Australians at War Film Archive

Don Charlwood - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 19th April 2002

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/666

Tape 1

00:29 Okay, Don, let’s just begin with your childhood.

I was born in Melbourne in September 1915 and I think one of my earliest memories is hearing of the Great War, as we refer to the First World War,

01:00 and being very much afraid of what was happening. Even thinking I could see the war reflected on the night sky from our front gate and hearing what I thought were the sounds of war and my mother telling me they were only

01:30 traffic sounds. And then I saw the Victorian contingents of original ANZACs [Australia and New Zealand Army Corps] returning to Melbourne. My aunt was a journalist on the old magazine called Table Talk, and they had an office somewhere in Collins Street and I was taken to a high window there and watched these long columns of men

02:00 coming up Collins Street from Spencer Street with the sun flashing on their bayonets and these were the men that I had been reading about and there seemed to be so many of them that I couldn’t imagine that huge numbers had been left behind but I did have an abhorrence of war even from those early

02:30 days and one of my aunts who told me I’d make a great soldier. I told her that I didn’t want to be a soldier and she assured me that all men were soldiers and I said I’d be a diver and hide under the sea and she said, “They’d find

03:00 you. They’d find you even there,” and I remember being quite chilled by that, quite afraid. Nothing much was said by the men who returned from that war. My father wasn’t at that war, by the way, he was very deaf but the men who did come back, it wasn’t the done thing to talk about what they’d been

03:30 through in front of children or even women and I think some of the deep family upsets that must have occurred between husbands and wives were in part a result of this bottling up and the men could only be understood by

04:00 other men who had been through the same sort of experiences as they had been. I started my school days in Camberwell but when I was 8 years old we moved down to Frankston, down on Port Phillip Bay which was my mother’s

04:30 home town and had a really idyllic upbringing down there for the next ten years of my life. They’re the years I based my novel All The Green Year on although it’s not by any means autobiographical. But that took us up to

05:00 the depression and I was at Frankston High School and one of our masters there, the history master, set us the project of writing the history of our local town – a man well before his time I think because this was a most unusual thing to do. And it wasn’t that everyone was writing about Frankston

05:30 because it was Frankston and District High School, and the pupils were coming from as far afield as Sorrento, and Flinders so that they were writing about those places. And I went home moaning to my mother about having to write this history and she said you get yourself a notebook and pencil and I’ll

06:00 give you a list of the pioneers – they weren’t so much the actual pioneers, they were really their children. My mother, having been brought up there, was of that generation herself so she was able to lead me to a number of people. Now in those days no interest was expressed in the pioneers so that

06:30 this became a bit of a scoop without my realising it and I found that these people were quite happy to speak to me. Of course they began contradicting each other and

07:00 one would say, “Old Joe McCoomb told you that did he? Well he would. Now the truth is,” and of course you get another version of the same story. But I began to enjoy this very much and I kept on writing this history to the neglect of almost everything else in the curriculum. And when I handed it in I could see the astonishment of this history master and the next I heard he’d take it to our principal and it was passed on to the local paper so at The Age of – I think I was about 13 – writing it, I was 14 when it was published in instalments in the Frankston Standard. So from that point on I wanted to earn my living writing and my mother told me that I’d never earn my living writing unless I worked for a newspaper and so she required me to go to Keith Murdoch’s Langwarrin home, on a Sunday of all days, and ask him for a job. Well it was a pretty tall order for a – how old was I then? I was 16 and interrupt this lion of the press in his den on a Sunday and ask for a job

08:00 and it was quite a walk. I think it was about three miles out to his place. The first time I walked out there I didn’t see him. He just wasn’t available. So I had to do it again the next Sunday and this time the great man came – this incidentally was before he was knighted. Before he was Sir Keith – and I remember he came in looking

08:30 rather irritably at me, slapping his riding boots with his stock and I asked him for a job and he was able to get me an interview with the chief of staff of the Herald and that individual interviewed me one day in the following week. I viewed his face between the soles of his boots because he had his feet up on

09:00 his desk and sort of looking at me between his feet and he said I was too young. I could possibly start off as a messenger, that he would call me if the opportunity arose. Well there never was any call. I got a much more sympathetic hearing at The Age. The editor was a Mr Austin – a well known

09:30 name there – and he was trying to get his son onto The Age and not having much luck at that stage although I believe his son did go onto The Age later on. And although he was sympathetic there was very little he could do. The

10:00 upshot of all this was that I completely failed to get a job on the press but a job came up when I was on my 17th birthday, when I was in my leaving year which was the matriculation year, a local job for 15 shillings a week at an

10:30 auctioneers and estate agents. So I started on that at 15 shillings a week and one of my tasks was going round collecting rent from unfortunate people who could hardly spare the money to pay it and I just viewed them

11:00 sometimes from behind curtains. I’d see them look out to see who it was. All I’d hear was a barking dog. I had to on Wednesdays pencil for an auctioneer with a very short temper. The people from Mornington Peninsular used to bring their produce into Frankston market and things like a case of Jonathan apples would go for one and sixpence which was very very little but of course we were all earning very little. My 15 shillings a week allowed me to buy a suit for 30 shillings after two weeks so that gives some idea of the buying power.

11:32 This is 1930 is it?

This was 1932. Yes. Now when I came up to my 18th birthday I found myself training someone else and I didn’t realise I was training my own

12:05 replacement because my pay was due to go up to 22 and sixpence once I turned 18 so I was given a holiday and my boss had the idea that in the busy season when he was letting out a lot of Frankston houses – because Frankston then in those days was like a holiday resort and he had a lot of holiday houses

12:30 on his books and he wanted to call me in then and in fact he did call me and my father told him I wasn’t available. In the mean time I’d been offered a job in the country at a little place called Nareen, where years later Malcolm

13:00 Fraser lived – a Prime Minister. I’d been offered a job for the shearing and the harvesting of 1933. So I went up there and much to my parents’ dismay, I remained for over 7 years and most kindly relatives, they were my mother’s

13:30 distant cousins by the name of Riddoch, and they were most kind to me. I think I was a most inefficient farm hand but I did learn to write there. I did do leaving English just by correspondence with Frankston High School and I became the Nareen representative of a few of the local papers – only one of them could afford to pay me.

Could you recall what they paid you?

13:57 What they paid me? The Hamilton Spectator paid me a ha’penny a line which certainly wasn’t very much but I did start a short-story course. There was nothing I could find in Australia by the way of a short story course so

14:27 that I enrolled with the London School of Journalism. So it took six weeks for my exercises to get over to London. Six weeks for them to get back but it was a good course except that I was writing plotted short stories of a type that didn’t appeal to me so I wrote under a pseudonym and to the best of my

14:57 memory I only had three of those stories accepted but they were accepted by one very good magazine published in Sydney called The Home and I think one was published by the Women’s Mirror that time and I wasn’t writing the sort of thing that I wanted to write but I think those stories went off reasonably well.

What was your pseudonym?

15:25 Oh I wrote under the name of I think it was E.K. Dwyer. Sometime I must track those stories down because they were the first thing I ever wrote.

Where did E.K. Dwyer come from?

15:41 Well my Dad worked with a fellow he often referred to and his name was Con Dwyer and I rather liked the sound of it for some reason or other and where I got the E.K. from, I just don’t know. I couldn’t very well use Con Dwyer.

Just while we’re there you say you weren’t writing about what you wanted to write about, what do you think you wanted to write about?

16:07 I really wanted to be writing about my own life but nothing much was happening in it though I began later on taking notes – I still have the note books – trying to set down the description of the country side and the various

16:37 characters that I was meeting and the – some of the happenings in life out in the rain and these 20 years later I used these for whole series, I don’t know whether to call them short stories. They were tales rather and they were

17:07 published not in Australia but in Edinburgh in Blackwoods Magazine which was a splendid old magazine that I think they started publishing in about the 1820s and went on until 1979. So that’s how those notes were eventually

17:37 used. Why Blackwoods Magazine? One of my jobs was milking the cows and turning the separator and my Dad used to send my copies of Blackwoods Magazine which had come from the Athenaeum Library so they were well and truly out of date and I used to read these when I turned the handle of the

18:07 separator. Our separating only took 7 minutes I remember so 7 minutes twice a day I went through these magazines and that’s why I eventually

18:37 submitted something to Blackwoods Magazine. I then began using those notes that I’d made but that lay 20 years ahead. Now I was accelerated into taking more and more notes when I joined the air force. Of course war broke out in 1939 and I viewed it with much the same dismay as I’d felt about the

19:07 First World War. I knew one thing, I didn’t want to be involved in barbed wire and the stories we had heard gradually of what conditions had been like and of course films had come out like All Quiet on the Western Front and they made a tremendous impression on the youth of our generation.

While we’re there – where else did you hear the stories?

19:20 Apart from those – there were short stories beginning to appear – I can’t remember the writers and while I was at Nareen I utilised the Melbourne Public Library – the state library which in those days had a lending library

19:50 and I wrote out a list of books I wanted to read and just – I drew that list of books from the outline of literature and so I got a steady of supply of books and I would imitate authors I liked like Conrad and Hardy and so on. I’d read one of those a month and there’d be someone else the next month and

20:20 all the while struggling I think to find my own voice and in amongst those books I got some very good First World Ones – All Quite on the Western Front,

20:50 I don’t think I did read that at that stage. I think I read that later but I did read I think something of Henri Barbusse and I’m rather stuck with trying to remember the names. Of course Hemmingway I read, now what was his famous First World War book, it just slips my memory at the moment. So, I was getting realistic pictures of the war by the time the Second World War broke out. Whether I would have gone into

21:20 the air force without the son of the household where I was living saying he wanted to be a pilot and I thought I was more navigator material. I was rather older and I think too bookish for that pilot. None of the thrills and spills appealed to me but navigation did appeal to me so we thought we’d be

21:50 able to fly together and we put our applications in soon after the fall of France. So we were interviewed down in Hamilton and we were both accepted and he was called up quite a deal ahead of me. I should say though

22:20 that before that we had to do what was called the 21 Lessons and these were to prepare men who had been quite a while out of school and needed to brush up on their maths and so on, particularly necessary for someone wanting to 22:50 be a navigator I think. I’d been no mathematician – quite the reverse. So we also used to go down to Coleraine which was about 18 miles away, to the post office to practise Morse code, learning Morse code and one thing we didn’t want to do was to become wireless operators because this terrible

23:20 Morse code was part of their existence. Well my cousin, or about third cousin a few times removed, he very much wanted to be a pilot but the entire Victorian intake when he was called up were made wireless operators, without the option and he was called up quite a deal

23:50 ahead of me for some reason or other. I was left languishing on the reserve for about eleven months and then I was called up. By this time Jim Riddoch, with whom I’d hoped to fly was finishing his training in Canada so my

24:20 inclination was to go to Canada. I thought I might still catch up with him. We could still fly together and also I had ready, while I was waiting, an article in the Weekly Times describing the first course of navigators in a city called

24:50 Edmonton. And for some reason it struck me that’s where you’re going. It was quite a irrational feeling. Anyway I was called up in May of 1941 and I was sent to Somers and I failed maths on the course and I had asked to be a

25:20 navigator when we were interviewed and of course this was a disaster to fail maths and I was given something that I didn’t recognise because I’d never experienced one before – an IQ test and I was feeling so indignant at having

25:50 to do this that I worked well above my normal speed and when it was all over the education officer said, “I can’t understand why you failed that maths. I’m going to make you an emergency observer.” An observer was – you do both

26:20 navigation and bomb aiming and so mumps broke out, or chicken pox broke out and so I was suddenly told I was going to be trained as an observer and not a wireless operator and soon after that three volunteers were required for

