Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Newtown and I have lived in Sydney all my life so I am a city boy. We were raised, when I was a young fellow, in Maroubra where I went to Maroubra Junction Public School. I went from there to Sydney Boys’ High School and from there I took a job in the Dunlop Rubber Company and

then I worked in the public service. My first appointment there was to the New South Wales Treasury. It was from there that I went into the army and the air force.

Yes I had two younger brothers, David and Raymond. David is still alive and lives up in Newcastle. Raymond unfortunately died when we has aged

fifty-five with cancer.

I actually joined in Sydney and it was in Sydney at Woolloomooloo that I had the extensive medical examination that put me into the air force reserve. And then it

was the practice at that time for you to go on the air force reserve, and then about nine or twelve months later you were called up and went to the initial training school. And that’s what happened to me, except that in the interim I had a call up into the militia, so I joined the Ninth Field Regiment from February to July, 1942. In that regiment I was a GPO

Ack, which stands for gun position officer’s assistant. And so I really went into the air force in July,1942.

Well I turned nineteen on the thirty-first of July, 1942 so I was nearly nineteen.

Oh well after initial training at

Bradfield Park I was volunteered, you, you and you type of volunteering, for a special project. They were studying the effect of airsickness on aircrews at Sydney University at the time. For about six weeks I was taken into a dingy underground smelly sort of place where I was swung

in swings for hours on end until I was sick each day, and after that was concluded I went back to Bradfield Park. But I was in the middle of a course. You could understand. The courses there were one months apart. So I was asked if I could do anything with wood so I said, perhaps, you know. And so for six weeks I spent making

models from balsa of airlanes, which were subsequently painted and used for aircraft recognition. It was after that that I went overseas on the Mauritania with two mates who I am still friendly with all those years later. They ended up on the same squadron as I did, but in different crews.

Yes.

I trained in Canada. Bombing and gunnery and navigation training was all in Canada. And after I got my wings I was sent to a special high level bombing course in Jarvis, Ontario with the idea that we would be in the lead airplane of special squadrons to attack German shipping.

The general idea was that at that time the RAF [Royal Air Force] had inflicted more damage on their own ships than they had on the German navy, and we were to be the knowledgeable people in the front of squadrons and virtually say you bomb that one and you don’t bomb this one. After I got to England

I was sent for a month to the Isle of Mann and for the whole month we spent looking at silhouettes of ships from all the navies of the world until we could recognise them all with just a glance.

That wasn’t with a squadron at this stage. I was still training. After the Isle of Mann I went up to Scapa Flow where I flew over the home fleet

and reported on shipping, practising for this great adventure that we were going to have against the German navy. But by the time that we had completed all this, the German navy was starting to disintegrate. The Tirpitz had been sunk and the Sharnhorst or Gneisenau had scuttled itself in the River Plate [actually the Grafspee]. And so I was sent to a commando school because

presumably they couldn’t find anything else for me to do. After a month there, I was then diverted back into the main bomber command stream through Advance Flying Unit, OTU [Operational Training Unit], conversion units and so on, and I ultimately arrived at 460 Squadron in June 1944.

They were both night and day operations. The bulk of them were against German targets, many of which were in the Ruhr. There were also targets in France, some of them against V bombsites and some even supporting our armies as they

swept across Europe.

I was a bomb aimer, and in our crew the bomb aimer was the Jack-of-all-trades. I worked the H2S or Y as it was called, and that was the first embryonic radar device by which we could navigate. I worked that while

we went to the target or alternatively if it were a daylight raid, map read to the target, then over the target of course dropped the bombs, and reversed that on the way back.

Thirty-two recognised operations and a couple of others that were not recognised because on one occasion,

with oil leaking from the port engine, we turned back, and on another occasion we got to the target but it was decided that since the target was fully clouded in, that that wouldn’t count as an operation.

Yeah.

No. My first operation was on the twentieth of July, just after D-day.

I was on a boat on the way back to Australia.

Yes, when the war in Europe ended, yes. I arrived back in Australian on the twenty-third of May, 1945, and the war in Europe ended on the eighth of May, 1945.

Well after we’d finished out tour of operations on 460 which was in November 1944, we had actually volunteered for a second tour but at that stage we were winning the war, and of course there were many more air crews available than were needed to finish it off. So, as a sort of supernumerary I was sent back to Australia.

I think it is fair to say that most of the time that you are in the services you spend waiting around for something to happen. And so it was. From the time I finished operations in November 1944 to the time that the

war in the Pacific finished, I didn’t do anything very much, except on one occasion I was put in charge of a party of three others, and asked to escort three prisoners up to Townsville. And these three prisoners were blokes who had shot through and gone on

leave without, they’d gone on AWL [Absent without Leave]. And it had taken them two years to catch one particular fellow who was the bad guy, I suppose, of the three. And it took us ten hours to lose him because by the time we got to Casino, he was no longer there and he had escaped our clutches.

So when we got to Brisbane I saw the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] people there and put the other two into an air force jail while we waited for our train northwards, and then with these other two we went up to Townsville and delivered them. At that stage the fellow in Townsville, the Officer in Townsville said that he

didn’t think that he ought to lay any charges against me, because it was really South of him that I had lost the prisoners, and he said that he had been in touch with the people in Brisbane, and they didn’t think that they ought to lay charges against me because I had originated from Sydney. And of course when I got back to Sydney they said that they didn’t think they ought to lay charges because I had lost the prisoner

close to Brisbane, and so of course I was anxious to get out of the air force before they all got together and decided who it was that was going to charge me for losing this prisoner.

I don’t know. I didn’t follow it up.

I was anxious to get back into civilian life. I have regarded my time in the air force as something that I suppose needed to be done, but it was an interruption to life rather than a raison d’etre for it. So when I, before I was discharged I married Beryl. We had been going together since

we were, I suppose, teenagers and then I went to university under the CRTS [Commonwealth Rehabilitation and Training Scheme] scheme, and did a Bachelor of Economics degree, and this put my foot on the rung of the ladder in the public service. So I progressed there from being a clerk to a budget inspector to

Assistant Secretary for Railways to President of the State Superannuation Board to a Commissioner of Public Transport, and finally to the Chief Executive of the GIO [Government Insurance Office].

No. None at all.

I must have been less than four, I suppose. Newtown was, I think that was the only home that my parents had that they didn’t own.

And so they were in the process of acquiring a home of their own, and the first I remember was one at Hurlston Park. And it was from there that I went into the very first, you know, kindergarten sort of school.

He was a mercantile agent.

He

did some…He did some activities, which were related to debt recovery and that kind of thing. It was a business that he had of his own. He was very much a self-made person,

no education at all. He was born in New Zealand and had come to Australia as a young kid and he was a battler.

No.

My mother and father didn’t get on

as time passed. My mother was Catholic and my father was Protestant, but that wasn’t the real cause of the problem. My mother’s family didn’t like my father and that made things difficult, but basically they were unsuited to one another, and so

my early memories, the memories of my brothers, was of continual bickering and arguments in the home.

I coped with it. I only say that because it doesn’t seem to have affected me, but it had a very marked effect on one of my brothers in particular,

and there was a constant pull and push between the two of them. I suppose this is a very common thing in family disruptions, where the children unwittingly become used as the pawns in the game, and that was the sort of childhood that I had.

My mother’s.

We’ve never been a close-knit family of brothers. Particularly was I not close with my…the middle brother, middle in age, that is, who is

still alive, and I think that the sort of family situation didn’t lend itself to closeness amongst us.

I don’t know that I had any role models. I did have a number of models in my mind that I didn’t

want to become, and the fact that ours was such a disruptive family has certainly influenced me a lot, because I and Beryl too have made strenuous attempts to ensure that our own family is the reverse of that, and I am happy to say that it has so turned out. We have two

kids, a boy and a girl that have given us more joy and less trouble than any parents have a right to expect. And we have four grandchildren of which we are proud. We have a son and daughter in law and also the partners of the grandchildren that all seem to be very good and very family-oriented, and

of course we have one great grandson who will be two on Thursday.

Family is very important to me. It’s the most important thing.

I wasn’t great

at sport or sport-oriented. I did play competition tennis as a young kid. I suppose I was used to doing the sort of things that most kids are, and that involved getting into a bit of mischief at times. And I don’t have a clear recollection of having aims as a kid.

Yes, yes. We had…In the nature of things then, of course, you had to have your friends who lived locally. You walked everywhere. We had a car but we were one of the few families that did have a car, and my father needed it for the business sort of thing. But we had a group of local friends,

mainly neighbouring kids and kids as school that you had as friends.

Well amongst the things that we’d do together, and most of my childhood was in Maroubra, we for instance made canoes

out of a sheet of corrugated iron, pulled up and joined together at the ends with a piece of timber, the iron hammered on each side. We would then pick up the tar off the local concrete road, and fill all the nail holes in the corrugated iron, and these canoes

we would then sail around in the lagoon, which was on what we called the Labour Farm at that stage in Maroubra.

I can remember paddocks and paddocks of empty land which

is now filled with houses. I can remember a stone quarry in Storey Street, which used to be a favourite swimming hole for kids, and in which kids would drown because the water was so cold. The Randwick Rifle Range was there. It’s now covered with houses. Maroubra, which

I don’t know how far it would be from the city centre, maybe six or eight kilometres, but at that stage Maroubra was almost an outer suburb of Sydney, and it had all the characteristics of that.

I’m not conscious of that.

Maroubra Beach, yes, very much so, and that was our surfing beach and we used to…I actually lived at Maroubra Junction which would be, I don’t know, about three miles from Maroubra Beach, and we used to walk to the beach with our billy-cart in which we had a tent,

and we’d pitch the tent on the beach, and probably if it was a time like Easter we might even light a fire and cook hot cross buns over the fire and have a swim, and that was the sort of recreation that we had, simple but very enjoyable.

No.

I couldn’t say I enjoyed it but I didn’t ever have much trouble with it, because I didn’t work at it at all, but I had perhaps enough natural ability that it got me through and got me through the qualifying certificate, which was the thing you needed before you got to a selective

high school in those days. The selective high school for the Maroubra Area was Sydney Boys’ High School, but once I got there I didn’t work hard at studying. I sometimes wish I had have, but no I was not a great student.

Probably my least favourite subjects would have been the languages, Latin, and my favourite subjects would have been the sciences, Physics and Chemistry.

My father-in-law was in the 50/4th

Battalion in World WarI and he served in France and so on, and of course those blokes who fought in the trenches in France suffered horrendous casualties. After

my father and mother were divorced my mother remarried and my stepfather served in Gallipoli in the First World War. He was in the horse artillery.

Probably about

seventeen, I think.

No he was not a major figure. He was a simple sort of man, a good man but a simple sort of man, but he was not a father figure for me.

No.

It didn’t make any impact on me at all.

Oh, I think Empire

night with the crackers that we used to let off and the ceremony at the local theatre. That would have been the major memory.

Oh well, it was a lot of the Land of Hope and Glory, a speech given by some local dignitary about

the Empire I suppose it would have surrounded then mainly, the British Empire that is.

I was very conscious of it because, not only of the firecrackers and so on, but the history that we learned, particularly at high school, was British and European history, but

mainly British history, and one was conscious then very much of the fact that it was part of the Empire. It was the done thing, the acknowledged thing.

No, I wasn’t. When I enlisted I wasn’t concerned so much with

fighting for King and country, but I was concerned with preserving a way of life which I think that we had here, which was worth preserving and worth fighting for.

I think that there was a great

recognition that there were things here, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, that even children could understand as being valuable, from thinking that the reverse would have been intolerable, sort of thing.

Not very much except for the geography

that we might have learned at school but that would be the limit of it.

Oh yes, as a kid I listened a lot to the radio, particularly the tests in England and the way that they were manipulated to make you feel as though you were almost

there, you know, a terrific thing, and whenever Bradman was batting I would be sitting with the radio to my ear for as long as I was allowed to stay awake and do so.

I think Bradman was a hero to a lot of people,

but I think cricketers generally had a higher standing than other sports amongst us kids. We even, most of us, collected cards which had cricketers on them and a little bit on the back about what they’d done and what they’d done. But the Woodfuls,

the Ponsfords, the McCabes, those sort of people were heroes as kids. We played a lot of our local cricket on the concrete road with a kerosene tin, one on top of the other, as the wicket, and we would either be Bradman or Larwood if we were bowling, that sort of thing.

So they’d be the heroes, the cricketers.

No, I never did.

Once I got to high school I did, because the main library…The school didn’t have

a library to speak of at all, and the main library, if you wanted any kind of books, was in the Queen Victoria Building, the Sydney Municipal Library, which smelled of spilt wine as you went up the elevator to the library on the floor above.

Well I think that you’ll find

that if you go into that elevator now, and I’m talking about the one that is nearest to Market Street, that you can still get a little whiff of…it just smells to me like spilt wine.

I went initially, I suppose, because the teachers of

particular subjects at Sydney High would have said, “If you want to read a bit more about this then you should be going to the library.” And there was a feeling that I should go to the library, and that became voluntary after a while.

You’re testing my memory now.

Oh yes, I liked adventure stories as a boy, very much so, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, that kind of thing.

I’m going to blow my nose.

I didn’t ever think if it that way until I got into the air force, but once I had finished my initial training at Bradfield Park, and I had done the other things,

we were at that stage given the option of whether we would prefer to train in Australia or in Canada, and I opted for Canada.

I suppose to get a satisfactory job,

but I didn’t know what kind. My mother always saw me as a bank teller with a black alpaca coat on, on which to wipe the nib of the pen that was used at that stage. I didn’t have any firm ambitions at all, and I suppose that these didn’t crystallise until I came back, and of course then we got married so

I thought I’d better seriously get down to the business of earning a few bob, and that prompted me then to go to university to get a degree so that I would have a better chance of doing that.

She was…She left school when she was fourteen, which was not unusual at the time, and she

taught music in her own home. She had a cap and gown from the London College of Music, piano, and she was not the sort of person who would impact on you in any particular way, but she was

friendly. She had a lot of friends, and she was always good to us. I think she was happy in a way that she had had three boys, although most of her friends said, “You should try again for a girl,” I understand in her younger days, but she was happy with that.

She decided when I

eight that it would be a good thing if I learned the piano and started to teach me, but I didn’t really have any talent for it and that only lasted about six or nine months, and she could see that I wasn’t enjoying it and probably not likely to make a go of it, so she desisted and left that.

I like what I like in music, which is very limited, I suppose, to the sort of music that you wouldn’t even look at. But yes, I can listen to music now but I never set about it in the way of listening to the classics

or to a particular sort of thing. I don’t mind certain types of jazz but I’m not musically talented.

That’s right. No.

Not really. We didn’t ever have any trouble as kids, but we had a dog, a red cattle dog,

and he was a family pet but he wouldn’t let anyone come close to us as kids. We didn’t have any trouble at all, and I wasn’t conscious that Maroubra was a tough place as I grew up.

No. Further out.

Aboriginal people lived in Little Bay, La Perouse, in that area, which was quite a way out from Maroubra Junction.

Well I suppose I should say first of all that

when I went to Maroubra Junction School in the infants class, in that same class was the lady who is now my wife. The only other notable thing I suppose was that after I finished third class, as they called it then, no, after I finished second class, which was the end of the infants school,

apparently they needed to adjust class sizes and there were three of us that were promoted from second class to fourth class, so I didn’t ever do third class, and that’s why when I came to sit for the leaving certificate and so on, I was usually younger by nine months than the average age in the class. In fact when I was at Sydney Boys’ High School

in my last year there, in fifth year, I was actually competing in the junior tennis team and the junior athletics, not yet having become a senior.

Well I must have been immature by the general standards because a year at that age, when you are growing up, is a big difference. These days of course a lot of people would say that they wouldn’t allow their kids to be promoted quickly or promoted slowly, that they wanted them to go with the general stream, but that

was quite common apparently in those days.

No. I wasn’t conscious at all of the Depression. I was born in 1923 so I would have been six to ten in the real

Depression years. But no, I wasn’t conscious of it. We had enough food to eat and I suppose that was the main consideration then. A lot of people I now know didn’t.

Not greatly. I wasn’t close to my father and that explains, I suppose, why I wasn’t greatly aware of what he was doing.

Perhaps not when I was a young fellow, but subsequently, I formed

the opinion that what I would like to be was an engineer and that stayed with me, but in those days it was a question of…with the divorce in the family and so on, and there wasn’t such a thing as maintenance and all this sort of stuff. I had to leave school at the leaving certificate and my two brothers had

to leave school after the intermediate certificate. And I suppose for some little time I was one of the main breadwinners of the family. So it was a question of get any kind of a job you can quickly, and that amounted to being a clerk first at Dunlop Rubber, and then in the public service.

No, the leaving certificate is the end of fifth

form as it was then. It was a five-year high school. The intermediate certificate is the end of third year.

