Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Brunswick, Victoria and my people were more or less what I’d call upper middle class they weren’t deprived people. We had cars

all of my life, most people didn’t even have a telephone we always had one.

He was an Auditor, Commonwealth Auditor. He used to do work for the League of Nations, he used to do investigation into even the peanut industry, and in 1927 he did an investigation into the film industry of Australia.

Yeah.

Well he did the survey into that and I’ve still got all of his papers.

I don’t think he was after a conclusion he was just trying to find out what information there was and that was it.

I wouldn’t know now.

He went to Nauru at one stage to investigate Nauru

No, no I didn’t, but eventually his papers came to me and I realised that, incidentally he put himself through university while I was still at High School.

It was the Depression yeah.

thirty-two on, until about the war.

Yes. I left high school in 1932 and then I went to work for a firm in the city. I got a job as an office boy in the city of Melbourne.

Calcutta Company and they imported jute and exported butter and stuff to Europe, and twelve-years later the same firm made contact with me and put on a posh dinner for me in Melbourne and gave me a cheque which I thought was good.

Oh good grief no, no I felt that after the war, there

would be a world mess up like we’ve got today and I thought the people that would survive best were people on the land, so I bought myself a farm. But I knew nothing about farming, I had trained to be an engineer at the, what’s now the RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] and

Yeah, I was in the militia. Most of my friends, my church friends, were members of the Militia and so I joined the same unit as they did, which was the Field Artillery in Chapel Street, Windsor and….

I served for three-years with them and while

I was at the RMIT I did all this.

I didn’t learn much, but it was good companionship and we used to have, I mainly joined I think because of the horses and we had to pick up horses, for example down at the, when I was old enough to be allowed to ride, my first job was to go with a party down to Sturt Street, South Melbourne where the

horse depots were, and pick up some horses to ride to Chapel Street, Windsor. I hopped on my horse and we had these, we were in uniform with these ruddy great spurs on and I dug the spurs in and the next thing we are doing a bolt round South Melbourne, the horse bolted and we did one corner or two corners alright, then on the third corner we came to a T Model Ford also at the same corner

and the horse decided to go under the T Model Ford and so it,

It didn’t fit, and it was smashed up and so was I. But I hopped on it again and rode it back to the depot and got another horse, no they dabbed me with carbolic acid, that is an antiseptic, then they took the same carbolic over and dabbed the horse, I thought that was rather good and I spent the rest of the day looking for an anti-tetanus injection.

I presume it did.

But it was horse artillery in those days.

No I was with the staff there. The horses.

Pull guns and that.

But I was with the staff there because I was doing

surveying in my course of engineering, so I was with the staff and I had a horse to myself.

They considered it and so that’s it. Anyway I was with them for three-years and I then I simply transferred from that to go into the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] as a cadet and air cadet.

Well pre-war it was very hard, there were about 30,000 applied and they accepted 40, something like this.

Well I had completed the engineering course, electrical and mechanical engineering, but I hadn't done the final examinations because the

examinations clashed with going into Point Cook. So I went to Point Cook.

Probably and the fact that I didn’t waste time watching footy, I used to spend all my spare time bush walking and, long bush, you know, carry a week’s supply of food type of thing always in bush walking. We did

trips over the Alps and all sorts of strange, on one occasion I walked from Eildon Weir to Marysville, it took us nearly a week and we didn’t see anyone in that time, no it was interesting.

That I think had a bearing in getting past the

interviews.

No, we were paid something like ten-shillings a day, ten-shillings a day it’d be, about three-pound ten a week and we had to, we were issued with uniform there, we didn’t have to buy it but we were issued to it and

we lived in solidly for a year and we were trained to, we had academic training as well as flying training, this was at Point Cook proper.

Well Point Cook was quite good as a training school or we thought it was because we knew no better. But we completed the course

and got out wings and at the end of the course they ask that eight of us volunteer for short service commissions with the Royal Air Force, and realising that if one applied for this and went to England, you would get the use of better aircraft and you’d get a chance to travel and

far better flying experience.

There was no war at all.

There was always the talk of the Japanese Peril, the Yellow Peril; it was always spoken about when I was younger.

No there was a big war in China at the time, the Japanese were involved in the

invasion of China and that was the most warlike thing and there was also a civil war in Spain at the time and we were issued with British/Australian passports. Australian passports but they were British passports and we could go anywhere in the world except Spain.

No, we had no idea there’d be a war on as quickly as that and we went to England, the eight of us went to England and they, one interesting thing is when we arrived in England, we went by boat, we were broke and we were met by the air liaison officer, Australian air liaison officer there, he was a

VC [Victoria Cross] from World War I, Anderson was his name and he realised we were broke and he gave us twenty-pounds each,

And I went straight down the street in London and bought myself a car for sixteen-pounds ten, and I always had cars after.

No, no it was a slow car. Anyway

When we arrived in England they asked us where we’d got our wings and we told them we’d got them at Point Cook and they sent us immediately back to a flying training school to complete the final course of English flying training.

They obviously didn’t because the term before us, of the term before us at Point Cook, some twenty or

twenty-five of them had gone to England and I think they’d fallen by the wayside as far as flying ability went.

Well there was a lot of bastardisation there at Point Cook when we were there. They for instance, had two courses running at the same time, the junior course and the senior course and we

were subservient to the senior course and they used to treat us like the lowest form of animal life and they’d for instance, they had powers over us they were only six-months senior to us, but they had powers and they used to on one occasion they made the whole lot of us walk down to the jetty at Point Cook, strip off and had us all stark naked and we had to go through the

initiation of jumping into the water at the end of the jetty, no question of whether you could swim or not, and then back to the tarmac where we were all painted, I’ve still got the photographs of us painted, we were painted everywhere over the body except, with red, and air force colours we were painted everywhere except where it would show if you had uniform on.

And so it wasn’t obvious, but I’ve still got photographs of us taken at that initiation. And then we were made to have peanut races pushing peanuts along the tarmac with our noses, still naked, this is what they called initiation, it would bring up your spirit, it came from, I believe, I heard later it came from Duntroon [Royal Military College] because, this type of theme because at that time there was this really early

depression days and they had too many people at Duntroon and they were either to be sacked or allowed to transfer to the RAAF and these people had come down from Duntroon and brought their bad habits with them including bastardisation and it was there.

We accepted

it, because again we knew no better. It was a silly, primitive, silly little childish.

No, I feel sorry that you have an air force like that, or had an air force like that, but it probably explains many things about the RAAF, where it fell down in the war years.

Definitely beneficial because we were on better aircraft than you ever had in Australia, you also go used to the climatic conditions, which were greatly different than Australia. I remember when I was training out here at Point

Cook, one day one of the instructors said, “One day you’ll see a cloud. But be careful there may be another aeroplane in it.” The flying Training at Point Cook you mentioned we went through Wapiti flying and one night I was going off solo in a Wapiti for the first time at night

and instructor called Sammy Barmer [?] said to his neighbour, he said, “They’ll be all right.” And his neighbour said, “What do you mean they?” and he said, “French and Jesus Christ.” and I think he’s always been with me.

Guiding hand yeah.

Yes but I will

explain more too you about flying panels because I, at later date I went on and did three blind approach courses, in other words you had to take a bomber off completely blind and land it completely blind and I did this over a period, just pre-war and early war and

at one stage later on in the war, they had a few of us we were star pilots and we were, when the whole of Bomber Command was grounded, they used to send us off to, we’d go to say Hamburg and drop a bomb, put them down in the shelters and then we’d go to Bremer and drop a bomb, put them down in the shelters and so on across Germany whatever and we would do it entirely on instruments, which was, it seemed to cut out about

1941 that activity I don’t know why, it probably cost a lot of people’s lives.

Well you were always so classified, as below average when you had to stick to a pushbike or average or

Or above average or exceptional or in my, but once I got

onto operations I was always classified as exceptional.

Yes we were allowed to keep our uniforms, wear our Australian uniforms until they wore out, but we also had to wear and buy English uniforms. We had to buy those ourselves and that was

the full mess kit and everything, the English stuff. But we made the Australian stuff last forever so that when one of our chaps got killed you immediately passed, his uniform was immediately passed onto another Australian so that you always wore an Australian uniform.

Well I was still wearing Australian uniform until

1942 probably. But

Several years yeah.

We were there during the Munich scare, this is about September 1938 and at, that night I remember, this was when Chamberlain went over and made peace with Hitler, and that night we were up all night painting our

silver aeroplanes camouflage, camouflaging our, we did this ourselves and then later on when the war started, they started, we had big aerodromes with no runways. They were big grass aerodromes so they started to paint black strips across them make them look like hedges, English hedges and they were magnificent for us because where ever

the black, it was really coal dust and ashes and stuff and oil and where it was painted on the ground the mushrooms came up in thousands so we always had mushrooms. That was interesting that; the heat off the black anyway, sort of caused them to grow.

It was a rapid expansion because they started about 1933 to expand, we were there say 1938 and we were still part of the expansion and after various training units we went to, we were posted to our squadrons and two of us, two of the eight of us

went to 50 Squadron which was a bomber squadron, we had Hawker Hinds. Hawker Hind aircraft, they were a bi-plane with an open cockpit and very draughty and they were good aeroplanes. When we joined 50 Squadron we found that there were already six other Australians in the squadron, so that when war broke out there were eight Australians

in 50 Squadron out of about 23 pilots.

It was it was called the Aussie, well it was a bit higher, but most of the other squadrons, the other bomber squadrons for instance had Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans and so on, so that there, most of the pilots were

colonials, this is the way I saw it, that was pre-war and anyway, we had these Hinds and then in early or, late 1938, early thirty-nine, we were re-equipped with Handley Page Hampdens and we had these and

they were a good aeroplane, we thought they were magnificent but they were lacking in many things, they had no armour plating or anything of that nature and they had no self sealing tanks which meant that if you got a bullet hole or shell hole through your fuel tank all your fuel ran away and they had

they were poorly armed, they should’ve had, their only arms were a couple of 303 guns, where we should have had cannons right from day one.

No they were up to date.

In those days they used to call them heavy bombers but then they were then reclassified later vas medium bombers. They weren’t used after about 1942.

I flew in the Phoney War. In the Phoney War we were

instructed to fly out looking for the German fleet, we were not allowed to fly over enemy territory at all. We had to, we were really looking for fleet targets and we weren't allowed to attack those unless they fired at us first and this went on until February, March

1940 and then the German Air Force bombed Scapa Flow and so we then took part on the first bombing raid on Sylt, S-Y-L-T, that was the first RAF bombing raid on Sylt [Hornum Naval Base near Denmark] and they used about fifty aeroplanes, fifty RAF bombers, some of them were Whitleys and the rest were Hampdens

and we bombed Sylt, and the interesting thing there was that, that was our first night bombing attack over German territory and it was amazing for us because we had no idea what heights to go in or anything like this and we were amazed when we got back, we couldn’t wait for dawn to get

out to see how many holes we had in our aeroplanes and we were most disappointed to find we hadn’t been hit. But when we got back to base we were told that the squadron had been awarded a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross]. So they looked round to see who had earned the DFC and they found, it went to the most senior person who got back and he put the DFC up

and then three-days later they were doing a check of the navigational logs and they found that he hadn’t been anywhere near Sylt. But he had bombed a place in Denmark and killed some Danes and the British Government had to pay compensation for that, but he kept his gong [award]. But later on in the war he earned it umpteen times because

he was badly shot up many times and eventually survived to buy a pub in Lincolnshire, he is dead now. We won’t go into it any further. But this is the way decorations were awarded in those days; no one had a clue on it.

Good grief no, no it went to this one fellow, he put it up and that was his

Well that’s the way it was

because it was the beginning.

That was the Phoney war and the start of the proper war.

Yeah that’s right, you’ve done your history.

Yeah. The invasion of France was next and our main targets

there were really railway junctions and things of that nature, that would slow down the German invasion and the invasion of France went on for a long time. But before that, see that first Sylt raid was in March and then the next thing was the Germans started to

invade Norway, that came before really before the Battle of France.

Well the Hampden was in those days, the only aircraft that could easily fit, easily fit a mine. The mines were about fourteen, fifteen-feet long and they were about two-feet in diameter and

these mines went down with a small parachute to steady them as they went down and they had to be dropped at no more than a hundred and fifty-miles miles an hour and had to be dropped at five hundred-feet. And we did, the Hampdens, we did most of the mine laying especially during the Norwegian occasion. I remember one occasion they sent five of us

to mine Oslo field and no one had told us that the whole place was covered with guns and search lights. But anyway, I was led in at night by my Australian Flight Commander Duncan Goode and he went in first and we saw him go in and

he got caught by searchlights and anti-aircraft fire and then you could see something happening and he was hit, he stopped a shell in the cockpit and it blew holes in both his wrists and blew his teeth out and he started to bleed and the blood, in those days the Hampden, the

second pilot was your navigator and he was also your bomb aimer and he sat below the pilot and he saw the blood dripping down onto him, so he scrambled up and, he scrambled up pulled the pilot out, this is all at five hundred-feet, at night, in the field and sat in his place and flew

in, got rid of the mine and then flew back to Scotland. We went in after this, after Goode and the search lights got us and we went completely upside down at five hundred-feet and then Jesus Christ was with me and somehow or other we came out of it, dropped our mine and went back to Scotland. But that other chap with the, Goode with the teeth and all that,

he went straight to hospital, they had a special hospital for us at Torquay in the south of England and he went down there, he picked up a new set of teeth and a new wife while he was down there.

No, and he came back to us and he was still flying with his wrists in plaster. And then he went, again mine laying

he went down to mine this, outside a submarine base in the south of France or down just below Brest and he was apparently, his body was washed up there, he was killed

No, but you didn’t worry because it happened

every night almost.

The

RAF?

Oh yes.

But the effect of the Empire Training Scheme didn’t show into effect until 1942, they arrived about the middle of ‘41 and they really didn’t come into strength until the beginning of ‘42.

No because there was so many

of us and …

No because for instance, whenever we went off the station, we never went in uniform and you just put on civilian clothes.

Well you always, it was the done thing; you never went off the station in uniform. So the only time I

went, I happened to be going through Lincoln on some official duty and then I was in uniform and happened to stop in the street and an old lady came up to me and asked what time the next bus went to Lincoln. She thought I was a bus driver. No, true.

The Tour, there were no tours yeah.

What happened was, we had a strange commanding officer, I was at the station Waddington, which is near Lincoln, we had a strange commanding officer there and he said, “Well, there’s so many Australians around this station that when you’ve done

six-trips, you can have 6 months off and go back to Australia.” Well we did our 6 and then it became 20 and so on and then the, by that time the invasion of France had come and I was sent out to attack one night and one of the railway junctions that the Germans were using coming down into France, anyway I

had a navigator pilot with me that night that had crashed an aeroplane the night before, a Hampden, and he couldn’t seem to pin point himself and we kept getting lower and lower and further in towards Germany and when we, all of a sudden we were down to a thousand-feet and everything was quiet and suddenly the whole

place was full of anti-aircraft fire and one of the shells hit the armour plate just behind me, and it came I’m still part-German up here. It’s still a bit, but no it was interesting because I couldn’t trust him to fly the aircraft back, so I flew it back several hundred-miles to England and then landed and then I spent seven-weeks in hospital.

with that.

Well I, you don’t feel pain when you’re hit like that, this is interesting, most people talk about pain but, there is no pain.

Well when the shell, it was a 20 millimetre probably, 20-millimetre, I used to have bits of it because it blew all my instruments out and it did a lot of damage.

But no anyway, they took me down to a hospital at Cranwall the next day to, we didn’t have a, we had an operating theatre but not a big one and they took me down there and the doctor drove me down, our own doctor, we had our own doctor and he took me down and they had me on the operating table and took out most of it, there’s

one tiny little bit left there, so I still claim to be German. But on the way back, he didn’t miss a pub on the way back, we stopped at every pub, no but this is the way the air force operated then. No but it was interesting really.

No well it happened so many, but

I had twenty-odd trips then, up to twenty, and while I was in hospital Butch Harris wrote to me, he was our OC [officer commanding] at the time and told me to come back and call it, call the twenty trips a tour, and he offered me promotion and all this, and but I didn’t

accept the invitation, I went back and completed thirty or thirty five-trips.

….as soon as I opened the bomb doors the whole bomb load fell onto the ground, you get a nasty feeling. The whole bomb load just fell from up about the height of the ceiling there, to the ground, a nasty feeling that.

No, it wasn’t that. See those are safe until, they’ve got little propellers on the front and they have to be

unwound first but someone had just left everything switched on.

See there was a case of LMF [Lack of Moral Fibre – air force term for cowardice] that fellow he should have never flown.

No, he couldn’t get off because it was LMF, he was the original pilot.

No, what happened was I was posted to a non-operational unit called 106 and I went to 106 and while I was there, I picked up a job. See if you, I found if you

watch what signals went in and out of a station you could usually find yourself a good easy job or whatever and in this case they wanted someone to fly a Hampden doing search lights, research work. In the same way before the war, I’d again heard that there was a ferry wing operating so I joined that. Just for,

I was with a squadron but I was attached to this Ferry Wing and they asked us to take out 3 Blenheims to Cairo, this is before the war and I put these Blenheims out to Cairo for the Turkish Air Force. On the way there we stayed with the French Air Force in the south of France and

incidentally we found there they bought the best champagne in France for five and six, or four and six a bottle, which was interesting. But the next day we were flying across the Mediterranean and we got instructions to fly into Tunis to find out what the strength of the French Air Force was in Tunis, in other words spy on them.

It was French Tunisia.

Well there were three commissioned officers on board and I was one of them and the rest of them were NCOs [non-commissioned officers] and whatever, but I wasn’t in charge of this particular thing, I was second in charge of it, but the boss of it was a Canadian and he told me all about it, he said “What we got to do is go in and find what’s

on.” This is all I knew about it. So we went into Tunis and we told them we had valve trouble and we, sort of engine trouble, but they gave us everything, they gave us interpreters, a car, put us up in the best hotel all this and our ground crew or the people looking after the engines were plied with

alcohol while they were working which was crazy really. But the French Air Force was like a club, no one worked and no, it was interesting. Anyway they even put on a flying display for us and put on their latest fighters to show us what they had, we didn’t have to ask too may questions.

No, but one of the interesting things was is the, our interpreter incidentally

happened to be Marshall Patton’s grandson who was doing his military service and he had perfect English and perfect French, of course, being Marshall Patton’s grandson. But he showed us all the sights, including the first night we were there he showed us the sights of Tunis which included the brothels and in the first brothel we went into was this Madam with an Australian rising sun [emblem] up here.

So we questioned her and it turned out she had married a World War I digger and come back to Australia and then she didn’t like Australia so she then turned to running brothels in Tunisia.

I wouldn’t know I wouldn’t have a clue. No, but it was interesting though, it shows how far the Australian

rising sun gets. Anyway, then we went on in that trip and we went to Malta from there and then along into Cairo eventually. But we spent a week in Malta waiting for room ahead of us more or less, on the way back by boat from Egypt to England war broke out this is how, and we were worried at the time, when

we heard war had broken out, we were worried at the time, our crew was, that war would finish before we arrived back in England.

