Australians at War Film Archive

I’m a sand groper. Born in North Fremantle. I’m a Mount Lawley boy. Apart from, my Dad worked in the post office, well actually the telephone branch, and he

had to go bush for three years so we went to York. But apart from the three years up in York, I lived all the time down here in Perth.

To get promotion. So he was lucky enough to go to York, which was only sixty miles away. He could have gone to any place but he went to York and we spent three years up there. And we

were there ‘29, ‘30, and ‘31.

Nine. Born in 1920, yeah.

Well my daughter would say…In fact she was amazed, just the other day. “You always wore shoes.” In fact we didn’t. We only wore shoes on Sundays, I think.

Oh, I don’t think it was that. But no kids wore shoes normally to school as far as I remember. No. It is only when you got dressed up that you wore them. Lots of kids wore sandshoes.

Oh well, maybe if there was a school concert or something or other like that. Or for going to church on Sundays you would.

Oh well, with my family it was regular. We used to go every Sunday.

So that did me, all my childhood. That excuses me now.

Oh York was a pretty important town too because it was on the railway down to Albany. I’ll tell you a fellow that comes from York that you’d probably be

in contact with, Jackie Sue.

He was in Z force. He went behind the Jap lines and all that sort of thing. I went to school with his sister up in York. Then when we came down from York in 1932 and I went to Perth Boys.

Oh we didn’t do much really. I don’t….Sport and so forth, back then, wasn’t like it is now. They are well organized into cricket and footy and so forth. Back in the

late twenties and early thirties I don’t really recall any organized sport on the weekend.

Mucked about. That was the expression I would imagine. We used to go out…Dad used to go out

shooting rabbits and that a bit but I don’t know. It was a very quiet life I think.

Yes.

Oh because by that time we had started to grow up and Perth Boys was…Well

you only had two big schools as far as I remember. There was Fremantle Boys and Perth boys. And of course there was a junior tech. But kids came from everywhere to go to Perth Boys. I can remember one kid came from Mundajop. He had to leave at about six o’clock in the morning to come to school. But there weren’t the high schools….Of course there was Modern School too but

Modern School was the elite school. As you probably know, Bob Hawke went there, and people like that. All the brainy ones.

Perth Boys used to be pretty…Well now days they would reckon it was pretty grim I suppose but…

Well you got the cane if you didn’t behave yourself. Kids now days would know they were alive if they went back to Perth Boys.

Pretty often if you didn’t behave yourself. I remember the first time,

the first day at Perth Boys. This was the first day back at school and up at York it used to be…you know it was settling in, it was very easy. But down at Perth Boys I remember I was chewing and this bloke Bill Potts, he said, “What are you doing boy? Chewing?”

“Yes sir.” “Come out here.” Bend over and six on the bum with a straight edge. Oh boy it hurt.

Oh that was my first day at Perth Boys!

Oh yes. Well it…Because the first couple of days you got sort of graded off, they had

exams and you got graded off. And as a matter of fact that was 1932, and a few years ago we had a meeting and decided we would meet every five years, but now we’ve come down to every year because…But we still get about twenty and it’s rather interesting really

when you read in the paper about they want smaller classes, and that sort of business. We had fifty two in my class. And I don’t think we suffered.

Perth Boys had about seven hundred. But see…really it was practically the only one.

I’ve got one brother, three years younger than I am, and my sister is eight years younger. They are both still alive.

Oh my sister was only a little

baby. What would she be? She was born in 1928, she would have been three or four. And my brother, he was three years younger. It didn’t mean much to him. But you see when you, well you probably

knew that, Perth Mod was the school in those days and the only way you could get there was virtually by scholarship. Or could go there if you passed your Junior. Your Junior exam was held at the end of ninth. So Modern School was the elite school and

I think in many ways it is something that should be carried on. But there is no such thing as an elite school now days. No.

I sat for the Junior…I sat for the scholarship but didn’t qualify. And when I came

…when I got my Junior at the end of ‘34, my parents would have kept me at school had I had wanted it. But of course that was the middle of the Depression then and really your obligation was to go out and get a job if you could.

Well he was a telephone mechanic to start off with and then he became a foreman and so forth. It was a technical

job really. But this is why he had to go bush for three years, to get promotion.

Yeah.

Well not really. You don’t know any different do you? You just, well we never really wanted for anything, although Dad

in those days you never earned more than five pounds a week and was able to buy a house and so forth on that. I mean a quid in those days was a quid.

Oh not great…good mates because you lived in different suburbs. You know, you used to

…well…used to go in by train from Mount Lawley. You’d get the train in from Mount Lawley to Perth railway station. So the kids came from all over. The fifty two in my class came from all over Perth, and you didn’t, well I didn’t really have any great mates.

Oh I played a bit of tennis and a bit of cricket. I never played Aussie Rules. But see back in those days even to…you know, to…

oh we used to have quite a bit of sport at school. That was where it mainly came in. It wasn’t like I did in my teenage…later on, where I played hockey and cricket. And then after the war I went back and played hockey for a while

but that time I was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, getting too old for it.

Not much because there weren’t any other schools. It’s not like it is today. In some ways they spend more time doing things other than learning. They are always going on

trips and so forth.

Yeah, my Dad was in the 44th battalion in the first war. He went away as a private and came back with a Military Medal and his commission.

When this war broke out we just automatically…My brother and I never thought anything but that we would go. One of Dad’s little jokes was “Don’t forget I’m a Cambridge man.” When he did his officer’s course it was done at Cambridge University in England so he used to say, “Don’t forget

my boy, I’m a Cambridge man.”

France.

Oh blowed if I know. The only one I really remember is that he got his Military Medal at a place called Hamel. And I think there’s a place Hamel just south of Werona, which was named after that.

Oh not very often. There wasn’t any reference to it because I think it was a bloody awful war. Really. That trench warfare.

It was automatic, I think. We used to talk about the old country but you know, that was a common term back then. But when the war was declared I don’t think there was any…I wouldn’t say I was greatly patriotic

but it just seemed that I would do what my Dad did, and I went to the war.

Not greatly. Not greatly at all. No, I think you were more interested in your job and your girlfriend and

stuff like that. You didn’t…I wasn’t into politics very much at all.

Oh shivers, yeah.

Met her when I was fourteen. I got married at twenty-one and I went to the war. But unfortunately she died back in 1976.

So…

I first saw her in church. She was a country girl and she came up and happened to go to the same church as I was at. So I just saw her and thought, “Oh boy, oh boy”.

And that was that. I was only fourteen too.

Oh yes. The only girl I ever had.

Well she sort of…it was the done thing in a way. You know everyone…

I don’t know how it would be nowadays but back then most blokes went I think. You’d probably know better than I do what the percentages were but….

Well you didn’t have as much liberty as you do now.

Up until the time I was eighteen going on nineteen I had to be home at ten o’clock every night. Oh boy, oh boy. It’s a lot different nowadays I think. But there weren’t the things to do then that there are now.

Nope. Not at all. You want to know how I got into the navy?

No I wasn’t really. What happened…I tried to join the air force. And this was I suppose early, about

January or February of 1940 they started to call for applicants to join the air force. And of course I was going to be a fighter pilot the same as everyone else. You know. And it was announced in the paper that they would take applications one night. And you know the McNess Hall in Pearce Street?

Almost on the corner of the Terrace and Pearce Street, there was a place called McNess Hall. Opposite the Playhouse.

Well it was going to be on this night at about six o’clock or something, they were going to call for enlistment. Well, you’ve never seen such a mob. God. From outside the hall it was just….

Talk about sardines in a tin. There were just hundreds of blokes. From Hay Street down to St Georges Terrace it was absolutely packed. And then it all the way up around the corner, up into St Georges Terrace and Hay Street. There were so many there they just gave up and said, “look we’ll start again sometime”. So a little later on they,

I forget now just how they did it, but I went down and volunteered to join the air force and all they did at that time was take your name. They had so many blokes. They said it would probably be about twelve month before they called us up. So roughly twelve months later I got

called up and went for an interview and was deferred again. So in the meantime, this was January 1941 by now, I thought I’d better get a bit of experience I suppose, so I joined the militia on a, three months in and three months out basis. So I joined the militia and went into the army service corps. We were based down at Claremont. Then the air force called me up again and rejected me. And I remember

I couldn’t even get into the air force

in the ground crew. I thought if I could get into the ground crew they would remuster and I would get to fly but they wouldn’t even have me there. But this air force bloke said, “No, the best thing you can do my boy is go and join the army.” So I went down to the army recruiting place. It was in Bazaar Terrace,

in Perth. It used to be, I think it was the, 16th battalion headquarters there. So I went down there and said, “What happens if I join the army?” And the bloke said, “Well you go into the armoured corps. You go to Puckapunyal over in the eastern states and you are trained for six months in tanks and all that”. He said, “Come on, sign here.”

I said, “Just wait a minute. I’ll go down to Fremantle and see what the navy’s got to offer.”

Well initially of course you did your square bashing. Don’t you…?

Well, square bashing is your elementary drill. You know, you march up and down and turn left and turn right and all that sort of business. So when you first go in you do a lot of that. It is just to instil obedience into you I suppose. But then I had my drivers licence so I got to driving.

A comb.

Well I’ll do it that way, instead of that way.

Well in…The army service corps [ASC] is like the supply side of the army. It supplies the…

bringing up the food and ammunition and all the rest of it. So I had my licence and I very soon got to be driving the truck and so…I did my three months. Oh and you do…you go down on the rifle range a bit, and stuff.

Well a bit of service life to find out what…One knew that once you got in you would be under a certain amount of discipline and so forth so I thought it was best to go and get a bit of this before I went into the air force, as I thought I was going to.

I don’t know that I expected anything.

Really.

Well, once I progressed to driving the three-ton truck and at one stage I was on the bread run up to

Northam Camp. And there was a bakery on North Perth. I couldn’t tell you the name of it, it was just off Charles Street. I used to there and pick up a truckload of bread and deliver it up to Northam, up to the camp, and drive back again. That took just about all day to do that. And we used to go out on manoeuvres.

Oh I remember we did one up to Moore River. They just made up a convoy. I suppose it was just pretend that we were going up to supply a group of people up in Moore River. We had a convoy of trucks and we drove up there and camped in the bush and so forth.

It was pretty hard to….

Well the Yachtsman Scheme was…The Royal Navy asked the Royal Australian Navy to supply

officers and potential officers and they had two schemes. One was if you were over thirty and one was if you were under thirty. For those who were over thirty, providing they qualified, and most of them had been sailing quite a lot in ocean races, even on this one, they went in with a commission straight off.

If you were under thirty the idea was that you were…And these blokes were….you were all going to be sent to England. If you were under thirty you were sent to England pretty promptly and did training over there. You did a minimum of three months in a ship and then went down and did a course to get your commission.

And once you got that you shot off to various sorts of ships. Altogether there were nearly five hundred were sent over and there were more from Fremantle than from anywhere else.

Well when the…After I had been down to Bazaar Terrace and the bloke said, “If you join up you will go into the armoured division.” I said. “Hang on a minute I’m going down to Fremantle.” So I went down to the navy at Fremantle and said, “What can I join down here?” And

he asked a few questions and they said, “You could possibly qualify to join the Yachtsman Scheme.” “Oh what’s that?” And they told me you know, if you get in we’ll call you up and send you to England and travel, and boy oh boy. So…

Well I had my

Junior, which in those days was pretty high. There weren’t too many kids who went onto leaving in those days. If you got your junior that was pretty good. I played top grade hockey by that stage and third grade cricket. And

I remember at the interview when I went down…There were five of us at the interview. You had three or four naval officers all sitting down there making notes of what you…And fortunately I was the last one. But they went through the blokes, you know, where did you go to school, and all the rest. But they already knew a lot of this.

And it came down to yachting and these blokes had all….they’d sailed this and sailed that, and sailed the other. And when it got down to me, I hadn’t even been in a yacht in my life but a couple of times there was down at Barrack Street jetty there was a fellow who had a little business with a little tiny putt putt motorboat,

about five bob and hour. And I’d taken my girl out a couple of times in this little motorboat and just puttered around the Perth water there. So when he came down to me and he said, “What’s your yachting experience?” I said, “None sir. I’m a motorboat man.” And he went “Hmph”, and passed me. If he’d gone any further I would have been buggered. Oh yes.

No, the other four fellows, they had sailed all sorts of things. They had been crewmen on this and that, and the other. So it was a fluke really.

Oh it was only about three weeks and we were called up. Went by train to Melbourne. It took about four days to go across in a train in those days.

Well it was…Well as I said it was sort of automatic, I think. My Dad having been in the first war it was….To me and my brother, I don’t think there was any thought about it. We would go and,

so anyhow we got to Flinders Naval depot in Melbourne, down they’re at Crib Point as they call it. We were only there…We left on the seventeenth of September ‘41, got to Flinders, got kitted up with uniform and all the rest if it, some more square bashing and so forth.

An experience for a boy who had never been further than Kalgoorlie. As I said it took about four days I think.

Where were six of us went over from Perth. There was the other four who had been at my interview

and then there was another chap who had had his interview a bit earlier, so there were six of us from Perth. We got over there and we joined four other fellows; two from Adelaide, one from Melbourne and one from Queensland. That made ten of us.

And so we left….We’d got kitted up with our uniforms and kit bag and hammock, and all the rest of it. And across to Sydney, we got to Sydney on the 11th of October, joined a troop ship on the thirteenth of October and went to England. Got there one the 28th of November.

We went, independently. She was a ship called the Sterling Castle. We went from Sydney to Auckland and we were in Auckland for about ten days loading frozen meat and stuff that. And then we went unescorted to the Panama,

through the Panama and then once again unescorted to England. And…

Yep.

Well yes, there was the inevitable square bashing again.

We had lectures in elementary seamanship and down the rifle range a bit, and so forth. Well you had to learn how to put on these peculiar sailors clothes to start with, with your collar and all the rest of it, you know.

I couldn’t fit into it nowadays. Yes so when we got to England then we went down to a big naval establishment just outside Portsmouth. It was called HMAS Collingwood at a little town called Ferrum, which is just outside Portsmouth and we did about

nine weeks there I think. And then we were…Oh when we got to Collingwood we were split up anyhow, two to a hut. The teams got split up and we were there about nine weeks I think.

To get to England?

13th of October to the 28th of November.

Yes, I’ve got it all down here somewhere.

Oh we just

went sightseeing and stuff like that. There was a funny thing happened in New Zealand. I palled up with a bloke called Doug Kay. We were in the same compartment on the train going from Perth to Sydney. And we became mates and we have been mates ever since, until he left me a couple of years ago. But they had

a sort of a bureau there with a serviceman, and they would give you theatre tickets and this sort of stuff. And so Dougy and I went one day and they had a blackboard with various things you could do and one of them was a sightseeing trip around Auckland and so we asked to go on this and went back in a couple of days and a couple of

End of tape

Well one funny thing is that of course….Back in those days you went to Kalgoorlie on the three foot six gauge, and you had to change in Kalgoorlie to get onto the

wide gauge, and there was a horse called ‘England’s Glory’. One of these days I’ll go out to and find out a bit more about it, but this horse was being sent to the east. And of course, back then it was steam trains and they had to stop every now and again and fill up with water for the engine, and all the rest of it. And it took us, just looking back at that, it

took us five days to get to Melbourne. But I remember this horse, when we’d stop we’d get out and try and get some grass and give this horse a nibble with it. England’s Glory. It must have been a pretty good horse, I think, for them to take it over east but what happened to it God only knows. But….

Well I can tell you something about

the 1943 Melbourne Cup. By that stage I was in the Mediterranean, taking troops backwards and forwards in the ship that I was in and we took some of the ground crews from 3 Squadron. I think they were a RAF [Royal Air Force] squadron. We took them up into Italy, up to Naples,

and there were a couple of brothers on board, and this would have been about October, I think, of ‘43, and one of them said to me, “Would you like a bet on the Melbourne Cup?” You were out in the Mediterranean there and this bloke said, “Would you like a bet on the Melbourne Cup?” “Oh yeah.” He said, “We’ve got a horse that’s going to win and the horse was called ‘Dark Felt’”.

