Australians at War Film Archive

Well, I’ll start by saying I was born in 1921 in North Carlton within 200 yards of the Carlton Football Grounds.

I have been a loyal Blues supporter for a bit over 81 years. I called myself on account of this a Melbourne Cockney to my RAF [Royal Air Force] colleagues during the war, that’s the sound of the Carlton football bell, was the equivalent of ‘Beau Bells’, I think. My first school was Princes Hill State School. We lived within a stone’s throw of that so

all of my early fights from little boys from Carlton I think it worth saying something about the ethos of that time was sort of the Australia we lived in. One vivid memory of Princes Hill School was how on every Armistice Day we would sit down at our desks and sing a song that went something… it was called The School of War and the song went something like this:

“We won’t forget you while in this dark November,

\n[Verse follows]\n The books are open and the judgment says your lives are\n For honour, and for England given,\n The school will not forget…will not forget.”\n

I quote that because it gives you an idea of the atmosphere in which we grew up. We were imbued with the sense of 60,000 Australians

that died in World War I fighting for England and that was something in our blood. As you know probably 95% British Isles stock in those days. At the age of 10 my mother, who was an upwardly mobile wife insisted that I be sent to Melbourne Grammar School

and I think it fair to say that this sense of patriotism, which was not patriotism to Australia alone but patriotism to the Empire was reinforced. We had at Melbourne Grammar a fourth verse to the school song, which went, if I can remember it…to the tune of Men of Harlech,

\n[Verse follows]\n “Some in strife of sterner omens faced\n The empire’s stubborn foemen\n

Falters erst their sires have bowmen,\n

One a deathless name, praise ye these who stood\n For Britain these by foreign marksman smitten.”\n

So you get the idea of how young boys in the 1920s and 30s grew up with the sense of loyalty to an Empire, you can get a feeling

for the Australia of that day. If you don’t understand that, you’ve missed the point. So let me say at Melbourne Grammar, I think all of us by the mid thirties knew there was going to be another war, and that was a dominant thought in our minds – what would we do if there were a war. I came from a family in which my father was a pacifist.

He had not enlisted in World War I. My mother had a brother who had half his face shot off in World War I and one effect of this was, while most of my colleagues at Melbourne Grammar were members of the cadets I was not even allowed to join the cadet corps, so facing the prospect of a war

I had very little idea of where I personally would fit in. I didn’t know whether I was up to taking part in a war or what. I can remember one occasion sitting down on the lawn at Grammar, talking with four of my friends and they were talking about the war they knew was coming and the other four all had fathers who had served in World War I

and “Oh I’ll join up” they all said and I just stayed silent. I can remember that very vividly. Nevertheless, the pressures of living at home, and having, I suppose, not an unusual middle class family, who placed Protestant work ethics and such like very highly on the agenda,

I felt a lot of pressure at school. And when I got to leaving year I faced the double prospect that I didn’t want to be dependent on my parents to go through university or did I want to do my own thing, so when the National Bank came around canvassing for applicants for jobs. In 1938

I was facing my leaving year, I was confident – in those days you matriculated after 11th year, I was confident of matriculating and I thought, well, I’ll join the National Bank and I’ll get paid there and I’ll put myself through university part-time. I proceeded to do that and joined the bank and worked in the National Bank, Fitzroy, as a junior on a flagstone floor

of a bank chamber that was about 16 feet high and heated only by an open fireplace. Rather chilly work and I passed the one subject I sat for. By the end of the year, however it already became obvious,

this was after the Munich [Conference] and such like, that war was imminent. And so at the age of 18, on my 18th birthday, without telling my parents, I applied for and joined the Melbourne University Rifles. War broke out three weeks later. So there I was and already enrolled as a private in the Melbourne University Rifles [MUR] and I was called up for camp

in December of that year and so we did four months camp in the MUR and I think in all my life this was probably the best educational experience I ever had because I shared a tent with seven other people, I think the tent was 14 feet by 12 – the floors were jarrah and we slept on straw palliasses,

but it was mid summer so it was quite warm and we did our camp at Mt Martha, the most beautiful site, watching sunsets over the bay

Yes

I think I was saying I thought this the most important educational experience

I had had in my life – sharing with seven other university undergraduates, all of whom knew things about Freud and Havelock Ellis and Marie Stokes on birth control and these subjects that were absolutely unknown to me and if I didn’t grow up exactly quickly in that time I had a whole new intellectual world opened up to me.

So that was also physically, a four months infantry training is a very good thing physically - just working in a bank and studying at night wouldn’t have developed much muscle, but doing four months infantry training was wonderful. So after those four months I went back to the bank

and found a lot of my colleagues in the MUR – the Melbourne University Rifles were enlisting, joining the services, for overseas service, and here was I hampered by the fact that, in those days until you turned 21 you could not enlist for overseas service without parental permission. So I struggled with this albatross on my shoulders

for a while, and I worked in the National Bank in the Melbourne Office for that year doing important work like carrying ingots of gold to the mint with a revolver in my pocket through the streets of Melbourne. I don’t know what I would have done if someone had tackled me but I can remember jay walking with this

and almost being apprehended. So that year went by and I was back in camp again at Mt Martha and by this time I had been promoted corporal and also platoon corporal for a while then they made me lance sergeant and still I couldn’t get parental permission and I went back to work in the bank again,

let me see, what are we up to – this is 40 - 41 – yes, I went back to work in the bank again for a while, and then was called up for an officers’ training course at which I did at Seymour and it was this time that the iron entered my soul because in the officers’ camp

what I suddenly realised was that if I took a militia commission with all the people coming back from the Middle East at this time, there was no possibility of transferring with a commission to the AIF, the Australian Imperial Force from the militia, and I would be stuck in militia for the rest of the war, for which was something I was not prepared to tolerate,

so I had it out thoroughly with my parents to the effect that I was allowed to apply for the air force, which I had always wanted to join and perhaps it’s relevant to give reasons for that, and I suppose first of all, a little infantry training had told me that as much as I respected the infantry, it was not the sort of war for me.

I didn’t like the prospect of trench warfare or jungle warfare and furthermore most of my friends, the friends I respected had joined the air force, and I wanted to be with them, and a third reason was it seemed to be intellectually a much more satisfying service.

You would learn skills that were not connected with puncturing people with steel and so I got my application in and was put on the Air Force Reserve, I think in August or September 1941.

Royal Australian Air Force, yes.

So the only problem then was that the Japanese entered the war in that December, again I was called up by my infantry unit – I had rejected the commission I had been offered to go on the Air Force Reserve and I was called up as a sergeant and I did this time, being told that no way would I be allowed to transfer

from the unit I was in, or the militia to the air force and no way was I going to get the commission I had rejected. So I did this camp, they made me an acting sergeant major, that ended this period and after that I did a guerrilla warfare school at Foster,

a militia guerrilla warfare school, which again, physically was great fun but it still didn’t convince me I wanted to be an army man. Now after this, I was just about due for call-up on the Air Force Reserve provided I could get a transfer. And the good fortune I had in this case was that Colonel Balf

who had been my colonel in the university rifles was the head of an organisation called the ‘Lines of Communication’ which was the effective body for transferring inter-service transfers. So on leave after the Jungle warfare school I went to seek Colonel Balf and put my position to him

and told him that I was sick of not seeing any possibility of action – I had been posted to a training battalion and I wanted to get into the unit of my choice. I had done this guerrilla warfare school and yet I didn’t have my commission. Colonel Balf said, “Well look McCredie,

we’re forming the 5th Independent Company at the moment, now I can offer you a commission in the 5th Independent Company.” and a chill went down my spine. Because one of the things you learned at Foster was that a commission in an independent company was about as sure a way – it’s a one-way ticket to heaven as possible to get. And if my feet

were a little cold at that, I suppose, I have to admit it. But I said, “Well, Colonel, my hope had always been to fly.” and he said, “Well think about it McCredie, today’s Friday, come back and see me on Monday.” So I didn’t really need to think about it but I came back and saw him on Monday and said, “Colonel Balf, I’m very grateful for the interest you have taken in my case but my wish always

has been to fly and I would like my transfer.” “It will be done McCredie.” so two weeks later on 27th April, 1942 I found myself at Summers at No.1 ITS, [Initial Training School]. Early induction into the air force had its boring moments, I might say,

for someone who had been a sergeant major to suddenly find himself required to do rifle drill, even if it were under the auspices of one Hubert Opperman, who at that stage was Australia’s most famous cyclist and who later became Sir Hubert and then a member of parliament, but Oppy, as he was known then, was not a very harsh disciplinarian

and we got on chummily with him. I don’t mean really me in particular, but the whole flight. I remember someone asked Oppy “Why all Australians such good cyclists?” to which he replied, “We eat more meat than anyone else.” and it’s probably as good an explanation for Australian sporting fortitude as any, I think,

but from Summers I went to Temora for my…let me explain that at Summers they had a process of sorting sheep and goats that’s pilots from navigators, wireless operators, gunners, etc and the only reason the others were called goats, I think is because they had the hardest job. The pilot was up there,

responsible for his own life but was also responsible for those and I would hate to think of some of the men some of my crew had when I was responsible for them and they wondered whether this idiot could land this plane properly next time and such like, but that was war and some people had to be pilots and I think I was fortunate to be

one of those who were selected. Anyway to get to Temora, I found myself being trained by this huge former Broken Hill miner who had been in private enterprise and who applied really strict standards to his trainees and when I was interviewed on the telephone,

Brad [Archive researcher] asked me, what did I think of him as an instructor? And I don’t think I gave him very much of an answer then, but I have since thought of a little letter I wrote at the time and Watters, Sergeant Watters, was his name, and he had been transferred from Temora

just about the time I was finishing my training and I wrote to my parents at the time, saying we were all sorry that Watters was being posted, he’s been the sternest man you could ever meet. He would shout our heads off through the tube if we did anything wrong, but by golly he got results and the results I quoted in my letter

are at the elementary flying training about one in five people were scrubbed, if you know the expression. Scrubbed means eliminated from the course. He had been transferred to Narromine. Yes, checking on this letter home, about Watters, I pointed out to my parents

that one fifth of pilots at elementary training were scrubbed, but Watters’ record at Temora was that he had 35 out of 36 pass. So whether I would have been one of the five, that another instructor might have scrubbed, I shall never know but I can be grateful to Watters. But an amusing little story I can talk

which will give an idea of his method of instruction. On one occasion we were required to do a practice forced landing, this meant cutting the engine off at about… he would cut the engine off at about 4,000 feet without warning and then through the tube I would hear the noise – find yourself a field and practice a landing on it so I would find myself a field

and I knew what the procedure was. I had been told often enough. Every 500 feet if it was safe, you of course had to open the throttle because otherwise the engine would get cold from the descent and when you got down you didn’t actually land, you of course made it close to landing but then flew away. Well if you didn’t keep the engine warm it might choke on you, so we get down from 4,000 feet

to about 3,200 feet and I hear Watters voice saying, “It’s pretty cold out there today McCredie”, and I said, “Right, I can’t feel it sir.” “No, but your bloody engine does”, and he opened the throttle to warm the engine and that was Watters way of keeping you on the straight and narrow.

Anyway further sheep and goats were sorted out at elementary flying training because most of us wanted to be fighter pilots in those days and you can guess why at least, you only had your own life at stake and you dealt out the punishment. But if you were in a bomber you relied upon all the other crew to save you when the emergency arose,

so you didn’t do your own navigating, what if that chump got off course, took you over flack and such like, so that was I think, also a much greater thrill flying fighters - the manoeuvres you can do in a fighter are much more exciting than those in a bomber. But be that as it may, I think they worked out that those

who showed greatest aptitude at flying at elementary school were more likely to be effective fighter pilots and so it was and the only solace, we as bomber pilots had, would be to say to our friends who had been selected as fighter pilots, “Well nobody would trust you with a crew chumly.”

but that was really hiding our own disappointment. So I went to Point Cook from there and got my wings. I graduated to my mother’s chagrin as a sergeant pilot and not an officer pilot. There are various reasons for that that I need not go into. From Point Cook, the course was more or less bisected. Half of it was kept in Australia

and the other half were told, “Well you go overseas.” This didn’t appeal to a lot of us at the time because we felt what would people think of us skulking over there when the Japanese are at the door. But we had no say in the matter and it’s a question of where the aircraft flying were.

And the air board for once showed some sensitivity in this matter. They sent Tommy White, a World War I fighter ace, a member of the air board along to talk to us. I remember Tommy saying how much he understood “How a lot of you young men would be in two minds about going overseas.” He said “This is a global war and wherever you are

fighting the enemy, you will be defending Australia’s interests just as much as if you were fighting them on our doorstep.” Then he went on to say, and I’ve always thought he was patting himself a bit on the back, that he had “Always thought of aircrews as the cream of Australia’s youth.” and he was, “Sure that we would acquit ourselves well wherever we served.” So we left in much better spirits, I’d say.

It was a very good pep talk and we were then put on a ship called the New Amsterdam. It wasn’t a hell ship I suppose, not compared with some that I would say later in the war. It had brought the AIF units back from the Middle East and we found ourselves in cabins about 15 to a cabin

and the first night I noticed itches developing on my body and by the second night I had transferred my sleeping arrangements to the deck, so I don’t know what the AIF had brought home from the Middle East unless it was bedbugs but there it was. It took us about I suppose two and a half weeks to cross the Pacific

and landed in Oakland in San Francisco Bay, from where we travelled across America by train through all sorts of places being robbed by Pullman porters on the way.

Yes, they had this uncanny ability to find your wallet in your tunic when you hung it up at night,

to realise that you were not familiar with the American country and therefore wouldn’t immediately notice if they substituted a one-dollar note for a ten-dollar note which looked almost identical. It took about two days for everybody comparing notes to realise what had happened to us. Yes, we then stayed about ten days in Miles Standish,

which is an American base in Massachusetts and from there went to Halifax where we got on board a ship called the Pasteur which was a very fast ship, a French luxury liner, of about 29,000 tons shaped a bit like a canoe,

at least we didn’t sleep in cabins but in what we call mess decks and each deck had three mess decks to its lengths and if you know the shape of a canoe, at the angles like that. The people who designed it as a troop ship had decided that the latrines should be at either end of the mess deck and the ships that crossed the Atlantic

would ride the waves and the usage of the latrines at either end was rather greater than the capacity to drain them, so that the mess deck in the middle tended to be afloat with whatever excess there was from either end, and we happened to be in the mess deck in the middle. But the mess deck comprised eight tables, if I remember rightly, each seating about twelve people

and the thing on that was to get near the end where the food was served, otherwise there wouldn’t be much by the time it got to the end of the table. Our hammocks were strung above the tables and if you can imagine 96 hammocks in a relatively small space it meant that everybody’s head was adjacent to a couple of pairs of feet,

that needn’t have been the most pleasant company at the time but that was the least of our worries I suppose. We landed in Liverpool on about the 17th April 1943 and then went by train to Bournemouth and if you know the Browning poem about

‘Oh to be England now that April’s here’, you’ll know what a lovely sight the English countryside can be in April which enthralled all of us to be driving by train, passing these little villages with steeples coming out of the trees, with the new leaves on them and blossom everywhere. So it gave you rather an ideal picture of England and we were saying to one another “Where are the bombs?”

