was established with only a few huts and personnel – there were only about twelve people there. Doug Leckie, who was the man I went down with eventually two years later, he went down just for the summer season and they took a couple of Auster aircraft, very light aircraft on the ship called the Kuster Dan [?]. They did a little bit of flying from the boat and onto shore, and not too far away.

They insisted in the passage through ice and reconnaissance and all that sort of thing, a little bit of freight. But they wrecked both their aircraft down there – one got bent rather badly on ice one day, and the other one got blown off the back of the ship in a storm. So, they came back with all that experience and at the end of that year he was able to form up an Antarctic flight again, but this time

they bought a brand new aircraft being that Beaver that I talk about, and another Auster aircraft. But the other thing was that they built a hangar to be built down at Mawson too, and it was built to the shape of the land by all the measurements that they sent back to Melbourne by radio. We took it down and put the hangar in place on the harbour, on the shore of the harbour. We were able to put both the aircraft in the hangar and that way we were able to fly right through the year, through the winter

and we used up all our fuel that year. No trouble at all, we didn’t have any accidents and it all worked fine. Only because we had a hangar there to put the aircraft in, otherwise they would have been blown away, which is what normally happens down there if you're not too careful.

The expedition had twenty and there were four air force people in that – two pilots and an engine and an air frame fitter. We had about four.

Two, only two – the Beaver and the Auster. They were all on skis but the Beaver also had floats.

It was a lot of fun but it had a wheel ski operation and you could operate with the skis partially up and still have the braking effect of the wheels. But once you took the wheels up through the skis, you had to be careful in crosswinds and all that sort of thing, because it didn’t

have any braking. Nor did you have any steering available, other than the rudder of the aircraft, which was normal practice – when you land you tend to keep the aircraft straight with brake and rudder if necessary, but not having brakes it’s a little more difficult. Usually you could land straight into the wind, which would help a lot.

Yeah, well it is.

When you first see the continent from the ship you see a lot of ice, pack ice, and bergy [iceberg] bits floating around for a couple of days before you get there. When you see the continent itself, it’s overpowering, there’s a lot of it. There’s a lot of ice down there and cliffs a couple of hundred feet high in places, at the edges of glaciers and that sort of thing. And it’s very white – it’s very white, I can tell you. A few pieces of ice free rock were sticking up around the shores, and every now and again you might see a

peak inland, but not too many of them, ice free peaks. But Mawson base was a lucky find for them when they decided to use it because it had a natural little harbour in it – Horse Shoe Harbour it was called and it had a very small mouth into the harbour but quite deep water. It was ideal for anchoring the ship down there in Antarctic conditions. The base was on ice-free rock as I said,

and we built this hangar and built a few more huts, and the base got bigger and bigger over the years. It was an interesting year, we did a lot of exploration down there, we were able to fly right out and put in fuel bases, and fly probably six hundred nautical miles out either side of Mawson, east and west. We made several discoveries down there – two of the principal ones was Amundsen Bay out to the west,

which had never been visited by people before and I had the honour of being the first person – Jerry Sunberg and myself, of landing in this place. That was one, and I also had the honour of finding the biggest glacier in the world when I was down there. The Lambert Glacier, it was way down to the southeast, and we could only achieve that because we put a fuel depot in, in the Prince Harold Mountains, which was well inland.

We took in several drums of gas over a period of two months beforehand and I was able to find this great glacier on a perfect day – it was just amazing. One of those days that you dream about in Antarctica, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. It was only because of that that I was able to do what I did. But Patrick Albion and I, we achieved that, and it’s called the Lambert Glacier for Lambert – he was the director of national mapping in Canberra.

Oh, I have a Seaton Glacier down there actually.

They named a glacier for me.

Not quite as big.

It is when you look back on it, but it was just run of the mill operation for the day. Everything worked fine,

it was good weather both days when these things happened, and we only flew in reasonably good weather. But when you do those ones that are way out on the limited range of the aircraft, it can be a bit on the dodgy side. But you would do it unless it was good weather. But it all worked out fine on both occasions, and I was able to land it in the bay, on this Amundson Bay one, but you wouldn’t dare do that up the other way. You turned around at the top of the glacier

at seventy five degrees south, and turned around and wended our way back down and took lots of photographs of it all so we could prove that we’d been there. And came home, that was on a good day. But as far as the pioneering bit is concerned, it’s only after you get back that I suppose you realise that it is. You’ve just done a days flying really, when it’s all boiled down.

Twelve, or fifteen – I’ve forgotten now. Because they didn’t have any aircraft there that year, that was only the second year. They were still scratching around trying to establish the place, and do a little bit of work inland with what facilities they had. They had a few Weasels, which is a track snow vehicle, and they had dogs down there for us to use. They built the place up pretty well

and we lobbed in with aircraft and hangars and steel everywhere. I have no idea the amount of steel out on the boat. Plus twenty men – it came through from about twelve or fifteen up to twenty overnight, and we had all this construction work to do, and we were able to get the hangar up – oh six weeks, two months it took us to build the hangar.

