Australians at War Film Archive

Righto. I was born on the 7th of August 1922 at Sutherland, it’s still called Sutherland. We had a

large property up there. My family came from Lancashire – or at least my father and his parents came from Lancashire. And they operated an orchard up there. We had about, oh, 20 acres or something like that up at Sutherland. I might say I wish we had that property

now; it’d be worth a lot more than we sold it for eventually. That’s on the side. My mother was of, well, half-French origin. Her mother was a French lady who came over to England and then finally out to Australia. And she married

an Australian, and that’s from a family called Thornton and hence my second name; my name is Robert Thornton Milner. So I carry the Thornton side of the family, that’s my mother’s side. And getting back to my father, and he had six siblings, and he himself and

two of my uncles were in World War I of course. My father was unfortunately gassed when the Germans started using gas. He had to be taken out back to England for treatment. He suffered from breathing this; and although it didn’t kill him it didn’t do much good for his lungs thereafter. So my father died

early. He died at 60 mainly due to the degeneration of his whole lung system and so on. He passed away. My mother lived till 100 years of age, so she went on a long time without him. And as I said, she came from—

partially—her French origin and partially British. So that’s a rough background of the actual family as we were. I had one sister, no brothers, and spent my life in, virtually on the borders of the National Park which [you] might know is Sutherland borders, actually

on the National Park. We used to be very happy up there. I think in those days the whole question of the way children were brought up and the principles which the families operated under were somewhat stricter, with control by parents, than they are today.

I mean, I’m making side comments here, but that’s my opinion. I came pretty well under control of my mother, I would say, more than my father who was a very lenient and forgiving sort of man. And my mother used to—my earliest recollections of her were that if I

did anything I shouldn’t, or she thought I shouldn’t she used to get the strap down from the… it was in the kitchen hanging up beside the old wood stove that we had in those days. And she would chase me with the strap. But I don’t think she ever connected because she used to just thrash the chairs and chase after me. And I used to bolt and get under, usually, under

a very large table that was in our lounge. This was a fairly large home; much, much bigger lounge than this one [indicates off-camera]. And there was a huge table in there where you could get under it and the chairs on either side would shield you from the strap of course. But she’d continue on round belting at the chairs, you see, to frighten the daylights out of me. But it was all a game, I suppose, when

you think back to it. However, that same lady lived. We have good photos of her and my father out in the billiard room there if you want to see them. But they were a family with considerable principles I would say. And if you want to look at their origin I suppose they were typical of the Poms [English] as we call them in Australia who came out here

in those days, migrated out to Australia. I gradually moved on into my school days and I went to school at the Sutherland school, Sutherland Public School. And then finally, when I got my

graduation from there, I went on to do what they called in those days the ‘Intermediate Certificate’ at the high school there at Sutherland which only went to the, what you would call these days I suppose, about 3, well, what do we go up to now? 8, don’t we, or something? 8 – do we go up to year 8 at high school?.

12 it is, isn’t it, that’s right; yeah, sorry – what am I thinking about? So that would be—when we went in that would have been after about 6 years at the lower school, of course, which was right adjacent to the high school anyway, and still is, there at Sutherland. But it was only Intermediate standard. I got through that all right, taking

pretty well to maths and geometry and that sort of stuff; and also to languages. I took French because I suppose my mother told me that was a good language to know. And graduated from there, finally, as dux of that school and

that is where my formal education stopped for a while because I then took a job at, I think I was 15 in those days, 15 years of age, after three years high school, I took a job with a large company in Sydney. We had several divisions. The company

was—the largest operation was in industrial chemicals. So after starting as a 15-year-old there I then went on to do industrial chemistry at what was then called the Sydney Technical College. But mind you, that was doing it the hard way; because that was all night school. And

we used to do about, I think, 3 nights a week there after work, you see, coming home by train by yourself and all that sort of thing. And it was fairly hard yakka [hard work]. But before I could actually finish that course—I got well advanced in it but then, of course, the war came along and

that changed the whole situation really as far as education was concerned. So that I had to complete that education after World War II. The only thing I can say about it was that the company that I joined, I was

accepted well by it and prospered in that company. Came back to it after World War II and became one of the directors of the large division, the chemical division. Just talking on the side a little bit, it had other divisions; it had mining machinery; it had a merchandise

division which had famous brands which my wife was very happy about such as Christian Dior and other cosmetics and toiletries that ladies were very keen about. We still have some of the products of that in this very house which are still being used by my wife, imagine, for instance, Christian Dior perfume. And

also it had, getting back to what you are obviously specialists at, it had a photographic division, Swift and Blinkley and the company was Swift and Co. Ltd., of course a public company. And I prospered in the company when I came back from the war. I mean, I’m jumping a bit here, no, because when I joined the air force I guess I was about 20 or

19, late 19. And I actually am jumping to a point where I turned 21 in the air force, so just to give you an idea of how the age situation was there. But the company itself, after the war, sent me over to Adelaide there to start up a branch. And

this I did fairly successfully. My wife and I still have many great friends in Adelaide from that 10 years. In the end I ended up as General Manager of their chemical division, and a Director. And that was that company. I’ll then shoot back to—I mean, I’ve gone there from where I graduate from high school, started

tertiary education, as you can tell, and which I had to finish after the war. The question of the war then came in of course, and we all learned about the great Adolf Hitler who had some aims. But I don’t think we even knew about, except they were probably about the same as the gentleman

we have just disposed of in Iraq; meaning world domination, I guess, or to achieve the position of the leading country in the world at least as, for instance, the United States is now. I suppose he was aiming for something like that. But he was our bogeyman, Adolf Hitler.

Just commenting—I mean, pardon these side comments, but the point is that I’m very fond of history; I did history at school. And as I see, Hitler came from a corporal, standing as a corporal was the most he achieved in World War I, to come up to the let’s call him the President, or

whatever he called himself at the time of a country like Germany. And then to engage in World War II was of course a big thing. But the man, politically and by the use of his various military associates, the black shirts and so on who supported him, gained control of Germany. And

of course, despite Mr. Chamberlain’s [Prime Minister of England] comments that there would be no war, there was a war. And the only thing that Hitler did wrong, and I can only assume it was because he had some liking or feeling of shall we say interest in

Great Britain or in England; and the only thing he did wrong was he didn’t invade. He was ready to invade England and just didn’t go ahead with it. Instead he started bombing it, as we all know; saturated bombing on various cities including London, of course. And this, naturally, proved Mr. Chamberlain’s forecast that there would be no war

as being—the Prime Minister at the time, Mr. Chamberlain—completely wrong; and so Britain came in. And then Britain could have been conquered, I think, by the Germans at that point in time except perhaps for the intervention of the United States who got dragged into it because the Japanese, of course, came into the war.

And they made the grave mistake of attacking Pearl Harbour [United States Naval Base]. So, I mean, I’m now going to head into history, but you want my personal side of my progress. So we got up to the stage where…

Yeah. Well, yes. And I think I was 19 at the time, something like that.

When I first joined the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] I went to initial training at the—well, the initial training, I suppose, was in

RAAF matters. That is to say, the structure of the RAAF. This was just learning this at our, what was then the depot on the north shore, I’m just trying to think of the name. Training in air force matters: ground staff matters, rank, policies, and all this sort of stuff.

But then, after I think about 2 months there, we were posted to Narrandera in New South Wales, of course, which was the initial training school – what they called Elementary Flying Training School, using Tiger Moth aircraft, which were a very good little machine to train

on. I mean, they were sensitive, very sensitive, but slow of course, and not easy to fly. You had to be quite light on touch with them and accurate with your manoeuvers, you know. But they were a safe aircraft to start training on. And they are still around, as you probably know; there are still Tiger Moths around the place. That was at Narrandera.

We had—this is where I have to look at the log book, if you don’t mind, if you want some dates; but no?

Trained at Narrandera and completed it after meeting some very good people among the instructors, of course, that were there. And incidentally, I’m talking on the side now, my wife’s brother

(the guy that I just showed you that photo, was an instructor; not at Narrandera, I think he was at Point Cook. And they were good guys. They had opted or been posted to do this work on the home front. It’s the sort of work that has to be done to build up the air force. And I would say that [I]

also met there other RAAF young people under training who some of them remained friends for life. And in fact, I’m still corresponding with some of them even though they are overseas in England and this sort of thing, they married overseas and that type of thing. And they’re still around,

of course, the same age as me, which is the early 80’s. The thing about the time at Narrandera—do you mind if I just have a quick look? [reaches off camera] I don’t know how you’re going to deal with this logbook, but… I was on a ‘25’ course in Narrandera

and started that in May 1942. As I said, we were on Tiger Moths.

And finished that course in September ’42, and I think I qualified above average there; yes, as a grading Above Average. And in total did about

61 flying hours there to graduate from that Elementary Training School. And then—do you want me to comment any more about that, flying on the Tiger Moths?

Well, we then went on to what they called the Service Flying Training School at Point Cook in Victoria which was, of course, one of the major—that was ‘number one’ Service Flying Training School. And at that stage I went on to a twin-engine aircraft. So I was going to be directed towards

the flying of bomber aircraft at that point in time rather than fighters. We trained mainly on Oxford aircraft. And that included, of course, the time when you went—we had all sorts of training

activity: about-turns and, of course, long distance runs. We did some…whatever they called them, where we travelled to other areas in New South Wales, turned around and came back again. And finally you go solo on the aircraft, as I did on the Tiger Moths. You go solo on the Oxfords;

you’ve got control of the aircraft. Albeit with a flying officer, an instructor, sitting in there. So that course finished in—

Yeah.

Oh, let me see… except without research of it again, so long ago you know, it is difficult to pick the, let’s say, the high points.

Yeah. We went—you know, I’ve got photos of the ship that we went on. It was—sorry, we went across the Atlantic on, I think it was, the Queen Mary. But the trip from

Australia, which was out of a north coast port, was on one of the American cargo ships. So that one was interesting. Limited number of us on board of course, in that case; whereas when we came across the Atlantic I think there was 17,000 troops on board the

Queen Mary, or whatever it was. And that was a lot of people on one ship. You can imagine what would have happened if it had been torpedoed. But of course, getting back to the American cargo ship. We had a voyage that was virtually uneventful. I mean, they try to

keep the service people interested on board, of course, by various things: boxing matches and various games and that sort of stuff. Also learning a bit about, as we went, about the RAAF of course being taught by officers on board. And at this point I should say that

the squadron we eventually went on to in Egypt was travelling from Australia. They were actually formed at Bankstown where, you know quite well there’s still an airfield. But they were purely ground staff; there were no flying people attached to the squadron at that point in time. Because under the Empire Air Training Scheme

(which you’ve probably also heard about the training for the aircrew was done in many places around the British Empire. You had them training in Canada and in Rhodesia and other African airfields. And so

the idea was to get the basic formation of the squadron in Australia, I’m talking about the squadron I eventually joined. It had while all of what I’ve been talking about was happening to me, had been formed at Bankstown with ground staff only, and had proceeded to Africa to take part in the desert war, what we then came to know as the

‘Desert War’. And incidentally, the chap we mentioned before, the secretary of our 451 Squadron Association, Jack Calbert, was with them of course. And they went on one of the big liners too. I think the Queen Mary was on that convoy that they went

out of Sydney with the full ground staff of the squadron, you see. Now, getting back to my progress. We landed at San Francisco, of course, and went across America. And we were at a transit camp on the east coast, not far out of New York. So we had some interesting leave

there meeting, naturally, American people, making new friends, and one or two of them were young ladies of course that we got to know locals there and that. Some of those contacts went on for many years, even post-war, with people we met on that trip. There was no flying

done in America by us at all. So we then got onto the liner that took us into—I think we came into Glasgow, as a matter of fact, in Scotland. And we then went down to Brighton, which was another transit centre in southern England – south coast of England.

And from there we went to Sywell which was the conversion course where we converted from twin-engine aircraft, for which we were trained, over to single-engine. And the aircraft there were called Miles Masters. And we did a

full conversion course there which again, naturally, we met many English people where we were staying. A bit of social life there on leave; went on leave from the camp. What can I say about Sywell? That was a successful course; I think I got above-average clearance

from there onto single-engine aircraft. So then, of course, before—it had obviously been decided to reinforce the Allied forces in North Africa. And we were sent out to the

training school, again, on a large liner… the name of which eludes me at the moment; but I could turn them up – they’d be in my diary, you know. But again, this is where you’re at a disadvantage, I’m saying now because I haven’t done this homework, and it’s a long time ago. We then went down to Brighton again, which was a transit centre

for aircrew in England. And then we were sent to the Middle East, to a, again a fighter course just out of a town called Abbis where the training station was called Abbis where we converted for the

first time onto fighter aircraft, you see. And this is where we came to know—we used American Harvard trainers, single-engine trainers, and then finally onto Spitfires. So that’s where I first came to know the Spitfire – and was very glad that I did because it was an aircraft that was certainly advanced for its time, and it had already done a great deal

to hold back the German attacks on the UK. As we all know very well, the history of it was that the fighters such as the Hurricane and the Spitfire were very active in holding back the German attacks on England during the war for Great Britain which was going on

with the German aircraft at that time. The Spitfire was a bit advanced on the Hurricane, higher speeds and higher altitude aircraft. So we started off on what would have been, I suppose, aircraft that had been used in the Battle of Britain and sent out

to these training stations for the RAAF and RAF [Royal Air Force] pilots in Egypt. And their ultimate destination, of course, was to be posted to active squadrons. Some Australians went on to RAF squadrons of course; but we were lucky enough to—the little group I was with—we got posted to 451 Squadron

which was already in Egypt and was actually in operations using pilots from the Empire Air Training Scheme which of course we came under – although I was fully trained, on the flying side, in Australia. As for combat activity, the 451 Squadron was using Hurricanes first

of all, and were successfully doing Army co-op work with the British and Australian troops of course or regiments. I would say that we got the Spitfires—let’s go back a step.

