Australians at War Film Archive

Alright then, I was born on the 12th November, 1923, in Melbourne – I don’t know which suburb it was but it was in Melbourne.

My father was sent down there; he worked for the Department of the Navy; he was a cartographer. We were down there for approximately five years. Then we was sent back up to Sydney. We were living at Arncliffe and, while we were living in Arncliffe, right opposite, there was a big playing field there, which is now an industrial area. We started school at Arncliffe Public School

and on the way to school – we used to walk – just across the road there was a Chinese garden, where there was everything growing and I used to be one of the first to go to school because the gardeners with the big clumps of carrots… there’d be small ones coming on and they’d pick the small ones out and throw them on the grass path that led up to the school. So we were always early to go to school because we could get a feed of carrots on the way to school.

After a couple of years, I got diphtheria and I was sent to the Coast Hospital and then, after that, my family moved to Paddington because my mother knew a friend in Paddington Street, Paddington. Then

we went up to Ocean Street, Woollahra and all this time, except when I was at Bondi Road. While I was at Bondi Road, I saw Kingsford Smith arrive. They marched the whole school up and stood on an embankment and watched the aeroplane arrive. I don’t know if it was from New Zealand; it most probably was. If he stopped in New Zealand, he flew across the Pacific. And at that time, believe it or not, I had a model aeroplane in my hand – when I heard Kingsford Smith was flying, I took my model aeroplane –

a tin one, it was and of course, as he was flying in, I was flying my aeroplane around as well. But then we came back to Ocean Street, Woollahra and my father was still working at Garden Island and he used to take me over to work on a Saturday morning, sometimes. I was watching the Harbour Bridge being built and one of the navy guards on the island used to walk me around and look after me. My father used to give him some money

and he’d take me along to the canteen there and buy me an ice-cream and I’d just sit and watch the bridge being built and then we’d go home and that was it. But, after a while, my father, and this was in the Depression, used to get paid on a Friday and instead of bringing the money home to my mother, he’d walk along Queen Street, Woollahra where all the pubs and wine bars were and shout all his mates that were out of work

a drink. And so, by the time he got home, there was no money left for my mother’s housekeeping. She must have had some money somewhere to keep going. This got worse and worse and my mother used to say, “Go down and see if you can find your father in one of the pubs or the wine bars.” So I’d go down and, if I’d see him, I’d just go like this to say, “Come home, Dad.” But when I got home, I got a good cuff over the ear for interrupting him.

And, of course, he’d come home pretty drunk and he’d have a go at my mother occasionally. My mother decided she’d had enough of this and by this time, I also had a brother who was born in 1927. So she took the two of us and we went to stay with the landlady whose house we were staying in in Woollahra. She said we could come and stay with her

for a while until we found somewhere else to live. And so we went down and stayed with her; she lived just opposite Queens Park. We still went to Paddington School and eventually, we stayed with another family and then I think my mother must have borrowed some money from her sister, who was a couple of years younger than her and worked at a solicitor’s office, which was a very good job at those times; this was the Depression, of course. She might’ve borrowed some money

and she rented a place in Underwood Street, Paddington – 160, just near the Grand National Hotel. She rented this place because it was a deceased estate and the estate hadn’t been settled. She sub-let… The ground floor was one unit, the big room across the front of the house and the smaller room behind and a kitchenette on the back verandah

was another tenant and we lived in the back room at the back of the house, my brother, my mother and myself. And that’s how we existed. We’d have different families move in there at different times and others move out. Paddington was the second worse suburb in the Depression. There was only one place worse and that would’ve been Woolloomooloo.

There were a lot of men out of work living in Paddington in those days. We went to Paddington School and I went up to 6th class at Paddington Public School and after I’d done the examinations, the qualifying certificate, I was sent to North Sydney Chatswood Junior Boys High School, which was at North Sydney

Station. That particular year, they’d combined North Sydney Intermediate High with Chatswood Junior Boys High and the two schools came together at North Sydney Chatswood Junior Boys High. I started high school there; I did three years at high school and at the end of second year high school, my mother got a note from the Education Department to say that I was being transferred. I had the opportunity to either

go to Sydney Boys High or Randwick Boys High School. My mother went into the Education Department and said, “Why are you sending my son to Sydney High or Randwick?” and they said, “His papers got mixed up and we made a mistake.” And she said, “I can’t afford to buy him another school uniform so just leave him there for another year.”

So, I stayed at North Sydney Chatswood Junior Boys High and did my Intermediate Certificate there. The headmaster gave me a very good reference. He knew somebody and jobs were hard to get.

He said, “I have a friend who is director or company secretary of a company called Cooee Clothing Company Ltd. You might go and see him.” So I went and saw Mr E.V. Cuff who was the company secretary and a director of Cooee Clothing Company Ltd and he said, “Yes, we’ve got room for you; we’ve got a job here for you.” So

I started work with Cooee Clothing Company as a messenger boy, riding a bike round the city, delivering mail to the two other branches in the city and doing the mail of a night-time and all that sort of stuff. I was there until war broke out. I turned 18 in 1941 and so I had to register under the National Service Act I think it was called.

I registered and I got a letter to report to part of the Victoria Barracks on Moore Park Road and so I went down there and there I was in national service, in the army, in the militia. They took us over to the Anti-Aircraft Artillery Training Battery at

Georges Heights, which is on Middle Head, which is where you did all your foot drill and rifle drill. So I did all my foot drill and rifle drill there and when I’d finished that, I was due to be posted to a gun site somewhere. The first thing they sent me on was a trip with mobile, three-inch guns and the rest of the gun crew up to Clarendon, which is a racecourse just near Richmond Aerodrome. We parked the guns where they had to be

parked, jacked them up, took the wheels off and then lowered them to the ground. We had to fill sandbags to build a sandbag around each gun and when all this hard work had been finished, I thought, “Well, I’ll have a bit of a rest now,” but instead of that, I got sent back to Georges Heights to the training battery. I wasn’t there very long when they sent me over to the gun site, which was in the park opposite the training battery and I think the park is still there now.

I was at Georges Heights for a while, at the gun battery there and I got told one afternoon that I was going to a new gun battery and I’d have to be ready to leave by 8 o’clock in the morning. So, we got up, emptied our palliasses, packed all our gear up, had breakfast. They put us on a truck and we started to

drive around Neutral Bay and I thought, “This is a funny was to go into a new gun battery. We’re the only gun battery within sight at Georges Heights, there.” The next thing I know is we’re on the wharf where they used to test the torpedoes there at Neutral Bay and I thought, “This is funny.” We unloaded all our gear; there was myself and about another 15 or 20 chaps from the gun site.

The next thing we know a tug pulls in, we’re put onto a tug out the midstream and there’s the Queen Mary. There’s three bigger ships in the world – we’re in Sydney Harbour at the time – the Queen Mary, the Il de France and, I think, the Queen Elizabeth; I’m not sure on those names now.

…I was put on board the Queen Mary as a gunner

and as soon as we got on board, straight off and out the heads and right down south of Tasmania and ended up in Fremantle. Seeing that we were militia, we weren’t supposed to go outside Australian waters. The Queen Mary was going on to New York and the skipper was quite happy to take us; there was nobody to replace us because they had gun crews but not enough to man all the guns. At the last moment, some British Expeditionary [British Expeditionary Force] blokes turned up from Singapore

and so they put them on the boat and we got off and came all the way back to Sydney by troop train and then, eventually, back at Georges Heights gun battery. Not long after I was there again, I got transferred into the gun observations room. Our living quarters were three of the tenement houses next to the Astor Hotel in Macquarie Street opposite the Conservatorium and the gun operations room was in the railway tunnel that led

from St James down to Circular Quay. In the Botanic Gardens, there was an air-raid shelter and that ran into one side of the railway tunnel; the air-raid shelter ran into one side, the eastern side. The Botanic Gardens is locked up of a night-time but alongside the Conservatorium,

they’ve taken out two of the iron spikes and the people who were on duty used to go through there and then down into the air-raid shelter side of it and walk up the western side of the railway line where they had the gun operations room. In the gun operations room, they had...

Well, while I was at the gun operations room, about September 1942

there was a big ad in the paper to say they needed air-crew badly. I was getting a bit fed up with working down in the tunnel and not doing anything, as far as the war effort was concerned and so I thought I’d transfer to the air force. I went down to Woolloomooloo, where the air force was, got the papers, filled them in, took them home to my mother and said, “Mum, will you sign this?” And she said, “What is it?” and I said, “It’s a transfer

to the air force.” And she said, “All right, what as?” and I said, “Air crew.” And she said, “Forget it, I’m not signing that,” and I said, “Well, give us the pen; I’ll sign it for you.” Anyway, she signed it, I took it back to the CO [Commanding Officer] of our unit and he was quite happy to sign it and wished me luck, etc. By that time and while we were at the gun operations

room…

I got discharged from the army and got the call-up to go to Bradfield Park. I had to do my rookies [recruit training]

again and within the same area, I got posted to initial training school where you did all your paperwork, Morse Code [communication system], navigation and everything you needed to know about flying. When that was finished, I was then posted to the embarkation depot and, while waiting there, I was sent up to Rathmines.

Being an office boy, I was used to using a Gestetner Duplication Machine. They needed somebody that knew how to run off the night flying programmes and so I was up there for a while. And then, of course, time got nearer so I was sent back to Bradfield Park and, the next thing I know, I was on a boat going over to Canada. They off-loaded us at San Francisco, went up by train to Edmonton

via Vancouver, into a holding depot at Edmonton and then sent down to Lethbridge where we did bombing and gunnery. From Lethbridge, we went up to Air Observer School at Edmonton and did navigation and graduated at Edmonton. From there, I was given leave and had to report to Lachine, which is a suburb of Montreal where there was

a big holding depot. When there was a convoy ready to go over to the UK [United Kingdom], we hopped on the train and they took us down to Halifax and went on convoy from Halifax over to Greenock in Scotland and then from Greenock down to Brighton and from Brighton, I went on a refresher course over near Bristol

and then from there to an operational training unit, which was on Wellingtons [bomber aircraft]. At operational training units you get crewed up and so all the pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, wireless operators and air gunners all get thrown into a big hangar there and they just swirl around and crew up. I was there looking around to see who was available and

an Australian flying officer came up to me and he had with him an Australian navigator and an Australian wireless operator and he said, “Would you like to join our crew?” I said, “Yeah, bewdy!” So that meant there’d be four Australians, an English, RAF [Royal Air Force] rear gunner from Southend-on-Sea and a Canadian

mid-upper gunner. So that was OK. We started flying at OTU [Operational Training Unit] and then we went to Heavy Conversion Unit. We were lucky that we went to Heavy Conversion Unit because, instead of going on to a Halifax or a Manchester [types of aircraft] and then have to go to a Lancaster finishing school, we went straight on to Lancasters so we cut out one course. While we were there, we found that the

mid-upper gunner, the Canadian, he went into Nottingham and got sick so we picked up another English, RAF mid-upper gunner and we finished Heavy Conversion Unit and were sent to 460 Squadron at Binbrook. We did 13 trips there and, while we were there, the head hunter from Pathfinding Unit came around and said he wanted

two crews to volunteer to go to Pathfinders [Pathfinder Force: especial target finding and marking unit within Bomber Command] and there were three flights: A, B and C Flights. The CO of C Flight, a bloke by the name of Holmes, he’d already finished his tour and so was the flight commander for C Flight. He went on an easy trip and he picked a scratch crew and they never made it back. The whole seven of them went for a sixer and so our skipper was the acting flight commander. When they said pick

three crews, he came down to the crew and he said, “Do you want to go down to Pathfinders?” The rear gunner, who came from South Head said, “Yeah, we’ll be in it,” and so, when the names came out of the hat our names didn’t come out. But one of the crews, the skipper, put his name in the hat and didn’t bother to tell the crew that they’d volunteered for Pathfinders. He went down and told them that they were

going down to a Pathfinder squadron and they said, “Like bloody hell! There’s no bloody way we’re going down to a Pathfinder squadron. You can have it!” And he said, “But you’ll be up on a charge of lack of moral fibre.” They said, “We don’t care what you do to us, we’re not going down to Pathfinders.” So our skipper said, “Well, how about we take your place?” and so that’s how we got down to Pathfinders and it was a good thing that we did because, when we got down there before we started flying, they gave each member of the crew a night vision test. Mine was about

28 out of 32. The mid-upper gunner: while we’d been on 460 [460 Squadron] and done quite a few trips down there, our skipper had said one time when we were getting into the target area, all the aircraft were getting together, a couple of times we’d get a bit close and the skipper would say, “George, didn’t you see that aircraft coming in from the port side?” “Ah, no, I was searching on the starboard [right hand] side.”

or, “George, didn’t you see that aircraft on the starboard side?” “I was searching on the port side.” That was all right, these things happen and I suppose it happens to every crew. But anyway, when we got down to PFF [Pathfinder Force], they gave us these night vision tests and George’s night vision was 2 out of 32. So they marked his papers, ‘Daylights Only’ and sent him off to another squadron, which was doing daylights and we picked up another Australian

mid-upper gunner. And it was from there we carried on until the finish of the war and ended up doing 29 trips. Our last trip was marking for food dropping at Rotterdam.

Yes and it wasn’t very long after that and I don’t know why me but I was the only one of the crew that got sent home and maybe they were glad to get rid of me. I came back to

Australia with a whole lot of blokes on the ship that were Mobile Naval Operational Airbase personnel who were going up north to the islands and I thought, “Maybe they’re going to send me up north to do the marking or the bomb aiming up there”, seeing as I was a Pathfinder. At any rate, when I got home, I was just given leave and then reported

back to Bradfield Park and it was all over sort of thing; that was it. Other members of the crew, when the war finished over there, the two English chaps, the rear gunner went home to Southend-on-Sea and the flight engineer went home to Glasgow but he’s now living at Ayre.

Well, I eventually went back to the firm that I worked for and started work there again with Cooee Clothing Company Limited and the same director who got me the job in the first place said, after I’d been there for quite a while, Mr Sailor from the Australian Wool Brokers who’d started that company off -

he was an Afghan camel driver who used to sell clothes to people in outback NSW –“Their office ‘round there badly needs somebody,” he said, “they’re still using quill pens [pens which were dipped in an ink well] ‘round there.” That’s how he described how old-fashioned they were. He said, “They need somebody to give the some new ideas how to do their paper work ‘round there.

I’d like you to go around there.” So I left Cooee Clothing and went ‘round to Australian Wool Brokers and it wasn’t very long after this that Mr Sailor decided to keep his pastoral interests – he had properties up near Segenhoe, just near Scone and he was into racehorses at this time, too. He decided that he’d sell his pastoral interests to Goldsbrough Mort.

Mr Cuff, who got me there in the first place, said, “I’ve made arrangements for you to go and see the State Manager down there. I’ sure they’ll be glad to have you down there.” All the office staff were interviewed by Goldsbrough Mort and I think, as far as I know, they were all given jobs down there except some of them kept doing the paperwork for Mr Israel for his properties

and looking after his racehorses. And so I started working down at Goldsbrough Morts, which was in Macquarie Place. The building has been knocked down now but it was a stone building. I started off in the administration department and then I went over to the wool department. We used to do the cataloguing for the wool growers, do the paperwork for their catalogues so that, on sale days, their

wool would be auctioned and they’d get their prices. From that the cashier, who was an ex-World War I bloke and he’d been promised a company loan and he was going on holidays and wanted the money to do the work on his house but they hadn’t given him the cheque for the money so he just increased his cash on hand by the amount of the loan and went on leave. I was

appointed cashier while he was on leave and at that time, we had a new internal auditor arrive and he came over and checked the amount of cash and vouchers and cheques. Then, when he went and checked the account in the ledger, he found that there was 1,000 or something more that what I was holding and so he came back and then they found that this bloke had… he hadn’t taken it because he was promised this money and so I stayed there

as cashier. And then, when we amalgamated with Elders Smiths up in O’Connell Street, I was appointed. There were two cashiers but I was given the job as cashier. After I’d been cashier for a while, I was moved upstairs, up into the accounts department and I was given a job in the banking section: statistics and training

trainees, young blokes who’d come in from school. They’d finish school on how the banking system works so that when they got sent out to the branches, they’d know what to do. While I was there, we also had the paymaster there … at that stage, we were paid on the 15th of the month and at the end of the month. On the 15th of the month, we’d get our pay to the nearest quid [pound] and, at the end of the month, you’d get

all the rest of the deductions taken out and the balance of your pay. It was organised through the assistant accountant that I would do the pay while he was on leave – you could only take about a week at a time – so that was alright, I used to do that. The next thing I know, he went on leave and he didn’t come back; he’d died. And so he said, “Viv, you’re the paymaster.” So, I took over the paymaster but the thing was, I

didn’t know how all the final arrangements were made, when all the ledger work had to be done of everybody’s pay and all their deductions and the amount of tax and all that sort of thing and the accounts paid for all these different group assurance schemes. Eventually, after I’d worked back for quite a while, I got to know how it was all worked out and so I stayed as paymaster until I retired in 1988. And, in 1988,

I’d retired a week and I went down to my daughter’s place who was living in Thirroul and she said, “Dad, there’s a tree down here that needs a branch cut off it so I can have a nice view of the coast.” So we went down there and I’ve got my bushman’s saw – about this big. The whole family were invited down there for this luncheon – it was actually VE [Victory in Europe] Day,

Mothers Day and my eldest son’s birthday. So we went down there and I got up and cut the branch of the tree and, as I cut the branch of the tree, it fell onto the branch that I was standing on and snapped it off and I fell thirty feet and broke my neck. I haven’t mentioned anything about getting married in 1953.

Yes, it was very tough; hardly ever saw him.

He wasn’t a navy man, he was a civilian who worked for the navy. He wasn’t actually in the navy. I understand that all the cartographers – there were a few of them in the office over there – they were all civilians but they all worked on Garden Island and were paid by a department of the navy.

Well, he was transferred back up to Sydney again. I don’t know how long before I was born that he was down there but I was born down there. I don’t know how long he’d been down there before I was born – 12th of November, 1923.

The house that we lived in at the time had an extension done

and the floorboards were down, the lining was on the outside of the house but it hadn’t been finished off and it was that freezing down there in the winter, I never used to hardly go out. I used to ride my bike ‘round the spare room to keep warm. Opposite the side of the house was a great big national park and there was a dirt road that went past the side of the house. A couple of days a week, the stock that was sold to the abattoirs

at the saleyards used to be moved to the abattoirs to be slaughtered and sold to the butchers, etc. As they used to drive past, another boy that lived opposite our house used to get out whips made out of a piece of stick and a piece of string and we used to crack these whips as the sheep walked past. We thought that was great fun. We weren’t so happy when the cows and the bullocks moved past because we didn’t want to get too close to them.

As I said, I had a boy over the road and used to go over to his place and play. He had Hornby trains over there and we used to play on the Hornby trains and play with those of a daytime. I wasn’t at school at that time; I was too young to be going to school.

That was in Melbourne, yeah, and then we moved up to Arncliffe and that’s where I started school.

Well, at Arncliffe, there was, as I said, a playing field. There’s all factories built on it now where the oval used to be. You go over the bridge that’s just over the road there – there used to be this playing field there – and opposite there

were about four of five cottages. At one of these cottages, there was a boy that was my age and so we used to go to school together and play over at his place. You used to be able to go through the back fence and onto the oval and kick a ball ‘round in the oval. His father also had an old bus that he was using. He used to park it in the backyard and we used to play in the bus; that used to keep us amused of an afternoon. Or he used to come over to my place: for my

birthday there, my aunt gave me a Hornby train and so we used to come over and play with the train sets at my place or play in the backyard; kick a ball around the backyard; throw balls around. And then from there, I went to Bondi. I wasn’t there very long and then went down to Paddington Street, Paddington and

went to Paddington School, there. There were other kids in the house but we used to mainly ride our three-wheeler bikes around and go over to Centennial Park. Some afternoons, about four or five of us would go over to Centennial Park but not very often;

we were a bit too young. We’d mainly just ride our bikes ‘round. At one time, I climbed out on the balcony – it was three storeys high at the back – and I climbed out a little porch on the back, climbed over the rail, across the roof to the top of the house next door and I sat on top of that and I could see right across to Manly. When I told my mother, she nearly had a fit because, if I’d fallen down, I would’ve landed on the concrete, four floors below. From there we went up to

Ocean Street. At Ocean Street, there were quite a few boarders up there, flats actually. You didn’t board, you did your own cooking and everything like that. Eric Turnbull was up there and we used to play in the back paddock with bows and arrows and throw balls around and kick balls around. We’d walk down to

Double Bay from the top of Ocean Street, Woollahra, my brother and Eric and myself and make models out of the back end of a piece of wood out of the case you used to get fruit in. That’s when my family split up and we went down to

the landlady’s house and then, from there, to Randwick and still went to Paddington School. But then we moved to the house in Paddington and so we

lived at Paddington and we used to go over to the park pretty regularly, then, because we were only five minutes away from Centennial Park. There were other children in the house: there were three other boys in the downstairs unit and there were two other boys in the upstairs unit. One of them worked so there were six of us used to be able to go ‘round as a bunch and there was a paddock at the back of the shops in Oxford Street. We could go over there and play soccer of an afternoon or cricket, depending on whether it was summer or winter.

We used to, as a bunch, go down to Double Bay or Redleaf. In those days, you couldn’t get onto Redleaf, only by low tide; you could walk around the rocks. It was private property all along Redleaf Beach but then the council bought one of the houses after the war and you could then pay to go onto the beach. When we went down, we used to go at low tide and stay down there until the tide changed again and

walk home from there.

Well, I thought it was the best thing that ever happened because my father used to come home and my mother used to ask, “Where’s some housekeeping money?” and he’d start to hit her and I would jump up between them while he was hitting her and he’d bash me out of the way as

well. So I was glad that they did split up because we had a smoother household. There was no fighting, no arguments or anything like that. My mother just said what had to be done and that was done and we did it.

Yeah, it was. As a matter of fact, all my father’s brothers were Masons and all my mother’s brothers

were Masons. There’s about ten in my father’s family and about six of them would have been boys and in my mother’s family, there were eight boys and two girls and it just wasn’t heard of. And so I never saw any of my uncles or aunts except for the one who came to live with us at one time. But, as you say, it just wasn’t done

so they completely cut off from us. We had nothing to do with any of them after that; we never saw any of them, except when I was in England. I met up with a friend of my uncle’s who had met his brother, who was wounded in the First World War and taken home to England. She was a nurse’s aide in hospital and my uncle, who was also working on Garden Island, in the engineering section as a civilian, he managed to get on a boat that was going to England and

saw his brother in hospital and me this English girl who was a nurse’s aide. They kept writing to each other and, eventually, they got married in 1953, the same year that I got married.

Well, she sublet the house to two other tenants and of course, that helped pay for the rent. It was about a pound or 25 shillings a week and the rent on the

house was only 25 shillings and apart from that, she had a job for a while with a photographer by the name of Harold Venn. She used to do his typing and sending out his accounts. And then, when the war started, she used to work for the Wheat Board when the wheat was coming in at the end of the summer and do all the paperwork for the consignments of wheat for

people who were sending so much wheat to the silos and then, when the war broke out, she had to register and she was spot on. She won a scholarship to Charters who were people who had typewriters and did stenography and all that sort of thing. And she won a scholarship to go there and do their course and she was a crash hot typist and stenographer. When the war broke out and she had to register, she eventually got a job at Victoria Barracks as a

stenographer there and used to do the minutes of their meetings and all that sort of thing, which had to be typed up.

No, I don’t think anything came from him at all except that it

showed you what drink can do to somebody so it turned us off it for life, I’d say. No, I can’t say that there was anything my father did that I was interested in. If he wasn’t at home, he was down the road shouting his mates a drink. He went to work, came home and he wasn’t at home for very long and we’d be in bed at that stage.