26:50 Canada. All the rest of the course were going up to remain Australia and they wanted three men – or it might have been four men – for Canada so for the first and only time in my air force life I volunteered. And a young scrubbed [failed pilot training]

27:20 pilot volunteered with me – Max Bryant – whose his life and mine would run in parallel for quite a while – and a young St Kilda footballer – 18 year old, Ted Freeman who was destined for a very turbulent and very successful career in the air force and a fellow named Ron Wheatley and we were all sent

27:50 at very short notice to Sydney and we learned that we were going to travel on an American luxury liner – the Monterey as passengers because America wasn’t in the war. In fact at that time we really

28:20 wondered if America ever would go to war with Germany. There was no inkling that she would and we had no inkling of any trouble with Japan but much to our surprise as we travelled on this luxury ship – two men to a cabin. It was really marvellous with steward services and the lot. When we got to Honolulu the air force, that is the American air force, turned on a remarkable display of air power and welcome. They swooped over our ship and so on and we were completely astonished when we were taken for a drive by Red Cross ladies, young women, we had a marvellous time but we found our drivers were very concerned that there might be an air attack on Honolulu. We thought this was ludicrous. We all had the same story and we laughed over the Yank panic. And we had seen this aerial display in the morning and we thought, “Goodness me, this place couldn’t possibly be attacked.” Now we were well into our training when of course Pearl Harbor occurred and the impossible happened. Now in the meantime we had landed in San Francisco and then gone up by train to Vancouver and some of our men had learned there were two places to which navigators would be sent. One was Edmonton – the place I had read about – the other place was somewhere near Montreal, I’ve forgotten the name of it. And the word spread around about this place near a big city and it appealed to a lot of the

29:50 fellows and there was rather a campaign of telling your mates about it so that when volunteers for this larger place were sought all the mates stepped forward together and the rest of us – there were about 25 of us – were left.

30:20 Well it didn’t bother me at all, because that’s where I had thought I would like to go and I’d only been one day in camp and Max Bryant and I had decided to fly together. We trained in pairs on Ansons and Max was passing the orderly room and the orderly officer said, “Hey Aussie, I’ve got a call here, a Mrs East, asking for a couple of you guys to go out for supper,

30:50 do you want to be in it?” And he said, “Yes,” and put my name down as the other fellow. That night I met the girl I married. Quite extraordinary. Then to find out that Mrs East was from Melbourne and hadn’t married a

31:20 Canadian, never been back in 30 odd years. So my training was very disrupted because I’d have much sooner been getting married and settling back in Australia but that was still three years away. We didn’t become engaged or anything because I heard from one of the permanent staff at 31:50 Edmonton that the course a year ahead of us of about 25 men, he quite laconically said to me, “I had a letter today from one of the fellows a year ahead of you and there are only two of them left.” And I thought well I couldn’t reasonably become engaged. Furthermore Nell’s Dad was a ferocious pacifist and he didn’t believe in the war I was involved in at all. I got involved in all sorts of arguments or avoided as many as I could.

What did Nell think of the war?

32:11 Well she was a bit inclined to her father’s point of view. She’s been brought up that way but at heart I was a pacifist too. I didn’t want to be in the war but realised it was the right thing to do. You couldn’t live with something

32:41 like Nazism occupying the same globe. So we were very fortunate in that we had a trip out east together to Quebec before I left. Despite all these darlings I got through this course but only just and there was great agitation

33:11 among some of the Australians. By now Singapore had fallen and we really wondered what was going to become of our people and we felt we should be going home. We didn’t ask ourselves the question that would have been

33:41 reasonable to ask – well what is there for us to fly over there? Nor did we know at first that such large numbers of Americans were going to Australia. So we went on over to England. I wasn’t – I rather wanted to pursue it and

34:11 go on to England. That’s what I’d mentally conditioned myself to doing and I still, I suppose, was. We still tended to think of England as the mother country and certainly she was dreadfully endangered at that time so off we went to England. By then I think there were only 20 left on our course

34:41 because some had been put back of course, a couple had been repatriated – hadn’t measured up. One broke a leg and was put back and so on but all still alive and so we got over to England and were posted down to Bournemouth. Well it was a beautiful time of the year, it was just spring and Bournemouth

35:11 was a picture. England was marvellous but on the train we passed Bath which had not long been bombed and we saw the first of the bomb damage and when we got to Bournemouth, I remember one of the first things that

35:41 happened was we heard Lord Haw Haw broadcasting from Germany and he said, “We know that you Australians have arrived now in Bournemouth. We’ll be visiting shortly,” and he was able to tell us that the town hall clock

36:11 was slow by so many minutes and they did visit us but just after we had left there – carried out a low level attack and several of the air force men we had waiting there were killed but I think our whole attitude was changed by leave in London. It wasn’t so much seeing the bomb damage – though that was

36:41 very sobering indeed. All around St Paul’s Cathedral was just a wasteland of rubble and although it was touching to see the de-housed people sleeping in the tube stations, I think the thing that affected us most or inspired us most was seeing the troops from all over the world – you’d see men with shoulder flashes – Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, France and you’d realise that each of these men had made a very brave escape and they’d left behind members of their family who are now hostages to the Nazis and you realised that all this

37:11 was happening, at its closest, only 22 miles away across the English Channel and this meeting in London of all these men on leave was a real inspiration and it became not so much a matter of, “I’m an Aussie and I want to get home,” as, “Will I measure up with these blokes?” and I think those leave periods in

37:41 London really were a tremendous pick up to us and a change of direction and when we finally met the RAF [Royal Air Force] by going to an operational training unit for crewing up, we didn’t find all the bull that we’d been led to expect we’d get

38:11 from Englishmen. There were certainly some that were that way but so were some of our own and we found that the air crew of the RAF were pretty free and easy. They were not too much spit and polish. They were pretty

38:41 scruffy lot. The real discipline we were soon to learn existed in the crew in the air. Now this business of crewing up was left to the men themselves so that you’d come together with all the different members of your crew.

39:03 End of tape

Tape 2 So we’ll just take it back. Your first posting.

00:28 My first posting in England was to Bobbington. Now that ...

00:52 In our first days in England at Bournemouth we were both pilots, navigators, all our group of navigators came together there and then we were split up. Some were sent to North Wales for some training and others – and I was one

01:22 of them – were sent to a place called Bobbington. Later it was called Ha’penny Green – it became better known under that name. The purpose for sending navigators there was to familiarise us with the packed nature of the

01:52 English countryside and cities and so on that we would be flying over. We had been flying in Canada where like Australia there were vast stretches of open country and it was pretty easy to establish where a place was – there was nothing else around – but in England you were passing a village every few

02:22 moments. We were flying in Ansons. Again we had been in Ansons in Canada and we got all sorts of warning and one of them was – don’t follow railway lines or you’ll come in at Paddington Station. We were given the

02:52 topographical maps showing all the area for some couple of hundred miles around us and we were dismayed by the congested nature of these maps. They were like a diseased body with great arterial roads winding like arteries

03:22 through to the big cities like Birmingham and on the way down to London. London didn’t quite come into our area. All these shaded built up areas and then open fields. I remember our first exercise was to do a turning point at a particular church steeple. Well of course we got up in the air and there were church steeples by the dozen all over the place. I had a New Zealand pilot

03:52 who didn’t know much more than I did and it was he who said, “Well here’s a railway line. Let’s follow that.” And I thought this is going to be a disaster and I thought he probably knew more about it than I did but in point of fact we both got completely bamboozled and we had to land to find out where we were and the place we landed at was the experimental station at Farnborough

04:22 - very hush hush sort of place so we found we were at Farnborough. I can’t imagine why they didn’t hold us there for a while. We took off, had some engine trouble, landed again and that was rectified and took off again. So I retired to my tent feeling I was never going to be a navigator or not in this

04:52 kind of environment anyway. And I was lying on my bed and in came another of our course just shaking his head and saying, “I’ve had it. I can never cope with this.” And so it went on but as time passed we soon began to get the hang of it but it was flying in altogether different circumstances

05:22 than what we’d been used to and this held for men who’d trained in Australia too. They came over there and soon were getting terribly lost but we got onto it after a time. Everything was happening much more quickly than we’d

05:52 been accustomed to. So we navigators were sent then to Lichfield and this was for crewing up and this was a key moment, crewing up, and it was left to the men themselves. I think the RAF were very wise to do this, to leave it to

06:22 the men. As one of the pilots said years later, “I had to go round and propose to fellows. It was for the rest of our lives as it were.” And so I thought well how do you tell a good pilot. I like the look of that fellow over there and this other chap looks a bit dodgy and I felt completely confused. There was no

06:52 way that I could forecast who was going to be a good pilot. In the mean time the chaps who were backing their judgement, the navigators were starting most of it, they were approaching pilots and they seemed to me to have snapped up all the chaps that I rather fancied. The end result of this was that I fell together with a pilot who had the same feelings as I had. He couldn’t pick who was likely to be a good navigator. There were – how many of us? I think eight navigators at that particular time and I might be wrong on that but thereabouts anyway. In fact I could put it another way. We crewed up with

07:22 West Australian pilots. They were all West Australians and in total there were 16 of them. And not all of them were in my group. Some of them were in another group, but of that 16 one pilot was left flying at the end of the war and that was my

07:52 skipper. The rest with their crews were all killed. No, one other pilot survived. He was a prisoner of war, but the only survivor of his crew. They were just blown up and he found himself floating down over France so only

08:22 two out of those 16 survived. So my skipper was Geoff Madden. Probably we would never have chosen each other but he proved a first rate skipper and then we went about approaching other men.

08:52 Now Geoff got hold of a rear gunner and this chap was a jaunty sort of bloke from Nottingham and he’d just got married I remember. In fact they’re just coming up to their 60th wedding anniversary now. So I remember with the English condescension – not condescension, the very reverse, his attitude to Geoff was, “Can I carry your case for you?” Geoff dressed him down. Said that was a most un-Australian thing to do. We couldn’t shut him up after that. He was just as cocky as the rest and ...

What was his name?

09:24 His name was Arthur Browett – speaking to him last week. We are still in touch – the four of us who are still alive. And we got a ... I spoke to an Australian wireless operator and if there was any mistake in our crew it was

09:54 probably him. Anyway, who else did we select. Max Burcher and there was a bomb aimer – a London optician that I’d already done some training flights with before I met Geoff Madden and we took him over – a completely

10:24 unflappable sort of bloke but his night vision wasn’t marvellous.

Was his name Bob Aver?

10:25 Ted Batten. Ted Batten is no longer with us. I think the Scotch got him in the end.

So you started with five.

10:40 We started with five because we were going to fly in Wellingtons and these Wellington 1C’s with wooden air screws and they were clapped out old planes but they were all the RAF had at that time. So there’s our crew. Have I mentioned five? Geoff ...

Geoff, Arthur, Max and Ted and yourself.

11:14 Yeah. So we trained in the summer of 42 and I must say once we got used to each other I really enjoyed the day flying anyway because we did exercises

11:44 over the Irish Sea quite a bit of the time and I got my first glimpses of North Wales and I thought, “I’m going to walking here before we leave this country and if I survive.” And we went way up the west coast of Scotland. Super country – you’d see these capes and locks and islands and so on – beautiful

12:14 and most of the time the exercises worked out well except for the first one. I remember we flew way down to somewhere in Cornwall and we were over cloud most of the way there, it broke when we were down there, and over cloud on the way back and I daren’t ask for a descent until I knew positively where we were and I remember this was Geoff Madden the first time, “Where

12:44 the hell are we, navigator? You know these things don’t fly on fresh air?” And I’ve forgotten now how I established our approximate whereabouts but oh we ran into all sorts of trouble. Our wireless operator, Max Birch, who got a bearing – I think it was QBY which was a bearing to a particular station

13:14 that balloons on the track so we hurried away from there but we finally did get down and found Lichfield again. But apart from that one the rest went pretty well.

