Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in Geelong in Victoria in 1923. Dad worked on a newspaper down there and after a while the paper went broke so Dad was out of a job. Well then we moved up to Echuca and Dad was

working on the local daily paper up there, The Riverina Herald. And that was 1925. We lived in Echuca from 1925 until …. Well I went to a school in Melbourne in 1936, I was there ’36, ’37, ’38, ’39, ’40. And at the end of 1940 I completed as far as I was

going at school and I got a job in Melbourne in an insurance company and that was at the beginning of 1941. And that time the war was going on but I hadn’t thought a great deal about it because I was only seventeen. And also the bosses were having a bit of trouble with … they had staff there that were being called up and enlisting and so on. So they

found a job and they said, “You’ll be right in that job for quite a long time because you won’t be called up for a couple of years yet.” So then in October that year my mother died. It was quite a blow but … Then in December Japan came into the war and then the end of December I got the call up. And, as I said, I was in camp, and I went into camp 31st December,

1941. So it was a great way to spend New Year’s Eve. We were at Royal Park, which is where the Melbourne Zoo is. And that was also the introduction to daylight savings, the first time for Australia. And we were in there and we were all strangers. We were sleeping on a palliasse, which was pretty thin and on boards underneath

that. And the lions, it sounded as though they were about fifty yards away and they were roaring all time. And the sergeant would come round and say, “Shut up you blokes. You’ve got to get up in a couple of hours time.” Because midnight they put the clock on so it was one o’clock and we had to be up at six. So we didn’t get a great deal of shut-eye. So that was the introduction to the army. Then we moved up from there to a training battalion which was called Boys Town at

Nagambie Road, Seymour. And we were there and then transferred over to the army unit, that was the 24th Battalion. And then we started learning more military things and we marched from Nagambie Road camp up to Bonegilla, which was about a hundred miles, and we did that in a bit over a week. Mainly because

they didn’t have a great deal of transport to transport army people from point A to point B. And it was also a way of toughening us up I suppose, about twenty-five miles a day or thereabout. And on the march up to we had to … we were spewed out over the

road. We just didn’t march up in lines of three, there were some over near one boundary fence and so other over near the other. Mainly because they were sort of taking precautions in case we were attacked from the air. And of course the air force thought this was a great time to try some of their blokes on attacking ground forces. So they sort of sweeped in from time to time and we had

to go to ground and just wait until they got out of the way. We got up to Bonegilla and we got a bit more equipment in there. We did training around Hume Dam which was … This was around about Easter time, April and May 1942, and it was pretty cold. I was with signal platoon so we had Lucas lamps

and those things that used to flash lights across the dam and send messages and received messages. Then they put us on a troop train and they sent us up to Queensland. That was pretty near … round about May, 1942. We came up and we were put off the train somewhere around about Beaudesert. And we went to a paddock

somewhere near Jimboomba and that was to be our campsite for about three months. Then after that we went from there up to near Maryborough, not right in the township but somewhere outside of Maryborough, and we were there for a period of time when we did all sorts of exercises. Some were quite interesting and hilarious because at one stage the

sixth sergeant got a couple of trucks and we were doing a map reading exercise and were given a set of figures, and said, “Your such and such a place. Go to at the next set of figures.” And so we did that and we ended up down at Hervey Bay. And this was August and it was a beautiful day and we said, “Why aren’t people swimming?” And they said, “Oh, it’s too cold.”

Of course, this was a Victorian unit and we thought it was lovely so we went in. And we just sat in the water, we didn’t swim, we just sat there and just splashed each other. And wrote home and said, “Oh, went swimming today.” And the letter came back, “Nobody in their right mind goes swimming in August.” So then after a while we moved from Maryborough back towards Brisbane. And

I think at the time they had the Brisbane Line which was being mentioned quite often. The idea was, in defence, if the Jap enemy landed then they would defend from Brisbane south and they wouldn’t worry about the north section of it. So we became part of the Brisbane Line and we were there at a place

near Beerburrum about seven miles north of Caboolture. We were there for about another two or three months and then we moved up to Eumundi and we were outside of Eumundi for some time. And while we were there I got my call up for the air force. I forgot to mention that while we were at Beerburrum,

some of the young blokes who were about my age had been on the air force reserve in Melbourne and had done training for various air force things, and they went into Brisbane and went to the air force recruiting place and said, “Look, we’re in the army. We were on the air force reserve. Can you get us out of the army?”

And the air force blokes rubbed their hands and said, “Oh, beauty, whereabouts are you?” And they were told. And so they came out and set up an interview tent. And everyone who was interested in getting out of the army went along to the tent and did an aptitude test. And at that time the government had … Because of the losses over in Europe, which were pretty horrific, they

decided they would release blokes from the army who were on the air force reserve, and also any others that wanted to join the air force, to aircrew, but not to ground staff. So I think just about all the battalion blokes stepped forward and applied, did this aptitude test. Then the results came out and the CO [Commanding Officer] and the officer

in charge of the platoon would say, “Oh yes, we’ll release this bloke. No you can’t have this one because he’s the COs Don R [despatch rider] and he’s also my chief radio repairer.” When the radios went pop they went to Arthur and he fixed them up, so he had Buckley’s chance [no chance] of changing over. But the rest of us

were just sort of put on standby and the air force in time called us up. So we got a call up early in 1943 and the rest of the army unit went up to Townsville, and they went up to New Guinea. And we went down to Melbourne and with the sergeant and then transferred over to the air force. That was the beginning of 1943.

Then 1943 saw us – saw me, anyway – go to Shepparton to the recruit depot. Because they didn’t have an initial training course starting right at that time, I had to wait, I think, about a month. They had a whole group of us ex army blokes at Shepparton. And that, in a way, was quite a hoot

because we were all in the army and we were sent to a rookies’ course. And it made it a lot easier because when it came to rifle drill we had thirty odd-blokes and we only had a couple of rookies, so that when the command was given the rookie only had to look out of the corner of his eye at the bloke on either side of in front to see what he was doing and we were all doing the right thing, except

for possibly the rookie. He would be a bit slower but he could fire, whereas in a complete rookies’ course one’s doing one thing and the bloke in front’s doing something else. So instead of having quite a few hours of rifle drill and marching we got away with something like twenty minutes. And the field instructor that had us in charge was there and he came back and he said, “Oh, you blokes are up to scratch. I don’t

know what to do with you now.” So they took us around to headquarters and went in and saw the chief drill instructor. He came out and gave us a few orders and we did a good job for him. So then he came back with a Bren gun and he said, “Oh, AC [Aircraftsman] James, you’re a Bren gunner, you were …,” and stand up and talk on that for ten minutes. So, of course, we were sitting under the shade of a tree and quite enjoyed it,

whereas we should have been out in the sun. This was round about February and that was Shepparton, so it was summer time and good and hot. So we got out of that one quite well. The same chap, James, when they went out to rifle practice they said, Oh, James, you’re the Bren gunner. There’s the Bren gun. Show these rookies how to shoot.” So they had a jam tin stuck up a couple of hundred yards away and he potted away at that and

made the thing jump all around the place, a single shot or a repeater. So because they were all new rookies who hadn’t seen a gun being fired were rather thrilled to see how this bloke could be so accurate with a gun because a Bren gun was very good. Well after Shepparton we went down to Somers which was the initial training school where we did all sort of subjects –

air force law, which was the basis of all subjects, and also mathematics to see if we would be cut out to be navigators or such like and what skills we had. Then they categorised us later and then we were fronted up to some of the powers to be and they said, “Right, your records show and your medical

certificate shows that you’d be suitable to be a pilot.” Or, “Your maths is pretty good, you could be a navigator or a wireless operator any day.” And that was what I was categorised as. So then from Somers then we went to Parkes, which was the wireless air gunners school. The wireless course and that was about six months we were there.

Then from Parkes up … Well while I was in Parkes I got a sore throat and that put me back a couple of courses so I didn’t complete the course at Parkes. And they closed Parkes down as a wireless operator school. And they transferred us then to No. 1 Air Gunnery School at West Sale. And that was … We

graduated there as straight air gunners, we weren’t wireless operators, we were just a straight air gunner. From there, that was about a month’s course, we graduated from there and we received our half wing, our air gunner’s wing. And then we went onto sergeants pilot. With the air

force ratings we started off and we had automatic promotion. After six months you went from sergeant up to flight sergeant and then twelve months as flight sergeant and you became a warrant officer, you received your warrant. And I think your pay was something of an increase of maybe two shillings a day. And then from flight sergeant to

warrant officer, I think it was an increase of sixpence a day. And so that was something in the future. Well we went from West Sale up to … We had leave and then we reported back to Melbourne Cricket Ground, which was one embarkation depot. And we were there … Because that’s where they used to gather people together and equipment,

mainly for going overseas, over to England. And we had all the stuff ready to go to England and so on. And we paraded every day and given jobs to do round the cricket ground as to emu parades and picking up papers and whatever, trying to keep us in order. Then we were equipped. And I remember saying to one of the chaps

who was much taller than I was, “Well if the ship gets torpedoed, we’ll be right because Steve,” who had very big feet, “Steve can throw a couple of his boots over and everyone can all climb on board.” But Steve didn’t take too kindly to that one. So anyway, on parade they picked out six blokes and said, “Oh, you’re going to Dutch Mitchell’s up in Darwin. Report to the CO …

to the orderly room and get your rail warrants to go to Canberra and take it from there.” And we thought, “Oh, that’s good. We missed that one, we’ve still got a chance of getting on that boat and going to England.” Because we thought, “We’re going to be six bob a day tourists and get a trip out of Australia, which will be something.” And about a fortnight later then they picked

another half dozen blokes and that’s where they caught me. And I was a bit disappointed, but they told us, “Oh, you’re not going to be like those other blokes, going to Darwin. You’re going to go to Dutch Catalinas at Burma. But report to the officer and get your rail warrant and go to Canberra and report to the Dutch at Canberra.” So we did that. Then

we got on the train and went up to Canberra and we were there for a couple of days. And when we got there, of course, they said, “Oh, you’re not going to Dutch Catalinas in Burma, you’re going off to Darwin where the other lot went.” Course we said a few choice words because we thought, “Well we’re not getting out of … We’re not going to England, but we’re getting out of Australia and going to Burma. That’ll be a nice change maybe.” And so then after a day or

so they flew us up to Darwin and that was a hell of a trip. For some reason there were six of us and we all had breakfast that day. Usually we … Strictly we didn’t have to have a meal and that day we all got up and had breakfast. Then from then on we got on a plane and flew … We landed in Sydney and you couldn’t get a cup of coffee or anything at all at the airport.

And we went from there. Then we flew up and they said, “Oh, Brisbane.” And I said, “No, we’re not going to stay in Brisbane. We’re going to Charleville. We’ve got a favourite pub out there. It’s a lot better.” So we went and stayed Coroney’s pub out at Charleville. And that was interesting because we got there and it was after meal time,

the pub was closed. And we said, “Where can we get a feed?” And they said, “Go to one of the Greeks down the road.” So we went there, and there was six of us, and we said, “We’ll have … What will we have?” And they said, “A mixed grill.” And the lass in the there, the waitress said, “What’s a mixed grill?” And someone said, “Well you’ve got steak.” And somebody else chipped in, “You’ve got egg and you’ve got bacon and you’ve got sausage and you’ve got …” Everyone added something. Anyway when the bill came it was two and sixpence. We reckoned it was the best feed we’d ever had.

Even now when the blokes get together we all say, “You remember that feed we had at the Greeks at Charleville?” Anyway, we flew up and the wet season had just started about that day and I said, “Land at … Don’t think you’ll get through, but land at Daly Waters and see. So we landed at Daly Waters and they said, “Yes, you’ll be able to get through, just follow the road up.” So we flew up with a couple of … About

three or four hundred feet above the road. And we might as well have been on the bitumen because, boy, it was bumpy. And we flew up and they said, “Here’s our turn off. We turn off here and we go into Bachelor.” And we landed in Bachelor and I’ve never been so damned sick in all my life as that day. I thought, “What a future for an air gunner who’s just about brought everything up.” So that was out introduction to 18th Squadron. And we got there and we were there for three weeks I think before

anybody knew that we were there. And we used to go down the mess and have a meal and go to the library and get a book, finish the book and go back to the library and go down to the mess and have another meal. And then after a while they gave us a bit of training. And they said, “Rightio, you’re in Captain Larwin’s crew. We’d better give you a bit of training, so we’ll go out somewhere and you can fit in the back there

and fire a few rounds off and that’ll be training.” So we had, I think a thirty-five minutes flight and that was our first training before we went out that night onto somewhere over Timor. Well I was up at Darwin, that was early March to Christmas Eve, and my period of operations finished then. And lo and behold

the whole crew came down to us, six of us to a crew and we all finished up together. I was the only Australian in the crew – the rest were Dutchmen. Some had come from Holland and some had come from Indonesia and we all finished up and they said, “Oh Mac, we’ll get you home for Christmas.” Well we got down as far as Brisbane and we went to the Dutch Club in Brisbane which was, I think, was next to the Commercial Travellers’ Club in Elizabeth Street.

And I don’t remember much about Christmas Day because I said, “Oh, I’ll buy a drink, Johnny.” And Johnny was the top gunner, a good mate, and I produced and pound and he put a fiver on to cover it. “No, you’re,” – this is at the Dutch Club – “You are not allowed to buy anything here.” So that was it. So somehow or other I just don’t recall much more about Christmas Day. Eventually I got down to

Melbourne and had leave there and then went back to the Melbourne Cricket Ground and that was referred to then as 1 Personnel Depot. And we were there for a while and we went back to where Sale is flying dummy instructors because they were having trouble with their … A lot of the rookies weren’t familiar with the guns and they’d go up and go back and they’d say, “The gun won’t work.”

And they’d take it to the rifle blokes to check it out and they’d say, “All they had to do was pull the lever to cock it.” And so they said, “We’ll have one … Instead of having three pilots we’ll have two pilots and an experienced air gunner to help them out.” And we were there for two or three months. Then back to 1 Personnel Depot.

And then I went up to Nhill to see if I’d be any good as a classroom instructor, but I wasn’t much chop at that so they sent us back. And while we were at Melbourne Cricket Ground, this was round about May, they assembled all the aircrew blokes and they said, “Now look, we’ve got ….” It was over in Europe and they were bringing a lot of blokes back and they said, “We’ve got so many of you blokes we don’t know what to do with you.

Now if you want another tour of operations, say what you’ve done and what you’d like to do and if you’d like a discharge tell us.” “What was that?” Because I had a hearing trouble then. And so I wrote down, “I have completed a tour of operations of fifty-nine operations and I desire a discharge.” And that was May

and I was out on 12th August. Actually I was out before it was over. After it was over then I did a course at the Melbourne Technical College as a linotype operator and came in under the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Scheme, which meant that the government would pay so much of the percentage of the wage for the first year and then gradually lessen,

I think over four or five years. And then the government amount … If the wage got less it meant that the employer was gradually paying a full wage at the end of the time. So after that then in 1949 I came up to Queensland and I’ve been here ever since. I worked in a newspaper and then I started work down here at The

Bulletin here in Rocky [Rockhampton]. Then in 1950 my wife was up here on holidays and I met her and we got engaged; in 1951 we were married. And our family’s come along since then – we have two boys and two girls. And one of the lads is here and Helen, the daughter, is teaching

down at Marlo. Alison is living in Brisbane and she has … Her family go to school there. And Ian is a teacher at Gimpy, at a Catholic college. And we’ve been married … We were married in 1951. So that seems to be my life story.

Well as at Echuca, when I went up there I was only about two years old so I don’t remember a great deal about that. But went to the state school and Echuca was quite a good place to grow up in because the river

was nice and handy and we all learnt to swim in the river. And because the place was nice and flat we all had bikes and we could go off, ride off somewhere, and we gradually had a good team of mates and we’d go camping down in the park or somewhere on the sandbank on the river bank and camp overnight, or we’d ride out somewhere out

west on our bikes or go south around where the old rifle butts used to be. And we did a lot of swimming in the river. And at one stage we found an old flat-bottomed dinghy under the wharf. Echuca was where All the Rivers Run was filmed. And under this wharf we found

this dinghy with it’s sides caved in. And we said, “Oh, that’s a pity.” And I said, “Oh, that’s okay, no problems because Mum and Dad have just had the floor in the lounge replaced because of white ants. We’ll get one of those six inch boards from there.” So we got that and we hammered that in place. Then the council had been working on the roads and they had been dropping forty-four gallon drums of bitumen out of the back

of their drays, And that would damage the drum somewhat and it would leak out a bit of tar. So we used to go round and pick up all these bits, and we took them back and we got a decent sized old billy, put all the tar in and melted it down and we made our boat waterproof. And for oars, we went at the Hum and got the floor brooms that the mums

are allowed to toss out, and we dipped them in tar and they made pretty good oars. And so we used to paddle … We used to go interstate, paddle across and go into New South Wales. We only had about two inches freeboard, I suppose, in our boat by the time we all piled in. I suppose there’d be about six of us in the boat altogether. And we’d paddle over. And the interesting

thing I found was that our dogs – we had two, my brother and myself and the other kids also had dogs – the dogs would fight a bit but when they saw us heading over into New South Wales in our boat they’d settle their differences and they used to swim over. And we’d look round and after we’d got over there we’d find all the dogs over there beside us in New South Wales. We used to be under the old railway bridge at Echuca, road and rail bridge,

and that used to have a nice big rope hanging from it and we’d climb onto that and swing out over the river and drop off into the water. And it was pretty good. The river never seemed to be polluted as much as I gather it is now. But I remember standing … Because any swimming that was done was done in the river and I never had a pool to swim in. But I remember standing on the pontoon one

day waiting to dive in, and just as I’m about to dive – there must have been flood through – a dead sheep floated past and I just about fell on top of it. But we had a great time growing up there. Then in 1936 I was sent down to Melbourne and went to Caulfield Grammar and I was there for ’36, ’37,

’38, ’39, ’40.

Pardon?

Well I went to the primary school, the state school at Echuca and started off at the Echuca High School, but only did two terms at Echuca High School.

Well in those days it wasn’t very big because it was the only high school in Echuca. So I can’t remember how many pupils it would have had.

I think it had a population then of about five thousand people. But since then it’s gone ahead. They’ve made a lot of … A lot of people have decided to come and live there because it’s a riverbank town and the climate’s pretty good, although it can get a bit cold in the winter and a bit hot in the summer. But a lot of people have gone …

I don’t know where they’ve come from, whether they’ve come from Melbourne or whether they’ve come from overseas and been in Melbourne, then said, “Well, don’t like the city life. We want something where life’s a bit easier.” But I found Echuca was pretty good. And I went back there after the war … I went back and worked on the paper for four years from end of 1945 up to 1949,

up till the time I came up here.

Parents? Well Mum and Dad were married in 1912. Dad’s parents, or Dad’s father, was one of three brothers who owned The Bendigo Advertiser. And I think there was a bit of ill feeling in

Bendigo with Dad’s uncles because two of Dad’s cousins were enlisted in the First [World] War and both were killed. And I think Dad was a bit older and the uncle thought that Dad should have enlisted and should have gone to the war and he didn’t. But he said he tried to, but the army people told him, “No, you’re too valuable here as an instructor,

we won’t let you go.” So he didn’t get away, but he said he felt a lot of ill towards him because he didn’t get away.

No, I think he just sort of felt that, and from the two uncles, they were Uncle Angus and Uncle George.

And both Uncle Angus and George were, naturally, pretty cut up when their boys were killed and so on. And they sold The Bendigo Advertiser about 1921. And that’s when Dad decided to go down to Geelong and started work at the, I think it was The Geelong

Advertiser. And he was working down there and he put money into that and then it went broke. And then he was out of a job and then he went up to Echuca, which was also owned by the MacKay family. And he bought into that eventually. And so after donkey’s years my brother and I became

part owners of The Riverina Herald at Echuca.

Well my grandfather came out in 1850 something, worked as a journalist and he went up to the Turon Goldfields when gold was discovered. And he worked for a Sydney paper and then he

moved down … followed the gold and went down to Bendigo. And he stood as a candidate for parliament in Melbourne representing the miners. And he realised that there were a lot of things that the miners needed, and what they didn’t need was the miner’s right to

registration that they had to have – the one that caused so much friction and resulted in the Eureka Stockade. And they eventually got rid of that registration. And also what was needed in Bendigo was water, because it was a very dry time and he had a lot to do with the water coming to Bendigo. I think it was

the Malmsbury Dam and also the Coliban [River] scheme. And those two, they had a channel going from the Malmsbury down near Melbourne up to Bendigo over … well not quite a hundred miles, I suppose, about seventy or eight miles. This water used to flow up hill and down dale and to get to Bendigo and supply Bendigo with water. And that’s how

the family became involved. He bought The Bendigo Advertiser, early … I can’t remember the … Round about 1870 or something like that. So when he died his sons, my grandfather, Robert, and Robert’s brothers, Angus and George, then took over. And that was round about 1880.