Yes, I did matriculate, and that then enabled me to take up a university course after I came back from the war.

I think so, yes.

It’s never been said so, but I think so. There’s always a bit of the young and the old in any family, and it’s a question of whether….My youngest brother was always the apple of my mother’s eye and I’m not saying that in any resentful way, but he’s the only one of the three who didn’t

go to the war because of his age. So he was there with her all the time, sort of thing. But I think there might have been a bit of resentment at the fact that I did go on to the leaving.

In kindergarten.

No.

Oh well I suppose it was when I would have been about….She could remember the exact date so I’d better be careful. It would’ve been when I was about sixteen I suppose. She might’ve been about fifteen. She actually went to Sydney Girls’ High School and I went to Sydney Boys’ High School, and

we had kind of met through a friend of mine who was a bit keen at that stage on Beryl’s sister. And that’s how it started.

Well we were well suited as teenagers, and in the way in which things happened then there were a lot of…We used to go on a lot of hikes together. When I say together there might have been a group of fifteen of us, and we would meet at Central Station and get a train to somewhere or other

and walk a couple of stations, Heathcote to Engadine, this sort of stuff, and cook a couple of sausages on the way and that was a common sort of entertainment, I suppose, that kids did together. And we were in the same group so that helped to blossom it, I suppose.

We were part of a group, really which derived from a dance, which was held in a local Church of England church.This was a sort of a supervised dance as it was in those days, with a couple of the church

elders acting as chaperones, but each Friday night, and this took place for some few years I suppose, a larger group, twenty or thirty of us, would go to the dance on the Friday night and then on the way home, we would call in at this milk bar which was run by an old lady

who was known to everybody as Miss Mac, and we would drink a milkshake and she always liked this group of youngsters so she would fill up great big jars full of milkshake. And that group then, often the next day, would, well most of them, meet and go on these hikes together.

I went to church because I was told to go to church. When we were at Maroubra, we lived initially within about a hundred metres of where the church met in a hall, and then within two hundred metres of where the new church was built. So as

a youth I went to Sunday school and then to the bible study classes that were held for growing-up teenagers. But it didn’t ever play a great part in my life. It was something to do I suppose, to me.

As a kid?

I can remember that we acquired…between the three of us we acquired at one stage a BB [Ball Bearing] gun, you know, an air-pressured gun that you put little lead pellets in, and we used to delight in shooting at the peaches on the tree

next door because the bloke had caught us pinching his peaches or nectarines at one stage and threatened to kick our backsides. I can remember another occasion where the house, which would have been four hundred meters, I suppose, from where we lived, had kids in it who were giving us cheek and we threw stones on their tin roof. And we did this once too often,

and a policeman who happened to be coming by called out to us and we all scattered. But this bloke could really run and he ran me down and he threatened to kick my backside till my nose bleeds if I ever did that again. And he caught me doing it again , which we desisted from. That was the way it was done in those days and very effective too.

Yes. Yes. I can remember air races as a kid, and in particular I can remember planes like the Hawker Demon, the biplane,

which you can probably see something like on that photo. And of course we were all very much taken with the England to Australia air race and the, as kids, the aftermath of that.

Logically I should say no, but I don’t believe so. No, I don’t think so. I hadn’t contemplated joining anything before war was declared.

Well I think the main thing, as I said before, is the fact that

I suppose when you are young a lot of other people were doing it. That’s a factor. And a lot of your friends were doing it. But I think the main thing for me was that I liked what we had here in this country and I didn’t want to see it changed, and I felt that was quite a possibility.

Very little. In the nature of things in those days there weren’t a lot of cars around. If you travelled anywhere it was by train. I would say that my travels were limited in the main to the areas in and around

Sydney, and that might have influenced the fact that when I had the opportunity I decided that I would like to go to another country to train.

Well I chose deliberately to go to Canada – that was my choice – and I was offered the choice at the time, so I preferred

that. Yes.

Oh Australia has always been home to me.Yes. Nowhere else. The only other country that I would ever consider living in, and I’ve discussed this in later years with Beryl and she agrees with this,

is Canada, which was the country where I trained on the way to England.

I didn’t know anything about Canada until I got there.

It was a selective high school, and it was a

part of the GPS [Greater Public Schools] system and that probably has some implications because the…and this was a bit unusual at that time, the aim was not simply to educate people with formal learning, but to perhaps educate them with other things as well. I

didn’t think about this while I was going there but I can see that now. And I’m a life member of the Old Boys’ Union there. I feel that I owe the school something even though I didn’t do as much work as perhaps I should have done.

Well,

we all sat for what was called then the QC, Qualifying Certificate which was at the end of sixth class, and sixth class was the final year of primary school, and those who achieved the better marks from all of the schools in the area that the selective high school

served, were offered a place in the selective high school, and that’s what happened to me.

You payed sports fees and don’t ask me what they were, and you also paid fees for the loan of

textbooks and so on. There was also a requirement that you have a uniform suit and a blazer, and everyone had a blazer because that’s where you put the pockets and the fact that you were in the junior A tennis team or whatever. So there was a uniform requirement and those two types of fees.

No. No. It wasn’t a drive. It was a tram ride in those days from Maroubra and you know, I can remember at just about that time the competition that there was between the trams, which were government owned and the buses, which were privately owned. And the buses would

deliberately go to a tram stop, pick up passengers and then race to get to the next tram stop before the tram could get there.They would go that way all the way into town. And in town at Mark Foys in Liverpool Street, the bus conductors would be standing at the front mudguard extolling their wares, saying where they were going to

and by what route. It’s a pity that competition didn’t last.

Collected a few stamps but most kids did that.

No I can’t remember specifically any other hobbies. As I grew older I got to like woodwork. In Maroubra Junction primary school my woodwork teacher was the man who became my father-in-law. This is the one who served in the

trenches in the First World War.

No. I didn’t do any rifle shooting, with the exception that when we were teenagers we were allowed to go and did go down to Minnamurra, and we shot some rabbits and cooked them in the

way that kids did over a campfire alongside our tents, that sort of thing. But apart from that, no shooting.

No I didn’t.

Yes. I can remember seeing the bridge going up, and I can remember

seeing photos of it as it was joining. Quite a marvellous thing to happen.

Well I don’t know about inspiring imagination, but I thought it was quite a wonderful thing the way that they built the bridge from two sides, and then joined it together and then hung

the roadway and railway from that structure.

I’m not aware of that. No.

There was a general awareness of that here,

but only in the few months preceding the war, I think from the time that Chamberlain came back and waved his piece of paper around that said ‘Peace in our time’. There was a, seemed to be, a growing apprehension that we were going to have to fight a war.

Well I shared

that apprehension, I suppose. When war was declared I was just about to leave school. I was sixteen, and I would think that in those few months before the declaration of war there was this apprehension but, I don’t remember anything prior to that.

There was certainly no recognition that from 1933 when they had the Reichstag book-burning era that this was about to precipitate into a world war.

I think the answer to that is probably no, but I was always a great believer in freedom and this translated rather easily into freedom of the individual, not to the extent that you would call it laissez-faire, but certainly there was a

tendency for me to think that the freedom of the individual was the most important thing in the community, and this, I suppose, gravitated towards the thought that rule by governments and states was a less preferable position. So, I suppose that

embryonically, I had a tendency to favour the Liberal side of politics rather than the Labor as I grew up.

Yes.

You were seeing the beginnings of things like…I can remember when I first went to the treasury there was a thing called,

in the state treasury, an ‘unemployment relief fund’. I mean this was designed specifically to provide relief to people who were unemployed at the state level, not the commonwealth, and you did have some of the start of social programs – and please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t say that all these are bad by any means, but

I did believe, I think as I grew up, that individual freedom was the most important thing and that you put other support systems around that concept rather than destroy it for it.

There wasn’t as much outlet then for individual ideas, I think as perhaps there is now. We might have discussed these amongst a few friends.

That would have been the limit of it.

Yes. We did have debating teams but I wasn’t interested enough and perhaps not good enough to get into them, so I didn’t participate in that. I really wasn’t a great participator in either the school or the extra curricular activities at school.

School was a place to me where I was required to go rather than one where I actively set out to take full benefit from. I think that was a wrong view now, but that’s the sort of view that I had.

I don’t know that I had a favourite place

in the city. I didn’t go to cricket or football matches in the city, but that would be mainly because we didn’t have a lot of spare cash to do those sort of things. No I don’t think I had a favourite place in the city. As a kid you mean?

No, I didn’t have a favourite place in the city.

Part of what we did growing up as teenagers was to…there were a number of groups of family and they would have the kids around on a Sunday afternoon and generally there would be a sing song around the piano and a few kissing games and that kind of thing.

It was at a friend’s place when we heard that war had been declared, at one of these evenings, and I can remember this particular friend had a favourite song, “When the

terrible war breaks out what will we do? We’ll be down to the wharf to see them off.” and all this sort of stuff, and we were actually singing this ditty not realising in a fit what was likely to happen to the people who went to the war from overseas and so on, and I can remember

this kid’s parents were teary-eyed because here we were as sixteen year olds, thinking that war was a great adventure sort of thing. This friend’s father had also been in Flanders in the First World War and he knew what it was really all about. Thinking back later on that was quite

a thing for us to do, unknowingly, unwittingly, to stir them up.

They disguised their reaction but they obviously were teary-eyed when we were singing this way.

Yes. Yes.

She was probably teary-eyed too.

Yes. Yes, we had. We were just school kids, you know, and I was in my final year at high school and she was in the intermediate year.

No, but everyone else seemed to think it.

Well I was more concerned with…I mean war wasn’t a possibility for me personally.

I was sixteen, and I was more concerned with finishing school and getting a job and putting a bit of bread on the table at that stage than I was about the war, and I didn’t really think about it until I got to be eighteen and the war was still going, and it was then that I thought I should

do something about it.

Japan wasn’t quite in at the time that I actually enlisted in the air force and was put on the air force reserve. It was just before December ’41 that I did that.

Better than walking, but

the navy, sea going things, I hadn’t thought about at all. Probably a certain glamour about the air force I suppose. Everybody who goes into the air force sees themselves as flying planes in some way or another, whereas of course the reverse is true. Nine-tenths or more of the air force are people

who never get near an aeroplane. Yeah, I think that preferring to be carried rather than walk was probably the critical thing.

Yes I liked walking, but

you see, to whatever extent you had contact with the older people from the First World War, it was quite obvious that the majority of them were Infantry and, the stories…to the extent that they did tell stories – and they were rather secretive about it – but to the extent to which you did hear them talk, they talked about the mud and slush of Flanders and so on,

which made the Infantry and so on appeal much less.

My father-in-law,

and the father of my best friend at that stage. They were both in Flanders, and the

fellow who became my stepfather. He was on Gallipoli and they all talked in similar terms.

No. You just absorbed casual remarks when they might be together, you know, to hear them talking.

No.

It didn’t make an impression on me. I wasn’t…I wasn’t consciously thinking about it.

Well I didn’t go to Anzac Day ceremonies for many years after I came back from the war. I suppose that we were busy doing other things, building a house, raising a family and so on, and I suppose it wouldn’t be earlier than maybe the 1970’s

that I would have attended an Anzac Day service. But then I became interested in the 460 Association. I’ve been treasurer of it at one stage and I’ve been on the committee of it for the last fifteen years or something like that, and I write the bulletin and so I’ve become more interested in Anzac Day, more

aware of what it means and so on.

Possibly so, yes. Probably so. One knew of course about that ANZAC tradition from

the kind of Empire days and the other sort of things that went on as a kid. It’s just that I didn’t attach it to myself, as such, before I came back after the war.

I worked for the Dunlop Rubber Company. That was the first full-time job, but while I was going to school, lots of kids did this sort of thing in those days. I worked for the last three or four years I was at school, just

for two or three weeks in the Christmas Holidays at Wynns, which was a retailer in Oxford Street, and I became quite expert in selling singlets and underpants and socks, which was the department that I was allocated to.

Well

you’d be surprised at the number of people who come into a shop and really don’t know what they want. There are underpants and underpants, and singlets and singlets, and Wynns sold a range from the very heavy fleecy- lined singlet type of thing that you’d use in wintertime, to the athletic type of singlet in summer time.

I was just joking when I said I became an expert in it, but at Dunlop Rubber Company I was attached to the credit department. It was a department of two people and our job was to pass credits to accounts for the return of goods generally, or for

damages and that sort of thing. We also dealt with rebates and these rebates, at that time, were considerable. I can remember one rebate to a company that had better not be mentioned, for tyres was less twenty per cent, less seven and a half per cent, less two and a half. So we would pass these rebates to the

their account, you know, every so often.

Not just at a desk because if there was a question that needed to be resolved you had to go to the individual department, whether it was the belting department or the tyre department or the shoe department, and talk to someone and say, “Should we give them this credit?

Did they actually return them?” and so on.

Oh I’ve always been fairly confident and I was confident then.

Where it was? It was in Wentworth Avenue, at the bottom of

Wentworth Avenue where it joins Goulburn Street. The company had just taken over Barnett Glass, which was a maker of tennis balls and shoes and so on. Subsequently it involved Slazengers. This is after I left. It was in sort of takeover mode but its difficulty as a company

was that so much was dependent upon the motor car industry through its tyre manufacturing department out at Drummoyne.

Oh masses of paper. That’s the impression that you would get. You were really paper shufflers. All of the

invoices or copies of invoices that were given to people you supplied were kept in paperback folders. There were rows and rows of these things all over the place, so the overbearing impression was of masses of paper compared to what you would see now.

Good.

Yes. It changes you in two or three ways. One is that you were successful in getting the job first of all, because you have to front somebody and you have to extol a few of your own virtues, although there wasn’t that

much to do with that. It was mainly on the basis of a school report in those days. If you had a good report from the school that you had last been at, and you presented this together with a couple of character references from somebody like a reverend or a school headmaster, that was the way in which you received an entry into a very brief interview and were hired.

That’s what happened to me.

Yes. Oh well I was earning the princely sum of thirty-five shillings a week when I was first employed, so it did change the status I suppose.

Well I handed over most of that to my mother, and

so there wasn’t very much change in that. I had enough money to buy clothes and perhaps the odd other thing, to go to the pictures once a week and buy an ice cream, that sort of thing. Pretty simple pleasures really.

Well I’ve already described the

Saturday night dance and the hikes that we had on the Sunday, and they would be the two main centres of it.

I was only at Dunlop Rubber for about nine months before I went into the public service, and no,

I can’t say that I made a lot of friends in Dunlop Rubber. No.

Yes. That was at the State Treasury and I was initially the boy who licked the stamps, and I gravitated from that to a job where I did clerical work in the

accounting sort of atmosphere. I actually joined the Treasury in October 1940, and in February 1942 I was in the army.

Yes, and there were so many doing

that, that they had what they called retreads, which means that they brought back people who had retired and gave them jobs so they could release younger men to go to the war. But amongst the accounts branch in the Treasury where I was, I suppose that by war’s end half of the total number who were in that branch were in the services.

There were no women who actually joined the services from the branch, and their role didn’t change much, no.

No. I can’t remember one single instance of that happening. The women were machine operators, typists,

that sort of thing, before the war started, and they remained that during the war years.

Yes. That was where I was medically examined.

To join the air force?

I didn’t take it lightly but I didn’t take it over-seriously either, so it is a combination of both. I think that if you were to understand the attitude of people at the time, lots of people were joining some sort of services and as I said before I thought that we had a way of life that was worthwhile preserving,

and those two things would have been the greatest contributors. But a funny thing happened while I was down at Woolloomooloo receiving my medical examination. You were there for the whole day and a number of different doctors test different things, eyesight and so on, and one of these fellows when he checked my heart, he had heard a murmur, which I understand is described as

a functional murmur, and he had made me jump around for a while and then listened again, and he commented on it but was satisfied that everything was normal. Finally after you have been to all of these people you have to go to the head doctor for the final examination. And he, of course, knew that he had to check this particular murmur and give the OK to it. So

when I went into his room he said, “OK, take off all your clothes,” and I’m standing there with nothing on, and there is a bang outside. And he rushed to the window and he said, “Oh what a bloody waste.” “What is it?” And he said, “That Brewery wagon was just coming down the hill, and it took the corner, but the beer casks on the top of it didn’t.”

And he said, “That’s all over the road. A waste of beautiful beer.” Anyway, I passed the medical exam.

No I didn’t know anyone.

Yes. I had to discuss it with my mother

because I was less than twenty-one.

She didn’t want me to go but she finally said, “Well if you want to go I’ll sign the paper.”

Not as much as I thought I would. No, it was…There was a certain reluctance there. Yes.

Yes. That’s right.