I graduated from the course at Abbis, which was advanced flying training of course, operational training, with, I think I got average marks there. And this was when I was posted to the 451 Squadron. And after a short while in the desert war, during which the

Battle for Alamein took place and so on. The Germans kept on trying to get to Cairo, and they never got there. And history shows that they were under their famous General Rommel; they were trying to engage the troops and force their way through to Cairo and gain control of the Allied operations in

the Middle East. But they never quite succeeded. And after several forward movements which where, they were forced back, the Battle for Alamein took place which everybody knows about. And that one, the Battle of Alamein, that one is the famous one when the Germans and Italian forces were finally defeated and forced to retreat right back along the

whole of the coast of North Africa into Libya. At that point in time, as I said, our squadron, 451 was engaged in, mainly in, what they call ‘Army co-op’, which means virtually keeping an eye on the enemy and informing the Army as to where they are and what they’re trying to do, and

that sort of thing. So it meant flying over fairly barren country, desert-type country except right on the coast where you had some, shall I say, rather like Australia, most of the forest and trees and so on, and green areas, were right on the coastal cities of North Africa. And

when you went in to the inland a bit you started to hit desert as shown in that picture [points off-camera]. It shows the Spitfires going over the sandy desert there in North Africa. Shortly after we received them we were re-armed – they dropped the Hurricanes and re-armed with Spitfires at about that time. And

what else can I say about them. The last Spitfire I flew in training was a mark-5 I think; so you could see that the Spitfire had advanced from mark-1 to the mark-5 at that stage. But when we were armed with them to go to Corsica—because by that time the Germans had been driven back. And

then those who weren’t, of course, killed, were moving back to Italy, via Italy, across the Mediterranean. And again, there were many sorties where we were flying over water to look at and assess what the movements of the German troops and Italian troops. And also

covering their activities and those who were captured, and so on; and attacking, where necessary, the coastal cities where they still remained and were throwing up a bit of anti-aircraft fire and so on. What can we say about that? My operations really started—although I joined the

squadron in North Africa—but when we really started, or I really started operations was, when the squadron was posted to Corsica which [was] where it carried on and it became, actually, part of the American command there although there were RAF squadrons and RAAF, in our case, squadron one of those; one other RAAF squadron there: 451.

The other RAAF squadrons which are sister squadrons, really, such as 450 and others were sent to Italy, southern Italy, to carry on the aerial attack on the Germans and Italians.

But we were sent to Corsica. And as I said, we came under American command there. And we were doing, then, different types of sorties out of Corsica over Italy and southern France to some extent.

Let’s consider this closely. We were actually in the first airfield we used on Corsica, we were on the western side of that island which of course, as you know, is not far off the coast of Italy.

And we used to—well, we were one of three Spitfire squadrons there: the other two being RAF and one South African one – but under United States or American overall command there because they were controlling the war, as far as the Allies are concerned, in

that area over Italy. The thing about it was that, I suppose the most dangerous thing was that you had to fly quite a distance from Corsica to the coast before you even started an operation unless you were going for ships, which we also did. If we struck

enemy cargo ships, and that sort of thing, we’d have a go at them as well. So those opportunity attacks by us were generally done by either our own squadron which would be 12 aircraft. We used to fly operationally in what they called ‘finger-four’ formation, which means your 4

fingers [holds out the four fingers of his right hand straight ahead of him], which means you had the leader up here [points at the middle finger], and here’s number two [points at the index finger], and the second pair also formatting on the leader [points at the ring finger], and his number 2 [points at the little finger]. And that was what they called finger-four formation. Now, the point would be that when you reach—unless it was an attack on a ship which we also did – and

that was pretty hairy stuff because the ships all had anti-aircraft stuff, and you’d be flying in pretty low there against them. But sometimes on those fighter sweeps the other squadrons would also be on the same sweep. So you’d have the total in that case of up to 30-odd aircraft; some on high-level

flight to watch what’s happening below by the attacking squadrons, do you see what I mean? Because there was always the possibility that you’d get attacked from the enemy aircraft. And the point was to, first of all, identify the target; and then those flying at the top level would be up-sun from the lower level,

watching for any attack by enemy aircraft. And their job was to turn that away, or to defend the squadrons who were doing the attack at the lower level. Now, they were called ‘fighter sweeps’ because they only had fighters involved there and as I say, well, Spitfires. Now,

another form of attack was on land where we would then also identify targets and would then go in usually at very low level to strafe German convoys, supply convoys, ammunition and food supply and so on for the Germans.

And the idea was to just do as much damage as you could to those convoys, which of course was very considerable because we had on the Spitfires—by then we had cannon, and not only just the .303 machine guns that the early ones had, you see. And we had the 20mm cannon. And some pretty hairy flying,

because—well, you can see in that picture that I brought out [indicates off-camera] that we were flying very low level. And you have to be a little bit careful because, I mean, you can tip the top of trees and this sort of thing and find yourself in big trouble. We did a lot of damage that way to convoys, munitions convoys

bringing munitions down Italy, you see, toward the coast when we were going in, and where the Germans were gradually retreating and retreating in a northerly direction. Now, another form—we did a lot of that type of fighter sweep; but as well as that, we escorted the American light

bombers who were operating over Italy as well, of course. And they were largely the ones which we knew as what the Americans called them, B-25’s and B-26’s, twin-engine bombers, or light bombers. And they were targeting their own targets

but we were doing high-level cover for them—that is, above the squadrons, up in the sun from those American bomber squadrons—and looking around to keep them clear of attack by enemy fighters, you see. And this was like a mini Battle for Britain, if you like I suppose, going on there; although by then the German Luftwaffe

had not anywhere near the number of aircraft operating over Italy that were coming over from Europe to bomb Britain, of course, they had substantial aircraft numbers there. Their numbers had been reduced considerably, but they were still around of course. Now, that escort work was important.

And the American light bombers, we would see them come over their target. And they operated always in strict formations, and bombed in formation; whereas we were constantly moving and weaving around over the top of them to try and forestall any enemy attack upon those squadrons. Rather like the sort of thing we did for the heavy bombers when we finally

got back to England in late ’44. But there, we were covering 4-engine bombers – the heavy bombers that were operating by then out of England over Europe and Germany. The thing to say about that is that the danger for the fighter aircraft, such as the Spitfire, was that

they did not have a long range – even with the 90-gallon tanks, under-fuselage tanks, they had by then which they didn’t have previously because when they were operating in Britain they simply were going off airfields in Britain up against enemy aircraft, this is in the Battle for Britain and engaging them, shooting down as many as they could, and

receiving plenty of hits from them. But then they would have their airfield that they were out of virtually underneath them because they were over the UK. But we had to keep in mind that, going from Corsica, you had to do your operation, whatever it may be, whether it be fighter sweep or bomber escort and then you

had to remember that you still had quite a large amount of sea to come back over before you got back to your own base, you see. Different situation. So you had to keep your eye very closely on the petrol gauge to make sure—or the leader, the leader of the group, whether they were four or whether they were three fours or 12 or whatever, or even larger number of aircraft,

the leader had to carefully estimate how much petrol he needed to get back, and how long they’d been out on the… So the question of the time of those sweeps was often, was absolutely curtailed by that important factor, you know. So, that was the difference, I suppose, in

the fighter operations off Corsica than those which were carried out over land. You always had to come back over that sea there. So, a question of 2½ hours or that sort of thing would be average I suppose for those flights, because you cover the ground very quickly in the Spitfire of course. And if you got over your target in, say, an hour

of flying, or a bit over an hour, well you then make your attacks and then make sure you had enough petrol—or the leader of the formation would have to be sure that he signaled them to turn for home quickly. If we did engage enemy aircraft, which we did of course, then you started to use a lot of petrol because you put the aircraft into

high revs and high speed. And that always caused some casualties because a few of our pilots actually ran out of petrol, literally including their—one other point I should mention: although we had a 90-gallon under-fuselage tanks

or wing-tank, if you like, beneath the wings in the middle of the aircraft with the fuselage – I’ve forgotten what they call them, but let’s call it a 90-gallon tank. It used to be jettisoned if you had to get into combat because it was too unwieldy on the aircraft – it spoiled the maneuvering capability of the aircraft, you see, single-engine aircraft.

So if you’d had to jettison the tank, then you still had to get home over the sea. So that was one of the problems, of course, that was built in there. It happened to a few pilots that they just ran out of steam and had to put it down in the water on the way back. There were of course patrol shipping the

Allies’ shipping patrol boats and so on, very high-speed boats who used to go out and hopefully rescue these people who were unfortunate enough to come down in the water. I’d say that that was about the type of flying we used to do: escort flying and low-level attack flying. We also, as well as attacking

convoys, of course, of enemy motor vehicles, trucks and so on, we used to attack enemy airfields. And there we would go in, again, at very low level and hit the aircraft that happened to be on the ground or were moving to take off et cetera, you see. Now, all these targets were planned by the commanders of the

area; and we, as pilots, just obeyed the commands and the delineated targets and so on; unless we were on an open fighter sweep when we would just simply—our leader would spot a convoy maybe, or some perhaps a certain building where they knew was occupied by enemy troops, or an enemy airfield

and so on. Would delineate the target and go in on it. And that was an advantage target, one that’s spotted and acted on by the leader of the formation whether it be a small or large formation. So I would say that that was the type of work we did in Italy.

We operated from 3 airfields in Italy. We had to move from one, the one we initially went to on the—that would be on the west coast of Corsica; was bombed by the Germans. They realised that, you know, the

Allies had taken over Corsica, forced the Germans out. But they targeted our airfield which I think was Soradyew, from memory, but I’d have to look it up to be sure and bombed it not only with, say, 250 and 500 pound bombs, but also with these ones rather similar

to the more advanced type that’s used where the main bomb contains numerous small bombs. And actually after it leaves the aircraft and the aircraft attacking us were, by the way, usually Junkers twin-engine stuff, coming from southern France, and

these were bombs that would open up when they left the bomber, and distribute a whole, virtually 100 I suppose, or thereabouts, small bombs which were very deadly from a personnel point of view. They’d drop these; and they did drop them over our camps where

we were under canvas, of course, on Corsica and caused quite a few casualties and a couple of deaths in our squadron. And I’m referring there to one particular attack that was rather deadly by the Germans coming from southern France. That caused a hurried move by our squadron to

an airfield on the northern coast of Corsica, and strictly a fighter airfield. And that’s where we were until we moved into southern France; the Germans then were starting to be driven out of southern France. And we moved up to an airfield in southern France.

But I’ll have to put in the name of those areas there because I’m getting a bit rusty without looking at the log book, you know. So do you want to take a little break for a minute there at that point? I’ve just thought of something. Because we were under American command, they gave us a, as a communications aircraft, what they called a communications aircraft, one of their B-25’s; this was

an older one they’d taken off operations. And they gave us this to use as a communications aircraft. And we call this, in the RAF we call it a Mitchell; but the American name for it is a B-25. It was very useful, and I used to fly that aircraft because I had training on twin-engine aircraft, you see;

whereas there were only, I think, two of us in the squadron who had that sort of training. So we used to fly that on some interesting missions down to Cairo, and other Allied centres in the Mediterranean area, to bring back—well—in some

cases food, and other cases a bit of the old grog [alcohol], of course – there was always a bit of beer and wine put on board there with foodstuffs; and equipment and that sort of thing. We used to take this aircraft quite long distances. But we tried to steer clear, of course, of Italy, there of course because of the

fact that the Germans were still there and still had fighters operating. And it would have put us into a very vulnerable position just flying a single twin-engine aircraft. So we had to go around via North Africa and then up to wherever we were going. At one point we ended up in one of the main airfields in France, just

for a bit of a difference; and again, picking up supplies. But we naturally took a bit of a break and had a look around at the city which had just been—let’s say the Germans had been driven north of France by then, of course, and we had a look at Paris and so on. And a bit of a break there before we headed back home. But this aircraft proved very useful.

At one stage we brought entertainers up from southern Italy and the island south of Corsica which just eludes me for the moment, but I’ll fill it in for you when I have a quick look at the map. And one of the most famous people we brought up, with his group

of entertainers, was Joe Louis the famous boxer, world champion at the time who came out to put on a display for the Americans, of course, and our people, our RAF and RAAF people, who were under American command at that time. So he put on a big show for us there in

Corsica. And other entertainers did start to come, even that far into—shall we say—dangerous territory at that time: singers and others who we used to transport in the B-25, this communications aircraft. So the summary of that is that, in my mind, is that

the twin-engine training came in useful, even though we were converted onto fighters in England. The B-25 came in very useful. And I have models of the B-25 kicking around somewhere, and probably could get those out if you wanted to have a look at one of those.

Yes, a fairly rare thing because the point was that was done because they needed single-engine people in the Middle East. The Battle for Britain had virtually lulled; they were still bombing, but even when we were over there, naturally. But the

critical point for the Battle for Britain, I think, was over by then. But we still used to keep out of London wherever possible when we were in England, you know; we were down south in Brighton. But we still had German attacks at Brighton, which was purely a transfer—there wasn’t an airfield—it was simply a transfer point for

Empire Air Training people, pilots, you see. And we used to man the machine-guns, of course, on the premises we were using there in Brighton along the beach there. And occasionally a German fighter attack would be made across there and we’d have to do a bit of our own anti-aircraft work against them if we happened to be on duty at the time, you know. They’d come across the [English] Channel very

fast and make a pass, and then hurriedly retreat back across the Channel. So they were keeping in touch, of course, with the movements of our troops in the same way as we were keeping in touch with theirs.

Yeah. We learned how to fire the 20mm stuff, you know: anti-aircraft. But, there we go. I don’t know what more I can say at the present time, but

I’ll, UNCLEAR—

Have a break, yes.

Oh yes. Well, now you’re really going back. As far as access or general surroundings are concerned, we had the

I think some of the best in Sydney down that way – you know, right on the borders of the National Park. And we used to have, for instance, fires in those days – you know, the shocking fires that have been through there just recently. They used to be there. You’d get bushfires; I suppose sometimes started and sometimes

just spontaneous lightning strikes and that. And they were fairly terrifying because we had a lot of trees on our property; it was similar type tree growth as in the park itself on the lower level of our property. We had about 20 acres there, and about 15 of it was virgin bush, you know.