And they controlled it until they sold it, round about 1921. And then the two brothers maintained an interest in Bendigo and Grandfather Robert, I think, had bought Riverina Herald and Dad bought into Riverina

Herald at Echuca and went up there to manage that and was editor of Riverina Herald. And I sort of followed there. At times I reckoned I didn’t have blood, I had printer’s ink instead of blood. Because of the family, with grandfather being a journalist and great grandfather being a journalist and Dad being a journalist. But I had no

journalistic qualifications. I write a letter every now and again but that’s about as far as my writing ability goes. But I was more concerned with practical things and worked on the mechanical side as a linotype operator.

Well that’s interesting because I seem to recall at a very early age going down to one of the wharves in Melbourne as two aunts were going overseas. One of the aunts was Susan Cohn and she turned out

as a sculptress in Victoria. She carved the Fairy’s Tree [Treasury Gardens, East Melbourne] and she also carved a statue in Adelaide of pioneer women, a couple of statues that I think that are out at the Royal Hobart Hospital, I think they’re at the entrance, they were carved in stone. And she did quite a lot of other works. And she lived in East Melbourne

and she and her sister, Francisco, went overseas. And I think that would be round about 1925, 1926, which if it’s ’26 makes me about three years old. But I seem to remember being on board the ship and all the flowers coming into the cabin and things like that. So that’s about the earliest I remember, unless I’ve forgot.

Yes, my brother was five years older than I was. He was born in Bendigo before Mum and Dad moved down to Geelong; he was born in 1919. And he only passed away in September last year.

What kind of …?

Well he went into the bank, in the ES&A [English Scottish and Australian Bank Ltd] bank.

Well lots of things, mainly firewood, cutting up the timber for the kitchen stove, kindling wood and red gum blocks and things like that, that would be our job. And when we got a couple of dogs we had to look after the dogs

and give them a wash once in a blue moon. But we had to be careful that when Dad said we’d better give the dogs a bath that the dogs were still chained up. Because if they had heard that and they were off the chain they used to make a beeline and down under the house and they stayed there till the day was finished and they knew it was safe come out. So we had to keep them chained up. And we took them … There’s an old washhouse out the back and we used to

go in there and shut the door and then get stuck into them and give them a good bath, and take them out, put a chain on them and tie them up somewhere on the lawn so that they could roll on the lawn rather than roll in the dirt as dogs, you know, usually like to. And that seems to be about all our jobs that we had to do. But we could roam around. Mum used to have an old cow bell

and it was very effective, so instead of calling out when it was meal time, she would rattle this bell. And of course, we were over in the backyard in the neighbour’s place and it carried much better that any voice would. And I suppose if it signalled where the cows were, it signalled to us where the home was. And so we’d come home very smartly after that.

I don’t know that I … Well I did … I was given a Meccano set and I remember we made a Meccano bus. And we took it down to Bendigo, apparently they must have had some competition for state schools, and I took this down and I was tickled pink because it won second prize.

So that started my mechanical bent and liking to fiddle with things and find out why things don’t work and if not, why not, and try and fix things up. But of course, I’ve to bear in mind that if it works, well if it ain’t broken, don’t try and fix it. So I sort of bear that in mind. So that’s mainly …

I suppose with mates, quite a few mates to play with. The ones over in the back were mainly my brother’s age. There were two chaps, three chaps over in the back – one was roughly my age and the other two were my brother’s age, five years older than I was. So they were pretty good because their place at the back had a vacant paddock next to them,

a vacant allotment. And that was good in the cricket time, summer time it was a cricket pitch. In the winter time it was a place for kicking a football or building something else in the dirt. So that was a good place to play with. Over time we had the other mates who were there. One was Jeff; his

parents had the chemist shop. There was Jack, whose father was a dentist. And Doug and Graham, whose father was at the Commercial Bank [of Australia]. And there was another mate, Adrian, whose father was the Anglican, Church of England minister. And there was another bloke

too, Jack (UNCLEAR), who was a good school mate. And we used to sit next to them in class. So we had a good round up of mates altogether. But of course, coming north in 1949 I sort of lost touch with most of those. And I had a letter a couple of years back from

one of the chaps, Adrian, and I hadn’t seen him for forty-seven years, something like that, so he filled me in on what he’d done after the war and so on. And some of the others I hadn’t seen since 1949. And I know a couple of them have passed on, but a couple of them, I think … One chap we met accidentally.

We were staying somewhere in Victoria when we were on holidays. We stayed at this hotel at Castlemaine and he was there. And he’s the only bloke that I’ve come across.

The first …?

The state school? Well it was a

brick building and I think it was State School 208. I understand that now being closed down. I’m not sure what it’s used for but they moved the state school, the classes to another building. But it was the old-fashioned one, built on a lot of Victorian lines with solid brick buildings, finished, leadlight windows, pretty hot in summer

and not real good in winter time. Fairly big playground – I think a segregated playground – a fence down the middle, girls over this side and boys playing on their own over on that side. But one summer time it was that hot they, for a week, they took us out and we went into the open reserve. That’s where we were taught, sat under the trees and sat there because the rooms got so hot in

the brick because once the brick heats up it takes a long time for it to cool off.

Sorry?

Oh, they were pretty good, some where … Always I thought the teachers were a bit old. And one time when my wife and I were on holidays we stayed at Echuca at the pub where I used to stay when I was working there. And a lady came in,

she was having a meal and she turned out to be a Miss Scott who had been my teacher at school. I thought she was pretty old when I was at school, so I was amazed that in 1953, I think it would have been, to see her still alive and kicking. So it was quite … So she was able to

give my wife a bit of lurid history that I hadn’t told her or hadn’t mentioned or wasn’t going to or something like that. I suppose, too, she couldn’t have been as old as I thought because this was … Well I left the state school in 1935 and this was 1953, almost twenty years later. But

we … 1991 my wife and I went down to Albury because they had a school reunion of fifty years since (UNCLEAR) class graduated from Albury High School and they had one or two of their teachers there and they … I thought … My wife said that they were

amazed that the teacher was still around. When they worked it out they said, “We actually thought she was more or less straight out of teaching college and possibly not much older than the kids in the class. And that’s why she’s still around now.” And she was very alert and the class masters were very pleased to see

her and have a talk to her and get her reminiscing and so on.

I’m sorry?

Most times I did. Melbourne, Caulfield Grammar, one thing that I remember. We studied French and I wasn’t real happy about that. And the French

master said, “Mac, your French is BA [bloody awful] and the A stands for awful.” But I found that I would be writing a composition in English and I’d write the French for ‘and’, or maybe I was writing a French composition and I’d use the ampersand sign for ‘and’ instead of writing in French and so on. So it didn’t worry me a great deal, because I thought,

“Well France is a long way away and I’ve got Buckley’s chance of getting to it.” And I think it was when we went overseas in 1978 before I got to see any … got to go to France. So this was 1936, 1940 so it was forty-odd years down the track, so whatever I learnt sort of went in one ear and out the other.

Sorry?

I don’t think it impacted very much really because Mum and Dad were fairly well off so that we ate pretty well whereas a lot of people had to stretch. Dad had a job and he worked night shift as editor on the paper. It was a daily paper

so he had a job and that was a lot more than many people had. And that was 1936 when I went to school in Melbourne. My brother had been going to school at Trinity Grammar in Melbourne in 1934 and 1935 and then he started work at ES&A bank in Bendigo

in 1935. So we were reasonably well off and I don’t think it made a great deal of difference to me.

Well I found it a bit hard being away from the parents. But we got up to a few antics and you had quite a few

good mates from various places. There was nobody else from Echuca. I went to Caulfield Grammar, but we’d have the train trip down to Melbourne and there’d be several of us from Echuca going to school in Melbourne. One of my mates, Jack, would be going to Scotch College. Jeff would be going to Melbourne Grammar and

so and so would be on the train to go down. And once we got to Spencer Street then we’d all go our separate ways. I’d got to Caulfield Grammar out at East St Kilda, Jack would go to Scotch College in Hawthorn and Jeff would go to Melbourne Grammar. And well actually I think part of Melbourne Grammar, because Melbourne Grammar had several

establishments. I suppose one for the younger kids and then for the … As they got older, more or less, the headquarters of Melbourne Grammar. We found a few good mates and we used to get up to quite a few pranks. Then we, at times, we’d go somewhere special. In the winter time if there was snow on (UNCLEAR) they’d hire a couple of buses and

take a bus over of kids and a few teachers and go to (UNCLEAR) and the snow. And we’d make snowballs and pelt them at each other and also at the teachers and things like that. In the summer time, when we first went back to school, they’d hire coaches and take us down to the seaside. And we use to go down to near Elwood and go for an early morning dip,

about six o’clock in the morning. And you could see as it got closer to Easter, the number dropping off because it was too darn cold. At one stage you’d have a good bus full when we first got back after holidays, but then you’d get down to maybe a dozen hardy blokes who’d want to go for a swim and then that would cancel out. But swimming in Elwood at that

time, the bay was pretty good but I gather now it’s not anywhere near as good swimming in the water around there. I don’t know where people swim … even if they do swim in the bay now days. Being at school, we used to have a Saturday morning off, I think, every fortnight

and then once a month we’d have a weekend and that was quite good. And I used to go down to my grandmother’s place which was at Black Rock down near Sandringham. And I’d go down to Ripponlea and catch the train down to Sandringham and then a tram down to Black Rock and walk a couple of blocks down to Grandma’s place. And that was just a couple of blocks away from the beach. And that was pretty good; we used to have quite a good time.

When my brother and I went down together it would be summer time, school holidays, and we could fly kites. There were quite prominent cliffs there and one time there was a terrific storm and it knocked hell out of … It removed a lot of the bathing boxes from the beach, and there was a fisherman’s

shed built over the water and it removed that entirely and brought down a lot of the cliffs. So they decided to landscape it and cut the cliffs down and sort of landscape it. They built a bluestone wall and also put in (UNCLEAR) to keep the sand in because so much sand had been washed away.

And at the time they did it everyone said that the quoins which ran from the sea wall, ninety degrees out, they said, “They won’t work, they should be run parallel, the same way as the waves so that when the waves break they’ll drop the sand over the wall.” Well when that was first built, the stone wall looked as though it was about six feet above the sand level. And later I went back there

and you could step from the sand over the brick wall because it was the same level down into the park way behind the wall. The wall was about eighteen inches think and it was made of blue stone, I think from the old Melbourne Jail or one of the old jails round about. And so all the sand came back eventually. And I think they got a Dutch firm to come out and design the

wall and the quoins and things like that and it was very successful. But as far as my brother and I were concerned it wasn’t at all good because it destroyed our chance of flying kites, because we could get nice and close to the edge with one bloke up top holding the kite and the other bloke down the bottom holding the string, and then the one up top would release the kite and

the air pressure would take the kite up. Of course, that was more or less straight up and down. But once the landscaping cut the cliffs back we couldn’t do that sort of thing, so we had to find some other way of entertainment.

Four and a bit years altogether at Caulfield Grammar,

then I was there in 1941 more or less, not quite twelve months working in Melbourne.

I would have been at school

Not really, no. We used to get all the morning papers and we would be interested in that, but that seemed to be too far

away.

I think they did have a radio, but they weren’t that reliable. We did have a section in our hobby building, a radio section in there, and we used to have ones that were crystal

sets. And we’d build our own crystal set and so on and tune in. Had a bit of fun learning the (UNCLEAR).

Did they have …?

I don’t think they did really. I think someone, they said, in one of the cartoons – I

remember quite clearly – someone wrote and they said … Showed the war on and they said, “Business as usual during the war.” And a lot of people just kept going, just doing usual things and said, “Oh, that’s happening over the other side of the world.” And apart from the fact that a lot of our blokes had gone we were not really interested or involved. And it was only when

Japan came in and they had air raids in Darwin and Townsville and some of the people really began to wake up to things. And then the thing, of course, on the raid over Broome where they caught so many flying boats on the water and in the air, that sort of shook them up. And also when the Yanks came out, they

sort of realised it was on for young and old. And even more so when the submarines entered Sydney Harbour and torpedoed … Well they had a go at one of the American battleships that was there. Missed it, but it sank a ferry that was being used as accommodation and a number of the people on that, I think they were navy blokes.

It wasn’t Garden Island, but it was somewhere there. And I think the ferry was the [HMAS] Kuttabul. And it was torpedoed and these chaps were … And the thing went down and of course they were drowned. And I think that brought war a lot closer to them.

Well actually it wasn’t a case of me deciding. They just said … They must have had a list of names and they said, “Right,

report to Hawthorn drill hall at 0800 hours on December 31, 1941 and bring a cut lunch. Your number will be V270346,” and that was that. So it wasn’t a case of, “Do you want to?” “You’re in and that’s it.”

I don’t know on that, that’s hard because at the time we … When I was working we had several chaps and I said, “Oh, Jeff’s on the air force reserve and he’ll get his call up before long.” And Jack Anderson was, I think, in the army. Somebody else had been in and had returned from overseas service and had been discharged because he was injured.

And several of the others were … We didn’t discuss it at any stage. I think at one stage a mate and I were walking or riding our pushbikes up to Belgrave and we called in somewhere, a café, to have a refreshing drink and they announced that Germany had invaded Russia. And that would have been around about September, 1941.

But apart from that I don’t think I’d even thought about it. So when Japan came into it on 7th December my brother had been in the militia before, but I think they did have a group of militia that were involved beforehand. And he’d been in training and he had been

released to do work associated with the bank, chartered accountant exams and so on. They said, “Oh yes, that’ll be okay, we won’t need you.” 1941, mid 1941, “That’ll be okay to go and do that. We’ll whistle when we need you.” And then Japan went into the war and they said, “Right, Russell MacKay, report to your unit at,” wherever it was.

“and you’re in.” And then I got my call up notice not long after, I suppose a couple of days after that saying, “Report to Hawthorn drill hall at 0800 hours on 31st December.” And I was in from then on so there was no choice about it whatsoever.

Well

the army wouldn’t provide a meal for you I suppose because they didn’t know exactly where we’d be. I think we had been to Hawthorn drill hall beforehand and had a medical exam and then we turned up and they sort of gave us another one and all the tests and swore us in. And then they transported us from there out to Royal Park after a couple of hours. Just how

we were transported I’m not quite sure because there might have been a hundred and fifty, two hundred at the drill hall because we were all rookies. So …

I was just about eighteen, eighteen and two months almost.

That’s right, yes.

Some of the chaps that had been

on the air force reserve, who’d been suitable thought, “When the war comes, then I want to join the air force and that’s the way to go.” But then later, in 1942, the army wanted to get all the CMF blokes, the ones like me, with the V or Q or whatever …

See, all the chockos, as we were called, weren’t allowed to be sent overseas. We could only defend Australia and Australian territories and we weren’t supposed to go any further than that. So the army wanted us to sign up and join the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. Well they were having visions and memories of the First

War over in France. Said, “No, you’re not old enough. You can’t sign your papers to join up. I’ll have to sign them for you and I won’t sign to join the AIF, but you can join the air force.” And he was very … Because he was thinking of the mud and everything else in France, thought the air force would be a cleaner life and so on. And just on that, my brother was older and he was

able to transfer over to the AIF with no trouble at all. But for the youngsters like myself, we had to get parental signature on that.

Well I should say Dad was there and he knew that it was coming and so they said, “Well the country

needs you and that’s it.” And I think Dad was always pro England and he’d say, “You’ve got to join up.” But he wouldn’t sign the papers for the AIF where if I had said I wanted to join the navy, I don’t know whether he would have signed the papers for that, but I’ve never been anything to do with the sea and so I had no inkling

on that one. But because he knew that the air force was coming around looking for air crew members he said yes, he’d sign papers for the air force.

Well I think the living conditions were better and when the air force went into action it was all over in say

five or six hours. Whereas with the army in France, they were there for several weeks in mud and slush and things like that. And the same thing when they were in the islands, when they were up around New Guinea, the conditions were pretty terrible and with it raining all the time. And one of the news coverage came back with the fighting in Europe, rain

and having to footslog through mud and, you know, well past your ankles and so on. Conditions were extremely primitive and very hard going. So I think the ones that went up to New Guinea did wonderful job. But I don’t know that I would have been able to cope with that so it was

just as well that I did end up in the air force, I think.

Oh, I think there was always a bit. “Oh, the chockos (UNCLEAR),” and so on. But that was about all,

that someone was a chocko. I think a lot depended too on the blokes because the AIF blokes were a lot older and they’d see us. Well when we went up to the Nagambie Road, the place we were at, they would treat you as Boys Town because we were all eighteen going on nineteen or thereabouts so they referred to our camp

always as Boys Town. And even in the army magazine that I get, people still write in and say, “Yes, I was a member of Boys Town.” And I went over to the 24th Battalion early in 1942 and I was a member of such and such a platoon, or 6th Platoon, or something like that. But they always referred to Boys Town. But the Nagambie Road was

the CMF camp and Puckapunyal was the AIF camp. And there was always … I don’t know if there was any antagonism in Seymour, quite possibly there may well have been with the tough AIF blokes being on leave the same night as the chockos. But suppose I went in there at

night, I can’t remember because we didn’t get a great deal of leave. You weren’t out every night by any means. I remember there’d be stunts going on at night or possibly we’d be on duty, because being in the 6th Platoon we had telephones to man and so on, so it had to be manned twenty-four hours a day so there’d be always somebody on the phone. Usually two –

someone to man the switchboard and also somebody else there to take any messages and do any errands that were required.

Yes, I was an insurance clerk with Western Insurance Company in Melbourne.

Oh, I think most probably hit the roof because they had said

earlier in the piece, “Jeff Ross is the re-insurance clerk and he’s going into camp before long. Gilbert Bell is next in line and he’ll be in camp before long because Gilbert’s about twenty-one.” Jeff was twenty-two or twenty-three and because I was almost eighteen they said, “Oh, it’ll be a long time before you get called up.” And so they

made me re-insurance clerk after being with the firm for roughly about eight months. And then lo and behold in two months’ time I’m not with then. So I don’t know, they must have got some of the girls, female staff to come in and work there. I went back after the war a couple of times, and then the company was bought out by somebody else so I lost track

with the people who I used to work with in Melbourne.

I don’t think so, no. But I think they were told that when somebody went into camp, that job had to be available for them when they came out. And that meant that for blokes like me who were well down the list when it came to

looking for a job afterwards, well if Gilbert Bell came back and Jeff Ross came back and somebody else came back – we were all re-insurance clerks – well there’d only be a position there for one bloke, not for three of us. So I said, “Well it’s not much point in wanting to go back to insurance work.” I wasn’t really rapt in it. And I knew that

at Echuca Dad wanted staff and I was interested in becoming a linotype operator so I went to Melbourne Tech College and did a compositors’ course and started off as a linotype operators’ course with the idea of going back to Echuca. And when I was at Melbourne Tech they said, “Oh, you’ll be eligible for the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme.” And I said, “What the Dickens is that?” And they said, “You do training

and the government pays a percentage of your wages to your employer. And in time that gradually gets less as you become more efficient and the employer will pay more, a bigger percentage of your wages.” So that was the help the employers got after it was over. But I don’t think they got a great deal of help while it was on.

Well I don’t know because they had a few girls there at the time I was there. And then Mum died in October so I had a week off or a fortnight off. That took us up to the end of November. And then a month later Japan came in and a couple of weeks after that I was in camp. So it’s sort of all a bit of a blur

really as to what happened at that stage. And what happened after as to who would have taken over my job, because I did have a couple of young chaps started while I was there. But of course they would have gradually gone on to become eighteen and then they would have gone into camp. So the boss could see that he would be replacing any young men

and he got into getting more female staff.

When that came through I would have been in Melbourne at my aunt’s place opposite Scotch College. I suppose I realised it would be on for young and old.

And as I’ve had a notice from the … I don’t think I had had a notice from the army at that stage. I think it must have came within the next week or so. Although I remember my brother talking about, “If you’re going into the army, why not got for the signals and try and learn morse code?” So it must have been some inkling that I would be called up. And I think

that once we heard that, it was, “Well it looks like I’ll be in the army before very long.” But that’s about all I can remember of it. It’s so far back and I haven’t really given it much thought.