Yeah, we were worried because we might miss the fun.

No it came down and there was an old colonel from India on board, he was going back to

England forever and he called all the officers together and said England expects every man to do his duty, this stuff, and so we knew then, he told us all about it, he’d apparently got it from the skipper of the boat. But anyway, we went back to our units and we found that they had sent one of our squadrons off and,

on a day light raid but they’d been recalled before they found anything and at the take off everyone had been there, including the local bar maid from the pub, our local pub. It was just a social affair.

Right, well I was there and I was on this searchlight

work on a fighter squadron called Wittering down in central England, Wittering a fighter station, and while I was there I got this signal to report to Air Marshall Harris and I didn’t know what he was up about, I didn’t know what he’d found I’d done or shouldn’t have done and so I flew down to Grantham

which was his headquarters then and reported to him, it was the only time I ever met him, and what he wanted for me, was I mentioned earlier that we’d this strange commander at Waddington and he wanted to know, he was a group captain and he wanted, I was then a flying officer or flight Lieutenant or something, and Harris wanted to know what I knew about the whole business, called the

Anderson Affair and I told him what I knew about this and then he said to me, “What are you doing now?” and I told him and he said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, I hear you’re forming a new squadron with a new type of aircraft and I’d like to be in it.” He simply picked up the phone and said, “French is joining 207 tomorrow.” So I went straight on to Manchesters. This was the

new experimental twin engine Lancaster.

No, no they didn’t exist.

Yeah, that was the Manchester and anyway they only built 200 of them

Yeah of the Manchesters and I’ve got all the histories of every one of em there, and they did them at different marks. Mark One and

when it got to Mark Three, it was the Lancaster, so they renamed it.

Yeah, it is a four-engine Manchester, but it is a Mark Three Manchester really. But the Lancaster was a successful aircraft in that the casualty rates, for instance for casualty rates on the Manchester was

six to ten percent, in other words, if you did send six aircraft you got. No not six, if you sent a hundred out you lost six, which you couldn’t continue at that rate of loss. The Lancaster’s were about two and a half percent losses. But they got almost no losses at all in the last year of the war because the Germans were knocked out

by then.

Well there were two other Australians with me, there was a chap named Johnny Seaburt[?], he’d been at Point Cook on my junior term, he was killed on Manchesters and another one was Dick Taylor, he was killed on Manchesters, but they had a

terrible casualty rate and on one occasion, I was still doing test flying on them, for months I test flew them and on one occasion they were still secret then, on one occasion I came through cloud and at the end of a trip and I happened to be over an aerodrome Linton-on-Ewes and they didn’t know who we were so they sent their shooters and they put

a hole right through one wing. This is the sort of thing happened to you.

I shouldn’t tell you this because this involves Australian secrecy. IFF, what do you think it means?

That’s right yeah; gee you’ve done your homework.

You’ve done your homework.

No anyway, no IFF came in

very early in the piece, it was long before the Battle of Britain. But one night in 50 Squadron where we had all these Australians, one of our chaps got lost one night over Germany and we were in touch with him and he’d got into some trouble in the air and he’d reset his compass and I think he had reset it one hundred and eighty-degrees out of

tune. So that instead of going west as he thought, he was going east, anyway he thought he was over Scotland and by that time it was just on daylight and he saw this aerodrome, and he thought Scotland thank God and he put down and he happened to be at Wombs in the middle of Germany. He was an Australian and he handed the whole Hampden with all its IFF and all its secrets, it was no longer secret and all

this’d be April or May 1940 and they still talk about it out here as some secret weapon. So it was useless from April May ’40 on. He survived the war as a prisoner of war and he died a few years ago.

He didn’t realise it, no. But he handed this whole, a complete Hampden over with all the secrets in it, he didn’t realise.

I was with the squadron then.

Yeah, I knew immediately what had happened.

Lord Haw Haw [German propaganda broadcaster] used to tell us, he used to you know radio.

Yeah. No interesting really. No I’d forgotten about that.

It’s so easy to happen, especially for a colonial that’s in the northern hemisphere.

No but your orientation is different, it is very hard to really get your north, south, east and west in the,

when you’re flying in the northern hemisphere, you are so used to being the sun in a certain direction, it’s in the opposite.

No. But the reason I survived was due to that blind flying stuff, cause I could, it never worried me, I could just go over to instruments and that would be it.

Yes well, when it came to the Manchester for instance, the Manchester had, originally it had a great centre fin on the tail and two

smaller side rudders, so that you had three in line. I forget what that one out there’s got. But the original Manchester was a three-tailed job and at one stage they asked us to go to Woodford, that’s where the Manchester was built by A.V. Rowe, and we went there and we did the testing on

a new form of tail which was a big double tail, with no centre fin and we did the testing for that and that was it, but that large tail was carried on into the Lancaster as well.

Well they were all the same because later on I went into Ferry Wing, I used to fly everything from Hurricanes down.

No well, you get used to an aeroplane actually, you do it without thinking. It’s like you drive a car without thinking and

well I did so much on the Wellingtons but later on. All aircraft were almost the same to me because I used to go from one to another. I’ll show you my log book later.

Well yes and no.

That star crew business I mentioned about going, that was one of them and another one about November 1941 they sent me a signal, it was an operational order, I’ve still got a copy of it there somewhere, an operational order, I was then a squadron leader

and they gave me six aeroplanes and crews, six Hampdens and crews and, it was a weird job. You’ve heard of the Gneisenau, and Scharnhorst ?

Well they were the two German, the battleships that were in, they’re the ones we spent most the time looking for them, they were the greatest menace to the, the Gneisenau,

that’s spelt with a G, Scharnhorst and they were in Brest and at the time they were in dry dock in Brest, that’s on Normandy and they gave me these six Hampdens with one bomb each. I think they made a special bomb for us, it was a nineteen hundred-pounder

and a general purpose bomb, GP and we were sent down to Chivena which is near Cornwall and my job there was to wait until I got the right weather conditions over Brest. We had patrols off Brest all the time, a fleet arm

a fleet air arm patrols because they wanted to get the weather conditions exactly right. I had to have cloud down to a thousand-feet, had to do this job in day light and my job was to lead these people in and put the bombs at the side of the vessels in dry dock, so as to blow out all the supports, have them topple over and they would have been there forever, or it would’ve been

a VC or the end, and I was on it for days and days waiting for the right weather conditions and then someone higher up cancelled the whole thing. But I have still got the battle order. It’s not very often that a battle order comes out that and I often think afterwards, or often thought afterwards that if I had survived that or if I hadn’t survived it, if I hadn’t gone overseas

as I did, I would have commanded the Dambusters.

I am sure of it because I was one of Harris’ favourite; he knew all about us, he knew every time we rolled over in bed. No he did and I would’ve taken over, instead of Guy Gibson. See when I was on that anti-searchlight work, they offered me a flight then in night fighters

and I wouldn’t take it, but Guy Gibson took it and he went on to nights and then he became the leader of the Dambusters. I incidentally, did my first tour with him on Hampdens, he was at Scampton while I was at Waddington.

Yes.

Nice fellow, yeah but he was a friend of two Australians. There were two Australians at Scampton, Ross and Mulligan

and they used to bring him down, this is how I got to know him, they used to bring him down to drink at Waddington, this is how I got to know him.

The which?

Yeah that’s right. Well I asked a dirty question earlier, who was the highest decorated Australian? It was one of the Dam, it was second

in charge, Dambuster, Australian, had nothing to do with the Australian Forces at all. It was Mick Martin, he was knighted Sir Harold Mick Martin, he was knighted, he got umpteen DSO’s [Distinguished Service Order], I think he got three DFC’s and an IFC [?] as well.

Well you can learn.

Yeah that’s right.

No well, Mick Martin he was with us in 455 Squadron. Anyway those Manchesters we were talking about, they were so unreliable and they caused so much trouble that they grounded them so much, that in the end they used to call them, there was two squadrons of them in the end, 207 was the first squadron, then 97 and I was with

97, when I was with 207 they flew their first operation or raid, this is Manchesters, on Brest again and I wasn’t allowed to fly that night, the CO took my crew and I had to stay behind and look after the man that had invented the Anson, the Manchester, the Lancaster, the lot, a chap named Lloyd Chadwick

he was the head designer for all of them. He was killed later on. Lloyd Chadwick.

He was killed in an air crash.

No he was a pilot himself. But I looked, this is interesting actually, this was the first night they operated and I looked after him

and they went to Brest, I forget how many of them now, but they went to Brest and they all came back except one of them and he was late and it was snowing, and the snow was on the ground, it was about three in the morning and he, this late one came up on the what they call TR-9, on the, he could talk to you and he came up he said, “I got one wheel up and one wheel down and

what do I do?” and so I put him straight away onto Roy Chadwick and Roy said try this and try that and he tried this and he tried that and then Chadwick said, “Come in and land on one wheel.” So he came in, in this snowstorm and landed on one wheel and the aeroplane, this is the Manchester, it weighs God knows how many tons, and it flew in six-weeks.

incredible. But he was a magnificent pilot that chap, he was an Englishman called Burton Giles, he was a magnificent pilot. The Americans reckon he was the best bomber pilot of the war.

Christ no, no. There were very few good pilots apart from me and Jesus Christ, but no there were very few, very few, I only with, I flew with thousands,

hundreds a people, but there were very few good pilots,

I don’t know, me and Jesus.

No, no I got no idea. But no, but no what was I? I was thinking about something I should tell you about. The, the Manchesters there,

This is what happened but it happened a bit later than that. I was with these anyway then Australia came in and they wanted to form this squadron, 455 Squadron and they sent me there to teach them to operate.

Yes it was and that was their first attempt and it was about the middle of forty-one they came in, mid forty-one, and they started, it was partly manned by RAF English and RAAF and they took me from

Manchester to these and they were going to equip us with Hampdens, anyway we had one Hampden, that’s all we could get for a start and they had no one to fly it, so I flew that for them. That was on Frankfurt. It was late August ‘41.

Why?

I was with that squadron probably for four or five-months probably and in that time they got the, they became the, they had the record for the most primary targets located and attacked in bomber command.

I am not sure that, because it’s very hard to find targets

and you had to have a good crew, a good, very good navigation. But they really rose to being a good squadron but then what happened was they were losing so many vessels at sea, that they wanted to whip bombers out of Bomber Command and put them into Coastal Command to look after the shipping and so they took 455 away from Bomber Command

and put them into Coastal Command. In the meantime as you’ve said the war in Japan or with Japan had broken out and I wanted to get home, so I applied to be posted to Australia or the Australian theatre of war.

No. People don’t realise we weren’t, our postings

weren’t like the Australian forces, our postings were always done on merit. You see, out here you’d have to, if you kept your nose clean for a hundred-years, you became the boss. We in World War II had a fellow out here in charge of the RAAF, Jones. Well post war I happened to be

on a farm I’d bought down in South Gippsland and the shire engineer told me, he was a brigadier, told me that in World War I the man that became head of the Australian Air Force, Jones, was a private and he was so poor so they wouldn't even make him a corporal. How did that happen? See this is what the Australian forces were like. You think of

it and here it is by some manner or other, he became from a Private Jones to Air Marshal Jones.

No by knowing the right people, simple as that. No, it is sad. Anyway there were lots of adventures there. I was on one raid in one of those Manchesters and I,

we were looking for the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst at night one night, in a Manchester, we were in anti aircraft for a long time and bad cloud for a long time and we were being shot at for a long time and when I got home there was this hole in the side of aeroplane and a heap of molten melted on the floor, it was the IFF set and this is, we used to have it sort of

put up on the side, or screwed onto the side of the aeroplane and we’d been struck by lightning and the IFF set always had a thermite bomb in it, a little tiny pound or two-pound bomb in it, thermite bomb and we’d been struck by lightning and this has just melted away to nothing.

Well, so as the enemy wouldn’t get it, but they already had it.

No incredible, it was so silly.

The which?

No, no, I was still on contract to the RAF, no I was still in my five year contract.

No I went to the, what they did then was I was a squadron leader then, so they said, “Yeah, you can go.” But we used to, we’d apply for a posting and we’d usually get it. It wasn’t a question of who you knew, but you’d just have to pass a few people and you usually were done, were posted like that, but out here it was definitely, anyway

So they said, “Right, put on another rank.” and I went up to wing commander and they put me as OC of troops and sent me on a vessel in charge of the air crew, the air force people on board.

No, we did all sorts of dirty jobs like this. I had about eight or nine-hundred people on board and

they were going out, most I, we didn’t have a clue where we were going and we were in a big convoy and we joined the convoy and it was really secret service stuff almost and we went out into the Irish Channel and mines all round, they used to shoot the mines and sink them, they were probably our own mines. But anyway…

It was very tiny little boat this. We had em sleeping down in the, it’d be in a boat, I had one boat, the Highland Princess and the Highland Chieftain I had one and one of my mates had the other and they’d been used in peacetime for bringing the meat from Argentine to England so they had

enormous, what do you call em down below?

Holds, yeah down in the holds. So we simply put up lots of hammocks and all our people slept down below there and at one stage in the tropics it got so hot we turned on the freezers and they all nearly died of pneumonia.

But that was, it was interesting. But

Yeah these are the Empire Training Scheme.

Yeah and there were about twenty-odd boats in the convoy and we zig zagged across the Atlantic and then we went into Freetown, that’s on the west coast of Africa there and I happened to know the RAF doctor there. so I was allowed ashore, no one else was and

that’s Freetown, and then we went heading south again, I didn’t have a clue where we were heading and then a bit north of Cape Town, one morning there was a hell of a bang and one of our boats went straight to the bottom, something had hit it, it either hit a mine and then later in the afternoon, another one was hit by something

or other, so we lost two boats, but the last one I didn’t see that sink, it seemed to be going around in ever lasting circles, could a been a torpedo.

About twenty I reckon in that one. I forget now, I didn’t count em, but some big boats. But your speed is the speed of your slowest, so you are more or less crawling along. Anyway so I, being OC troops I

had thousands of pounds in small notes with me and I put this down, it was all in a parcel in the purser’s safe, so I thought if our boat goes down those thousands of pounds are going overboard with me. So I got it out and put it in a parachute bag which you could put anything in a parachute bag.

I don’t know about that bit, but it’s pound proof. But we weren’t sunk, anyway the next thing I knew was we were going into port and I looked up my secret files or whatever they were, and I found that before we went into this port, I had to find out how many condoms were required to get our troops past the evils of what happened to be

Durban. The Durban?

Eight or nine-hundred. So I

I sent down questionnaires to all the decks, different decks and only, not many people it was only a small boat and they would have cleaned Durban out of condoms for weeks, they were all ambitious young gents. English.

But they were going to be trained, it turned out, in was it Rhodesia.

It was, what do you mean?

I just simply as I put it to you, how many do you think you will require?

No, no

no, but this is war at its dirtiest. But anyway, I was worried about this and when we finally at Durban the embarkation officer came down, he said, I told him about my worries, he said, “Don’t worry.” he said, “We’ll fix it.” and he had a train come right to the boat. There was a railway right to the boat and he simply turfed them into the railway and went straight through Durban

and up to Rhodesia.

No, but it’s one of the highlights. Anyway, I hung around Durban for weeks and weeks waiting for a boat to take me somewhere else. See I was still trying to get to Australia and the next thing I knew they put me on a boat. It was a beautiful boat called the New Amsterdam. It was about

twice the size of these boats you normally went to England in, 45,000 tonner, a magnificent boat and I was just a passenger on that and then within 5 minutes I was OC Troops of a deck. There was an army colonel on board and he had a wireless he shouldn’t have had or something and they locked him up and I had to do his dirty work for a time, until we got up to..

… if you read a lot of the histories you’ll find that most of the flying types would not go to training units, cause they resisted it because there was a group of people in training command that knew they were safe, actually the safest place in the world in the war was to be

ground crew in the air force. But they, these people in training command used to stick around training command. When I was in Karachi, I was there for six-months, and that was a whole centre of people who were keeping out of the active war. It was a fascinating place to be, but I was with Ferry Wing there later on.

Yeah that is right. That’s where I, but I got fed up to the teeth with it because it was too much like training.

No, then, are we on again are we?

I got up to Cairo and

I was a still wing commander then, so I immediately asked to be put back on Ops [operations], and so they searched around and in the end, I found that if I went down in rank again, so I went down in rank to squadron leader and took a flight on, in 108 Squadron, Wellingtons and no one asked me

what experience I had in Wellingtons, I’d never flown one and the first time I flew one was I flew one at night to bomb Tobruk, which is in my log book.

No, no, it was the fact that I was a capable pilot and I knew the systems well, cause I had done almost two tours

by then.

Yeah, yeah, as long as you had Jesus with you.

No there is a good, people out here, they didn’t know what it was like, but this fellow he was a

doctor and he could’ve easily sat back and been a GP [general practitioner] or whatever.

Definitely, yeah they had football and race meetings, hundreds of thousands at a football match, it’s sickening when there’s a war on, it’s not cricket you know.

Of course they should’ve.

Yeah.

Of course it would have but, no I’ve just picked up a, the war was finished anyway, long before, it was finished long before they dropped the atom bombs. I’ve got a book out there, I picked it up recently by one of the Empire Air Training Wing commanders,

you may have read it, I don’t know, but Lionel Hudson wrote it Wing Commander RAAF, and he wrote this book, he was shot down or went down over, in a Mosquito, over Rangoon or near Rangoon and he was in the jail at Rangoon and then the Japanese walked away and left them entirely in charge, three-months before the atom bomb was dropped.

Yeah, yeah.

Well my termination with them actually came in, I happened to be in Egypt when my five years ran out and I met a friend and he told me to transfer back, so I transferred back but

that was when I was in Egypt on a visit while I was in Ferry aircraft and what I didn’t realise was I’d transferred back to the reserve RAAF not the to the permanent RAAF, the regulars. See I’d been regular and people I’d trained with who remained in Australia.

Yeah, the Desert Air Force anyway, we were bombing Tobruk and bombing Tobruk and bombing Tobruk, that was our main target and also desert targets, we did desert targets and desert targets.

Yeah, early this was, I started operating there about July forty-two and I was still there,

still there in September forty-two and then it was just the start of the Battle of Alamein. Incidentally, I am still in touch with one of the rare gunners there, who he was a wireless operator and he lives at Heidleberg down here and we exchange phone calls nearly everyday and he…

Yeah.

No he’ll ring up and he’ll say, “I’m doing something can you, what’s your advice on this.” and he’ll ask me about female circumcision in Africa or something weird sort of things, you know, but he’s a brain. He was a printer after the war and we’d always exchange notes and he got a wide variety, he’s interested in pre-history in the same way as I am, that’s one of my hobbies and, no it’s interesting.

But he was with me when we were doing 2 trips a night.