Oh no, we were pretty young. We helped with the washing up and things like that and maybe drag the broom around the room or something like that. That was when it first happened but when we moved into the house at Paddington,

we looked after the front garden. We had tenants in the house so we made sure the backyard was clean and we used to sweep that down – it was all concreted anyway, the whole backyard. There was only one toilet and that was downstairs and we always used to make sure that was clear and clean. We didn’t buy toilet rolls in those days;

we used to cut up old newspapers or, if we were lucky, we’d find an old telephone book and that did the job – rip a page out of that. We always made sure there was paper hanging up in the toilet. I used to clean the stairs that led up to the first floor where we were; clean the stairs and the passageway and of course, the rest of the house. The part that they sublet, it was up to the tenants to look after that section. But I always used to do the

stairs. We had brass stair rods to hold the carpet in place on the stairs and I used to take out the stair rods one at a time and polish them up with the Brasso [brass cleaning polish] and put them back again and tidy up the place like that.

Oh yeah, helped Mum out with the chores. She just said what had to be done and that was it, my brother and myself would do it.

Well

with us, she was the best thing that ever happened as far as we were concerned, especially after the years that we’d had living with my father and seeing the way things gradually got worse until she’d had enough and had to move out. But she was a very loving person but I think maybe those days you just didn’t show your affection as much as you do today; you were a sissy if you

kissed your mother or things like that. That’s what my father used to say – we were sissy. But once we were on our own at Underwood Street in Paddington where we had somewhere we could call home, the three of us got on very well together. And my brother and myself both worked together to help my mother do whatever had to be done.

Well, we didn’t know that many families apart from the tenants that were living in the house. We would’ve known the children but we hardly knew any of the parents of the children.

Maybe they were ashamed that they were living in that area, I don’t know, but that’s what it appeared to be. You didn’t see the parents very much but of course, we saw the kids. Seeing there was a back lane to the house and a spare paddock over at the back of the shops, the kids used to get out and get over there and play games together.

Oh yeah. And we used to go over to Centennial Park and we used to make model boats out of scrap wood or old cricket bats. We’d make model boats, sailing boats and take them over to Centennial Park and to Moore Park, there was a pond there, and sail the boats and have races with the boats. It was good times; climb the trees over in Centennial Park unless the park ranger

was around – he’d pull you down or tell you to get down. We’d even go swimming in the ponds over there when the park ranger wasn’t around and swim over to the islands, hit the ponds and play over on the islands there. There was a lily pond in Centennial Park, down in about the middle of the park, and we used to go down there and try and catch the goldfish that were in there at times unless the park ranger would catch us. Sometimes, we’d get a few home and we had an old tin bath – the bath was replaced

in the house at Underwood Street – and there was this old tin bath in the backyard and so we used to fill that up with water and if we could catch a couple of carp or goldfish, we’d bring them home and put them in the tin bath. But we didn’t know how to look after them properly so, after a while, they died. Eventually, we got some goldfish and made a pond out of pieces of glass about this size. We had some goldfish and gold carp up on the back verandah

of our house in Paddington but that was about it as far as pets were concerned, except when we had the house to ourselves and my brother got a dog. We had a dog in the house there for a while – Digger. He was there when I got called up and he was there after I came home in 1945 and he still recognised me

after that absence. It was good compared with what we’d put up with but as I said, it was still declared a slum area. But you still used to see people going into the pub. The Grand National Hotel was just on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Underwood Street and we lived a couple of doors up from that corner. We used to see PD [police department] pull up at the side door of a night-time when the people should’ve

been out by six o’clock and they were getting shuffled out through the side door. Sometimes they’d pull a few in and put them in the car and take them up to the police station. Apart from that, we had a good time.

Yeah, I enjoyed school and I think I did very well at Paddington School. In those days, when we finished 6th class, out of the two 6th classes, 6A and 6B, there would only have been about eight or ten at the most, kids that went

on to high school. The others, they couldn’t afford to send them to high school. As I said, I was sent over to North Sydney / Chatswood and then, after two years, they wanted me to come back and go to Sydney Boyd High or Randwick and my mother said. “I just can’t afford to buy him another uniform.” At North Sydney School, I had a good time there. I used to run and represent the school at athletics and in the summertime, I played

cricket and I was one of the selectors for the cricket team. I used to help select the teams that used to play in the various places, at St Leonards and down at Cammeray. In the wintertime, I’d play tennis and if there was an athletic carnival coming on, I’d give the tennis away and do a bit of training for the athletics. I represented the school for three years at the Combined

High Schools’ Athletics Carnival – never won the hundred yards; we always got beaten in the finals. We were playing tennis up at Chatswood, one of the areas where we used to play; there were four courts up there. I could play tennis pretty well but at school, I didn’t want to be playing in

competition as if my life depended on it – I had to win; I had to win sort of thing. There were a few of us, we used to get up to the end court, which was the furthest away from the best court, where the teacher who came brought the tennis crowd would nominate the blokes to the different courts and then watch the “experts”, as I’d call them, play and grade them and see

how they were and tell them their faults and what they were doing. Those that just went down to bash the ball around, we went down to the end court. And while we were down at the end court there, one day, one of the blokes hit the ball over the fence and into somebody’s backyard. When he came back with the tennis ball, he had about three or four mandarins and he says, “Have a mandarin.” “Is there a mandarin tree

over there? Oh good.” So when we played tennis, we’d bash the ball over the fence, go around and come back with a few more mandarins. This went on all afternoon; we were eating mandarins all afternoon, practically. That was all right. We went home after sport and the next morning, at assembly, the deputy principal said that he’d had a complaint from Mrs So-and-So

of Chatswood that boys had got in and had helped themselves to her mandarins and would those responsible please report to the headmaster’s office. So I walked around to the headmaster’s office and I was the only one there. That was a bit stupid because the sports bloke in charge of the tennis that afternoon had the names of the people who were on all the courts and so all they did was go around to the different classes

and so we were all ‘round the headmaster’s office. And so he said, “Do you realise you did the wrong thing? You shouldn’t have been doing that; you shouldn’t have been taking other people’s property.” He came over to me first and he said, “I thank you very much for being the first one ‘round here.”

That’s what should’ve happened in the first place; we should’ve all been ‘round there. And then he gave every one of us, I was the first, a sixer each. And so when it came for me to leave school, he gave me a very good reference and introduced me to this bloke who was at Cooee Clothing that was a friend of his and I got a job; other people just didn’t get jobs and so that’s how I started with Cooee Clothing Company Ltd.

Just that I thought I’d like to go in and do clerical work. My mother couldn’t afford to send me to university or to go any higher than 3rd Form at high school. As I said, things were that bad in Paddington, the dentist used to come ‘round once a year and examine everybody’s teeth in the school. My mother

used to make appointments for us for a dentist that she used to go to. And my brother and I used to go and get our teeth checked every year and if anything had to be done, it was done. My mother paid for it eventually. For the kids at school, the dentist came and if he could see holes in their teeth, he’d just pull their teeth out and that was it. My mother

sent a note up to say that they could check my teeth, “But not to touch them”. While I was at school and living in Ocean Street, Woollahra, a neighbour in another flat, her husband was a doctor in China and there was a civil war at the time and he couldn’t get away

so my brother and I used to go and do her shopping for her and take it up to her – down to the local shops and buy whatever she wanted and take it up to her. One weekend, she gave us threepence each for doing her messages and so we went down and bought a comic. In each comic there was a game to play. My brother’s comic, his was ready to play, whereas I had to cut out all these numbers. I think it was called ‘lotto’ and I had to cut out all these round numbers. My mother had

a pair of curved nail-scissors and so I cut out all the numbers and as I cut out the numbers, I entered them into the goldfish bowl that we had at the time – just a round one. We had no goldfish; they’d died. And so I cut the numbers and I let them drop into this bowl and my brother said, “Come and play my game,” and I said, “I want to get my game ready first.” Anyway, he did his lolly [was upset] in the end and he

came racing over and he pushed me and the chair for a sixer and as I went across the table, I took the goldfish bowl as well and fell and I had the nail-scissors in my hand and I was falling. The nail-scissors were going towards my face so I pulled my hand away and fell on my face and snapped my front tooth off about halfway down. And so my mother sent me to the dentist and they had to wait for the nerve to die. Then they made a gold piece with a stem on it to fit

onto the original tooth with enamel on the front of it. And that was my brother who pushed me over and did that. And that was unheard of is those days for kids. If they snap a bit off, too bad, they just had broken teeth or no teeth because the teeth were badly decayed; the school dentist just pulled them out.

Yeah, my word.

I started going to Sunday School when I was in Melbourne when I was about five; just to a kindergarten. Then, when we were in Arncliffe, I went to the Sunday School

there. When we were eventually living in Ocean Street, Woollahra, we used to go to the Paddington Methodist Church every Sunday morning. We never used to go to church unless there was an anniversary and the whole Sunday School would be in the church and sing. We used to go there until I was 18 –

we might have missed a few. My brother and I were still going to Sunday School while we were at Ocean Street and when we were living in Underwood Street, my mother eventually bought the house there. We went to Sunday School every Sunday and the church anniversaries and things like that. After the war, when I came back, there was a big youth club started in the hall at Paddington

Methodist Church and it was big enough to play basketball. They had basketball nets in there and there was a painting group and two cricket teams and two soccer teams and the girls used to play basketball in the hall. We used to play cricket over at Queens Park against the protestant churches’ cricket teams.

Eventually, this was after the war, I was made a trustee of the Paddington Methodist Church and trust treasurer as well as being circuit steward to help with the church service – taking the plates around and welcoming people at the door and taking the books around and all this sort of thing as well as singing. By this time, we had a real,

good choir and the choirmaster was a schoolteacher from Newcastle and he used to come down from Newcastle every week to take the choir practice and go back and then come down on the Sunday for the church service. The organist was a chap I got to know when my brother came back, because all these kids were in the youth club and I was just a bit older than them. None of them had been called up. My brother

hadn’t even registered but if he had to register for service, he would’ve been exempt because he was working at the glassworks, which was over at Dowling Street, Waterloo. They were making parts for torpedoes over there. Before that they were making beer bottles and he was doing the designing and making the first beer bottles that were done and they used to make all

different shaped bottles – wine bottles and beer bottles and all sorts of things like that. As I said, I was just that bit older than them and I didn’t join in the group but eventually joined the choir and it was there that I met my wife; she was in the choir as well. Also her brothers and father were living in Elizabeth Street, Paddington and this was in the Depression when things were crook – they were still pretty crook then, after the war but

not as bad as the Depression. She had two elder brothers and herself and a younger sister. I think she might be the second eldest… Yeah, boy, girl, boy, girl; that’s right. Things were that tough, her father couldn’t get work. Well, he got work but it wasn’t permanent but at least he was working and used to get some money. They moved into the caretaker’s cottage at the church.

They didn’t have to pay rent but they had to keep the church clean and the grounds around the church clean as well as the parsonage. After service on a Sunday night, when the choir had finished singing, they used to come down and join the congregation for the rest of the service, for whatever the minister had to say for the sermon.

Some of the choir would then go ‘round to Judy’s mother’s place and she played the piano and we’d go ‘round there and have a sing-song and sometimes even the minister would come ‘round there and join in the sing-song with us. That’s where we got together and her elder brother, I played cricket with in the cricket team that was over at Moore Park and my brother was in the same team as myself as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, it would’ve been about that.

Well, there was talk at the time. The Germans were taking over different countries

and according to the newspapers, if you’d ever get one, you’d look at the whatsanames and they’d say they’d taken over Belgium or they’d taken over a part of France and take over other parts as they started to move east towards Russia and move west towards the UK. There were headlines, “They’ve done it again!” and they’d take over some other country.

The conjecture was, “What happens when they get to the [English] Channel? Will they still want to move? Will they want to go to America or Canada?”

Well, it wasn’t a concern for me, I was in a job. The only thing I noted was

that some of the chaps that I worked with at Cooee, they were on the Reserves and they’d get called up for going to camp for a while and therefore, you’d have to help out doing their work while they were away. Apart from that, they’d come back from camp and that was it. One of the blokes was attached to a searchlight battery, I think. Eventually, when he did get the call-up, he transferred from out of the army and into the air force.

No, we celebrated Empire Day and that was about it. We knew we were part of the British Empire, you used to have lessons

on that at school. Canada and India and South Africa, we’d have lessons on those areas but I don’t think it made any of us grab a gun and help defend the Empire. We thought, well we’re still too young. When the time comes, maybe, when we’re old enough we’ll

have to do something then

I can’t say that I actually remember the day; we didn’t have wirelesses [radio] in those days. Well, we didn’t have a wireless, anyway; we were just relying on

the newspapers and it was just another newspaper heading as far as I was concerned at that time.

Well, I thought, “In due course I’ll be old enough to join the service and, therefore, I’ll be in and I’ll do whatever I’ve got to do”.

No, I can’t say that I did. I knew it was coming so I just continued doing what I was doing until the time came and then I was called up and, bingo, I went into the army.

Very little, I suppose, as far as I was concerned. I just had my job and a lot of people didn’t have jobs – kids that weren’t able to get jobs. A lot of those kids, when they turned 18, they

joined the army. Some of them even put their age up so they could get in and get a job. I don’t remember exactly but I don’t think there was any mad rush. As I said, we were pretty poor in those days and maybe some of the men who hadn’t had any work for a long time

took the opportunity to join up. At least they were getting six bob [60 cents] a day in the army, I suppose. No, I can’t say I was excited about waiting ‘til I was 18 or trying to join up before I was 18. I just thought, well, when I’m 18 I’ll be in and that’ll be it.

The friends I had were mostly my brother’s friends. When we were at Paddington, there were three other boys downstairs and, there again, their mother had separated from their father and she was looking after them. Jim was the eldest but he was a bit younger than me and he was always saying it’d be great to get in.

But I never felt that way. The eldest boy of the family that lived upstairs in the front two rooms, I think their boy joined up when it was time; he wanted to go. He was saying, “Why can’t I, I’ll be 18 soon?”

I think his parents said, “You’ll just wait ‘til you’re 18 and that’ll be it.”

Just advised by mail to report down to part of the Victoria Barracks, which was on Moore Park Road. It might’ve been the artillery section of Victoria Barracks, I don’t know, but report to this particular

place down on Moore Park Road in Paddington there and you would be called up for national service [compulsory military service] after you had a medical examination, of course, to see whether you were fit or not.

That would’ve been 1941. When I turned 18, I had to go down and have a medical examination and then, in 1942, I got a letter

to report down there and that’s when they took me over to Georges Heights and that’s when my service started.

Yeah, well we’re all young blokes of 18, so we thought we’re all in it together; there were no older blokes. We’re all 18 year-olds that were called up and went into the training battery at Georges Heights on Middle Head, there.

No, you just signed up.

There was a medical, yeah.

Oh yes, it was a thorough medical. After the results of all that had been taken into account, that’s when you got your

call-up notice to report to the same place down Moore Park Rd.

She realised that everybody had to register, so, if you’re 18, you had to go into the army and that was it. She didn’t like it but

that was what you had to do. I think she was a bit sad to see me go. But, at Georges Heights, I used to get leave. Once you got into the gun battery there, you’d get half-a-day off once a week if you were a local kid, whereas the country blokes would be in camp all the time and then, after a

couple of months, they’d get a week’s leave and be able to go home to their property. But the local blokes would get half-a-day off and I’d go home and do my washing and have a decent meal and have to be back at camp that night.

No, nothing; put us straight on a bus and took us to Georges Heights.

It was a large area with a very big parade ground where all the different units got called up and went on parade for the

CO’s parade once a week. That’s where you did your foot drill and you rifle drill on the big parade grounds there. They were that big that you could have two or three groups performing, doing your rifle drill or doing your foot drill or just standing there doing rifle drill. You have two or three on the main parade ground there.

Oh good, I enjoyed it.

You could see you were getting somewhere. I thought we might be sent up north, up to New Guinea and places like that. As I said, we got into the anti-aircraft artillery although there been artillery up north but they would’ve had units from Queensland supplying those. We were sent to units up and down the Australian coast where they had anti-aircraft gun units.

When I was sent to the gun battery, I was sent into the gun operations room and, while I was in the gun operations room, that’s when the Japanese aircraft were flying over Sydney Harbour. Georges Heights gun battery, which I’d been at, reported that there was an aircraft –

they didn’t have the code for it but they hadn’t seen one except the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]…

Oh yeah, definitely. You had changes; you were on guard. Apart from that, you were also on duty in the battery headquarters, which was underground, where you had contact with the gun operations room in Macquarie Street and also got the messages

there and you had to report aircraft that were approaching. You had a bloke on a height finder and he would look through that and recognise the aircraft and he’d report it to me down in the headquarters there and I’d ring up the gun operations room and say, “A DC3 [aircraft] approaching from…” and give him the bearing and the slant range and that would go to the gun operations room and be advised to the various other gun batteries in the area

where this aircraft was coming from, to say that it was a friendly aircraft, one of ours. It was interesting to be doing all this information and getting information from the gun operations room saying, “There’s an aircraft left Brisbane; it will be approaching from the north on such-and-such a course at such-and-such a height. It should be in your area within half-an-hour or so!” And you’d report to the bloke on the height finder machine

and say, “There’s a DC3 coming through from 10 degrees at such-and-such a height. Keep a lookout for it.” And, apart from that he’d be looking around, not only with the height finder but he would be looking around the rest of Sydney to see if there were any aircraft flying around approaching from the south going up north. We would report any aircraft we saw flying no matter which direction they were flying, whether flying north, south-east or west or

whichever way they were going. I liked doing the paperwork; you had to work in the kitchen and help clean all the plates and all that sort of thing. It was all done by hand; there were no machines; all done by hand. We also had to clean out the what-do-you-call-them? They had big underground things where all the

food from the kitchen and stuff… when the plates were washed, all the stuff used to go down the drain – great big sinks they were. We used to get down there and stop all the water going in and bail all the water out and then clean out all the rubbish, all the muck that was floating around in the bottom of the tank, the septic tank.

Clean them out and do all sorts of things and had a variety of jobs to do around the place as well as help looking after your own billet. It had to be clean and swept and tidy and that sort of thing. So I was used to doing that at home because, as I said, I was the eldest son so I used to help my mother do that sort of thing.

Oh yes, I used to get different positions on the gun:

number one was in charge; number two was the layer for line; number three was the layer for elevation; number four was on the fuse-setting machine; number five was on the breech mechanism lever, which fired the gun; number six, seven and eight were loaders, I think – carried the shells and put them in the tray and you pulled a rope and that pushed the shells, this is 3.7s,

up into the breach and it was ready to be fired then.

You’d be able to do all seven or eight jobs on the gun.

Four 3.7 anti-aircraft guns and there was the height finder

and there was a small aircraft identification machine like a telescope. They lined up the aircraft and from that they would give the bearing and the slant range to the height finder and the height finder would then tune in and get a decent picture of the aircraft. He would then keep rotating the height finder and following the aircraft all the way down and be reported on until it could be positively identified.

Once we knew it’d been reported to the bloke down in the bunker that there was a DC3 coming down, there was no need to keep following it all the way down; we’d identified the aircraft and that was it.

I enjoyed being on the predictor, actually.

That was a machine that, once the aircraft had been identified, the information, the bearing and the slant range, were given to the predictor and from that the predictor would work out the height because the slant range would work out the height, although the bloke on the height finder would give you the height but the predictor was more accurate. It would also give you the setting that had to be

set on the shells. That information would be transferred to the gun site and the bloke that was put in with the shell nose, he would set the height that it would explode and press the lever and that would be fed into the gun. There was a layer for line, a layer for elevation, a fuse setter and I think there were about five or six on the predictor.

Oh no, I just thought I’d wait until I was ready to go, until they pulled me in.

Yeah, it did and that’s when I saw the ads in the paper and that would’ve been about September. Japan wasn’t in the war until December, were they? In September, things were getting serious and that’s when I went up to the CO at the gun operations room and said,

“It feels as though I ought to be doing something rather than sitting on the backside down here working out heights and slant ranges and all that sort of thing.”

Everybody thought, why are they sticking us in here? What gun battery are we going to? Then we were told…

We weren’t told where we were going; we were just told that we were to man the guns on the Queen Mary. When the Queen Mary arrived in Sydney, it brought American troops over and of course, there were enough amongst them to man all the guns on the boat. But when all the troops had gone off, there was only the permanent staff on there and some of those were able to man some of the guns but I don’t think they were able to man all of the guns. And so we went on there to man all the guns

from Sydney to Fremantle and then from Fremantle across to New York. And when we heard that it was going to New York, all the single blokes said, “Bewdy!” [Excellent!] But all the married blokes said, “We’re not supposed to be sent outside of Australian waters. We won’t be allowed to go that far.” But when we got to Fremantle, the Queen Mary was just off-shore

with the motors running in case we had to take off in a hurry. As I said, we were expecting to go and, at the last minute, these BEF [British Expeditionary Force] blokes from Singapore turned up so they took over our positions on the guns and we got off-loaded and had to come back all the way to Sydney by troop train.

I thought it would be great.

I hadn’t travelled anywhere until that time; there was no such things as annual holidays when you were kids and growing up. I don’t think we went anywhere for holidays. We might’ve gone down to Bowral once to see one of my father’s sisters who lived down there. Her husband was the mayor of Bowral but apart from that, we didn’t have holidays.

It was good. We were all in cabins down there. Instead of having one person in the cabin, we had about four people in there but that was alright because we were all on the same guns or all on the same watch and therefore we all got up together and we all had breakfast together and that was it. It was very rough going across the Bight:

it was that rough that one of the guns, mounted up on the well-deck on the front of the ship, it was that rough that a wave came up over the side of the Queen Mary, under the turret and it had bolts about that long that were holding it down on the deck and it wrenched the whole turret. And it was up on a stand about six feet up before you got into the turret, steel frame and the gun in the turret as well,

the whole lot came smashing down on the deck and it started to roll around. One of the permanent staff on the Queen Mary came along and he got a couple of shackles and as the boat rolled and the gun went with it, he put a shackle in the hole – they had holes ‘round the top of the turret – he put a shackle in there and put a rope through it and he tied it down to a – what do you call those things

that you tie ropes around? But anyway, he tied it down and there was a bit of slack in the rope and as the boat lurched the other way, so did the gun and snapped the rope and the rope went “pshhkk pssshhh” and split the rope. You could see every hair in the rope. So then he got a steel cable and when the boat rolled, he put the steel cable through the eyelet and then put it down on the bollard

and tightened it up and when the boat rolled, the gun turret didn’t roll and so he was able to tie it down then. But even some of the permanent staff on the Queen Mary were sick, it was that rough. The blokes said, “We’ve never struck it this rough before.”

I thought I was going to be sick at one stage because everybody else around me was sick but I didn’t. I just hung on a while

and I wasn’t sick at all. But I thought I was going to be sick at one time there, it was that rough.

No, no idea. We were just told the night before, we were going to leave camp and go to a new gun site. I didn’t ring my mother because I’d thought, if I do go to a new gun site, I’ll be able to get to a phone and ring her up and say I’ve been shifted, I’m up at such-and-such. I might be up at Richmond, at the racecourse,

I might’ve been shifted up there again; I didn’t know. I thought that’s where I could be and I’d no need to ring her up and tell her I was just going to be moved up near Richmond and so I didn’t worry about it. The phones were out-of-bounds anyway. Georges Heights gun battery was on the road and there was no fence around the gun battery there. You could walk down onto the street there and some of the blokes used to walk down onto the street and go to the houses and because we were on Middle Harbour there, they thought it was a dangerous place to be

with a gun battery there and so they moved away and left their houses vacant. Some of the blokes used to go down there and use their toilets and use their showers and that sort of thing. There were no gates around the camp, so you could’ve rung up at any time but the phones were out-of-bounds and so that was it. We were just told we were going to a new gun battery.