So, one of the most terrifying things I remember was when those fires would be on in the summer and at times, and they would come right out of the Park and come right up to our property. And I can remember seeing the forest, actually, in our second block, the larger block that we didn’t have the orchard in; we had an orchard in

the cultivated block; and I can remember seeing fires come up out of there. And most terrifying for young people, you know, young kids. But, on the other hand, we had the advantage of the use of the park because all we had to do was walk down Acacia Road which was

the address of our property and come to, say, Forest Road which was below our property, toward the park and over that, of course, we were in the National Park. So we were within easy walking distance. We used to swim, for instance, down at northwest arm that’s the northwest arm of the Port Hacking River – was our famous

and well-loved swimming hole. I mean, we simply went down through our property proceeding in a southerly direction, and then turned toward the northwest arm of the river. And there was a beautiful area where you had not only a good, deep swimming pool but lovely sandy area; you could walk for quite a long distance out up to here [indicates a depth of waist-deep]

in the water there in the northwest arm of the Port Hacking River. That was always a favourite pastime on the weekends; we’d just walk down, hike down, to the northwest arm. And then, of course, we would also hike in the park itself, going up at times as far as Waterfall –

you know: Engadine, Heathcote; long-distance walk through to Waterfall and back down through the National Park itself to, where did we end up there? right at the top of Port Hacking. I’m just trying to think of what we call that place now… Oh dear; doesn’t matter. And we would also have picnics and

swim there as well. Saltwater, of course, up as far as the crossing of the river there where – and above that crossing it became, it was freshwater. Boats: also they had an excellent boat shed there. We used to take out boats on the river. And

by-and-large I’d say we had an excellent surroundings there in terms of, I’d say, health because of the good air most of the time, plenty of vegetation around the place. We had a substantial house, about in floor area about the size of this one I suppose.

Built in the old style, but nevertheless quite attractive in its way. I suppose it was an English-style place, really. It had a verandah right round three sides of the place. And if it was raining you could just get up on the verandah and have a bit of a game, you know, throw a ball – that type of stuff.

We had a tennis court, quite a good tennis court, which we used. One of my uncles lived with us for some time there before he married; and one of my aunties lived there before she married. They would have been young women at that time, and

he a young man, my uncle. But he had quite a good car for those days. He used to take us on trips down to the park and that sort of thing over weekends. And by-and-large, I don’t think we could complain about our surroundings, put it that way.

Later, I was always interested in cricket. I joined the junior cricket club at Sutherland and we used to play cricket in that district, in the Sutherland Shire, you know. This is junior cricket of course, before I started work –

and after I started work, of course, until I was about 19 I suppose when I joined the air force. Always enjoyed the cricket. Not much good at football; played a bit of soccer, but not rugby or league.

What else can I say about Sutherland? Sutherland Shire Council was the senior political body, or the senior, should I say government body in the local government body. And we had

a church group over near the Sutherland Shire Council, which was in those days called Congregational Church which is now part of the Uniting Church of course. And we were lucky enough to have two very excellent people there, namely the minister of the time was a chappy named the Reverend

John Robinson, and his good wife Helen Robinson. And they had a very active youth group there which I was a member of, so had some religious training; and in fact, this resulted

in me after the war, when we were discharged, again going to that church and becoming a lay preacher – which might have meant that had I not gone into the chemical industry I might have ended up as a parson, shall we say, or a minister of the Congregational Church. So, however, that did not

happen.

Yes, that of course did really start before World War II as you would know. I think the economic situation started to decline from about 1937

or 8 it started to get very hard for people, especially, I think workers, workers in general. Much unemployment. My father, fortunately, was a professional in the sense that he was a shoemaker, and he had a fair-sized,

until his health prevented it, he had a fair-sized shoe making business and shoe selling business, resale business – retail and also shoe repair business both in Arncliffe and in Sutherland. So we were, what you might say, in the sort

of middle-class type of level. We weren’t stuck for funds in any way, and he continued to work during the Depression. I was at school, of course, during the Depression, so I didn’t feel it too much.

Yeah.

Oh yes, I knew it from history and also from what he told me, and also the uncle, younger than my father, an uncle who lived with us for many years until he married. And they, of course, were staunch members of the Returned Service people. What was it called in those days? It wasn’t the RSL [Returned & Services League] in those days I don’t think. I think it was

Returned Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmens’ Association, yeah. He used to—he had some mementos he’d gained in service from World War I. And in terms, as it is with the World War II returned people and other people who have been to

overseas wars, they had quite a lot of stories to tell about their activities. My uncle was a true ANZAC [Australian & New Zealand Army Corps]; he was in the ANZAC forces that landed at Gallipoli. And my father, on the other hand, fought only in Europe; he was with

an artillery battery in Europe.

Well… Very hard to remember, but you would hear them. They had their own group, you see, of, let’s say, returned soldiers in that area, in the Sutherland Shire, naturally,

and they used to talk among themselves – quite substantially. And, of course, we also had history books—I was always interested in history—we had history books to read on World War I. We were fairly knowledgeable about what went on in World War I, and the type of butchery that went on in what was

still largely, let’s call it, man-to-man fighting including bayonet attacks and goodness knows what, you know. I mean, it was not too far removed from Napoleon’s days and so on, except that the weaponry was a bit updated. But compared with the weaponry of World War II, of course a very different situation because aircraft had only just been

discovered – the first aircraft activities by the Wright brothers in USA [United States of America] had only just started, and aeroplanes were a thing of the future. They had a few squadrons operating, of course, in World War I with the aircraft such as the little fighters there: the little Camel and others that were active, of course, but nothing like

what we had in World War II. And then you can say the same thing of World War II as I’m saying about World War I because World War II is now, in terms of weaponry, antique compared with what we’re looking at these days – and dangerously so from a world-wide point of view, in my opinion.

Not a great deal, really, no. No, I don’t know why I preferred it to the army or navy, to tell you the truth; but somehow I did. I think it was just a desire to learn to fly, really, more than anything, you know. I can’t say there was—I wasn’t influenced

toward air force by my family, anyway, who were both army men, you see. Well, my father and my uncle who lived with us were both army men.

World War II was declared…

Well, it was declared, I guess, in 1939 wasn’t it when you think about it. So I would have been only about 19 at the time maybe, 17 or 18. I would have been just started working there with Swift & Company which as I say, I started

with them when I was, after I finished my Intermediate Certificate, which would have been in 19… That would have been about…

What was the question again?

Declared, yeah. Well, I remember it being declared, but I was only a teenager at the time, early teenaged sort of thing: 15 or so. I’d only just started to work for that big company I mentioned. And

I don’t know that we followed it very closely. I think that we listened to what—I listened to what my father and uncle said about wars. And they were not against me serving when I got to the right age in the war – in fact they expected it I suppose. Again, we had a different situation there to what we see now. I mean, we got a mixed society

here now; it’s a multicultural country. We don’t know what we’re faced with here now. Probably the most worrying thing of all is the type of thing that can arise out of, for instance, religious warfare between virtually two religions that believe in the same God. So, you know, very conflicting and very—

it’s a source of worry for an old guy like me whose got children and grandchildren who’ve got to face up to what’s in the future – in-built within the country here, including terrorist activity and so on, you know. I don’t think we ever heard of terrorists in my young days at all – wouldn’t know what it was all about.

Oh yeah, very strong Empire, yeah. Big accent on the British Empire.

In fact, we knew more about that than we did about Australian history when I come to think of it. I mean, British history was taught in detail, you know, going right back through the different monarchs and so on, and finally government of Britain.

Well… That is a very hard question, but I would say that it was the influence of my father and my uncle – not that they urged me to join up. But I had heard

their stories; and the other reason I suppose would be that, “Okay, this is a chance to learn to fly,” you see. So that’s why I chose the air force.

Very calm. Very calm and what shall I say?... even my mother, you know, and my dear aunties—my

two fat aunties as we used to call them, Ada and Flo. They all took it as a thing that if Hitler’s attacking Great Britain—and bearing in mind that all that family came from Lancashire, you see, so they were really British, British origin. It was to be expected that somebody had to go and help defend the country. And as you can see,

all of my action was taken overseas; you know, I didn’t participate in the war against the Japanese at all.

Well,

I simply went—bear in mind that I was at this point about 17 or 18 I suppose—just simply went by myself to the recruitment depot at what is now Woolloomooloo. I don’t think the building’s even there now because of all the freeways and

roadways that have gone through there. I don’t think that I could identify the building. But the main Sydney recruitment depot was there, and I simply went down to there and went through the routine paperwork and passed my medical tests and expressed my preference for the air force and that was about it. Nobody came with me.

I got the okay from my father and mother and I just went there and enlisted. I can’t say there was much more to it than that. I was about 17 or 18, and I suppose able to make up my own mind on the thing virtually. That’s what it boils down to.

Oh, pilot – definitely, yeah. Definitely. That was, as I say, one of the main reasons, I think, was to learn to fly.

I doubt it. I don’t think that

subject was a leading subject or, shall I say, a thing that was talked about or where any of the then recruitment people talked about, because that would have been negative, wouldn’t it? So there you go. I think we were

all in a positive mood. But looking right back on that I’m a bit sorry that all our service—all my service, that is; not all Australians, of course—all my service was done overseas. And by the time I got back to Australia the Japanese—well, the atom bomb had been dropped on

Japan, because that happened I was only halfway back by ship to Australia, going to go onto carriers of all things: aircraft carriers, with what they called the Seafire, that was the carrier version of the Spitfire. And that’s what I was coming back for, and we would have done a conversion onto them. But I think if I’d done that I wouldn’t be here talking to you know because that was highly dangerous, operating Spitfires

off aircraft carriers. They just weren’t made for that sort of thing. But that’s the only—as far as war is concerned, I did not participate at all, I can’t say that I participated in any way in the war against the Japanese; whereas I think ensuing generations

have lost sight of the fact because it wasn’t, for probably political and economic reasons, it was not clearly spelled out in our school systems that the Japanese intended to invade Australia. I mean, certainly they were up north there fighting in New Guinea and all the way down to New Guinea until they got to Milne Bay and then they were finally turned around by our forces and started to move backward –

which is back up to where they belonged. But as I said, the Japanese made a dreadful mistake in joining Hitler and the Germans—the enemy—in bombing Pearl Harbour. That was a fatal mistake. And their top Admiral knew it; he said that it was the worst thing they ever did, at the time. They were ordered to do it and that brought

America into the war. And that was virtually the turnaround point in the general sense; but the turnaround point for the Australians, as I recall it, was Milne Bay where the Japanese were finally forced to retreat. But no doubt, they were intending to invade Australia.

I don’t think I knew it until they—we didn’t realise it until we saw the war as a European thing: Great Britain and Europe and, of course, the other wars that were going on in North Africa and so on, and Italy,

and France and so on; but the point is, I don’t think it dawned on us that the Japanese actually were going to attack Australia, but we sure got to know about it. For instance, we didn’t get much news about it except in letters from home, and that sort of thing, after they attacked Pearl Harbour.

The news was very scanty about it as far as we were concerned. So we weren’t too worried about Australia, the home country, at that point in time. But when, of course, they got down as far as New Guinea and so on, they came down from – conquered Malaya and then Singapore and then finally on down to New Guinea we did start

to realise that. And I guess that could have been one of the reasons why I then, having done my tour, a tour and a half, actually, including the English service out of British airfields at the end there, I was on the way back to do something about the Japanese – in other words, to go onto carriers, you see, convert

onto carriers and attack the Japanese fleet if they tried to hit Australia. Which in essence they did; and they were by combined American and Australian forces, of course, at the famous battle when they were bringing very substantial navy and troops down to occupy part of Australia

as far as I can see. That was their intention, but they got turned back at Milne Bay. And then, of course, from their northern positions their aircraft started bombing our Darwin and the Northern Territory. And by then, I suppose, we started to realise that Australia was under attack.

Well, that surprises me because I never encountered that at all. Maybe they were army people, I don’t know. Could be army, probably. But I never heard that term used at all.

Absolutely unfamiliar with that term.

The point was, in my case as I said, I could’ve stayed on in the UK and gone over to the occupation force – which the squadron did of course. It was re-equipped again with the very latest Spitfires, the mark-14; and Joe Barrington if you’ve spoken to him, he wrote that end of this book. He and I compiled the book, you see – photographic one.

And we were on the committee, too, that wrote and approved of the first book. And, well, I had volunteered to go back to Australia and go onto aircraft carriers, you see. But we only got to Colombo or wherever it was – Indian port.

We only got that far and the Americans dropped a couple of atom bombs and that was the end of it as far as the Japanese [were] concerned. Not too long after that they surrendered of course. But as I said, I rather fancy that had I gone onto Seafires on aircraft carriers I mightn’t have been here because that was a highly dangerous

aircraft to operate off carriers.

Yeah; well, if you know anything about aviation they’re just not made for it. Their landing speed’s too fast and their undercarriage is all wrong: it’s close instead of being right out like the Mustangs, for instance, and a lot of the other later fighters

where you’ve got a very broad wheel base, and the aircraft doesn’t tend to tip over or catch a wingtip or something like that. Oh yeah, we’d be conscious of it, yeah – for sure. But I think in my mind I just decided it was about time I went home and did something about it. But the atom bomb stopped it because what happens?: they then

dropped the atom bomb, and that was the beginning of the end – as far as the Japanese were concerned. Yeah…

Yes. Well, first of all I was probably somewhat

sad, shall we say, about it because I had just met my wife just before I left. And you can see she was a very charming young lady. And we expressed love for each other and we sort of cuddled up a bit and so on. And you can see from one of those pictures [indicates off-camera] that was one I sent her at the time, when I’d only just

got my wings. And it wasn’t long after I got the wings in Point Cook, and I was a qualified pilot, that I met her at a party put on by our music teacher because she went to the same music teacher that I did, learning the piano. And she was invited to that same party—which was put on for me, actually,

because they knew I was leaving. And I happened to meet her. And that was the sort of beginning of things between us. And we’re looking back, 57 years there or more now, I don’t know how long – we’re looking back to early ’44 I suppose, something like that. So that made me a bit—

I expressed my love for here in terms of a telegram, which we still have here or she kept, as I was going north by train to embark on the American transport that took us over to the United States, on our way to England of course.

Oooh yeah. Sure. Yeah,

we knew exactly where we were going; it just took a little longer than expected to get there because you had—first of all, we disembarked in San Francisco and went to a transient camp. See, they always had these transient camps for moving military personnel. And we went to a transient camp on

the, where are we? east coast by train, and then we were there for a short while waiting for the passage to England, see. When we went to England, as I say, it was on one of the new liners then I think it was the Queen Mary where we had no less than 17,000 military personnel—mainly Americans going

over there since they’d been drawn in by the Japanese activity at Pearl Harbour. They’d already joined the fight and they were mainly American troops going to the UK. But we had our little contingent onboard. And that was quite an experience to be on that vessel because it was a very, for those days, a very fast

ship. And we struck stormy weather, of course, going across the Atlantic. And we were on the bridge because they wanted officers of the air force on the bridge as lookouts on the wings of the bridge, you know. So when you get out on the wing of a bridge like that, and the ship is rolling, it is absolutely thrilling really. I mean, the ship’s going

about—I think one gale hit us on the port side, and we’re going over about, oh I don’t know, 15 degrees to port and then we’re going way down to starboard because it’s hitting us on the port quarter, you see. And way down. And you’re up on the bridge and you see that then the ship hits the waves and it comes right up over the bridge. First experience of a

gale out onboard ship. And then we had always the possibility of the U-boats, which were very active out in the Atlantic, as you know, then. But that’s why they used to send these ships alone; we had no guard. The ship was doing very high speed all the way across to Britain. And it was quite

an experience because I’d never been on a large vessel before. And somehow they kept all the troops in order— 17,000 of them—and entertained them a bit. And so it goes on. So, there was no serious fights between the Yanks and our young blokes.