So at this point of time you’re navigating purely by sight?

13:22 No, without sight really because my eyes were the bomb aimer. And this was something new to me – or new to all us navigators – working on a large white chart and you put in your tracks on this but you were dependent on the bomb aimer for descriptions of where you were.

When you say ‘tracks’, this is the course that your flight would take?

13:59 We’ll have to go into terminology here. The track was what you wanted to follow but in order to follow that track with the wind blowing from port or starboard or whatever it might be, you had to go on a different heading to be blown onto that track. We didn’t call it ‘heading’ in those days, we called it

14:29 ‘course’ but later on it was called ‘heading’ and the job of the navigator was to determine from the pin points given to you by the bomb aimer looking down, “We’re passing over Stratford now,” it may be. Well the wind’s blown you away from where you wanted to be and you’ve got to work out with a

14:59 hand-held computer – nothing like today’s computers – just what sort of wind would be blowing you to that point. Then you apply that in a corrective sense to keep you on that track. So that’s what the navigator was doing all the time.

Just while we’re there, just describe to us the hand-held computer. What did that ...?

15:15 It was, it had a round dial set in a square shape and on this dial you plotted a wind vector and you turned – the dial turned – and by using this wind vector

15:45 you could find out what course or heading you must steer to make good that track to take you to your next turning point. Now it would be difficult to give a clear picture of what that computer was like. Pretty primitive thing by today’s standard of course but it was called a Dolphin computer and on the 16:15 back of it had a circular rule so that you could work out speeds and so forth on the back of it. So those day flights I found very enjoyable and we gelled well as a crew except that our wireless operator had hoped above all things to

16:45 be a pilot, just like Jim Riddoch had early on, but like Jim he didn’t accept it very well and he was a bit cantankerous at times and the skipper found that he had to take him aside and have a word with him and this was rather an awkward start to things but he was a rather adventurous type of fellow – quite

17:15 the reverse of myself. Or I wouldn’t seek my adventure in the air. I wouldn’t mind seeking it in the bush or somewhere but not in the air. So that was the situation when we began night flying. Now that was much more

17:45 challenging and we’d be up for five or six hours at night and of course England was completely blacked out but they had a lot of beacons, called ‘occults’ and ‘pundits’. Pundits were red flashing beacons which were – you always knew they were near an aerodrome. And the code was changed,

18:15 they’d be flashing two letters in Morse code. The occults were white lights – more powerful and not so many of them and these helped a great deal in your navigation at night, provided always they weren’t covered by cloud. Very

18:45 often of course they were. By and large we did pretty well on our night flights though one night going up into the north of Yorkshire we drifted a way over to the east and an American Lightning must have been sent out or someone flying a Lightning anyway and clearly wanted us to turn back. We’d got over the North Sea and there were some disastrous mistakes made at night. One poor crew were heard calling up and it was realised they’d passed right over England and they were going out into the Atlantic. That was the end of them.

They didn’t come back?

19:12 They never came back, yeah. There were various happenings that fortunately we were spared. I remember our course – Keith Webber – on one of the day flights his pilot was Ted Lang another of the West Australians and Ted Lang glanced out just as a prop flew off and he had a what they call a ‘screen

19:42 pilot’. On your first flight you were accompanied by a screen pilot, a screen navigator, you were being watched over and assessed by an experienced man. Some of them they’d already been on operations and they found it more

20:12 dangerous flying the pupil crews, but this screen pilot – a chap named Puggie Pugh – a Welshman – he just said to Ted Lang, “I say old boy, I believe we’ve lost a prop. Just put it down very expertly at the nearest drome.” Created a great impression. That Puggie Pugh was from the squadron we

20:42 eventually went to and he was hankering to get back there to get back on operations and he was lost on his first operation of his second tour there.

So we’ll keep moving ahead.

20:48 Yes. There was one night flight where we had difficulty in landing because Geoff mistook the – and this was very easy to do with low cloud and so on – he mistook the Burton-on-Trent rail yards for our aerodrome so we nearly

21:18 came in there. And there were losses of lives but not for our particular course, very fortunately. Now there are probably things I’m missing here about our training. I had hoped incidentally, right up to this point of crewing

21:48 up and even a bit beyond it, I had still hoped that I might be able to get with Jim Riddoch’s squadron but he was on coastal command and well on with his tour way down in Cornwall and it soon became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to do that. Furthermore I’d committed myself to a skipper and a crew so it was quite clearly going to be in bomber command.

Because you had in fact asked hadn’t you?

22:13 Oh yes. I had. Yes, I put in a word I think while I was still in Bournemouth but it just didn’t work out. Anyway I was becoming bonded with a crew and

22:43 we all got well together except that Max was rather fractious at times. Now it came the business of being posted to a squadron. We had by this time heard that the requirement was that we do 30 operations and then have a rest and the rest was to come back instructing like that fellow Puggie Pugh which

23:13 wasn’t a very safe job anyway. And then the requirement was you go back and do 25 more but they only recently reached this decision as to what constituted a tour of operational sorties. They were never called missions. The Americans did. They were always called ‘ops’ by the men and

23:43 ‘operational sorties’ by those over us. So Max Bryant said to me one day, “We’ve got to do 30 ops and they say the loss rate is running at 5% per op. He said, we sort of end up owing them something. And he said, “How many”

24:13 “About 20 of us came to bomber command.How many of our mob do you think’ll get through?” And I said, “I make it about four.” He said, “So do I,” and then he laughed and he said, “Who do you think they’ll be?” I do know I

24:43 named three out of the four and I was the fourth and I could never ... One of them was our course leader, he did 90. He survived a tour on Lancasters. He didn’t fight for each 30. He had an Australian pilot – a

25:13 Victorian pilot then he went on to Mosquitoes. The loss rate there was more like one to two per cent and he got up to 90 on the ‘Squitoes. The second pair of fellows that I mentioned Ted Freeman, always known as Blue Freeman

25:43 because of his blaze of red hair and a fellow named Harry Wright. Blue wasn’t at Lichfield when we first crewed up. He arrived a bit later because he’d been one of those ferrying across the Atlantic. The top course men, the

26:13 men who had done best on course in Canada, four of them flew across the Atlantic navigating for ferry command. So Blue turned up a bit late at Lichfield after the crewing up had been done and he crewed up with a first rate young West Australian named Sid Cook. Sid was 21 and he and Harry Wright had come together. Harry Wright was from our course of navigators. Harry Wright was the most improbable man, a gangling man of Irish background and I came to know

26:43 Harry very well indeed. Harry was to end up doing 78 operations all on Lancasters which really was something. He was awarded the DFC and Bar, the DFM. And he was an acting squadron leader in charge of navigation on Pathfinders. Blue Freeman, as I said, he had been a St Kilda footballer – he was a great man at getting into

27:13 fights and he really got into quite a bit of trouble but I’ll mention that later on – do remind me. So Sid Cook ended up with these two men from our course, Harry Wright and Blue Freeman and Sid. I suppose because I was somewhat older he regarded me as a kind of uncle figure I think and I said, “Sid, as long

27:43 as you’re flying with those two you’ll come home.” I was convinced and they did come home – those three men and I was the other one that was lucky enough to get through.

Just while we’re there Don, you had this conversation with Max Bryant who didn’t get through.

27:58 No.

How did he feel when you named these others?

28:05 I had this hunch that there were going to be about 4 get through and I just said to him, “I feel so sure of those three but I don’t know who the fourth is.” So the fourth could have been any one of us. And this was a crazy thing to

28:35 be saying anyway. I don’t know why I came up with those names. Just because those three seemed indestructible. And that’s who I worked out too. Anyway we crewed up and we were sent, everyone was eager then to hear where we would be sent – what squadron.

29:05 And what the reputation of that squadron was. Was it a good squadron? What was their loss rate like? And our squadron was number 103 flying Halifax bombers and they were at a place called Elsham Wolds in Lincolnshire. Now some of our men went to a place called Bottesford in Leicestershire.

29:35 That was the predominantly Australian squadron. I’ve forgotten its number at the moment. Others went to 460 Squadron which was a well known Australian squadron but we were sent to a mixed squadron and I’m

30:05 convinced that the mixed squadrons were the most desirable squadrons to go to and the reason for my thinking that is that if you get a congregation of men all from the one country, they tend to grizzle a bit together but if you’ve got

30:35 with you a Dutchman, an Englishman, a New Zealander, a Canadian, you’ve got to match them and that’s what we had. One of the most successful pilots on our squadron was led by a Dutchman. Now I think this was a very real thing, this challenge given you by other nationalities. Now Elsham Wolds

31:05 was going through a very bad time unbeknown to us. We just arrived there and we went into the mess the first night and I’ve forgotten which one of us. I think it was one of the younger ones. I don’t think I’d have asked the question. He just brightly said, “Oh how long does it take to reach 30 here?”

31:35 and no one would answer his question. It wasn’t that there was any sense of depression in the mess. Quite the reverse. It seemed a mad house and blokes doing crazy things and then we found out that since they’d had Halifaxes, 32:05 which they’d had for some months, no one had reached 30 and no one did reach 30 while they had Halifaxes. These were Halifax IIs and they had a bad rudder stall and the day we arrived on the squadron one had crashed on the drome and there’d been two crews on board. They were all killed and I

32:35 believe our doctor, the squadron doctor, won some commendation for getting in there as quickly as he could but he had to confirm of course that they’d all been killed. Anyway we had to pick up two more crew members to go onto the heavy bombers and these men we didn’t have a chance to select. They were just more or less given to us and we got a first rate flight engineer – the coolest man I ever knew. The Welshman. His name was Doug Richards and we got a villainous mid upper gunner who was a local boy and we didn’t know that he’d already been up on charges of poaching and this was to continue all through our tour of operations. He had a war on two fronts – one

33:05 with Hitler and the other one with the local game keeper , the Earl of Yarborough and this property he favoured. And we used to see the Earl. He was an army liaison officer and I suppose living at home in his fine residence and we used to be having a meal with Frank and we’d see the Earl walking

33:35 past the windows of the sergeant’s mess. Now we were all sergeants and that’s the way Geoff wanted it because he didn’t want part of the crew commissioned and eating in a different mess and we had great camaraderie

34:05 between us. Now fortunately we never did operate on Halifaxes. I only knew from Geoff’s diary, which I read well after the war, that he wasn’t impressed by them at all but he didn’t tell us that. We did do night flying on them and we did take up some army fellers – two army men who were

34:35 commanding the searchlights and flood batteries for Hull and they wanted to see how effective the search lights and so on were. Geoff flew them over there. We were to go on and continue on a night flying exercise. We got

35:05 over to Hull and got caught up in a German raid so the flak was coming up very effectively and the search lights and Geoff was really turning on the speed and cork-screwing and diving and pulling out, just to get away from the place and I think one of the army chaps was being sick up front and we had to go back. We’d run out of colours of the day. We’d been firing off colours of the day to identify ourselves as friendly. Of course it didn’t make much difference because we were mixed up with the enemy anyhow so we got back and landed

35:35 at Elsham and Geoff said, “Now we’ve got a five hour cross-country. Would you like to continue with us?” And they thanked us very much and we heard one chap say, “We live to drink again.” So we got rid of them and I might be maligning one of them to say he got sick because I don’t remember we had to clean up after him. I think he was just feeling very sick, so we

36:05 went on with our cross-country flight and were full of laughter for the rest of the night. But it was a great blessing when we heard that the Halifaxes were going. Sadly the squadron leader who announced it to us, said there’ll be Lancaster bombers arriving tomorrow and he got the chop that night and his navigator and one other of his crew walked out ... no, only the navigator got back and his name ...