Yeah but they thought there could’ve been submarines,

especially off the Western Australian coast, move down from that direction but I don’t think they were expecting anything down across the Bight or anything that far down. But they expected stuff over near Western Australia.

By troop trains. We had Americans who were given first-class treatment; they had sleepers and they got three meals a day and we had,

I think, they were the last two carriages. There were blokes from other ack-ack [anti-aircraft] units in there. I think we had the last carriage of the train and we only had enough room to sit up. If you wanted to sleep, you wrapped yourself up in your overcoat and slept on the floor or you climbed up into the luggage-rack and slept up there or you just stretched yourself out on the seat. We stopped twice a day for meals and we had bully beef [tinned meat] and biscuits

for lunch. We had no cutlery and we ate with our fingers. When some of the blokes went up to the American part of the train and said, “Could we get some cutlery?” they got a bit upset and came down and started to bash some of our fellows up in the train. One of our fellows put his back to the door so they couldn’t get out and then stood on the seats and we had army boots on and they only had soft shoes and so, with the army boots

they just went bang and gave them a decent kick. After a while they opened up the door and said, “Righto, get out!” and so they got out of the way. But they were having three meals a day with sleepers and everything provided for them and we were on bully beef and biscuits twice a day

I didn’t think much of the bloody Yanks [Americans] at that time; a bit annoyed, actually.

It took us a week to get from Fremantle to Sydney. We stopped overnight – I think one night in the Melbourne Showground and then got on the next day.

About

Easter time or maybe a bit later.

It would’ve been later I think.

Yeah, we were posted there to the gun operations room and, as I said, there was not only the gun operations room, there was

searchlight headquarters, there was fighter headquarters, there was about five units in there altogether. And our entrance, as I said, we were living in three tenement houses next to the Astor Hotel. Two of them have been taken over by the Astor now but there were three tenement houses and we lived in those houses. We walked across alongside the Conservatorium. The Botanic Gardens is locked up of a night-time and there were

two steel posts taken out of the fence. It was behind a tree so the public couldn’t see it and we walked through this gap in the fence down into the underground railway tunnel. Our section was the first section in the tunnel just near the

Museum in Macquarie Street. The WAAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] that were on duty, they lived in a place near the corner of Hunter Street and Macquarie Street and they came in just near the Art Gallery, would go into a tunnel

near there somewhere in their section. Occasionally, we used to walk up the rest of the tunnel and come into the other sections and say “G’day” to them or see what was going on up there, see what they did. We were the first section that you came to, the gun operations room.

It was just a big room and on one side of the room, there was a

big map of Sydney and at each site that was a gun site, there was a hole in the board and a 360 degree circle around it. If the gun site from Georges Heights rang up to say there was an aircraft approaching, the plotter got the ruler that plugged into the middle, got that out and put

it into Georges Heights section and they say, “There’s an aircraft approaching from 030.” You put it to 030. “And the slant range is so much.” You’d mark that slant range and you put a cross. Then you’d get another bearing and you’d plot the aircraft coming down and, while you were plotting that, there was another bloke that was overseeing you and he’d see where it was going and he’d see that there was a gun site at Bankstown. Right, ring up Bankstown, “Bankstown, there’s an aircraft approaching at such-and-such a bearing,

at such-and-such a height.” The rule that you’d put in, you have a converter from slant range, would give you ground range and so you could actually plot the spot where the aircraft was seen on this big chart. And the same thing when the aircraft were going and they would advise you they were going on such-and-such a course, you could plot the course and then you’d get the bearings from the gun sites and from the GL [Ground Locator] as well.

The ground locators were those instruments that picked up aircraft and gave you the bearing that was coming or going and the slant range, which you converted to distance on the ground and related all that to the gun sites that were in that area where the aircraft was flying so they could keep track of it.

I was, what they

called, the plotter and I was getting an extra two shillings a day; I was a specialist. I’ve got my army badge where I was getting an extra two bob a day for being a plotter. I was the plotter with the headphones on to the gun sites. We used to take it in turns to do this; there was more than one plotter on the job at a time. That was our job there, to do the plotting and the other bloke

would do the converting from the slant range to the ground range with a ruler.

It was very different to what you’ve been used to because, when you’re on a gun site, they put alarms on at two o’clock in the morning. You’d have to race out in your overcoat or over your pyjamas or grab anything to warm you up and get up to the gun site. You might sit up there for an hour waiting for something whereas, down

here, you were underground. You didn’t see daylight at all while you were down there. If your shift finished at midnight, you walked home and slept ‘til about midday the next day. You didn’t see much sunlight – so different to the ack-ack site. The ack-ack site was manned during the day but of a night-time, you didn’t have anybody. You had the bloke in the underground position and you had roving guards going around to see that the guns were

OK and of course, it was fenced off and barricaded.

No, it wasn’t cold; it might’ve had some sort of heating down there. I can’t say that I can remember any heating there but we’d wear our overcoats across the park alongside the Conservatorium until we got into the tunnel and

once we walked up to where our section was, it was reasonably warm there. You just sat there with your uniform on, long trousers and jacket and jumper maybe and wear your overcoat back to the billet and that was it.

I think we were on for four hours

down the hole and if some of the blokes wanted a feed half-way, we used to be able to walk down the tunnel to the Quay – it didn’t go across the Quay in those days – and there was a hamburger place down there and we’d buy a couple of hamburgers and walk back up the tunnel again. We knew the way to get ‘round the barbed wire down at Circular Quay and walk up the tunnel.

I don’t think so.

Once you stepped around the barbed wire and got down to the Quay, there were service people either catching ferries home or getting off ferries or walking around down the Quay. It was not as if you were the only army personnel walking around; there were lots of other people down there, army people, navy people, air force…

There was a small instrument that identified the aircraft and that would be confirmed by the blokes on the altimeter. They would say “Yes, it’s a DC3,” or “Yes, it’s a iger moth,” or whatever it was flying around.

Well, what happened was, as I said, there was a plane flying around Sydney Harbour and it was reported by Georges Heights. They didn’t know what sort of an aircraft it was because, possibly, they’d never seen one before although, in the gun sites, there were diagrams of Japanese and German aircraft.

They couldn’t identify it so the aircraft was reported as unidentified and the plotter reported that to the officer on duty in the gun operations room. The first thing he did was to ring up the USS Chicago. We thought, “A plane flying around, maybe it’s going for the Chicago”,

which was moored alongside Garden Island. He said to the duty officer, “There’s a single engine aircraft with a single float” – which is the aircraft that they used to use on the USS Chicago – “flying around Middle Head.” And the officer on duty in the USS Chicago said, and I remember these words, “All our chicks are

bedded down for the night.” In other words, all their aircraft were on the deck and tied down. And so then they knew it wasn’t one of our aircraft and they rang back the Georges Heights gun site. Georges Heights were going to open fire on it at first before they reported it but they said they’d better report it first. But, anyway, by this time, the aircraft had flown out of sight and

back out to sea and disappeared. Georges Heights were going to fire on it but as far as I know, they didn’t fire any shots on it. It was only a matter of days after that when the Japanese subs came into the harbour and glided through. The USS Chicago, as soon as they knew it was an enemy aircraft, they up anchor, cut the ropes, threw the ropes off and straight off out through Sydney Heads and disappeared.

Maybe that’s what the Japs were after but it was a couple of days after that that the subs got into Sydney Harbour and started to blow up ships and look for targets to demolish and sink.

That’s right, nothing was done! It disappeared that quick, maybe they saw what they had to see. They might’ve even seen the battery at Georges Heads and got clear of that and thought, maybe we’d better get out once we’ve seen what we want to see? They would’ve seen the USS Chicago moored at Garden Island and, of course, there would’ve been other troop ships and cargo

ships in the harbour that were carrying supplies up to the troops up north. They could’ve been there.

I was back at the gun site at Georges Heights by this time and this was only a couple of days after the aircraft had been reported

and all the gun sites around the harbour were on call, on duty. We just sat there for hours waiting that, maybe, they’d get a chance to see a submarine and fire at it. To the west of Georges Heights there was a cliff and there were some small launches

going around the harbour and one of them reported that they could see the periscope of the sub and it was over near this cliff. The gun battery at Georges Heights were going to open fire into the cliffs so that the rocks would fall down and fall onto the sub and that would be the end of it; they’d have to get out quick or they’d just drown but that didn’t

happen. But there were other small ships, some of them might have been navy launches, reporting submarine sightings in different places. Ack-ack [anti-aircraft] guns: we were up that high that our guns couldn’t be directed more than a certain angle because there was a stop on it. They weren’t made to fire into the ground, they were made to fire up

into the air. But there were no ordinary gun sites. I don’t know about Fort Denison at that time; I don’t know if they could’ve opened up on anything but as far as I know, there were no just ordinary artillery batteries anywhere around the harbour that could’ve opened fire on them if they’d come to the surface.

Yeah, a lot

of people from the eastern suburbs, especially Bondi and places like that, they just left their houses and moved west away from the coast so that they wouldn’t be in the line of fire and maybe get blown up, houses destroyed. Some of them moved to the mountains.

Oh, definitely. When you get it on your front doorstep, everybody’s wary that they’re

doing everything they should do, making sure their lights are turned off and their houses are blacked out so there’s no light showing.

In September, there was an ad in the paper saying they wanted people to join aircrew and,

at the movies, I think there were even ads on. I was just a plotter down in the gun operations room and it wasn’t very long after I left there that they got the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] in to do the job. When I was there, I thought, I’m doing nothing here and the war’s getting worse, maybe I could get out.

When they put this ad on about joining the air force, they wanted aircrew, I thought, that’s for me, that’s what I wouldn’t mind being in. Because I’d always looked at aircraft. As kids, we made model aircraft and took them over to Centennial Park and flew them around the park with elastic instead of little petrol motors. We used to go over there and fly our model

aeroplanes over there. So I thought, that’s for me and that’s why I went up to the CO and he said, “Why do you want to transfer out of here? You’re a specialist; you’re getting an extra two bob a day for being a specialist in the gun operations room.” And I said, “Yeah, but I want to do something.” And he said, “All right.” And he was only a young bloke that’d come back from the Middle East and was the CO in the gun operations room. I said to him, “You’ve just come back from the Middle East, haven’t you?

You’ve seen a bit of action over there?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, I wouldn’t mind doing the same,” and he said, “Good idea.” So I said, “I’ll go and get the forms,” which I did. The RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] had a section down at Woolloomooloo so I went down there and got some application forms, took them home to my mother and said, “Sign this.” Being 18, I wasn’t legally of age until I was 21. And she said, “What is it?” and I said, “I’m transferring to the air force.” And she

went to sign it and she said, “What as?” and I said, “Aircrew,” and she said, “No way.” And I said, “Well, give me the pen and I’ll sign it for you.” So, when she saw that I was determined to go, she signed the form and of course, I put the form in and I took it back to the CO of the gun operations room and he OK’d it and so that was put in and it wasn’t long after that we started to train the AWAS to come down and do our job. I was sent

back to the gun site at Georges Heights and once I got back there, even though I was a specialist, they couldn’t do anything about it because the CO and my mother had both approved for me to join the air force, so I eventually got called up into the air force in January 1943.

Well, I was the eldest son and she only had two children and she must’ve thought she might lose me;

if I went to the war, I mightn’t come back.

Very little. All you could say was you were joining the air force and you were going to join aircrew. At that stage, you didn’t know that there was an Empire Air Training Scheme where you could be sent overseas: you could be sent to South Africa to train or Canada to train and, possibly, end up in the UK or come back to Australia to

do your fighting here – go up north.

No, I always wanted to be a navigator. My father used to bring home charts from Garden Island. His job at Garden Island was… any ships that came into the harbour, they sent a launch out to the ship and they would go up and get all the charts that they had on the ship. They’d bring them all back to Garden Island

and any alterations to the depth of water at different ports or different places around the world, their charts would be upgraded. Then they’d go back to the ship again. And so I used to see these charts and I used to look at them and say, “Gee, they’re interesting,” see all the depths – so many fathoms of water – and that’s what got me interested in charts. And so I thought I’d like to be

doing work on charts again.

Well, I thought that would be a good job for them. A lot of them had done clerical work the same as I’d done clerical work and so it was just the same sort of thing except, instead of working with an adding machine, you were working with a converter doing the plotting and that sort of thing. I thought

it was a good idea.

As far as socialising went, we’d just go up to the other sections in the underground tunnel and say “G’day” to them. We’d make a point of going when they were having morning tea or afternoon tea or supper so that we could have a cup of tea with them and they would always have

some fancy cakes, buy a few cakes or something like that before they came down. We wouldn’t have thought of buying anything like that. We’d wait until we got back. We could have a cup of tea there generally but we didn’t have anything fancy to eat. We’d always go up and have a cup of tea with them and have a nice little fancy cake or something like that. That was about it. We didn’t know anybody apart from that.

No, there was nothing. Off duty, I’d go home to my mother’s place at Paddington and just do my washing and have a good meal and have a snooze and then I’d have to be back in camp that night.

There weren’t that many about, I don’t

think, at that time. I can’t remember seeing a great number of them. I think they were mainly based out of Sydney. I thought there might’ve been some in the Showground but I don’t think they were even in the Showground there.

No.

Actually, he did.

I didn’t know anything about it until he died. At one stage, I got something to say that he’d served up in New Guinea but as I said, we’d separated from him. His brothers might’ve known something about his service but I didn’t know anything at all about his service. All I knew was I thought one of them had said that he had served

in New Guinea. Two of his brothers came down to where we lived in Paddington, and this was some time after the war, and said that he’d died and wanted me to pay for the funeral. I said, “You’ve got to be bloody-well joking! I haven’t known him since I was ten. I’ve certainly got nothing to do with him now. My mother is separated from my father.”

I don’t think she was actually divorced until some time later on. But I said, “We’re separated; we haven’t seen him since we left Ocean Street, Woollahra. We certainly want nothing to do with him now.” I had no time for him at all at that particular point.

That was in January 1943

and I was told to report to Bradfield Park, which I did and had to report to what they called the Recruit Depot part of it and that’s where you did your air force foot drill and rifle drill. Once that was finished, there wasn’t a course available for me to start initial training school so I got sent up to the Rathmines as a clerk in the office up there because, for one thing, I could use a

Gestetner copying machine and I used to run off the night-flying programmes and distribute them to the various sections that were needed that night for the night-flying programmes. You’d have to send one to the Officers’ Mess, the Sergeants’ Mess, the Airmen’s Mess, the Marines’ section, because the motor boats would have to go out onto the lake to get the crews off the Catalinas and bring them back to base, bring them back onto land. Everybody had to be notified that

was required to service those men when they returned from their flight. Actually, I went on a flight with them one night. When they got to the area where they were supposed to drop their bombs out in the sea, they dropped a flare but they didn’t light up properly so I don’t know whether it was a near miss or a hit. I only went for the one trip. Most of the time, I was in the blister gun spot at the back of the aircraft there. I

did go up to see what the navigator and pilot were doing but I only went for the trip basically to see what it was like to be up there of a night-time.

Yeah, that was the first time I’d been in a plane.

It was great. I thought it would be better of a daytime when you could see what you were doing. Then the ITS [Initial training School] was ready to start so they sent me back to

Bradfield Park to report to the Initial Training School and that’s where I started all my aircrew training: navigation and Morse Code and aircraft recognition, mathematics. I was a bit weak on mathematics, another bloke was a bit weak on Morse Code, so, when we had a weekend leave, we used to go down to a place in Clarence Street where there was Morse Code and

I would sit with him and we’d both do Morse Code together until he got his speed up so that he could pass the examinations. He’d had better schooling than I did, he lived at Chatswood, and he was able to help me with my mathematics – I failed mathematics in the Intermediate Certificate – so he was able to help me build up my speed more or less, so that we could work things out quickly so you could convert it

from nautical miles into miles and that sort of thing. As I said, we helped one another and we both made aircrew; he was made a pilot. When your course is finished, you go before the Category Selection Board and depending on your marks and what they need at the time, you were given three choices: you could have

pilot, observer or wireless operator / air gunner. And so everybody used to go for pilot first because, if they had enough pilots, then you could be made an observer or a wireless operator / air gunner. But, if they wanted pilots and you said wireless operator / air gunner, they wouldn’t

move you up to pilot, they would leave you as a wireless operator / air gunner. But when I went before the Category Selection Board, they asked me what I wanted to be and I said, “I wanted to be an observer” and they said, “Why?”, and I said that “I’d always been interested in maps”, I said, “I used to study my father’s maps” and told them he was a cartographer and he used to bring them home and I used to study those. And so I was automatically made an observer because, in those days in Australia, you only had aircraft that would take

possibly three in the aircraft and that was the pilot, the observer whose course used to take in gunnery and bomb aiming and then you had the wireless operator at the back. And so the observer had to be a bomb aimer and a navigator and a front gunner as well, sometimes. Once we got to Canada

there were pilots and then there were navigators who did navigation but they also did a short course in gunnery and bombing – how to set up the bomb-sight and bomb – and then there was the bomb aimer who did bombing and gunnery who also did a short course on navigation and then there was the wireless operator /

air gunner. Later on, when you got to the heavier aircraft, there were blokes who were trained purely as signals officer, they didn’t do any gunnery, they just did Morse Code and wireless. In the UK, they had not wireless / air gunners, they had just straight air gunners because they didn’t need to do the wireless.

They made me a navigator / observer, which I wanted to be so, instead of being sent to an operational training unit in Australia, I got sent to Canada. When I got to Canada, I was

classed as a bomb aimer, not as a navigator or an observer. As a bomb aimer at Lethbridge, we did bombing and gunnery and then came up to Edmonton to do a short course in basic navigation and then I graduated as a bomb aimer and then, after leave, I was told to report to Lachine, which is a suburb of Montreal and waited at Lachine until a convoy

was ready to send me over to the UK. There were hundreds of other blokes waiting at Lachine and eventually, they put us on a train and sent us from Montreal down to Halifax and onto the boat and across over to the UK.

That would be right, yeah.

About the end of July.

The USS Mt Vernon.

Not very many at all. There were quite a few personnel that had already been trained in Australia; my skipper had already been trained and he was on that boat. He was

from Moe in Victoria and he graduated as a pilot; he was an officer. Those that were trained were going to go through America, which he did by train from San Francisco to New York and then by boat over to the UK. He was already trained and there were quite a few of those and there were quite a few, possibly 40 or 50

that were trainees that were going to Canada to be trained. Some blokes, possibly from Western Australia and South Australia, were sent to Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe] to do their training and on to the UK. Seeing as I was from the east coast, I went to Washington and then up to Canada that way and then, eventually, to the UK.

Well, it was an American

ship. It had brought Americans out to Australia but there were no troops on board, apart from those that manned the guns but they were part of the crew. The trainees worked in the kitchens every second day so that’s what we did to fill in our time. The rest of the time, we just walked around and looked around the ship and talked with one another

and got up on deck and looked around in the daytime. In the night-time, I just bunked down. They had movies on the boat.

We didn’t actually know where we were going. We knew we were going to Canada but we didn’t know whether we were going straight up or whether we were going to stop anywhere. We

were a bit uncertain of where we were going. One thing that happened on the boat… As I said, it was an American ship and some of the blokes of a night-time, we’d get up and lay around the deck. We could just get up on deck and lay down, some hunched down or leaned against the railing and some would lay down. Anyway, one particular night,

there was an American MP [Military Policeman]– he might’ve been part of the crew, he was in uniform – and he came ‘round and it was just on dusk and they played the American national anthem and one bloke in particular was just lying down on the deck.

So this American came to him and started to kick him and he said, “Get up, don’t you know that’s the American national anthem?” And we said, “We don’t know one national anthem from the other.” They didn’t play the Australian national anthem, they played the American national anthem. He started to kick him and the bloke got hold of him and said, “Don’t ever do that again or I’ll bash the daylights out of you.” And so the bloke eventually stood up so we knew what the American national anthem was then, so

we did it every night. Whenever they played the American national anthem, we just stood where we were and that was it. He just came up and started kicking into this bloke because he wasn’t standing up when they played the anthem.

No, they were on duty; we just stuck around our own blokes. We were on duty together in the kitchen and we were off duty together so we just stuck together. We didn’t mix with

any of the other crew at all. I don’t think our officers wanted us to mix with them anyway but I’m not sure.

No, that was the only time that I saw any tension.

We were in cabins. A cabin

that was occupied by one person, there were about six of us in there. They put in double-decker beds and we slept in double-decker beds. It was good because, not only was there a bath and a toilet in the bathroom, there was a separate toilet and a separate shower. So you could have a shower in the bathroom as well as a shower in the shower recess so, if we were going on duty, we could get through our ablutions

pretty quick rather than have to wait until everybody had their turn in the shower and toilet. It was very comfortable.

Well, most of the blokes were on the same course at Bradfield Park. There were some who might’ve been on earlier courses or were just waiting to go, I don’t know, but most of them were blokes we’d been on course

with at Bradfield Park.

Yes, I thought it’d be great – first time overseas.

The boat zigzagged all the way across the Pacific, a methodical zigzag, non-stop from

Sydney to San Francisco; didn’t stop anywhere on the way.

Just about a week, I think, and then, from there, we went up to Vancouver, were given leave when we got off the train and then caught the troop train

to Edmonton. Instead of having double-decker bunks, we were given first-class treatment. We had porters looking after us and a dining room where we went along for our meals, three times a day, not like the troop train in Australia where we had bully beef and biscuits, twice a day and slept on the floor. We had beds provided and

porters came along and made our beds every afternoon, when the beds came down from the ceiling, made the bed up from the spare blankets that were housed in the one that folded up. The seats folded out into a bed and part of the ceiling came down and that was a bed and the blankets and sheets and everything were stored up there. We were on the train going from San Francisco up to

Vancouver and then from Vancouver across to Edmonton. As I said, we were looked after by porters and beautiful meals, three times a day – spoilt.

Very nice way.

Yes, beautiful over there. I’ve got photographs of the trip from San Francisco up to Vancouver and then across to Edmonton

and of course, on that trip there, the mountains in America and Canada are close to the western coast and so you’re going through mountains and beautiful scenery like that and coniferous forests and forests of trees where you see nothing but trees and trees and trees. Beautiful countryside, very colourful, very nice.

Edmonton was a big base; it was a recruit depot. We were what they called 2HD, Holding Depot and then there was a 2AOS, Air Observer School there, as well as a recruit depot where you did your foot drill and your rifle drill and as I said, I think there were only three sections there: the navigation school and the holding depot and the

recruit depot. And we were held in the holding depot until they determined which base we were going to do our training and seeing that Alberta had a bombing and gunnery school down at Lethbridge, the possibility was that we’d be sent down there. Some of the pilots

were sent to a training depot in the next state, down around Manitoba, I think. When we got to Canada, we weren’t going over there as an observer because, when we got to Canada, they were used to flying bigger aircraft

and so they broke the blokes up who were going to be observers into navigators and air bombers. The navigators did main courses on navigation with a smaller course on bombing and gunnery but mostly gunnery. Our course was on bombing and gunnery with a

main course on bombing, with a smaller course on gunnery. When we’d finished the bombing and gunnery course, we went up to Edmonton to the Air Observer School and did basic navigation and graduated as bomb aimers and not as observers. But, in Australia, you only had the smaller aircraft so, in Canada, they were getting you used to the bigger aircraft when you got over to the UK.

I thought that was just as good because we did navigation as well. I thought, “That’ll do me; anything that’s going.”

Yes, that’s right. We weren’t at Edmonton very long and we were sent down to Lethbridge for bombing and gunnery.

No, they

gave you leave and told you to report to Lethbridge for such-and-such a date.

