Australians at War Film Archive

After been born at a very early age I went to Junction Park State School which is Japamanly there then I went to Brisbane Boys’ Grammar School to junior standard. Then I went to Watson

Ferguson Printers as a lithographer, and have you ever heard of lithography?

You have? I was an apprentice and I was in about my third year of getting a terrific sum of twenty one shillings a week. I joined the air force as an AC4 [Aircraftsman 4th Class], I got five shillings a day for seven days a week, so it was thirty five shillings a week I got, I was rich.

I served my time in the air force and I did my initial training up at Amberley at number 1 ITS [Initial Training School] and then I went down to Parkes and did the wireless course there. Then went to Evans Heads on the

Fairey Battles and did my gunnery course there and then I graduated from that as a sergeant and then I went overseas to England. Everybody in the war either went to England or to the Middle East the army fellows went to the Middle East, as the Japanese weren’t in the war in those days. We were about three quarters of the way sailing across the Indian Ocean

on the Thermistoclese in a troop ship and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and that brought America into the war and we wanted to turn the boat around and come back to Australia. The officer IC [in command] of the troops said, “What are you going to do when you get back all you have got are a few Hudson squadrons and a couple of Tigermoth squadrons, no good. Carry it on and go to England

where you can do much more good against the Nazis. ”So we pressed on and went there. I had about three or four weeks in Durban because we were one hundred and fifty highly trained aircrew on this ship and we were heading off into the Atlantic where the U-Boats [Unterseeboots – German submarines] were pretty active. They didn’t want the boat to be sunk with the whole one hundred and fifty

crew on it so they split us up into three lots of fifty. I went from Durban on the Alamendura I think it was and it was a Portuguese vessel and we went down to Cape Town and up to Takoradi and Freetown and western Africa then I went to England.

Went down to Bournemouth which was a holding centre and from there I went to a place in south Wales near Porthcawl called Stormy Down and it certainly was Stormy Down because it was bitterly cold because it was in December-January-February in the middle of the English winter and it was bloody cold down there. After I did that course there I came back to

27 OTU at Litchfield. OTU stands for operational training unit and HCU, which is the heavy conversion unit, but they didn’t have then when I was at Litchfield all we had was OTU, operational training unit, flying on Wellington bombers, Wellington Mark I Cs I think they were with the Pegasus engines.

I did the first three thousand bomber raids on these Wellington I Cs and they were pretty slow old aircraft and I wasn’t too fussed about them. Then I went to 460 Squadron which was at Breighton up in Yorkshire, not to be confused with Brighton down wherever it is near Kent I think along the [English] Channel coast.

Breighton, it’s not even marked on the maps its just a little farm south of York and the nearest village was Bubwith the Yorkies call it Bubwoth. We were there for quite a long time I forget exactly how long. I did several ops [operations], we did about ten on

Wellingtons, we had Wellington Mark 4 then which were much better, it had the Twin Row Wasp engine, a radial engine and that was a lot better and much more powerful and it could go a lot faster. In fact on takeoff if you stood in the navigator’s dome and the astrodome you could see the wings were going like this as you took off, because they were a very flexible construction they were geodetic,

bet you don’t know what that is?

It’s sort of square, squares of dural, big ones about so big, but they are all welded together and they are welded together in series along the side of the fuselage and along the wing. It was a system invented by a British scientist called Barnes Wallis

he was the man how invented the Skip bomb that they used in the dam raids, the Mohne Dam and the Eder Dam. Later on when we were on Lancasters this happened, so I flew with them and did about ten operations I think on Wellingtons and then we got Halifaxes, which were a dead loss.

They were an early mark of Halifax Mark 1 or Mark 2 I think but when you were coming down wind and cross wind and turning up wind they’d just spin and ‘whoosh’ and then ‘crash’, I think we lost three maybe four Halifax crews during the training because of this so called rudder stall. I think the rudder stall was just a name dreamt up by the

back room boys to cover up what they didn’t know. From then on we weren’t very happy with these Halifaxes because they were electrically operated turrets and the least bit of damp weather and these tiny little micro switches would get short out because of the damp weather and it rains a lot in England, believe me. If they don’t have rain for a fortnight they declare a drought.

Then from Halifaxes we got Manchesters, which was sort of a smaller version of the Lancaster twin engine aircraft, and we converted onto them but didn’t operate on them thank goodness because the engines in them weren’t very reliable. Then we got the Mighty Lanc [Lancaster] with the Rolls Royce

engine I can’t remember the name of the engine but I will think of it later. From then on we didn’t look back because they had plenty of power and the turrets were hydraulically operated because there was no chance of any short outs with any wet weather or

anything like that, they were really a mighty aircraft and they could travel very fast. The Wellington could do about one hundred and ten mile an hour down hill with the following wind but the Lancaster could do one twenty or one thirty going uphill without a following wind. I did the rest of the twenty ops

on Lancasters. The first tour in those days was thirty, the second tour was also thirty ops but there were so few experienced aircrew getting through the second thirty that they reduced it to twenty which didn’t worry me at that time because I didn’t have any intention of doing a second tour with them.

I flew on these aircraft and went to many places, I have a list of them somewhere of the targets we went to. The shortest flights were to places in the Ruhr Valley like Essen and Dusseldorf and I’d say we were only about four odd hours because we had to fly from the North of England down the South of England and across the channel and then to the target,

so four hours was a short op. Berlin was about eight, eight and a half I think depending on which way that we went. I was six ops on Berlin but the rest of them were operations around Germany to various industrial targets. Mainly big towns with

railway sidings and also where the raw materials were coming in on one train and the finished products would go out on other trains. It was our job to bomb these rail lines and put them out of action and also bomb the factories and put them out of action. The Germans were amazingly resilient they could

overcome these problems and kept on manufacturing things. When the Americans came into the war later on with their Flying Fortresses we were bombing at night and then the Americans would go over in the day time and bomb the same target which cut down the war output quite a bit. The Flying Fortress was a big airplane

about the same size or maybe a bit bigger than the Lancaster but it only carried the same bomb load as a Wellington which is a smaller twin engine aircraft. The Americans had their gunners everywhere they had about seven gunners and as I remember rightly there was a nose gunner, a belly gunner and two waist gunners, a mid upper, and

a tail gunner. That’s about five or six isn’t it?

You had to carry the machine guns for all these blokes and the ammunition for them which of course cut down the bomb load. After we had been flying on the Lancaster for quite a while we originally had about two thousand rounds per gun and they came down through the fuselage in tracks into the gun turret. Some shiny bum at

RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] headquarters said, “You don’t need all those rounds of ammunition because we have studied all the combats and they only last a few seconds each so you only use up a couple of hundred rounds.” So they cut us down from a thousand rounds per round to three or four hundred which we thought was a not very funny. But they were right because the average attack only lasted seconds.

I did some very long flights to targets in northern Italy to Milan and Turin and they were about eight, nine, ten-odd hours, about nine hours I think. The longest one

I did was one to La Spezia in northern Italy on the west side. We went there to bomb a factory of some sort and we had a sprog [inexperienced] navigator with us, he’d only done about two or three ops and he didn’t believe or didn’t know how to do star shots or how to keep a line of what he was doing or where we were.

We were lost, we are still not sure whether we bombed the right target or not but there were a couple of search lights that came up as we circled around and we thought that this must be it, a little twin engine aircraft came up on the portside and I said to the squadron leader, “Will they open up?” and he said, “No, just watch him and if he opens fire then fire back.” He was only as big as a Tiger Moth I think,

a small aircraft. We bombed this target and we set course for home and the navigator got lost again. We didn’t know where the devil we were, we were heading across somewhere and we were crossing coasts and land and then cross coast and then land again and more coast. Eventually we were completely lost and we left land behind

a long time ago and we were out over water and somebody suggested if we didn’t know where we were why don’t we just ditch the aircraft and swim home. I said, “If we are going to do that they don’t we go back where there is land and bailout of there, it’s a bit safer than landing in the drink.” Our skipper said, “No, we will press on,” and we had the engines throttled right back to just

as bit above idling speed to just save on petrol. Our wireless operator was trying to get a radio fix, that’s a two line thing from England so they’d know exactly where we were, if we were too far out the second one, we could only get a position line. So through the reciprocal of this position line we crossed the Bay of Biscay and we were out in the Atlantic Ocean heading

towards America. We got this position line and we followed it back to England and landing at a diversion drome and went back to 460 Squadron the next day. It was a bit harrowing because we’d been up since goodness knows how long the day before and we hadn’t had any sleep and we were twenty four hours to thirty hours without any sleep altogether, without any rest even,

by the time we got back to Breighton. What else do you want to know?

One night we were sent to Essen in a Lancaster

and we were circling around waiting for the target indicator flares to go down they were dropped by the PFF Force which was a Pathfinder Force and they used to dropped these target indicating flares and they had another Lancaster circling around. In this Lancaster was a fellow they called a Master of Ceremonies or the MC and he had all the latest radar gadgets in his aircraft.

He could say, “Bomb the yellow flares,” because that was the right way and they were falling the right direction and the wind was carrying them in the right direction. If the wind changed he’d say, “Ignore the yellow flares bomb the red flares,” and somebody from another PFF aircraft would drop red flares or green flares so we’d have to get on course again and bomb these flares. This night we went to Essen

and was circling around the target, circling around starboard to port, because I was flying backwards, this was my left side and that was the right side, that was port and that was starboard. There was a gunner instructor at Litchfield used to say to us, “Starboard is green and port is red, forget this fact and you will soon be dead.” We were circling around this

to the port and then all of a sudden the aircraft just flipped over onto its back and thinking about it later on we worked out that it must have been a couple of heavy flak shells burst underneath the port wing and the force of the blast must have been enough to force the aircraft over onto its back and we were dropped down and down and fortunately the pilot and a fellow by the name of Flight Sergeant Fracker had the presence of mind to put the stick forward

to pull the aircraft down. As we went down and gained air speed they gently pulled back on the thing and we were down about a thousand feet or five hundred feet before the aircraft pulled out of this dive and it’s a long way down from twenty odd thousand feet. So we circled around and bombed the target and got back home ok.

Many times we got shot up by night fighters and flak. I claimed a few enemy night fighters as kills and eventually I got confirmation of them and that’s one of the reasons why I got a DFM [Distinguished Flying Medal].

It was nothing spectacular that was only one action that I was awarded a DFM for it was to cover a period of these actions against enemy night fighters. When we got back to our squadron we had to go to what they called interrogation where we were interviewed by

the intelligence officers and they’d asked us all these stupid questions and we’d have to go through the whole operation again. “What time you were on the target? What was the wind? How high were you” Did you see any light? Did you see any heavy flak? Did you see any reading flak? Were there any fighters about?” Of course these things happened every night so you had to go though the

whole lot again and it was a bit harrowing. That’s why I get twitchy now.

They were all with 460. Then they brought in those so called Pathfinder which I was talking about before and they had

special radar and things to track their positions across the ground because the normal radar wasn’t very effective, on cloudy nights or moonlight nights. Especially cloudy nights they couldn’t see through the cloud to the ground but these later things, G I think they were called, they could sort of see through the cloud and pickup the formation of the land so that the navigator could read his way across the target.

The second tour was thirty ops which was later reduced to twenty and then they introduced the Pathfinders that’s right, it was with the Pathfinders that you had to do an extra fifteen ops. You were screened as they called it, you were grounded for life, but you had to do another fifteen ops,

so there were forty five ops that you had to do straight. There was one particular crew and I wont mention any names. There flight engineer came to me a couple of times in the mess and said, “How about coming with us, we are going onto Pathfinders?” and I said, “No way.” He said, “Why not?” and I said, “Your crew could hardly get through one op without getting through an extra fifteen.” Because every time this pilot would come back he’d

either come in too heavy and bounce the aircraft and strain the undercarriage or he’d land up too high and flop down or he’d force the aircraft into the deck. He was a lucky man he did the paths necessary forty five to go into Pathfinders and then he did one or two with Pathfinders and he got a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] and a DFM and I think he got a DSO [Distinguished Service Order],

but that was just pure luck, absolutely pure luck. When I finished my tour I went on what they called your rest. Your rest could be anything from three months to five months or six months, it was called a rest because you were screened from going back on ops for that period of time. I went to Sutton Bridge in southern England

and did the gunnery leaders course down there and I got an A assessment. When I went back to the night squadron I’d been they’re for a couple of weeks and the gunnery leader said

that he got me posted down at this central gunnery school as an instructor and I was there for about four months or five months. The group gunnery leader came to me a few times and said, “How about going back on ops again?” and I said, “Not me, no thanks.” I just got through thirty ops and I reckon I was pretty lucky and he came again

to me several times and his final offer was that I would be made up to a flight lieutenant because I was a flying officer then I got a commission along the line, instead of getting only twenty one and six pence a day I would get twenty three or twenty four shillings a day sterling. When you convert that into Australian money it’s worth another twenty per cent or twenty five per cent,

that was about ten pounds a week, that was really big dough. When I came back I went back into the printing game and they paid us tradesmen wages while we were finishing our apprenticeship and the tradesman wages in the lithographic department were eight pound ten I think which I knew, ten pound a week that’s pretty good I’ll take it on.

I went back to this English Squadron RAF [Royal Air Force] number 576 Squadron which was stationed up at Elsham Wolds on the southern part of the Humberside, nobody has ever heard of it.

A bit like Breighton, yes. Then the squadron moved down to a place called Fiskerton, which was just east of

Lincoln, so I finished my tour there and the war finished then. I still reckon I was instrumental in when the war finished, I’m sure that when Hitler and Goering got to talking about things and they said to each other, “Hey Adolf, I’ve just heard that that Flight Lieutenant Petersen DFM was back on ops. What are we going to do? We might as well as quit.” So Adolf said,

“Yes I think we might as well surrender.” So they surrendered and that finished the war.

Lucky for me too. I did about ten I think there and did a couple of manna operations, have you heard of the manna operations? You know, manna from heaven.

The Germans cut off the food supplies to Holland and all those low land countries, completely cut it off. They had no food at all so we used to go on these so-called manna from heaven in daylight and we’d drop bags of food to them, it was dried eggs, dried flour and pulverised ham and things like this that they could cook up, at least it was something it probably wasn’t very

appetising but it was food. I did about four of them I think and they were pretty much a piece of cake there wasn’t much flak about. I did a couple of other daylight raids one to Bremen and a couple of night raids, I think I did about ten altogether I think. Then VE [Victory in Europe] Day came along

and we were pulled off the squadron. We heard about it at Fiskerton and nobody said anything to anybody for a week or so and I went to see the wing commander who was in charge of the squadron the squadron commanding officer and he’d been on leave so he wasn’t there but there was an English squadron leader from one of the flights

who had taken over temporary command of the squadron, Squadron Leader Duckman I think his name was. I said to him, “What do I do now? I’ve been hanging around here for a week or ten days and nothing is happening,” and he said, “You bloody colonials can buzz off. We don’t need you any more,” and I thought, “You ungrateful bugger.” We risked out bloody lives for him.

“You bloody colonials we don’t need you any more.” So that was that, finished.

I stayed there for another three or four months and I went down to London and I got engaged to a girl over there and we shared a flat

with another Australian girl, who was a driver for the American army and she was a driver or a chauffeur if you like but they call them drivers, and we shared a flat in London with her for three-odd months four months. That was good and I enjoyed that because London was quiet and peaceful and no air raids, no search lights and no blackout. If you struck a match to light a cigarette you didn’t have

someone yelling at you, “Put that light out.” There were no search lights and the lights were on everywhere and there was no blackout and you could walk around and see where you were going. It was quite enjoyable, the theaters were opened and the nightclubs were opened. This girl came out to Australia. I had to pay her fare. If you had an English war bride

the government paid her fare out but if you were just engaged the man had to pay the girl’s fare out so she came out here. After about three or four months I had to wait a lot longer for her to get here than if she was a war bride. Eventually she came here and I think she stayed ten days or a fortnight and said, “I don’t like it here. I’m going back to England.” So she went back to England and I stayed on in Australia of course.

I wrote to her a couple of times and I never ever heard from her again. I don’t know what happened to her. She probably found some other bloke.

After the war I went back to the printing trade, back to being a lithographer.

Lithography was a fairly highly skilled branch of the printing trade. Your newspapers were printed in the letters press and that was hot type printing. Lithography was printing. It comes from the Greeks and in the early days they had these great big limestone slabs which were polished evenly across .

The work was drawn onto the stone and it was printed off that and a very painstaking thing. When I came onto the scene we had all the art work on these stones, you were printing on a big quad tram plate which was thirty inches by forty inches and we had to write up all these stones and there was

about five or six colours on these labels I think. We used to print them for Victory Cross Cannery which was in Logan Road, you wouldn’t know them. They used to do can fruit which was sliced pineapple and sliced peaches and fruit salad and all sorts of things like that and I think they were in six colours, there was yellow, red, blue, light blue, grey and pink.