It depends where you were. See in those days if you could do two a night, you were so close to the front line, you used to go out and bomb, come back bomb up, off and bomb again. This was in the Wellington.

Quite, it was, and the casualties were fewer, fewer, fewer.

The fighters didn’t do any fighting. No they didn’t. Let me, I’ll show you the figures afterwards, of fighter casualties in the war, there was about two-thousand, Bomber Command lost fifty-six thousand.

Yeah, no one in two.

Oh yeah, after the war. But the fighter people did nothing, they had hardly

any casualties. Many of my friends were, went on the fighters one of them lost his sight, that’d be worse than dying.

Yeah?

Yes, I was purely RAF, yeah.

Well wherever I was I always had a preference to work with New

Zealanders and Australians.

Well our

main targets there, say Tobruk, it was mainly the shipping we were after to try and get [Field Marshall] Rommel’s supplies, this is what the targets there were, it was mainly shipping not open town of Tobruk, but you always bombed the shipping and in the desert targets you always, what happened was there was, these are the Alamein job, this was all done at night at, say, three and a half thousand, the

Albacores used to come in from the sea and they’d drop flares over the desert and you’d see tank and tank and tank. It was all done with precision because you were pretty low, three and a half thousand-feet and you used to go in and bomb all the targets there, all your tanks and your transports and this type of thing and this,

but it was so close to Cairo see, this is why you were on two trips a night. We in those days operated from a strip just in between the Pyramids and Alexandria, we had an aerodrome there we used to operate from, but for a long time we operated from Cabrit, which is on the Suez Canal that was where I did my first operations from.

We killed some, we killed a hundred one night of our own troops that had advanced too far and we killed them, but that was just one of the things.

Probably a few days, see that’d be internal intelligence we, so we had it pretty well…..

Yeah, but ...

Let me tell you this about the Italians. When I first got there in July, I had an Australia up here (indicates shoulder) you know, and I attended a briefing for, well in this case it was Tobruk, and the intelligence officer said

“Take that down.” I said, “What do you mean?” and I said “I’ve only taken it down once before.” he said, “When was that?” and I said “Well, it happened to be in Durban because the Australian 6th Division had gone through Durban and away and they hadn’t left a good impression.” and so he said, “Well why have you got to do it here?” he said, “If you get into the hands of the Italians, they don’t take Australian prisoners,

they’ll cut your throat.” How many people in Australia know that?

Well this is from the intelligence officer, it didn’t come from Joe Blow [anyone].

Yeah they must’ve, but at this particular stage this is July ’42 I’m speaking, these are specific times, so I took it down and I didn’t

put it up again until I got out of that area.

I was only there for about four-months and then I found they wanted a Wellington delivered to India, so I thought that’s closer to Australia so I took the job myself and flew it out to India.

No, no, no. Look, people don’t realise that we, up to a point, we more or less made our own decisions. It sounds silly.

Yes it’s because, this is why the Australian Services are, it’s like having a policeman that keeps his fingers out of the till, it’s…

I didn’t say it, you did.

Yeah, I took this Wellington out to India and I said, “Who’s this for?” and they said, “We don’t know.” This was Karachi, everything goes through Karachi, so they said, “There is a Wellington squadron down at Madras, take it down there.” so I took it down to Madras and it was 215 Squadron was there, so

I was then, what was I then? Squadron leader ….yeah squadron leader then, and so after awhile there, I flew up to Delhi one day, I said, “Do you realise I brought this aeroplane out weeks ago, what do you want me to do with it?” they said, “Hand it over to 215 Squadron and stay with them.” This was from Delhi, so I did that and so I

I remained with 215 for awhile. One of my first jobs, they wanted me to, the CO there he said, “Fly up to the north west frontier to Chaklala.” that’s Rawalpindi or where it is now, Islamabad’s up there, that’s been built since. So I went up to Delhi and walked in and said,

“I want to get some maps to take me from here up to the north west frontier.” and the people in Delhi said, “Ain’t got no maps.” so I went down the street and bought a school atlas which I used to navigate up to the north west frontier, still got it and bought in a newsagent. Anyway then, I arranged for the fuel and all this and we went to an aerodrome up there

we went back and took the squadron there to this place, Chaklala and Chaklala it was there and what we did, we had these Wellingtons and they simply cut a dirty big hole out of the centre of the floor in the fuselage and we were parachute dropping. Most of the people we trained we had, I think they had to do ten or twenty drops or something, most of them were Ghurkhas

they were beautiful people and we trained a lot of these Ghurkhas and Morartars [?] and they had English officers and it was quite a successful operation.

Yeah, you’d have eight sitting round, you’d either fold back sort of flap, two flaps and it’d

fold back and they’d sit round and you’d could them out, one, two to eight, and no we used to drop em at three-hundred feet, which is

No they were on a fixed line, the line automatically pulled the chute open as they went, so if they dropped they, but we, at one stage I thought well I’d better do a drop myself, I’m dropping these poor B’s [bastards] and that. I got permission and then I checked on the,

I used to have to sit on all the casualties and I found that we were killing six in a thousand, instead of one in six-thousand, so I said, I change my mind. The main fault was we were using Indian parachutes which were pretty poor and they used to wind up. Anyway,

Yeah anyway, so we were up there but that was interesting, I was able to

take a leave up in Kashmir and Sriniga and those places, but, no it was an interesting bit of tourism.

No but then one day they said, “You’ve been promoted again.” and they promoted me and they sent me to Karachi as a wing commander second in charge of Ferry Wing India. That was a lovely job we flew everything,

and went everywhere. Sometimes I’d go back to Egypt and all this. We used to take all the aircraft from Egypt to Burma and then at one stage early forty-three they told me I had to find a new, we nearly lost India you know, the Japs were into it, a corner of it. They wanted me to find a new route

from Egypt to India and

Well it was there, they were in the corner of it, they went right up through Burma. Read about the activity at Imphal, that’s where we turned them back, I-M-P-H-A-L. Anyway, normally we used to go, in ferrying, we’d ferry

from Egypt up into Palestine as it was known then and then Palestine down the oil pipeline to Baghdad and then from Baghdad down to Basra, then Basra to Sharjah and then Sharjah to Karachi and so that you, that was the normal route but they reckoned they’d lose most of northern India. By way of interest the Brits had a chain of

secret aerodromes right across the north of India and they, at one stage when I was with this Ferry Wing they gave me the job of marking, they had underground operation rooms, everything them, these places but they didn’t have control towers and they sent me to site the control towers on places like Quetta right up into Afghanistan.

But,

But anyway,

I did that and on the first trip, I’ve always been a tourist, on the first, finding this new route, I picked up a Blenheim Four I think it was and I flew up the Nile towards Khartoum this was my first job, this was the new route,

up to Khartoum and when we got about three quarters of the way there, one of the engines almost fell out. It was a new aeroplane and so there was an aerodrome right underneath and it turned out to be Luxor the Valley of the Kings so I was a real tourist. That’s where all the antiquities are in the Valley of the Kings.

Anyway then I hitchhiked back from there to Cairo, picked up another aeroplane and went down to Asmera. Asmera is the Eritrea, that’s the, that’s where the Italians had been and used poison gas on the people there, that they had when they took that country over, more Italians. And then from there I went down to

Aden and then along the southern Arabian coast, Sharjah and [(UNCLEAR)] and then Karachi.

Anyway, I was there I don’t know, I’d have to look up my log book for that. But the first time, I was with it twice you see, and then I was with this Karachi mob the Ferry Wing I got fed

up with it and I had some friends around who you know, one was a doctor and one was a parson, service people, and I said “For Christ sake, get me back to a squadron.” and they got me back, I went back to Command 215. And I spent nearly a year with them there as the CO.

No, when I got back to the squadron I was bombing.

We were actively, we were stationed at Jessore that’s a hundred-miles miles to the west of, Jessore, it’s to the west, it’s in Bengal…. Bangladesh and we were there bombing Burma, Japs in Burma, and that was my job, I was were still bombing then.

No it was, it was, there was no satisfaction in that you couldn’t see your results, you had no intelligence to get your results and so that you, it was a pretty futile exercise and they’d probably say there’s a Jap squadron on a certain aerodrome and by the time you got the information and you got

there, that squadron would be a thousand miles away, this type of thing.

Yeah, yeah, but the aircraft were unsuited, the aircraft were worn out, they were worn out Wellingtons 1T’s. My headquarters was in Calcutta and they used to ring up every morning and they would say, “What’s your serviceability?” and you’d tell them and they’d say, “Your target is such and such

tonight.” This was on a scrambled line. Do you know them?

You simply talk in and anyone that intercepts it can’t hear a thing but it comes out right at the other end, they always used a scrambled line for us. Anyway I got fed up with these because you’d have people, you’d have your aircraft taking off and they’d crash long before they got air-bourn and

you’d have to drag the dead bods off the tarmac so get the others off, it got me down in the end, so one morning they rang me and said, “What’s your serviceability?” I said, “None”. I said, “Send your plumbers up and let them test them.” So they came up and, we had to fly over ten-thousand feet just to get into Burma. They sent up all their Engineer officers and they tried a couple of aeroplanes and they finally got air borne

in one and they couldn’t get it above nine and a half thousand-feet and we had to do that at night, go through the mountain passes at night which isn’t funny. No it was and those Wellington 1C’s never flew ops again they grounded them after that.

God, we didn’t lose many, but we could have lost a hell

of a lot more if I hadn’t of stopped them using them. But anyway they offered me Liberators to re-equip the whole squadron with Liberators and I found out we could do better with a later mark of Wellington because we had all the Wellington equipment you see. But lots of funny things happened. One day while I was there, I saw them servicing a Wellington and everyone ran like hell they were leaping off the

wings and running like hell and fury and this funny whistle, and what happened was that the, this particular Wellington had an inflation, a series of inflation tubes in the bomb bay that if you went down in the sea you pressed a button and all these expanded into a dirty big balloon and kept the aircraft afloat and someone had been fiddling around in the cockpit

and pressed the wrong buttons and all these had exploded and all the bombs fell off, and there was always a bit of comic opera around like that.

Yeah I was in Bengal the whole of ‘43 pretty well.

Yeah and then my father was dying and I wanted to see him and they said, “You’ve got no one to replace you.” so I kept trying and in the end I got home but he died before I saw him. But they had hundreds of people out here could’ve taken over, but they were all too busy in the

Hotel Australia I think, not on dry red here.

Yeah it was, apart from that and the rank business, I was allowed to keep my acting wing commander rank but before that anyone that came, one of my friends

Bob Bundy he’d been on my senior term at Point Cook, he went to England and he’d been decorated in the battle of Britain and he was with the invasion force in France and when he came back he was a wing, he was the first commander of the Australian Fighter Squadron 452 Bundy and when he came back

as wing commander they said, “Take all those down, you’re a flying officer now.” They pulled him back to flying officer, there’s squadron leader, flight lieutenant, flying officer, so he went down to the beach and blew his brains out and shot his young son. This is Australian history. Sorry.

People wrote up, actually some of the books say he died during an appendix operation.

It’s not true.

Well things like that.

Yeah, but why has it never come out public?

Well, for instance have you ever seen a finding as to why

not one Australian aircraft took off to fight the Japs when they arrived at Darwin first time?

Well why, you answer the questions you see, unless you get the answers, it is all a secret society.

No I know, but….

It is a secret society. See that has never been exposed as to why that happened.

Not much because no, in general we were poorly trained and poorly equipped right from day one, both RAAF and RAF. See we should never have had aircraft that wouldn’t take off, as we had.

No I put it to you this way.

The politicians do the best with the money they’ve got available.

No, but they will do their best, in other words we should have had armour plate long before the war, we should’ve had self-sealing tanks long before the war, we should have better guns long before the war and the reason we didn’t have

them because there’s always a shortage of money, so that they, the same thing will happen next war. They always get their priorities wrong and the only way to do it is to introduce a better, more efficient tax system. So that people, well for example, are taxed on assets and not income, the income system stinks because anyone can avoid tax,

which they do and when you’ve got a whole industry that this tax avoidance industry you have got, even today.

See, you’re an educated person, do you do your own tax?

Yeah, yeah?

That’s it, but why, you can read and write,

Yeah but why do you do it?

Yeah, but why select a specialist?

But you could do it.

No but this is the topic.

That is it, if the money was available.

I hadn’t thought of the bloody Depression as an excuse for it, but you’re probably right.

You’re probably right. I hadn’t thought of the bloody Depression. What we had was inadequate and what they had out here was less than adequate.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes, the two essentials you need to fight a war, one is communications that’s intelligence and the other one is mobility and you need those, especially Australia, those two items are most important.

Mobility and communications.

Yeah, well when I got that posting to command 215, I was

posted there a senior, I was posted to, I was junior to the people that I commanded in the air force base and this was, they were people that had served in training command, they had served everywhere else except in the, but I had the experience of operations, long experience of operations behind me. This is why I was posted to command these people. It was not a happy situation but I overcame

it. But that is what happened in the RAF, you were promoted on merit not on seniority.

Yes definitely because our whole public service out here is on seniority which is wrong. But

Is it?

Yeah, yeah. For instance in the past, if a person say did a university course while they were working in the public service, it didn’t mean a thing, it should do.

No, it was the fact that it enabled you to grow up very quickly.

No,

No you just did your duty but never queried about it. Had we been better equipped and better trained, see when I started those first night raids

on, the phoney war for example, I had more hours of night flying than anyone in the squadron three-hours-fifty, you could barely do a couple of circuits in three-hours-fifty. In other words, we were completely, although we had the aeroplanes, there was bad leadership there, in that we hadn't been, we had bad leaders, this is RAF I am speaking of now, but three-hours-fifty

it’s three-hours-fifty is nothing in the air.

Well the Battle of Britain to my way of thinking, is a myth in that most people believe that it was fought

and won by the by the fighter people. The official figures in the Battle of Britain, Fighter Command lost four-hundred and fifty men fighting, that is RAF Fighter Command and Bomber Command for the same fifteen-weeks of the Battle of Britain lost seven-hundred and thirty and we in the Bomber Section are not allowed to put up the Battle of

Britain clasp, although we flew at the same time bombing German aerodromes and invasion barges and I’d like to know why we are not. What happened in the Battle of Britain, Hitler intended to invade England but, and he started to attack England and he certainly did have a bitter battle

with the English RAF Fighter Command. But he suddenly changed his mind and he ordered General [UNCLEAR} his Luftwaffe in charge and he ordered him to pull out all of the attacking forces that were attacking Britain in the Battle of Britain, take them to Poland and prepare

them for the invasion of Russia, so that what happened was the Battle of Britain just fizzled out, it wasn’t won by the RAF at all.

Because of just public opinion, public opinion likes to think they win. See a lot of people out here think Gallipoli was a victory for us

a lot of people, see even Dunkirk is presented as a victory.

No, but in that Battle of Britain business, they did withdraw and the attacks on London and all the other cities, I was there and all the other cities got less and less and less. They used to bomb our aerodromes quite a lot.

They even killed all our NAAFI [Navy Army and Air Force Institute] girls one night when I was there. Which was a waste.

As I explained, we were bombing mainly

aerodromes, communications, German aerodromes, communications to them, the general supply of equipment from Germany to the coast so that they could get the invasion barges ready and all this, and we were attacking those lines of communication which was most important and as I said, we lost seven-hundred and thirty men.

No, at that time no, they were purely night bomber operations by us, entirely. When it came to the Kokoda Trail which I also think was a myth, in that the Australian forces went in and they certainly contacted the Japanese but the Japanese had taken, they’d come across from the north into the south and

they’d extended their lines of communication so far, that they were out of supplies, they were out of food, they were out of this and they were on the verge of retreating when they were first met by the Australians. So what the Australians did was follow them back as they retreated.

I am not sure of the actual units at all.

But they followed them back because they were retreating anyway because of their lines of communication being over-extended.

Well that’s not exactly a victory.

Well why were they under equipped and under

trained?

This was two-years after a war had started.

No, no, no.

The hierarchy, the upper defence hierarchy that had us ill trained and ill equipped.

No because in many cases people accept

what the media present to them and the media still present that as a victory.

I don’t know, people are treated on their merits in a true service, and I think it did affect me up to a certain point. I know at one stage I was recommended for higher decoration and I didn’t get it because of it, I know this.

Well on one occasion I was briefing some people for a bomber raid and a senior officer countermanded my instructions or ideas on how the attack should be made and I suggested to him that he should fly himself that particular night and when it came for me being put up for a decoration it had to go past him and the decoration

was demoted. I know this officially, or unofficially from the adjutant of the squadron involved.

After the war.

No it doesn’t worry me, if people are small minded let them be small minded, it’s not the way I made them.

He was an English gent incidentally.

No. One of our daughters married one of them.

Yes, you had to know how to handle your knife and fork. We had some remarkable Irish people flew with the RAF, one was a friend of mine Paddy Ayrton and Paddy had the record of being, he was with me on Manchesters he had the record of being, he was in a dinghy off the coast, had the record

of being the longest time in a dinghy before he finally, he used his parachute as a sail and sailed to Holland and he survived the war as a prisoner of war. But on another occasion we had several Irish chaps working with us in the squadron, or one of the squadrons I was with and they went on leave and they came home three-weeks late which put

put them AWOL [absent without leave] and when we asked them they said, “Well we didn’t really know, we could neither read nor write.” So it didn’t say much for the Irish from that part of the country.

Ireland.

No it is true that.

No, no, that was their excuse.

I wouldn’t have a clue. I never got to Ireland I always wanted to go and never got there.

Well many of the, there were several classes of them of course, the Earl of Bandon he was called the Abandoned Earl he was RAF and he

was Irish, but they came back after the Battle of the Boyne is it, when they fought the Brits and all that?

Yeah yeah, but that war still continues really, the people are still divided by it. I recently did a family tree for some Irish people and they had all the Irish gentry there. You could pick them; no you could pick em out of sight

No, no. What happened in the early days was that

when they sent a group out to say bomb the Dortmund Ems Canal, that was a VC job. The senior person in charge got the VC, the next in charge got a DSO, the next in charge in line got DFCs and the NCOs got

DFM’s [Distinguished Flying Medal] and it was all done on a seniority racket which was crazy. The VCs were allotted like that. If you were the senior person on that job you got the decoration.

No it’s not strange but that is what happened.

Well it was the way

it was because they had some funny customs but was that one.

See, for instance after what I saw you get different, it’s like all decorations, for instance, Queensland Knighthood wouldn’t stand against a Victorian Knighthood.

No, when Bjelke [Jo Bjelke-Petersen Queensland Premier] was there knighthoods were floating, you with me? In the same

way in the theatres of war, decorations in the desert were very rare, decorations in say 1943 in Europe, in England were common and so on right down. There were hardly any decorations when I was into Burma.

Well it was just,

a lot of those decorations are political, well I’m sure they were. I left them a bit, when I left my squadron 215, in India, I left them a bit confused there because one day just before I left I’d put a chap up for a DFM or DFC, I forget which and the next day I put him up for a Court Marshal for trying to sell his pistol in a brothel in Calcutta

and I still don’t know what happened, whether he got his decoration or a court martial.