You did some basic bombing skills and you had

bomb sights on the ground where you looked through the bombsight and did it on the ground and then you got taken up in the air and did your bombing and gunnery from the Avros [aircraft]. The gunnery we did from the [Bristol] Blenheims [bomber aircraft], which they called “Bolingbrokes” but the British nomination for them was Blenheims. We did our air gunnery from the Blenheims. We did air-to-air gunnery as well as on the ground ranges.

Yeah.

Yeah, real good.

I don’t think there’s any prerequisites

as long as you’ve got good sight – well, you’ve been tested for eye-sight as part of your medical examination. I don’t think you’ve got to have any special requisites. I think anybody could be trained as a bomb aimer as long as you do the course. As you did your practice bombing, there

were people there that marked whether you hit the middle of the target or whether you were outside the target area. There were plotters there that took bearings from the areas and where they crossed is where the bombs fell. And they would give you the results of your bombing exercise and come back to the unit and they’d say you’re bombing too quick or you’re bombing not

quick enough or you’ve missed the target altogether. There’d be very few people that, maybe one shot out of them…[?] You’d have about eight bombs that you’d drop – practice bombs; I think they were 22 pounders, something like that. And once you’d dropped the first one, if the first one was outside, you’d know you were either a bit slow or a bit too quick so therefore you

adjusted, because you didn’t have an accurate figure for the wind direction and wind speed. It was only what the navigator told you at the time when you went up that you’d use and it possibly wasn’t as accurate as it could be.

But most of the shots ended up around the target area – either bulls-eyes or pretty close to it. Maybe one might be outside but you made adjustment for that and you came in on the target from different headings. You didn’t come in on the same heading all the time, you came in from different headings: maybe once from the north or east and south or south-east of south-west or north-east and west and you drop your load like that.

I think I was there for twelve weeks, did bombing and gunnery and graduated; finished the course and sent from Lethbridge and went up to Edmonton to do navigation.

Yes, at Lethbridge, we were given leave, another two friends and myself.

Once we went to Banff and we went up for a swim in the sulphur springs up the side of the mountain where it came out of the mountain red-hot and there was a rope across the pool. If you were there, one person on your own, you weren’t supposed to go past that rope because the fumes from the sulphur could render you semi-conscious and you could drown. But, if there were two or three people there, you could swim anywhere but you wouldn’t want to swim

there. I’ve got a photograph taken in my costume and there’s snow on the ground and all the lakes are iced over with about six foot of ice on them. We went up there and I think I was the only one who went in for a swim. We slept at the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] while we were there and they

looked after us Australians, they really looked after us in Canada; they couldn’t do enough for you over there. As a matter of fact, at Lethbridge, we used to go into a restaurant there every Friday night when we had the weekends off. We’d go into this restaurant and three of us would order lamb and of course,

Canadian lamb is nowhere near as good as Australian lamb and it was a bit stringy but we used to lap it up; we used to like it. After we’d been going there a few nights, the waitress who’d served us on previous occasions said, “I’ve ordered your meal tonight,” and I said, “Oh, thanks very much.”

We were only on six bob a day or whatever the equivalent was in dollars. And when we got the meal, it was beef, the best beef you could get. And the girl said, “I know you’re only on six bob a day and you can’t afford to buy a decent meal so that’s why I’m buying you beef.” We thanked her very much for doing that.

But that’s just what they did, the Canadians, they just couldn’t do enough for you. On the way to Banff, we pulled up at Calgary – you’ve got to catch the train from Calgary to Banff. You catch a train from Lethbridge to Calgary and then from Calgary, on a separate line, to Banff, and it terminates at Banff. While we were walking around Calgary, the three of us, filling in time until the train went for Banff, a Rolls Royce pulled up alongside us on the kerb

and a voice said, “Are you boys at a loose end?” And we walked over to the car – it was chauffeur driven – and we said, “Yes, we are, as a matter of fact. We’re going to Banff and we’re waiting for the train.” And she said, “Hop in.” So we hopped in the car and she drove us to her home, which was a palatial place. And most Canadian homes, in the basement, they have their heating system and they store their vegetables and fruits that they bottle and put in jars and store them around there – it keeps them ‘til summertime.

This house had a small theatrette underneath the house. She said, “You’re going to Banff; I’ll show you what Banff is like.” She put the films in the cameras. “Now, this is the Banff Springs Hotel. You won’t be able to book in there; it’s closed. It would take too many staff to keep it going so they close it

during the war. This is Sulphur Mountain and this is so-and-so…” and she gave us a rundown of Banff and then gave us afternoon tea. Then she said, “The bus will be going soon so I’ll get the chauffeur to drive you boys back to Calgary.” She didn’t know us from Ned Kelly! So we got on the train and went up to Banff and

had a nice time, stayed at the YM [YMCA] and walked around the town and bought a few things to send home, post cards, etc. and had a good time. And another time, we went to a place called Pincher Creek and I was billeted with one family and the other two blokes were billeted with another family and I was billeted with the

Armstrongs. All the young blokes our age were in the services, the same as we were in the services and I don’t know whether they were on service overseas or in Canada but all the young blokes were in the service and there were plenty of girls around. Pincher Creek had a very big telephone exchange, mainly because it was not far from the American border.

We’d meet up each day and we’d have breakfast where we were staying and Mrs So-and-so would ring up and say, “Tell the boys to come here for morning tea.” So we’d go there for morning tea and somebody else would ring up and say, “Tell the boys to come here for lunch.” We’d go to somebody else’s place for lunch, somebody else’s place for afternoon tea and then somebody else would say, “Tell the boys to come over here. We’re having a game of cards. They’re having supper at our place.” We didn’t stay in the same place twice in the one day.

We just shared amongst the families here and this is what it was like. We used to go skating there. By this time we had bought skates and we used to go skating up the creek; I’ve got photographs there. There was a lake at Pincher Creek. We could go skating on the lake; six feet of ice on the lake. Although we didn’t feel the cold as much as we could’ve, we were fortunate. When we were sent to

Canada, we were sent there at the end of summer so we gradually got used to the cold weather, whereas some of the blokes who were sent from Australia left Australia in the middle of summer and arrived in Canada in the middle of winter. They went down with pneumonia and colds and all sorts of things so I was very lucky that way. I gradually got used to the weather and I hardly ever wore an overcoat all the time I was in Canada; only when I went

on leave I’d wear it, mostly. One of the things we used to do – there was a training camp there for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – and, what we used to do some nights, we’d go along, snow on the ground and

we’d build a stack of snowballs. Then we’d go and knock on the door and yell out, “Come on you bugs, come out!” and, as they’d come running out, we’d have all the snowballs ready and we’d be pelting them with snowballs. As they ran, they’d pick up the snow and, before you knew what’d happened, the three of us would be getting belted with the snowballs and so we’d have to run off and leave them to it. They were friendly blokes. They were the only blokes

in this particular camp there, out of town a bit. We used to go to this big telephone exchange and talk to all the girls in there and just go up to the creek to skate during the day and then go to Mrs So-and-so’s place for dinner and somebody else’s place for afternoon tea. They really looked after us. They couldn’t

have done more for us it they’d wanted to.

Went back to Edmonton to do navigation at Air Observer School. That was only about a six-week course. We did night flying as well as day flying, did navigation

night and day. We’d practise bombing as well.

Avro Ansons. They brought out the new Avro Ansons, which were made out of plywood, the same as Mosquitoes were made out of. On the Avro Anson, the pilot could practically set the course and then just sit back and fly on course whereas, on the new ones

they must’ve been weighted the wrong way – they weren’t flying on course. The pilot actually had to be at the wheel the whole time whereas the old Avro Ansons, you touched the wheel every now and again and they were right, keep your feet on the pedals and everything was right. They weren’t as controllable as the old Avro Ansons.

We used to do air-to-air gunnery and the drogue [target towed behind an aircraft] was taken by a Westland Lysander and we used to take three chaps in the Blenheims or, as they used to call them, Bolingbrokes, and then take it in turns. The ammunition was coloured red, white and blue and when you’d used all the red ammunition, you’d pass it over to the next bloke and when the

drogue was taken back to the aerodrome, they saw how many hits you’d had and that gave you a mark for gunnery. When that navigation course was finished, that’s when we graduated and got our wings [qualifications]. As we were bomb aimers, we got our wing with a “B” on it. First off, they gave us a Canadian wing, which was brown. Australia

didn’t have any B wings but when we got to the UK, they had Australian bomb aimer wings especially on Australian squadrons and they gave us a blue B and I’ve got a sample over there, the one I graduated with. My uniform is up at Richmond.

No, there were Canadians who were ready to do their course; they were there. We even had some New Zealanders with us as well as the Canadians.

There was, I suppose, an equal number of Australians and Canadians on the course. As a matter of fact, at Lethbridge, a lot of the blokes were learning to skate, because it was our first winter. Some Australians could skate, it wasn’t a sport that you did in Australia but some Australians could really skate and so they challenged the Canadians to an ice hockey match.

The stadium where they booked he match was open to the public and of course, it was full. They turned up there – I wasn’t in the team; I was just learning to skate myself at the time – and the Canadians came out and they were going round, warming up on the rink. They were going backwards and forwards and sideways and jumping, doing everything with their hockey sticks and a couple of Australians

came out and they were skating backwards and sideways and frontwards and backwards. You could see the Canadians, “This’ll be a good match.” The rest of the crew came out and they were pushing themselves along with the hockey sticks, they could hardly skate at all. Anyway the game started and the puck was passed to one of these blokes that couldn’t hit the puck properly. They would just fall on the puck, pick it up and then throw it

to an Australian they saw further down and, of course, the Australian would go for it. Well, the Canadians… When I saw it, I thought, “Well, the Canadians will be horrified; they’ll walk out. They’ve mucked up their game.” But instead of that, they laughed and I’ve never heard so loud laughter in all my life. They really couldn’t believe that these Australians were playing a hockey match like this. They realised the blokes couldn’t skate but they thought it was great fun and they really enjoyed

it. They really thought it was a good night. And if you wanted to go anywhere in Canada you used to just hop out on the road and a car would pull up and say, “Where are you going?” And the blokes would say, “Where are you going?” “I’m going down to San Francisco.” “Oh good, I’ll come with you.” They’d even shout you your meals and your accommodation if they stayed overnight on the way to San Francisco. Canadians just couldn’t do enough for you.

They were terrific, just so obliging and friendly.

No, not really. Because you make a friend with a Canadian, you’re posted, they might be sent to a Canadian squadron, which is formed in Canada and then on to the UK.

Once I graduated, I don’t think I saw the other two fellows that I’d been on leave with, not even at the embarkation depot, which was really chocker-block full of blokes waiting for the next troop ships to go to the UK. I don’t think I ever saw them again after that. I saw them in Montreal when we arrived by train together there. We didn’t know

Montreal at all. We hopped out of the train, booked into a hotel, had tea, had a shower and then we went out to see what was going on. Montreal is right down the channel of Canada at the bottom but, even so, they still had partial blackout. We got out of the hotel where we were staying and we started to walk down what we thought was the main street. We noticed

they were talking in English and then, after a while, after we’d walked down the street for about 10 or 15 minutes, they were talking in French. We were walking down the middle of the road and all of a sudden a Canadian policeman came up to us and he said, “What are you fellows doing down here?” We said, “We’re

looking for a place for a feed or maybe go to the movies or something.” He said, “This is the French Quarter down here. They killed one of their own servicemen, a French Canadian, down here in this French Quarter. Stick with me and I’ll take you as far as I can on my beat. You see those lights up there? That’s the main street of Montreal. Get up there.” So we stuck with him all the way back until the end of his beat.

So that was Montreal where they’d actually killed a French Canadian serviceman in the French Quarter of Montreal. So the three of us just went up there. I was in Montreal for a while at Lachine and I got sent up to an Officers’ Training Course at a place called the Domaine Esterel, which is up north of Montreal, up in the mountains.

We were supposed to be doing an officers’ course up there. There was a shopping complex with a big underground garage and a theatre and shops all around this shopping complex and so we’d go down into the underground garage and there weren’t very many cars down there. We’d have foot drill – fall in, fall out and size us all off and number us.

The bloke that was in charge would say, “OK, fall out.” “What are we going to do next?” “OK, get yourselves a pair of skis.” And he’d take us up to the mountain and teach us how to ski. Some of the blokes would climb a fair height up and instead of finding out how to stop with skis, they’d just come tearing down and when they wanted to stop, they’d just grab hold of a small shrub or something like that and end up on their backside.

The instructor would just leave us there and say, “Don’t go any higher than this. That’s the safety height,” but some of them would go up and really came tearing down. I don’t know what the Officers’ Training Course involved, we didn’t have any paperwork or anything, we just did this fall-in every morning and breakout and that was it. We’d go skiing most of the day and there was a swimming pool at this place. It was winter time and

it was all iced over so you couldn’t swim there but we’d go for a walk – we were issued with snowshoes – we’d go for a walk in our snowshoes and come back to the depot and have tea. Mostly the people that were living around there were French Canadians and there was a big hotel there owned by the complex that ran the place that owned the swimming pool. They also had a sailing club

on the lake and there was a place made out of logs, Canadian-style logs, right on the water. It was dearer to stay there than to stay at the big motel up on the top of the hill where some of the blokes were billeted. When the so-called courses was finished and we were told we were going to be sent back to

Montreal, we thought we’d put on a concert for the local people because they looked after us as well while we were wandering around wondering what to do – it wasn’t a very big place, Domaine d’Estrelle. So we put on this concert and the New Zealand blokes,

they got some grease paint and painted themselves up in their Maori colours and they knew the hakas [Maori war cry], the words for the hakas. There were a few of them and they’d made some little skirts and lined up. Another bloke and I did a tap dance and a song and then these New Zealanders

came out and they put on this haka and they went up to the Canadians and at one stage, they were growling and grinding their teeth and giving these threatening looks and looked like they were threatening the people in the audience. And you could see the French Canadians move from the front seats towards the back, so that they could get out the doors and leave quickly in case they left the stage and started to bash them or something. They really got frightened. These fellows did the haka and that was the finale of the

show. When it was over, we all went back to our billets and the next day we were on the move back to Lachine. Then we knew we were ready to go so we were taken by train from Lachine down to Halifax and then onto the boat over to the UK, up to Greenock up in Scotland and then from Greenock down to Brighton. We were held in the holding

depot there at Brighton. There were aid-raids at Brighton. The German aircraft used to come in from out at sea, over Brighton towards London. Any hang-ups they had, they’d drop them over South End or the entrance to the Thames and then back home or they’d come in from north and drop

their hang-ups, if they could get rid of them, over Brighton. This aircraft came in from the sea and the anti-aircraft must have damaged it and it crashed in the cemetery. One of the crew got thrown out of the aircraft, I don’t know whether he was dead when he got thrown out but it landed in a tree, crashed into a big tree and

it must’ve been their bomb aimer or something, he got thrown out. They don’t know whether he was dead when he hit the ground or died when he hit the ground but the pilot got thrown out of the aircraft and he got strangled. He must’ve pulled the clip for the parachute to be released and he got tangled up around his neck in the cords of the parachute. There again, we don’t know whether he got

choked by his own parachute or whether he was dead when he was thrown out. When we used to hear the aid-raid alarms, instead of running to the shelters, we’d just walk along the beach and see if we could see any aircraft. But, once we heard this aircraft come in and crash in the cemetery, after that we all got down to the aid-raid shelters pretty quick and we didn’t wander around the streets to see any action.

My impression was that they had nothing over there, with food rationing and everything like that, clothing rationing – clothing was scarce. Everything was scarce; you had to have coupons for everything. I suppose they did in Australia

but I don’t think I remember ever having coupons here. They had coupons for everything over there: for meat – I think, even if you went to a restaurant, you had to take meat coupons to give in at the restaurant but I’m not sure about that. But I know one way to get a good feed was to go to a restaurant and get a feed that way or the YMCA and places like that. Things were very severe over there.

I told you about the Messerschmitt crashing? That crashed in the cemetery at Brighton – very appropriate place.

I’d say they were tired of being rationed and being told what to do by being rationed. They were only too happy to get stuck into them.

They were glad that bomber command was on the go and fighter command had shot down a lot of German planes and things like that. The Germans were still bombing Britain at that time. I was introduced to a friend, who has now become my aunt and she took me to a club, which was on the outskirts of a forest and

one of the bombs that they dropped landed in this club. They had a restaurant there and part of it was destroyed. Even when they were getting bombed, a lot of them would just walk into the air-raid shelter, some would run but some would just walk as if they’d had enough of it. The trains were held up, even the subway trains were held up at times. As a matter of fact, one

bomb went straight down the entrance to an underground station. It was three levels and it went right down to the bottom and exploded – it must’ve been a time bomb of some description. People were only too happy to invite you home and that but as I said, meals were a problem with everything rationed. When I first arrived over there

I’d had leave, I’d had my first lot of leave at Brighton but I’d received a note from a friend of my mother’s who used to live at the boarding house at Paddington and her name was… He came out to Australia

in the 1936 Test – he was a cricketer… Worthington. Her maiden name was Worthington and Stan Worthington came from Derby and that’s where she used to live too, at Derby, which wasn’t that far away from Brighton. When we finished, I could’ve gone up there; this was my first leave. She wrote to Mum –

my mother must’ve told her that I was over in the UK – and she said, “He’s up near Leeds. Tell him to go up to Leeds, to 20 Cross Flats Drive. I’ve got a friend who lives there and she’ll look after him for his leave.” I got the train up to Leeds and got a bus out to the suburb where I was staying, Cross Flats Drive. I went along to number 20 and knocked on the door and the lady came to the door

and she said, “Yes?” and I said, “Mrs So-and-so?” and she said, “No.” And I said, “I’ve got an address here that was sent to me by Doris Worthington, now Mrs Doris Johnson – used to live at my Mum’s place at Paddington – and she gave me this address and said it was a friend of the family’s and to come and see you.” And she said, “I’ve been living here for twenty years and there’s nobody by that name ever lived here. But I’ll take you up to number 4.

Mrs Ferzackly’s lived here all her life.” So she took me up to number 4 and introduced me to Mrs Ferzackly. Mrs Ferzackly had three daughters: one was married and separated from her husband and had a daughter about 14; the next daughter, her husband was over on the continent in the army somewhere; and the youngest daughter was a head shoe buyer for a big company like

David Jones in Leeds. Two of the daughters were at work and the eldest daughter and her daughter were at home – she used to do part-time work. Anyway, Mrs Ferzackly said, “There’s nobody by that name living at Cross flats Drive since I’ve been here

and I was born here and lived here all my life. I tell you what we’ll do. My daughter and Cynthia will take you…” It was one of those estates – I don’t think there’s one like it in Sydney – there was Cross Flats Drive, Cross Flats Avenue, Cross Flats Lane, Cross Flats You-know-what, Cross Flats Cross Flats and Cross Flats. Everything was Cross Flats! So Cynthia and I walked off from Cross Flats Drive and we walked into

Cross Flats Lane, number 20 and she said, “No, no, never heard of them,” and so we went on and went on and went on. This is in the afternoon – I’d got there after lunch – so Cynthia said, “Let’s go to the Police Station.” The Police Station was also the headquarters for the fire-wardens and they

had all the names and addresses of people in their area and how many people lived in each house in case of air-raids and if a bomb landed on a house they’d know who was killed. So we went to the Police Station and they looked through their records and they said, “No there’s nobody by that name living in the Cross Flats Drive area.” So I said, “Thanks

very much.” So we went back to Mrs Ferzackly and, by this time it was afternoon tea time, so we had afternoon tea. And the two daughters that were working came home – it must’ve been a Friday night or something because they had to go back to work again – and Mrs Ferzackly said, “You may as well stay and wait ‘til my daughters come home and we’ll have tea.” And so the daughters came home from work and we had tea. I thought,

“I’m wearing my good fellowship out. I’d better do a bunk.” So I said, “I’d better go, Mrs Ferzackly” and I grabbed my bag and went over to the tram stop, which was just on the corner, on the next cross street that went back into Leeds. So I waited there and I was waiting and waiting and all of a sudden, Cynthia came over and she said, “Grandma said there’s no trams

after seven o’clock. You’d better come back and stay at our place for the night.” So I went back and they bunked me down in a room. The next morning I said, “That was very good of you. I’d better head back this morning,” and the grandmother said, “Well, why don’t you stay with us? Where else are you going to go?” And I said, “I don’t know anybody else,” and she said, “Well, stay with us.”

So I said, “All right then, I’ll stay with you. Thanks very much.” And of course, the daughters went off to work and Mrs Ferzackly said, “Have you got any coupons?” Of course, when you went on leave, you had coupons for sugar, tea, meat, you name it, you had coupons for it and you only got a certain number each month. So I said, “Yeah, I’ve got some coupons,” and she looked at them and said, “Oh, you’ve got some meat coupons. Would you go ‘round to the butchers and get some meat?” And I said, “What do you want?” and she said,

“Get a roll of beef.” So I went ‘round to the butchers and, of course, I was in uniform, I wasn’t in civvies and I went into the butcher shop and he saw me and he said, “Australian, ey? Bewdy. Who are you staying with?” And I said, “Mrs Ferzackly, just around the corner.” So, he said, “Have you got some coupons there?” So I gave him the coupons for my week’s supply of meat and he

went out the back and he came back with a piece of meat and I guarantee, it was no bigger than that. And I said, “What’s that?” and he said, “That’s your supply of meat for the week.” I said, “You’ve got to be joking?” He said, “No, that’s it. That’s all you’re entitled to.” I said, “I’d have that for breakfast and come back for seconds” and he said, “Give it to me.” And I gave it to him and he said, “Come out the back with me,” and I went out the back with him and he said, “Before you come, turn the sign on the door to ‘closed’.” So I turned the sign ‘round

to ‘closed’ and we go out to the freezer out the back and he had a side of beef there. He started at the top, which was about two inches wide and as it got down, it gradually got bigger and bigger and he cut me off a piece of steak that must’ve been that long and about two inches wide at the top and about that wide at the bottom and he wrapped it up. Of course, people weren’t used to seeing big parcels coming out of the butcher shop, so he said, “Put it under your arm and only have a bit sticking out and get home as soon as you can.

Don’t talk to anybody on the way” – I only had to go around the corner – “and give it straight to Mrs Ferzackly and turn the sign around on your way out.” So I turned the sign around, shot through the door, straight ‘round the corner and in the front door and I put this huge parcel on the table. And Mrs Ferzackly said, “What’s that?” and I said, “You asked me to go around to the butcher shop,” and she said, “Yes,” and I said, “Well, that’s from the butcher,” and she said, “What did you do, kill the butcher?”

I said, “No, we got along very well together, thanks very much. He’s a great friend.” She still couldn’t believe it. As she unwrapped this huge piece of meat, her eyes were sticking out like knobs on a wardrobe. She just couldn’t believe it. Then she said, “You can get the meat any time!” So that was my job: any time I went on leave to Leeds, I used to go ‘round and get the meat for her.

I spent my leave there. I went and had a game of golf with them one day, with the youngest daughter and the granddaughter and one of the others; we went and had a game of golf. That was hard, looking for golf balls – golf balls were pretty scarce over there. That was the first leave I had in the UK.

Then I got sent over to somewhere near Bristol, part of Wales – it’s in my log book there somewhere – and I did a refresher course there because I’d been in Canada in the holding depot and then up to Domaine d’Estrelle and back to the holding depot, on the boat and so, what they did,

they gave us a refresher course once we were in the process of getting to a squadron. And I did a refresher course there of navigation and bombing and we used to fly across Cardigan Bay where that bites out the side of England, that big bay. We’d go down to Swansea on the bottom end of it and fly up. There were two islands up near the north, one was a spear-shaped island and there was a lighthouse on that

and the other one was a square-shaped island and there was a bombing range on that. On the way up there and this just introduced us to the weather we were likely to cop, we were in Avro Ansons…

I was sent to this refresher course but then I was sent to OTU and this happened when we were at OTU, this trip up the bight… We got sent from there to OTU and all the blokes went into the hangar and all the pilots went ‘round and picked their own navigators, bomb aimers, air gunners, wireless operators.