Because all we had read about in the paper was how England had been flattened by bombs. But of course there were parts that had been. So we went to what was called the Personnel’s Dispatch and Receiving Centre [PDRC] in Bournemouth, waiting for an aircraft. But it turned out there weren’t too many aircraft in England for the number of crews seeking them.

We spent a few weeks at Bournemouth and then the powers that be decided, “Well, the people are doing nothing here, we had better make them sweat a bit”, so they sent us to what was called an RAF commando course

in Whitley Bay and as a commando course after Foster it was a total joke but we had a corporal in charge of us who had enough disciplinary effect on Australian aircrews senior to him in rank to be able to march us off the parade ground into a quiet lane and no discipline whatsoever thereafter,

except that at the appointed time we would rejoin him in order to march back on the parade ground. We were able to seek places like Edinburgh from Whitley Bay and like Salisbury from Bournemouth, like Oxford from Bournemouth and such like but when we got back to Bournemouth from Whitley Bay we discovered

that the Focke Wulfs [German fighter plane] had found out where all these Australian men were spending time and had been over there and they had strafed our parade ground.

And they had even found the hotel that was much frequented by Australian aircrew and quite a few of our comrades were killed in there.

How?

It wouldn’t be very hard in an open society for such information to escape, I think. The Germans had their spy networks, there’s no doubt about that, many of them were discovered.

Later in life as a matter of fact, it was in San Francisco, in the house next to us we learned a German signal centre had been set up during the war, and operated for many months before it was detected.

So as a result of the Focke Wulfs raid the PDRC was shifted to Brighton which was not a hardship post because there was lots of amusement in Brighton, very close to London, and we could nip up there for weekends and such like but we were still getting pretty toey

about not getting any flying and I for instance had last time, in February, and by now, it was getting on for July, or late June, but finally I was posted to a thing called AFU, Advanced Flying Units and the idea of this

was to give us familiarity with flying in English conditions which were vastly different from Australia. In Australia you had visibility in those days, that doesn’t exist anymore but if you took off from Point Cook, you could see the Grampians, with utter clarity on the horizon. In England you could see about five miles on the best of days in war zone conditions

and at night of course, the sky was full of other aircraft. The airfields were so close to one another. We had none of that congestion problem in Australia. The third thing was we had to develop our night flying because the RAF was involved in night raids over Europe and so there was a great need for familiarisation generally

but we spent about four weeks at South Cerney which was near Cirencester [in Gloucestershire County] and then we had to do what was called a beam approach course which familiarised you with all sorts of navigational aids and developed in that flying further. After that, back to South Cerney and we awaited posting to an operational training unit,

which was the next step towards becoming operational. And so I was sent to Harewell and from there I would normally be expected to go on to either Halifax which was in Yorkshire or something like that, which was the normal fate of Australians going to Harewell in those days. But in the meantime

I believe this was the result of the Casablanca Conference where President Roosevelt convinced Churchill “Look you have all these aircrew in England and we have a war in the South Pacific in which we can supply aircraft but not aircrews. There isn’t sufficient quantity.” So at this stage

Australians in England were given the option of flying to serve in the Indian theatre. I think a lot of us did this because at least felt it was the sort of war we had originally expected to be fighting against the Japanese and so I applied for this. I hadn’t really remembered, I hadn’t

re-read my letters and I went through OTU [Operational Training Unit] at Harewell, or Hampstead Norris which was a satellite from Harewell. This had its anxious moments. We were put onto these ancient crates called Wellington 1Cs.

Yes, well these were a very ancient crate, I think they were in service at the start of the war but by 1943 they had been superseded by the Wellington 10 and almost every OTU other than ours was flying Wellington 10s

but the 1Cs could be said to be at the end of their tether. We did learn to feel that during training. I had a bit of luck on this OTU because partly Australian insubordination was the cause of it.

My friend Newman and I had decided early in OTU that having the option of doing the new drill or church parade, we much preferred doing the drill which took place at a place called Streetly and Goring on Thames, adjacent to which was the Swan Inn. And what that thinking comprised

was of course, without supervision, taking a rubber dinghy, paddling across the Thames once or twice and then I leave the rest of the drill to your imagination. But on this particular church parade I had unearthed a pair of Australian civvie shoes, brogue shoes and they were not serviced issue. And our Flight Commander, Jimmy James doing his inspection spotted these

and said, “McCredie, those shoes are not suitable.” And I said, “Oh, Australian issue, sir”, and I heard James mutter, “Smart bastard” as he walked along the line. About two days later we were doing our first night flying exercise

all of us, all the crews were in this thing, my new crew, who I expected to look up to me, with me, and James says, “Right, McCredie”, picking me out, “You tell everybody what you would do in the event of a fire on your aircraft.” And I stammered and coughed and looked embarrassed

and he said, “Right McCredie, repeat after me, this is what you do.” So he spelt it out sentence by sentence and I had to repeat what he said and I thought, you’ve got your own back for the brogue shoes. But it turned out to be a stroke of luck because about three weeks later we were flying along at night and the flight engineer

said, “Skipper, the starboard engine’s on fire.” And I look out and there’s the damn thing blazing away, but Jimmy had impressed on me the drill and somehow or other it worked. And my crew all landed safely, except for my navigator who crouched behind me, preferring that to bailing out

and we landed at a place called Silverstone and I think the main effect of this was the only course on which I got an above average assessment for doing this luck deed. But there it was, but we also had some excitement over France. As part of your operational training they used to send you up

on what were called nickels. These were leaflet parades and

Yes

We called them nickels. Spelt like the metal. And the first one of these was totally uneventful. It was a place near Caen on the Normandy coast, which we just whipped in and whipped out without a problem.

The next one we dropped the Christmas message on Paris and Brad asked me if I had it by any chance and I have a fragment of that message which I retrieved from the bomb bays and sent home which my sister kept.

But coming back my navigator, who was a wonderful chap, but somehow or other, instead of hitting the coast in the right place, flying out of Mont Gassicaux where we dropped the leaflets, he took us a heavily defended place called Lycier and our crate as I have mentioned was a very ancient thing, and in December weather what it did was ice up

not only on the wings, which added about an inch of ice over the leading edge

Well that might be an exaggeration, but certainly a coating of ice, I should have said and it also tended to ice up in the carburettors and I couldn’t get this, even unladen on the way back, I thought I would be able to climb higher, but I couldn’t get it above 8,000 feet.

That meant over Lycier all the little Beaufort’s guns and things of that ilk were within range and the Wellington had what was called a geodesic construction, crisscrossed aluminium frame with a canvas exterior around it all, glued in with dope as we called it.

Well, painted with aircraft dope, a type of glue – the stuff that’s sniffed these days is what is called dope. So when we got over Lycier, we heard I would say for about 30 seconds, this noise like a boy running a ruler along a picket fence.

It was just bits of fragments hitting the skin of the aircraft. We had two holes when we got back. One was through the perspex in front of me and one of the ground crew was irritating enough to come to me afterwards with the fire axe, and pointed the end of the fire axe and suggesting that it fitted the hole in the perspex. It was not quite what I had done.

The other thing about that particular mission – the navigator further excelled himself by taking us over Portsmouth crossing the English coast, so we got caught in search lights there and we were rather afraid that the English anti-aircraft would hit up on us, but they apparently identified us

and we got back to base alright. But that was about my service experience in England. The social experiences, is that of interest?

Well, under the Empire air training scheme

Well I don’t think we called it that. I mean, when we were with the RAF, we were RAF.

We were RAF squadrons under RAF commands. There were RAAF squadrons in England but ultimately under RAF command. Or CAF [Canadian Air Force] squadrons. in England. Ultimately, the majority of Australians in England, however were in RAF squadrons.

No, my crew in England, for instance, on the Wellington, comprised an Australian wireless operator, two English gunners and one English navigator. My crews later on

in an 11 man crew Liberator crew, I had only one Australian. The squadron was RAF and you selected your own crews from the squadron level and if you chose to, if you preferred to select Australians, you had to find them

They had to be in the pool. But what you learned was you didn’t differentiate between people. On this Maloya in our mess deck we had Da Silva and J.L. Wardner, two Ceylonese.

Well, he would be about my age.

Well it could well be.

Because about 50 Ceylonese were part of the Empire air training scheme as well. Yes, and anyway, as I was saying, we had this inter-service boxing tournament where I was able to select the team that would represent the RAF without needing to put myself forward which would have been an abuse of

authority, I thought. But I got my own back on a couple of people. Anyway, the other thing about it was, for tropical service in India we were issued with British tropical kits. This was something to be seen to be believed. We were issued with tunics and the heaviest English cotton drill

that you could imagine. Magnificent material. Flight Lieutenant Dredman, the man I reported to as head of the mess deck said, “Oh he had been in Iceland and found the tropical kit wonderful there.” But anyway, that was the tunic. The trousers were pipe-stemmed so that you could barely get

them on with your shoes. We were issued with topies – these helmets that weighed about a ton that Ralph Richardson wore in The Light that Failed in the siege of [(UNCLEAR)] or something. So we got off the ship carrying our navy blue

sausage bags over our shoulders and our tropical kit and topies and I only wish I had a photograph of it. The moment we landed ashore in Bombay and ran into some other servicemen they would say, “Why don’t you get your knees brown?” You got your knees brown when you had been there long enough to learn the ropes. The ropes were you didn’t wear British issue tropical kit.

So our first job was to go and get ourselves fitted out by a Bombay dersey in bush jackets and trousers with 12 inch cuffs and ditch our topies. We still had to carry round our gas masks and gas capes.

13th February 1944.

Yes

Yes, I left there, believe it or not on 13th December, 1945.

Yes

Demobilised, Yes.

Yes, that’s right. You called it the reserve, I don’t remember the precise name. It was just called Air Force Reserve by us. I guess it was the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve.

Yes.

Well, I suppose my last six months in India was a matter of working out what I would do because by then it was clear the war in Europe was over and the war with Japan wasn’t going to last much longer. After my tour of operations I was

put on a transport squadron, became a transport captain flying a Liberator around India, Cocos Islands and such places and I always had in mind that that was a possible career – to take on civil flying. It was clear to everybody that there would be a big expansion of civil aviation after the war.

But I think, well, the turn my life took at that time, decided me that I was more interested in continuing my studies than I was in flying so, I also decided at this stage, that I was not interested in the book-keeping sort of life the bank had offered me before the war.

So, I wanted something a bit more expansive. I had before the end of the war set my thoughts upon entering the Department of External Affairs. I had seen advertisements for it and on discharge, when they took my profile

I raised this with the Flight Lieutenant, who happened to be a woman who had taken her degree in history under Professor Crawford at Melbourne University. She said, “Well, I think if you are interested in that sort of career, you couldn’t do better than enrol in history.” I had always had an interest in literature as well

so I enrolled in the dual honour course of history and English at Melbourne University and set my sights on trying to get into External Affairs as it was then called, which I succeeded in doing in 1948.

Well, it was a three-year honours course in those days,

and probably a four-year course these days. We had a pressure-cooker system after the war. Whether it was good or not I’m not quite sure.

A system of turning out honours graduates.

My first posting was Canada. My second posting was Pakistan, third posting was Philippines, fourth was Netherlands,

fifth Indonesia, sixth San Francisco as Consul General and then High Commissioner in Ghana and simultaneously Ambassador in Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Finally as Ambassador in East Germany.

Yes, about 34 years.

Well, I suppose I was one of those who were fortunate enough in the depression years to have a father whose business was in the food trade. He had a prosperous retail business

in dairy products, delicatessen type business. Of course, in the depression he used to say, “People have to eat.” There was only one downside to that, living in North Carlton.

Living in North Carlton in my early years, it was not the prosperous Princes Hill of today. It was very much a working class area. My father was very conscious of his good fortune, having more than most people.

He used to make presentations to the school. On one occasion he gave a case of eggs, which – quite a large thing, which probably contained about 12 dozen eggs, something like that. Which was wonderful in one way.

It didn’t endear me to the roughies of the school, you know, a kid who didn’t know any problems in the depression. So the first inkling I got that this was not a popular thing for my father to have done for me was that a young chap in the class below me comes up and whacks me in the stomach.

And I thought, well, that’s not right and hit him back and he went away bawling because he was considerably smaller than I. And the next thing I know is, his mate, a fellow called Sparks, who was a thug in the same class, came up and tried to deal with me in the same way. I was sufficiently larger than he to be able to deal

with him and send him away howling. But that wasn’t the end of it. He got a mate from the class above me to deal with me and I was dealt with pretty thoroughly. That was part of my experience in the depression. It was not easy to be prosperous in a working-class area,

in the depression to be wearing shoes when so many people weren’t wearing shoes.

I don’t know that I’m very good on senses of guilt. If I have them I don’t easily identify them. I do know there was another story like that

when I was later sent to Melbourne Grammar. One of my old friends at Princes Hill said to me “You had better be careful on you way home from the tram.” The Pretty Gang are after you. I knew Alan Pretty – he was a thug too. I was determined to escape the Pretty Gang, so I knew where their beat was

and I got off a stop earlier and walked home that way. When I was about 13 my parents decided to move to Kew from Carlton and that of course, destroyed some of my roots actually. I seemed to be a bit self-pitying about those experiences. Carlton was my roots in a way,

because I only lived a short period at Kew before the war.

Very staid so that the first time I met a man who lived three doors away from me, it was a party given by Richard Casey, then Governor of Bengal, on Victory Night in Darjeeling.

I had lived next door to him for three years and never met him. Yes, it was a stuffy, church-going community. A lot of social life was built around the churches which would have monthly socials and inter-church tennis competitions.

A much more vibrant organisation than the churches of 2003.

Well, I missed all this getting out at weekends, and playing football and cricket with my Carlton friends.

Apart from the problems I had had there, I had friends there.

They varied. One didn’t go into people’s backgrounds much. If you played cricket with someone, he was someone you played cricket with. He didn’t have a father as far as you knew.

Whereas everything was very, very much nicer. More genteel in Kew.

I think I just tolerated it because I never felt part of the community

the way I did in Carlton.

13 or 14. I think nudging on 14.

Yes, I think so. It was much longer travel to school also.

He was an interesting man. His father died at the age of seven. His father had migrated from Scotland

and the Scottish family was quite a prosperous family. But of course, leaving a widow with two children at the age of seven, and I think the older sister was about nine, there was very little left over for them. So he left school at the age of 14.

I believe he had been offered a scholarship at Wesley but felt he had to work.

As I was saying I believe my father may have been offered a scholarship at Wesley, but he felt at the time he had to work to help his mother and his sister. And his working life went through

working for various retailers, there was a firm called Henry Berry, a tea importer among other things from whom he got a feeling for Darjeeling tea. Which might come into my story later actually. At the same time he had a number of interests. His athletic interests were mainly in running

and he ran as a miler and won a few watches and things like that. I don’t know how good he was, but he had a few watches to show for. He developed a talent for juggling. In fact, he was juggling professionally for a while. He had a partner called Max Martin.

