Australians at War Film Archive

Okay. I was born in a place called Dungog on the north coast of NSW [New South Wales] on 7th July 1924 so I’ve just turned 80. My father was working with the water board and consequently

he went to a few water board sites. He was a clerk in charge of the office. We went to Nepean Dam was the last place we lived on and then we came to Bondi and from there I grew up, went to school, primary and high school. Around the Bondi area I naturally did a lot of swimming and stuff and met a lot of young people and then I

went to Randwick High School and from there after I joined the Air Training Corps and spent a bit of time there which was a forerunner to going into the air force. I joined the air force in 1940 and initially I was waiting to get into aircrew and that took a bit of time so you could volunteer to do something different, which I did, and I became an aircrew guard for a couple of months. Just guarding aeroplanes.

I had my first flight in a Wirraway and that scared the daylights out of me and I thought, “I’m not going to aircrew any more.” Anyhow I went on. I went to Bradfield Park and did initial training. Then up to a place in Maryborough in Queensland. I did a wireless course and then to Evans Head gunnery course and then from there overseas. Through America. I spent a week on the train going across from San Francisco to New York

and then across on the Queen Elizabeth to England and I did a fair bit of training there. Then transferred out to the Middle East. They decided they were going to put us on to coastal command. Do you want details of, more detail than that?

Okay, well did an operational training unit Egypt, no sorry, Palestine, and

then we were posted to a squadron in Italy, 458 Squadron, and spent a very short time there and then we were transferred over to an RAF [Royal Air Force] squadron which had taken over from 458, and continued there until the end of the war doing all these operational sorties. I think I did about 15 or 16 altogether including the one where we got the submarine. But in the meantime we used to go out looking mainly for German

shipping that was moving up the east coast of Italy. What they used to call E-boats [enemy torpedo boats] and F [fire] lighters and things like that. Then of course we went over the other side to Ancona, over to the Adriatic side, where we managed to nab a sub [submarine]. The war finished while we were there and we had a bit of celebration and then we came home. After the war I studied accountancy through the Commonwealth

CRTS [Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme] and I decided to join the Commonwealth Bank where I spent 40 years of my life.

I retired 18 years ago, actually. I’ve played a fair bit of sport since then. I belong to Killara Golf Club and I play golf and tennis still.

Actually I was, yes, until the last couple

of years they made me a branch inspector and I had to travel around the country a bit.

Oh yeah. 1952 we got married. Just been over 50 years now, coming up 52 years. We had two children. Louise, who unfortunately died 10 years ago at a very young age, and David, who you’ve met.

Well actually I was only a very small child when we left and probably mainly Bondi is where I… I was probably only about 10 when we finally came to the city to settle.

I think probably mainly spending days on the beach and going to parties with friends and that sort of stuff.

Probably memories of school of Bondi Beach Public School, and I used to play a lot of tennis in my younger days

and it was either the beach or the tennis courts or a party if some other friend’s mother was away we would. But nothing much apart from that, I don’t think.

He was in the water board, yeah.

Dad was on a few of the construction sites. There was Warragamba Dam, Nepean Dam, Avon Dam. A few of those until he was transferred to

the city and that’s when we settled in Bondi.

Not particularly, no, because I was fairly young and I don’t have any special memories of those, no.

Dad? He was a very hard-working sort of fellow. He studied accountancy and he did it under candle, under the gas lamp, and he qualified I think

in about 12 months to do his full accountancy degree. Studious sort of a guy. Very ambitious. And we had five children in our family, by the way. There were four boys and one girl.

I was the second and my eldest brother was also in the air force and unfortunately he was killed, and it’s only my sister and myself still surviving. I’ve lost two other brothers.

He had great ambitions.

He was good. He was a bit strict sort of thing. He believed that we shouldn’t spend too much time on the beach because we start to get sunburnt and start to look like a beach bum sort of thing, so he would rather we study than spend the time on the beach.

Mum was great. She rose a big family. We were lucky in that we weren’t affected by the Depression of course. Dad always had a job, unlike a lot of people that went through the problems. But she was good.

No it didn’t, no. I think he might have been cut back a little bit on a day or something

but by and large it wasn’t a problem.

Not particularly, no. It’s, my wife went through quite a bit of trouble during the Depression because her father was out of work a fair bit. But it wasn’t obvious to me in those days, but I don’t think kids noticed

it when you are sort of, when you have always got three meals a day and a bed and that sort of thing. I guess it’s only when it’s affecting you that you do take a lot of notice of it.

I think the meals were pretty good. A roast on a Sunday and fish and chips on a Friday night and things like this. We didn’t

lack food at all. There wasn’t any problem with it.

As I say, I think we spent so much time playing tennis. Every time we had an opportunity to go and play tennis, and of course, the beach in the summer time. I’m sorry I can’t give you any more information.

Around the Bondi area there is quite a few courts. There was never any shortage. We had a woman who sort of lived back to back with our house and if we were prepared to roll the court and mark the lines she used to let us have it for free on school holidays. That was a bit of a plus. And we would be off to the beach in the summer time, the gang that we sort of knocked around with. Girls and boys. It was quite

a pleasant time. But when the war came I just wanted to get into the air force. I was so keen. My brother and cousin were all sort of keen and they were a bit older than I was. You had to wait a bit of time for your call up because aircrew was a bit in demand. Do you want me to tell you about them, my brothers and that?

It did play competition at one stage, yeah. A bit later on than that. We played a bit of what they call A Reserve in that comp and B Grade. I wasn’t a great player but just a lover of the game. I did a bit of swimming too. At school I swam in the swimming carnivals and you know

I was keen on sport. Athletics. I used to enter in that too.

Oh yes, and the surf. We actually had a surfboard. One of the original long hollow boards that they have.

It’s about 12 ft long. And we also had a canoe

that was probably a two-seater sort of thing but this, the hollow boards followed on the solid boards. In the old days they had like the Hawaiian-type solid boards and then they were followed on by these hollow boards. So we did a bit of surfing and that type of thing. I was never great at it but I enjoyed it.

Swimming costumes. Bondi in those days you had to have a skirt on your costume. I don’t think you could even have trunks. I think you had to have a full. Speedos, cotton Speedos were all the rage, especially if you wanted to swim at school. Everyone wanted cotton Speedos type of costume. Of course the girls had to have a full one-piece costume with a skirt and…

Well there was a beach inspector at Bondi in those days called Aud Bladelaw who used to police the beach, and if anyone breached the conditions of modesty he quickly took them off. He was well known, actually, for many, many years as head inspector of Bondi beach.

In those days, yeah. Surfer planes. We used to get surfer planes. We couldn’t afford to buy them so when someone was coming out of the water we would say you might have quarter of an hour left before your time expired.

A surfer plane is one of those little rubber things. I don’t know if you see them around now. They are about as big as the top of that

couch there.

They would hire them out, yeah. They were inflatable and they would hire them out for an hour or so, two hours.

That’s exactly right. That’s putting it.

We were that way. We were stamp collectors and we made a couple of model aeroplanes from balsa and things like that and had bikes and scooters

and that sort of stuff.

I did. My elder brother who was killed, he was about 18 months older than I was. I spent a bit of time with him.

Other friends, yeah.

Oh yeah. Why not?

I think I’ve always had a bit of that in me.

Not that I did all that well but I was.

You’ve got to be in it.

It was probably a bit, it used to be visited a lot from people outside the area and that sort of thing. It’s just advanced so much. We were out there the other day and the beachfront is really

something else compared to what it used to be. It was just a few pretty ordinary sort of shops along the beachfront. I suppose it used to be middle to working-class sort of area and but it’s certainly changed structurally as far as…

I don’t really know. I think it’s probably… In the summer of course it would bring a lot more people, but every day of the week was pretty much the same.

There was a big influx. It was such a popular beach and, you know, world renowned and it was a place that was very popular.

I was there the day that they had, I think it was 1938 when they had the big, there was about six people drowned in the surf. Have you heard about that time? It was I think Black Friday or the Sunday following Black Friday, and the surf came in and the channel was washed away and they were on a sandbank from out of the beach

and the sandbank got washed away and those that couldn’t swim, they would swim enough to get out to the sandbank but once it was gone they just couldn’t get back. It was a terrible day. In fact the surf was so big the backwash was almost like a wave. It was going back. That was one of the tragic events during my life at Bondi.

I was swimming that day, yeah, and a lot of the public tried to help the lifesavers,

which is the worse thing they could have done because they broke the lines. And they had the old reels in those days. It was rather a sad event.

I wasn’t a great swimmer but I could catch a wave and go out a bit.

Not really, no.

I didn’t sort of, I wasn’t that sort of anxious to get cash. I remember delivering groceries for one of the, I think it was called SR Butlers, the people. I had a bike and I had a basket on the front. I can’t remember getting much money out of that but it was probably

but the one and only thing I ever did. I joined the scouts. I was in the Boys Scouts, that’s another thing.

That was called the 1st Bondi Troop. I had a couple of years in that.

You would meet once a week and you would have a talk and learn to tie knots and do this sort of thing. Semaphore

and do all that sort of stuff. Then you would get your badges. Are you familiar with the scouting organisation?

We went to jamborees and things like that. I went to one of those and it was just like a camp sort of thing. You did your own cooking and this sort of stuff. I can’t even remember now. I can’t remember. But scouting. It was a good movement.

You get badges. You get badges for cooking and different… It’s probably still the same today.

I went to Bondi Beach School and it’s pretty uneventful I think. I remember in 1938

when they first started to get migrants coming out from Germany. The first of the Jews and that sort of thing. We had one young fellow came there from Germany. He had one of these terrible hats on and his shorts were held up by braces and this sort of thing. The poor fellow, everyone took to him and a friend of mine must have picked on him and he decided to chase him and he chased him right around the school trying to catch him. In a way, the hard time we’d given him.

But I don’t think there was anything terribly eventful.

Pretty ordinary, pretty ordinary. Nothing great.

Probably average at mathematics I suppose. Maths, English,

probably geography. They were about the best I think.

No. No.

Just the usual. I think we used to play when you jump over the top of people sort of thing and they…

Leapfrog. That type of thing. That’s the only one that I can remember much about and nothing too exciting in that respect.

We used to play marbles. That was pretty popular in those days. You used to swap marbles of course. If you had a good one you might get six from someone else’s collection and

when the bell went of course… Are you familiar with marbles?

There were games like big ring and little ring and 9 hole and this sort of stuff. When the bell went to go into school they used to call it ‘smoke on the whistle’. Everyone was grabbing to grab their marbles and very often you would grab some that weren’t yours, but you just had to fill your little marble bag up as quickly as you can when the bell went.

Who owned what, yeah. But no, there wasn’t anything else that I can particularly remember.

High school, yeah, I went to Randwick High School and I participated in sport there.

I didn’t excel too much.

I played soccer and I was entered in the athletics and swimming and stuff like this. Fairly ordinarily. I never starred in anything like that. I just joined in it.

Other high schools.

Well actually it was Intermediate High School in those days.

I think there was a high school called Homebush that used to produce pretty good athletes.

Homebush High School, yeah.

That’s right, yeah.

I used to go by bus in Bondi. For primary school I would walk. We were fairly close to the beach and the school and then high school we would go by bus.

Still fairly average. I managed to get through the Intermediate and that’s about all. Later on after the war I went to Sydney High for a while to do the Leaving and I just about got to the end of that. I didn’t quite finish that either. I did accountancy and I started accountancy before I joined the air force actually

and then I so I was in the Air Training Corps for a while.

I think I was about 16.

I think it was after that. Maybe 17.

They were still there. Still very interested.

We would mainly go to the pictures and that with the girls. If you had a girlfriend

you wouldn’t be shouting her. She would pay her own way sort of thing. I think the movies in those days was about sixpence or nine pence to go in and threepence to spend. Something like that. No, I knew quite a bit. When we used to go to the beach it used to be good to get our photograph. We had a beach photographer come along and he would come to your group and take a photograph for the newspaper, which we had

happen a couple of times and you know, real publicity in those days.

Yeah, yeah. Oh no, just a snap of kids on the beach enjoying the sun and what have you.

Oh gee, that’s going back a long way. You’d probably go to the

matinee and I just can’t think of current movies in those days.

You used to like to sit in the back row so you could put your arm around her. But there was nothing else. So pretty harmless sort of thing. Nothing untoward.

Probably was, yes. I can remember going to school and my sister was going to Sydney Girls’ High School and there was one particular. Do you want to hear this?

One particular girl that I was very keen on. She was a very good swimmer. She did the swimming scenes in the picture Blue Lagoon. Have you heard of it? But we used to write and she would send me a note and I would give my sister a note to give her and this sort of thing. She was one of my main

likings in those days.

Special interest. This is a bit embarrassing, all this sort of stuff.

I’m sure I couldn’t teach you too much.

We were pretty aware of it, naturally, but it wasn’t a great concern. At that age you don’t get too concerned about it. The main thing like many young people you wanted it to keep going so you could be in it. You weren’t as patriotic as thinking you’ve got to go and fight the enemy, I just wanted to get into the air force and fly and my brother and cousin who were

pretty close to me was the same and…

1939. 15, yeah, when it broke out so three years before I finally got into the air force.

Well I took a reasonable interest

in it but not a deep interest in it I don’t think.

My father? No, he hadn’t.

Yeah, his brother was and my mother’s brother was. My wife, are you interested in my wife too? Her father was in both wars actually and she had two brothers

in the war, one in the air force and one in the army.

Not of vital interest. My main aim was to get into the air force because aircrew was a pretty selective service. We were very proud of being aircrew and as I said before

if you weren’t prepared to wait your turn to start training you could volunteer to be a guard or something like that in the meantime.

The Air Training Corps. Well that was just a matter of joining. I think we met once per week and they gave you uniform. Have you seen the Air Training Corps uniform? It’s very similar to the air force uniform. Different badge and things issued

by the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] and you did a lot of stuff that you were going to do when you got into the air force. Studies like morse code and aircraft recognition and theory of flight and the type of stuff that would prepare you for a future in the air force.

That was at Rose Bay. They call them different flights.

Like ours was ATC [Air Training Corps] in those days and we would go out on the weekends probably to one of the aerodromes and look over the aircraft. We didn’t do any flying but generally anything to do with aircraft that you would be interested in.

Air force, yeah, and school cadets was run by the schools whereas this was run by a government type thing.

I can’t remember if there was any rifle drill or not, but prior to going to the Air Training Corps I don’t think I mentioned about six months that I spent in the military cadets. That was, I think I must have been younger than… I must have been only about 15 or 16. But I was only that for about six months.

No, no. It was the City of Sydney Regiment, 1st Battalion, I think

and we used to meet in Moore Park Road and I think that was also one night a week. As I say that was only for a short time before I decided to head over to the Air Training Corps.

Well I guess I always had air force in my blood and that was just another chapter.

Yeah. It was infantry I think and it was one of the original battalions.

No. It was only something to do, I think.

Japanese I think from memory, but we had American and British for a while.

I wasn’t bad at morse, but aircraft recognition I think I wasn’t bad on that, but

I can’t remember anything particularly standing out.