No, to America: from America to England on the Queen Mary. I went on an American freighter there.

A limited number of personnel from the RAAF on that freighter – pilots on that freighter, yeah.

Well, you know… It’s a bit hard to bring… We were at various points there but mainly on the

east coast of America. We used to get occasional leave, go into New York and that sort of thing; and up to Boston and so on on leave. Actually, it was the first experience that I had personally of America and its landscapes and it’s what shall we say? rather excellent—

I was impressed by the fact that there really was no desert to speak of. It was fairly luxurious sort of surroundings of the cities. Of course the size of the cities, New York, of course, and others that we were in, we went to, that was very impressive.

We of course, being young blokes, we used to take out a few ladies round there who were quite—spoke fairly good English with their American accent. We didn’t get into any serious trouble there to speak of. I’m just trying to think of what other impressions

we got. I think the impressions of wealth and even though, of course, the tail end of the Depression was virtually on because it didn’t get really tough ‘til about 1939 and it went through ‘til, well goodness knows, I suppose about the end of World War II before it started to improve. But

they all seemed to be—we found them a likeable people and all very receptive of us and what we were doing; because at that stage I don’t suppose the Japanese had come into the war because, as I said, we took—their troops were going to Europe in a big

way there including on the Queen Mary when we left from—we boarded the Queen Mary in New York I guess. And they were just sending large numbers of troops to take part in the war of all the services you know, army, navy, air force in the UK. And we

were impressed with them as people who, you know, came from largely the same sort of background as our family came: that is British families; Irish families of course—quite substantially—because, as we all know, the Irish moved over there in big numbers, especially during the famine, the famous potato famine and the rest of it in Ireland; and of course the

downturn in economic conditions and so on. And what else did we do? We had plenty of entertainment on leave, you know. But you daren’t be late back at your premises, you were on the airfields where we were stationed—not the airfields, in this case it was a transient camp where we were stationed otherwise the local warrant officer

would bail you up and you’d be up before the commanding officer of the station, you see. So by-and-large a very enlightening experience, I think, for a young person about 19 or 20 as to what’s happening in other English-speaking countries. That’s about all I can say for it. I can show you photos of

young ladies that we used to go out with occasionally and fraternise with a bit. But I don’t float them around, and never have, where my wife is involved, of course. Not that she’d recognise them even now; but there you go. We don’t talk about those things particularly.

Yes. Yes, there were a few that came back and either brought their hitherto girlfriend into a closer relationship out here, you know, by them coming out to Australia, in the same way as we had in Australia. We know friends and still write to them who were very close to Joyce, for instance, and who married Americans while they were here. And went

back to live and raise families with them. But that certainly didn’t happen in my case, to my knowledge anyway – put it that way. I mean starting families, yeah.

Oh, excellent. Yeah, those that we met, I mean, were

very receptive, co-operative, appreciated what we were doing. We didn’t find them too different to the Australian girls of that era, you know. On the side, this is before we became multicultural. Mind you, America had been through multiculturalism long before we had. But I think, let us call them

(I don’t know what to call them, the ‘whites’. Well okay, their black population, of course, was in-built and they hadn’t advanced when I was there. I’ve been to America many times in my life since, as Overseas Manager of the company, you see, before I became General Manager. But that was the first taste of America, and at that stage the dark people

had not advanced in what shall I say education and business to the extent that they have now; quite different these days. I mean, a lot of the people whose antecedents, or their forebears, went out as slaves from Africa you know,

taken over from Africa and built up largely in the south, families in the south, when they became free. But they hadn’t, as I say, ascended into the multi or the rich upper classes that we encountered, you see; because we found we were encountering the upper classes of let’s call them ‘white’ Americans if you like.

And that was my general impressions; but mind you, as I said, I’ve been there many more times since and know a lot more about the country now. And I’m very glad to say that we’re on their side, to be quite candid, because I wouldn’t like not to be on their side at this point in history. That’s unless—unless—weapons

of mass destruction are used by our erstwhile enemies in the meantime, which will be a new ballgame altogether which I hope never comes off. I hope we can handle it diplomatically because the Iraqi thing is bad enough, really. I support what we did, and what this government did, and why it did it, but it

was supporting our major ‘friend’ if you like the United States. And they’ve got their little problems there right now still going on, but that will be nothing compared with what might start if Korea got offside, you know what I mean, and really had some nuclear capability. But I’m coming right up to date, which are only viewpoints, you see what I mean? But you asked me the original question of what did I think of the

American people. I don’t know if I’ve answered it adequately, but I can’t think of too much because we did—we were entertained and taken out and, you know, given great support by what were virtually middle to upper class people, you see what I mean? And we didn’t see too much of the black Americans.

So, maybe we got a lesson in the disadvantage of multiculturalism to some extent. And I firmly believe it has serious disadvantages as a policy if we can’t control the, let’s say, the different thinking—and especially religious thinking—

of the people we now have here. In other words, for instance, Christians versus Islamics and so on. I mean, room for very bad conflict in Australia if it’s not handled better than handled to date. And yet we know that one of the greatest proponents of it was the Minister for Immigration, not the Minister for Immigration currently, but

it was in those days, I think, Phillip Ruddock [politician] was the great proponent of multiculturalism. I personally, in the Liberal Party, heard him lecture on it years and years ago. And before [Gough] Whitlam [former Prime Minister of Australia] ever started it, or moved into it, as a policy; and of course, that was followed up by [Malcolm] Frazer – the Prime Ministership of Frazer, who supported it; by [Robert] Hawke [Former Prime Minister of Australia] and then

[Paul] Keating [Former Prime Minister of Australia] who supported it. And I’d say, in my own personal thinking, it is rather a dangerous—turned out to be a rather dangerous philosophy, if you like, this question of multiculturalism. But, how does a small country, in population, such as ours build its population, and then I say: if we want to, without multiculturalism? Put it

that way; it’s another way to look at it. We were under-populated, but we could soon become over-populated for the amount of supplies of all kinds, food and every other thing that we need. I mean, where is the limit? I see it around about 25 million at the outside, supportable population;

and we’re fast approaching it. Put it that way. Now, we’re coming right up to date. This is not answering your question;

because America teaches me those things, because you know the population they’ve got now, and you know that their farmers are highly protected. Ours haven’t recently been protected more, especially economically and then from this wretched drought. But

the Americans still protect their industry, including their farming industry, very much. And we on the other hand, in our wisdom, lowered tariffs right across the board and allowed much competition to come in here, which closed down many industries – especially textile, which I was interested in because we were

a supplier to the textile industry of dyes and chemicals and that sort of stuff. The textile industry has been shot to pieces except for highly specialised parts of it, fashion parts of it: fashion design and so on. Then you’ve got our poor old farmers who’ve had a frightful time lately. I mean, the small farmers; and many of them are going out of business, as you know.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah – sorry about that.

I’ve been giving you my philosophy instead of my story.

Mm-hm.

Yeah, I had to go from twin to single. Yeah,

well we came into as I said, I’m pretty certain it was the Queen Mary because it was one of the big liners Glasgow and had [a] short time there in transit, and then straight down to—I think we came into Brighton first up; again: transit. And then, obviously,

the powers that be had decided they needed more single-engine pilots in the Middle East to support the squadrons over there. So my fate was decided that I should do a conversion course. And we went up to that, onto the

Miles Masters which are a single-engine trainer, at that time; not a fighter aircraft. That course was relatively short; and I’ve got the times of it, of course, if you want them, but, or you may even have them. But…

Well, it’s a different story, you see. You can’t handle twins in the same way that you handle fighter aircraft for the simple reason that they are not maneuverable—or not as maneuverable—as the single-engine. The

other point is that because we were going onto fighter aircraft they have to be extremely maneuverable, including upside-down or climbing sharply or diving or rolling or any other air maneuver of, what shall I say? a fairly tricky kind. You see, you’ve got to be careful in all cases here where you don’t

come to the state where you put the aircraft into a stalling situation. And that can be if you pull out, for instance, from a very powerful dive and pull out too sharply and climb too sharply, well even though you were going at pretty high speed you’re going to stall pretty quickly if you’re not careful. And so we were taught, for instance, one of the things apart from rolling the aircraft completely – slow rolls, we were taught

what to do in the case of a stall. If you climb too steeply you had to do a stall turn, which is something that no multi-engine aircraft, twin or multi, would contemplate. This is going up and purposely stalling your aircraft so that it just falls away. If the prop’s turning to the right it falls away that way; if it’s turning to the left it falls away that way, depending on the aircraft. And then you’ve got to allow it to gain speed by

natural fall, and think yourself lucky if the engine hasn’t stalled. And if the engine actually blacks out when you’re up in the top of the stall turn you got big trouble. You got to immediately get it over and down to gain flying speed. And that was one of the tricky maneuvers I suppose. All sorts of other maneuvers like, including low-level flying and all that sort of

thing we did at that course. And night-flying of course, which is always much more dangerous than day flying. And so the Miles Master was in those days recognised in England as the best single-engine aircraft to train on to move on to either the Hurricanes

or the Spitfires, you see.

I thought it was a pretty good plane. It was a twin: it carried the instructor as well, or could be flown by the pilot only without the instructor, see?: both. So in the early stages you went up with the instructor in the aircraft,

and he checked any faults you were making and advised you how to improve your flying and so on on single-engines. And then we did night flying. Now, there you had to be very careful because, as I say, that’s always—it carries a lot more danger if you run into any ticklish situation where you’re near stall or just before landing or this sort of thing.

When you come down and land you finally stall—with these aircraft you used to stall them on, because all of these aircraft I’m talking about now including the Miles Master, the Hurricane and the Spitfire all landed virtually on the stall, you see. Because they had a small wheel at the rear and they landed on three wheels: two up front and one down the back. And you stalled

them on. Now, you had to be very careful on night flying that, because the calculation of distance at any stage of the approach was ticklish and dependent on your own judgement, two things: a your own judgement, if you’d gone solo, when you were now flying them solo it was entirely on your judgement. If you were approaching early in the course with an instructor he would correct you as you went in because he didn’t

want to lose his own life, do you know what I mean? So he was thinking about himself at the time, no doubt, as well as the poor old sprog pilot, you know. And so the Miles Master wasn’t a bad aircraft I would say. I don’t think it was as good as the Harvard, which is the American

equivalent; or which later was copied and made for the RAAF in Australia under another name again .What was it called? Almost based on the Harvard; made during the war in Australia, and I can’t think of it. It was actually used against the Japanese up north for a while, and was very dangerous for the pilots because the Japanese Zeroes could fly all over it and

much faster. And the Zero’s a very maneuverable aircraft too. And it didn’t do too well. What did they call it? The Wirraway.

You remember the name? You got that? You remember the name? Well, that was really a copy of the American Harvard. However, that’s digressing again. The point is that in the course that we did at whatever the name of the damn

place is, you’ve got it on your list anyway, I think it was enjoyable. It was an upgrade of flying to what we’d been used to already, having not yet gone onto the Spitfires, you see. And again, we had friends. The English treated us extremely well. They welcomed us,

and we had pretty good time on our leave occasions, of course, when we got into town and played up a bit.

Oh well, you know, you’d go to dances and that sort of stuff. Some shall I say there’s always a few young ladies there who were keen to dance around and sort of carry on a bit and

shall I say relationships, the usual relationship which I don’t discuss in any great detail, frankly, between you and me. You’re not looking for that sort of stuff, surely! I mean, everybody knows about that stuff, right? Same sort of stuff that happens in the city every day here. But, this one—tragically—is now followed by some very nasty fights

and even murders and woundings and so on, you know, as we are seeing here in modern times. It’s getting out of control because of the mix of the multicultural situation in my opinion. Whereas I was from English—like many Australian pilots, we were from English families who’d come to Australia. And as far as we were concerned,

the Brits were virtually the same sort of people.

Yeah, stall turn was one of the most difficult maneuvers.

Well, you had to just use the rudder. Let’s say you’re going up like this [indicates flying straight up] and you’re going to stall turn to the right, you just use the right rudder. And the tail—the fin—from memory, you turn the fin to the right also, you see. So you’re encouraging the aircraft to fall away that way [indicates falling to the right]; because they just

fell out of a stall turn. They reached virtually zero speed upward, and then just fell away to the side where you directed them to go. And there, you were hoping that your engine had not stalled also which was possible. And if it had stalled, well then you had to try and get the prop started again – which was with not much time to

do it. So, if you were going to do those maneuvers you had to be up around sort of at 15 to 20 thousand feet at least before you started playing around with that sort of thing. And a stall was the last resort as far as pilots were concerned. You always stay away from stalling – same with any pilot in any aircraft, you know.

Well, in maneuvers, in maneuvers; you see, in maneuvers in an air conflict with the opposition, right, you could pull it in too hard. I mean, that’s an upward stall. Now, if you happened to be banking when you stalled, you were in a worse situation because

the aircraft generally went into a spin! Spin! Spinning down like that [indicates off-camera]. And for instance, say you were turning to starboard, very hard pull in, a spin created would throw the aircraft over on its back and it’d start to spin down. And you had to learn how to pull out of that spin also. And

frankly speaking, it’s not a—we had to practise those things, and they were not easy to control. And the same can be said of a slow roll. If you try and do a slow roll low down which many silly people, like me, used to do when they came in over the airport – just as showing off, more-or-less you had to be damn careful that you kept the nose of the aircraft up, otherwise you could either pull it into a stall

(and it would spin in immediately because you were so low down, or you had to keep the nose of the aircraft up because if it started to point down and you gained speed, you’d be into the deck upside down, you see. So with a slow roll you had to push the stick forward and keep the nose up. And then unless you were doing it properly, low down, you could make a mistake and it would actually flick and spin in. As opposed to a—

we’re talking there about a slow roll, a genuine slow roll, where you maintain the same height. Different story if you’re coming in faster and you pull away like that [indicates coming in at a downward angle and pulling away at and upward angle] – different story. So, you know, the attitude of the aircraft is very important in a slow roll. But when you’re coming in just showing off over an airfield, and you come through fast and low and then pull it away, and then turn of course – that’s a different story: you maintain full control of the aircraft.