We didn’t pick flight engineers because we were onto Wellingtons by this stage – Wellingtons didn’t have a flight engineer. The bomb aimer had to be trained to change the petrol tanks and a certificate to say he understood how to work them. The pilot came ‘round and by this time, he was a flying officer and he had a wireless operator with him – an Australian flying officer – and the navigator was an Australian and he was a flight sergeant same as me –

that was four of us – and so he picked up a rear gunner and a mid upper gunner. The mid upper gunner was a Canadian and the rear gunner came from Southend-on-Sea. This was at OTU and we did our flying training and while we were doing our flying training, we had to bomb this island in the Welsh bay

there and we were to go to the square island and do the bombing but on the way up we struck ten-tenths cloud and you couldn’t see up or down it was that thick. As a matter of fact, one of the aircraft that was below us, they had some difficulty and they crashed into the sea and that was the end of them. The up-currents from the cloud formation was that dense that it was blowing us up

to 25,000 feet and blowing us down and the skipper said, “There’s only one way. I’m not going to keep on course, I’m going to get out of this.” So he downed one wing and went down in a screaming dive and got out of the severe heavy cloud, which went up to about 25,000 feet. We bombed the lighthouse and got back to base. We had a Canadian mid upper gunner, at this stage.

We did our flying training at Bruntingthorpe and at Bitteswell, which is where we did out night-flying training, from Bitteswell. This was on Wellingtons and while we were there – there’s no note of it in my logbook – but we were told to go on a special cross-country flight and they loaded up the Wellington with window,

which are strips of silver paper and the same number of silver paper in each bundle and the Wellington was loaded up with bundles and bundles of this. We flew down to the south of England and once we crossed the English coast, I gave the navigator my stopwatch and, every ten seconds, he said, “Now.” I grabbed the rest of the crew, except for the mid upper gunner and the wireless operator was helping to move this window up to the

bombing compartment all the time. The navigator would say, “Now,” and I’d grab one of these bundles. They put a special chute in the Wellington with a cutter on the side. I’d cut the string ‘round the window; down the chute now and this went on and on until we reached a certain point, which the navigator knew about and he said, “Right, turn around.” Each one of those pieces of window represented… I thought it was two days before VE Day but, as I said, I’ve got no record of it in my flying logbook. Whether they told us

it was top-secret, forget about it or not, I can’t remember but each one of those strips of silver paper represented an aircraft of German radar and we were supposed to be heading down towards Gibraltar so it could be that they just directed the Germans… and other aircraft were doing it up towards Sweden and other places along the European coastline and this wasted petrol

and distracted their fighters away. As I said, I’ve got no record of it, but I know that we flew on that particular raid. While we were at Bruntingthorpe, we had this Canadian mid upper gunner and we all finished our course there – we were doing night and day flying and bombing and gunnery –

we moved to a heavy conversion unit, which was on Lancasters and we were lucky we didn’t move to heavy conversion unit as Stirlings or Halifax, because then we would have to go to a Lancaster finishing school and do another course on Lancasters before we went to a squadron. So we went on to a heavy conversion unit and this Canadian mid upper gunner went on leave into Nottingham, which was out of bounds. All the people on

Bottesford, on the aerodrome, were told that Nottingham was out of bounds; they were not to go in there. But, anyway, this mid upper gunner, the Canadian, he went into Nottingham and they said in Nottingham, if you wanted to pick up a virgin, you stood on the steps of the Town Hall and there was a rampant lion on each side of the steps

and when the virgins walked past, the lions roared. So he went into Nottingham and, the next thing, he came back and he’s in hospital and so we lost him. We picked up another RAF, mid upper gunner and he was from Birmingham and that was George and we flew 13 trips with him from the heavy conversion unit at least. We were then posted to Binbrook –

I went up to Scampton for some sort of course but I don’t know what that was all about – and we eventually ended up at Binbrook, which was 460 Squadron.

I think that’s what it was, yeah.

Well, that meant he was in hospital and we had to continue our flying training. He would’ve missed out on part of his training and he

wouldn’t have been trained enough to go to a squadron.

That’s right, quite right, we got the flight engineer at the heavy conversion unit.

First of all, we had the skipper, Ivan Paul who was RAF; he was a flying officer.

We had the navigator, Stan Ladner who was a flight sergeant. We had the wireless operator, Ken Glasziou, an Australian from Sydney. We had the mid upper gunner, George from Birmingham. We had the rear gunner, Danny

Haywood who was from Southend-on-Sea and we had Viv Walsh, Australian, the sergeant from Paddington: seven in the crew.

We knew. Most of the instructors that we had at OTU were people who had completed their tour of operations

and that was it as far as they were concerned. They were sent to other units, especially heavy conversion units, to train the oncoming aircrew that would continue on the bombing of the war. Some chaps were allowed to do a second tour, others weren’t. I don’t know how they managed to get on the second tour but some did. On Pathfinders, after you’d done 30 trips

you went on leave for about six weeks and then you would come back and start your second tour and you were expected to do at least another 20 trips after you’d already done 30 and had leave.

They certainly told us what to expect in the way of ack-ack coming up and the long trips, mostly of a

night-time. Pathfinders were on the job lighting up the targets for you and you’d have to keep your aircraft tuned in to what the master bomber was saying as to which marker or which flare to bomb and to keep on course and not to vary off course. They were giving you hints like this all the time. Even at OTU, there were blokes that had finished their tour

and even on the squadrons, there were chaps who had completed their tours and were acting in doing clerical sort of jobs, just to keep in touch with everything and being advisors to the new crews that were coming, what to do and what to expect. They’d only just finished their courses. As a matter of fact, the CO of C Flight, he had finished his tour, he was the flight-commander for C Flight.

He’d finished his tour of duty and there was an operation coming in and according to him and a few other people, it was an easy one. He didn’t have a crew by this time so he picked a scratch crew from the spares on the station and they took off and that was the bloody end of them; we never saw them again. They just got shot down; the whole crew got killed. And our skipper

was then acting flight-commander for C Flight, the 460 Squadron.

The two officers in the crew got sent to the officers’ quarters.

The rest of the crew, the other five of us who were all sergeants or flight sergeants, got sent down and each crew operated – it was a permanent air force station, pre-war air force station – we got sent down to the married quarters and we moved into one house, which was a ground floor level of a dining room and a lounge room and upstairs, there was two bedrooms and a bathroom and toilet. There was a laundry and toilet downstairs, as well.

We had just arrived there when we were told which married quarters we were to go in so we went down there and just as we got in the main door, the tannoy went and it said, “Would Flight Sergeant Ladner report to the Commanding Officer’s office?” And Stan, the navigator, said, “Bloody hell, they’ve caught up with me all ready!” So he threw his bags down and he walked up to the Commanding Officer’s offices in the

office / control area and the corporal orderly said, “You can go straight through, Flight Sergeant Ladner.” He went in and knocked on the door and a voice says, “Come in.” And when he went in, the CO is leaning over the desk with his head down. Stan fronts up to the desk, “Flight Sergeant Ladner reporting, Sir.” And he lifts himself up and

it’s Huey Edwards who was the CO of 460 Squadron and they both went to school together. So he said, “Howya goin’, Stan?” And Stan said, “Bloody Huey!” He said, “I need a good bridge partner, Stan, so you’re a pilot officer from now on. You can come into the officers’ mess and we can play bridge together.” So Stan moved out and went up to the officers’ quarters and that left three upstairs and

me downstairs on my own. And so that was our initiation into 460 Squadron. We stayed there and did 13 operations there. We had a few sticky ones. Before we’d done the 13 trips, the head-hunter for the Pathfinder Force came. By this time

Huey Edwards had gone and the new CO of 460 Squadron was Group Captain Parsons. He said to Group Captain Parsons, “I need two crews to volunteer to go to Pathfinders.” At that time, 460 Squadron had A Flight, B Flight and C Flight and we were in C Flight. Ivan, the skipper was the acting CO for C Flight. Group Captain Parsons called the three COs of the

flights into his office and said, “We need two crews to volunteer to go to Pathfinders. You know which crews are in your flight. Go to the senior crews in your flight until you get somebody to volunteer to go to Pathfinders.” So that was all right. Our skipper was the CO so he came over to us and said, “Who wants to go to Pathfinders?” And the rear gunner

who lived at Southend-on-Sea, which wasn’t very far away from where the Pathfinder squadrons were, said, “Yeah, I want to go down there; it’s nearer home.” And he asked the rest of the crew and we said we’ll go down to Pathfinders. And so Ivan came down

and the other flight commanders put their names in a hat and, when they drew two names out of the hat, our name didn’t come out. So one of the crews who’d ‘so-called’ volunteered to go to Pathfinders went down and told his crew – he didn’t ask them – he just went down and told them that they were going down to Pathfinders. And they said,

“Pathfinders? You’ve got to be out of your bloody mind. We’re not going to Pathfinders.” The whole six of them said, “We’re not going to Pathfinders,” and they said, “Well, you can bloody-well go on your own; we’re not going.” He said, “They’ll have you up on a lack of moral fibre charge.” And they said, “We don’t care what they do with us, we’re not going to Pathfinders. Have you got the message?” And so our skipper said, “Rather than break your crew up, we’ll take your place.”

I heard later on that those blokes never flew with that skipper again; they got a different skipper. It was a good thing that we did go down to Pathfinders because, on those 13 trips that we were flying, as we were getting near the target area and all of a sudden the skipper would see an aircraft getting a bit close and

he’d do something about it. But, after the operation was over and we were getting debriefed, he’d say to the mid upper gunner, “George, didn’t you see that aircraft coming in on the port side?” “Oh, no, Skipper, I was searching on the starboard side.” And a couple of operations later on, “George, didn’t you see that aircraft on the

starboard side?” “No, Skipper, I was searching on the port side.” It didn’t happen every trip but every now and again. Anyway, we just put up with it and that was it. We got down to Pathfinder Navigation Training Unit and they gave each member of the crew a night vision test. This was given to each person individually

and there was a screen with eight images on it and 64 articles that had to be identified. My mark out of 32 was 25 or 28 and George’s, the mid upper gunner, was two or two and a half. So they straight-away marked his papers, ‘Daylights Only’ and sent him off

to a squadron that was doing daylight raids and we picked up another mid-upper gunner and he was an Australian. I think he might have been an ex-wireless operator who’d had enough trips as a wireless operator and he thought he’d just be an air gunner in the mid upper turret. And so we picked up a bloke by the name of Jimmy Close and he was our mid upper gunner and he was the bloke that we flew with until we finished our first tour.

Well, we were all a bit nervous, I’d say, not knowing what to expect and of course it was night-time, black as pitch and occasionally we’d get

a few shells that would light up, so that maybe the people on the ground could get a fix on you and fire on you. We were pretty nervous, not only for our first mission but for a few trips. We didn’t have anything happen to us; we just flew to the target and back again. It wasn’t as if there were fighters coming at us or

we were getting too close to other aircraft or anything but we were still pretty nervous and glad it was all over when it was done, that’s for sure and glad to get your feet back on solid ground again.

On 460 Squadron, the bomber is right in the front of the aircraft.

He’s not only the bomb aimer but he’s the front air gunner. He’s looking out for objects that can be identified so that he can notify the navigator you’re flying over this place or you’re flying over that place. He stays in the bombing compartment and you’ve got to set a few things like the bombsight and that’s the terminal velocity of the bombs. By this time, we had

the latest in bombing equipment; it was all automatic: the airspeed was fed automatically from the skipper’s airspeed indicator into our machine; our height was automatically fed in from the altimeter from the pilot’s instruments. The only thing we had to fit in – and that changed and that couldn’t be fed from the pilot’s instruments because he didn’t have one – was the wind speed and direction, which the navigator would tell you

once you got reasonably close to the target area, what the wind speed and direction was which was to set the bombsight and also the terminal velocity of the bombs. The 4,000 pound bomb, which was like a couple of 44 gallon drums joined together weighed 4,000 pounds and fell head over turtle, whereas properly designed bombs just went straight down to their target so you had to allow for the terminal velocity of the

4,000 pounder and the other bombs in the bomb bay. Once you started to get into the target area, the bomb aimer got down and made sure that his bombsight was working correctly, fed in the terminal velocity of the, I think the 4,000 pounder was dropped first and then you adjust the terminal velocity for the other bombs that were coming behind you. The 4,000 pounder took longer

to get to the target area than a bomb that’s designed to go down to the ground. You check the front guns to see that the ammunition had been loaded. The ground staff would only load them in but they wouldn’t load them into the chamber. You’d make sure that the ammunition had been loaded right into the chamber so that, as soon as you pressed the trigger, you were ready to fire instead of having to cock the guns first and make sure the turrets worked and all that sort of thing as you’re on your way.

That’s basically all I’d do. I’d just stay in the bombing compartment all the time. If there were any hang-ups, I waited until the bomb doors were closed and then I got the Aldis lamp that transmitted Morse Code and I opened up the hatch between the bombing compartment and the bomb bay and saw if

there were any hang-ups. If there were no hang-ups, I told my skipper, “No hang-ups.” If there was a hang-up, I’d tell him there was a hang-up and I’d get a long hook that was in the bombing compartment or further down the back of the aircraft which had a hook on the end of it. I’d work out which bombing hook it was hanging on and there was a little aluminium plate over a hole and you’d put the hook down, turn it around until you got onto the release unit (after you’d got

the skipper to open the bomb-bay doors, of course) and then pull the thing and release the bomb and let it fall away. But we didn’t have very many hang-ups – very few.

Well, I was doing everything. Sometimes, I’d be standing up in the turret; sometimes, I’d just sit down behind the bomb-sight and have a look through the bomb-sight down towards the ground (sometimes

you could see the ground, other times it was just cloud) or I’d just move around the turrets to make sure you didn’t get cold – it could be very cold up there, anything from 18 to 22,000 feet. We had to connect our oxygen mask, of course. There weren’t points all over the aircraft – there were for the crew wherever they were seated – but if I had to move around, if I wanted to go

down the back to check to see if there were any hang-ups to release, there’d be no oxygen masks; there’d be no places to plug in your oxygen masks so you could just release them and go back to your place as soon as you could. Otherwise, you might suffer from the loss of oxygen and have a fainting fit or a black-out.

You could certainly

see it coming up at you at times and here I am, lying on my belly over the bomb-sight. If I’m going to cop it, I’m going to cop it in the chest or the belly. There was armour plating and stuff like that on the floor but even so, even if you got a hit there, you’d certainly know all about it or anywhere into the cabin at all for that matter. You were careful not to expose yourself too much in this area

that was protective area for you.

You were just tense until you’d done your bombing run and it was all over and then you’d turn and get home. You could be picked up by fighters on the way home but the thing was that you felt, “boom” you’ve dropped them and that was it; it’s easy from now on to get home. But there was still the chance of getting intercepted

by a fighter on the way home or having an accident with another bomber; it wasn’t unheard of to happen. You were still careful but weren’t possibly as tense as what you were getting up to the target.

End of tape

We fly together and we also go out together. The flight engineer used to come with us… The skipper had a car and the flight engineer used to go off and play bridge with some of his

mates who were flight engineers. In 460, George didn’t come with us at all, maybe because they weren’t getting paid as much as we were. Australians were getting paid more than the RAF blokes and we had three officers

in the crew: the pilot, the navigator and the wireless operator. And the skipper had a car and we’d go in to Grimsby. At this stage, I didn’t drink, being a strict Methodist. We’d go in to Grimsby in the skipper’s car, the five of us and the wireless operator who’d been in the air force and he’d been operating in the Mediterranean Sea in

Beauforts [aircraft]. And his job as wireless operator / air gunner was… They were flying with degaussing gear around the perimeter of the plane from the wingtip to the nose to the wingtip to the tail. There was an electrical current going through that and they’d fly low over the water in the Mediterranean on the routes where supplies were coming to the troops in the Middle East and bring up any magnetic mines to the surface. Once the mines were on the surface, he would hop in the turret and give them a burst and

explode them and that was it – one less to damage any shipping that was bringing supplies to the Middle East. I haven’t heard this directly from Ken but from other members of the crew that he’s talked to, especially the skipper. They were both flight lieutenants at this stage. One particular time, they were either very low or too close to the mine or it was

extra powerful and, when it exploded, it blew the aircraft into the water and he was in the Beaufort and the turret was at the back of the aircraft. The pilot and the navigator got out and he never saw them again but he managed to get out even though the aircraft was sinking in the water. He got out and was afloat in a dinghy for two or three days and, eventually, got washed up on the North African coast and there was an Arab family or

tribe there. They looked after him and gave him a feed and made sure his clothes were all right and started to move along. They weren’t living in one particular area, they were just moving along and so they looked after him for a while except the Germans were starting to retreat from the forces in the Middle East and they were getting closer to these Arabs and they must have got word of it and so they said to the

CO or to somebody in the German forces there, “We’ve got this bloke, he’s not one of ours. We rescued him from the water.” So they traded him for a free trip through the German lines, away from the fighting so they wouldn’t get caught up in the fighting; free exit so that they could get away. They just traded him in

and he ended up as a prisoner of war. They put him in a detention camp over there, which he escaped from. I don’t know how long he was in it. As I said, I haven’t heard this directly from Ken but he escaped from that and a French family hid him up in the attic of their house and when the allies eventually moved up to where the family

were living – of course, they fed him, gave him meals but that’s where they hid him most of the time – and so they handed him over to the British forces and they flew him back to London. He went to Kodak House, which is the Australian Headquarters, over there, in a pair of Bombay Bloomers [tropical shorts] and a khaki shirt, no badges of rank or cap or anything and the corporal in charge of the orderly room said, “How dare you

come into the Headquarters of the RAAF Association dressed like that…” and started to dress him down, Ken just stood and took it – I suppose he was used to that, that’s the sort of guy he was, not give any cheek. Eventually he said, “I’ll go and get your records.” So he went into the back where all the records of Australian personnel were in the UK and grabbed his file and came

out and he said, “Glasziou, K.T.?” And Ken said, “Yes,” and the corporal said, “You’re dead!” and Ken said, “Like bloody hell I am!” The corporal said, “But your parents were notified that you were ‘missing’ and then ‘missing and presumed dead’ and then ‘dead’.” And, of course, that part of Africa had no contact with the Red Cross in Switzerland at the time and so his parents were notified that he was killed in action.

When he graduated, he didn’t automatically go to sergeant, apparently – I’m not sure about this point. The corporal said, “You were a sergeant on such-and-such a date, you were a pilot officer on such-and-such a date, you’re now Flying Officer Glasziou, K.T.?” “Yes, Sir.” I’ve never heard of any POWs [Prisoners of War] being

allowed to fly again. I don’t know whether because this bloke made the boo-boos with him that Ken said, when he said to him, “What do you want to do?” instead of being sent off as an instructor somewhere and he’d be an ideal bloke to tell them what to do if they ended up as a POW, he was sent to OTU and was allowed to fly again and he was our wireless operator. As I said, the skipper had a car and the five of us would hop in the car and go in to Grimsby. And when we’d get into

Grimsby, we’d go into the pub and we’d get five chairs and the five of us would sit around a little table and Ken would order a table full of pints. I never drank up to this stage so they’d put a pint in front of me and that’d last me all night. The others would have a pint and then Ken would see somebody, “Ey, Timmy, come over here and have a beer with us.” The pilot would see somebody, “Ey, Syd, come over and have a beer.” The rear gunner, “Ey, Jimmy, come over and have a beer.” Anyway, before you know what’d

happened, we’d have about ten blokes sitting around the table. We were all 460 Squadron and we were all talking about this trip or that trip or whatever we did or didn’t do. The pints would disappear and eventually, there’d be no full pints left on the table and the skipper would reach in his pocket to get some money out to buy another table full of beer and Ken, this wireless operator, would say, “Do you want a bloody broken arm? Put it away!” Even though he’d been a prisoner of war,

all his money had to be back-dated in his pay-book so he was sitting on a fortune – that’d be a fortune in war-time with the pay that we were getting. We’d go in to Grimsby and have a beer and then hop back in the car and come back home again or, if we didn’t wasn’t to go in with the skipper, we might just go down to the local village and have a beer down there with some of the locals. There would always be 460 blokes down in

the village so we just had to walk down the hill from the aerodrome and into the village and that was it. The locals were always very happy for us to go down there because there’d be somebody different to have a game of darts with.

They would always win because not all Australians were darts players but these blokes, that’s what they did in the pubs between drinks, play darts and so they would have a good game of darts with some Aussies. Being aircrew, you had extra good vision, your vision was very good and so some of the blokes would give them a real battle for their entertainment that night. We had a good time down there. When I first got to

460 Squadron… when I was in Canada, as I said, I hardly ever wore an overcoat over there and the overcoat I did have was one of these ‘bum-freezers’, they were called. They only came to about your knees, Australian issue overcoat and it had no lining in it except just on the shoulders and no other lining. It barely kept your body warm. When I got to Binbrook,

they used to have a clothing parade and I thought I really need something that’s going to keep me warm in the cold over here. And it was getting pretty cold in November when we got to Binbrook and so I went on the clothing parade and I went before the officer and he said, “There’s nothing the matter with that coat; you’re stuck with it.” So I got back and I thought, “Bloody hell, I’m going to freeze!”

I was made a flight sergeant and my time was up to go up a grade and my new badge had arrived and so I went up to the tailor shop (I wasn’t going to sew it on my uniform. I couldn’t sew but I wasn’t going to sew it on my uniform and my overcoat). So I went up to the tailor shop and I said, “I’ve just been made a flight sergeant, will you sew these crowns on for me?”

They said, “Yeah, we’ll fix that up,” and when they saw my overcoat, they said, “What are you doing with that? That’s no good; that won’t keep you warm.” And I said, “I’ve been on parade and they wouldn’t give me another one.” And they said, “Just leave it to us.” They measured me to see what size I was and, the next thing I know, I’ve got an overcoat that is made… it practically came down to my ankles and it was

a good, heavyweight, cowl coat, which would take the cold weather because Binbrook was south-west of Grimsby and it was on a plateau and the wind used to come in from the North Sea and right up over this plateau and it was freezing weather. I’ve got a photograph of the 460 Squadron, which was taken in December, I think, of 1944 and there’s snow and ice on the ground. I’m not

in the photograph because they wanted me to sit on the ice and wait until the rest of the squadron got up there and the ground staff on the aircraft itself to have the photograph taken. I said, “I’m not sitting here with my bum on the ice ‘til you get the photograph,” and I walked off. The rest of the crew are in it but I’m not. There’s a photograph of 156 Squadron, which I made sure I got in that one. As I said, the tailor shop at

Binbrook made sure that I got a good, heavyweight overcoat and so I thought, well, they’ve done me a good turn so when I get some parcels from overseas, from the Red Cross or from home – some of my relatives sent me parcels during the war – I’ll take them up and ask them what they want. I’d been on leave in London quite a few times and you went into a shop and asked for a fruitcake,

you used to hold a lottery to see who was going to get the sultana or the date that was in it and when you got a cake from home… and by this time, my mother was working in Victoria Barracks and there was no rationing down there. She would make a fruitcake and it was full of fruit – I think there was more fruit in it than cake – and of course, I’d take it up to the tailor shop and they’d cut it up. I’d go up there for morning tea. I think there was a corporal

RAF bloke and one other chap and I think there was a corporal WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] and about three other girls that did all the sewing in the tailor shop. As I said, I used to take a cake up there or get some chocolates that would be in an overseas’ parcel, one from the Red Cross or something like that. And so I was told, “Anytime you feel like a cup of tea, come up and see us!” And so I did that. They always looked

after us. If anybody ever wanted anything done, any sewing or anything like that, they were only too happy to oblige. But they helped other people out as well and one thing they did do for us while we were up there is, after we’d done a few trips, they said, “We’re making scarves for some of the fellows.” And what they used to do was, they’d get a piece of material and I don’t know where they got these because you had to have

coupons for everything but they had a square piece of material and they used to write the name of your operation and the date around the edge. The girls in the tailor shop used to do it in coloured thread and put the date there and every couple of days or every week after you’d done a few trips, you’d go up and they’d gradually put the names all the way ‘round the edge and make it into a scarf. I’ve got

one there and the lass that I used to go to, she not only put the names around the edge but, when I went down to Pathfinder Force, I used to come back and write the names that I’d done on the Pathfinder operations and she would do those and in the middle, she sewed a Lancaster and, in two corners, an RAF emblem and in one corner, the 460 crest and in the other corner, the 156 Squadron crest and I still have that;

it’s over there. As I said, they did us a good turn and so we used to look after them, take them things, tinned peaches we used to take them. Their eyes used to pop out when they’d see tinned peaches and things like that. Occasionally, when we weren’t doing anything and there were no operations on, most of us had bicycles and so we’d ride off into the bush a bit, into the country away from the station and pull up somewhere

where they had an orchard and we’d get a few apples and things like that and bring them back and give them apples because fruit was hard to get, too, because most of it was for the defence forces. Some of the kids hadn’t seen oranges before. I took some oranges up to Leeds and they didn’t know what they were, when I went on leave up there, one time.