I don’t know. No decorations are, we used to have to recommend people for decorations every three-months, that was automatic and you went through and apart from that, you had, if a person did something unusually good, you’d put them in for an immediate

decoration which could be done immediately.

Yeah you didn’t put anyone up, yeah.

No, no that’s right.

Yes we’d been,

what had happened was, the German fleet were invading Norway and one of the squadrons from the station, 44 Squadron I think it was, they’d sent someone out to attack this German fleet and they were half way across the North Sea and someone stood up in parliament and said, “What happens if they happen to kill a Norwegian?” So they were recalled in

the air and they were brought back to Waddington aerodrome and later on in the afternoon someone else in parliament changed their mind again and we were sent off, without any proper briefing, I didn’t even know what the target was and it turned out it was the same target. But we were in formation and you flew off to Norway which is a hell of a way across the sea in a, we were in Hampdens. Then

we found a couple of boats off Bergen and so we broke formation and climbed to about ten-thousand feet and in my case, we went in and attacked them. The pilot can see nothing underneath his nose cause he has a dirty big nose of an aircraft there, but the navigator pilot come bomb

aimer can see everything and he claimed we got a direct hit on one of the boats and so we went back to base and almost immediately they said, “You’ll probably get a gong out of this.” so we both got, the navigator and myself both got DFCs, simple as that.

The bar was, the bar,

you may have heard a bit of talk about the Gneiseneau and Scharnhorst, well they were in Brest for a long time and they broke out of Brest one day and they, without telling anyone they whistled up the English Channel at great speed and everything, they suddenly found them, saw them and everything in Bomber Command that was available that could fly flew and we attacked them. My

particular squadron at the time was 455 squadron, that was February, early February 1942 and I lost my Deputy flight commander, he was and Australian, Perrin, he was good fella, he was shot down. But we found them and we attacked them but that was for that raid. They holed us, they put a hole through my one of my wings.

But nasty people, that was it.

That was part of it yeah.

No I always think that, say if you’ve got

anything like a higher decoration or even a knighthood, you’ve got to live up to it and I’m not prepared to live up to it thank you very much, I’d sooner be humble me. Not so humble.

Well I explained, it was mainly to fly better aircraft and get more travel experience.

Well flying, it was just flying and it was ability flying that sort of appealed to me. Yeah, it was the aspect, see I had completed this course at the RMIT and when I was also, when we completed courses in those days the

College found you jobs and I was to start work say January that year following and as assistant, assistant, assistant, electrical engineer to the Melbourne City Council, so God knows what the electricity would have done. Instead of that in January that year I went into the RAAF.

I enjoyed it. I really loved flying, I loved aeroplanes and I loved flying, cause the aeronautics of it, the engineering side of it was the thing. At that time when I was stationed at Whitbury on night searchlight co-operation, I only flew at night so that the CO of the station there decided I should work during the day, so he sent

me down to the village or town of Stanford where they had on, in the middle of the town they had this German bomber, a Junkers 88 I think it was, they’d shot down and I had to tell lies about it to all the public who paid six-pence.

No, but it was a magnificent aeroplane, see I’d trained as an engineer and I knew the setup of engineering, they had this beautiful aircraft with

annodisation which was almost new to us was there, and it was a beautiful aircraft, beautifully assembled, instead of a million nuts and bolts as we had to put an engine in, they had a couple of dirty big screws about six-inches in diameter. No it was magnificent.

Well in this particular case. By the way, I was able to judge aircraft because pre-war

we’d been on a cycling tour of France and Belgium and we didn’t see a cycle. But we happened to attend the aero-exhibition in Brussels. There were your Spitfires and all the German bombers and the French fighters were there as well, all on show. But including a Spitfire this was well before the war, at least a month.

No, no. No, but what happened quite often out in the desert, I should’ve

done this but some of our people did it, they used to, as we moved backwards and forwards they’d pick up aircraft and we’d pick up their craft, so that but, no I never sort of picked up anything like that. I probably wasn’t in the desert long enough to do that.

The effective one?

Well you can

only judge the effect by the casualty rates I would think because the, your casualties rates on your Mosquito were almost nil, which was a, it carried an enormous load and it was an unthinkable thing made of wood and yet people that flew it tell me it was magnificent to fly and it was simple to fly

and on the bigger stuff, well the top aircraft was the Lancaster, that was, that had a lot of casualties but it did a lot of work, enormous, it’s casualty rates were about two point five.

I don’t know because I didn’t actually fly them, the only ones I saw were the odd ones like I mentioned at Stanford.

Well the general effect of anything like searchlights or anti-aircraft has the effect of keeping you, the higher the safer and it is simple as that. See for instance the ceiling, the

ceiling, that’s the limit of a Hampden for instance, was barely fifteen-thousand with a bomb load, the ceiling with the Lancaster is nearly thirty-thousand which is a heck of a difference, so that the higher the fewer. Understood?

The higher the fewer.

Yeah and less accuracy yeah. No it’s very hard to get really accurate when you’re at great

heights. One, you have target identification problems and that’s it.

Yeah. We had one in England but at one stage they’d brought more of RAF planes down than they had German planes.

No just that they, a matter of fact I had a lot of trouble, when we returned from raids we had certain channels, air channels to come through that were clear of balloon barrages and we also had receivers, wireless receivers on board that as you approach this English coast you switched it on

and it would indicate whether you were in amongst balloons or not. So that, one night I was coming home and I approached England and I put my things on and the next thing I knew, I was right in the middle of what I thought was a balloon barrage and this great thing loomed up in front of me and it wasn’t a balloon, it was the moon coming through stars, I nearly rolled upside down. No this is what happened though.

Not sure of that, it could’ve been helium in those days.

Yeah, no but we had balloon cutters, we had balloon cable cutters on the aircraft and they were fitted to the leading edge of the wing and as you hit a cable, it’d slide along and go into a little, it was only a small thing, a little slot, it’d go into a slot

and a small explosion would simply throw out a chisel and chop off the cable. I saw these being tested before the war at Milton Hall using a battle aircraft to test them and they worked.

Of course it did. It slewed you round. Quite a lot of our people went into balloon barrages

Yes you could, see if for instance, if your balloon cutter wasn’t working and you got in between engines if the cable hit between your engines, you’d be in trouble there, unless it cut, this is why we had balloon cutters on.

No many of the pilots didn’t even know how they worked. I remember some people came and they didn’t believe we had them, but we definitely had them. Right from, pretty well early in the piece.

Well it was to make it look not like an aerodrome, to make it look like normal paddocks, fields sorry.

These were the main

ones, they painted nearly all the aerodromes like that. But gradually all of those grass aerodromes had runways put on them, this was about ‘41, they started to put runways on them, proper concrete runways so that you had your series, or several landing strips crossing one another and so that if the aerodrome got shockingly wet, you didn’t get bogged you simply

taxied off the runway onto a path.

Yeah but we were used to it by, we’d been there for several years.

The climate in England, I found changed about four times,

five times a day. You didn’t get any long days that were continual, you’d start off with a good day and the next day’d, the next hour it’d be winter and it varied, seemed to vary so much and there was a lot, see the weather there comes from the west and it comes from the Atlantic and it comes from Iceland and all places like that to the west and north and you had a great variety

of climatic conditions.

Not to my knowledge, unless you’ve got freeze-up, which quite often happened you did get things frozen up.

Oh definitely yeah and in the Hampden it used to fly off and hit the side of the fuselage and if you had your hood back you’d be hit all round the face with the

ice coming off.

The hood back? Yeah, sometimes you’d have to if it was sort of dirty weather because of the, all your screens would get smoked up and you’d open it up.

We had, let’s see, in the early days, we had

in the Hampdens we had heating and if you opened up you did cool the whole thing down. In the Manchesters we wore electric suits which you plugged in, they were electric flying jackets and pants.

Yeah they were, some were clumsy things, but some of them were good. But we used to fly in all sorts of things, some of the older people used to fly with a complete suit of civilian clothes underneath, no which was in case of going down.

No.

But many of them did this alternately. See the attitude to being, people don’t realise out here, the attitude to becoming a prisoner of war is quite different in the RAF. In the RAF pre-war we were taught or almost compelled to read all of the escape books of World War I and so that it is an officer’s duty to escape and not do a

Weary Dunlop and work for the Japs. This is why most of the great escape stories are nearly all flying people.

Yeah.

Well it was the way we were trained, we were trained to escape, it’s an officer’s duty to escape and we always went prepared to escape. My gear’s in

the archives, I put it all away with them, I had all the moneys, we were given escape money always, if we flew over Germany we were given German money, if we flew over France we were given French money.

No, no, we weren’t given false documents. But we always had money and even in India Burma we always had money with us, money belts went on with you as you flew so

that if you, but that was in the form of silver rupees which weighed a ton. No.

Yeah, yeah, on ops and you were supposed to hand it back, but I had some I don’t know where I picked it up, but it was there and I passed it onto the archives.

No we knew the geography pretty well and we, it was left to our own choice to make up where we went. Now if you want to talk to a fellow that flew, he flew not with me in 50 Squadron, but I can easily give you

his address, he flew with 50 Squadron and he was shot down in his first raid as a Captain in a Lancaster from 50, and he simply walked out through Spain. But he’s still alive in Canberra.

Yeah.

Yeah. He’s an interesting character. He had flown a few operations and he

flew out from Spain.

Just name and number, that was it.

You were briefed as to what to be careful about.

I forget now what the precautions were, but they varied in each theatre of war and

by the way, we never got anyone back from India Burma.

Yeah. No, we never got anyone back except on one occasion one boat load went down in the sea in the Bay of Biscay and they, was it the Bay of Biscay? No the Bay of Bengal.

Yeah the Bay of Bengal and they

floated back in a dinghy but it took them a week and they were useless to us after it because it, fortunately rained every day so they had water, but they just came up the coast and came home. But they weren’t any good on ops again, so we sent them home back to England.

I am not suggesting, I said they either died there or they killed there, I don’t know which. But see that Wingate expedition that was operating many miles behind the enemy line there and it was a remarkable thing. He is the fellow that said all sport is a waste of time and harmful.

No, no, we were given a lot of pills apart from olive, not olive oil, what do you call it? Fish oil stuff what do you call it?

Cod liver oil, we were given loads of that to take to improve our sight and all that but,

we found that when we were doing lots of ops we were always taught to, I forget what squadrons we were with then, Manchesters or Hampdens, but before we hit a target we had to take Benzedrine, that’s a wake up job and before we hit a target an hour before take a Benzedrine tablet and an

hour before you landed back at base take a Benzedrine tablet. It was to wake you up because, some of these were eight-hours you know, a long time and. But we found if you did that for a long time you couldn’t sleep, so then they gave you Nebatol and you couldn’t wake; you used to be walking in your sleep. No it was.

But these were the drugs that we were on at the time, but it was only I can only

remember them being in existence when we were really, really busy. I just though a something, it’s gone out of my mind immediately.

No, no it was some other subject.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it but a lot of people were under the impression we didn’t use them at all, but we did, we definitely used

Benzedrine, it was in Europe and it was probably 1941 and then they brought the Nebutol in.

If you had Nebutol and you went out and had a drink you were the life and soul of the party, but you died next day.

Alert.

I didn’t know that.

No I never got tight like that, it never worried me, probably it was because of my co pilot, old JC [Jesus Christ], but I never got tight like that.

Oh Christ no. No I’ve got no religion at all. I think Mr Hindwood should get off his pulpit.

That’s only humour.

No look if he’d been see, when I was in Bengal, what I didn’t tell you, he was on L [learner] plates then because when I was there, there was a million or three-million children and young people died of starvation.

It was all man caused and he was on L plates, it was sad.

It was commercialisation of everything commercialised.

It was under Brit control and we had a, even a Brit, when I was there we had a Brit Governor, an Australian Governor and when all these people died of starvation they

brought him back and made him a Lord. You’ve heard of Casey? He was the Governor of Bengal when I was there.

Politics again yeah.

Oh no, it was, that was during the, really, the invasion after Dunkirk that was the, when Hitler first started the Battle of Britain.

You won’t believe this but we used to go

down and watch the bombing just to see how it should be done from the ground.

Well as I said.

Well you could get an idea is to how effective it was and what happened and one night I was down there and a terrific raid one night we walked down the [River] Thames and we could smell this beautiful smell of alcohol and we went down and they’d blown the side right off,

it was the side of a brewery right off, and there was this great still hanging out and dripping, it was still dripping alcohol. I still think a that.

We didn’t learn much, but it was interesting though to see how the other half lived.

Yeah. Well I was on Waddington for instance when that was bombed and I was on Coningsby when that was bombed and the night I was on Waddington they came, the air raids went on and the war, the air raids went anyway and

the RAF accountant officer and myself we said, “We’re not going down in the shelters.” so we stood up top to see what it was all about and this German bomber came over and bombed and as I said, he killed all the NAAFI girls, but he didn’t hit us and he took the top off the church spire at Waddington Village and

no one fired a shot and then about a quarter of an hour later, this was at night, a fighter aircraft from one of the fighter aerodromes came over and he got the lot, everyone had got their guns ready. He was really shot up.

One of ours. No, this is what happened, you didn’t know. But one night there I was out there I was on, I’d been out on a long raid and

while I was away an air raid came over, they turned all the lights on and wouldn’t let me land and I screamed at them and said, “I am running out of gravy [petrol].” and they still wouldn’t, so I just simply came in and landed without lights, without any flare path.

I knew where the aerodrome was and all that, but it offended a lot of people.

Well, a lot of people think that they’re Jesus and they’re not

I am. I must show you a few pages of the, there’s a book there, written by the adjutant of the squadron, when I flew that first raid in the RAAF that’s interesting that.

No, I’d like to think that our

targets were mainly, apart from the nuisance raids I’m talking about, apart from that they were military targets like railway junctions and all this type of thing and in the briefing, we were always, they had briefing maps and that showed where all the hospitals and the important places to avoid were shown and they always impressed this, now the interesting thing about this, that

nearly all of these target maps had dates on them and they all dated up to about 1933, this was when Hitler started to come into power and as soon as the fall of France came, we had to bomb French targets and you wouldn’t believe it, but we had every town in France on our target maps, immediately, no question you were going to get em, they were there so

they were more or less treated as an enemy before the war. No it’s interesting bit of secret history.

Yes, later on the open town business.

Well the only time I ever heard any protest was once, we were brief to bomb, it was someone, I forget who it was now, we were briefed to bomb

Heidelberg and there was a stink about that, the people didn’t want to bomb Heidelberg because it was, well a cultural town and had been forever and should be left alone and that was the only time, I forget when exactly, it was but I’m sure I didn’t bomb it. But in the back of my log-book you can see a list of the places that I bombed

A lot of em.

It must have affected them, yeah.

Well let me tell you, before I came here I lived at Nagambie, on the Lake at Nagambie and my next door neighbour was, he’d served in one of the same squadrons that I’d

been in two-years before and he was on Lancasters and he hardly spoke to anyone. He wasn’t really, I saw him at one RSL [Returned and Services League] meeting, probably only one I was at anyway, but he was on one raid when we had five-hundred aircrew killed one night. Have you ever heard of that?

The raid

on Nuremberg where five-hundred of our aircrew were killed one night and he was on that raid and he was on all the raids when they were bombing around the Baltic and Peenemünde and Peenemünde and or whatever it’s called, where all the, what are they called those things? The flying bombs were being built.

Yeah, yeah, no he was involved with those. But he’d done a tour, one tour and he

was decorated and he died last year or the year before but he never, it affected him because he never, he’d speak to me about it, but he’d never speak to anyone else at all. He was almost isolated.

Yeah. Oh no

he was definitely, he a nice fellow , wonderful woodwork man. Where’s some of his woodwork, I’ve got some of it here. Can’t think where it is. Probably, I dunno. Stella’s probably pinched it.

I can’t find anything on it in any of the records.

Because all I’ve got down there is nuisance raids in my log book. Nuisance raids, yeah go on?

Well one of my friends, I only knew one other was in it, he was a New Zealander, that came Frankie Eustace and Frankie one night he was on

the circuit, we’d do a circuit really and this must have been in Manchesters. Anyway he did this circuit and he happened to drop a bomb through cloud over Hamburg and got the Gestapo Headquarters, well that’s faith for you. No but he in the end came in and one day at Collingsworth it was, Collingsworth, it must’ve been Collingsworth, anyway

he came in and said, .I’m engaged to be married,” and I said “Oh yes.” he a nice fellow, and I said, “To whom?” and he said “Frieda.” and I said, “Jesus.” so I went a bought him a wedding present. Freida had been through nearly all the pilots in the squadron everyone she touched, it was on the wall. And so I, and I bought him a wedding present, took it up to his room and he went out that night and didn’t come home. That was the last

we saw of him. He came from Nelson New Zealand. No it was sad really. She stopped after that, Freida stopped after that, she started going after the navigators and started a line a navigators. So there’s still a chance for you Stella.

No it was sad that.

Married people were a menace.

No, no, no, I would have never got married in the war years. Not while I was on ops, no.

Well it’s simple, it’s simple, simple as that, you

just were, you couldn’t do two jobs, you couldn’t look after a wife or family, you had to do your job, you had a job on hand that was it.

That’s right, yeah. No one could, no, it’s a different way of thinking, you only, no.

Well you see Guy Gibson he got married and he popped off pretty soon.

Yeah and all these other. One person I knew very well, I haven’t told you about was Bluey Truscott I knew him quite well in England.

Yeah I know, but he was also a piss poor pilot and killed himself.

No, but he flew into the sand and killed himself. No, I was with him on his, you’d have loved this, I was a at dinner here one night and this chap started talking about him and I said, “Have you got the book on him?” he said, “Yes.” I said, “Well it has got my name in it, it is mine.” and he said, “I don’t believe you.” So he went away and got the

book and sure enough my name is in Bluey Truscott’s, the book called Bluey Truscott cause I went to the same dinner as Bluey and we singed each other’s menu and there’s a copy of his menu in the book with my signature on it, so it’s my book. No, he was with us in this party at a place called the Ludgate Club in Fleet Street, about six or eight of us there and we drank, it was his last night before leaving England

for Australia and so we really turned it on and we slept there all night in this club, and he was still there in the morning and he went off on his embarkation trip to Australia and we were still there the next night and he was, he turned up again, his embarkation leave had been extended for twenty-four hours, so he had a second party. So we sent him off twice to Australia.

Then he came home and killed himself. No he should never have been, he was pushed in

by the sporting media, he should have never been a pilot. It took him about; God knows how many hours to even go solo.

No, no. I’ve got his book there, the Bluey Truscott book out there somewhere.

No he was a poor pilot because he took so long to go solo. That indicates it.

Yeah Nebutol the drug yeah.

Yeah. No need to hurry out and get some.

No I don’t think it affected us like that. No we were more or less disciplined drinkers; we never drank before we flew.

No, no, but we didn’t but some did, some did and they didn’t last too long.