Yeah.

I think basically people who went into aircrew wanted to be pilots. A lot of it depended on demand and location and one of the tests they gave you was what they call the… What do they call it now? It was like a moving dot on the screen and you had to do

coordination and if you were particularly good at that they might make you a pilot. A lot depended on the demand at the time because at the end they had a big surplus of aircrew towards the end of the war, particularly pilots, and a lot of them never got into doing any operations. But we all wanted to be pilots but we were made air gunners, wireless air gunners,

which three categories were the pilots, in those days pilot, navigator or wireless air gunners. They were the three basic training scheme categories.

Well

my brother, was he was a cadet in the water board, and he was on the graving dock on the night that the Kuttabul sank. And he was on nightshift and he came home and he and I shared the same bedroom actually and he got home about 7.00 in the morning and he woke me up and he said, “The Japs are in the [Sydney] Harbour!” And I said, “Get away! What are you talking about? You are joking?” He said, “No. There’s been a ship sunk and sailors killed.” That was amazing to believe that the Japanese were

here in the Harbour and we actually heard the… There was something happened after that that we actually heard the shells going over our house at Bondi. The Japs shelled Sydney from out at sea and I think a couple of shells landed near the Rose Bay golf course, but the question you asked me was there anything particularly I noticed.

I can remember when they took the… Bondi used to have two great cement piers and they took those down. I don’t know what for because they didn’t serve any purpose, I don’t think, and they had sort of dummy camouflage, dummy guns around the Bondi area sort of thing, and just there seemed to be more aircraft activity over the

city. A lot of servicemen were coming in, especially Americans of course. I think it was a sense of excitement to some degree.

I can’t remember it being a great problem.

We managed to get by on the… It wasn’t the sort of thing that was discussed to any great extent. The only rationing I can remember is after the war when you had a car and the petrol was rationed and that sort of thing. I don’t think it affected our family terrifically.

Well we actually built our own aircraft

air-raid shelter. Our house had a garage a bit lower on the level and sort of jutting out at the front and a cement roof about, I don’t know, six or eight inches thick. And we filled all these sandbags up and made an entrance into the garage and all the neighbours were all invited. If there was ever an air raid they could come and join us in the garage. But I think most of the air raids were done personally by the…

I don’t think there was any public air-raid shelters or that.

No.

Well I didn’t hear anything going on, just in the morning when my brother woke me up and told me they were in the Harbour. And of course

they hit the Kuttabul and sank her with so many sailors killed on that one. I suppose you know all about the Chicago and…

Personally or just general?

Well I think it was an exciting event because at that age you don’t get too concerned about things like…

It was, “The Japs are here! What are we going to do? We might get into the air force quicker.” I don’t know.

Yeah, yeah, and I think it was fairly common amongst young people.

Well he actually

joined the navy and they didn’t on the naval reserve. He was more keen on the navy than the air force but the army in those days had the control over you so he got a call up from the army too. So he said, “I’m already on the naval reserve,” and they said, “If we get you first…” Strangely enough, the navy reserve said they couldn’t take you so he decided then to join the air force reserve and

subsequently went into the air force.

The naval reserve said the army would have priority for some reason or other, and it’s a funny sort of a setup.

He might have gone in about six or eight months before me. It might have been 12 months.

Yeah, well I went in originally in 1942 so he probably went in early ’42. He was categorised as a pilot and unfortunately he didn’t make the pilot grade and so they recategorised him as a navigator and he was sent to Canada to do his navigator training, and unfortunately he never made it.

Bondi. It was there, a theatre called the Six Ways Theatre, which is probably gone now. And Kings. I think there was two theatres in Bondi that we frequented.

Do you know Bondi?

You do. Kings was in Roscoe Street.

You know Curlewis Street, Blingers Street. I think it was Roscoe. It isn’t there now. You live at Bondi, don’t you?

Not particularly, no. In fact in the back part of the pavilion there was a concert

stage there and maybe once or twice I might have to something there, but it was mainly just a dressing shed if you wanted to get changed.

No.

At Rose Bay. I think I many have once or twice.

I can’t. It doesn’t stand out in my memory.

In the early days there was a little grocery stores and fruit stores and stuff like this. Mainly done locally and then of course later on with Bondi Junction going ahead so

much, but during my time I don’t think my parents ever shopped any where else much. They would go to town and shopping in the big stores like David Jones and shops like that. But groceries and greens was just done from the local stores. Do you know Blair Street?

We started our Bondi life in Blair Street and then we moved to Waratah Street. Do you know that one?

A little tiny street. And there was a grocery store on the corner of Wallace Street and Waratah Avenue, I think, just there. And that’s where Mum used to do most of her shopping I think just for local goods.

Yep. My first job in the bank was in Bondi Road,

the Commonwealth Bank, and I used to… When I got married we had a flat in Hastings Parade and backing up on the golf course and I used to go to work on the tram. Of course we didn’t have a car in those days. Then of course the buses took over.

I think Bondi did. It was still a well-known beach even in those days and of course it’s where you would walk along on a Sunday night and look at all the talent and sees what’s around. I think Bondi always had a certain… We thought we were a bit above Manly as far as popularity went, which was the second, probably the second beach.

What do you reckon?

We went to a few. Not so much in the Bondi area. I think we used to go school balls and things like that

but the town hall was the venue I remember. Sydney High always used to have their ball there and not a lot of dancing I don’t think.

I did learn to dance. There was a place called Doyles Dance Studio and we decided we would go and learn to dance. I never made a great fist of that. I don’t think there were any little local dances. I can’t recall.

No, I don’t think so. I might have gone to North Bondi Surf Club on a couple of occasions. I’m not sure. No, I can’t recall that.

It was just one of those things. You are supposed to know how to dance a bit. To save embarrassment. If you went to a dance and you trod all over a girl’s feet

sort of thing you weren’t very popular. Much interest in dance?

No, it wasn’t a big part of our life, no. Nothing spectacular as far as music goes.

No. No Mum and Dad

weren’t musical so consequently the family weren’t musically inclined, not above more than anyone else probably.

Oh yeah.

Well I suppose we listened to the news and of course it was always one of the topics, and I remember my Dad was keen on the cricket. I remember we had a radio years ago, an old valve model, and the cricket would be coming from England and you’d hear it going all night listening to the

results. But the radio was used pretty extensively.

It was. My Mum and Dad, we… My Mum was Anglican and my Dad was Catholic. Of course we were brought up as Catholics and we went to church on Sundays.

Do you know St Anne’s at Bondi? That’s where we started our

pilgrimage. But I’m afraid we weren’t very good Catholics because we didn’t go to a Catholic school, which was a bit of a bone of contention with the local priest. And if you want me to relate an incident, I could. When we were growing up we went to state schools, the whole family, and a priest visited us one day. That’s right, Dad was

excommunicated from the church because he didn’t send his kids to a Catholic school. So later on a different priest who visited us, I was telling him about this and he said, “That’s over. Why don’t you come back to church?” Dad didn’t.

Well they didn’t have Sunday School churches much. I don’t know if they did now. It wasn’t like the Anglican church which had Sunday Schools.

But I think the Catholics they had what they call catechism classes and things like this. But we grew up as Catholics in Bondi.

Yes there was. CYO [Catholic Youth Organisation] I think it was called. We were members.

The meetings. I think it was more religious instruction.

I don’t think there was any outings or things like that but that was only a very short term in my life. I can’t recall too many details.

I think early

in the piece they used to fly the air force, they used to fly around the city and they had aircraft. I think they were called Hawker Demons. You know it was a bit fascinating to see these things flying around and that might have been the sowing the seed of… I don’t know if I was madly interested but I always wanted to be in the air force, like a lot of kids my age.

They were kits. I think you made them from plans. They weren’t flying models. They were just made for… But you could get a flying model if you wanted to. You could get a gas engine and that type of thing, but that was a different story.

Not a lot of the detail. Of course Gallipoli and that sort of thing was pretty well taught. But not a great deal of the other battles. Everything seemed to centre around Gallipoli from the First [World] War as far as we were concerned.

No.

I don’t think I had any desire to follow their footsteps or anything like that, but my wife probably knows more about the First World War than I did. Her father was in France and those places.

Dad not having been in it, I suppose we didn’t talk too much about it.

Yeah, Empire Day they would have at school. They would always march us down to the local theatre and have talks

and that sort of thing, singsongs, but that was about all. I think that might have been cracker day too, wasn’t it, where we would build bonfires and light crackers and that? All the kids from the neighbourhood would gather around when you would all share one big bonfire. But as far as I didn’t have any intense hatred of the Germans or the Japs that I wanted to get in and fight them. I think

it was just I wanted to get in and be an airman and fly.

There was a degree of patriotism, I suppose.

Yes.

We had a fair idea in the Air Training Corps. I’d known a couple of other people who had joined and what the sequence of events was and I knew that depending on what category you were made whether you were a pilot, a navigator or a gunner whether you would go to… A pilot would go to what they called an SFTS [Service Flying Training School] into a service training school and onto

and I knew that WAGs [Wireless Air Gunners] would go to wireless training school. I had a pretty good idea of what it entailed.

Yeah. Yeah.

I did.

That was very sombre but it was sort of…

Lead up was pretty well… It was expected. It was getting close with Chamberlain returning from Munich was it, and said, “Peace in our time,” and this sort of thing, and the war clouds started to grow then, but it was very sombre.

I was actually with the fellow from next door. We were pretty good friends and…

I think they were quite happy for us to do it. My brother had joined up earlier. There wasn’t any objection except my brother was killed.

He was a navigator on a bomber and he was shot down so Mum had, they had me overseas getting toward the end of my training and my brother had just been killed so it was a bit of a shock to them.

I think so.

They were part of the deal. If you joined the Air Training Corps they expected you to enlist in the air force. I was working then. I had just started working at the Department of Transport and I got my call up for the air force. The fellow in charge of staff. And I said, “I’ve got my call up to go into the air force and I’ve got to go in next week.” They said, “You can’t go in. This is a protected industry. You can’t go.”

And I said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve been in the Air Training Corps and I’ve got my call up and I’m going,” so that was it. I went.

That was virtually the first job I had. I’d had a couple of part-time jobs in the school holidays. I remember at one stage working at Mick Simmons. I don’t think they are there now, the sports people,

and a place called Milstons that used to deal in china and things like that. I used to work in the theatre for a while. Not acting, but as an usher.

It was at Randwick. I think it was called the… It’s near the spot at Randwick.

I think it might have been the Ritz. Three nights a week. I saw one picture about ten times I think.

They were the only jobs I had I think.

I left there when I joined the air force and I never went back there again.

In head office in Phillips Street.

Mmm. Yes,

we lived in Bondi from about, well virtually we went there about ’34, ’33 or ’34 and I lived there. My parents lived there right through and I got married and we still lived in Bondi. So we lived there and come up the North Shore in about 1957 I think.

And Dad died, of course, when we were living there. My Mum went back to the town of her birth to live with my sister and she died there at 94.

Go through my air force career?

Well if you want me to go through in fine detail. First of all we went and did the rookies course at a place called Evans Head. We volunteered to go in as what they called ‘temporary aircrew guards’ and they said, “We’ve got to put your through this rookie course,” and did a bit of drill and stuff.

Let’s see. Probably a month. And then they transferred me to a place called Uranquinty. It was near Wagga [Wagga Wagga] and that’s when I spent about another two months there.

Aircrew guard. Night-time we would go out walking around with a rifle making sure no-one was getting at the aircraft and stuff. That was at what they called No. 5 Air Service Training School.

I think there was about three or four on every shift sort of thing and…

I think it was a Browning .303 Lee Enfield Rifle I think they were.

Yeah. We’d had a little bit of rifle drill but you never had to fire it anyway. That was the first aeroplane ride I ever had. I think I mentioned with Matt. We used to

try and get a ride in an aeroplane and they were Wirraways. Do you know the Wirraway at all? I managed to talk this pilot into taking me up for a ride and he said, “Okay. Get a chute out, we all go down to the parachute hut.” So we all go down and he says, “Here’s one. See if it fits.” I said, “It’s a bit loose, the straps are a bit loose.” “Don’t worry about it. You won’t fall out.” So he said, “When we get up there you can take over if you like.” So, “Oh yeah,” shaking.

So in the back cockpit of a Wirraway the stick is fixed by clamps at the back and, “When I get up there I’ll roll the aircraft so the stick goes in and you can take control.” So it frightened the daylights out of me. I tried to get it and I had to undo my safety belt to get the stick out and I said, “I won’t take over. You just keep going.” And he said, “Do you mind if I do a few aerobatics?”

and I said, “That’s okay.” “This aircraft just had a new engine put in and I want to put it through the test a bit.” I reckon he did everything that aircraft could do. He rolled it and he stall turned and anyhow we finally landed and he said, “Did you enjoy it?” and I said, “Yeah, it was great.” “Jump out now and get on the wingtip and we’ll taxi over here.” So that was my first experience of flying, which was a bit

solid to start your career sort of thing. So I thought, “I’ll still go ahead.” So anyway my turn came to go on to course and I was posted to Bradfield Park down here and I did what they call initial training school.

That was about three months I think.

You were categorised then.

Well that involved history, theory of flight, morse, aircraft rec [recognition], the usual things. Training drill and a bit of maths, bit of physics, bit of radio, to learn how to work, the workings of a radio set.

We did morse.

It was a very slow procedure but I can still remember morse. Funnily enough I could send it, if I had a key I could still send a message now but I can’t receive it. It must be something to do with the brain that it works different than the sending, but anyhow that was… Of course then we were categorised then as wireless air gunners

and we had the choice of going to Canada, Parkes or Maryborough, but you had to be 19 to go to Canada and I was 18 and they said, “Okay, you can go to Parkes or Maryborough,” and I chose Maryborough which…

No, I loved it. Especially Bradfield where you had all the physical training and that sort of stuff. You were really fit in those days.

Oh yeah. With aircrew the thing that you were proud of is on the front of your cap you had a white flash and that denoted that you were aircrew, and a lot

fellows on the ground used to sling off at aircrew. They used to say that if you had that white flash it meant that VD [venereal disease] and all this sort of thing. That was the common story.

We quickly dispelled that.

There was rivalry, yeah.

Mmm. Am I saying too much?

Are you sure?

That didn’t worry me. I was quite happy to go ahead and do anything. The whole thing too, a lot of people who were going ahead and being made pilots and they were being scrubbed very early in their career. If you didn’t, if you weren’t made a,

if you didn’t get through your pilot’s course in the early days you were very often made a straight air gunner, or in my brother’s case he was made a navigator, so it didn’t upset me about not being a pilot.

No, not particularly. I think you had to be good at maths and that to be chosen. They seemed to go for maths people.

Well I don’t know. I think probably the pilots. A lot depended on demand at the time and their logistics and things and how many they needed. I think a pilot, if you probably

did very well in the visual motor coordination test, which was a screen that you had to follow this dot around. Needless to say a lot of blokes had heard about that before and they practised it pretty well. Navigators I think were people who got high marks in mathematics and those kinds of things. That demanded a bit more maths than other categories and of course, the wireless air gunners were the also-rans.