When you say he got the chop?

36:48 He was killed. Yes, they were shot down and the navigator and the wireless operator – the wireless operator was Lofty somebody and Dizzy Spieler was the navigator. And Dizzy and Lofty were on the ground and they got rid of their parachutes and they decided they would seek help at two different

37:18 houses somewhere in France and Dizzy struck people connected with the underground and they put him on his way home. He got home in six weeks and Lofty struck the very reverse and he was taken to the police station and

37:48 became a prisoner of war. So we were rather, or I was, rather heartened by the fact that the navigator had found his way home and got home in six weeks. And then another navigator turned up, a chap named Pipkin, who

38:18 had gone missing just before we arrived on the squadron and Pipkin gave us a lecture on escape. He was never allowed to go back onto operations. He had killed two Germans or maybe one German on the way out and I think he spent most of his time lecturing on escape. So we, although we were briefed

38:48 for operations on Halifaxes – we were twice briefed. It was a very chilling briefing and it was our introduction to briefing. Look I err here. I should go back because we did two operations from Lichfield on the Wellington 1C.s.

39:18 Does it matter? Yes at the end of our training at Lichfield most of the people round our time were required to go on a flap. And they were called flaps because everyone did flap about them. I mean an operating training unit is not as efficient as a squadron and here we had this clapped out old things that were scarcely suitable for cross-country flights and we were to go over to Germany in them. And the first target was Dusseldorf and Ted Batten, our bomb

39:48 aimer had gone off to London to get married. We thought we were all going to get away on leave. He’d gone off to get married and we had to borrow a bomb aimer. We borrowed a bomb aimer from – a New Zealand pilot names Mick Sullivan, a tremendous fellow, and his navigator was George

40:18 Loader. And I want to come back to those names. Mick Sullivan and George Loader. And Vince Gibney was their bomb aimer. So Vince did his first two operations with us and this is very significant in his life. And we never did get to Dusseldorf. Our oil temperature was overheating drastically

40:48 and it was pretty obvious we were going to lose both motors unless we turned back, which we did. We were within sight of the target but we came back and the next night we went out again to Bremen and that was a real taste

41:18 of a very hot target and I remember Arthur Brown, our mid upper gunner, when Geoff was swinging around to go into the target and Arthur saw what it was like, he said, “God, we’re not going in there are we? Think of my missus.” And anyway we got away with

41:48 it with a few holes. Sid Cook came back with a whole collection of holes. Blue Freeman said he was down in the nose, in the bomb aiming position. They were coned in searchlights. The searchlights form a cone. And he said, “I was all screwed up in a little ball in the nose.”

Tape 3

00:28 Okay, so we went back to the Wellingtons. Let’s move forward to the Lancasters again.

00:38 Well our first reports on the Lancaster came from Geoff. He was absolutely delighted with them. He said they were like a Tiger Moth to fly on a rather larger scale and so we started out with a great feeling of optimism to have

01:08 this beautiful plane. Our first operations didn’t go marvellously well in that not much damage was done to targets and there were more losses among air crew than there were among people on the ground as it happened and they were rather distant targets and then we were given ones that changed life

01:38 considerably for us. It was a mining operation beyond Denmark. And we had to go in there at low level and on that raid we were uncertain of our whereabouts on our way home. The reason being we were down so low and

02:08 cloud was low and we were in an area of islands that was very difficult to determine just where we were and we were very badly shot up at a place – now the name of it just eludes me. And I remember the bomb aimer calling

02:38 out, “Pull up Geoff! You’re nearly into trees!” And the gunners were exchanging shots with the gunners on the ground. Anyway Max Bircher was wounded and I bandaged him as best I could because he and I were working

03:08 close together. The shot came through just across my desk, angle wise, passing behind my talisman photo of Nell and my parents, and through the wireless set, wounded Max and the rest of it went out through the astroband.

03:38 Now this had the end result of putting Max into hospital and he had lost about a third of a muscle in his right arm and we had to get a new wireless operator. So in a brutal sort of way it solved our problem of personalities

04:08 and we got an RAF man who had already done a tour of operations and the first thing he asked us not to do was to let his wife know he was back on operations. And he remained with us all the way through and when we

04:38 reached 30 he was well beyond his double tour. He just volunteered to stay on with us so we could finish our 30 with him. We were very relieved. He was one of three married men in the crew and our skipper was always conscious of the married men. And of those married men, Arthur’s wife – that’s Arthur Brown – his wife was pregnant.

05:08 Our new wireless operator was an RAF man who had already completed a tour of ops and had a DFM and he was to prove himself an excellent

05:38 acquisition. A man I’m still in touch with – and he did all the rest of our tour with us. His name is Graham Briggs and we were asked by him not to let his wife know that he was back on operations. Geoff was certainly very

06:08 conscious of the wives. So. From that point on our first few operations were the long distance targets. Places like Stuttgart, Nuremburg and they weren’t very successful operations in that not a great deal of damage was done to the 06:38 targets and there were heavy losses right across bomber command. Then came the Battle of the Ruhr which we always referred to as Happy Valley.

07:08 And we did six operations there alone and the concentration of anti-aircraft fire there was just tremendous and these raids were being led by Pathfinder Mosquitoes who would go in on a beam at very high level and

07:38 mark the target very accurately. And they marked with either ground markers or if there was cloud they marked them with sky markers. They were very successful raids. They were hair-raising raids. The were relatively

08:08 short. Navigation wasn’t all that difficult but we really felt that a good job was being done in this horrifying form of war. We then reverted to some of the longer distance raids. Went right down to Milan and to Turin. Very difficult raids as far as navigation was concerned. People were apt to run out of fuel if they wandered too far off track. And we were caught one night when we had to land short

08:38 of base. We were getting very low on fuel but gradually we were creeping up to the 30 operations. One didn’t dare expect to get there. You hoped you’d get there but you were seeing the leading lights of the squadron going

09:08 missing and it got to a stage where the four leading crews were all taken off when they were in their high twenties to provide instructors. There weren’t enough men getting through so before long we found that Sid Cook, who were mentioned earlier, and my skipper

09:38 Geoff Madden were among the leading crews. We’d lost a lot of those that we’d come with and we’d see men come and go and come and go – all very keen young fellows but not lasting many operations at all. It was known that a Lancaster needed replacing after 14 to 15 – no 15 to 16 operations and by

10:08 that time it would either have been shot down on operations or crashed. But of course the crews were being asked to pretty well double that number of operations – extraordinary that some went on and on and survived. So

10:38 we became very keyed up towards the end then. Pretty high on our own adrenalin I think. There was one crew ahead of us and we saw them go on their 29th on a raid on Berlin. That was a big shock and really the

11:08 jubilation of our squadron when our crew reached 30 was just incredible. So then Geoff and I were both sent back to Lichfield and within a couple of weeks Geoff was wanting to get back onto operations again. I have just recently wrote to him on their golden wedding – on the occasion of their

11:38 golden wedding and I said, “You wouldn’t have got there if I didn’t dissuaded you from rushing back’.” The trouble was he was gaining such a high reputation as an instructor that they didn’t want to let him go anyway. So we

12:08 took on this instructing job and it had its hair-raising moments. But it was great to be back in the tranquil countryside around Lichfield and to have leave so that I could get off – because I loved getting away into the

12:38 countryside. But the biggest blow came to me June of 43 when Max Bryant was killed. He had been like a young brother to me. He was 22 when he was killed and then Sid Cook and his two villains they were going on I think it

13:08 was their 52nd operation and he had lost Blue Freeman because Blue had taken on the local police and was under close arrest. Fortunately he got out of it. Everyone was much relieved but he missed flying with Sid and then one night Harry Wright was smitten with tonsillitis and taken out of

13:38 the crew and Sid went that night. Now I think it was his 52nd operation. He would have turned 22 the next day. That was a hard one too. And then Mick Sullivan, the New Zealander went and George Loader – his navigator – he and

14:08 I had been very close. He and I and a chap named Harry Wardell had walked across Scotland together and climbed Ben Nevis and Harry had never believed he was going to come back but George had a daughter he’d never seen in Australia and so very anxious to get back. So anxious that he was

14:38 getting very plane sick on the last operations, just from anxiety and this was told to me by that bomb aimer I mentioned earlier on, whose name now gone from my mind. He did his first 2 operations with us. He wasn’t with them

15:08 on their last two operations because they were celebrating getting their commissions and he fell from the back of a van and broke his arm so he wasn’t able to fly on the last two operations. They were blown to pieces. Nothing found. And that daughter is Professor Elizabeth Webby of Sydney University’s Professor of Australian Literature. So the men I’d known best and thought most highly of had pretty well all gone by the end of 1943.

How did you continue to train men under these circumstances? 15:28 It was very difficult because you’d be – you see I was lecturing as well as flying and you’d be – I remember being asked in class, a pupil said, “Most of the instructors here

15:58 have come from the desert. Where do the men from the European theatre go?” I couldn’t say to them, “Well very few of the survive.” You just had to try to convey to them things that might save their lives.

What sort of things?

16:13 Well speaking to navigators, giving them tips on navigation, what help they could get from learning the flak dispositions of the enemy. Because you could recognise places like – that’s Amsterdam over there, that’s Rotterdam,

16:43 the big glow ahead that’s the Ruhr Valley and so you got to feel your way around in the dark in a way. Although we had been taught navigation to a high standard, really you couldn’t make proper use of it. The coastal command men could.

17:13 They had to be very accurate navigators but in our case it was a bit of a grope and luck played the dominant part of course. So you had to tread a very fine line instructing. I didn’t like deliberately misleading them but the facts and figures were there for them. 30 operations and we were still running around

17:43 4 to 5% casualties, sometimes better, sometimes worse but anyone with a bit of nous could see what the end result was likely to be.

So you finish your training period.

17:53 Yes, well Geoff was insistent and he said, “What about going on the Mosquitoes?” and I said, “Okay. I’ll come with you on ‘Skitoes’ and you had to be tested in a decompression chamber and Geoff got the bends so it put him

18:23 out of reckoning and then very soon after that he got advise that there was a chance of us getting back to our own squadron and by then I said yes. And then came a demand from the Australian government that we be repatriated

18:53 and I think the government must have woken up to the fact that they weren’t going to get many back or fewer than ever if they remained to do two tours. So oddly enough I found myself objecting strenuously to going back. You just felt that you faced so much together that that’s where you wanted to go on. D- Day was going to be coming up very soon, not that we

19:23 knew it was going to be called D-Day. And you wanted to be in at the finish but the government was absolutely adamant. Geoff managed to prolong things by getting married. So he was given an AFC [Air Force Cross] to add to his DFM for

19:53 his instructional work so all of a sudden I find that I’m going home and I assumed that we just get over here and go to a squadron once we get out here. I’m afraid I thought better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. I’d sooner have gone back with Geoff than onto an unknown future. Now

20:23 Nell and I had written to each other pretty well daily but when we got through operations I could see the influence on her of her father and she wanted me to come back and talk things over. Well I couldn’t see how this could be done and I was indignant about her father by that time because I felt so much

20:53 for the loss of the men I’d been with and I wanted very much even then to start writing about them to put some kind of memorial in words. Anyway, we didn’t know which way we were going to Australia but we were sent by

21:23 train up to the Clyde [River] and embarked on the Queen Mary and she just raced along – she could do 32 knots. No convoy, just raced to New York and of course once we got into New York we thought, now we get on a train for San Francisco and so home. Well we were told to report at the Australian