Of course I had to have a plate made for each one, for each colour and that was quite painstaking and a bit boring. I was getting then about eight pounds a week Australian, the government paid ex-servicemen tradesmen wages while they were finishing their apprenticeship and I got to tradesmen’s rate, which was

eight pound ten I think, which sort of wasn’t too bad. I did this until I was nearly finished the five years of apprenticeship. The sales manager over at Watson and Ferguson a fellow by the name of Jim Fleming had also been in the air force but he was on

those twin engine aircraft, those Mosquito secondly, I think they were Beaufighters and he had been on them and he offered me a job as a traveler for Watson and Ferguson which I took which meant I got out more. He was on the Beaufighters and Mosquitos

and night-fighters because they were twin engine aircraft a crew of two and they used to put them up in the German bomber stream to try and shoot down the German bombers. The German fighters were harassing the British fighters. He didn’t like it because he reckoned the British crews always opened fired whenever they saw them. We were all in four engine aircraft.

There were Halifaxes, Stirlings and Lancasters. They were all four engine so if we saw anyone with two engines, like the night-fighters would open fire on them.

I was born in 1922 and the Depression hit in 1927 I think and it lasted

about four or five years. I was too young and I didn’t realise that I was in the middle of the Depression. My mother had Scottish parents and her mum and dad came from Glasgow and her eldest sister was born in Scotland, all the other daughters and I think there were four or five of them and they were born out here.

She was a canny Scot and looked to save money and like many other people we had rabbit for tea several times, not several times a week but a couple of times a week we’d have rabbit because it was cheap and it was tasty. My Mum was a pretty good cook and everything she did was tasty. Apart from that I don’t really remember much about the Depression I was too young I suppose, I was

only about five years old and it didn’t mean very much to me.

We used to play cowboys and Indians because there were lots of movies on with Boot Gibson and Hopalong Cassidy, what was the other fellows name Gene Autry we didn’t like Gene Autry very much

because he used to sing and kiss girls on the movies we thought he was a bit of a sissy.

I was an only child yes.

All the Neighbourhood kids

we were all mates, we had to be mates because there was nothing else to do. They used to come over to my backyard and play cricket a lot because we had a concrete path which was so wide going from the back steps back down to the toilet down the back because they were all outside dunnies in those days. We had this concrete split going down and we used to like playing

cricket on it but it was nowhere near as wide as a proper pitch but it was a cricket pitch and it wasn’t long enough either. All the kids from around used to come over the fence and play cricket there and the rule was no slogging, over the fence and you are out, over the fence was a score of six, you scored six runs if you got over the fence but you were out.

If you hit it over the fence because some poor kid would have to scramble over the fence to get the ball and bring it back or throw it back. I went to Junction Park School and it’s changed a lot now. It was an old timber building in those days. Now it’s all bricks and mortar and very modern. I think the old

timber one has been pulled right down altogether. Especially the scholarship class school it was a separate building over on one side and there were three classrooms in it and they were the scholarship classes. There were three classes, A, B and C or 1, 2 and 3 and they were considered to be the cream of the intelligence.

If you were in Class One you were bound to pass, if you were in Class Two you could but if you were in Class Three you were a bit more ‘iffy’. I managed to pass by a couple of marks so I was all right. We had a lot of bush out there at Amberley and as I was telling you before my Dad’s father said to him, “Why are you buying land out at Amberley there for that’s way out in the bush?”

His father was a Dane and came out in the late 1800s–1890s and he married an Irish girl here in Brisbane by the name of Mary Porter and his name was Lars Christopher Petersen. They married and they

only had my father and two sisters I think. They lived down the Sandgate way and we didn’t see much of them.

Not very often, I used to like going into town because it was so

metropolitan so many things to do in there but I wasn’t allowed to go in there on my own when I was little. To go right into town I think the children’s fare was a penny, the adult fare was threepence. Coming back home every so many stops it would go up a penny, we’d say we were going to stop at Juliet Street which is

No 19 I think we’d say, “A penny fare to Number 19,” so we’d get a penny fare but we went one stop more where it should have been a tuppence. The conductor didn’t care or wasn’t alert he didn’t know brought the fare and he’d stop and we’d get away with it. A penny fare to Juliet Street.

I don’t think so.

I remember when the infantile paralysis was on, the infantile paralysis and they call it polio [poliomyelitis] now they closed all the schools around Brisbane for eight, ten or maybe twelve weeks.

All us kids were around Amberley thought we were being cheated because it was happening at Christmas time and we were getting five weeks school holidays anyway, so we didn’t score the whole ten or twelve weeks of the infantile paralysis. It got a bit boring after a while being around the house and trying to make your own fun and playing with the kids next door

and having a few fights and playing a bit of cricket.

I don’t know, just for something to do I suppose probably because we were bored stiff.

Not very much,

Dad never talked about it very much. One of my mothers sisters married a fellow called Jim Lloyd and he was in World War I and he always skiting about what he did in the war but Dad just nod his head and say, “Yes that’s right.” He was a stretcher bearer with the Army Ambulance Field Service Hospital.

Part of his job was a stretcher bearer so he saw some pretty horrendous sights on the battle fields. He saw some blokes blown to pieces and all their legs and arms blown off and he had to pick them up and put them on a stretcher and carry them up, it must have been very harrowing. That’s probably why he didn’t talk about it very much.

That’s why in the services during the Second World War or maybe towards the end of the First World War they introduced all this continental time. Instead of having one o’clock in the morning and five o’clock in the afternoon they had 0 five hundred hours and seventeen hundred hours. These poor buggers were out in trenches and up to their knees in muddy water and so forth and the telephone communication was a land

line across these muddy battle fields and of course there was all the water in it and with the electrical contacts that weren’t the best they’d short out a bit now and again and the Lieutenant in the trench would get a message from headquarters saying, “You are to go over the top of gargle gargle gargle.” They didn’t know what they were saying, four o’clock or five o’clock in the morning or four o’clock or five o’clock in the afternoon.

So they’d pick on five o’clock in the afternoon I suppose and they’d get a rocket because they should of have gone over and attack at five o’clock in the morning. They introduced this continental time and there’s no way you can mix up 0 five hundred for seventeen hundred hours. You know how that time works don’t you?

Twenty four hours in a day so it’s twenty four hours.

I understand that’s how it came into being and it was generally accepted now in all the services as being the right way to tell the time.

Not very much. They didn’t have Anzac Day then did they?

The ANZACs [Australia and New Zealand Army Corps] didn’t come into being until World War I and they weren’t called the ANZACs. Yes, the Australian and New Zealand forces, yes they were called the ANZACs. But Anzac Day didn’t come into being until about ten or twenty years after the First World War had finished. That was my first knowledge of Anzac Day.

When I was discharged I used to go into town to the march quite regularly. I sort of lost all track of them and one day my father said to me, “There’s a story in the paper about 460 Squadron and Anzac Day.” He showed it to me and they had a dinner at the hotel that was along the riverfront there,

Crest I think, I forget now. He showed me this article, I think they mentioned the chairman’s name so I rang the hotel and ask them and said I was on 460 Squadron and I wanted to get in touch with these people and could they give me this bloke’s name.

A fellow by the name of Keith Walker who was with the 460 Squadron and his address is so and so and his number is and I rang this bloke and he didn’t know me and I didn’t know him from the squadron days because I was on it fairly early. From then on I went pretty much to all the meetings and get-togethers because most of the blokes who were at Breighton with me have

either got the chop or have since died. Most of the fellows in the 460 Squadron Association were at a place called Bingle in North Lincolnshire which is fairly close to Grimsby, have you heard of Grimsby? It’s a fishing port on the east coast and it’s fairly well known.

I liked meeting them and talking about old times. One of my mates that I knew from the 460 Squadron as I said either got the chop on the squadron or have since died and most of them are from the south. There are not very many of them

that came from Brisbane. In the air force all the air force blokes came from all over Queensland up to Amberley and when you went down to Parkes to the wireless school more blokes came in they were from all over Australia. The same thing at Evans Head at the bomber and gunnery school and the same thing at the pre-embarkation depot. In the army all the blokes in one district all joined up together,

trained together and fought together so they knew each other all the way through the war. In the air force they came from there and there and at odd times and from all over Australia so you didn’t get to know them so well. I don’t suppose their reunions had the same sort of impact in those days.

No, very very little. You heard about him but not much, not like if you were living in England or in Europe. That’s why that Saddam Hussein

has to be stopped because Hitler was like him in the beginning. He got a bit big for his boots and wanted to concur this and invade this country and the next country and he took over all the low lands in Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg and then he invaded Poland, and took over Poland. The story goes that they captured

a whole lot of Polish uniforms from somewhere that they took over. They had the German soldiers in these Polish uniforms and they had them advance on Germany he said, “The Poles are invading Germany we will have to retaliate” so he sent all his troops into Poland and his blokes had moved out and they invaded Poland. He took over

Denmark, Norway and all those other countries, Lithuania. The Danes had a way of picking out the Germans, a lot of the German language is quite similar but certain words are pronounced entirely differently. If the Danes were suspicious of a man who said he was a resistance worker

they’d ask him to pronounce, ‘Roth bloth me blur’. I don’t know how the Danes say it but it’s close. It means ‘red bread with jam’ or something but nobody could pronounce it like the Danes can pronounce it.

If you didn’t get it right you were German, yes.

My cousin over there told me all this and even now a days I say to him, “Roth bloth me blur,” and I tried to pronounce it the same that they did and they roared with laughter so it must have been something pretty rude in Danish, it must be a bad saying but they have never told me what it was.

I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea. That was back in 1939 wasn’t it? I was still a lowly paid apprentice lithographer in 1939. I joined up in 1941

so I was about nineteen wasn’t I, I was born in 1922. I think it was on the 5th March when I joined up and I was nineteen or twenty on the 25th March. I reckon it was five years

and I was discharged on the 2nd March 1945, my discharge papers saying five years service in the air force, they say four years and eleven months, I was only two days or three days short or something. I suppose the air force and the Army they say that you have to be exactly right.

I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I was telling you before, was that on camera when I was telling you about Patty Fanucan.

He was an Aussie fighter pilot during the battle of Britain.

He and another fighter pilot and I can’t think of the other fellow’s name, they were sent back to Australia. I suspect they were sent back to boost the war effort and they’d be on radio and talk about being fighter pilots and being in the Battle of Britain and they were regarded as flying aces. They shot down about twelve, fourteen or

fifteen German aircraft, so I thought that’s for me and I will join the air force and be a fighter pilot and get all the kudos. I joined up and I’m sure now all the fellows that went to Amberley on the Monday were pilots the ones that went in on the Tuesday were observers and on all the Wednesday

intakes were WLOP AGs, so I was a WLOP AG, that’s a wireless operator air gunner. I got fed up with doing the wireless course down at Parkes and I just went off course and became a straight AG [Air Gunner]. One of the main reasons was I couldn’t image myself being cooped up in

a tiny little place in the aircraft and being shot at, and not know what the hell was going on out side. At the rear turret I could look around and see everything, too much.

I never thought about that in those days but I did later on after I’d been shot at a few times.

Everybody that went into the air force in 1939 they’d give you the choice of enlistment officers.

They had an office in Creek Street. That’s where you went and joined up. And they asked you there, “What would you like to be? A pilot, observer or wireless air gunner?” Well everybody said pilot straight away. Then, as I said, it wasn’t until I was posted up to Amberley that I knew I wasn’t going to be a pilot, nor did the blokes that were made observers. You can appeal against the decision

but your chances of getting a changed were pretty much nil. There was only one bloke that I can remember who appealed against it being made an observer and I forget his name now and he was a red headed fellow and he got changed to a pilot but he was the only one out of about ninety blokes in the twelve course.

There were twelve course in the EATS [Empire Air Training Scheme]. Do you know what the EATS were?

Yes the Empire Air Training Scheme, it was pretty early there are not many twelve course blokes around these days. My number was 405363. I can still remember it. I suppose after five years in the air force

when you have got to say your number every day for the paper race was, “Name and last three.” they used to say and they’d go though the alphabet A, B, C and all the names and of course Petersen was always well down, and you’d think, “God, they have forgotten me again.” Then you’d front up to the pay officer and stand at attention, I don’t think that you saluted and then you’d

say, “Petersen 363.” They’d say, “Right, sign here,” then you’d get some pay. This was when I was on the squadron.

I didn’t have any choice,

the Monday intake were pilots, Tuesday were observers and the Wednesday were WLOP AGs.

Yes, they said that it wasn’t but it was, it definitely was. When I asked them about it they said it was because you’re too short in the leg, you wouldn’t reach the controls. I was only

thirty inches from the inside leg to the foot you had to be thirty one I think but I was an inch too short anyway, so they said. As I got into the air force and I got to met more blokes and they were shorter than I am and they were pilots, perhaps I didn’t have enough scholastic,

what do you call it, attributes to make a pilot, or a navigator.

We were sent to Evans Heads and we were put into what they call the gunners pool because they had a surplus of gunners and once we got on the course we

learnt about stripping down Vickers guns, Vickers gas operated machine guns and they were the ones with the big drum on the top and you had to put the bullets in. In training had to dip the bullets in the red paint, blue paint or green paint, so when you shot them with the drogue they’d leave this splash of paint on the drogue so they’d drop drogues and they’d be picked up again and they counted the coloured dots on the drogue. The drogue was the

target that the aircraft towed behind it and count them up and the details at such and such a time on such and such a day, detail number one, number two, number three they had so many red spots, so many green spots and so many blue spots. One of your jobs was loading your own magazine and you had to dip these rounds

into a shallow dish of paint, red paint say and dip them into the paint and put them into the magazine and push them down and push the down and wind the thing up, to wind up the spring and you’d take the drum with you. If you didn’t load them properly the machine gun wouldn’t work. We were flying on Fairey Battles there and it’s only one of the two times that

I was never air sick, I got ground sick. It was the first time that I’d flown in an airplane and I was fine on the exercise but we got down and I was handing out the gun, there was only one gun, we all used the same gun a Vickers Go Gun it was called, a gas operated gun a Mk 7 I think.

They were handing out the ammunition drum and I felt my stomach start to heave a bit and I called out to the bloke on the ground, “Look out I’m going to s-p-e-w,” and I spewed all over his head, he wasn’t very happy about that but I apologised profusely but I just couldn’t help it Charlie.

They were a great big aircraft and the Brits reckon they were the answer to the Luftwaffe but they had this Rolls Royce engine the same as the ones that the Lancasters have or an early Mach, Lulu engines, Rolls Royce Lulu but they were too slow,

too big and too clumsy and too slow. They only had this one gas operated gun in the back and a navigator, I think a navigator a wireless operator and the pilot. They had two machine guns fixed firing forward and they were no match for the Messerschmitt not a scrap of it, the Messerschmitt just shot them right out of the sky.

When we had them for training down there they’d taken the bomb sight gear out and there was a great big hole in the floor of the aircraft and it was two or three feet wide and there was just nothing underneath. When the first gunner had finished you had to climb up and step over and hanging on somewhere and tap the pilot on the shoulder and you’d do two taps to get his attention then one tap to say that number one gunner had finished.

Then when he had his go and number two gunner would have his go and when he was finished someone had to climb over this hole in the aircraft and do two taps on the pilots shoulder and two more taps to indicate that number two gunner had finished so that we could turn around and go home and land. I was always scared I was going to step down in this bloody great big hole and go ‘whoosh’ because you couldn’t wear a parachute

in the aircraft because it would stick out because it was too bulky.

It wasn’t too bad, it was in the sub-tropics and we were always flying in daylight. We only did one exercise a day maybe two sometimes. It used to get very cold

flying over England in the winter time, it would be down to five degrees or ten degrees at ground level and once you got up to twenty thousand feet it was five minus ten. Sometimes when we were on these Italian targets we had to fly over the Alps and it would get down to minus twenty and your feet would get cold and you could feel them getting number and number.

I used to wiggle my toes and stamp my feet in the turret and get the circulation going again and wiggle my toes again and stamp my feet again and you could feel the warmth coming back and God it was really sore, because the blood started flowing again but it really made it ache, it made your toes and feet ache.

We had electrically heated inner suits and the early ones were practically useless because it was an electric waist coat and it came to about here and the waist coat had a plug each side that went down and plugged into the electric flying boots. The same with the gloves a lead came down the sleeves to each glove which you plugged in

and they were useless because by the time you climbed into the rear turret because you had to get in on your backside and slide back down to get into the turret these things in your legs would pull out and you didn’t notice it pulling out until you were up twenty thousand feet and you started to get cold, so you practically froze to death. There was one bloke that I knew on 576 Squadron,

the electric lines overheated and burned his legs and he couldn’t get a pension because he didn’t go into hospital with it, he just went to sick bay. He had to put up with this damaged right leg right through the war and after the war and he kept on applying for a disability pension and they wouldn’t give it to him

until his leg so bad and so infected that they had to amputate it and then they gave him a disability pension.