But there was no particular attributes I think that this guy is going to be a WAG right from the start. There was nothing like that at all.

I don’t know if we stood in front of a board. They just put the list out and these are the guys that are going to do this and so forth.

Queensland, Maryborough, yeah.

It was quite good. Do you know Fraser Island and Pialba and those areas. We did our training on aircraft called Wacketts. Have you heard of them?

A little single-engine aircraft with a fixed undercarriage. Fixed? Yeah. A fairly basic trainer

and we were just… Two-seater.

They were okay. We used to fly up around that area, Pialba, Maryborough and Fraser Island. Around that area. You generally do about an hour stint in the air doing radio exercises. Sending back to base and they send to you and just general. Then you would do a bit of work on the ground in simulated aircraft.

They strung a line of boxes and there would be a guy there with a morse key sending messages and you had to send back, and then you would go out in a van with an aerial on top of it and simulate aircraft to… So you would do your drill through them also.

They were huts. About 20 or 30 in a hut. Quite comfortable.

Much the same as any other air force base and…

Well that was the wireless school, yeah. I think there was No. 3 Air Gunners Wireless School and after you graduated from there we were given a set of sparks

to put on your uniform and your rank, after your, when you finished your initial training you went to… After you finished your wireless school you became a leading aircraftsman – LAC – and then from there after you are graduating from there we went off to Evans Head, which was a gunnery school.

I don’t think we ever knew or had a mark or anything like that. You just passed or didn’t pass. The occasional guy was… Sorry I’ll get to that later.

Evans Head was a bombing and gunnery school and we did a course on Fairey Battles. They also were a two-engine plane

similar to what they called a C Flyer which you used to fly off carriers, but these were land version. And as the gunner you did various tests. You had to do what they call underground firing, air to ground firing, relative speed tests, under tail tests. All these tests. And they would assess you on those and when you went up and you were firing you had to paint your rounds before you went up.

The guns were called Vickers GO [gas operated] guns, gas operated guns, and two gunners would go up at once and you would have the turret free gun and the back turret and you were doing, they would have a drogue. Do you know what a drogue is?

It’s like a big banner being towed along by another plane and depending on the test you were doing the relative speed was across from you on the same level, and the undertail would be down here somewhere and

then they would drop the drogue. And if you had rounds with a red tip then they would count the number of hits that you had. The other guy might have green and they would count his and they would assess you on that. And then they would have air to sea firing. They would drop a marker and you had to fire at that. Air to ground was like all these sand pits in a row and you had to fly along there and do a steep turn and come back and fly down the other end

and you had to fire at say number one and number five or something like this, and then the guy in the little hut there would come along and count the number of hits you had. And all this was assessed in your final graduation from gunnery school.

I passed. I can’t, I don’t think they gave you a figure either, just either pass or fail. I think I had about

6 or 7% hits, which was good in gunnery. It was pretty accurate work.

The first trip I had was an air to sea exercise and the pilot gave you a signal to start firing with the aircraft doing this sort of motion and I didn’t have my safety belt. You didn’t have a seat belt but you had a sort of

strap that was like a dog lead on the back of your parachute. And I nearly fell out of the aircraft so I didn’t start firing and we got over the town and did a steep bank and by that time I was so excited I started to fire again and it was almost over the town. I didn’t kill anyone though.

But it was quite exciting, air gunnery.

It was probably more interesting than wireless.

We were doing something pretty constructive things, but after we graduated from there they gave you your wings, your wireless air gunnery wings, and they would make you a sergeant.

I think it might have been. I can tell you exactly in my logs there. It might have been a month, two months. Some people

would finish and they would get a commission off course straight away, and others would be made sergeants. I was made a sergeant. No-one was nothing less than a sergeant.

Yeah, it was a good place. It’s out from Lismore and right on the coast and we used to have swim parades every day,

which were compulsory. We’d go down after work to the beach and have a swim. It’s now a famous place for tourists. A good spot.

Well often the fellows

had just started but at initial training school and had gone to Maryborough would be with them right through in one case. I finished with one bloke right through to the end and finished up flying with him in Italy.

Powers, Jack Powers, and I sort of lost track of him. Not that I should have, but he lost track of me too. But he lives in Sydney. He’s a dentist.

After about 50 years I finally got in touch with him and we’ve been having some regular correspondence since then. He was with me right from Bradfield Park right to the end of the war.

I was a sergeant. That was special. I think it was

your ambition to get through it and there was a few that didn’t make it. If you didn’t make it at wireless school they would probably make you a straight air gunner. Your training would be accelerated then and you would go over to England then and get onto probably Bomber Command without much more training. There is a friend of mine, he was a scrubbed pilot and they couldn’t make him a navigator so they made him a straight gunner and

he was sent straight to England without any more training other than the straight air gunner school, and he went straight onto operations. He did two tours on Bomber Command as a rear gunner and survived.

Well the next was back to embarkation depot at Bradfield Park and off to the [United] States.

We went from Sydney, we had a bit of leave and then we went across to American by a ship called the Mount Vernon and spent time in San Francisco for a day or two.

It was good, great. It was only about, it might have only been a couple of hundred of us. And there was

Australian war brides who had married Americans who were going back to live in the States. You know, it was good. We didn’t have to do any work much and about 15 days of just pure pleasure.

Not on that ship, no. Later on I did but I’ll tell you about that later. We got to San Francisco and had a couple of days there and then they put us on a train and went to New York right across by

train. That was about a six day trip.

Lovely. Lovely city.

Mmm.

Well I think we were all

looking forward to it. We went, we didn’t see any land at all on the whole journey across. We went straight across and I think the blokes were all bit tired after being on that ship for that long.

I don’t know. I think we just ate and drank milkshakes and things like that. We had a little bit of duty. Some people had to do a bit of KP [kitchen police] duty. That’s kitchen police, and the Yanks were spud barbers. They had to peel spuds and had to do a

bit of sentry duty but basically very little we had to do.

We were sleeping in I think three-tier-high bunks below deck a bit, from memory.

No I don’t think so. I think it was… This ship had been an

American passenger cruiser before the war. It used to run down the west coast of America and of course the navy took it over and they made it the USS Mount Vernon. No, I think it was… I just can’t remember. It certainly wasn’t big dormitories. I think they were small spaces but I think they had three high bunks.

No. No, they were kept well apart.

It wasn’t any concern. Strangely enough I can remember the day we got on the ship the American sailors were loading all the luggage and stuff onto the ship and they were a bit cheesed off with us going to the

States and them still stuck there. And I remember one of the guys yelled out, “We’ll look after your girls, Aussies!” And one of the blokes on the decks sang back, “And we’ll look after yours, Yanks!”

But that was quite a nice trip although it was a bit long without seeing any land. And the trip across the States was quite good too. Long, but we stopped at a lot of places for an hour here and there

and that was great. And whenever you would stop the American Red Cross would be there with coffee and cigarettes. We had the works.

Mmm.

There were other troops on board but I can’t remember now, but we had our own carriages

and every carriage had a waiter attached to it. He’d look after your carriage and you would have to allot someone every day to go and get the meals and bring them down and eat in the carriage.

Yeah, great.

I can’t remember. There was all us airmen and there must have been a couple of hundred of us and obviously there must have been others troops on board. It was a troop train. A troop train that you sleep on at night. You pull your bed down and you sort of… We stopped at every, at most of the big cities going across for a

couple of hours. Just long enough to get out and stretch your legs a bit. I think it was about six days and five nights or something like that. Very interesting.

Well the first time I ever saw snow was in Chicago. It was quite a change, yeah. It was lovely, you know, to

see all the trees that didn’t have their leaves and it was just very nice. A trip I wouldn’t have missed for quids you know.

It wasn’t any trouble. We were young and well rugged up.

No, nothing like that. We were a bit too old for that.

Well, as I say, well in New York we spent a bit of time there. Chicago was only a couple of hours sort of thing but just a big city. In New York we spent… We had two different stints in New York. We arrived there and they had what they called the Air Force Club or the Airmen’s Club and we got off the train and they said, “Tonight you have been allotted to a place called…” – myself and mate

particularly – “a Council Club that was in 76th Street.” So we got a cab and we got to the destination and my mate said, “How much is it?” and the taxi driver said, “Two dollars,” and we gave him the exact money and he abused us. He said, “You guys ought to know that this goes to the boss. We live on tips,” and he really abused us. The next day we went out to the place where we were going to stay for a few, little bit

longer. A place called Fort Slocum near New Rochelle. Have you heard of New Rochelle? In 1945 it was an old song. So that was sort of our base and we were given leave for about a week and we went down to New York and saw all the sights. The Statue of Liberty and all those sorts of things. Then we had to report back and they said, “Right, that’s it, you are off now. No more leave.

You are off to England.” So they put us on a boat and took us down the Hudson River and we looked at the ship and it’s called the Ile de France, which was one of the big French liners in the prewar years. We got on that and they left us on that for two or three days and never sailed. We understand that it was taken out in the middle of the stream because the engine room had been set afire. And the Americans that were sailing on it, they weren’t given any leave at all and they were sort of objecting.

So they put it back into wharf and we got off and went back to camp and another week’s leave. So we went to the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] and enquired about going to live with an American family. There was a great list of people who wanted Australian airmen so we went to a place in New Jersey called Glen Ridge and we stayed a few days with this family and they did everything for us. We had beautiful meals and cigarettes

provided and parties and all this sort of stuff. And we went to the pictures one afternoon and got up at interval and the woman who was sitting in front of us said, “Oh, Australians! I haven’t seen an Australian for years!” Apparently she was on the way across the Atlantic when war broke out and she never got back to Australia. She said, “What about coming around to my place? I’ll send my husband around to pick you up. Where are you staying?”

So she got all the neighbours in and everything to meet the Australian airmen. So anyhow our leave finished and we went back to Fort Slocum and they said, “Right, you are off this time.”

Yeah. We saw two of the famous bands, Tommy Dorsey. You’ve probably heard of him,

no doubt, and his brother Jimmy Dorsey. They had a pretty big orchestra. Yes, it was fascinating.

I think one was what they call the Paramount Theatre in New York now and the Roxy, and they were sort of, even though they were brothers they were sort of rivals in the… But they were the ones. Tommy Dorsey of course introduced Frank Sinatra in his original days.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Well strangely enough they were very warm to us, but a lot of them used to read ‘Australia’ and think it was Austria and they would say, “You speak English very well. How long have you been here?”

Of course, yeah, but anyhow some of the fellows when they used to ask about things. I remember one particular person stopped me on the street and he said, “I’ve got a friend Bill Smith and he lives in

Melbourne. Do you think you would know him at all?” because they used to think Australia was just a little tiny country and everyone knew everyone else. And blokes used to kid them along and say we had kangaroos pulling the trams along the streets and this rubbish. But they were good, the Americans, very warm. We went to a party. We were there on New Year’s Eve 1943 and all the Australians, there was about ten of us had to get up

on the stage – it was a party at the YMCA – and sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and that was the usual thing with the Yanks. Waltzing Matilda had to be sung.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Well that was the cheapest place to stay. If you weren’t at Fort Slocum you spent a few nights at the YMCA and we would eat our breakfast on what they call the automat.

Have you heard of the automat? It was like a big thing and you put your coin in the thing and you would pull your breakfast out. That was in the early days before they came out here.

No problem I don’t think, from memory.

Oh, well. Couldn’t have been better.

Their name was Abbott, I can remember it quite well, and they had a son in the US Navy. They said, “Right that’s his wardrobe. If you want to use anything out of it and just put on civvies [civilian clothing], do so.” We didn’t have to spend a penny they were so generous.

People used to put their names with places like the YMCA and that and they would be host to visiting servicemen.

It was a sort of upper-class area. They had lovely big homes and everything. This fellow we stayed with, Abbot, I think he was in the fruit importing business. Obviously pretty wealthy sort of people.

Well we didn’t really see much more of the town. I remember

going to the movies and I think we went to a little dance there but we didn’t sort of walk around the town or anything like that.

Quite a few did. There was a bit of a, they were sort of anti-black in New York, of course, and we were getting in a bus once and this fellow was sitting down there with his homburg hat on and this sort of thing, and my mate

went to speak to one of these coloured guys and he said, “Don’t have anything to do with them.” The blacks used to sit down the back of the bus and the whites used to sit down the front. There was a lot of class distinction in that respect.

Yes it did. We certainly didn’t have anything like that, not in my experience with Aboriginals or anything.

I think that visit to New Jersey.

No I didn’t, unfortunately. I should have, but things went by.

There was two of us stayed with that particular family and his mates stayed with another family.

The dentist fellow that I am sort of corresponding with at the moment. We certainly come together again after all these years.

Well it was rumoured to have been sabotaged and they took us off.

Well they were going down, they were being sent across to Europe without having had a disembarkation leave or embarkation leave

and they were pretty annoyed about that and I think that was the rumour. We don’t know if that was true or not but that was certainly the case.

We knew that we were going to England. That was in

January. We left New York on 1 January 1944 and the troopship was reputed to have close to 15,000 people on board. When we went back to Fort Slocum they said, “Right, you are leaving now,” and they put us on board the Queen Elizabeth. That was the biggest ship afloat of course in those days and that’s where we went, and we had a very comfortable cabin. It hadn’t even been a passenger service prior to the war, and the US

government had taken it over. And we travelled six to a cabin and our own bathroom and the whole works. All the Yanks were there by the thousands and double bunking and their trip wasn’t like ours.

Yes we did but it was very rough seas. Just about everyone on board was sick it was so bad. A ship that size, 85,000 ton, being tossed around like a cork in the ocean.

I was. There were so many people on board they only had two meals a day, and for breakfast there would be three sittings. The first one would be at 6.00, 7.00 and 8.00 because there were so many to feed. But anyhow we got there.

Queue up for meals, I don’t know. We might have played a little bit of cards of some sort. Poker or something like that. Nothing particularly

exciting.

It was, yeah. It wasn’t nice. You couldn’t go anywhere without the smell of vomit and stuff. But the Queen Elizabeth travelled by herself, of course. You have probably been told a lot of these things. She couldn’t go in a convoy. And just off, I think it was off Greenland or Iceland, we got a

call on the loudspeaker to say that everyone should be advised to sleep fully clothed as the ship, the heating system was failing. I found out years later that a submarine had been discovered in that particular area by a bloke that I knew. He was a wireless operator on a Liberator on the coast and they had picked this up, and strangely enough it was on that particular crossing that we were on and he was flying that night too.

It used to zigzag every few minutes to keep the…

It was a furphy, yeah.

We had a pretty good air Bomber Command and what their losses were. Pretty horrific.

Oh yeah, but not worried about it.

I don’t know. I don’t think you worry too much at that age. I was still only about 19 then I think. And so we had quite an eventful trip in that respect and that took us about six days the crossing.

He was probably about 12 months.

He had trained in Canada and he had been, he went across on the Queen Mary. When I arrived in England he was at the operational training unit so he had started his operational flying in early June ’44 about a week or so before D Day.