So I wrote to my wife and told her and she got the letter after the race was run. But it won but it was only six to four, so we were given the winner of the Melbourne Cup out in the middle of the Mediterranean.

It would have been a while I think. When you

got to Adelaide you had to change trains again to get to Melbourne because they had different gauges all the way across. But it was quite an experience really. I can remember we got to Tarcoola, and Dougie my mate, it was his twenty-first birthday. And we all went racing across to the pub to get a beer to celebrate his birthday and

I forget what the price was but they were quite staggered at the price of a bottle of beer, I think.

Yeah. Well the train….they were steam trains, you know and they had to fill up the engines with water and I guess they had coal there as well. There were little stops all across the Nullarbor, across the

the transit. It’s not like now. The only place you stop is Cook, I think, on the train.

Oh they would have been four to a compartment I suppose. We went across as…We weren’t in a troop train then. We went across as ordinary passengers.

Later on, of course, they would have crossed in all sorts of things. Cattle trucks and God knows what.

No. I wasn’t into cards in those days. No I suppose we just chatted and so forth.

Only the one, Dougie. I don’t remember the others. The others….

Well this was the first time that I had met him, it was on the train. But we hit it off then and we remained mates right through till two years ago. Although he was a West Australian boy but after the war he went to Queensland but we kept in touch all the time. But…See,

with my war experience…It’s not like being in a battalion or something where you’re with the same crowd all together. I went across to England and after we split up, we went to various ships you didn’t have any real mates. Well I didn’t anyhow and I don’t think any of

us did although the ten of us kept in touch after the war. Now there’s only two of us.

Oh yes. Yes, we all got separated. After we’d finished at HMS Collingwood we then

were sent on this, with this Yachtsman scheme you had to do a minimum of three months at sea. Now one chap went to a battleship HMS Nelson. He loved it but God, I would have hated it I think. Dougie went to a motor launch, I went to a motor launch.

Keith Nichol went to a motor launch and he went to Dieppe. Well Dieppe was a raid which was made mainly by Canadians on the port of Dieppe, in France. It was a hell of a place to go. And Nichol got wounded at Dieppe. There were three

other blokes. Who was it? There was Johnnie Hind, Geoff Hancock and Alan Feely. They all went to a destroyer.

But this is where it’s all such a matter of luck. You’re in…Okay you finish at HMS Collingwood and you go

into the barracks at Portsmouth and from there you’re allocated to a ship. And it works something like this. A ship will want so many seamen. It might be a destroyer, it could be any old thing. And you’ve got a card and some little WRAN [Women’s Royal Auxiliary Navy] goes, “Okay, three men.” and the Witherington, that’s where Johnnie Hind and Hancock and Feely went.

And you can just see it. Somewhere or another they said we want three blokes for the Witherington. I could have gone. It could have been me. It could have been anybody. It’s just nothing, it really is, where you go to and that’s what happens.

Well,

it’s all together different. Poor old Nichol. He goes on a motor launch and goes to Dieppe and gets shot. Fotheringham goes to the Nelson, a bloody great battleship. As a matter of fact there were four yachties went to the Hood. You know, the Hood? No. The Hood was sunk by the

Bismarck, a German pocket battleship as they call it.

That was a lucky shot. It went down and hit the magazine of the Hood and blew it up. And I think they got something like…there were only three or four survivors out of the best part of

two thousand men. But there were four Australian yachties in the Hood. They were doing their three months sea time. It’s just luck. A hell of a lot is luck.

Well after Collingwood there were about four of us, I think,

who went up to a place called Fort William in Scotland to do a course on what was called the Coastal Forces. Coastal Forces were motor launches, motor gunboats, and motor torpedo boats. They all come under the heading of Coastal Forces, and they had a base up there where you did initial training.

So, I forget, it is probably written down there somewhere, how long we were up at St Christopher. It’s got to be somewhere. There we go. Yeah. 14th of March to 10th of April.

Well you sort of…

You had lectures on ship handling, you know and then eventually you go down and act as part of the crew. You sort of learn on the job. That’s what it is and at the end of that period you are allocated to something in the coastal forces.

We all went to the same type of little ship, Fairmile motor launch. But as I say Nichol went to Dieppe and got shot. And Doug went to an ML [Motor Launch] and puttered around the coast of Scotland. I went to an ML.

Don’t ask me how but I was appointed Coxswain. Acting Leading Seaman. This little ship was built at a place called Burselton on the Hamble River. That’s just near Southampton and here’s me, never been a Yachtsman or anything and I finish up as the Coxswain

on this motor launch. So then we went up to Scotland, back up to this place at Fort William and joined the rest of the flotilla. You’ve got eight ships in a flotilla normally. And we joined the flotilla up there and you were doing what they called ‘working up’ exercises. You were

you know, sort of working together and from there we went down to the Clyde.

No. Didn’t make any mates. It’s entirely different in the navy

from what it is in the army. In a battalion you sort of stick with those blokes more or less all the way through. But if in the navy maybe you are on…well, I was only on the thing for three months and then I left. We come back and we go off to the Clyde and by that time we had orders and we knew that the flotilla was going to sail across the Atlantic

and go to the West Indies and act as anti-submarine ships. They had what’s called ASDIC [Anti Submarine Detection Investigation Commission or sub detector] on it. You know, anti-submarine detection and of course because the Gerries [Germans] got across to the American coast and did a hell of a lot of damage so this flotilla was going to go across to the West Indies to

act as anti submarine detectors.

Yeah. They’d all be the same. And to do this trip across the Atlantic we were being fitted with three great big

petrol tanks. They were self sealing, you know, they are a tank but they have rubber and that around them. They call them self sealing, the aircraft and that, have that so that a bullet could go through them but they would seal so that you didn’t get a leakage. So they were fitting three of these big tanks to the upper deck to

carry extra fuel plus a mast with a sail in case they got into trouble. Just as an emergency. And quite frankly I was getting a bit apprehensive over sailing this bloody thing across the Atlantic, with my terrific experience as a yachtsman.

But there was a Royal Navy Coxswain came aboard and I was shunted off down to do my officer’s course. Oh dear.

Yes, well see, don’t forget…Well what you’ve got to realize is that we were specially picked here in Australia to go over.

On the various qualifications, if you’d been a yachtsman, education and various qualifications and all that sort of thing. So we…either you were an officer right from the jump if you were over thirty. Or if you were under thirty you had to do your three months sea time and then you had to pass various interviews by the…But as you had been pre-selected here

you had to do something pretty grim to not go through. Now I know one bloke that when he finished his sea time he said, “No I don’t want to be an officer. I’m going to stay an ordinary seaman.” So that’s what he stayed. So most blokes, there were very,

very few who didn’t qualify really because they had already been sort of pre-selected.

Well basically you steer the thing. But those Fairmiles…it was almost like driving a car. They were two engine jobs and you

got the little wheelhouse with the controls down to the engine room and quite often the skipper would just say “put it alongside”. He wouldn’t bother giving orders. You could bloody near drive it like a car. You know. Put it alongside.

I’ll show you a picture in a minute.

Well, a hundred and twelve foot long and I think about twenty foot wide, something like that. Up in the

…Carried a crew of about, oh about twelve or fourteen I think. You had a motor mechanic who was a leading motor mechanic as they call it and two stokers. They call them stokers although they didn’t do much stoking. There were three engine room fellows, two officers and about

twelve seaman in the crew. We slept in bunks. The leading hand motor mechanic and I had a little cabin each. Very posh. And the officers had a wardroom down aft. It had a top speed of about twenty knots and they carried

the ASDIC, the anti-submarine detection business. It was what they call a dome, goes down, pokes out the keel of the ship and this dome sends out sound waves and if they hit a submarine or what not, you would get an echo back. And the trained ASDIC rating, he can tell how far away it is, and all that sort of business.

So…

Oh yeah, but it was much smaller. I mean the corvettes were real sea going jobs whereas these were more harbour based really.

Although my mate Dougie, after he was commissioned he went to a HDML [Harbour Defence Motor Launch], which was a harbour defence motor launch, which just by its very name it was for harbour defence. I mean here, say at Fremantle, you’d only be patrolling just a bit off Rottnest but he finished up doing five hundred mile convoys in this thing.

Yeah. Golly.

Yep. Well we went down to Brighton and …

where the devil are we? It was about eleven weeks all together. It started off we went to…When we got down there we went into

private accommodation and we were there for two weeks. There were a lot of little bed and breakfast sort of places that normally they would have a couple of blokes to one of these. And we used to go for lessons at a place called Moden [?] College, which pre-war was

a pretty classy school for girls but this was the…Moden College was the…And you did all sorts of stuff. You learned Morse code and Flags. So that was the first fortnight. Then we transferred to a place about five or six miles from Brighton called Lancing College, and Lancing, pre-war, was

a pretty exclusive Anglican Boys college and they lived-in there. We had about six weeks there. And all the time we were having lectures on navigation and of course there was a certain amount of drill and a bit of boating experience.

And after the six weeks there, went down back into Brighton and they had a college there, we had another two weeks there. All the time you were getting examined as you were going along and if you were lucky you finished it and got commissioned.

Basically I reckoned there was about ninety percent passed. As far as the Aussies were concerned, as I said before, as you had been preselected, unless you did something stupid you were pretty certain to pass.

Oh it was pretty intensive and you were always worried, you know…Because…And then when you finished there was always the worry: what ship am I going to go to? And once again it comes down to luck as to what you go to. Now Bob Fotheringham who’d spent

his sea time in the Hood, no not the Hood, the Nelson, it had been a cruiser. It suited Bob down to the ground. He loved the big ship sort of business. But I would have preferred the small ships where there was not so much naval routine and discipline and so forth. But as it was,

I was…after I was advised that I had passed and so forth and then I was told that I was going to go to America to pick up a ship, and I would have to buy tropical gear. And I though, you know, this is beaut. I’m going off to the Pacific, I’d get nearer home but instead of that it was into this new type of ship

LST [Landing Ship Tank], landing ship tank or tank landing ship if you’d like to call it. And instead of going to the Pacific it went to the Mediterranean and that’s where the tropical rig came in. But…

Curious more than anything. And of course

a trip to America, you know. Now Roy Hall, one of the chaps that I went away with. He finished up…He was itching to go to a destroyer or something like that. He had done his sea-time in a destroyer and he wanted to go back to the destroyer. And he didn’t. He finished up in combined ops as they called it.

It wasn’t even a ship. Combined ops, you had, in his particular case he went to what was called an LSI [Landing Ship Infantry], a landing ship infantry and they carried a whole lot of infantry but then the navy had a whole lot of little boats to put them ashore. And Roy

finished up in charge of some of these little boats. Once again all luck.

Yes. I thought this was beaut but I didn’t, I went to this new type of ship the LST and looking back I’m quite happy that I did

because it was a great experience. If you are in a destroyer for instance, you are with the same blokes all the time and it could get very monotonous but with LSTs, our job was to take troops and land them on the beach. Once that landing was made you then went back and forwards just like a bloody big truck, filling up with vehicles and

soldiers and various sort of goods and take them back the other side. And you had different people every few days. It was every interesting. Well I thought it was very interesting.

You just sailed it back. An LST was two hundred and thirty foot long. It wasn’t a little bloody ship. That’s an LST.

Well an LST was about three hundred and thirty foot long and was fifty foot wide. It had a draft of about three foot six forward, and about nine foot aft. It was flat bottomed

so it could go up onto a beach. Rough as guts in a storm or what not because being flat bottomed it rolls and then you had the…you had two decks basically. You had the tank space, as it was called, the ship had two big bow doors like that

and then it had a ramp which came down so that vehicles could come on and off. Of course that ramp was watertight. The two bow doors were not. You could actually…Well the bow doors, once they were closed, they had to be fastened together and the sailors used to go down inside

and fasten these two, clamp these two doors together. And so there was all water down in there. You carry, depending on the size of the tank, you could carry ‘round about eighteen to twenty tanks, depending on the size of them. And then you also had, well we used to call it

the ‘elevator’. It was sort of a little lift thing that would take one truck at a time. You’d drive in the bow doors, onto this elevator thing and take it up and then it would go onto the top deck. It could carry something like…..

You’ve got your twenty

or so tanks in the tanks base and up on the upper deck you’ve got anything, you could carry forty or so jeeps on the upper deck but depending on the size of the trucks. It just depended what you….And of course then you had the blokes that were driving the trucks and all the rest of it as passengers.

Oh she was built at Baltimore. I remember. Well of course I had gone across to the states, down to New York and then I was told that the ship I was going to was down at Baltimore. I got down to Baltimore

and got a taxi down to the….It was just about dark. I came round the end of this shed. “What the bloody hell is this?” It was an ugly looking thing. “What in the hell is this?” “It’s an LST.” It carried a…normally five officers and a crew of about sixty.

They were a very interesting ship. They really were. You’ll find the blokes who had been on proper ships wouldn’t agree with me but I was quite happy. One good thing about it was the engines in the ship had come out of American trains. They were General Motors diesels of some sort and they

were water cooled so we carried a hell of a lot of fresh water. We got to have fresh water showers whereas on a normal ship you don’t. You know destroyers and so forth you shower and what not, mainly in salt water. But that’s one of the little perks that we had. Fresh water showers.

Yep.

Got there…I’ve got to refresh my memory. Got there early February I think, and I know I sailed on the 22nd of April.

We picked up…After we picked up the ship we then did working up exercises in Chesapeake Bay, which is a big stretch of water in America. It runs down near to the north of Virginia and I’ll never forget it. Our skipper was what’s called an RNR, Royal Naval

Reserve. He was a merchant ship officer in the naval reserve. And the first time we had to put her on the beach I remember he gave the orders, you know. I should explain that as you went on the beach you had what was called kedge anchor at the stern. So this was

dropped off, so when you went on the beach you had this anchor out the back, out the stern with a winch to help get you off. You started up the winch and it dragged on the anchor and it helped you to get off. I remember the skipper, he stood on the….He out his hand over his eyes. “I’ve been thirty bloody years keeping off the beach and now I’m being paid to put it on.”

Oh yes. Yes.

A fellow called Laws. L-a-w-s. that was the 430, which I joined. I know that we sailed for New York on the

27th of April and it took us about twenty eight days to get across the Atlantic to Gibraltar.

Right, the next…What was the one that…Normandy, wasn’t it. The Normandy was a French ship which was going to be converted to a

troop ship up in New York. It caught fire and turned over. It was lying on its side. Pier 90 I think it was. And we loaded…We had a general cargo of ammunition and stuff like that but the funny thing was we had…You’ve got it there.

There was a ship…Little ships called LCTs [Landing Craft Tank], landing craft tank as distinct from landing ship tank and

an LCT could carry about one or two tanks and there were different sizes. The American ones were much smaller than the British.

Well for me it was alright. I met some…I have to go back a bit. The night before I left England I happened to be having a drink in a pub and there was an air force fellow there on his own.

And of course the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] in those days had this beautiful blue uniform which they’ve recently gone back to. So you could tell an Aussie because they had this beautiful blue uniform. So we got talking and he said, “Where are you off to?” And I said, “I can’t tell you that.” You know.

“Loose talk sinks ships” and all that sort of thing. And he said, “Is there any chance of you going to New York?” I said, “Could be, could be.” He said, “I’ll give you an address in New York.” So he gave me this address and I phoned these people when I got there, and they invited me around and looked after me quite a bit. So as far as I was concerned I had somewhere to go. As far as the

ordinary sailors onboard were concerned they got extra pay while in the States, because the ordinary seamen in those days only got two and six a day, the British seamen, and you couldn’t even pay for bloody haircuts with that. But it was quite funny when we were lying at

the pier and of course you had gates to get in. And the lasses used to line up at the gates and take the blokes out. They used to pay for the things because the fellows couldn’t. They didn’t have any money. So I was very fortunate. I was taken to quite some nice places. The Waldorf Astoria and the Twenty-One Club and places like this.