It involved going to classes, which were held, particularly on Morse. There were people, and I can’t remember what they were called, who held these classes and it was quite common for the aircrew

reservists to go in and have Morse lessons. And that’s where I learned to use a Morse key and to understand the code and so on,, but apart from that there was no duty required from the air force’s point of view.

Yes, but none of them, I think, were in the same

initial training course as I turned out to be in.

Oh very keen. There was…I didn’t do this, but the reservists were, some of them, were given kind of refresher courses in things like mathematics and

that sort of thing. A number of people who were accepted as aircrew had left high school before the intermediate certificate so their school education was limited, and they needed to be brought up to a slightly higher standard. I didn’t need that, but I did do the Morse code courses.

It was a feeling of being let down a bit I suppose but no, we were happy to wait, because everybody else was waiting. Obviously the number of recruits that they were getting exceeded the intake that they were capable of managing.

I hadn’t thought about being a pilot. I wanted to fly and if that involved being a pilot, well yes, and if that involved being something else that was all right too, as far as I was concerned.

Oh ninety plus per cent of them would have wanted to be pilots.

Yes. Yes, I think the competition…I would say to that the answer to that is yes, the competition was stiff.

It didn’t worry me at all. Nor, I think, did it worry the people who were rejected for pilot training. The simple test for pilot training at that stage, as far as I’m aware, was a

coordination test where you had a joystick and you were required to follow a particular pattern with a red light, sort of thing. I think you have to understand that the number of people they had meant that they didn’t have to be too picky and choosy about who became what, sort of thing, but you’re right in saying that most people would’ve

had a definite preference to be a pilot. I didn’t have that and, strangely enough, the two friends who I’ve had for the last fifty or sixty years who served on the squadron, they didn’t have that preference either.

Unusual, yeah. I believe so.

Yes. Yes.

What I remember of it…I think there was on a screen a light and you had to follow that light with the movement of the joystick, but I really don’t have a great recollection of it. I don’t seem to have been

interested very much in what the result of that test was, looking back.

No, no, I was in the army.

From February to July, ’42, and I was

actually called up from the army, as it were. That’s when my time on the reserve finished.

Well I knew that ultimately I was going to be in the air force, and I had decided that I might as well go into

the army, for a little while anyway, and I enjoyed my time in the army, despite the rougher conditions in some way. I have recollections when we were out on bivouac, of sleeping under a truck and being very thankful for the fact that I was in the artillery so we had

trucks to sleep under and we had groundsheets to put on the ground. And I can remember getting up the next morning and it’s pouring rain and people are shaving in the rain. And as we went to get our mess tins filled for breakfast, we would keep our hand over the tin, hold it out quickly and pull it back but it was still half full of water and you know, the scrambled eggs and water

didn’t go down too well.

It was at Liverpool initially, Woollgrove, and then we were camped on Pymble Golf Course when I finally left the army.

No.

No. They were still

a domestic unit, and it looked as though the sort of thing they might be given was to go to North Head or somewhere like that.

No the Japanese were not yet in it. We are now in July, ’42. Oh yes. They were in, I’m sorry, yes.

Well the first thing that I had to do was to get the initial training and then go from there, but I was conscious of the fact that it was going to take some months training anyway, so I wasn’t yet itching to get over.

No. The training in Canada was interesting because it was all new, dropping bombs, firing guns, photography, navigation, and then of course the subsequent training, the pre-operational training in England,

that was the real war because a number of our planes were shot down during training. I don’t know whether you are aware that the bomber command losses were about forty-four per cent, the casualty ratio. Five of the forty-four were lost in training. Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the present head of the air force said

recently, that had the Australian air force training casualty rate the same as ours in Bomber Command, public opinion would have shut down our air force completely. In other words, that training loss rate would now, today, be absolutely unsustainable,

unacceptable.

No, no. That was the casualty rate over all.

Well there are two others. One was an unfortunate one where

two friends whom I didn’t know very well were on guard duty and they were horsing around. And one fellow said, you know, he raised his rifle and was pretending to shoot the other, and put his hand on the trigger and shot him. And that was an unfortunate experience. But the other one, which is

humorous in some way, we had been on a shoot out at the Liverpool range, and when we came back from this shoot it was the night that the Japanese subs were in Sydney Harbour, and so there was a great hustle and bustle to hitch the guns and carriages up, and we are headed for North Head

so we can join in the warfare, and somebody suddenly said, “Well, what about ammunition? Haven’t we shot off all of our ammunition earlier today?” And of course we had, so the order came down, “Well just unhitch the guns boys and go to bed.”

No. I think it was significant in that two small subs could get into the harbour, but it wasn’t frightening because of the actual result of it. It could have been a United States cruiser that was sunk rather than a ferryboat.

Oh yes.

Well it changed them in the sense that, I know from what Beryl has told me, that there were a number of people who lived in the Maroubra Bay area who sold their houses for a song sort of thing

in order to move out and go somewhere away from the big smoke. A friend of hers was canny enough to buy one of those houses for a song and benefited greatly with her husband later on, after the war finished. So it did change attitudes.

To me personally, no. I mean I wasn’t destined to be in the CMF 9th Field Regiment. What I was going to do was in the air force.

Well the first repercussion of course was a typical reaction. The order came down that guards were not to have anything up the spout while they were on guard duty, which is the wrong reaction. A guard that’s not armed is not a guard sort of

thing. But the second reaction, I think, was to make everyone more careful. It wasn’t a game any longer. You had to be careful when you were handling weapons.

It was, as far as I know, hushed up.

I didn’t know them really well at all.

No. There was no service to which people in the unit were involved at all.

I think if the alternative is that if you don’t fire the weapons somebody else is going to kill you, that focuses your mind quite a deal on what your attitude should be. War is a terrible thing in all of its

manifestations, but once you are in a war the only way to fight it is to win it. And probably the only way to win it is to win it as quickly as you can. You’ve seen a good example of what you shouldn’t do in a war with Vietnam to a point, but that kind of engagement where you are fighting,

or one side is fighting a bit with it’s hands tied behind it’s back. You see the opposite, an example of what I am saying in the latest war in Iraq, where the only way to fight it is to win it quickly.

Oh it’s a similar training. First of all, I learned to fire a rifle and so on, but the 9th Field Regiment was an artillery unit and so

our real weapon, apart from guarding things, was the twenty-five pounder artillery piece. But later on I fired weapons including revolvers and Browning machine guns, which was the .303 that was used in the aircraft. There’s no basic

difference between that and firing a rifle.

The idea of a weapon is to destroy something and I think that anybody who uses a weapon and doesn’t understand that

is astray. So there’s no basic difference in what the weapon is for as between a machine gun and a bomb, whether the bomb is a high explosive bomb, or an incendiary, or even an atomic bomb.

Certainly in the air force you are not as close to the individuals that you are hurting, and your main attack is not against an individual but against

a target. The target might involve nearby individuals but it is the target that you are aiming to destroy. It’s the ball bearing factory or the engineering works or whatever it is that you are attacking rather than the person. So it’s less personal than the unarmed combat or the one-to-one

combat.

No, I didn’t. Looking back on it now of course it was obvious

that where I would end up was in bomber command, but that didn’t impinge itself, that didn’t impress me. I didn’t think about it that way at all while I was training. I was training to drop bombs and I didn’t think much about the sort of planes that I would be using. Of course those aircraft were changing quite dramatically.

Out in this sector people were not made simply to drop bombs, they did other things, and I was trained to do other things besides dropping bombs too, but that’s what I ended up doing.

No. You were in a pool

to…you were in an aircrew pool initially. As LACs [Leading Aircraftsmen], all that you were was you wanted to be a part of the aircrew. Then at the end of the initial training school some were categorised as pilots, some as observers, some as wireless operators,

and they were sent to special schools either here or in Canada, and I was one that went to Canada and then …

I looked in my log book today. I was categorised as an air bomb navigation, which was the

old observer, so called, and the wing that I received was actually an A wing, not an air bomber’s wing.

Yes, after the initial ITS, the Initial Training School at Bradfield Park.

We were offered choices as to whether we wanted to train in Australia or train in Canada, and that happened to all categories of aircrew. Some pilots went to Canada, some wireless operators went to Canada, but observers, a lot of them, went to schools in Australia.

I suppose the main impression I had was that we had won the battle of Britain, but probably also that we were losing the rest of the air war over Europe. We had

heard good reports about the Coastal Command – 10 Squadron and so on was the Australian squadron there – but relatively little was known of Bomber Command except when we got to various schools in Canada, and there the instructors were generally people who had served in Bomber Command, and they were able to

tell you certainly something more about what happened, but they never did tell you, while you were training, about the very severe losses that were being suffered in Bomber Command.

Oh I don’t think that in Australia very much was known about what was going on over there anyway.

I don’t know how much news came back to Australia about those, but I gather from talking to people now, that their main concentration, naturally enough, was on the war in the Pacific, not the war in Europe, and so relatively

little was known about what was happening over there I think.

Yes. When you got to the Advance Flying Unit

or to OTU. The Germans were sending in Messerschmitt 110s and they would shoot a certain number of the people down who were training like we were training, so that became known, and it started to look as though the losses were going to be pretty high in Bomber Command at that stage.

Oh I understood what was involved. That was explained to me.

No I think I was volunteered. It was “You, you and you.”

But I understood what it was about. I suppose in a sense it wasn’t all bad news because whilst we were in the university every day and being made deliberately sick, which wasn’t very pleasant, the flipside of that was that we were able to

get home at night, and of course there was Beryl waiting for me at home, so it wasn’t all bad news. But the general idea was that they wanted to test to see just how much the normal person could bear of being thrown around in aircraft and so on. And the way they did this was to put us in swings of different types,

some sitting up and some we were lying in a bed that was in the form of a swing. We would be swung in musty cellars virtually until we became sick, and from that they deduced certain things. As well as that they did things like putting electrodes on various parts of the head

to make judgments about what the brain pattern might be before and after and all those kind of things. I don’t know what the result of all these experiments are or whether it led to anything at all, but it was done and I was a part of it.

I can’t remember. I think it was called simply ‘Air Sickness’, but

I can’t remember.

Six weeks.

Yes, it was run by a group of doctors but they were civilian doctors.

There were about three of us, as I recollect.

Well, I was considerably chuffed by the whole experience, because it was hard for them to make me sick, and on most days I didn’t reach the point of vomiting. So I thought, “Well this bodes well for when I get

tossed around in an aircraft.” And so it’s proved – I’ve never been sick in an aircraft, and I’ve flown on some days in Canada where there was a very severe temperature inversion where the plane, an Anson trainer flying straight and level, would be going up and down at the rate of about four thousand feet a minute, and

I was one of the few who was not sick. So it was of some benefit to me.

No. No. They did not discuss the experiments at all. We were simple guinea pigs. We were the bodies that they were experimenting on,

but they didn’t discuss the experiments or their findings. The only remark that was made to me was when one of these tests with wires attached to different parts of your body was being conducted, the doctor said, “Has anyone in your family had epilepsy?” I said, “No. Why?” And he said, “Oh, it just looks

like that sort of brain pattern.” As is transpires one of my granddaughters is an epileptic and I’ve told her about this and as far as I know there is no epilepsy, but that was the only remark that was made to me which was in the way of informing me what the thing was all about.

I didn’t feel too badly at all. No, I just didn’t feel too badly at all. I wasn’t disrupted or, you know, I wasn’t staggering around or anything.

Oh there was one fellow

who seemed to be affected more than the other two of us. He was able to last for six weeks so he couldn’t have been too badly off.

Special dispensation?

Well as I say the general arrangement was that if you went and did the experiments by day then you could go

home at night, and that was leave virtually. So that was dispensation. Yeah.

No.

A Jopack?

No, no, no. Air bomber navigation. No, I was trained as an observer, but that was later on. I had to sit and make model aeroplanes first of all, out of balsa.

Oh no. I think it was just…I think that this particular experiment was so because they wanted three bodies to work on, and of course after the six weeks they were finished with us. When we went back to Bradfield Park we were in the middle of another course so that

some time would need to elapse before they could put us back into the main stream, and in my case they took up six weeks of that time by getting me to carve model aeroplanes.

Yeah.

As part of the

initial training course a part of that was aircraft recognition, and you can understand you need to know the difference between a friendly and an enemy aircraft, and so they had models of these aircraft, of various sizes to indicate the distance you were away from it, in a room, and you

would look around and recognise them, and say, “Well that’s a Zero and this is a Spitfire,” or whatever. Apparently they were running short on models so they needed a few more.

I can’t remember now. I can’t remember.

But you see, new types of aircraft were being

introduced to each of the theatres of war on a fairly consistent basis, so there would be a need to update the sorts of aircraft that were being recognised.

I can’t remember anyone else but me, but there might have been somebody else. I can’t remember it.

Well I suppose I was silly enough to…When somebody said, “You’re right in the middle of a course. We’ve got to find something for you to do. How are you on making things with wood?” I said, “Oh well, not bad,” or some response like that, and that led to me being put into that.

Japan was still a long way off at that point in the war. I don’t…I can’t remember when the fall of Singapore was, but I think that that’s about the time that

we seemed to become conscious that things could be pretty rough out in the Pacific area.

No I don’t.

During the…

Well then I went to Canada and to Paulson Manitoba.

No, nothing else in Australia.

Oh it was

towards the end of 1942, but the way in which you received the word that you were going, first of all you were transferred to what they called 2ED. Two stands for New South Wales and ED stands for Embarkation Depot. Once you were transferred to 2ED then – this was still at

Bradfield Park - you knew that you were destined to go overseas, and of course there was a clamp down on communications outside and all that sort of stuff. So that’s how you got to know that you were going overseas.

She knew that I had expressed a preference to train in Canada, so it was just a question

of when I was transferred to 2ED and would go, not if sort of thing.

No.

I guess she didn’t like it but that was a part of the war. Yeah.

At that stage, no.

No. He hadn’t joined at that stage. He is eighteen months younger than me, so he

subsequently joined.

Departure from Australia….Well I guess we were trucked down to

Woolloomooloo and put on a ship which we subsequently found out was the Mauritania, and that was about it. We then put into Wellington, New Zealand, for three or four days to freshen up supplies and so on so that we had leave in Wellington, and

then we set sail across the Pacific, and there was some threat of a submarine attack so that we put into Pearl Harbour while that quietened down.

No.

Because it wasn’t a

public war. I mean the idea was that you don’t tell anyone what’s happening. There were people there when you came back but not when you left, and it was the same with every other embarkation, from Halifax to Britain and so on. There were no people to see them off as it were.

No,

but we were able to say beforehand, “This is what’s going to happen. I just don’t know when it’s going to happen. I’m going to Canada.” And once we got to Canada, of course, then you could let them know.

It was only a matter of days, a very short period.

How was I feeling? I suppose in a sense I was feeling a bit of relief that at last I was on track to get to where I wanted to be, because I’d had the

diversion of the other things happening. But there was not exactly jubilation but certainly a degree of confidence about the whole ship. We’re going to do something now that really matters.

Yes.

One of these two mates was in his youth a bit of an amateur boxer, and we were talking about something one day and he mentioned something about boxing so I said, “I’ve never done any. I’d like to do some boxing.” So he said, “We’ll see if we

can get some boxing gloves.” So we got a couple of pairs of boxing gloves and he started to teach me how to throw a punch and so on, and we were doing this on the back of the ship, close to which was a compound, a barbed wire compound which contained German prisoners. And these fellows were highly amused at seeing the two of us sort of

pummelling into one another. So that’s one thing I remember about it.

This was on the Mauritania.

These major ships go from port to port all over the world during the war. I don’t know where they picked them up but they were German, they were prisoners and they were going somewhere. Whether they were headed back or…

I don’t know.

No. no. no. They were German soldiers. And you know, until you asked that question the thought never occurred to me to ask myself what they were doing there. It’s quite conceivable though that the…Did we have a Middle East

then? I don’t know. Yes, we did probably have a war in the Middle East. They could have been picked up there on the way out to Australia and then be destined for some concentration camp. There were concentration camps, of course, in Britain, and maybe the Mauritania was ultimately headed for that.

Bert Uren,

and Bert’s still alive. Bert was a…He was regarded as an old man amongst us at the time, because Bert, when he was operating on the squadron he would have been all of twenty-five, twenty-six. I turned twenty-one during the tour of operations on the squadron. So Bert’s now eighty-five or eighty-six,

but he’s still going strong after having had open heart surgery.

Well he was Leo Armstrong. Leo was a navigator on 460. He was in the crew which did the last three trips on G for George, which is the Lancaster aircraft in the Australian War Memorial.

Leo was, for over ten years, the chairman of the Panthers Leagues Club and is still on the board of that club. He’s still going strong too.

No, I didn’t know them prior to joining up. We really met on the boat going over to Canada,

and then once we got to Canada we each went….I went to a different station. They both went to Portage La Prairie, and then Bert was hospitalised for an operation, so that Leo got ahead of him, as it were. Leo reached the squadron in about April,

1944, Bert reached it in June, ’44 and I reached it in June, ’44.