Oh they were pretty good. I think mainly they wanted to … If you’ve got two arms and two legs and two eyes you went and that’s about it. Because they used to make some wisecracks of people that got in. But hearing seemed to be okay and eyesight was good and general health right. And I think at that stage, most of the young people, their health was pretty

good. I think we all played a bit of sport, tennis or cricket or football. And there weren’t the attractions around to make people out of shape like wrong eating habits. I think everyone used to … If they had food on the table it was nutritious food, there was no junk food

about. I suppose the only junk food would be pies, and there’d be hot dogs at footy matches and things like that and that’d be about … Or you’d get to be not much in the way of chips. If you wanted a packet of chips you’d go to a fish and chip shop and pick a packet up as we used to at Black Rock. Walk up to Black Rock, village which was about half a mile away from Grandma’s,

pick up a penny’s worth of chips and they’d wrap it up and then we’d walk back along the beach and eat chips. But that was only once a fortnight or once a month or something like that that we’d do that. So we didn’t eat all the wrong things, so I think we were in pretty good shape really. The army knocked us into better shape with marches and things like that. And we’d go do twenty-five miles a day, gradually

work up to that, and also carrying the gear, whatever it was, your rifles and pack and side-arms. And if we were a six, possibly a sig [signals] radio equipment as well. But generally I think our condition was reasonable. And then of course the army did a good thing and

they knocked us into shape.

Beg pardon?

Well infantry training really. Rifle shooting, marching and some drill, parade ground drill and things like that. But mainly the basics for fighting. And we would go out on exercises out

in the country where we would be either the enemy or somebody else would be attacking us in a farmhouse or around the creek where we’d be taking cover. And so we learned various things on that. And we’d be learning radio procedure, and one of the things was that you weren’t

to swear within so many yards of a radio transmitter because they … Apparently the civilians used to say, “There’s some terrific bad language coming over the radio.” Well I don’t know how come because the frequency that we were on wasn’t the commercial frequency unless someone had altered either the transmitter that was in use or

some freak transmission. Because we’d find that sometimes. The radios that we had didn’t have a great range. They were great monsters. We used to refer to them as a heap of junk because they weighed twenty-eight pound and sometimes you’re stuck with those for three or four days having to cart them round, and the damn things wouldn’t work. And we’d test them. I remember one time we were

down at Caloundra. We were going on this exercise. We were known as the umpire signaller. They’d have an exercise and then they’d have a group of people, officers, to act as umpires, to say, “Yes, that bloke was supposed to be shot. He’s out,” and so and so. And we’d be his signaller and we’d have to report back. Well on this particular day we

had … Bill had his set there, on his back, and he just spoke and I was about six or eight feet away, “Yes, Bill, I can hear you okay. Over.” And we got a mile away and I couldn’t hear a thing and it was just a dead loss. So I stuck with that thing for three days, time like that, and couldn’t do anything with it. And you couldn’t just

sort of leave it somewhere because the army was very fussy on it’s equipment and everything had to be accounted for. In fact when we were on the troop train coming up from Bonegilla up to Maryborough, somewhere or other they had to break the train, I think, for some reason or other and they lost the telephone, a Don 5 telephone. And it went

on for ages before … All the red tape to explain why that telephone got lost and where it went. I don’t know whether they ever recovered it or not. But it was linked with one end of the train in case there was an aircraft attack. And they had a couple of anti-aircraft guns, Bren guns, mounted on tripods so that they could warn someone that there was an attack. And they had

this phone at one end, somewhere possibly down in the compartments it could have been, that were down the end another telephone to warn people to take cover or lie down in the compartments because of attacking aircraft. But the phone went astray and they had a lot of trouble trying to explain how it got lost.

Sorry?

Oh certainly, because…

Well it was pretty ancient because

I think the rifle that I had had a date stamp on the butt and I think it was 1917, that would be what it is. But they didn’t have any equipment at all because, you see, the army had said, “There won’t be any wars. No need to do things.” And they managed to get the AIF equipment, but even with the AIF it was going overseas.

They didn’t have rifles to start off with, they had broomsticks to practice. Just shoulder arms and things like that.

Well I think we got rifles, but they were pretty old. But we were further down the list for, you know … The most important ones were the AIF and they got equipment, slightly newer equipment. But I think the army

unit that I went to, they had Bren gun carriers. I must … I don’t know how they got onto those, but that was their most modern equipment. We had old wirelesses. We had flags left over from 1914. 1914–1918, they were a white flag with a blue cross and we had to learn semaphore, A B C D, and wave all these damn things around. Stand up somewhere where you

could be seen and hopefully not get shot at. And also we had Lucas lamps, which were like a miniature searchlight. You’d sit them up on a tripod and they had a sighting on there. And when we were around Lake Hume they sent someone up on one side of the lake and then they went across to the other and they set them up there. And the idea was that they pass the first one, a message,

he had to send that by morse code over to the next one. He had to receive it and write it down, pass it onto his mate who had another light set. Then cross back to the other side of the weir and so on. He was across the weir. And that was in morse code and that was the Lucas lights. And that was a small lamp with about three inches

circumference – a very bright light. And it had batteries, I think they were twelve 1.5 batteries in the box and it seemed to weigh about half a ton. And that was our signalling equipment, the flags, the Lucas lights and the radio. I’m surprised they didn’t give us carrier pigeons, but still. I think some

of the aircraft carriers carried carrier pigeons and they managed to let them go, but we didn’t have anything like that. We had Lewis guns, and they were ones that were in use during the First War and they were not very accurate. And they gradually got onto Bren guns, which

were a lot more accurate. And then they got onto Boys anti-tank rifles, which fired a round about a fifty calibre round. And much later again, they got onto Thompson submachine guns and some of them had that, but that wasn’t in the initial training. That sort of came in when they went up to closer to New Guinea

they got that equipment. But even the Don Rs, the despatch riders, they were given side-arms. And one had a .45 but no ammunition and one of them had a .38 calibre and no ammunition. So these blokes went on the scrounge and the Yanks were round about and they got

.45 ammunition from there, but the Yank ammunition was rimless whereas the .45 revolver required one with … well a round that had a rim on it. So the chaps got a pair of pliers and crimped the so-called rim of the ammunition that he had got so that it would fit in in the chamber.

And we went down to the river at Beerburrum and we did a bit of target practice, unofficial, at the railway bridge. And this chap pointed his revolver, pulled the trigger, “Where the hell did that go?” A channel about that far down the barrel and it got stuck. So then he had to come home and try and get the damn thing

out because every now and then they’d have an inspection of arms and so on and he’d have to produce this. Well if you produced a gun that you couldn’t see through it he would have been in quite a bit of hot water. So our equipment was not at all good. One of my air force mates who was also in the army beforehand was up around Townsville and they were given, I think, ten round of ammunition

and they were told the Japs were coming – they were expected that night. I said, “Ten rounds?” “Well that’s all we’ve got to give you is ten rounds of ammunition.” So Australia was very poorly defended when … very poorly off in regard to the arms and material that it had.

Well I don’t know that we would have talked about it

a great deal because we said, “Well we all know the hole they’re in,” because there were a number of chaps, especially in the 6th, had been in the CMF for a number of years and they had done camps at other places. And they would say, “Remember when we camped at Trawool? We had horse and drays and things like that and everything had to be carted like that, with the horse

and drays.” And then they gradually got some motor transport and so on. So they realised that things were in a pretty bad shape.

Well at some stage or other I had a sleeping bag because … And I think I would have had that while we were in camp at Seymour.

And other times we’d go out and camp overnight and the sleeping bag had to be waterproof. And you gradually learnt that when you slept on a hill you started off at a certain point there and you gradually moved. You turned over a few times and you had to watch where you put your boots because you’d wake up in the morning, “Where are my boots?” And the boots are three or four foot further up the hill because you had moved down. So you

had to put your boots in the sleeping bag with you so that you still had them when you woke up. Also a bit of shelter for the rain, too, because you wouldn’t want to wake up in the morning and find your boots full of water. But we had a lot of outdoor exercises and some of them we managed to get a bit of shelter. And I remember one night we were on

an exercise round about – somewhere near Eumundi – and I slept under a truck there. And that was a steel bodied truck and that was the sig office and we had blokes clumping in with messages to be passed over the switchboard and onto somewhere else. And the steel boots

on a steel floor about that far above your head weren’t conducive for a good night’s sleep. Also, it must have been very unlevel ground because I realised that if I moved down a little bit, sort of shuffled myself down in the sleeping bag, I upset the balance. And there was a hole at the other end and my head would go up, but I’d hit my head on the diff [differential] of the truck. So I had to sort of stay in the uncomfortable position all night. So I was very

pleased when daylight came, or time for me to go on shift and work the switchboard. So I got out of that one. Somebody else was sleeping in the front of the truck. The vehicle would have been what’s known as a Small Blitz Buggy, a four by four, just with two seats in the front and a very small tray at the back and

canvas to cover it. So that was about the best way we could manage. We had to be somewhere around to be on call to take over the switchboard when the time came. I think we’d do something like four hours on and four hours off, that was why you had to be on hand.

Oh, pretty good because I learnt a lot from the older blokes. Some of them were a bit hard to get along with, a bit prickly I would say, because some of them were actually past the age required for AIF so I think

they gradually got phased out after a number of years. Where, I think, when the unit went up to New Guinea, I think these ones were relegated to a job somewhere else in Australia with a battalion. Either it was a storeroom job or stores clerk or something like that because they had been … As a stores clerk in the Q [Quartermaster’s] store or

something like that looking after all the equipment that they had. And they thought, “Pop’s too old to go. He’s thirty-five. He’s too old to go on to New Guinea. Send him down south.” And so that’s … Most of them were pretty good. I’ve met up with some of them from time to time when I go down to Melbourne. They have … Occasionally I’ve

been down there on Anzac Day and other times I’ve been down there … I think it’s the second Sunday in September and they usually have a march at the Shrine [of Remembrance] and they form up there and I look around and see if there’s any of the old signal platoons still there. And then we march up and have a service at the Shrine. But they’re gradually falling by the wayside. We’re all getting to the stage

where we’re gradually falling off our perch.

I’m not quite sure on that, I think so. I seem to remember seeing some there, but I don’t think it was quite then because it was December, 31st December when I

went to Hawthorn, then we went to Royal Park, which was just another suburb. Then we went up to Nagambie Road, which was Seymour, about sixty miles away. I don’t think the Yanks were there then, but I think they came in a bit later as we went from Nagambie Road up to Bonegilla. I think the Yanks were beginning to arrive then.

Sorry?

Well that seemed to cover most of our training because we were doing stints out in the country and then we were doing night-time work around Bonegilla and being equipped to

go north. And our sig training was to do with laying telephone cables and so on and looking after the cables and the telephones and how to set them up so that when we got to a campsite it wasn’t as though we were all nice and handy. Because headquarters would be here and they’d say, “Right,

here’s a roll of cable.” It’d have a mile of cable on there. “There’s a roll of cable, here’s your telephone, go and find A Company.” “Where is it?” “Oh, it’s out there somewhere.” So you’d wander off with this cable. There’d be two of us. And our cable laying equipment was … to say it was primitive is scarcely the word. We had a nice big drum about that wide, a hole

through the middle. And what do we do? We cut down a tree and put that … that was to actually hold the cable on. So then we had to walk out. Well that was okay if it was someone about my size, but if I got someone like Pop who was six foot and his hands are up here and I’m down there, the thing kept sliding down onto me and I’d try and hold it up, or Pop would lower his end down. Well it’s a bit hard for a six foot bloke to be hunched down and carry that thing round. So they tried to match us

sometimes. But we’d wander off and we’d come across a company. “Are you A company?” “No, we’re Charlie Company.” “Oh, where the hell …?” “Oh, A’s over there.” “Oh bugger.” So we’ve got to go around and go back again. Then we had to connect the phone up. Well of course we only had one cable going out and, as you know with your phone, it’s got two connections. And one is the earth return so then you’d have the earth wire, well you’d

put that on and you had a steel peg you put into the ground. And it was dry. You had to wet that thing to get a good connection back to the switchboard. Well of course we would have water in our water bottles, but we liked to save that to drink. So the only other way was this water that we all carry and we just had to stand up there and piddle

on it and that gave us a good connection. But then, of course, in a couple of days’ time pull that … Ahhh, oh well too bad. And pull the thing up and take it back. But that made a good connection to get back to the switch board. Being on the switchboard was interesting because at times … I remember being at Eumundi and they had a phone connection onto the main exchange

so that at one stage, I think a brigadier from a brigade rang up, I don’t know just whereabouts he was. And he wanted to get onto the CO. So that was okay, I plugged him through. And the CO also wanted a couple of his offsiders, various … captain of A Company and B Company and so on. So I had to plug them all in, so I had them all lined up. But usually the thing was with the

Don 5 they had a little buzzer on it. And when they were finished they tapped the buzzer and that would operate the switchboard and we knew that they were finished. We weren’t allowed to listen in – or we weren’t supposed to. But this meant that with all those in there, if anybody hit the button I wouldn’t hear it. So I had to listen and waited till such time as there was no-one saying anything and then I would

have to say, “Have you finished? Have you finished? Have you finished?” And then I’d pull the plug out. But I had all these … about … it would be four, possibly five company commanders and the CO and the brigadier out there all on the one line able to talk together. So I was quite pleased that I managed to get that. Usually it’d be … maybe the sig. officer would say, “Sig, would you get me the CO?”

Or, “Would you get me Captain Isherwood of A Company?” “Yes sir, right.” And I’d turn the handle and plug in and ring A Company and ask for Captain Isherwood. And they’d go and get him and he’d come in and then I’d say, “Oh, the CO wants the captain.” Or, “The sig sergeant would like to have a word

with you.” And then I’d leave them to it and they’d yarn. And when they’re finished they’d just press the buzzer. The buzzer also had another thing too, that people could use that as Morse code so that if the phone connection was crook they could just send that as a little buzzer and send it by Morse code and we could take that down.

Yes. I was very slow with that because I didn’t have a good

grounding in the first place. I had to learn morse code when I went into the air force and we were supposed to get up to an efficiency of twenty-two words a minute, and I think I only got up to eighteen words a minute. So the standard wasn’t quite good enough. Because I found after the war … I used to wander past the police station and I’d hear the Morse code going there and I’d –

beep, beep … I couldn’t remember enough of it so I’d get lost after a while. But it was beeping in code I would imagine because you could hear this thing coming out just as if you watch a film, it says, “RKO.” It used to come out as dots and dashes as Morse code, the introduction with the first on the screen with the radio tower and so on. We used to be able to read some of them much faster than

others.

That could be so. But I think you need a bit of grounding. With the way it was done, usually there was a group of four or five letters in a word so you’d

only get four letters. You wouldn’t get say a ten letter word coming at you. It would be all divided up into small things so it would be easier … pretty brief, well not necessarily a brief message. And you have forms and you’d just write down the group of letters as they came over.

Well they were pretty good as sergeants and corporals because the sig sergeant was very good. And later I understand he got his commission and went onto another battalion. And our corporal was also quite good. I think he … I’m not sure what his civilian life was, but I know they called him

at one stage when we were at camp near Eumundi on the hilltop and the road was pretty sloppy. And they said, “Oh, Corporal Hood, would you get a team of men and put corduroy down there on that mud hole down there where everybody gets bogged at that dip in the hill.” So Bob had to get out and get his men to cut trees down and put logs in there and fill up the mud hole so that vehicles wouldn’t

get bogged. And one of the things in Melbourne, I was down there in September and Bob was there and, “Oh, Corporal Hood, you came from Taradale.” And he looked amazed that I could remember the place he came from because going down from Echuca by train we used to go through Taradale. And I remember if he had lived at wherever it is, something like that, it wouldn’t have mattered, but

he was intrigued that after 1942 or 1943, the last time I would have seen Bob. And this was some time in the 1960s, I suppose when I … ’60s or even later than that when I saw him and I could remember where he came from. And he was very impressed.

I don’t think so. I never saw any. But then I suppose we sort of stayed together as a bunch, we’d go somewhere as a group. I remember sometimes, some of our blokes, Bob Hood and a couple of the other older blokes would say, “Oh, we’re going to sneak out to the pub, we’re going to the pub over at Mangalore.” So we’d slip out of camp, go through the back fence somewhere and go

over to the pub. And they’d say, “You can’t have a beer, you’re not old enough.” “Oh well, sarsaparilla,” or something like that, they brought it out and you can have that. “Okay, well it’s time we headed back for camp.” So off we’d go back and go back through camp. I did have a wet canteen that was open several nights for the ones that like to have a drink, but most of the blokes in my tent

didn’t drink.

Were there …?

Not really. They reckon that anyone that went in there to the pub would usually have a beer. But they’d mix up … You’d say, “I’ll have a sars [sarsaparilla], thanks.” Or, “I’ll have a double sars.” “Yeah, sure.” And no, no trouble at all. Nothing fancy, I mean, that generation was all ninety-nine per cent

beer drinkers. And I think there was very few who got … Wine wasn’t fashionable at all. Australians weren’t, by any means, into wine at all until much later.

I think the blokes in the

CMF got … I think they would have sat for exams at some stage or other. But a lot depended on their qualities of leadership. Because some people would have it. They could have gone in as a private and then … Well under the CMF thing they were mostly saved, but under actual battle conditions, when a sergeant get killed and a corporal gets killed, well instead of being a lot of

headless blokes, then someone would take over and says, “Right, well you do this and I’ll do that,” and so on. They find out the ones that had natural leadership and they were promoted rather smartly. And I think the Australian ability to think has been, to the blokes in the army and also in the air force, whereas a lot of

other servicemen … Once all the top blokes go, that’s it, like a mob of headless WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s. They just don’t know what to do. But our blokes have always been better trained.

Oh I think it’s just the Australian initiative actually,

that they get out and do things. And it’s shown up quite often. In one of the books I was reading not long back of chaps over in Timor and the … I think it was General Cosgrove was there, and he went down to see this section who was stuck out in the sticks somewhere and he got talking to the blokes. And the blokes said, “Could

we have a medical officer now here?” “Why?” Well the chap said, “Well one of the Indonesians came up the other day and said, ‘My wife’s pregnant, she’s giving birth.’ And he said, ‘I helped her out and that’s okay, but there’s somebody else there and she’s going to be a breech birth and I don’t know anything about that. So can I have a medical officer down there?’” Well

I think most of the blokes … This was I think just an army section. And the Indonesians had become pretty friendly with these blokes and vice versa and so when the Indonesians need help they came to the Aussie and asked for assistance. And this bloke was able to do something which wasn’t in the ... not dealt with in the army rule book. And then of course a bigger problem looked like coming up and he was

calling for help. So when the General Cosgrove was there and this chap spoke out and said, “Can I have the MO [Medical Officer] down here for this reason?” And, “Yes, I’ll see what I can do about that.” So I think … And a lot of the blokes, in a lot of cases, they would have said, “There’s nothing we can do about it. I don’t know anything about it,” and just let it go at that. But I think Australians

have been able to rise to the occasion and do a lot of things that haven’t been expected of them, and for that reason they’re very highly regarded.

Oh yes, I was proud. Especially being a member of the 24th particularly. Because it had a pretty good history in the First War

and they were a good mob of blokes to be with, so I was proud to call those blokes my mates.

Well it wasn’t too bad for army tucker. I mean, you didn’t have a choice. The army set-up, of course, because it was so sudden, they just took over

areas and said, “Right, build cookhouses and dining rooms.” And they were more or less just sheds and there were latrines out the back and toilets out there. And they built toilets and they were something like six or eight holes there and they just sat there. Sometimes the food was crook and I remember at one stage I got a belly ache in the middle of the night and I got up and staggered over to the

toilet and it was just about full. And blokes were sitting there in their overcoat and they were asleep because they thought, “Oh good, I can go now.” And you’d just get up and, “No,” sit back and drop off to sleep again. And they were there and that was an occasion when the tucker wasn’t quite so good. But there was no choice, that’s it, and take it or leave it. And of course you

had to keep going.

Well I had resigned myself to life in the army until this thing came up about joining the air force. And well not so much joining the

air force, but joining the AIF. And wrote back to Dad and Dad said, “No, I won’t sign your papers to join the AIF.” So I said, “Well, what happens then?” Well that means I’ll go so far with this unit and they’ll say, “Right, you can’t go any further.” But then the chaps that went into Brisbane, the ones that had been on the air force reserve, they made enquiries and they got the air force people

to come out and conduct the aptitude test. And I went down to that and said, “Now this is on, can I join the air force? Would you sign the papers for the air force?” “Yes, I’ll sign the papers for the air force.” So that was that. But we were … The idea was getting out of the army was to join aircrew, not so much join the air force. But that was the government thing. All of our blokes out of the army to join

aircrew. And they didn’t say it, but I think it was because of all the losses over in Europe at that stage. But even that was 1942, the end of 1942, and they had pretty heavy losses then. Well I mean, ’43 and ’44, they became a lot heavier. So they needed a lot more replacement blokes so they got us to

transfer.

Well I think it was … Well if we go as a unit then we’ll all stay together and we can go to all sorts of places. Whereas if we just remain as a chocko unit then we can only go up to

New Guinea. We won’t be able to go further. Because the AIF went overseas, over to Egypt and to all places. Some of them went to, actually over in England around about … Not long after Dunkirk and like that. So that not that we … The army sort of had visions of that by 1940 odd, but they said,

“Well we go to New Guinea and then we were going to go up to Japan eventually. And so that’s what each of you will be able to do, so we’ll ship the whole unit.” Instead of saying, “Well no, you can, you can’t.”