But no, and also when you get out into the East you use the axiom there that you don’t drink until the sun sets, this is a good thing.

I’ve heard of them.

I don’t know. No more than anyone else, no I don’t think so. But married people in a crew were a menace. I had one sergeant for instance and he was a rear gunner or something

and whenever I went into Lincoln and his wife would be there nagging me to take him off ops. He had an unlikely name like Smith, but I don’t know whether he survived the war. But he should never have been flown because he had this nagging wife at home. He should never have been flying.

No. No God no.

He’d get confused, he’d get his aims confused, he must have. Cause he’s got a job on hand to do flying, that’s enough. It didn’t matter what job he was in aircrew, if he’s part of an aircrew he’s got to work with the crew.

But I’m surprised, I read a lot of these biographies

of these people, especially fighter people, and most of those got married. Yeah most of em got married, I’ve just ready Johnny Johnson’s biography.

Yeah.

Well it was, when I was on that searchlight work I lived with the

fighter people there and I thought they were very immature and they had a strange way of dressing. They used to always leave their top fly button undone or whatever, no they did, and if they had uniforms they used to have them lined with red silk, they were almost weird like queers [homosexuals] in my book. No, I served with them for a long time.

No but in Coastal Command out here you didn’t get into Coastal Command in Australia unless you had five thousand-acres this was in peacetime. We used to laugh about it.

Yeah it was all done on establishment job.

Yeah well it was.

No they were the same, see many of my friends went into fighters.

I dunno, I was just posted to a bomber squadron it was simple as that.

No it’s one of these, when I went onto bombers it’s one decision I didn’t make. No I didn’t.

It just went and that was it, we were glad to get to a squadron. Two of my friends, two of my Point Cook friends that I went with, they went to fighters and they both died in fighters. One was an interesting character, he finished up in a flying training school outside Baghdad of all places and the locals there, the local Arabs attacked the place, so they,

they simply put guns on all the training aircraft and shot the Arabs to bits and he got a DFC for it, no but he died afterwards. No it’s interesting.

We had some very interesting people at Point Cook with me, one of them was a chap named Francis James. Francis James, you’ve probably never heard of him. No, anyway Francis James was a, he was kicked out of the RAAF because he was not

amiable to service discipline.

No, I was, “Yes sir, no sir, three sacks full sir.” and he finished he joined the RAF as a sergeant pilot and he was shot down and he was a prisoner of war and he escaped, not escaped he influenced himself and he got out of the

prisoner of war camp on exchange with some German character. This is long before the war ended. Anyway after the war he did all sorts of funny things including becoming the owner of the church paper called The Anglican and he kept sending me The Anglican for months and then he sent the bill, I got the lot. But anyway, he finished up in China and he was locked up in China in a jail there and Gough Whitlam [Australian Prime Minister] got him out in the end. But he was a strange

man. He’s dead now, but he’d fly anything, fly anywhere but he did, had a great record in England and the Australian Air Force says, “Not amenable to service discipline.” Francis James, no it’s a pity you haven’t, he was a journalist, but he did everything. You know the writer in Sydney Bob Ellis?

Well Bob Ellis did his apprenticeship with him.

Many of them yeah.

Yeah.

Reg Leonard was the one I knew most of all, Reg and I were good friends.

I wouldn’t have a clue, but we had two different companies, the Consolidated and what’s the other press?

I forget now. But he was one and he was terribly good to the,

he used to accommodate us with everything, if we were out of accommodation he’d put us up, or he looked after us well, that was Reg.

Very good yeah. We had a lot to do with them because they were always visiting us, they were different. No,

it was a good set up.

Well on one occasion, when we were working on 455 we told one of them, I forget which one it was, but the poor neglected Australian squadron in England and had nothing, no home comfort and within days the local railway station couldn’t cope with all the stuff that came in, you know and, you know those leather jackets, flying jackets and things, some were made out of sheep skin,

and wool and lambs wool and stuff and we found there was a great trade going on, they’d come out thirty-shillings a piece they were selling them in the local pubs, but it was all the do-gooders in Australia were looking after the 455 Squadron.

Of course we were yeah.

No I didn’t try because I knew the hierarchy as it was, you can’t shift them. Yeah Keith Murdoch, well Keith Murdoch he was a do-gooder, I’d forgotten about that. No I came back one day and they said, “There are two people wanted to see you in the mess.” so I went in and here’s is Sir Keith Murdoch and his off-sider

was a Wing Commander Anderson, the VC from World War I and they wanted to see me about, this is what Keith Murdoch was really like. He was then running the Sun Herald out here and his sports editor was a chap named Taylor, George Taylor anyway this Taylor, his son had served with me at Point Cook and then he had served with me in 50 Squadron in Hampdens and then I’d taught him to fly

fly Manchesters and he’d gone missing and Keith Murdoch came the whole way up to central England to see me to find out what I knew about it and I thought this was good, so as he could take the information back to the father.

Good effort. Anyway while he was there we yarned away and he said, “I’m putting on a show for the 452 Squadron.” that’s Bluey Truscott’s mob, so he said, “Bring down half a dozen of your chaps and you can

go and have lunch and dinner, or tea and dinner with them.” So we went down, I booked the accommodation in the usual pub in London and went down and I took half a dozen of the fellows and it was a great show. But when we got to our accommodation, they said, “We’ll put you up in the annexe, we can’t put you in the usual place.” So we went to the annex and after the show, it was good, theatre and Café

Royal and all this. Then we went back to bed and the annexe turned out to be a brothel and in the middle of the night all these ladies of London kept bringing in their customers and it took me months to live down this story, that “I didn’t know anything about it.” No but Keith…

Of course his wife lives out here just a few yards out here, in Frankston.

It was good because one pub used to cater, I forget the name of it, it was, there was a woman ran it, it was in Fleet Street, I’ve got to think of it.

No they used to have this great book there, Bastards that I have Known from Down Under and it was the Australian visitors’ book. I forget the name now.

I was number, I think about twenty or twenty-three in it, so I was the first

I forget now. God you wouldn’t remember that.

Literature. No.

Yeah, yeah. No, many of my friends were Poms but they had the habit of dying. One of my best friends out there was an English accountant officer, he was our permanent accountant officer at Waddington and when I left England to go overseas I left all

my heavy trunks and things with him and I said, “Send em over, I’ll send back when I want them.” And years later I sent back to him, he lived outside Lincoln and I sent back for them and I said, “Send my garbage out.” and I didn’t get a reply for a long time. Anyway then the garbage turned up, all my luggage turned up and a note from his mother. After I left, he was a permanent commission a wealthy only son,

he’d abandoned his , he was a squadron leader then, he had abandoned all that, become an pilot officer, pilot and was killed over Berlin. So not all Poms are bums, he was a goodie.

That’s a curly one because they thought they were doing the right thing, but many of them were so used to saying yes sir no sir, for instance they didn’t think for themselves, they did what they were taught.

This had been going on for many generations. You don’t get out of that habit. On one occasion I remember early in the war I sent out to find a paddock, a corner of a paddock in which to put a beacon for our home coming aircraft you see, so as to guide. I went to this, there was a fellow there working in the farm and I went to him and I asked him, I said, “Is this your farm?”

he said, “Yes.” and I explained what we want to do and he said, “I’ll have to go and ask the master.” I’ve never forgotten that, it sticks in my mind. But this is the mentality of the people; they’re so used to that attitude. Out here you’d say, “OK Joe put them over there.” You would, no you wouldn’t you’re Irish I forgot that.

Yes they did, they all felt that they had a hand in it and doing their best. I could never understand why there was so many colonials in the front line, like as I explained before. I could never understand that. Either they weren’t educated enough or they

had lost the spirit and I think it was perhaps they had lost the spirit and they hadn’t had it for a long time because most of the fighting had been done by the Scottish and the Irish for them. They used to use you people as mercenaries. True. This had gone on for a long time, generations, and once the clearance of Scotland came on, if you know what that means. When the Poms

bought, 1840 period, the Poms bought out English bought out most of the Scottish Highland properties and the people were pushed off to the colonies and they got all the Scottish clearances and after that happened the Lord of the Manor in Scotland could no longer send Scotch people to fight for the English and after that I think, the whole thing fell apart.

So they had to get people from the colonies to do their dirty work.

Right.

I’m right on the ball with that one. I was at the end of my course at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] and they sent us to study all of the engineering plants in Tasmania and we went all over the hydroelectric and all that stuff and while I was there we happened to see this advertisement in the paper wanting inviting cadetships at the RAAF and so

I, and my mate put in for it and they accepted me but they didn’t accept my mate. This is rather interesting because it shows the tension of the time, and afterward he said, “I didn’t get in, I know why.” I said, “Why?” His name was Hugh Gunther and his father ran the police in Melbourne. I said, “Why?” he said, “Because I’m a bloody Catholic.” this was the animosity at the time. No it’s interesting that.

Well he wouldn’t have said it otherwise.

You never have proof of these things, but that was the feeling, I still remember his words. Anyway he went into the war and became a part of, an engineer in part of the 9th Division and was decorated. But this was apart from that, he didn’t get in, admitted to Point Cook.

Yeah, that is right, yes.

My personality.

No, nothing at all. No but it’s interesting, it’s an interesting survey on our social frailties at the time.

Very few. We had one with us in 50 Squadron and he was killed and

he was one of the names that they wouldn’t put on the honour role, he was a Catholic and he his father happened to be Premier of Tasmania.

An omission yeah, someone omitted. No but there was that anti-, well not anti-

Masons, yeah there was, in most of the services you either had a strong

Masonic holding or a strong Catholic holding, especially in the police force out here it was like that.

Yeah it just carried on. It’s interesting that point of view. But that was the only one that submitted a return with me, same time, same everything, same qualifications.

I wasn’t with them then.

I’d gone to RMIT.

They had sacked me

before that yeah.

Because, I hadn’t done anything I hadn’t been caught with my finger in the pie or anything. No they sacked me because they said it was just the change of, it was bulk handling of wheat that got me the sack I believe.

Yes, machines and augers and all that sort of stuff.

But, it was Depression.

The wish was to fly.

I had flown a bit. This’ll interest you. I’d been for a pleasure flight of all places off the beach at Lorne, it cost

me five shillings or six shillings or something,

Off the beach at Lorne, you couldn’t fly there now.

I forget now, an aeroplane.

I wouldn’t have a clue, but it was a twin seater sort of thing, a bi-plane, an old bi-plane. But it was interesting and that induced me to fly. But Lorne now of course that was contrary too, we went a spent our honeymoon there

a hundred years ago, a hundred and fifty-nine years ago.

Did it do em much good?

Christ, something must’ve been happened there.

That’s what they told us in England. We weren’t to know, we thought we were good.

I’ve got my log book here; I’ll have a look at it.

Yeah, the earlier Tiger Moth with a slightly smaller engine.

Lovely, quite simple. The Wapiti was

a heavier thing, it was still used as a bomber in the north west frontier.

Good heavens, it’s a hundred years ago I can’t remember that.

I couldn’t answer that one. No, I enjoyed it and we were very keen

to you know do our best.

No war didn’t come into it. It was mainly a search for better aircraft and travel.

No, the essential tourist the everlasting tourist.

No I’ve never experienced fear in the normal sense, in fact some people seem to be afraid of flying but I never have had that. But I must’ve

had it at some stage because the symptoms of fear in that well an example, we were always given chewing gum and stuff to chew on the trips and on odd operational journeys right over the target, when you fear, afraid properly your mouth goes completely dry and you couldn’t chew your chewing gum and that was a sign when you were

you really had to get out of it. Are you with me?

No, you always were, you were in control. But you knew it by the state of your chewing gum.

I dunno.

I don’t know how they judged them because the hierarchy was pretty pathetic really, I thought.

Well they, for instance you were approaching World War II and they were still, well all they knew was World War I and some of them hadn’t even been there.

Yeah it was laughable yeah.

If I’d passed out, I’d a been in the air force list about 170 in the air force list which was pretty high up really.

I kept correspondence with most of my friends out here and all round the different parts of the world. Yes they were, I suppose.

No everything was interesting because my family left there a hundred or something years before and I’d been, even in those days, I was the family historian and I still keep the family history going, the family trees going.

Somerset and Scotland. In fact, this young great granddaughter that’s coming over it’s a question of naming them now. You know how you put down born B, M for married and D for died in your family tree, with the year 2003 you have to put SU, shacked up, so that you, no it’s very awkward, but I have learnt how

to do it now, when you are christening the child, this is for your benefit, when you’re christening the shacked up child, you should always put the mother’s surname first, hyphenated with the father’s.

You may need. No it’s interesting that. This one from Hobart she’s just taken her father’s name and her family

name is not registered which is wrong in my book.

Yes, but one of the others his daughters for instance had two different fathers to two shacked up jobs, it’s simple there because they put the father last and you can see where your bloodlines run. You with me?

Well French comes from my

grandfather who, no he was from Cornwall, not Cornwall Somerset, but we didn’t know him, he was a lay preacher and as children we used to go and stay with him and we thought he was an old bastard and when we did the family tree we found he was an old bastard. No he came from Somerset. No it’s interesting.

Yes it was our homeland. The first thing I did in England when I this old car, I went down to see the family at Somerset.

Yeah well, I’ve still have all the documents going right back to when they first left England.

No we thought of them as being English but pretty ignorant.

We went to see, I went to see this family and I found that they lived about twenty-miles from the sea and they’d never seen the sea and one of them had been to London once in his lifetime.

No. But only last year by way of interest a lady wrote to me from a place called, I’ve got it out there, call it Broadbank, that’ll do, it’s near

Taunton in Somerset and she wrote me and asked me all sorts of questions, so I sent her a lot of family documents from the 1800’s and next thing I knew she had published the whole lot in the book, including the fact that my grandfather was an old bastard. No, it was all published word for word in a book which, Blackford was the name of the place, no I’ve got it out there, Blackford, the history of Blackford written only last year.

We were, proudly, well one of my authors there calls me arrogantly

Australian, so work it out for yourself.

No simply left, we had both sets of wings and we could wear them. We had RAAF and RAF wings.

No, on the blue uniform, the Australian uniform, we left our Australian wings on,

simple as that.

Only one A extra. But after the war started those uniforms had had it anyway and I went out to the desert and I simply wore any uniforms around, but after the war started I didn’t buy any more uniforms then, because as soon as someone popped off you simply grabbed their best uniform. It was done automatically.

Good God no, no. But you always had a super best, you never flew in your best so there was always one. When my second pilot was killed I used his uniform for years after that, it fitted me.

As soon as, I don’t know what happened then, but the only time we ever got anything for free in England, was for instance

say when I was wounded the doctor certified that he’d to cut the uniform off me when I was wounded and then I go a free uniform.

The doctor used to sort a sign a certificate.

No what happened, as soon as someone

got bumped off, there was a special crowd went round, I dunno who they were, but they were non flying people, they used go round and they’d simply sort out all their gear and send it back to the next of kin. And we didn’t trust these people a course, because all of us had cars and there was one hanger at one stage full of cars of people that hadn’t come back.

and there was a fellow, one of the officers, a ground officer running a racket with his brother who was a used car man. So we put on a sort of diner night one night and we had the custom throwing him up and catching them as they fell to the ground and we missed him one night, we threw him up and he hit the deck and smashed him up. He got the message; he didn’t take any more cars. But it was a racket. He was a Pom. Sorry.

I, from memory, I don’t remember, but in the early days we used to drive down to the hangers and leave our cars there and when we came back the cars were always full of petrol and then one night we came back and our cars weren’t full of petrol and we

were about to complain and we found that, there was one particular fellow he was in charge of refuelling the aircraft and he’d been backing a bowser up on a tractor and his foot slipped and he was bending over backwards and the foot slipped and he was buried under the tractor and it sort of dug into the ground and we never got any more cheap petrol after that.

It was, it was badly rationed.

Well that is, it’s amazed me because we were never short of petrol and we used to use millions of gallons a night some nights. See the Manchester’d use say, six-hundred, we used to fly up and down England just to use up six-hundred gallons, testing every day in each aircraft, it’s a hell of a lot of petrol. It was never, I never saw an restriction on

fuel.

No, that only applied to aviation fuel. No, in general it was pretty fair really, but that’s how it

was as I saw it.

It was good, it was cordial, but it wasn’t matey. We weren’t allowed to get matey, you with me? We weren’t allowed to, you had, there was a great differentiation, especially if you had a commission, you weren’t allowed to even drink in the same pub as the sergeants or anything

like that, there were officer pubs and NCO pubs.

Yes and no because I don’t think I had any close friends that were NCOs, no. But it was a bit limiting but it didn’t apply to me.

Well for instance, one day we sent out five Hampdens one day, during the invasion of Norway, we got one back. In other words we lost four and one of those that we lost, went down in the sea off Newcastle in England

and we went out and found, they got into a dinghy and we found the dinghy every day for five-days and the Royal Air force wouldn’t send out a flying boat, they sent out some sort of a naval vessel and the fellow got into a mine field and turned back, and on the last day we went out to find him, the boat, we found the dinghy empty. So they’d either shot one another or gone overboard. But that was an Australian from

South Australia in that boat, he was the captain, a fellow named Ball, Johnny Ball. That sort of thing, that upset us really

Angry yes angry, but.

You couldn’t because it was the system, you couldn’t beat the system.

It’s like trying to beat the system out here, you can’t do it. But I was lucky in that I had a girlfriend very early in the piece and she was a WAAF officer and we used to get away a lot, she had the same sort of car as I had and we used to drive everywhere and she kept me sane.

No but that, you had to have a relationship like that.

No I’d sooner not.

Hers was a life of tragedy, she happened to be the daughter of one of the Fighter Group commanders, he had a terrific rank and I went during the Battle of Britain, I was invited home to stay with them one weekend and I went there and over diner this chap said to me, he asked me about bombing ops and all this

and I told him what I knew about it and I told him how we could never find a target over Germany unless the anti-aircraft with searchlights lit up and then we knew that was our geographic guide and we knew where we were then. So he went back to operations that night and he apparently put this idea into operations, it was the whole, one half of England was involved and

at breakfast next morning, he was mad as a rattler, and he said, what had happened was he gave the order out to black out the whole of England or half of England and within half an hour someone had sent a counter order from his own headquarters countering his order and it could only be someone of high rank

in his own office that could have done it. I never did find out what happened. But he was sent off, he had a lot of important jobs. At one stage he was going to take over the whole of the air forces of the Far East and he disappeared and he and his wife were found dead on the Alps.

No they crashed on the way out to India. No it was sad.

No you can’t, no I’ve got lots of permanent interests. For instance for years

when I was ten up here on the beach at Rye, you know Rye? I found my first aboriginal axe and I have been studying aboriginals for seventy-odd years. So I’m almost an authority on aboriginal pre-history. You’ve got to have, not footy [football], you have to have outside interests.

I’ve always had outside interests.

The way I was brought up.

That was a non-operational thing yeah.

That was ferrying yeah.

On the way out there yeah.