Yes. We used to do ops to Milan, Turin, La Spezia there were about four of them in northern Italy

that I went to. To get to these targets you had to fly up over the Alps and sometimes if the aircraft were not in real good condition you couldn’t fly above the Alps you had to fly between the Alps and you’d be flying and there’d be these great big icy peaks on either side of you and hoped that the pilot could see where he was going.

I had nothing to compare it with really, I reckon it was quite good and adequate I suppose.

Technically yes, but not experience wise. I don’t think any of the instructors out here had been on ops in England.

Yes we got a bit of instruction at an OTU there because there were more British RAF fellows instructing there. When I was at Litchfield there was a sergeant gunner instructing

and his name was Gardener and he used to say to us, “Starboard is green and port is red. Forget this fact and you will soon be dead.” In our case it wasn’t because the starboard side was the port side because we were flying backwards and the left hand side was the starboard side because we were going backwards.

Yes. You soon got use to it because when an aircraft coming up this side and you would automatically stay on the port side. You could see the bombers, they were always talking about bombers move that was a fallacy and we hated a bright moonlit night because in Europe there

was always cloud cover and you were above the cloud. Any aircraft flying above the cloud like a fighter could look down and spot these little black spots and they were flying along and they were always bombers and swoop down and attack from the dark side and that was the first that you saw them when they were turning in to make an attack. The fighter aircraft had to turn in and turn the other way to attack the bomber so if you were lucky and had a bit

of time to retaliate. After a while the Germans were pretty cluey blokes fitted out the JU 88s and they were probably the biggest and strongest two seater fighter they had they fixed them up with forward firing machine guns, fixed forward firing cannons.

I think there were two and they were fixed and the navigator had a gun sight in front of him and that was harmonised in with the two cannons pointing upwards so you could fly along underneath the bomber until he got a bomber in his gun sights and you’d say to the pilot, “Left left, steady right, steady left, steady, right left,” and then you’d say, “Fire,” then he’d fire.

I think the navigator fired the guns you couldn’t see the fighter attacking from down underneath and we lost a quite a lot of aircraft that way because all of a sudden there was this trigger burst of flak and that was the last that you knew.

You didn’t get enough to save.

There was yes, there was an AC2 [Aircraftsman Class 2]. I forget now. It wasn’t very much.

Like I said when I first went in and you got paid seven days a week, and you got paid for weekends as well so that was thirty five shillings a week. I was only getting about twenty two and six pence as an apprentice lithographer so I thought that I was a millionaire. When we got up to being a sergeant air gunner and I passed

out the course I think we got ten and six pence a day, but we had to make an allotment to our next of kin. If there were fellows who were newly married and they went overseas their wives would receive money instead of them spending all there pay on booze, slow horses and fast women.

It was compulsory to make an allocation to the next of kin and in my case that was my mother, to make an allocation I forget now maybe two and six pence a day. To bring my pay from the sergeant air gunners pay down to the equivalent in English money less the twenty five per cent which brought it down to seven and six pence a day,

which we thought was pretty mean. When I was discharged all this allocation that my mother had been collecting was in the bank account and there were five or six hundred pounds in it so it was pretty good, it turned out good in the finish.

I banked it and kept it, I am a bit careful with money.

Some people might say I’m a bit of a shylock or a bit of a miser but I think it pays to be careful.

I don’t know maybe a bit of each,

because everybody was in trouble during the Depression. They had these relieve workers going around doing up the footpaths if you wanted to get paid and they didn’t get very much it was like a shilling a day or a couple of bob a day. You had to report to a certain council the depot and they’d assign you to do work

on the footpaths and they’d dig up the footpath and dig the gutters out and sometimes they’d concrete them but most of the time they were doing pick and shovel work. If you didn’t turn up and do that work you didn’t get any money at all, I don’t know how they managed to survive on it. If anybody was sort of

loafing around in their normal job they’d be ribbed by other people saying, “Are you a relief worker?” because a relieve worker they used to lean on their shovels and spades and things, lean on their banjos they used to call them these spades were called banjos. You are on relief because you weren’t doing anything. I can remember that because I remember my parents were talking about them

coming up and down Lewis Street occasionally digging and chipping away at the weeds and the grass that was growing. Then in those days they were all earth and footpaths, and earth and roads there was no bitumen. Bitumen and concrete – they hadn’t got around to that then, not on the side streets anyway. The main streets were bitumen they had a narrow strip of bitumen that went up the middle of the road.

No we didn’t because there was no SP [Starting Price] betting in England like

we knew it was SP betting here.

Starting price, licensed book makers. They used to operate around barber shops and there’d always be a SP bookie and then at the pups there’d be a couple of SP bookies going around taking a few bets, then they’d run the race and they’d pay out when the race was finished. My mother and her neighbour Grace Parker were

always having a shilling each on the horses on Saturday afternoons. They’d go down to the barber shop down on the corner of Lewis Street, the street opposite and he was an SP bookie, so they’d go down there and lay a couple of bets and hope that they’d win something, every now and again they’d get a win,

there are no rich punters.

No they never mentioned it. I don’t know whether that was intentionally a closed

book or something that never happened but they never mentioned it. It wasn’t until I got to England and started talking to some of the instructors at these training units of there who had been on and done tour ops and they’d tell you about the chop rate and your life expectancy as you say of gunners,

it wasn’t very exhilarating news.

I survived yes.

Lots. In the early days when we were on Wellingtons and we were just flying across Germany sort of haphazardly they reckoned that the Air Ministry or the bomber command would allocate each squadron a target and they weren’t always the same target. They had different targets

at different times a squadron could please themselves as to take off time so they reckoned so they’d be taking off willy-nilly and there’d only be a few aircraft flying across Germany. The Germans were pretty well organised, they had these lines of boxes and they were fighter boxes and flat boxes down the east coast the eastern side of northern France and as soon a bomber would fly into

this box they would pick him up on the radar and they could see this little blip on the radar and they’d vector in a fighter the fighter blip would be smaller or different to the bomber blip, and they could vector this fighter or talk to him or instruct him where the course the bomber was taking and it’s height and the fighter pilot would then fly in until he got a visual on the target and then he’d attack on the target.

Of course the bomber fellows couldn’t see them, but they did that with fighter aircraft and also with flat boxes because you could see these little blips come up on the ground radar and they were quite advanced with this stuff. They could pickup aircraft flying in the box at ten thousand, twelve thousand and fifteen

thousand feet that was about the maximum height we could get to in those days. They’d be in radio communication with the flat guns on the ground, they’d give them the height and the elevation and they’d go bang bang bang, of course the flat was very accurate because they could see the target more or less. The best we could manage in Great Britain was these barrage balloons,

have you heard of them?

They were I think helium filled balloons, great big balloons that they flew on short cables up to three or four hundred feet above the cities to stop these German low level bombers coming in because they used to do that a lot. They used to do hit and run bombing

through the daytime and the night time but mostly through the day. They had these barrage balloons cable down to the ground that was a fixture and of course the fighter couldn’t weave his way between them so he couldn’t come in low level and drop his bombs he had to fly up above six or seven hundred feet to drop the bombs and of course they weren’t as effective then.

We used to say to the Pommy blokes over there, “Why don’t you cut those bloody cables and let the island sink? It’s not worth saving.”

You had to rely on getting down to you and pull you out of the turret because we had intercom communication.

But if you got wounded you either bled to death or somebody came and pulled you out of the turret, make shift bandage to stop the bleeding and you just had to sit there for the rest of the trip and hoped that you didn’t bleed to death.

Mainly Lancasters yes.

It was quite big, it was big by Wellington standards but it’s not big by today’s standards but it was big. There was the nose gunner who was the bomb aimer, the flight engineer sat beside the pilot and in a little cabin behind him was the wireless operator and navigator and then a bit further down there was the mid upper gunner who sat in the turret on the top of the aircraft

and there was the tail gunner, there was quite a bit of room in side of them. To get into the rear turret you had to first of all put your parachute on because you couldn’t carry it yourself by hand because you had to hang onto a couple of the handle bars up top and get over the rear spar which control the elevators

and swing your legs over that and slide on your backside down the fuselage until you got near the turret and lean forward and open the turret door and then hop into the turret and then close the turret door. There was a parachute storage just inside the fuselage and you’d take the parachute and put it on the two clips in there, which I didn’t do very much because

you wouldn’t get out of it quickly. You could turn a turret on a beam it was the only way to turn it on the beam to bail out. You’d turn it on a beam and knock emergency door levers with your elbows and the doors would just fall off and you could just roll out the back as long as you had your parachute. If you had to wind this thing around and if the hydraulics were shot away, wind

this turret around fore and aft and open the door and reach in around way back and get your parachute out and clip it on and wind your way back to the beam position and then bail out you’d be too late. By the time you did all of that the aircraft would be hitting the deck. I used to sit with mine on my lap and I reckoned if you got shot down or shot up I could pick it up and clip it on and turn the turret on the beam

and be gone. I never had to do it fortunately, somebody up there likes me. Or somebody up there didn’t want me up there with him.

It was the anti-aircraft guns I

suppose. I suppose we did have a few collisions but nobody knows how many mid air collisions there were. When Air Marshal Harris became Chief of the Air Force he stopped all the wandering around by various squadron going to different targets and taking off at different times and he organised the thousand bomber raids,

you know doubt heard about. With the one thousand bomber raids we were all over the target with a thousand bombers that were supposed to be all within an hour of each other. You all had a set course to fly and a set course and height to bomb at but if you got there a bit late and your bombing height was say fifteen thousand feet and the next wave was seventeen thousand feet well if you were late getting there

you’d get bombs dropping from seventeen thousand feet, there must have been quite a few aircraft lost that way. There were also aircraft lost though blokes coming in late and once again at the wrong height and they just crashed into another Lancaster or Halifax and both crews would be wiped out so you never really knew what happened. It used to take

some weeks or months sometimes to get word back from the various sources as to what aircraft went down. You’d get a report from the Red Cross I think I was, they’d send a report back to England that a Lancaster or Halifax or something had been shot down and had crashed in a certain part of Germany. I think it was the Red Cross first then the

French underground would get reports in from Germany or from their people from Germany or from the people from around France and they’d send a report that a Lancaster or a bomber had crashed and give a certain latitude and longitude at a certain time on a certain night. They’d tie this in with reports from the Red Cross and from other sources and it would be sometimes weeks

before you got confirmed of a kill. In a combat with a German night fighter and by the time all these reports came in it would be weeks and weeks. I suppose they had to be careful and precise.

I don’t think so no. It was only the poor silly Hanley I think it was who landed an Oxford twin engine aircraft it was supposed to be a bomber but it wasn’t anything. One came into land

and there was a bloke underneath it and he didn’t see him and he landed on top of it and the bloke underneath kept flying and supporting the weight and they did this famous piggy back landing, the aircraft underneath flew the aircraft on top. It’s a wonder they weren’t all killed, they didn’t crash. When he landed the undercarriage collapsed and it just skidded along and went along on it’s belly, it was quite a famous episode.

Nothing much happened at Evans Heads. It was a good aerodrome there we could sneak into Lismore and Casino on our nights off. If you knew your way you could take your togs and sneak through the barbed wire fence and across the dunes and down to the beach and have a surf and nobody knew.

Yes. I teamed up particularly with a fellow by the name of Col Lowerson, Snowy Barton. Col Lowerson got shot down on his first op in the 460 Squadron.

I was a bit longer in getting crewed up at Litchfield and the others and I got to 460 Squadron at Breighton about a fortnight after Col and his crew and I was asking around, “Where’s Col Lowerson?” They’d say, “He aborted. He got shot down on his first op.” Where are some of the other fellows that I knew in

twelve course that I went over with on the ship, “Where’s Dutchie Holland?” “He got shot down and he’s missing.” And I’d say, “Where’s somebody else?” and they say, “He’s missing.” I thought I’d come to a suicide squadron here. The same thing happened or much the same when I went back on ops to 576 Squadron

RAF as gunner leader Flight Lieutenant. I was on the squadron for a few weeks and we had to go to a battle order meeting every morning and they’d work out which crews were flying and which crews weren’t flying. They sick personal and sick aircrew and there was a Flying Officer Reeds I think his name was

and he said at this briefing, “One of his rear gunner sergeants so and so was sick and couldn’t fly,” so I said to Wing Commander Selleck I said, “I’ll go with Flying Officer Reeves,” and he said, “Hey you bloody well won’t.” And I said, “May I ask why not sir?” and he said, “Because I’ve lost five gunner leaders in the last four months and I aim to keep you around here a bit longer.” I thought, “God,

another suicide squadron.” But I lasted. That wasn’t so bad that second tour I didn’t have to fly very often – about once a month or something.

Being gunner leader I had plenty of routine officer work to do,

I had to look after about ninety gunners I think there were. There were two each Lancaster and there were about twelve odd Lancaster to each flight and there were three flights and if you multiply that all up it’s about ninety isn’t it, two men to a plane.

That was when I went to central gunnery school, yes that was before I went back on ops.

It could have I suppose but not consciously though.

Hey.

I lost part of my hearing in my right ear because of it. I was only flying on training

things and I had a bit of a cold. When I was down at this place Sutton Bridge and I got this terrific pain in my right ear and it hurt and hurt and hurt and I had to put up with it until the exercises were finished because we used to take four gunners with us each time on the exercise. I had to wait until they were finished firing the cannon guns at the attacking aircraft and we landed and I still had this pain in my ear so I reported

immediately to the sick bay. The medical officer there he was either a New Zealander or South African I think and he had one look at me and said, “Good God, I haven’t seen that before.” He said, “You are bursting out your eardrum.” He said, “Your inner ear is sticking out through like that.” He said, “Hospital for you.” He got a little thing and poked it and it hurt like anything but

I don’t know if he was trying to poke this bubble back in again or whether he was trying to burst it but he organised a RAF driver to drive me to Ely hospital. Ely is in the south of England and drive me to this hospital and I was there two or three weeks with this split ear drum and they sort of patched me up and sent me back.

No, there were plenty of WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] on the station.

Yes all the time.

Yes now and again, of course I did. You didn’t meet many civilian women come to think of it. Only when you went on leave or went to the nearest village

and you’d meet a girl there but there were so many other aircrew meeting girls in the village that the competition was pretty fierce but there were plenty of WAAFs around dozens of them.

We had men and women on one station here,

and the Americans on another station and the army on another one, there wasn’t much competition really only if you went into the nearest small town and you’d meet up with competition.

Vastly yes, as different as chalk and cheese.

They are sort of cosier. This Charters Hotel up here for instance, you go in there and have a glass of beer and nobody ever talks to you, perhaps you’d fall down dead and they wouldn’t notice, maybe an hour or too and you’d be just lying on the floor. But in the English pubs everybody talks to you and you talk to everybody else and when you are leaving the pub the owner always says, “Good night, sir.”

How they can do it over all the people in front of them I don’t know but they always seem too. We used to go to a little pub down towards where I worked

the publican there I think he had ESP [Extra-Sensory Perception] because there’d be people lined up at the bar and he’d stand back a bit and you’d finish your beer and go up and put your glass down and he’d say, “Good night, sir,” without even looking at you – it’s sort of a sixth sense they have, the English publicans.

Black and tan sometimes but a pint of draft was the most popular beer, and that wasn’t very nice because it was always flat. Their mild ale was sort of a darker brown and it was even fatter

and sweeter and it was terrible beer but I used to drink it. “A pint of mild please, governor.” And I’d down these pints of mild, but downing a pint of bitter was struggling enough. They call it still beer, not aerated like our beer, quite effervescent.

It’s cellar temperature, so if it was a warm day you got a warm beer, on a cold day you got cold beer. The kegs were kept down in the cellar and the publican had these pumps that were connected to the kegs in the bar and he’d put the pint glass there and pull this thing down slowly and fill your pint up and pass it across the counter. In those days there was no cold beer.

Later on when Stella and I were there in 1955 to 1958 they were getting around then a bit more to serving cold beer in tinned cold beer and it was called

Double Diamond works wonders, that was a song that we used to sing up there.

‘Double diamond works wonders, works wonders, works wonders; Double diamond works wonders, works wonders for you.’ Something silly like that.

I went to her cousin Jim Shaw lived opposite me at Amberley in Lewis Street and I think somehow or other between Jimmy Shaw and some other people we arranged a barbecue on the north side and it rained.