It was about – let’s see, the aircraft wingspan was about forty eight, fifty, so it was about sixty feet wide.

Big door on the front which would wind up on two winches which we had on it. It would roll out and down, like one of those garage doors that you see pretty common around the place. And it was snow proof – it had cushions on it that snow proofed it, to keep the snow out in a blizzard. We were quite comfortable in there really, as far as – it was pretty cold, but we lived in base about four or five hundred meters

up from the hangar. But we had our aircraft pretty snug in that hangar and we were able to fly right through the year.

Two, yeah that was really cramped.

Pretty basic – small, very compact. In fact the sleeping huts were really reverse

refrigerators. They were built like a big cold storage thing and put reflective aluminium on the outside and lots of insulation in between and lined up pretty well with kainite type material. Nicely painted out but each of the cubicles was only about the length of a single bed, and it was a bunk up to about this height with a little desk and a small wardrobe and storage area underneath it on the other half. Not much

room to move, and there were six of those in each house, plus a snow room where all your gear would hang. And a big door, like a refrigerator door that had access to the place. And a stove burning continuously at the far end, an anthracite stove which kept the temperature up around a very comfortable twenty two degrees, or something like that, at all times.

That was ok, but it was pretty small, and the mess was pretty small too. We used to eat in a room not much bigger than what you see here from wall to wall. There was no room for a small snooker table or anything like that, just two long tables for meals and a kitchen at one end. We could fold the tables up and put them out of the way

and make a bit of space for other activities if need be. The odd football match, and party night, and we could show the movies in there. But gee, it was so small now you come to think of it, it was so small. Compared to what they’ve got there at the moment, they’ve got Hilton hotels down there really now, compared to what it was like. We had a lot of fun though, a lot of fun.

It was warm

it was just confined. It was really confined to barracks, when you weren't outside, and you'd only be outside when you had to be really. It was pretty cold – you’ve got the right gear but work was in the main in another building in the hangar. It was pretty cold for the technicians there, they had to try to work out in the open virtually, even in the hangar. It was only about ten or twenty degrees below freezing.

You couldn’t touch metal, it would stick to your fingers. We had all those problems with tools, trying work on engines – that was a bit of a worry. But we got by, we got through there. After the first couple of months it all becomes pretty normal pretty naturally.

Cabin fever? Yeah, you get a bit short with each other but we

did pretty well over the year. We didn’t have any problems, we didn’t have to put anyone in a straight jacket or anything like that, although we had a couple down there. We had a doctor down there with us too, he used to keep an eye on us like one thing. No, you had to keep yourself busy. If you're going to sit around in your room all day you'd go balmy, or even in the mess.

Oh yeah, I loved it. I’d go back again for a short stay if I could.

I've been down a couple of times on the tourist flights – they’ve asked me to go down as a spruiker on the flight, and general spectator on the flight. I enjoyed those flights, they were good – a bit long, fourteen hours away. Melbourne to Melbourne, you don’t land anywhere. Sometimes if the weather is pretty poor and they’ve got to change the flight plan, but I don’t think they’ve ever been down and not seen anything and had to come back. They’ve always been able to

show the passengers something.

Oh no, I didn’t because you can pick where the weather is down there and when it’s going to be crook, and if it looks as though it’s going to be crook you go back home. I had one forced landing down there but that wasn't due to weather, it was in the little Auster, it was only a control problem but it was a forced landing until I found out what the problem was and we were able to

fix it and get going again. No, we didn’t have any problem in that respect, but you didn’t take too many risks there. The only big risk was having a single engine up front – they wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, they decided no more single engine operation, or unless you’ve got an accompanying aircraft with you. They do all helicopter stuff down there now anyway, and usually they’ve got two or three helicopters, and the second or

third helicopter’s not too far away if there’s trouble.

Number one, was helping the scientists down there. They wanted to get out and do things, and they were stuck at base all the time – they had that thing surveyed to death, they knew exactly what was going on there. Geology, biology and marine biology, magnetism,

astro stuff. So we were conveying people backwards and forwards all over the place. Putting in supplies for field parties and our own fuel and things like that, and we did a lot of aerial photography for cartography and national mapping. That entailed having the three cameras in the aircraft – trimetric cameras they were called. You fly backwards

and forwards over known tracks all day and take pictures. It was an automatic function, and every so many seconds it would take another picture, you fly on and take another picture. That way they were able to make pretty accurate maps of Antarctica than before, that was the area we were in. We did a lot of that, but there were two or three of those good trips that I mentioned, and others. We were kept busy.