It’s still going I think. The Twenty-One Club. It’s just a very expensive nightclub. You know.

I’m just trying to think. I can’t remember. There was one women called Hildegard. You know, like you talk about Sinatra and these sort of

blokes. Well back in 1941, they had their contemporaries, those sorts of things. But don’t ask me their names. I can’t remember.

Oh I could walk around. That’s about all.

When I went from England across to America, actually we left from

the Clyde and went across to St Johns in Newfoundland. And then by train from Newfoundland down to New York. And Canada was dry. Well you had to have a licence to get a drink, and every time the train would stop the blokes would jump out and go looking for a beer, but if you didn’t have a licence you couldn’t get a beer.

Most peculiar. And it’s funny, we went from Canada down into the states and as part of their war effort they had a meatless day once a week in the States. They had a meatless day. So we were into America and the steward comes along for the meal

and he stands at the end of the carriage and said, “It’s a meatless day. You’ve got to eat turkey.” Oh God.

I can tell you the phone number. Sacramento 27218. Flat 9C 10-75 Park Avenue.

Yeah. They had an apartment up in this unit. Well they were 9C so there must have been at least another two up there. Oh they were great. I kept in touch with them for many years but I was there a long time too.

Their name was Hefner. The husband had a publishing business in New York. But they entertained, it must have been dozens of Australians. They said that there’s enough Americans to look after the Americans so they used to have…

Well that was something wasn’t it? Yeah. I wouldn’t like to live there I don’t think.

No. But I tell you another funny thing. When we were down in …Well we’d picked up the ship and I told you we’d been working up in Chesapeake Bay and we went down to Northwick. And you are down in black country down there and I remember the first

time we went ashore, we jumped on a bus and there were all empty seats up the back and we went to go up. “You can’t sit up there! That’s for niggers” It took a bit of getting used to, that. But of course I think the war changed a lot of that too.

Oh back in those days all this business about that the Afro Americans couldn’t walk on the same footpath and all this sort of business. Cafes and that. Segregation. And I understand that most of it’s gone nowadays. But it was rather…you know, a new experience for me

to see that sort of stuff.

No. You didn’t. There were a few up in York and the only really indigenous people that I remember when I was a kid, was the fellow who came around and sold clothes props. You wouldn’t know what I am talking about would you?

Perth.

Yeah there used to be some coming around with props. Props.

No. It was just a prop to push the line up after Mum hung the clothes out on the line. You’d just use the prop to push it up. of course then later on they brought those things like a T- bar. You know that.

And of course now you’ve got the hills hoist and what not.

Yeah.

No they only had a number. The official, well they didn’t say it out loud, but

all the landing craft only had numbers because the idea was that the casualties were going to be so high that you wouldn’t waste time to give them a name. It was a hell of a job I should imagine, digging up names for all these ships so we just had numbers. And there were roughly…They were all American built or

initially they were. There were over a thousand of them built. The Americans had the majority of them and the Royal Navy only had about a hundred and ten of them I think, roughly. And they were supplied on lend lease and after the war they were handed back to the Americans again. But I would imagine that there were no

other ships built in such numbers. I wouldn’t think. There were over a thousand of them.

You can’t think up a thousand names for them.

It we came across in a big convoy.

I believe there were about eighty ships in the convoy and it took us twenty-eight days from New York across to Gibraltar. And once we got into the Meds we went down some of the various ports and called into the various ports. Algiers was the first one we came to. Eventually we got to a port called Biserta

and that’s when we unloaded our Yankee LCT. They had great big blocks of wood. They were fitted across the deck and this LCT on those blocks of wood, and was secured with various wires and shackles and things.

And then when we came to unload it everything was loosened off or taken off and the ship was tilted over, and all that held this thing was one wire. And the chippie got out with the axe and went boom like that and broke it and she just slid off sideways into the sea. That’s how they launched them.

Well you filled various tanks. Basically you emptied the tanks on one side because you carried water for the engines for one thing, so you had a hell of a lot of fresh water. You’ve also got your fuel, so basically what you do is empty, or partially empty the one side into the

other so that the ship tilts over like that. And then it just slid off.

Oh there’s different…You can see how…I don’t know what that is. Probably about twelve foot or so. It didn’t need a hell of a tilt really.

Oh it just slid off like that. It had all been worked out. It wasn’t up to the individual ship. You had a set of instructions as to what to do. The engineer, he knew what tanks he had to fill to get it to a certain

tilt and then just off she went. The American crew lived on the thing on the way over. I don’t know how many they had on, probably about fifteen or so crew I suppose. We never saw them really. They lived on their own little ship on board us.

It was just general stuff. I can’t remember what it was. We carried some ammunition and stuff like that. In that book, in that it talks about other ships that took timber across to North Africa and unloaded timber. We weren’t refrigerated

or anything like that it was just…so it was just general sort of cargo that we took over.

The first operation we did was up into Sicily, which was in July. We did a landing up near Sicily on July the 9th, I think.

10th of June, ‘43, Operation Husky.

Well Operation Husky was the landing by American and British troops to drive the

Germans and Italians out of Sicily. We loaded in the two ports in Tunisia- Sousse and Sfax. We loaded in those two ports and then away we went to

Sicily. We landed at a place called Cape Passero. We didn’t have any troubles. We unloaded alright but the people who had the real trouble in Sicily were the airborne. The night…

…That was on the 10th was the landing. The night of the 9th and the 10th was a hell of a storm. It was rough. The Mediterranean is, because it is very shallow it doesn’t take much…you know, much wind and that to create a bit of a storm in the Med and

by the same token it dies down very quickly. But on the night on the way over it was the worst night that I remember when I was at sea. Dear it was rough but by morning it had settled down. But the poor old airborne, they went in in two lots. There were paratroopers and there were glider borne troops and

a lot of them perished. A lot of the gliders were dropped before they got to where they should have been. Now after we had unloaded at Cape Passero we took onboard about thirty German prisoners and about thirty

Italian prisons. They were put down in the tank space and we had, it might have been twenty or thirty American paratroopers as guards. Now they had been dropped a hundred miles from where they should have been. What they weren’t going to do to the pilots of the planes when they got back to North Africa! There was a…But you know it was very, very windy and the…

But there shouldn’t have been any excuse for being dropped a hundred miles from where you should have been. Once the actual landing is over you then, just like a bloody great truck, you go back and fill up again and just backwards and forwards. Then as I said earlier on, every two or three days you get a different crowd on board.

Oh we landed British troops. We were divided into two sectors. There was the American lot. They had their part of Sicily to land in and look after and we worked in the British sector. And so after

….that was what the 10th of July and then we just went backwards and forwards for quite a while resupplying the troops in Sicily. And then I think it was the 28th of August, I got transferred from the 430

to the 420 and the next landing that we did was at Salerno.

Oh I don’t know. Turn over the page.

Well Operation Avalanche, that was a funny business really. That was on the 9th of September, I know that. On the

evening of the 8th of September it came over the radio that the Italians had surrendered. So we thought “Oh good. This is beaut”. We thought the Ities had surrendered and it would probably be a piece of cake. But it wasn’t because the Gerries had more or less expected that this was…They had more or less worked out that this could be where the next landing was going to place,

and I believe they had only just prior to this, they had conducted dummy operations, to be... And although my particular ship, the 420, we had no trouble, we went in and unloaded. But my old ship, the four430, I was a lucky boy. She got caught by shell fire

from the shore and she got into quite a bit of trouble. Several weeks later I went aboard and where my action station used to be there was a hole. She picked up, I don’t know, I believe she got about five or six shells.

The Captain, Lieutenant Commander Laws, he was badly injured. He was up on the Bridge and he got hit and I should have been up on the Bridge if I was there. So there we are. But once the actual… the sort of excitement and so forth is the actual landing. Once the landing has been made

you are more or less just shuffling backwards and forwards and all you’ve got to worry about then normally is air attack. But I’ll tell you a funny thing that happened on the night of the 8th of September. Well everybody’s

sort of keyed up in a way I suppose, and although my watch was normally what was called the first watch from eight o’clock at night till midnight, that was my watch. But I remember I went down and I didn’t go down to my own cabin. I was having a quick zizz in a cabin that was just

under the Bridge. Just a cot and what not. And I had a dream that I was standing on the stern of this LST dropping depth charges. For a start we don’t carry depth charges in an LST. They are too bloody…Well you just don’t carry them. So anyway I was standing on the stern of this LST and I said, “Fire 1. Fire 2.”

And away goes the depth charges. Mind you I’d never been in the position of doing it. This is all out of films and books and that. And I said, you know, this goes on. You know, you’re doing this. Fire 1, fire 2, fire 4…And then I woke up. And what had happened was alongside us was a cruiser and it had fired four shots

at an aircraft. And yet in your dream it’s going on and going on and it’s just a split second really. You know. And this has always intrigued me that I had this dream of depth charges, four depth charges and it’s the ship next door to us firing off four rounds.

Yeah. It’s just that’s how your mind works. Yet in the dream it takes ages. And yet in actual fact you’ve dreamed all of this just like that. So…I don’t know if you’re psychiatrists or something like that, you can work this out. You know if you’ve been asleep and you think you’ve dreamed all night and it’s been bloody half a minute.

This is what I think after that experience.

Yeah.

Well we were actually…I was in the first convoy into Naples. Of course you’ve got the army pushing up. What happened in effect was that the army went up Italy in two sort of lots; the left hand side and the…Well, the eastern side and the western side. They went

up like that sort of thing. And in between at one stage we took some troops into Taranto. Taranto is in the heel of Italy, right down in the, and it was a big naval base. And I’ve never seen so many warships in one spot

apart from Normandy. The Italians had a terrific navy and they just weren’t game enough to come out and have a go. If they’d come out and had a go at the RN [Royal Navy], back in the days of 1942, 1943 sort of thing, they would have wiped the floor with them, I reckon. But they just weren’t game enough to do it. God. So…But then

as I say, in the first convoy to go into Naples and Naples had been pretty badly bombed. The docks were badly damaged, there was a lot of sunken ships and so forth. And so we had to…we were carrying American troops on this particular trip, and we had to go round the corner from Naples. There was a little port called

Pozzuoli and this is where we unloaded there. And I will never forget, there was a lot of really ragged little kids on the wharf, yelling out for food. We had a lot of tins of bully beef and army biscuits sort of left over.

The troops that we were carrying would leave some of the stuff behind. So the crew started throwing some of these biscuits and bully beef to these kids. And the next thing was the bloody grown men coming down and taking it and putting the food away from these kids. I think they were really pretty hungry some of them, but

that’s something I’ve not forgotten. So then the… Don’t ask me the name of the next landing. What the devil was it?

Shingle was it? Yeah. What happened was the Germans put up some pretty stiff resistance.

You’ve got Naples and then after Naples there was quite a bit of awkward country. I believe it was called the Pontine Marshes. It was very swampy and all the rest of it. So the idea was that they were going to circumvent this country. I don’t know how far it was. It might have been

sixty mile or something. They were going to do another landing up at a place called Anzio. The landing went alright but the army didn’t do too well there, so it was a bit of a waste as far as we were concerned.

Well the history books will tell you that the Yankee general in charge was incompetent. He wouldn’t push on and so forth, and instead of attacking as he should have, he sort of played safe and so the army didn’t accomplish what they had hoped to do.

I forget his name now but he was actually replaced at one stage. We only did two or three trips, I think, up to there. We had one interesting…The night before we went up to Anzio, we

took American troops up there and we had more or less finished loading these troops. See you’ve got your LST. It’s got its doors open and what not, and being filled up with the tanks and all the rest of it. There was a major in charge of it and he went up to our First Lieutenant and said,

“Hey look, if I can get some steak to cook, enough for your crew and for my men, can we borrow the galley.” He said, “Oh yes. Yes.” So these Americans, they quickly unloaded a three-ton truck with a Negro driver and ahead of us, about three or four ships ahead of us, there was a Liberty ship unloading.

And there was a procession of trucks alongside this and down would come a sling full of…It was cartons of frozen steak. So this bloke just gently got into the queue, down came the…filled up his bloody truck with cartons of steak, drove around the corner, and threw a tarpaulin over the lot,

and came and drove onboard us. Oh, that was a pleasant memory. That steak was beautiful. Our biggest trouble was getting rid of the empty cartons afterwards.

Oh blowed if I know. We probably chucked them overboard when we got out to sea.

Oh God, we didn’t get steak. I remember at…we used to get quite a bit of bully beef, which we got sick of and the yanks had Spam, which they got sick of and we did a swap, bully beef for Spam with the yanks. They thought it was bloody great. It’s marvellous, isn’t it?

We didn’t have fresh vegies either. We had… potatoes were, what do you call it? Dehydrated and so forth. And rice, we had stacks of rice. The poor old cooks were trying to make rice look like potatoes. Oh yeah.

Oh we went back to the UK. I think we got back to the UK on…what, the end of February was it?

Oh just in a convoy. It was an uneventful trip.

We didn’t stop anywhere. We went straight back and we landed at Liverpool. Half the crew went on leave and then the rest of us went on leave afterwards. But I can’t….

Oh I had a couple of weeks leave. It would have been that leave I think that I went down to Australian 10 Squadron of Sunderland flying boats. I found out that you could go along to the RAAF headquarters

and ask to go on a squadron. The same way as they could ask to go on a ship, not that I ever struck anyone who did. And I asked if I could to down to 10 Squadron, which was the Sunderland 10 flying boat squadron. We used to see them out at sea. You know, they were escorting convoys. I went down there and had a week’s leave down there. It was the first time I had ever been up in a plane.

Was down there. They were a huge thing the Sunderland flying boat. We had….There were various people that would entertain you…you know, you could go and stay with them and so forth. But a lot of it I’ve forgotten

quite frankly.

It was just LSTs. God they were very slow. They barely did ten knots with, God, wind and tide in your favour. That was it.

No, not that I remember. Of course by that time…This was… they’d got things pretty organized. Maybe we did have some escorts but more or less out of…Because as I said, we were lucky

if it was an eight-knot convoy, if we made eight knots all the time. So if we had any escort it wouldn’t have been a permanent sort of escort. Not like these big convoys that used to cross the Atlantic and so forth.

Well you didn’t think about it. You just…We had a few occasions in the Med where we had a bit of air activity but I never struck any submarine warfare at all. But when we were say, going backwards and forwards from North Africa, up

into Italy we never had any escorts. We just paddled along. You’d generally…four or five or six of you and there’s somebody in charge and you just followed one behind the other.

I don’t think there were that many

of their subs. In any case, they didn’t much go for us. For one thing, we had a very shallow draft. But we did have a bit of air activity. I remember at Anzio we were unloading and I was down on the ramp and we were unloading into LCTs

at that stage. They came alongside and we were able to load over the op. And there was a stick of four bombs dropped. They looked like four tomato sauce bottles. They were red. And they came down on a stick of four. Two each side. They didn’t hit us though, they just landed in the water. But just like tomato sauce bottles, they were.

Oh loud enough. But you see in a situation like that there’s so much bloody noise going on. All the ships are firing at the planes and so forth. It…You know, there’s just a lot of noise. You don’t.

Oh buggered if I know. You

just heard them. You know.

Well there were two LSTs, these are American LSTs, and had been fitted up as sort of miniature aircraft carriers. The

navy, when they are bombarding, it’s very handy if they’ve got someone to tell them where their shells are landing and so forth. They used to…Two types of planes were used for artillery spotting or in this case ship bombardment. The Americans used some little planes called Piper, Piper Cubs and the British used a little plane called an Oster.

The Americans, at Anzio had two LSTs that had been fitted up to fly Osters off. They couldn’t land them back on. Once they had flown off they couldn’t land them back on. I believe out in the Pacific they did had some arrangements where they could land them back on. You’d need to be a pretty good pilot, I would imagine, to be able to do that.