Stella was there with her brother Lou and they said, “Come back to our place” because they weren’t far away. We went back to Somerset Road there and had an indoor barbecue and cooked it up and ate it and that was how I met Estelle, because I had another girl that night. I soon forgot about her though.

Yes, but it didn’t really bother me at the time, it’s only in sort of post war years that it began

to get at me, going through the whole op again and again and you would be going through it in your mind and you think, “Gees I was lucky, wasn’t I?”

Now and again I do. Stella reckons I’m having them all the time because I talk a lot and throw my arms around

and she’s only crook because she can’t understand what I’m saying.

I suppose I did I felt very cramped up at times. I don’t know how tall blokes got into the turret at all. There were a couple fairly tall five feet ten blokes

and Jack Kirby was one of them and a couple of other blokes, they were five feet nine, five feet ten how they wound themselves up and crunch themselves down in the turret I don’t know because if I’d sat up like that I’d hit my head on the roof of the turret it was only about an inch or too above me, so how they sat there all that time for four, six, eight or

ten hours I don’t know.

No, he got shot down on about his twenty fifth I think. I was one of the lucky ones. As I said before somebody up there liked me.

The chutes? The long shoots or the short shoots or the parachutes?

Did I mention them before?

Through the plane?

You climbed up the ladder and got in the door on the starboard side and that was down towards the tail of the plane and you got in and there was nothing until the mid upper turret and that just hung down a bit. There was nothing down the back accept the Elsan can.

That’s where you went to do a motion, or a wee wee

which I never did because it was too much trouble getting undressed. I had to take my parachute harness off and the canvas outer and the cape in the flying suit and the heated flying suit and get your pants suit and take your tunic off so you could get the braces off and get your pants down and sit on this thing, too hard so I just held onto it.

To the left.

If you went right you went underneath the mid upper turret because your feet hung down a bit but you could get around easily enough. Then there was really nothing else until you came to the main spar which held the wings together and the engine was stuck on the wings.

Then you went forward a bit more and then there was the little cabin where the wireless operator and the navigator sat and then forward of them was the pilot and the flight engineer and down in the front bit was the bomb aimer who had to lie prone beneath the turret when we were on the bombing run. When he wasn’t on a bombing run he could stand up

and would climb up into the front turret but that was only on a Lancaster. The Wellingtons they put you in the front turret and closed this great big canvas door, it frightened the hell out of me the first time that I flew. On these thousand bomber raids I went to Bremen I think it was the first one and they said, “You are flying as front gunner” and I said, “Okay.”

We got airborne and they sent me down from where I was waiting behind the pilot down the front and opened this big aluminum frame door covered with canvas and opened the turret doors and said, “Hop in.” I swung my leg up and hoped in and as I was looking around they closed this big canvas door and I thought, “God,

I hope if anything goes wrong they don’t forget about me.” I suppose I could have opened it from the outside but it was pretty frightening those first couple of ops I did. I suppose the pilot and the navigator could see it as well, you could see all the search lights and all the flak going off I thought, “God, we have got to fly through all of this.” It was a bit stomach churning.

Yes, I had done a couple as front gunner but I’d much prefer to be a tail gunner because you would be flying backwards into where all the action, once you were through that you knew that you were pretty safe.

You couldn’t see it if you turned the turret right around on the beam, you’d look back and see up the front but I did a couple as mid upper gunner and there you could see all around. The idea was the mid upper gunner would either look forward or look to one side or the other because he had a three hundred and sixty degree vision all the way around.

They had interrupter gears on the gun elevations things so you didn’t shoot the wing tips off or shoot the tail off. As you came around this interrupter gear would lift the guns up if you were firing and it would lift the guns up and stop the fire so you didn’t shoot the wingtip off.

Yes.

Because it was the Kings name and because it was sort of a strong manly sort of name and there was no confusion with it, you can’t rhyme George with anything can you? not like Gunter. But I have always had trouble with Gunter, people would say,

“What’s your first name?” I said, “Gunter.” They say, “Oh, what’s your second name?” and I say “Petersen.” They say, “Oh, it’s Gunter Petersen.” I’d say, “Yes that’s right.” As I said before, I’d be introduced later on as Peter Guntersen.

From my father he was James Christopher from his Danish grandfather who was

Lars Christopher.

No. In retrospect I was a bit surprised that my Dad signed the papers so readily because he had been in the First World War as I said in a hospital unit as a stretcher bearing and it must have been

pretty horrific but I suppose he thought that if he didn’t let me join the air force they would go into the Army and that’s not for my son. He signed my release papers because I was a bit under age when I applied, I hadn’t turned eighteen, no I was eighteen.

Yes, that’s where the little pendant came from he had it in the lounge room over a photograph or something.

I think he was yes. He had the Australian flag and the English flag draped over the front of the house the day I came back.

He came down Sandgate and drove down with Mum and a couple of his sisters picked me up down there in his Oldsmobile and drove me back to Brisbane. He had a 1927 Oldsmobile that he bought a Tourer with opened sides, a touring car.

If it looked like rain you’d have to pull up and get some things out and stick it in the top of the door and put the blinds down over them and he was sopping wet by the time that he did all of that. One day when I was still

overseas a telegram came addressed to my parents at the house and my mother looked at it and she knew it was somebody in the air force and she wasn’t game to open it because she thought for sure it was the news that I’d been shot down and I was missing. She rang Dad at the office and he was flat out and he said, “Open the thing,” and she said, “No I can’t. I don’t want to know what’s in it.” And she said, “Can’t you come home?”

He said, “I can’t just at the moment because I very, very busy,” being war time and short staffed. So he got home as quick as he could and she thought that it was a notice that I’d been shot down and was missing. Dad opened it up and it said that ‘Your son has been awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal.’ During the Depression

in the DW Murray’s and they were a big warehouse in town and they sold haberdashery and sheets and things like that, a big warehouse a big firm. The staff had to take a week off in three or two weeks in four. Dad had to take because he was office staff and more or less indispensable to keep the wheels turning he had to take a ten or fifteen per cent cut in pay.

The other blokes took the equivalent, which was a week off every three weeks or whatever the alternative was. Things were pretty tough in the Great Depression.

I was on the gunnery leaders course at Sutton Bridge. I got this telegram from the gunnery leader at 460 Squadron and it said something about ‘Congratulations keep up the good work’ and I thought, “What the hell is this about?” And I read it and I showed it to a couple of other blokes they were just as mystified as I was.

Three or four days I had a letter from a group captain I think he was from the Australian Headquarters in London which were in Kodak House in a street that I can’t remember. From this group captain rear commodore

there was a letter saying ‘Congratulations on your DFM. Here is a little bit of ribbon just in case you can’t get any locally’. So that was what the telegram was all about, I’ve still got the telegram over there somewhere, if I can find it amongst all those bits of paper.

Not really no, I don’t think I did at all no. I was too

busy on this course and I wanted to do well, because they only had three passes, there A which was a good pass, B was sort of a pass and C was a fail and fortunately I got an A pass. I went back to 460 briefly

and I was posted back there as an instructor at central gunnery school. I think they posted a few colonials like myself and there was one other Australian I think and two Canadian instructors at the time that I was instructing.

I think the colonial services complained to the Brits that there wasn’t enough representation by the dominion aircrew, there were too many regular RAF men and the instruction and the selection committee. The ABC [?] and everybody selected

British RAF men above the dominion troops. I think that they thought that they better have a couple more dominion instructors on the panel. Because at the end of the course you sat around a conference table and went through each person on the course and you gave your opinion of his ability and how he did in the course and

so on and gave them an A, B or C rating. I’m sure there were more RAF men put through than dominion New Zealand, Australian and Canadians.

I don’t know I never thought about it, I don’t think so.

Yes, I think so.

There weren’t many other Aussies, only on the course they were very transient. On the course I made it up with a couple of Brits, that was when I was instructing.

We moved from Sutton Bridge down north to a place called Catfoss back up in Yorkshire. I used to often wonder why we moved around because 460 moved from Breighton down to Binbrook and 576 Squadron moved down from Elsham Wolds down to Fiskerton outside Lincoln and we used to wonder why they were shifting these things around.

The gunnery school when from up Nordic to Yorkshire. Somebody said the idea was when we invade Europe to get rid of Hitler who could have move squadrons of troops across and squadrons of aircrew and the aircraft and all their kit and move them over to airfields in France or Germany so we were just getting into practice to do this,

it seemed a reasonable enough excuse or reason. It never really happened as far as bomber squadrons went. A lot of the fighter squadrons moved across.

I only met one bloke who used to take his little fox terrier with him, he was a gunner an Australian. He was the only fellow that I actually knew and I met him when I was instructing at Catfoss and I’d known him at Evans Head. I think he was on his second tour by then too. He had a little fox terrier and he used to take it with him on ops, which I always thought was

a bit stupid because the dog sits there in the turret and he’s cold and freezing, scared to hell and if he gets excited he could start jumping around and trying to get out of the turret at a crucial moment when you are getting attacked by a fighter, so I thought that idea was not very good.

He was the only one that I ever knew personally who took his dog with him or a pet of any sort.

We had huts to go back and sleep in.

Maybe twenty or so, twenty or thirty. We were lucky at Breighton because we were in a big hut first as a crew along with all these blokes and it was freezing cold and it was down to about ten degrees or five degrees nearly all the time. Then somehow or other there were some huts there that had separate rooms in it, one, two, three, four, five, six, six single rooms like a

dormitory with about ten or twelve blokes in it. Bill Mitchell our wireless operator heard there were three rooms going in a certain hut at a certain sleeping sight so we grabbed our gear and sped over to this sight and grabbed a room each put our stuff down and that was our home.

Until we moved down to Binbrook.

Pretty well, maybe.

Some of the blokes used to put pin ups of American singers and

movie stars, some very scantily clad females.

Vera Lynn. She was an English singer, I don’t know, I’m trying to think of the Americans.

This is long-term memory loss isn’t it?

Possibly Rita Hayworth, they were mostly singers I think.

Yes Betty Grable, she was one.

Yes the million dollar legs, these posters always showed them with their skirts up to their thighs and not much on top, pulled down as far as possible and up

as far as possible, and showing off their boobs.

Miles we were about from York, which was the big town we were about twelve miles and they were all dispersed

airfields. There’d be the flight officers down there and way back this way say another two or three hundred yards there’d be the mess sight and the sleeping sight would be dotted all around there with quarter of a mile spaces. If the Germans came over and wanted to bomb the aerodrome they’d only catch one or two or a small number of people.

You’d go down to the village which was at Bubwith and have a few beers there. I had a bicycle it was willed to me by one of the other blokes there. We used to sit around the mess waiting

to go onto ops and jokingly we’d say, “What size shoes do you take Charlie?” and he’d say, “I take a seven.” I’d say, “So do I.” He’d say, “You can have mine if I don’t come back.” One of the other blokes would say, “I’ve got a new issued shirt or a new issued tunic. You can have that if I don’t come back.” This fellow Dutchie Holland I think he was called he said to me,

“George, you can have my rally bicycle if I don’t come back,” and I said, “Okay,” just as a joke; he’ll get back all right. Anyway he didn’t come back so I didn’t like to go and take it straight away. A couple of days later a chap said to me, “You, when we were talking the other night and Dutchie Holland said you can have his bike,” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “You better go and grab it before somebody else does.”

So I went down outside the mess where he parked his bicycle. I was down at the flight officer, that’s right, where we went down to get dressed for our operations and I went down there and I knew the bike it was a rally with handle bars. Most of the big bikes in those days the handlebars came back that way and this had handlebars that came out and went that way

and down, what did they call the ‘Major Mitchell’ handlebars I think. It was a pretty good bike and I rode it all through the rest of the war there fore nearly three years and all I got wrong with it was the odd flat tyre. I took it everywhere with me.

No, after the war I just gave it away. I gave it away to some ground staff bloke I think.

Fish

mostly, smoked kippers they were plentiful. They catch them in the North Sea and kippers are just codfish and they catch plenty of them in the North Sea. Beef we never saw, mutton we got a fair bit of because they grow mutton in England,

but beef had to come from Australia, Argentina or America it was very rarely that we got beef. We got powdered scrambled eggs which weren’t too bad I rather liked them they had sort of a cheesy flavour. You knew it was Monday because for breakfast you had scrambled eggs and if it was Tuesday for dinner you had scrambled eggs. A lot depended on the cook, some

men were good cooks, they’d make ordinary meals and quite tasty and some would just hash it up and serve it out, but mostly smoked kippers we had. I said to Stella if we went back to England I said, “If you give me smoked kippers I will kill you.” We used to get food parcels sent from home every now and again I’d get a parcel from my mother with fruitcakes or a tin

biscuits in it, a couple of packet of cigarettes that Dad had scrounged around from here and their and a couple of tins of fruit and things like that about, it was a big parcel about so big. They were always very welcome because they broke the momentum of the wartime British diet. The poor civilians got only one and sixpence worth of meat

per week because when I was living in London I had to exist on the food rations and one and six pence would buy about three chops a week, the rest of the time you would have to eat offal or something like that.

I remember once just after we’d finished this gunnery course at Stormy Down I palled up with a fellow called Johnny Hide he was also a gunner. He said, “Come and stay with me and my mother for two or three days when you get some leave when you finish?” Col Lowersen and I and there was maybe another bloke I think I’m not sure. He lived near the North

Circuit Road it was easy to get too because you could get the train up to London and get the tube up to the station. It was a fairly short walk and Johnny Hide met us and showed us where his mother lived and we stayed there for the rest of that leave which was about six or seven days. We put our heads together and said, “Poor old Mrs Hide she’s scrounging around trying to get food for us and there’s not much

meat going.” Col he was a pretty wide boy he said, “Let’s go down to the local butcher and get some meat.” We went down there and pitched him a story and he gave us a leg of lamb, a whole leg. We took it back and said to Mrs Hide, “Look what we have got for you. You can cook that for dinner.” She said, “No, I’m not touching it.” And we said, “Why?” and she said, “I don’t eat stolen food.” She thought that we had stolen

it from the butcher. We managed to convince her that the butcher had given it to us. I think the butchers gave everybody meat if they knew them well enough. I know with the petrol rationing when I brought the car over there somebody said to me, “When you get your petrol ration,” which was only about four or six gallons a month,

“get your coupons in half coupons at a time,” because then you could go along to a service station and present half a coupon and say to the bloke, “I’m stationed at somewhere ten miles away, I need to get back today and I’m nearly out of petrol can you stretch this half coupon a bit,” and the bloke would give you two or three gallons, so if you did that with all your half gallon coupons and you had plenty of petrol.

Yes.

I bought a Hillman Minx 1935 Hillman Minx first up. There were a couple of flight engineers on 576 Squadron they’d go around and buy up old cars and get them going again and flog them off,

I suppose they did all right. I think it cost me forty pounds, it seems ridiculous now. Car were reasonably easy to get over there because the average civilian couldn’t get petrol you had to be in a reserved occupation or in the services to get petrol rations. I kept this thing for quite a while and then something went wrong with it and I took it down to a

garage in Lincoln down by the canal, I don’t know why I took it there but the fellow must have been recommended to me. In his yard there there was an Austin 7 Ruby Saloon, do you know what they look like?

It was an Austin 7 and I think they called them Ruby Saloons.

He said it was for sale and it was only for about fifty pounds and it was a later model than my Hillman so he took the Hillman and gave me thirty quid for it I think and sold me the other one for fifty quid so I had to pay him twenty quid, and I got this little Austin. I kept it all the rest of the war and I drove everywhere in it and it hardly missed a beat.

I guess so yes.

Yes, but there was no hope of that, I was flat out getting all my gear back.

Some of them used to yes.

You were not supposed too, it was a bit dangerous

because if you are sitting in a turret and it was dark and you lit a match and there was a German night fighter about he could see the flare of the match. I don’t see how because the match would only last for three or four seconds but that was the story anyway. He’d see the match flare up and come in and attack you. I tried this a couple of times and I didn’t like it at all, it was hard to get the cigarette lit because of the draft in the turret

and it tasted awful up there. I smoked a lot around the squadron especially because we could get English cigarettes like Players, whatever the other English cigarette was for about five or six pence a packet of twenty. Later on through the war you could get American cigarettes like Chesterfield,

Camels and things like that, first class cigarettes for threepence a packet from the American stores in London. You just wrote to the stores and told them who you were and gave them some money and you’d get one carton of these first rate cigarettes and a couple of cartons of the cheaper ones. There were ten packets in a carton so that’s thirty packets a month for threepence each.

I used to smoke a lot on the squadron because my nerves were a bit ragged and I used to smoke a lot. In retrospect I think that I sub demoted my smoking by saying to myself you either smoke or you have a straitjacket or a padded cell or go LMF [Lack of Moral Fibre], do you know what LMF is?