Yes, individual missions, for instance, taking a group of two or three scientists out into the field where they had established a little base of their own, which consisted of

one or two tents which would stand up to hurricane force winds of about one hundred and twenty knots. They’d sit on the ice for those days, so you'd take them in with the supplies to last them for several weeks and get them established. And they were as happy as Larry doing whatever they wanted to do there, their magnetometry or ‘synthalology’, or marine biology or whatever it was. And then hopefully we’d go back and get them in a few days time. They used to worry about this

from time to time – not the operation of the aircraft, but just the weather you see, they didn’t want to be stuck out there for another week in a blizzard. So that was one of the jobs that we had to do. The other one was the photography, that I mentioned. They’d be four hour stints at a time, flying along known tracks wherever they might be. The exploration stuff, where you would plan to fly to a particular point on the surface of the earth

and have a look at what's out there – because most of that had never been surveyed before, no one had ever been there. So they were the exciting ones, at the end of the long track, that was about two hours out and two hours back, or even more if you had a base which you’d previously established and had taken fuel out, and establish a little airstrip, put in a few drums of gas there and then being able to extend your range a little bit more. So there was that.

Then dogs, we used to carry a few of the dogs out from time to time. We’d put them out on sight with a broken down sledge and leave them out in the field with the survey party. Lots of supply haulage backwards and forwards. Ice reconnaissance out off the coast, particularly when you were

expecting a ship to come in. There were little oddball jobs that I can't recall at the moment, but in the main it was survey, carriage of freight and the photography.

Yeah that was always at the back of your mind -

it wasn't too worried because you have a lot of faith in the Pratt and Whitney motor – I did anyway. That’s always in the back of your mind. But we had supplied on the back of the aircraft, emergency supplies of food and a tent, an ice saw and a .38 Smith and Wesson to shoot the seals with. You could exist for two months with what you had on board – that’s for one man. If you had two it would only be one month.

But on some of these flights well out, I don’t think they'd ever be able to get us. It was as easy as that, you'd run out of food and stuff before you were shifted out of the place. We didn’t have a relief aircraft down there so that was a bit of a worry, but as I said the triple aviation or the air force, whoever might be doing the work, wouldn’t allow for single engine operations anymore, or without an accompanying aircraft.

Once it’s warmed up it’s ok, but the engine is always preheated before start up. We had various means of doing that, you could put a blanket and arrange it around where the flame was seated and leave it there for ten or twelve hours before the flight, and the aircraft engine would start up quite normally

the next day. If you don’t do that the oil freezes up thicker than grease, and you'd never get it started under those conditions. It wasn't good for hydraulics and other things, and other components in the motor but the main one was the oil, and being able to get the engine a little bit warm so you could start it up. Whenever you wanted to leave, the first next morning or whenever it might be, but it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s the middle of the night or the middle of the day down there,

it’s still about the same temperature.

Oh, not good. Spanners and all that sort of stuff had to be coated with plastic, usually you would always have mittens on – always have mittens, and most times gloves of some sort. But it was very difficult to perhaps take the head off a

barrel of a piston or out of a motor or something like that, without having to get your fingers on it sooner or later. In that case the metal would stick to the ends of you fingers, so you had to overcome that by having the blow lamp handy to handle the metal parts before you operated them, and things of that nature. I had a piece of metal stuck to the end of my tongue once. We were

building this hangar and I had to punch a hole in some metal, and up a six foot ladder someone probably said something to be below, and I turned around the punch just caught the tip of my tongue. They had to take me down and put me in the heated store we had adjacent to where we were working, and get the blow lamp onto the metal punch before they could get it off the end of my tongue. Those sort of things would

happen from time to time but particularly bare fingers in contact with metal. You can't just tear you hand off it, you had to go somewhere warm and warm it off, or you end up with a first or second degree frostbite on your fingers.

I would have to look in the books for that, but extremes of temperature never are anything in high temperatures, they’re always in the lower end if you're worried about it.

Once it gets under freezing it doesn’t make much difference.

Exactly. Other than the flying part, you mean how to live there

and survive sort of business, is that what you mean?

Well you’ve got to have the right equipment to start with, the right clothing. If you have the right clothing you can do almost anything down there – well Douglas Mawson proved that, he was able to get right out there and do the things he did without an ounce of internal heating or anything, only a little oil stove that they could take in the tent with them. But if you have the right gear on you can stand up to most wind

and most temperatures. Some of the temperatures that Scott and some of the Antarctic explorers had to put up with, I don't know how they did it. But they did it, and some of them didn’t survive, they didn’t have enough food to keep them warm. So it’s just a matter of having the right gear, as far as the clothing is concerned. Eat the proper food too, once you start to get a little run down you start to feel the cold a bit more. Frostbite was always a worry, your skin tends to harden up over the months, your face particularly.

The first thing that happens to you down there – well it did with me – I’d get first degree frostbite on my face and all this sort of thing. Then you harden up and you don’t feel it anymore, your skin really toughens up. Not browns up, nut just toughens up against cold. Those sort of things. Your quarters too, that’s very important, just your general environment – if you’ve got a little bit of space to recreate in, that helps.

Having a few books and a bit of music. It’s a different environment all together but you can used to anything once you’ve been there for a while.