Well the food was crook, and we were…

there were ten of us in a cabin which was used by two people in peacetime, so it was a bit crowded. The whole boat wasn’t crowded but this was the way that troop ships were set up then. For instance on the Aquitania, going from Canada to Britain, there were amongst other things, there were a lot

air crew on it but amongst other things there were twenty-thousand American troops on it, and on that ship we used to eat in shifts, two meals a day, and you might have breakfast at midnight or you might have lunch at three o’clock in the morning. There were bunks, one on top of the other, close enough so that if

you rolled over in bed at night your hip might just clear the bunk above you. You had to sleep with your kit bag on your bed, because you couldn’t put it on the deck because the crew would be up at three o’clock in the morning sluicing down the decks, and your kit bag would go with it. So it was a bit cramped, but

yeah, and the food was not too hot.

Cattle you mean.

Oh yes. I can remember us sniggering quite a bit when it was announced that a Royal Navy Tombola will now be played on the

main deck. The Royal Navy Tombola turned out to be as one fellow said, “Bloody housie.” Well there were those sort of simple things to keep us going, I suppose.

I can’t remember two-up being on the boat, but there were

certainly Crown and Anchor boards on the boat and I played that, yes.

It’s a game which you use with dice and you bet on whether the thing that comes up will be black or red or will be a particular number.

No, but I didn’t lose any either.

How did I find the….

Well it’s certainly not like a cruise, not like a luxury cruise by any means. I didn’t

mind it. Most people didn’t mind it, but that was the way that everything was transported then. If you wanted to move things from one place to another it was by boat.

Yes. We had about three days in Wellington where we were on leave. I’ve got a photo incidentally if you are interested, of Leo and myself in Wellington.

But, you know, we had three days just to look around and sample the beer and that sort of thing.

You must understand that I was not a great judge of beer because I virtually hadn’t drunk and hadn’t smoked in my life, until I got into the air force.

So I don’t know how I’d judge it but we drank it anyway.

Yes, oh yes. I think all travel is exciting the first time or two that you do it. It gets to be a bit mundane after that.

Yes, I think so. I think you’re right. Yeah. There were a small number of New Zealanders that joined us there. Air force.

Well, we knew we were destined for Canada, but no, we didn’t know where we were going.

It turned out to be San Francisco that we made the land for, and we went up by train from San Francisco to Vancouver, and then across by Canadian train to Edmonton, which was Alberta in the middle of Canada.

No I didn’t. It wasn’t a rough

trip. There wasn’t anything particular about the trip that would have induced you to be seasick.

Yes, yes it was, and to see battleships upside down, which was literally the case, and the destruction which had been done from the air. It was really

quite a surprise to me.

Well, I think the ship was called the Arizona, the battle ship I’m referring to, but if you can just imagine this huge, huge thing and literally all that you can see is the bottom of it. The rest is buried somewhere in the mud, and

that was the outstanding impression that I had as we looked at the scene, and around the wharf area, damage and a lot of minor ships beaten up, but outstandingly the battle ship with its bottom skywards was the thing that I remember.

That would be right, yes,

the first time I saw the results of actually the enemy doing something.

Well I suppose it made me feel glad that I was going to join the air force because if the Japs could do it I suppose that we could too. But it certainly brings home to you, you know, the

terrific destruction that you can get in a war, and quickly.

I didn’t think too much about that because it wasn’t a question of whether how you felt could make a difference. It was simply a question of, I suppose, going where you were sent,

and it always seemed to me that there is a similarity between the sort of thing you are razing and a fire. I mean, if there is a fire in the next street do you go and fight the fire there or do you sit on your backside and wait until the fire, perhaps more fiercely, gets to you and then fight it? So

it was not going to make any difference what I thought about it, but what little I did think I thought it was better to go and fight the fire, and I saw the main fire as being in Europe, not coming from Japan at that stage.

No. Well, I think the things in my mind have always been rather separate, and I don’t believe that there’s been a full appreciation, on either part, of what happened in the other area. I feel this very much in our case that,

for instance, in Great Britain during the war there were seventy thousand civilians killed. I don’t think that people here who talk about being subject to a few bomb attacks on Darwin and somebody shelling Newcastle and a submarine in Sydney Harbour, those people who talk about being at war,

and a number of them have talked to me about Australia being at war, realise what it really amounts to when a country is at war, and I just use Britain as an example but even better examples are places like Russia, you know, where twenty-five million people were killed in the Second World War. I don’t think that there’s either an appreciation

of, people like myself, of what went on here after I left the country. I don’t really know. I don’t know what kind of rationing happened or that sort of thing. So I think there’s an insufficient appreciation on both sides.

Oh yes.

I suppose the single impression I had was that as the ship was going under the Golden Gate Bridge we were all looking up, thinking that the masts were going to hit the bridge. It had that sort of visual error about it, but we didn’t see anything of San Francisco. We were bundled straight off the ship and

onto a train, and it’s only in later years that Beryl and I have seen a bit of San Francisco and so on, but San Francisco, that was the initial impression of the bridge, and will our top mast hit it sort of thing.

Going up the coast you go through some beautiful timbered woodlands. I mean, you know, the softwoods and that in that western part of the United States are something to see, tall trees growing with

their butts three or four feet apart, for miles and miles. By the time we got to Vancouver I suppose the impression that was starting to come to us was that we had left Australia in summertime in December, and we were going to

Canada in the opposite sort of wintertime, and when we arrived at Edmonton, actually the temperature was fifty-four degrees below zero F, which is eighty-six degrees below freezing. And to get up the next morning and walk to the Mess hut, you literally had to keep on blinking your eyes

so that the water in your eyes wouldn’t freeze. They’re the sort of initial impressions that I had.

No. We had summer underwear, but the saving grace in Canada against the cold is that everything is heated. The shops are heated, the buses are heated and the huts in which we

slept were heated. The huts in which we messed were all heated, and generally heated to a great extent.

Yes. Air bomber, navigation.

Well, the first part of what we did was bombing and gunnery, so that means you learn about what bombs are made of and how they are activated. You learn how to drop them onto a target and as far as the gunnery is concerned, you learn about the

Browning 303 specifically, and its rate of fire and how to strip it down and put it together again, and then of course, most importantly, how to fire the thing at a drogue, which is tied behind a plane. We were lucky when we got to

Paulson, that they were in the process of shortening the course from a three month course to a two month course, and so they had to make adjustments for the new course, and they said to us, “You have to do

the three month course, but if you can do it in two months we’ll give you a month’s leave.” So we said yes and there wasn’t too much going out or what not for the two months because we were trying to cram three into two, but then we had a month’s leave and most used it to

go down into the United States, and then with five other fellows I did that too. We went down to Detroit, to Minneapolis, and to Chicago, and I have to say that the generosity of the Americans towards

us foreign troops, let’s say, had to be seen to be believed. On a number of occasions, we would go into a restaurant, the six of us, and sit down and have something to eat and then go to pay the cashier, and she’d say, “That gentleman sitting three feet from you would like

to, would like…”

Paulson.

Paulson was an air force station with a small town attached to it. I would guess that

the population of Paulson might be a couple of thousand people or something like that, and about the only entertainment in the town was a bowling alley, so we did a little bit of that.

At Edmonton, which is the place we arrived at, and we were there for a couple of weeks before they decided to which stations we were all going to be sent, we did have leave there on a six-hourly basis or something from the station, and I can remember being in town one time

and a lady, a stranger, approached the bloke I was with and said, “Tell your friend to cover up his ears.” He said, “Why?” And she said, “Because one of his ears is frostbitten.” And apparently my ear turned white for a particular part of it, and to this day when

there’s a cold snap coming I can feel it in my ear, sort of thing. So we did have some contact with the locals, yeah. And of course the people on the station were Canadians and so we were able to make some friends there.

Well, it didn’t appear so at the time.

I covered the ear up and I’ve never done anything about it since then, but it just seems to register a cold snap to me now.

Oh, we generally liked them. I think they are very much like us in their attitudes, different accent and so on, but no,

and I haven’t changed my mind about the Canadians since then. Beryl and I have been back to Canada two or three times, and we’ve always enjoyed being there.

They were Canadians. It was virtually a Canadian station so that all of the instructors were

Canadians and in fact, after we left the bombing and gunnery school and went on to navigation, most of the people in the courses were Canadians. At the bombing and gunnery school though we had a whole course of Australians, and I don’t know whether that’s

unusual or not but the whole course were Australians. There were about twenty-five of us, and we were the twenty-five who were offered the option of finishing the course in two months rather than three and getting a month’s leave.

Yes. Bombing and gunnery. And so during that month the group scattered all over the place and the six of us went together,

and we enjoyed our time, a month virtually in the Northern United States.

Oh, by contrast to conditions in Great Britain they were very good. There was plenty of food,

the right sort of food, juices and all this sort of stuff, and the barracks themselves were two-tiered beds but not overcrowded. The conditions for training were very good in Canada.

Well the particular one I remember had served in Bomber Command –

and I’m talking now about the bombing and gunnery school – he was our, if I can call it that – I don’t know what his title was, but he was virtually our class teacher, as it were. We had other people to take us on specific aspects of, for instance, taking machineguns apart and putting them together again. But he took us for the main

lectures, which would be on bombs and bomb types and the theory of bombing and so on, and the bomb site. Those sorts of things he took us for. He was a great instructor, and he did tell us a little about what we could expect as we got further up the chain.

There was discipline, and there were pranks that the Canadians didn’t appreciate, like raising a pair of women’s scanties up the flagpole, because the two

Australians who did it actually had a thing about saluting the flag in Canada on their stations. The practice is that every time you pass the flagpole you salute the flag, and Australians don’t like saluting anyway and these two blokes didn’t like ‘just saluting a bloody flag’, as they said. So they took the flag down one night and hoisted a pair

of women’s pants on the thing and there it was in all its glory when the Canadians got up the next morning, and they didn’t really appreciate that.

They were never found.

Yes, but not closed in the sense

that it was one against the other sort of thing. We got on well with the Canadians. You’d have to say that.

Well, the

introduction to bombs wasn’t quite as dramatic as the introduction that I had to artillery shells in the army, and there we had a lecture given to us by a Warrant Officer and he explained the components of a shell, which he’s got in front of him, and he talked

about the detonator going off and so on, and he said that you don’t really have to worry because the mechanism for exposing the detonator to the striking pin in the head of a shell is the rotation of the shell given by the rifling in the twenty-five pounder.

And he said, “No rotation, no exposure.” With that he picked up the shell, and he threw it on its detonating nose into the floor, and of course it went straight through the wooden floor and no explosion. The introduction to bombs wasn’t quite as dramatic as that, but they talked

about the type of filling that’s in bombs, the Amatol and Baratol and those sorts of things, about what makes a bomb burst, the action of the striker on the percussion cap or whatever it is that you used in it, and they talked a lot about bomb trajectories and terminal speeds of

bombs and other things which are thrown out of aeroplanes, and that’s the type of theoretical discussion that you get. The main thing of course is to get up in the air, and initially someone might go with a group of you, but after that normally five or six people would go up with a pilot and

drop their bombs at targets. The targets were comprised of latticework layers in a pyramid, and some distance from the pyramid there’d be two observation points with a fellow in each, and when the bomb burst – and these were smoke bombs, the practice bombs –

when the bomb burst each would take a bearing on the smoke, and this would be plotted and they would tell you when you come back where you actually dropped the bomb, in relation to the target.

It’s made up of a casing first of all,

and the casing normally has grooves cut in it so that when the bomb does burst these things will shatter and go over the place. Its main component is the explosive, which used to be things like TNT but are now these Amatol and Baratol explosives. They’re mainly ammonium

nitrate in some form, and that’s an unstable mixture which, when a match is applied to it, as it were, will explode. The match to do the explosion is normally some type of percussion cap which flames on a striker piercing it.

The striker is held from piercing it by normally a plate or a fork, and once that fork or plate is removed then the whole action can commence. The plate removal can be either, in the case of an artillery shell, the circular motion, or in the case of the bombs that we used in practice

and the bombs that we used in operations, it can be the withdrawal of the tuning fork as it’s called, which is a device that looks like that and holds the detonator from impacting against the cap, and that tuning fork for each of the thousand pound, five hundred pound, two fifty

pound bombs, is held up by a magnetised arrangement until you’re ready to drop the bombs, and if you fuse the bombs, as they term it, then you activate the magnetism which will hold that tuning fork when the bomb drops, so that the detonator can then, as soon as the bomb hits something, can

move against the cap. And that’s, in simplified form, the way the bomb works. That applies to a normal bomb with a tail trajectory, like a two fifty pounder, a seven pounder, a five hundred pounder, a thousand pounder. With the cookie that we used on the squadron, the four thousand pounder, that’s made just like a cylindrical drum,

and it has detonators set into it, about six of them, on the end and around the sides. It tumbles down just like a cylindrical thing would, and then when it hits, one of these detonators is bound to activate it. That’s the dangerous one because there’s no tuning fork to hold the detonator back, and

so if you are loading up a four thousand pound bomb and you drop it, it could go up.

Different again is the incendiary which were packed in canisters, usually a hundred and fifty in a canister. An incendiary was about that long and was octagonal of about that diameter. Each of them was packed

so that there was a spring in the side of it holding the detonator back, and when the canister bars were released and these things came apart, the springs disappeared and it was ready to detonate.

Phosphorous.

Yeah.

The bombs have a different trajectory and when you practise bombing they are all the same bomb. They are a seven-pound practice bomb with a tail on them

and a set trajectory so that you know what that trajectory is, and you know at what point you release the bomb to hit the target. When you get further on with a variety of bombs, say five hundred pounders, the cookie and the incendiary, which all have a different trajectory, if you want to drop them on the same spot then you’ve got to drop them in a different order. Maybe you release

the incendiaries first, then the cookie and then the others, and you can do this so that the others arrive first, the cookie second and the incendiaries last.

Not very precise..I don’t know what the average sort of margin of error would be for dropping bombs, but

my guess would be that if you got the bombs within a hundred yards of where you were aiming consistently, that that wouldn’t be too bad. That’d be pretty good.

While we were in training the targets would be, as I say a pyramid, which might be

the size of one-and-a-half times the size of a large room, sort of thing, and of course every bomb doesn’t hit that sort of a target. But once you got into the serious business the targets were generally big targets. They were manufacturing plants or that sort of thing.

Well I was pretty successful. I had, I believe, the second best average error for Canadian courses at the time that I went through, and

my best mate had the best score. Unfortunately he was killed on a squadron in England shortly after he got to it. Accuracy wasn’t as great as a lot of people might expect, and of course it could be affected by other things over an actual target. Your

own can be upset by close bursting flak or the need to dodge a plane that is opening its bomb doors straight above you and you don’t want to be there when he lets go, those sorts of things.

Yes.

Well a bombsight is just like a gun sight,

except that you use it to drop bombs, and the main factors which you need to set into the bombsight of course, are the wind, because whilst your plane is going in that direction through the air, it is going in that direction over the ground, so that you need to set the wind on the bombsight, and you also need to set

the height from which you are going to drop the bomb.

You see two hairs, wires, parallel wires, and these enable you to determine whether you’re tracking towards the target or whether you’re not tracking towards it.

There is then also one cross-hair which tells you when to press the tip, as they call it.

Yeah.

I think I appreciated some of the mathematics that was involved behind it, and I think you need an appreciation of what the aircraft is doing when you drop the bombs. In practice, and this was unofficial, but in order to get a better score we learned

to what we called sling bombs, so that if you were just not in the right position but you wanted the bomb to go over there sort of thing, you would give an instruction to the pilot which would tell him to bank the plane this way, and at the moment that he did that you would release the bomb and you would sling it or throw it towards the target. There were

little things like that that made up, I think, a better bomb aimer.

No.

No. While you are training you fly with a different pilot almost every time. These pilots at the training school were pretty skilled, I mean they had done it so many times, and when you think that

in one sort of flying exercise you might have four or five bomb aimers in the plane, each of them going to drop six practice bombs. So he virtually does that run over the target twenty-five or thirty times, and he would do that a number of times a day. The pilots at the training stations got to the stage where they could really put

you right over the target without you having to make any corrections which they didn’t do of course, because the whole idea is that the bomb aimer guides the pilot. It’s not only the instructions that you give, it’s the tone of voice that you give them in which tells the pilot. If you say, “Left left,” that means I want you to go left. If you say, “Leeeft, leeeft,” that means I want you to do it more smoothly, and in

between the instructions you’ll say, “Steady, steady, steady,” and that keeps him flying on the same course. It becomes an inflection of the voice that the pilot learns to interpret.