And there’s a photograph of an LST fitted up for these little Pipers to fly off. Amazing. But that’s the only time I ever saw them.

Yes. Except they were one way.

Well Tripoli would have been the main one I suppose. Yeah. Tripoli would have been where we took most of our troops and equipment.

No, I can’t really. I remember they had…Along the seafront there was, there was a road that ran there with a terrific lot of these pines and they had a couple of big statues, Romulus and Remus. They are mythical,

what are they, mythical dogs or something.

Well we never saw them. We had no contact. I mean we were pretty much on the go all the time. We were just backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. There wasn’t too much sitting around with LSTs.

Sfax. Oh I just remember going in there. As far as we were concerned, as I’ve said before we were just a bloody great truck. You just went in and got filled up and went and delivered the goods and came back and got filled up again. That was it. Just backwards and forwards. There wasn’t much sitting around.

I’ve got no great recollection about it. All I remember is that this is where we went and embarked for Sicily. Before we embarked troops were there but after that we never went back. We either went back to Malta or to Tripoli, mostly back to Tripoli.

No. What the hell would you do there anyway? No. We….We were on the go all the time. The LSTs, they were just backwards and forwards.

Well I remember that when we first got there I don’t think it rained for about three months. I remember when it did rain the crew went out and stood on the upper deck and enjoyed the rain.

It was….It was very tourist weather.

Well you’ve got your watches. Normally you do two. On the ships, the LSTs,

were mainly… the officers, nearly all the captains were RNR [Royal Navy Reserve] blokes that is Merchant fellows who were reserves and we ran to merchant service hours and that’s two watches a day, really. I usually had the forenoon.

The 8am to noon sort of thing, and then the first 8pm to midnight and the crew worked the same way too. One on and two off, sort of thing. No, you were…And then in between you would have bits to do, sort of thing.

Now as far as the crew were concerned you’ve got your engine room crew who would have your four hours on and eight hours off but in between, if you were coming into berth or something like that, everybody was more or less on the ball then.

Oh blowed if I know. It was just a gradual sort of thing. We used to play a bit of ‘whist’ and so forth. Of course in the…I believe in the troops…And some of your time was taken up censoring flaming letters too.

No you…no there was always, you know, sort of things to do. By the time you come off your watch and it’s time to have a meal and so forth. See we carried three watch keeping officers.

That was the First Lieutenant, the Navigator and the Gunnery officer. They were the three watch keeping officers. And then you’ve got the skipper and he would normally…He didn’t normally stand a watch as such, but he would bring her in and out of harbour and he shot up to the Bridge every now and again and just see how things are going on.

And then you have the Engineer officer. So that was the five officers that we had. The American ships had a lot more crew than what we did. They had a lot more armament to start with. They had a lot more guns than we did. And I think they carried something like ten or twelve officers. Our sparkers, for instance, our Telegraphists,

we had three Telegraphists and they would, in the 420s, in the British ships they would have a leading hand and then two ordinary Telegraphists. Whereas on the Yankee ships they would have an officer in charge of that. They had about twelve officers I believe. A crew of over a hundred.

And of course, as I said, they had more armament than we did too.

Oh six twin Oerlikans.

Well an Oerlikans is a twenty-millimetre job. It so happens…

Yeah but I... This is a marvellous book. ‘Warships of World War II’. Just about every ship in the Royal Navy appears in here. This gives, for instance the numbers of all the LSTs that were built and which were sunk and so forth and fifth.

A very interesting little book.

You were asking about the Oerlikans. We had six. Two in the bow, two by the

bridge and two after the bridge. And then a twelve pounder as it was called, which was near enough to a three-inch, and that was near the stern. And the only ones we ever used were the Oerlikans in the case of air attack. And the twelve pounder was never…I don’t know what the hell we would have done with that.

Oh yeah. We had quite a few. You might go weeks without seeing anything and then you might get... I remember when we first got to the Med and we were

coming down past…There’s an island called Pantelleria. There were some islands which the enemy still had so they had planes that were able to take off from that. But once we captured those islands their air power was restricted to a certain extent and then the

more, when we finished up defeating the Germans in North Africa, of course, then we had planes all the way along. And airplanes had to come down from Sicily or Italy.

No not really. I think

mostly the initial landing was when we seemed to get the most. And of course, see, once we took Sicily we could have our aircraft up in Sicily whereas before they had to come from Malta or North Africa. The more country we took the

closer the air force could look after us.

Well I told you before about Taranto. I have never seen so many ships. If they had come out to attack the Royal Navy back in 1941, 42 they would have wiped the floor with them but they just weren’t game enough to

come out.

No guts. That’s all. That’s what it boiled down to. No, they just... God they had a stack of ships there in Taranto. Now if they’d liked to come out and have a go,

God they would have wiped….They really would have wiped the Royal Navy out I reckoned.

Well all I can say is that we were absolutely dumfounded as to how many ships there were there.

As I’ve said, this is just my impression that there were so many of them that if they had come out they would have lost quite a few but just by sheer weight of numbers they would have overtaken the RN [Royal Navy]. I couldn’t tell you

the numbers of the RN ships that we had in the Med but I don’t reckon they would have been a quarter of what the Italians had available.

No we went into the harbour at Taranto. You mean

…well we took a load of troops from North Africa up into Taranto. We went right into the harbour and to unload the troops and there was just dozens of these things lying there at anchor.

Well they had, they’d surrendered by this stage. See they surrendered on the

…in actual fact I believe they surrendered on the 3rd of September but it wasn’t made public until the 8th, the night before we landed at Salerno- Operation whatever it was. So they, a very nice word, they became our “co-belligerents”. They

sued for peace and pulled out of the war and became out co-belligerents as it was called. They weren’t our allies. They were our co-belligerents.

Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. We went to Taranto to…

as a follow up. We just went and took a load of troops and stuff up there. No, they had surrendered. This was after Salerno so it could have been sometime in October that we went up to Taranto. But no they surrendered, as I said on the 3rd of September, I believe,

but then it was announced over the BBC [British Broadcasting Commission] and so forth on the 8th. And this is what we thought, that we were going to land at Salerno on the 9th and this was going to be easy because….But the Germans were better off without them, you see.

Oh the Germans. Well, the same thing happened in North Africa. They surrendered by the thousands, the Italians, compared with the Germans.

Well my

action station was on the bridge with a pair of headphones on just to keep in touch with the…I was officially the Gunnery officer, not that I did too much. I was just up on the bridge to assist the skipper and what not. You’ve got the,

well the engineer was always down below at the engines at that stage but we were, just about all the officers would have been on the bridge, not actually doing anything. I mean even if we were under air attack there was not much you could do but just bloody sit there and hope that you don’t get hit. And your Gunners are…They look after themselves. You don’t

tell them “there’s a plane coming in there” or “there’s a plane coming in there”. There’s nothing much you can do. You just sit there and hope to Christ you don’t get hit. It’s not like if you’re in a cruiser or something like that where the guns are controlled and stuff.

I don’t know that we ever did anything.

Yeah, well it was my watch officially, although the skipper was up on the bridge too. It just came on the BBC that the Italians had surrendered and all over the ship everyone went “oh this is great”. You know.

But the Gerries had already worked out where we were liable to come and they were prepared for us and they gave us quite a pasting. And I believe the beach was a bit of a problem there too. You can imagine sometimes the sandbanks

offshore a bit and of course there is no good you running on the sandbank and being fifty yards off the beach with water in between so you can’t unload. So…And I think this is what happened with the 430. The one which I had left. I think she had hit a sandbank and she couldn’t go any further. So then she had to try to pull off and come round again and this is when she got caught by some

shore artillery. And I believe some of the, some of them were landed in the wrong place. This happens if you can’t get in. If, because as I say, if there are these sandbanks, you can’t get in you’ve got to look for somewhere to try and get in.

Well I wouldn’t know because I never got…You are sort of keyed up, there is no doubt about that but you…

It’s always going to be the other bloke anyhow. It’s not going to be you. It’s going to be the other bloke that cops it. But no. We were lucky. We didn’t get into any trouble. Both the ships, when

I was on them anyhow, we didn’t get into any trouble. It was only after I left.

Yeah. I was lucky.

No. no.

No. Not that I recall really.

It wouldn’t do you much good anyhow. I think everybody had the idea that if your name’s on it, it’s on it and that’s it. But we didn’t…There were no casualties on the 430 or the 420 when I was on them. We didn’t have any at all.

Oh there were quite a few that were sunk and so forth. I…With the LSTs, one, two, three, four…

sixteen lost out of about a hundred and ten and there would have been various sort of casualties on those. Some, I suppose, got a real pasting. Others didn’t. I remember the first, although I didn’t see it,

the first one we lost caught on fire. This was around about when we were loading to go up to Sicily. And one of the stories going around was the fact…was that a couple of soldiers were making themselves a cup of tea down in the tank space

and that caused a fire. Although it was never official, that was the unofficial that went around the flotilla. The soldiers, they had a practice of a little tin of sand and they would pour petrol on it, like a little stove and this was the story that these blokes were down there. They were supposed to be on guard down there, watching the

vehicles in the tank space and they brewed up, brewed themselves a cup of tea but officially nobody knows what happened. That was the unofficial.

But they didn’t lose any lives in that but they lost the ship

and all the cargo of course.

No I don’t think so Julian [interviewer]. It was after the Med that there was a great sort of realization

of just what the LSTs could be used for. I mean they were…some of them. We are jumping a bit ahead I suppose, but for instance some of them were fitted up with railway tracks and they took rolling stock from England across to France afterwards.

Hey?

Well you see part of the build up to the Normandy thing was the air force went around shooting up all the trains that they could. Engines and stuff like that. They destroyed them to interrupt the German communications. And so there were several LSTs which were fitted up with railway tracks in them

and so you had engines and so forth. Cherbourg was where they brought them across to. But they would fill up the tank space with railway rolling stock.

No. We’d shot up all the bloody railway engines and what not that we could

forth, and so when we got there we took our own engines and what not via the LSTs and were able to….

Yeah. We were fitted up to carry

wounded back too. We had a medical team onboard for Normandy so that we could bring back wounded. Oh they were a very versatile ship. But we don’t want to get on to Normandy do we?

Yeah.

Well we had no preparation because, I guess having done three landings already in the Med, we knew what the hell we had to do but some of the poor fellows in the UK, they spent months and months and months…

this is the smaller type of ship, LCTs and stuff like that, they spent months on exercises and what not. But we didn’t do a damned thing after we got back from the Med. We didn’t do any exercises or what not. We had the life of Riley.

Well we went to Liverpool first. And then we went up to the Clyde. What for, I’m damned if I know. We went up the Clyde and then we came down to near Portsmouth, just off the Isle of Wight in early May. And we just waited. Just waited. We didn’t do any training

at all. We just, as the saying goes, we just swung round the pick. There’s the anchor and you just swing it.

Oh yes. We used to get night leave, I think. I don’t remember. There was no actual

long leave to the crew at all. We just sat there and waited for orders to come through.

Well I think we would have…D day was supposed to be on the 5th of June but it was very bad weather that cropped up and so it was

called off until the 6th. I think that we would have loaded on the 3rd. It’s something that I have always regretted that I didn’t keep a diary. You weren’t supposed to keep a diary and so I didn’t but one of the blokes that I went away with, he kept a diary, a complete diary. He could just about…

He could tell you where he was on any particular day. He had it all written down. And this is what I regret now, that I didn’t keep one. Because it is a hell of a lot one forgets.

What? To Normandy? Our main load was what was called a beach recovery unit. It was a lot of

soldiers who had special equipment. They had bulldozers and stuff like that to retrieve vehicles that got stuck in the sand. The beach recovery unit, it was called. This is what we took down there on D-day. It was a beach recovery unit.

Well we knew it was going to be the big one. Well I suppose, really, the first we knew of it was when we went in and loaded and then of course, the skipper, he would have had his sealed orders. He knew a bloody sight more than we did early on. I mean all that we knew was that we were going to go and land

but where and what we didn’t know. Your skipper would have his orders that were sealed and he was told when he could open them up. He would open them up and say, “Oh God.” And then he’d come and tell us.

Oh we’d all gather down in the wardroom probably.

And of course don’t forget you’ve got your troops on board and they’ve got their orders too. They’ve got a set of orders telling them where they are expected to land and what they are expected to do, and all the rest of it. See Normandy was separated into several beaches and the army knew which beach they were supposed to land on and what they were supposed to do when they got there

and so forth. There was roughly five thousand, round about five thousand ships went down to Normandy. All sorts of ships.

Oh I should have brought….During the lunch hour I might nip home and get it. Most of the troops took off from around the south coast of England. We had Falmouth and we had all these various

ports where the troops landed and then you had what was called a swept channel down from below Portsmouth. The minesweepers went down and made sure there weren’t any mines and okay we were, we left Portsmouth

just at midnight, when we went through the boom. You know they’ve got a boom across the anti submarine nets and so forth. We left at midnight to go down to Normandy and of course this is where the skipper’s job comes in. He is making sure he doesn’t crash into anybody else and you’ve got five thousand bloody ships making for the one spot.

What’s she talking about? Five more minutes or something?

(UNCLEAR). And I wasn’t on that, the 420. I left here and on the third trip after I left her, she got sunk. A hell of a loss of life that. It’s just luck.

Oh yeah. We didn’t get into….We got shot at but we didn’t get hit. Where are you off to then? To have some lunch or what?

He’s arranged on Saturday we’re going to go out to his place and have lunch and so forth and she’s going to talk to the three of us.

Nobody knows anything about it.

Well you don’t. Nobody. The thing is

he said, Ted said to me. “Oh by the way,” he said, “she’s sixty.” I said, “Good God. Nichol talks about a lass.” Well Nichol’s eighty odd so anybody…she probably still is a lass.

Oh the thing is

that the Royal Navy asked the Royal Australian Navy to supply a certain number of men. It was supposed to be about five hundred and so this is it. And as they all went, practically all went to England, nobody knows much about them really. And it is probably a little known fact too that before the war, at a shore base called HMAS Rushcutter

in Sydney, there was a British Royal Naval Lieutenant Commander, an expert in ASDIC. He came out here and they ran a school in Sydney at Rushcutters. Looking back now, see the navy sent…This bloke came out in 1938 to start an ASDIC school in Sydney.

So they were looking towards the war even though the rest of us didn’t. And they sent over several hundred ASDIC ratings to England. And New Zealand, on the other hand, they sent deck officers, like the Yachtsman scheme were, and also fellows for the fleet air arm. But the Australians, they weren’t asked for fleet air arm.

And the Kiwi’s weren’t asked for ASDIC. They were looking ahead. You kind of think that most people took no notice but some people did, you know. They were doing these things pre-war.

Oh no. I don’t think so really.

See all it is, it’s a…..There’s a dome that hangs down under the ship and it sends out these signals. And when they hit the other ship or the other submarine, it echoes back. For one thing they know the direction it is coming from because the ASDIC dome is turned to …

and they also know by the interval and so forth, they know the distance.

Oh no. ASDIC been around for quite a while but apparently they reckoned the Aussie boys were particularly good at it. But there were several hundred that went over there and once again

they got split up right throughout the fleet. Now a fellow that your crowd did an interview over on the Sunshine Coast, Stan Lanes. Stan went over as an ASDIC rating, and he was in a destroyer on the Atlantic, and he was pinging away and the next thing he woke up in the water. He didn’t know how. He was just blown right out of it.

Well they’ve got….I told him he wasn’t doing his job very well because he didn’t pick up the submarine!

Yeah.

Well we came back from Italy

and we went to Liverpool and we were there for a few weeks. We had some leave and they overhauled the engine and stuff like that. This was the end of February. We then went up to….

I think that was one leave where I went down to 10 squadron, the Australian Sunderland squadron.

Yeah well, Sunderlands used to come out and shadow the ships. They were another submarine detecting device really and so you got used to seeing them in the air. And it was an RAAF station and it was quite easy to get permission to go

down there. That’s how I happened to go down there.