Cowardness, Lack of Moral Fibre they call it.

Yes.

Not very often no. There was one poor gunner on 576 Squadron when I went back on my second tour named Johnny Postlethwaite or something and he did about three or four ops I suppose.

He said to the squadron commander, “I’m not flying any more. I don’t like it,” because he had had a couple of pretty shaky dos and nearly got shot up and they court marshaled him before I got to 576 and he was found guilty. The sentence was carried out down at

Fiskerton, because the squadron had moved to Fiskerton and the thing came up for sentencing and this ceremony. Everybody was sort of invited to report to this briefing room and they had a stage up one end and they march this little fellow Johnny Postlethwaite in as a prisoner

with an armed guard each side. Then they just pulled his stripes off each side and took his wings off and said, “Right, you are sentenced to six or twelve months,” what ver it was, “in prison for being Lack of Moral Fibre.” It was rather chilling.

I don’t know. He was marched off and I didn’t see him again, he was taken to an air force prison somewhere in England to do his two years or whatever it was.

He certainly was LMF

and he was guilty, he admitted he was guilty, but at least he was an alive coward and not a dead hero. I suppose that was his way of looking at it.

King and Country was the main thing I suppose, politics I couldn’t of told you who was Prime Minister other than Winston Churchill and he was PM through most of the war. In the beginning of the war or just before the war there was a fellow named Chamberlain who was Prime Minister. He was the silly bunny who

flew over to Germany or somewhere and met Hitler and got Hitler to sign a form to say that Hitler would not attack any more countries. He came back and got off the plane and was waving this bit of paper to the newsreel cameras saying, “I’ve got this piece of paper, I’ve got this piece of paper,” of course the next week Hitler invaded Poland.

I was at Fiskerton then, I was in Lincoln I suppose, I didn’t even know it was VE Day, they didn’t broadcast it very much.

Two, three months I forget exactly what it was,

VE Day was in June 1945 wasn’t it? No May 1945 was VE Day, D Day was June and VE Day was May 1945. It took them another eleven months to squash Hitler after the D Day landings.

No. Phone calls were impossible.

No.

I didn’t phone them at all.

No.

I think I phoned them from Perth. Phone calls were terribly expensive, to phone England to phone from England was about three or four pounds a minute. Not like these days where you can talk all weekend for fifty cents or something.

The food, the weather the surfing

because I swam a lot, I like swimming. I got my bronze medallion for life saving at grammar school, I’ve got three or four silver medals in my room there that I won for swimming at grammar. The weather was what we missed the most because it’s always raining over there and if it’s not raining it’s what

they call misty which is sort of drizzling rain which does neither one thing or the other – it’s not rain, it’s just wet. I think I told you before that if they don’t get rain for about fortnight they declare it drought.

Mind you England is very pretty in the spring and all the flowers come out, especially around

Trafalgar Square and those places. They grow these Tulips I think in hothouses and they bring them out in truckloads. They take all the plants out of the gardens in the squares and put fresh ones in and they are all flowering, the transition is so sudden it’s striking.

The trees all die off in the wintertime and the twigs go all black and the leaves fall off and things go dark and it looks horrible. When the spring comes the leaves and the little twigs all green up and they get bigger and bigger and the leaves come back on the tree again and it’s quite pretty in the spring.

I nearly did stay on there for a little while mainly

again because of this girl. You could stay on in England and learn a trade if you wanted to, being in the printing trade I thought I’d apply to finish my apprenticeship in England. I applied and I got to be interviewed by some fellow in the printing game and he wasn’t a very responsible sort of a bloke and he said to me, “In future when you

come to see me don’t wear your uniform,” I thought, “What else am I going to wear?” I brought in civilian clothes one pair of slacks and one shirt I think in the whole wartime. It was like the meat rationing you only got about five bob worth of clothing a year, it’s just enough to buy slacks and a shirt. Somebody gave me a pair of

rope sandals and I can’t remember who that was now, they were rope sole sandals. I’d never heard of them before but they wore them a lot over there in boating situation because you don’t slide so much as you do with leather soles.

I didn’t go back, I only wanted to stay there for another two months to finish my time there only because of this girl, it was a waste of time anyway. The man I saw there wasn’t very helpful,

I don’t think he liked colonials either.

These intruders were sent over by the German air force the Luftwaffe and they were German night fighters. They’d get into the circuit when the bombers were landing on their airfields and they’d follow the bombers around and as they came in wheels down and everything at a very slow speed they’d just come in behind them and shot them,

shot them down, which wasn’t considered very sporting. The Brits did the same, the RAF they did the same to the German aircrew over there and there was a fellow in the RAF called Cunningham and they called him ‘Cats Eye Cunningham’ in the press to boost it up a bit. He shot down some incredible amount of bombers over Germany

but it wasn’t all Germany. He’d do the same thing and fly at night and get into the circuit and follow these bombers around and when they were coming into land with their wheels down doing practically naught miles per hour he’d come in and shoot them down. He was regarded as an ace because he shot down all these German bombers.

Cunningham. Our bomb aimer Stan Rickets got shot down the same way because he did a tour with us our crew on the 460. He went on his rest to some OTU and he had been there for about three months

and he was out with a sprog crew on a night cross country and you have to fly at different legs at night and find your way around the Irish Sea and back to base all at night practice flying. They follow them up with the Royal Observer Corps followed them up all the way and down the Irish Sea, and they were coming down the Irish Sea off Wales and the aircraft just

disappeared off the screens. A week or too later there was part of a wing washed up on the beach at Abariswith, which is a seaside resort in Wales. From the number stamped on this piece of wing they could identify it back where it was made and what happened was it did a tour and went on OTU and it was the aircraft that Stan was flying in that night.

All four engines couldn’t of stopped at once, and all four couldn’t of run out of petrol at once. The only thing was it was jumped by an intruder and they shot the bomber down over the Irish Sea and that was the end of that, the whole crew was wiped out.

It was rather, yes, you got quite a bit upset, especially when we were on ops on Wellingtons we were losing more aircraft than we did on Lancasters, there were all those empty seats at breakfast time when we went into the mess, you wondered who was missing. Sometimes you could find out

that day if they landed at an airfield in England but if they had crash landed or had been shot down over Europe it took a couple of weeks, three weeks or five weeks before you got word back from first of all the Red Cross I think then from the defence underground

the Maquis.

Or had engine trouble and had landed at England at an emergency drome. If they landed at England you would get word back the next day or sometimes the same night, if you didn’t get word back quickly you started to worry a bit about what had happened to them.

There were fellows there that didn’t come back all the time, but fortunately I didn’t know them all that well, because they didn’t last long enough to get to know very well. I was one of the lucky ones me, my crew and Bill Mitchell.

Our navigator went with another crew and he got shot down and our bomb aimer a fellow by the name of Jack Penous he didn’t finish the tour either he got shot down somewhere.

You thought how bloody lucky you were, that you didn’t get shot down.

I suppose it did a little bit but as I said before it was either a straitjacket or a padded cell or cigarettes, they helped a lot and kept the nerves down a bit.

It was something to do with your hands when talking about things.

They had to go on whether they were feeling nervy or not, or you would be court marshaled.

I suppose so yes. I can’t tell you what it was but you just got this feeling that you wanted a cigarette so you took out the packet and lit up, and puff away at the cigarette. It did seem to calm the nerves quite down a bit.

No, it’s all in the mind you know, we used to say on ‘The Goon Show’, “It’s all in the mind, you know.” I know some blokes wouldn’t go on ops unless they walked around the plane backwards

three times or stood on their head or something like that.

There was that suspicion too either on the rear wheel or the port landing gear or the starboard landing gear, it didn’t mean anything I don’t think.

We had plenty of time because you’d go down to the crew room and change into your flying gear and we had a fair bit to put on and I have a photograph there of a tail gunner in full flying kit. You had to have kapok inner and canvas inner and

canvass outer besides your ordinary battle dress pants and jacket. I told you all this before didn’t I?

When we first started flying we had knee length flying boots which were wool lined, but the pilots had leather boots,

all the other aircrew had these sort of suede leather ones that came up below the knee and they were wool lined. These electric heated things they were only waist coats at first but I’ve told you this before about the waist coats and the long bits of things down and you had to tuck them into the boots and by the time you got into the aircraft and you got all your other gear on these

things would fall out and you’d be sitting up there at twenty thousand feet in the dark trying fiddle around and put these things back in again it was pretty hopeless. The second ones we got when I went back on the second tour they called them silk inners I doubt it they were silk they were probably nylon and they had the electric wires all through and they were like an overall. They had the electric wires all the way down and into the

bottom part of the pants. On each leg there were two press-studs and you’d clip these into your slippers that you wore and you’d put your flying boots on and the same thing with the arm. It was an overall that came right down to the end of your arm and you’d put your gloves on and you’d press these

studs in and they stayed together. Of course when you switched the thing on it was nice and warm and it stayed warm all the way over and all the way back and they were marvelous. But they didn’t introduce them until I was on my second tour and I didn’t get all that much more of a chance to use it.

It was like an electric blanket yes, they were beautiful and warm. Your head got cold because they didn’t have any heating in the helmet.

You’d pray a bit, but you couldn’t do anything about it. Your head didn’t seem to get cold

like the rest of your body because you had a helmet on and some fellows wore goggles but I didn’t because you couldn’t see properly out of them. You had a oxygen mask that covered your face and the intercom was in the oxygen mask and you had an oxygen tube that came up and plugged into the bottom of the oxygen mask. That was a bit of a dead loss a few times because your

breathing outwards condensed the air on this cold rubber and it would freeze and if you squeezed the oxygen tube you could hear the ice breaking off and crackling away. I forget where we went now but coming home from this place one night I couldn’t get my breath and I was puffing for all it was worth and I was squeezing this thing

and big chucks of ice falling off the inside of the tube and your breath was frozen inside the tube and I passed out from lack of oxygen because the thing was so solid I couldn’t break it up any more. I came around again fortunately.

It was a bit but I didn’t know what was happening at the time I was sort of

passed out and then when I came too I thought, “I must of passed out there. I wonder what happened while I was passed out.” But nothing must of happened because I’m still here.

I rather liked it actually except for the weather. We got there at the end of December I think it was and we landed at Glasgow about midnight we docked. It had been snowing and it was the first time that many of

the blokes had seen snow. I had been down to Mt Buffalo once on a school holiday and I saw snow there but it looked worse over there because it was dark about midnight as I said and we were sailing up the Clyde River in an industrial sort of river with lots of dock yards and ship yards and the soil of all the buildings were black.

The snow was falling down on these black buildings and it looked a bit spooky and a bit dirty and a bit grubby. We got off the ship and we assembled at a railway station at Glasgow and we came down on a train down to Bournemouth which was the holding center, it took all night to get down there. We were rather spent by

the time we got to Bournemouth and got to a billet. The only time I’d ever won a lot of money on poker because somebody had started this poker game and I had played poker before but I didn’t know a lot about it and I sort of was feeling my way around and was asking “What do I do now?” and “What do I do next?” and I won about fifteen shillings, which was pretty good for a mug punter.

We stayed in Bournemouth for about three or four weeks I suppose and we got moved over to Stormy Down and did a course there and then came back to Bournemouth I think and stayed there for a little while and then got moved up to 27 OTU at Litchfield.

Not in Bournemouth no, there was a little bit of bomb damage but the Germans didn’t bother a great deal with those sort of resort towns, it would have been a waste of bombs and a waste of aircraft and petrol. They were more interested in

bombing industrial targets the same as we were. Later on through the war the Germans started doing what they called the Decker Raids pre war there was a tourist company called Decker or some name like that and you’d go on these Decker tours and they went to towns with historical interest maybe six or eight around Britain.

The Germans started doing the same thing by bombing them whether they did it intentionally or coincidentally I don’t know but they were called the Decker Raids. They certainly bombed out a town up the north of England it was flattened absolutely flattened, I can’t think of the name of it now.

Stella will remember I’ll ask her when she comes back. I told you about the Barbican didn’t I? How it was bombed flat and the city. The Brits used to say that there is something in the city, the city was the financial

hub of England. If you were something in the city being insurance or banking or something like the old lady at Thread Needle Street that I mentioned before. There was Lloyds Bank and Barclays Bank and a few others Lloyds Insurance we used to say,

“You are A1 at Lloyds,” which meant you were categorised as being A1 at Lloyds Insurance which was the top line.

A certain amount but they didn’t talk about it very much. If some incident came up on the OTU they’d mentioned that they had been to this target or that target, but generally speaking they didn’t shoot a line about it, no.

They were the knowledge of being the experts in their field whether is was gunnery, radio or navigation. I suppose we learnt a lot from talking with these fellows who had been through it all. The only one that sticks in my mind is,

“Starboard is green and port is red. Forget this fact and you will soon be dead.” And he was pretty right.

The night we turned over on a target and I told you about this one didn’t I?. The night we went to La Spezia and got lost. Every night we seemed to get shot up or nearly every night.

What can we do?

How do you mean exactly?

As far as flak was concerned you just had to hoped that your skipper was taking the right evasive action. Much the same with the fighters if you saw a fighter you call out to the pilot and said, “Tail gunner to skipper. Bandits on the port side’

and just hope that he got the message clearly on the intercom because the intercoms in those days were pretty ropey. Hoped that he dived port in time so that the fighter bullets to go over you. The fighter-bombers would

have to turn like that to get a sighting that way to fire his guns and sort of dive away from it so in theory you had plenty of time to shoot him down if you saw him in time and if your aim was good.

It didn’t follow that line, lots of times you got shot up before you shot at the fighter.

It was the same with flak, you report the flak on the port side or the starboard side, take a bit of evasive action and keep weaving a bit because if you flew straight level you were a steady target a dead sitter but if you changed altitude and changed direction it was much harder for the gunners on the ground to follow you around.

Because they had to put the guns back and forward they were big ack-ack guns they just weren’t rifles, they were big guns and they took quite a while to alter aim with them.

With flak we got shot up plenty of times.

The turret got smashed and the perspex around the turret got holes in it but never enough to injure me fortunately. Some people are born lucky and others get lucky.

I was a lot of each I think.

Faith I suppose so I don’t know I never thought about faith.

Faith I suppose too yes. As you were saying before lots of the crews would often until they had wee on the port end of the wheel or starboard outer wheels or something like that but it didn’t make a scrap of difference really.

I did actually.

Before I left here a friend of mine gave me a Saint Christopher medallion and Saint Christopher is the patriot saint of travellers. If you wear Christopher you won’t have any trouble on your travels. I wore this with my identity discs around my neck all the time I was at 460. Then one day after I had been there for some weeks

I suddenly noticed that these things were missing. The string must of broke and snapped off and they call them dead meat tickets or identify discs and my Saint Christopher and they fell off somewhere. I had done a few ops and nothing happened to me so there mustn’t be much truth to this Saint Christopher bit, and he wasn’t there to look after me when

I was doing ops. From then on I didn’t worry about it.

I don’t think so but I sometimes wondered why. Especially after we had a couple of shaky dos. Another time we were on a practice cross-country of all things in a Wellington and we landed at some place and the pilot was a squadron leader Bailey he was one of the flight commanders and we landed at this place

I can’t remember why we went there, to pick up his golf clubs or something. We were supposed to be training cross country in the daylight, so we landed at this place and we did what we had to do and we got back into the aircraft and we were taking off and as we were taking off the dinghy used to be stowed in the starboard wing. It flew out of the wing and wrapped itself right around the elevators

so we couldn’t go up and we couldn’t go down. The squadron leader Bailey said to me, “Tail gunner, where are you?” and I was sitting up in the forward and I’d never taken off from there. I was just behind the main spar back up against the spar with my head down and I went down and got into the rear turret and had a look and sure enough I could see it on the starboard side

this big dinghy because they were quite big an orange colour and when they were deflated they were even bigger and it had come out of the holding bay and wrapped itself right around the elevators. Every time the pilot tried to move the elevators up or down this dinghy was wrapped around it and it wouldn’t let him move it up or down. He finished doing the circuit by using

the motor, the engines to increase height or lose height because it was the only way that he could do it. He was trying to lose height most of the time or maintain height while he finished the circuit. We got around and made the approach and then he cut the engines and came down and made a landing and got out and had a look and we all looked at each other in wonder and said, “How did we get out of this?”

there was this great big dinghy which was almost wrapped completely around the elevator. The squadron leader Bailey took the dinghy off the elevator and just moved it up and down a few times and everything worked both sides in unison and said,

“We are right,” and hoped back in and fired up the engines and we took off, and the aircraft worked perfectly after that. They were a very sturdy airplane the Wellingtons as I told you before about the geodetic construction didn’t I?