We arrived at Gourack in Scotland. I’m never sure if it’s Grenock or Gourack. They are both close together, but I think it was Gourack. We arrived there and went by train to Brighton.

No, straight onto the train through to Brighton via London.

You could see nothing. It was all blacked out. All the windows were blacked out and everything. I think that took us about… We got on the train about 6.00 in the afternoon and we arrived in Brighton about 6.00 the next morning. It was more or less an overnight trip.

Have you been to Brighton?

No.

Well Brighton was… Originally we were billeted in a hotel called, not the Grand. I can’t think of any of it. Anyway we went to the Grand Hotel after that. The original one was condemned so they said, “Right, you are going to go to the Grand.” Apparently Margaret Thatcher was there when it was bombed years ago. And we spent a fair bit of time in Brighton doing virtually nothing and just waiting for our initial posting to our first school.

Well we used to hear every night there was an air-raid siren go off and you had to go right down into the basement of the hotel, and then they would go off again and off you would go again to your bed. It was almost a nightly occurrence.

Oh yeah, they were still going through to London but had eased off quite a bit in those days as far as the damage they were doing.

No, I don’t think so. I don’t remember any bomb damage

because they had a lot of coastal guns around that area to get them as they came across.

Well again, not too worried. The school was in Brighton and we spent a bit of time there. We only formed up in the morning and had the roll call and then you would be off for a couple of hours. And you would have morning tea somewhere along

and then you would come back and have lunch and call the roll again and off you’d go again for the afternoon. It was really only a holiday while you were waiting until they eventually caught up with us. And they gave us a bit of training.

No, no. That was all right. That was never any problem.

You would have a few drinks

here and there but I used to go skating almost every night because there was a big skating rink and I got a bit keen on ice skating. It was a massive thing. And you would have a drink after every few rounds of the rink and stop and have a drink on the side. Have you ever been? It’s probably gone. It mightn’t be there now but.

No, I didn’t have anything to do much I think. I don’t know why.

Oh yes, yes. I had a leave in London there with my brother. He had already seen me in Brighton. He came down to visit me there and then we met in London again, and I think once more and that was about the last time I ever saw him.

I didn’t spend that much time there. You know, just visited the usual things like Westminster Abbey and places like that. A couple of museums and that’s about it. And I know she was pretty well knocked around but it was an exciting place just the same.

There was a lot of air-raid shelters, of course. Coming back, I came back from my first leave, which I went up to Birmingham. Would you like me to tell you about that?

When you got to England the first thing they say is, “You are going to have a bit of leave. Where would you like to go?” and I said, “I think the Midlands is probably as good as anything.” So I went to a place in Birmingham,

out of Birmingham just outside Stratford. So I got to Birmingham and spent the night there and they said, “Now, would you like a bath?” and I said, “Oh yeah.” And this woman brought a dish of water out to have a bath in. They didn’t have too many showers in those days. So then I set off the next morning to my host, who was Mr and Mrs Eales, and they had a daughter, Connie. I had to get out of the train at this place

and I had the address as Ashley Green Lane, Grimes Hill, Birmingham, England. So I get out of the train and I’m walking down the road and this woman has come out riding a bicycle with a shopping basket on top of it. You know, typical English, so she stopped me and said, “Are you the Australian? Are you Alan Smith?” and I said, “Yes.” And she said, “I’m Mrs Eales. You are going to stay with me.” I found out later on that she rang her daughter, who was only about 16,

who was working in Birmingham and she said, “Our guest, the Australian, has arrived and guess what? He’s white!” So anyhow I had a couple of leaves there and they looked after me pretty well.

Just out of the blue, yeah.

Where they lived?

Very nice. Just typical suburban sort of. They might have

been three or four miles out of Birmingham itself and not a bad little place from what I saw of it. We went to Stratford, visited Stratford. I corresponded with those people through the war.

Well that was virtually my only chance I had to stay with anyone. They seemed to be doing all right. They ate all right.

Of course everything was highly rationed in the food line and clothing line and things like that but.

From what I can remember we just ate normal, adequate meals. I wasn’t there that long. I only stayed a couple of days.

No. I don’t remember doing that at all. But they were

a nice family.

I think we went to the movies, from memory, and the air-raid siren went and I jumped up, of course, not having experienced as much. And he said, “Don’t worry, that goes on all the time.” We did a bit of sightseeing and a bit of drinking.

Oh yeah, but it was becoming

less than it had been previously. We stayed at the Strand Palace Hotel, I know that. Have you been to The Strand?

The Strand. In those days it was pretty reasonable.

Well there was probably Australians in the minority. Of course it was full of Americans and things like that. And we used to eat at Australia House, which is on the Strand. They used to have pictures and things and I remember being on the queue with Mr Bruce, the high commissioner I think he was at the time, in London. He was in the queue in front of me to get something to eat.

It was a fascinating place.

I just had the feeling that they were a little bit resentful of us. We were still colonials and this sort of thing but no real problems. I think they were pleased to see us. But I think the Brits always had a little bit of jealousy towards the Australians for some reason or other. I think we were better paid than they were.

I don’t think we paid for anything like that, no. We travelled by train. I can’t remember paying anything. It was too long ago.

It wouldn’t have been more than two months. So they, then they shifted us up and the first course we did in England was at a place called Whitley Bay in Cumberland near Newcastle and it was an aircrew, NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] toughing up battle school sort of thing where you played soldiers. Bang, bang, you are dead sort of thing. That was quite good. That was a cold place right on the North Sea.

That’s right. Escaping, escape practice and that sort of thing. If you were shot down, how you would manage to escape and how to avoid the enemy and…

I think we had sides. Some were the Germans and some of us were British Commonwealth and you would have to sort of simulate escapes hiding behind bushes and shooting someone. That was about

a month. Toughening up. A bit of physical training and stuff like this. But we lived in a cottage and it was about 5 minutes from where the mess was, which was an old, big old English castle type place. I think it was called The Priory and you would go there for your meals and type of things. We lived in a little cottage a mile or so away from it.

But that was cold! Boy! Even the Canadians thought it was cold!

Yeah. So that was the first course and then back to Brighton.

The Geordies? We managed. We didn’t have a lot to do with civilians really. Do you know Newcastle?

You’ve probably been to most of England, have you?

Well Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians. Mostly dominion air forces.

They were very few I think. I didn’t strike a lot of South Africans at all. No.

I take it you don’t like South Africans. You ought to come and live in St Ives.

They called it aircrew and NCOs toughing up school, yeah.

Yeah, that’s right. We went back to Brighton again and then we got posted to another place to do what they call a radio school. That was just a few hours flying on the small aircraft.

I think they were Dominy, was one of them. DH [DeHavilland] Dragon. And we did a bit of flying on that and a bit of flying on some of the smaller stuff. One was a Proctor. Just a bit of local sending backwards and forwards to base.

To a place called Yeatsbury in Wiltshire and I think Stonehenge is fairly close to there.

Yeah, just air to ground communication.

And then, do you want me to keep going?

Then we got posted up to Scotland to do what they call an advance flying unit. It’s getting towards the later stage of the training that we would be doing, so we did that on Avro Ansons for about a month.

Mainly flying, we used to fly out over Ireland, Northern Ireland, and back to Scotland and again just transmitting, transmitting and receiving messages.

About their experiences? I don’t think, it’s not

particularly strong in my memory sort of thing. I don’t think there was anyone who told us we’d be sorry or any of this.

No. No. We were up there doing this. We were destined for Bomber Command. That’s what this… AFU [Advanced Flying Unit] was advanced training for Bomber Command and they said, “Right, we are short for a few people for Coastal Command. Would anyone like to volunteer for it?” So quite a few of us put

our finger up, our hand up, and we were one of the ones that were allowed, won the toss sort of thing.

At AFU, yeah.

I think because we started to think then that coastal was probably a bit safer than Bomber Command. I don’t really know, but Coastal Command seemed to be a bit better than Bomber Command in respect that

it was a bit choosy, selective sort of thing, but we only just put it that we had that opinion. It might have been. So anyhow we got it and we were one of about four people I think in that particular group that went on to coastal, so we went on to do another school at a place called Huyton Park. That was down in near Liverpool, near Chester.

We had to learn to do

radar there. We’d never had radar before and ASV – air to service vessel. So we also had that extra part on our wireless so we had that training and we did a bit of flying there but mainly radar operating stuff on an aircraft called Boffer. Have you ever heard of Boffers? Crystal Boffers. And Ansons were the other ones.

When I was at West Frew. He was killed on 17 June 1944. A couple of weeks after D Day he was killed on a raid over to France. They were doing a raid of railway marshalling yards, I think it was. They were the only aircraft lost that night.

115.

An RAF…

Lancasters.

I was informed with a telegram. The first telegram you get says, “We regret to inform you that your brother Ian Harrison Smith is missing in air operations on the such and such.” That’s the preliminary one. Then the next one you get is the presumed dead. So you get generally three,

three notifications.

I’d been given as the next of kin when he went to England. I was the next of kin and I happened to be there also.

Well, naturally, shocked. You don’t sort of think of a member of your family going down like that

although we knew the bomber time was pretty dicey. They lost a lot in the bomber units. But strangely enough, no-one seems to know clearly what happened. Whether they were shot down or it was ground fire or a fighter or engine failure or what it was. We got some accounts later on from French people in the village near where they crashed that they heard this aircraft going down and the engines screaming and

just plummeted into the ground. The whole crew were killed straight out, of course.

No. No. In fact they were all buried in a communal grave in France and they had a funeral. In fact most of the people in the little town turned up for the funeral you know. I don’t think they were too sure at that stage who they were. So a Frenchman picked up one of my brother’s discs, you know the identification discs, and of course they knew then who the crew were and the names of them.

There were three Australians in the crew. There was a crew of seven, I think, and four Australians.

He had only flown about four or five. We’ve got his logbook still. I got that back. Yeah, he was about four, I think.

No I don’t think so, I don’t think so. I wasn’t exactly shaking in my boots about things. I think I was just taking things as they come. It didn’t have an overall frightening effect on me. At that stage we were still destined for Bomber Command and it was after that. It might have changed my mind as far as putting in for Coastal Command.

No, I think they had all that in records. They packed it all up and sent it home to my parents in that respect.

Well later on. Initially my brother’s father,

who was a doctor – skipper, rather, who was a doctor at Burwood, went over and he went to the town and got all the details from the village of what happened and pictures and all that. Then my brother went over. He was a dentist in London for a while. He went over and visited the place and they were that good the mayor even put them up overnight so they could… Then David, my son, went over and he took photographs, so we have got a bit of information about it.

It’s a place called Montdidier. They were doing a raid on this town and I think, I can’t think where. We’ve got the records of where the grave is and all that.

North of Paris. I would have to get David to check exactly because I haven’t been there. I think it’s only a little, fairly small war cemetery that they are buried in.

But prior to that, my cousin, who was very close – we grew up together – he was also killed in… He was flying Spitfires on Malta and he was only killed about six months before. He was in the photograph reconnaissance unit and he was shot down, so that was the two of them that we lost.

They used to get them when they were coming in to land because they had to come in fairly long and get a long approach to Malta, and the Germans used to sit in the sun and cop them as they were coming in. We never knew exactly. They never ever found him or anything.

He was my cousin. My mother’s sister’s son.

It was just like a screen like a TV [television] screen. I can’t remember. You get like a blip sort of thing. You get almost a full picture of the coastline, and in fact you didn’t really need radio later on because we had such a good picture of where we were any messages you would send to base were when, the expected time of arrival back, and but all of the flying was virtually done with the radar screen.

I just can’t remember the knobs you used to turn and that sort of thing. And if we were hunting the shipping or anything like that we would get the blips out on the water and the coast over here and the blips out there, but I can’t recall the method of operation exactly. You would have to tune it in.

Yeah, you knew exactly where you were.

It was.

Yeah. Well Bomber Command had the radar This radar was the ASV, the air to service vessel. Bomber Command had what they called H2S, which is a similar sort of thing but was modified for the bomber, or the other way around.

That was about a month’s course, too, I think.

So that was the last course we did in England.

How to operate it. How to maintain it and how to operate it, and I can’t remember if we did any exercises with shipping or not. I just can’t recall that part of it but it was the operation and manipulation.

Well by this time we were flight sergeants. Six months after becoming a sergeant you were automatically promoted to flight sergeant. Time off would be where I met a nice little girl, actually. I nearly married her. That was one of my romances of the war years.

That was near Chester. She lived near Chester and so I spent a bit of time

with her. A bit of time sightseeing, generally. A bit of time drinking. Not too much time drinking.

We wrote for a while and by the stage I had volunteered for Coastal Command I hadn’t met her at all and it was too late then to sort of change, so we were on our way.

And you soon, we used to write every day, believe it or not, and when we were on our way from Liverpool to the Middle East, and strangely enough we used to… I got called up to the census office on the ship and he said, “I don’t know if you’ve got this letter going to the right person are you? You are not married or anything, are you?” and I said, “No”. We used to call each

other husband and wife on things and he said, “That’s all right, I just didn’t want it to go to the wrong place.” That was on a ship called the Monica Bermuda so that was the last… That sort of fizzled out and I was never able to re-establish contact. She probably met someone else and that was it. That’s life.

Well not particularly. I guess it was a change of scenery sort of thing and I don’t think I was terribly absorbed with the idea of it. It was a pretty uneventful trip out.

Fairly uneventful.

I forget how long it took us now. A few days. We went through the Suez [Canal] and landed at Port Said.

Well Port Said was a place near Cairo. A place called Heliopolis. Scenery was mainly desert except for some of the spots like the Pyramids

and some of the other historic sites.

Yeah, I got a look at the Pyramids. Fantastic! Massive! Actually I… Little kids in Cairo always used to shine your shoes. The place was lousy with shoeshine boys and guides. You know, the guides would come up and, “I knew an Aussie back here. He’s in the 6th Division and his name

was Joe Blow. Does he recommend me?” and all this sort of business. You had to go and smell all the perfumes and they would try to sell you carpets and this sort of thing. but this little kid threatened to pour, I knocked him back on a shoeshine and he threatened to pour the liquid boot polish over me. We went out to the Pyramids and the little kids were very tough. We were riding the horses around the Pyramids and

he said he wanted a tip and I said that I’d give it to him later. He said, “No, you will give it to me now.” He threatened to pull me off the horse! But the Pyramids were interesting and a couple of other sites around Cairo.

Oh no. I think I bought a watch there because they were always trying to sell you watches and this type of thing and you would always haggle them and this sort of thing. The first price mentioned you wouldn’t

be interested in.

We were welcomed at the New Zealand Club. They had taken over a big building there just for New Zealanders and Australians and I’m allowed to tell you a funny incident that happened. I met a friend of mine that I lived on the same street with and he was coming back from Italy and I met him. We jumped on this gharry. Do you know what a gharry is?

It’s a four-wheel sort of thing like a carriage and the driver sits up the front. And he said, “Where to?” and we said, “The New Zealand Club.” They were always trying to rip you off, these Arabs, and Paul said to me, “When we get to the outside of the New Zealand Club, have you got any change there?” and I said, “I got a few akkers [piastres].” He said, “Give them to me. When we stop outside the New Zealand Club I’ll give this to the driver and you just follow me and race into the New Zealand Club,” which we did.