21:53 Liaison Office in New York and Air Marshall, no he wasn’t Air Marshall then, he was Vice Marshall Richard Williams spoke to us and he said, “You men are going to be the nucleus of a ferry group back to Australia, flying

22:23 Liberators out there,” and what he really had in mind would be the nucleus of a postwar airline. And here was me leaving no stone unturned and he talked about it too much and it never came to pass. Anyway he said, “You’ll have to wait in New York until more tour-expired men catch up with you before we

22:53 have enough men to go on and you’ll go to Tennessee for your training.” I was corresponding with Nell still but things were edgy. We weren’t sure what we should be doing and I thought, well I’m going to sort of leave it to chance. Just see what happens. And during our time in New York I began buying up reference books that I hadn’t been able to get in England. They were published in England but more readily available in America from getting American dollars to keep the war going in Britain I suppose. And lots of beautiful, creamy white paper which you couldn’t get either in Australia or England 23:23 and I bought stashes of that and it ended up I had to buy quite a large – it was almost a trunk – quite a large thing and that got heavier and heavier and all this was going to be to write a book which in the end took me ten years to write. So we went down to Pennsylvania Station to catch the train to Tennessee and I could barely lug this thing and I had my other gear too and

23:53 we ran late at the station and the conductor shouted out, “You can’t take that thing into your compartment. You’ll have to take it to the caboose,” and I tried to run with it and within a few days I knew there was something desperately wrong with my back. In fact I’d slipped a disc in

24:23 my spine. I didn’t really know that I could do about it. It was desperate city in class and I was all right walking. I could walk. And stand on the cross-country exercises. I could stand to take sun shots but to sit down to work them out I was in quite a lot of pain and I didn’t want to report it down there

24:53 in Tennessee. I didn’t want to be off-loaded in the place – I just didn’t know it and I knew we were going eventually to California and I thought if I could stick it out till then I’d report it then. I knew I’d be within reach of Canada, as much in reach of a Canadian hospital as in reach of Nell too. And that’s

25:23 the way it eventually worked out. I had quite a few experiences on those cross-country flights. They were remarkable flights – very long flights and anyway

25:53 when we got up I reported that – I thought I’d give it a go but they had two spare navigators anyway. I then said, “Have I got permission to go to Canada?” And I felt very likely that I’d get married, certain I was going to hospital and that’s the way it worked out. I went up and Nell and I were

26:23 married and nine days later I went to hospital for about six months or five months. Then came the extraordinary good fortune that we were going to be allowed to travel on the same ship because I was still convalescing so I was

26:53 told Nell could travel with me as my nurse. I could hardly believe that this had not been granted to anyone under air rank before and here I was a Flight Lieutenant. So we came out on a Swedish ship – the Kookaburra – left San Francisco early in 44 and in the meantime I’d been surprisingly well accepted

27:23 by my pacifist father-in-law and very well accepted indeed by my Australian mother-in-law. But a lot of the acceptance by my father in law was due to Nell’s brother, a doctor, and we had to spend our honeymoon within reach of

27:53 him because I had to have injections every day – odd sort of honeymoon. Anyway we expected Nell to be in with the ladies and I in with the men.

28:23 There were only 8 passengers but they had quarters for the men and the women and at the last minute they had to carry a VIP – an extra person, would we mind taking the small cabin usually occupied by the wireless

28:53 operator. Right up on our own on the high – near the bridge. So that’s how we came to it. Really too much remarkable luck. You can never forget them and they didn’t come back.

29:23 Anyway I fully expected to go onto operations in some form or other, instead of which we ended up at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. My impression of Australia at that time – the RAAF anyway, especially when I report back to Bradfield Park in Sydney was an air of, I don’t know what to call it, it was like disillusion. We’d left Bradfield Park when we were all on a high, we were going overseas together and the very reverse seemed to be taking place and it began to dawn on me and I don’t know whether I was right or wrong, that Australia had been side-lined in its own country. That the war was basically being fought by the Americans and our air force was getting quite a bit of action but the army were losing men in side shows which need never to have taken place- places like Borneo. The Americans were away fronting up to Japan and we knew or we believed that there would have to be a massive attack on Japan and we thought, well that’s where we’ll be used. In retrospect I doubt whether we would have been. MacArthur was keeping things I think very much … they were to be the victors, never mind that the Australians were the first to hold the Japs and my own brother among them in the old 39th Battalion of chocos [chocolate soldiers], as they were called. I had this feeling of, I don’t know whether disillusionment was the right word, but anyway at the Melbourne Cricket Ground there just seemed to be stagnation happening. While I was there the death was announced of Roosevelt

30:53 and the death was announced of Curtin and I thought, “Well at least I can go out and see if I can find myself a job for the future,” and I went to Holliman’s airlines, ANA, thinking that they probably ran air traffic control. I didn’t even know it was run by the government and they said, “Oh you need to go to

31:23 civil aviation,” so I went there and they accepted me straight away. So I said, “I’ll try to get out.” I felt rather guilty about this because the war was by no means over.

When was this?

31:31 This was about May 1945, we arrived out in Melbourne in the March – or we’d come down to Melbourne in the March. So I thought well at least I can have 32:01 my medical and so I fronted up for that in July and I was dismayed, I was written off as totally medically unfit for air crew. Probably because of this quite heavy operation I’d had – a laminectomy. I had no difficulty in passing for the public service for air traffic control. I thought it might help me to

32:31 take out a second class navigator’s license with my experience and that was fairly readily granted but I had to do another air crew with this one under the civil aviation and I was passed A1, B1, which was my category when I was accepted for air crew. I could only assume they were trying to get rid of me

33:01 so that was the beginning of my career in air traffic control and I was one of the first in and from that point they were accepting only air crew into air traffic control so it became a kind of remarkable air crew club and it’s remained so. The remnants of us still get together and I think unwittingly we

33:31 underwent great therapy because we were talking about our experiences in the war and all manner of experiences. I even struck a fellow who had been dumped in a concentration camp in Buchenwald. And the Australian government denied there were any there but there were. They admitted it about 25 years later.

How did he manage to survive Buchenwald?

33:53 I don’t know. He said they did nothing much for them at all. He was in with a lot of French political prisoners and he said he helped surgeons, helped hold men down while they amputated legs and this sort of thing – an absolute nightmare. Now that particular fellow, he’d been a navigator in bomber

34:23 command, but he was a meteorological forecaster in the next room to us. But at night when there was little traffic we’d all exchange these stories and one was shot down up in the Arafura Sea and saw a leg floating there and thought – one of the others has had it – and it was his own leg. They managed

34:53 to save it. We used to call him the fastest walker in air traffic control but he couldn’t run. All these astonishing stories. Two fellows – one a squadron leader in the RAF and before the war he’d been a grocer’s assistant with his

35:23 merit certificate – Year 6 at school. But a born leader and the RAF which was very democratic and forced to be because of the loss rate, he was a squadron leader on a Stirling bomber squadron and we also had his 2IC [Second in Command] with us and their job was dropping saboteurs at low level and he had some extraordinary stories to tell so we used to swap these yarns on night shift when things were quiet.

Were you in any way involved in Korea or Vietnam?

35:56 No. No. Not at all – only marching in protest of Vietnam wearing my air force tie. Nell and I both marched with our teenage kids. No, once in air

36:26 traffic control I was six and a half years at Essendon, which was in the main airport for Melbourne and then I was instructing men – other air traffic controllers – from all over Australia. And finally I spent 20 years selecting men for air traffic control and being responsible for their training and that

36:56 selection took me regularly around Australia and over to New Zealand and four times to Britain because the RAF wasn’t – didn’t have enough time-expired men for us to recruit. Then we set up a cadet scheme which is the main source of supply today.

Tape 4

00:33 So Don we’ll go back. You mention being taken to see the World War I soldiers marching. What was your family’s attitude to the war?

00:55 My family’s attitude on both sides, that is on my father’s side and on my mother’s side was very much with it, in support of the war, particularly in

01:25 support of Britain. Given that, there was one outsider in my mother’s family and that was her brother who at about 17 put his age up to 18 at the urging of one of his war-like sisters to go to the Boer War and he went and was very disillusioned because they were de-housing people and burning down their

01:55 farm houses and so on and ushering the families off to concentration camps and he, I believe he arrived home and threw his medals into the Kananook

02:25 Creek at Frankston. But my mother and his sister – at least one of his sisters – were very supportive of the war and I can just remember my third birthday party when this particular aunt had me sing ‘Australia Will Be There’ and then she had me sing that blood-thirsty song ‘In the North and the South and

02:55 the East and the West, we’re going to kill the Kaiser Bill before we go to rest. We’re going to kill our very, very, very, very best in the North, South, East and West.’ You know, to be singing this at the age of three, and that’s when she said, “You’ll make a good soldier,” and of course I didn’t want to

03:25 be a soldier. On my father’s side my aunts and uncles there had been very pro-war but one uncle lost his son in the Polygon Wood. He was buried alive at 18 and my aunt, not the mother of this girl, a spinster aunt who was the

03:55 social editor of Table Talk, she’d given him a ring to wear and when they dug up his body, he was unmarked and they sent this ring home and I always remember his father wore that ring and I don’t think I ever saw his father

04:25 smile. So, there was a big sense of sorrow there but the members of the family thought it was a British war, and we should be in it, yes. They didn’t think much of Keith Murdoch because he had been very critical of British leadership at Gallipoli and really years and years later when I read his letter, I thought it was a splendid letter.

Was there religion in your family?

04:40 Yes, on my father’s side. My father was in the first boy’s choir at St Paul’s Cathedral where our son is now working doing restoration work as a stone

05:10 mason. And in Frankston, my mother’s town, she went to the local Anglican church simply because there wasn’t a Presbyterian church. She was a Cameron and I think they were all Presbyterians but drifted across to the Church of England. So, yes, there was but not in any oppressive sense though. And of course in those days there was the old Catholic/Protestant thing which was – thank

05:40 goodness we’ve grown out of that now – which was quite ugly. But I think that was sorted out by the time of the Second World War and we were all in it together. But there must have been in the First World War. Surprising it continued between the wars. But yes there was a dose of religion in the family.

You talked about marching to war – you talked about your master L.M. Mathieson talking against war. Was that unusual?

06:30 Very. That was very unusual. Now he was really an odd man out and the other staff felt uncomfortable when he spoke out against war but he was the only one on the staff who had actually been to war and we came rather to

07:00 expect that on those days he would be visibly upset. He was so anxious for us I think, that we were not to get caught up in another war and I remember when a couple of German aviators flew out here and there was a photograph in the paper of one of them holding an Australian

07:30 baby in Geelong, I think it was, and he said, “Now in that war that man could be bombing that child.” And he was really driving it home to us but when we could hear the drumbeats of Nazism we were at a complete loss to know what we could do.

You mention standing at your front gate and seeing what you thought was the war happening. What other images of WW1 did you encounter?

08:04 Well we used to get quite a few, I think they were Illustrated London News which contained photographs in them of the front. These would come from my journalist aunt and those hideous pictures of the trees with branches lopped off and all the ground in between churned up and the men in their tin

08:34 hats. I couldn’t read at that time but I got the message from the pictures. Oddly enough, by the time I was at secondary school which was quite a few years after the war, none of the poetry of poets like Wilfred Owen had come

09:04 through to us. War was still fairly glorious. We were still living with poets like Newbolt, you know: ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight, ten to make and a match to win.’ Still living in the glories of war when there’d been very powerful writing against war by such men as Owen but it was

09:34 never accepted in our time in school. Occasionally you’d learn a bit from returned soldiers but very seldom but as I said before it wasn’t done to speak in front of children or women about the realities of war.

You told us about that project you did when you went out and researched the pioneers. Did any of them talk to you about war?