Well I think there must have been a

bit of pressure from the officers to join it. And I think most of them tried to … I don’t know how. Well I think the ones … even the ones that were … would have been accepted for the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force], but the CO wouldn’t let them go. They joined the AIF

and they realised that that was the thing to do. And so one of the chaps I knew, the chap who was the CO’s Don R, he joined the AIF and I used to … I write to him every so often. And he’d explain, “I haven’t been able to write for a long time, things have been …” Well he wouldn’t have said ‘hairy’, but that’s what the expression would be

today. And so on. But he’d say, “We’ve been a bit busy.” And that would just pass the censor. Or he’d say, “The worst conditions we ever saw on the mainland are chicken feed compared with what we had done here.”

Not a great deal because we’d only read what was in the papers. And of course, we didn’t see papers every day because we were in camp. But we just had a fair idea and possibly we might have got word of friends who had been in … family friends or someone a bit older who was already over there in

England in training and so on. Douglas was killed flying or somebody else was killed over Germany or something like that. But apart from that, not really.

Not a great deal really. Well there were a few publications. In New Guinea there was what they called Guinea Gold

and that was a little paper that was put out. And I think there was one put out in Darwin area as well. But that just gave us a bit of an inkling as to what was going, where people had landed and things like that. But my period of time, actually, on active service for the air force was fairly short in relation to the

war time. I mean, that was … We did a tour of operations, that was what they … The ground staff went up or were attached to a unit and they would go north for maybe two or three years. But they said that we would do a tour of operation. But nobody even knew just how long a tour of operation was. Sometimes some of the places over in Europe, I think they used to consider a tour of operations was

thirty ops [operations]. I don’t know what they considered out here to be a tour of ops. Because I got matched with a crew in late March and I was there till, I think I did the last operation

about two days before Christmas. And I was out at a movie up there not far from camp and I got back from that and mates said, “Hey Mac, they’ve been paging you on the radio, they want you.” “What the hell do they want me for?” “Oh, you’re going back onto leave tomorrow, you’ve got to pack up.” So I had to pack up and dig somebody out of the orderly

room to sign the papers and go and take whatever gear I had – a revolver and a few other things – and hand them in to the service policeman. And he had to type a list out and sign it and so on. And then I left there the next day and they said, “Mac, we’ll get you home for Christmas.” And that’s how it started. So I just got down to Brisbane on Christmas Eve and so on.

Well I think he realised that the living conditions would be better. I mean, he used to say, Oh, those bombers,” you know, “do a good job,” or, “They’re not real safe,” or something like that.

But he mainly … The living conditions, you’re there and your living conditions are okay and then you’ve got a little bit of hell, maybe five or six hours or something like that and then you’re back to good living conditions. Whereas the AIF could be weeks of horrific conditions and very hard living and so on and no fresh tucker and things like that, no mail

or anything like that. Whereas in England of course, the blokes used to say, “Right, we’re not flying tonight.” “Okay, down to the pub.” And off they’d go and they’d possibly have a sing-along down at the pub or they’d get leave, they’d go off and go to London or meet up somewhere and go up to maybe somewhere else round England and enjoy leave. But our conditions with 18th

Squadron, we used to get four nights’ leave every three months. And this was peculiar to 18 Squadron because it was a Dutch squadron. Chaps who went up to an RAAF squadron, something like 2 Squadron or 1 Squadron, they were up there for their period of tour of operations and they didn’t get any leave till they came back. But they got … if they got back they got all their leave.

Whereas we’d get a fortnight’s leave at the end of three months and at the end of another three months we’d get another fortnight, so that we got a month taken off our leave at the time. So some of the chaps only managed to get one lot of leave and then they were reported missing possibly the next time they went out. Or in fact one chap was due to go on leave on Saturday and we went out on Friday

and that was that. So it was just the luck of the game. Some, they did quite well. We had a couple of chaps with us who had changed over from the AIF who had been over in Egypt and they thought, “Oh, the air force must be safer than the army,” and it wasn’t as it turned out.

Well I don’t know that I’d say I was excited, but, “Dad’s not going to sign AIF papers, sign the army papers. Oh, well that’ll have to do then.” And that’s it.

Well again there wasn’t any army one. I think the air force wanted to know mechanical

abilities and things like that, whereas the army said, “Right, you’ve got two arms, two legs and two eyes and you can carry a rifle and you can shoot,” and that’s it. “You can shoot and you can march and that’s all we need.”

Oh well I think so many of us were … I think there were eight in our tent and I think all of us

applied to join the air force. So … And I think just about all the ones in the sig platoon wanted to join the air force. So I don’t know just how many of us from the sig platoon actually ended up in the air force, but there were quite a number.

Well then we went down to Initial Training School and that was to learn about air force ways of doing things. And they put a lot of emphasis on air force law because they reckoned that there was a possibility that we could become officers and therefore we would need to know air force law as to what to do and how to conduct oneself, and if there was an infringement on something,

how to go about it. And I feel there was a lot of red tape really, it was (UNCLEAR) under the sun. I feel I nodded off quite often. The place we were at was Somers and that had been … I don’t know whether it was specially built or whether … They used to have a Lord Mayor’s summer camp and after the war it was Somers, but I don’t know whether

it was in use for that beforehand or not. But they had windows on the west and I was sitting on the western side and it was February, beginning of March, and still pretty hot and airless in there. And when you’re listening to a very dry subject and after having twelve months out in the open it was very hard

to keep awake and concentrate on the various dry subjects. Others were mathematics for navigation purposes and things like that to sort of sound out the ones who had a good mathematical brain and would be capable of working out distances and things like that. And others

whose eyesight was particularly good – they used to give us eyesight training as to what we could see and close-up things on vision and so on. And also how our eyes were for seeing if something … extreme angles over this side or that side while we’re concentrating and looking straight ahead. So that all had a bearing. And then after we’d been there for

five or six weeks then they paraded us up, singularly, to an interview and then they told us what they’d selected us … as our mustering as to pilot or navigator or wireless operator.

I think they said, “What would you like to be?” And of course everyone said, “I want to be a pilot.” And I think the blokes who were five foot six

or anything above five foot six had some chance, but anyone who was like me, five foot four, didn’t have much chance. I think some of them did get to it, but not too many.

I said I would be a pilot, but they laughed it off. But they looked at you and said, “Oh, something is not suitable for a pilot course,”

or something like that, “and we recommend you to be a wireless operator. So then, you’ll go to a wireless air gunner’s course or wireless training school.” So then we went off to … Some of us went up to Parkes, some of us went to Ballarat and I’m not sure where the others went to. And we were up there for six months trying to learn wireless skills, which

meant morse code, and also as we graduated a bit they had vehicles with a radio loop on the top and they had a radio inside and they’d go out around the countryside. And they’d have base headquarters and they’d have to receive messages and log them and so on. And then after they got you that then they’d have aircraft that were flying and they would do

much the same sort of thing, only in the aircraft. And we were out at Parkes and in the summer time that would have been pretty crook because when the ground heats up the air becomes pretty bumpy, and these old aircraft weren’t flying very high and I think they found all the potholes all around the place and they dropped into them. In fact one of them … or a couple of types of

aircraft they were referred to as percolators because they reckon the poor old air gunner spent half his time perking. And so that’s got that. But I never graduated to that because I got this wog and put me back a couple of courses and then they decided to close Parkes as a wireless training school. And I think they put that down to

air navigation there so that they could do their navigation course there. And they took all the wireless trainees … I think the ones that graduated went on, but the rest of us I think they said, “Right we’ll send you all down to gunnery school and make you all gunners. So that’s what they did. So they sent us all down to East Sale or Evans Head, which was another air gunnery

school. And I think Evans Head and also West Sale were originally bombing and gunnery, and by the time I got there it was only air gunnery schools. So we’d fly out over Bass Strait and do flight training from there.

Beg pardon?

No. I had … My special mate was Cec. We were in the same tent up in Darwin. There were six of us went up there together. There Pop Bruce, Cec Eastman, Tommy Barkley, Jim Cowry and Bernie Clark. Well Jimmy

Cowry was the first one we lost, and then Bernie Clark was flying with the CO and they were killed around about Merauke and Tommy Barclay was killed later in the same ship that Cec Eastman was on. So that of the twelve of us, there’s only three of us alive today.

I’ve seen Cec Eastman quite often when I go to Melbourne and we keep in touch, we get a Christmas card from him and his wife. And as for Pop, we don’t know, we’ve just lost touch completely with him. He was, I suppose you’d say, not one of our mob or not one of our class or something like that. But he must have gone into ground staff. He was, I think, a bootmaker

and he’d been in ground staff and then they said, “Right, we want aircrew and I think you should …,” or, “This will be a better life than fixing boots.” And he joined aircrew. So what happened to him when it was over, I think he went back to bootmaking, but just whereabouts I’m not sure.

No.

Well we got into … We learnt

about valves and a few things like that and how valves were interesting. And that would have been part of it. And then we got up to March, June, we were about five months I suppose, it would have been almost a nine month course so I got, I suppose, about half way

through it. And of course being crook put me back two courses so that sort of settled things rather. And then they closed the place down and shipped us all off so we never got much further with the radio part, which would have been very useful but it wasn’t worth following up after the war.

It helped quite a bit because we had quite a bit of rifle drill and so on. Especially when we went to Shepparton, the recruit place, and then later.

Well actually we didn’t do much radio training, just a voice training with the 108, which was a voice radio. So

that was … Well there’s the radio and that’s the microphone and that’s the button you press to talk into it and there you are, off you go. And that was all there was to it. The Morse code wasn’t much better than that. And if you did have a specific time to learn it … And I think most of the ones that had learnt it had done it in their spare time between camps before they went in, before the war actually started.

Well we were all in the same boat. We were all going down to Sale and off we went. And here we were at Sale … But the snag with the air force, it isn’t at all like the army, the army blokes were a unit and they stayed as a unit until they

possibly got injured, wounded, and they might have got shipped to another unit. But the air force was there, we had our mates when we were at Shepparton and then they said, “Right, you’re going down to Somers, you’re going to Bradfield Park, you’re go over to South Australia.” And then at Somers, you’re there and you’d have your mates and they’ll say, “Right, you’re going to be an air gunner – you’re going up to Parkes. You’re going to be a pilot – you go to Benalla.”

Or, “You’re going to somewhere else,” or someone was going to navigation school at Nhill or something like that. And so you’d lose that lot of mates. You’d get up at Parkes and you’d have another lot of mates and then you’d go down to Sale and you graduated from there. You go to PD [Personnel Depot] or ED as it was there, embarkation depot, and

then they’d say, “Right, we want six blokes to Darwin.” So they got those six blokes, and then they chose another six, and none of the mates I had before were in this lot of six. So we went up there, we had to start all over again. So that we were mates for just that period. I’ve only known Cec Eastman since 1944, whereas

some of the other ones when we were at Parkes I went to school with. A couple of them … I’ve got photos somewhere in the air force things of activities at Parkes. And… Oh, that’s ‘Trigger’ Gun; I went to school with ‘Trigger’. And that’s Charlie George, and Charlie was … They went to the same school as me. But I think ‘Trigger’ pick up an award somewhere and I think he died by

1945, after, I think, he came back from Europe. I’m not sure about Charlie George. And I don’t know about any of the others.

Well we did a series of various things there. They had an Anson aircraft and it had a single gun and a turret and we’d go out in that.

They had another aircraft, a single engine Fairey Battle. It used to tow a drogue along, a cylinder thing of something like silk a couple of hundred yards behind. When we were going up in the aircraft they’d give us, I think, three hundred rounds of ammunition. It may not have been three hundred; it may have only been a hundred. But they were dipped in a colour and they’d

make a note, “MacKay, you were given so many rounds of the colour red.” Maybe Eastman could have had blue, somebody else could have had black or green, or something like that. So we’d go up and they’d say, “Okay, first bloke into the tail.” And we’d toss. So, “Okay, go in first.” And he would fire off his rounds and then the next bloke would go in and fire off his and so on. And then they’d come back and they’d look at the target and

say, “Well we had so many rounds of …” What went through would leave a little red smudge or green or whatever. And we had so many … He’d say, “Oh, that would be so many percentage of that.” Some of the things, the Fairey Battle would fly straight and level, just along a couple of hundred yards out from us and we’d shoot at that. And other times it was what they call cross under

and it would fly above and we’d have to fly like that underneath and shoot up at it. Then another lot would be air to ground targets. And they had these targets spread out, I think they had ten targets all together and they would be about twenty-five yards square I suppose, sand. And they were all numbered and as we were

going on this they’d say, “Right Mac, you’ve got number one. Eastman, you’ve got number two.” Or he’d be number two and I’d be number three, Eastman would be number five and so on. And so then we’d fly around and shoot on those then they’d rake it over after … or before they’d rake it over. And they’d say, “Right, there’s a one there, a one there and a one there.” And they’d know the percentage on

the number of rounds that we’ve put in from the air.

Not really. I suppose we were pleased to be going up and flying at last. The snag with the Anson was whoever sat in what was called the co-pilot’s seat had the job of winding up the undercarriage. And it was

something like twenty odd turns to wind it up and it was a bit of a pain. It was a bit easier letting it down because you could just … and let it go and it’d get down. But you had to watch in the Anson because although it had a turret it also had turret movement, but it also had extra movement of the gun itself so that the turret would be still but the gun would move, so that if you had your head in the wrong place you could have the gun

coming in towards you, but you’d have the handles to raise it or lower it or whatever.

It was a Browning 30 calibre training weapon, very similar to what was in a lot of the English aircraft. We had been … We were given a lot of training on guns, on the ones in

use so that we could take them apart and know what happened, what certain stoppage was. That if it stopped up the front it might have been that the bullet was faulty. Or it could have been that the firing pin was broken and didn’t fire the round, so that you’d have to re-cock it and that would throw spent bullet out, and you put another one in and you’d

try it again. If it didn’t go, well it sounded as though it was the firing pin that was broken and in that case there was nothing that we could do about it in training, and we’d just have to bring it back to base and say, “I think the firing pin’s broken and the gun doesn’t work.” And most times I think they just said, “Oh, the gun doesn’t work and that’s that.” And then the armourers would get in and test it and find out. And apparently

then, by 1945 they must have been having a lot of the crews coming back and saying … I think I might have been training for air gunners at the time. And they said, “Well this is happening too often and there’s nothing wrong with the gun.” So they said, “Right, we’ll put an experienced air gunner in there and he can clean up the trouble if possible and it might stop some of this

wastage.

No.

Only in the air, yeah. I don’t recollect doing anything on the ground with them.

Well I’m not sure what the percentages were, I don’t think it shows up in my records. But I don’t think it

was, you know, two or three per cent. I mean, three rounds out of a hundred or something like that would be three per cent. But I don’t think anyone got much more than that. I suppose they could have, there could have been some eagle eye there that could calculate. Because you’ve got to allow each moving and on moving, so you’ve got to allow so much ahead for it.

Beg pardon?

Oh, I think so. But it was rather interesting later, during the war, we were … We’d be flying to Cape Cutcha and an enemy aircraft came up and flew parallel with us a long way off and someone fired at it … and it was more or less parallel with us. No good me having a go

because my gun would only swivel a certain direction. But later it came in closer and I go a few rounds. And then they interviewed us later and I said, “Well I saw flashes along the side.” And they said, “Well how do you explain that, because there’s no guns in that particular section where you saw flashes.” “Well I don’t know. I don’t know whether I hit him or not.” But one of the

mates went up to the crew room the next day and he was stickybeaking about and he said, “Oh, that aircraft that you had a go at, that had a go at you, they found it on the beach at Cape Cutcha the next day.” They went over and photographed it. So I don’t know whether I shot it down or whether he took off at the last minute and didn’t have a full tank of petrol and couldn’t make it back to base. So one of the mysteries of life. But I’d like to be able to look through records

and say, “Right, on such and such a date in June, we were attacked by a fighter around Cape Cutcha. What do the records show and so on. Because nowadays they can do all sorts of things like that.

Most times, yes. Sometimes it was pretty rough, but it was beautiful

country we were flying over. It’s the Lakes Entrance district along the Ninety Mile Beach and we were just a bit out to sea from there. And we’d fly along and then the Fairey Battle aircraft would drop it’s drogue target somewhere and they’d counter it. But they had certain sections of that beach which were prohibited to civilians

and not long after the war, it might have been 1945, apparently, a couple had gone down to this area and were in a prohibited area and an aircraft came in and dropped it’s drogue and the girl got her legs cut off because of the steel cable. And they were suing the government because of that. I don’t know whether they were actually in the prohibited area or

whether they were just outside it, and the chap who dropped the target, the steel cable, whether he dropped it a bit early. Just what happened, I never really heard the outcome of that court case. But there were dangers there. We did hear stories about the CO who … gunnery expert, used to say, “Oh, I’m getting jack of this job.

We’ll go duck shooting around there.” So he’d go duck shooting in the Avro Anson with a .303 machine gun. I don’t know what happened to the ducks because if he hit any, well that’d be it and they’d just land in the water and that’d be curtains for the duck. And no-one would row out later and get them. So we heard stories like that, but I never got any closer than hearing it.

Oh yes, I quite enjoyed that. When it was true and level going it was pretty good. But there were a few times … Later when I went back as a flying gunnery instructor, it was a slightly different time of the year and the co-pilot was in his seat, strapped in, and I was in mine and strapped in, but the trainees were in the back and he hit an air

pocket. Well the number of rounds in the ammunition box which was a long thing like that, only as long as a .303, but fairly deep. All the rounds came out of there and I turned round and I could see the pupils sort of half… about eight inches off their seats, sort of just sitting in mid air. So that was one of the things why they got the safety belts

for the air crew.

No. We just went out. They figured we had enough experience to cope. Then later, in January the next year, then they brought us in. But the instructors were

mainly on the ground, they were experienced blokes who had been overseas and done a tour of operations overseas and had come back. And they could tell us about it. Not that we got a great deal of chance to hear what they did.

Well I think the first one, I didn’t actually make contact directly with them, but we heard from our dispatcher, Arthur Newing, who had been sent into Brisbane, we were camped around about Jambalaya, outside of Brisbane. And he came in and it was getting dark by the time he was

coming back and he pulled up a truck and asked the driver, you know, if he could tell him where such and such a place was. And he said this black head popped out and he said, “I don’t know boss. I’m a stranger here myself.” And Arthur was pretty taken back and I think that was the first contact anyone from the army had had with the Yanks here. And that would have been 1942,

roughly about June, 1942.

Oh yes. Well they say they were overpaid, oversexed and over here. And that was always a sore point because they … Well they lived at a better rate than our blokes – they had better food and they had their canteens, their PX [Postal Exchange - American canteen unit] as they called it, the post exchange, had

more things on offer. Apparently they had nylons and things like that, which Australians couldn’t get, and I think they’d go in there and they’d come out and give the girls a pair of nylons, things that they couldn’t possibly get, chocolates and drinks and things like that that were just not on the shelf here, they had lots of. Their food was much better than ours

and with their meals I think they had a choice and they always had ice cream available. Well the army blokes never saw an ice cream until they went into town. And we were all on sorts of hard rations. Well sometimes there’d be fresh meat, but other times it would be … If we were on an exercise it would be bully beef, a can of bully beef and they’d say, “Right, that’s between the three of you.” So we’d tear the lid off and

open it up and cut it into three pieces. That was compressed meat and it must have had a lot of super ingredients in it to keep us going because it wasn’t like a camp pie or something like that, it was a pretty solid meal. I remember one time we marched from Eumundi down to Noosa and that was

about twenty-five miles up hill and down dale; we didn’t follow the road down. And we had absolutely had it by the time we got to the end and we were shipped off then and we went and had a swim. And I said, “Right, well here’s your tea, one tin of bully beef between three.” And I’m not sure if we had … I don’t remember having a cup of tea, but we had our water bottles. And we sort of picked up a bit after

having a swim and then they brought the trucks down to Noosa, which was a very sleepy little place in those days, and then they took us back to camp. But it was quite an event for our … March twenty-five miles up hill and down dale because it meant that … It was also trying to rain so we had anti gas capes on and we pulled the string on that and

it’d come down. And because we were Victorians and we weren’t used to humid weather, and when that came down like a plastic raincoat and so on, you just melted underneath it, you know, perspiring. And we said, “Oh, to hell with them, we’ll just keep going, it’s just a shower of rain, we’ll get wet and we’ll get warm and we’ll dry out as we go along, we won’t worry about the gas capes any more.” So we just … Well we didn’t throw them away, but

we just had them there and we rolled them up eventually and just had them. And we used to tie them and they stayed on the back of our necks with just a ripcord and we’d just pull the ripcord and they just sort of unrolled and then we just grabbed them and clipped them up and that was that. That was one thing too, somewhere along the track we did anti gas training. We did some in the air force; we did some

in the army. In the air force they had, I think, I’m not sure, I think it must have been in a room. But they seal it off and they put teargas in there and they told us to put on our gas masks and go in and so on. And they said, “Okay, do you think,” you know … “Ha, Ha, Ha, that was easy, wasn’t it? Okay, now you go back in there without your gas mask and you see the difference.” And that was the teargas and we all came out and our eyes were running and so on.