It was quite peculiar. You know, it was my first time. The funny thing was…well they were anchored out in the stream. You’d go out there in the motorboat and they are quite tall, the Sunderland. God I don’t know, probably about thirty foot high all together. So we

got into this thing and the pilot said to me, “Sit down over there Bluey.” So I sat down. And he said, “What the hell are you doing?” And I said, “Where’s my bloody parachute?” “We don’t have parachutes.” He said, “If we go down a parachute’s no good to us.” They didn’t carry parachutes apparently.

Well the funny thing was there was another RAAF

Sunderland squadron up in Wales, in Pembroke. And we were down in Plymouth and you just cut across land. And I said, “Good God what happens if…?” And they said “Oh we could just land in a field.” You know, if anything goes wrong. But oh no. And just before I came back home in October ‘44 I went up

and spent a week up on a bomber squadron and that was very interesting.

Oh well I just waited around, waiting for passengers. Very often there is a lot of waiting around. I had been told that I was coming home and was sent on what was called ‘indefinite leave’ until transport is arranged you…

I mean it might happen in a week and it mightn’t happen for four or five weeks. I don’t know, it was probably more or less like six weeks or something before I actually got a passage to come home. I was with another Aussie, a Queensland boy and we were just waiting around London and spending more money than what we had and so forth. So I just said to Fred, “Lets go up and see if we can get on the Bomber squadron.” So we

went round to the RAAF again and asked if we could go on a Bomber squadron and they sent us off to 460 squadron which was a very, I would say it was the most famous Australian Bomber squadron. So we went up there for a week and you just…Well they make you very welcome and so forth. Then we were able to go and watch the briefing, when they…you’ve probably seen it on films.

They say “we’re going to fly to so and so tonight”. They’ve got the big map and they go through all this and so forth. Then we went up in the tower and watched them take off. Then went back and I forget where they were going that night. Somewhere quite a fair way into Germany. And then I watched them coming back in and they’d have them on the old blackboard and tick them off. And it would come to the stage where there was two didn’t

come back and so after waiting, I suppose a reasonable sort of period they sort of said, “Oh something’s happened to them.” Pack it in. So we packed it in and this would have been after midnight I suppose. And then the next morning the adjutant of the station came into the room where Fred and I

were and he said, “Hey Bluey, you come from Perth.” I said “Yeah” and he said, “One of the boys who went down last night comes from Perth. Kenny Frankish.” I said, “Bugger me dead. He lives two doors from me.” So it’s amazing. You get all that way and there’s a fellow who lives two doors from me.

Oh yeah. Quite okay.

There you go. All the way from Walcott Street, Mount Lawley to go to the funeral of the bloke that lived two doors from you.

So how’s

that for a fluke.

Well eventually after we got down to Portsmouth, about early May. And we just went to anchor in the Solent.

Well, the Solent is the strip of water which runs more or less from Southampton down through. You’ve got the Isle of Wight and then you’ve got the Solent, as they call it, which is between the mainland and the Isle of Wight. And we just lay at anchor there off Ryde and the Isle of Wight.

Well we didn’t do anything. We just sat there. You couldn’t go on leave or anything because you didn’t know when the thing was going to…When the balloon was going to go up, as they would say.

Nothing. We just knew that there was something on. It was obvious that it was on but we had no idea when or whatever. And the…It would have been about

the 3rd of June when we went in to load.

No. That’s a service saying. When the balloon goes up that’s when the thing starts. It’s just a service saying. When the balloon goes up that’s when it starts. It’s just a saying.

We’ll come back to that in a moment. But just outside, you’ve got Portsmouth and you’ve got the harbour and opposite Portsmouth is a place called Gosport. At Gosport they built quite a big section of what they call ‘hards’, which are sloping concrete ramps

running down into the water. So the LSTs would come in and you’d go in until you get to the hard and open up the doors, drop the ramp and get loaded, button up, pull out and go off. You’ve got these concrete hards were there…That was the… But this was the first indication when we went in to load. We knew that

…and that would have been about the 3rd of June. D-day was supposed to be the 5th and the weather was bad so it was put off until the 6th. We would have loaded on the 3rd. It might have been on the 2nd. On the second, we loaded in preparation for leaving at midnight on the 4th, and D-day was on the 5th

but because of the bad weather it wasn’t until the sixth.

No. We were at anchor. But if you read anything about D-day, oh there’s been films made about it, where this weather is quite stormy and so forth, and the chief meteorological bloke

gave a forecast that there would be in interval that might just suit. And Eisenhower had to make up his mind whether he would take the risk or not. And he made up his mind and said, “Right. We’ll go.” And this is how D-day actually finished up on the 6th.

Well personally we never listened to it. I think you get this more when you’re army out in the desert and that. I think the army out there got it. We never took any notice of it, I don’t think.

Well my particular ship loaded up a beach recovery unit, it was

called. It was an army unit with some specialized vehicles for recovering trucks or whatever that had got stuck in the water or bogged on the beach. So this sort of stuff, and this was practically our main cargo. I couldn’t tell you what the rest of it was but this is a beach recovery unit.

Oh, they had bulldozers and so forth. See, if you got a vehicle stuck in the sand or what not, it had to be got out and this was what this special unit was for.

We were fitted out to carry back wounded

so we had onboard a special medical team. We had two naval doctors and round about ten or twelve sickbay tiffys as they called them, male nurses or whatever.

T-I-F-F-Y-S. Sick bay tiffy. It’s just an expression [short for artificer]. So we had two doctors and about ten or twelve of these, and

the idea was that they came in on the stretchers and they used the tank deck. They were all laid out on the tank deck.

No they were all on stretchers.

No you’ve got your tank space, where you’ve normally got twenty tanks or what not, and they would just bring these blokes in and do what they could, first aid for them.

Oh yes. We didn’t have any tanks on the first one. Are you talking about the balloon going up? We actually had a balloon.

An anti aircraft balloon as they called it.

Yeah. I know. So we actually had a balloon that we could let up. It was already inflated, sort of thing. And a windlass so that if we let it go up we could also wind it down. And somewhere or other you’ll see pictures of these ships with this balloon sitting up

there. See I’ve done a bit of homework. Not a hell of a lot.

There you are. There’s the tank space.

Yep.

There’s the (UNCLEAR). That would, when you’re going over,

be full of tanks or lorries or whatever. Then for the purposes of the wounded, there they are in the tank space, you see.

Yes.

So we brought back a mixture

of things. We had gerry wounded as well.

Well nothing really. It’s

….You just take what’s coming. For the initial D-day it was incredible really that…When we were down in North Africa, for a bottle of whisky we got something…what was called a blitz buggy. It was something like about a fifteen hundred weight, flat top

little truck. Oh it had little sides on it. We got this for a bottle of whisky.

Oh, when we got into port to go and get your stores, and so forth. Instead of depending on someone bringing the stores down to you we had our own little truck and off we went.

We painted it battleship grey and LST 420 written on it and away we went. Now everywhere we went we were able to fit this in. When we went to…Well I didn’t join it till after at Salerno and Anzio, but we could always squeeze this in. At Normandy there wasn’t a bloody inch left. We couldn’t get it on.

We had to leave it on the harbour at Gosport and when we got back it had gone. Somebody had pinched it.

Yes. For a bottle of whisky. Yeah. It was handy. You know. When we were in Naples, half the ship went down to Vesuvius to have a look at Pompeii. I remember one of the blokes came

back and saying, “Oh,” he said, “It’s all rubbish.” They were showing them the waterworks and stuff like this and the Roman baths and whatnot. “It’s all baloney,” he said, “They’ve got American fittings.” The pipes were…. oh it was very, very handy but we lost it.

Yes. On our way. We leave at midnight on the 5th, 6th. We leave Portsmouth and we go down, this is the skipper’s job and the navigator’s job. You get down to Piccadilly Circus, and then away you go down to the beach. When you get down to the beach you…

Well there were half a dozen or so main ports from which the invasion force came. The left hand side….I’d better get it…

I can’t remember the names of them.

Yeah. She’s right.

I should have got you to go and get that.

Yeah. You see the Americans were all over this side. You’ve got Falmouth, Plymouth, Weymouth and Poole.

I know Poole was the British. But Falmouth, Plymouth, and Weymouth were the main ports where the Americans embarked. And the British mainly went from Poole, Southampton, Portsmouth, and New Haven. So they all come down.

That’s has all been cleared by…There’s minesweepers gone through and checked there’s no mines and so forth.

That’s why the Americans finished up on those two beaches.

No.

that’s how they finished up with Omaha and…

The two beaches that they ended up with because they were coming down from the southwest coast of England. They couldn’t be coming across to Sword and Juno and that because they would have to cross all the others. So that’s how they finished up with those two beaches. It was just the luck of the draw.

I got that tea towel in 1994. I went across to….

Operation Overlord, 6th of June. I got this when I went over for the fiftieth anniversary of it. And you see you’ve got…All this is being swept by the minesweepers so hopefully they are all clear of mines. And then

the same thing right down to the coast. And there were round about five thousand warships finished up on the French coast in the first few days of the invasion.

Yes. ’94 was the fiftieth anniversary.

Well D-day was 6th of June 1944 and fifty years later is 1994 and there was quite a big celebration for that. I can show you a photo and what not.

The Americans made a big thing of it too. Because they’ve got huge cemeteries there. They really got the cane, particularly at Omaha. And oh it was quite a day. The whole lot of Normandy was closed off. No private cars were allowed and all the rest of it. And

we had to book…I had to book the tour months prior to that. And there were hundreds of bloody buses and they took us down to the beaches and there were various ceremonies at the different beaches and all the rest of it. And then on our particular lot, down at a place called Arromanches, the Queen was there

and all the Royal family. And of course we were all lined up on the beach. And you know, the Queen comes past and all the rest of it. Some World War II planes fly overhead. Spitfires, and Hurricanes, and Lancaster Bombers and all of this. It’s quite a do.

I’m a lucky boy.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. You know, there was a lot of family went along too, but it was only vets who were marching and so forth. There is all sorts of little places that had their ceremonies.

The big one was at a place called Bayeux. You’ve heard of the Bayeux Tapestry? Well the Bayeux Cemetery is quite a big one. The crowd that I was with, we went to that ceremony and the Queen came there. And over where the Yanks were, they had their various dignitaries came to their services.

I guess down on Omaha or Utah beach, they had their march down there. But we had ours, of course, at this place called Arromanches.

Oh there weren’t very many. John Goldsmith came across with me. We had two buses I suppose with

about sixty. There was only John Goldsmith, myself and my son that went over. All the rest were Brits. Of course some had their wives and so forth. I imagine the same thing went on with the Americans.

Well I’ve got a brother that’s lived in England

for donkeys years. He was a chalkie and he went over there to gain some experience and he never came back. He said to me, when the fortieth came up, he said to me, “Why don’t’ you come over for the fortieth anniversary?”

I said the fortieth.

I said, “The fortieth is nothing. I’ll go to the fiftieth.” And when the fiftieth came I went to that.

Yeah.

That is a close-up of that. And the Queen…See…Here’s the Queen. There.

So we get down on the beach at about ten o’clock in the morning.

Oh yes. There would have been hundreds of them.

Well all you can see is ships.

At night time it’s pretty dicey. There must have been some collisions, I imagine. It would have been impossible for there not to have been. And then as daylight came, my most distinct impression of D day really was early morning when dawn started to break and

there are all these planes overhead. And as you probably know, they had three white stripes painted around the wings and the fuselage so that …Right at the very last minute the air force were busy painting these white stripes. You didn’t have to know what type of plane it was. If it had white stripes it was ours. Whereas normally you had to try and work out whether it was one of theirs or

one of ours. After about an hour we stopped looking because we knew that they were ours. This to me was a great thing. Not to have to worry.

Only about twenty-four hours before. Otherwise if the Gerries had woken up to it they would have done something. They would have painted some of their own, or whatever. It was quite a rushed job.

It was a very simple way of identifying that they were allied planes. And so we didn’t have to bother about them.

You are always frightened of being bombed. That was as far as I’m concerned. You were never really worried of torpedos because, for one thing,

the LSTs were so shallow that getting hit by a torpedo was pretty unlikely, although there were one or two that were hit. But they were so shallow that a torpedo was more likely to pass underneath it. So you were more vulnerable to air attack than anything. The fact that you didn’t have to worry about air attack was great. But then

as daylight sort of came, you looked around and God, the ships were just incredible.

Well, you couldn’t help it. You know. There were all sorts of ships. One of the funniest was they even had Thames barges which are quite big, ugly looking things.

Barges on the Thames, fitted up a bunk houses and things like that with a midshipman as a captain. Here he is standing up, steaming down to Normandy while his crew is baking bread for the troops. It was quite funny. And then of course at the same time there was the big

concrete sort of big boxes, which they made the harbors with. You’ve seen some of that, I suppose. And we’d look and say, “What the hell’s that?” Because we’d never seen them before. And all of a sudden you see these things being pulled down by tugs. And “what the bloody hell’s that?” You know. Oh gee. Anyhow we get down there about ten o’clock in the morning and anchor, waiting to be told to come in.

Because they would sort of call you in as…

Technically we were but in practical terms we were just one bloody great heap all going down….You know.

All that we knew was that

we were going down to France, and we knew what we had to do when we got there.

Well go in and land, get rid of our troops. And that would all depend on the state of the tide and this sort of thing. So we got down there and anchored and waited to be told to come in and land. But we didn’t actually land until D plus 2. I don’t know why but

anyhow…

Well you are just at anchor. I mean you can’t go in and dump your troops until you are told to come in and do it. But as we had a beach recovery unit I sort of thought that we would be in pretty early but it didn’t happen. You just sort of had to wait until you were told to come in and unload.

Well you would have thought it would have a job to do with broken down vehicles and all this sort of thing. But it probably happened that things weren’t as bad on the British beaches and that, as maybe they expected. They expected that maybe a lot of vehicles would get shot at and so forth and need

pulling out of the road and that. But it’s possible that it didn’t turn out as bad what as was anticipated.

I don’t know that there is really, because don’t forget this was our forth one.

I would imagine the poor old army blokes probably had more butterflies than what we did because for most of them it would have been their first time. But I know it was…I was up on the bridge. Well we were all up on the bridge more or less just waiting around, we could nip down and have a cup of coffee or whatever.

We were parallel to the beach, about a mile off I suppose, and we were at anchor. We had our barrage balloon but it wasn’t flying high. It was more or less close, probably up about fifty foot or something or other like this, and we were at anchor parallel with the beach. And all of a sudden I saw a plop in the water.

And another plop nearer than the first one, probably about fifty or sixty yards away. Nearer and then I said, “Bloody hell. We’re being fired at.” So somebody grabbed the loud hailer and, “Everybody clear the deck. Bla Bla Bla”. And the third shot probably landed

twenty yards away, it went off and the shrapnel brought down our balloon. It came collapsing down. One of our Oerlikon gunners up on the starboard bow, he got hit. He had his helmet on of course, and he got hit behind the ear, with a piece of shrapnel that just knocked him over. But he was lucky he had his tin hat on and that was the only thing that happened with us.

I reckon it would have been within five minutes that a destroyer came pelting past us. And over on the shore there was a neck of woods. A little bit of forest came almost down to the beach with a farmhouse and each side of that there were fields, or paddocks as we would call them. So this destroyer comes pelting and you should have seen this farmhouse go.

End of tape

Because they also had on top of these caissons, some of them they had accommodation for blokes to live in with anti aircraft guns on it.

Yeah. On top of them they had little…some of them

were just used to make a breakwater. But they made these things, towed them down, got them all lined up and opened up the bow. And down they went and left so much sticking up on top. Oh there was…well for instance.

Well you,

imagine down here at Fremantle at the Moll. The North and south Moll and you’re told, “oh well we’ll make a north and south Moll”. That was one way of doing it. You couldn’t cart over thousands of tons of rock and make a breakwater. See, what they did is made an area so that

the ships inside this were in comparatively calm water.