So these were what we call ‘battle maneuvers’ that we had to do at that stage before we went onto the frontline aircraft, see.

That was after we were transferred—or posted, shall we say—as pilots to the Middle East, you see.

And we were re-equipped. The squadron, I think I mentioned it to you before, in the Middle East had Hurricanes from the beginning when they first went into operations, and through most of the operations in the Middle East they had Hurricane aircraft - which I didn’t fly.

I trained on Spitfires at Abbis, and the first Spitfire I flew was, I think, a Mark-1, from memory, the very earliest one, you know. And they were still, of course, pretty snappy aircraft there for pilots. And the thing about it was you didn’t get any dual on them; once you took off

you were on your own because they only seated one person. So that was the big thrill when you went up without an instructor, even at the beginning. So what they did, they’d start you on Harvards which are the American aircraft I was talking about; Abbis where we happened to have them. And we did trial with an instructor; they were a

twin-person aircraft and the instructor sitting behind the pilot. So we started off on those, which is what we used to do—in Australia they used to use the Wirraway for that; but we used American Harvards. Now, then at a certain point in time which would be in my logbook and I can’t

possibly think of the date but I qualified to go solo. Then the instructor just watched you and you had to take the thing off and fly it, and that was it. And you relied then on the ability as a pilot which you’d gotten from the previous dual, or two-pilot, situation with the instructor, you see. You had to rely on

all the teachings there to fly this Spitfire in this case, or even the same applied with the Hurricane, by yourself just from scratch. And that of course was a critical point, as you can well imagine. I actually force-landed one in the desert, not far from Abbis, by fiddling around too much myself—making an approach—and

cutting the motor down too low. And I’m about to hit the throttle and take off again, you see, just practising on a desert, on an unoccupied airfield nearby, and the motor stalled. And of course, before I knew it I was on the ground, in the sand in the desert, you see. So that was a bit of a shock. I let the motor get too low down to too low a revs, gave it the push off, and obviously the petrol flooded the carburetor

instead of going easy on it, and bang she landed. Now, all by myself. I thought, “Strike me lucky, what am I going to do here? This is nice.” The thing rolled to a stop, wheels down. And doing a landing approach, you see, meaning the idea was of course you had to take off before you actually landed. And luckily, for me, it was an old airfield they weren’t using

a small airfield and the aircraft rolled to a stop. So I had to turn around and fly out again off the sand again, you see. That was a bit dicey because had there been any potholes or bad situation there it might have belted out one leg of the undercarriage—or both—you know, and you’d have ended up stuck in the desert frantically calling for—if you didn’t end up on fire or something—frantically

calling for base to come out and send a truck out after you or something like that, you know. And that was a bad experience, really, but it was all over in about 5 seconds because luckily the aircraft didn’t catch fire or anything. Well, wheels were down, luckily. The lucky bit was that the strip was reasonably flat and there were no bad creeks or potholes or anything developed in the desert.

Oh yes, definitely.

Well, the strafing bit is purely—you do that usually as you see it on that painting [indicates off-camera] where you’re generally doing that with four aircraft finger-four,

and your leader’s up here [indicates off-camera] and in these cases would be an instructor, an experienced pilot on the type of aircraft. So you come in with four people and two would attack and pull away, and the other two would be behind them and pull away. And well, having therefore the aircraft

with a single pilot in it mainly the trainee, you had to be damn careful to follow closely the leader’s activity in the early stages, as to follow him closely and listen to the command coming over the radio all the time on when to pull out and you know. But those were attacks, low-level attacks. And that’s where they were practice. And they were largely practiced

out in the desert from Abbis where all the fighter pilots were trained, you see. And you’d go through a practice phase on those with Harvards first, and then you had to do it actually in formation as you were going to be in the future, you see. That’s what it boils down to. You had to be just damned careful. You were judging your height above ground, and you didn’t have a hillock or

some trees or something in front of you, otherwise you could be in big trouble. And of course the Germans knowing this, when you got into ops over from Corsica over Italy, the Germans knew this very well – they used to park their convoys—during the day—generally in roads that went through forests, you see. So we had to be extra careful then because you never knew when one tree was going to be higher than the others around it. That’s

what it boils down to.

Moving ones as well, yeah, moving. Both. In fact, when we got into operations anything that was moving was likely to get hit. You know, we couldn’t tell whether it was a farmer’s truck half the time or a German convoy truck or what it was, you know. But anything that

moved, generally, on the ground if we were on low-level work used to cop it. So, that was about all you could do. But the most dangerous flying, as any pilot will tell you, is low-level flying. I mean, you’re not meant to be moving along at 250-or-so miles an hour, not kilometers an hour and coming in like that and

without being very, very careful, because you’ve only got a split second to pull up if you see something ahead. That’s a good example of it, that painting [indicates off-camera], is one where they’ve obviously just hit a… And we’re lucky that the air vice marshall who painted that thing knew what he was talking about; and we’re lucky that he happened to use our

identification initials, you know, the ‘BQ’, which is the one we used in the Middle East.

The squadron had BQ in the Middle East, but when we got to England it was changed to NI. So the later photos, when we were re-equipped with Spitfire 16’s in England, was NI.

So there we go.

Well, I came in on the tail end of that desert war. As I said, the Germans and Italians were already in retreat – for the last time. I mean, they’d come up

(I think three times already to take Cairo there, but they’d finally been forced to start the long retreat. And they ended up virtually in Libya, and those of them that could get back went across the Mediterranean again up to Italy. But there were many, many captured. But anyway, to come back to your question though. I only flew

Spitfires on the period—I started to fly the Spitfires on the Mark-1at the Abbis airfield. And the first operational Spitfire I flew was a Mark-5 I think, which was—wait a minute, sorry;

no, that was under training also. That was still at Abbis. But then the squadron were equipped with Mark-9’s before we went to Corsica, and of course we were using those already under desert conditions, as you can see from that painting in there [indicates off-camera]. We went out on a few flights

with the squadron using the Spitfires. And you’re talking about desert conditions. The main problem could be in the coastal areas where you had sudden unexpected elevations along the coast. It’s a funny

coastline; you’ve got a sharp drop-off in many cases into bays, and cliffs and things like that – not too unlike our own here. So you had to be very careful there. But in the desert itself it was largely flat and, of course, much hotter. It was extremely hot conditions for flying. And one of the things you had to be careful about

was that if you ran into an up-current and you could get boosted upward; but if you ran into a down current which was when the cooler conditions as the day goes on into the afternoon you could drop. So you had to be damn careful you didn’t drop too far and hit the ground. So the question of using

those fighter aircraft including the Hurricane of course, which wasn’t as fast as the Spitfire you didn’t have any time to speak of, except a split second to react to any sudden rise in the ground level or any other obstruction that came up out of the blue. And in some case you had little valleys where streams used to

run and run into the sea, rather like Australia I presume in the days before it became desert territory in what could you call them? the pre-Egyptian days when the great family, the famous family of the Egyptian rulers and the building of the

pyramids and all that sort of thing. When that happened you had, I think, even more desert in the days when we got there. And I’d say the flying was all right except you had to watch out for sudden rises in the terrain, because there wasn’t much coverage of the terrain – no trees and that, you know, very little. So in one way it

was kind of easier; but secondly, you had to watch out for the heat changes and the possibility of a sudden down-current or up-current. But that was only for low-level stuff; I mean, for high-level – different story. But the squadron, now, this is before my time, but when they had the Hurricanes before we were re-equipped with Spitfires the

thing we had to watch out for was the German fighters—the Messerschmidts, which were largely the Messerschmidts and others—which were very well advanced, up to the Messerschmidt 109’s and so on were about equivalent to the Spitfires. And they were faster than the Hurricanes, and so those that flew them, I didn’t fly those had to be very careful

that if they saw a Messerschmidt coming in, or if they saw a flight of Messerschmidts above them, they had to be damn careful. And about all they could do was sort of—when they attacked them—was to just turn in a very sharp circle, low down near the ground in a very, very sharp circle until the attack had gone through. That way it made it very difficult for the Messerschmidts, if it was a flight of Messerschmidts to hit

any single Hurricane. And, of course, that caused also though the Hurricane formation to break up usually because they couldn’t just keep running around one behind the other like that; they had to break away and keep low down and keep turning until the attack had gone through. And it was very hard for the Hurricane to outfight a 109 because the 109’s in that point in time were a lot faster,

although not as maneuverable, as the Hurricanes. So the Hurricane had to outmaneuver them low down. And many a Messerschmidt went in, in trying to attack the Hurricanes down like that, they’d either cop some bullets from the Hurricanes or they’d gone down and misjudged where they were and went into the deck. So they lost quite a few aircraft that way. There are persons here that

you should interview, by the way, I’m talking on the side here again. One of the committee, that we call the ‘451 Committee’, is a guy called Edmonson. Have you heard about him? Charlie Edmonson. Have you interviewed him? Well you should interview him. He’s still got with it to a large degree. Lives out at Condell Park, near the Bankstown airport.

He’d be the boy. I suggest you talk to him if you look for another 451 person, because he’s an ex squadron leader, he’s more advanced than I was and he flew on no less than 7 different squadrons, including 451. But he was right in the middle of the desert warfare

when they were doing this army co-op stuff on Hurricanes. And he can tell you all about that phase of it, see, and what they used to do to avoid being shot down or trying to shoot the German fighters down. You can imagine with the Messerschmidts diving and coming through very fast, the Hurricane had no chance of getting on their tail, see. So they had to just circle like that, [draws a horizontal circle in the air] low down, and wait for the—the general thing is to wait until the attack had finished and then try and catch the

Messerschmidt on the way up; or even the Messerschmidt would make a pass and then go back and join his squadron mates up high, you see. Or a flight of Messerschmidts would come down; they had the same sort of formation. And they would come down at a flight maybe of four – same sort of thing: strafing one of our airfields or attacking, say, the army co-op people like

our squadron was. It was in their interests to shoot them down because the Army co-op people were plotting the progress of the German Army, you see. They were telling our armies and our supreme commanders who were British in those days where the German Army had got to and what they were doing next, and all that sort of thing, you see. When I joined

them we did some flying over the desert and I thought it was fairly easy as long as you watched out for down-currents and that sort of thing. But a different story when we got to Corsica, of course, which is a heavily foliaged island, if you like. Different conditions altogether,

with some mountains and so on. And the same with Italy of course, also an undulating terrain with forests and things like that. Different conditions altogether. If fact, the people on the ground, that is, the army were more exposed, by far, in the desert warfare than they were in more favourable country like Italy or, you know, or in some cases coastal,

North African coastal areas which were surrounded by trees and things like that. So the real answer to it is, they were entirely different conditions there. And the one that could speak more about the desert ones, I’d say, would be people like Edmonson. And he also had an on-going career: he’s a decorated pilot

because he served on 7 squadrons, I think 6 of them after 451 – he went onto 451first and then he was on about 6 other squadrons, including in the last case they were equipped with the latest American fighter, and he commanded that squadron. So he knows a bit about both command and subordinate officer situation, you know.

Not unduly. Not unduly, because by then we were awake up to all those things, you know, that we’ve been talking about there. The different dangers of changes in air pressure

(especially for low-down flying. If you were flying at altitude and that was often at 20 or 25 thousand feet, that sort of thing on operations – different story altogether. I mean, the real skills creep in if you’re low-flying – for obvious reasons. I mean, if you make a mistake you don’t get a second chance. That’s what it boils down to

usually. And this is why, again, every day we’re losing aircraft – people flying around the countryside who don’t realise that there’s dangers of low-flying, and the dangers of the tall electricity distributions systems and that sort of thing, you know, that suddenly loom up ahead of the aircraft. So low-flying is a thing that’s

discouraged in club flying, as you know, these days. But I can really say that I did a bit of flying over the desert; I can’t say it was that difficult – except for that one unexpected landing I mentioned to you. That was a bit of a—I was lucky to get out of that one, because of a stalled motor, you see –

couldn’t take off again.

No. The worst situation I had was where I had to land when we got back to England and we were returning from a sortie.

And I think we were on Manston there, which is one of the big airfields – was taking all the heavy stuff: Lancasters and that sort of thing. And we were attached to that airfield as accompanying fighters, you see. We used to go out with the Lancs. And as many as 1000 aircraft would be in the air there, going at German targets. And this was in

the later part of our stay in England. To answer your question, I had a motor cut out on me when I was coming in; it just cut out. It was a Packard & Earl motor in it, which made me wonder if they were as good as the original British Merlin who designed and made them for the British fighters. But

this motor just cut out – I probably gave it bit of a sudden boost; I can’t remember what I was doing. I might have just been doing just an odd, steep turn or something like that. And the motor cut and I couldn’t start it again, so I was on the way down. And I had to land it on the—one side of, I don’t know if it was an east-west runway or a north-south—but

I couldn’t land it on the main Manston airfield because we were not allowed to do that in cases of emergency landings because we’d mess up the whole thing for the Lancasters who were going to go out that night, you see. And so I had to land it alongside the runway where there were little trees and things like that. And I had to land it wheels up and flaps up—no: wheels up and

flaps down, because with a Spitfire you could only have your flaps either right up or right down; there was no intermediate move. So what happened in this case was, if I remember rightly, I put the flaps down to slow the aircraft but left the wheels up because if you landed in that sort of territory with wheels down you’re likely to just do a couple of somersaults and get on fire or something. So that was about the worst landing I experienced.

The aircraft was practically a write-off, and I came out with a bit of a bump on the head and over this eye [indicates his right eye] and that sort of thing, and was just in under observation for a couple of days and got out of it all right in the end, speaking physically. But the aircraft was practically a write-off; whereas the other one, on that desert landing, the wheels were down and of course I thought, “Geez,

I’m not going to report this. This is crazy.” So I just turned around and took off again. Didn’t report it, you see. It’s probably in my logbook, I think, but there was no, shall I say I wasn’t asked to front up to the commanding officer. So I was forgiven because I didn’t damage the aircraft.

They weren’t worried about me – it was the aircraft. But we’d had some close calls. I mean, I’ve come away with leaves, minor leaves from branches in the forest, you know, where we’ve gone down to attack very low down, and caught in under where the wheels retract, you know what I mean? There’s a bit of a hollow up there, and we had to pull out leaves from under there where we’d just clipped the tops of the trees, you know.