Yes. There’s got to be something there because, if you’ve got the best pilot in the world and the bomb aimer’s a dud you’re not going to get the bomb on the target and the reverse applies. In fact during out time at OTU a particular pilot that we had

had a lot of trouble getting the plane in the right position for the bomb. I was getting some very bad bombing results and I said to him, “Look, this is not usual.” And we talked about it quite a lot, and confidentially, at one point he was about to go to the Squadron Commander

and say, “I can’t chuff this. You’ve got to get another pilot for this crew.” We sort of persevered with it and it came right. We got some good results on the squadron, and we had some photographs of targets that we bombed that were actually sent to Bomber Command as examples of what the

force was doing to the target that night.

I think the main thing is confidence. It is a bit like putting a golf ball. It is about ninety per cent confidence and ten per cent skill and I think that’s the same.

We had a good relationship in the crew once we got to the squadron – the incident I’m talking about happened at OTU before we got there – once we got to squadron we had a really good relationship, so much so that I did a couple of things, which I suppose the pilot, who is the chief of the crew, could well have

queried. When we got to the squadron a normal position for the bomb aimer to be when he is going to the target is in the front turret. I think you have to understand that the turret that we had, the guns that we had, were – this is just my opinion – they were more to

do with giving the crew confidence than they were to do with having an actual chance of destroying the enemy. We used guns that had .303 bullets in them, that diameter. The German fighters had thirty millimetre cannon, that diameter. Our guns were normally synchronised

in the turret and deemed to be most effective at about a hundred and fifty yards. Now, you travel a hundred and fifty yards pretty quickly when you are closing in on a bomber, bomber to fighter. On about the third trip I was sitting up in the turret and wondering what it was

all about for the first couple of trips. On the third trip I spotted a Focke-Wulf 190 coming the other way directly under us, and before I could lower the guns to have a shot at him he was gone. I calculated that night that the closing speed between a fighter and a bomber

going this way – the bomber would do about two hundred and fifty to two hundred and eighty and the fighter close to four hundred – the closing speed was about six hundred miles an hour. Six hundred miles an hour is equivalent to eight hundred and eighty, say nine hundred feet a second. So in one second those two, the target and the other one, would

close at three hundred yards a second, which was twice the range at which our guns were synchronised. I said to Bruce, after that operation, the pilot, I said, “Look, I’m not doing any good up here.” I said, “Last night I saw a Focker Wulf and I couldn’t get the guns down in time to have a shot at him.” And I said, “I’m not going to be

in the turret. I’m going to help the navigator navigate on the way to the target.” And he accepted that and said “OK.” He could have said, “Oh no you’re not. You’re going to be in the turret.” thinking you’re going to do some good there. So we did have a good relationship for that and a number of other reasons, once we got to the squadron.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

I don’t know. You get in the thing. It’s an Anson, a two-engine plane, you get in it

and they take off and away you go, and it was quite OK as far as I was concerned. No, I didn’t have any feeling that “Woops, this is the first time I’ve ever been off the ground.”

It is much more natural

to me to be in the air than it is to be three foot off the ground on a ladder. Even when I first came back and I was much younger, from the war, I didn’t like being on a ladder, and yet being way up in the air and the bomb aimer’s position you can see everything, all you’ve got is a sheet of tin between you and

the air, but that didn’t ever worry me.

Well the first time, the first time that we went up there were four or five of us, and I couldn’t see the target. I couldn’t tell where the target was. I didn’t know what a target looked like or anything.

I couldn’t identify it, and I said to the pilot, I said, “Look, I can’t pick the target out.” and he muttered something about ‘bloody Australians’. I was the last of this group of three or four bomb aimers to bomb, and the rest had bombed, and I said, “I can’t see the target,” and as I said, he muttered and then swooped down and

he swept us over the target at about five hundred feet and he said, “That’s the target there.” So I didn’t drop any bombs the first time up, but you get acclimatised to it very quickly.

The Anson? Yes, I can talk about the Anson, about one particular aspect of it anyway.

The Anson was actually used as a front line plane at one stage but it was very slow. It didn’t even have a retractable under cart. The under carriage had to be wound up a hundred and twenty turns to wind it up, and the winder was alongside the pilot but he would always, when we were training,

he was the big pilot skipper so he says, “Hey you. Come up here and wind this up.” Or you had to wind it down too. It was the sort of aeroplane that would fly anywhere, that had no vices. It was ideal for training. You rubbed a kerosene rag over it once in a while and that’s all you needed to do with it sort of

thing.

Oh we probably sat on a spar or something until it was out turn to bomb and then you’d go down to the nose where the bombsight was and so on and do your bombing, drop your six bombs and then come back and somebody else would go down.

No. no. Just bombing.

No. That’s the American system.The bombsight was completely an independent instrument and you had to give the instructions to the pilot as to whether he

went left, right, stayed straight.

Ours wasn’t regarded as a sensitive bit of equipment. The two references you’ve made are to the Norden bombsight, which was used by the

United States, but we weren’t specifically told that the bombsight was significant.

Yes. Yes. We knew that the Americans had it and used it, and the British never did.

I don’t know anything about the Norden bombsight. I’ve never used one.

Not really. Not really. It was a fairly automatic process once the timing of the particular bomb load

was set. There was a setting, a little instrument, which set the order in which the various triggers were released in the bomb bay, and that determined the order in which the bombs or the canister or the cookie was released. All of those things were set on

the ground before you took off and got into the air.

I don’t know of any specific accidents, but I think what you’ve got in training is that they are using aeroplanes which have been

replaced, normally from operations, so that they are probably longer in the tooth, possibly less well maintained, and that doesn’t mean that they are basically unsafe but there is probably an element of accident proneness in that for a start.

That was at Jarvis, Ontario, and where as all of our previous training had been done on the slow moving Ansons at Jarvis, they had the Canadian Bowling Broke, they called it, which was the Canadian version of the Blenheim bomber.

Now the Blenheim had been a front line bomber at the start of the Second World War, and was in fact extensively used in the Second World War. It was in a Blenheim that the Commander of Binbrook station where 460 was stationed, Hughie Edwards, won the VC [Victoria Cross] in a Blenheim bomber attacking

submarine pens at Bremen.

It was simply bombing at a level that was closer to our actual bombing height. Most of the training that we did in Ansons, we might have bombed from

heights of two or three thousand feet. In the Blenheim we might have bombed from ten thousand feet. There’s a subtle difference but not much difference between the two.

Oh a similar type of bomb sight, with the hairs crossing and so on. The difference between that bombsight and the one we used on operations was that the one on operations had a gyroscope in it, which was a levelling device, ensuring that the bombsight would be absolutely level, which gave you greater accuracy.

Not fixed to the plane, but it was fixed to an adjustment, a bracket that was fixed to the plane.

You’ve got me into a difficult area there because I was thinking of this last night. The strange thing is,

the bomb aimer was the guy who normally found the wind by looking at the way in which the guiding hairs reacted to the path of the plane, and I was thinking last night, “Now Jos, how did you find the wind?” and I can’t remember.

Yeah. Yeah,

but there are just some things about the technicalities of it that I’ve got no recollection at all about.

Well you put that into the bombsight and that’s one of the components of how you set up the bombsight to use it. You’ve got to have the wind in there. When we were on the squadron

certain of the planes were wind finders. We would be given, before we left England, the met assessment of what the wind would be on the way to and over the target, but certain of the planes in the stream were wind finders, and they would send back to base, via Morse, the wind that they were finding,

and if there was a need for a substantial correction then a signal would be sent out from base to the bomber force to say, “ The winds are such and such, not as we had predicted before.”

You would put that into the bombsight. You would put the wind into the bombsight.

That’s what I can’t remember.

It’s amazing, isn’t it?

No. It was a very short course. I think I should make the point that on a number of the courses that

I was on during my air force career, the time from arriving at the place to leaving it again after the course would be a fortnight, and sometimes less than that. The conversion courses, for instance, from two engine to four-engine operation, the conversion from Halifax to Lancaster, they were the sort of courses where you would only be at a place for a fortnight,

and then onto the next.

Well from there I went to Britain and the first posting after that was to the Isle of Mann. They were following up this idea of establishing a strike squadron against German shipping. For a month at the Isle of Mann we sat watching,

looking at and identifying the silhouettes of different ships of the navies from all the world, until in half light, you could identity something as the Nelson or as King George the Fifth or as the Tirpitz or whatever.

The next posting after that, the follow-up to that, was the practical recognition, flying over the home fleet up in Scapa Flow, and reporting on what we saw. And we had to virtually draw a map of Scapa Flow and position each of the vessels and identify each of the vessels.

a month’s leave.

Well we didn’t go all that far really. We went from the centre of Canada, I suppose, down through Detroit

to Minneapolis and then to Chicago, and in Minneapolis we went into some kind of club for a drink one day and a fellow came in and got talking to us and it turned out that he was a dentist, an orthodontist, and

he said, “Where are you boys staying tonight?” We said, “We’re just trying to make up our minds about that.” So he said, “Well you boys had better come home with me.” He took the six of us and put us up at his place for a couple of weeks while we had a look at Minneapolis and so on. And, you know, that was typical of the sort of American hospitality that we encountered over there.

Well I’m not talking about the Hyde’s, that’s the dentist – his name was Hyde – but you did strike some funny situations. I can remember in Chicago in a bus one day, a couple of people sidled up to us and stood very

close to us, and when we looked around they said, “Don’t worry about us. We just want to hear how you talk.” On another occasion earlier, going across Canada by train, we stopped at a particular place and this is a little town sort of thing, and so we got out of the train and

we were talking to a couple of the locals and they, at one stage pointed down the back of the train where there were some New Zealand airmen. The New Zealanders had a grey uniform and we had, of course, the blue. And they said, “Who are they?” And we said, “They’re New Zealanders.” And one person turned to the fellow

alongside of him and he said, “Prisoners of war.” So they didn’t know very much about Australia. I think they still don’t know much about Australia, but that doesn’t stop them liking the place when they get here, and they were very kind to us.

American girls? Well I can remember

one night in Chicago where we actually went and I was the guest of a family there that did have a daughter. But we went to a nightclub and in no time flat I found that I was taken out of their bosom, as it were, and put on a table. It was a table on which Ginger Rogers, an actress,

was sitting, and everyone thought this was great, that you should be at a table with Ginger Rogers, but all she wanted to do was get a few publicity photographs of her with an Australian airman, and when the photographs were taken she sort of said, “Good night. You can buzz off now.” So the girls were comme ci comme ça [so-so].

No. I didn’t get a photo. I didn’t get a copy of it, although I was promised a copy of it. They said they’d send it to me, but I think if it had appeared in the next day’s paper, that would have served the purpose for which I was invited to the table.

No. No.

Yeah. Pretty well. Pretty well.

Oh pretty well I think. Look I was young. I was nineteen and I don’t think you are looking over your shoulder at that stage of your life, you’re looking forward to what’s going to happen next, rather than

looking behind you.

I can’t really remember. I’ve got a photograph somewhere of the six of us in the backyard of the Hyde’s place in Minneapolis, and we’ve all got hatchets or axes or something in our hands, so they must have wanted

a tree cut down and we said, “Do you now, we’ll fix that quick smart.” And here we are in our half uniforms with the equipment.

To Winnipeg, and Winnipeg was the navigation school.

It was a much larger place, of course.

It was a major city, in that Winnipeg, Portage La Prairie area and so on, that was really the area in which the navigators were all trained in Canada, a lot of low-lying land. It didn’t matter much if you got lost. You’d find somewhere to put down and some

way to get home. But I enjoyed Winnipeg. That was a comparatively short time we were there, only about a month.

At Winnipeg.

Well I’ve got a photograph downstairs and I look pretty proud. I think most of us regarded it as a milestone.

I suppose it is like getting a diploma or anything else – you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

The navigators have a saying that man is never lost. He just doesn’t know where he is. So my answer to your question is no.We didn’t ever get lost completely. In other words we found our way back to

where we started.

From Halifax.

Well I can’t tell you very much about Halifax because we were trained, we went by train down to Halifax and more or less straight onto the boat.

The boat was the Aquitania, which was a sister ship to the Mauritania, different in that it had four funnels and the Aquitania had three, but large elements of similarity. The Aquitania was more or less permanently on the Atlantic run, from America to Greenock, Scotland. It was fitted out to carry

the maximum number of people, and as I think I might’ve mentioned, you had two meals a day and you had the meal in shifts. You slept in shifts, the bunks were that close, one on top of the other, that you just had room to turn over without knocking the bloke above you, and it was very crowded, crowded but quick because we didn’t travel in convoy.

We travelled on our own. We could outrun the submarines unless they were directly across our path sort of thing. So that was the Aquitania. We arrived in Greenock in Scotland, which is where most of the troop ships coming across from America arrived.

Oh now it would have been about July or August, 1943, and then we were taken down to Brighton, which was where all the incoming aircrew were held

until they decided what to do with them. In Brighton we were billeted in two hotels on the main waterfront, of which one was the Grand Hotel, which was bombed not so long ago when the conservatives were having an annual conference there.

No. Not really. That was incident free.

Well, we had two meals a day. They weren’t gourmet meals but they were quite adequate, and we didn’t mind the fact that there were only two

meals a day or that we were sleeping in shifts, because it was only going to occur for a short period anyway. I forget how many days it took us to make the crossing, but it wasn’t many.

Yes.

We didn’t have any contact with them. Actually they were on the lower decks and we were on the upper decks. But there were twenty thousand American troops on the ship going over at the same time as us.

Cold, damp, Scotch mist they call it up in Scotland but it is almost a continuous drizzle. Green, green. Very green. But

it wasn’t long before we were down at Brighton and that was markedly different to Scotland.

Waiting. Waiting for posting. And in my case, because

it appears we were being held back until they could get the appropriate training facilities in place on the Isle of Mann, I was in Brighton for about three months. Most of the aircrew passing through there would have been out of it within a month or six weeks, and on their way to wherever it was, advance flying training or whatever.

Well, we filled in a reasonable number of them acting as guards on the top of the Hotel as a matter of fact. It was a question of, “Who knows how to fire a machinegun?” and, “Well those guys do.” so we were sent up

to mount a guard on quite a number of days in each week. And the nights of course, we went out and drank too much beer, I suppose. That’s how we filled our time in, but it got to be pretty boring because here we were trained up to the teeth, as it were, and ready to find something useful to do, and we were

cooling out heals. But that happens so often in a service career. It becomes par for the course. You get used to it.

We didn’t report to anyone daily. We were all billeted in the two hotels and as far as the machine gun

duty was concerned there would be a little notice pasted on the board that today its so and so, so and so, and so and so from this time to that time. And that was it. It was pretty slap-happy.

I think that at that stage we were rather anxious to get on with it.

That might have been the wrong thing to be hoping for, as it turned out later on, but I think that that was the general feeling, that you wanted to get out of Brighton and into somewhere where you were doing something.

Well, we came into

a situation where a lot of the population, and it wasn’t Brighton so much, but certainly a lot of the population of other cities. Portsmouth, London, Liverpool, Coventry and so on had all had pretty severe bombing of their facilities and of the civilian population. So we couldn’t do anything to give them encouragement, as it were. We were a bunch

of sprog airmen who hadn’t seen a shot fired in anger yet, and we were amongst a civil population who had been putting up with quite a deal for some years.

Yes. We were not restricted in the amount of travelling we could do, but

there was a sort of a minimum parade each day or so at some time early in the morning, so you had to be there for that so they’d know where you were. You couldn’t go away for days at a time, but within that twenty-four hour span you could do what you wanted.

Not very far really. We went to Hove and played a few games of

tennis. We might have gone up to London for a few hours, that sort of thing, but in the main we spent the time around the Brighton area.

When we flew over the home fleet in Scapa Flow, after the Isle of Mann. We went up to Scapa Flow to

chart the home fleet and the boats that were in the flow.

No. No. This was not an OTU yet. This was another Anson flight, and before we got to out, of course, we had to go to AFU, the Advanced Flying Unit, where we had further training but mainly in acclimatising

to the local conditions. Temperatures were much different. We hadn’t flown really over any mountainous areas, whereas in the areas in which they had the AFUs, there were a lot of mountains and a lot of steep mountains, so that you had to be careful and know what you were doing. So that was just acclimatising to the local

British conditions, I suppose, and that preceded OTU.

That was after OTU. We did our OTU in Wellingtons, which was a two engine bomber, and after we finished OTU we went to a four engine conversion

to Halifaxes and then we went to Hemswell to a conversion to Lancasters. But the conversion to Halifaxes was one of those postings which lasted less than a fortnight. That was the first time we flew in four engine aircraft.

The Wellington had been a front-line bomber only a year or two before we got there. It was a pretty well regarded aeroplane. It had an unusual geodetic. It was called construction which means it was constructed of a number of cross beams that way.