No. They were being brought down on D-day. Actually there were two harbours being built. An American one and a British one. And then round about the 12th I think it was

there was a terrific storm and the American one got so badly damaged that it couldn’t be completed. And the British one got damaged too but they were able to use some remnants of the American one to... It’s a false harbour that they made. You know.

Oh buggered if I know.

They were just sunken I suppose. Then they were quite close together. At low tide you can actually walk out there and go on them.

We’re waiting. First of all we got shot at and lost our balloon.

And then about…I think it must have been round about eight o’clock at night, some airborne were brought in. Glider troops came in. They had the tug planes as they call them. These are the ones that pull the gliders. You’ve got your glider full of troops, okay, but they haven’t got engines, they’re pulled

…towed over. Then when they get there they release the towrope and down goes the glider and they’ve got to get on with the war. But at the same time as they are coming over with the gliders they are pushing out coloured parachutes, out of the tug plane. Different colours mean different things. There’d be one colour for water and one colour for such and such ammunition. They’ve just got all these,

hundreds of parachutes coming down of all these different colours.

Yeah. These are supplies. The people are in the gliders. They would come in and you could see these poor buggers being shot at. The amazing thing to me was that they go in, make their run, they drop off their gliders, and they push out their coloured parachutes,

and then they go back to England. But as they came back over the coast, there were two of these four engine planes. They both had the port inner engine, that’s the left hand, inside engine, on fire. And I thought they could easily fly on three engines but these two were in trouble. And one of them was losing height quite a lot and he came

down, down, down, and he was going to crash. From where we were it looked as though he was going to crash into a warship. I don’t know what it was but it was a warship anyhow. And he just turned it up like that and went in. There was a big flash and he was gone. But the other bloke, although he was losing height he was able to turn round and go back

and I saw him land, landing, because he disappeared behind this little bit of forest I was talking about, where the farmhouse was. So he landed and got away. It was a sight though. All these coloured parachutes and…oh golly.

Oh no. As they are going along they just push these out. They are not going to go round twice.

Oh no. This is eight o’clock at night. The landing was made about six o’clock in the morning.

Yeah…These are reinforcements, this lot.

There were the…the first assault was actually made by paratroopers and glider borne troops around about midnight.

Oh no. We were only just leaving. This is a minute into D-day, these blokes are landing in the dark and

you can’t…You’re trying to visualize it, aren’t you?

Yeah well I…I didn’t see this but what we saw, at about eight o’clock on D-day evening, was reinforcements coming in to the glider troops who had already landed.

They are being reinforced. More troops being landed to help them and of course the supplies that went with it, they were being pushed out of the plane.

Yeah. We were anchored off there for twenty-four,

nearly forty-eight hours, we were anchored there before we were told to come in and unload.

I don’t know.

Oh you just go in. It all depended. See a lot depended on the tide. If you could get in or not.

There’s pretty fierce tides there at Normandy and if the tide was coming in you could sort of go in on the tide and hopefully get your troops off very, very quickly, and get back out before the tide turned and left you high and dry. But

later on when things quietened down it was quite the normal thing to go in and let the ship dry out. You could get out and walk around it. Some of them went in and unloaded on these artificial harbours. See you’ve got this breakwater out to sea.

Yeah. The caissons.

And then they had roadways. They had a big thing called the Mulberry Harbour. That was a big platform, which could go up and down with the tide and from that you had a road going into the shore. It was made with pontoons and what not, so that you…Now ordinary

cargo ships couldn’t get into the beach like we did so they needed to have a wharf in effect, where they could unload and so if someone went into this to be unloaded, and then the trucks would go and pick up the load and bring it back to shore.

Just ships. Hundreds of them. Yeah. I didn’t really see any aircraft. Some people did. It just sort of depended where they were I think but as far as we were concerned I didn’t see any.

Well this airdrop I think was round about eight o’clock at night, I think and another thing we could see…see we were about a mile off shore, and I am only guessing, but I think about four miles inland the land was pretty clear there and it gradually went up to a little bit of a hill,

and it dropped away down on the other side. And at one stage we could see the German tanks poking their noses up this side of the hill and the British tanks going up to…And it always reminded me of knights of old, sort of, jousting. There’s the Germans coming up this way and the Brits coming up this way and, oh dear. Yeah.

Well you are certainly interested. You are saying, “thank Christ it’s not me”. Yeah. But then…well it got dark and around…We had been warned that round about midnight there was going to be a further supply drop into the…

particularly the paratroopers and the gliders. There was going to be another supply drop. And you’ve got to realize that we are about a mile off shore, and way out about as far as you could see there were ships. Ships of all sorts. There were battle ships and big things like the Rodney and so forth. Real big battleships that were bombarding. There’s cruisers

and destroyers you know. There’s all sorts. So from the air it must have been a marvellous sight. But we were told that some of the troops were going to be supplied around about midnight. We were not to fire because…But when the planes started to come in and somebody way to buggery out

started to fire. And everybody, I’ve never forgotten this poor fellow was a Dakota, with the white bands around him and so forth. Only up…you thought you could damned near touch him. Here he is coming in and they just shot him down. Terrible, terrible. Oh, even my own ship was firing at it. Could

have shot him. But it’s a sort of automatic reaction I suppose. You’ve got your blokes strapped into the Oerlikan guns and what not, and somebody starts to fire. And all the rest of them just pull the trigger and this bloke just sshhh. So

a signal come through that all commanding officers were to report immediately to the headquarters ship. There were several headquarters ships as they called them. They were sort of controlling the various beaches. So we had to start up the motorboat and off went the skipper, over to this headquarters ship to get his bum kicked, you know, like everybody else. It was terrible when you come to think about it.

You know, the poor devil in the plane being shot down by their own. God. So once D-day was over, of course, and when we had unloaded we then just became a…it was called the ‘shuttle service’. And you just shuttled backwards and forwards. It was just like a great lorry.

No. Oh no, no. You carried all sorts of various troops. Sometimes it would be infantry. It was just all sorts. A mixed bag of everything.

In the initial we had the beach recovery unit. Once you were in the shuttle service

you just take what’s there. Now one…I think it was the 12th of June we were being sent up to Tilbury, up the Thames, up to London, up to the docks at Tilbury to load. And it was my watch. It was the eight to midnight.

and although it was my watch most of the others were up there too. The skipper would be up there and so forth. Technically I’m in charge of the ship until the skipper said to me that he would take over. Way up ahead we saw some ships on fire. I though, Oh my God. The air force is getting into trouble tonight. There is a lot of them getting shot at and on fire. But

what it was, was the first buzz bombs.

You should know. You do don’t you?

V1s they were called. They were the first of the flying bombs, the V1s. They are a pilot-less thing packed with…I don’t know what they’ve got. A ton of explosives or something. And they took off from

the part of Calais that…Near Calais. And they would take off. They were worked by the fuel that was in them as to how far they could go. They were aimed at London. This was going to be Hitler’s secret weapon to bring England to its knees. But the funny thing was, they were worked,

they were steered by a gyro compass. That’s sort of an automatic compass. But if it went wrong, it would turn a hundred and eighty degrees and turn around and the bloody thing would go back the way it would come from. I saw two or three of those happen. This was the first night of buzz bombs as they called them.

Well as I said, we thought initially that they were our bombers coming back

on fire. But it wasn’t. It was these damn things. They were just like a jet engine. You could see the flame coming out of them. And we were forty or fifty miles away from them, I suppose. And that is why we though they were planes that were on fire. And very soon of course they put up a lot of…

They had a belt of guns to try and shoot them down as they came over, and they were also attacked by fighter planes. They would have these…They travelled pretty fast, these things. I don’t know what the speed was but the normal planes at that stage couldn’t catch them. The fighter plane would be way the hell up here waiting to see them come over and then in a dive they could catch them. And hopefully they would either shoot them down, or another

trick they used to do was to try and get alongside with their wing and try and tip them like that. They would go down.

I never saw any of them in daylight that were actually…But I remember one night in particular there was this buzz bomb going over the top of us and there was this plane chasing it and firing at it, and we are all saying. “Ooooh.

I hope he doesn’t hit it”.

Well of course, he couldn’t, his job was to shoot it down. That was what his job was, to shoot it down, and the fact that it was flying over the top of us, he wasn’t going to stop just because of that. He probably couldn’t see us anyhow. The only reason he could see the buzz bomb was because of the flame of the exhaust.

I don’t know. Because it’s going like hell and he’s going like hell after it. Whether he caught it or not I don’t know. When you’re on shore you’re okay as long as you can hear it. But what you worried about was when you couldn’t hear it because you knew that the motor had stopped and it would go along until

it ran out of fuel or what not, and then it would just go poop like that. As long as you could hear it you were okay. Once you….

Oh I felt better in your own ship really. Yeah.

Oh you’d be mighty unlucky.

What the…normally there were two types of mines. There was the acoustic mine. That was the mine that was set off by sound. This magnetic mine that was set off by

metal, you know, like magnetized sort of thing. This mine is set so that if metal passes over it, it makes a contact and blows up. But then the Gerries brought out a thing called a pressure mine and it was actuated by a ship going over it, and the disturbance of the water would trigger it off. And they could be set

for six ships to go over them or twenty ships or whatever and they caused a bit of panic for a little while, until they found out how to deal with them. There would have been two ways. One was, according to the size of the ship, and what not the experts worked out, that an LST shouldn’t

do more than about three knots. A destroyer would be quite okay because it was going so bloody fast that it would explode behind it. So you had destroyers and other fast ships just racing up and down, hopefully to set them off. And we did one trip where we had come down from England with a

mixed convoy. It was a little…We had some Americans and British. It was a bit of a mixture. You might have six in a convoy as they called it. There would be a leader and we would all follow behind like a lot of little dogs until we got down near to the beach, and then we would disperse. We would get the signal to disperse and go your own way to whatever little beach you were going to. So I had the watch

and I was following this American boat and the skipper had told me, “Tell me when we get to the dispersal.” So I buzzed him and told him we were coming near to the point of proceeding independently. He came up on the bridge and he said, “I’ll take over now.” So we’re right behind this bloke and we’ve got to more or less keep down to a certain speed

to avoid the mines and what not. And the skipper said, “Port ten.” A little turn of the wheel and up about ten revs just to get a little more speed. He said “I’m not going to sit behind this bugger”. So we pulled out to the left a little bit and a little bit of speed to overtake him a bit, and another Yank popped in and took our place.

Within two minutes up in a mine. Oh….Luck.

Yeah. We pulled out to the side because we were going to a beach over that way. So we pulled out and just started to take up a bit and this other ship came in where we’d been and he was forty

or fifty yards up in front of us and up he went.

Yes. Eventually, I believe. Yeah. Because those sort of…those mines normally would explode under the engine room. That’s where the…well that’s where most of them seem to get it.

Yeah.

My ship, the 420…

There was a signal came out to the fleet some time ago…I think it was about the beginning of 1944. Might have been two months into 1944 there was an AFO which is an Admiralty Fee Order. Anyway this came out saying that any Australian who had been overseas for two years could apply to go on leave. And so of course

most of us applied, well a lot of us applied to come home on leave. We were in dry-dock in Portsmouth when I was relieved by another Australian. A fellow called Bill Many from Sydney. Go back a bit. We’d had a collision in the Solent. We’d had a collision with a tanker and

it buggered up our bow doors. They wouldn’t work properly. We couldn’t open or shut them. We had to get a bulldozer to sort of get a wire on and open them up and then to close them again. And so eventually we had to go into dry dock to get these repaired. So we were in dry dock in Portsmouth Harbour and then one afternoon this little fellow comes up the gangway. This is Bill Many.

I had to be relieved by another Australian apparently and Bill Many had come over. So he relieved me and I went on leave, waiting for passage back and on the third trip that he did he went up with the….He got blown up. This is when they only got twenty-two of the crew and lost

fifty-seven. And they got about thirty something of the army and navy that we were carrying and lost nearly three hundred. Now what happened with her apparently was the fuel tanks were nearly empty because she had been due to go and get some maintenance done. They had got water in the fuel and so

they were deliberately running down the fuel. They were due to go in and have the tanks cleared out and so forth. So when she sat on the mine that went off bang. Almost within four or five seconds that explosion set off the vapour in the fuel tanks so there was a second explosion. And she just broke straight in half and

that was it. Because when I was over in ’94 I went back and spoke to a couple of blokes who had been survivors of it. So…But Bill Many was one that survived. Yeah. They lost two officers.

Well by this time, apparently too, the naval doctors and the sick bay tiffys, they had been taken off. Their job was finished.

Oh yeah. We took quite a few wounded. We had Gerries amongst them.

We took some prisoners back. We saw. It was just a mixture. Whatever happened to be there when we got emptied. Sometimes there would be nothing for us to take back. We’d go back empty and load up and go back again. Unfortunately not having kept a diary, and so

I’ve got no idea how many trips I did. But there is an account in one of those books of some of them doing about twenty-four trips in about four months.

No thankyou.

Oh no. They used our…They used the wardroom and stuff, the two doctors. But I personally didn’t want to go poking around looking at wounded people.

Oh it didn’t matter really. I remember there was a very famous

bit of a battle called the Falaise Gap. F-A-L-A-I-S. It might have been S-E. But this is when the allies were trying to surround the Germans and they got them in this Falaise Gap as it was called. The Gap was where they could sort of escape, where they could try and escape. Of course you had the Yanks on the right hand side and the British on the left.

And they came in and they sort of surrounded them and they got quite a lot of them. But there was a terrific bombardment. When you were out at sea it looked like a lightning storm. You were out at sea and the flashes of the guns. And I saw some Gerries…they were POWs [Prisoner of War]. They came back and they were completely dazed. They didn’t know what day of the bloody week it was or…They had this far away look.

Oh it couldn’t have been much fun. The Falaise Gap. that’ll stick in your mind.

Oh I don’t think so because they got a terrific pounding. I mean they

really did. Oh no doubt there were some of our blokes that got a bit shell shocked and that too but we didn’t really see much of it. Oh there were some funny things went on. We took some RAF over once from England and they were,

oh they had something like forty odd trucks. Replacements to be taken over so that they had, well let’s say it was forty trucks with RAF drivers. They came aboard. We unloaded them on the beach and they drove three or four miles or whatever, to a park and dumped their trucks and then came back.

And they came back with us. They had an officer in charge of them had a little van with a canvas cover over it. So I said to him…I think we dried out on the beach this time. We were there quite some time. I said to him, “Are you going to come back with us.” We were going to be about three hours or whatever it was. And he said, “No.” He said,

“I have some business to do.” And I said, “What the hell business can you do?” “Oh”, he said. “I’ve got a contact to buy Camembert cheese.” He was buying them for a shilling and selling them in England for ten bob. He had a racket to get hold of this cheese and he had this little van.

It was not bad going, was it?

Oh they do it constantly. They sort of don’t stop. But you don’t get

many mines in the actual sea itself. Not at this stage of the war. Well you used to get…Well even submarines could go out and drop mines or mines could be dropped by aircraft but at this stage... See these mines that were down on the Normandy beach were all part of their defence set-up.

Rommel had been down building the “Atlantic wall” as they called it. They had lots of mines in the sea, these various sorts of mines. They had lots of mines on the shore, buried. And they had, in effect, sort of fences made out of railway lines and these triangular things that stuck out and

they had mines stuck on top of them so that in the initial landing, the small craft, the LCTs and stuff like that, if they went in they could hit these mines and then go off. But once they were brought under control there was no way of the Germans being able to replenish these. So it was just a matter of time before they all more or less disappeared.

Now acoustic mines are set off by noise. There were ships that had, a couple of arms sort of went out over the bow and it looked like a big drum on it. This thing used to make a noise like that and it would set them off.

And then you had the magnetic mines. Now ships were specially treated electrically to reduce the magnetic field. But these new ones, this pressure mine, that was the new one. But once they were sort of cleaned up they couldn’t be replenished.