09:52 No they didn’t because they were pre-war people – they were pre-First World War people. They would have been the parents of the First World War generation. There was no mention of war among them.

So who did you say occasionally encountered? Were they ex soldiers?

10:15 Yes, you see a lot of the ex-soldiers were employed by the council. They’d be rate collectors and so on. There was a lot of preference for employing returned men, especially those who had lost an arm or a leg so we’d meet a lot that way and in the depression years you’d have these old diggers coming 10:45 around, virtually begging, selling a few things just to try to get enough for them and their families. My mother was forever giving things away to them. We used to reckon they fared better than we did in the end but it was quite a

11:15 pitiful sight. Some of them still wearing their army greatcoats. And you heard such things as the mayor of St Kilda, who was a VC [Victoria Cross winner], when he died his personal finances were in such a poor state they had to take up a public collection for his family. Dreadful state of affairs.

You said you felt that a lot of the troubles that people faced post war were as a result of experiencing war.

11:50 Oh yes. I was thinking more of psychological stresses between husbands and wives. I’m sure a lot of wives suffered more than they would have if it had been the done thing for the men to talk about it.

Did you actually know families like this?

12:10 Well, I didn’t personally know but many many times I heard about men whose marriages had been very difficult just because of this and I heard it after the Second World War too. After I’d written No Moon Tonight and I thought to myself, “I’ve revealed myself far too much in this book.” I would have held it back if I could have

12:40 at that stage and then I had so many people writing to me and telling me, “That helped me to understand my father.” Or even from women saying, “I realise now what my late husband went through.” So there still wasn’t enough

13:10 done to talk about it so that they didn’t have any ventilation.

Why do you think that was?

13:15 Why was it? I suppose it was a hang-over from days when war was mens’ business and women had no part in it. Of course in the Second World War

13:45 women were a large part of it but they were the women in Britain – well in Australia too – but not in the circumstances that the girls in the WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] in Britain faced where they saw men going missing so regularly.

Just coming back to ideas of empire really and Australia being part of the British Empire, what was your understanding of Australia’s place in the empire?

14:19 Well, we thought we had a kind of dual citizenship. On the one hand we were Australian – and I think very much more Australian than the kids today. On the other hand we were children of the British Empire and this was

14:49 inculcated in schools, in the poetry we learned and the songs we were taught and the saluting the flag on Monday morning and we had it in mind that we were a very remote part of the empire but there was certainly a kind of family

15:19 feeling to it. And when finally I went to England I felt quite at home really and I think that's the general experience.

You say that you felt very much more Australian than perhaps the children of today?

15:38 Well because I think the children of today have been influenced much more by America than we ever were by Britain. We just grew up with our own ethos whereas now the power of the American entertainment industry alone

16:08 has changed I think the outlook of our youth and I think that’s happened since about the 1960s.

So as you’re growing up and you have a family that is very pro-war, you have a society that is very much indebted to empire or feel as though their place in the empire is very important, yet you talk about being scared of war from an early age and not wanting to be part of it. Where did you think that came from?

16:52 Just me I think. I was atypical. No, I cherished all the unusual things I think, particularly the peacefulness of countryside, both here and later on in Britain where I found that 6 days at the end of every six weeks you could get tremendous healing from the countryside. I’m afraid that was probably just me and an interest in history.

As a teenager did you find this difficult?

17:44 No, not really because there were plenty of youthful things I enjoyed. I was a good swimmer, a good sprinter, a very mediocre footballer and cricketer. I didn’t find any difficulties there. I think all through I just enjoyed other

18:14 people. When I came to write All the Green Year I was surprised how readily all the faces came back out of the past and I combined people to make up composite characters and so on. I think perhaps my enjoyment of other

18:44 people was evident and perhaps I even drew people because I was interested in them. I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t a typical youth.

So during your teens was when Hitter’s rise to power began. How aware were you of that?

19:03 Oh we became very aware of it from about year 4 of high school when there’d be a lot of reporting from what was going in in Germany and it was

19:33 clearly getting worse and worse, though we didn’t foresee war and when it got to 1938, when I was up at Nareen by then of course and I took time off in that particular year to go on quite an adventurous trip really. I was still in the rover scouts just in a loose sort of way – the first Victorian scouts and a

20:03 number of South Australian scouts invited me to join them on the journey into the western MacDonnell Ranges and I went off with them and we went up by train to Alice Springs and across by truck to Hermannsberg and we hired

20:33 three camels and a couple of Aboriginal lads who came with us as camel drivers – or they rode most of the way. We went out and climbed Mt Sonder and this is a very remote area. I didn’t get to the top of Mt Sonder. We ran

21:03 out of water and we were miles from anywhere and then walked back to Alice Springs down the range and it had been quite a challenging journey. Now the first news we got when we got back was that Chamberlain had returned from Munich proclaiming ‘peace in our time’. We were all very relieved. It’s all

21:33 very well to look back now and call him an appeaser but that’s what the people wanted. They still had this memory of mud and barbed wire and horrendous losses from the First World War. People didn’t want war again. There’s another point here. We had learned in our school days that a lot of the writings that had emanated from the First World War had been shown as

22:03 propaganda. Germans bayoneting babies and all this sort of thing. They were no different from ourselves and this had a repercussion in the Second World War. The British authorities knew about the lot of the Jews in the

22:33 concentration camps. We were never told all that and I think we were never told because I think our generation would have just rubbished a report like that. It would have been just more propaganda. I don’t think they ever brought it up with us for that reason because if we could have really been persuaded to believe it, it would have stiffened resolve enormously but it was never done. Not to my knowledge anyway. I’ve wandered rather a long way off.

No. So you talk about hearing the news of Chamberlain announcing peace in our time, where were you when you heard that WW2 had been declared?

23:00 I think I was at a, I’m sure I was at a country agricultural show and it was announced over the loud speakers that German troops had moved into Poland. And there was a chill over the crowd. We knew what that implied –

23:30 that there would be war. And then of course we had Robert Menzies saying Britain is at war, therefore Australia is at war. He’s been criticised for that but that’s what we believed. It’s with the benefit of hindsight that he’s criticised for it. He was just giving voice to what the people believed – same as Chamberlain had done.

Is that what you believed?

23:52 Yes.

Well you clearly must have thought, well I’m going to have to ...

24:02 Yes I held back. I thought surely the world will come to its senses and then there was the phoney war and I thought well the world is going to come to its senses. We can’t go on with behaving as we did a generation ago. But then

24:32 when Hitler broke out and overran France we thought, “Well where is this going to end?” I had been persuaded a good deal too then by the broadcast of W. McMahon Ball. He was a professor at Melbourne University but he

25:02 was attached to the ABC at that time – News from Abroad – and he was in Britain at the time and before Britain was at war he managed to get accepted for a visit to a concentration camp. They weren’t up to the liquidation stage by any means and he wrote an article which I quoted from in Marching As To War of the terrified Germans who were in

25:32 that camp – people who had disagreed with Hitler and the terror very evident in them and the implication of how they must have been treated and I could see what a terrible regime this was and I began to think then war was

26:02 inevitable. I still held back from it until the fall of France and my mother wrote to me up at Nareen and said, “What are you going to do about it?” So war was still man’s glorious destiny. She wouldn’t have said it in those

26:32 words but by the time she had 4 sons in the services and later on Vietnam came, she was sheltering one of the chaps who had been conscripted for the Vietnam War and the police came for him and she didn’t know where he was but she gave the police a cup of tea. So she’d swung right around.

Do you think that was as a result of her sons’ experiences?

26:52 I think so. When I did go into air crew I perhaps foolishly gave her the names and addresses of mothers of men I was with. And it ended up that Blue Freeman and I were the only ones left and she used to write to me and

27:22 say, “Blue’s mother is so glad of your news. She doesn’t get any from Blue.” He was just as much a villain at failing to write home as he was in his fisticuffs.

So you stayed in Australia for a little while once the war had begun.

27:43 Yes, war broke out September 3rd '39 and I was accepted in about July of '40 but then I was 11 months on the reserve.

We’ll talk about the reserve. You must have been aware of the Battle of Britain.

28:10 Yes well that was around the time that I enlisted or just perhaps before it. I think we put in our applications when France fell then the Battle of Britain followed.

What did you think enlisting in the air force then seeing this battle being played out in which the Germans were so superior?

28:44 Well I thought we were in for a very long haul from which a lot of us weren’t going to come back. I don’t think I can put it in other words. I felt a strong

29:14 obligation to go and I think most males felt a pressure from other males enlisting and there were a lot of females who thought we should enlist too. That goes along with the white feather story. There was a lot of belief among the women folk that we should be going.

Did you experience that?

29:34 No I never did. Except my mothers letters. That was all. That was pretty strong.

And what about your brothers. When did they enlist?

29:48 Well two of my brothers were in the militia because they lived in the city and one brother was in the Royal Melbourne Regiment and my brother Ian, I just can’t remember at what stage he enlisted.

Did they choose to enlist or were they conscripted?

30:15 No they chose to enlist. None of us were conscripted. The police were around at our house the day my youngest brother turned 18 and my mother said, “He’s already gone.”

They were there to take him?

30:35 Just to check yeah. He’s the one who never got into action and has been disappointed about it ever since.

So the two brothers in the militia, had they enlisted before you?

31:00 Arthur certainly did and he went into army intelligence and his whole war was out here and Ian, my second brother, he was the one who went into the 39th Battalion. He was in New Guinea very early. Remained very proud of that old militia battalion – that 39th Battalion because they were the ones who stopped the Japs.

So let’s talk about your enlistment. Just talk us through the day you went and signed up.

31:43 Well we were interviewed in Hamilton by a couple of, it seemed aged and certain air force men and they had a look at our intermediate certificates,

32:13 that’s all you were required to have at that time. They set us some questions. I didn’t answer very well at all on one of mine. I thought, “Oh well I’ve done my dash,” but apparently I hadn’t. And both Jim Riddoch and I got through and we were sent soon after that down to Melbourne for the medical

32:43 examinations. When I saw the large number of men awaiting medical examinations I was caught up in the camaraderie of the group and then I noticed during the day as they did their examinations they were whittled away and whittled away until there were fewer and fewer of us and I wondered what kind of super being they were after and mostly the medical

33:13 examination it was finding relatively small things wrong with them. The thing that found some of the men out was you had to blow up a tube of mercury and hold your breath for a minute. Now some of them could do it for much longer but I remember I’d heard about this and wondered if I’d get

33:43 through it. I got through it all right. I didn’t find it very easy but by the time we got through there was a relatively small group of us taking the oath on the Bible and so on to be a member of the reserve for the Royal Australian Air

34:13 Force and then we just went back home and started on these 21 lessons which really were brilliantly set out. Basically they were an RAF series but they had been added to and refined in different ways by a Melbourne teacher,

34:43 a Dr Sayer from University High School. And I found maths that used to bother me at school, I picked it up quite well from these 21 lessons. They took us to an advanced stage of navigation. They went right on to what they call ‘radius of action returning to a moving base’. That is if you are operating

35:13 from an aircraft carrier, which none of us were going to do ever in our lives and the carrier is moving on and you’ve got to return to the carrier. Well studying those things on your own, it took a pretty good course to be able to work those things out and that’s when we were going also to Coleraine post office to learn the Morse code. So it was a very good grounding we got before we even started at initial training school.

So upon enlistment they handed you this book, the 21 lessons, is that right?

35:38 I think it they were sent to us through the post after we had returned home. I think you got each lesson and then returned it and then the next one would come along and you’d see the markings on the first one you’d done.

What did you think at that point of time you’d be doing? Where did you imagine you’d be serving?