Well we had written reports on it once we came back. It was the first time that the air force had been into Antarctica

since the early days, since the early ‘30s when the air force took a couple of aircraft down only for the summer season – they could never stay right through the winter. Usually they wrecked the aircraft or had some sort of mishap with it. But we learned a lot about how to exist in the cold weather. We took a couple of basic handbooks with us that were put out by the Royal Canadian Air force who knew a bit about Arctic flying – quite a lot actually. That proved invaluable.

We were able to write a few things we learnt ourself about what we learnt down there – particularly in the maintenance area and the heating of engines and that sort of thing. That was passed on back to air force headquarters, and they in the meantime had written a bit about that for crews who came down later on. I built an igloo down there just as a training thing. This manual that we had showed you how to do it,

and you could do it with one saw, just an ordinary household saw would do it. And you just patiently cut all the blocks and place them into position and the keystone on the top, and a little tunnel entrance, makes a beaut little house to live in – much better than a tent. It’ll stand up to blasts of a couple hundred miles an hour, no trouble. In fact, they just don’t blow down. They could drift over a bit but they were a good place to live in, if you could say that.

Quite warm, relatively speaking. We learnt all of those sort of things, how to live in Antarctic conditions. Most air force operations over the years have been conducted in tepid climates, and that’s the first time they’ve ever really got stuck into it down there.

It’s still pretty pristine, I think that – yeah we were a bit on the dirty side to be quite honest. Everything was packed in wooden crates, not everything but most things. Food was out in the big dump at the back and anytime we wanted to get some food, we’d take a big basket or something out and fill it up with cans or whatever it was contained in. It

didn’t matter what happened to the empty crate – sometimes it got blown out on the ice and sometimes it didn’t. That sort of stuff, and we used to dump human effluent and kitchen rubbish and all that sort of thing, into the water immediately in front of the camp – which is not a good thing to do now in hindsight. Those sort of things were happening then. But now you have to contain everything and bring it all back to Australia with you, and make provisions for that sort of stuff.

Well we didn’t worry too much about it in those days, but as far as visitors, or tourist ships and all that is concerned, they can do a bit of damage to the place with the leaving of rubbish and just being there. They interfered with the animal life a bit, where there’s only seal and penguins and lots of seabirds and things like that, but they are easily disturbed because they haven't got any predators at all down there. In particular penguins – you could walk up to a

penguin and almost and pick him up with no trouble at all. He might peck at you a bit but he wont run away like rabbits or anything else. There are all those things to consider but it is deteriorating a little I think. For instance if you out oil on the ice it’ll stay there ultimately and when the sun comes up in the summer time, it will heat the oil up and it will crack the ice right in front of where you want to operate

in front of the house, or in front of the hangar say, with the aircraft on skis. All those things have to be taken into consideration. But we were a bit dirty in the early days, but all that’s been contained now. But that’s what they’ve got in mind, and there’s a little bit of adversary in heating going on down there I believe, and that’s starting to do a little bit of damage in Antarctica, and bits of the continent are breaking off and floating away. There’s a lot of other things that we could talk about I suppose, but it is deteriorating a little I suppose.

I don't know that it’s got to the stage where it’s not pristine. It’s not as pristine as it used to be, put it that way.

No, nothing could ever happened to it you know, nothing could ever happen – you just tip things in the sea water, it’s out of sight, out of mind sort of business. Much the same as it is up here, but probably more so down there because there’s so

much of Antarctica and it would be so easy for Antarctica to absorb all the little bit of stuff that you're throwing it all the time.

We tipped it down a crack in the rock. We never had any fuel to waste but there was always oil and things like that. But as far as I remember, engine oil went into a convenient crack in the rock behind the hangar.

Did I ever what?

Yeah, sorry. Penguin eggs, early in the season the (dearly UNCLEAR) penguin, and we used to eat seal. The best part of the seal carcass is down near the tail, very much like fillet steak. If it was prepared in the right way it was quite enjoyable.

We used to feed it to the dogs of course too, you’d have to catch a seal every couple of weeks, usually shot and dragged in on the tractor. Butcher it up and that’s about all the dogs lived on.

Oh, yeah whenever you could get a selected piece off the seal before the dogs got it.

It was, mostly in cans. Anything that was in glass was kept in a heated store room, or heated fridge. It was dehydrated vegetables, that sort of thing. Lots of cans – cans left, right and centre. Milk, what else? Dehydrated eggs. Most of the fresh food that we took down lasted next to no time, that was eaten up pretty quickly.

We had a ration of beer and quite a lot of wine, that had to be kept in a heated store. We hadn't invented beer cans in those days. Richmond Tiger and Abbot’s Lager seemed to be the preferred bottle beer. We were making our brew down there of course, that was allowed, it was quite permissible. We’d have a couple of bottles of wine at the table on the weekend on picture night, movie night. There was a movie on every Saturday night I think it was.

We’d have a couple of bottles of wine with dinner and a couple bottles of beer each during the movie. You could talk as much as you like during the movie and make remarks about the actresses or the actors, and all that sort of thing. Usually before the end of the year you’ve seen that particular film two or three times, and you know it off by heart.