A lot of twisting and turning and shelling, flak shell holes through them and I’ve seen one or two of

them come back to the squadron with all the fabric burnt off, off the fuselage but it didn’t matter very much because all your lift comes from the wings. The fuselage is only covered with fabric to cut down the drag but it was a bit spooky looking at this plane with no fabric along the

fuselage. They had lots of good points about them except they were very slow, but they were easily repaired because they have flak shells through them somewhere where they could put in a new square and put some canvas over it and a bit of paint and it was ready to go. The other aircraft like the Lancasters

and things that had the sheet aluminum covers over the longer rods and the sections you had a lot more trouble cutting the pieces out and putting the new pieces in and sort of spot welding it to stay in place it took a lot longer.

Just a normal operation do you mean?

All operations were a bit hairy and especially in the Lancasters because you were taking off with a full bomb load with a full petrol load so the aircraft was very heavy. The pilot had instructions to

fly straight and not do any violent turns until you got airborne and climbed up to about three or four thousand feet before you did any turns either way. Because if the motor cuts you had a bit of time then to bring the aircraft down. But if the motor cuts and you were low down you just went straight in. This English squadron leader

I used to fly with squadron leader Frank Camping he used to take off and do a turn straight away as soon as he had the wheels up. It was a bit frightening at first but he did it every time and got away with it. He did a lot of operations, he did a lot of flying in India in the early part of the war and before the war he was flying Hawker Hearts and Hawker Hinds

around the Kava Pass area. Then he came back to England and the war broke out and he was flying Wellingtons again I think. When those two German battle ships broke out of the harbour on the north of France there the

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. He attacked them and tried to skip bomb them with ordinary bombs which was pretty hopeless because they were so heavy that when they hit the water they went straight down. He got one hit and one of the vessels, got a DSO for that. The reason why he did this

sudden turning on take off was because he was a bit of a show off. After I finished my first tour that I was on it may have been a training squadron I had heard that he had killed himself along with about ten or twelve ground staff including some WAAFs. He was doing a night flying test on a Lancaster at this training unit and

when he was coming into land he was doing a B Duck down the runway and did it once and went around and came back again and did another B Duck just to give the ground staff and the WAAFs a bit of a thrill I suppose. As he came down the third time and went straight in and wiped out the aircraft and all these ground staff, himself and the aircraft they all got killed straight away.

He was just showing off how he could do low flying I think.

He came in a bit too low yes and they reckon he forgot the fact that the aircraft when you pull them out of a dive they don’t just go like that they squash down a bit further and he didn’t allow enough for the mushing down

and he hit the runway. Which was sad because he was a great flyer and a great bloke. When I had done about eighteen I think they put me with a sprog crew one night and we went to Saint Nasair it was supposed to be submarine pens there

where the Germans took there submarines for repair and Saint Nazaire is up in the Britain coast of France. There was supposed to be concrete walls with covers over these submarine pens twelve feet thick or something so that if they were bombed down they wouldn’t go right through the thing. I went with this sprog crew on about the second or third op and someone must of told

the pilot that the only way to stay alive on an op is to keep weaving and altering height and course. As soon as we left the English coast he started weaving and weaving and weaving he only straightened up for the mandatory ten seconds or twelve seconds while we did the bombing raid and he weaved all the way back to England. That was only the second time that I ever got airsick and I threw up all the way across the target,

I just couldn’t help it. I was only ever airsick twice the first time was at Evans Head like I said.

Unloading the guns out of the aircraft and this other time and that was the morning the next day I went to Flight Commander Camping and said to him, “Although I’m not really in love with doing ops,

I don’t mind doing them because it’s my duty and I will do them, but please don’t send me with any more of these sprog crews,” and I told him why. And he said, “Oh yes I see.” Then he said, “Come and tell that story to the Wing Commander

Charles Martin.” And I used to call him Chad Martin. I went with Squadron Leader Camping to see Wing Commander Martin’s office and they sat me down and I told them the story again and he said, “I see, how would you like to fly with Squadron Leader Camping or myself for the rest of your tour?” I said, “That will do me sir,

I’m your man.” So for the rest of the eleven ops I flew with Camping or Martin, and that’s one of the reasons why I survived I think.

Yes that’s right.

I was Presbyterian.

No, not a bit. This bomb aimer that I was telling you about he was a Roman Catholic

and it didn’t matter much what time at night but on a Saturday night he got back to the squadron, if it was early he would go to bed but if it was eleven o’clock or twelve o’clock it was about four or five o’clock he’d go and sit in the sergeants’ mess where they had one of the stewards primed up to come and give him a wake so that he could go to six o’clock mass, but he got the chop anyway.

He was the bloke that I told you about that disappeared flying down the Irish Sea. Another thing they used to do over there which always mystified me for a long time was on the training stations they had church parades which they didn’t bother about on the squadrons because the squadron times were so theatrical. On the training stations they had these church parades

every Sunday and they had the big parade of the whole unit. The warrant officer called the role and they would all be present he’d call out, “Fall out all the Roman Catholics and the Jews.” They’d fall out in the one spot and all the Jews would fall out in another spot and they would call their roll, and they would march them off to separate churches. I was puzzled over this for a long time and

I thought ‘That’s pretty stupid’ because we went to a Church of England denomination service why are these Catholics and Jews singled out for special treatment. One day when I was in Greenslopes Hospital not so long ago I asked the padre who comes around there about it and why was this so. He said, “It’s because there are so many denominations

in the Protestant church, Presbyterian,” and there was a lot of them anyway. He said that there were too many of them to separate them all but the Roman Catholics were all together and the Jews were all together and the Protestants were all together.

I really couldn’t tell you because I never spoke to anybody about it, you sort of kept those things to yourself I guess, nobody ever asked me about it and I never asked anybody else about it. I suppose you just went along with the thought

what was the easiest and the best for yourself.

Was I? I was Presbyterian but I didn’t go to church very often.

During World War II, I didn’t know they had home brew in those days,

I never heard of that before.

I suppose they could’ve it would have been a spirit would it. I never heard of it but I guess lots of blokes would of made their home brew. I was only a youngster I was only eighteen when I went in, I never heard of home brew in those days.

Most of chaps that I went in with would have been twenty, twenty-five, thirty.

I don’t think so, I never drank very much and I never ever had a beer before we went on ops because it always interfered with your judgment, or it would make you sleepy. If you had a couple of beers before take off and it would make you sleepy and

drowsy and made your responses that much slower, so I just didn’t bother until we had a stand down and I had a couple of beers in the mess. Unless we had a full night off and a bunch of the other blokes went into York we’d get a crew bus, an air force crew bus and they’d drive us into York and drive us back to Breighton for free.

No it hadn’t been heard of in those days no. They just trusted to you your own common sense I suppose. Most of the blokes and all the ones that I knew were pretty sensible about it and didn’t indulge in alcohol

the night before or the day before or the day up to going on ops, not that I know of. I would of seen them in the mess having a beer before, through the day before we took off because we would be told in the morning briefing was five o’clock, six o’clock or four o’clock and then we would come back from the briefing to the sergeants’ mess and have a meal, and just wait around

until it was time to walk down to the flight officers to get changed into our flying kit. We would have to hang around there until the crew bus came, the crew bus would put on as many blokes as they could and they would try to keep them. The bus drivers knew where the hard Standings were and they would pick up the crews for each

aircraft and dropped them out to the aircraft and go off again. They would have to stand around, that’s when I would have another couple of smokes while standing around waiting to get on board to take off.

The hard standing.

They called them the hard standing or the dispersal sites because the

aircraft weren’t bunched together as I said in case of an air raid everything was scattered around. The dispersal sites were the same they were round lumps of concrete put out along the perimeter track, and there was a perimeter track that went all the way around the airfield and these hard standings were stationed along the thing. The pilots then had to be very careful when maneuvering

or taxing the aircraft didn’t get off the hard standing too soon onto the concrete neck that connected the hard standing with the perimeter track. The aircraft was so heavy and the ground was so soft it was just farmland and the concrete was this thick. The wheel would go in and straight down and bog the aircraft and you couldn’t take off. They would have to come out and send a ground crew out to unload the bombs

and pull the aircraft out with a tractor very gently so they didn’t bend the (UNCLEAR) leg. Everybody was very conscious of the alcohol problem.

Did I say billeted?

The sleeping sites were also called billets I think that’s what I meant the sleeping sites

I’m not coming back, lots of times, many times, too numerous to mention.

I told you about the one when we went to La Spezia and got lost didn’t I and we flipped over on the target, I think that’s about it. They bring back too many unhappy memories.

You were supposed to yes, shave everyday, supposed to shower everyday but it was too cold for that.

When it’s zero degrees or five degrees or ten degrees you don’t shower, you don’t need it because you don’t sweat. The first time I went to have a shower after a few days and the shower, the ablution huts they were called they were concrete walls and they were just empty there weren’t even any partitions between the showers. There was just a shower rose in the ceiling

and you could turn this on and it came out warm water all right, it was cold, it was freezing. The first couple of times I went in for a shower and there were one or two other blokes there and from then on I would get all my gear together which meant I would have to walk over to the sleeping sight and collect all my gear and a change of clothes and come back to the ablution sight. I waited around until there was at least half a dozen or ten

other men going in there at the same time because with ten of them the showers, eight showers that were pouring our hot water it was a lot warmer, and it was a lot more comfortable. There were many times when you wait there for half an hour and you would still be the only one in there so you would give it away and wait for another day.

Didn’t have a what?

A Pommy wash, yes sort of. The great unwashed. You didn’t really need to shower everyday like we do here, being non tropical you didn’t sweat and didn’t perspire so you didn’t smell very much, you didn’t get BO [Body Odour].

I don’t think so no,

there may have been in play talk but that was about all.

Yes.

Yes.

It was a bit difficult

because we came back on a ship and I have forgotten the name of the ship now and we disembarked in Sydney I think. We had to wait in Sydney all day for a train up to Brisbane and it was hot

and we went into some railway station shower unit, some of us did and had a shower there. Then we went to the station, at least we had sleeping births, they were just bunks three each side of the carriage I think. Sleep in overnight coming up to Brisbane. We didn’t sleep very much because they were pretty hard bunks and we didn’t get any pillows.

I was quite difficult really because all the fellows that I knew before weren’t around any more, one or two of them but the majority of them weren’t.

I didn’t know many of the air force blokes that I met before the war because we all came from different parts of the Queensland, I told you that all before didn’t I? Like in the army they are all from a certain town and go and join up on a certain date and they train together

and they fight together and get discharged together. But in the air force there were blokes joining the twelve course from all over Queensland. Then when we went down to Parkes and Evans Head there were others there joining in from other parts of Australia. Then when we finished the training there we were sent back to a pre-embarkation depot in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne and we all split up again.

It wasn’t the same amount of camaraderie that there was in the army I think, at least that’s my theory.

I knew a few blokes from the printing days and knocked around with them. Went to

the dancing academy because pre war there were a couple of other chaps from Watson and Ferguson’s who went to, what was the name of it? The chap that ran it was Tibby Challenger

and his girlfriend who ran it was somebody else and they were down the end of Adelaide Street getting almost across Queen Street on the right hand side. The ballroom is still there the Ritz, the Ritz Ballroom I think it’s still there but it wouldn’t be run by the same bloke, he was in his middle years when I knew him.

I went there for a while and met some other fellows and some girls and went around and there was another dance place down in the valley and I went there a couple of times the dance academy to sort of brush up on my modern and jazz dancing. The fellow there said to me, “You have done some of this before?” and I said, “Yes, with Tibby Challenger

and somebody at the Ritz.” He said, “How would you like to be an instructor here? You meet lots of girls and you don’t have to pay any fees to learn.” I said, “That’s all right, that will do me.” I stayed there for quite a while.

It’s a bit rusty now.

Up to Breighton.

No that was back when I went back to England in 1955 to 1958

and I also went back there another time, it must have been in 1991 when we went over there. I had a car, I had a Austin A40 and we went up to see these people Thornby again these Smiths on this farm. One day we went for a

drive into Bubwith to Breighton and I had a drive up and down the runway and it was real spooky because the huts were falling down and derelict after all those years. The doors were hanging off the hinges and the windows were broken and swing in the breeze and the whole place was empty. The sergeants’ mess the local farmer had knocked the end wall down and filled it up with all these mangel-wurzels,

they are sort of a vegetable that they grow over there and I don’t know what they are like, I never ate them but they were called mangel-wurzels. He stored them in the officers’ mess or the sergeant’s mess. We went to the White Swan Inn and I think her name was Smith too and she was still there.

She reckoned that she remembered me from all those years before. In fact she made us very welcome and invited us back there for high tea one night. So we drove in from Thornby to have tea with Mrs Smith and her husband had died and he was Burt Smith I think he was the publican.

She even produced a little book where I had signed my name, sort of a guest book, memo book where I had signed it during the war.

We were running out of money I suppose.

We went over there in 1955 intending to have a couple of months touring holiday around and about. When we got there there was so much to see and so many of my old air force mates to look up and people I had stayed with on leave like Mrs Smith and the Walkers and these people’s farm down in Cornwell,

and look up this historic place and that historic place. The Poms are funny because they have no idea of distance because I said to them once that we were going to drive over to Wales and it was an Easter weekend. They said, “Wales, for Easter!” I said, “It’s only about one hundred and fifty miles, two hundred miles.” He said, “Yes I know but that’s a long way.” We went over there and went

all round North Wales because Estelle’s father’s people came from Wales and we were trying to look them up and we drove all around and we had a great four days. I think it was the same time I had a job in London driving a delivery van. I went to the labour exchange and I said, “I’m looking for a job,” and they said, “What do you do?” and I said, “I’m a lithographic printer.”

They looked at their books and they didn’t have any of those but they said, “We have a vacancy for a van driver, how well do you know London?” I said, “I know it like the back of my hand. I was here during the war for three years. I used to always come to London for leave,” which I didn’t but I knew the West End and Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square and Fleet Street and so forth. I was telling my mate Johnny Hide

and he was in the RAF that I got this job and he said, “What you have got to do is get a red bus map, and if you know the suburb you are going to you look it up on the red bus map and find out which bus route you have got to follow, and follow the signs along the street and when you get near it I will give you my old London A-Z. You can open the London A-Z and get the street name and get a pinpoint on the map and find out exactly where you are on the big map.”

So I did all this and I was able to find my way around and I did that for six to nine months I suppose. A couple of times I had trips down to Rye and Bex Hill. Rye was a very interesting old town, very interesting. Next time I had a delivery down there I took Estelle with me

and she also found it very fascinating. Once I had deliveries to do up to Oxford, Oxford’s up that way from London isn’t it?

North East. The store man at this place and it was called

Cordell and Son, it was the firm that I worked for. He said, “You will have to go up to the office and get some money,” and I said, “What do I need money for?” He said, “You will have to stay overnight.” I said, “But Oxford’s only fifty miles away. We go down to Coolangatta which is seventy miles or eight miles and go down there and back for the day.” He said, “Oh, do you?”

Once again he thought that was a long day trip. We loaded the van up the night before and took it back to the flat and parked it outside and got up early in the morning and I was in Oxford by about nine o’clock or half past nine did the deliveries around and went to these colleges they have the universities and I was finished by about two

or three o’clock and drove back to London.

Yes it was a bit, my word.

Get free?

No, it was soft goods, like sheets and pillowcases and blankets and things like that, mainly deliveries to hospital,

hotels and clubs and things like that.

Yes. I could of lived on the food couldn’t I. It wasn’t anything like that but it wasn’t a bad sort of a job.

Fairly fit yes. The pay was

when I first started for the first month on trial was seven pounds ten a week and after a month they put it up to eight pounds a week and that was considered to be not bad money. We thought it was pretty poor money because we got twelve or fourteen or fifteen pound in Australia for the same sort of a job.

Yes.

We got on pretty well with the Poms of course I mixed with them for three years during the war. I got to know them fairly well then and their funny little ways.

They were pretty nice people.

After May 1945 I didn’t leave

England until about November as I was with this girl and her friend in a flat in London, I wasn’t in any great hurry to come home. Eventually they chased me up and said, “You have got to get your finger out and get down to Brighton.” Brighton was the pre-embarkation depot there.

I didn’t like that very much because Brighton was thirty miles away from London which was only an hour on the electric train down there and an hour back. That was almost like flying it was considered very fast travel. I think it was an express train it didn’t stop anywhere, I forget the name of the station in London but it’s a well known station

and you got to the station got on the train and you were in Brighton in an hour and it was the same coming back.