We went to Freiburg…

… Now you’ve got me.

It was night, it was pitch dark and we weren’t in the target area but we were getting towards the target area.

There was no moon; it was pitch black. Our rear gunner came on the intercom and he said, “Skipper, screw!” That meant that the aircraft would have to go up on its side and, when the rear gunner depressed his guns, he couldn’t see right down

low because his armour plate would go up and protect him and once he was on eye level – the armour was connected to the manipulation of the guns – once the guns came down level, the armour plate went down out of his sight but once he was down low like that, the armour plate went up to protect him. That armour plate was there all the time in front of him except a spot where he looked through and he would be

very vulnerable if there were gun fire. So he said to the skipper, “Screw starboard!” And so the skipper swung the aircraft up to the starboard side and Danny must have looked out through his side window. You didn’t do this in a regular pattern; you didn’t screw starboard then automatically screw port.

You could screw starboard, then you could screw starboard again at a higher angle or drop down a bit. He said, “I thought I had a sighting.” The ME 110s [Messerschmits; German aircraft], when they were designed, their guns used to fire forward but when they were stalking bombers, what they did was they put in special guns that were up at an angle and so they could come down

well below your height and once they got within range of those guns, they could open fire on you and they would hit you in the belly where your bomb load was. And so what happened was, we were going on this night and he said, “Screw starboard,” and then the skipper waited a while and he rolled it over to port and rolled it again. And Ken said, “I thought I saw something but everything looks clear to me now.” It wasn’t five minutes, I suppose, after we got

onto a straight, level course again that the aircraft, which was on our port side, the whole aircraft just exploded and that was the end of that aircraft and seven aircrew.

That frightened the bloody life out of us. We were very thankful that we had a rear gunner that

thought he saw something, which he most likely did and did something about it rather than just sit there and hoping it was something the imagined.

That was right through the crew. Occasionally, the wireless operator, and this was when we had the

mid upper gunner who had no night vision, occasionally, when he wasn’t doing anything on the wireless, he would stand up in the astrodome, which was just behind the wireless operator and have a good look around himself and he’d do this unbeknownst to us anytime during the night that he wasn’t tuned into the wireless. Once we got into the

bombing area, he wouldn’t because we’d be getting instructions from the master bomber, what to bomb or what not to bomb, to bomb this or to bomb that, bomb the red marker or the green marker or whatever it was. That’s what he used to do. As I said, we had that trouble with the mid upper gunner at 460 that didn’t see the aircraft coming in. He was double-checking the mid upper gunner. Even when we got on Pathfinders, he used to

get up into the astrodome every now and again and have a good look around and see if there was anything within range that shouldn’t have been there.

Yeah, we went to, I think it was called, Pomeranian Bay up in the German, Black Sea area between Sweden and Germany.

We flew over Sweden, which was a neutral country during the Second World War. They fired on us and they fired light ammunition and they used to fire it in V-signs. Everywhere you went there was a V-sign. They wouldn’t fire at us but they’d just fire up into the sky and it’d be a red, white and blue V-sign going up from their anti-aircraft guns. That was Sweden and we flew into Pomeranian Bay and, I think, at

about 150 feet, which we weren’t used to, we were flying over the water and dropped these magnetic mines because the Germans were experimenting with some sort of nuclear bombs and nuclear explosions and that sort of thing. By dropping the mines there, the supply ships that were bringing in the metal and parts, etc. that were used in the manufacture of these nuclear bombs… was being brought in by small coastal ships and therefore,

we dropped these mines at the entrance to the ports where they were going so, instead of going in, they’d hit a mine and blow up. They were magnetic mines. They’d hit a mine and blow up so they wouldn’t get the supplies that they needed. On the way back from that, we were diverted to East Fortune, which was on the coast from Edinburgh, and, when we landed there, the two front wheels touched down, that was OK, but when the tail wheel

hit the ground, it went bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! The tail wheel tyre had burst so, whether we’d been fired on and a bit of flak had hit the tail wheel tyre, I don’t know but the tail wheel tyre was flat and it made a hell of a jar and when we eventually stopped and the rear gunner got out, he said, “I think I need to see the dentist – it’s shaken all my fillings out.” They moved the aircraft

off the strip and they eventually jacked it up because there could have been other aircraft coming in as well as other aerodromes. And so we were dragged off the runway and they rang up 460 Squadron and said they wanted a tail wheel and a tyre – they didn’t have any spare parts up at East Fortune –

so they said, “Well, we can’t do anything about it, we’re snow bound and fog bound down here.” That meant that we had to stay there overnight and so we got fed and that night we just slept in what we had. We only had our flying gear on and we slept in the sergeants’ mess in front of the fire there, because it was going all night. That was all right, we were warm all night but they weren’t really prepared for us

because it seemed to take hours for people to get allocated a bed and they were supposed to be a station you could get diverted to – I’m not sure about that – but some of the blokes took quite a while to get a bed after having a meal, so we just bunked down in the sergeants’ mess in front of the fire there. The officers went off to the officers’ quarters – they got fixed up pretty quick. We were on hand for breakfast the next morning. The next day, 460

were ready to take off with a crew and some ground staff to put in a new tail wheel and tyre and it was fog bound in East Fortune. So we ended up staying about three nights there before it was all clear in both places. They actually flew up, put the tail wheel on – the aircraft came along near where we were parked, the blokes jumped out and loaded out the spare wheel and everything they needed to do the job and then that aircraft flew off

and back to Binbrook. So when we were repaired and had a new tail wheel, we put all the tools and the spare bods into our aircraft and we took off and flew back to Binbrook. We went into town one night, there and we didn’t have ties on and we didn’t have hats. With the blokes that were in aircrew and were operating from that squadron, they all said, “You’re bunging on an act;

you really were on operations.” And, of course, the SPs [Station Police] could have picked us up, I suppose, if we weren’t properly dressed, getting around in flying gear. Anyway, we got away with it. The first night, we only got about half-way into the place and booked in at a motel so there was nobody there much to bother us but once we got further in, we thought we’d better take it easy and

not stay in town too long and get back to the base rather than get picked up.

Well, it all depended what time the trip was. Sometimes you’d go to bed at 11 o’clock. You might have gone down the village with the boys and

had a game of darts with some of the cronies down there. You might go to bed at 11 o’clock and at four o’clock in the morning, you’re woken up – you’re on a night trip! Or, you could be flying on a trip that would start in the daylight and finish at night-time and by the time you got to bed, it would be two o’clock in the morning and then the tannoy would wake you up the next morning to go up to your

section, up to where the bomb aimers are or the pilots went to the CO’s office or the gunners went to their section and reported in there. You had to report to your section every day unless you were on night-flying exercises or operations and that was it. Sometimes you’d feel as if you were really tired but you got used to saying, “Well, tonight

there may be an operation on,” so you’d go to bed early. Seeing as our skipper was, at this time, the CO of C Flight at 640 Squadron, he was keen to fly as we all were. He would put his name on the list I’d say first so we’d get woken up at two o’clock in the morning or one o’clock in the morning and we’d be over the target at three or four o’clock in the morning or something like that. Or

you’d be doing training flights while you were on a squadron. You’d go off on a training flight and then come back and look at the board and find out you were on operations that night. Sometimes you did feel really tired but once you got into that aircraft and you knew that everybody was depending on you to get to the target and do the bombing, I think you pinched yourself internally and

thought, “I’ve got to be on it,” and kept yourself awake. I don’t think anybody ever had a snooze while they were on their way to a target or anything like that. You kept yourself awake.

Yeah, I wanted to do my tour of operations and say that I’d done a tour.

Well, they had an Elson down there, a portable loo on the plane. It took you a while to get there by the time you took your parachute harness off, take that off down there and have to put it back on again and you weren’t plugged in to oxygen. I don’t think there was an oxygen connection near the Elson; there might have been, I’m not sure. That might’ve been only

if you wanted to do a real first-class job, instead of just the preliminary.

Yeah, when you were on operations, before you actually went, you made sure you went and had a good clearance before you went out to the aircraft. Always, before we took off, the whole seven of us used to get to the rear wheel of the Lancaster and christen it before we hopped into the aircraft,

once we knew we were going to start to move. The rest of the time, we were just ‘round the back of the aircraft, talking to the ground staff blokes who used to service our particular aircraft. These were the blokes who serviced all the aircraft in C Flight and our aircraft in particular because we were flying in C Flight and were in one particular area, as were B Flight and A Flight and these were the blokes who came around and serviced and made sure your aircraft were airworthy before you took off,

run up all the engines and check all the mechanisms that they could.

No that was the only one that we did. Made sure we got our flying rations, of course.

My aunt who wasn’t my aunt at the time gave me a silver bracelet for my 21st.

I flew with that a few times but then they said you don’t want to fly with that because, if you ever come down and you end up in a POW camp, that’ll be the first thing they take – pure silver. I also had an opal ring; I used to leave that behind. I used to leave my own wristwatch behind because I was issued with a wristwatch and a stopwatch.

As a bomb aimer and set operator, I used to have to use both watches.

Not really, only when we went out to the aircraft. We’d always have a joke with them or, maybe, occasionally, we’d take something out to them if the skipper got a – the skipper’s people owned hotels in Moe and I would say, compared with the

rest of the crew, they were very well off – and he used to get plenty of parcels from home and occasionally, he would take a tin of peaches or a cake or something like that and give it to the ground staff lads. There’d be about four or five of them – they’d have their hut out there. They’d operate in the snow; they’d be out working on the aircraft in the snow, checking motors and things like that. Yeah, he would occasionally take things out to them

when he got two or three parcels at the one time.

Yeah, I think it was when I was with 460 that I got a letter from my mother

saying that this uncle of mine had come over to see his brother that was wounded on the Western Front [part of the war taking place in Russia]. Eventually, when he recovered from being in hospital, he got sent back to the Western Front and was killed on the Western Front. The nurses-aide who was looking after him while he was in hospital and

one of his brothers, came over from Garden Island to catch up with his brother to see how he was. He was working for the Department of the Navy on Garden Island – so was my father – but he worked in the engineering workshops. He came over and met this nurses-aide – I don’t know how old she would’ve been at the time; she couldn’t have been old enough to be a nurse but she was a nurses-aide. She apparently helped my uncle that was over there while he was in hospital and the uncle that went

over to see his brother met her and said hello to her and maybe took her out a few times and they corresponded all the time and they didn’t get married ‘til 1953. But while I was at 460 Squadron, apparently one of my uncles had heard that I was in the air force and over in England and wrote and gave me her name and address. And so I wrote to her and said I was in 460

Squadron and where I was and that I was going on leave and she said, “Well, you’d better come and see me.” She was the accountant for Michael Josephs, the big publishers in London. I went into the office and saw her and she said, “I can’t come now but what do you want to do tonight?” And I said, “I wouldn’t mind going to see a live show; they really appeal to me.” And she said, “All right, then,

you go and book us a couple of seats and we’ll go and have tea.” She knew where the best restaurants were to have a meal. So I went down to the theatre and stood in the queue – the queue was anything up to about 50 or 60 feet long – and the bloke in charge of moving the people along up to the ticket office

came up to me and said, “What the hell are you doing down here? Come with me,” and took me up to the head of the queue, just pushed the person aside and he said, “Righto, what do you want?” and I’d get two good tickets instead of right up the back and sometimes, they’d be free; they wouldn’t even let me pay. And then I went, when my aunt finished work

and went off to a restaurant somewhere, have tea and then we went to the show. And then I put her on the bus to go home because I could walk to where I was staying. I forget the name of the place I used to stay but it was an ex-service personnel place down near the railway terminal for the train trip down to Brighton.

I think it was an Australian Leagues Club – you knew it was Australian as soon as you heard the name of it. I mostly wouldn’t wait for the bus because the buses were few and far between of a night-time so I’d just walk back. The next day she’d say, “What have you seen? Have you seen Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works or have you seen any of the museums?” So I’d go off to see a museum or go for a walk around London and see some of the

squadron insignias along the Thames. Then I’d pick her up at teatime and we’d either go to another show or go out for a meal somewhere. She took me home to her people’s house and they were a bit beyond it. She didn’t ask me to stay there because I don’t think they had room to put me up.

Everybody had an air-raid shelter in their backyard so, if there was a raid on, they could duck down and get into their air-raid shelter. I just stayed in the clubs where I was. I kept writing to her when I was on operations to let her know I was still alive even when I went to Pathfinders and when I came back to Australia, my Uncle Bert

went over there in 1953, when he retired and they got married. And they came out to Australia on a cruise ship one time and we entertained her and took her up to my mother’s place. My mother was living up at Collaroy Plateau at the time, so we took Dickie up there and Bert, too, I think, and my mother looked after them up there for the day. But they were staying at Bert’s place – Bert lived with his other brother, Billy

on Bondi Junction Road, I think it was, that led to Rose Bay and Double Bay and Bondi Beach, New South Head Road, I think it was called.

Is it? The tram used to go through Bondi Junction and then p the hill past Waverley Council Chambers and the other New South Head Road used to go straight out and then down the windy hill of Bellevue Hill to the Rose Bay

Golf Course and turn right and go along the main street to Bondi Beach. And you’re from there, eh?

End of tape

I’m not getting any directions from the pilot. The bomb aimer is in charge of the aircraft at that particular point and as you get into the target area, if he can

see the target and line it up in his bombsight too far to the starboard side, he’d say, “Skipper, move to the port side,” and the skipper would line up the target and that would continue until you got into the target area. By this time, all your bomb switches had been turned on ready to go.

The bomb aimer would, say, bomb the red marker or the green marker or whatever it was and the bomb aimer would then give instructions to the pilot, “Port side, steady, steady…” and then ‘boom’, I’d press the bomb switch and the bomb load would start to fall out of the aircraft, a few light bombs first, then the 4,000 pounder and then the rest of the bomb load.

After, I’d say, “Bombs gone.” I’d then say, “Close the bomb bay,” and the skipper would close the bomb bay doors. I’d get the Aldis lamp out, which I’d parked down just near me in the bombing compartment, I’d turn the switch on and I’d look through the bomb bay to see if there was any bombs hung up. If there weren’t any bombs hung up, I’d say, “No hang-ups.” Then I’d hop into the aircraft and, seeing as the bombing mission was completed, the navigator would then say, “Turn

onto course,” and we’d be on our way home. That would be the finish as far as I was concerned. The run in to the target would be up to the bomb aimer to give the final directions for to get over the target and over the markers that were dropped by the Pathfinders to which particular marker you had to drop the bombs on.

The bombsight had a

cross, a long line with a small line going across and when the master bomber said to bomb the red TI[Target Indicator?], you lined your bombsight up on that marker and if it wasn’t quite on that mark, you’d say to the skipper, “Port side, steady, steady, that’s it.” You’d see your target coming down that long line and when it got to that cross line, that’s when you started dropping your bomb load.

That was done automatically; that was already tuned-in to part of the bombing instruments in the bomb aimer’s compartment. And I don’t know if it was done with the first bomb or the middle of the run or when the 4,000 pounder went down or what but it was done automatically.

You were too busy. All you were looking at was a target and making sure you were going to get there on the right wind as advised by the master bomber to, say, which was, you were to head into the target. It’s no good trying to come in the cross wind across when everybody else is coming this way. You get a thousand bombers coming

this way and one coming this way, it would be curtains. So you were not only aware of the angle at which you were going in but you’re also aware, not completely, but aware to watch out for any other aircraft that were directly ahead of you or just above you or slightly below you with their bomb bays open the same as you were, ready to bomb and so make sure you didn’t drop your load on them.

Yeah, you could almost hear the sigh of relief when the bomb load had gone.

You could feel the aircraft rise in the air once you got rid of that bomb load, generally about 14,000 pounds. In my logbook, I’ve got the weight

of the bomb load of 460 Squadron raids and the height that we dropped the bombs from.

Very little. Most of the cities were blacked out, the same as in the UK. You may see a light but you couldn’t even see cars moving on the road.

From 18 – 22,000 feet, you wouldn’t see very much from that height, anyway and sometimes, there would be cloud or low cloud and so you wouldn’t see very much anyway except when you got in the target area.

You could see fires and explosions from anti-aircraft guns and generally, they were lower than you. There was not very much at your height – sometimes

but mot very often.

You used to say, “Well, cop this!” They were my first words after the bomb load had gone, “Cop this!” I thought, “Well, they deserve it.” They took over all the European countries there, Holland and

Belgium; they moved into Denmark and took over Denmark; they didn’t move into Sweden but every other country they moved into and they didn’t treat the inhabitants very kindly. The Dutch people were practically starved to death and I have a book at home with photographs of Dutch children and their legs are just practically bone and tissue; there was hardly any muscles on their legs.

The Germans practically starved them to death.

Oh, definitely, yeah. Apart from industrial targets, the Germans just dropped their bomb loads on cities. If they had any hang-ups, they would drop what was left on inhabitants that had nothing to do with the war

as far as providing instruments or making things that were connected with the war effort. They were working but some of the bombs were dropped on this club that I went to at one time and demolished part of the club. Another bomb dropped in London and went down an underground railway station. They didn’t even bother to go down there to look for people, they just sealed it up and I think

they didn’t open it up until after the war was finished to see if they could identify anybody who was down there because the amount of the explosion that would have happened down there when the bomb went off.

No, I can’t say that I did. No.

No, I never saw anybody. As far as I know, the crews that were listed to fly that night all turned up. Their whole crew was there ready to go. Any time I was there, I didn’t see anybody not turn up. Other people might have been

sick in hospital but they’d just take one of the spares; they always had a few spares – gunners, pilots and everything that they needed on each flight – but I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anybody wilfully dodging going on operations.

Over 1,000. I’m a

member of 460 Squadron.

You knew when, eventually, the operation was finished and all the aircraft were back at base but of course not all the aircraft always came back to the one base. As I said, once we were diverted to East Fortune and at other times,

aircraft would be short of petrol and they’d get diverted to an aerodrome… There was an aerodrome on the coast, I can’t even think of the name of it now but it had a runway about a mile long and about three times the width of an aerodrome wide. Aircraft didn’t need any procedure to come here, they just got on the intercom and said, “I’m coming in!” And

if they crash-landed, they had tractors and everything to pull the aircraft off the runway in case another aircraft followed them in. They didn’t want that aircraft to crash into the damaged aircraft that was already there or to kill the ground crew or the crew that had survived an operation, so they used to pull them off he main strip and the aircraft just used to come in there and land.

They just crash-landed there and, if their aircraft was a write-off – it might’ve been short of fuel, so they’ll most likely refuel it and bunk them down for the night and they fly back to the squadron the next day. So you wouldn’t actually know unless you went up to the flight and saw where the names of the crews were listed and they were still there after a couple of days or, maybe, they were just rubbed out and you think,

“I wonder what happened to him? He didn’t make it…” sort of thing and that was it. You didn’t know what happened to him, whether he got killed or whether he was in a POW camp or whether he’d been diverted somewhere else. Eventually, you might see him come back after a couple of days, the aircraft was written off, they’d either have to go and fly another aircraft to Manston and pick it up and fly it back to the squadron or they would make their own way back if they were not too far away.

Well, you didn’t think about it. You knew that crews were being lost because you had new crews arriving and seeing as our skipper was a flight commander, you knew who the new crews that were arriving in C Flight; you didn’t know about B Flight or A flight but you certainly knew who the new crews were who were arriving in C Flight, because that’d be the thing that he’d tell us

after he’d done his duties. If we were going on an operation, he’d say, “There’s two new crews on there. Just give them a few tips,” or something like that and that was it. But he’d tell us if there were new crews that were on operations that night.

They reckon that

the first five trips were the worst you could have because everybody was that on edge and nervous about the first five trips and that’s when most of the blokes lost their aircraft, got shot down or the got killed or something or other. And the last five trips, they were that cocky that they were going to finish their tour-of-operations that they made stupid mistakes, which they wouldn’t have done in the middle of the tour.

They made silly mistakes, which either led to them being shot down and ending up as a POW or shot down and killed or just crashing. The last five, because you knew you’d done that many operations and managed to get through OK… you had to be very careful in the last five operations and make sure that you’re given the right directions and not making stupid mistakes yourself or the rest of the crew making stupid mistakes

so that you can complete your tour.

I think maybe at the end. The last trip that we did was three days before peace was declared and as I said, the Germans really made the Dutch people suffer for their part in the war because there were a lot of Dutch people helped out

in the Underground and looking after POWs and that sort of thing. Three days before peace was declared, there was an amnesty for one hour and they had Pathfinder crews flying to Rotterdam and Amsterdam. In Rotterdam, we were marking

a big playing field and we had to drop a flare in the middle of that playing field and then it was slightly flooded but the flare was still burning there. It was 460 that did the food dropping. The air force blokes came over and it wasn’t held in by anything – the stuff was just loaded in the bomb bays – and then, as soon as they got to

Rotterdam, they just opened up their bomb doors and everything was in waterproof canvas bags and the food was dropped on this slightly flooded playing field and therefore the bags and their contents wouldn’t burst open – sides of beef and bags of flour and all sorts of stuff was dropped from 460 Squadron aircraft

coming behind the marking that we did. Our skipper got port and starboard mixed up when we went over Rotterdam. As I said, the amnesty was only for an hour and, when we got over Rotterdam, we were supposed to turn to port and get back to the UK as quick as we could whereas the skipper said that, when the navigator said, “Turn port, now,” he turned to starboard. And so we went around starboard and all the other aircraft that were coming and dropping the

food, we moved over to the side and watched them drop their food loads and all the people on the buildings were up waving handkerchiefs and tea-towels and towels, anything they could wave. They were waving at us as we were coming in to the playing field and so we ‘round over the target twice and one of the aircraft that was doing the marking was fired on. They were lucky to get back; they destroyed the

control cables that went down to the ailerons on the tail-plane, so the rear gunner hopped out of his turret and grabbed hold of the wires where they’d been burst. The tail-planes would have just automatically fallen down like that and the aircraft could have nosed into the air but you had the ailerons on the wings, which would have helped keep it up. He leapt out of the rear turret and grabbed hold of the broken cables and pulled on them so that the ailerons went up straight and level again and they flew the aircraft back. I don’t know whether they got it

back to the squadron or whether they landed at Manston, the aerodrome where they could crash land. He got the immediate award of the VC [Victoria Cross], I understand. I don’t know whether that’s true but I’m pretty sure that’s true, that he got the immediate award of the VC.

Well, I didn’t go to church much while we were on the squadron.