That didn’t come to me, it went to the head of our Group, there was a flight lieutenant he took it and we went on his say.

He was a Canadian.

Yes, but they weren’t novels.

they were true histories.

No it is not, that non-fiction.

Course it’s not, it’s non-fiction.

No, no, no you weren’t encouraged to do that.

I can’t remember, the only thing that, for instance I can still tell you some of the books at Point Cook, one of them was Lawrence of Arabia’s book, what do you call it? Seven Pillars of Wisdom, isn’t it? Things like that, they were in the library there I still remember them being there.

Well that’s non fiction definitely non-fiction.

That was just a superficial thing, we said on the way to and call in at Tunis and do this. No, it was just a superficial thing and we did it, we

enjoyed our stay in Tunis and that was it.

That’s right. See we’d been at war with the French so many times ourselves that they really had remained our enemies. England’s

always been like that I think, it’s never really had good friendships anywhere.

The ordinary public you speaking of?

I can’t really go into that because I don’t remember, most of our interests were what was happening in Australia still because we were more or less tied to Australia, our people were there and we used to write home and they used to write to us and all this stuff and the only way of communication in those days was by boat virtually.

So that you couldn’t sort of hop in an aircraft and be home in two-minutes. They really had no idea of what was happening, in Australia they didn’t know what was happening in England. Cause it took months and months to get, or six-weeks at least to get a boat either way.

Yeah, well especially on that boat trip back to England

because we knew something was about to happen and in fact so much so that we tried to get off the boat at Marseilles and go overland through France to get back to England that way. But we didn’t make it and we finished up going right back to England.

Could you get my log book from over there?

No that’s an old one. There’s one over there it’s got the flying log book on it, on top.

No it’s a big,

it’s a thick book a thick book, but flying log book on it.

That’s him yeah. No see that flying dog, we had that going, they put that on Qantas [airlines] now, the same dog, we had that…

No it’s supposed to be all dingoes rum. It was the call sign of 50 Squadron in World War I.

Rum, R-U-M for grog and that’s, 50 Squadron had been a squadron that had a lot of Australians in World War I and so that was the recall sign for them.

I wouldn’t have a clue, but it was used in World War I probably. Now thirty-nine,

Thirty-nine, Avril. Anson, Anson, Anson. There’s one of those blind approaches, they call it VHF or Lorenz and I did that one at Milton, that was the first one of the, that was in June 1939. Incidentally, I was wounded yesterday sixty-three years ago, that’s not bad is it?

No I was looking this morning how long ago it was. August, there you are. Waddington to Marseille, Marseille to Tunis, Tunis to Haifa… Malta. Haifa to Mersa Matruh, Mersa Matruh to Alexandria, Heliopolis. That was August, that was just before the war September,

Now war declared. This was the thing, it was, this was a terrible day yeah, September. We were watching, I was always intrigued with this blind approach business I told you about then, and just before the war we were doing what they call a Z approach or someone was in a Hampden and they had seven

people on board and they called up and they had to signal to go round again, so we went out onto the tarmac to see whether we could see it, this was just, and this damned Hampden came in and hit the hanger straight above our heads and all these people jumping, aircraft, the hanger caught fire and engine dropped on a chap near me, it shook me a bit and

another ran out into the aerodrome and dropped dead there, and the medical people came up and they didn't know which one to attend to, it was real panic. That night, three of us involved in this, and we went to the pictures in Lincoln and it was Goodbye Mr Chips and I looked at the other two and they were weeping and so was I, it was the emotional thing of seeing so many bods at once but this is the sort of thing that

happened all the time, you didn’t know. There am I, that’s certified that I have done it and fully competent to instruct in blind approach, this was before the war.

Wait til I ask JC. You can see nothing they, put you behind a hood, and you’re there, this is a , when you’re training there’s a safety

pilot with you, if you’re going into a hanger he’ll stop you. But in actual fact when you’re doing it, you’re on your own and eventually, what it is, is there’s a, assuming that’s the runway there, right you’re coming in and you’ve got dots on that side and dashes on that coming in, blasting into a, and you come up and you do a rate one turn there and come back and then

onto the beam where there’s no dots and dashes, it’s all solid there, solid signal coming through there, then you come along here and you do that one and then you come in and land. It’s simple, all you do is a big figure of eight, but it’s all done on instruments. It’s quite simple but you’ve got to have the equipment on the ground to transmit all that stuff to you and you’ve got to have the equipment in the aircraft.

I’ll charge for this one.

You see nothing.

Some of it is on your instrument panel and some is in your ears.

Yes you’ve got your ear phones on and if you’re left of that line you got dots and if you were right of the line you got dashes.

Yeah, but and you’ve got to be at the right heights, so out here there’s an outer beacon and an inner beacon and you’ve got to be say a thousand-feet over your outer, five hundred-feet over your inner and you’re falling like that.

Yes on your altimeter yeah, but if your altimeter’s not set correctly to start with, well you are in trouble

from day one.

Well we weren’t allowed to attack anything unless it fired at us. We weren’t allowed to fly over the land this was the phoney war proper and we, well that was it, and so that

you could fly round, you could find something and unless it fired at you, you weren’t allowed to touch it.

We’ll call it reconnaissance if you wish, but we were searching for shipping, but it was just to really acquaint them with the fact that we had an air force up there.

Yeah let them know, I think that is what it’s all about. But we didn’t want to antagonise them; this was part of the message.

I don’t know, I didn’t take much interest in politics then.

You live in the air force mess on the aerodrome. Right on

No you live right on the aerodrome proper; you live on your work.

Now, here’s the political thing that may interest you. I’d been down to be decorated I think it would probably be June, I’d been decorated in April but I had to go down to be invested say in June, yeah June, and

I was on my way back by train and the guard came up to me and said, “There’s another gentleman on the train would like some company back to central England, Grantham.” I said, “Right I’ll go along and see who this chap is.” I was in uniform then because I had been to this investiture at Buckingham Palace. Anyway here’s this chap, he was in full uniform and he was a pilot officer,

air gunner and he had three rows of ribbons up, and I thought Jesus wept, or Jesus Christ or whatever, anyway we got talking and he told me quite a bit about himself, he was quite old and he told me about himself and he had a son my age and all this stuff and later on I found out who he was

exactly, and he was an English Member of Parliament that’d been down to a Parliamentary meeting and he was a friend of Hitler’s and a friend of Churchill’s, all this came out just in a matter of and afterwards I bought his biography, not is autobiography, his biography and since then I’ve collected all the books that I can find that he wrote. He was a member of the Parliament and he wrote all these books

and in it he wrote about, he’s the man who the Iraq war resulted from because he did the survey of the boundaries between Kurdistan and Turkey and Iraq, he was the man that did all that and he was a Knight, Sir Arnold Wilson and he was killed in action a fortnight after I met him, as rear gunner

in a Wellington, and I think now how many of our Members of Parliament would do that? And he was aged fifty-six. I’ve got all his books.

That’s right, that’s right. But there were some magnificent Poms. No Sir Arnold Wilson.

No he’s an amazing man.

No, we weren’t on the Hawker Hinds then, we were on Hampdens.

No four, four on that crew, yeah.

Navigator yeah, yeah. But my original crew there, they were all killed. After I got wounded he took the crew and he killed the lot, they were all killed. No

he, Malloy, see he was with me, Ireland, Barratt, they were all killed. No Malloy he was a South African, he took my crew over when I was wounded and he was on a raid one night and he’d an engine shot out or something and he came in and he thought he was landing on a beach, instead of that he was landing on this rocky reef just off the coast of,

near Newcastle there and they were all killed. Anyway, I was just out of hospital by then and the CO said to me, “You’d better go down to…” we never went to funerals, we didn’t, we did in the Far East we did because we had nothing much else to do, but they had a special crew used to attend to all the funerals when we had, and we had a lot of them

the aircrew never went to funerals except on this occasion I went to Slugger’s funeral, he was buried at Doncaster, I thought Christ, what’s going to happen here? I drove up to Doncaster and there was a lady there, I didn’t know it was Slugs sister and she looked at me, it was in the morning and she said, “Let’s go and have a drink.” That was the most diplomatic thing you’ve ever heard of. So

we went and had a drink and then we buried Slug. But he was a villain; I think he left two of his girlfriends in the family way at the same time which was a bad bit of operation really.

Poor management, no I called him a messer. But anyway

We always called him that, his name was Bill Malloy, but he was a nice character. His father had been a South African doctor.

No it was interesting. You know years later people have come in, in Australia there’s one woman came in an she was his niece and she brought in a beautiful thing I dunno whether that’s it over there, it should be,

A thing made of bark, a bark painting. She gave one to Diana and Charles when they were married. So she’s

pretty good.

I don’t know, they never do. No you laugh, one of our, Barb’s got two nephews, they both went to Vietnam one came home a staunch homosexual and the other one came home and he couldn’t stop getting married, he had one wife after another and the homosexual one kept whinging, he said, “He’s had four sets of wedding presents, I’ve never had one.” No,

you’ve got to keep your sense of humour?

No but it was part of the war.

But you didn’t get closely attached to people like that, you did but he was an officer and that was it, he was one of me mates but

you never got really tight, you couldn’t afford to, otherwise you’d have gone round the bend.

No because it happened every week, every day almost, there were casualties all the time.

God no, no, that only came later when people

like Don Charlwood came along and the Empire Trainees, they were a bit that way, they put on a lot of drama. But no it was, well we couldn’t afford to anyway.

I have still got that, he’s still sitting this side a me.

No I

could tell, well mentioned Lord Louis, not Lord Louis, Keith Murdoch coming to see me and later on I got hold of the log book of that fellow he came to investigate, and when I read that log book, his brother incidentally lives in Canberra and he leant me this log book and I studied it and I realised that fellow had died at least three-months before he died and

he was killed over Berlin in a Manchester, but when you read his log book you’d see he was sent say, on a trip to England and then he’d change his mind and say he had engine trouble or his wireless had broken down and he always had a good, plausible excuse to not to complete the operation. He was dead then really but I didn’t realise it.

Well LMF wasn’t strong, this one I mentioned to you earlier when I dropped me bombs on the tarmac, it was pretty rare in those days. What happened was I think in the past many of the squadron used to just quietly get posted and we as aircrew didn’t know why, they just got

posted and there was a place in Yorkshire I think, I think they had five-thousand people, that is a lot of people.

Yeah, LMF yeah, in one place and I think it is mentioned in one of the books I got there.

It was handled quickly and quietly. Quick posting and you never saw them again.

They weren’t allowed to create a, or fester, put it that way.

Yes and no. There’s a fellow who wrote the history of the Hampdens and he I think was LMF, but he’d been shot down once or twice and he’d been, he wrote, Harry Moyle, he wrote a book the true story of the Hampden and he

featured every Hampden that was built is mentioned in it. He was shot down I know at least once. But incidentally when I was in wounded I was in hospital at Torquay and I shared a room there with a fellow there that you couldn’t get a word out of him, he’d been wounded somewhere or other or damaged and we were walking patients, we were allowed out all day until night time and we used to do all the pubs over

in Torquay which was good fun and one night he came home and he was full, I couldn’t shut him up and other times you couldn’t get him to talk and in his conversation he told me, he’d been decorated, he said, “See this, they call it a decoration.” he said, “It’s a gob stopper.” and I said, “What do you mean?” he said, “I’ve been shot down twice by our own people.” so they gave him a gong to shut him up.

This is the sort of thing that went on all the time and it’s true, he’d been shot down by his own people at the Firth or Fourth and shot down into the Thames and so they decorated him.

No, but it’s, people take so much notice of all this stuff, they don’t realise what the truth is.

A waste of good lives.

It is yeah.

No it was part of my life, simple as that.

Well everyone life’s full of strange things, mine was a bit stranger than most that was all.

That was nasty

yeah.

Yeah, that’s the one I told you about where I had to go in and follow Duncan Goode in and that was it. I went back there once or twice, I went back to, that was Oslo, but we used to mine right up into the Baltic, do all that mining.

Absolutely accurate, it had to be done within a few feet.

We did the, they were all named, all the mine laying was named after, was called gardening and it was named after, like Oslo was planting an onion, O for onion. We did a lot in the Alb that was called planting an Eglantine.

Eglantine, it’s a flower presumably.

But on one occasion in the Alb, I remember I had to plant it in a certain place and when I came to the certain place there were two boats at anchor, so I dropped the thing in between the two boats and I often wondered who moved first. See the thing went down on a parachute and then once it was in the water it went to the bottom and then it came up on an anchor about six-feet below the mine itself and it floated

backwards and forwards there and there was a, it had a safety device on it that had to dissolve before it was active. They were pretty cunning, you could lay them so that you could have four to six boats go over them and not blow up and the seventh’d blow. You could sort of adjust them. That was all done by the navy incidentally, the naval

people used to set them and all this and all we had to do was drop them.

No the navy used to fuse them for us yeah, the navy showed us the exact position they had to go on a map and they used to fuse them and then they used to wave us off. But the navy people were magnificently brave, at one

Swinderby, we had one aircraft didn’t make it taking off and he crashed and then the aircraft caught fire and everyone ran like hell and next morning the aircraft frame was still there, it’d all been burnt away and in the middle of it was this ruddy great mine, and a naval fellow came along and defused it, it was still warm, he went up and defused it, but oh they were brave. One night when I was with 455 we had

one crashed on take off, not take off he was on his way back, something had gone wrong, and they turned to come home and they went into a village on the east of Wigsley that was one of the aerodromes we were at, and he went into there, so I drove over to see what was happening and this aircraft, it had burnt up and you could see the mine in the still a lying there in the middle of the

burnt wreckage. So I went to the, there was an old major or something in charge, I said, “Get everyone out of the village.” he got everyone out of the village and then it blew up. All windows were broken. But oh no, things happened all the time.

Yeah. But

you only had a, that was limited, when you were close up you had the TR9, that’s the one you’d talk to one another in the aircraft, but you could also talk to the people, TR9, you could talk to the people on the ground as well with that one. But we also had the wireless operator could talk to anyone within limits, not everyone but. Your wireless operator was very important.

Well they never shouted like they do on the television.

No, in many cases you did have complete silence, yeah.

No you could

talk to one another but you were encouraged not to chatter or do anything silly really. You only spoke if it was essential.

Essential? Well someone’d tell you that there was an aircraft attacking or watch out for anti-aircraft or whatever on a certain position.

Yeah this was before; this is what I am speaking of before radar.

Well we used to position ourselves as I said before by use of the searchlights and ack-ack [anti aircraft] belts, they were in more or less fixed positions and once you got used to it and also on a, any water on a moonlight night well water shows up like nobody's business and you could pin point on say, a small lake even,

if you knew it. It was a question of knowing your country and many of us that were there early, we knew the country backwards.

I’m still lost. No I don’t think so, I don’t think so otherwise I wouldn’t a been here. See originally all the pilots were trained as navigators and so if you had a crook navigator

you as a pilot knew, well for instance, you’ve bomb some place in Germany and your home bearing would be about, no it’d be about two-seventy or something like that, you’d steer for home and you would be able

to, if he didn’t give you the right bearing you’d know he was wrong, you could do it in your head more or less.

Yes this happens occasionally, but once you got to know a crew you trust them. The navigator was most important and he was…

No, that Slug

was a funny one. He would be captain and one night on a raid, we were on a raid and he was intent on being a captain and he didn't want to fly on this raid for some reason, it may have been a girlfriend, and as we took off down the runway, he was down in the nose of the thing and there’s a bit of a trapdoor down there, he left the bloody trapdoor open and all of his plans, his map plans for the day went along the runway and

it was useless going, all his information was there, crafty old devil. You had to laugh at it though. But I forget whether we went on the raid or not. But didn’t matter much.

Nothing much, they used to give us quite bits of fruit actually.

No, all sorts of fruit and stuff but mainly

No this is interesting,

but mainly it froze and you try eating a frozen banana, it’s not funny. But no, at one stage we had this South African doctor, I told you, he took me to have this wound fixed up and being South African he introduced biltong and ask me what biltong is.

It’s dried meat, you slice a, you get a dead cow not a live one and you slice off bits of its rump and you, about that thick

and you dip it in salt water and then hang it up to dry and it’s the main, antelope’s used in Africa, but that is what they live on, Biltong and it is wonderful. Matter of fact, one of my daughters in Albany sent me a bag of it the other day but I finished it all. No, it’s a beautiful thing if you are ever hungry and you go into a pub and you have a sharp knife and a bit of biltong and you cut it across the grain, you know not

with the grain, across the grain, that and a few beers and god it’s a good lunch. But we used to do this a lot, but biltong was, it was a wonderful aircrew ration.

Take that up with us.

Nothing but the main problem was piddling and we used to have fun with that because you’re strapped in a Hampden for eight-hours and we used to try all sorts of devices

everything from condoms down and you’d especially, you’d get piddling into a condom and it’d get lower and lower and then hit a nut or a bolt and the poor B down below’d get the lot. There was no appreciation went on.

Because later on they brought in all sorts of things, you could pee into a funnel and it went down into a bottle and all

this, but I don’t know what the, the answer was of course to get the bigger aircraft, then you could walk around and we had a toilet and everything in them and it was good.

Just a yeah, just a sort of internal one.

I don’t know who did that.

Ground crew yeah. You had to make them, no

Don’t know. I did one or two oxygen courses, they were interesting, they used to put you into a cylinder, a great cylinder as long as this room and they put you into that and then they’d take all the oxygen out of it. Have you ever had this done to you?

No it’s interesting because you,

it’s like having your oxygen cut off in the air and you become, you go through a stage where you’re over confident and if you’re, many of the fighter pilots used to die like this, but they didn’t know it, but they used to go up and say they’d either run out of oxygen, most people have an oxygen ceiling, mine’s about twenty-two thousand, but in other words above twenty-two thousand

I really need oxygen, but below that I can survive quite well.

About fifteen I think,

But anyway, so that when you’re above that you certainly need it. But anyway, in this oxygen chamber they take the air out and they’ll have you signing your name you see and you’ll be signing away and signing away and the oxygen’s getting less and less and less and you’re still full of confidence and you’re not writing anything.

You’re doing the job, you’re all scribbling away and can’t see anything, I don’t know whether your sight goes or not, but it’s really a con job, it really upsets you. But this is how many of the fighters I think went for a six, they either ran out of oxygen or had their oxygen lines cut.

We all used oxygen but

we found the greatest of all, was if you had a severe hangover to go down and sit there and breath pure oxygen it’s a wonderful death, no it is, it brings it right back to life.

No, I’ve enjoyed it, it’s never won.

I’d say about, in those days it was at least twelve-hours

No, no you wouldn’t be drinking the night before. But most of the trips were done at night, so it didn’t matter much if you sort of, you didn’t drink during the day anyway much you might have a beer that was all.

Well you wouldn’t do that many.

No you’d take months to do, see in those days they used to clear the whole thing down. Where we up to forty yeah. War declared, see there’s one, two, that’s the one in that book I showed you there, that’s the entrance

there.