The bloke jumped out of the carriage and he chased us. A couple of guards just put their rifles across the door and said, “Sorry, you can’t come in here.” But that was only because they rip us off a trillion, you know.

Yeah, but Cairo is a sort of fascinating city.

No. Not at all.

Yeah, there were a lot of New Zealanders. They were mainly fighting in Italy. They were either coming or going from Italy. They were one of the main army forces in Italy, in the Italian campaign.

In Cairo? Recreation.

Another incident in Cairo we went to a dance and there was a big dance so a group of us decided we would like to go to this. There were a couple of officers amongst us. One was a flight lieutenant, I think, and they didn’t want to let us in. I think we had a few grogs and they said, “You can’t come in here.” They were English Red Caps. You know, the corporal Military Police. And this officer guy, he said, “We are coming in.” So anyway we got

in and went to the dance and why we were dancing there someone dropped a brick from the mezzanine floor. They had obviously tried to put us off sort of thing, but that was a little bit of mischief we got up to in Cairo. Generally we were pretty peaceful.

No, except they would always want to sell their sister. They would say, “Clean Syrian bint [girl], clean Syrian bint.” But no, I wasn’t interested but there was a lot of it around though.

No, not there.

Never ever told me. No-one ever told me.

Yeah. Well we were based at this little place just out of Cairo. It was right on the desert and we were really living out of canvas. And because you would go into Cairo… It’s only a matter of a few days really.

Yeah. We caught a sort of a tram. It was like a very fast tram that would take us into Cairo

and spend the day there and probably get a cab back, back to the camp again. So that’s about the end of Cairo I think.

The next thing was on the train to Jerusalem. That was a cattle train you went. We didn’t have seats or anything. They had big sliding doors like you see on cattle trains and the old sand gushing in and your hair

was full of sand. That took us, I can’t remember how long that took. It seemed to be one complete day. So we were going to Jerusalem waiting for a posting to another training unit. A lot of time was taken up training with aircrew. You seemed to wonder if they couldn’t do it all in a week or so.

Oh no.

This time we had landed. We finished our training in Australia in about October ’43 and we were almost up to the end of ’44 now, so almost 12 months. And we got to Jerusalem and they put us in billets there because the ex German hospital where we were sort of billeted. We had a couple of lectures while we were there.

Well it was an RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force], sort of. They had taken over this old building in Jerusalem and that was interesting except there was a gang operating called the Stern Gang. In those days Britain had control over Palestine and they used to object to, all the police there were British Military Police. In face one was within earshot of where we were

and you could hear the shots ring out as they shot the Deputy Commissioner of Police.

Well they used to operate at night-time. We were told not to go out alone. We had to go out in groups of two or three people sort of thing just in case. If you were alone you could be a target for attack.

Against British rule, yeah.

They were Jewish, mainly Jewish people who were the Stern Gang.

Lots to see, naturally, being a biblical place. We visited Bethlehem and we visited the Mount of Olives. We rode donkeys up to the Mount of Olives and rode into the Garden of Gesthemane where Jesus was and went to the Dead Sea and all

the, most of the sights. The Station of the Cross in the old city of Jerusalem. Have you been there? No. Saw most of the things you should see in a place like that.

Oh yeah. Most of them you would, some of them there wasn’t any doubt about them. It was reputed to be that such and such happened here.

Yeah, lots of little shops. Little coffee shops and things. Actually just after we left there, there is a hotel in Jerusalem called the King David which was being used as a YMCA and that was blown up by Stern Gang people later on.

Not a lot.

No, you mostly stick to your own guys most of the time.

There wasn’t any problem. It wasn’t as though they resented you or anything. It was just no worries at all that I can recall.

Wherever you went it was there, especially in uniform there was no question about that. We visited Tel Aviv while we were there. That was a nice spot. Lovely beach sort of resort. Something like Bondi with a promenade and that. That also was offered there for the taking but we spent about a week there I think. Again

as pure as the driven snow.

Just to save you going there again.

You want something interesting?

Now we left Jerusalem to go to an operational training unit

at a place called Einshemer. That’s where we formed up our crew. Who was going to be our pilot, navigator, gunner, wireless operator.

Yes. They were all posted just as individuals and you just got together sort of thing. The other two WAGs I knew because I had trained with them right through from initial training school,

and this fellow Hamilton, who was one of the pilots there for the offering. One of my friends said, “Would you like us to be in your crew? The three of us were mates from way back.” He said, “That would be great.” There was no, “Show us your qualifications,” or anything like this if they thought you sounded all right. The captain had the final say and that was it. You trained

together for the rest of your time.

Once we arrived there.

More or less from that time onwards you started flying together.

We just did it on the spot.

Yeah, yeah. “That sounds fine to me,” so that was it. We all met each other and I don’t think we had met the captain or the first captain or the officer or the navigator at that stage, but from then on you were together.

Sure. Now the captain was a fellow called John Hamilton.

He lives up in Tenterfield. He went to school with Peter Allen’s father I think. He is now about 83 and he’s very active up there. He’s been involved in building nursing homes and all that sort of business. He’s starting to lose his memory a little bit, I understand. I haven’t spoken to him for a little while, but he was our captain and he was the eldest member of our crew in those days.

Then?

He would have been around 23. Pretty young by the same token. Our second officer was a fellow called Thomas Johnson from Queensland. I forget where he came from. He might have been older than the skipper, Hamilton. Tom Johnson

from Queensland. Then we come to the navigator who was a fellow called… Do you want their names? John Griegs from Adelaide I think, or Melbourne. John might have been a little bit older. About 36, 37 too. Then we come to the next first wireless operator, Jack Powers, who’s a friend of mine. I’ve had a little bit to do with him lately. He’s a little bit older than me.

Six months. He lives at Randwick and he did his, he was a dentist. He did dentistry after the war and then retired a few years ago. Then myself, I’m from Bondi, and a fellow called George Farrow who was a bit older. I think I was the youngest in the crew at that stage. Farrow might have been a little bit older and is now dead.

To my knowledge all the rest of them are still alive. That was the crew.

I think so, yeah. We never had any squabbles. The captain never had to go crook on us and we seemed to do the job all right.

Oh yeah, yeah ,

particularly with the NCOs. They officers, they were in a different mess than we were. We were in the sergeants’ mess and we were getting to the stage of being promoted to warrant officer soon, the four of us. But in those days they started to make all the pilots commissioned officers. In the earlier days they weren’t necessarily commissioned. They were just ordinary pilots and whether you were first pilot or second pilot you would still get a commission.

It’s a bit harder for other aircrew.

Mmm.

Operational training exercises. I’ve got my logbook there. Do you want me to get it or not? They were designed for different aircrew.

Well, wireless operator, radar operator and rear gunner.

We only had one gun turret on the Wellingtons.

Well probably the rear gunner had the least to do. I think, I can’t remember having any preference of one over the other. We just had to take our turns.

The wireless operator probably had a harder role because he had to send messages back to base and receive messages from base so he had more than the average exercise. So I think he was the hardest worker but I wasn’t too worried about that. Nothing to comment on.

What aircraft?

Wellingtons. I think we had a couple of trips earlier in Avro Ansons and then on to Wellingtons.

Good old aeroplane. Had a good name throughout the war. The ones we were flying were the later models. Some of the earlier ones used to have a bad crash record but they got better in the later years. We didn’t come in until the last few months of the war in Europe.

Yeah. Dorothy’s brother was also a rear gunner. He was a bit behind me but he never got onto operations. He arrived at OT [operational training] training

and it was sort of all over. So that was getting towards the end of it. I think I would like to have a go after all that training we’d done. It would have been a pity to miss out.

OTU. Probably five or six weeks. Again it’s in the book but I can’t

quite remember. It wasn’t long.

Next thing is a overseas, over to Italy and so we set off from Einshemer and back to Cairo by train I think. Most of the transport was by train then and we took off from a place called Payne Field in Cairo.

Flew to Benghazi. You’ve probably heard of Benghazi in the war history of the army. It was on a DC3 or B47 as the Americans call them. It’s like a sort of transport aircraft just to go across the Mediterranean Sea took us about… We had to land in Malta on the way and went to Italy. We spent a night in Malta.

Well it’s a very seemed to be all brick and concrete and there is no open fields much like you would expect to see in other places. Sort of underground. A lot of places are built underground and as I say we only landed there and had one night there.

I think we were the only crew going with that. There might have been another one

going at the same time as us.

458.

Not at all. Not at all. Except that I found out that they had a bit of history in the desert. They had operated in the desert and they were in Greece and I think Sicily and a few of those places, but that was only a very

short stint with them.

We arrived at, we were supposed to arrive at Bari but it was snowed over so they flew us over the other side to Naples and we landed there and that was pouring with rain too. It was very wet.

We went into the city, yes. The billets were a bit out of Naples but

a couple of us I think we walked into Naples. Starvation was terrible then. When we came out of the mess they would all be there with their plates to get the scraps and things like that. People were starving around there so we…

No I didn’t. We saw Vesuvius from a distance but as I say we were only there for more overnight and next day I think.

Oh yeah. Very bad. Even the little kids would be outside the mess waiting to get the scraps that were left over. So after a day or so in Naples we choofed off by truck to a place called Foggia which is about the middle or over towards the west side, east side of Italy

where we joined the squadron 458.

Foggia is a fairly big city but we were based in an old paper mill a few miles out of the town. That was just walking around in the slush all the time. It was so wet, the rains were so heavy and that, and all the windows in the building had been blown out just by the fire,

German fire or Allied, and to keep warm we used to make these little four gallon drums in our room with a tube full of petrol going out the window and we would light them up and you’d cook your toast or beans or something on them. That was a bit tough there. Foggia was nice. We used to go to the town and we’d see, the Americans used to have shows on that you could go to free like the USO [United Services Organization].

Have you heard of the USO – the United Services Organization? An American services organisation and they had stage shows and things. You would just pop in. I remember two particularly that I saw two or three times. One was, ‘Ark Our Cooking’ I think it was called and it was this fellow called DRT and his all-girl orchestra. American orchestra, yeah. All that sort of thing. It was all for nothing. You didn’t pay anything. You could go to operas or anything else that was

on for next to nothing.

Oh yeah, yeah.

They were wild boys.

I remember being in this theatre seeing this show and they came in and these blokes, all these condoms starting to float around. They had all been blown up and they were floating around the air in the theatre

and we didn’t have a lot to do with them though.

Yeah, no troubles. They were operating from Foggia too. There were quite a few squadron operating from that aerodrome. There were fighter squadron and Liberators and so forth. Wellingtons.

Not to sort of socialise with or anything.

Most of them didn’t speak English anyhow.

Not as bad as Naples. Foggia was more… Naples was a much bigger city of course. It wasn’t evident to me in Foggia. Again, we didn’t see it or have a hell of a lot to do with the civilians. Just to the base and to where we

had our quarters.

That’s right. The troops were pretty well established there by that stage, the air force and army. The Yanks of course they were fighting the main battle in Italy under Marcus Clarke

and the New Zealanders under Freyberg I think was their general, so we were the very few Australians that were in Italy. There was no Australian Army there. Only air force.

At this paper mill there would have been

probably just about five or six of us.

I think it was palliasses. Do you know of the palliasse? Yeah, well I think it was palliasses from memory, but it was pretty rugged. Very basic.

The mud was all there of course, and knee deep almost. We weren’t there long.

The mess? I can’t recall, actually. I can’t recall the mess really. No. It just escapes me. It was probably pretty basic and not too inspiring otherwise I would remember it.

We didn’t undertake any training at all

at 458. I think I did one hour’s flying in about three weeks and then the word came through that they had too many crews. There was three too many crews so the latest ones, which included us, were dropped and we had to join an RAF squadron which was coming over to take their place, coming over from Greece. The 458 left

to go to Gibraltar then and left us behind, so from then on we were 38 Squadron.

No, not really. We knew they would eventually be going back to England, 458, but I wouldn’t have minded going back there but that didn’t happen so we joined 38 and spent the rest of our war years with them.

Oh no.

The main squadron was there but we were a flight detachment and we were spent to a place called Rosignano up on the Tuscany near, have you heard of Leghorn, Livorno. Leghorn. That’s virtually where we were based for the rest of the war then. We hardly ever went to Foggia except once or twice just to sort of take an aircraft or something like that

but basically we were based at this Rosignano.

Quite a way north. Right up near Genoa. That’s where we were doing our operations up around that area. Right along that coastline as far as Genoa Bay and we were patrolling that area up…

Oh flying, I think it was about…

We flew, yeah. We were a detachment of flight crew sent there and eventually the main force of the squadron moved up there to from Foggia. Did I make that clear?

Rosignano. R-O-S-I-G-N-A-N-O, and Livorno was the place it was near. That was more of

a city. Leghorn, that’s in Tuscany.

We were under canvas there in tents and the women used to come around and they would do our washing for us and this sort of stuff and we would give them a packet of cigarettes. We had tons of cigarettes there in those days and they would do a load of washing for a packet of cigarettes. So

we did all right.

I think initially when we went up there there was only three or four crews, and eventually the other ones that were still at Foggia moved up.

It was very nice. It was very accessible. It was right on the coastline. It’s a beautiful

section of coast, northern coast which a top pleasure resort now. Places like Portofino and Genoa and almost right through to the coast of southern France. We would fly right along there and we visited Pisa and Florence and those places that were quite handy to us.

The mess was a tent and we slept in tents. I think three of us shared one tent, and the sergeants’ mess I think was a tent and the officers’. They were all tents. There was nothing there apart from tents, canvas.

So we operated from there for a while.

Yeah.

It had been a German airstrip but they had been pushed away from there north.

Yeah. It’s what they called a metal mesh runway.

They lay this stuff down and it’s like this metal with holes in it to make a quick airstrip rather than building them with concrete and stuff; it’s a fast way of doing it.

I think they just flattened the ground and then put this mesh down and let the aircraft land on that.

No, the ground is flat and then they just put the mesh on top of it.

It used to be bad on aircraft tyres. It used to rip them a little bit. But from that place it’s… We did a few operations from there mainly looking at the Germans. The Germans were moving up the coast as the British were approaching, the Allies I mean, and our job was to try and get them and sink them before they got too far.

The first one? I can’t remember exactly what it was on. It’s in the book. But I wasn’t very apprehensive or anything about it. I might have been a bit. But I think it might have been from memory uneventful. I can’t remember what job I was doing on that. I’ve got it there again but…

What’s it say there, Matt? I don’t think I was terribly apprehensive about it. I can’t recall.

I think we settled in pretty quickly and I don’t remember being overly nervous or apprehensive on

any of them because they were all a sort of adventure, you know. We didn’t get a lot of flak fired up at us and there wasn’t any fighters in the area or anything that were of any concern. So I think we handled it pretty well and we settled in pretty well. We all had our jobs to do and we had been fairly well trained. We sort of got to know each other a little bit

flying together.