No, it was very enjoyable. You could keep the beer up to a suitable temperature like what you would get over a pub counter now, in the store. We wouldn’t let it get too much warmer than that. Wine was kept at the same temperature, otherwise you could crack a bottle or two, and that would be disastrous, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, those couple of factors I mentioned to you.

On those days probably a little bit. You were able to walk the isle in the aircraft in those days, among the passengers, but that’s not considered the thing to do these days for various reasons. There are too many passengers now to depend security, so that’s not on. But you were able to walk up and down and talk to passengers. I don't know about glamour. It was a pretty satisfying job in a way, but as I said it got to be a very boring occupation after a while.

Yes, there were still quite a few people in the air force who stayed in, be they all rejoined a few years after. In fact in Korea we had several pilots in 77 Squadron

in the Mustang days who were on the same sort of aircraft in the Second World War. So there was still an element of the old brigade around even in those days.

No, not so much with the pilots. They’d all been fighter pilots in the main, and they were a little bit more – what's the word I’m thinking of? Inclined to be

not abnormal, but out of the ordinary – individual, or individualistic I suppose. But there were several officers in the 77 Squadron who had seen action in the service during the Second World War. They declined quite rapidly over the later years. When I was instructing I still had two or three who’d been in service in the Second World War.

One of them indeed on Lancasters and he was still instructing in the air force in 1955, but he retired soon after that.

I met my wife in the front bar of the Great Northern Hotel in Newcastle in 1957. Yeah, that’s right.

One Saturday morning, and I continued to see quite a lot of her over the following months and I came out of the air force at the end of that year and went to New Guinea, and I came down from New Guinea in October of ’58 and we were married then, and Barbara came back to Port Moresby with me a short time after that, because I was flying out of Port Moresby then.

Yeah, on freight planes and seaplanes,

Catalina flying boats and Beavers again, back onto the Beavers, and Otters. An Otter was more or less a large Beaver, a ten or eleven passenger single engine aircraft still. It was quite pleasant flying up there around the coast and the delta and up and down the rivers, I enjoyed that.

Well, as I said I went into commercial aviation, and we had the first daughter in Moresby and the second one was born – I had the second year in Qantas, and number three was born in the Solomon Islands, but I was still flying all the time, and I was quite happy with that. We still had our house here, much the same as it was before

I left Qantas. It was a pretty happy existence, although I was tending to go from job to job at that stage. I finally settled down, and we had ten years in the Solomons which was good, I enjoyed every minute of. Barb didn’t like it as much as I did, so we ultimately came home and I’ve been sort of semi-retired

out of aviation ever since. I did a bit of part time flying on floats with Rick Walker at Aquatic Airways. Ultimately I had to give the flying away because of ears and eye problems.

I was asked to go up and fly in the Solomons. An airline had just been started up there, it was in a pretty basic form

but they had two Dove aircraft, which was ok but they didn’t have any really regular public transport in the air at the time, and they were a bit short on airstrips, other than those that were built during the Second World War by the Americans. So we kicked off from scratch virtually and established an airline. I became the general manager and the chief pilot of it, and the chief pilot of the airline.

And we were able to establish more and more airstrips with the assistance of the government. Ultimately it became a viable little airline and in profit, and it did quite well. But I had to give it away at the end of ten years for various reasons. We had the girls’ education to think of, and they were still in boarding school down here when I retired out of the Solomons. One of them continued to go to school after we came back.

It was damn good up there, I enjoyed that. It was a very operation, I had all Australian pilots in the main. It was a bit hard to find them a bit at times, when we wanted them. I had some cadet pilots from Qantas up there with me from time to time, which was very good both for Solomon Island Airways and for Qantas.

But it was a nice little operation for ten years and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It was pretty basic really, it was a Protectorate, it was run by the British by the Colonial Service, and it was good. It was starting to form an economy with good

products coming out of it, like forest and fish and copra, and basic agricultural type economy it was. A bit of gold starting to come out of it too, or there was a gold mine up the back which was being developed. But after a while independence was starting to rear its ugly head, and it became independent and from that time on, in 1978 it tended to go downhill, until they

ran into the big troubles they had over the last couple of years. It was very, very disappointing and sad that you know, that sort of thing happened, because it was starting to ahead, and it had an economy. It wasn't quite breaking even, it was getting quite a lot of funding from the British Government but there was no reason in the world why it couldn’t be self supporting within a few more years, but it didn’t go that way. It went downhill after independence.