And we learnt a little bit about gases. But of course that was the most simple form of gas; a lot of others rose blisters on the skin and things like that. Well we didn’t make any contact with that. Some of the army blokes, I think, did have experience with those in training, but we weren’t involved

with anything like that.

Well the No. 1 was the … Each state had various places, so that the first place we went to was No. 1 Initial Training School and that was where we learnt all the basic

things about the air force. And then you’d go to another place and that might have been No. 1 Wireless Training and that would be possibly Ballarat. I think Parkes was No. 2 and somewhere else … I’m not sure who was No. 3. But each state had it’s own sort of place with it’s name on it

and so on. There was bombing gunnery school, well there was No. 1. The gunnery school was West Sale. Evans Head was also a bombing and air gunnery school and I think that might have been No. 2. I’m not sure about the numbers of the things, whether they tied in with the State. Victoria, No.

1, New South Wales, No. 2, Queensland, possibly, No. 4, South Australia, No. 5 and Tasmania. Because I didn’t get there so I don’t really know what the things were. They had things pretty well scattered. They had a Flying Training School at Benalla, I think that was elementary flying training school. Deniliquin in New South Wales had

I think was SFTS, special flying training school. And they would have had other flying schools in various states so that they sort of spread them all out. Some were over in Western Australia, round Pearce, I think. Others were Narromine in New South Wales was another flying school. And

I think Amberley was one and Maryborough was I think initial training school. Sandgate in Brisbane was a reception area where they first went into camp and also later became a discharge centre because I know a lot of blokes from Queensland said, “Oh

yes, I went down to Sandgate.” And we used to get the train out to somewhere and go out to Sandgate. And that’s been made into an old people’s home now. I’m not familiar with any of the places around Queensland because I started off in Victoria and did a course at Shepparton and then at Somers and then up to Parkes and then back to

Sale. And then Sale to Canberra and then up to Darwin and from Darwin back to Victoria, back to Melbourne Cricket Ground and Sale, and then up to Nhill, which was the armament and gas school, and also the instructors’ training course. And then of course I got out not long after that.

Well they were … For a lot of us it was our introduction to military flying. And they’d been around for quite some time because in about 1935 an aunt took me to an air force display at Flemington racecourse and I remember

the announcer saying, “This is Australia’s leading bomber aircraft.” And that was the Avro Anson and this was 1935. So in 1943, end of 1943, we were using it, which we regarded as rather antiquated aircraft. But they were doing coastal patrols in Ansons and I think somewhere I read a

report where someone on an Anson had sunk a submarine. So they used to fly up and down the coast because there were a lot of submarine reports. A number of ships were torpedoed off the Australian coast between … all round from Sydney down. The [HMAHS] Centaur was torpedoed not far off Caloundra and so on and so forth. They had aircraft doing surveillance over the waters outside the

coast.

Well we would fly … That was just air gunnery so that a flight with the three air gunners would be roughly about an hour and twenty-five minutes or something like that. And that would tail because three of us going up they would say, “Well

your duty today was quarter cross under, the three of you.” So that would take maybe an hour or forty-five minutes. I’ve got a log book over there, too, that I could refer to at some stage. But that’s just off the top of my head.

Well they had the … They were towing the drogue and we’d shoot at the drogue with

the tail because being only one turret and one gun at a time, he’d use up his number of rounds, and then the next bloke would hop in then the third bloke would hop in. And then when that was finished, the pilot would take us back to base at West Sale and somebody else would be up with another aircraft, another towing drogue aircraft and so on. So we

were out just about … only for about an hour or so each day, each time.

Well I didn’t really get round to think of that because we were all trainees. We all had our job to do and we never knew how

the ones we flew with, how they performed. You know, because we never talked … The next day we didn’t get there and say, “Oh, I got nine per cent,” or, “I got three per cent,” or something like that. We never seemed to discuss how we went.

The bullets, when they were clipped up, they’d come in a

thing about that round and they’d pick them up and they’d have a thing of paint and they just dipped the nose in, so about the first one half inch would be one colour paint. Red for one, yellow for another and blue or green or something like that, and that’s how they distinguished from each one because they’d say, “Well that was the first flight … to go from the first flight and the one who wrote red was

MacKay and the one who had green was …” They’d have a record and they’d match them up later. We only hoped that they got their things right because, “That’s your heap of ammo [ammunition], and that’s yours Smithy, and that’s yours Downsy,” and off she’d go. So I suppose we could have loused things up and said, “Look, what say we swap over just for the hell of it.” But I don’t think we ever thought of that. “That’s mine and I’m sticking to it,” and that was that.

Not really. I suppose in the long run it would have been because they, I think, on passing out parade they would have said, “So and so who was the top student and got the best average at shooting,” or something like that. But we weren’t aware of it at the time.

Well I don’t know

anything outside of my mustering of air gunner.

Well some of the pilots had been … were rather browned off because they had joined to fight and here they were just doing a taxi job of training runs day in and day out and they seemed to be there for ages. They got rather fed up with it. Some of the instructors, of course, had been overseas and had done

a tour of operation and they were back, and they were also getting a bit fed up with having to teach these rookies on various things. They wanted to get back to where the real war was instead of that. Some of the pilots did silly things and we had one chap, I can’t remember what his name was, but he flew his Anson

out along the beach – and the Ninety Mile Beach is a lovely long beach – and he came back and they said, “The propellers are bent.” He’d bent them flying up along the beach. Well the Avro Anson propeller wasn’t very long from the centre of the boss to the tip; it would be about three feet. So he would be about eight or nine inches off the ground by the time

he was flying – you’ve got to allow for the engine and so on. And he’d just bent them flying along the beach. So they said, “Right, you’re grounded for three months,” or something like that. So he wasn’t allowed to fly for … I suppose most probably he was a bit browned off with that one. But then when he went up the next time he was flying over the water and he come back and he’d done it again – he bent them over the water this time. And of course, flying over the water is more dangerous because

you can’t really judge your height over the waves and not all waves are the same height. And he bent his props [propellers] again over the water. And in 1945 some of the pilots had been quite browned off and they had gone out and measured where the air to ground targets were and they said, “Well there’s so many feet between

the signs with the target,” maybe seven or eight feet tall and they, I think, went up to number ten, Roman numerals, “and there’s so many feet. We could fly between those two.” So we went out, but they didn’t measure just where the dead centre was. They said, “Oh yes, we’d have five foot clearance between them.” So they went out and they didn’t know the centre

and they flew left of centre or right of centre and they were killed. And they lost a number of people who were doing silly things like that.

I think there were quite a few. None of our people were concerned with that. But there were things like that where people got up to … I suppose you’d say got into mischief, got bored with it and said, “Oh, we’ll do something different,” and did that.

Other things cropped up and I read quite a few years after that some of the aircraft that came out from England had a heating system installed in it. That was apparently something coming off, like from the muffler, and they said, “Oh well, just block that off, just put a steel plate over that or an aluminium plate over that and that’ll be okay.”

And they lost a number of aircraft at one of the, I think, OTU [Operational Training Unit] bombing school. I think it was at East Sale and they were flying things from there and they wouldn’t hear from this aircraft any more and they’d find that it had crashed. And they weren’t sure what was happening. And apparently one time one crashed and it must have landed in a swamp

and they recovered a body and then they did an autopsy on the body. And they investigated the blood and they said, “Oh, carbon monoxide poisoning from there.” And what it was, we had this heating thing coming off the engine, it was pumping in carbon monoxide and the crew just went to sleep while they were flying. And that’s the thing they’ve often said about the cars, you know, with faulty exhausts and things like that,

putting carbon monoxide into the cars. Well this was happening in the aircraft, but they didn’t know about it until they’d lost a number of aircraft and it was just by chance that that bloke crashed and went into a swamp and they did get a body and could examine it. Because other times they’ve crashed and the plane’s burnt up and everyone’s been incinerated and there’s no clues whatsoever.

Well we didn’t have too many problems in training. They ironed out most of them with the initial training for air gunners. But this was further on; they might have had more advanced flying. I’m not sure … They were operating from East Sale, which was another air force base, whether it was …

It might have been West Sale before they made it an air gunnery school. But they seemed to change round, have one place that was one thing and they’d say, “Right, well …” Just as with Parkes, well that was the …Well with training and so on I think

we were pretty clued up. The air force seemed to like to change its base, jobs for the bases, for navigation schools and wireless schools and they’d say, “Well … like Parkes would be a good place for people to do navigation, they can fly all over New South Wales. And the wireless can be done at some other place so we’ll transfer all the wireless people out of

Parkes and make that a navigation school,” and so on. So I don’t know just what happened to a lot of them.

Well I think that would happen because in time they had done training, they had done

conversion from Tiger Moth up to something bigger, up to Wirraways or something like that, single engine. And they’d be doing a conversion course onto multi engines and so on. And they’d say, “Right, well so and so, right, Smith you go down to one air gunnery school, they want you down there. So and so, you can go to 1 Personnel Depot, 1 Demarcation Depot and

you could go over to England,” or, “You could go to Parkes and fly there.” So that they were all split up all the time. And I think it’d be quite something for someone who had got so far to think, you know, “I’m getting a bit closer to going to war and I’m looking forward to this,” and then all of a sudden it’s shattered and he’s sent down to a place like Sale and all they’ve got to do is fly out, fly a mob

of rookie air gunners backwards and forwards along the coast for an hour and a bit today and maybe an hour and a half tomorrow or an hour and three quarters tomorrow and the day after and so on. And do that for three or six months and he’d think, “Well, the blokes that I’ve been … All my mates have gone on, they’ve gone over to England and here I am stuck down in Sale and doing nothing.” Or, “The other blokes have gone over to Canada and they’ve been … Had a letter from Joe

the other week and he’s been to New York and here am I stuck down in West Sale.” So I think they got browned off rather easily.

Did …?

Not so much. We were getting a little bit closer each time. We said, “Well the course only lasts four weeks so after that then we’ll be fully-fledged air gunners and then we’ll get so much a week and we’ll be

going up … maybe we’ll get over to England or something like that with a bit of luck and we’ll be on the next thing.” So it wasn’t … We could see the end of our course coming up. But the ones, like the pilots who were trained and thought, “Well you know, I’m trained as a pilot. I should be getting more training towards going to war, going to operational training unit and doing all sorts of navigation exercises and possibly

doing coast watch things.” Well even the coast watch must have got pretty boring after a while, just flying up and down the coast looking for enemy shipping, submarines and things that weren’t suppose to be there and just keeping an eye on things generally. So that could have got pretty boring for the pilot. And I think possibly from the fully trained crews who had done navigation and had done

wireless operating and things like that, to be stuck in somewhere and just doing routine up and down the coast sort of thing. I think they could have got pretty bored.

I don’t know. I think we

all wanted to get overseas because it was a chance of a lifetime to go over. Because people didn’t move round much in the ’30s. You were brought up in a certain town and you sort of got a job in town and you were there for a lifetime. And lots of people were in the same town that their parents had grown up there, Mum and Dad had both grown up there and the kids were there. Well this was a chance to

get round and see the world. I remember at school being … One of the chaps, he went on holidays and went to Sydney, well that was a big thing. Nobody … Very few people from Echuca ever went interstate more than … which they’d go interstate, just go over the river to Moama – that was interstate. But for somebody to come back and say they’d been to Sydney on holidays, “I’ve seen the Pacific Ocean.” Wowee! You think of it now; kids go everywhere.

I think … I know a couple of my grand daughters, I think they’ve done more air travel than I have done in my lifetime. And they’re sixteen. Because her parents, well her dad’s got a job with Royal Burma Airlines and they used to fly up to Burma. And they’d say,

“Ramadan, everything closes up at Ramadan. Oh, we’ll go through Japan.” So they’d take the kids and off they’d go and they flew up to Osaka. And another time … a couple of times they went over to England. They went over to England one time and then they went on the train and went under the [English] Channel, in the tunnel. And went

up to Holland because that’s where Alan’s people came from originally. And they’ve been over there a couple of times. They’ve been up to Japan a few times. Places that … Well I haven’t been to Japan, but they flew off quite easily. They’d say, “Okay flight number so and so to Burma.” And even the youngest one, Ashleigh, who’d be five or six, she’d have a pack on her back and she’s striding out. None of this hanging onto Mum’s

hand when she went, or Dad’s hand. She was out with … Once she got the hang of where they had to go, she was out ahead of them. So they’re very experienced travellers. They haven’t done as much travelling since they got back, but for the four or five years that they were in Burma, they did a terrific lot of travelling.

Well when we finished our course, whatever it was, wireless operator or air gunnery or pilots … Of course, once you’ve got your wings or half wing or whatever it was then you automatically became sergeant. The English system was altogether different, but this was the Empire Air Training Scheme. And they had got the … And that meant that some went from Australia and went over to

Canada to train or straight over to England or something like that. But we all had the same thing so that we got our wings or whatever and six months on then we went up to flight sergeant and a slight increase in pay. And then twelve months after that we went up to warrant officer, and another sixpence a day I think, as warrant officer.

No, they just said, “Your flight’s come through.” “Oh beauty, a bit of extra money.” And that was that. There was no … But I think even with the warrant officer, I don’t really know, I don’t think there was anything there. I think they just said, “Oh, your WOs [Warrant Officer] come through, so and so.” And there it was. See, I got out, actually,

a week after my WO was due to come. It was due to come, I think, on 6th August or something like that and I was out on the 12th. So three or four months after I got out I got notification from the air force that my promotion to warrant officer had been approved and there’d be an increase of pay of sixpence a day for seven days.

And that was end of … And I got deferred pay, went up very slightly, so I don’t really know what happened. I’ve got … Somewhere or other, I’ve got my warrant showing that I’m a qualified warrant officer, but I haven’t looked at it for quite a long time.

Well we always had a

log book that each time we flew we had to enter. And that was, I suppose you’d say, flying on business. I mean, different from being a passenger. We flew from Canberra up to Brisbane, then out to Charleville then out to 18 Squadron. Well that didn’t apply. But once we were selected in a crew and we flew,

we had to enter in our log books the date, the time we … who the captain was, the number of the aircraft, its registered number and the time we took off, what our target was and what we were suppose to do and the time we got back and the number of hours we were airborne. And then that was totalled up at the end of the month and the

CO would sign it. And then we’d start on the next one. So some months were busier than others because sometimes I might have only had a fortnight flying in a month because I’d be away on leave. But because I was with a Dutch squadron we … The Dutchmen have … Some Dutch

navy blokes were on there and they were paid … They had to fly so many hours a month to qualify for flying pay. And so they’d say, “Oh, Fred, your hours are a bit down this month. What can we do about it? I tell you what, take an aircraft and fly over to Broome in Western Australia and get us some beer; our beer’s a bit low.” So it’s six hours over to Broome and six hours back so that would qualify you nicely for

your flying pay of so much a month. But if he didn’t do that then he wouldn’t qualify for flying pay. But that was only for them Dutchmen – the Dutch navy blokes. And my co-pilot was a Dutch navy bloke. So him and his skipper was an army or a Dutch air force bloke so he didn’t qualify for the same thing; he just flew. I think I was very

fortunate that I was selected in Herman’s crew because having been in the air force for a long time he was pretty clued up and he got … We worked very well together. And whenever we went out as a flight of four aircraft we always came back, all of us, the whole flight came back. Whereas on many of the other trips,

ones like Cec Eastman went on, they didn’t always come back. You know, there’d be always someone that was lost. We don’t know whether it was chance because I don’t think that had a great deal to do with it in a way because they used to say, especially to Herman, (UNCLEAR). One night they said … They briefed us before we went out and said what target we’re going.

And they said, “Righto, Captain Owens, you’ll be doing the pathfinder job. You will fly in and drop your incendiaries on the target, which is …” And we knew it was the hottest spot in the south west Pacific because of the number of anti-aircraft guns and things there. “Don’t fly below five thousand feet.” Well of course we got up there and there was cloud from down to quite a bit. So Herman

went down below five thousand feet and dropped his incendiaries and lit the place up so that the others that came in could see the target area burning and bomb on that. But they said this time, “Don’t do anything off your own piece of wood.” You know, don’t do anything off your own bat. But the Dutch had a slightly different way. They said, “Don’t do anything off your own piece of wood.” But he did

quite a few things – he’d be a bit curious. We had flown over one place in Timor and he said … It was a bright moonlight night … “What’s that down there?” So we stooged round for quite a long time and I was sitting in the back and usually we’d go over the target and then drop the bombs and then come back and you’d realise that the air coming in the back was

usually pretty cold. And I’d been sitting there for a long time and we were still over land and I said, “Well this is not real good because Timor’s only a thin strip and twenty minutes flying we should be over the water and shouldn’t be, you know. What’s this air coming in? It’s pretty warm.” And I looked out and I saw a building disappearing behind us. He’d

gone quite long so as to not wake anybody up sort of thing and go down and have a look at this place. And he flew around for what seemed to be hours. I really don’t know how long it was. And he came down and, “Oh, that’s a big building. That hasn’t been there before,” or something like that. “I’d better go and report.” He’d get back and he’d say, “Yes sir, we flew round and we saw a big building near at such and such a point.” And the navigator would comment on … give his

map references to where that place was. So they went out and investigated it. And he’d do all sorts of things that a lot of blokes would say, “Oh, well I’ve been there and bombed my target. That’s all I’ve got to do,” and go home. But he did a bit more than that. And extremely good pilot. And

I reminded him of … I went to an aircraft squadron reunion on the Gold Coast in 1986 and I was walking up the steps and Herman was coming down and he says, “Oh, Mac, I didn’t know you were here.” He’d come out from America and he didn’t know that I was a member of the association. I’d only just joined. And it was the first time I’d seen him since 1944. So we had

quite a good get-together and so on. And he said, “Oh, I’ve found Fred Strooney …” The co-pilot that lives down at Jackson Mississippi, John Coots lives up at California, Hans Hutchens who was the navigator, he lives at …

round about Pasadena or something like. And so he said, “We just haven’t been able to locate the radio operator, Van der Diesa. Nobody knows. He’s just dropped off the planet.”

Beg pardon?

Well we were at Melbourne Cricket Ground, that was No. 1 Embarkation Depot, and we were all equipped to go over to England. So we had two great big kitbags of

flying gear. Inner flying suits and outer flying suits and everything under the sun. They called it like a teddy bear jacket made of kapok and so on (UNCLEAR) sleeves and a great zipper up the front. And we were all equipped to go to England. They were waiting to build the numbers up and waiting for the right ship to come in and then they’d say, “Right, everybody

on board there.” They would have had a list of names and so on that were waiting. Had calls from various squadrons for replacement aircrew, air gunners or whatever. And they lined us up each morning on parade just to check that we were there and hadn’t gone actually AWL [absent without leave]. And then they’d call out six blokes and they’d tick them off and they went up to Canberra,

went up to a Dutch squadron. Then a week or ten days later they picked up another six and that’s when I became involved and they said, “Right, you’re going. You’ve got to report to Canberra to the Dutch. You’re going over to Dutch Catalina from Burma.” So we went and got our rail orders and then went up to Canberra and reported into Canberra

and they told them what we were there for, and later after the officer said, “No, you’re going out to Darwin where the other blokes have gone to.” So then we had to stay there until they had … well not quite enough people, but they had an aircraft going up to Darwin, and they stuck us half dozen on board and possibly other replacement crews for

RD [Royal Dutch] Squadron. And that was our introduction going up to RD Squadron.

Oh, “Want half a dozen, you, you, you, you … Oh, another six, right.” And that’s how it was. No reference as to height or anything like that; they just wanted half a dozen blokes. He took half a dozen blokes off that flight down there one week and half a dozen blokes of this flight and … We couldn’t

have all been in the same flight though because, coming to think of it, because I was M and I don’t think Cec Eastman was in the same flight – he would have been in one a bit further down. So it would have been sort of alphabetical. So must have had one out of here and one out of there and one out of each flight I imagine. So we just all lined up and they were calling the role and then they said, “Tight, one from here and one from there.” And took us off, “Report

down to the orderly room and get your rail warrant and so on and go from there. And when we got down there they said, “Right you’ll be on the Spirit of Progress. You leave Melbourne at six o’clock, I think it is, and you’ll go up to Canberra, change at Albury and get out at somewhere like Goulburn I think and go down to Canberra. Catch another train and go down to Queanbeyan and then

on to Canberra.”

Where did I …?