I didn’t. A couple of my friends carried a St Christopher medal. I think I carried a St Christopher medal. We reckon he gave us, he was the patron saint of travel. A girlfriend of mine in Australia gave me one when I left and I think I wore that most of the war

but nothing, no shaving or anything like that. Nothing superstitious.

Yeah.

Yeah. He was a pretty easygoing bloke. He didn’t sort of, he didn’t go crook on anyone. Even the night when one of the guys

was having a smoke in the rear turret and we ditched 700 gallons of petrol. You could see the stuff flashing back past him and he still had his cigarette alight. He quickly put the cigarette out of course but I don’t think the skipper ever knew about it. But he was good. He was actually, he had done his training on single engine aeroplanes in Canada but it was pretty hard at that stage of the war to fly fighters. They were becoming a bit surplus

and they put them onto twin-engine aircraft, Wellies [Wellingtons] and… I never had an incident where he went crook at me. Perhaps he should have at times but.

It was an achievement, yes.

Yes. There is always a lot of ground crew. They reckon there is about 10 ground crew to every flyer, the various areas – engine fitters and armament fitters and all that. We didn’t have a lot to do with them but we put a lot of faith in them. That was about the 10:1 or something like that.

No you wouldn’t because you didn’t really have a lot to do with them. You didn’t have a lot in common except you were in the air force and…

I hope I can remember them.

They were built for what they call Leerlight work and they had a big searchlight in the middle of the fuselage. I forget how many candlepower but it was a hell of a lot, and the nose had a little blip on the nose for the radar

equipment and basically that was the only thing that separated them from an ordinary Wellington. They were painted white.

Yeah. On the fuselage. It was so big, about so wide.

Yeah I would say so from memory. About a metre. I haven’t got all that stuff. I didn’t actually learn it precisely.

It was powered by the electrical system I guess. It was like a, I don’t really know offhand the candlepower of it but it was quite a lot. It was powered by the aircraft’s electrical system I guess.

But it wasn’t on for long. It was never on for long. It would only be turned on for the run in and then turned off. It wasn’t on for long periods of time.

In the nose, yeah. You can’t see it in that picture.

Well I guess that we didn’t have the crew for that type of work. There was a front turret but it wasn’t mounted with guns or anything. I think it might have had space for

a free gun. If they wanted to mount a gun they could put it in, but it wasn’t a free gun like the rear gunner which had four .303 Brownings. But that was never used as a turret. I don’t think it was a turret. I think it was just an opening at the front that you could put guns in.

I can’t really answer that quite offhand.

I have an illustration of a Wellington upstairs.

Well the pilot, the radar operator. Well the two pilots would sit there and I think the wireless operator was behind them and the radar operator was behind that.

I think that’s the order they went in and of course the rear gunner down the back.

Well we would distribute, rotate the jobs, gunner, wireless operator and radar so we would rotate them around. There was no arguments. You would just do it that way and that was the accepted way of doing it.

No, no-one expressed that desire to my knowledge. You just took your turn on the various positions.

I think we carried mainly 250-pound bombs and depth charges sometimes.

It might have been eight or ten 250 pounders, so 2,500 thousand.

They would have been stored in the bomb bay too. It might have been a shortened bomb bay. I can’t really tell all these specs [specifications] I’m afraid. Well the radar, the Leerlight had to come down so it was probably forward of the Leerlight or behind it. I’m not sure on that.

It would drop a little bit down and tilt towards the front where it would throw the beam down. I’m not actually sure so you can’t take that as… I’m trying to remember what actually happened.

The navigator would operate that. He would tell the pilot the course to steer and as we were reaching the target he would let the light go down and turn it on and from very low altitude. Sometimes from two or three hundred feet.

Yeah, you would have that blip on your screen, on the radar screen

and then you would, you reckoned you were on it the light would go down and you would do a run on it, run in on it, and that was it. Most of the time it was fairly accurate. The radar was accurate until fairly close I think, but then it was sort of go visually.

Okay. We were given a, the exercise was just anti-shipping survey or what do they call it? Convoy. Not convoy, anti-shipping sortie, and you would be given an alternative target

and if you didn’t strike any shipping you would be given a place to bomb on land, a road or a fuel dump or something. But very often if you got a sighting on the radar screen you would use it because these German vessels used to stay pretty close to the coast. If they knew aircraft was there they would very often move into the coast and you would lose it on the screen and of course in this case we would have to

go and do the alternative target. But the pilot and navigator were the only two that were briefed. We knew where we were going and generally we were doing these operations up the coast and the wireless operator, the only thing he would send to start with was to tell the air staff that we were airborne. It’s what they call Q signalling. They would send a Q signal and say that we were airborne. Most of the rest of the time would be

radio silence. And the radar operator would take over and he would do the scan for the ship and so forth. The wireless operator would only, when we were due to come back, Q the base and tell them the estimated time of arrival. They generally say, “What time?” and he would make a bit of a guess. He could tell from the radar screen. You could see your base most of the time how far it was

away and it was reasonably accurate, his guesswork. But we would generally fly most of the time at night-time. Most of our operations were about five hours, four to five hours, and we would operate from base right around to as I mentioned before Portofino and Spezia and Genoa, all in that area, and

we would mainly hug the coast most of the time.

Well it was pretty well accepted what we were going to do anyhow. We would know just about exactly where we were going and the course we were going to do. The pilot might say we were going to do

the same coastal run and the alternative target was a coastal gun placement at such and such a place or a road. So that was about all we needed to know.

Yeah.

Yeah. You would have dinner when you came back too.

Very often an early morning breakfast around 2.00 or something like that and then you go to bed. I think we might have had bacon and eggs or something like that. It’s very hard to think looking back 60 years ago.

It was pretty nice weather at that time. We would wear our flying suit, just the outer of the flying suit. You had an inner suit

on and you had underwear and you had flying boots. So most of the time I think we would just wear the flying helmet, which had the intercom in the earpiece, and an outer suit and flying boots. We didn’t operate at a terribly high height, maybe 7–8,000 feet most of the time, so we didn’t need oxygen or there wasn’t any fear of frostbite or anything at that height.

Taking off you are supposed to turn the turret to the front taking off and landing in case you had to get out because the turret was a very confined space and if the aircraft crashed, the doors, there was only two little doors in the back, and they jammed you would be stuck in there,

but with them at the side you would be able to get out.

Out the back of the plane. I mean if it was on the ground crashed and you had to get out in a hurry. Of course if you had to parachute out it was a bit harder. Not that we ever had to. The parachute was stored in the main fuselage and all you wore in the main turret is the harness. So there are two types of chutes as you are probably aware. One is called an

observer chute, which all the crew wore bar the pilot. They wore a pilot’s chute, which they sat on, but the rest of the crew stowed their chute packs and just wore the harness. So if you had to get out of the plane in a hurry and you were the rear gunner you would have to turn the turret and get right into the fuselage, open the doors, get the pack, clip it on and jump. So it was…

I know. It wouldn’t be easy.

Well sometimes. If it’s on fire or it’s going down in flames you get out the best way you can. But there is no way you would get out and jump in cold blood. I wouldn’t anyhow. But I always thought it would be rather hard to get out because you couldn’t sit in a rear turret with a parachute pack on. It was too confined in that small space.

You were just sitting a metal seat. It’s only a little seat about half the size of this chair where you would probably sit for five or six hours. It got a bit uncomfortable, I can tell you.

I think it was reasonable. The guns had handles and things too. Between you and the guns

you’d have about that far so you would have a bit of room. You wouldn’t want to have arthritis or anything sitting there all that time.

You would just be scanning the skies, and fortunately we never had any fighter attacks. At that stage of the war it was starting to wind down quite a bit and

we had a bit of flak from the ground a couple of times but fortunately no fighters. It would have been horrible to be in the thing attacked from the rear by a fighter.

We would fire the guns, yeah, do a test fire. Just a short burst. And we were trained, gunners were trained. Guns had a stoppage sometimes, they would jam up

and that sort of thing and you are supposed to know how to rectify the stoppage. I wouldn’t know now but in those days we knew how to do it.

I suppose it would be, the widest part would be half the width of this room.

Relatively easy, yeah.

I mean you didn’t need to move around. Once you were in the aircraft you sat there. You didn’t move around. There was no such thing as moving around. You took your seat and that’s where you stayed until we got down.

They didn’t have anything like that. I don’t know how I got on. I don’t think, some of the aircraft is supposed to be fitted with this type of toilet type thing but I, strangely enough I never needed to use one

in all my flying time. I think when you are young you’ve probably got strong bladders and things like that.

I don’t think there was a toilet in the aircraft. But I think some of the aircraft did have toilets. The bigger ones.

In a little compartment about,

it might have been about 2 metres x 2 metres or something like that. You were fairly close, your head was fairly close to the radar panel.

Dim light, very dim.

Just a little metal seat. It might have had a bit of padding on. In fact the rear turret might have had a bit of padding on it too from memory.

Well by today’s standards they are pretty noisy, but it was a good aeroplane I think. Designed by Barn Wallace. He designed the Dam Busters of course, you knew that.

You could see. There were little windows

at the side. The type of construction is with cross metal type of stuff and I think you did have a window on the side for the wireless operators and I think all of the crew had a bit of a view.

Mainly the time he was just listening in.

It was radio silence. You weren’t supposed to

break it because they reckon they could get a fix on you if they picked it up.

Most of the time he only sent two messages and he had the intercom turned on to the pilot in case there were any messages that had to be sent, but he didn’t do a lot of work on an average trip.

I think so, fairly cushy except he had to be there waiting for anything if necessary.

Of course in an emergency he would be needed but we didn’t strike that situation.

The radar? I think it would show up about, gee, it’s a long time ago. I can’t remember all these things. Probably a mile circumference.

Well when you were getting towards base you would send your time of ETA [estimated time of arrival] and sort of estimate how long it was going to take you flying to get there, but you couldn’t see it from too far away but within a mile or two you could see it.

As far as shipping goes?

They were what they call E-boats, which was like a torpedo boat, a fast craft, and F fighters. I’ve never known quite what they were but I think they weren’t of any great importance.

Mainly E-boats, yeah, and other shipping that happened to be around there at the time.

Yeah, we bombed a few of them

at different times, yeah, but you couldn’t always tell if you got them or not. They would go off the screen and you weren’t sure what the results were.

I think it probably be if you hit them and they sunk you wouldn’t see them any more on the radar. They were often bombed and the results were never actually confirmed.

Yeah well you would have the radar and the Leerlight but they weren’t too big, yeah.

Well as I say when they knew you were coming they would head for the coast and they would blend in on the radar with the coast and we couldn’t pick them out, and they would stay there until they knew the aircraft had left.

No, not if that got in close to the coast, no.

He would turn the Leerlight on and direct the pilot to where it was.

No. The navigator would release it as in Bomber Command, a bomb aimer would do it. He would give the pilot directions

of so many degrees and you would hone in on it and hopefully you would hit it.

Well they were originally torpedo bombers. I think that was before they put the light on them. And this guy, Leer, put on the light and that’s how, I think it was in the later part of the war that the Leerlight came in, but that was a new invention.

Only when we had enough fuel left and it was time to go home, we would then go for the alternative target which as I mentioned before might have been a road, fuel dump, gun placement. These types of things.

Well we had a bit of flak from the ground at times.

Fortunately no fighter aircraft and we were never hit, fortunately.

A couple of times yeah. It’s not real frightening. It’s like watching the fireworks come in the sky and they fade away and you think it’s coming straight for you and it just pales off and goes down.

No, never. Only in one case and that was the submarine case because you would be coming to the vessel from the front and the rear gunner was stuck up in the air at that stage and…

I don’t remember ever doing that. I don’t think it would do much good firing a .303 at a ship

as you are flying away. I don’t think that was in the instructions but I can’t recall that.

Well you would be pretty sure that you had hit. If it was a road you would be so low that you could see it. You could visually see whether you had hit it or not.

If it was a fuel dump you would see a bit of an explosion going on, coastal guns it was a little bit of uncertainty about those but they were the main three alternatives. You couldn’t return to base with your bombs on board or fuel. You had to be pretty well out of fuel or it was a bit dicey otherwise.

Well the Germans were moving their supplies. They were moving out of Italy and things and I think in the Atlantic and the other place was all they had, and this was more or less the tail end of it and I wouldn’t know what the extent of it was but I would think that there wouldn’t have been a lot left at that stage.

Maybe only two or three.

Yeah, could be.

I think it was only the pilot that was debriefed and maybe the navigator too. That was about it. You would say what happened and

then you would probably have something to eat, breakfast or something and then go to bed.

Just, “What you reckon? Do you think it was a success or not?” Actually I never attended a debriefing because wireless air gunners didn’t really go. They might have on bombers but I think mainly it was the pilots and navigators that

did the… And they would get the message from the gunners of their version of what happened and they would report it to the interrogating officer.

A couple of times, yeah.

No I don’t remember ever getting picked up on a searchlight.

Well I told you mentioned before at Rosignano on the Ligurian Sea side of Italy and word came in that an American aircraft flying across the Adriatic had picked a submarine, a small midget submarine, and they wanted an aircraft to go across from Rosignano right to the other side of Ancona to see if they could get hold

of this one, and we were the nominated one. We took off at about, it must have been about 6.00 or 7.00 at night, with depth charges to find this thing going from Italy to Yugoslavia. And it was supposed to be carrying saboteurs. They had been bombing things in Italy. They were escaping. And so we went off and we couldn’t find it for quite a while

because the calibration of the radar, the ground radar, was out a bit and we were searching and searching and every time we’d think where it was there was no sign of it. So they told us to hang around for a little while longer for an hour or two until the moon came up and we’d probably see it when the moon passed, which we did eventually, and then that’s when we found it and honed in on it and we sunk it.

We were given the impression that it was Germans we were firing at but it wasn’t – it was Italians. The crew was Italians that were fighting against the Allies that hadn’t gone with Italy in its capitulation.

Yeah, pro fascist. And one of them, would you believe was one of Mussolini’s, his nephew I think it was, and

anyhow we had that kill confirmed and they were all fortunately, there was only a crew of six and they were all picked up the next day and escaped. What happened to them, we never knew whether they were shot or what happened but until the last year or so I was under the impression it was a German submarine. But it’s quite devastating to know it was an Italian we were firing against.

Well you don’t think you would be fighting against them because our enemy was the Germans and Italy was supposedly out of the war.

Oh no. Well these were Italian-built subs and we were given the whole history of them. A fellow, one of my fellow crewmen,

the dentist guy, he’s done a lot of research, who is an authority on all the warfare in that particular area, and he supplied with a lot of this information. Anyhow we were accredited with that information.

I think it is painted on the plane. If you have a look at that picture. Can you see that little sub painted there?

The sub, yeah.

Yeah. But we weren’t across, I was drafted and I was in the rear turret and I could see that they were on the deck of the submarine and they were on the surface. Apparently there was a bit of trouble with it.

Yeah, according to this friend of mine he was on the radar that night and he said that they had given him the wrong fix and their calibrations were out, and the guy that was on the ground who was supposed to have done it got a bit of a kick in the pants about it.