Much the same as up in Rabaul that we talked about earlier. It was everywhere, actually it was an identical situation. The action that had been there, the Americans verses the Japanese in this case, and all the rubbish was left there to be picked over. I mentioned the business of the mortar bomb under the house

and all the ammunition strewn around the beaches and this sort of thing. It’s very similar in the Solomon Islands, but it left a bit of a bonus really, in all the airstrips that they built during the war. They were damn good long runways but they were starting to deteriorate. It was a bit of a job to keep them in commission. Half the length of the runway had to go, you know, where the four thousand foot

runway had to be brought down to three thousand or two thousand perhaps, depending on the type of aircraft. But they were good hard coral airfields and they had good taxiways and all that sort of thing, but it was very hard to keep them maintained after the war. But we built a nice modern office in the main street of Honiara. Communications were starting to improve a lot, we didn’t have very good communication in the early days.

Radio in the aircraft was pretty suitable but that improved a lot and they were able to get radio out in the base stations after a while, which was very good indeed. So you could talk to all the outlying stations at any time that you wanted to without having to pre-plan a schedule through the government channels. It was starting to get to be a pretty nice little country really, very pretty country. It got to be very touristy,

all the big cruise liners would pull in there. Lots of visitors from all around the world, but it was sad when we came home and found that it was starting to deteriorate because of independence, mainly. A little bit of graft and corruption got into it, and that was the end of it really.

Oh, she was missing the children. She had an empty house down here doing nothing

and it appealed more to a male than it did to a female.

Oh very well indeed. They were very happy people, it was called the Happy Isles, but we got on pretty well. I’d had quite a few years in New Guinea before and I could mix with them quite well. They were happy people, they were happy to see everybody – all the ex-patriots we were called up there. They weren't worried about us at that stage

of the game. There was always inter-island jealousy in the Solomon Islands, and in the early days, they’d think nothing of canoeing all the way across from one island to another, and waging war and taking a few prisoners or beheading a few – or eating a few even. They were cannibals in those days. One island in particular. All that sort of thing, it diminished them right away. But they were pretty

happy after the war, they all had jobs, most of them had jobs and they could all go back to their village at a moments notice and live off the produce of their land, which was a very arable sort of a country, and they could exist in their own villages, really.

Oh yeah. Malaita was the cannibal island in those days, and they were

a little bit more, is suppose intelligent than the people on some of the other islands, and they tended to come onto Honiara and form little businesses in the way of trade stores and building industries and things like that. This I think was one of the elements that caused the big blue a couple of years ago. The Guadalcanal people didn’t like the Malaita people, or the number of Malaita people who were on Guadalcanal and Honiara

in particular, and I think that was one of the main reasons.

We used to watch it day to day in the papers and on the radio, we thought it was sad really, because the airline which I helped to establish up there, it was deteriorating rapidly. I believe it got to the stage where it didn’t fly any more in the revolution, or whatever you want to call it up there.

It’s still going I believe, they have an international level now. Solomon Airlines it’s called, and they run a service with a leased aircraft, they don’t own the aircraft. I don't think they make any money out of it, but I think it’s a bit of a strain on the Solomon Island’s government, where they get the money from, I don't know.

Oh yes, I was decorated with an MBE [Member of the British Empire] by Her Majesty up in Buckingham Palace.

Yes, we were on leave at the time, and the authorities asked if we would like to attend the investiture at Buckingham Palace, and I said, “Yes, we would be honoured to do so.” We were listed for that, that was November of ’75 I think it was, yeah.

So we appeared for the investiture and met Her Majesty. We’d already met her actually at the Solomon Islands – she was out there the year before on a Royal tour, so we met the Queen and the Duke, and old Mountbatten, and one or two others while we were in the Solomons, and then we had the pleasure of meeting her again in Buckingham Palace when the investiture took place. So that was quite a moving event. Barbara was there, and she enjoyed that immensely.

Well she asked me where I was from, because she had forgotten that she’d met me before, but I said I was from the Solomon Islands. “Oh, Honiara, yes I remember being there last year and it rained all the time.” or something like that, you know. “And it rained all the time” she said, so she remembered that vividly. But she thanked me very much for my services to the Solomon Islands and pinned the aforementioned medal on my chest.

Oh, as you say, it was an honour. You feel pretty proud about it all. The usual old thing, it wasn't just myself alone that did it, it was all my staff and everybody else. But yeah, it made you feel very proud about being out there.

Well there are many islands in the Solomon Islands, and two or three of them had good runways on them. There was no reason in the world why they shouldn’t have had a good internal airline, and that was the whole idea. We were able to establish that and get it running pretty smoothly, and regular public transport. Not charter or anything like that, it was all regular with a published timetable and it ran almost to schedule every day of the week, which was one of the good points about it all.

But people liked that.

The government, local people. We had to charge a fair that tended to keep us in operation financially of course, which was a bit hard on the local people who didn’t have much money. But as the economy improved you found that quite a lot of the native people started to use the airline, more so than boats because if they wanted to go from island A to island B, sometimes it took them a week. In the

aircraft it only took them an hour, or an hour and a half. They realised this after a while and so we started to get a lot more patrons in that area. It was used a lot by ex-patriot businessmen, the government who used it quite extensively. We did a lot of charter work too, that was the thing, for the government, and they got a little sick of spending days and weeks on ships when you could take an aircraft and do it in a matter of hours.