So it was very thrilling, I can assure you. But you don’t want to do it when you’re 80 years of age – it’s not advisable.

No, not really, not really. You see, I wasn’t badly hurt, I just got a bit—I hit the reflector site. When you go down like that the plane just stops

quickly. You hit the undergrowth, you see, low trees – luckily no big trees. But you can imagine the runway was an excellent runway; it used to take heavy bombers, you see. And we were just attached, as a squadron, to escort those bombers out as far as we could go over Holland, northern France and Holland and,

well, as far back as the Germans were at that time. And these bombers were attacking cities and targets of various kinds in Germany, actually in Germany. Well, we couldn’t go all the way there because the duration of a Spitfire even with the largest belly tank on which was a 90-gallon belly tank was only about 2½ or 2¾ hours roughly. So we’d just escort them as far as we could

go. But, mind you, the Germans were attacking them by then. They were sending up, at that stage, Messerschmidt not only 109’s but they were sending up their early—they had an early jet. I think it was a 262 or something from memory that they’d only just brought into play. And it used to come up trying to knock down these Lancasters. The RAF lost many, many large bombers that way. And some

raids, I’ve seen the number, but I think they lost damn near 800 or 900 aircraft in one night and that was with their crews of course. By then, the Germans had already come through with a couple of jets, jet-type fighters you see, which were again much faster than the multi-engine bombers, and faster also than our Spitfires.

We didn’t really come out with any jets until after World War II, in terms of the British manufacturing. But no, to answer your question about that, I didn’t find that it mentally disturbed me in terms of flying again. I flew again within a week, I’d say, of that particular crash. They give you a bit of a cooling off period, yeah.

Oh yes, if it gets to their nerves, if they are affected that way, well, they were generally withdrawn from service. I had to undergo tests, you know, by the doctors to ascertain your sort of general physical and mental standard after such a thing.

I came through that all right. I probably felt a bit tense, but by-and-large—I’ve still got the affects of it over this eye [indicates his right eye] there, and that bothers me more than anything I noticed at the time, you know.

Yes, there’d been a few

where it’s found—well, they literally found in the end that they shouldn’t be pilots, naturally, and they were just moved into ground jobs. They weren’t actually sacked from the air force, they were just moved into ground—they were grounded, you know, by doctors’ orders.

Get what?

Oh

well, I don’t know. I didn’t see any of them that left our squadron come back on the squadron. It would be most unlikely because once, you know, you got an LMF ruling you were out of the air altogether, put on some other job. You wouldn’t lose your commission if you were a commissioned officer, but you’d be put onto something else; maybe onto – well, onto

even training, you see, as an instructor.

Generally quite close, especially with those handling your own aircraft, you see. I’ve got photos of those two people; I still remember them.

One is dead; the other is still barely alive up in a north coast retirement home, in the medical section of it. And you got quite close to those who were handling your particular aircraft. And well, generally, the officers generally mixed together. Like

if you were a pilot officer, or in my case I would have been a flying officer because I was promoted while I was overseas, and then finally I was promoted to flight lieutenant, but by-and-large I’d say the… See, you had, in the air force, as you know, you have Officers’ Mess; that’s one thing. That was still retained. We

didn’t mess with the, when I say ‘mess’ I’m using the air force term—‘mess’ doesn’t mean messing around with them ground crew because they had their own. The sergeants, the non-commissioned officers, that’s like the sergeants and flight sergeants and so on, warrant officers they had their own. The officers had their own, and the ground crew had their own - generally. But where you were dealing with ground crew who handled your own aircraft, of course, that was a different

story because you didn’t—they didn’t have access to the Officers’ Mess, but you became much more knowledgeable and friendly with them, their background and all that sort of thing, you see. That’s the only answer to that question.

Oh yeah, very strong, very strong, yeah. I can show you—I’ll show you after—I’ve got some pictures there in this study over here [points off-camera] where you can see the group I’m talking about who include those you’ve already talked to. Well, Jack was not a commissioned officer; he got to sergeant, I think, in the end. But Jack went on and did some service after the war,

and did some before the war, by the way, too. And I think he may have become a warrant officer in the—what service was he in after the war? Was it army or…?

…What was he…?

Army, I think he was. And I think he got to warrant officer there, or something like that, which is up the line; because when we knew him in the Middle East as a transport man I think he was only a corporal in those days. So

the general trend was that the officer group was a group, or a clique, if you like, and then you had the other ranks. But the sergeants usually had their mess as well, you see, the non-commissioned officers had their mess as well. That’s still the case, of course, in the air force.

And I suppose it’s mainly because of their ranks, you see, because most of the pilots are officers of one level or another. Now, on the other hand, in the permanent air force for instance of those that—I’ll show you the photos of—that I still see quite regularly, Joe is the only

one who served on the squadron at about the same time as I did. Edmonson had much longer experience including the desert. Wal Smith, the Canberra guy was not a pilot, he was a ground staff man; but he stayed in the air force and got to group captain. So he did very well after the war; stayed in the RAAF.

And well, as you go to Richmond, for instance, which is our biggest RAAF airfield here, you still find the same things – the three messes are there, you know, and they don’t usually mix to any extent unless it’s a march or a function of some kind where they’re called out on parade, you see.

So, does that answer your question?

Yes, well…

The airfields we operated on were not permanent airfields; they were made specially for

the World War II. They were pretty rudimentary sort of airfields, generally with steel, I’ve forgotten what they call the stuff… Because the ground at times, especially close to the coast where we were,

could get quite muddy. In Corsica, of course, you got a different climate altogether – you got rain, plenty of rain; and you’ve got mountainous type country except on the coast. And I’ve forgotten what they call these damn things, but in the temporary airfields they used to put the steel sheeting with the holes in it across there to sort of stabilise the surface. And

that’s another different, I suppose, to what was the situation in the desert where generally providing you levelled the sand and took any rocks away you didn’t have to cover the surface of the airfield at all. It was sand, but it was stable and flat; and all it needed to be was to be kept flat.

But, as I say, heavy rain didn’t cause the problem that it did in Corsica. That was about the only difference there. They were all temporary airfields, except when we got to Britain and there we were operating off some very large, permanent RAF airfields. We didn’t fly over Corsica much because we were on the

east coast of Corsica with access to the west coast of Italy, that’s the way it is. And because we were on that coast rain could be a problem – muddy conditions and that sort of thing. The people certainly welcomed

us as saviours—as what shall I say? And the Americans, of course, who were there then with us were all highly regarded by the locals, except that I have no doubt there were a few German spies in there. But by-and-large we got on well with the local population; and if we could speak a bit of French it was better – which I could. So we got on pretty well with the locals.

The nearest town was, as I pointed out on the map to you, I think Bastia. We used to go in there for a bit of leave and mix a bit in the clubs and so on. We used to have our problems, like when we were coming back from Bastia one night and we didn’t

see or even hear the guards on the barrier across the main road along the coast there. We were coming along at about 60 miles an hour or something in the blitz wagon, and we didn’t see them and they had concrete drums up there with cross-bars and that, and we hit that. That was a bit dicey. We hit that and nobody was killed

or badly injured, including the guards that were guarding the barrier – luckily! I’d say we might’ve had a few too many there on that night, coming home; but I wasn’t driving the damned thing, luckily. As I say, the people certainly received us well.

Not really, no. I couldn’t bring to mind any particular person. But I’m sure they had a few spies there. They would’ve paid them, probably, to keep them posted on what was going on at our airfield and so on. Because after all, I told you, they later bombed it very successfully

and caused us to move very quickly. And so I don’t know…

Yeah.

Well the bombing, I was up in the…

I don’t know what I was doing: writing letters probably, or reading up in one of the trailers we used to bring along with the paperwork and all that sort of stuff in it. That was a trailer type thing, which was better than being stuck in one of the tents. And I was doing a bit of work up there. And all of a sudden, out of the blue came the Junkers 87’s I guess they were —

dive-bombers—onto our airfield, of course, after our airfield because we were doing damage and they knew it very well; and that’s where information might’ve come back through the spies as to where the airfield was and all the rest of it. And I’m talking about local spies, not our Allied people, but local citizens. And they

plastered the place well-and-truly. There were about, oh about… I don’t know – the casualties were fairly high. We lost at least, I think, about 5 or 6 people killed outright, and quite a large number of people injured because they were using these anti-personnel type bombs that I described to you earlier. And luckily, in my case, I was the only one in the caravan

there doing whatever I was doing: writing letters or some damn thing. I dived out into the slit trench that was near that, so I didn’t—if one of the small bombs had dropped in the trench I would’ve been gone, but luckily that didn’t happen; whereas those that were down in the Officers’ Mess and so on were not so lucky – a few of them copped it. And it was a very successful raid, I think, for the Germans

because it forced immediately a move by our squadron away to the airfield on the northern end of Corsica. We had to take up new positions and a new airfield up there, which we did very, very quickly. I mean, the move was extremely fast because they suspected there’d be more raids,

you see. The Germans were then operating those raids from the south coast of France, at, as I said: it would be in my logbook the airfield we finally took over ourselves. We went up there and when the Germans were driven off there, back along the coast there, we

took over their airfield that they had been using to bomb us in Corsica. Now luckily there was only one raid as far as we were concerned. They also did a few other raids on American airfields and so on for where they were using the B-25’s and B-26’s out of those airfields, which were on the same coastal strip there of Corsica. And they were the ones we used to escort. You remember me saying that

we would escort those when they went over Italy. So does that answer your question there?

I don’t think they were too popular immediately after that, you know, because

there were bodies around and quite a few carted off to hospital and so on. Luckily, I think they had access to the hospital in Bastia for what it was worth, as well as treatment on site for those who were less injured. The casualties are all stated in these books there [indicates off-camera], that were sustained over that raid. And I don’t think the Germans lost

many—if at all—aircraft. We didn’t see any come down, anyway, immediately over the airfield – although there was anti-aircraft fire going on like nobody’s business, you know. They were heavily under fire. But you could see the Junkers come down before they dropped their bombs; you could see them come under the cloud and just drop their bomb. And of course they were under heavy fire also. But as I said, I don’t think they lost any aircraft. So it was

a very successful raid, and one which could have influenced strongly our activities out from the Corsican coast to Italy. However, it didn’t, and the American fighters were also in the game by then – the Brewster Buffaloes and the, whatever else they had there. They didn’t have any of the latest—their last fighter, which was a

very good one, I’m trying to think of the name of the damn thing…. Again, I’d have to look at the logbook. But they were also operating fighters on those same missions as we were, you know. We once almost flew right into—imagine us with, say, a

dozen aircraft going one way towards Italy, and here’s a, again, whatever the Yanks called it – it’d be a fighter group who’d been attacking convoys and so on in Italy coming back. And we virtually flew right through them and, luckily, hit none of them. I mean, we went through them like

a flash as you could imagine.

Yes, I’m just trying to think of other things that are peculiar to Corsica in terms of the surrounds and so on. I think I told you that I was flying the B-25 out of there, didn’t I?

And doing quite long trips on it at times, including down to Cairo.

And up to Paris as a matter of fact; as far as Paris.

We landed in at Paris there. On the night we went up there we had a couple of the other officers of the squadron including the CO [Commanding Officer] in the back, and we landed at night in Paris. Now that was a bit dicey because we weren’t expected to—well, I don’t think the communications had got through too well to the Paris airfield that we were coming in. So we

came under scrutiny, coming in at night, you see. And undoubtedly they were used to B-25’s because by then Paris had been—the Germans had evacuated, and it was virtually back under the control of the Allies. So we got told to go round a couple of times;

they were obviously trying to get some identification of this strange twin-engine aircraft that had come out of the blue from nowhere . So that was a bit silly, actually – should not have been done. I think it was purely because the communication didn’t get through, you see, to the right people who were then controlling the anti-aircraft activity of Paris. So,

in doing that we risked coming under fire from the ground, and that could have been quite serious. So that was a silly mistake somewhere there. But we enjoyed the trip to Paris. We went up there to get some provisions: drinks and one thing and another; but we also had a couple of days in town, and that was very interesting. Went up

and had a look from the top of the Eiffel Tower of course, and attended numerous nightclubs and that sort of thing in Paris.

Well, not too different to what it is now, I imagine – or what it was when we came back to Australia anyway. We used to go to a few nightclubs in town here.

They’d maintained it, of course, because the Germans were in control. But the French at that time were virtually neutral. They’d sort of been dominated and controlled by the Germans, and I dare say the operators of the nightclubs just decided they’d continue on with the usual entertainment practices, shall we say, for the

Germans. So I don’t think there was much change in the nightclub situation; and they had some of the greatest nightclubs in the world, as you know, in terms of world standards – especially for onstage musical entertainment and that type of stuff. We had about a three or four days there to have a look around

before our aircraft was loaded. I mean, finally I think the airfield got the message that they should’ve got before we arrived in there. And we had the provisions that we were after loaded on the aircraft, so we had to take off back to Corsica. And that was really the only landing that I made in France in World War II. We made

landings later; when we were operating out of England we made many landings in Belgium and Holland. We used to fly over there then refuel, fly out escorting large four-engine stuff on air-raids, and then we’d fly back and refuel again and fly up and meet them on the way in again, on their way back to England. So

we saw quite a bit of that up-and-down work in Belgium and Holland but not in France because the Germans had moved virtually north of France by then – they’d been pushed back. So I don’t know… Talking of Corsica, I’m just trying to think of a few other things that might be worth, you know, in the human side of the thing.

Yeah, well that was from Corsica over Italy of course. Yes, well they was our instructions. Because if they couldn’t identify themselves from the ground, well then they were a fair target and that was it. Now, it’s quite likely that we hit a few trucks that weren’t strictly German munitions

or supply trucks. It’s quite possible. I mean, we might’ve hit a few other private trucks or farmers trucks, or people moving on the highways who shouldn’t have been, you know. On the other hand, that was part of the game at the time because instructions were to hit anything that moved. Now, those type of flights, however, were naturally

daytime flights; we didn’t try that sort of stuff at night. And then, as I told you before I think, we used to attack the odd ship or two that was going around the coast there of Italy obviously carrying provisions for the Germans.

Well, one of the best I was on I’d say we knocked out… We hit an airfield over there and, again, I would have to—it’s in the logbook, the name of the airfield in Italy, and so on, which was being used at the time by the German Luftwaffe [air force].