One of the features of the plane was that as you were flying along straight and level you could look out the window and you could see the wings moving gently up and down. It was part of the way it was built and it was a most flexible sort of air frame. The other thing that’s significant about the Wellington, of course, is that we flew

that first at OTU, and it was at OTU that we crewed up, that we chose the people with whom we were going to fly with on operations.

Each of these other courses you were with a variety of people and you were following in your own discipline. In other words,

at the advance flying unit you were learning…you were still pursuing your bomb aiming, or your navigating, or your piloting, or your wireless operating function, but you were acclimatising to the local conditions. At OTU we crewed up – that means we formed the crew that ultimately we flew with on operations.

When I was at Scapa Flow, which wasn’t the AFU incidentally – the AFU was at a place called Wigtown – but when I was at Scapa Flow I was destined, at that stage, to be a bomb aimer in a lead aeroplane

to attack German shipping, and the basic idea was that the lead bomb aimer in each flight of Marauders, or Bostons was the plane they had in mind, would identify for the rest of the stream, the rest of the force, whether it was an enemy vessel or a friendly vessel that was down there, in other words whether to drop a bomb on it or do nothing.

So that’s what I was destined for when I was flying at Scapa Flow, and of course that didn’t eventuate because the German navy ceased to be an effective force by the time we finished that course.

How? Visually.

Yes.

No. No. Naked eye.

The sort of ships that we were interested in or that this whole concept had in mind attacking were not small destroyers. They were the large chunks, the heart of the British navy, the Tirpitz and the Sharnhorst and Gneisenau – cruisers, battle cruisers, battle ships, and you can see those quite clearly with the naked eye from the altitudes

we were flying over Scapa Flow, which was only about five or six thousand feet.

Well before I got to the AFU, after the German navy became an ineffective force, they didn’t

know what to do. There were six of us in this group training to attack the German navy. They didn’t know what to do with us so we were split up and went in all directions. My best friend, who I’d been with since the first bombing course in Canada, was

directed into the bomber command stream, reached an English squadron and was killed on one of his first few operations. For some reason which I’ll never know, they didn’t do that to me. What they did to me was to send me to a commando school for a month. They must have done that because they just didn’t have a place to put me so

they thought, “Well, we’ll keep him doing something.” At the commando school I did a few waltzes over obstacles with rifles in hand and so on, and crawling under barbed wire while they were firing live ammunition over you . In about the second week I was there, we had an exercise where we had to crawl through

a metal pipe, and in this metal pipe they had smoke bombs so that you couldn’t see where you were going, and you had to crawl through this with your full kit, and unfortunately when I got half way through I put out my hand and I put it on one of the red-hot smoke bombs which was lying on the ground.

And of course I immediately inhaled deeply and so my lungs were filled with smoke and five or ten minutes later they dragged me out by my legs, and I spent the next two or three weeks, not in hospital but certainly convalescing, as they tried to get the smoke out of my lungs. So it wasn’t a very… I didn’t do much at that commando

school after all.

Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly right. Yes. By the time I got to the squadron I had…It was July, ’42 when I went to the initial training at Bradfield Park, and I got to the squadron in

June, 1944. So it was two years, and of that two years, approximately seven or eight months was taken up with training that was relevant to what I would have to do on the squadron. The rest of the time was waiting in some fashion, or

doing things which proved that weren’t needed for the role that I ultimately fulfilled.

It happened that suddenly, it was simply a question of, when we

came back from Scapa Flow to the mainland, we were just given a chit each and that was where we were told to go, and it was almost instantaneous. There wasn’t time to worry about it.

Keith Sampson. And his brother, his brother, who died recently,

turned up on 460 Squadron as a wireless operator, and Keith and Roy, his brother, and I went on one leave together just before Keith was killed. Unfortunately, when I came back to Australia, or

after I came back, I was up at Bradfield Park with Beryl, to welcome back a cousin of hers, and on the same draft coming back was Leo Armstrong, the friend I’ve described, but also Keith Sampson. He was saying how the family had very few photos of Keith, and so I said,

“Well look, I’ll let you have what I can,” and I virtually sent every photo that I had of Keith up to Roy Sampson, so I don’t have very much of Keith now.

We crewed up at OTU, which was at Desborough, and on the way to Desborough I was travelling by train and I got into a carriage and was talking to a pilot who was sitting there and

after a while he said, “Are you crewing up with anyone?” And I said, “No. I haven’t met anyone yet.” And he said, “Well what about we fly together?” And so, impetuously I suppose, I said, “Yes. OK.” And after we got there people from all sorts

of other callings were arriving and coming into the Mess where we were seated and so we would say, “Well that’s a likely looking bloke there.” “Yes.” and one of us would go over and get him to come over and sit down, and after a couple minutes we would say, or Bruce would say, “We haven’t got a navigator yet. What about flying with us?” “Yes,” he’d say, and that process

went on through the different crew members. It was not very scientific. I suppose that when Bruce and I, initially, and then the others as they joined us, were discussing it we had only one real criterion, and that was none of us were keen on having

an obviously older, married, staid type in the crew. We were stating our belief that you had to be a bit young and silly to be in that business, and you didn’t want someone who would be over-cautious and because of that, might get you into trouble.

The crew that we formed there was all but the engineer. We picked up an engineer later on. The other six of us all crewed together, two gunners, the pilot, air bomber, navigator and wireless operator, and of that total there were four Australians and two Englishmen. The two

gunners were English. But we didn’t seem to have any problem. We, of course, from that point onwards we virtually lived almost as a unit, in the sense that, if we went out we went out as a crew. If we’d go out to the pub or go out to a dance or whatever, we did it as a crew.

And we didn’t have any conflicts. Perhaps we were lucky but we didn’t have any conflicts.

Yes.

No. After OTU we went to a four level conversion course onto Halifaxes, and then we

went to a conversion course onto Lancasters, but at the stage where we converted onto Halifaxes, we picked up an engineer, who was also an Englishman. The main difference between the Lancaster and the Wellington was that the Lancaster had

two turrets operated by gunners and one in the front which the bomb aimer operated if necessary, and it also had an engineer.

Yes.

I suppose it was some of the exercises that we were doing. For instance, none of us had ever experienced, except perhaps the pilots in their very early training days, had ever experienced, even training, air-to-air combat. I mean I was trained to use guns but

against a drogue, not against a real target. At OTU we had fighters attacking us and they had cameras instead of guns, and we had, in our turrets, we had cameras instead of guns so that after the attacks were over, you could assess just how good or not so good you’d been by reference to the film.

There are always accidents, I suppose. Yes, none that impinged directly on us, although we had a near miss with an engine oil leak. One day we were coming back and

not so far away from our drome when we had to shut down one engine because it would have seized had we continued to operate it, and the other engine, the one on which we landed, was starting to leak oil too. So, I mean that could have been a nasty situation had we been a bit further from base, but as it was there was no problem.

Oh well they might not have known directly, all of them, about it straight away because the first thing that you do if you have a drop in oil pressure, of course, is to use a manual pump to try and get it up, and so the people who were in that part of the plane, the front part of the plane particularly, would notice somebody going down and using the manual pump and they would know that something was up.

But when we landed then all the crew would know all the details of what had happened.

Oh we had intercom, which meant that we could communicate with any member of the crew all the time.

Well comparatively little really. The communication was different at different times. For instance, if the navigator wanted to give the pilot a change of course then he would communicate with him. If the pilot wanted to ask something about someone he would communicate with him. If you were being attacked by a fighter then the main communication, of course, was from the rear gunner to the pilot.

We had a procedure for dealing with such an attack, and the procedure really was to avoid contact as much as possible, but if contact was inevitable then the manoeuvre was called corkscrew. The basic idea of a corkscrew was

that you manoeuvred the bomber in such a way as to continually increase the deflection which the fighter pilot had to give his plane to shoot you down. In other words, if you are rising to port then he has to rise to port more quickly than you because he’s got to fire his guns ahead of you so that you’ll be

there when the shell gets there, and as soon as you know that he’s about to do that then you do something different. Again, he’s got to increase his deflection to a maximum extent to get his guns focused on you.

Well I’ve done a corkscrew, not in a Lancaster – I’m not a pilot, but I’ve done a corkscrew in an Airspeed Oxford,

and basically it amounts to changing continually what you are doing so that….and you depend a lot of course in a real life situation, on the information that the rear gunner is feeding you. The attacks are generally almost always from the rear and low, because that means that

there isn’t a great amount of difference between the fighter and the bomber, and it gives him a better chance and a longer chance to get a burst into you. But what the pilot does of course – he can’t see the fighter attacking you from behind – what he does is dependent largely, in that situation, on what the rear gunner tells him to do.

Well we know we are going to be attacked by a fighter, and it’s good clean fun because we know it’s a friendly fighter. We know that he’s got a camera rather than guns, and so we would just be told that today,

probably on such and such a leg, you’ll be attacked by a fighter and then it was up to us. Normally the first thing you know about it is there’s a rear gunner screaming out, “There’s a fighter! Bandit! Port high!” or, “Port low!” or wherever he is. And of course the next thing that he says,

he’ll say, “Corkscrew port!” and he stops there so that the pilot knows that the first thing he’s got to do is to go to port. When the gunner judges the situation to be right he’ll say, “Go!” and so you go to port and that has the effect, as I said, of increasing, the deflection so you go through the corkscrew

consecutively in that way. You might go down and to the left, then you might go up, still in the same plane, half way up you might turn right still going up, you might then go down and left, any combination to increase that deflection, and as the fighter positions himself behind to get in

the telling shot, so the gunner calls the instructions.

Yes. The mid upper gun would be manned, and normally if you are under attack the front turret would be manned also by the bomb aimer.

Just about nothing. The defence of the aeroplane depended in very, very large measure on the rear gunner. A fighter pilot who is worth his salt, first of all he is going to attack the plane, but having attacked it and fired his burst he is going to avoid like the plague going anywhere

where the other guns can get at him, so he’s not going to fire over the top of the plane where the mid upper gunner can get a crack. Some mid upper gunners have fired shots but not too many. I don’t know of…I haven’t heard of any bomb aimer firing shots out of the front turret, in a real life situation, I mean, but there are plenty of rear gunners

who have done so.

You can hear what the rear gunner is saying to the pilot, of course, so you can judge from that what’s going on, but you’re no different off

to almost the rest of the crew. The wireless operator is probably sitting down at his table. He is probably not in the astro-hatch, which is immediately above him. The navigator is sitting at his table, the engineer is up the front standing alongside the pilot, and none of them can actually see

what is going on unless the fighter plane overshoots and it gets to be in the front area.

I think the time I described where we had lost one engine and we looked like losing another, coming into a landing, but generally speaking our training was incident free.

Yes, because I was the guy who was asked to go down and pump some oil.

We’ll leave out the bomb aimer.

The pilot drives the plane. The engineer, his normal position is standing or sitting – there was a drop-down seat – but standing or sitting alongside of the pilot, and

he’s concerned mainly with the way in which the engines are operating, so he’s watching the engine gauges for boost and things like that, and then in the main he is the fellow who will, when the pilot tells him to, switch tanks so that you can get fuel from one or the other, and, of course, he stands alongside of the pilot so that if there’s a need for

something very unusual, like a burst of power through the gate, which would give it about five minutes of terrific speed, sort of thing, he might be on the controls to do that. Behind him is the navigator who sits at his table and he navigates. Most of the navigators would rely almost

exclusively on a device called G, the letter G, which was a system where signals were sent out from two different points in England. This G machine in the plane could interpret the point at which those two signals met, and when you plotted that on the chart that was where you were, and that was the main navigation aid.

The other navigation aid was an embryonic radar called Y or H2S. In fact for most of the time the bomb aimer in our case operated that, but that was a device where a signal was emitted from the bottom of the plane, and when it hit square

structures like a built- up area, the signal bounced – and you can do the angles sometime you’ll see this happens – it bounces around and bounces back to the plane, so a strong signal indicated a built up area and a weaker signal something different. On that Y you could also tell the difference between water and land, and you could see a coastline delineated.

Anyway, that’s the navigator. Behind him, the wireless operator, he was mainly on a listening out basis for any signals that might be sent out from home base, either about winds or perhaps a change of route if the fighters were particularly active in an area or something like that.

Generally the idea was to preserve radio silence so you only transmitted if you had some specific job to do, like finding a wind and sending it back to base. Just behind the wireless operator was the mid upper gunner, and in his turret were two 303s. He had about

a minute to a minute-and-a-half continuous firing in ammunition. The front turret had about a minute and the rear turret had about two minutes continuous firing, and of course you didn’t fire continuously. Behind him, to the right of the tail was the rear gunner and his duty was obvious.

The rear gunner in our crew would have been, at the time, about six feet tall. He would have weighed twelve to thirteen stone, and he was able to get into the rear turret, albeit not with too much despair, but he was able to

get into it. So you don’t have to be a small bloke necessarily, but you might be more comfortable.

Well, we all had

flying suits, and this was generally in the form of a kind of a quilted suit underneath, and then above that was a waterproof type suit which was impregnated with electric wires, and you plugged that in and that heated up. You wore

fur-lined boots and the most sensitive part of course was your hands, and on the hands you had first of all silk gloves, then chamois leather gloves on top of that, and then the leather gauntlets on top of that, and that kept you reasonably

warm. The temperatures, of course, the outside temperatures over there in wintertime, at the heights we were travelling could easily get to minus forty Celsius so that you needed that heating, and that was the main discomfort. The other discomfort was, once you got above ten thousand feet where you needed oxygen was in being able or not able to move

around, and we had little oxygen bottles at various parts of the plane, so that if you wanted to move around, you would go off the mainstream oxygen supply, just a bayonet clipping, and pick up one of these bottles and hook up to that. The difficulty about all this oxygen is, and I’m getting personal now, we were never instructed

how to use oxygen and how much to use, and I get a disability pension because of the fact that I’ve had three retinal detachments in my eyes and it’s been accepted as a war disability. It’s thought that, flying at altitude where we needed oxygen is the primal cause of it. There was no such thing then

as compartments which were, I don’t know the term of them now on the commercial airlines…pressurised – there was no such thing as a pressurised compartment, yeah.

We used to turn it on at ten thousand going up and turn it off at about ten thousand coming down.

No. We were breathing oxygen.I don’t know what the biochemistry of the whole thing is, and nor did we at the time. We were simply

told that as you get over ten thousand you need oxygen and when you come down you can turn it off.

Well if you knew where the main spar was it was

not so difficult. The Lancaster had a main spar supporting the wings which went through the central body, and this spar would have been about two feet or two foot six high off the floor. It was that spar which made up our crash landing position. Most of the crew would get their backs behind that, sort of thing. But that was more or less in the middle of the

plane, and as long as you avoided the bits and pieces that came out of the turrets, which you can imagine intruded into the inside of the plane, it wasn’t too bad moving around. We didn’t seem to have any trouble moving around, but I noticed that when we went down to Canberra, not so long ago, to have a look at the inside of G for George, all of us were commenting

as we went from the back of the plane to the front, on how we’d never realised there were so many obstructions in the plane as we were encountering.

Oh not a lot. There were lights over the navigator’s table, lights over the wireless operator’s

position, no lights at all apart from that, except for the engineer had one light somewhere. No he didn’t. He didn’t at all because he had to pull the curtain back. They were the only two lights, and the general idea of, course, was that you didn’t disrupt your night vision, and it was for this reason that most

crews didn’t like the rear gunner looking down at the target after you passed over it, because he would thereby lose the night vision.

Well, the air force put a great amount of emphasis on it actually. They used to stuff us full of carrots and all this kind of stuff to improve the night vision, and

certainly when your eyesight is good, and all of our eyesight was good at that stage, it is quite surprising what you can see without the aid of lights. The pilots cockpit was lit up in inverted commas, but mainly in the sort of way that modern cars have little lights to indicate the various

dials, but for the rest of us we thought it was an asset to have our night vision rather than to have the lights on around. The navigator had to have the lights on, of course, because he couldn’t see what he was doing otherwise.

You lose it instantly if

you go into a lighted area from a dark area. Some of the targets, the ones where it was a multi bomber raid, and incendiaries were being used freely, some of the targets were quite bright, quite bright.

Well, I had to lose it because I

had to look at the target in any case.

Exactly. Yes.

Well the main part of my action, of course, was over the target so I was going to look at that anyway. What

happened immediately afterwards was probably only gong to be of general interest to me because, over the target was not the place, as a rule, where you were going to be attacked by fighters. What they had over the target was flak and over most of the German targets particularly, the flak was in a barrage form.