Generally good, but when it was poor it was poor. It was mainly rain considerations. But you got used to flying in pretty poor rain conditions after a while. The first couple of weeks in operation, a new pilot up there, he used to be really upset by the conditions, and say, “Will you do the service over to so and so?” and he’d say,

“What, in this?” sort of business. But after a while he got quite used to that. It wasn't dangerous, you learn to fly around weather up there, nit through it but around it. They were usually isolated storms, a lot of thunder. Not often did you get general rain that persisted for days on end, it was usually pretty quick, sudden shower activity, and that sort of thing. But that was easy enough to

fly over and around.

No, every day was a gem for flying up there, it really was. It was good scenery, and you didn’t have to fly known routes everyday. You could fly around islands, over islands and look at different things, particularly on charter flights. It gave you an opportunity to find

little places you’ve never seen before. But it was always a pleasure to fly in the Solomons because it was such a pretty place. The weather in the main was good.

Well not so much primitive, they were exposed to modern conditions in as much as they were importing trade store food and

that sort of thing, and they all had pretty good gardening equipment and outboard motors on canoes. So they weren't too primitive – they were even going to school, most of the Solomon Islands were starting to attend school. They were the children and they were becoming quite well educated up to HSC [Higher Schools Certificate] level when I was there, and some were even going to universities in Australia and New Zealand. Some into England. I sent one

of my mechanic lads over to Edinburgh at one stage to further his knowledge about aircraft maintenance and all that sort of thing, and the last I heard of him a couple of years ago, was that he was the chief engineer at Solair [Solomon Airlines] in Honiara. So he did well. But there were quite a lot of people that were sent out to university to do things like that in various fields, and they became chief ministers

and head of departments, and even doctors. There were a few Solomon Island doctors, not so much in surgery I don't think, but in specialist fields.

Favourite? It’s a toss up

between the Antarctic and the Solomons, but I think overall it would probably be the Solomons. It was over a longer period of time and I enjoyed the flying up there, and the challenge of being able to form a business, which we did with the help of my wife and all my staff who worked in the Solair office up there. Barbara was very good with the staff up there and the training aspect.

Teaching them all about office procedures and airline procedures, ticketing and what have you. Yeah, I’d say it was the Solomons probably.

Oh, no I don't think so. That’s a thing that you can miss out on really, but you enjoy the flying when you're in the air force, but you can do without the combat side of it I think.

Yeah, once or twice!

Oh yeah, they’d have loved it, yeah.

When I decided to come out of the Solomons I thought that perhaps I would get involved in something associated with aviation, I don't know what but not a distributor ship or anything like that.

But something on the operational side, or perhaps some part time flying, and ultimately I did. I picked up very quickly with some part time flying down at Palm Beach on floats with a little company called Aquatic Airways. That was very enjoyable stuff really, we used to fly charter flights around Sydney Harbour and up the coast and around the Hawkesbury and things like that. Much the same as the things that you see flying around here everyday now,

almost exactly the same operation. That was part time, and there was that. I didn’t fly commercially at all other than that, I don’t recall. No I didn’t, it was just with Aquatic Airways. I used to go back to the Solomon Islands from time to time though, in the first two or three years just to help out when

perhaps the operations manager or the manager went on leave, or something like that. Or if they wanted an aircraft ferried over from here to the Solomons, I’d do those sort of things for them. That petered out over a couple of years. I was still part time flying down here for a few years, and then I was involved in a thing called Pelican’s Progress, I don't know whether you’ve ever heard of it. It was a TV thing that ran for about eight or twelve episodes every Saturday evening or whatever it was. It involved taking three float planes all

the way around Australia. I was involved in that all around the Kakadu and Darwin, and down the west coast as far as Esperance I think it was. That was very enjoyable, good stuff. Incidentally we’re on our way up there again in a couple of weeks time, doing a tour through the Kakadu and down through there. No that was good, but that was about the end of the aviation side of it.

I then decided that I would then have to do a bit of work, so I became the manager of a small business down in Mona Vale, and I managed the small business for six years in glass, and then after that, it was sold that particular business. I was asked if I would help out doing the same thing for a good friend of mine who owned a glass company out at Ryde, so I went out with him for eleven years as a representative.

But I good very good at selling glass products in those times. Then just after that I think I retired completely. No more flying, no more glass. I got a bit involved in Air force Association work and ultimately only three years ago, I got involved with another charity called the Peninsula Senior Citizens tour repair group that I mentioned to you earlier. So that seems to occupy a fair amount of my time at the moment,

particularly now that we’re trying to build a new building for headquarters because we had to move from where we were. So, you know, mixed in with all that, there’ve been a few little trips around. We did a trip to Europe a few years ago. We did the battlefields and up through France. We went to Korea on invitation eighteen months ago I think it was, to become part of the Soccer World Cup.

Back to Seoul, I didn’t get to look at Kimpo again though, we couldn’t quite get to see Kimpo. But the whole of the place is different up there now, it’s a really booming sort of economy.