And, oh, we got, oh I don’t know, 20 or more aircraft on the ground there. So we just made minced-meat of them. That was very successful. It knocked them out of the war for sure. And we’re talking here about Messerschmidts, you know – up-to-date German fighters. I think that was probably one of our most successful. But we knocked out many convoys on the road; many

road convoys. And that was one of the main activities of the squadron at the time apart from the escort activities.

Well, we saw a lot of activity of course; they were trying to get to the aircraft and take off. But too late, because we came on them by surprise and all we would do is go into that finger-four formation and just go down with the leader, and follow the leader down and leader with his number 2 – the number 2 always kept slightly behind the leader to keep an eye out behind

the leader for something coming in from that direction. And, again, I’d have to know to, what size group we had out there – it would have been on a strafing mission, you know, not an escort mission. And I don’t know if we had the full—usually with the full squadron you’d have 12 aircraft: 3 lots of 4, you see; 3 lots of 4 with the commander flying the front four and the other two one on either side of him, scaled down

from the sun usually. Or if the commander wanted to attack, it’d be scaled down the other way if the commander wanted to go in first, the commander of the mission. But they were caught by surprise and it was just there was nothing they could do to get any aircraft off, so we just knocked them to pieces, and on fire most of them – well, much the same as what the Japanese did on

Pearl Harbour, you see: absolutely caught by surprise and murdered – blue murder. But all we were concerned about was to reduce the number of German fighters in the air over Italy. So that was good. Again, we knocked out a few—we shot down a few aircraft over Italy in aerial combat. And I was involved in a couple of those

things. I mean, we got a few bullets into them and they went down. Mostly we were still escort and ground strafing, mostly. Because especially in the daytime the activity of the German Air Force was much reduced to what it was in the desert phase.

Oh yeah. sure, sure. Troops being conveyed in, for instance, in the convoys. They’d have large trucks with the back filled with troops. That’s one way of carting them around. Usually, in Italy, you’d find they were on the move north, because the Allies had already landed

(you remember down near the toe of Italy there, the peninsula. I forgot where they went ashore, but you might remember the Germans were ensconced in a large mountain which I’d have to look at the name and so on. See, without looking at a map or my thing I can’t tell you these names because they’re out of my mind. But where they landed, the Allied troops, they landed too close to this what shall I say?

defence situation the Germans had on top of the mountain, which was not far off the coast, you see. And in landing in there they came under dreadful fire from the Germans, and continued until they took this German stronghold on the top of the mountain. And that was all ground stuff of course. My personal view is that was a mistake

to land at that point; they didn’t realise how heavily the Germans were entrenched. But once they’d knocked out that stronghold the Germans, of course, were on the retreat. And from that point in time the Germans really were backing off—which they don’t like to do, as you know—all the way until they got up virtually to north Italy. And we had by then moved up to southern France, at the airfield there previously occupied by the very Germans

who attacked our airfield in Corsica that’s where they were operating out of. By then the Germans were being forced back off the Gold Coast or that area along there is that the Gold Coast or what is it? Something like that? And they were being forced back.

And most of the Germans we saw when we were on the ground were dead Germans, you know; they were being knocked off pretty much by our—we’d also landed our infantry by then up there, and we covered that landing by the Allies into southern France, you see. We also did the aerial cover for that landing. And then we finally moved up there and operated out of there. So that was another phase you might say; we were operating out of southern France. And that was

before we were then withdrawn down to Foggia airport; we had to hand in our aircraft there and the whole squadron moved by ship back to England, and set up again there with new aircraft – Spitfire 16’s.

Over strafing them?

Not really, not that I ever saw. If they did they’d be up for Lack of Moral Fibre or something like that if they backed out of it – unless their guns had jammed. I mean, they might’ve pulled out if their guns jammed – and that could happen. But if there’s a reason like that that’s a different story. But if they pulled out just to get away from the ground fire, well that would be a—they’d have to account for it,

very definitely. I didn’t ever encounter—none of our boys were brought up before command for that type of thing; called up before the command which, as I said it was RAF command, which we were attached to. But we were operating under overall American command at that time. I’ve forgotten the top Yank who was in charge down there; he was a very well-known

American General.

Oh, it was okay. Good rations for a start; much better than the British rations, put it that way.

Oh, it was sort of fairly fancy tinned stuff which you could—or if you were lucky enough to attend one of their

main fields, well there they had a full kitchen and chef there, was of course a different story. But in the main, even the provisions we got were greatly improved when we were under American command. I mean you can see a lot of their stuff in the supermarkets now, and made by the same people who used to make it during those war years, only they’re much bigger these days. You know that half of that industry is owned by

overseas don’t you? You do know this don’t you? Even the names like Kraft and so on, you know.

No. It’s an industry that’s been badly affected by this business of becoming part of the so-called ‘world economy’ what’s the name for it? that we’re so mad about politically

these days.

Yeah. Yeah, globalisation – call it that.

We used to always favour the old—if we could get it—the old, even bully beef, but certainly if we could get the ‘real McCoy’: roast beef in the old English style, you know, with

vegetables, potatoes and vegetables – if we could get it. Failing that it had to be stuff like—well, you can still buy this in the supermarkets in fact I’ve got a tin of it in the cupboard there that I buy occasionally at the local supermarket, stuff made in South America,

in Argentina and so on tinned over there under contract because they weren’t in the war, but arranged through American companies, American suppliers—steak and kidney pudding, things like that. Anything for a change from the strictly bully beef style of thing you used to get through the British supply channels, you know. That’s what it boils down to.

A bit superstitious?

Some were. Some were. Some were I guess. I could never say I was really superstitious. I had a certain faith there; I was a converted Christian and still am for that matter.

I didn’t seem to have any worries that I would—I had full confidence that I would survive, put it that way. Self-confidence I suppose – and a faith of some kind, right? I have only seen a couple of pilots back off, and they were ultimately removed from the squadron for Lack of Moral Fibre.

And they couldn’t help it; I mean, it’s just that it was just too much for them I guess – nerves got them.

No, general conditions. Yeah, oh it had to be; they wouldn’t knock them out on a first-up problem, you know what I mean? It’s something that involved the doctors immediately to,

you know, get involved in discussion with them and so on, try and see how their—well, moral fibre was going, put it that way.

In a couple of cases I’d say we did expect it, yeah.

I don’t know. Personality I suppose; a personality. Certain personality there; certain presentation of the person - this sort of thing, you know. Lack of fighting spirit, conviction as to the cause to which we were, shall I say

dedicated, to use high-falutin’ words. I don’t say we were dedicated; we had ‘committed ourselves to’, put it that way. I don’t know; it’s a strange thing. You find it in people all the time, don’t you. I mean, you can find it today in people and

I don’t know. I think we better leave it at that; I won’t comment on the subject. It gets a bit touchy, if you, if you try to put them into a category, you know what I mean?

You could notice, though, in the attitude and general lack of aggressiveness and things

like that I would say.

Well, we went from—after we’d been up operating out of the French airfield which was a permanent French Air Force airfield. The Germans took it over and then

finally when they were driven out we took it over. And after operations there, which were going into northern Italy and some pretty hairy conditions there because we were then flying into low parts of the Alps and so on where you had snow in winter on the peaks and so on.

And you were flying up valleys and so on, and you could get fired on if you were down too low, and you couldn’t get up high because there was very dense cloud above. And sometimes you’d find that you were going up a valley that was decreasing in depth, you see, and you [were] suddenly getting close to the mountains; so you suddenly had to take a quick turn, turn around and go back down

the valley, because you couldn’t go up through the cloud. Those conditions were probably the most hairy we encountered in weather terms, because you had to get yourself back. You’d find yourself going up a valley and you were being fired upon from the ground by the Germans, and you had to turn around 180 degrees and go back down the way you came because if you tried to go over and up through the cloud you were likely to hit one of the mountain peaks, you see.

Now, those are hairy conditions; we had a few cases of that. But luckily that did not go on too long because we were, then, ordered to hand in the aircraft – the squadron was ordered to hand in its present aircraft down at what was called Foggia Main Airfield a main Italian airfield which, of course, was under the Allies’ control

at the time and to proceed to UK. And this we did, together with again on a large vessel whose name I have but can’t remember it. Had an enjoyable trip back to England again on board with lots of other service people: army, air force people

returning to Great Britain. We arrived there—again the date I must look at my logbook for, but we’ll call it for the moment early ’45 I suppose. When did the war end?

About the end of ’45 I think it was; or where are we? When did they drop the atom bombs? Do you remember?

Yeah, August, righto. Yeah, well we arrived in Britain on this vessel about the—it must have been just early in the year, January or February or something like that. The squadron was still in its full formation – same

people, having come direct from Italy. And we were then re-equipped, as I mentioned before, with what was a later Spitfire here but not—it’s a bit deceptive because this was called a Mark-16, but it

was not as late as the Mark-14 which was almost an entirely new Spitfire with a much more powerful engine and only came in right toward the end of the war. I did not fly them because I’d already left for home by the time the squadron re-equipped with them. But we did a lot of work in the 16’s in terms of, again which I’m repeating myself on this escort work over Europe and into Germany.

And as I said, we would fly in as far as we could go in accordance with the duration of the petrol supply of the aircraft. And then the British multis would go on and we would fly quickly back and land either in Belgium or Holland airports that we were using

there by then being cleared of the Germans. We would refuel quickly and go out and meet them and escort them back again. So that was a time when the Germans were putting these multis under quite serious attack by—

including not only Messerschmidts—by they had a new Messerschmidt which was, I think, the earliest rocket-type, fly by rocket power, up into these Lancaster formations and shooting down a couple and then they’d have to drop out because they had very little duration. But then they got the Messerschmidt 262 which was a different story altogether

where it could stay up for a long period. And that was the first really, what shall I say? powerful and active jet with a fairly long duration in the air that the Germans. But they got it too late. It was very active and a lot of Lancasters, of course, were shot down. Not only Lancs, but you had three different

bombers there of the 4-engine type. And, again, my brain is starting to lose those names too; but they were well-known aircraft producers that were into the multi-engine stuff by then. As I said, the refueling business and then up again, and then escort them on the way home when they were still subject to or vulnerable to

chase by German fighters or a very advanced kind when you think of the 262 and how good it was. Those missions were—we did, I suppose, about 8 or 10 of such missions of those. But the hairiest of all was that we were at the same time we were

dive-bombing ourselves, not with proper dive-bombers but with Spitfires. We were dive-bombing V1 and V2 sites largely in Holland, coastal areas and further south, which was pretty hairy business because the Spit was never made for

dive-bombing. One of the main reasons was it didn’t have dive-bombers’ flaps on it for a start. Spit flaps are only about a foot long and they go down either all down or all up, which is just no good for dive-bombers. So if we put them down we were likely to rip the flaps off once they gained speed, because you were going quickly. On dive-bombing you’re going nearly vertical, after having identified the target.

Again, flying four aircraft here. The leader goes down, leads them down, here’s number two; this one follows and they go down in a string like that; four aircraft. And because the leader’s gone down on the target, those that come in behind him are going steeper and steeper because he’s moving on you see; he’s gone over the target, dropped his bombs, and you’re coming in behind him, and therefore your dive is getting steeper and steeper. So, in

many cases you found yourself doing about 500 miles an hour, which they are not made for of course straight down almost vertical, and almost past vertical at times trying to get back on the target. So that was pretty hairy business with, of course, plenty of anti-aircraft fire coming up at you. And well, I don’t know, how

we went for target achievements there I don’t know; but it was very hard—I’ll put it that way, being experienced—to stay on the target when you were going down at that speed. And how many actually hit the target I will never actually know because you dropped your bomb and you had to climb away slowly because you’re going so fast that if you tried to pull out too fast you would just black out

very quickly and probably lose control of the aircraft. So after the dive it was a big, long and slow curve back up again to rejoin the other three aircraft in the formation of four. Hairy business; aircraft was never made for it – should never have been used for it. So, that’s all I can say about that. Success rate, don’t know. The degree

to which the success on the target sites was. But it must have been something because it certainly slowed down the activity of the what’s-their-names over England.

The rockets, yeah. What’d they call them?

V1’s and 2’s, yeah – of course. V1’s and 2’s

Yeah, holding together. Not that I can recall, and nor did I record any. That photo [indicates off-camera], one of those photos, shows that crowd who were doing that work there – the entire squadron’s there. And

I can’t think that any of them actually went in due to disintegration of the aircraft. We lost one guy, one of our flight leaders, Barney Wallace, we lost him because we were flying as a five there under a — this is when we first got over to England — and

we were flying in cloud, and we were flying as a five with the first one’s supposed to be over here, you see. [indicates off-camera]. Now, he took off late and tried to join us in cloud, and he came through underneath the four, the other four were in formation. And he came through from underneath, climbing sharply to try and join the formation, cut off the tail of the leader, that’s

Barney Wallace and Barney went in. That was one bad accident I recall, because I was flying right here [indicates off-camera] alongside Barney Wallace, and he could’ve hit my tail or these over here [indicates off-camera] – we were flying formation, in cloud, pretty close, you see, so we could keep together. But poor old Barney went in. But that was not caused by anti-aircraft fire; that was actually the fact that the fifth aircraft cut up through our

formation and had lost us in cloud, you see, and didn’t realise we were there.

Well, the other one who cut off the tail, he continued up and got above cloud and then bailed out, and he got out. And he landed in friendly territory, I think this was in the stage when

the Germans, I don’t know, they’d been driven up about to Holland I think – he fell into friendly territory and got back out – they got him out. But poor old Barney went in. It could’ve been any of the four; but luckily it wasn’t. And I saw the whole thing. I was formating on this side here [indicates off-camera] and

when you’re formating in cloud on an aircraft you’re very close to it; you’ve got one wing almost tucked in on his—in my case I was on his port side, so I was tucked in behind his port wing. And I saw the flash of the aircraft go straight through like that [makes a fast upward motion with his hand] – could’ve got me or the other blokes on the other side quite easily. And that’s how close that one was. But that was a mishap.

I didn’t see any of the flights I was on escort work where there were any of our aircraft shot down by enemy fighters, even though they had this one little rocketship and the jet 262. They didn’t manage to get any of the people we were flying with, 451 people. In the dive-bombing

racket, I don’t think we lost—I can’t think of the casualty situation there without looking back over the record of it; but I don’t think we lost any of our pilots on that. But, I can only say that it was a misuse of aircraft because Spitfires were just not meant for it. If you remember

the Germans had specific dive-bombers, if you remember which were heavily flapped and could slow down their dive very, very much to avoid this business. Because when you pulled out of a dive and you’re going at 500, roughly, you gotta be damned careful – you’re squashed down in your seat by gravity force, and you can easily

pass out and lose control of the aircraft. That was the danger there.