That old postman you saw he’s sixty-nine and he’s just been to England to see his brother before he died, he’s ninety something his brother. I said, “Christ you’re mad.” I’ve got him trained, he brings my paper in of a morning, he’ll wake up one a these days, brings the mail in. I think he’s unhappy at home. No nice fella.

Well, I don’t think I ever differentiated between them, they were both a menace. But we didn’t see the fighter, we didn’t have the fighter attacks that the later people had, they had more fighter. We

worried more about search lights and anti aircraft, particularly anti-aircraft. I’m still not sure whether it was anti-aircraft or a fighter that got us when I was wounded. But we were often hit, we were quite often hit, you’d get holes there and holes there.

Yes it was quiet

as hell and all of a sudden hell broke lose and there was anti-aircraft all over the place. But we were over a big city and I think we went as, we were really I think in the middle of Düsseldorf miles from where we should have been. And at one stage all I did put the nose down and got as low as I could and I found myself flying up a valley of in between great buildings on each side of the river,

I think it was the Rhine I was on.

Yeah.

I was following the navigator I wasn’t lost, I was following my navigator but he’d instructed me, he said, “Go on, go on, go on.” but I think he was lost, I’m sure he was there.

He survived that trip, but he killed himself soon after, he didn’t last long

after that.

No I don’t think so, it’s best not to, it’s best to sort of let them simmer. No it’s best not to, you’ve got to live with them, no I was in hospital anyway so it didn’t matter much.

No I had an appointment with the WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] I had to get home. Now where’s

that one? God there’s some wonderful people in here. Smedden that’s the fellow. Bombing the Ruhr a thousand- feet, wounded, Düsseldorf, hydraulics and instruments shot away. That features quite well doesn’t it and Ashmore is here and he’s still alive today, he’s the fella that’s sending me out the video on me climbing out of an, he’s still alive today. Sergeant Ashmore. See

the aircrew there didn’t have ranks, at this stage they did this was June forty, but before that though we used to pick em off, anyone that happened to wanted to fly, we used to take them up as rear gunners and they had no rank at all, they were just privates more or less. LAC Leading Air Craftsmen. Yeah Dusseldorf, I’ve got it down as Dusseldorf, this was the, but no that’s interesting.

See there’s your normal, that’s not a month, that’s one, two, three, four, you asked how many a month, five, six, seven, eight. See eight that month,

Eight ops in a month yeah.

Yeah, gardening cinnamon, I forget what

cinnamon was, La Rochelle cinnamon that was gardening, Bombing Macsburg, nine-thousand feet, some ASI, Air Speed Indicator US [unserviceable], Bombing Beuna, no interesting.[These were targets such as oilfields etc] Some of these were nasty, these are all in Hampdens, 740 and all that stuff. They’re long trips.

No and JC.

No, no. It’s signed by the station commander or squadron commander, see there, they used to check it through and sign it once a month.

No you used to do night flying tests and all that sort of stuff and you were on duty and all sorts of things, you did as well apart from that, all sorts of flights there. What were we into? Forty-two, see that’s,

NFT, night flying tests or you’re flying around the countryside and

Yeah, and you also had other duties you were, for instance I’d quite often work as Station Adjutant, you learn a lot when you’re a station adjutant.

Definitely, that was the purpose of the exercise and you found out when there

were trips going, ferry trips going and all these things.

No, but you knew a bit and you knew when to shut up and no, it was interesting.

No you didn’t bother about saying goodbye you just went and did your job.

No, the women involved, see a lot of people don’t realise but we had

several thousand WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] in the air force long before the war, they came in about August of thirty-nine we had them there, and no, it’s a question, she had her job to do in my friend’s case, she had God knows how many WAAFs under her that she controlled

She was the Chief Administrator of all the WAAFs.

Simple as that, a matter of fact, sometimes her rank exceeded me and I nearly had to call her a ma-am.

Well it went up with mine, she was a flight officer I was a flight lieutenant say, but sometimes she would, I think she’d be, I don’t know what rank she finished up at, but no it was a question of, “Yes ma-am,”

She was a WAAF stationed with us

for years before the war, no, no interesting. No, she was a nice person.

I’m not sure who was, I’m not sure about that, no.

God, no it was interesting. No it was,

it was fascinating to me because I saw both sides of the picture, I saw the fighter side as well as the, see she was so much fighter that I, and she was posted away from us in the end, she went down to a station, one of the fighter stations and ran that. The strange thing is, I was married one day out here a hundred years later and she was married the same day I think

in Canada or somewhere, she married a Yank I think, have never heard a word since.

Yeah she was a nice person.

No she hated my guts my mother, she wanted at least a daughter and she didn’t’ get a daughter, she got me and she treated me like a savage.

Well you have now.

Well as you approach the British coast, we hoped the British coast, you switched it on and it sent out a signal and that signal was received by the anti-aircraft and searchlight people and they just didn’t illuminate or shoot at you. It was all done on a frequency business and as I explained to Stella earlier the

Germans had a copy of it April or May 1940, so it was no longer secret but everyone talked of it as secret.

Of course it was, I heard one of the RAAF talking on the tellie [television] this week about using it in Iraq, but it went out of date sixty-years ago. This is how…

Yeah they could tell

a single beam job yeah.

Not to my knowledge, no I think it was a single beam job.

Yeah, but you, we used it and it seemed to be effective, but on the other hand we always came in on safe channels, channels that were clear of balloons and all this type of thing.

Well those blind approach courses I had, they worked on beams. On one side as I said you’ve got a dot and the other you’ve got a dash and a solid beam up the middle. That was a beam system for landing aircraft.

That’s what you’re thinking about.

But only certain aerodromes had them, so you had to have the equipment and the aerodrome had to have the equipment.

But it was pretty well fool proof as long as you weren’t a fool.

Yeah course there were.

They probably had the personal

attachment.

Yeah but all telephone people are like that, they’ve either got good voices or not. This annoys me on TV today right this year and everything, the people aren’t picked for their speech.

No it didn’t. No I never, it never worried me. Odd occasions when I came home they wouldn’t turn the lights on for me and I used to land anyway. No.

Not to my knowledge, there was a good feeling though, the morale was kept up on both sides by the, there was a good feeling.

Yeah it was,

It was, no, we won’t go into that because many of the WAAFs suffered because they lost their partners or whatever and it was,

it was a bit grim really. This is why in the early years of the war, as I told Stella before, we used to pick up anyone that wanted to get flying pay, as a private or LAC [Leading Aircraftman] and we’d fly them and they’d do this and then gradually when our casualties got higher, we found that the wives of those people suffered. Many people don’t realise

this that, we had lots of corporals and LACs’ wives that were widows and so to overcome this they made the law that no-one under the rank of sergeant should fly as aircrew. This was bought in probably forty-one.

So it was to look after the widows, this is why it happened. People aren’t aware of it even today, they think it happened because

they were doing such a responsible job, it wasn’t that, it was to save the hardship of the widows.

It was limited, we weren’t encouraged to associate, you never went out on a walking party with a ground chap or even drank in the pubs with him unless

it happened by accident.

I’m patient you know.

Yes we had pigeons on the plane and they were a ruddy nuisance because if you landed away from home which we quite often did, we say central England could be blanked right out with fog

and we’d have to land up north or down south or somewhere and then you’d have find somewhere to feed your blinkin’ pigeons which were embarrassing. We were never troubled to eat them and people often said did they ever get back form the end, and usually after a crash I knew of a few cases where they did get back to base after a crash, but usually after the crew had got back. No this is

true, this happened. They’d liberate, fly around and then land on the tail of the aircraft and this type of thing and then later on when they felt a bit better, then they’d take off and come home.

The people that owned those, they were privately owned they got a certain, so much a trip.

No, they were owned by enthusiasts and

No, they had little basket, little brown basket, wicker baskets about that big.

Well you won’t like this bit Stella, but my friend Frankie Eustace from New Zealand had a dog called Jill, Jill was a cocker spaniel and she had an affair with a dachshund and when the dachshund and I said I want one of the pups and I got one of the pups and you wouldn’t believe, it was born on Christmas Day, so I had to call him Jesus and Jesus used to fly with me. No this is, years later I got

a letter from a fellow in England and he said, “I’m looking for a fella that used to fly Manchesters and had a dog called Jesus.” and I wrote back and said, “You’ve found him.” and that was it. No it’s true.

He had his idiosyncrasies and one of em was wherever we landed he used to hop off to see all his friends and of course his friends wandered and he wandered with them and after a while I lost him, where he finished up I don’t know.

No, he seemed alright, we didn’t take him on ops, not on operations just on sort of home flights. Oh no, I wasn’t as cruel as that.

Poor old Jeez.

Yeah, no effort.

No I can’t think of anything no. No there were many eccentrics but God made eccentrics, so let’s put up with them.

I wondered why we got on so well.

Help them a bit?

No, no, no, sometimes I have had people bounce to the roof, you could do that and they didn’t like it. But it was only done in sport; I didn’t kill anyone that way.

Well the noise, that’s

why I’m deaf today. But on the other hand it’s nature’s way defending old men, he sends them all deaf. It’ll happen to you someday.

Defence, you cannot hear the nagging going on.

Night fighters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well when I had that jet black aeroplane, this is over England, experimenting flight there, they never found me at night, our night fighters never found me at night unless I turned my lights on, I had to help them. I did.

Well they had radar, the Germans had radar and we didn’t know it and they didn’t know we had it and so on. But radar was, it was there and it was barely used and not used because so few people understood it, understood its limitations I think.

I wouldn’t have a clue but it wasn’t developed as quickly as it

could a been, put it that way. I’m sure of it, it was around, it was around for a long time.

No but the radar’s only a guidance for you to get up to me, that’s all it is, it’s a guidance really.

No, no, not half as many as they did in say 1943. That was a period when the night fighter really came into it’s being. But our enemy was mainly anti-aircraft fire.

Well many of the aircrafts that I saw at night over England that I thought were night fighters, could’ve been night bombers, see it’s very hard to differentiate at night, tell the size of a thing. I saw something one night bombing Norwich and, well it could’ve been

fighters it could’ve been, looking for our people, and it could have been bombers bombing Norwich. But on one occasion at Conningsburgh we were landing Manchesters there one night and a night fighter came and joined in the circuit and it put something like a hundred and six bullet holes in one Manchester and didn’t hurt anyone. You wouldn’t believe it.

Yeah it’s a big aeroplane

too, but there were all these shells about that, empty shells all over the aerodrome, including you know in our own mess, and yet no-one was damaged, the fella just kept doin’ his circuit and landed. No one was shot down, but the thing was literally full a holes.

Well my opinion of formation flying is that it’s a waste of bloody time, I was never in favour of formation.

Well because if you’re flying formation you’ve got to, for instance your main thing is to keep in formation and to keep in formation it’s not easy and

in other words you cannot really keep an eye out for yourself at the same time as formate and I don’t care a damn, you could do wide formation a lose formation, that’s OK. But not this silly stuff tucked in like that. Once when we were up in the north west frontier we had a fellow with us there, he was a wonderful pilot he’d been a fighter pilot and one day we were sent to shoot up the town of

Rawalpindi to cheer the Indian people up or something and we shot it up and I gave the signals to close up and I didn’t look round for five-minutes and here’s this fellow tucked into, inside me Wellington, he was in a Wellington, he was tucked inside like that, I could have almost spat in his eye he was so close. But that’s the way he had been taught to fly as a fighter pilot.

We did all our ops individually when I was on it, except on rare occasions we might form up in daylight and go out together in daylight, like some of the Norwegian shows were done in lose formation and we’d just sort of leisurely accompany one another out, but not tight stuff.

No, no I wasn’t in those but it,

but I’m again that type of formation because I think it was bad for morale and if one aircraft got shot, invariably turned in on one of his friends and you couldn’t help but hit him, they were so close in many cases

Yeah, well that’s an accident, a straight accident. But again if the circuit is right, for instance we had a system when we were out in the desert, we called it the Maw System after my CO, Wing Commander Maw, he evolved it, and say we were bombing Tobruk,

you only bombed every ten-minutes, you think of that, so that you’ve got 2 o’clock everyone came into bomb, but they bombed on a circuit, they bombed on north and south and so on this way, so that you had no opposition stuff and then ten-minutes past two they’d all go in again. The purpose of that was that if there was anti-aircraft there

it couldn’t pick on one aircraft, you had so many conflicting targets and it worked out quite well, it worked the Maw plan as we called it, M-A-W.

I don’t know, we used it in our group which was 205 Group.

No I would like to know what date you’re referring to here. I’ve got complaints about my promotion, I seemed to be sort of pushed on and pushed on forever and I never asked

for a promotion, I was quite prepared to go back anytime. But I was pushed on and pushed on and as I said, when I took over 215 my flight commanders were senior to me which was an embarrassment.

It worked quite well because I’m easy to get on with.

No I don’t, I’ve never heard this before. No we did our own thing.

We weren’t, we were encouraged not to mix with them.

Definitely, we had to be friendly with them. There’s some strange ones in that. Some of them are very interesting. I used to, if I saw an aeroplane I used to sit by until I either flew it or photographed it and I photographed thousands of em.

Pre-war, some of them are rare old things.

That’s right.

Didn’t have a clue but we didn’t want to miss anything that was happening.

No we’d done a lot of

before the war, we’d done a lot of long trips over France and places like that, and we didn’t really have much of an idea what we’d be doing to be honest. No an important question that comes up there is the bomb loads and the types of bombs we had. In those pre-war days or early war days we had the two-fifty-pound general purpose, five-hundred-pound general purpose

and that was about the biggest, five-hundred-pound general purpose was the largest of the general purpose stuff. We had anti-aircraft, not anti, they were used for dive-bombing, I forget the name of them. They would go through armour plate decks

and things like that. But we had them up to two-thousand pounds before the war. Then when the battle of Norway came into being we invented a thousand-pound bomb that was used to break up the ice and the Germans were using some of the frozen ice as aerodromes and we used them for that, thousand pounders. Then later on we got two-thousand-pounders

and then on that Sylt, not Sylt, on the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst raids, I was given nineteen-hundred-pound bombs, they were a new bomb again and we had two-thousand-pound general purpose, then they got the four-thousand-pounders and only a few of the aircraft could carry those at the first.

Yeah, some of the Wellingtons couldn’t carry them and then we got up to

twelve-thousand-pounders and then on and on. Twenty-four-thousand-pounders I think we had in the end.

I wouldn’t have a clue, I never saw, never carried one. But on one occasion my sister squadron in India had, each would carry four-thousand-pounders. Now you think of this, they bought this four-thousand-pound bomb

out from England, made in England, shipped out to Calcutta, taken by train from Calcutta to our aerodrome out in the jungle and put on this aircraft and the opposition took it and bombed Mandalay with it. Weeks later we got the information, it had killed one deer. So there’s your cost of the war, one dear with all that.

Of course it was wasteful.

No it’s interesting thinking back on it now.

No what happened John [interviewer] was that they, when you got to the desert you got only what they let sneak out of England, it was mainly kept in England. You mainly got more or less the rubbish, anything that they didn’t much immediate, you’ve never heard

of Lancasters being used out there, they probably were a couple of times. They used to do ferry trips they’d bomb, go into the desert, and come back to England again. When you got to India Burma, you got even less because as soon as a Wellington say, got to Egypt, it’d be stolen, all the bits would be pinched off it, and stealing went on all, of parts went all along the line.

Yes that’s right, you were less efficient because of the serviceability.

Well it was hopeless because your aircraft was unserviceable most of the time. Incidentally this is interesting to you, we had a system of maintenance, I dunno whether you know anything about maintenance, but aircraft have to be inspected by a long system of inspections on

different parts and when we were in the desert, we used to soon as an aircraft landed at night, a series, a certain number of those inspection tasks would be completed immediately, and so that you never had an aircraft unserviceable, in other words you flew every night you just staggered these, you did a few inspections and then bombed up again

and so that you didn’t have to, except for major inspections, then we used to take them up to Palestine and they were almost rebuilt. Then they’d come back to the desert again.

It worked, it was most efficient. See in England they had a lot of unserviceability because they didn’t do that, they used to wait and they’d have an aeroplane and it’d be out of use the next night,

they needed to be in use that night, they could’ve done it if they used our system, it’s all systems.

No it didn’t because serviceability there was so poor and I think I explained, this fellow that they used to ring up each day and I finally grounded them all in the end.

No well you do what is good for the, for your own people. You don’t see em slaughtered.

That’s right, you’re unpopular up top, but you had to do it because it was such a, you weren’t achieving anything. I knew what was going on behind the lines because you always had friends somewhere that could tell you and you understood the system.

They were telling me one, we had no intelligence there worth a thing and we had to do, many of them for instance were against General Wingate’s expeditions, he’s the man that hated sport and they were again him and yet his people operated a thousand-miles behind their lines and they did an enormous lot a damage to the Japanese and our people used to be invited to

work with him, pilot officers and flying officers, they and quite often they used to lead army men in battle which is unheard of, people didn’t realise that. These are done by, in Windgate’s expeditions that they were taken along so as to advise on aircraft landing places and all this type of thing.

Well it wasn’t effective, I don’t think any of that theatre was right. I don’t think it was an efficient theatre of war at all.

Well the only way I could do it was to, as I did, and have the aircraft grounded.

No I didn’t receive a reprimand, but

it didn’t increase my popularity up top, no because you’ve got to be, do what you think’s right, it’s the only way. You can’t do what people tell you to do all the time.

About a thousand or so yeah.

That’s just the way it is, if you worried about, it you could never do that job.

Tends to, no well for instance when I took over 215, the CO of it, he had a fancy lady in Calcutta and he had, he’d just left the place and had gone to live in Calcutta with her. It was a cock up the whole area

out there.

More or less. I used to go bird watching I didn’t go troppo.

Feathers yes. No it was a wonderful birds. No but, it was an interesting experience. People are still in touch with me, some of my and when Wellingtons arrived in the east there, I used to check on them and if

I found there was a New Zealand crew or an Australian crew, I used to have the aircraft channelled my way, so in the end I finished up with almost a colonial squadron.

It was good because you could rely on em , and some of them still come down to see me here, some come down from Queensland to see me this last couple of weeks. Oh no it’s interesting.

Yes it was

a backwater, yeah.

No, it probably was, but I wanted to get home and when I did get home I was disappointed with what I found.

Early ‘forty-four.

No, God no, I came home to see my

father and he had died and my mother didn’t have a home and my brother he was with the, he’d been in the CMF [Citizen Military Forces – militia] and he’d been shockingly damaged, he was unconscious for a month and he was half witted and I was in really a mess when I come home because of those, I decided to go on the land and I didn’t mess around, I went

I knew nothing about farming and so I went to see the Minister of Agriculture which is a pretty step, so I went to see him, his name was Brake, and I went to see this fella and I told him it was about time he put on a training scheme for people like myself, to teach them how to be farmers. He arranged to have me sent down to the Werribee Research Farm to work as a labourer for nearly six-months.

And so I went down there. Then after that I bought myself a farm.