They were know as the Two Cedrics and appeared on Vaudeville stages and the like and they were offered a contract in America to go and perform there. And this would have been shortly before World War I.

Max Martin was a man who also had a group. His partner had a great artistic talent. I have one of his paintings on the wall over there. It later hung in the Royal Academy and such like and he got a bit of money in Australia. Not a fortune, but a bit of money. But at this time he decided he wasn’t very interested in being a juggler for life.

That ended the association. He later went on to become involved in the putting down the Irish Rebellion. But I’m not quite sure of the details of that. But this left my father on a bit of a hook but

he decided then – he worked then for a man called Lloyd, I think it was Harold Lloyd, that’s the name of a comic actor as well. Lloyd was the surname anyway. He was a man in the dairy produce business which he later he came to establish his own business

at Victoria Market which he operated for something like 40 years and it was when he got established there, of course, just got established there when the war broke out. You asked about his pacifism.

A thing I discussed with him philosophically rather than personally because I always had this inhibition that my father’s eyesight, in spite of his being a capable juggler was defective. He had what’s called a lazy eye and I believe that would have rendered him

physically exempt from military service. What I never knew was whether he decided he would become a pacifist or whether pacifism was truly in his blood. Once I broke the bond and enlisted

he never allowed his pacifism to upset our relationship in any way. He was always a very supportive father.

He could be quite blunt, and say, “Don’t be a fool. Only fools go and fight.”

That was quite aggressive back then, in its way. But it’s one I have encountered in other people and it’s not always a genuine feeling. One of my superiors in the National Bank at Fitzroy, I remember asking him what he was going to do now that war had broken out. He said, “Well, one thing I’m not going to do is die a heroes death,

let other people do that if they want to.” Six months later he drowned in a boating accident in the Royal Australian Navy off Swan Island. So in his case the reaction was not a genuine one when he said it. Now I’ve never known how much my father’s comments about don’t be a fool masked it,

or whether it was the thought that by saying this he might give me a reason to protect myself against the risk of war and possible death which I suppose most father’s feel in two minds about sons at a time of war. They don’t want their sons not to do their duty but they don’t want their sons to die either.

He was, very. He was as you’ve mentioned before, I must have said it to Brad, he was a rationalist. There was a man called Joseph McCabe that he read widely. He was an early believer in the origin of species. He had no time

for religious cant. I think it’s true to say that he was a man of strictest morals who did not have one feeling for the supernatural or occult. If religion didn’t make sense to him it was nonsense.

I only knew this by report because he returned from the war and died very shortly afterwards.

My mother was utterly horrified to see someone who she thought of as a handsome young man with his face totally disfigured and his life ruined.

Once I enlisted, she was about as proud a mother as you could imagine. She wore little air force wings on her costume and that sort of thing and I don’t think ever anyone received more parcels than I did when they were overseas.

Initially, for three years we were living in Carlton, that’s four years probably and then the rest of the time at Kew.

Yes, I was at Melbourne Grammar from 1932-38

I did recite to you the verse from the school song.

Of course, every ANZAC day the whole school was assembled in an edifice called the Memorial Hall, which was built to commemorate the four schools bombed in World War I. The names on ANZAC, or Armistice Day, or perhaps both, the names of the four men were solemnly read to us by the Headmaster.

We sang all those great hymns like Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past, Our Hope in Years to Come was that the one? Or was it Kipling’s Lord God of Hosts be with us yet, Lest We Forget, Lest We Forget.

I can’t say I’m a great fan of Kipling, no. I’m not too familiar with his literature.

Well, we could debate that. Kipling is, I think, the English author who most understood India. If you read his short stories – they were wonderful stories. If you read his poetry, such as

\n[Verse follows]\n Lord God of Hosts be with us,\n For heathen heart that puts her trust\n In reeking tube and iron shard --\n

you are obviously not a fan of Kipling but

I do commend to you his short stories.

I don’t think I read his short stories at Melbourne Grammar but certainly you can imagine the impression that these services command – the memorial services had. Now an interesting statistic arising from that is

in World War I, the school had something like 200 dead out of 60,000 in World War II we had 262 dead out of about 28,000 Australians. That’s almost one percent of Australia’s war dead in World War II, were students at Melbourne Grammar School.

I often say to my friends we were brought up as cannon fodder. It’s one way of putting it. Another way is to say we were brought up to be good patriots.

About 1,000 boys.

That meant a yearly turnover of about 100. But in going through my papers before you people came along, a lot of my old school papers were mixed up in this. One of them was a football team I played in which has a photo of 24 boys among whom 5 were killed in the war.

Well, those who had served in the school cadets, I wasn’t one of them, as I mentioned earlier, tended to go into the navy or the air force rather than the infantry. I think this was a matter of

feeling a foot flogging might be necessary in war, but it wasn’t necessary for everybody. Also was the feeling for respect, I think, you wouldn’t join the army to join the pay corps if you went through Melbourne Grammar. You would join the army to be in the infantry or the commandos.

The navy and the air force were themselves of the same esteem in people’s minds. That you were doing your proper bit if you joined one of those services. They didn’t need to join the infantry or the commandos to enjoy that.

Well, the Battle of Britain gave the air force enormous prestige, there’s no doubt about that. And again, if you can put yourself into the mind of the young man of sixty or seventy years ago, you looked toward service,

you felt the womenfolk would look up to you. This was a huge influence, I think on a lot of people. There is no doubt, the air force, because the blue uniform was more attractive than the army uniforms to the extent that the army used to call us

“Mr Menzies’ Blue Orchids” – if you have heard that expression? There was a song at the time called I dreamt of two blue orchids, two beautiful orchids last night but we were contemptuously sneered at as “Mr Menzies’ Blue Orchids.

Yes, I think that is certainly so. I think the more intellectually developed people are,

the easier it is for them to put it out of their mind, flying is not safe. An untutored mind in those days would say to you, “I couldn’t bear to be up there”, so many people had never flown. Very few people had flown and it was regarded as a thing of great adventure.

Once you were able to read books like as St Exupery and others, Night must Fly, what was it? Night Flight, I think, Sand, Wind and Stars, these were great adventure books written by a professional pilot. They excited the imagination.

I think you are right, the more educated, the less inhibitions you had or the less fear of flying.

I don’t know about that. The army had a staff college, or it had a cadet course in those days – as did the navy and the air force, as professional services before the war.

What led people to go into the respective services - the army, I think might have been from some tradition, there was army in the background, perhaps the Indian Army, perhaps World War I, other things where the young man thought, well, I would like to go do a cadet course

at Duntroon. The navy likewise, the navy used to take people in at about 13 and start them off then and develop them as midshipmen. I remember they took one boy from Melbourne Grammar about the age of 13 or 14.

The air force, in pre-war times had a training college at Point Cook – a very limited affair so that I think the commanding officer was a Briton.

I don’t know much about it – it was very miniscule, so it wouldn’t be easy to ascribe middle-class but obviously it wouldn’t take people – to be an airman you had to have a certain level of education.

You would think so.

It was a militia battalion – an infantry battalion. There were three rifle companies; the machine gun company, and what was called the headquarters wing, which entailed signals, supply, service corps, functions, and probably something else I don’t remember.

The machine gun company had a mortar platoon, which I ended up in. I spent three months at that first camp in a rifle company and then four of us from the same tent were transferred to mortars.

Yes, I became a mortar platoon sergeant.

In which my lieutenant, Gordon Bryant became a Minister in the Whitlam Government.

Very high spirited. It was a wonderful atmosphere.

A thing I had never encountered before and if you can imagine the problem of imposing discipline on the students, it did create something of a unique situation. They brought in

Warrant officer from Duntroon, a staff corpsman who wore red tabs on his shoulders. To me, a regimental sergeant major. This man’s name was Watson and Watson was a real tartar for proper behaviour and to such an extent

that when you sloped arms he would pick on somebody whose slope wasn’t even with the rest of his platoon and he would say, “That man in B row of the second platoon, second from the right, get your rifle straight!” Well, this was wonderful. We get back from New Year’s holiday

I think New Year’s Day must have been on a Tuesday and we came back on the Wednesday and Watson picks on somebody – “That man, B Company, get your slope straight. It’s Tuesday morning, not Monday.” Now as I mentioned, it was Wednesday morning so within a day

the regiment was singing a song that went, if you know the song it’s the same the whole world over it went like this:

“Who’s that man in B Company, with his slope [(UNCLEAR)] he may think its Monday morning, when it’s really Tuesday week” and that was the spirit of the MUR

that could see some amusement in anything that happened there.

Well, what you did there was simply hard exercising. You would crawl up slopes

pretending to attack a position. You would go on route marches. We only had Lewis guns in the rifle companies so you would be made to dismantle and put together again a Lewis gun in thirty seconds or something like that.

In the end, after you had gone through the drills you’d do what we called tactical exercises without troops, tewts, and that would be the only theoretical thing you would do.

You would survey – you would be taken to a position on a field, you would be told “There was enemy over the crest of the next hill, how will you approach it? What you have got to do is destroy their machine gun nest. How will you approach this?” That, as I remember it, would be the most intellectual thing.

As you can imagine, every possible faculty of the university - in my own tent we had one dentistry student, who was killed in the air force

I think two commerce students, one science student …

I wouldn’t know enough about it.

I wouldn’t have thought so. I would have thought that the personality of the individual would be more important than the character of the faculty.

Yes, we had as our platoon commander in the rifle company a man, Freddie McNaughton,

who was a physical, what did they called it in those days, I don’t know if it was a physical education student. I think he was probably a teacher and he was a man famous for his being the author of numerous Noel Coward like skits

that were performed at university reviews. Such as, ‘I’m a Flaming Beaut in my Bathing Suit’, ‘Swimming Underwater with the Lord Mayor’s Daughter’ – Freddie would ride ahead of us on route marches on his horse, which would deposit its droppings

in front of the platoon at very regular intervals. Not from a great height. Freddie was killed in the third week of the invasion of Malaysia [Malaya] by the Japanese.

Yes. The 8th Division.

It was simply the case that I had to get the signature of my parents before I would be accepted, being under 21 and that was

simply a requirement and I, although wasn’t without any rebellious instinct, I wasn’t able to do it covertly and pretend that I was 21.

This was Colonel Balf. He had been the CO [Commanding Officer] of the University Rifles.

I wrote a letter from Seymour in fact, when I was undertaking the officers training course, explaining what would happen if I took a commission, that I would never be able to transfer to one of the overseas services

but as far as I was concerned I was not prepared to end the war as a conscript. I wanted to hold my head up after the war and I didn’t care what my father thought about that. I was insistent and I wrote that letter, if I remember rightly on my 20th birthday, which was the 13th August.

I went on leave I think very shortly after that to Melbourne and had it out with them and applied for the air force immediately and got on the reserve.

Do you know this poem of Yeats? An Irish airman foresees his death? It goes something like…‘a man of the light led to this tumult in the clouds’. Yes, I suppose there was a romantic feeling and I had read the books of St Exupery.

There was the romantic Battle of Britain. These were big factors. I felt there was a possible exultation flying that I didn’t see in footslogging. Yes, I think that was there.

Not too much coming back, but knowing they were going away. One of my closest friends in the MUR, a man called Ken James – I don’t think I have liked anyone

or admired anyone more than Ken. He stood out for me on a couple of occasions. He did a guard duty for me when I had a boil on the back of my neck. And on another occasion, when some people, for reasons I hope never to understand tried to

blacken my arse with boot polish, Ken came, rushed at them and said “You can’t do that” to old Macca and we turned on our assailants, or my assailants and routed them.

This is in the MUR camp. Yes, one always wonders what

led somebody to want to do that to you. But I didn’t want to have it done to me. Ken anyway, had joined the air force and to end that tale, very sadly, was killed on his first operation in Europe. He’s buried at Eschburg, the war grave cemetery in Denmark.

You would like it described from the start. Well, Ken James was a very clever friend of mine to whom I had a number of obligations. He was on the air force reserve at this time undergoing militia duty

at Mt Martha. He was sergeant of the guard on this particular night, and as such wore a red sash diagonally across his uniform. The function of the sergeant of the guard was to preside over the changing of the guard each evening when retreat was beaten at 6pm.

As retreat was beaten the regimental flag was lowered. The flagpole was situated on the Balcombe Road which at this very time; an AIF platoon passed the ceremony. As they saw Ken with his red badge someone in the AIF platoon

called out “Choco!” To which Ken, breaking the formality of his guard changing turned around and roared in a stentorian voice, “Susso!” And susso of course, referring to the fact that it was often said of people who enrolled in the armed services that

they did it to get off the dole, known as the sustenance.

Yes.

This was a slur that was cast against them, but

of course, the aptness of this particular slur was that anyone who had dared to call a man who was on the air force reserve a choco

They were under discipline, they were supposed to be marching themselves so they had broken discipline enough to yell out their insult in the same way that Ken had responded.

But as I have mentioned earlier, Ken’s fate was to train in Rhodesia, go on to Britain and was killed in his first operation which was over Stettin in Germany and he is now buried in Eschburg cemetery.

He was a bomber pilot.

No, I think he was either University High or Melbourne High. As a matter of interest, one of the men who tried to blacken my arse had once spoken of Ken, saying, “You would almost

think he had been to a public school wouldn’t you?” He was a total snob, this fellow.

Well, that almost expresses it you see. There was a difference in outlook that is hard to explain these days or perhaps it isn’t but if you were at a public school some people felt they were a bit superior and this fellow I’m talking about undoubtedly felt superior to anyone who had been at a high school, for God’s sake.

On the high school side, I would say I did encounter in one person the inverse to that. The chip on the shoulder because they had not been at a public school and therefore wanted to express some inferiority of their own

for not having been at a public school. Which in Freudian terms, I would probably think you would describe as, or not in Freudian terms, or in Freudian thinking, you could say there was a chip on the shoulder. But people like Ken James, it would absolutely have never entered Ken’s mind that he had been at a high school and somebody else had been at a public school.

And it never entered my mind but who knows what one was like sixty years ago.

What we knew then was, we jolly well had to win the war and that there was all there was to it. If you didn’t win the war what was there – what were you in for? The Japanese run Australia?

We had so many feelings about the Japanese. Rereading the letters I wrote from India, I regret to have to say that I find that I would refer to them as those Japanese scum and of course, in my subsequent life, I have had many Japanese friends,

who I would never regard as scum, but that is what we felt and one of my contemporaries at school, Bill Newton, Bill Newton, Victoria Cross, was beheaded by the Japs in New Guinea

Yes, Bill Newton. And as you can imagine, this is a man I had had bowl me over on a football field. You can imagine how you felt about the people who had beheaded him. You didn’t want them running Australia.

Well we knew they had eyes on Australia. They got to New Guinea, they bombed Darwin, they at one stage had a submarine in Sydney Harbour. We were right on the limits of Japanese expansion

at that stage, where they were held up was in New Guinea. They had taken over Indonesia, they had taken over South East Asia, they had pressed right to the border of India. So it was not inconceivable that Australia itself would be overrun. Of course the Americans

entered – of course the mistake the Japanese made was to bomb Pearl Harbor. That was the turning point of the war.