Yeah, well… I don’t know… I…

I don’t know. It didn’t influence me too much—or too badly. I mean, we used to go to the funerals and that and bury them; and the padre would come along and go around among the boys and that sort of thing. But it didn’t influence me too much because right at that stage we knew what we were doing in terms of killing people.

I mean, we killed I don’t know how many people. You know, what with these strafing missions and that sort of thing. It’d be hundreds and hundreds of people dead, right, without any doubt. So you just had to get used to that sort of thing. When you lost—I didn’t lose any particular tent mates. Now, your own tent mates, we were in tents there on Corsica; I did not lose any of those,

so that was one thing. And they were the ones that you were pretty close to. Still write to one up north there, Jimmy Sidney. He was one of our flight leaders, and Jim’s still going strong – wife’s not too good. But he’s not too bad. And well, I don’t know,

others, of course I knew well; quite a few of them have gone – they’ve just died of old age virtually. Bob Mercer was one of our flight leaders, but he didn’t come from Sydney; he was from Perth. He died fairly early, but how much of it was due to war service I don’t know, because he lived over there. But I’d say, of the pilots that you could see on that shot where we’re together in England

there [indicates off-camera] there would be, if I counted them now there’d probably be half of them gone I suppose. But you’ve got to bear in mind that they came from different cities; not all of them came from Sydney. Some came from Queensland, some came from Victoria, some came from Western Australia. And we sort of lost touch with them; but we kept in touch with the Sydney people of course.

Correct, yes. We, again, were coming by ship of course, not by air. And these were people who had finished tours, which I did. You used to do a certain tour depending whether you were on fighters or bombers et cetera. And

I finished a tour and a half, actually, by the time I got to the position where we were in England. So I decided to come out here, and in my ignorance I was going to go onto the Spitfires that fly off carriers

as I mentioned to you before which are called Seafires. Now, that was a different story, and I had no experience with landing aircraft on carriers. So it meant a whole new training session to go through that again. And that might have taken 3 months at least—2 to 3 months I would say—to do that. Also, it might’ve meant, as I said before I probably wouldn’t have been here because

the casualties on them were very high. And I’m restating something when I say that the Spitfires were just not meant to use carriers. But, however, that was the way it was moving. We got to, our first call was on the west coast of India

and I’m trying to think which city it was; but, again, it’s in the diary of course – and I haven’t even used my diary, but I do have it. We got there to have the news that, of course, that the Americans had dropped the atom bomb, and then followed closely by another one. And before long, of course, the negotiations were going on between the Americans and

the Japanese to terminate the war, the Japanese having surrendered. So I continued on of, course, here and was discharged because there was then no continuation of the conflict with the Japanese of course.

And I was discharged pretty quickly. I went back to the company, Swift & Company which had employed me since I was 15 years of age. And I went back to my teenage sweetheart, Joyce Sommerville who’s the lady you see out there. And we got together again and

we were married in 1947. Shortly after that the company, Swift and Company asked me to go over and set up a new branch in Adelaide. And I did that over about a period of about 10 years; I set up a pretty active branch that was increasing quite

rapidly in its growth and so on. So, we come on there—as a consequence I regard Adelaide virtually as my second city. I mean, Sydney we were born, but Adelaide I know a lot about because of that spell of about 10 years over there.

Sorry.

Considerable relief I would say, in the sense that by that time we were well aware of the threat to Australia by the Japanese. This had been clearly explained in the service, in the RAAF, that it was about time

we did something back here to defend Australia; and that’s what we were going back for. And other squadrons had already come back of course, as you know, and were serving again in the north against the Japanese. But I’d say a certain amount of relief; again, after having been away for about 3 years

from the family and that sort of thing, you think you better get back into civilian life again, you know. I would say that most of the people on the ship and it was quite a large ship, again the name of it I would have to look up, but we returned on a large vessel and I would say those on board generally accepted the news with some relief, because

we were starting to understand that the Japanese really had intentions on occupying Australia. And in fact, as we all know, Australia was continuously under surveillance and fire in some cases, like the case of Sydney here, which we’d heard about of course from Japanese submarines and mini-submarines and so on.

And we now know that they were patrolling all around Australia, and did actually get many and sink many ships. So it was becoming obvious that their intentions were to take and occupy all or part of Australia. So they were the last people we wished to see do that.

And therefore, as I said to answer your question specifically, I would say generally there was a feeling of some relief onboard – albeit some concern about the fact that nuclear war had begun. And that of course was the first strike in nuclear warfare,

for which we have attacked Iraq and still can’t find the evidence of weapons of mass destruction. So goodness knows. I mean, updating to the reason for attacking Iraq, are they going to produce any weapons of mass destruction? Or have they been buried down numerous wells or some darn thing? You’d never know. But anyway, we’re coming right up to the future. But

we proceeded back here; I was discharged and went back to the company that I was with before the war.

No, I didn’t find it unusually difficult because they needed people, you see. And the company at that time was engaged in expansion and creation of other divisions and so

on. And the two divisions that I was concerned with, one was the industrial chemicals division, and the second one was the division that built the tank farms here for liquid chemicals; and as far as New South Wales was concerned I was the Division General Manager as well. So I had all of the divisions under my thumb

as far as New South Wales was concerned. But that promotion came after 10 years in Adelaide, because when we first came back from Adelaide where I built up a successful branch. I was then made Manager of Overseas Operations which concerned all our agencies world-wide, and we had many of them. And I was concerned with building

those relationships up, and increasing our import merchandise as an importer. Now, because of that I was called on to do some very long overseas trips, and we used to go away for 6 weeks or more, 8 weeks on an around tour because the cost of the

air transport and so on was relatively high – relatively high in those days: low by today’s standard but relatively high for those days. And the Directors of the parent company, of course, like to get their money’s worth in terms of a trip which, I think, from memory in those days used to cost around 2,500 or 3,000 dollars – chicken feed by today’s standards. Anyway, they expected a round trip,

and we used to start off—we had agencies in Italy; we had agencies in France; we had agencies in Germany even. So I even got in behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. But we had agencies in Holland; we had agencies in Norway, Denmark, and of course in England; and then, also in Canada and America. So the round trip was very extensive,

put it that way. All done by air, and not spending too long in any one place – but it meant that I’d be away for anywhere up to, well, 2 months. And my wife of course had to keep the family show running, which she did admirably. And that went on for, I don’t know,

that would have gone on perhaps for about 5 years, 4-5 years, before I was promoted to overall manager of the New South Wales operations. Now, that period was, I think gratifying

in terms—but a very hard working period, very hard working – a lot of night work. And I regret it later that I had to—my wife really had to bring up the children because I was away quite a lot, and also entertaining customers and this type of thing. I used to arrive pretty late home, occasionally, and

all those things which managers do these days – male or female managers.

Only that I have never flown an aircraft since. I would like to have continued on with casual flying, you know, private flying, but

I just didn’t have the time for it. I would’ve done it but I did not have the time for it; I was engaged fully in the management responsibilities which the parent board of Swift and Company expected of me.

Well it is a certain thing, you know. I mean, flying is

a certain – there’s something very… I don’t know what it is. It’s exciting, I suppose, for mankind to do an unusual thing, you see. We were never meant to fly because if we were we would’ve had wings wouldn’t we? That’s what it boils down to. And we’d have joined the—way back

a few thousand years ago we’d have been a different thing; and perhaps we now are beginning to know we may be. That is we may have come down from a certain group of apes. And I find this hard to accept because of my religious teaching of course, but I’m afraid that that’s probably where it’s come from. Now, who created that particular brand of apes, I don’t know; but

they are said to have originated in Africa. And we’ve got stuff coming over TV on it right now, as you know, on the very, very explicit explanation of that type of origin which is a bit contrary to what we have been taught in the past in the church, you see.

However, I don’t know – at the moment I can take anything, really; I’m inclined to just go along with what I have to do on a day-to-day basis and… But when I, speaking in terms of rejoining the air force or something like that – never really considered it. For private flying I would have needed to go to

a private airfield and, you know, either own or rent an aircraft and continue on that way. But I never really had time for it. That’s what it boils down to. I don’t mind flying, as a passenger; wouldn’t like to be doing too much of it right now because of the wretched terrorist threat and so on, you see, which has come out of the blue and one of the worst things that’s

hit the human race I would say so far.

Only in relationships with the—which I still have—with the RAAF Association, which is the, as you know, no doubt the representative body in the same way that the RSL is for the army.

And we have—I’m still on the Australian board of that organisation, the Australian committee rather. It’s not a board because it’s not a company; it’s an association. And I’m still on that representing South Australia which is where I spent the 10 years. I know people over there very well. And

secondly, we have another—this one’s a company unfortunately and has been right through, and that is the Air Force Club, of which I’m the Secretary. That one doesn’t run a club any longer. It did run a club, the last one being in Martin Place,

where we had to close it down because it wasn’t making a profit. And after that we’ve run just virtually as an association of about 120 so far, and fast-decreasing members all in their sort of late 70’s or 80’s. I’m secretary of that club; that’s why I use that office down there to keep it away from the other stuff I get through my number one study.

It means a lot to me. Because it goes back to World War I of course, as you know, with the landings at Gallipoli. And one of my uncles was there; my father was not. But

the truth of the matter is that that occurred, it involved Australians and New Zealanders of course, let’s not forget our New Zealand mates. And it was a time in history where, I think, Australians really proved themselves as fighters in adverse situations. Because

the whole point about the ANZAC venture was that they landed at the wrong spot, should never have been put ashore at a point where they only had a beach, a sort of a beach, and then they had to start climbing up cliffs. And the Turks, unfortunately, had machine guns on them all the time. So the thing became rather a butchery more than anything until they finally

got up to the top and then landings were made further north from there, as you know and they started to make some headway. So I think that the Anzac tradition was what was inherited, and it still is inherited by the Australian armed forces and respected by them. Now, by the same token,

I’ve got to say that I think it’s become a focal point for Australian service people, male and female. And I hope it continues on. I notice that the interest in it is increasing again. There are more people—

we march on Anzac Day of course, as a squadron. There’s only about 12 of us there that can march because others are living elsewhere than Sydney. I mean, they’re up on the north coast, they’re in Brisbane, they’re in Victoria and Adelaide and so on, Western Australia. They all have their own Anzac Day celebrations of course. So our squadron only turns out about 12 people these

days. Our sister squadron, which is 450, have a bigger turnout because they have more of their troops and their pilots in Sydney than we did – and still have that situation. So we may be forced to merge with them. There have been some talks about merging 450 and 451 into one squadron group, as Jack has probably told you.

Jack is running out [of] time – he’s now 80 I think; yes, he’s reached 80. Jack Culbert, I don’t think he can carry on with the Secretary-ship too much longer. And we, as the committee, shall we say who give him a hand, and we were involved in the writing of a couple of these books, or the composition—or the

putting them together, we won’t have too much longer to go on. So where that goes is, I’m sure, has to be a merger, in my book of the two squadrons. I pressed for that when one of our 451 people, who also worked on 450, was their President, of 450, and I think we’d almost achieved that merger, oh,

about 5-6 years ago. But this bloke, a guy named Don McBurney, who was one of our senior pilots on 451, he was also in 450 in the desert war, and also in Corsica, went and died on us. He was swimming at the north shore swimming pool, the big pool there across the bridge, and they found him leaning into the swimming pool dead. He’d just passed out; he’d been doing some laps

and he passed out. There we had a common interest because he was in both squadrons, you know what I mean? But I’m sure, I don’t know what Jack has said about it, but I think we shall have to just merge with 450, and on Anzac Day we’ll just march with them. Can’t see any other alternative, really. As for the other meetings of our half-a-dozen people that we call the committee including Jack of course, naturally

we will continue to meet as long as we can. We generally meet at the RACA [Royal Automobile Club Australia] where I’m a member; and usually about three times a year. And we try to combine one of those times with Anzac Day, you know.

Well,

I don’t know. I can’t possibly answer that one because if it hadn’t been for that I probably would have been a minister in the church, a minister in the Uniting Church I would say – ‘Congregational’ as it was in our days, merged with the other ‘dissenting’ churches, to use the right name, having dissented from the Anglican church. I was christened in the Anglican Church. And we probably, if it hadn’t been

for the war, I probably would have been talking to you in the same situation as our leading light who was just ordered to step down from his position without naming any names; and you know who I’m talking about: our Anglican primate who became our representative of the Queen in Australia. And that’s the first time that’s happened for a long time, and it’s a bit sort of

disturbing that just because he fiddled around a bit when he was a young man that this should be forced upon him. And I think he tried to say that he was encouraged by the lady in question, didn’t he or something, or whatever it was? Haven’t you followed that one?

I was sorry to see it because I didn’t think he was a basically bad man, frankly. He tried not to be stood down, but

once it gets into the hands of the media—and you people are media—so be careful. You might be sued, you know. You better warn Mr. ‘what’s-his-name’ up at Orange there.

About the war? The war and Australia.

I don’t think so, no. I can’t say that I fret over all of the hundreds I killed. We did literally kill hundreds. I mean, every Spitfire strafing, for instance, killed, oh, 50 people – or more

than that if we were strafing a whole convoy of German soldiers in the back and that sort of thing. But you know one of the ten commandments is ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ as you know. So anybody who’s engaged in a war has disregarded that commandment, when you think about it. But it doesn’t worry me unduly – as far as I know unless it’s worrying me mentally

and I don’t know it, put it that way. I mean, I’m trying to do the best for my wife at the moment and trying do the best I can for her, put it that way. I don’t think it worried me unduly. Well, we had to [do] it; we were under instructions. If we didn’t do what we were told, we were going to be put before a court-martial anyway – so what the hell. You may as well ask George Bush [President of United States]

is he sorry now that he set the mob onto Iraq. I don’t think so, but I wish they’d find some weapons of mass destruction, you know, I wish they’d find the bloody things and let’s get over that one. Because now the Opposition is trying to make some headway out of that one, and they’re calling for as you know —and I just barely

keep up to date with this through the Liberal Party—but they’re calling for a full investigation of this, and if necessary a public hearing on whether or not there were any weapons of mass destruction. So what the hell. I don’t think it—I’ve never fretted about it, put it that way. I’m not asking the good Lord to pardon me at this time; I’ll wait until I get to the gates,

the pearly gates there and then I’ll ask St Peter to let me in. Fair enough!

I hope that answers your question.

Okay.