No they were all air force I think. They had a surplus of aircrew over there towards the end of the war. The Empire Air

Training Scheme really got on the way and they were training the aircrew here in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, there were aircrew all over the place. In fact some of the blokes were finishing a tour in about two months, one month to two months because after D Day

or leading up to D Day they were doing two ops a day. Many of the squadrons this 576 Squadron that I was on some of them or all the squadron were doing two trips a day. They’d do one in the morning and get to the target at about ten o’clock drop their bombs and come back it was only about an hour there and back about two hours.

You’d be back before lunchtime and the ground crew would bomb the aircraft up again and refuel and it would be ready to go again at two o’clock in the afternoon. They’d all pile in and do another op in the afternoon and come in time for tea. There was non of this flying for four, five or six hours to get to the target like we did in the early part of the war.

Sometimes the fuel got a bit low, but we always knew what sort of a target we would get because of the petrol load. If the petrol load was twenty one hundred gallons we knew we were in for a long trip, that was a lot of petrol for a Lancaster to carry. If the petrol load was under two thousand gallons we knew we were in for a short trip, somewhere in the Ruhr valley,

or somewhere like that which was quick.

You couldn’t get chocolate. As I said before about the only things we had for breakfast was smoked kippers,

I got sick of smoked kippers. We got plenty of lamb and a fair bit of pork, but no beef.

I don’t think so they let me go my own way. I had to go back to Watson and Ferguson’s

and finish my apprenticeship because I still had about two years to go.

Yes. Then I got a chance to go into the sales staff there because of this fellow Jim Fleming, I told you about him.

I went into sales from then on and I never looked back.

I wish I could think of that town that was bombed up in north England, Stella would remember it.

The town that was bombed flat in the North of England was Coventry, it was bombed absolutely flat like the Barbican in London. Then the Germans had the cheek not long after the war to complain about how we bombed Dresden

set fire to the whole of Dresden which did happen. The Germans were a bit unlucky that Dresden is composed mainly of wooden homes because they burnt pretty fierce and there was a pretty strong wind blowing which blew the flames left right and centre. They had the cheek to complain about that and some of the English aircrew

said, “Shut up why don’t you. Remember what you did to us in London and Coventry and Birmingham,” and all those industrial targets they went to.

After the war do you mean?

You could see the fires.

We used to take on our bomb load a whole lot of incendiaries and they’d go down first and they were eight or ten pound incendiaries which were things about so big and

hexagonal and about that big and they would all explode on the ground and smolder away. Then the heavy explosives would come down and blow these little fires out and dispersed them all or otherwise we’d take all incendiaries and drop them. The second wave of bombers would drop high explosives and blow the little fires out into the surrounding village.

A terrible thing wars aren’t they? That’s why I was glad to see the Yanks, another country stopping mad man insane from going ahead with his ideas

and that could of developed into another global war.

Not very much no, hardly at all.

I don’t think so. I can’t remember now it’s such a long time ago, I don’t think so though.

Most of us yes, forget about it where you could.

I still have a lot of dreams about it and Stella reckons I’m still very restless in bed and move around and talk a lot. That’s what she frustrated and sour about because she can’t understand what I’m saying.

These sorts of things get buried down and if you are busy doing other things as you get old you are not so busy doing things and they float up to the service again I suppose. I’ve been too busy going to the hospital for the last few years anyway. The year before last or a couple of years ago I was in Greenslopes Hospital four times.

Once with bronchitis and once with gallbladder trouble and I had to go back and have the gallbladder out and while all that was going on they discovered I had a aneurism on my aorta so I had to go back in again and had to have an operation on that. I had a gash across my stomach

which is fourteen and a quarter inches long it goes right across here. I was in for three weeks.

Over in England do you mean?

You just sort of milled around and met these fellows at Litchfield and the OTU, nobody was crewed up there you just got posted there, as separate crew members. You just sort of met them in the mess or outside the mess and if you got talking with a bloke and you liked him then you’d go and find some other crew members. Bill and Stan had got together first and they came

to me that they were going together and would I like to join them. They had a good pilot a fellow by the name of Keith Douglas who was a crash hot pilot and I said, “Okay.” They seemed like nice blokes so I crewed up with them. Steve McCulloch was our navigator and Keith Douglas was the pilot. Keith Douglas was a very good flyer but he turned out to be a

bit of a dead loss, as far as we were concerned. When we were posted to Breighton Keith Douglas just disappeared and we had been there about a week or a fortnight and Steve McCulloch came to us one day and said, “Keith Douglas has got a posting to a Stirling squadron and he wants to be on four engine aircraft,

he reckons he’s too big time to be flying little twin engine Wellingtons,” so we never saw him again – he just disappeared. We went on and he was a good pilot and a good organiser, but he was a bit ambitious and we were in the way and he went on later on to do a tour on Stirlings I think then he came back to 460 Squadron at Binbrook long

after I had left Binbrook. He got to be a flight commander and a wing commander and he got to be a Group Captain in the end. Then he went to some other squadron and got shot down, he was missing and killed.

Not that I know of no. I suppose they sorted all that out at Litchfield OTU. I don’t know.

We just got crewed up and we seemed to click with each other and we had no problems. I can’t speak for any of the other crew.

Yes I would say so yes. There were a few blokes that you got around with in particular above other men on the squadron. Like your own crew for instance and one or two other blokes. There wasn’t a close

sort of bonding like in the army I don’t think. As I said before the army all joined up together and fought together and trained together where as we came from all over Queensland and all over Australia when we were training. When we went to England we were even more inter mingled with different fellows from different parts of Australia.

I don’t think so, I think it was pretty generally an air force thing.

Generally very good I thought. The fellow that wrote that book that I

was showing you, I was showing Heather [interviewer] and he was ground crew and he was a fitter 2E engines I think, a fitter 2E is the highest grade of the fitters that you can get. You can be fitter radio, fitter this, fitter that fitter engines. After the war he got interested in computers and

after a while he decided to coagulate all the aircrew together and all the operations and the WAAFs and everything and put them all into a book, and that’s what he sold, that was the first one and he’s since brought out a revised one. I didn’t bother buy a copy of it but I should of I suppose, but that’s a pretty good book and it takes me hours.

I still look through it and when I think of a fellows name that I knew I think, “I must have a look and see what so and so did.” So I have a look in the book and see what this particular fellow did and it satisfies my curiosity.

Socially do you mean, off duty?

Yes we used to meet down at the White Swan, a little bit, not a hell of a lot but a little bit. There were three pubs in Bubwith, the White Swan, the Seven Sisters and the New Inn. The White Swan was always called the Dirty Duck and the Seven Sisters was always called the Fourteen Titties

and the New Inn was just called the New Inn.

It was for us, I don’t know why maybe because of the publican I don’t really know what it was. The publican was a nice bloke and friendly

and we found it very hard to understand what they were saying because they were real out in the bush, real country people. They’d be going there for a drink and they’d be sitting at a table because they don’t stand up at the bar very much up there. They sit around at a table and we’d strike up a conversation with a chap on one side or the other side and he’d say, “Hey lad, do we see you on

George there he’d been York three times?” I’d say, “Hey,” they’d say, “You’d been York three times.” He meant that George had been into York three times and York was only about fifteen miles away but they consider that George was a big time traveler because he had been to York three times.

Did they get nicknames?

I suppose they did but I just can’t think of anybody just off hand that had a particular nickname,

no I can’t help you there.

It was good for business. The clientele trebled or quadrupled itself more or less over night.

There were a lot of aircrew on the squadron and a lot of ground staff and they had to go somewhere for a beer. It was only about a two mile walk down the road to Bubwith.

Nothing very dangerous. We had a stand down and we’d write letters home or have a couple of drinks in the mess. Stand around the mess and have a few more drinks and have a bit of a sing song and sing all these bawdy songs.

I couldn’t repeat them.

No, because I would only get the first couple of lines and I would forget what the rest of it was.

We’d play darts and play cards. Pontoon was a very popular game,

do you know pontoon where you play twenty one? Darts was popular all over England playing darts.

You nearly always had money down,

it wasn’t much fun without a few pence in the kitty.

Nothing really it was just another operation to fly over and bomb a target, and they were nearly all daylight so it was easy to find the target. Not like night bombing where the navigator or the bomb aimer had to map read his way to the target, or

try to map read his way to the target in the dark. You would always look for a river or something that would glitter in the moonlight or the starlight and try and do it that way. Once again the Germans were pretty foxy because they’d lay out a dummy target a town beside the real target. It was just canvas and poles and things and it would make it look like the streets were the same as the real target.

They’d sort of semi illuminate this and the bomb aimer would look down and see all these streets and they corresponded with his target map and say, “Here we are, bombs away,” and they would bomb the decoy target, that happened many many times. Of course once the first one or two blokes had bombed the target and dropped the incendiaries and there was a fire going everybody else thought,

“There’s a fire down there so that must be the target,” so they would bomb the decoy target as well.

They were pretty cunning the Germans.

Not really we didn’t come in contact with the enemy so close, we were up twenty thousand feet and they were down there, no didn’t have that sort of feeling.

Fighters?

We mainly had night fighters and that was the Messerschmitt 109 was a single engine day fighter

and the 214 was a night fighter a twin engine twin seater and the Junkers 88 was a twin engine twin seater. The Messerschmitt 414 was a bomber but we had mainly trouble with the night fighters. I told you about my friend Jim Fleming

didn’t I who was on Mosquitoes and they put him up in the bomber stream and they shot down the German fighters before the Germans shot us down and everybody opened up on them because they were twin engined aircraft, the Mosquitoes. Jim reckoned it was dangerous flying against the Lancaster was more dangerous than flying against the Germans. If it didn’t have four engines

it must have been a Jerry fighter so we’d fire first if we could. You would always tell a Halifax but they were always called Hallibags for some reason. The exhaust ports on each side of the engines and they were four engines would glow red hot after a while and if you looked up you could see these red glowing thing

moving across, “God, he’s going to fly into us and we are going to have an accident.” I suppose they must of done it a few times fortunately we saw them first and then got out of the way.

Not really no because everything was very hush-hush, very top secret. They just said that the daylight operation on one of the channel ports they’d be back by lunchtime and they’d go by the afternoon but they didn’t say why you sort of guessed for yourself, but they were

prepping up for an invasion.

For the D Day things?

No I wasn’t I only did very few ops,

I was on 576 Squadron then I was on my second tour and I only flew about one, two, three or four times a month. Nobody went sick so I didn’t have to step in and take over another gunner’s position, so I had an easy finish to the war.

Yes.

The cities were flattened, we were bombing at night and the Yanks were bombing in the day. The Cologne Cathedral you’d look down and you’d see the only think standing was the

spire to the cathedral all the rest of the town from miles around was bombed flat. We went back there one day and we were driving around Germany and France and we went through Cologne and I said to Estelle, “Let’s go and have a look at Cologne,” and they hadn’t done much towards rebuilding, it at all.

The dome from the cathedral and you could walk up the spiral staircase and there was two hundred and thirty one steps up I think, we were exhausted by the time we got to the top because they were little steps and they were tight and they were nice and square and right up to the top and all you could see the devastation. All the buildings were bombed and laid flat for miles around.

Still that was what they were trying to do to us in London and Coventry and Birmingham and all those industrial towns and the Midlands in England they were all severely bombed. The Germans were only getting a taste of their own war.

When we went to England in 1991 I think it was, it might have been 1993 we went up to Norway to have a look around Norway. We went to Oslo first

and another town up the great big fields they have up there, the field they have in Norway. It was a bit windy and we were waiting to get a car ferry across from one side to the other instead of driving all the way up and all the way back. There were some Germans in front of us and they were having a bit of trouble with the booking office.

I could tell by their accent that they were Germans and I said to this Norwegian, “What is wrong with those blokes?” He said, “They are arguing about the fare or something.” I said, “They were Germans weren’t they? They have got a bit of a hide coming to your country now haven’t they?” He said, “They do quite often. They are good tourists and good payers and none of them were ever Nazis,”

because they said that they were never Nazis. We found the Germans very friendly when we were touring around there because we drove everywhere. I brought a car here and I went over there in 1995 an Austin A45 I think it was

or an Austin A40. I paid for it here and I had it delivered in London. Second hand cars were a hell of a price in London then because they hadn’t got back fully into manufacturing. New cars were almost impossible to get, second hand cars were very pricey so I brought this car here and picked it up in London.

I met one of my old air force mates over there a fellow by the name of Nicholas who was another gunner from a different squadron to me but I met him at central gunnery school and we became very friendly. He drove me around to this depot or garage or showroom where they had these cars and picked the car up and stepped into it and drove it down to,

God my memory is shot,

Cookem, Marlo and Cookem. They were two little villages close together and he happened to live down there at the time because he was out of the air force by then,

no he was still in the air force. He got a remuster and became a pilot instead of being a gunner because the pilot’s pay was better. They discovered that he was falsifying his log book. They had to do so many hours flying per month to get their flying pay and Nick was falsifying his log book

to get his pay and he was found out. He was court marshaled and he had a mild reprimand and after that we didn’t hear much from here, he sort of faded out I don’t know if he felt the dishonour from being court marshaled was being too much for him or what. He was one hell of a nice bloke,

he didn’t get on with her too well no, but he was a squadron leader at Catfoss at the central gunnery school he was a flight commander out there.

The best one without a doubt was the Lancaster and the worst one was the Armstrong

Vickers Whitley that I flew on at Stormy Downs, that was a terrible plane. I think they had a twin engine or twin burns or something but they were slow and they had only one gunner in the front and one gunner in the back. I did a couple of gunnery exercises and I happened to look down one day and there was a little trap door

on the bottom. All it had was one of those slide bolts, a bolt that slides across and goes down and it was about so big and the thing was up and I thought if I put to much pressure on that I’m going to go right through, so that put me off Whitleys. That was one of the many things that put me off. They had the Defiant there as well,

do you know the Defiant?

Originally it was a single engine fighter to look like a Hurricane or a Typhoon but behind the pilot they had a four gun turret, it was one of those electric turrets that I mentioned before,

that wasn’t the problem. Somebody in the Brits’ Bomber Command said they’d build this aircraft and we will put a turret on the back so that they were firing backwards, and they would fly over Germany in formation and have the guns ready for firing backwards. The Germans would scramble their fighters and come in and attack from the back and would shot them all down. It did work two or three times and then the Germans woke up

to that and they attacked from the starboard beams or the port beams, and they couldn’t swing these turrets around quick enough because the turrets were so heavy that if they swung them quickly the aircraft would go into a bit of a list to port or list to starboard. That was one little trick that didn’t work so they took the Defiance off operational flying from then on.

They had some good idea the Brits but they didn’t follow them through. Their bombers were terrible they had Whitleys as I said and they only had a very small bomb load and there were Handons which was a twin boomed aircraft and it only had two gunners one on the front and one on the back, and they didn’t carry very many bombs. They had the Fairey Battle and that was

a dismal failure.

The Fairey Battle?

I thought I did that before didn’t I.

It was all right. We had this Vickers Go Gunner clamped onto a sort of a tripod that you could sort of move around a bit on the back. You had a little monkey’s tail that you could clip onto a ring on the floor so that

if you fell out the tail you didn’t fall out because this monkey’s tail would hold you in because the back of the aircraft was only about waist high or a bit higher so it was possible to fall out. We just did these exercises the target aircraft was another Fairey Battle and they’d just tow alongside a drogue, which was a cylinder of canvas, and I told you all about the different coloured bullets?

That was air to air firing and we did air to ground firing. They had big sand pits and they had shelters for the ground crew to hid in and the aircraft was coming up and firing at these sand targets.

They’d go out and count the number of bullet holes but there were no sort of targets though. Out on the bombing range there was a hut in the middle that had a bomb proof ceiling like that bomb I showed you downstairs and we were in the gunners’ pool again and this was again at Evans Head and we’d watched this plane come over

and drop these bombs and we would see where the puffs of smoke were on the field. Four aircraft would come over one after the other and drop these bombs and we were supposed to go out and pick these bombs up and carry them back to the hut so they could reload them and use them again. They weren’t damaged in any way because they were only smoke bombs as you can see from that one down stairs that’s not damage.

I brought that home and made a little side lamp out of it, I had it chrome plated and polished it up and made a little base for it and stood it upside down on this base and drilled a hole through the perspex and it worked pretty well.

I haven’t got the lamp shade any more no.

I haven’t got the base. I don’t know what happened to that.

They were too big, too heavy they couldn’t carry enough bomb load, and couldn’t carry enough self armament. They only had this one Vickers gun in the back and one fixed one firing forward and the Brits hoped that that would shot down all the Jerries for them.

The Messerschmitt 109s had about eight guns forward firing. Later on the Spitfires and the Hurricanes had four guns in each wing that fired forward and that was really fire power. The Typhoons which were similar to a Hurricane

and were a very strong aircraft and when these buzz bombs would came over they were flying at low level and they’d send up a couple of Typhoons and they’d fly up along side the buzz bomb and tip it with their wing and tip it off course, and flick it with the wing until it sort of veered off, out into the north sea.