In March 1943.

First operation? More than two years after I had got my wings. That was the slow progress you had in those days. When did I get my wings? 43? No more than a year after I got my wings

Just on two years after I joined the air force. That was in March 44, I did my first sortie.

Yes, but that’s not counting the two nickels in Europe, which in a way were sorties. They counted towards my, or they would have counted towards my eventual tour

if my eventual tour hadn’t been extended anyway.

I have one, I can show you later, I have a tattered fragment, but this one told the Christmas message. Paris, to the French, I suppose to be of good cheer or something like that. We’re coming.

I don’t really know.

As I said, it was only through my letters that I had realised this. I must have applied to be posted to India sometime in 43. The option was offered.

I suppose it was offered especially to Australians because of some of the pressure put on the British Government by the Australian Government to have as many Australians fighting the Japanese as possible.

The Wellington 1C?

I think we had mid upper turrets and a rear turret. I think they only fired .303 bullets – machine-guns, sorry. There were probably four guns in the rear turret

and two in the upper but I couldn’t be confident of my memory of that.

I think five. I think there was the pilot, navigator, wireless operator and two gunners.

At the start of the war they were the principal RAF bomber, but of course as the war developed, the four engine bombers came into service. First of all the Stirling, which by my time was known as a desk crate because full bomb loaded it could only climb to about 12 or 13 thousand feet which made it easy meat for anti aircraft fire.

Then there was the Halifax, which was not a bad aircraft but didn’t have quite the elevation, nor could it carry the same bomb load as the Lancaster, which came later. The Wellington 10 which superseded the aircraft that I was on was not a bad aircraft.

It could get up to a reasonable operational height but it of course couldn’t carry anything like the bomb load that the four engine aircraft carried so it was not really, at that stage of the war, an effective element of the striking force. I don’t remember what actual bomb load

it carried.

Weight I think. The Lancaster could carry something like 20,000 lbs, which is quite a massive amount of high explosives.

I wouldn’t know – it would be much less than half that but how much less, I don’t know.

No, from OTU you only did these nickels, which were considered training ops.

They were a night operations, you never had escorts on night operations. Your main worry at night was not having protection from another aircraft, but not running into another aircraft.

Because the night fighters, I don’t think there was a means of tracking

a night fighter by your own fighters so there wouldn’t be much point at that stage of the war in putting fighters up to protect you at night. Later in the war, in the daylight ops, or in our daylight ops in South East Asia, around Rangoon we would be accompanied by Mustangs.

On one occasion, I can remember being attacked over Rangoon. The Mustang must have coped with most of the opposition as far as I know.

I’m not sure that fear entered much into it.

It’s like any job. If you are doing a job you tend not to fear what might happen. When it happens it happens too quickly to be afraid. So I don’t think, from my recollection, I may be totally deceiving myself

but from my recollection I don’t remember that emotion at all.

Well, you wanted it to stop. It seemed to go on forever, on the one occasion I ever felt it, but your main concern as a pilot, but I can’t speak for the rest of the crew

they could nothing. As a pilot, you were concerned with keeping that aircraft going, so the flak was a nuisance but it wasn’t pleasant music, but then you put up with all sorts of noises in civil life and do nothing about them and they get on your nerves but I don’t think flak did more than get on my nerves

but I never had enough of it to do that. People who flew over the Ruhr or somewhere like that might have a totally different story.

Yes, and these things bursting around you do

create an effect like throwing stones on a roof or something like that or as I have said before, running a stick along a picket fence.

I mentioned to you the navigator didn’t do too well on this particular night. He took us back over a heavily defended town

and then over Portsmouth which were two errors of judgment and whether it was the flak that led to that or – no, I think we hit the flak at Lycier so it wasn’t the flak that caused him the error of judgment after leaving the Mont Gassicaux…

How did the pilot perform on that night? Well I can tell you one thing, normally when you are on such an operation, and you got to the point of safety, you would say to the gunner, well you can get out of your turret now because it could be pretty cold in the turret and there was no point in his being in it when you had got out of range of the enemy search lights or the like.

On this occasion, whether it was because I had been fired on by flak, I don’t know but I hear crossing the English coast or getting through the searchlights, or past them in Portsmouth, a plaintive voice saying, “Can I come out now, skipper?” So whether that was my response to flak, lapse of concentration

on the job.

They were pretty hated in England when we were there. We didn’t mind what we did to the Hun.

Look at what he had done around England – have a look around St Paul’s. A quarter of mile in most directions around St Paul’s Cathedral ground were flattened.

Yes, and when you saw these things, if you had to bomb Germany and did that to Hamburg or Dusseldorf or Berlin, what the odds. They had done it to us first.

Well, if that was you job, you didn’t question it. You had to rely on the judgment of the people getting the orders as to the way to win the war and that was the priority so

I can talk more about the ethics of war when we deal with the Burma campaign actually.

I wasn’t in England at that time and I don’t like to cast doubts on the memories of people who say that now, but I don’t know that when we bombed Mandalay, we will talk about that later –

I remember my friend, Butch Smith saying, “We pattern bombed Dufrem Square in Mandalay on 13th January, 1945, when the Japs were well on the run from Burma. I’m really anticipating perhaps a next time. Perhaps I need that.”

Yes, I apologise for that.

I don’t know what to say about that. Talking about Mandalay, I’m very interested in that though. It’s clear you’re operational, the bulk of your experiences are in the South Asian area so it’s obviously going to be of great interest, which I’ll leave to a separate section.

Can I just go back to that Dresden thing? I think what also has to be remembered at this stage is that always when you are getting to the end of a war,

political considerations start to have an effect on military strategy and at the end of the war at Europe what was already shaping up was the Russia/West confrontation and Dresden, rightly or wrongly, I think has to be seen in that context.

That this is what we can do and just watch it and the ethics of that I’ll discuss over Mandalay.

Yes, it was a question of how far the Russians are going to advance.

Yes, it was part of East Germany of course. But it was how far and Berlin was very much a consideration, it was a very difficult diplomatic battle that led to the partition of Berlin within the middle of Germany, within the middle of East Germany.

Impressions of England, there was a wonderful wartime spirit in England evinced everywhere. If you went anywhere in an RAAF uniform in England,

someone would want to be kind to you. My friend Brian Ingles and I, we were on a starvation diet when we were at Whitley Bay and on this Sunday afternoon we went into Newcastle in the hope of finding some nourishment in the town. Everything was closed of course. I can remember looking our, looking at a stale yeast bun

in some little hole in the wall window on a dirty paper doily and we were looking longingly at it and an old lady saw us doing this and said “You boys look hungry, come home with me.” And she took us home and she poached some eggs for us, and gave us nice eggs on toast

with warm tea and the thing that remains in memory is that the wartime ration in England was one egg per individual per week and she had given up two eggs for us and some of her priceless butter ration because she had seen these two hungry looking boys.

So, I cite that as just one example of the spirit in England at that time, which was something that has a lasting emotional effect on me.

You didn’t believe it would happen to you, that’s how you dealt with it. I didn’t pray, I didn’t believe in prayer. I just believed totally fatalistically, that if there were a bullet with your name on it, you would get it. If not, you would not.

Well, as we landed in Liverpool, we came off the boat in our great coats, and I was shat upon by a seagull and somebody said to me, “That’s good luck Mac”, and I “Well if it’s good luck, that’s good.” Then later

when I was at South Cerney, a New Zealand colleague who we originally named Kiwi Stratton and I were hitchhiking, because we wanted to spend the weekend in Cheltenham. There must have been a dance on I think. He had a master’s degree in whatever I was calling it earlier

and I was tagging along in the hope of learning from him, but we were picked up by a gypsy woman in a horse and cart and taken into Cheltenham by this woman and as we got out, we must have been talking to her I suppose, she said, “You boys will be luck and left it at that.”

It never occurred to me that I would be unlucky in spite of Kiwi’s much great prowess on the amatory front. I’ve always wondered what happened to Kiwi. Yes, I think that’s as much as I can tell you. I’ve told you of the conjunction of the 13th,

my lucky number. So I was not free of superstitions, but I didn’t believe in prayer.

In Brighton we used to have church parade every Sunday, do you know Brighton? We were billeted in the Majestic Hotel, which was next door to the Grand – the two of them are the two great hotels in Brighton these days, but we were on the fifth floor, only reasonably comfortably there in those days, but church parade would be at a church many streets away and the streets of Brighton are very winding.

The church parade would begin with 30 people in it and we would march in file towards the church and as we turned every corner, the last three would tend to peel off so by the time they got to church there would be no more than half the numbers. I always spent my time drinking the most awful coffee you could imagine in Cherie’s restaurant rather than going to church parade.

I suspect that that is a fair division between the devout and the undevout. Presumably the devout prayed and the undevout just had fatalistic ideas such as I have expressed, I don’t know.

End of tape

Bobs, known as Bobs, Earl Roberts.

Yes, at the very start of the war. So that stuck in my memory as something that really had meaning. Of course, you know what the word Posh meant?

It meant port outward, starboard home going to India, so that became posh, you were posh especially if you were going home. We had a few diversions on the ship. Mostly I remember reading books of various selections, which told us a little more about India

and its customs. Some of them told them you of the harrowing experiences of people who had been caught by Pathans on the Northwest Frontier and put in the ground up to their necks until the ants crawled all over them. We were lectured of course, on things like proper behaviour in India.

How the Indian were to be treated as equals, decently and we weren’t to assume superiority. We had explained to us the religious differences between Indians. The Hindus, the Moslems, the Sikhs, – all the rest of the minor sects.

We were told about the languages, Hindi and Urdu. We were told that Urdu was really the language you should learn because that was of course, the language of the Moslem empire which was adapted by the British when they came to try to be a lingua franca. By this time, English was more of a lingua franca

in India even more than Urdu was. What else on board, well, we had things like races along the decks. I remember the Australians taking on the Poms in a relay race on the deck and showing their athletic superiority and rubbing it in as hard as they could. I’m not sure that

I can recall much more than that about the trip except it took 30 days. They seemed pretty long days.

No, I was never seasick. I have done a lot of sea travelling since and I have never been seasick.

No, that was my first time.

India was simply something now and then in books you would fall in – stories of Empire were the things for small boys to read in the thirties.

Well, I did describe this yesterday how we wore our uniforms. Would you like me to go through that again?

Bombay, the first impression was of course, that we had never seen so many people in all our lives, and never been besieged by so many people in all our lives. Because they would want to come up to you wanting to sell shoe laces

or virtually anything it seemed, the moment you got off the boat. Obviously it was a bit later than that we were taken to camp at a place called Worsley, which was about five miles on the north side, I think, of the wharves where we got off. But immediately we got off

that evening and the first thing we did was to get our knees brown as we had been told the moment the old Indian hand saw us –“Why don’t you get your knees brown!” Because we looked absolute newcomers in topies and the pipe-stem trousers and heavy tunics and shirts and ties. So we hived off to the nearest dersey, that’s the tailor

and got ourselves some pretty dreadful bush shirts and slacks run up extremely quickly and extremely cheaply. We bought ourselves mineral water because we had been warned, “Never drink water in India unless it has been boiled.” We learned that soft drinks were called mineral water, not soft drinks as in Australia. So we spent two weeks in Bombay

rather enjoying the February climate. We had nothing to do so we would go to a swimming club called Breech Candy which must have been one of the few clubs open to British other ranks in British India, but we enjoyed going there and swimming and gazing at people we would never know.

Bombay hasn’t left as considerable an impression on me as Calcutta has so we can wait for that. I think we just obviously felt the unusualness of the place. We were getting accustomed to it but we were doing it without having any work to do as comfortably as we could

by going to places such as Breech Candy. A lot of the boys went to the Bombay races. I didn’t do this, but there were three Australian jockeys riding in India at the time, called Roberts, Scarlett and the other name I had on the tip of my tongue but it doesn’t matter I suppose. But the boys got to know these jockeys and would come home

with their pockets lined with rupees. The jockeys had tipped them off who was going to win the races. Britt was the other jockey – Roberts, Britt and Scarlett were the three. And all of the races, apparently, were fixed beforehand.

One gathers from the reports of the cricket bookmakers – yes,

so some of our number found a place called Grant Street, which didn’t appeal to me but was the red light area. I can remember driving through it and the Reeperbahn in Amsterdam has absolutely nothing on Grant Street in 1943.

Ah, yes. That’s something I was thinking of mentioning too. We were entertained at little afternoon tea parties. You could almost call them soirees,

which being NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers]we were never admitted to what in British India, was the top caste, I can remember the femininity of these parties, being, I don’t say this, of course, in any racist way, they were Anglo Indians and they spoke in this lilt, Welsh lilt which was again, quite unfamiliar to us.

We used to call it chi-chi. I don’t know if you are familiar with that description of what was then the Indian accent. We called it chi-chi. Well, these were for me, painful experiences because there was too big a cultural gap if you get the impression.

The girls were so nervous and we tried to dance with them and instead of the relaxed dancing we enjoyed in England, it was anything but relaxed. So I think that was rather a sad introduction to the sort of Indian society that we might have gotten to know.

Yes, well you didn’t penetrate that area of society in any literature that I was familiar with.

The common expression for Indian women

was Billy and I have since learned that that was the equivalent of calling women tarts. We didn’t mean anything pejorative about that. To us, we had to call them something and of course, you could divide servicemen into

I suppose, two categories in India. Those who really had the enterprise to find more about Indian women and it was pretty hard to do to break the race barriers. And those who thought, well that is impossible for me, were therefore,

and if I got the chance, would look towards European girls in India. It’s a sort of racism that’s inseparable from Imperial society, I think.

As I say, to most not. Australians are not unique in this and in my subsequent diplomatic experience

I had visited a naval mess in Kulna, what is now Bangladesh, but was then East Pakistan and there were two West Pakistan officers – two very beautiful young men who were playing billiards and I joined them in the mess and we got talking and I said to one of them after a while

How do you find the Bengali women and what do you think his reply was? “Disgusting”. And this is an inseparable reaction I think. Racial difference hasn’t had the social watering that will enable these social reactions to disappear.

And the other experience that was identical was when I was in Jakarta, I visited what the Indonesians now allow to be called West New Guinea and I asked an Indonesian military officer exactly the same question only about Papuan women. A virtually identical reply.

As I say, you can generalise from the three examples that this is the sort of reaction that has to happen in most cases, which meant I had a second pilot who found no problem in fraternising but then his demands on women were a bit different to mine at that time.

Wait a minute, I got it wrong, 44. Yes, I did say 43 earlier, I should have corrected that.

An Australian presence?

Yes, we had our own liaison officer in Delhi, man called Pate, Wing Commander Pate, subsequently became Windeyer’s assistant in the Petrov Royal Commission enquiry. But he was supported by Dick Richardson, former Australian test cricket captain, a lieutenant and grandfather to the Chappell brothers.