It was moonlight that got it, yeah. Moonlight over the water is

like a big searchlight going down. You can see for miles.

I can’t remember now. I guess anyone who had a view of it. Probably the pilot or second pilot.

Yeah, that was something quite definite, yeah.

I don’t know; it’s a bit doubtful. I reckon we had about three passes over it but my dental friend said we hit it first time, and there is a little bit of a dispute about what happened. The only thing we know is I’ve got the name of the crew and everything. Every member of the crew. And this Italian fellow has done all this research. It shows the actual number of the submarine and where it was launched and what it did during the war.

I’ve got it upstairs. I haven’t got it here. Do you want to know?

Oh yeah, yes.

I think they were only dropped once but I think that when we went over it I was in the gun turret and I fired at it. I could see them as clear as day on the port side as we went across and I thought I saw in the Leerlight, even though it was on the port side the turret turned right on port side, and I could see it as plain as day and I could see the guys standing on the deck.

I don’t know if I hit it when I strafed it

or not. You can never be exactly sure. We were only about 300 feet and that’s pretty low. Did you read my logbook account of that one?

I don’t know. I can’t remember whether I was instructed to or not but that’s what I was there for.

I did my best to make sure we got it but whether it had any effect I don’t know

with gunfire from memory.

They picked it up the next day. They were rescued the next day by a Catalina I think, and they were interrogated and probably duly dealt with.

It was about 15 metres I think. I’ve got all the specifications in the papers but I didn’t jot them down but again I can tell you that later.

Midget sub, yeah.

No. It wasn’t a U-boat but the Italians built a lot of those in the early days back in the late ’30s and they were deployed to the Germans after Italy surrendered.

After all that time. I think we were about six hours in the air and that’s a long time at that time of the night to be sitting in a little turret. I don’t remember but I keep referring to this dentist fellow but he tells me that

they, there was great celebrations when we got back and this sort of thing. But naturally it was a success.

I don’t know. I don’t think there would have been more than one or two because they weren’t…

That’s the only account I can remember, but of course I wasn’t with them in the early days. I didn’t join them until January ’45 so.

Well from memory I think I was too tired and I just went to bed. We might have a drink or two the next day to celebrate it.

I think it was congratulations all around. As I say, 60 years is a long time ago. I can’t remember all these things.

The next day.

When the Catalina went out and picked them up, apparently. They went out searching and found them and they must have been in dinghies or something like that.

Yeah.

It was getting close. Yeah. I think peace was declared in early May I think it was.

End of May.

Regularly. Done by air letters. These little ones that they photocopied or photographed but you could. I suppose you would get a letter once a week from home and one away. They were censored of course.

I don’t know. I mean if there was anything that would be cut out. I don’t think I said anything that would have been of great moment.

I just wrote ‘Nice day’ and this sort of thing and ‘Keeping well’. It wasn’t “We were up in northern Italy or sinking and doing this and doing that’. Anything relevant to the war was of course taboo.

Well we didn’t have a lot of down time. You might go visiting somewhere. You might have a drink. There wasn’t a lot to do in those sort of places. Nothing much. Probably a bit of sightseeing of anything that was appropriate around the place.

They would have the NAAFIs [Navy, Army, Air Force Institutes]. The British had the

Navy, Army, Air Force Institute where you could go and play tennis or something like this and have a beer and have coffee. And if you were close enough to a place worth visiting you would visit that for the day.

Only three crews, about 18 people.

We were friendly with the other ones, the Australians. Not a lot to do with the British crews. They were made up of British, Canadians, South Africans, but I suppose we tended to stick to ourselves a little bit.

The Australians? I didn’t have any reason to believe that we weren’t thought of in reasonable

esteem by them. There was one bloke that there was a bit of controversy of who sunk the submarine. He was supposed to have claimed to have sunk a submarine, so that was another matter that brought a…

Yeah. It’s a long story and I can’t remember all of it. I’d have to have a look at my paperwork but there was a Pommy pilot that was supposed to have sunk one too but all his facts are completely wrong. He wrote a book and he mentioned

the submarine attack but that has all been discounted and found that he wasn’t telling the truth.

Well from what he was saying, yes, but it was, as I say, all his times are out and the whole works. I think he put that in to fill his book up and give it a little bit more excitement.

I think so,

yeah, but there was no question that it was ours.

No. No, I don’t think so. Then that was we went over to Ancona on that side and then we went back to Rosignano. We went backwards and forwards a little bit because the squadron, the main base of the squadron was still operating over at Rosignano, but then eventually we

came back and stayed at Ancona until the war finished and that’s where we left from.

Of Italy? We were sleeping under canvas and the civilian population, although northerners, seemed to be getting better than the southerners. Will I tell you about VE [Victory in Europe] night?

No.

In fact I would say definitely not. Not on the operational base, no. Other training stations there were always WAAFs.

Yeah, hardly anything.

Oh no. You hear from your parents and that sort of thing. I didn’t hear anything of any great importance. They probably mention it but it wasn’t sort of a day to day news on the radio or anything like that and I don’t think we got newspapers in Italy so there wasn’t any way of finding out definitely what was going on.

Not at all. Not at all. Actually, when we got home the war was still going against Japan but that might be a bit later on in the talk.

Okay, it was leading up to hours before sort of thing before the final war came through. We were in Cona, a place called, I’m trying to think of the name of the aerodrome, our aerodrome. Anyhow we got the news and

of course there were great celebrations in the squadron. Both messes were open and the officers’ mess and the sergeants’ mess and we just sort of went between the two messes. The three of them just sort of all combined then. No class distinction then. I remember it was towards evening and we had a big table outside in the open sort of thing with plenty of grog on it. Everyone was welcome irrespective of what you were.

Anyhow we came this voice coming in the distance yelling at the top of his voice and of course an American guy, an American air force fellow. He seemed to have got lost. He was from a squadron nearby and we said, “Come and join us.” So he sits himself down and pulls his .45 out and puts it on the table and, you know, a six shooter, and he was a drunk as a skunk. Anyhow we partied all night and they were firing the cartridge from the aircraft.

You know the signal things that indicate whether you have got wounded on board or what have you. And I was sharing a tent with two other WAGs. This fellow, George Farrow, who’s now dead and this fellow Jack Powers, the dentist that I talk about all the time. And George Farrow did a bit of boxing in his younger days. Jack went to bed fairly early and he woke up the next

morning and he saw me covered in, I had been sick sort of thing all night, all over perk and stuff, and George Farrow had two black eyes. George said to me, “What’s happened?” and I said, “What’s happened to me and what’s happened to you? Where did you get those eyes from?” And Jack said, the sober guy said, “The last I saw him he was telling this Englishmen what a good boxer he was in his younger days. So he must have had a go and he finished up with two black eyes.”

This is the bloke that supposedly slept right through the submarine attack. He was on the radio and when we got back to base he didn’t quite know what had been going on. He had been asleep the whole time. But yeah, so we went off to Venice the next day on leave. That was quite a celebration. All over. It was quite a…

Yeah, we went to Venice on leave for a few days.

Good.

I went with this fellow who had the two black eyes. We were pretty good mates and do you want me to tell you a bit about Venice?

We stayed in a hotel right on the, have you been to Venice at all?

Right on the Grand Canal is a beautiful big hotel and they call it the New Zealand Club, and when the New Zealanders got into Venice they had driven the Germans out

and General Freyberg, who was the general in charge, he said, “This is the New Zealand Club. No Yanks in here. Australians allowed.” So we had free go and so they had a little pub that was about 100 metres along the canal from the hotel. Just a little drinking bar sort of thing where the grog flowed from about 10.00 in the morning to all hours of the night sort of thing. So no limit to it there so great celebrations there.

And we met a fellow. He was an Australian flight lieutenant and he had a nice coloured scarf and flight lieutenant pilot and all this sort of thing. And we got quite friendly with him, being Aussies, and he said, “If you are going back to your base at Cona we are just down the road from here. We are at the Spitfire base so

you might be able to get a lift back. Rather than get a truck you might get a lift.” So that’s good, so Jack said, “I’ve got to go back today.” He said, “If you want to come drop in tomorrow and I’ll see what I can do for you.” Is this making sense? So we went down and we said to the CO [Commanding Officer], who was the Australian squadron leader, we said, “Jack Law told us to come and call in here. Flight Lieutenant Law.” He said, “Flight Lieutenant!

Jack! Jack’s a flight sergeant. I don’t mind as long as you don’t put any more rank on his shoulders than I’ve got. He’s up in the mountains today getting supplies and things down.” But he was a very colourful figure. He had been flying Spitfires but he had been court-martialled twice and he was just about to get his rank and he lost it. Back to tours again.

He was supposed to be driving a cab in Jerusalem, which he wasn’t supposed to do, in his spare time and he was noted for shooting up farmers out in the fields and church bells. He would go down with the Spitfire and give them a bit of a burst and they didn’t like these fellows for some reason or other. So he would be one of the most colourful people I have ever met. He was a banker

before he joined up, actually.

I don’t know. It’s just one of those things that I must get in touch with him and never have and I presume he’s still alive.

Oh yeah.

I’ve got a photo there of George, the fellow with the black eyes, walking along the Grand Canal sort of thing.

I bought a gun actually. This shouldn’t be official or on the thing but it had been taken off a dead Italian officer and since been disposed of, handed on. But I can remember that incident. They were selling souvenirs

and things, but I didn’t keep it.

No, I didn’t think so.

It was very nice. We had the usual gondola ride. It’s a funny sort of a place with all the back alleys and canals and things, like we have streets and they have little narrow canals. It was

quite nice. Lovely city.

Not particularly. I’m not really into pasta.

Well there weren’t many restaurants or things open so it was most of them had been cleaned out. The Germans had only been kicked out a few days before and I don’t particularly remember getting into pasta.

In the hotel they had a dining room and that sort of thing.

Well back to, through Jack and his Spitfire squadron back to Cona where we were subsequently on the way home. So they flew up to Taranto on the south of Italy and unfortunately the rest of the crew I had to leave them because my warrant officer hadn’t come through. I had it but it hadn’t been propagated

so I had to go home with the troops, and other guys who were warrant officers went home with the officers, so I sort of went independently of them. We went to Taranto and waited there for a few days and got a ship back to Port Said.

Yeah I do. It was a Dutch ship called the Indropera. They were bringing a lot of German POWs back on it too. They were only young kids. They looked about 15 years of age.

And had a lot of girls going to South Africa, so being bits of villains so one of these girls that we liked the look of very much, or a couple of them. We thought when we got back to Egypt that they were going to a do at the officers’ club at a place called Ismailiyah. So this mate, Yuri Cofield, was his name and he was also a flight sergeant,

and he said, “Why don’t we go down to this officers’ party? They are going to be there.” So what did we do? We both became flying officers. So we went to the party and no-one knew any different sort of thing. We met them and had a dance and that was about as far as it went, but that was quite an interesting night. We waited there in Egypt for a little while to get out ship back to

Australia.

A matter of days.

We got on board a ship called the Orontes.

Brilliant. Very happy. I was overseas for nearly two years.

It was carrying a lot of people. The Australians were mainly engaged in two up and things like that. It was a rather reasonable troopship. Only a troopship.

I think so mainly, I can’t remember. We got home and our parents were supposed to be notified. They were notified that we were on our way and something went wrong

with the… We arrived in Fremantle and of course there was a band there to meet us and everything. It was wonderful. We went into Perth for the day. We only stayed for one day. The first Australian girl’s voice we heard for a couple of years. We went into this café to have something to eat and she came up and said, “What are yous blokes going to have?” We thought, “We’d like some steak and eggs.”

“Yous blokes are all the same. Yous all want steak and eggs.” I thought, “Gee, is that what an Australian female sounds like?” So anyhow we set sail across and we got to Sydney and our parents didn’t know that we had arrived. The ship arrived a bit earlier than… And there was no-one at Circular Quay to meet us. We had to go back to Bradfield Park where we had to sort of report

and then I went home and I knocked on the door and they said, “Gee, we didn’t expect you for another three or four days.” But that was it. Home.

Oh yeah. Mum and Dad put on a party and invited a few friends, which was very nice.

Down at Waratah Street.

Great. Naturally I was still in the air force for another, that was July. I turned 21 on the ship coming home.

It’s very hard to celebrate on a ship with a few troops and things. There wasn’t any grog or anything. But

what was I going to say? The war was still going against Japan and we had to decide what we were going to do. Be discharged from the air force or go up to the islands and fight the Japs or what happened. In the meantime while I was thinking about it. It all finished so I was discharged Mothers’ Day after that.

I thought I might be discharged.

I didn’t feel much like going and fighting the Japs.

But they made up my mind for me.

I think their atrocities were pretty well known, weren’t they? Not a lot apart from that. They were a pretty formidable, nasty fighting force.

They were very upset about that of course, but my Dad sort of changed his attitude. He was one of the head officers in the water board. They say he was a bit of a so-and-so in his early days but he sort of mellowed after that after the news of my brother and we settled back in.

It was, yeah.

You are sort of restless. When you are moving around like we were sort of thing from place to place it’s a bit hard to come back and lead an ordinary civilian life.

You miss the comradeship of the men you are with more than… It’s just a different life altogether.

Well for a little

while we had a bit to do with them for the first. That came a bit later. Meanwhile my WO [Warrant Officer] had been propagated and come through but probably being at the end of the alphabet there were others. They came home a couple of months later and I had a bit to do with them. One of them was at my wedding actually and the guy that I have taken up this sudden renewal of friendship with he’s

sent me stacks of stuff. Material that I didn’t even know about that went on. He must have kept a diary on what happened so he’s filled me in pretty well. So we’ve sort of renewed our acquaintance. We have been out to lunch and had a drink here and there. So he’s done well. He’s had four sons I think. One’s a doctor, one’s a dentist, one’s a top businessman so he’s done pretty well.

So I went back to my old job at the transport department for a while and the boss said to me, “Look, anytime you just want to go for a walk up the street then go.” So they were pretty good.

Settle down. But then I left the transport and I did accountancy full time and then I joined the bank in ’48.

But I also had an opportunity to rejoin the air force as a trainers pilot or navigator and at the same time as the bank gave me an offer of a job. I had the two and didn’t know which one to accept. Dad said, “Oh no, you’ve been in the air force. You’ve done three years in the air force and your brother was killed so I think the bank would be a good solid career.” So that’s what I did.

Oh no. I thought there wasn’t many jobs in civil airlines for operators or anything for a while. They had sort of been phased out in those days, like navigators the same. They were about the end of that. No, I didn’t.

Oh I didn’t take long. 12 months, maybe less. But I joined the air force reserve and I went to a couple of their day things up at Richmond. Day things. That didn’t come to much at all.

Very short time. About six months, that was all. They just wanted a few names of people in an emergency

to just be recruited again.

Yeah, about ’46 I guess.

Not at all.

Not at all. I wouldn’t have missed it. I reckon to have had the opportunities that I had at that age, my age, that young age, is not something that most people would have in this world except servicemen who have probably been there. It was a very good two or three years, even though

it was fraught with danger. You travel around the world and different places and that.