They might have had a church parade… I don’t even remember going to a church parade on the squadron. I might have gone to church once or twice when I was on leave but that was about it. I can’t say that I went to church a lot while I was flying over in the UK.

As I said, the skipper was CO of C Flight on 460 and I’d say that we were known as

experts in the job that we were doing and we’d been on so many operations and we hadn’t been shot down or nobody wounded or killed. The aircraft may have been damaged with a few flak holes, I suppose. We were still alive after so many trips and we were still there. I think that’s mainly the attitude.

It wasn’t so much good luck, it was your training that was providing you with the good trips that you managed to survive.

We were confident that we could do the job after doing 13 trips on 460 Squadron.

Our skipper was acting CO and they wouldn’t have made him CO if they didn’t think he was capable of the job and that his crew was capable of the job, too. Possibly that’s why we felt… Well I don’t think that we felt that we were the senior crew but we were one of the crew that had done a few operations and therefore, learnt a few tricks of the trade and aware of what could happen or what couldn’t happen and therefore,

we were able to give information to the new crews that were coming to the squadron as to what to do , things to look out for and things to watch out for.

Yeah, that’s a possibility, too. You could offer the information, whether they act on it or not, that’s up to the crew themselves and if, as you say, they felt

that by changing something in their flying that they knew might endanger them more, you don’t know. On Pathfinders, our skipper wasn’t flight commander or anything like that, we were just a member of Pathfinder, C Flight, I think and that was that.

There were other crews there and there were other crews there that had done more operations than us and there were other crews that had only just started operations. And if they wanted to, the skippers could ask… when you went to briefings before operations, sometimes the skippers would get together and swap notes on ‘what do we do at this height?’ or ‘do we change course?’ and that sort of thing. At Pathfinders, we had to be marking the target at the time specified within a few seconds of what time we were supposed to be there and

if we had to cut corners, you certainly wouldn’t cut corners over a main town, main city that was heavily defended. You wouldn’t cut a corner there to fly over that city. You’d do a turn where it wasn’t as dangerous and there wasn’t so much defence on the ground that could shoot at you so, if you had to do a slight change of course, you’d do it on a corner where there wasn’t anything much underneath you.

You’d tell other crews if you’ve got to change course in a hurry, do it on this one here or do it on that one there. The navigator would mostly do that to the navigators in the other crews. Navigators would go to a briefing on their own to start off with, so that they could get all their charts drawn and a bomb aimer used to join them and do all his charts as well. Then the whole crew would be briefed for the operation as to what was

going to happen and what to do and what the target was and what your bomb load was and what height you were supposed to be at and all that sort of thing.

As I said, on the main force squadron, the bomb aimer just sat up in the bombing compartment so, at the Pathfinder Navigation Training Unit, the bomb aimer learnt how to operate… First of all, there was GEE,

which mainly had three communication stations in the UK and by picking up the radio beam that they sent out, you could get a reading from that and you’d also get a reading from another one and where the readings crossed, that’s where you were. So that was GEE [radio navigation system] and LORAN [Long Range Navigation] and there was also H2S [targeting radar system]. H2S

sent out a beam to the ground. If you throw a ball to the ground, it just bounces off at the same angle as it hits so you didn’t get a reflection of that beam, whereas, if you went over a city or a town or some buildings or railway junction or things like that, the beam hit the built-up area and the beam reflected back up onto your

screen and lit up the screen. You could change from large to small on the screen and so you could get a picture of that town, which was shown on our maps that you had, your radar H2S maps, would be the shape of that town and, therefore, you could take a bearing on it and you could plot that.

Every six months, the set operator, as I was then known, took a reading on a town or a river or a bend in a river or something like that and gave the position from my map in latitude and longitude to the navigator. My maps were different; my maps were made to look like a globe where the longitudes gradually got up to zero

on the North Pole, whereas on the Mercator’s projection that the navigator used, the latitude went straight north and south and the longitude east and west. So I would have to notify the navigator from my charts in latitude and longitude where we were, so that he could plot it on his chart and from there, work out if there were any change in the winds – he would check wind speed and direction. And

he would check to see that we were on course and what speed we were doing between the two spots or three or four spots he had plotted, to see what our air-speed was like and what our ground-speed was like, to see if our ground speed was covering the amount that we should be covering at that air-speed and check the wind speed and direction to see if that was blowing head on or tail on or sideways, blowing us off course. So that was the navigator’s job, to give corrections for course

if the position I gave him from either of those three instruments was what he wanted.

I was sitting beside the navigator and depending on our job as Pathfinders, whether as visual illuminators or blind illuminators, as to whether I did the bombing or not. If we were doing visual illuminating -

that means that I would crawl down in the bombing compartment and turn the bombsight on, before we got to the target, of course, and get ready to drop making flares over the target, which lit up at a million candlepower and drifted over the target area. I might drop a string of six of these and they might be purple and they’d gradually drift down and another aircraft would come along and they’d drop a string.

The master bomber would then decide and of course they burnt with a million candlepower so you could virtually see your aiming point on the ground. The master bomber would then instruct the visual illuminators to drop a red marker on the built-up area on the port side or

drop it on the starboard side and the master bomber would issue instructions to the aircraft that were following us, as to where he wanted the target illuminated. If the first bloke dropped it and it wasn’t quite where he wanted it, he’d get another visual illuminator to come in and drop the marker a bit further on. He might say, “The green plus three seconds”, and that’s what they would do.

There was always backups because, after a while, they would burn out so there were other aircraft coming up behind them as well so that, if there was more marking to be done, they had other aircraft to do it. Once we dropped our visual illuminators, we then had to do a turn to port or starboard, whichever was recommended at briefing, and join the main force coming behind us and then drop our bomb load and then bugger off as quick as we could back home, back to base.

Blind illuminators just had one load of flares that were dropped and then, after they were dropped, we’d go back and join the main force to drop our bomb. I’m not sure about the visual illuminators – we did do visual illuminating

and I think we did blind illuminating at one stage. I think we only carried the one flare, left to some other crew coming behind us if we were not as accurate as we could be – somebody else to correct us and then just head over the back and drop your bomb load.

I would say

anything from about 10 to 15; maybe even 20. I’m not sure about that but I’d say about that.

Everybody was at the same altitude. Pathfinders are all at the same altitude going over the target but I don’t know about the squadrons. Some of the squadrons

might be layered at different levels going over.

I think what you’d learnt on a squadron was enough to cover you on the Pathfinder Squadron except that you knew you were dropping either a

string of flares or markers and on the squadrons, you knew you had to go for the aiming point, the same thing only maybe, if you didn’t quite make the aiming point with your bomb load on a squadron, you destroyed something near the target and it didn’t matter that much - you did a lot of damage. But on the Pathfinders, of course, you definitely

had to be right on the ball as far as your marking was concerned. The master bomber would be flying around and would know whether your marking was accurate and, therefore, ask aircraft following you to drop their markers in a different position. You might have dropped a red and, if he didn’t think yours was accurate enough, he would get somebody else to drop a green marker, the red marker plus three seconds or

whatever. The blind illuminators and markers did their job and it was the master bomber’s concern to make sure that the bomber squadrons following on behind us bombed whatever he said to bomb when they got to the target area where they were only minutes behind us.

And, also, some of the bombing crews press their bomb release too early and, therefore, as you said, the fire starts to creep away from the target. The master bomber then says, “Bomb the red” or “Drop another red” and, if it’s not accurate, “Bomb the red plus

15 seconds,” and so, instead of the fire drifting this way, it then starts to go the other way. He would issue instructions for other markers to be dropped further on than what the bombing was creeping back.

Yes, that’s right.

Once you’d done that second time over the target, there’s no way you’d be getting a third chance because you’d dropped your markers and you’d dropped your bomb load and so you got off as quick as you could after that. And seeing that you had to come ‘round and join in the main force behind you, there’s always a chance that somebody was flying at our height instead of the height the bombers were flying

or flying a bit low because they were having engine trouble. They could have crashed into you while you were circling to join in with the main force to drop your load.

Yeah, being bombed from above.

Yeah, if you’re flying at the wrong height because you didn’t have the opportunity to get up

to correct height. You might have started to have a bit of engine trouble or something and therefore, had to fly a bit lower, couldn’t keep up at that height with a full load on, a full bomb load.

No, I didn’t. That was on an operation

that that aircraft blew up but apart from that, I didn’t see any other aircraft that were damaged. They might’ve had a few flak holes but everybody got a few flak holes, I suppose. I didn’t actually see anybody in a critical condition, diving down out of control.

I could have just opened part of the bombing compartment, that’s where my parachute was stored. I could’ve just put my parachute on the harness, pull the handle on the trapdoor and pushed it – the wind would’ve blown that away – and just fall head first through the hole in the

fuselage. I would have been the first out. All the rear gunner had to do was just turn his turrets so that it was square-on to the aircraft or wind it round, if it was damaged, by hand, grab his parachute, which was in a container with two elastic bands to keep it in place, grab that, put it on, rotate his turret or turn it by power

and then just fall our of his turret. The mid upper gunner would have had to climb down out of his turret, go to the back door of the Lancaster and climb out on the starboard side. The pilot – the canopy above him was plastic – all he had to do was touch that and he and the flight engineer could have screamed out of there.

The navigator would also have got out through there or gone to the back door. The wireless operator could have got out through the turret but it would’ve been quicker for him to go to the back door or, once the others in the front had got out through the canopy above the pilot, he could’ve got out through there. There was only the one door big enough to take two or three

people out at the one time, just crash out together if you had to.

Not very good. You’re likely to get caught on something for one thing. If the plane is damaged, you’re likely to get caught on a part of the aircraft that’s hanging inside the aircraft – you could get your parachute caught on there, your harness or your pack –

and by the time you get that off, the force of gravity may not allow you to get out; it just forces you down onto the floor or something like that.

Yeah, you don’t wear it all the time you’re in the aircraft. The only one that does that is the pilot and he sits on his and so, if he has to bail out, all he has to do is move the canopy above him and then get up on his seat

and either jump out or climb out and, once he’s out, just pull his parachute harness. The rest of us have our parachutes on our chest and we pull it from there. The pilot sits on his parachute pack and he pulls the switch on that from a sitting position whereas ours are on our chest.

Just wearing

a singlet and a shirt. Sometimes you’d wear a jumper, your battle-dress jacket and then, over that, if you wanted to, you could wear your flying suit – an inner flying suit which was all padded and warm – or you could wear your outside flying jacket, which covered you from neck to toe to wrist

and that was just canvas. That was good; that kept the cold out. You had gloves but you couldn’t be wearing gloves while you were selecting switches and doing that sort of thing. The navigator couldn’t wear gloves because he was using a pencil and doing figures all the time and marking his charts where we were and that sort of thing. On Pathfinders, I was doing charts at the same time and giving him our position every now and again

in latitude and longitude so that he could check my position with his to see that we were on course.

In the bombing compartment, I could stand up with my head and half

my body in the turret and jig around and do a foot step there and get myself warm that way. The rear gunner and the mid upper gunner wore their full inner and outer layers over their battle-dress. They wore the inner suit, which was kapok to keep them warm

and their canvas outer suit over that to keep them warm. I think the rear gunner was able to plug into a… they had heating, electric wiring in their inner flying suit, which would keep them warm and I think the mid upper gunner had the same. I’m not sure about that.

End of tape

Yeah, they used to come around on a regular

basis, really. I don’t know how often but we had at least two or three people come ‘round and tell us. One chap in particular said that he and another member of his crew had escaped and that they’d got back as far as Holland. Holland has a lot of canals and the Germans, apparently, had guards on some of the bigger canals where there were

towns and these two chaps were walking along past the German guard and gave him a nod and just as they were walking onto the bridge – and I think it was just as a joke – the German saw that they were walking in step and so he wasn’t expecting anything but he yelled out, “Halt!” and they both did a perfect halt and the guard swung the rifle off his shoulder and said, “Right, stand right there!” and then, of course, they were taken to a police station and

checked out. I don’t think they had any identification papers and they were back in a prisoner-of-war camp, again. Another bloke came ‘round and he said, “If you’re shot down and the whole crew lands, don’t go ‘round as a whole crew. Break up into groups.” One of the exercises we did at the Operational Training Unit, they took us by truck out

one night – they more or less closed the truck down so we couldn’t see where we were going – and the truck pulled up and they said, “Righto, half of you can get out” – this was at OTU and there were only six in the crew at this time – and so three jumped out and then the truck drove off. We didn’t know where we were and

the truck drove off and dropped the other three off somewhere else. We thought, well, we’ve got to get back to the aerodrome and so off we headed. We didn’t know where we were heading; we were on the roads and, of course, the roads during wartime had no names on them. All the stations had no names on them, their names had been removed and they were just a blank. You just got on the road

and kept walking until you could see which way you were going back. You had an idea of where you were but you weren’t sure and see if you could find your way back to the aerodrome. We got back one night. I think you were allowed to ask people where you were but when they heard you speak English and there was three of you together and

you had Australian uniforms on, I think they thought you were OK and therefore, they’d give you the information but I don’t know about all of them. We didn’t have much trouble but it took us a while. We could look up at the North Star and see where we were travelling, whether we were north, south, east or west and we eventually made it – just part of the exercise and training.

In the daytime, the marking was still done just the same. If you could see the target, there was no need to

take blind illuminators or visual illuminators. You could just take visual illuminators and then visual centerer. The visual illuminators just dropped a red or a green marker – whatever was chosen for the day – or a blue marker but, generally, it was red or green and drop that on the target and then did an orbit and came ‘round and dropped their bomb load.

The master bomber would then give instructions on were to bomb, whether the red TI plus ten seconds or plus two seconds or what to do. If he didn’t think the marking was accurate enough he’d call for another visual centerer to come in and drop the marker on his instructions. It might be the red marker plus five seconds or the red marker plus ten seconds or

however many seconds he thought where it should be. Then he would give instructions to the main force coming behind him, “Bomb the red marker, not the green marker. Bomb the red marker,” and everybody would bomb the red marker, then. If the bombing started to creep back, he would call, “Bomb the red marker plus three seconds” or “Bomb the red marker plus ten seconds” and that would gradually get the bombing damage on the other side of where they were drifting back from and where it should have

been.

No, mostly night and one of them, a day operation, was done with cloud cover underneath us. We couldn’t see the target. We bombed with flares that were on parachutes and of course, they were wind-affected, so you couldn’t keep bombing those because the wind would blow them away from the target area

and so you’d have another blind illuminator dropping another blue flare somewhere in the direction where the master bomber wanted you to drop it and then he would assess whether that was the one to bomb or not. At one time, we were the master bomber’s supporter on a thousand-bomber raid to Dortmund;

the bombing was going ahead. We weren’t doing any marking, we were just doing the master bomber support but we had a bomb load to drop and so, everywhere the master bomber went we followed him. At one stage, he said, “I’m going underneath to see the damage,” and so, with that, we flew through the heavy layer of cloud and we were like two flies on a ceiling – all the ack-ack guns could see us and so everybody started to open

fire. So, after a while, he’d seen what damage had been done and said, “Right, that’s it.” So we all took off and separated from him then and went our own way and got up above the clouds again and apparently, he was quite happy with the marking that was going on. By this time, the main force was up. Our job then was to join ‘round and join in with the main force and drop our bomb load on the target and then get home. On the way home from that particular raid,

we were flying along on our own… you didn’t fly as a squadron; you didn’t fly all together. Everybody took their own course home. They had their course but because of delays in bombing and marking, you might not see another aircraft on the way home. We were on the way home and a Fortress [Flying Fortress; aircraft] came up alongside us and practically touched our starboard wing

and he waggled his wing to catch our attention and their bomb aimer or his navigator was up in the nose of the aircraft and he held up his charts and he pointed to his chart and he shrugged as if to say, “I don’t know where I am.” On Pathfinder squadrons, part of your trip home was, more or less, counted as a cross-country exercise and you were supposed to do so much map reading and so many

star shots or moon shots or sun shots. This was all on operations, you were supposed to do this. I was up in the front doing some map reading so, when this bloke said that he didn’t know where he was, I said to the navigator, “Where are we Stan? What’s the next biggest town coming up?” And he said, “So-and-so is the next biggest town coming up.” And I said, “Right, give us a yell, according

to your reckoning, when it should be it.” And he said, “Righto, … now!” So I looked out and I saw this town ahead of me so I said to the skipper, “Waggle your wings” and he waggled his wings and the other bloke looked over to me and I pointed to his chart and I pointed down there and I see him look down there and he shrugged again. So I said to Stan, “What else is coming up?” and Stan said, “There’s another

big place coming up – it’s So-and-so.” So I said, “All right, give us a yell when you reckon it should be coming up.” When he said, “Look out now,” I could see it in the distance and I waited until you could get a good view of it and I said to the skipper, “Waggle your wings” and he waggled his wings. This bloke looked up again and I pointed down. He looked at it and shrugged again. The skipper said, “Tell him to get down the bloody back.”

So I said, “Waggle your wings, again” and so he did and the bloke looked over again and I pointed to the back and so he went down the back and that was the last I saw of him. When the Dutch coast was coming up, I said to Stan, “Whereabouts are we?” I was still doing the map reading so I had a pretty good idea where I was but I wanted to confirm it with the navigator. He said, “So-and-so, we should be crossing at such-and-such a place.” I said,

“Good, waggle your wings,” the skipper waggled his wings and this bloke came up alongside us and I pointed down to the Dutch coast and he saluted and off they peeled. But I didn’t realise, by the time this had happened, we had two other Fortresses flying behind us and we had three Fortresses flying behind us that were completely lost. Once we gave them the position of the Dutch coast, they were right and took off.

This is what used to happen on the way home and it could happen with other aircraft. The navigator could’ve been uncertain of where he was and his instruments could have been damaged or things like that, so they’d just hook onto somebody and then land at Manston, the emergency aerodrome and land there and either get driven back or leave the aircraft there or, if it could be repaired, get it repaired and carry on,

take it home or get it home by car or truck and take it back to their own aerodrome.

Yes, I did, because it’s harder to see… Enemy aircraft, it’s hard for them to see us and it’s hard for us to see them. It’s not as easy to catch up on enemy aircraft

if they’re looking for you.

One of them was a thousand bomber raid on Dortmund. I’d have to look at my logbook but I think Gelsenkirchen. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t

remember the names off hand.

Yes, I think that was the most intense one. We never had to do that again. Once the guns could see you, everybody started to open fire on those two spots whereas, otherwise, they’re just firing up. They’ve got radar, I suppose,

that picks you up but that just fires up into the air. They don’t know what height you’re at or anything. They can’t tell at that point in time, I don’t think. Whether they’ve got a gun operations room like I was in I don’t know, they most likely have but they’ve got to move pretty quick when, all of a sudden, these aircraft appear over your area and they’re going along at a fair speed.

No, most of them were pretty straight forward.

Oh, yes! On 460, I just sat in the bombing compartment and did nothing, virtually. Occasionally, the navigator would ask me when we went over the coast to let him know, if we could see it or, if we went over a certain

town that I would know – German or whatever or Dutch or Belgian – to let him know when we go over a pass or a curve in the river or something like this, I would let him know from the map that I carried. I would say, “We should be there,” and he’d check with his instruments and, from that, he’d be right. Yes, it was

a tricky business all right.

It was definitely more satisfying. I was doing something all the time, not standing there waiting for something to happen, waiting for me until we got to the target area before I could do the bombing, which was my job. I would be standing in the bombing compartment for maybe two or three hours before we actually got to the target and, virtually, doing nothing

whereas, once I got into the Pathfinders, between the navigator and myself, we were doing checks and double checks on our position all the time, all the way to the target.

Oh, I think so. Our navigation was that much easier and our timing was better. On squadrons, if you lagged behind a bit,

that was it, you were on your own whereas, in Pathfinders, we flew as Pathfinders but we weren’t all together because different Pathfinders had different jobs to mark the target and there weren’t that many of us but at least we were ahead of the main force. And the enemy didn’t know where we were going to bomb until we started to drop our markers on them whereas, once we’d started to mark the target, the main force coming behind us, by the time they were

over the target, their ack-ack guns were ready to start sending up flak and anything else they could shoot up at you. We were over the target first and admittedly, we had to go and drop our bombs the second time over the target and there again, we were the main force and there were a lot of aircraft, so the chances of you getting hit were getting less rather than just a couple out in front of the main force.

Well, in some ways, it was very good – it was nearer to the nearest little village; we had to walk down there. On 460 Squadron, a crew were moved into one of the family residences and nobody

else came into that unit except crew – you could invite friends in, your mates, to have a talk or a drink or whatever they wanted to do – but on Pathfinders, we were all put in barracks and, of course, being on 460 Squadron, if you were flying, nobody came in to wake you up. If you weren’t flying and somebody was detailed to fly, nobody came in to wake those blokes up while you were asleep and virtually woke you up at the same

time and so you got a good night’s sleep or a good day’s sleep, whatever it was. If you were on duty on 460 Squadron, you were out and nobody else went into your billet and, apart from your meals, you could sleep or do whatever you wanted for as long as you like. But, on Pathfinders – I don’t know about the officers – but the sergeants and the

warrant-officers had their own mess – the sergeants and the flight sergeants went into their barracks. Everybody slept in there and if you were on duty or not on duty, they just came and woke up the blokes that were on duty and in the meantime, woke practically everybody else up. On 460, the crew that weren’t on duty were together in the unit whereas, down there, everybody – Tom, Jack or Harry – were in the same billet

as you were; 20 or 30 blokes in the same billet. And, if they were on duty, they got woken up, which, in the process, you got woke up and so you didn’t get as good a sleep as what you might have needed. Apart from that, everything was more or less the same as being on an ordinary squadron. You reported to your section, A, B or C Flight, whatever it was,

although I don’t think they had separate flights down there. Everybody just reported of a morning. I reported to the bombing section, the navigators reported to their section and then you were told that day whether you were on operations that night or when you were on operations and then you just went on your way and did whatever you had to do until you were ready to get briefed and crewed up and off.

The crew weren’t as close as what they were at 460 Squadron. We still used to meet up with one another and walk down to the village for a drink if we wanted to if there were no operations on. We could catch the bus into Peterborough but mostly we’d walk down to the local village.

Of a night-time, I suppose. Daytime, they were all doing their duties that they were supposed to do – folding parachutes. Parachutes, you’d wear them for so long and then you weren’t issued with the same parachute pack every time. Every time you went to get one, you’d just get a parachute and after a certain time, those parachutes

were opened and they were strung up to get the air through and get rid of any folds in there so that they wouldn’t stick together if you had to bail out – it mightn’t have got any air in it. There were girls that were packing and repacking parachutes and there were WAAFs in the signals section and WAAFs in the messes that were providing meals for us three times a day and WAAFs in the bars, I suppose, where we went for a drink.

Sometimes, we’d go down to the village and there’d be WAAFs there. I think there was some sort of service building, like the YMCA, down there where you could go and have a meal and a drink if you didn’t want to go to the pub.

You had the opportunity, if you wanted to, but as a crew sometimes, we’d still go around with the skipper in the car. If he wanted to go into town, we’d go in with him but at that stage, the mid upper gunner that we got was an officer, Jimmy Close, so that made four officers. So the four officers used to more-or-less hop in the car and go off and left the other three of us to our own devices. We used to go down the village or

go into Peterborough if we wanted to but that was a bit far by bus. Just a walk down to the village was sufficient to get away from what was going on at the station at the time.

Oh no, you expect it, more or less. Well, they were teamed together in their mess as far as I know.

Once we all got together, we were just seven bods, not four officers and three others. We were all bods doing whatever had to be done.

Not that I know of.

The skipper was married.

He was married before or just after he joined the air force. He was married.