So it was just a matter of…But my old ship, the 420 for instance, that was sunk the third trip after I went. She went…I think there were five or six ships that were supposed to go to Ostend in Belgium. That’s a port in Belgium. And the weather

was so bad that they almost got to Ostend and it was too rough for them to get in. Because Ostend apparently was a very tricky little port for them to get into. They were told to go back, more or less to England, and wait till the weather abated. And the 420 was the last one in this little convoy. Hit this mine and just pop. Went in no time at all.

Except, see that that thing could have been there for ages.

Never really thought about mines.

No, as far as I was concerned I was more worried about air attack than anything. But a bit worried when this Yank sat on the mine that took our place in the line. You just think for a moment “Ha Ha.” But

you can’t sit and think about this all the time. You forget about it. You’ve got to.

No. I don’t think so. I mean…

No. I don’t think we had…I’ve always thought that being at sea is a sort of a long drawn out thing. Now the air force, say bombers for instance, they had a pretty hectic time and a lot of them got knocked off but it came in short, sort of bursts.

They would go over and they’d bomb Germany and they would come back. They may have a day or two off. They might not. It’s all in short bursts and when they get to their thirty operations, that was what they used to call a tour. And when they finished their tour they would go on leave for a while and maybe they’d come back and do another tour or start another tour or something. But it’s a pretty

We were just having a bit of a chat about the LST and the 420 when it went down and how there were so few survivors. At what point did you find out that this was the case?

After I came back I was….I got back here just before Christmas of ‘44. Got twenty eight days leave and then was sent to a crowd they called the Naval Beach Commando…More or less beach masters. There was myself,

and those couple of fellows who went to…we went to Cannes in ‘94. We were three blokes who had gone over to Europe and done landings in our own ships. And the bloody navy back here regarded us as experts I suppose, and we finished up in what they called this Naval Beach Commando. So we went in and reconnoitred the beach for other LSTs to come in so

we were attached to the army.

Well I didn’t much like living in a two-man tent. I can tell you that. But anyhow we did a landing at Tarakan and then came back to a place called Morotai. And there’s bloody Bill Many. So he’d come back, he’d survived, come back to Australia, and been sent up to the

beach crew. I said, “Bill, God? how are you Bill. How’s the ship?” We’re on tape aren’t we?

He said “Bloody sunk”. I said, “You’re kidding.” He said, “No.” He said, “I got off it.” And the funny thing was that while I was at Tarakan, at this landing at

Tarakan, VE [Victory in Europe] day occurred and I’m on the beach at Tarakan and I’m listening. I’ve got it on the radio that peace had been declared in Europe had occurred, or victory in Europe day. And I’m on the beach thinking, “oh Christ. I should have stopped in England”. But if I had stopped in England I probably would have finished up in the cemetery there. So it’s a funny thing.

Because I probably would have gone down with the bloody ship. Unless me being on it would have made it dodge it. I don’t know. You see it’s all luck. This poor old bloke Bill Many who relieved me, only had three trips. Well he didn’t even have three trips, he only had two and a bit and he finished up a survivor.

Well you just say “lucky me”. That’s what I say, anyway. It wasn’t till much later that I got the full list and so forth. But what must have happened in the meantime, because there are a lot of names that I didn’t recognize,

I think there must have been a lot of change in ships and change in personnel. I went across to England in 1952 and there was a fellow called Kelly. Kelly was the Navigator on the 420. Now he doesn’t appear in there. He must have been…

I met him up in Edinburgh in 1952 but he wasn’t a survivor. I only saw him for a few minutes. I found out where he worked and I went and saw him but…Now see he had left her before she went down. Why, I don’t know. And the same thing happened to a lot of the crew. There must have been a lot of replacements

for some reason or another. So a lot of names I don’t recognize.

Yeah.

Well I was glad for the blokes who were over there but it never occurred to me that

she had gone down. No, and as I say a lot of this stuff I didn’t find out till several years later when I got in touch with this bloke Bill Chalk and he was able to supply me with a lot of this stuff then.

Through John Goldsmith. John was in an LCT [Landing Craft Tank], landing craft tank. One of these smaller little things at Normandy. He’s the bloke that came out here and joined the Australian army and went to Korea. And John told me about

it so I got in contact with them and then I was sent out a membership list and I went through the membership list, looking to see if there were any blokes that I knew. And there was only three off the 420. There was Bill Chalk and George Fox. George Fox was my Signalman. I was always on watch with George. And another fellow called John Essen. But John Essen’s the only one left now.

But that’s why I’ve got that. The LST.

I don’t think you can get them now. But I was saying earlier on too…I spoke about them being fitted with railway

lines so that they could take rolling stock across. Some were fitted up as engineering ships. They had a whole lot of lathes and all that sort of stuff so that they could do repairs to some of these smaller craft. And of course we were fitted up as hospital ships, as well. Another interesting thing while we were lying in the Solent ready to go

for D-day was…Oh just a small distance away for us was…You’ve heard of Pluto? Pluto was the pipeline under the ocean. P-L-U-T-O. Pipeline under the ocean. So what they had was a pipeline that ran from Portsmouth over to France I think it was, under the ocean so that they could pump petrol

without having to have tankers and all the rest of it. And it was like a huge cotton reel floating in the water with this pipe on this reel. And the idea was that they had this ship that towed the cotton reel and the pipe, unwound and lay on the bottom and then when they got so far they had to join another

one on, and so they ran this petrol line all the way across the channel to…They had all sorts of funny things. They really did.

This is how the…what was called the

“RORO”s developed. The roll on, roll off. A lot of these…Towards the end of the war there was a third version of the LSTs came out. They were a little bit bigger, and they were steam driven, and they were British built. They were either British built or Canadian built. Whereas all the others were American built.

But a lot of these, just after the war, were converted to the roll on roll off, as they were called, and used in the cross channel ferries. So that’s where it started. From the LSTs.

Oh I was with this flaming beach crew.

Yeah. Tarakan and then we went back to Morotai. And then I had a bit more leave and then I went back to…my beach crew went back to a place in Borneo called Balikpapan. And I was there and I finished up getting hospitalised

and…

Balikpapan is in Borneo. We were attached to the Australian army…To the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. There’s a group of about, I think we had about sixty ratings

and fifteen or so officers and…

A Sub-Lieutenant. I finished up a Sub-Lieutenant. And our job was to go in and reconnoitre to make sure it was okay for the LSTs to come in to that particular beach. So this is where

I was in Balikpapan when VJ [Victory over Japan] day. And just after that I got sick and went to hospital and came home. I came from Borneo down to Sydney in a hospital ship and then…

Oh I got a stomach upset and so forth. I think it was nerves actually.

Stretched. And I think and to be taken off your ship and finish up with a beach group was….I mean after being a watch keeping officer on

ship to come down to living with the army wasn’t much fun.

Well they called them commandos but they weren’t really commandos. No quite honestly I had just about had enough. I

started to…I developed stomach pains and things, was all nerves and so I was admitted to hospital up in Borneo. Came home on a hospital ship. Came back to Perth on a hospital train. That was about the 6th of November I think and then I went on leave until I was demobbed in

February of ’46.

Well it was great after living in a two-man tent. And would you believe it, I’m sitting on the deck and there’s a skeleton sitting in another chair over there. I said, “Is that you Orb?” A fellow called Orb Hosking

that I went to school with. And he’d been taken up in Singapore and he was just a…He really was a skeleton just about. And here he is on the hospital ship coming home.

Yes. He didn’t go up on the railway I don’t think, but yes. Now he was an interesting fellow. When he was in Changi he…

there was a civilian there that took classes in engineering and I believe he offered a prize to whoever passed out the top. This was something to keep them occupied. And Orb finished up top of the class and when he came back I believe this bloke put up five hundred quid. And when Orb came back through

rehabilitation, through the army rehabilitation service and he went to uni and got his engineering degree and was quite a big wheel over on the Snowy. That’s where he…the only place he worked I think was the Snowy.

Oh yes. He was….You know.

He was always a skinny bloke but he was more or less skin and bone. I used to hear from him, well not from him but he had a brother in law that I knew pretty well so I used to get a bit of news through that. He was a pretty bright boy, really, to get his engineering degree.

at uni down here after the war and then went to…I saw him on TV a while ago. There was a bit of flash back about the Snowy River and Orb was in that.

Oh we didn’t discuss it really but…

Well. I remember. I remember I was in Portsmouth Barracks. We had been through the initial training in the camp when we first got to England and of course it was the 7th

and 8th of December when Pearl Harbour occurred and we went straight down and asked could we go back to Australia and they said, “No. It’s the same bloody war wherever you are. You’ve only just got here.” But I remember being in Portsmouth Barracks, lying in the hammock when the fall of Singapore occurred. And that rocked us.

Once again, we sort of tried to get home but we had no chance of going back.

It was near home and Singapore just sort of seems next door. And here we are ten thousand miles away or something and…

Oh yeah.

Well you only know your own little bit really and you don’t know too much anyhow. I mean there you are, in my case,

I stand a watch on the ship. I’ve got my two watches a day and so forth. But even the skipper’s got no say in where he goes and what’s loaded. He’s just told. Like after Salerno for instance, he is just told to go back to Tripoli. So back we go to Tripoli and then what comes onboard

God only knows. It’s just whatever’s there. You load up with that and you are told to go here or there or whatever.

Well all that we knew was that the Japs had packed it in. We didn’t care why or how.

We were just glad that it had happened. And you couldn’t have cared really if every Japanese in the world had been killed. As long as it wasn’t you. But of course we didn’t know anything really about the atom bomb. We knew it had been dropped and then all of a sudden it comes over the radio, “The war’s

finished.” And the blokes start firing off ammunition and so forth. It was quite a night really.

Yeah. VJ day.

Well it would have come over the radio. I know it was

…it must have been night time or round about night time. Although I was shore based, somebody had invited me onto an Australian ship, and I can’t even tell you now which one it was. I was invited aboard for a meal and it was while I was there that the news came through that the war had finished. And of course all the ships that were there started firing off

ammunition, you know, and so forth and on shore blokes were firing off things. It was just pandemonium because the talk had been that had we had to invade Japan it would be pretty sticky. So you were just grateful that it was all

over because altogether…See I was away, the first time I was away three and a quarter years in the first hit. And then I came back and went up to the islands that was another six months or so. I think we were just glad

it was over.

Yes I was married just before I left. Oh yeah.

Put that out of sight.

Give it to him and he can stick it on the table.

Yeah. Well. I was discharged with what they call it. What to they call it now a days?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I didn’t realize it at the time but it’s just a thing that accumulates I think.

Yeah for quite a while afterwards if a car backfired or something I would surely jump, I can tell you but it was just one of those things.

No. I worked for the government pre-war so I had my job to go back to. It was not as though I had to go chasing around for a job or anything. I had nerves for quite a while afterwards really. It took me a while to sort of get over that.

But there we go.

I got back to Perth, I think it was on the 6th of November ‘45 and was demobbed on the twenty-something of February I think. I’ve got to look it up.

Oh I don’t know why you wait so long. At times there is a hell of a lot of waiting around and don’t know why. Like when I was waiting to go to America I must have been waiting the best part of a month.

There’s a lot of waiting around and you don’t know why.

No not really.

When I came back there were some fellows down there at HMAS Lewin who were there when I went away. And at that stage I was rather jealous of them and yet looking back you think but what the hell did they…I had a trip around the world and all they did was go back to work at [HMAS] Lewin. So

I think they missed out quite a lot.

Well it was the adventure of it you know. You know the foreign travel and all this sort of thing. And I suppose to be perfectly honest with you, you look at it

and there’s not too many blokes who were on LSTs and did the things that we did. It wasn’t bad I don’t think because I think I told you before I had one bloke who did his

sea-time before his commission, did that on a battleship, the Nelson. God. I can think of nothing worse. And when he was commissioned he went to a cruiser and he loved it. It was the best. I would have hated it with all the spit and polish. The LSTs were much nicer with the change of cargo, both

personnel and goods. Perpetual change and something. Oh no, I’ve got no regrets.

Well of course really there was the nervous side of it. That really took me a few years to get over that. And yet it was a thing that snuck up on you. You didn’t really realize it was happening. I think the big thing I disliked

was I fully expected to come home on leave and go back to another ship but instead of that to finish up on the damn beach crew. And the same thing happened with my other mates. Now I had a mate, my great mate Dougie who’d been on harbour defence motor launches in Africa. He was supposed to be only on a ship

which was used for harbour defence, doing five hundred mile convoys. He was captain of this little thing and he came back on leave. He came back on the same ship as I did. He came back on leave to a Fairmile in Sydney Harbour that had ten officers on the damn thing. Just ridiculous.

In some ways the Australian Navy was to some degree, it had too many…This is just what I think…It had too many personnel for the ships. It was under shipped and over manned, if I can put it that way. But just imagine ten officers on a Fairmile.

I just went back to my job in the Taxation Department and I finished up doing clerical work all my life.

Oh yeah.

There was not the variety back in those days as to what there is now, I don’t think. I think there was the…things were more permanent than what you are now, with individual contracts and all this sort of thing. I think I’d find that a bit hard to take. There doesn’t seem to be

such a thing as a permanent job nowadays. Correct?

I only had three or four jobs really. It was always

really sort of clerical work. I’ve never done much physical work.

No. Not really. And you don’t talk about it so much now a days. You go into the RSL [Returned and Services League] and all that.

Oh it’s only just little bits that come up. You know. Oh it’s just things that come up in conversation you don’t…I was talking to you earlier on about this one chap. I won’t mention names but this fellow who was off the Perth and he got sunk.

Up on the Burma Railway, and then being sent up to Japan and gets torpedoed by an American submarine, and spends five days in the bloody water. God, what have I got to grizzle about?

Yes.

Well they weren’t really mates because you don’t… I was the only Aussie in eight ships in the flotilla. Oh no, there was one other

Aussie but…Well, it was my experience that you don’t mate much because having joined this Yachtsman scheme business and being sent over to the UK you are in a Royal Naval ship. They don’t even speak your language.

And even my best mate, Dougie, we were really only together for about less than six months but we clicked and we’ve always kept in touch. Although he married a Brisbane girl and went to live in Brisbane, we kept in touch all the time.

And I’ve kept in touch with the other fellows that I went away with until they all dropped off the perch. But as I said before, it’s a different thing in the army and even in the air force. If you go to a squadron there, you normally crew up with a crew, and in

the normal course of events you stay with them, I think. And the same thing happens in the army when you get to a battalion and that, you don’t get shunted off to another battalion so much. You’ve just got to live with them all I think.

And yet they weren’t mates really. Well , they were shipmates. I’ll tell you a funny thing that happened. This Bill Dowling. He joined the ship just before D-day. He was an extra bloke that came aboard. We had two more officers join for D-day I think. There was

Bill Dowling and there was an extra Engineer officer. And we went up to Tilbury one time and we had overnight leave, and I used to go and have drinks with a girl that I met in London. A very nice lass she was. We got into Tilbury and I rang her up

and said “are you free tonight to have a beer?” We used to go down to the air force’s pub in London. It was a pub called the ‘Codgers’. So I said, “Patty are you…” Oh Bill said to me, “See if you can get a girl for me for the night.” So we went up and we met Patty and we went up to the Codgers. And we were sitting there having a beer and she said, “Give me your hand.” And then she

read my palm and I couldn’t tell you now what she told me. But she took his palm and she said, “You’re going to die young, Bill.” “Oh for Christ’s sake Patty, Shut up.” She said, “No, there’s nothing you can do about it and there’s nothing to be worried about,” she said.

This would have been in July I suppose and on the 7th of November he was gone. And I don’t believe in these things and yet this is what happened. And we left bloody Bill buried at Ostend.

Whether she could read palms or not I don’t know.