No I resigned.

I could yeah.

No I’d done more than anyone else

and I just handed my resignation in.

No, good heavens no.

A few people in Melbourne offered me jobs. No it was interesting. I’d forgotten about that. They did send me on two parades, they sent me on a church parade and I said, “Christ you don’t have church parades in war time.” and they said, “We do.”

so they had a church parade and then they sent me to march through the streets of Melbourne to make people buy more war bonds. So I resigned.

It was absurd.

Flying officer.

No I was allowed to keep it because Bluey Truscott had come home after that and he’d been allowed to keep his Acting squadron leader and so that they, he’d altered the toss and then of course he killed himself. But no, another friend of mine he came home, he was one that went over with, Tom Boylen, he went over with me and he was on Five Group with me and he flew Hampdens

and Lancasters and you name it, he came home a DSO and a DFC, and the best job he could get in Australia was serving behind the counter in David Jones [department store]. He is dead now he died at Manly. But no, they treated us badly.

I though I hadn’t come home because I had no home you see. I stayed

with odd aunts and things like that, until I finally got myself established on a farm of my own. But oh no, it worked out quite well.

Six, six and a quarter years.

No there wasn’t I didn’t get back at all.

Yeah I wrote letters to them ever fortnight and I used to get letters from them.

and all of those letters incidentally went to the archives, they all came back to me and they’re all in the archives and some of them were interesting. Some of them were interesting, some for instance 1938 in England I write home about spending the weekend in London watching TV, thirty-eight.

Yeah, no it was wonderful really.

I forget. Probably

Steele Rudd [Australian author] or something like that.

No it was interesting that, no it was good, it was all black and white of course.

In those days the range had just been extended. You could, I dunno whether you know London, you should do, you would hear it at Nottingham which was really a

Quite a way.

I forget now.

I forget it,

but I wrote home this letter and told my parents all about it and even the price of it and

I reckon it was going to go I said, “It’ll leave wireless for dead.” But …

Dunno how much I’m gonna charge you.

Yeah.

It was the normal Hampden and the idea was to just eliminate any light reflection and if you’re, the jet black you could put a searchlight on it and no light was reflected

Matte black yeah. Sorry I said jet black, matte black I meant. Thank you son.

I can’t think of anything.

Nothing is secret after a hundred-years.

No, no. I’m still not sure what is secret today and what isn’t to be honest.

Yeah I think it, yeah.

No I won’t it hold back. No if I know anything I’ll tell you.

Well what I thought was that the

there’ so much chaos, I’d seen so much chaos and seen these millions die in Bengal and all the waste of the war years and the futility of that and I thought that what’s happening today, like world chaos which we’ve virtually got today would happen very quickly, well it didn’t. I was wrong. It didn’t happen quickly and I thought

well the best place to be was on the land and so it was that, that prompted me to go on the land.

Well people now are almost scared to get on an aircraft, or go, look what happened in Bali. You’ve got this so called terrorism and that type of thing. People aren’t travelling today. They are not.

No I felt that the war was finished when I came home, it was on the way out then. I knew the signs and what war was all about and we were winning definitely, and I had no more worries about that because and the other fact was the enormous effort put in by the Americans, the Americans saved England and the Americans saved Australia

and when I was on Manchesters for example, before, a year before Pearl Harbor, a year before just on a year before, the boss came to me one night and asked me whether I’d take a passenger on a trip in a Manchester and he turned up in full military uniform, Lieutenant Commander Wannamaker of the United States Air Force flew with me as an observer before, as I

say, before they’d even come into it and I thought that was rather remarkable because he didn’t stir a hair, he just stood and watched the whole operation.

The bombing operation, he went as an, he just stood at my side the whole trip.

Early ‘41. Pearl Harbor didn’t come right to the end of ‘41.

No he was just an observer but he was in full military uniform. God knows what, it’s written up in the books.

What would’ve happened? God knows.

No that’s right. We would have all had to explain a bit. But anyway when I got to India Burma my boss there was Lord Louis Mountbatten and under him

an American general who was my immediate boss. Lord Louis incorporated the American effort with the British effort, he brought everyone in, if he had a wing commander there RAF, he’d have an equivalent rank, United States Air Force working with him and this is how he brought the sides together. Anyway this American general came to me one night at briefing we’d briefed the crews to

bomb a place in Burma and then h turned and said he’d like to fly with one of the boys, so I said take your pick and he selected the most junior pilot we had, a sergeant and flew with him over Burma, in a broken down old Wellington that shouldn’t have been flying. I thought at the time there goes General Blamey, but it wasn’t General Blamey

it was this American general. No but this is the attitude.

Because he served in three wars and didn’t have a wound stripe from any of them. That’s why, he didn’t, he was a political appointee.

Because he wanted to see what the operations were like, genuine, this is what a leader should do; he shouldn’t sit at home in an office.

He should be out there amongst the fighters. I’m an old fashioned fighter.

No but I’ve always assumed that a battle leader should lead in battle, and well you get these people that try and do it from Vic [Victoria] Barracks and you can’t do it.

But morale in the squadron jumped up because everyone knew about it and we needed a morale booster.

That’s right. But it was a pretty dicey trip to get into Burma. You had to go through these mountain passes at night and the aircraft were terrible.

Well

it’s the southern part of the Himalayas really.

Well the mountain tops there are at least ten-thousand and that was our ceiling virtually.

Yes, but we also, see there’s a great strip of mountains run right down that Arakan Coast and this is where the invasion of Japan was going to start, they were going to invade

on the Arakan Coast, we did all of the photographic work for it, 215 squadron did it. They were going to invade across these mountains into the Irrawaddy Valley, Irrawaddy yeah, and then down to Bangkok and sort of back into Japan virtually, and this is what the plan was.

That’d take in Mandalay and Bangkok and up that way. But on one occasion there were very few passes over these mountains so one of our jobs was to take out tonnes and tonnes and drop tonnes of these funny things, they were about that size and they were sharp edges to puncture the tyres of the Japs convoy

on these mountain passes once one was stopped and then the whole convoy would come to a halt and then our people would go out next day with some form of fighter-bomber and shoot them up to bits. No it was interesting.

I don’t know I was only on the dropping of these things. These funny things.

Yeah, we used to

for instance, in the early years of the war we used to spend a lot of the time bombing the black, not bombing, burning the black forest. We used to have a thing called razzle which was always carried in the four-gallon tins, you remember the old four-gallon tins, the square tins, four gallon tins of water and we had phosphorus, phosphorus dets [detonators] about that big and used to drop them all over the

pastures, not pastures, over the wheat crops and things like that and all through the forests to start fires and burn the black forest. That’s one of the things we had. We had lots of funny things. Many of the chaps used to personally take bricks and they’d throw them overboard, no it was all personal,

Yeah, yeah definitely.

Yeah,

I wouldn’t know but lots of rude messages for Hitler. But no, it was interesting. We were allowed but in general we obeyed the rules and didn’t overload stuff.

They’d just chuck it out, sort of out a window or somewhere, something like that I think.

I forget now.

There wasn’t staunch discipline; you only did things that were pretty sensible really.

Well, I thought it’d come more in the form just a general disintegration of government and I think it has come to that now. See the League of Nations was our controller in those days, the League of Nations turned out to be nothing, it failed and now we’ve got United Nations and

that has more or less failed and the most powerful person, in this case [US President] Bush, has just taken over which is wrong really, he has done a lot of silly things.

This is one of the silly things. It was, it’s, I don’t agree with it because I worked in the area and know, I’ve worked with Muslims a lot

and I understand their attitude and what Bush is worried about, the whole business of that Iraq war is to maintain Jewish votes for Bush, I am sure of it. That’s all that was in it, couldn’t care whether this is on the line or not. But that’s my opinion.

But it’s to preserve his voting strength.

We shouldn’t be involved with that because we’ve got more to lose with our wheat sales commercially and all this type of thing we should keep as many Asiatic and Muslim friends as we can. They’ve got a strange religion but it is more dedicated than ours.

I’ve been on purely Muslim boats and been about the only so-called Christian on it, and that boat that I was on for example, for weeks, it used to stop every, I think five-times a day it’d stop and they’d all get their mats out and pray to Mecca, it was strong, strong influence.

Very disciplined yeah call it that. We haven’t got that.

We go to church, people are watching.

The Victorian or the State or the Commonwealth?

Well I don’t,

I don’t think it did. For instance if it had done its job, the Commonwealth had done it’s job, you wouldn’t have organisations like Legacy creep up. Legacy has really taken off the government the job it should be doing. All the work of Legacy should be done by the government, why isn’t it done? It is sort of a private enterprise almost, that’s an example.

I wasn’t even cheered or welcomed. In fact when I came home there was a wharfies [wharf labourers] strike on and I had to carry me own suitcase down the gangplank. No this is true.

No I didn’t, I couldn’t,

think I credited on experience and the experiences I’d had, I reckoned I’d won anyway. But no many of my friends had been killed in the war of course; many of my old friends had been killed.

God no.

With an experience like that, you never get it out.

No, no you form your own opinions and you stick by them that’s the way I’ve always gone and my opinions aren’t (unsure – popular) opinions.

No, no it’s all part of life it still goes on.

No I did my own thing. This is why I did everything independently I sort of, or tried to be independent all the time. I’ve never worried about money, I’ve never inherited money, if I have I have always split it six ways and given a bit to each of the

family.

That was before the war, he was Militia he was on some stupid prank with some people up at Liverpool in I think, in Sydney, I was away at the time and he was smashed up on a motor bike with someone else, I don’t know what it was all about. But he was a mess, he,

they, ever now and then used to take the top of his head off and have a look at his sort a damaged brain. But he worked in the Commonwealth Bank and the Commonwealth Bank sort of hung onto him and kept him in work until he died pretty well. No it was interesting really.

Yeah, yeah. There was a, when I came home there was a terrific anti-American

feeling going on, that’s the thing that annoyed me because I’d got the opposite, I’d realised how much good, all the equipment they’d bought into us and it saved us really. In that Bengal business where I was there, we’d been trying for ages and ages to get the RAF to put beacons in between us and Burma, it was just jungle, it’s a swampy jungle and they said they couldn’t do it.

When that American general came along, he had em there in 3 weeks.

They were our beacon so we that had a guiding, we had nothing, we had no navigational guides there and it was a navigational guide to us coming back from Burma and all that at night.

It’s primitive stuff, it is all tiger country,

interesting, but tiger country. They called it the Sundabuns [?],

Well, Sundabunds, it’s an Indian word for swamp I spose.

I did, I joined it for a few minutes and then I dropped out and recently I joined again and I even joined here for a year but I couldn’t get the feeling of the place.

There’s a chap comes and gives a lecture here, a parson comes and gives an Anzac Day ceremony here every Anzac Day, I went to one of them, but he annoyed me because he didn't give one mention, all he mentioned were the Australian POWs [prisoners of war] who wouldn’t fight in Singapore or wherever and he didn’t mention once the fifty-eight Americans that died around Australia

defending Australia or the twenty-three million Communists that died fighting the Japs, or the Germans I mean, Japs and Germans, but there were millions of Russians, now these anti-communists out here they don't know what the world is all about.

We’re living in a fool’s paradise. Simple as that.

Well I asked you a simple question earlier and you answered no, how many footy people you see killed in Vietnam and you couldn’t name one.

No but you should know who was around, the history.

No. God it’d be nice to be your age, wouldn’t it?

No. Australia needs strong friends and hence we must have, and the only strong friend we’ve got’s America, we must stick it to America but we should become an American state really.

No I wouldn’t be happy with that, but we should be it’s our only way of salvation because the, I understand the Asiatics I’ve lived amongst them for so long or I did, and they’re, see there’s some wonderful people amongst the Asian people, the Indians and what have you, but we’re still racist most people out here are racist.

Definitely. If you have people, if in World War II you had people properly equipped and properly trained you would never have had thirty-six-thousand people surrender as prisoners of war. Would never have had it, they would have either fought to the death, but they surrendered long before they had

proper casualties, they had a few casualties.

The hierarchy the upper defence hierarchy, no, it’s sad really,

because once a hierarchy gets established it perpetuates itself. Jeez, it’s a long sermon this.

Have you ever read his diaries?

Well if you’ve read his diary you’ll be able explain to me why after weeks and weeks of being a prisoner of war was he worried about what to do with his pistols.

No but why did he have the pistol? A doctor, is it to shoot his patients, he’s a non-combatant and here he is with pistols and he is worried, it’s in, I’ve got a copy out there, it’s in his journal.

I just wondered what you think he should a done.

Why’d he have them?

I’m sorry. I’m correct. But no it’s, his duty was to escape, but instead of that he stayed behind and repaired people not to escape but to work for the Japs. So he worked for the Japs.

I know he’s a great humanitarian, I’ll give him full marks for humanitarian, but he was a piss poor soldier.

No, a doctor, look I’ve got a book out there where one doctor did ninety-eight bombing raids, ninety-two, sorry, I correct myself, ninety-two bombing raids, a doctor. He could’ve easily said right I’m a GP, I’ll sit by and watch and done a Weary Dunlop, no but he could have.

But there are doctors and doctors.

No he was a doctor and a pilot, he was a medical doctor. Medico, no it’s interesting really. You probably have never read Hardie’s book on the Burma Road. Hardie he left a diary, he was a doctor and he worked in Weary Dunlop’s surgery on the Burma Road

and he left his diary and in his diary is a 1943 Christmas Dinner Menu, jeez, it’d make you feel hungry. The beautiful food they had, this was in the hospital on Christmas Day and people make excuses for him. Not

my type of doctor.

God you’ve got to stick by your opinions if you believe in them.

No I never had

nightmares. I’ve got a clean conscience and if you’ve got a clean conscience and 2-bob in the bank, you never have trouble sleeping.

It has in some regards, it’s like the tide it comes in and goes out. It has good days and for instance I’ve noticed this over the years that sometimes it’ll

give pensions to everybody and then for another five-years it’ll stop giving pension to anybody and so on. It varies like this, I’m not quite sure what stage it is now, but many people I know are on TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated] and all this stuff and they never saw any combat, they are, this happens in one of the sort of give away periods, when they have

no giveaway quite the opposite. They’ve treated me all right. Actually the first thing that happened when I came here, I’d been given a few people to look up in the village and when I went to look up one and it turned out to be this local parson that talks here and all he wanted to do was increase my pension. I said, “I don’t want any more pension, I’ve got enough thank you very much.” he couldn’t understand it. You don’t want more than you can handle. Think of the dry red I could buy.

No, you’re too young.

Yeah that’s right, that is true. They were right across the North of India, they ran into Afghanistan and

there was a whole series of them and they were beautiful aerodromes. I sighted a the aerodrome control towers on some of them.

Well the aerodromes were there, some I think some of them even had runways, but I used to have my own aircraft then and it was a broken down Blenheim Mark One I’d pinched from somewhere, it had been crashed on the west coast of Africa and come over to us when they were no longer

using them, so I grabbed it and chucked everything out, armour plate, everything all chucked out and it was like a race horse, it was beautiful to fly a Blenheim Mark One and I used to go in, use that to get into these places. That was fascinating really. This is when I was in Ferry Wing. The aerodromes were complete except they didn’t have the main control towers, that’s where everyone sits up and says come in and land or go round again or whatever. He sent me

to sight the areas where they were to be built. And I was working, see all of those aerodromes were built by the Indian Army, and so I was working really with the Indian Army, but the Indian Army couldn’t read maps properly and on one case they couldn’t tell what were feet and what were metres and they built all the runways, no all the turntables in feet instead of metres you couldn’t turn a bicycle on them.

No, this is India, classic India that was at Karachi actually.

Well the purpose was they thought the Japs would get into India and they wanted to have the aerodromes all ready in case the Japs got that far.

No-one knew about them except for a few people, the Indian Army knew about it, I knew

about it and. There was almost a half circle of them around the top northwest corner of India, right up into the Khyber Pass area it was. No it was interesting really, there’s a place up there called Pasha, up past Pasha that’s on the Khyber Pass, well on the bottom of the Khyber Pass.

No, no, no because I always looked down upon them as like air borne taxi drivers. See we had so much independence in the work we did, it was quite different when you’re flying independently as I did for a long time, you

did your ops, that was all right but you were independent most of the time, you sort of made your own decisions all the time. But to fly some people round just as passengers didn’t appeal to me at all.

Over seventy, seventy-five, I think.

I know.

No I don’t think so. I realised that some of my landings were getting a bit squiffy but no I didn’t think I’d had it.

No, no, no. Towards the end you see, you’re allowed,

you were only allowed to fly only once every blue moon once you run a squadron, this was out in India anyway, and what I used to do was, I didn’t have my own crew then so I used to simply fly with other chaps on operations as a passenger more or less. They were then the skipper and I was just a supernumerary, which was the best way of doing it because it allowed them to carry on

with their sequence of operational flying and it didn’t interrupt that and it didn’t have me having a crew tied up, which was a bit selfish. But no it worked out quite well.

No I didn’t have a clue. I came home with the idea really of, I’d bought a lot of stuff home to

hand over to the RAAF, we’d evolved a special for example a special escape kit for use if you went down in the jungle and this type of thing and we’d evolved it over the Burmese jungle set-up and when I came home and saw what was going on, I just threw the whole lot away, I wouldn’t even bother to give it to them. They

treated us badly.

Well, different knives, different escape knives, different water tablets and all sorts of things of that nature, water purifiers and we had the whole kit was there. It was crazy.

Well the mere fact

of their apathy on that first raid, it put me off when they didn’t even attempt to fight off the Japs. They had warning that the Japs were coming but they did nothing because of their bad hierarchy.

I forget now, I think they had a few Hudsons. But they were all destroyed on the ground. There were some, there were a few Americans there passing through, six

Americans passing through in fighters, they all went up and they were shot down. But the Australian Air Force did nothing virtually, not one aircraft took off.

Not strange at all, that’s the Australian Air force. No, one of my friends I’d trained with at Point Cook he, we passed out there in thirty-seven and I met him at the reunion

in 1987, 50 years afterwards, I hadn’t been back to Point Cook in all that time, and his name was Galvin. When we met, I thought he was a bit subdued and afterwards he wrote me a long letter and told me how he’d escaped, how he’d got out of the air force and how he’d left the Royal Australian Air Force and he

told me, this is an amazing story, how he’d been a supernumerary, in other words an odd bod, Wing commander up in Darwin and he was involved with lots of things up there, he was mentioned in dispatches or something as well and then he was down on some job again supernumerary and he was involved with flying

boats and there was apparently an old parliamentarian of some sort got into the air force and crashed a, I think a Catalina. Anyway he was to be court martialled, he’d been a politician this chap, and he wast to be court martialled, and they asked my friend Jack, or John as he calls himself now, to preside over

the court martial and so then his next order was to report to the Chief RAAF Judge who happened to be Winnaker, you’ve heard of him?

That’s a long sermon.

Yeah no but it’s interesting, its part of the history, no he’s a good fella this chap and no he is a good fella, or was, til they crucified him.