36:04 Well my mind was pretty open about that because I knew we wouldn’t have any real say in where we were going but I did know I wanted to be a navigator but I just didn’t equate very well with my efforts in mathematics in

36:34 the past because I’d always fumbled along in maths at school except geometry I enjoyed but algebra and arithmetic as it was then called I had always had trouble with. I found when it came to the put down I could cope with it quite well under pressure.

So what was it about navigation?

36:57 I think my interest came first through my father’s interest in Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the South Pole and the navigation carried out by Wilson – Dr Wilson, his second in command and the precision with which it was done

37:27 and then I had a bit of experience of this when we were up in the MacDonnell Ranges. This business of finding your way appealed very much to me rather than flying or being a wireless operator or anything like that.

What was the post office you go to for the Morse code?

37:49 The Coleraine post office. Hamilton we went to for the interview.

And what sort of messages were you sent?

38:00 I don’t really remember their content. Anything they cared to send us we had to take it at ever increasing speeds and then the only use that non wireless operators put that to was the visual readings of the beacons I mentioned to

38:30 you in England. Because they each flashed a pair of letters and we had to be able to read them readily. They incidentally were changed daily and the code for the night was written on rice paper which you were supposed to chew up and swallow if you were likely to crash

These were the occults and the pundits?

That’s right.

What was it that led to the air force rather than the army or the navy?

39:15 Indecisiveness led to it because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the services I should go into. I initially applied – it might have been in 39, I’d quite forgotten this – or early 40, to go into anti-aircraft and this was at

39:45 Frankston and I went in for an interview at the local RSL [Returned and Services League] and the sergeant behind the table said, “Oh yes, sign here for the infantry and you’ll be able to transfer,” and I thought, I’m not having that. I won’t risk that so then Jim

40:15 Riddoch expressed his wish to be a pilot and I thought perhaps we can fly together and I’ll be a navigator. Of course we both ended up in different commands and I only occasionally saw him during the war.

Tape 5

00:23 So Don, you complete the 21 lessons and the Morse code and what happens next?

00:33 Well it generally worked out that you didn’t probably get through to the end of the lessons before you were called up and in my case because I was 11 months on the reserve I had completed them and even then had something of a wait and much to my chagrin I attended a farewell to Jim Riddoch in the local hall – one that I’d imagined we’d have been sharing – and he was off on his way to Canada and I was still cooling my heels in Nareen.

How did they choose?

01:16 I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. What I do know is the fellows in the country generally speaking had a longer wait because fellows in the city were always pestering the call-up people – when am I going to get my call up?

01:46 They were doing anything to have themselves advanced whereas we were far removed from it but how it was that Jim was called up, I don’t know. We had a third fellow – he was a splendid type from a well known western district family – a chap named Claude Austin and Claude I think was a bit over the normal acceptance age. He was married and had daughters and he had a very

02:16 prosperous property but he was accepted as an observer also and I only got one letter from him after he was called up. He just said, “We’re AC2s [Aircraftsmen 2], the lowest form of human life. We salute everybody and run every time we hear an order.” He was a tremendous sportsman – a giant of a man in every way

02:46 and he later became an outstanding navigator with coastal command. And happily he got back and so did Jim Riddoch get back.

So, you eventually receive a letter do you?

02:54 That’s right. We had to report to the police station at the tiny little place – Harrow, which is on the edge of the Woomera, just to let it be known we were still where we claimed to be and we were told when to report to Somers. Somers was the Victorian initial training school – Number 1 ITS.

And what did you do there?

03:32 There we did – of course a lot of square mashing – a lot of drill. That’s just another term for a drill and rifle drill which was entirely unnecessary for air crew.

So you actually did rifle practise?

03:50 Oh yes. Yes and firing on the range and we’d each be given a turn in charge of the squad because anyone who had been in the militia it was much easier for them but if you gave them a right turn instead of a left turn you could

04:20 depend on all your mates to carry out the wrong order to the nth degree and go marching on off the parade ground. But the most important task were the lectures we were given and by and large they were very good. A lot of the

04:50 ones on flight – How An Aeroplane Flies – I remember was the title of one of them, they bored me stiff because I wasn’t particularly interested in how they flew as long as they stayed up there and things like air force law were deadly dull and for us the important subjects were the maths and physics

05:20 subjects. Now we had an outstanding lecturer – the best I’d ever heard – and he became very prominent in life in NSW later on and his name was Davis Hughes. And he was the minister for housing I think who took over from Utzon in the big blow-up over the Sydney Opera House but he was a splendid lecturer. So we had all these lectures and then I think I got exam nerves or something, I

05:50 can’t account for it at all but I failed maths and that’s when I was given an IQ test.

I’m interested to know what it was like for you – had you used a gun at Nareen?

06:03 Ah yes. I had used a service rifle too on a rifle range so I was pretty familiar with that but I wasn’t familiar in all the drill positions for the rifle. We were learning all that afresh and of course a lot of it you did after you’d had injections and so on. It was a very different situation. Were you aware at this point of time you would probably be serving overseas?

06:36 No. Didn’t know where we’d be serving. No hint of Japan coming into the war. Everything was centred on Germany and how successful Germany had been up to the Battle of Britain – well that was the halting point so no, you

07:06 just assumed that most of you would be sent overseas but that’s not the way it worked out. I suppose it did up until our time but once there were hints that Japan would be in it there were more held back here but Australia had given an undertaking to Britain as to how many air crew would be provided.

07:36 I’ve forgotten what the number was now. And she stuck by those even when Japan did come in.

So you do the IQ tests and you receive a terrific result?

07:40 Yes, I must have got a good score.

Where did they send you after that?

07:47 I remain at Somers as a reserve navigator in what they call the pool. All the men who had finished the course but hadn’t been posted were being held there and I think I mentioned it was chicken pox broke out and some

08:17 of the navigators went down with it – some of the men who had been selected as navigators – and the reserves had to step in. I’d been going as a wireless operator to Ballarat and suddenly I was going to Cootamundra as an observer and then they wanted these four volunteers for Canada.

So you find out you’re going to Canada. Do you return to Melbourne to say goodbye to your family?

08:41 Oh well you see Somers was just down south of Melbourne – not far from Melbourne. I went home and just before I went home, my father, I mentioned he was deaf and he was knocked down by a car and seriously

09:11 injured and I had to say goodbye to him in hospital. He had not long regained consciousness and of course I just didn’t tell him I was going away and then I went up to Nareen for the usual farewell up there. I think that’s

09:41 the only place where Jim Riddoch and I appear together – both on the honour board in the hall at Nareen and then I got permission or an elder cousin got permission for me to be held back for the last possible moment so I could be sure my father was going to pull through. And then I was sent up to Sydney to embark on the Monterey.

This is your first time in Sydney, isn’t it?

10:07 That’s right. It was my first time in Sydney. Unfortunately the day we arrived it was raining all day I think and of course that was a disappointment but the day we left it was just glorious and I really felt for those Sydney

10:37 fellows saying goodbye and the Monterey passed under the bridge and just down below the bridge was just a little knot of people waving quite desperate goodbyes with parasols and so on.

What did you pack in your bag to travel?

10:50 Well everything was issued to you. The only extra things I took a book – which is in my bookcase behind me The Poets Way. That’s the only book that accompanied me overseas. Oh and the Weymouth New Testament I took.

Who’s The Poet’s Way by?

11:13 I can’t remember who put it together but it’s an anthology of poetry. It was given to me by my youngest brother. He had just done it in about Year 10 I think. Something like that. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of it was poetry emanating from England which was familiar to me, like Tennyson’s Ulysses

11:43 which in those days I could recite right through. In fact each of my diaries I put a couple of lines from Ulysses in the front of each volume of diaries.

So tell us a little bit about the trip over?

12:01 As I’ve said before we went over in luxury – just two men in a cabin and I shared with a Brisbane fellow who was a bit older than I was – another

12:31 navigator or observer – Colin Cooper – and I remember Blue Freeman was in a cabin nearby and his cabin mate was a fellow Catholic chap who became a very close friend of mine – Johnny Gordon. He was a classicist and had a high standard of Latin and Greek and I became very close to Johnny. I was

13:01 his best man when he was married in England. He was killed about ten days later. I remember Blue running into our cabin, “Come and have a look at our toilet seat!” Everything was – it was all the height of luxury – unimaginable. And we sat down to dinner and went through the menu and thought, “We can’t afford that.” Quite forgetting it was all on the government.

Do you remember what sort of food they were serving?

13:35 Oh it was a very wide range. We even had snails. It was very upmarket. Very upmarket American meals of course but we called in first at Auckland and we had a whole day there and the people were marvellous and took us in

14:05 hand and drove us all around Auckland and we took on board the New Zealand contingent and these fellows were to remain with us more or less as their careers paralleled ours and leaving New Zealand I remember they did a ‘haka’ on deck and it must have been morale boosting for them. It was a hell of a noise for us. And then we went on from there to Fiji.

Were there civilian passengers?

14:41 Yeah the civilian passengers on board and to a degree we mingled. Some of the American passengers on board – the women did some of our mending which was very nice gesture. Given a very good welcome in Honolulu and

15:11 as I said they turned on this great welcome by the American air force and then heard the unbelievable fears of a raid which we couldn’t imagine. Our table steward, Johnny, said, “You’ve got a great welcome at Honolulu. But

15:41 wait till you get to San Francisco,” which was his city, “You’ll get a wonderful welcome there.” And the fact of the matter was we didn’t. Except from Johnny. He was there clapping us as we marched through the lower end of the town to a train but I felt sure the Americans could sense war coming. They weren’t in it themselves but they felt they might be. And we

16:11 were put on this train for Vancouver and it was all like something out of the movies. As we left San Francisco, here was Alcatraz and the Golden Gate. Then this train with the Negro porters and lovely linen table cloths so we

16:41 really travelled in style and we saw such magnificent scenery up the Coast Range there right up till we passed Mt Shasta and it was magnificent country. And then a very warm welcome by the Canadians in Vancouver and taken in

17:11 hand right away and driven around Stanley Park and then on that night through the Rockies and I remember Max Bryant and I just being overboard with the scenery. The mountains and the steepness of the grade and the service on the train. We couldn’t get over the fact that a lot of the

17:41 Australians were playing poker and not bothering about the scenery at all. So we went up through places like Kicking Horse Pass and so on.

Was there an acknowledgement that Australia was part of the Commonwealth?

17:46 Very strongly in Canada. We didn’t know what to expect. We just knew that Canadians were some sort of Commonwealth cousin and they weren’t calling the Empire Air Training Scheme by that name. They called it the

18:16 British Commonwealth Air Training Plan because they had the French to placate and they never used the term Empire. Though I think these days they’re much more British than we are. Anyway after going through the Rockies – oh we got off at not Banff, Jasper, and went for the usual route march just for exercise.

What does a route march involve?

18:43 Usually it’s just a march going from A to B along some route chosen by whoever may be in charge for exercise.

So was there a commander who was looking after you?

18:59 Oh yes. There was. I don’t remember. I think one of them was Barker and I’ll tell you who was also in our crowd but going straight on to England –

19:29 Tommy White. Now that name might not mean much to you but he was a First World War pilot and when we got to England he was in command at Bournemouth. He was very much an Empire man and a dyed in the wool conservative. Not a bad poor bastard as the boys used to say.

So you eventually end up in Edmonton?

19:58 Yes. Of course we came out of the Rockies into these endless plains of the prairies which was a bit of a let down and we came into Edmonton in the evening and we were surprised to see the enormous crowd waiting at the 20:28 station. These were local people who were readily offering hospitality and a lot of men from the camp to which we were going.

How many of you were there at this point in time?