What that means is that there were guns on the ground and they were firing up shells within a small range of height and perhaps a half a mile square, and they would put as many shells as they could up into this box. The box was established once the strike force indicated the target it was going for and the

heading that it was attacking it on. Those things couldn’t be changed at the last minute. All of your navigation and timing depended on them. When you struck that barrage flak, the technique for being least dangerous about that was to increase your speed a little if you could

and fly straight through it. Now the very reverse applied if you were being attacked by what they called predicted flak, and this would come about where you had a flak battery – we struck this a lot going over Denmark and Holland and places like that, and a lot of these batteries were manned

by German boy scouts – these batteries would fire two ranging shots, and the idea was that they were actually firing at the aeroplane, and when you saw these two ranging shots you knew that you had about thirty seconds in which to change your position or else the next shot

would be close to where you were. Predicted flak operated always in conjunction with searchlights, and the barrage flak often but not always.

The pilot and the engineer at the front of the plane, and the mid upper

gunner might have observed them. If the wireless operator was in the astrodome he might observe them, and sometimes he would go into the astrodome. We put our bloke into the astrodome every time coming into a target, because on one occasion he yelled out to us that there was a plane above us just opening it’s bomb doors, and there was a need

to take evasive action to avoid having the bombs dropped on you.

It’s a piece of perspex which sticks up on top of the plane, and it would be a bit less than shoulder width in diameter, and so it was half-shoulder width in height. It was called an astrodome

because it was from the astrodome that the navigator, if he was using the stars as a way of finding where he was, that’s the point from which he would take his star shot or his sun shot, as the case may be. But it was a viewing platform also for the wireless operator for the purpose for which I’ve just indicated.

Oh you can see flak burst. Yes.

They just look like a bursting big cracker. That’s the only way I can describe them.

You can see…coming up ahead you can just see an area

of the sky which is full of bursts and smoke puffs.

But you have to get through it. You have to get through it if it is placed in the right position, as it invariably was.

We were told of the two types of flak and how to recognise them, yes, and it was known what the technique was to have the best chance of surviving them.

Yes.

He’d learned to fly an aeroplane in Tigermoths. He’d then gone to an advanced flying training school,

and at that point he was selected for multi-engine flying. And he would have gone through an AFU and then an OTU and then the operations. You should appreciate that there was not a lot of, whilst there was a long period of

training, there was not a lot of flying time. For example, the total time that I flew in all of my years in the air force, was a little less than five hundred hours, and of that a hundred and fifty or a hundred and sixty hours

would have been on operations so the rest was training, so we are talking about a total training of three hundred and fifty hours, which is the equivalent of fifteen days continuous flying.

Well we thought we were prepared. I don’t think that I can

remember an incident where it could be said that it was the lack of preparation that caused some disaster. So we were prepared. We were regarded, and apparently still are by the standards of that time, as being well trained.

I’ve seen you before.

Well, they all followed a similar pattern, and

there was a battle order which was current at any time, and on that battle order were the crews which were ready to fly, and by that I mean they were the ones who were not on leave or didn’t have a sick member, or had a complete crew. Each day that battle order was

posted up, so that you knew that there was a possibility that you’d fly. Then, depending upon when you were taking off, an order would come down to say that there was an op on that night, and there would be a list posted up of the crews who were going on it.

Normally then the navigators would be briefed first, because they had to prepare a flight plan. A flight plan is what you would like to happen, where you would like to be all the way along the route to the target, into the target and out and back home again So they had to be briefed first

because the preparation of that flight plan might take them an hour or two, depending upon how far we had to go. You would then be given a meal, the main part of which was an egg, and eggs were like gold in England. They were like platinum in Germany but they were

like gold in England, so you always had an egg with that meal, and then there would be an assembly of the crews including the navigator who already knew where you were going, and you would be briefed about the operation. The whole crew was present for that. The Commanding Officer of the squadron would normally tell you what the target was

and why you were going there, that is, you were going to bomb a ball bearing factory or whatever. There would then be reports from the meteorologist to say what sort of weather you could expect on the way to the target, what the likely winds were – crews were all making notes of this, you know, as the thing went on – and

what the cloud cover over the target was likely to be. If it was a night operation he’d be telling you whether the moon was in full phase or part phase or what that situation was likely to be. The intelligence officer would brief then and he would give an indication of what you could expect on the way, in the way of

flak and of fighters, where you could expect them on the route – and we had maps on which we put all this information. What else was there?

and the intelligence officer and so on, and then we’d be given generally by the commanding officer the bomb load, from which you could gather what type of attack it was going to be, what we were expected to do, whether we would knock it down or burn it out or whatever, and he’d give details also of the petrol

load, the diversion points in case it was fogged in when we got back to base and we had to go somewhere else, and that sort of information generally about the flight. Of course, we’d have information too on what height we were to bomb at, and we’d also

receive information as to what time the different phases of the attack should arrive at the target. Often there was about a twenty-minute period of the whole force being over the target. If you were in phase one you arrived at such and such a time, phase two was five minutes later, and so on. Now all of that information would be given

at the briefing, and he would wish you luck. And so then you’d go out and you’d draw parachutes, go out to the aircraft and each of the different people in the aircraft would test the part for which they were responsible, so the gunners would go into their turrets

and let the breech blocks forward and make sure that they were working, and finally draw one in up the spout so that the next thing that would happen, the safeties would be off as soon as you got off the ground and you could fire the guns and it would chatter away. The bomb aimer would check over the bombsight and the settings

that were appropriate for the bombing. The engineer would make sure that the dials were working and he and the pilot would run up the engines and make sure you had the right boost and other attributes that you needed for the engines for that night. The wireless operator would send signals backwards and forwards to the signals position on the base to make sure he was sending and receiving, and generally you’d

all check your part of the equipment. Then normally you’d get out of the plane and talk together and wait for the Very Pistol which would be to start up, and start taxiing out. In the main time, of course, the ground staff have completed their check of the engine and the airframe earlier in the day. They’ve

bombed up the aircraft with the appropriate bomb load that’s needed. They’ve made sure that the guns are in the turrets, are armed, and the ammunition is there and so on. So that was the sort of process of getting ready for an operation, and it was a similar process weather it was a daylight

or a night operation.

I forgot one thing that happens during the preparation for an operation. We would each go and collect our survival kit, and the survival kit included a silk map

of the area we were bombing, and the route to escape from that back to England. It would include the currencies of all the countries through which we would have to go to get from the target back to England. It would include the iron rations which were generally malted milk tablets, chocolate, that sort of thing.

We all had different ideas about this but, we all had compasses about our person in various forms. I used to smoke a pipe, and in the bottom of the pipe, when you undo the bowl in a particular way, was a compass. I wore a

collar and tie, and the stud in the shirt was a compass. We didn’t have zippers on our flies then, we had buttons, and if you were to take off two consecutive buttons and put one on top of the other it swivelled as a compass. And this reminds me to tell you a little story about during our

OTU training. One of the exercises that we did during training was to be taken out at night and dumped in the middle of the countryside as a crew, and then the RAAF or RAF would warn all of the local home guard that there were likely to be some German prisoners around so they should keep an eye out.

Our function was to get back to base without knowing where we were when we started, and most of us managed to do that, but prior to us going there was an inspection. The inspection was, they encouraged us to hide as many things as we thought we would need on us, and their part of the game was to find the things. So the first thing they did, of course,

was to take all your clothes off, and they sent all the clothes into another room and they found all these compasses I’ve just described, and the iron rations and whatever else. But one fellow thought that he would be clever one night, and he was using a particular type of compass, and this compass was known as the compass arsehole mark two.

The idea was to hide it in that particular position, and he was a bit at sixes and sevens about losing this compass, so he actually tied a piece of string around it and duly hid it in the required position, and while he was being body-searched the Sergeant who was doing the search said, “Hey, what’s this?

There’s a bit of string hanging out of this bloke’s backside.” and he pulled it out. That was the game. Anyhow, we had a package which we took on every trip, and it wasn’t just a survival kit. We were told that a lot of money had been invested in us, and that it was out duty, nothing short of that, our duty to escape. So there was no question

about just sitting still. We had our wings and badges of rank and Australian's were all sown on just by a couple of stitches at each end so that on the way down out of the aircraft we could rip these off, and then, of course, we were clothed in what was actually our blue battle jacket but it looked like a blue suit

sort of thing. We had flying boots which were fur-lined, but they had a piece around about the shoe-top level, a zipper, and on the way down you also just undid that zipper and let the leggings part go and you had a pair of walking shoes. Everything was designed to encourage us to get back

to where we started from.

No, I don’t think so. I think we just stood quietly talking. One night,

well I can tell this story. One night we were preparing the plane for an operation and I was in the front turret. I had just let the breach block go forward on one of the guns and I heard a brrrr. I thought, “My God, I’ve let one go!” And I looked out the front and I could see the tracer, which is headed for what we called

Bullshit Castle, which means the squadron headquarters. And then I checked the guns. I hadn’t let one go, and after I got down and we were talking I went over to the mid upper and I said, “Did you see that, Pete?” And he said, “See what?” And I said, “Someone let a few go, over at headquarters.” He said, “Is that so?” And I knew full well by the way that he said it that it was him

who’d let them go. Now we didn’t ever hear anything about that. We didn’t say anything and we didn’t hear anything. I don’t know where the shells ended up.

Oh I think the…I think Australians as a group are a fairly irreverent lot. I don’t think that’s associated with tearing down the tall poppy, that sort of syndrome.

But anyway that’s what we called it.

We had gone to Stettin, which was a seaport up near Russia. We’d brought a photograph back which seemed to show or showed that we’d bombed the right target, but

the Germans were in the habit of setting up fake targets, and they set up one for this night in Stettin, and it was about five miles short of the wharfs that we were supposed to hit at Stettin, and when we were flying over there somebody in the plane said, “There’s the target, down there.”

And I said, “No it’s not. I can’t see the water yet.” So we continued on and as I say I believe we bombed the right target but, the fact was that ninety per cent or so of the bomber force bombed the wrong target. They bombed somewhere out in the open fields. So when we got back and this was revealed,

we knew that we had to go back to Stettin and do the job properly. We had some bad weather for a while and we would go into the local town and you’d walk into the pub and a civilian there might sidle up to you and say, “Hey, Aussie, when are you going back to Stettin?” The word had got around all over the place.

And we said amongst ourselves, now this is the worst target that we could get, because they will move their anti-aircraft there, they’ll know we’re coming back, they can move their fighter streams there, and so on. Anyhow, the night before, in fact they did go back. It was out turn to go on leave and we didn’t participate in that operation. But that would have been the worst operation that

we were called to do.

Well we taxied out to the take-off point in line. If you understand we were all taking off pretty close one behind the other.

The first thing of course is to get it off the ground, and we were pretty heavily laden. The loads of the plane were worked out in such a way that if you were going a long way you needed a lot of fuel, but if you were going a short way you didn’t need much fuel so they put more bombs on sort of thing. And so it ended up pretty

much of a muchness, and when we cleared the fence at the end of the runway we didn’t have very much height on and the plane sort of staggered in the air compared to a modern day jet, for example. If you look at a 737 now it takes off at a sharper angle than a fighter plane did in the Second World War.

But once you got it off the ground then you had to climb up to height and that might take some time. Or alternatively on some of the operations we would fly out at wave-top height, and then climb up just before the target. Whatever the drill was that’s what we did, and quite frequently this has

amounted to circling around and gaining height, maybe to twenty thousand feet over our base, and then setting sail from there. We knew where the flak was….Well we thought we knew where the flak was before we started so that we were generally routed around those points. The

only exception to that was if they moved a lot of mobile flak into a particular position then you might have to change your mind a little bit, but generally speaking the whole philosophy and the whole idea was that, singly we were pretty vulnerable, together perhaps not so vulnerable, so around the navigation and briefing rooms were

things like, “Keep on track, keep on time, keep on living.” In other words, if you stick to the way we’ve planned this operation and you stick to the timing of the various points then you’ll all be together, and you’ve got a better chance of survival. Well, I don’t know what else to say about going out. I mean you do that and

get to the target.

The navigator would normally give an indication that he thinks you’re about ten miles or whatever it is from the target, and the bomb aimer, at that stage, goes down to the bombing position,

and he would recheck the equipment. He would, perhaps at that stage fuse the bombs. Fusing means that after you open the bomb doors and drop the bombs that the tuning forks stay up the top and the bombs are fused and ready to go off.

As you’re approaching the target then he would start giving the instructions to the pilot. “Left left. Steady, right. Steady, Steady.” to get you into the bomb run. He would then say to the pilot, “Bomb doors open.” and the pilot had a switch and he would open the bomb doors, and the final instructions,

“Right, steady, steady, steady, bomb’s gone.” And the pilot would then, after you’d given him “Bomb’s gone,” he’d say, “Bomb doors close,” and he closed the bomb doors and you were away.

Well you can feel a big…like going up in a lift, because

you’ve suddenly lost this weight. On some trips we would carry, I think the maximum tonnage of bombs for a short trip was about ten tons. The whole plane bombed up might weigh thirty tons, so you are losing up to a third of your weight when the bombs go, and there is a substantial lift

in the plane, and a sigh of relief from the crew.

No, but we did go around on the last target which we attacked, which was Dortmund, because I…The bomb aimer checks in a panel, which is a hole in the wall where he can see

into the bomb bay, and he shone a torch in there to make sure everything’s gone, and on this last trip one five hundred pounder had hung up and so I said to the pilot, “Orbit left.” And he said, “What?” And I said, “Orbit left. There’s no flak there.” and we went around and we bombed again and dropped this bomb, and that’s the only time we went around twice. It was not a good thing to do, actually.

It’s just concentration I think, like knocking a putt in the hole. You’re looking at the target and you’re concentrating on that, and you’re concentrating on giving the right directions to the pilot so that you are going to hit the target.

I wouldn’t notice the flak. I might feel it if we had one that burst particularly close to us, but otherwise I wouldn’t notice it going on the bombing run.

I

released them on one occasion where I had a bombsight which was out of action, and that was over Frankfurt. That was the target where, as we were coming in the wireless operator who was in the astrodome said, “There’s a bloke above us just opening his bomb doors.” And Bruce the pilot side-slipped the plane out

and back onto a parallel course, but in the process he did it that violently that he toppled the gyroscope in the bomb sight, so the bomb sight was useless. So we went over the target and I bombed with finger and thumb, and that photo of Frankfurt was sent to Bomber Command as an example of what good bombing crews should do.

It was a plum hit, a fluke absolutely, but anyway I did it.

Well you get used to looking at…In your training you’ve looked so often at a bomb sight and about how far it should be from your eye and where your eye should be positioned in relation to it to hit the target, and

perhaps it’s not as scary as it sounds. I think it’s just having done it so many times. I suppose it’s like a pro golfer having hit 5,000 balls a day, you know, he doesn’t have to think about the shot. He just makes it automatically. It’s OK.

I didn’t see anything of it, because I’m lying down in the bomb bay at this stage, in the bomb aimer’s position, so I’m lying on my stomach looking out at the target at the front, and this plane is up here and I can’t see it at all. But I knew, I could hear, I’m on the intercom so I could hear the wireless operator tell the pilot and I could feel the plane

swish out and in and a quick check of the bombsight indicated that it was useless so I had to do something. I forget how long it takes, but from memory it would have taken something like ninety or a hundred seconds for the bombsight to recover but we were, by this stage, nearly over the target. We didn’t have that time.

I think the most that we ever went with would have been about five hundred. There were thousand bomber raids and the number of planes that participated varied greatly. We were on one target, which was attacking a fort in Northern Holland

Did we drop incendiary bombs?

Yes. Yes. Probably a third to a half of the trips that I

did would have involved incendiaries, and incendiaries were used against targets like factories, where you would often have a cookie, a four thousand pounder, maybe a few five hundred pounders, but a large number of incendiaries. The idea was to knock it down with the big ones and

then burn it down with the rest.

Well we must be. I’m here.

No, I didn’t fly in G for George.

I was looking at the log book today and I did thirty-two trips and they were in seventeen

different aircraft. Many crews had the same aircraft, which meant they had the same ground crew and they got to know the aircraft. We were unlucky in that the aircraft which were designated for us, and the main one of these was M, Mike, seemed to be destined to have trouble. That’s the one that we had to

abandon the mission because we had an oil leak in one engine and looked like having a bit of trouble in the other engine. So we had to abandon that operation. That didn’t count.

I don’t know that we had a real scary moment, so perhaps we were a bit lucky in that way.

No. We saw a fighter but we were not attacked by a fighter, and we saw plenty of flak but we were never actually hit by flak.

We didn’t have a hole in any plane that we flew.

Yes. I suppose you think of all of those kind of things. I can only

go back to what I said earlier on, that all war is terrible, but once you get involved in one there’s only one way to fight it and that’s to win it. And I’m afraid that with the technology that we had, or lack of it, and maybe with the lack of skill in some cases, it was inevitable that some

civilians were going to get hurt.