Well I think we all wanted to go over to England. I think that was the main thing. And then, of course, this was a big let down. But we sort of … We were quite pleased,

the first time we’d been picked to go to Darwin we said, “Oh well, it’s better than that mob. We’ve still got a hope of going to England. They’re not going to get out of Australia.” And then, of course, they came along and chose us, “Oh bugger, bugger, bugger. We’re not going to get that trip to England. But we’ll go to Burma and we’ll see a bit of the world anyway. It might be better than those blokes just gone to Darwin, but not as good as these others that will go to England.”

Well I don’t think we thought a great deal of it. We just all hoped we’d go to England. And then we got into our heads that we could end up at either Darwin or somewhere in the [Pacific] Islands. We were there and we could have been posted to an operational training unit somewhere in Australia that could have gone on.

But just as an air gunner, it meant that we would have been going to a bomber unit and as far as we knew there weren’t a great number there. As it turned out there were several bomber squadrons around Darwin and I think they had a number further north, but we weren’t aware of just where they were at that time

and so on.

Well not at that stage, no. They said, “You’re going there and that’s it.” But I don’t know whether we were well trained and that’s what you’re going to do and just go ahead and do it. And I think there were objections raised later at the Dutch squadron because we were chosen to go

with the Dutch and some of the chaps were there, and the Dutch crews – depending on their make-up – some of them only spoke Dutch. Or they may have been over in the Islands and they spoke Malaysian. And one of my mates said, “Well if you’re not going to speak the lingo that I can understand, I don’t want to fly with them and get me another crew.” So that’s okay, they found him another crew, someone who was more compatible

and he went with another crew. I can’t remember who Butch was flying with in the first stage, but I remember him telling us some time later that he didn’t get along too well with these ones because they didn’t speak English, or spoke very little English, on the plane and he didn’t know what was going on. He said, “I want to know what’s going on. I don’t want to be the only clod here that doesn’t know what goes on.” They could quite well forget about him if something … the plane

was damaged and they had to bail out, he’d want to know the English what was going on, and so he’d have some chance because he … I think he thought, “Well, they could give a command in Malayan and Indonesian or whatever,” and forget about him sitting up there on his own and all hop out.

Well I think it

was for some people. I think most of my blokes spoke English. But I don’t know that they could always understand my English because when you’re a bit … When something’s happened and you get a bit excited, it could be a bit hard to work out what the person’s saying, you know. Another Australian might be able to, but a foreigner who knows

the elements of English, but not how an Australian soldier would talk under pressure.

Yeah. Well there was one case, I mentioned we had flown over this place at Nangoa and Herman went down and dropped the incendiaries, well sitting in the back and I was

looking for enemy aircraft round and I look up over there and round and down and so on, and I looked over here and I looked back over here – there’s a great hole in the elevator. The elevator was a section that was made of fabric and that sort of moves up and down depending on what they want the aircraft to do, and that was fabric covered. And of course, I let out a hell of a squawk and told the skipper that we had a hole in the elevator

and he didn’t know what was going on. So after a while I got out of the turret and went and saw John, the top tail gunner, and told him to go down and have a look and report back to the skipper. And he went down and explained what it was. That there was this hole right along there. Well … I suppose I had an air gunnery’s … much more than I’m taking up now. And it wasn’t a proper turret because a lot

of the aircraft had turrets, you know, a sort of glass-topped place with a couple of guns stuck in. All we had was sit on … so not really to sit, we had like a bicycle seat that sat up from the floor, about a foot off the floor, a bicycle seat, a couple of kneel pads, a sheet of about three-eighths steel in front of us and we

stuck our arms around there and that was our turret. And after a couple of hours it wasn’t very comfortable, you’re just sitting on this bicycle seat, kneeling with this bike seat as support. And you sort of looked round everywhere and so on and looking back and seeing this great hole alongside. So Johnny went down and had a look and reported back to the skipper. And somewhere they said, “Oh, that would have been

one of the incendiaries that he dropped during … taking evasive action, it could have ripped back out.” And then they investigated that and said, “No, it couldn’t possibly have been one of the incendiaries. It must have been an anti-aircraft shell that went through, but because it was fabric covered it wasn’t strong enough to detonate the

shell when it went past.” Because usually, they had found from experience, not to have that part of metal because if it got hit with an explosive it would have wrecked the elevator and could put the aircraft down, of course the aircraft would crash. So they found for moveable parts like that would be fabric covered and they’d have a much

longer life. They might get hole in it, but it would only be so big and it wouldn’t affect the rest, whereas if it was metal it could tear everything apart and send bits of the shell through the aircraft.

Well we got up there and we were there for

roughly about three weeks. And we got there and they said, “Well the wet season is late in coming. You’ve brought it with you.” And I must have done some flying because I remember we were there one night and we hadn’t met a lot of the crews and they came in and said, “Oh, we lost an aircraft over Ambon last night.” And

they said who the chap was who was killed. And at that stage they found that Ambon was too far away for the B25s, which were a medium aircraft, to go to and bomb and return safely with the fuel they had on board. They had enough fuel to go to

Timor and the islands round about, but not … Ambon was the limited of their thing. And they said, “It would be better to leave Ambon and some of the other places further out to the bigger stuff, the B24s rather than the light stuff.” So that was the last time 18 Squadron went up to Ambon. But because …

I think they could fly up there and fly back, but if they were attacked by an aircraft and they had to do evasive action or use up more petrol they wouldn’t have had enough petrol to get back. And one or two … One place there in one of the books I’ve got, a plane was shot up after being up to Ambon and they flew for three hours on a single motor and they had to ditch

somewhere outside of Darwin on Australian territory, on a beach out there, and they got back that way. So that aircraft was able to fly for three hours on a single engine and the only reason why it stopped was they ran out of petrol – they couldn’t transfer petrol from that wing over to this one. Or maybe they’d used up all … I’m not quite sure exactly. But anyway, they

didn’t have any more flying time … any more petrol to keep flying and they had to look out for a landing space and they chose that beach and crash-landed on the beach. And they … I think somebody was injured because a chap was telling me later that that was 1943 and he went up there in about 1982, up to Darwin

for a reunion and I think they got a helicopter and they went out to this point and the remains of the aircraft were still there and they said, “Look at that bloody tree. I don’t think it’s grown an inch since we landed here in 1943, in the forty-odd years between time. We strung a parachute over there to give a bit of shade for so and so, who was injured in the landing.” So they got back there and they looked the aircraft and said, “Well, it did it’s best to get us home and this is where it finished up.”

So it was a very reliable aircraft, extremely so. And we were quite pleased with them. A couple of times we had to fly back on one motor. And a rather interesting thing that cropped up with that was we were coming down on leave one time, and this was a day or two ahead of schedule. Usually

we left Batchelor on Saturday and sort of flew down. But this time, because Herman was captain and was ready to come down on holidays they said, “Oh, the veggie kite has come in. The veggie kite was an old decommissioned B25, an earlier model. It wasn’t

fit for war service but it could still fly. And they said, “You can take the veggie kite down there, Herman. Gather your mob together and leave on Thursday morning and go on holidays a couple of days early instead of waiting for the commercial, the DC3 to go down.” “Rightio.” So he sent us all up and we started. So we took off bright and early in the morning and

I was just sitting well down at the back of the aircraft – there’s a lovely little seat, the dummy seat, which stood about that high. It was about half the size of that table, round, and it had padding on the top and it had a window over there and a window over on the other side and I got a view, you might say, a room with a view. And I was sitting on there and having a nice nap and we’d been flying for about five hours or something like that

and I looked out and I could see … “Oh yeah, I suppose we’re about seven or eight thousand feet up.” And then I realised that I could see, when I looked out the side, that there was a propeller. Blank, blank, blank. That’s supposed to be going round and round, not hang there like that. Then I realised that there’s a chap standing in front of me, had a parachute harness on and his hand out, standing over the escape … like that. And I said, “Oh, relax

fellow, skipper’s flown on one before, no hassles.” But, he said, “Yeah, see that one there? That’s the good one. We’re flying on the crook one.” He said, “I’m a mechanic. I’ve worked on that and I know.” And he was just one of the ground staff. He’d dug out a parachute and adjusted it to himself that it would fit. And he was all ready to go, and as soon as the other one stopped he would have pulled the lever and dropped out. And I

thought, “Oh, what the hell.” Because making a parachute ready to fit you isn’t a job that you can do in five minutes because the straps have all been tightened and you haven’t got anything to loosen it. They’re webbing straps; they’re not like a suitcase strap. You take a long time to get it properly adjusted, especially if it’s a big bloke that’s worn it before and you’re a little bloke like me.

It takes about five minutes. Well five minutes it would have been all over.

Well I suppose they have things, parachutes in the aircraft and I might be flying in an aircraft today and the next day it might be someone like a six footer or someone who weighs something like ninety kilos, something like that, you know, a much bigger bloke. And so we never … I suppose we weren’t

that fatalistic, we didn’t say, “Oh, better adjust the parachute before I get in.” And a lot of pilots already had their own parachute; they were standard equipment. But for the rest of us, we didn’t wear our parachutes all the time. Well I think some of these had sort of like a backpack and you fit it on there and you’d have a ripcord and you’d just pull the ripcord and it would come out the back.

I think the English ones, I think it stuck on here. You’d wear your parachute harness. And then they had a place for your parachute, you’d sit so that you would be fitted up for your parachute harness all the time, you’d wear it on the job and then you’d just pick up your parachute, if you had to go, pick it off the shelf, clip it on and go. But with ours it was

too bulky to wear it all the time and sit in the turret, so we just let them sit there. So we just relied on chance. And I don’t know of any of our … Well there must have been some of the planes that were shot down; they must have got out by parachute.

Well on that particular case, we got

down to Cloncurry and we … I’m not sure what we did to fill in time, but the mechanics worked on it for two or three hours and then the skipper said, “Rightio, we’ll get in.” You know, so he took off and there was a great cloud of smoke and we did one complete circuit and brought it back. And the Yankee duty pilot said, “I didn’t expect you guys to make it back.” And I wrote … Years

later I wrote to Herman and I told him about this episode and he said, “I didn’t know about the bloke in the back with parachute on and his hand over the escape lever.” And he said, “When I took off in that thing, that wasn’t one of my better decisions to fly.” So it was nice to hear that some fifty years later, the admission from him, because he did pretty well on all the others. We

caught up with him. My wife and I went over to American and stayed with him at … he and his wife at outside of Washington at West Virginia. And then we went on, we went down to Jackson, Mississippi, where the Dutch pilots had done their training and we stayed with Fred down there, my wife and his wife. And then we went up to Glass Valley, California,

and we stayed with Johnny. And Johnny said, “I’m the only bloke that came back.” This was when we were here training during the war. He said, “This is a beautiful area and I’m going to come back after the war.” And he went back after the war. He was a Dutchman, but he took out American citizenship and when America was involved with Korea he enlisted in the Korean air force and he trained

aircrew for them. So he was a very nice bloke; he was a great bloke. He had a very interesting story because he was in Holland and had joined the air force, and then the Germans came in and took over and said, “Right, well if the able-bodied blokes got to work in the mines.” And Johnny’s mate said, “Nuts on this one.” Or words to that effect, whatever the

Dutch equivalent is. So they walked from Holland down to the occupied countries and they got down – I presume it was down to Portugal – and got in touch with the Dutch there and then they shipped them over to America. And then he did training with the Dutch air force over there and then found himself over here. And he said, “I don’t know what happened to the mate I walked

down with, I’ve never seen him before.” But it must have been a hell of a walk because, I mean, you couldn’t trust anyone that you saw there. Anyone could have dobbed you in and said, “Strangers walking around the road.” So whether they moved by night I’m not quite sure. But he did a very good job. He was a great mate. And he … The funny thing was, there were three of us on this end of the

aircraft were all non commissioned officers; those up the front, they were the commissioned. So it was them and us. So Johnny would say, “Oh yes, those blokes up the front, they don’t talk the same language as we do. We’re mates, the three of us.” And that was Johnny and Nick and myself. And I said to Nick, being with the

Dutch, “Oh Nick, would you teach me Dutch?” “What, teach you Dutch? I can’t even teach my wife Dutch.” So that was the end of that one.

Well all our tents had the Australian component and we were all here and the Dutch component was over there. The Dutch squadron was unique because we

had twenty-odd languages there altogether and ever so many nationalities, because we had the true Dutchmen that had come, like Johnny, he’d come out from Holland. And we had blokes like Herman who had originally been in Holland and had come out, was living in Indonesia by the time the war broke out. Then we had Javanese-born Chinese,

and one of the chaps who was Javanese-born Chinese was a radio operator and he was in the Dutch section. And then we had just the Australians. But amongst even in the Dutch section, we had one chap there who was an Australian-born Dutchman. And that was very interesting because when a crew was reported missing they said, “Now, we’re going to auction their belongings

because we know there’s no chance of them coming back.” Over in Europe, someone could be forced down and they could get in touch with the resistance workers and they’d gradually get back to England. But there was no chance of anyone coming out from our lot. So they said, “We’re going to auction their belongings.” And they’d give a bit of a speak and say, “We’ve trained with these people and we know how they’re situated. We ask you to bid

accordingly.” “Okay, what have we got?” “Groups of six wire coat hangers, what do you want?” Pound, two, three, four, five, six pounds for half a dozen wire coat hangers. And other things. And the Australian-born Dutchman said, “Oh, they’ve got a Dutch-English, English-Dutch dictionary. That’ll be great. I’ll buy that and I’ll be able to learn to speak their flaming lingo.” So he bid, “What have we got? Dutch-

English … What do we bid?” Pound, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Up to something like twenty. And he said, “Bugger it, the buggers don’t want me to learn their bloody language, do they?” So he stalked off, he didn’t … And I was interested in getting a flying jacket which was a leather … a sheepskin lined one. Because when we were flying … Okay? And I was interested in

getting a flying jacket, one of these … because when we were flying I’d be wearing not much more than I’m wearing now except that I’d have long pants on, they’d be jungle dungarees, jungle boots and dungaree shirt and that’d be all. Well that’s okay at ground level or round about sea level, but eight or nine thousand feet, it gets a bit cold up there even in the summer time. Well in

dry season or wet season, it’s still pretty cold up there. And the air force, the Australian air force, didn’t consider that we needed flying clothing. And so, “I want a jacket. I’m freezing up there.” So they said, “There’s a flying jacket there. It’s about your size, Mac.” So I started bidding for it and somebody else bid as well because they wanted to force the price up, and I think I

got it for about twenty-five pound. But someone … Later I saw him somewhere and he said, “Oh yes, I kept bidding against you. I didn’t want the jacket, but I wanted twenty-five pound or something out of you.” So I was quite happy. It was a little bit big, but still at twenty-five pound it was as good as gold. And I never know … When they say, “Oh, you’re on … We wanted you on standby for tonight’s op.” And I’d see

one of the chappies, Happy Roach, going past and he’d say, “Oh, we’ve done your aircraft today.” “Oh, did you Happy? What have you got on it? What sort of fuses have you got on the bombs?” “Oh, instantaneous.” “Oh, good. Well I’ll want my jacket tonight.” Because that meant that when we … instantaneous, we’d be flying up nine, ten thousand feet and the bombs would be going off when they made contact with the ground. But if he’d said, “Delayed action,” that meant that we would going

out on something like a shipping sweep and they’d have an eleven second delay and they’d skip bomb. And the thing is they’d hit the plane and we’d be a couple of hundred yards away somewhere else by the time they went off. So Happy used to put me in the picture as to whether my aircraft was going to be used that night, and then I knew from that, from the fuses, whether I wanted my fur-lined jacket, so I’d take it along with me. So

it was … And again, I mentioned to Herman in 1988, “You know it used to get bloody cold up there.” And he said, “Why didn’t you tell me? We could have got you a jacket.” Because the Dutch had everything under the sun. You just say the word, “Oh yes, we’ll do it for our Aussie mates. We’ll get you that.”

Well they … Queen Wilhelmina was buying the

aircrafts apparently and all their supplies and that was, I suppose, something like Lend Lease to their stuff. And that was, I suppose, part of her own money and it was going and buying aircraft and buying equipment for her servicemen. And if the Dutch said they wanted something, well they got it. But if Australians wanted something,

it was just too bad. I think also the Australian government wasn’t real keen on spending a great deal on the servicemen. All you’ve go to do is look at the uniforms that we had, when you measure up the shabby sort of uniforms compared with want the Yanks had and what the Dutch had. They had very similar uniforms to the Yanks, you know, well cut, more or less tailor

made stuff. And we had … the army uniforms were not quite World War I stuff, but pretty close to it.

Oh we had a RAAF uniform, but we just had jungle greens for flying. And then we just had khaki uniforms other times and then we’d

parade with the RAAF component of our squadron. The Dutch squadron was initially formed in 1942 with a few Dutch that managed to get out from Indonesia. And they said, “Well we haven’t got enough Dutchmen to completely make the squadron so we’ll fill it up with RAAF personnel

for flying duties and also for ground staff personnel until the Dutch get enough to whittle that component down. And when they started flying, they went up to Darwin in 1943, when they started flying there they’d have a couple of Dutchmen in a crew and a number of Australians, possibly navigators and wireless operators and things like that. And then they’d get more Dutchmen

coming out so that by 1944 all they needed from the Australian component was an air gunner. And we were all convinced that all they wanted was Australian air gunner because we were a bit on the short side and we could fit in the tail gun, the tail turret. But I had one friend here who served at 18 Squadron about twelve months before me and he was a navigator.

Somebody else I got talking to was a pilot, somebody else was a wireless operator and they were all the Australians that had been with 18 Squadron in 1943 before we got there.

We did have some there. There was something on each aircraft and there would be a dinghy

attached to part of the aircraft. And one amusing thing that happened, they went up for a gunnery test and I’d say, “Oh, we’re going up on a gunnery test and do you need a rear gunner today or not because there’s not much work there.” And I used to try and dodge flying if I didn’t have to. “Oh, no, we don’t need you. You can stay home, Mac.” “Oh, beauty, thank you.” Well they went up in this aircraft

and carried out tests for the top turret gunner. And the turrets would swing round and they had a gun interrupter because they had tail up here and a tail fin over there and they had to make sure that when the gun was coming around here, it would interrupt it and either rose up over the tail so it didn’t shoot the tail off, otherwise you could very simply, you know, damage your own aircraft. And if

somebody’s concentrating on the aircraft coming in you might forget and, “Ahhh,” you know, “I’ve just shot the tail off.” Anyway, what happened, apparently the interrupter must have … I don’t know if it was put in the wrong way or just what, but it tripped the radio antenna that was clipped from the tail back to the main part of the aircraft. And that flipped off and came back and hooked on the catch that released the aircraft dinghy at

four or five thousand feet. And it wrapped itself around the main plane, the tail, and made the aircraft rather awkward to handle. And one of the chaps that, one of the Dutch chaps that was there, I think he would have been the top turret gunner, didn’t like the idea at all. And he bailed out and jumped, but he broke his ankle on landing. And we’ve got a photo there of the flight

taken outside the camp hospital and there’s this bloke on crutches, and he was the bloke that jumped out. The rest of the blokes said, “Oh, we trust the skipper and he’ll get us back to ground.” And he brought the plane back in one piece minus, of course, the radio antenna and the aircraft dinghy. So that was a bit of luck that I missed out, missed out a bit on that one, so I didn’t mind in the least.

Oh, I think I would have had something, I can’t remember just what mine was, but I always carried our filthy old hat in case we were shot down and needed it in the jungle. Some of the Dutchmen who were … well not quite alcoholic, but they liked their drink, they used to have a

very potent aftershave lotion that had a very high alcohol content and they used to take that in case they were forced down. Sip, sip, sip.

They’d drink it, yeah. I never tried it, I wasn’t up to that at that stage. But I think we had lucky charms, I just can’t remember what mine was, but we’d take something along with us. Because we had what we call our dead beaches,

which were metal and they were stamped with our number and our religion on it and so on. Air force number, our religion and the fact that we were RAAF. I think that was all the information that was on there.

Any?

Oh yes, there’s always a padre

there somewhere. I can’t remember what our padre’s name. I remember the army padre quite well, but I don’t remember the … I think we just went out and I think if someone didn’t come back we said, “Well go out and have a look.” And there was nothing we could do about that because once I remember that there were just

the three of us in the tent at this time, Cec Eastman, Tommy Barkley and myself, and Cec and Tommy went out this night. And so I hit the hay and went to bed. I woke up early in the morning hearing a voice saying, “Sergeant, sergeant, sergeant.” And I sort of woke up and I could hear clip clop, clip clop. “Sounds like a horse. No horses around here.” Then, “Sergeant.”