I doubt that the present day youth would do what we did. As I said earlier on, my Dad

was in the First World War and it just seemed, not that he talked about the war but you know you just…well I suppose you felt it was your duty to go. Blowed if I know. We weren’t political. But my brother was three years younger than I was and he joined up just about the same time

as I did. But he was unlucky. He never got away. He joined the AIF and that would have been about the end of 1941 I suppose. It got to the end of 1944 and he still hadn’t got overseas, although he had tried to get overseas. So in disgust he

was able to transfer into the air force. But he hadn’t finished his training when the war finished so he never got away and I feel sorry for him that he didn’t. But he did his level best to get away. And the most he got was training on Catalinas just near Newcastle. Rathmines I think they call it.

He did…He told me he went as far as New Guinea on training flights but he didn’t actually get … the war finished before…yet he had been in just as long as I had. It’s all the luck of the draw Denise [interviewer].

The blokes that I went away with? They all came back.

Oh well I didn’t know them. See what happened is, when applications were called for this Yachtsman scheme, as they got together a little group…In our particular case it was only ten and

we shot off together. Other cases it went up as much as thirty. Now I think that we were the second last batch to go away. They started in 1940. The first lot went away sometime in 1940. But as they got little batteries together they would send them off. And this depended on the shipping and all that sort of thing, because there was no flying in those days.

It all depended on what the shipping was and we were class number thirteen, and I believe there was another class after us but I’m not too sure. I hope that this lass on Saturday might know a bit more about that than I do.

Oh yes. Some of them…See when this thing came out that you could apply to come home

on leave, I never thought about it, but some of them applied to go back to the Royal Navy. If I had my head screwed on it was probably what I should have done but it didn’t occur to me. And some of them…Now Bob Fotheringham…It was called the British Pacific Fleet. They

…Had I realized this I probably could have finished in an LST out here because there were quite a few British LSTs coming out in the Pacific. But at that stage all you are thinking about was getting home for some leave, and this is just what happened. As I said to you my mate Dougie finished up

officer number ten on a Fairmile. They just had too many officers but we really could have asked to go back to the Royal Navy. But we didn’t do it. And then I wouldn’t have finished up living in a two-man tent with the army. But there were quite a few LSTs came out. I’ve got photos in that book of mine.

Photos of LSTs in Brisbane and so forth.

Oh no when we first got to Morotai this was all

we had. You had half of a two-man tent and you and some other bloke got….They were only bloody little things like this. You put the two halves together and this was your tent. Later on we got, although we still lived in tents, got sort of normal army tents it wasn’t quite as bad as the two-man tent. I think up at Morotai we finished up,

I think it was in a banana plantation. Mud everywhere. Oh God.

How do you mean?

Well at Tarakan we were only there for about a week. We

went over in Manoora…That’s an Australian landing ship, infantry. That was a converted peacetime liner. That was full of troops and we had to go over the side, down a scrambling net into a motorboat sort of thing, and choof ashore.

In the second wave, if you please. And then we…well what we did really, we linked hands and walked out in the water as far as we could and walked along and tried to feel if it was safe for an LST to come in. You know, with…And we were only there about

not much more than a week I suppose and by that stage things were pretty established and we left and went back to Morotai. Then we waited for the next operation.

I was losing a ship. That’s what annoyed me, and just because we’d been overseas

and done landings they reckoned oh yes, we could join the bloody beach crew. Stan and Burnie were the same but they were both captains of their little ships. And although it was very minor, very minor little ships, they were still captains and they had their own ships. Whereas I was a

watch keeper on a much bigger ship. But then to lose that and come down to…well.

Oh it was quite a comedown really and I think both Burnie and Stan would say the same thing, that they hated it. Hated it.

Oh….Well I’d go back to the RN tomorrow. Lets put it that way. Well, I never served in an Australian ship. But that was just my feeling, that

we didn’t get a decent go when we got back home. That’s just the way that I feel, really. I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong but…

Well I would much rather have gone back to the UK or … seeing the war

was virtually over there by then…Because I got back there when the war finished in Europe in May so I barely would have had time to get back to the UK but they were starting to send ships out to the Pacific here. LSTs and so forth. And had I been

awake to it I should have applied to go back to the RN. Rather than be like Dougie where they had ten officers on a Fairmile, whereas in England they had two officers on it. No. And when I think of Burnie for instance, Burnie had an LCT, a landing craft tank and I think he carried about four tanks

into the Canadian beach on D-day. There’s a bloke who’s a captain of his own ship. It might only be an LCT but it’s that, and you’re not living in a bloody two-man tent when you came back.

Well I never served in this one. I was never on a ship here. I presume they were pretty efficient and so forth. I really think they just seemed to me to have too many men and not enough ships for them to man. Whereas back in the

UK I would have been quite happy to have gone back to a Royal Navy LST out in the Pacific rather than be beach crew. And of course it all depends on your point of view, but I’m firmly of the opinion that a lot of what

was done by the Australian army in the islands was entirely unnecessary. See we did…There were three landings done in Borneo and there’s two ways of looking at this. One way says that the Japanese were already finished. The expression was that they were withering on the vine.

All we needed to do was leave them alone. They couldn’t get any supplies. They were living in the jungle and all this sort of stuff. We didn’t need to do a damn thing. We could have just left them. But instead of that we went and did these invasions and these landings, and that’s just my opinion. There has been books written about it but…

Oh we don’t discuss it. See the only thing…The crowd I belong to now at the RSL is a crowd for the Normandy veterans. These were the blokes who were at Normandy and of course they were all Brits. There is only one other Aussie who belongs to it, but

now we’ve come down to the stage where I think it will all fold up. I think it will probably fold up next year. We don’t get enough to march and so forth, and they are getting to the stage where they can’t march. But I think when we joined them we had over sixty and we’re now down

to something like about fifteen. See it’s the same with the battalions. They’re bringing down now, on Anzac day, there’s a lot of grandchildren and that marching. Although some units still won’t allow it. But no, it is coming to the stage where I think it will probably disappear.

They should. They should be allowed to, I mean. But some…I couldn’t name any, but some just won’t wear it. \But oh no. I’ve been lucky, Denise. I really have.

Yeah, next year I’ll go back again.

Oh we are tossing up whether…My son will come and John Goldsmith’s going. And I don’t know whether Gill will come or not. It all just depends.

Well I don’t know. Just to…Well you’re proud that you were there. Oh, I haven’t got the figures with me. They’re at home but

one of the blokes who was working on this Yachtsman scheme. He got these figures from Canberra and roughly it said that there were five hundred of these navy fellows working over there, altogether, because you had a hell of a lot of ASDIC fellows and you had a lot of the yachties and there were two and a half thousand air force and a dozen army. But the army weren’t…

…They were more observers I think. They weren’t there as a unit or anything. But there was one unit that was in Great Britain for all of the war. The crowd called the forestry unit. They were mainly up in Scotland and they spent their war chopping down trees. They

were used in various ways. I don’t know what but every now and again when you were in London if you were lucky, you saw a slouch hat, and they were blokes from the forestry unit. But there’s not too many people who’d know that. Just this one crowd, the forestry unit.

Oh you

just…you know you just go up. “How are you Digger?” This is the great thing about the… I think I said to you earlier about the RAAF uniform. That, do you know the colour of it? That dark blue. It’s only in the last year, within the last twelve months that they’ve started to bring it back again.

You’d pick an Aussie a mile away with this. But they couldn’t tell us really except that we wore a flash with ‘Australia’ on it on your shoulder. But I know when we first got to England and we had a red ‘Australia’ up on our shoulder. We had to take them off when

we were on Collingwood. They wouldn’t let us wear them.

I think the weather. Oh God. And mail was a problem too until, I think it must have been about 1943, they

brought in what they called an aerograph. You had a sheet of paper on which you could write a letter and then they microfilmed it. And so all they had to send was a little…dozens of bloody letters on microfilm. And when it go to the other end it came out about that size. It was pretty small.

That got down to the fact of getting there in a week. Prior to that it had been months. Because if you were…Okay, now if my wife was writing to me she had to write care of the Naval Liaison officer in Australia House with my name and number on it, and so forth. They knew which ship I was on. She didn’t know. All your mail went

care of NLO [Naval Liaison Officer] Australia House. And then they would sort it out. They would say he’s on ship so and so and they’d readdress it. And then it might chase you across to New York, but you’d left New York and it was months sometimes before you got any mail.

No just…Because initially they were coming by ship. And then later on I suppose they started

to send them by air. But it was from here that the Catalina’s used to fly direct to Colombo. What did they call it? The flight of the two dawns or something. You know that Catalina’s used to fly out by here to the Royal Perth Yacht Club? And there’s a couple of hards still down there. You know, these concrete slabs where they used to bring the Catalinas up on

and I presume some of them carried mail. But then that was only as far as Colombo and I don’t suppose it was much. But when that microfilm stuff came out it made a hell of a difference. You could maybe get a letter in a week if you were lucky.

Well if we were at my place I could show you some.

It wasn’t much bigger. Just a little bit bigger than that.

Oh yes, actually Roy Hall, I’ve got some of his actual written diary. The one I showed you is just condensed dates but in it he talks about.. “I think I might have to try and find a

magnifying glass so I can read my mail”. Oh I’ve still got one or two at home but they were very small.

Well you couldn’t tell much. ‘I love you dear’ and all this. No.

If you couldn’t tell too much. It would probably get censored out. You know.

Oh yes. Of course, onboard ship as an officer you used to have to censor the mail then. I’ll tell you something that…My daughter will tell you this. Somebody I don’t like.

What’s that bloody woman’s name. The English singer, “White Cliffs of Dover”, and all that.

Vera Lynn. Out in the Med it would come on and they had the Vera Lynn hour or half hour or something, and these boys would go…

“Oh, you know” They’d cry into their letters and I said, “Oh God.” I’ll tell you a funny story. Well I think it is funny. You’ve got your harbour at Gosport where you’re loading your LSTs from. Now at Gosport it’s funny because of the way the land is built you get four tides a day.

Although normally there is only two tides a day but in Portsmouth you get four tides a day. You’ve got the normal sort of tide which comes in with the Atlantic but then apparently the sea goes all the way round the top of Scotland and comes into the English Channel again and so they meet of the Isle of Wight and so you get four tides a day. And so this place Gosport

is good for loading LSTs. The idea was that if you went in, there you’ve got your hard and if you went in on a rising tide, the tide is coming in so you go in and oh, there is a stern anchor. You drop that anchor in at the back as you are going in. When you are coming off you can wind on that anchor and it will help you out. Besides the engines, you can wind on that anchor and it will help you

off. So if the tide is coming in, you go in so far and down goes the ramp and you start to load as quickly as you can, and you’ve got to keep shoving it forward if possible. Get the thing loaded, back off out. And another one come in and he’ll be on the falling tide. So he goes in as far as he can and as the tide goes out

he has to back off a bit so that you get two ships in a tide and you get eight ships a day loading, you see, at the hard. Next door to us is a Yankee LST and we are on a falling tide so you had to keep your wits about you, and as the tide fell, with the aid of the engines and this keg, this anchor out the back,

you would go back a bit so that you were always…Now this American LST was loading and part of the crowd that they were loading was what was called an ENSAS [EU Entertainment Unit] entertainment group. The ENSAS…I forget what it stands for. Entertainment something or other. But they were all groups to entertain the troops with. And you’ve got …

you load the top deck first. The trucks come in onto this…We call it the elevator. It was sort of a cable operated lift. Just one truck at a time would come on and we’d bring it up to the top deck where it would back off and be chained down so it doesn’t fall off overboard and so forth. When the top deck is full you then can fill the bottom deck with tanks or whatever.

So we are loading and gradually backing off as we get loaded and next door to us, all of a sudden, was a bloody truck comes up and on the top of it was George Thornbury. “I’m cleaning windows…” So all this crew get around, clapping. The next thing they are high and dry. They are stuck, oh dear.

It was comical really. They should have been floating off but they couldn’t. They got stuck and I bet they got abused. George Thornbury.

Not that I could repeat.

No. I couldn’t. There’s a lot of lewd talk goes on of course.

I can’t remember much. George Thornbury. God. I’ll never forget it.

Well they were so versatile for one thing. And as I’ve said before, it was the variety. Every three or four days, sort of thing, you’d load up. Say you’d load up in Tripoli and probably go up to Naples. Or say it was Sicily…what? About a three-day turn

around. You could load up, be up there and be back again in three to four days, and a different lot of people. Whereas if you are on a normal ship it was the same old blokes you were living with. It was the variety of it, and it was a challenge every time you went in to unload. It was probably different.

And the fresh water showers.

Yeah. I told you abut Pots Wiley didn’t I?

Yeah. About the bully beef and the biscuits. I can more or less still see that still. Us chucking the bully beef and these hard army biscuits down to these little kids and men coming along and grabbing it off them. That’s a thing I won’t forget. And I remember these Germans who came out of Falaise Gap.

You know the bombed. I remember them.

Well they didn’t know where they were. They were completely dazed. They’d had such bombardment that they weren’t with it really.

No. No not really. And onboard ship too you wouldn’t have the passion against them that you would if you were in the army, I think.

You know, you are detached from it. It’s not…A lot of the army would be sort of man to man, face to face sort of business wouldn’t it? Whereas…and we really weren’t a…what you could call a fighting ship. Not like a destroyer that went and demolished that farmhouse, where the gun

was that fired at us on D-day. You didn’t fight in that respect and yet we were so vital in as much as we could ship so much material. As a matter of fact it is supposed to be Churchill that thought of the idea of them. He of course did not have the expertise to…But he said this is what I want

and left it to the experts to work out how to do it. I want a ship which can run up on the beach and bla bla bla.

Well really you didn’t really know much about what was going on. As I said to you earlier on the skipper just gets his orders, go here, go here. Not like the army. I would assume…

because they’ve got definite objectives to take and all this sort of thing. I always say we were just like a bloody great truck. Just backwards and forwards. Just carting whatever we were given to cart.

Well a much more interesting one I think. But I don’t think one knew much more than your own little circle. I mean you weren’t sort of interested in the grand strategy of things. You didn’t know enough to know about it. You just did your

own little job and you did it to the best of your ability. But no, looking back it was very interesting. I would go back to LSTs tomorrow, rather than be like Bob Fotheringham and go to a cruiser. Oh God, I couldn’t stand that.

Well I think you’ve just got to weigh up whether you think it’s right. And if you think it’s right you should do it. Now I had a

mate who was a conscientious objector. He spent the war chopping wood somewhere down the southwest. I think that took more guts than what it did to go to bloody war because he was reviled quite a bit. He was a school teacher and I think

that stood against him all his career that he just did not believe in war and that was it. So he got put into a sort of conscientious objectors’ camp and what not. And he could chop wood. I can tell you that.

So you get the two different outlooks. And I think that World War II wasn’t that far removed really. When you look at it, it was twenty one years from the end of World War I and it wasn’t that far away really.

Well you still get blokes joining up nowadays but…

Oh no. It's an entirely different…

It’s much more sophisticated now, isn’t it? I should think nowadays you very often wouldn’t know that you’ve got it or what it is.

I’m just sorry that I can’t…

More pictures. Yeah.

Let me…I think it’s difficult for you because you don’t know enough to, at times, to ask questions or sort of realize what went on because it’s getting close to sixty years ago isn’t it for …

as far as D-day’s concerned, and yet as far as the outbreak of the war is concerned, it’s sixty four years isn’t it? You are not even half way there.

No but you…It’s a matter of having lived long enough I think. This is just a…

I quite often watch, what’s that show on Monday nights? ‘To be a millionaire’ or something. And some of the questions which get asked, that the people just haven’t got a clue, just amazes me and it’s purely because they haven’t lived long enough…It’s not. And yet if I got on the show and they asked me something about

a singing group, what bloody singing group was this or that, I wouldn’t have a clue. But other things they just happened when you were a kid or whatever so you know them or you should know them.

Clothes prop.

But you must learn a lot as you go along too, I think.

The ships that won the war. And you just remember there was over a thousand of them built and I don’t think there was any other ship

that built that many. Yeah I….

Yes. I can’t escape the fact that I have been lucky. I have been lucky haven’t I.

See I could have been like…