The slight sense of adventure and so forth. Seeing the world at the government’s expense. Meeting a lot of people. I stayed, I told you about the people I stayed with in England.

I told you that earlier on.

I really can’t think of anything during my air force career. No. Not really.

No. I told you about the… We went through the training quite thoroughly and my operational service. No, I think you have pretty well touched on all of it.

That came out of it?

No, I don’t think so.

I guess was to get

a job that I liked doing and get a reasonable sort of job. And I had a few different girlfriends at different times until I met Dorothy and that was it. But I joined the bank and I was pretty happy in that for most of my time in 40 years.

Yes. She worked in the sub-treasury

and it’s a long story actually. My brother’s girlfriend also worked there and they used to have a tennis day, and at Peakhurst one I was invited to go out and play tennis and I sort of saw this good sort and I thought, “She looks all right to me,” and from then on it sort of developed. I asked her out and we were only engaged for about a month

and I proposed to her and married 12 months later.

It was pretty quick, yeah. But we have been married for close on 51 years. That’s a long time.

No, she mentioned before she was born in Coogee but she

was out in the western suburbs. She was in the sub-treasury in the city. She worked and she started there when she was 15 I think.

’52. So it’s part ’52 years.

Oh yeah.

Where? Down at Kiama. It’s quite a nice little place in those days and we honeymooned down there and we had two children. A girl and a boy. You met David but our daughter, Louise, she unfortunately died when she was about 35 with MS [multiple sclerosis] and that was very sad.

1956.

1960. So we got a little flat, Dorothy and I, and it was in Hastings Parade. I was a teller, a clerk at Bondi Road branch in those days and I thought, “Gee, where are we going to live? We have to get a place somewhere.”

So I put a notice on my teller’s block: ‘Unit required by staff member getting married’. And there was this eccentric women, woman, she used to come in, and she said to me, “Who is it who wants the flat?” And I said, “It’s me, actually.” And she said, “Now, may I ask you a question? Are you a Catholic? You might be a Catholic.” She said, “Do you mind if I ask you if you are a Catholic?” and I said, “No, actually I’m an Anglican.” She said, “Yeah, you’ve got the flat.”

A biased sort of woman. But anyway we stayed there for five years backing right onto the golf course in Hastings Parade.

Through the bank?

I started at Bondi just as a clerk and then you

are a teller and junior teller. Well not so much junior in my case, but a teller and examiner and so forth. You might become a branch accountant and later on you might become a manager a few years later, which I did.

I got my first manager’s job at Collaroy in about

1965 I think it was. From there I was promoted to manager at Forestville and then manager at St Ives and then they made me a branch inspector. I used to go around and inspect branches in the city and suburbs and throughout NSW. I did a stint… They have a big staff college over here at St Ives and I was a tutor there for a while and I had quite a good career. Most of it on the North Shore, actually,

except for Bondi Junction where I was moved later on after Bondi. That was I was there about five years at the Junction down on the corner of Newlands Street.

Not terribly closely, but I happened to have a nephew in Vietnam and a friend of this bloke, ‘Pushy’ Pembroke, the colonel, he was in Korea but I didn’t follow it terribly closely, no.

I think I agreed with it. I don’t think we should have been there

in the first place. I think it was a war that Australia should never have been involved in.

Again I don’t think we should be there.

I don’t think it’s our job to be a world policeman and we have only played a very small part

in it, haven’t we? And there seems to be more people getting killed now than during the war actually, not that Australia, they have fared all right. But I don’t think personally we should be there. The only thing of course was to appease the Americans. We have to keep on their side and I think that was the only thing that really got us there, wasn’t it?

I don’t think a lot. I can’t really… Life just seemed to go on the same way. There was no dramatic change in my outlook or anything.

Not really.

That’s a hard question. I think before we go into the war we’ve got to get a pretty good consideration, and being a Christian I think we should pray about what is going to happen and I think the world leaders should also pray about it.

It’s pretty serious business. It’s just horrifying what some of the future wars might be if we go into North Vietnam or any of those places, North Korea. But I don’t have any hard and fast ideas on it but just a pity. I don’t think the wars are over yet. I think it will always be going on, won’t it?

Religious wars will be…

I can’t see an end to those. No-one is going to give in on their views.

I guess so. I got to the Anzac Day marches. I haven’t been for many years but strangely enough I went this year and last year after about 40-odd years break

as a support because the numbers are dying off.

I guess just laziness and always good intention, and I do this and one way or another I wasn’t sort of… I used to watch the march but was just too lazy to get up and go to it.

So I started going to the reunions of 458 Squadron, and being a short-term member I thought I was entitled to march with them, which I have done.

Just the local school parents and citizens and things.

I was in the Air Force Association for a while but I let that slide and

the RSL [Returned and Services League]. I’m still in the RSL.

No. Just a member.

How do I, what’s my idea about it?

I suppose if they are related to a servicemen or returned servicemen, but I don’t think they should bring in every young kid in just because they feel like marching. There should be some connection.

Wonderful. The last two years that I have marched there has been a fellow standing right in the front barrier with a smile on his face and he has a little placard

‘Thanks’. That’s all he’s got written on it, ‘Thanks’. That’s Dick Smith. Apparently he takes up the same position and that’s all he says is just ‘Thanks’. But no, I think it’s good to see all the kids so patriotic and certainly big crowds.

Yeah. I sort of went to the 458 dinner last year and I said to the secretary, “Have you heard anything of Jack Powers? Do you know anything of Jack Powers?” I had sort of lost track of him and I suppose I should have looked up the phone book myself but I was looking in the wrong section, and so he gave me his phone number and we decided we would go out and have lunch. And I’ve met him once or twice since then but he sent me so much material from this

Italian correspondence. He’s a sort of an expert. He’s a doctor, medical doctor actually, and qualified pilot and he’s been doing all this investigation into Italian shipping and submarines and he’s a brilliant bloke. And the other fellow, the English bloke, he’s a journalist. A television journalist with a camera and all that sort of business and he’s also got a lot of background on the air force and

and so they’ve dug out all this stuff that Jack’s sort of sent on to me.

Oh yeah. I started to read through it again. I’ve been getting it for about 12 months and so much so that’s… It’s very hard to sink in. But it’s excellent.

Well there has been some good movies made, haven’t there? My son is keen on that one, Saving Private Ryan. That is one of his favourites. They don’t do a lot for me though, not that I’m against the filming of it but I’m not a great follower or anything. It doesn’t do much.

I enjoyed that series World at War series that has been on recently.

Yeah, he’s had a bit to do. He’s got many books on aviation history and that and his friend is particularly interested. He could talk to you all day on military history. He works in the defence department and he’s got all the fine details about the First World War

and the Second World War. He’s really an expert on it.

I think so, yeah. Well he had, there was my brother, my cousin who was a Spitfire pilot, my other younger brother who died, unfortunately. They were aircraft spotters during the war. They go up and sit on top of buildings.

A bit of that’s rubbed off, I guess.

Never. No. Dorothy has.

She was back there a few years ago and did a tour around Europe including Italy. I’ve been back to the UK [United Kingdom] since and the Straits. We did a trip through there but never Italy. I would like to see some of those places on the Genoa peninsula and up that way. It’s supposed to be very beautiful.

But maybe one day, maybe not. Fortunately you don’t have to write all this down, do you?

Not a worry at all. I think it was a very small percentage that were the type they were, the horrible types. I think the average Germans were pretty normal but by and large I think they were all right. I mean they were only doing what they had to do, weren’t they, fighting the war against the British? They didn’t start it. I mean Hitler did, sure, but the average German soldier was all… I don’t think I liked the Gestapo and

the SS [Schutzstaffel]. I think they were a type of their own. Just thugs.

The camaraderie of Australians, of course, which seems to be superior to most others,

doesn’t it? You know, the Australian it doesn’t matter if you are a general or a private. You are still the same sort of guy as the others with him, and I think the Australians stuck together right through it irrespective of rank or anything else. Pretty good mates.

CB6.

I go the dimensions amongst those papers. I just couldn’t. I’ve actually got a diagram of the whole thing.

It was renamed, yeah.

No I don’t.

Naturally a bit annoyed about it, a bit aggravated about it but it was just a war that we sort of… The only time that I got a little annoyed about was when I read about the SS and the Gestapo and some of the

things that they did to people. But the average German, no. I think that was the general feeling amongst the pilot and the aircrew and things. They tried to shoot us down and we tried to shoot them down.

No. We were told to do it.

I’ve still got it.

All the time. I used to go to church when I was in the air force whenever the opportunity arose. I feel that without that sort of thing you have nothing to carry you through. I’ve always felt that.

Oh yeah, especially in Italy

and they had padres in the forces, of course. You could always talk to them. They were always comforting.

No. I’ve never been a conscientious objector or anything like that. In this case I think a war is quite acceptable.

No.

I would say that my war was pretty good compared to a lot. It was a reasonably eventful war but not dramatically

dangerous, but of course there was always the danger there. If you got shot down or anything like that, that would be the end of it. One night I did, we took a couple of navy guys up on operations one night. They talked us into it and we took them up and, “Right, in exchange you can come out on one of our torpedo boats with us.” So we were out all night on a torpedo boat patrolling up the coast and about me to the wall away from the coast and

that was quite an experience. They said, “There was a cruiser sunk last night. We might have to pick up a few dead bodies. Would that worry you?” “I don’t think so.” Fortunately they didn’t, but that was quite an experience.

The navy? I think ours was all right. I think we did reasonably well

and of course had we been on Bomber Command it probably would have been a different story of course.

I don’t know. One of them, this Farrow fellow, he died a few years ago. I was with him; I contacted him for a few times. He came to our wedding and then he just drifted away and I couldn’t get in touch with him. I think he left Sydney and I don’t know where he went to. And

Jack, the dentist. I don’t know, just one thing. We had a little bit of contact for a while and gradually we sort of drift away from people and time just goes on and that’s it. The captain, John Hamilton. He lives at Tenterfield of course, and I saw him a couple of times after the war but time just got away. And a friend of mine still goes over to England. There’s only he and one other left out of the

bomber crew, and he went over last year to visit him. That was the last he would see him. Everyone else is dead. But I don’t know. I’ve got no real reason for it. I sometimes wish I had been in touch a lot earlier, but never mind.

I think I went to a 458 reunion and started talking and I said, “I’m looking for a Jack Powers,” and he only lives in Sydney, to which sort of started. I started the pursuit of contacting him again.

And having such a short

time on 458 Squadron I really didn’t get to know anyone much at all. And I think that was the reason I went to a couple of reunions and they would sort of, a lot of them were older than I was and they had left the squadron before I got there. The short time, about a month, I didn’t get to know anyone much at all. But I thought, “I’ve got to march with a group if I march,” so that was the logical one to march with.

I think it’s a fairly strong unit over there, yeah. I think there is quite a few followers, ex-members. I think.

Well as I say, even in 38 Squadron – I was there for about four or five months – the only people that I had anything to do with were Australian crews and that was only about a dozen people. The others were English and from other parts of the world, New Zealand, Canada.

No. I just think these were the sort of places that were highlighted, weren’t they? Were featured so prominently those battles, more so than Bomber Command for instance. It was just ‘Bomber Command

raided Berlin last night, 1,000 bombers’ and that sort of thing. But I think Tobruk would be Australia’s main, one of the main battles we featured in, wasn’t it? And they couldn’t say how many Australian squadrons that were on the raid on Berlin or Hamburg or whatever it was and I think it was probably highlighted more in the press back here than air force activities.

No. Not at all. We were part of what was called the Mediterranean Allied Coastal Air Forces, of which Coastal Command was part of it, but no, it’s doesn’t really worry me. There is no reason to worry me.

We were probably one of the more exclusive, a small amount of people to be in that area really, especially air force. There was no army there.

Well as I said earlier, we were okay.

That’s right. That’s put the words into my mouth.

Tremendously. Starting from you writing up your ledgers with a pen dipped in ink and blotting every entry that you made in the ledgers and the gradual mechanisation of the Commonwealth Bank right through to present day, which

amazes me with some of the things that you can do now. But I sort of saw the whole thing go from virtually from the old days to the modern methods that you have now. Staff wise, you would never be able to do the work by hand that they do now in the old days. Working interest on accounts and things like this now it is done so fast. But I think it’s a much harder

bank. It was good in my day. As a branch manager you were running your own little business. There weren’t too many people around to worry you. Of course now it’s the bottom line with everything they do and they’ve got to produce results. They have to put a thing in every day of who they’ve interviewed and what results they’ve got. It’s just too tough. No, I rather enjoyed the bank in all that time.

It used to be a big thing. I don’t know if it is so big now. They used to put a lot of emphasis on customer service. If you had to wait it would go in favour against the branch. And the inspectors, I was an inspector for a while, and that was something that you had to observe in your inspections. What the service was like and comment on it.

I don’t know now. It’s probably not too bad.

I don’t think they worry too much now as long as you… They don’t want you to go inside the doors now. They would rather you have you at the machine and I do think they haven’t given much concern to

people’s needs around the place, although by the same token you don’t have too far to go to a bank, do you? We still have one at Wahroonga that’s still going and St Ives. But I suppose cost wise it was inevitable they were going to close them down. I think it’s more the country people that live miles and miles away from branches that are most affected.

Poke fun at, that’s right.

I used to be fairly proud of being a bank manager once. In society you were fairly well liked. Most were, anyhow, except for that fellow who went into the bank and said, “I would like to see Mr Smith.”

The fellow said, “I’m sorry, but he’s dead.” And he came in the next day and he said, “I would like to see Mr Smith.” “I told you yesterday that he’s not here any more.” He went in the next day and said, “I would like to see Mr Smith.” The teller said, “Listen, that’s the third time you have come in and asked. What are you doing?” and he said, “I just like to hear that he’s dead.”

I had an experience. I knocked a woman back when I was manager at Forestville

and she was absolutely hopeless. There was no chance in the world she would have got it and one day, I think she was a little bit off her head, and she said at the door with a whole bank full of people sort of thing and she sang out at the top of her voice, “Smith! You are a bastard!” The whole bank looked around. That was a little bit on the embarrassing side.

No. No. Some funny things happened. You haven’t asked about my sporting activities

and outdoor activities and things like that.

Well I play golf regularly once a week. I’m a member of the Killara Golf Club and just involved. I like golf.

Well that’s another question.

I was 14 but I’ve blown out now. Do you play golf?

No, you don’t know. But I enjoy it. I enjoy that part of my activities.

I have been in the past but I could still go because I’m still fairly active. We may do it one day. Probably in the near future if we do go.

I’ve never been to Yugoslavia. That was the Italian coast.

We never went to Yugoslavia.

Well at this stage I’ve only got David and he’s not married and he’s had a fair bit of sickness

over the last few months, but I do hope if I have any grandchildren that one day in the years to come they might dig this out and see what the old grandpappy was like and the old question, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” and it will be a bit of an insight of what I did and how I filled my time in. That’s about all I guess.

Thank you.

All right.