“Oh, it’s a goat. It’s an Indonesian sergeant.” So I got up and we had light in the tent so I put the light on and saw that Cec was in his bed and his mosquito net’s down, and Tommy’s mosquito net was still up. Well Cec has been home sound asleep, he must have been there for a couple of hours, it’s something like three o’clock in the morning and he should have been back by

a bit after midnight and it doesn’t look at all good. So they said, “Oh, report to the crew room.” So reported to the crew room and went down there they said, “One of our aircraft is missing and we’ve got to go out and have a look and see if we can find it.” So we went out the next day. And they looked at the report that Cec’s crew and the others had filed, and they’d said there was a night-fighter in the vicinity that night. And there was a fair bit of

cloud around and they assume that the aircraft was attacked. And he flew into the cloud and pulled up a bit, and apparently there was a Japanese fighter flying there and collided with him. And they went into the sea. And we went down and we had a look around the coast line, not too far away, on the track that they would have had. And there was a great hole you could see in under the water

because the water’s very clear like out …

We found this section fairly close to the beach with a great hole there. And I don’t remember any wreckage around there. I suppose there must have been. Whether the tide might have been in and washed away or just what. But that’s all we could come back and report on, that all there was

is a sign … There must have been an explosion on the sea floor and we fear it was that particular aircraft and the enemy aircraft. And that was about it. And that was the third bloke from our situation gone off the air, was then reported missing believed killed. Missing in action.

Well not from our point of view. But in some of the others, some of the crews were captured and I believe that some of them were beheaded. So that after the war they sort of followed various things through. But one interesting tale came up that

many years after the war an Australian chap fronted up to the secretary of our squadron association and said, “When I was in the islands I was given this ring by a chap, an Indonesian, and it’s got a name inscribed on it.” And he said that the Indonesian found the body and so on. And I think … I don’t know whether he actually took the ring from him

or … I think they buried the person then the Japanese said, “No.” Then they came out and dug him up and so on. And I think then the Indonesian got this ring, but he gave it – said, “Well it’s engraved with somebody’s name in it there. It might be able to go to next of kin.” Well that started quite a hunt because this chap had been married in America and this was a wedding ring that his wife had given him with

his name on it. And he had become a father only a couple of days before he was killed. I don’t know whether he was aware of this. But they managed to trace back, in America, and found the widow and quite a few years later. And so that the baby that was born in 1944 now has that ring. Been able to go

back and present it to the widow and to the son. So it’s one of the stories that they’ve been able to follow up. And it’s been quite interesting to keep up with that work. Because a lot of the others are buried … In places they have a big Australian … War Graves Commission have a big cemetery at Ambon and some of the

chaps that were flying with 18 Squadron are buried there. I think … It doesn’t matter whereabouts we were operating and the plane’s down, if there had have been a body I think they re-interred it up at Ambon.

Well it was very hard. I think we gradually got,

more or less immune to it, mainly because it was only one of our mates. Whereas if we were pretty close with six of us, say six Australians, well we would have felt it more. But this was a case of, “That was Tommy,” or three months before that it might have been Bernie or Jimmy or someone like that.

Well not a great deal. Well if it’s going to be hit it’s going to be over pretty smartly and that’s that. Here today and gone tomorrow I suppose. Because not having any permanent girlfriend or anything like that, there was … We’d say, “Well I’d like to get back to …” They’d say, “I must get back and see the family

and see how they’re going.” And there wasn’t that thing. There wasn’t any family life as far as I was concerned because I was single, Mum had passed away a couple of years beforehand, Dad wasn’t living at home and my brother was also in camp. So that … And there were similar cases to that. In some places there were a number of brothers from a

family, they’d all gone west.

Well, we’d get leave and they used to fly us down to Melbourne, and I’d let Dad know that with a bit of luck I should be down on such and such a date. And I’d ring up and he’d come – because he was living at Echuca – he used to come down to Melbourne. And

then we’d go and Dad would bum a couple of my Yankee smokes. We’d go into a pub somewhere in Melbourne and have a couple of beers and have a cigarette and so on and while doing that, a bit of a talk. Because at that stage my brother was five years older than I was, didn’t drink, didn’t have a beer and so on and didn’t smoke. So I

think Dad felt a bit closer to me. And of course he was pretty much at a loose end too because Mum had passed away in 1941 and this was 1944 and there was only the two of us. And my brother was in Western Australia or up about Tamworth or somewhere like that and I was flying. And he’d see me once in a blue moon and he would have seen my brother even less than that.

Because he was with the army and they didn’t get home leave at all, whereas we were getting a bit of home leave. And then, so got to know a couple of girlfriends from army days and so on. And so we’d go somewhere and go out.

And I met up with a WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] who was in the air force and I think she was a dental mechanic, or dental assistant I think. And she was stationed somewhere in Melbourne at Ascot Vale and so on. And I’d keep in touch with her in the period that I was up at 18 Squadron.

No, they were all hours of the day. Some were night missions, some were daytime. Some were shipping sweeps; we’d go out and look for shipping. Other time was photo reconnaissance and that was a trip of eight hours twenty-five minutes, I think. And I said something to Herman

years later about that and he said, “Yes it was all for nothing. The camera didn’t work and we didn’t know and when we got back someone else had to go and do it over the next couple of days.” And we flew from … We started off at Batchelor, we flew over to Fitzroy River Mission over in Western Australia and that was somewhere in the area where Truscott was made, the base was made. And we flew up around Sumba and Sumbawa

and so on. And then we came back and it was a damn long flight because most of our flights averaged about six hours twenty minutes, but this was an eight hour one and our aircraft wasn’t designed to fly for eight hours. We had to carry extra fuel on board and so on.

Well we just had extra fuel tanks in the plane. They took out where the bombs were normally were, they had a couple of extra fuel tanks and they

fitted those up and they worked and we went out and back. And because we started off from Fitzroy River Mission – it meant that it wasn’t quite so far that we had to fly. It wouldn’t have been possible to do it from Batchelor. And Batchelor was an interesting landing strip because it was the only airstrip, I think, in Australia where the railway line used to cut it. We sort of had to look out for trains before we

took off and trains had to look out for planes before they crossed. But there was only about one train a week so we reckoned we’d be damned unlucky if we hit a train.

Well I think it was a bitumen strip, I think it had been an old one, but it was bitumen. But one of the advantages with the B25 was the fact that it had tricycle undercarriage. And that meant that some of the blokes, when they had to taxi from

the revetments down to take off point they used to go along as though they were driving a taxi round. Whereas ones that … The Beaufort that had a tail, well, bump, bump, bump, bump along the ground and they were, you know, five or ten mile an hour would be the limited. But these blokes used to do thirty, forty miles an hour. And we went over to Truscott at one stage and they had

used that Marsden matting, the metal matting on there and we took off and we had three thousand, five hundred pound of bombs on board, I think it was the maximum. We took off this way and we got up there … “Where did he come from?” Somebody had taken off that way at the same time on the same strip. I can’t remember who it was and I don’t know

if he got a roasting over that or not. But someone thought, “Yes, we can take off.” Because usually you take off into the wind and apparently someone said there was no wind, or something like that. So they took off together. It saved a bit of time because you get up there together, usually you take off and then he’s got to take off after you and then you’ve got a waiting … stooge around and wait for them … the blokes to catch up. “How, the hell did he get up here so fast?” And we found out later. But when it was landing time,

the first couple of times I landed you thought you’d blown a tyre because the noise it made was quite a bang. Marsden matting I think it was. And it was very effective because they could use it in swampy conditions and things like that.

Well I think

we went out one day and unfortunately I was in the middle section so I could only see twelve aircraft on one side and twelve … I think there were twenty-four aircraft altogether. And I think that was a combined flight of No. 2 Squadron and 18, and possibly even No. 1 Squadron with Beauforts on that particular day. I know Cec must have been on one of the

extremities because he said he could see the rest of the aircraft from where he was.

Occasionally when we went out we had fighter escort. We went out one time to Cape Cutcha on Timor and an aircraft, enemy aircraft, came up and challenged us. So we went back in the next day or the

day after and we had a Beaufort flying alongside us just in case this bloke came up again, but nobody tackled us. But we went out on one case and the Beaufighters were equipped with rockets and they were to do over this place and we were to take photos and so on. So they

did that and then Johnny, in his top turret, shot the place up and we set off a couple of thousand yards off. But it was very interesting to watch the bullets because every third or fourth one would be a tracer so you could see it. The plane is here and the target’s over there, but the bullets seemed to go like that to go in and it was marvellous to see.

For every one you could see, there’s several in between them that you can’t see.

Well we would have had incendiaries with the red nose, armour piercing, ball … There was the red ones and the black ones and the blues.

I think the blue ones were the explosive ones that go in. So we would have had about five altogether in there. But every fifth one would be a tracer.

Well usually we fired …

We tested the guns on the way out and then, depending on what the target was, if it was just a bombing target well I wouldn’t have fired at all unless there is enemy aircraft about. So sometimes it would be a quiet night and there wouldn’t be much for the air gunners to do. But the navigator bomb aimer would have been

the one that had the … Well I suppose pilots had the most important job, to get us to the right spot and then the bomb aimer was next. But we were more or less just passengers.

Oh we were all on constant lookout all the time. But they used to … If we just went out somewhere and … Say a shipping

sweep, looking for enemy shipping … If we didn’t fire any bullets at all, that wasn’t counted as a mission. And we had to fire something so that … And there were a number, I think there were ten that they said weren’t actually operational missions because we didn’t see anything. At that stage the Japanese were getting very hard-pressed for shipping

and they were using small luggers and sailing by night, getting to somewhere, going into a creek bed and then cutting trees and camouflaging things down. So you had to be pretty keen to spot it because you’d fly past, you were doing a hundred and eighty miles an hour and you had to pick up a bit of difference in the foliage around some of the creeks

and so on, to see something like that.

Did I …?

Well we were always there and we made some comment as to what we could see. But the snag was that whatever I saw we were flying away from. So that for every second that, you know, if I saw something and thought, “That would be interesting,” by the time I

pressed the microphone and spoke it was a couple of hundred yards behind. And I’d say that the skipper would have seen it before me, you know, we’d fly down and fly past and I’d see it there, so I saw everything after everyone else had seen it.

Well actually it wasn’t a true turret as most of the things were, a round turret and they had levers

to move the guns up and down. This was just a spot in the rear of the aircraft coming round like that and they’d put a bit of a plastic dome over the top and a plastic front and I stuck a gun out the back. And I had it on a joint so that you could move it up and down, move it down and so on. And that was the so-called turret. Later they improved it in the

next model that came out, J, had power operated two guns, that was power operated and they had a row of ammunition coming on either side. But because I was in the skipper’s aircraft we usually flew in a model D aircraft, that had an astrodome round about the pilot’s department

and he could … If we were attacked he could put his head up and keep and eye on his blokes and tell so and so to close up or whatever. But in the later model, in the J they brought out, they removed the astrodome and put the gunner’s turret straight over the pilot. And that must have knocked hell out of the pilot’s hearing to have this turret so close and dropping all the

cartridge cases around the pilot’s feet and so on. And I don’t think … Well they did change the armament in the back, they put the power operated turret in J, gave them an extra gun. But the Mitchell had a top turret out of two, a single tail,

two waist guns, one on the port side and one on the starboard side and two four package guns down below the … on the wall beside the pilot. And two fixed guns fired forward in the navigator’s compartment or the bomb aimer’s compartment and a flexible gun in there as well.

Well there was two, four, six, seven,

nine … I think there were about a dozen on the B25. There was a later B25 that they put out and it carried a seventy-five millimetre cannon, but they reckon that when they fired that the plane used to fly backwards. But it was apparently very useful over in places like Europe for a tank buster and things like that.

No. Not … Johnny was always in the top turret. I don’t think Johnny would have been able to fit in the turret in the tail, because he was a much bigger bloke than I was. And Dick of course was a wireless operator and he had to be near the wireless and he looked after the two waist guns.

Oh we were there, I went there as rear gunners and that was all … All of the ones that went up in 1944 went up there as rear gunners.

Beg pardon?

Oh, that would have been an American fifty calibre.

Well I’m not sure if it was a Browning or just what it was, but it was a standard one for American aircraft.

No, I think it was pretty good. It had a pretty good rate of fire and seemed to knock things about pretty well. So I don’t really know because I didn’t see it do any damage to anything really.

Well one showed up after the Cape Cutcha trip, but he stood off so far, about a thousand yards off to one side, and I couldn’t swing my gun to bear. And then he must have come in closer, either to have a look for some reason or other, and I managed to fire off a few rounds at him. And I claimed that. I reckoned that I hit him.

Well they reckoned that I must have hit him because they said there were flashes along certain sections of main plane and they said well (UNCLEAR) because he hasn’t got any armament so it couldn’t have been his guns firing. So just whether it was my good marksmanship I don’t know. I never found out.

Well it was just a wayside stop on the

train line because it was something like sixty miles south of Darwin and there wasn’t much there at all. And it was just a camp stuck out in the mulga. We had … Somewhere there must have been a water supply somewhere and the pipeline … About a three inch pipeline along the top of the ground, that gave us scalding hot water during the day time, and when you wanted to cool off in the night-time you had to wait a couple of hours after

the sun had gone down before you were game to go and turn the water on to have a shower. But the meals were interesting because they were … All the aircrew blokes ate together. Well I don’t know about all the aircrew blokes, I think the officers’ mess had their mess. This was a sergeants’ mess so all the aircrew, anyone from sergeant upwards, ate in the sergeants’ mess,

and that was usually Indonesian food. And sometimes it was very good, a bit warm. Most times it was … Well I’ll say it was good all the time, but there were a few problems. They used to make up, I’d say, a dressing to go on this. We’d have rice (UNCLEAR) and nasi goreng

which was a lot of rice and fish and stuff like that and sort of vegetables mixed in with … And they’d make up this dressing. And we’d say, “Now just go easy on the dressing before you ladle it on because just look round and see the people that are sitting down.” And we’d see them all sitting down and you’d just sort of watch as you sort of lined up, there’s no movement. “Right,

yes, ladle it on today. It’s pretty good.” But if you were there and you suddenly saw someone grab his glass, push his chair back and race over to where the cool drink was, just go easy because it’s hot. And I’ve never had anything at any stage that was hot. I’ve tried chilli, but chilli’s hot around here, and mustard. But this used to get down to here and then go boom, like that. And I reckon that it wouldn’t have been safe to walk back

past the petrol dump because we felt like George’s dragon, a great puff of flame come out. And it was just … And I was talking to someone later, years later, and he was up there later up in the Gulf of Carpentaria and he said the Malayan people have something like that. And he did mention what it was, but I’ve never been able to find out. But if you want something hot, find out what it is because

curry is chickenfeed compared with this stuff. And we all said the same thing, it just gets down to here and then after a while it goes boom. And we just learnt, just watch how these blokes are sitting now eating it, that have been sitting there a few minutes and if they’re hoeing into it and enjoying it, right, well ladle it on. But it was basically of peanuts. And I’ve

seen something in the shop markets now, much the same sort of thing, but it hasn’t got the hot element.

Well I think most of the Dutchmen had lived in Indonesia, so that’s why we had the Indonesian stuff. And being in the minority we had to eat that. But

whether the OR mess, the other ranks’ mess had that, whether they had something like Australian diets, soup or steak or what, I’m just not quite sure about that one.

Well one squadron

was fairly close to us. I don’t know exactly whereabouts, but they used to use a strip called Gould. We used Batchelor strip. A bit further down the road there was 31 Squadron and they were at Coomalie Creek and they used that. And much further down, over the road, there was 24 Squadron. But I think each squadron had its own airstrip. 2 Squadron was

Beauforts at the time and then they went onto Mitchells. But they were huge and that was a bit closer to Darwin and further east of the main road. But we were pretty close to the main, also, road.

Well they came over a couple of times, but one of the peculiar things at night time was that a fog comes down

but it’s about eight feet off the ground. And some nights they’d say, “Oh we’re not on duty. We’re not on call or anything. Can we get a truck and go down to one of the canteens beside the roadside?” “Yeah, rightio.” “Where’ll we go to?” “Oh, we’ll go up north to the thirty-eight mile one,” or something like that. So we’d go up there. And then we’d be coming home and we’d be coming along the dusty road and the fog would be about ten feet off the ground. You could drive at sixty

along this road, it’d be dust everywhere, and the headlights on full beam and no-one could see anything. Because when you came in at night-time you just couldn’t see a thing; all you could see was cloud. And other times, of course, they burn off a lot during the day and there’s smoke. And it looks like camp fires, as though the whole area’s got camp fires there. And you’d be

flat out trying to find your base, you know. And for any enemy aircraft coming over, they’d be flat out trying to find … I think there were a couple of raids at Darwin and also Truscott while I was on leave at one stage. I remember going over to Truscott around about September and there’d been a raid over there and they’d shot down a bomber and I think it went into the sea and they had recovered

it and it was out on the land. And we went and had a stickybeak at it and they said, “Get a load of this. It’s got Dunlop tyres on it.” I don’t know whether they were made in Japan or just where they were made, but I remember seeing that.

Well it was pretty good. I think somebody used to have a gambling thing set up sort of behind it. But they used to have mainly

soft drinks and there was a meeting place because the army unit from home used to be camped opposite. I didn’t realise at the time, but we went up there one time and a bloke from Echuca came over and claimed me. “Where the hell did you come from?” “Oh, we’re in camp just over there.” “Oh, beauty, we go back there and meet some of the blokes.” So we went over there. And sometimes … There was one down at Adelaide river, we’d go south. But

if I had a chance I say, “We’ll got up to the thirty-eight mile one, hey?” And I’d go up there and I’d be able to see some of my mates. Because the army blokes were well and truly browned off – they’d joined the army and they were just stuck up at thirty-eight mile and not doing anything much and just doing the cases they wanted.” And he’s one of their blokes, going out and flying over Timor and seeing a bit of action and so on, and they’re just sort of sitting there and

just looking after the place really.

We had a number of night operations. I can’t remember how many, my log book is over there and it will say that I completed round about five hundred hours, I think, altogether, three hundred and something night hours and so many daylight hours. So for the time I was there, so

that would be April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and a few in December.

Well it didn’t happen to us while we were flying, so I think we were pretty fortunate. But the aircraft used to have what they called IFF,

Identification, Friend or Foe, and we’d have to switch that on as we were coming back to Australia. And a couple of times I looked out and said, “Hey, what’s that Spitfire doing?” And then the skipper would report in and say, “We’ve got a Spitfire keeping us company.” And they’d say, “Well somebody didn’t turn their IFF on.” And so there was planes coming in and no identification,

better go up and have a look. Other times we went up and we did exercises in cooperation with the searchlights and also Spitfires to get used to working with searchlights. But by 1944, things round Darwin area had slowed up quite a bit because I think the Japanese were getting

such a hammering in other places they needed their aircrafts somewhere else. And so we were just sort of keeping an eye on things and making sure they couldn’t build up their supplies. But they did have a bit of a panic on at one stage – they said there was a decent sized Japanese cruiser had left, I think it was Singapore, and they didn’t know where it was going.

And they thought it could have been heading down towards Perth or Fremantle because Fremantle was where the Catalinas and the submarines were operating from. And the submarines used to go up around there and they were sinking a lot of ships and so on. And they thought it might be coming round there and they also noticed that large transport carriers, troop carriers, were missing and they thought, “Yes, they’re coming down south.” So they

had quite a hunt at one time to find them. I think eventually they found them, but that was a week or two after I left them so I missed out on all that fun.

I went in a couple of times. They had a flight going up to Darwin and we had a look round and saw the damage that was done. But we were just around the air force, around the airport and

that was it. There was a Liberator on the tarmac so we climbed inside and had a bit of a look in that. And that was the closest we got to the big stuff, because we’d heard about them and so on.

I don’t think so. I think

we saw that there was a lot of damage, but I don’t think they really announced it till quite some time after the war just how many were killed.

I would have had a .45. And every now and again they’d

take us down to give us a bit of experience with this. And I remember that one of my mates, Jim, stood up and lined up something on the other side of the creek and pulled the trigger. And of course, everyone (UNCLEAR) we all stood up, there’s eight or nine of us in the line and we pulled the trigger and then he pulled the trigger and again, and nothing happened. So what, what, what? And so gave him another … reloaded his magazine

and put some more in and he lines up and pulls it down. And of course there’s that much noise you couldn’t hear it. He pulls the trigger once and pulls it again and nothing happens, what’s going on. Gets the magazine out and it’s empty. And they examined the gun quite closely, somebody must have filed the seer down. And the seer is part … so when he pulled the trigger once the whole lot went like that in one go. And of course, there’s so many guns going off at once you wouldn’t have heard it. If he had just been

there singularly he would have said, “Gee that didn’t sound like one bullet going off.” But it was … I forget just how many were in there, about eight or nine rounds I think.

Mmm.

One of the chaps had a Luger and he was tickled pink that he’d managed to get a Luger. But we just had a .45.

Well at gunnery school I completed 13 hours and 25 minutes to

the graduation course in January and February 1944 and then went up to 18 Squadron. And then we were going out this particular night and I said, “Oh, I’d better you give you a run through so you know how to handle things.” And, “We go out for a flight this afternoon.” And I see in the log book it says one hour and forty-five minutes, so that’s my operation training was one hour forth-five minutes. So, thirteen

hours and twenty-five minutes on actual gunnery training, it’s skill, and one hour and forth-five before the real thing. And six hours twenty that night, so that’s what we got. So I guess you can say from that that we weren’t really fully trained. Well compared with the number of hours

say a wireless operator would’ve put in in flying and things like that, but we didn’t need it to be a great deal. We were only up there to point a gun in the right direction and pull and trigger and keep your fingers crossed that you made contact with the right target.