That was the only way that they could shot them down

because they were too low for anti aircraft fire, they’d come over about two or three hundred feet these buzz bombs.

You would be standing in a pub in London or one of the big towns along the east coast there.

They didn’t have a very big range they could only travel about maybe a hundred miles just to get it across the channel and London and along the channel ports. You’d be standing there playing darts or having a pint and you’d hear this buzz bomb and you’d listen to it go across and if it kept going you’d think, “Oh, it’s passed us.”

Sometimes you’d hear the buzz noise and it would stop so you’d wait for the explosion and if it didn’t hit you it hit somewhere down the road and blown up somebody else. Once again you’d have a sip of your beer and say, “Thank God for that it missed me again.”

That was very demoralising. There were people who slept down in the tube stations there for all the years the war was on. They’d go down there on dusk and a lot of people built their own little bomb shelters in their backyards but there’s not many backyards in England because they are all tenement houses they are all flats. If you were in a flat you didn’t have a bomb shelter,

so they’d go down to the nearest tube station and spend the nights there. So the story goes and they all had their own sort of special little spot and they’d take down there their blankets or mattresses or whatever they wanted and their bed clothes I expect they slept in their clothes I don’t know. They all had these special little spots reserved sort of thing for every night. As soon as it got dusk they’d go down there and stay there until the morning,

I don’t know how they got on for toilets and things.

That’s right yes. If they stayed up in their flat and there was an air raid and a bomb fell on it they’d get blown up, if they were down in the tube station they didn’t get blown up. The poor buggers up on the street got blown up.

Yes that’s right.

No they didn’t.

In fact up to many years ago I had a little 32 revolver, an American colt, but I threw it away in the finish. Mainly because it was unlicensed and I’d run out of bullets anyway, so I just tossed it away and it was very heavy to carry around the place.

No,

I reckon it’s safe enough. The only time when I got a bit scared was when the King and Queen were visiting Brisbane and they had all the city lights on at night time they had the flights from Eagle Farm. You got into one of these passenger planes, jet engined plane and flew up for an hour or too and looked at all the lights down on the ground and it was great.

the custom was with Lancasters and Wellingtons and those aircraft the pilot would taxing them around the track and turn onto the runway and he’d run the engines up and down each one separately but if you got what they called a Maggie drop, which was a magneto drop in the engine it would fail and you’d lose that engine and it would die. The drill was always before

turned onto the runway while you were waiting for the green light the pilot would run up each engine and make sure that there was no Maggie drop in it. I went on this sight seeing flight and the pilot taxied up around the perimeter track and turned onto the runway and zoom and I thought, “God, we’re dead.” And I thought quickly for a bit. “Maybe these jet engines don’t need running up.” And

oh, my heart stopped.

Yes.

Later on after the war do you mean? We wrote to each other for many years and Bill was trying to get a job as a wireless operator with KLM [Royal Dutch Airlines]

that was that Dutch airline that used to fly out in the east. He came to Brisbane a couple of times to see about this job and we met in town and had a couple of beers and he went back down to Dapto and I kept on writing to him and writing to him and he wrote back. Then all of a sudden he stopped writing, it must have been twenty-odd years or more I never heard a thing from him. I looked up

at the post office and got the phone books out for various areas and looked up Mitchell in all these country towns and wrote to the address and said, “Are you connected with Bill Mitchell at all?” Some of them wrote back and said no they were not, and others just didn’t worry. I don’t know if somebody had suggested it but we have a

monthly 460 Squadron news letter and I thought of putting a little para [paragraph] in there that, “George Petersen who had flown with Frank Camping and Charlie Martin was looking for Bill Mitchell the wireless operator in the crew. I haven’t seen him for years. Was he still around?” It was the Hendricks fellow’s wife, that funny bloke,

his wife was English and she knew Kay in the air force they were at the watch office together. She wrote to Bill’s wife Kay and said, “This guy George Petersen is looking for him in the monthly newsletter.

Why don’t you write to him?” So he did. We met up at the reunion at Penrith, so that’s how we got back in touch with each other.

Yes, Bill and Kay were married at Saint Auburns, it’s a small town just a bit north of London.

Now-a-days do you mean? Yes Mercedes Benz is one of the best motor cars in the world, it’s got to be the dearest. A couple hundred thousand for just a normal sized Holden,

a Mercedes Benz is a couple hundred thousand.

Yes I think so. As I was telling you about the 88s that they fixed guns in the back, nobody else thought of a thing like that. They turned out to be a pretty good weapon.

Yes. They are always very friendly and when we were over there in 1955 to 1958 we found the Germans were very friendly and very helpful. Outside the Danes of course,

the most helpful and the most friendly people around the continent. The French are a bit aloof, they are very aloof and in fact some of them. When we were having dinner somewhere in southern France and I forget now said something to the waiter about a bottle of wine and what sort do you have and we said to him, “Don’t you have any Australian wine?” He said, “A Frenchman never drinks

anything other than French wines,” two to the valley.

Some but not all.

I don’t know, I don’t watch many movies.

On TV do you mean?

That was a good movie yes, it didn’t touch on the war so much, as a war.

No we used to take them with us on ops occasionally.

I can show you in that crew book there that lists the crew and then one name will have beside it press and he was a newspaper man. He’d come up with a camera sometimes or just do the op and come back and write it up in the paper, there were a few of them that got shot down too, but they didn’t do it very often.

No I don’t think so. The officers in charge of the squadrons and the stations were all experienced officers who had done a tour

of ops or had been posted as squadron CO [Commanding Officer] and they all knew the business back to front. I think I had full confidence in them all the time.

Yes, I had four of them to look after

and they were all Browning’s, Browning Mk 7 they were. Then we got onto Wellington bombers we had two in the rear turret and then on Lancasters for a period we had two and then we got another Mach Lancaster with four guns in the back in the rear turret.

It’s a machine gun, it’s a .303 machine gun.

No you just pressed a little trigger, there was a central sort of control and you could tip it forward or backwards to elevate or lower the guns and you could turn it to the right or the left to rotate the guns and just in there inside the guard there was a little trigger each side and when you got your aim right you just pulled this trigger and the guns went off.

No because the guns were mounted down there, the control was up here and you couldn’t feel the guns going at all. You could certainly hear them but you couldn’t feel them like you can feel the recoil of a rifle for instance.

You had to look after your own guns, even though there were different crews flying on the same aircraft, in my case they were. In lots of cases the crews were allocated an aircraft and they flew it all the times because I flew like I told you before there were ten different crews I had at least ten different aircraft to look after.

It was up to me to go down to the gun room and help the ground staff clean the guns and made sure they weren’t putting in dummy rounds on a belt and make sure they were feeding through properly and get them ready to take out to the aircraft.

I suppose so yes, fitter armourers they were.

I think some people used to but I never bothered. We were flying at such high altitude and it was so cold that by the time you took your gloves off and undid the top of the thermos and tried to drink it it was a bit hopeless and in the turrets it was very windy.

In the turret there was a piece of perspex that came right down, some bright spark at the headquarters got the idea that they’d take this perspex out so that the gunners would get a clearer view which was true but it was God damn windy and cold. The perspex used to get scratches in it and sometimes the searchlights would strike. There was not just one scratch but a lot of scratches.

The searchlights would hit these scratches at a certain angle and once again you couldn’t see out past the scratch.

No. They had quite a thing in England about security

at night time and don’t show a light and all this nonsense. The story was going around was that if you showed a light and pulled the curtain across and shone a light out through the window that the German bombers could see that light down there and go and bomb it which was a load of crap. You wouldn’t leave your formation or your bombing course just to go down and bomb an odd light down there,

it was stupid.

No they wouldn’t that’s true. Some of the gunners when they got back they would skite about how they saw a light on the ground and they had opened fire on it which again was very stupid because there were generally farms out in the country in France and the French were sort of on our side. So it was a bit pointless shooting at a light down on the ground when you were flying over France

in the country, because it might have been a tractor out in the field and some farmer had left his lights on and all you would be doing was trying to shoot up an abandoned tractor, or if it wasn’t that it was some friendly farmhouse, so that was a stupid thing to do.

They did but you wouldn’t know who they were. Do you mean when you were on leave?

No that was just another Lancaster going over, or another Wellington or Spitfire or a Hurricane. Unless you were on the squadron and you knew which aircraft the blokes were flying in but you had no idea of who was up there.

You could always tell a Spitfire from a Hurricane if you heard them flying overhead because the Spitfire had a particular engine rhythm and the propeller used to make a particular sort of whistling rushing noise as it spun around it was most distinctive, you couldn’t possibly imitate it.

It was quite distinctive and you could tell whether it was a Spitfire, Hurricane, Lancaster or a Stirling or something like that, just from the engine noise.

You couldn’t see inside them, no.

When I was on flight 576 I suppose. The chop rate was becoming less and less and less although they never actually said they were going to have an invasion, everything pointed to it and especially when these Lancasters were doing two raids a day, I told you about them didn’t I? On the channel ports, but nobody ever said that they were preparing for

D Day. There is a very good digest, a year ago it came out, and there was an article in it about D Day and it was a very good article about Montgomery and the American chief of staff. They were waiting for the right weather

and they got fed up with waiting and they made a day to go and the channel turned nasty and everybody got seasick on the way over. Most of the troops had to go across the channel in those landing craft, those ones that they dropped the thing down on the front and the troops all pour off. They were throwing up all over the place and trying to keep

their heads down and some of it was a bit of a shambles. The Germans had put on the beach those steel railway line things that were welded together and they were sort of in nests and they plonked them across the beach so that the invading soldiers couldn’t get past these things I forget what they call them now. They were like

spiky railway lines that were bits of steel that were welded together in cross formation and place all along the beach. They had to wade ashore even with these landing troops LSTs [Landing Ship Tanks]. They had to wade to part of the ashore and try and get around these spiky

things that were imbedded in the sand because they were sitting targets because the Germans were up on the cliffs and bang, bang, bang.

There wasn’t much difference in them except that Italy was further because Turin and Milan and La Spezia were

eight hours nine hours but if we went to the Ruhr valley it was only about four or five hours those targets were much closer. Although the Bomber Command made them a bit longer, it was a good strategy because they would send the force out on a course that way going towards some target in the north. When we got almost to it

about ten miles from it we would veer down south and attack a target down there. They had scrambled their fighters to attack us on that route there and we quickly went down here which made the flying time longer, but they reckoned it was safer. Flying to Berlin a few times we had to go out over the North Sea over that island where…

I will have to get some of those memory pills from Dr Tutt. This island that was heavily fortified with anti-aircraft guns so you had to be careful that you didn’t fly over that but you could fly over Denmark a bit and then along the southern part of the Baltic Sea as though you were going to attack a target along there.

Change course and fly down to Berlin and got to Berlin and bombed Berlin and then come back, and they were about eight or nine hours. That was a long, long time to sit in that little turret and not have a pee or a poo.

It was the dome.

A couple of times yes. Another thing that bomber command used to do was to send a force out and bomb a target in the south of Germany or the south of France which was occupied by the Germans and then fly on to some neutral country like Czechoslovakia or somewhere,

I don’t know where they went, some neutral country. I was in southern Russia at some aerodrome in southern Russia and they flew across and bombed

this target and fly on to this aerodrome in Russia and land and get refueled and re-bombed up and have a rest and come back the next night and bombed the same target on the way back to England and fly back that way. To go out there and come back was impossible because it was beyond the range of a Lancaster so they went there and bombed and went onto the neutral country and came back and bombed on the way back,

which was quite good thinking on the part of the Bomber Command.

No I wasn’t.

From Russia, get some vodka. They only stayed overnight and came back the next day

or a couple of days after, but I suppose they would have been feed Russian food yes. I never did any of those because that was getting on more to the end of the war, though we didn’t know it was nearly at the end of the war, there weren’t very many of them done.

Do you think I was? Yes very, very lucky.

As I said before there were three types of air gunners there alert, the quick and the dead. So if you were alert and saw the fighters attacking and were quick to fire you survived. But if you were a bit slow on the trigger you got shot down. I would like to think that I was alert enough and quick enough to avoid getting shot down.

Yes.

It wasn’t for any one

particular event it was just for having pressed on regardless of spirit and always being there I suppose and doing the right thing and never getting shot down. Because the DFMs are more valuable than the DFC. The DFC was awarded to commissioned ranks called the Distinguished Flying Cross, I got a Distinguished flying Medal.

Just about every pilot towards the end of the war or the last quarter of the war who finished a tour of ops was awarded a DFC, but every other aircrew didn’t get a DFM or a DFC. What bomber command should of done was to do what the Yanks did and awarded a medal for doing a tour of ops, without any distinguish between DFMs and

DFCs for bravery but they didn’t think of that apparently. They should’ve done that and given a medal for the touring of ops. The Yanks got a medal for everything, you got a medal for joining up and when you went to camp and a medal when you came out of camp and a medal if you went to the pre-embarkation place and a medal for getting on a ship and a medal for crossing the Atlantic Ocean and a medal for landing in France.

Some of them had about two or three rows of medals all the way across there and they hadn’t done a damn thing.

I feel better.

I don’t think so. It was a long time ago and it’s hard to remember my feelings and my reactions when I was nineteen or twenty, now that I’ve got my OBE [Over Bloody Eighty – pun on Order of the British Empire] it was a long long time ago.

There was been a lot of water under the bridge since then.

I reckon we will probably have a few more wars, like madman Hussein, he had to be stopped and this other

joker that is there the Iraq leader he’s got to be stopped too and all these terrorists I don’t know what we are going to do about them.

This Amrosi [Bali bomber] he’s a bit of a nut case, they should give him the death sentence then he would be regarded as a martyr won’t he and make his case even stronger. The Taliban are a dangerous crew. Like the

12th of November when they blew up those skyscrapers in New York.

The 11th of September yes. They just deliberately flew them into the skyscrapers passengers and all, you have got to be crazy to do something like that. How are they going to stop it, I don’t know.

You get these crazy just singly by themselves somewhere you never know you could be walking down Queen Street and some bloke could be a suicide bomber and up he goes and up goes twenty or thirty innocent civilians with him. I don’t see how that can be stopped and it’s a very big problem.

If they get enough of these Amrosi types and the bombings in Bali, which he was in that wasn’t he used to go to that. I’ve got a Danish cousins whose just starting to run a hotel in Bali at the Kuta Beach he was running a tourist hotel

and he’s alive but his hotel got blown up and burnt, and poor old Nikolai, he picked the wrong place to start a business.

No, just keep your head down and don’t get shot I suppose.

It’s such a different war now to the one that I was in. Even the air force is so vastly different because they don’t have to fly over the targets. They have got these F111s two crews and there is another fighter aircraft and I can’t remember the name of it and they have got these guided missiles.

The navigator can feed into the guided missile the latitude and longitude of the target and that sort of automatically starts working and guides the missiles to the target. As wing commander Adams said, “They pull up miles short of the target and let this thing go and it goes and bombs the target while they are half way home,”

having a beer in the mess. When we went to Amberley when we went to our 1990 reunion and there was this wing commander and he gave us this talk it and he said, “I don’t understand you blokes you were crazy you had to fly across the target and aim for it and drop the bombs and then fly out of the target. I don’t know how you did it,” these days they don’t have to go anywhere near the target.

You saw that in the Gulf War the news reel shots of the aircraft would come over and drop their bombs here and the missiles would go down to the target while they were on their way back.

On your nerves the ones we did yes, there were quite a few blokes that became basket cases,

worried about it. The straitjacket or the padded cell or the cigarettes.

It was about nine years ago, it was very easy I gave up smoking about five thousand times.

But every now and again I still get the urge sometimes to have a cigarette. When we go out shopping and I go and have a look at the price of cigarettes at the tobacco counter and the cost of that was enough to kill that yearning again, they are getting expensive these days. You see people going in there and buying them by the

carton and they are something like eight dollars a packet.

Are they?

I suppose so. In the shopping centers around the place and I used to work down in Coplanar and I was sales manager of a printing company down there and there was a big shopping centre just as you drove into Coplanar on the right hand side and sometimes if I was a bit early I’d go and have a walk around because I had been sitting and driving the car all day and sitting down, mainly for exercise I did it. There would be three or four girls

walking about the center, or a certain part of the centre handing out cigarettes and they were certain brands, I don’t remember what brands they were. I’d take one and I’d say to them, “Can I have one for Ron?” They’d say, “Who’s Ron?” and I’d say, “Later on,” so I’d get two. I was never a person who could smoke while I was doing something else

or doing a job because I didn’t enjoy the cigarettes but if I had a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and something to eat after that I could sit down and have a cigarette and I would quite enjoy it.