He was behaving himself. And the wireless operator – he was the bloke who was on duty in the Middle East, Ken Glasziou – when he went by ship from Sydney, they called in at New Zealand and he met a New Zealand girl and became engaged to her so he kept pretty straight

as far as I know. If I’d taken anyone on, I certainly wouldn’t have been bragging to anyone about it, I would’ve kept it to myself. As far as I know, you might go down to the local pub and see some of the girls from the parachute section and ask them over for a drink or something like that but that was it. You might walk home with them

back to the base and the WAAFs walked down to their section and you went to yours and that was it. The navigator was a married bloke; he started off as a pilot. He went to Initial Training School in Western Australia somewhere and then he got sent to South Africa to do his flying training. He was 29

and I was 21. I think they said he was a bit too slow off the mark but for some reason or other, they said he wouldn’t ever be a pilot so they made him a navigator. He was married and the rear gunner knew a WAAF at this stage. He was in the service

but I don’t know where and the flight engineer from Glasgow, I don’t think he had anybody in particular before or after he got into the air force.

No.

I don’t think so. In the 406 Squadron, there was a WAAF there in the tailor shop where I used to go for morning tea every now and again or take some cakes up there. She’d been going with three different blokes and each one of them had gone for a sixer so she was a bad omen – they didn’t want anything to do with her. Your hours…

you couldn’t say, “I’ll meet you down the pub, tonight,” because you might be flying on a trip and so that was that. If you went down the pub and you met them down there, you most probably had a drink with a WAAF there and walked home with them. With 460 Squadron, you just walked home from the local pub, just up the hill and into the aerodrome and that was it and you just talked on the way. There might be two or three or half-a-dozen of you all walking home at the same time. But that was it as far as I know.

He was on the same boat that left Australia when I went to Canada and he went through America and got held up in America because somebody had got something that was contagious. I don’t know what it was but they were all confined to camp in America before they were allowed to go on to England. Then he

was posted to various spots around England – I don’t know whether he was trained as a flying instructor or up in flying control – and eventually he got sent to Operational Training Unit and that’s where he grabbed me to be in his crew. I, more or less, treated him, seeing as he was a married man and a pilot long before me, as my older brother.

That’s it. If I wanted to know something, I’d ask Ivan or Stan. Ivan was 26 whereas Stan, the navigator, was 29 when I was 21. He was the bloke who was knocked back as a trainee pilot in South Africa and made a navigator. I think the skipper was only about five years older than me and

as I said, the wireless operator got engaged to a girl in New Zealand before he went so I think he kept reasonably safe and secure. Nottingham, as I said, was placed out of bounds because of VD; that was rife in Nottingham and so you never went into Nottingham but I suppose there were blokes… nothing that I knew of in our crew…

I think the rear gunner had a friend in the WAAFs and the flight engineer might have known somebody back in Glasgow but they didn’t talk about it much. We’d just talk about things that were current – if you’d had a letter from your parents or something like that. That was always the current news and what was current was what we were going to do that day or that night or there was operations on or we had a free night. I don’t think there was that sort of talk

entered into the conversations anywhere.

Well, there was always the newspapers. All the current newspapers were in the sergeants’ mess or in the officers’ or airmen’s mess; there were so many copies of the newspaper. We used to look through the newspapers and I’ve got cuttings… it was a funny thing, the Americans

were given the right-of-way to hit the front page with where they went last night: “The Flying Fortresses bombed so-and-so last night.” Of course, this could be because we were on late trips over a night-time. The Americans were mainly daytime trips because they weren’t so crash hot on the night navigation, I don’t think. And so ours would get in the late news and there’d be a little section: “The RAF last night went down to Gelsenkirchen

and Dortmund last night,” and that would be it as far as the RAF was concerned but the Americans got the headlines. As I said, the RAF generally only got the late news. Sometimes there were good pictures. We went to an oil refinery once and it showed the pictures out of the newspapers, the oil refinery functioning as an oil refinery and the oil refinery when the RAF had finished with it and it was a shambles.

I don’t think there was one tank that hadn’t been hit. I’ve got quite a few newspaper cuttings. I used to go up to the mess if we weren’t flying first thing after a raid, I’d go up to the sergeants’ mess and get the newspaper after everybody had thrown them all aside and take it back to the billet and cut out that piece and stick it in my exercise book and keep them.

I’ve got quite a few there, the thousand-bomber raid and the oil refinery at Gelsenkirchen and rail yards somewhere that had been struck.

Some people said to us, “Why aren’t you at home fighting the Japs [Japanese]?” And we’d say, “Because, when we done our training we were sent over here.” There were still Australians being trained and others, Americans there, in the war effort fighting up in the islands and

British chaps that are there. When I was on the Queen Mary and pulled up in Fremantle, a lot of the chaps that came on had escaped from Singapore and those areas and got away down to Fremantle. They were taken onto the Queen Mary with the idea that they would be going home to the UK once the Queen Mary had dropped them in New York; they’d go across and go home. But they had been fighting up north

and Australians didn’t tell them to get home and fight their own war. They just accepted that they were out here to help Australia to defend itself and that was it. That was our position in England. We were trained in Canada, we could’ve been set back to Australia but they saw fit to send us over to the UK and of course, the losses were pretty heavy over there. 460 Squadron lost over 1,000 aircrew during the war. I don’t know what the figures were for Pathfinders; it most likely would’ve been higher because our

loss rate was higher than ordinary squadrons and they reckon, to complete one tour your luck was in and then you were expected to do another tour of at least 20 trips. It was in those 20 trips that you sometimes made silly mistakes, which could mean that was the end of you.

Well, the war had finished and as I said, we dropped this food over to Rotterdam. Then, when we got back, that was three days afterwards and it had finished. That was the end of it and that meant no more operations so we were, more or less, just sitting on our hands at the station and that was it.

I got called into the CO’s office and I was up for a commission. I had an interview there and then they sent me down to London for an interview there in Kodak House and then I came back. When I got back to the squadron, I was told that I was moving out and I had to go up to, I think, it was just up near

where I landed in the first place. The next thing I know, the war was still on in Australia and I was on my way home with MONAB – Mobile Operational Naval Air Base. All these chaps were ground crew chaps who could land on an island and prepare an aerodrome for aircraft to come in. And that was their job, to chop

down palm trees and get an aerodrome ready and I thought, well maybe the idea of sending me home with them is that I’ll be available for some of the aircraft that come in. As they fly the aircraft up, I’ll be available for the aircrew that are operating from those islands and operating further north. When I came home, I was given leave and then, before I knew what happened, it was all over while I was still on leave – on the eighth of August.

The war had finished out here so I just kept on leave and that was it. I got called up to Bradfield Park and told I’d been granted a

commission. I got all my new gear and hardly ever wore it, so that was that.

They were overjoyed.

Well, I was pleased too. The whole crew was pleased. It meant we weren’t sticking our necks out anymore.

No, we didn’t. I don’t remember going anywhere and having a wild party. The flight engineer was granted leave and the rear gunner was granted leave and the navigator ended up… They were making a film on something to do with

the Sahara Desert about some Romans I think it was – I forget the name of it – and he was getting an extra two bob a week for carrying a spear and that’s what he did for quite a while. The skipper and the wireless operator, seeing as the skipper’s parents owned hotels in Moe in Victoria, he and the wireless operator went to work in a pub for a while. The

mid upper gunner, the Australian who had joined us on a Pathfinder Squadron, he went and caught up with his girlfriend – I don’t know where that was – but I did receive an invitation to his wedding. He got married in England and then came back to live in Western Australia for a while and then went back to the UK. When the skipper

died, we sent notice of the funeral to the whole crew and some of them did come out. I went to his funeral and the wireless operator was there and that was about all. At least I went to his funeral. He died in 1992.

Well, for people that you’d joined up together as a crew and it was a matter of life and death between the seven of you, it was a bit severe, I’d say. We had nobody to turn to and have a joke or a laugh about something whereas that’s what we did when we were a crew. If somebody had a good joke

the seven of us enjoyed it whereas, when I came home on that boat, I knew nobody on that boat. As I said, I was with the navy outfit and I didn’t know any of them and so it was pretty quiet for me coming home on the boat. Even though the boat was packed, I didn’t know anybody on in the crew. I think I might’ve been the only Australian on the boat. I don’t know, I didn’t get around that much and we were pretty jammed in.

As I said, when we were a crew, we were like a family. On one leave, I went down to Danny’s place at Southend and of course, you didn’t like going and Jock didn’t like to invite us. I think he was brought up by his grandmother – I don’t know what happened to his parents – and you wouldn’t have liked going to anybody’s home, which means

you didn’t have ration tickets. You were given ration tickets for leave but it really wasn’t enough to feed you. You didn’t really like imposing yourself. I went down to the rear gunner’s place at Southend and when I saw just how difficult it was for them to provide meals for me … I was on a week’s leave but I don’t think I stayed there for the whole week. I realised how difficult it was when food rationing was that severe

that you didn’t want to be staying there and being young, you had a decent appetite and, when you got away from base, you expected something nicer than what you were getting fed at base all the time. We didn’t like to impose on people by turning up at their homes or English members of the crew to have a feed and get away from the squadron for a while.

I think because we had, at one stage, four Australians in the crew, which were possibly in the vital positions, if you could call the

vital positions, like the navigator, pilot, wireless operator and bomb aimer. The main work was done by the navigator and we had a pilot who’d been flying in England a lot before he actually got crewed up; that might’ve been a help.

Just because he was a pilot didn’t earn him any more deference than anybody else. First thing in the morning, he got saluted, “Sir,” and then, after that, everybody called him Ivan and that’s what he wanted. That was the atmosphere as if we were a family together.

We never had anybody say a cross word to one another in the crew except when George was in 460 Squadron. It wasn’t a cross word, the pilot just used to say to him, “Didn’t you see that aircraft, George?” and George would say, “No, I was searching on the other side.” And so it was over and done with. He didn’t carry any grudge against George because he hadn’t seen an aircraft coming reasonably close to him and just expected that that was one of those circumstances when you’re flying. You had aircraft coming

at you from different directions when you’re getting into the target area on main force, not particularly on Pathfinders but even so on Pathfinders. The new Australian mid upper gunner we had, we were never bothered by aircraft getting close to us or anything like that when we were doing the marking.

I think it played a great part in our survival, luck.

Like I said, when other aircraft got shot down, that was luck and I suppose it was good training that our rear gunner thought he saw an aircraft below us and instead of just ignoring that, he did something about it and he said, “Corkscrew port or starboard,” and when the enemy aircraft saw us turning like that, he knew

and, at that time, the ME 110s had their guns mounted so that they shot upwards. He knew that we had sighted him once we started to corkscrew and so he moved on to an aircraft that didn’t move once he got up within firing range and he fired and that was the end of that aircraft.

It wasn’t very difficult. My brother was a member of the youth club up at the Paddington Methodist Church and he was in the cricket team. He didn’t play soccer in the wintertime but we used to go and watch the soccer team play. We both played in the same cricket team

together over at Queens Park. When we were kids growing up, my mother was an ALCM, she was an Associate of the London College of Music and entitled to wear the cap and gown and we had a piano and sometimes of a night-time or if we had visitors, they’d say to my mother, “Play something” and so she’d play some classical piece of music and we’d say, “Play something we can sing, Mum,” so she would play

a popular song of the time and my brother and myself and maybe some cousins or the kids who lived in the flat underneath would come up and sing along with us and we’d sing some of the popular songs. My brother and I were both singers – we weren’t trained but we had reasonably good voices, I’d say. I can’t read music

and I sang with three choirs. We had a big youth club at the Paddington Methodist Church with activities going on. The ladies’ church aid provided supper some nights and there was always something going on – the girls played basketball up in the hall and the boys were up there playing table tennis or billiards – and that’s while we had

a minister who was really a strict Methodist. After a while, we had a minister by the name of Jack Bram and he had a twin brother who was a minister over at Glee and he’d been working for the Electricity Commission, putting up telegraph wires out the back of Bourke. Then he joined the ministry and he was posted to Paddington. I don’t know where he

preached before coming to Paddington – Paddington might’ve been first – but, when he saw that we had the big hall there and that the kids played soccer and basketball and cricket, he said, “Well, why don’t we have a dance?” And all the elder members of the church said, “Dancing is not allowed in Methodist churches” and he said, “In Brisbane, dancing in allowed in church halls.” So we said, “We’ll have dancing.” He said, “But the

sort of dancing we’ll have is not where you have the one partner all the time. We’ll have barn dances and some of those Scottish dances where you zigzag across and change partners all the time. We’ll have dancing.” And so we started to have dances, progressive barn dances and Scottish dances in the hall. It was called Paddington Christian Youth Club. It wasn’t designated as Methodist only and we had some kids that were

Roman Catholic. I think we even had one Jewish kid that came to the church. There were different things on different nights; it might’ve been basketball for the girls on Wednesday night and for the boys on Friday night and cricket on Saturday, choir on Thursday night, whatever it was. And so my brother kept at me, “Viv, come and join the choir, we’re short of tenors.” So I eventually joined the choir and I joined

in that group. Judy was a member of that choir as well and her parents lived in the caretaker’s cottage on the church property and her father undertook to keep the hall and the grounds tidy and cut the lawns and that sort of thing. After choir practice some nights and after some nights if things were on and we knocked off early, we’d go around to Judy’s mother’s place and she could play the piano. Blokes

were in the choir, Judy and I and my brother were in the choir and some of the people who came ‘round were in the choir so we’d all have another sing ‘round at Judy’s mother’s place. Her father would always go out to the kitchen and make cups of tea and there’d be cake that he’d cut up and bring in. We’d have supper and then we’d have another singsong and then we’d go home. I felt a bit queer when I first went

there because I was about five years older than anybody else there and I’m seven years older than Judy so that, for me to be talking to kids five years and younger than me, I felt a bit out of place there but I gradually joined in with everything and the choir. I was made a trustee of the church at Paddington and I was

the treasurer of the trust – I used to look after all the bookwork and I was also made a circuit steward, which meant I helped in the services at the church. If necessary, I had to read passages from the Bible or go ‘round and take the collection or stood on the door and welcomed people as they came into the church and stood there as they went out and said goodbye as they left the church.

We moved to Oatley here in 1956; we bought the block of land and our house was ready to move into in Christmas 1956 and I said that I would do the outside. All the outside woodwork was undercoated with pink primer so I undertook, in 1956, to do all the outside and inside painting of the house. I still kept going to Paddington as a trustee but I didn’t go as circuit steward

or treasurer. For a while I did but after a while I gave it up. I went up to the church at Paddington at Christmas in 1956 – we’d moved into the house about a week before Christmas – and I was standing beside somebody and they heard me singing and they said, “You should be in the choir.” So the next thing I know I’m in the choir up at West Oatley Methodist Church.

There was a competition for the St George area at Rockdale Methodist Church for choirs to go in an eisteddfod and there was a great big shield and you sang something religious, something of your own choice and a fixed hymn and if the judges thought you were the best, the great big plaque

was hung in your church for twelve months and the next time the eisteddfod was on it got taken to the eisteddfod and whoever won it the next time, it went to their church. At West Oatley Methodist Church, our name, when the plaque was full with all the little badges around the edge were full of names of choirs that had one it, our name was on there more times than anybody else, so the plaque was hung in West Oatley Methodist Church. I

was also made a trustee up at West Oatley Methodist Church and a steward. And then, about 12 months ago, maybe a bit longer, West Oatley… because the number of younger people that were… there were older people my age going there by then were a lot of younger people, just-marrieds, going there that were living in Oatley, getting married at West Oatley but then moving away to areas where they could afford to buy houses.

When we had the church anniversary… up there the platform at the front of the church was completely right to the ceiling… some of the kids’ heads were touching the ceiling – admittedly, they were standing on forms so that the kids could be layered. The choir sang for the anniversary service. As I said,

gradually the younger people got married and moved away from Oatley. It’s not closed down now, it’s part of the youth club of the Uniting Church in Oatley. There were sometimes only 9 or 13 people in the church and it wasn’t worthwhile keeping a minister to do… The minister in those days used to have a service at Oatley…

No, I survived and that’s all I’ve got to be worried about. That’s the attitude I take: I’m a survivor; I’m lucky to be a survivor and that’s it as far as I’m concerned.

I’d say, compared with some people, I had a very good war because I wasn’t wounded; I wasn’t hurt in any way as compared with some other crews that I know. I think I had a sore throat once and that was about it. When I was on leave, my aunt who wasn’t my aunt

invited me to stay at her place the one and only time and I said, “Have you ever painted anybody’s throat?” and she said, “No” and I said, “Well you’re going to learn in a hurry,” so I went up to the local chemist. When I was growing up, practically every winter my brother would get a very severe cold and I would get a sore throat and my mother would paint it with glycerine and tannin with a long brush with hair on it about an inch long and she would soak it in glycerine and tannin,

put it down my throat and paint it. You wouldn’t know it but I have what they call a double uvula. Instead of one little thing hanging down in my neck, I’ve got two. I don’t know whether that signifies anything, whether I’m a good singer or not. So, I went up to the local chemist near where she lived and I said, “I want some glycerine and tannin,” and he said, “How much to how much?” and I said, “I don’t know, I want to paint my throat with it.” So he made me up a batch and gave it to me and a

brush and I took it home and my aunt painted my throat every morning and every night and I think that was the only time that I could say that I felt crook. I certainly didn’t feel crook in the army and nothing ever happened to any of the crew. As I said, we were like a family and not one of us got injured or had to miss an operation because you were sick or had a bad cold. The seven of us flew together

on 460 Squadron without any changes. We lost the mid upper gunner because of his night vision but when we picked up the other mid upper gunner, we all flew together and none of us missed an operation at any time and had to be replaced by a spare while we were flying on operations. Physically and mentally I was very fit before, during and after it.

I don’t think I put on any weight even though we were on rationed food when we went on leave. There was no rationing over in Canada, except liquor, I think.

They were definitely overlooked. There’s no mention made of the RAAF over in the UK. I don’t know whether it’s made now or not but, even on Anzac Day, there was hardly anything. It was RAAF and you just joined in with RAAF. They didn’t specify Europe or Pacific, they were just RAAF. I don’t think VE Day gets

the celebration that VJ [Victory in Japan] does, the celebration that we have here.

I don’t know how many we lost in 156 Squadron but over 1,000 lost on 460 Squadron and that’s a hell of a lot of blokes to be losing on a squadron. There was a lot of sacrifice there and there might be other squadrons,

British squadrons, RAF squadrons. Pathfinders was an RAF, it wasn’t an RAAF squadron. 463 and 467 were Australian squadrons and I don’t know what their losses were over there.

I think it’s great, really great. It

really lets people know what a bomber looks like. We only had smaller aircraft here until the Americans came and I think they brought their Flying Fortresses with them but most aircraft here were only smaller aircraft, twin-engine aircraft. When you talk about a Lancaster, you think it’s just another aircraft but when you see what size it is, you realise just what a job that is to get it up in the air and keep it up in the air with a bomb load that it carried and the petrol load

that you needed to carry that bomb load – 21,000 gallons of fuel and possibly a 14,000 maximum bomb load that you could carry. You realise that that’s an effort to get the Lancaster up in the air.

I always like to celebrate Anzac Day. At one time we had

and ex-World War I digger [soldier] living in the back room, which was actually my bedroom and we got married and lived down there in the back room in the terrace house in Underwood Street, Paddington. He was a digger from World War I and he had something the matter with his leg and wasn’t walking like anybody. He had a job

as a lift driver in David Jones but on Anzac Day, he always went to the march and I think he got taken around in a car. On Anzac Day, my brother and I used to go into the march and end up in Macquarie Street somewhere. He was a bloke we could talk to when we were kids growing

up. He said to us coming up Anzac Day, “Why don’t you go down and get some rosemary and take it down on Anzac Day and sell it?” and we said, “OK.” And on Anzac Day, we got this bunch of rosemary and

broke it up into sprigs and put it in a paper wrapper and went down to the march and we sold it for a penny or tuppence or threepence a sprig depending on the size and I think we made five shillings. Every Anzac Day we did that. And also another thing, being a semi-invalid, he could get around but with help. On a Saturday, he used to back

a few horses on the races and there was an SP bookie [Starting Price bookmaker –illegal] living next door to us at Paddington and he apparently found out about this. So he said, “How about you take my bets down to the bookie?” They had a lookout that used to stand outside the house and see if there were any police cars and there was a back lane and they used to go in the back of the house. So he used to

have a bet and write it out and wrap it up in paper and I used to take it down and look up the lane to see if there was anybody about. The bloke that was the lookout there used to say, “OK,” and I used to duck in the back gate and up to the back door and hand over the money to the bloke that took the bets and that was it. And when I came back, the race would be on and he’d say, “I won on that. You can go down and collect.” So I’d go down and look

at the scout and go into the house and collect his winnings and take them up to him. At the end of the day, he’d give me two bob and I thought that was great. But that’s as far as it went as far as having a bet.

I got my two bob from him and the next Saturday that he wanted me to do it – he wasn’t there every Saturday - I got my two bob and I changed it down to sixpence and I took it down and I had threepence each way on a horse and I think it came last so that was the last bet I ever had. But I always used to go in the sweep for the Melbourne Cup when I was working; everybody in the office used to go in the sweep. Sometimes you’d get a horse and sometimes you didn’t.

That was as far as I went as far as betting was concerned.

Well, I think for a lot of them it’s just an excuse to go and get sozzled. I think there are a lot that are quite sincere and go down to the Cenotaph

and lay a wreath or just go down to the Cenotaph and say, “Hello, Uncle Sam” or “Uncle Bill, I’m sorry you’re not here now,” and think about them that way. I think for some of them, it’s just an excuse for a public holiday. I don’t think it’s something to be celebrated

about. I think it’s rather a solemn occasion, if anything and I think I should reflect inside myself to think what a bad time those blokes had over there and how many people we lost over there. I don’t think it’s something to celebrate, the people that got killed over there, on Anzac Day. I think it’s more a period to think biblically, if you can call it that, that they made a sacrifice, which… they were

just remarkable odds that practically destroyed them but a few of them managed to survive.

Well, I think, if the opportunity happens,

you’ve enjoyed the country so much of your life-time and if you’re eligible, I think you should join the military forces, whatever they might be and whatever you think is your criteria – whether you’re air-minded or think you’d do better on the ground with rifle shooting or whatever sort of ammunition or devices they have

or the navy, to join in that sort of activity. I think it would be your duty to volunteer in whatever capacity you’re capable of or whatever they think they can train you to be capable of doing.

No, I think I’ve covered everything pretty well.

I’m sorry that I’ve forgotten some of the names of some of the targets that I’ve bombed.

As a matter of fact, we went over to the UK in 1990 and went on a conducted tour of France and Holland and ended up in Germany. I think Mannheim might have been one of the places we stopped at and there was something on there.

I think I went to a museum or something in Mannheim. They would’ve known that I was at an age, which would’ve been available for service during the period of the Second World War – I was in that age-group. We had a phrase book we used to carry

on operations with us with German phrases like, “Where is the railway station?” or “Sprechen sie Deutsch?” I said to Judy, “I’m not speaking any German and if anybody speaks to me in German, I’m not saying anything.” Not that I would have understood them by this time. So we just went and if they asked if I’d ever been before, I said to Judy, “Yes, I could say I was up above them and not on the ground but I don’t want to say anything like that in case anybody

might…” and that was 1990, which was 45 years after it was all over. You still might’ve found somebody that had a bad grudge, that their whole family might’ve been wiped out and I was the cause of it seeing as I was in the air force bombing Mannheim at that time, so I just kept quiet about any of my German activities.

Well, you didn’t have that much to say because they all

spoke German and you couldn’t understand what they were talking about. You were relying on an interpreter on the tour to see what they were saying but there were very few people that could’ve understood you anyway so you didn’t really have to say anything. They might say, “Where from?” and you’d just say, “Australia,” and that was it. That’s all they wanted to know, where you came from – Australia.

Some of them had a bit more English and would say, “You’re a long way from home.” “Yes.” And that was it as far as conversation with any German people.

That’s OK. Good.