These people were supposed to get things like, well to do our liaison with the RAF, to handle problems, to ensure we got our uniforms. Somebody in Delhi got away with all the navy blue gaberdine raincoats which we were supposed to be issued with when we became officers.

Nobody ever saw the gaberdine raincoats. In Bengal we were told, “Oh well, they’re in Delhi and we will get them out to you.” When I happened to get posted to Delhi, I was told, “No we have never had them.” So they were beautiful raincoats I know that.

We were just waiting in Bombay until room could be found for us on a squadron so we spent two weeks there and travelled in conditions slightly better than the cattle did to Calcutta. It took about three and a half days from memory – five days perhaps. We were in third class carriages as British other ranks.

These were compartments that had a salon each side and down the middle were two other benches. There were 15 of us to a carriage and I remember we could just all manage to fit on a bench to sleep at night. We had not from memory been issued with malaria pills and we were all dead scared of malaria.

We kept the windows and hatches closed on this train. At nights, we would cover ourselves with the issued anti-gas capes, which were these oilcloth things, which were quite impenetrable by air as well as mustard gas and absolutely have horror nights on that train.

It did get very hot even though it was by this time only late February. Every time the train would stop with a clanking that had to be felt to be experienced, the door would open; about a thousand faces would appear at the door looking rather like one of those Arthur Boyd paintings if you have ever seen what I mean – of faces around a cross or something.

but they would be saying, “Razor, toothpaste, bootlaces”, all of these sorts of things, trying to sell you anything it seemed. Occasionally it was said, some of them would be trying to sell you their daughter. There was a song about that anyway.

Do you want to hear it? The chorus of it went something like this:

\n[Verse follows]\n “Sergeant major hologram[?] razor,\n Queen Victoria, very nice chap,\n Seven long years you’ve known my daughter,\n Now you go to Blighty sah,\n May the boat that takes you under\n Sink to the bottom of the Pahni sah\n

Oh dear Eliza ….”\n

and so on. There were all sorts of songs like that. I haven’t given a fair rendering of it.

\n[Verse follows]\n “Sergeant major, hologram razor,\n Queen Victoria, very nice chap…yes.\n Had my daughter, nearly a virgin,\n something, never get something, never get the clap.”\n

Yes, it went on something like that. We had songs for everything in the air force. Mostly perversions of hymns and the like.

This particular one must have gone back to Victorian times. The Alalli was the embarkation place

for people who were being sent back to England. Not the embarkation, somewhere near Poombah I think, the dispatch centre.

We didn’t stop in Delhi, we went to Calcutta. This was the end of the 1943 famine, which was

at that time, the most severe in Indian history.

We got off at Harrowers Station and I had never seen anything like it – never again will I see anything that will make such an impression on me. People with elephantitis, kids with distended stomachs, beggars everywhere and virtually having to tiptoe over bodies on the platform.

It was an appalling thing. I spent in the transit camp in Calcutta and not very long, but long enough for me to see on one occasion a skeletal old woman going through our garbage until she finally found an old discarded mutton bone with fragments of old meat on it,

she was peeling these fragments off with her fingernails. Yes, Calcutta was really an appalling site at that stage.

Well, if you can imagine someone who was heading for an operational station, which I was,

you sloughed these things out of your mind, like pulling the chain on them. You couldn’t afford to be worrying about other people. You had your own life on the line, I suppose.

We spent a few days there and then those of us

who had come out from England were dispatched to their various squadrons. There were two Liberator squadrons at that stage, operating from Bengal. They were 159 and 355. So I was posted to 355 Squadron at Salbani, which is about fifteen miles north of Kariknamidnapor [probably means Kharagpur], in what is now West Bengal.

Some of my friends were sent to 159 Squadron. My old mate Newman had gone there but with me to Salbani came Clem Walker, Butch Smith, Dick Higgins and we had all been together at OTU that’s operational training in Europe. Dick had been with me a bit longer than that.

And we arrived on the squadron and the first thing we know is we get the advice “The squadron is moving to Chesor, so you fellows who have just arrived, before you unpack, get in the garrie and you can be on the first shift going there.” So we get in the gharry and travel all night across Bengal, which is now Bangladesh, fording creeks

punting across rivers and arriving in Chesor right in the middle of the holy festival. That was something that had to be seen to be believed with people swinging their great lingams, a man called Manuka Lingam told me what that meant, and throwing powder all over one another.

We thought this was extraordinary. Is India going to be like this, but we spent a night there and it was almost extraordinary because we were told “It was all a mistake, you’re to go back to Salbani.” So that was my one insight into the holly festival, which I wouldn’t have missed for worlds. But the experience

I don’t know if you know the saying, but we were used to being mucked around, but when we joined the air force we were mucked around by experts. I never thought it more fitly applied than to that particular experience. But we got back to Salbani and then for me, the war started. I was assigned as second pilot to a man

called Joe Morphett who was my flight commander. Squadron Leader Morphett. We got ready for operations, but my first impression of the squadron was not very favourable. The sergeant’s mess was almost in revolt because the rations hadn’t been coming through properly.

I think there could have been a palace revolt or something if suddenly a crate of bully beef hadn’t arrived. Bully beef being canned corned beef.

That was a staple.

Yes, and so we could do it up into all sorts of things,

In batter, as Irish stew, as great cold slabs of meat. You couldn’t make chicken Maryland of it however. If we wanted anything for a change what we found out on the squadron was, that there was no such as NAAFI [Navy Army and Air Force Institute] which used to provide you with such things as tea and buns at break off times in England.

But these sorts of functions had been handled, dealt out in Salbani to a gentleman called Haq. And later a very famous name in East Pakistan, a man called Fazwal Haq became Prime Minister of East Pakistan and I’ve no doubt that this was the same Haq family because they must have made a fortune.

They issued things called Haq coupons, which were legal tender in the Haq canteen and to supplement this incredible mess diet, if you went to the canteen you could buy things like, well they were called chicken, and as you pulled the elements of it from your teeth you could probably identify some relationship to what you had previously known as chicken.

But they were pretty scrawny and pretty tough. But he had the other thing that was important to us and that was Nimbupani, because fresh limejuice I think was probably an important element of diet for most of us in India. No one got scurvy anyway.

I was very lucky. I’ll describe at a later date the one problem I had that led me to seek medical assistance. Yes, on the squadron, we were quickly anyway brought into action. We had the old timers telling us, a lot of Australians had come

from flying Blenheims in the Middle East. Joe Morphett being one of them. They were getting well on in their tours and regarded themselves as old hands and they tried to put the fear of God up the newcomers, so it was just as well that my beliefs were what they were.

We played a lot of bridge. Now, the squadron is extremely badly run and that was one reason for the sergeant’s mess problem. We only gradually took this in through our pores but it came to us of course, the words had been let out, the bloody CO dodges all the ops he can. He’s only required to do one a month and that’s all he does, then he makes sure it’s a milk run.

And this was an attitude on the squadron and it went right through. We weren’t getting our number of aircraft up. We had 16 aircraft and 24 crews on the squadron. The target was to get all 12 aircraft up on every operation but we weren’t getting anything like that out. That is always a question of morale

and leadership and it was lacking when I got to...

Well, I prefer not to say, because I know it wasn’t up to standard. I might say too few but it was not good. The next thing we have on the squadron is an accident. The armourers,

the people who put the bombs in the aircraft, and the heat in Bengal can be quite incredible on a tarmac and the aircraft at this stage would be in full sun all day, going out to arm them, the temperature in the aircraft might be 60 degrees Celsius. It might even be more.

But it was an awful job being ground crew in these conditions and obviously you had to have them well motivated and they weren’t but then during a loading operation, an aircraft blew up and two of the ground crew with it. And again, if I remember rightly, sometimes one has to trust one’s memory in things like that, but that is my memory – that two were killed.

Now after this, I think there must have been a bit of an enquiry from group headquarters but I would like to continue this theme a little later as I’m getting out of order. Because, personally, I was getting ready for my first operation and of course, we shared a billet with this – there were about 12 people to a billet,

these being bamboo thatch buildings, on cement floors, dusty cement floors and we slept in charpoys which were four posted beds with strings drawn across them then a durry put on top of the strings and on top of that whatever bedding you had provided for yourself and then a mosquito net hanging from bamboo poles

in the canopy above the bed. And we had about 12 of these in what we called a Bacha, and the one I was in, we shared it with a couple of English ground crew. One of whom I think was probably a bit of a sadist. Before our first operation, he brought out a record of an English baritone called Denis Noble

singing the aria from The Marriage of Figaro in which Figaro is sending Cerubino off to the war – do you know that? Well it ends up with “war is glorious”, “what a glorious thing is war”. Well, this didn’t seem to be very appropriate to us at this stage being sent off

by a ground crew man playing a record of this sort. But anyway, such is war. So, I’m getting to the point before my first operation, which of course is going to be a vital one for me. How do I cope?

End of tape

Yes, well I had got to the stage where we were about to have our flight test for this. Always before an operation you would have a briefing session, of course, in which the target would be described and you would be told the way to go into the target. You would be directed on timing

because you didn’t want everybody on the target at the same time. We were doing night flying at this stage because of fighter opposition and so before the op then you would undertake a flight test to make sure the aircraft was in airworthy condition. This would entail getting off the ground, going through the usual engine tests before you did that,

ensuring then that when you were in the air that the bomb bay doors were going to open, that the bomb release mechanisms went off in time, that your wireless equipment was working properly, that your gun belts were fed properly because, the guns of course, the belts moved at a huge rate and if they got tangled they wouldn’t be much use to you.

Liberators – Liberator Mark 3, which differed from the one I later flew, which was a Liberator 6. It had in the front a larger navigational panel, which I will tell you about in a minute. Then the navigator would be making sure all his charts were in order and the sextant, and the wireless operator would be testing the wireless and these sorts of things would have to...

then you would come back to the ground and your aircraft would be ready for operations hopefully, and so would you.

It might take 30 minutes in the air.

A briefing would depend on who had asked questions and the intelligence officer would be responsible for the briefing.

He would tell you also about enemy opposition you might encounter. Then as we were coming to land on this particular night, Salbani was one of these places, which had attracted a large host of loyal host of kittyhawks, which used to feed on the offal and other wastes around airfield.

They were ever-present friends, hardly friends, but you couldn’t come out of the mess for instance, with a slice of bread in your hand without a kittyhawk, or a shite hawk, as we used to call them snatching it away from you. On this particular evening, as we were coming to land, I hadn’t flown a Liberator before this stage, and the flight engineer is sitting in the

second pilots seat being told to explain to me everything that I should be doing in my turn, and I’m kneeling between them coming in to land, no seat belt on, of course, nobody wore seat belts, you were a sissy if you did. So there was a sudden explosive sound, and I feel a sting in my mouth. What has happened is that the navigation

panel has hit a shite hawk, which has flown up through the navigation chamber between the skipper and the flight engineer’s feet and straight into my mouth, which fortunately, was closed. So of course, that put our aircraft, in spite of the splendid test we had done out of action. So the first operation was delayed, but it wasn’t delayed for long.

I suppose a wing span like that – [opens his arms out] They are a fairly big bird – not eagle size. Bigger than a seagull. So that was it, but we got off the ground eventually but in the meantime

group headquarters had obviously been concerned about this accident I had referred to the ground crew and the whole of the squadron’s output had presumably been put under challenge to which the response of our CO was well, there was not enough discipline on this squadron and he,

and he immediately set up a watch on the NCOs who were arriving on flights and 18 of them were charged for being late on duty. If I can say there were simmerings of revolt when they were short of rations, this really was an experience. But out of this, someone on the squadron, and this always happens,

when this sort of crisis happens someone has the wit to defuse it. Someone composed this little song which went to the tune of The Shrine of St Cecilia which you probably never heard, but the words of it went like this: “The squadron’s a shambles, there’s no ops anymore, 18 NCOs lined up outside the CO’s door,

they’re handing out the 252’s, and reprimands galore, on 355 Salbani.” A 252 being a charge sheet. So this had several verses and I can only remember one other but that’s a little irreverent, but it gives you the flavour. Well, I can’t remember what happened after this except my flight commander seemed to take a much more active role

in the running of the squadron because, if you remember, we went ahead with our operations and I fitted in about seven in April, 1944 which was a pretty good number so it means that some stimulus had been given to the squadron and,

and my squadron leader Joe Morphett was responsible for this. I don’t really trust my memory enough to be sure of that. What I do remember is that after we had done four or five operations we were getting towards the end of April, six or seven actually and Joe has got this word from group headquarters,

the squadron’s fuel efficiency is not up to standard. 159 were getting much better results from their aircraft using less fuel and spending time in the air and all the rest of it and compounding that was the fact that one of our aircraft had landed at a forward base, he had plenty of fuel left, but he thought he had run out of fuel. And so Joe gave a pep talk and

as a talk it was very positive. The problem, he found out that what 159 people were doing, after they had unloaded their bombs, they were coming back in a particular way. They were flying on what he described as the step. The step meant that the aircraft co-operated most efficiently on return with a light load at a lower flying speed than on the way out

and that if you gradually descended as you were going – coming home the best angle of attack on the wings at the speed he recommended which was about five knots less than the cruising speed going out, so the idea was to lose about 2 or 300 feet an hour, just almost imperceptibly

losing speed but getting maximum lift at the speed you were going and therefore economising. So he turned on this poor pilot who had landed at the other drome and said “How could you think you had run out of petrol, you know you have got two hours spare supply?”, and the pilot, if my memory serves me rightly came back and said,

“But the visible gauges were showing empty”. Joe said, “Everybody knows you can’t trust those gauges. You had enough for two hours flying when you landed, do you think, Chiefy was trying to kill you?” Chiefy being the flight sergeant responsible for signing off the aircraft

as properly laden in every way. So this meeting ended up with Joe saying “You can’t possibly run out of fuel, just don’t trust the gauges.” Now it was the next night, I think, that we bombed Mimeo and I was flying with Joe and we unload our bombs

and I think he must have been determined to see that he got maximum economy on the way home because we had been on the home journey for sometime and it should have brought us in over the Aracans at the point of entry which took us over a lower part of the Aracans avoiding Mt Victoria, which is 10,000 feet.

Now the first, it’s a clear moonlit night and we’re looking ahead and Joe says, “We’re running into a mountain”, and sure enough, we were. He whispered to me, “Should I go through the gates?”. My mind blacked out at this point. To go through the gates meant using emergency power.

The gate itself comprised a separate area in the throttle segment that you couldn’t push by going straight ahead, you had to pull over to the right and then break a copper wire, then you would get extra boost but this was on every operational aircraft, you had this emergency…and there was a song about this, if you were followed by a fighter

the word was, “Don’t hesitate, just go straight through the gate and you would smother the bastard in oil” and that was the way we were told –“for God’s sake don’t use it except in an emergency”, so I think we must have, but we cleared the mountain and we get on across the Bay of Bengal and I’m saying

Sundermans coming up on the right, skipper, the Sundermans being the delta of the Ganges Brahmaputra and so we just get across the coastline and one of the engines coughs out and Joe says, “Jesus, are we out of petrol?” and I put the emergency petrol, gas pump on

and the engines started up again – we had these emergency pumps as well as the normal suction pump integrated in the engine, there was an emergency pump so it came back to life and I said, “Oh it was just the petrol pump, skipper” and so about a minute later we were driving along and another engine coughs out and I do the same thing and it comes to life again

and Joe says, “Jesus, two of then can’t go out.” Melville the flight engineer comes forward at this point and says “The gauges are showing empty, skipper.” Joe didn’t remember what he said about the gauges being unreliable, he made the right assessment and told the crew to prepare to bail out and report back to him and at this point, all four engines had cut out.