Oh it felt good, it felt really good, yeah. One or two parts that are around Seoul that I remember, as I mentioned before about the Hahn was the only bridge and now there’s twenty two over the river. There are lots of differences in that respect. It’s a very modern sort of city, have you been up that way yourself?

That was quite enjoyable.

We met all South Korea Vet’s, their association was beautiful, you couldn’t ask for anything better. We went up for a dedication of a quite large memorial that had been built down on the edge of the Pusan Box, down on the southern end. We were

freighted down there, and flown down in the (Hercu [Hercules transport aircraft] -bird UNCLEAR) with all the old generals, and they were all there and it was great. It was a good ten days up there. So we’re off to the dead heart of Australia in a couple of weeks time, and then we’re going over to South Africa at the end of the year to see my daughter again. But mixed in with all this there were a few other things that I recall we did.

I dig the garden and mow the lawn, generally look after the household.

It was, really. I had to do a review, which you have to do now in aviation every two years, particularly if you’ve just got a commercial or private licence. You have to answer a lot of questions and do a

flying test and just bring you up to speed again. I did that about nine years ago I think I said, wasn't it? In a small aircraft up to the north of Sydney at a flying school, and I didn’t fly again after that particular day. So I did the review for nothing really. I haven't flown in command of an aircraft since then.

Oh, I don't think it

made a great deal of difference to me, not that I can see. Other people may see it, I don't know. No, I can't think of anything about my own self that’s changed since the Korea business. It has affected some people, I know. But as I said I had a pretty comfortable time in Korea, compared to the battalions, the army blokes and some of the other blokes that were taken prisoner that was not good.

But I got through it pretty comfortably.

Well for many years it was, and it was after we got the memorial in at Canberra in 2000, people started to see that

something had happened in Korea all those years ago, but not too many people knew about it much. It was, as you said, a sort of a forgotten war. There were three hundred and something of us that lost their lives there, including forty pilots, so it should not be forgotten. But I think people do realise now that it was there, and we contributed quite a lot, the Australian people to the Korean people.

Yes.

Only through my

association through other veterans, and through air force associations and anything that I could contribute in that way. We did a lot of work leading up to the dedication of the memorial in Canberra. I think people became more aware then, than they ever have been.

Oh yeah. Air force Association, yeah.

Not the Queen Veterans Association in New South Wales, you can be a member of far too many organizations really, so I’m quite happy to be involved in the ones I’m in at the moment, which is the Air force Association and the 77 Squadron Association. I’m a committee member of that, and it’s quite active at the moment.

I’m a member of a sub-branch at Palm Beach down here. I don’t serve in any official capacity, no. I march every Anzac Day.

Yeah.

Oh, camaraderie

more than anything.

Yeah, and that’s what we usually do.

Definitely. Yes, the march – it’s hard to say how

many attend the march until perhaps you look at it on TV the night after or see the official figures. But as a veteran marching you see more and more people every year.

Yes.

I’ve been a bit fifty/fifty on it, but I think it was wrong. That’s in hindsight, it’s very easy to make those remarks in hindsight. The Iraq business, right from the first George Bush’s attempt to do something about it,

it wasn't so bad in those days, I don’t suppose because he was trying to do something to clean up around the Middle East. I think the next effort was a bit wrong, myself – in hindsight, you know.

Well at the time, usually when people go to war you're a serving member of the force and it’s your duty to do it. Usually, up to date – other than this Iraq business probably – you’re a member of the force and you go, because it’s your duty and there’s been a reason for it, a valid reason. But it seems to become more and more

apparent that there are not many valid reasons left why we go to war. It’s a bit hard to follow, if you get what I mean, why we are doing the things that we’re doing at the moment. I think we could do without it. It’s a costly business to go to war now – it’s bad enough during the First and Second World War. The Korean War was pretty costly in lives, and losses to either the Koreans,

the South Koreans and the participating nations. But now, to go to war it must cost the Americans billions of dollars that we don’t know about. And the Australian people have suffered to a certain extent, the expenses that have been involved in it. We could have done without that too, I think that it could have been applied in a better manner than sending forces to Iraq perhaps.

Well, it’s a bit hard to answer. Things were stabilised when in got up there, but I think I assisted as best I could under the circumstances. We were just trying to hold the line until they eventually signed a peace agreement there, that’s about what it boiled down to during the time that I was there. It would have been easy enough for North Korea and China to

break through I think, but I think once the breakthrough had occurred and many lives had been lost that they would have been repelled again. Pretty disastrously, if you know what I mean, and yet the war was started up there I think.

Oh, there are pretty obvious ones that I think we can do without, all the conflicts that we go through. Particularly

in recent years there seems to be a conflict going on in almost every country in the world. I think we can do without them, the amount of money that’s spent on armed forces, and trying to repel terrorism and that sort of stuff, could be applied much better to much more humane things, more humanitarian type functions, than spending millions of dollars on armed forces. Something to that effect.