Well, our aiming point in Frankfurt was the bridge over the river, and it was not a moonlight night, but it was

not a completely dark night, and approaching the target I had a – Frankfurt’s on a river, of course. It’s Frankfurt on Mane – I had a good look at the river system on the H2S and could tell that we were headed pretty well for the aiming point of the target. Then when I got down into the bombing

position I could see the river, I could see where the bridge was that we were aiming at, and it all flowed from there. And despite getting out of the way of bombs overhead and so on, I just kept the target

in view so that I wouldn’t lose sight of it in the darkness, and I’m sure I hit it.

It looks like a city that’s been knocked about a bit. It looks just like you would see on

TV of London, parts of London and Liverpool in the Blitz. I have never actually gone into a German city just after we’ve bombed it, but I know what a bombed English city looks like and I imagine a bombed German city looks the same.

We certainly saw flashes light up the sky which could well have been a plane either hit by flak or some type of collision. We did have odd collisions over the target and I think there was

one from our squadron but I can’t remember who was involved. And they were bad news of course.

Well, it was when we were on the Mauritania leaving Australia. As we left Wellington some well-meaning group of people presented us with a little bundle

of goodies each, and included in this bundle was a packet or two of a cigarette called Wild Woodbines. And so when I got back to the cabin in which the ten of us were located, I said, “Look, I don’t smoke. Would you like these cigarettes?” “No,” said the first bloke and I asked the second.

“No thanks.” and the third one, “No, stick ’em.” and so on, and to cut a long story short, no-one would have them, so I said, “oh well, I suppose I’d better try one of these myself.” Millions of cigarettes and years later I gave up smoking in 1970.

I might have thought so at the time. I don’t know whether that’s actually so, but we certainly…the whole crew smoked, and most of us smoked heavily. It seemed just to, not to go with the operational situation as such, but to go with the fact that we were

in the services.

Well in my case, I don’t know that I thought a great deal about it in the initial operations, because I had a strong streak

of ‘what will happen will happen’, but as the tour progressed, and this was common I think to the others, as the tour progressed, and we reached a point where we had twenty-five ops under our belt, it was then that we started to think well maybe there’s a rough chance we could get out of this after all. I think it was more stressful at that stage than it

was in the early stages, but overall there was not much point in worrying about it, and there was a great deal of excitement associated with an operation. The members of a crew had things to do and things that they knew that the rest of the crew depended on, so they had to do them and that made less time

to be thinking about things like that.

The Bomber Command losses were pretty consistent throughout the war at a casualty rate of forty-four per cent amongst aircrew.

Yes. To convert it into other figures, the length of the normal first tour was thirty operations. The Lancaster, on average, had about ten operations before it was destroyed or had

to be written off, and the average of the aircrew was about sixteen operations. That was about the average. There were many crews in planes that were shot down and lost on their first operation, and many more that were lost before they were able to get

ten operations up.

Oh I think the hearing of the loss of Keith Sampson on another squadron certainly affected me, and on our squadron a bomb aimer who had trained with me on the first course that I was on in Canada

was shot down and that saddened me a little until four days later, he walked back into the mess. He had escaped through Switzerland and was back in England.

I didn’t actually say “Bill, I thought you were dead,” but that was the thought that was in my mind.

I said, “Where the hell did you come from?” And he said, “I got here via Switzerland.” and that was that.

No. When we were at OTU. We did have some talks by intelligence officers about escaping and we were told that it was our duty

to escape or evade capture and so on. And at that stage, up to that point I think, there were more than four thousand aircrew who had been shot down and had evaded capture or escaped from prisoner of war camps in Germany. So it didn’t surprise me when one day the Germans shot fifty who were trying to escape because it

had been going on for a long time.

Well, sometimes of course they would bequeath their belongings to a friend in another crew. Often the belongings,

they would say they didn’t want them sent home. I didn’t leave any particular instructions but there were all kinds of instructions, usually given to a friend who was in a different crew so that the chances of both going at the one time were minimal. But they were here yesterday and

not here today and I’m afraid that was a part of the whole situation that everyone just had to accept.

I don’t think that he had been gone long enough for anyone to do anything about it, but, well I didn’t ask him, but I didn’t hear of him being upset about anything about it.

Well, the casualty rate is the casualty rate whether a few people come back or not, and that became rather well known as you progressed in the business.

Oh, I was completely

prepared to. I had an acceptance of the fact that it was at least an even-money chance that I wouldn’t survive when I reached the squadron.

I didn’t really make any.

I don’t know, I didn’t make any. I think that a person can be prepared to accept a decision, whether it’s bad or good, without wanting to change his whole life.

I think the

one, which turned out to be three, which led me to think about that most was Cologne. We went three times to Cologne within forty-eight hours, and the Americans went to Cologne also during daylight in that

same period, and it seemed to me that you couldn’t have a, what amounted to four bomber forces going to the one spot within a short period of time without contemplating the very real risk that a lot of civilians were going to get hurt. Now we had

specific targets within each of three quarters of the city which we went to, but I have seen photographs of Cologne after the war which were taken from aircraft that flew over it, and about the only part of the city which was untouched

was the Cathedral.

Well, I wasn’t operating in the final stages of the war.

I finished operating in November, ’44 and the war didn’t finish until May, ’45

We didn’t ever think of it that way and we were never briefed that way. The only occasion on which I can remember a reference to civilians

during a briefing, was in respect of Stettin, where we were told the aiming point was the docks at Stettin. It was a shipping port and very important for supplies to Russia to get through and so on, and the remark that was made by the intelligence officer on that occasion was, “If you miss the docks you might hit the dock

workers.” But that’s the only occasion I can remember where other than the specific target, be it a factory or a bridge or whatever, was mentioned.

How much pressure?

We had no decision to make about the target. We were briefed to bomb a particular target. Early in the war the crews had a discretion and they had things like secondary targets, and they had a discretion to

select a target in some cases where the primary target was, for instance, overcast. We didn’t, in the time that I was operating, ever have that discretion. We were given a target, and that’s the target we were to bomb.

No. I thought I was a pretty good bomb aimer,

and the only time, as I say when I dropped bombs that I had a U/S [unserviceable] bomb sight was on Frankfurt and I was sure that I was within the target area, and the photograph that I had proved that to be so.

Not that I’m aware of, but I know that there were crews which dropped their bomb, which dropped one bomb anyway, on the way to the target because crossing the North Sea on some occasions you could see the flashes of what were obviously cookies. A cookie was the

four thousand pound weight.

No, but I’m well aware of what LMF means and the ramifications of it.

No. I’m not

aware of any specific instances. We did have a member of our crew who was grounded after he had done – this was the first navigator – after he had done eleven trips, and after the eleventh trip, while we were in the billet together he took an epileptic fit, and the decision was made to ground him on medical grounds. He was reduced,

I think, no he wasn’t reduced in rank but he was reduced in pay because he didn’t get his flying allowance, but that’s all that happened to him.

It was discussed by people who had

friends or someone elsewhere, who knew of the cases. I had the impression myself, and this was only an impression without being able to back it up, that if there were cases of potential LMF that they could well have been weeded out before they got to the squadron level.

In other words, if somebody was afraid to fly they were probably afraid to fly anyway.

High.

Oh, there was a great camaraderie amongst flying crews. I think there always has been.

They see themselves as different to the people on the ground, and the mere fact that they are exposed to great danger I think just extends that camaraderie. In any event the morale on 460 was high.

Well we had no problems at all in our own crew. The examples? Well, I’ve already sighted an example of a machinegun being fired during the preparation of an aircraft for an operation and

as far as I’m aware to this day there are only two people who would know about it. That’s the mid upper gunner and myself.

Well you were effectively because in most cases of a casualty the crew went together as it were.

I mean there were cases where one member of the crew might have survived and the rest died but the more general circumstance was that the whole crew lived or died together.

Yes. We were…Yes.

The sort of interdependence in the aeroplane on operations carried over into the off duty times when we went out together. Yes.

I

think there is a natural camaraderie where people are exposed to danger and each of them knows what that danger means and has experienced it and there’s a tendency for them to think and maybe even say that a person who hasn’t experienced that would not know what they are talking about. And

this I take to be the reason why so many ex-service people have tended not to talk about what they have experienced except when the company of people who have had like experiences.

Very little. Very little about the actual danger. The concentration was on the operation that we were on or completing the tour but very little about the dangers that were in the way of

that happening.

Well, it was acknowledged that when you had done thirty operations that you were ‘screened’ is the term that they use, which means that you were taken off operations. That was

some sort of symbol I suppose that you’d done enough for the time being. And both the pilot and I had done an extra trip with another crew so that we reached a point where, of the seven in the crew, the pilot and I had done thirty one, four others had done thirty

and the engineer had done twenty-nine because he was sick in a few of the early ones. And we decided, as a group, that we would do an extra one to get him through his tour of thirty. As a matter of fact when we returned from our second last trip, we had the debriefing officer and others

coming out to shake our hands and say well done and so on. And we said well we’ve decided we’ll do an extra trip so that the engineer can get up his thirty.

Any extra trip is unlucky. Yeah. I mean

the extra trip that I had done early in my tour was because some other crew’s bomb aimer was sick and they said, “Where can we get a bomb aimer.” So the bombing leader said to me “Would you be prepared to take a trip with this less experienced crew, incidentally?” And I said, “Yes.” And

I didn’t fully realise what I had done until, as we were taxiing out to take off, we passed all six other members of my crew and they’re standing on the side of the taxiway waving me goodbye. And I thought to myself, “Jos, what have you done?” But it was too late.

I don’t know. I don’t know really.

Well no because we had also actually decided that we would be prepared to do another tour if we were asked to do it. That might have been pushing it a bit.

No, it was like another trip except that we went around twice to drop the bomb that hung up but it was more or less like another trip. I can’t explain a lot of these things, I can just tell you what I did and

what we did. I don’t have a logical explanation for a lot of the things. Perhaps you had to be young and a bit silly to be doing these things.

Yeah. That’s right.

First of all, of course, we were scattered to the four winds and, in my particular case, and I think most of the others, we were posted to a station with nothing to do and then sent on extended bouts of leave, sort of thing. When it became certain that the war was drawing to a close

and that they didn’t have any need for further crews – they were still getting crews coming forward from the Empire Air Training Scheme at a rate of knots – I suppose it was decided, in my case, that my active time was over and they’d better send me home. So I arrived home

fifteen days after the war in Europe was finally over. I left Scotland only about the same amount, fifteen days before the war was to end.

Well I don’t know what happened to them at that time but generally what happens after a completed tour is that you’re

screened and that means often posted to a training unit where you teach your specialty sort of thing. I still don’t know what happened at all to two members of the crew with whom I lost contact completely. The engineer and the mid upper gunner. The rear gunner is still alive,

although fighting cancer in England. And the three Australians, the pilot, the original navigator and the wireless operator have died in the last ten years. And the remaining member of the crew, the navigator who replaced the original one, who took an epileptic fit,

I have no memory of his face, of his Christian name, of anything and yet I flew seventeen operations to and from the target sitting alongside him. And I’m not sure whether that means I have had some bad experience and blacked it out or what.

That’s the fact. I just don’t know.

It seemed that we had come together for a purpose and that the purpose had been served so that the actual breaking up

wasn’t the problem. I think that the fact that I kept in touch with the Australians and with the English rear gunner, periodically – he’s been out to Australia and I’ve been to England a few times – and, before they died, I’ve had contact with the others, not often but

from time to time, sort of thing and we kept up that way and we were always glad to see one another. And on the last occasion when the rear gunner was out here from England at the time of the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, we actually had a mini reunion at the navigator’s place, amongst four of us, before we went down to see the pilot who was

at Tweed Heads and dying of cancer at the time.

Well, the boat, which was the New Amsterdam and I may say to you that the conditions on the boat coming back were the absolute antithesis of those experienced going over,

you know, silver service and all that sort of stuff.

No. no. I thought it was a European ship but I might be wrong. Anyway the service was great. We actually landed first of all at Fremantle and at Fremantle we had a

speech given to us by the air officer commanding the local area who said that he was glad to see us and welcomed us home, even though we had left Australia to its own devices and avoided the main battle, which was in the Pacific against Japan. And that didn’t go down very well with our troops at all. Then we came around to Sydney and had

to stand off the heads because of an intense fog in the morning. But when we finally docked at Woolloomooloo at ten or eleven o’clock there standing on the wharf was Beryl because she had been told by some bloke who had some in to the shipping lines or the transport arrangements that Jos was on the New Amsterdam and it would dock at Woolloomooloo on the morning of

the twenty-third of May. And my first impression of hearing her talk was that she had the broadest accent that I’d ever heard and she seemed to be saying. “Hooow aaare yoouu, Jos.?” Just as the English would ape us. That’s how it sounded after listening to the more clipped English tones for two and a half years.

She thought I was thin and you see, when I left the air force, a little later, I was still only nine stone four and I was probably less than that when I reached Australia. And nine stone four was not a great weight for me.

Oh yes. Any homecoming is that, of course.

Oh yes.

Oh well, you’re much more mature. I make comparison between myself at that same age, what was I, twenty

one, twenty-two, no twenty-one and my grandchildren and others of the same age. And there seems to be a big gap in maturity and I suppose that’s only natural.

No, I haven’t felt that way because the years that I spent in the forces, although most of it was hanging around, I think that the system made up to me by allowing me to go to university and get a start on life here that I possibly wouldn’t otherwise have had.

In the accounts branch in the Treasury to which I returned, there was an old digger from the First World War and he understood the sort of

unsettlement that you can feel on coming back to the civil situation and, every so often, he would call me over and say, “Why don’t you take Bill Henry,” who was another Air Force fellow who worked at the same place, “take Bill down and put a couple of rums into him or something.” And so we did. We would go and have a

couple of drinks and a talk, not necessarily about the war and come back. But that little release and that understanding helped a lot.

Well I think I had other things to focus attention on. I

returned to Australia in May, ’45. I married Beryl in July, ’45. The whole war ended in August or September, ’45 and by that time I was back in the Treasury and already planning to go to university from the following opening of university,

and so I had enough of other things to think about not to get too worried about whether I was settled down or not. I was ready to come home and I was ready to resume civilian life. I didn’t want to stay in the air force. I had gone there for a particular reason, that reason had been

satisfied and I was ready to resume civilian life.

I didn’t seem to have too much trouble.

Again we didn’t have a house. We didn’t have any prospect of getting a house quickly because I didn’t have much money, but I had started planning to build a house, so we acquired a piece of land at

Oatley. I started the university course and I was working full-time during the day and doing the full-time university course at night so I didn’t have too much spare time. Three years after we were married I was still doing the university course so our daughter was born.

By that time we had a piece of land and I had decided that I was going to build the first house we lived in myself, so I acquired a sort of a kit home, a ready-cut sort of home and I had help from my brother and brother-in-law,

to do things and from other friends to survey the site and lay out the foundations and so on but the brickwork foundations I did myself. The timber frame, Beryl’s father, my brother-in-law and I erected together. I had the tiling,

the roof tiling, done by a tradesman and the internal fixing done similarly and the plumbing and the electricity but the rest of the place, the finishing off, the painting and all the other stuff we did ourselves, so there wasn’t really all that much time in those first few years to be thinking and feeling sorry for myself but rather, having to get stuck into it and get

established.

Well with the exception of the, sort of memory gaps that I have, and the worst one of those is the navigator with whom I did seventeen operations and I can’t even remember his first name nor what he looked like.

That seems a bit spooky to me but apart from that, I certainly had eye problems that came out of the fact that I operated at altitude, and they have caused me a few problems, but I don’t detect anything else.

Maybe others do but I don’t.

Well for about the first three years I suppose after we came back, Beryl used to tell me how much I grinded my teeth and dreamt and kicked around and yelled out and that sort of thing.

That seems to have gone now so let’s hope we’ve got over that.

Not in a specific way, but without doubt the time that I spent

on the squadron and the time operating is the one period of the service, which stands out, if you like, and maybe always will to me.

I don’t think I feel

a great deal differently to the way that I described it to you before. I think that war is a terrible thing and is to be avoided at all costs but if and when – and sometimes it is when it becomes necessary to fight one, then you have to fight it with all you’ve got and win it.

Oh comparatively yes. I mean comparatively with other countries. Times have changed and a lot of people my age have a certain amount of regret at the passage of time and think that things were always

better in the old days, and whenever I have a tendency to think along those lines I just cast my thoughts around my grandchildren and what they’ve done and the sort of people they’ve become, and it was all worthwhile.

Oh the sound of a Merlin engine which was in the Spitfire and also in the Lancaster. If I hear a Merlin engine now the hair rises immediately on the back of my neck and even sometimes just talking about it that happens, so the memory is very strong.

I don’t think so.

To be avoided at all costs, but if you have to fight one you fight it fully.

No I’m not a philosopher really but the only thought that I would have is that

a life of freedom is worth fighting for.