So we were about, at this stage, to enter the circuit at Salbani, we need to have been down to about 4,000 feet so we would have been no more than four and a half thousand feet when the first engine cut out, we were so close to home in fact. So we all go through this business and by this time running on about two engines

being on the emergency pumps and we were all getting ready to bail out, and of course before I can get out the mid-upper gunner, the navigator, the flight engineer

and the…I guess that was it on this aircraft. They have to get out first. Joe had said, after he told them to bail out, he said, “You too Mac”, so I’m looking up and then he says, “Could you give me a hand with my safety belt?”

So, these things, I had never thought of them, we had not used them when I got hit by the shite hawk, nobody had used them, nobody had told me there were such things as safety belts, and so I see this thing and tie it up around his belt and look something more and can’t see it and he says, “For Christ’s sake get out Mac”, so I head for the bomb bay hatches which is what we have to go through

and there’s Ron Vine my wireless operator who I had bailed out of the aircraft in England when I had the engine fire and he can’t get out because Melville’s stuck in the bomb bay thing. I said, “What’s wrong, Ron?” He said “He won’t get out.” I said, “Get him out”, and then I thought I may as well run back to see how Joe is, so I ran back and touched his shoulder and Joe said

“For Christ’s sake, get out Mac, look at the altimeter” and there it’s going down like that [spirals with his hand] and I simply rushed for my life. I’d had my parachute on of course by this stage, but in the parachute you have got a little spring laden canopy and this lets the parachute out, catches the air, when you’ve pulled the ripcord, so what I’d done before I hit the hatch

was pull the ripcord, but held the canopy in and I see Ron Vine disappearing through the windows, and I’m after him like a rabbit down a hole. The next thing I knew I had hit the ground and was turning over backwards pulling my parachute behind me. The first thing either I or Vine did was give a yell

and I can remember his saying, is “That you Mac?”, so I don’t know whether I was the first one to fall out but we were within about thirty yards of one another and if we are near the end, perhaps I can leave the next episode until the next day. Well, we hit the ground and of course, what to do.

We had a pretty fair idea from the way we had been going forward, which way the aircraft had gone and it was obviously necessary to find the aircraft so we headed in that direction. So we came to a village. Now I’ve got some papers that tell me this happened about 1.30 in the morning and so we get to the village and there’s no one about except

just as we arrived, someone must have heard us and then a young male led us in and we get to a point in the village where the paths go like that and along comes this very corpulent man for a famine in Bengal – who was clearly in charge here. So we try to explain to him what

has happened and about our only Urdu word at this stage is “Wallah”, so we are saying, “Airplane, wallah”, and things like this and then about five other people have joined him, probably the village panchiat. It’s still not making sense, then luckily enough someone who was clearly aware of the aircraft

having crashed very close at hand, came forward and we get directed out of the village and I think I committed the unpardonable thing of going to shake the village foreman’s, I’m sure the plump fellow was that, because I really think

I have a memory of his hesitating to do it and then touching my hand and then moving away rather quickly. But, we get escorted to the other village, it was probably no more than 500 yards from where we landed and there we find a terrible commotion and it’s still quite moonlight

because we saw our way across there, and there, as we get to the village, we find the dam, clearly the one that was used for bathing the cattle and not for human consumption on this side and around it, the village was done in that sort of L shape and the first thing we see is a mango tree

alongside the dam and Joe is propped up alongside it – the unforgettable sight – he had almost been scalped. The top of his scalp had gone back like this and you could see the wave where it had been peeled back and it was hinged at the back, I suppose about two and a half inches wide

not bleeding and he sees us and grins which you could hardly believe, and says, “Can you get me some water?” And we think, “Well, where do we get water?”, and the aircraft which as far as I remember, had not done any damage to the village,

had hit these trees on the other side of the dam and luckily enough the fuselage was intact and we were able to get into it and get to the emergency supplies and there was water in the emergency supplies, so we were able to get that and give it to Joe and having got the emergency supplies. We had things like bandages, scissors and the rest of these things.

So we then look at Joe more completely. Of course the village is milling around us at this stage, and trying to get through them had been a major exercise but that was that and we tried to keep them away from Joe. But the small kids couldn’t bear not to be within poking distance almost.

But then of course, when we got back, we realised there was blood all over Joe’s trousers, so what we must have done is used the scissors to cut up the trousers, and there we saw out the back of his thigh had been taken something about the size of a cocktail sausage out of the back of his calf and then out of the inside of his thigh was a piece like, I would say, a minute steak

taken out of his thigh and the miracle here was that no artery or no serious blood was occurring so we covered these things as best we could with the available dressings and tried to make ourselves understood to the people and at last

along comes somebody who must have been the village interpreter. So we talked to him and he’s not a very good linguist, but I think explained to him, a guzenman must be told and a doctor wallah and after a while he, no it wasn’t after a while,

we carried money belts, I did the illegal thing after a while, as we weren’t getting through and he wasn’t moving, I opened my money belt and handed out some of the silver rupees I was carrying and I think that was the inducement necessary to get him to go and seek help. Well in the meantime, you can imagine, Joe’s,… we gave him damn all chance of surviving.

Joe never gave up for one minute. He would be saying, well, one of the things he demanded was morphine, we carried morphine. Vine said, “Can you use it Mac?” “I don’t know how to”, and I had no idea how to use these little ampoules either, but I had a go at it, stuck it into him, and said “Can you feel anything Joe?”, and he said

“No, get the bloody thing out.”

Well, I’m not sure whether when you have such traumatic injuries whether there isn’t some protective, because his behaviour throughout the day was incredible, it really was. Of course there wasn’t any water over for Vine and me

and we had been brainwashed at this stage, never to touch Indian village water and we thought well, if help comes within a living period we’ll survive and we’ll do it better without drinking village water so we were thirsty to that extent for the day. This went on and on with Joe saying,

“Where’s the bloody doctor?” and we’d say, “He’ll just be a minute, Joe”. So we were offered food, I suppose, by the villagers but the only thing we took were mangos. If you go to a village mango in India, a village in India in the 1940’s

and ate the mangos I think you would be probably likely to find what we found, something stringy, impregnated with ants, virtually juiceless, with a sickly flavour that wouldn’t leave your mouth so we didn’t get much sustenance from the mangos and it took me 18 years before I would eat a mango again after that.

This went on and on, and I would say it must have been after three o’clock in the afternoon when finally the linguist came back with someone I would take to be a medical orderly but then he was able to make a pelancum[?] and Joe was carried across a paddock and then we found a bullock cart and Vine and I trailing along of course.

And then we had something like, I would say, a two hour march behind the bullock cart before we got to a road where an ambulance was waiting and all of this time Vine and I had had no water, we had refused the medical orderly’s water bottle, I pretended to drink from it. But I didn’t.

He gave us boiled eggs, hard-boiled eggs.

Yes, well we couldn’t be rude, but anyway he gave us hard boiled eggs, and I thought this will be good, so I cracked the egg, good shell, good hard thing and put it in my mouth, do you think I could swallow? I did not have a drop of saliva in my mouth.

So, anyway, I don’t know how I covered that one but the MO [Medical Officer] was walking ahead alongside Joe, so perhaps I discreetly dropped it behind me. Well, Vine and I had heat exhaustion. We were kept in hospital for a day I think, nothing serious but Joe was on the critical list for I think, until July when I’ve seen cables

back to Australia saying that he was off the critical list. He was awarded his DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] for this, he received that decoration in February 1946. He died in 1967, he married after the war and his wife died in the 1970s. After I retired I tried to contact him

but that’s all I could find out. So that virtually ends my experience on 355. Vine and I were then without a skipper. We were the only two who weren’t injured in this business. Melville, the man whom Vine had to assist through the bomb bay doors with the toe of his boots,

broke his leg and his collar bone. Others sprained ankles, and Smith our mid-upper gunner landed in a dam and got dysentery. So Vine and I were the last out, but the lucky ones. We were the only two Australians, I might say. Apart from Joe, we were the only two Australians in the crew.

Yes. There were a lot of these Aussies who had been on Blenheims in the Middle East, and others who had come out to the squadron from Australia from England such as we had. Joe was RAAF of course, if I hadn’t mentioned that before.

Yes, 1300 RAAF served in India during World War II.

Yes, it is.

I was such a short time on that squadron,

I didn’t take much on board and then my real operations were on 99 Squadron and I’ve kept contact with 99 Squadron but I’ve not had any further relationship with 355. But there would have been a very considerable proportion of Australians on that – I would say certainly higher than 99 Squadron.

I did, I think I did seven or eight on 355. I only did one on 355 after that one and finally I was sent on leave because we had no skipper.

Then we came back from leave and the Imphal, the Japs attack on Imphal into India had reached the point at which they were being held and starting to be driven back and when we got back from our leave, the emphasis of the bombing had become in support of the army and Imphal.

So I did one operation then with a delightful Welshman as skipper, called Nicky John and that was on the Imphal road somewhere and then I was posted to conversion unit to become a captain in my own right. So to do that I had to become

passed out as a Liberator pilot. Well, the leave, Vine and I decided to go to Darjeeling. My father used to import tea from Darjeeling – he thought it was the best in the world, so I thought it would be an act of piety to go up there

and see what it was like and be able to write and tell him I had seen Mt Everest. So we get up there and it’s ten tenths cloud everywhere and we get up we occasionally see Kankanjungara, we take a ride on ponies up to, no not on ponies that time, we went by car to Tiger Hill. It’s about 9,000 feet where Everest is supposed to be visible and didn’t even see Tiger Hill.

When we came back we had sniffles all the time we were in Darjeeling, but that was normal for that time of year apparently. So we get back from Tiger Hill, and it must have been about then that my elbow started to swell. I didn’t know what this was about, but at our little billet we had a good Scotch woman called Mrs Bell who said “You had better see a doctor.”

So she bandaged the thing up and told me where to go, but I can’t see him immediately and I go to bed feeling awful. Eventually I see him and he says, “Oh, yes come back tomorrow, I can’t do anything now, but come back tomorrow. You have an insect bite I think.” So we get back to the billet and I explain this to everybody.

Mrs Bell said, “Aye, I thought it was a pipsi bite!” I always describe this as a pipsi bite, whatever a pipsi is, I’ve never met anybody else who knew what a pipsi was. But I went back the next night and had the thing lanced. My arm was up like Popeye’s and went down immediately

like squeezing out a toothpaste tube. So that was the only real time I had to seek medical attention in India, which I referred to you before. While I was indisposed in this way, my friend Vine who was a good catholic had gone down to the Loreto Convent which we had often walked past, and they told him

“Why don’t you go into the YWCA [Young Women’s Christian Association] next door, there’s an Australian girl working there?” Vine promptly wasted no time in doing this and came back to me and reported that all he needed to do was get me off his back to get somewhere – there was nowhere else you could get in Darjeeling. Men outnumbered women by 100 to 0.

He said, “I’m going down there for afternoon tea, and I suppose you’re too sick to come.” I don’t thing anyone has convalesced more quickly under that urging. I get down there and found there was this charming English girl there that I got talking to and

Vine was talking to the Australian girl, but unfortunately it was my last afternoon. But I remembered her. I thought of her a lot on the journey out. But there it was.

I do, I’ll give you her name later. It wasn’t the end of this affair.

In the meantime I had had a parcel from an old girlfriend in Australia, so by the time I got back to camp I wasn’t thinking much of this girl, who was called Anne actually. And there we were, and I was posted at this point to get a crew in my own right.

TAPE STOPS

End of tape

Yes, well we left Salbani just as the monsoon was about to break and anyone who has been in that part of Bengal when the monsoon is about to break knows about it. From memory, it was118 Fahrenheit in the shade that day

and I have a letter to home saying it was 104 when we left the squadron. I do remember this, that I had the habit of taking morning showers, and as I got under the shower that morning the cistern for which was on the roof, and I got out with alacrity, as the water was still too hot to stand under. Anyway we were proceeding to Calla

in Mysore state, via Calcutta and Madras. So we get to get to Calcutta, and I’m sure it was a Sunday morning, there was so little traffic on the streets, but the monsoon had started to break according to my letters home. The roads were wet and somehow or other our truck skidded and Dick Higgins

who I had been for some time was sitting to my right in the truck, in the back of the truck, his arm up against the steel staunchion supporting the canvas roof. Our truck skidded and hit something metal. His elbow hit the staunchion and that was the end of Dick’s war. He lost complete use of his arm for some time.

When I saw him a few months later, just before he was repatriated, he told me he could use his arm just sufficiently to do up the buttons of his fly. That was the amount of movement he had in his arm. So that ended Dick’s flying but the other two of us who had come from England were Butch Smith and Clem Walker, Clem being an Australian and Butch being a cockney.

So we get to Madras and in the meantime the steel trunk which I had all the effects I had collected in addition to my sausage bag which I carried with me had been sent separately. They told me they would follow. In fact, the steel trunk followed three years later in Melbourne. But we get to Madras and spend the night in absolute agony:

in the St. Thomas’s Mount aerodrome quarters. The basher they had given us was full of these old charpoys and as the charpoys get old the strings in them become infested with bedbugs and that’s what got at us all night. Anyway we got along to Calla

and enjoyed the scenery – the little monkeys and chipmunks and things like this instead of the shite hawks and jackals of Bengal and that seemed very nice, and we noticed that the weather was much more balmy – about two and a half thousand feet high, so the Deccan Plateau was very pleasant climatically. So we get to Calla and do our time there.

And, of course as pilots we have the problem of getting crews. But who should we find at Calla but a lot of the people we had travelled out on the ship with. A lot of the odds and sods hadn’t been posted to squadrons yet and were twiddling their thumbs for months and were waiting to join a crew.

And among these was my old navigator, Tom Sutton, who was a charming man. Reading my letters I discovered he had described one of my mother’s fruitcakes as the epitome of culinary excellence, which must have given my mother some pleasure when I reported that home. But Tom was a Durham man

who was an Aberdeen undergraduate and was a charming man to converse with. But I was worried about those times we got off course over Europe, and the time when he hadn’t been the one who hadn’t bailed out and I had this question mark about Tom and he wanted to crew up with me and I had evaded this. Well, I think it fair to say that I met Tom some months later

when he had utterly redeemed himself on another squadron and had got a commission and was very well thought of so maybe I did him a service which shook him up a bit, maybe I misjudged him. One makes these decisions in war and I’ve always had a bit of a twinge in not backing his approach.