No they went over when we were first

there, some of our bods went over to Potshot, Exmouth Bay, because they had word that the Japanese could be coming down and they flew a section of the squadron over there. But it wasn’t in my … My mob wasn’t included in that. Some of the squadron were there, so that must’ve been in March 1944 that they flew over there.

Well I don’t recall it cause I think they evacuated most of it, but we just got up there and I can’t remember whether we flew up or they said, “There’s a truck going up to Darwin. Anybody like a ride up?” And those that aren’t on

standby and we said “Oh yeah, we’ll do anything to get out of this dump.” So off we went and had a look and clambered round the Liberator that was on deck there and had a look inside, and made some comment because the Liberator was very close to the ground and its bomb bay door sort of shoot up the side. But there was a catwalk in there about nine inches wide I suppose,

about that wide, and that went – sort of held the plane together. But that was available so that someone could walk down from one section to the other. And one of my friends here was a trainee navigator at Evans Head and he said they were flying around at Evans Head one time on some … quite few thousand feet and while he was down there the bomb bay doors went up and he said, “argh … 5,000 feet.”

And I don’t know if he had a parachute harness on, but no, it was quite alarming. I didn’t hear much more about that, but it was quite an experience.

No I don’t think so. Possibly the one at Laga had

been the hottest one because we’d been up there a number of times and it was regarded a pretty hot area because of the number of anti-aircraft guns that were there, and also the fact that the skipper had been told to drop incendiaries and light up the place, and the fact that he went below the height that he was

supposed to go and did that, and the fact that the aircraft was a little bit damaged on the way back. But…

Well you could see flashes of things further around black clouds and things like that and you could see the tracer coming up towards you, and you’d just hope it’d hit somebody else

and not hit us. But occasionally we came home and we said, “Oh we’ve got a hole here and a hole there.” Not a great deal; it must’ve only been a small hole. But we were out flying out around at some place at Timor and they spotted this big area down there, and some clot down there must’ve thought he’d take a potshot at us and the skipper must’ve been looking for something to drop. He had

this decent size bomb on – I’m not sure if it was 300 pound or just what. So he dropped it and flattened the place completely. And when we turned – he dropped it and it was on target and when we turned back it was just a sheet of concrete, so it just blew the place apart. So whoever it was … I think he only fired a rifle, it wasn’t anything bigger than that, so he certainly knocked him out.

Well the Dutch marking was a red, white and blue horizontal in there. And I have a couple of photos – not in colour – and somewhere or other I’ve got a decent painting of an aircraft, Dutch aircraft, attacking shipping in the Islands. And I think that was

1943. So, but they were all the … The Dutch had apparently arranged to buy B25s from the United States early in 1941 before the Japs came into it and they … The Dutch must’ve had some sort of a clue their aircraft were outdated and so on

and they’d better get something and they decided to buy B25s and they went to America. And of course they were in the process of getting those when Japan came in and then the Yanks said, “We want all the B25s we can get, so you can get some.” And they virtually got a squadron together of B25s.

Well we

just did so much time and we sort of completed things as a crew, and then they said to Herman, “Right, you’ve completed so many operations and go south or… They took Herman off flying because he had been a captain. I think his promotion came through to a major and I’m not

sure if the CO then was Colonel Asher, so that … And I said, “We don’t want Major Owens flying.” And I notice in my log book that I flew a number of missions with other pilots and sort of filling in a gap, and then they said, “Rightio Herman, that’s end of your time at [(UNCLEAR) Batchelor?] base. Get your crew together and go south.” So that’s when we all came down together.

We had a RAAF component and it was a pain in the posterior to say the least, because when we got to Canberra in the first place they said, “Right, you’re flying up to Darwin.” We said, “We’ve got a hell of a lot of baggage. We’ve got all our bags that we’re supposed to take to England. We’ve got all that and we’ve got all our stuff.”

And he said, “Well you can’t take much with you. You’re limited to what we can fit in the aircraft. More or less what you’re standing up in boots and socks and shoes and shorts and shirts and a hat and personal gear and that’s about it.” So that’s what we did. And we got up there and we were up there for a couple of weeks and they said, “We’re going to have a kit inspection.” You were supposed to have three pairs of long pants, three long sleeved shirts and so on. They came along to

us and had a look well the… Back in Melbourne… Oh, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge. “What happened?” So we all told the same story and they put us up on a charge, and because we didn’t have all this stuff and because and I think it was because we had the chap in charge was the ground staff aircrew and ground staff chap and we were all aircrew, and there’s quite a division of

that feeling. And I remember a book not so long back and a chap was talking about seeing ground staff commission people and he said, “We don’t salute penguins,” – people that don’t fly. “We don’t salute penguins.” Anyway this chap put us on a charge and we got … Oh, they read the riot act to us. What was it?

No promotion for 18 months, an adverse report to the area officer commanding and a severe reprimand. And we were a bit hot under the collar, but that’s the way the law went and we couldn’t do much else about it. But we were very pleased to see that our no promotion for 18 months, that our promotion came through a little bit late, but it was backdated

to the 6th of August because we graduated at the 6th of February. So I think when it got up to the area officer commanding, who I think was a chap by the name of Eaton, who was also known as ‘Moth’ Eaton, area officer commanding, he said, “Oh, what a lot of rubbish,” and screwed it up and threw it in the bin. Because we were flying

and we said, “Well we’ll go down and get them and when they go on leave …” Or, “We’ll write down. Someone’ll post them up to us.” But when we were convinced by this bloke at Canberra that sent us up, said, “You don’t need any of that stuff up there,” and so a real beauty. So we didn’t take it and sent it all back and he said, “Label it and put the label on where you want it to go.”

And that got back to Melbourne and we were able to pick it up some stage later.

Just the Dutch people, just … I think they would’ve gone back to Canberra, but I went back to Melbourne so I lost touch with all the blokes who were up there for donkey’s

years as a matter of fact, because I looked in the Melbourne phone book one day and I got … I said, “Oh, there’s a name there. It’s only one of … and that looks pretty good. I’ll ring him up.” And I got speaking to him. Yes, he was the right bloke. And he said, “Do you know who we got in touch with?” he said. He had a daughter going to school and

said, “The teacher is Mrs Le Marcarand.” I said, “Le Marcarand? Gee, that was … Phil was Le Marcarand.” And there was only one we’d ever heard of and we all went up and spoke to her and, “Oh yes, sure, he was my husband.” And so that was another link in the chain. And Roy said, “What about Cec?” “Oh, he’s a bank manager at so and so.

We’ll get him on the phone.” So he rings him up, speak to him, “Oh hello, I’d like a loan of a couple of thousand, could you do that Mr Cec Eastman?” “I know that voice from somewhere. Donnie! What are you doing?” So that’s how he came on then. So we’ve been in touch ever since. I go down and we go out and we have dinner together sometimes and go over there and send Christmas cards and

get all their family news. And also, a couple of years back when our youngest son was going over to England, we sent a card down to Cec and Betty Eastman. I said, “Peter, our youngest bloke’s going over to England working holiday next year.” And I said, “Oh, we’ll be over there. We’ll be staying at the Hotel Russell. Tell him to look in. We’ll be in such a such place there.” So they were there one evening and Peter walks

in and said … He looks very English there with a suit because he was working for, I think, Thames Television, I think at that time. And so he walked in there and so and so and they’d made contact with Peter and they were interested to hear what … They hadn’t met any of the other family at all, so…

Well it was so sudden

because I’d been to the pictures and come home and thought, “Mackay, you can’t go to bed. You’re wanted. The orderly room wants you and you’ve got to go and see them and you’ve got to hand your stuff into the service policeman. You’re flying … You’re going out at 6 o’clock in the morning.” Well I didn’t have a chance. I said, “Hooray,” to Cec and I think Rory in the tent nearby and that was about all I said farewell to. And we were off and didn’t see them again until

years later, about 1970 as a matter of fact I suppose.

I went back to Melbourne Cricket Ground and they gave us leave that was … Then became 1 Personnel Depot ‘cause they changed it, it was no longer embarkation depot ‘cause we were – it was personnel we were dealing with. And we were there and

they said well they need people down at West Sale flying gunnery instruction. So we went down there and had a couple of months down there and then they sort of send us up to Nhill to do an instructors’ course to see whether you’re suitable for that. And I wasn’t. And then went back to Melbourne Cricket Ground. So I must’ve…. East Simms, I think,

somewhere along the track there at Nhill – I’m not dead sure on that one. And then we were sitting around at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and they had so many blokes coming back from Europe that they didn’t know what to do with us, and if we wanted to discharge or if we wanted a tour of operations, and Cec wrote down and said that he had completed tour of operation with

18 Squadron and wanted another tour, and he was posted to Tocumwal. And that was an operation training unit for a Liberator squadron, and he was there when the war was over because this was around May, June. It was over a couple of months after that.

Not really. I remember that was May. I think I may well have been either up at Nhill or back at Melbourne Cricket Ground after Nhill.

Not quite so much for Germany, but it was really on when

Japan came in. But I was halfway through being discharged on the Friday and my girlfriend and I had 21st birthday party to go to, and we were there and they had the radio on and they announced that they had dropped the atom bomb and Japan was seeking peace. And I had to go back at this stage to complete the last little bit of

discharge work and get papers signed and so on and then I was a free man after that. And on the Wednesday I had to go for another aptitude test for this Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme, and that was on the Wednesday morning in a building in Elizabeth Street. And we got in there and all waiting and the person came in and said, “Well sorry, fellas. It’s over. We’ll see you in

a fortnight.” And we just went ‘whoosh’ out the door and just about killed him in the rush, I think. And we sort of phoned up our girlfriends and said …

Well not a great deal actually ‘cause they had the armouries

to check guns and things like that, so we just actually hopped in and flew and they said, “You bring our aircraft in one piece.” And, “Any complaints?” “No, everything’s right, thanks.” But we were interested because the aircraft that Cec flew had a cat painted on there and it was called ‘Jarpee’ because the

skipper’s name was very similar to Jarpee, and they made this cat, painted it on there. Originally they had him playing with a toy soldier and they said, “That’s a no-no. If you get forced down and they see that playing with a Japanese soldier, no, you’d better paint that out and make it a ball of string of wool or something,” and they did that.

The chap who was the wireless operator was Dutch, was Jan Coolhaas, C, double O, L, H, double A, S. And everyone now and then he would electrify the camp because, “I got a letter! I got a letter from home!” Well home was Holland. Mum used to write to, I think, an aunty in South America and

she used to forward this letter on to Jan out in Australia. He got a letter from home, you know. How the dickens did he manage that? His mum’s in Holland and it’s occupied and he gets a letter from home, whereas we were getting one maybe every week or something like that. But once every six or eight weeks, Jan’d come up and get a letter.

I think I’ve

got a bit on a photo there. I don’t think it was anything spectacular, but it was nearly always the 188. Earlier we had started with a different aircraft, the 180, and we had that for quite a while. And then apparently they said, “Well we want a good aircraft to fly over to Singapore and sort of show the flag.” So they

took it off us. And they must’ve put in extra fuel tanks and so on and flew round Changi camp, but because all the prisoners were there … The rumour went around it was an aircraft there, but of course they went up in aircraft recognition and didn’t know what it was. My father’s cousin was in camp at Changi and I mentioned to him and he said, “Yes,

I did hear a rumour about the plane flying around that wasn’t Japanese, but we didn’t know whose it was.” And I suppose they hadn’t seen any aircraft with Dutch markings on it as well. Most the time when Herman flew he flew in 188, and when Bette and I were

over in America we stayed with Johnny Jokoster, the turret gunner, and he said, “We’re going to Nevada County Fair today.” “Oh, that’s good.” And he put on a T-shirt and it had a B25 on the back and I said, “Where did you get that?” He said, “I’ve got a friend who airbrushed it for me.” And I’ve got an identical shirt now and it’s marked with the 118, that’s the aircraft we flew in.

And so off we went to Nevada County Fair and Johnny introduced us to a lot of people, “Oh, this is my tail gunner. We haven’t seen each seen 1944.” This is 1948 [?]. “Gee, that’s really …” “You see this plane? Well he was down here and I was up there.” “Gee, that’s real … That’s …” “We’ve been up …” And he, in his time over there he became secretary

of the American Legion of Ex-servicemen, so that he had quite a lot of contact with the ex-personnel over there. But we were very pleased that we could stay with him, and he drove us hundreds of miles round California and so on, yeah.

No, because here in

Rocky [Rockhampton] most times Anzac Day, well I worked at the (Bully UNCLEAR). I should be on night shift or day shift. I suppose I could’ve said, “I want time off,” and I might’ve got it and I may not’ve got it, but I thought, “No, no.” And then later I joined the air force association and I became secretary of it and so on, and I marched a number of times.

And now of course I’m the keeper of the flags and it’s a case of I have to front up and march. Couple of times I’ve been in Melbourne and marched on Anzac Day, but they’re few and far between.

Well, I remember the ones that are no longer with us, the ones that we lost in action, the young lads, because some of them you see, like ‘Butch’, were

only 18. Others were considerably older; some were parents. But ‘Butch’ was 18 and a bit and here I am not even 19 and my life could end just like that. So we were all ages. Some were considerably older than others and of course Herman, the skipper, was, I’d say

he was about 10 years older than me at least, because he’d been in the Dutch air force and done training and done quite a lot of training. And I think someone told me he had something like13,000 flying hours at the time we started flying together. So that’s a hell of a lot of flying, especially in those things. A day would be a six hour, you know, flying.

We had six hours fifteen or twenty minutes, or eight hours I mean for a flight, whereas now an eight hour flight covers a fair distance and can be even longer. But so he had quite a lot of experience and I think that’s what brought us back alive was that he was so experience. And I think also, he being pretty well up they would let him in to

whatever we were going to be doing the next day and he could sort of plan things, where we were going. And he’d get Fred, the co-pilot, and the navigator and say, “Well this is where we’re going tomorrow and we’ll be doing so and so and we’ve got to look out for this and whatever.” And for the rest of us down the back, we didn’t know until they got up to the briefing stage, but Herman would have it all worked his course and things like that.

Well around about a half an hour, might’ve been an hour depending on what was involved and how many crews were going and so on. If we were just going out round a number of Islands then they’d just say, “Search J,” or, “Search K,” and that goes up and that was already planned. And we’d just go up and fly that particular search and knock up whatever we could see, and then

come home. One of the interesting things was, too, especially when you came home at night-time they used to give us a good feed. We’d have a meal before we went out, but we’d get home at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning and there’d be a Javanese chap would be in there and he’d be cooking and he usually made pancakes. And I’ve always had a weakness for pancakes,

and, “Oh, pancakes, sergeant?” “Yes thanks, Johnny.” And I’d get another pancake. All the other blokes had gone back to bed. “Pancake?” “Yes thanks.” Well I was on leave in Melbourne one time, and who should come along the street, but Johnny. He can’t speak English except to say ‘sergeant’ and I can’t speak Indonesian. We were standing there in Elizabeth and Bourke Street near the post office and I’m moving my hands around and he’s waving his hands around

and everyone turns around and, “What? What? What are those two up to?” Because the uniform was pretty, you know, cause being Javanese in red. We got on like a house on fire. So it was great to be able to see him. They had a separate place, a pub in Bourke Street where they used to get their accommodation. I think the Dutch Post used to have a

separate place and we used to go to a hotel in Spencer Street, opposite Spencer Street Station. And the idea would be the take-off would be round about 6 o’clock, or we’d gather or sleep somewhere at this hotel on the night before. The whole crew would sleep there and then we’d go round to the Hotel Argus, which was near where

the Melbourne Argus was and we’d pick up our transport. And I think that’s where the Dutch Club was. And then we’d pick up our transport and go out to the airport and catch our plane back to Darwin from there.

Oh yes, a debrief as to what we had seen. What the weather was like, and enemy aircraft, did we see any

and if so what you think it might have been. As Cec described the night when Tommy’s aircraft was missing he said they had seen aircraft and they saw an explosion in the sky and they reckon that the pilot must’ve gone into the cloud and pulled up and the enemy had also gone into the cloud and had

collided and then they fell into the sea. So all I could say was we saw an explosion in the sky and that was that, and so we didn’t know just who was involved. So we counted the chickens as they came back and they said, “Such and such an aircraft didn’t make it.” “Oh, that was Lieutenant so and so.” And we had to go out the next day and look for them.

Oh no as soon as … while your memory was fresh. But I’ve gathered that a lot of the reports were sort of altered because the chap that was writing it would say, “Oh, I can’t say that. It doesn’t sound real good.” And I’ve heard a number of air force people say, you know, “That’s not what happened.

That report’s not right.” The bloke who wrote it thought, “We can’t put it like that,” and wrote it a different way.

Well I think it was pretty crook. We were supposed to tell it like it was and this bloke’d go in as an official report and sort of camouflage it rather. And

I don’t think we really knew about it, especially at the time because the report’d go away and then possibly years later blokes’d come across and say, “Oh, I was involved in that. That wasn’t the way it happened.” But they wouldn’t know about it until many years later in most cases. I suppose the skipper would be … If he was a person of authority like Aarons

was, he would know what was going on. But for ones further down, they would just sort of brush them off and say, “Yes, well thanks for your input. I’ve made my notes and will put it into longhand and type it up and send it off to area officer commanding and that’ll be that.”

Well I think just about everyone came into the city

because you couldn’t move in the places where there were tram lines. There were just wall to wall people from there. All shapes and all sizes and all colours because, well, with the Dutch we had so many, we had West Indians with us, we had Javanese born, Chinese

and others from Indonesia. We had the Dutch people from Holland. The girlfriend and I spotted someone who was a Dutchman there and we got talking and he was tickled pink to know that I was with the Dutch squadron because I didn’t have any markings to show who I was flying with. All he could see was that I was an air gunner and

that was … He didn’t know which squadron I was with. At one stage I came down on leave and all I had to wear coming down from Darwin was khaki long pants and long sleeve shirt, and the warmest thing I had was the sheepskin-lined jacket. Well that had a emblem on there, the Dutch

klinter, which was the old girl in Dutch with her big skirt and her like a witch’s broom. A Dutch klinter sweeping up the rubbish. And so that was the official Dutch emblem. And I got on to a tram at Batman Avenue, and of course all the air force blokes, they were all done up in their pretty blues and their nicely pressed uniforms

and light blue shirt and black tie and hair nicely down and so on, and here’s this scruffy individual gets on in khaki pants that looks like he’d slept in – well quite possibly I had too, and the shirt too – and the old Luger flying jacket and a hat that looks like it’s spent half its life in the dust. And

sort of, “What’s this character doing amongst us?” you know. It didn’t worry me. I was home and that was the main thing. But one of the big things that I was a bit disappointed in, I think it was actually after the army servicemen came in, and I was having a shower and I was watching my suntan disappearing down the plug hole because we were up in

Queensland for 6 months and I think we saw a mobile bath unit, a shower unit, once in that time. So I can remember having baths in the sea here and there, but that’s not the same as a personal thing. But to stand there and to suddenly see your suntan disappearing down there…

Well I

think again a lot of from comradeship from the army and also quite a bit from the air force. But the air force one was sort of narrowed down to a couple of blokes in a tent with us. Although we started off with six of us in the tent, a couple moved out because they were drinkers and they wanted to be with their drinking mates

somewhere else and left Cec and Tommy and I because we didn’t drink. Oh, Jim Cowry, and then Jim went so that was a … And somebody else went and we got a replacement in and he was a new chum and he didn’t go down too well. And there was one

thing which was … We were quite lucky really, when we were issued with our side-arms up there we said, “Righto, we’ve all got revolvers. Now we don’t muck about with these. We don’t point them at each other at any time at all, even if you swear that you’ve taken the magazine out and that because it’s how accidents happen. We don’t ever point, so okay.” And we

did pretty well and we got most of our time and nobody lost a shot of the side-arms in time. But we got this new bloke there and he’s there cleaning his … He’s going like this with his revolver and the damn thing went off. It hit the floor, which was ant bed, and went straight up through Cec’s bed. And Cec says, “That was a bloody miracle.” He said, “The first time in ages that

I wasn’t stretched out on the bunk.” He said, “I was up at the table in the middle writing a letter a home.” He said, “Usually at that time of day I’d be resting, reading or something like that.” But this young man was just … And this damn thing went off. And we had never had any trouble like that all. And we’d just said, “Right, you blokes really don’t know. You’re not with it.” I can’t remember what his name was and I think

it wasn’t long after that I left the squadron so I never heard much more. I don’t know how long after that Cec left the squadron either.