I did get in his place a most splendid navigator, Pat Jones, a Lancashireman, a red brick educated Englishman who spoke with what he would always describe as a Lancastrian accent and was proud of it. And with him I got a Yorkshire navigator but it took me a day to get these because I’d been dodging Tom Sutton all day.

Clem Walker and Butch Smith had got full crews by this time. I was worried they would pick the cream off the available crews, but anyway with the help of Pat and dumbbells, Rajah we called him, we got our crew the next day except for a co-pilot. I still didn’t have a co-pilot and then on the third day I was introduced to Donald Monroe Gregor.

A craggy, bald-headed 28 year old Australian who came from the cane-cutting regions of the Clarence River in NSW and Don was a bit annoyed because he was older than I was, he had his wings much longer, he was a warrant officer, and I was still a flight sergeant and he had been on coastal command from Madras captaining his own aircraft but the

powers that be had decreed that I should be a Liberator captain and so Don was required to serve with me and I must say, that after his first disappointment, he was a wonderful operational colleague. He was the only Australian in my crew.

Yes, except for a Welshman and they came from all parts of England and I, of course, wondered,

as I always did about how many different types England could produce from that small country – all of their different voices and different approaches to life in fact. So we did our time there and I could report a slightly discreditable episode about myself. We had one leave

that Taffy Barton, the Welshman, my flight engineer and a very important member of my crew, as it turned out, and I decided to take our leave in Bangalore. Delightful town in those days, a military cantonment town, but clean and well ordered. Taffy and I went about trying to get the best out of our leave. We tried the Bangalore Club and were stuffily told

that British other ranks weren’t admitted and saw a film, For Whom the Bell Tolls and then went on to Green’s Hotel which was the only establishment of its type that we could go to and there met up with some other friends. One of whom, Norman Sayer was another Yorkshireman,

another pilot that I had got to know and like, so we sat down and drank with them and I poured my Crème de Menthe over Norman’s cap field service, which we called by another name actually. But leave it at that. And that became a standing joke between us because once Crème de Menthe enters barathea it stays there like a goanna bite, if it rains

the Crème de Menthe suppurates in the barathea. Norman would later come in with his cap in his hand and say, “McCredie, you bastard, see what you’ve done to my cap” and we would go and have a drink on that. The next night, what I had been foolish enough to do was go to Bangalore without long-sleeved shirts and curfew

orders demanded long-sleeved shirts after sundown because of the malaria risk which wasn’t very high in Bangalore because Bangalore has other things galore, but not mosquitos. So we get in there and I’m walking around trying to think of something to do and I hear the voice saying “Sahnt” and the tap on my sleeve.

I take no notice and walk on and shake my sleeve away because I was a flight sergeant and I didn’t answer to things like “Sahnt”. So it comes again and the grip on my arm becomes firm and I fling it aside and turn around and I see one of these dreaded red caps who were the military service police for the air force. He tackles me and says, “Why aren’t you in long sleeves,

it's after six o’clock?” I said, “Aren’t my sleeves long?” He turned to his mate, they hunted in pairs and says “Tell him he’s in short sleeves”, so his mate tells me and I said, “Well, they must have shrunk in the wash” and this didn’t go down well at all. I had flung his arm aside and I then started very disgracefully to insult him

about being the sort of bloke who couldn’t get his knees brown up in the front lines, and had to pick on people who were doing the fighting for him. And I had done damn all fighting all the war but I remember saying and I can only excuse myself that I must have had a few too many before the incident. So, he took down my service particulars and said, “You’re on a charge”.

That was to have repercussions which I’ll describe later. But otherwise, our period at Calla passed. We learned at the end of it that my crew was to be posted to 99 squadron and so were Butch Smith and Clem Walker’s crews, so we were to be together again. And we get sent away by train. I pick what I think is a newer looking charpoy

in Madras in the transport camp there and think I’ll have a more comfortable night this time. The upshot of that was that I had a mongoose get under my durry, which I spent from about three o’clock in the morning until six o’clock thinking it was a snake because its tail

its long tail thing, I had felt with my feet and thought it could only be a snake. Anyway that’s a long story short. I woke the whole bashir in the morning when I realised what it was and gave a great roar and belted the thing on the backside. I didn’t have a more comfortable night the second time in other words in Madras but apart from that in Madras, that was where Gregor, my co-pilot

had done his coastal command work from and he knew the rounds of the town so he had taken half of the lot along to the hotel known as the Cone Mara [?], I think. They got pretty high, but Clem and I and a couple of others, Clem Walker and I and a couple of others had gone and seen Fantasia so we get back to the billet about the same time as Gregor and his crew

and there’s Gregor shouting at the top of his voice, “They’re the greatest bunch of black thieving bastards God ever put breath into!” And further diatribes and it transpired that having taken them into the Cone Mara Hotel, Greg had kept on ordering drinks without checking on the bill.

And when finally the bill arrives, none of the others had enough money to make a decent contribution and Gregor had all his money there and blew the lot on paying the bill for the drinks. That was Greg’s way. He was the hardest drinker bar only one other that I ever met, in fact. But never before an operation.

From Madras we went by one of these miserable train journeys. Ostensibly to our squadron but there were steps on the way and at Delbungar, a town in Bihar, we were dropped of and spent about a week. That was an interesting experience because it exposed us to a bit of sectarian strife.

We had one occasion when these little boys were stoning these other little boys and yelling out “Kandy wallahs!” And it was quite clearly part of the pre-independence intercommunal strife that we were witnessing there because little boys

wouldn’t have had this antagonism towards one another without the influence. One of the interesting things about that, I found out later in life, is that the Bahari Moslems who were the little boys stoning the other ones, had no future in India after independence or fled or were moved out

to Bangladesh where they were equally shunned. I think they were one of the more tragic stories of Indian independence. That is by the way, the rest of our experience at Delbungar was that Clem Walker went down with dengue fever and I think this probably shortened his life in the long run.

Before this Clem had always been a stout fellow, known by Butch Smith, the cockney, as Slim. And after it he had lost so much, that Butch changed the nickname to Slug. We stayed there about a week and then went to Calcutta and had long enough for me to

pass a little shop that sold gramophones about five times and then went eventually going in to enquire the price. It was Indian made. It was a horror. I wound it up and asked to hear it and heard something and the needles that were put in were made by Tartars were quite incredible, but it did make some music and we were able to get some records,

so that provided something on squadron.

Well, we arrived there and it was a matter of starting training before operations. You did things like bombing practice, you did things like fighter affiliations, you did practice in formation flying

because by this stage of the war, fighters were no longer a factor in Northern Burma. They had all moved south to Rangoon. The change had occurred from night bombing to day bombing and that was to be done in formation so we had to practice formation flying. There was a second thing that affected

when we went into operations and that was a situation in India. The Japanese had very cleverly made use of the Indian National Army in their advance through Burma and this was clearly a worry to the authorities in India. Instead of being operational, our first major flight was a demonstration flight over Madras, Magpur, Bombay

and Calcutta and back to base. So that was a very long flight and we would form up in formation. We did three of those flights. I mention them because I think they are very relevant to a facet of the war.

There were 48 – 4 squadrons of 12

and every squadron intended to get up all 12 flights. Our squadron would have got up 12 except I had one of those that turned out to be a very lucky experience from what happened later of having what’s called having a run away prop on take off. Now when you have a run away prop, it means there’s no way of stopping the revolutions while the engine’s running and they will build up to an extent

where they will shake the engine out of it. Mounting if you don’t shut it off. So the only way to handle this is to feather the propeller and then have them turn the engine off. So then, of course, I couldn’t continue with the operation. But I did come into land but I had to use up four hours of petrol before I did

because the plane would be too heavy without it. So that was an experience that bears on a later experience. We then started off on our tour of operations. I think a very early one was on a place called Nonpladuk which is a few miles away from Kanchanaburi the town on the bridge of the river Kwai.

Yes, this was in Thailand. So there we are – it was a Japanese dump we were after. The Japanese habit was to put their dumps or prisoner of war camps all together so the dump we had to bomb was right alongside the prisoner of war camp at Nonpladuk.

This was as it turned out, the most heavily defended target that I encountered in my tour of operations. They had ground to air missiles, these things came up most disconcertingly.

Yes.

Well, missiles, rockets I should say.

Yes, these rockets came in clusters of half a dozen, I suppose, all of which would be aimed simultaneously and being as such would cover a much wider area than the normal shell would and then the fused would explode at the height that the gunner had determined. These things were bursting all around us. They were quite uncomfortable.

The first thing I hear as we are approaching the target is, Bill Bowler, my rear-gunner, calls out, “Cripes, cut his tail off”, he did. And Flash Leggett my second wireless officer said, “That’s right skipper, one of our crates have gone down.” And how this happened, whether it was a result of one of them being hit or somebody panicking

and flying into the other wing we never found out. None of us had had a great deal of flying formation training at that stage so accidents of this sort are not uncommon. But there I was, it was my first operation, approaching a target with ten instead of twelve aircraft and I can remember the thought going through my mind

something about thirty operations to go. That doesn’t sound too good. But there it was, we got back all right and the lost crews, one of them was captained by an Australian called Harrison. I never got to know him personally but he was an officer and the other was a Canadian officer called Jones.

Oh, we went ahead with the bombing and I suppose that was alright except I know that we scared hell out of the occupations of the prisoner of war camp because I met four of the occupants of that in subsequent years.

One was about three nights after I got back to Melbourne

my sister had a cocktail party and at it was a man called Jok Bjonkier who was a Dutchman in this camp and my sister said “I must introduce you to Jok.” He was a prisoner of war in Burma and when he found out he embraced me. He said, “It was wonderful.” We had all gone up on the roof and cheered. The second person I encountered this way

was the Dutch Ambassador in Manilla, a man called Van der Salle. He gave the same reaction. The third was a man called Theofeld Bott who was the Dutch Minister for Development Aid, who had called me in to explain Professor Tim Burgin’s theory on national aid. I looked up his curriculum vitae and discovered he had been a prisoner of war so

fortified by the previous experience, I said, “I note you were a prisoner in Nonpladuk.” He said “Yes”, and I said “Well, I was in that bombing raid”, and he went absolutely as white as a sheet. His reaction was totally different to the other two and I’ve always been a bit charry about that since.

Well it was good for morale, as far as the first two were concerned. Bott may have been a bit close to it or he might have been sitting on the toilet or something and had the daylights scared out of him. I don’t know. I said I would never mention it again, but I met a man called Terdake in Surabaya and he had the same reaction as Bott.

And that’s when I resolved never to mention it again.

Well, they were too exposed in the north - at this stage they were in retreat.

Yes, late 44. I mentioned to you they had got to the limit of their advance on the Tiddim/Imphal Road. We were bombing that in June 1944. By this time it was November 1944 and they had already been pushed well clear of the Indian border and the advance was back towards the Irrawaddy and Mandalay and such like,

so our main strategic aim was against their lines of supply. These lines of supply were mainly by rail, airfields and as opportunity targets, we always had the coastal shipping because they made use of prows and things of that sort along the coast.

I guess there were thirty operations to cover and they can be covered in a fairly short time. We didn’t encounter a lot of opposition. The one experience I had was as it turns out on New Years Day 1945,

when we had a bridge, about 50 miles inland on the Burma/Siam Railway, east of an island called Calligork Island. We flew across the Bay of Bengal and then across from the point where the Burma coast…we joined up in formation in that point,

because there were fighters around Rangoon, in daylight you were much safer in formation than you flying singly. You had a formidable amount of armament to focus on any fighter that dared to attack you from the rear in formation.

So on this occasion we had this bridge to bomb and bombed it and I was, at this stage, toting up my hours because I figured at the end of this operation I would be half way through my tour and that seemed terrific, New Year and all. So we bombed it and the navigator took us in perfectly and I could see the target and I knew when the bomb aimer said

“Bombs away”, that our bombs must have landed where they should have, as long as I was at the right height, which was important because if you went too low, your bombs would skip on the ground.

Would you excuse me if I say I couldn’t give it to you within fifty feet at this stage. I would have known it at that stage. You would go low, but you would have to leave enough height

for the bomb as it dropped. The bombs were laden on the horizontal but the nose had to drop sufficiently in descent for the fuse to hit the ground otherwise if it landed on its belly it would just skip along like a stone on water and it wouldn’t detonate until that nose cap had encountered some opposite resistance. But I was confident we had gone in at the right height.

Bit elated with all. We get back to Calligork Island which was the rendezvous point and I discover one of my companions is there and is circling and I see him dive. One of the gunners calls out, “That’s Clem, Mac, skipper

going in on a dhow” and we had been briefed to attack any coastal shipping as opportunity targets and we had a lot of armament to turn on one of these, we would be capable of cutting a boat in half. So I followed Clem in and the next thing we know, I get the voice, “Clem’s had it skipper and

the bomb aimer”, I remember said, “They’re shooting at us Mac”, and I said “I know that” and we get over it and we’ve strafed it and then there was this enormous explosion. Taffy Barton, who I told you earlier was a very important member of the crew, says, “Port inner, skipper, oil pressure’s going” and that run away prop came into my mind,

and these are the lucky things that happen. I had had the run away prop and knew exactly what to do if I encountered a problem, there were emergency feathering buttons as well as the normal thing but I figured you’ve got to go for the emergency button and press that within a second – within a hundredth of a second and the thing about the port inner engine was

that it was the engine that supplied the hydraulic power to all the operational mechanisms on the aircraft – the flaps, the undercarriage, and all these things were activated by the port inner. So we had lost that but by pressing it in time, apparently there was enough oil in it to feather the engine. If there hadn’t been it’s pretty

unlikely we would have got back because as I’ve explained, the drag you get from a whirring engine is pretty tremendous. Anyway we had a great debate, Don Gregor and I as to what we would do and I thought we could get back to base, and Gregor says “It will be dark”, I said, “Oh yes, but we’ve got enough fuel.” He said, “You’re going very slowly.”

We couldn’t keep up with the rest of the squadron flying in formation, so we took a route further south. And we debated all this and he said, “Anyway how do you know if the undercarriage will work?”, and of course, I didn’t know if it would work because we had no hydraulic power from the port inner engine and would have to use the emergency system.

He says, “It might be shot up, we might have flat tyres, you ground loop”. I said, “Yes but we could let it down and see” and we debated that and yes, we might not get it up again if we did that so we eventually settled for the idea of going to Cox’s Bazaar, which was an advance field and well, to cut a long story short, we were told by base to land at Cox’s Bazaar,

everything worked perfectly. The next day, a Mustang coming in to landing on Cox’s Bazaar wrote our poor old aircraft off. But that was it, we

Yes, I believe it was a Mustang.

Yes, it was. South East Asia Air Command.

That was from Colombo and Mountbatten was the supremo of all armed forces in South East Asia.

Yes, in Kandy.

ABDA? What do you call ABDA?

Well this may have formed after the Japanese surrender and I had no part in operations after that but no, we were under group command from Calcutta, and group was under command from Colombo.

Air Vice Marshall Park I think, was the senior RAF officer who controlled RAF operations and he was in Mountbatten’s headquarters. But anyway, the landing at Cox’s

was an experience in itself, apart from the CO of the station telling me it was a bloody silly thing to be doing on New Years Day and my asking could we could get a beer and his telling me we are under siege here didn’t you know and although I didn’t know, he also didn’t know at the time that the Japanese had just pulled out of Cox’s Bazaar, besieging Cox’s Bazaar, but what we had seen

in riding into the sergeant’s mess was all of all of these colourful tribes people in the fields and I remember asking about them and who are they and getting the reply, “They’re tribes peoples and they spy for the Japanese.” And my saying, “Why do you let them?”

and being told “We are not allowed to shoot them” and the only thing about that I’ll say is that years later, I happened to read a war history, a British war history by a man called Donaldson who talks about unauthorised shooting of civilians in the Arakans [Arakan – province of South-western Burma]. Now Cox’s Bazaar was in the Arakans. I did pick up

enough information in that sergeant’s mess that night about relations with the tribes people to believe that they might well have been the people who had been shot without proper process. British instructions at that stage were very clear, that we are going to be reoccupying this country and we don’t want them to think that we treat them no better than the Japanese and it’s very important therefore that they be treated as British subjects, which they will all become again on the liberation.

Yes. Well, I’ve given a lot of thought to the raid we did on Mandalay on 13th January, 1945. There was no other operation that we ever did that was given

the amount of ballyhoo that this raid was given. I told you the British were concerned about the impression they left on the Burmese people, from all sorts of operations, on the ground and no doubt in the air as well. Now this raid on Mandalay, from memory, entailed almost 100 aircraft. British and American.

The area of concentration was the Fort Dufferin area in Mandalay, which is the centre of town. We bombed it in formation, pattern bombing that means, because when you bomb as a single aircraft, you can focus on a target singly, but when you do it in formation, you’re hoping because there’s a wide pattern of bombs, you won’t miss the target.

And of course, this always entails collateral damage. Why was everybody so keen on this raid? I believe the factors here are: first of all, General Stilwell, who had been deputy to Mountbatten in SEAC and was also Chiang Kai-Shek’s principal military advisor and had been

withdrawn at the request of Chiang because he was telling Washington that Chiang wasn’t fighting the Japanese, he was more interested in fighting Mao’s communists and it was a waste of aid giving it to Chiang. Now Stilwell was replaced in about October 1944 by General Wedemeyer

and Wedemeyer clearly came with the instructions that all aid was to be given to Chiang to fight the Chinese communists. And to assure him that aid was coming, it was important that the Burma Road be reopened as a main source of – main channel of aid,

and Mandalay, of course as the main city through which aid, the Burma Road, would be supplied. So this is, I think, the background to this raid. The second thing about it is, with the RAF on this occasion, a man called Stewart Allsop who

with his brother, Joseph, is written up by Barbara Tuchman in her biography of Stilwell, as principal funnel of advice to the Whitehouse, on policy on China and all of these sorts of things. These two brothers were war correspondents and Stewart Allsop flew with the RAF on this operation. Now what happened on this operation is that we dropped

a huge amount of explosives and I think it was not terribly discriminately dropped on Mandalay. Stewart Allsop came back and we encountered no opposition whatsoever on the raid, not a puff of smoke. Stewart Allsop wrote it up the next day. “This was the biggest operation of the Burma war.

I went in with the RAF, the big boys. After we had been through hell on earth over the target, we came back to base for bacon and eggs and whiskey.” But then he went on to heap praise on the RAF and such like. Now, the Allsop’s are well know as US intelligence trustees among other things and why were they sent

with the RAF and not with the US Air Force on this occasion? It seems pretty clear to me, that to get British consent to this raid, which to some extent, to a huge extent, was not operationally justifiable. The Americans had to say, “Look we’ll give you all this publicity”

and it went around the world and we had from Australia, a man called Hutchison, from the RAF PR [Photographic Reconnaissance] outfit, come to our squadron before the raid. It was he who took the photograph of my crew, which subsequently appeared in the Calcutta Statesman with all this ballyhoo of Stewart Allsop’s on the raid.

I think here it is pretty clear that the importance of the raid for the Americans was to send the signal to Chiang to say, “Look we’re just about to reopen the Burma road, here’s proof of it, be of good cheer in the meantime and we’ll throw in everything we can to fight those commies.”

All I would say about that is the sort of advice that went to the Whitehouse after people like Stilwell and John Service and other experts were discredited, distorted American foreign policy for the next thirty years or twenty five years.

Well, it was,

but one could have observed at the time, would they all have been lying in their barracks having a kip so that we could blast hell out of them? I don’t think so, I think it was a demonstration raid.

I think that may have been a comment I may have made earlier when were talking about

this in that connection. When bigger strategic and political factors enter the picture you get military strategy thrown sideways I think.

It would have done a hell of a lot of damage. There were reports in Australian papers

at the time. I have copies of some of them saying so and so saw fires a mile high and that sort of thing, but there it was.

No one would have let that one out.

Who can tell, who can tell civilian casualties in Iraq?

The people who planned this never intended to release any figures about civilian casualties. All they were concerned with was writing it up as a huge success for the RAF.

Well, I wouldn’t say we did more than wonder at the time.

Yes, I have had a lot of opportunity since to read about everything connected.

Reach this conclusion?

Well, I don’t think I gave it a thought for something like 28 years, and then I started writing a series of letters to a daughter, who kept asking me what I did in the war. And then I started to think about it – I virtually hadn’t thought of the war for 28 years.

I have five.

Never. I do these days, because they’re interested but it was something I was concerned to blot out in my life. It had been a job. I had done it.

I wanted no more of it and just having led the life in civvie street that I did, I was not thrown in contact with other people, none of my old crew or squadron people did I ever meet until I went to a squadron reunion in 1978.

Yes.

Clem Walker was the only one I met, I was best man at his wedding, oh, and Ron Vine came and saw me in Melbourne in 1948, that’s all.

No. I became a student

and was too concerned with trying to get through my course. It’s not the easiest thing to study after the war.

No, we kept on going and I finished my tour in late April, I think, just before VE Day,

not very long before VE [Victory in Europe] Day. I went to Darjeeling about the 1st of May and re-met the girl I had met a year previously.

I suppose it was the most - quite a very pleasant interlude

in my course of amatory studies.

No.

I had finished my tour of operations at that stage. The tour was supposed to be 300 hours but I had done

371 hours by then. But others had done a bit more, because that was counting our time on 355 Squadron. We wanted to finish with our crews on 99 Squadron, to get them through as well as ourselves. But I think when VE Day came

it was like the pricking of a balloon, you had that feeling of relief and knew that the Japanese war was going to be over soon enough for you to be free of any need to participate actively in the war. By that stage, I knew what my next posting was – I was posted to a transport squadron in Delhi. I thought,

Oh, well, that does offer a possible future life, if I have experience with a transport squadron which I had for about six months – a future ahead of me in aviation, but in the meantime, the girl I met in Darjeeling convinced there was more to life than flying, so it was a very influential relationship on

my future and I determined from that leave that I would accept the government’s offer of university education, and as I think I mentioned to you earlier, I had a deign of getting into Foreign Affairs which I was able to do after I graduated in 1948.

Yes, we all were, yes and we simply had to wait in a queue until your turn came up and we were eventually promised home by Christmas. We were actually put on an aircraft

that got us out of India on 13th December and land in Colombo to be told that our aircraft was to be taken over by the Australian Services Cricket Team which had an engagement in Australia which had priority over our repatriation. So I got home eventually on Christmas Eve, 1945.

My friend Clem Walker, who lived in Ballarat was with me, and we got to Melbourne alright, but there was a train strike and Clem had to spend Christmas Day with my family because there was no way he could get to Ballarat. So that was really the end of my war which wasn’t a really difficult one compared with a lot of people.

Well, not I’m not an optimist about the human race. I believe in Pascale’s

view that man is neither angel nor beast, but if you try to make an angel of him, you will make a beast and that’s a problem with humanity – or to put it another way Churchill said “War is a normal condition of humanity.” You’ve got to look at the centuries after the enlightenment and try to find a decade when there hasn’t been

more than one war. Among supposedly enlightened people then what is our hope for the future? Our hope is that we can keep our spirits up and our powder dry and be prepared to face problems without being aggressive.

Well, you’ve got to look at the future in short to medium and long term and the short to medium term, American power is so overwhelming that no-one can challenge America, but it means

no-one can stop America belting anyone it likes about the ears. In the medium to long term, one wonders about China. I have the personal view that the one gainer out of the American action in Iraq will be China. America has entered into a period that has been called Imperial over-reach.

That is to say it has taken on more commitments than even its economy is likely to be able to stand in the long run. Therefore what happens when the American economy breaks down on us, the assumption being of course in the meantime, has China the discipline

to continue to develop in the way we have seen develop over the last years?, and in that case, might we not see in fifty years or less time a world dominated by China rather than dominated by America, and in which case, what kind of behaviour are the Chinese going to employ?

Well, Australian participation was inevitable. I’ve recited to you those little indoctrinations we had at school at Melbourne Grammar and Princes Hill State School. We were indoctrinated because we were part of the British Empire and proud of it and that is something of course

in 2003 is difficult for young people to understand. Apart from a permanently refractory Irish element, there was this pride in it because we thought, well, they rule the world, they must be good and of course, all of the outward signs of British civilisation have an attractive side.

So that we felt we were part of the best and it was our job to defend the best.

My experience in India didn’t lead me to be hostile to the idea of the British Empire. It did lead me to understand the necessity

for change. I could understand that Churchill’s statement that he wouldn’t preside over the dissolution of the British Empire was idiotic. The British Empire was not going to hold together. It was a matter of how it fell apart and what benefits could be retained by all those parts when they did fall apart

were the important thing. So I think I went to Labor Club meetings at the University when I returned – I had always voted Labor, always would until I found I couldn’t stomach Whitlam’s foreign policies in Indonesia but I also

found the totally uninformed anti-imperialism which didn’t understand what had been created so many years ago, couldn’t be dissolved just like that without greater damage than if people accepted that it was there. There were good things about it and those good things must be maintained.

So I walked out of that Labor Party meeting and never had any association – that was University Labor Party – dominated by communists I might say, at that time, and I never had anything further to do that side of student politics, but I had even less to do with conservative student politics. I was an apolitical animal at that stage.

Well, as I mentioned I only read my letters home for the first time before this interview, they were saved by my sister

and given to me four years ago when I came to live in Melbourne and I’ve had them in a box and meaning to read them but I never have and then I’m rather surprised at the degree with which I dealt with questions of world aims and general political questions, I wouldn’t have thought

I was so interested in them at the time, but I clearly was and clearly was part of my motivation in seeking to join foreign affairs.

I had a father who had a brother with forthright and idiosyncratic

views of world affairs. One of his pet theories was, which I have just given to you now, is that China will be the power of the future.

Oh, throughout the thirties.

Yes, well, I think he

admired what he knew of Confucius and the whole Chinese tradition, foresight or instinct, I don’t know.

I suppose there was lingering suspicion; there was a questioning of whether the American building up of Japan was wise. Certainly I got rid of that suspicion shortly after seeing some Japanese films which showed a side of the Japanese sensibility than none of us knew existed.

I have to own up to being like many other people, in my letters home, when I learned of Bill Newton, I told you I had been at school with Bill Newton, and when I learned of his decapitation I wrote something to the effect that the best we can do with these Japanese scum is liquidate the lot of them.

Now, how many people thought like me, I would think a lot of people thought like me at the time. And the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can partly be seen in the context of the feeling servicemen had.

Well, I know perfectly well now that what should have

been done now, is that a demonstration of the bomb or what could have been done is a demonstration explosion of it, could have been given 20 miles out to sea or something. The Japanese were told the next one lands on Tokyo. There we are, you can’t turn the clock back and was that a possibility at the time given the advice

given to Truman? There you are. You know the whole Manhattan Project which was designed to produce a bomb before the Germans or the Japanese could. So there were all these forces behind, what in retrospect, we can see as a horrible decision.

You are quite right there, yes. It needn’t have been on Japanese soil to send that message. On the other hand of course, the message was stronger from having done it. If you wouldn’t hesitate to do it there, you mightn’t hesitate to do it on Moscow, I suppose that

is a consideration?

That was about ‘48.

There it was. There was all this negotiation to be done about the borders, though, by the time the bomb was exploded

Germany had been virtually partitioned. But the fear certainly was that Russia had such overwhelming army forces that without a deterrent in the form of overwhelming firepower, they were a definite threat.

Enough was known I think about Stalin at that time.

You mean the loss of allied lives in an invasion?

It was certainly a factor. Just how one weighs these factors without access to the inner thoughts of Truman’s inner circle at the time, I don’t know. It was a factor. There was no doubt, American lives, when you had virtually won the war, every additional life lost was going to be a political problem for the incumbent power in the United States.

So, they don’t like body bags in the United States, and they had had a lot in World War II.

I think I grew up a little bit during the war.

It gave me confidence, I suppose, in areas I might have found harder to develop

without the war. But then you don’t know what challenges you would have had to otherwise face, and had to come through, so I don’t like to think war changed me a great deal, but yes, it gave me a few callouses I would have otherwise failed to develop.

One simply develops callouses in life anyway. So, who knows?

Do you want me to sermonise or be anecdotal?

Well I think what may worry quite a lot of people of my generation is the loss of a sense of service to country in Australia that one tends to wonder whether there can’t be some better

development of youth programs, that are not necessarily military programs, that can look at questions like unemployment and say these things are bad for national spirit, but youth should be a strength, not a problem and yet we see what problems are created by drugs, graffiti

on walls, vandalism, all of these things, yet we have a degenerating environment. Can’t some effort be put by our governments into marshalling the enthusiasm of young people into positive areas instead of allowing this continuous demoralisation which occurs to a lot of,

unemployable people given the present climate and approach of government.

I’ve been pretty frank over recent years. I think I had a rather soft war.

I could have, as I explained earlier, had a much, probably a much harder war if I had accepted Colonel Balf’s offer of a commission in the 5th Commando Company. I mightn’t have survived the war. I had a lot of luck in surviving on a number of occasions

that I felt it was interesting to relate just the accidental experiences that lead to my being able to get out of a critical situation. So I think in life there is no gainsaying the factor of luck and the only thing is one wishes everyone the same best of luck.

And of course, reaching an old enough age to say that without being utterly ridiculous.I would like to thank you very much for your time, for the interview today and I’ll look forward to seeing the fruits of this interview transcribed. Thank you very much.

END OF INTERVIEW

“My service with the RAF would not have left the great memories it does had it been confined to my experience on 355 Squadron.

99 Squadron, on which the great bulk of my operational flying was performed was vastly different. In Wing Commander Lucian Ercolani DSO, we had a C.O. who understood thoroughly both the need to get the most out of his aircrews and ground staff and how to go about getting it. Personnel will always respond to a leader who not only leads from the front but is also able to explain the importance of the directions he gives to those who follow and , in “The Erk,” as he was known to both ground staff (the erks) and air crew, we had this sort of leader par excellence.”