20:35 Who went to Edmonton. I think about 25. One of my photos will show the actual number. So we were made feel very welcome from the outset and all sorts of remarks passed by these Australians preceding us as to how we’d

21:05 find the food, what the local girls were like and so on and how hospitable the people were and of course when we got to the camp we were told that we would be flying in pairs and that we had better decide who we were going to fly with because we would

21:35 occupy upper and lower bunks. These higher and lower bunks. So Max Bryant and I decided to fly together.

Was this like Steel City where you were?

21:49 Our base was on the local airport – a bit like having it at Mascot. Quite a busy airport but a lot of flying done there was by bush pilots flying up north.

22:19 All our pilots who took us on exercises were bush pilots who had been employed to do the job and they knew the country backwards. They could rescue us if we got lost. They didn’t intervene. They just let us get lost and

22:49 then they could recover us if necessary. But there was a very handy thing we found. Grain elevators, like big silos, were at each railway station and on each of these tall grain elevators was the name of the town or the little village so if you were really desperate you would try to see the name of the place you were at.

What sort of plane were you in here?

23:00 We were in Ansons. Yes. We didn’t begin flying immediately. We started into studies very quickly but really the very day we got into class was the day

23:30 I met Nell so that was something of a disaster in one respect. But in class we found the chap in charge of our course was a French Canadian – a very dapper fellow and he gave us this serious address. I don’t know who had warned him about Australians but he ... I don’t think he’d ever had a group

24:00 of Australians before. We were a pretty mild bunch really and he said, “Three things I will not joke about. My race – I am French. My religion – I am Catholic. My wife – I am just married.” We were absolutely stunned. None of us would have had any idea about laughing at any of those things.

24:30 And so he then ordered us out on the parade ground just to exercise a bit of control over us. Ordered us to fall in which we at once did and our marker was our course leader who was our tallest man – outstanding chap, H.J.

25:00 Barker – nick name Tid for some reason. A Bundaberg fellow and we all fell in and so Jarry, that was the name of the Frenchman, he balled out, “From ze left. Number.” Looking down to his right. No put it the other way. He was

25:30 looking to the left and he said, “From the right, Number.” So no one said anything and he went to the tips of his toes and balled it again. “From ze left number,” and so they did start from the left and he thought they were mocking him of course and he did turn almost purple and then he realised he’d made a mistake and said, “From ze right, number,” And so away they went from Tid Barker the right way. He marched us around for a while and brought us back in. It was a very amusing meeting.

So at this stage of training are you learning the basic navigation? Are they training you at all in warfare?

26:02 No. Nothing in warfare until you get onto bombing and gunnery. We had ... I’m just trying to think whether we had any – no I don’t think we had any bombing and gunnery at Edmonton. We went further south for that to a

26:32 place called Lethbridge. No, it was meteorology, compasses, navigation. I’m just trying to think of our other subjects. We had a very good Met lecturer. Inevitably he was Met Mick but he became quite close to us as a

27:02 group. He was a great chap except that Johnny Gordon always looked half asleep in class. He was a secondary school teacher at – is it Sydney Boy’s High? And a very fine teacher – so I heard later from some of his pupils. I

27:32 remember Met Mick sending Johnny Gordon to run around the drill square to wake him up and I said to him, “Do you realise that chap’s a school teacher and double degrees?” He was a bit astonished.

So when do you finish up at Edmonton? 27:50 If you passed Edmonton and I think there were about 4 of our blokes who didn’t, you went on to Lethbridge and you carried out there bombing and gunnery from clapped out Fairey Battles which had been flown across or

28:20 brought across by ship. I don’t think they’d have been able to get across the Atlantic themselves, for use at these training schools

What did they look like?

28:28 They were very handsome aircraft. In a way they looked like an enlarged Spitfire. They used to carry a pilot and two trainees in the back and you were held in by – I think they used to just call them G-strings. They clipped onto the floor and then onto your flying harness and as you were being flown by

28:58 completely browned off pilots who didn’t want to be doing this but wanted to be in action somewhere. They performed all sorts of aerobatics and of course you’d be stretched out to the end of the G-string. In fact I’d arranged

29:28 to meet Nell at a midway point in Calgary. She was flying down from Edmonton and I was flying up from Lethbridge and I was doing a bombing exercise that afternoon and – I think he was an American pilot who was only wanting to get over to the UK to get into the war – and he did a barrel roll

29:58 and the engine cut and he had to put this thing down on the bombing range in feet and feet of snow which he managed to do very well but here was I stuck out on the bombing range with Nell on the way down to Calgary. Fortunately a truck came out and got us. Now I’d teed everything up. I’d teed up George

30:28 Loader to do my machine gun exercise and Harry Wright to do my air-to-air firing for me and now I was really caught and I think Max Bryant lay on my bed and left it looking as if it had been slept in and he was asked where I was and he said, “Look, I’ll go looking for him.” And anyway they covered up

30:58 very well and Harry was sore with me because he got a better score for me than he did for himself in the air to air firing and George Loader carried off my machine gun exercise. I never did fire a machine gun. And in the

31:28 meantime I met Nell in Calgary. So we struck our first blizzard there which was quite an incredible experience for Australians and that held everything up for a while and it all had to be snow ploughed away and then we went a

31:58 way over further east to near Winnipeg to a place called Rivers which was the end of nowhere. Very strict station run by a naval man and what we had to do there was astro-navigation. It was wholly given over to learning the stars and learning sudden shots and it was a very intense course and I was writing letters every day as well as doing this.

At what point do you say goodbye to Nell?

32:11 I said goodbye to Nell for what I thought was the last time when – first when we left Edmonton but I managed to get up and say goodbye before we went to Rivers and I think by then we’d got our observers brevet and I took mine

32:41 up ahead of time and got her to sew it on for a photo and took it off again and had it put on officially when I got back.

A brevet?

32:53 Yes well you see with pilots it was wings and with other trades it was only a half wing. I think I’m using the right expression. Anyway we went to this

33:23 place, Rivers, at the end of nowhere and we were again back on Ansons but doing most of our navigation by the stars of by the sun. Sometimes getting horribly lost and the great trap there was the fact that we were near the North Magnetic Pole and the isodynals, which are the lines of magnetic variation

33:53 all converge and you see a compass before you use it must be corrected according to the magnetic variation in that area. Well in that particular area it’d go through easterly variation, easterly, easterly, zero, westerly, westerly, and you could make awful errors and some made errors as gross as applying it the wrong way round. Anyway if it was an easterly

34:23 variation you added it to your true heading. Westerly it was minus. So you get into a lot of trouble that way.

Did anyone crash during the training?

34:36 No. In Lethbridge, I think it was, a Fairey Battle that Blue Freeman was in was forced down for some reason in the United States and all the school kids gathered round to have a look at this plane. They were able to take off again 35:06 and come home because by now America was in the war. I think apart from our landing in the snow, I think that was the nearest thing to any accident. No, all our men got through in Canada but at Rivers, a tremendous snow

35:36 storm – the worst blizzards for 25 years blew up. Now that so set us back in our training that I could see that we were going to get away just as Nell got Easter holidays from school and we just dwelt on this happening. At first it

36:06 was just a wild gamble and then it became more and more probable. The blizzard was so bad that in our classrooms the snow built up and the icicles came down over the eaves until the two met and to get to the mess and to our barracks you daren’t depart from a rope line. You had to follow the rope or

36:36 you could just vanish. Of course we’d seen nothing like this. It was unimaginable. The railways stopped, but then everything worked out and Nell’s train drew in while we waited at the station. And off we went east

37:06 together. So there again amazingly fortunate. And we said our final goodbyes. We went right out to Quebec and then came back to Montreal where we parted. That was the last time we saw each other. And then I went down to New York and joined the rest of our crowd down there and that was quite an experience. It had all been a bit of a wrench leaving Nell of course.

Let’s talk about that a little bit. Obviously at this stage are you aware you are heading to Great Britain?

37:36 Yes. Yes. Yes we did know by then and the Australian, I suppose High Commission, had someone going out speaking to us, speaking to the troops and we were going to be of much more value to Australia when we’d gained

38:06 operational experience. Well of course, hardly anyone came back. But I suppose we swallowed that one.

So when you came to say goodbye to Nell what was the understanding between you? Here’s someone you’ve fallen deeply in love with ...?

38:38 Yes, well we were just going to keep in touch which we did on an almost daily basis. We numbered all our letters just to be sure that we could know if any were going astray but I think they all came through. Nell’s got all mine still. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t got mine. Some of them reached her with bits cut out by the censor. All hers got through to me all right.

Were you aware that your letters were being censored?

39:02 I knew that were liable to be censored. Some of them ended up looking like a piano roll. Bits hacked out. So we certainly had an understanding but it didn’t seem to me to be a time of talking about formalities of becoming

39:32 engaged and all the things that belonged to peace even though people like George Loader had married before he left and his wife was pregnant. We went out then to Halifax, which was our embarkation point, but the first four

40:02 or five top marks on the course ferried over the Atlantic and Max Bryant was one of those. Blue Freeman was another. Our course senior Tid Barker was a third. Ron Whitely, one of the fellows who had volunteered for Canada at Somers, he was the fourth.

What were they ferrying over?

40:19 They were taking one of the Hudson series of daylight bombers, I think Venturers. They were ferrying them over. They were going via Reykjavik in Iceland and I think their first landing was even further west, Goose Bay, then Reykjavik and then finally they landed up in Prestwick. Quite a challenge for a new navigator but they had all done well on course. I’d done well with Nell though. I didn’t care about the ferrying trip.

How did they get the rest of you to Britain?

Tape 6

00:18 Heading to Great Britain – what are you expecting as you head across? What do you think you’re going to be doing?

00:30 We’re thinking mainly of will we get across because it was the peak of the submarine warfare, the U- Boat [Unterseeboot, German submarine] warfare and we knew when we left Halifax that the U-Boats watched the ports pretty closely and were well informed and

01:00 we were on a Polish ship – the Stefani Petori – or Stefani Petori was the man it was named after. I think Petori was the name of the ship and we were really packed in. It was just a short voyage of course and as we got out I

01:30 remember it must have been a Sunday – the second day at sea and they had a church service and we were singing for those in peril on the sea and we sang with great gusto and it was punctuated by blasts from depth charges being dropped so we knew submarines were around. And it was a big convoy and

02:00 we had the USS Texas as our main battle ship and a number of destroyers and each ship had its own code by the number of blasts it gave and each ship towed some wooden device that allowed the following ship to see how close it was to the one in front. This became very necessary because we ran into

02:30 fog which was a blessing in a way. At least the U-Boats must have given us away for a while I think. And the fog continued for days and I believe the skipper was on the bridge for about 3 days in a row unchanged and I

03:00 remember a Canadian chap I had met through Nell, another school teacher, saying, “Here we all are each with a little hope in our hearts,” and that feller was later my best friend. We had no idea of that then. It just happened he

03:30 was invalided home with TB [Tuberculosis]. So when we got over near Ireland and up toward or round the north of Ireland the Spitfires came out and I’ve never forgotten one of the Polish sailors raising his arms and shouting, “Spitfurs!

04:00 Spitfurs!” So relieved that we were within range. So we went into the Clyde. No one had ever told us how beautiful the Clyde was and fronting the water were rather dour looking buildings and kirks and we were embarked onto this little toy English train that was to take us down to Bournemouth.

Who else was on the train with you? Was it only airmen?

04:13 Oh no. On the Petori were lots of Canadian army and although we were crammed into our cabins, they were in hammocks way below deck and some of them were required to wait on table and I don’t think this went down very well with them.

Did you have much interaction with the other forces?

04:42 There was very little. You were all so packed in that you tended to just mix with those on your deck.

What about on land?

04:57 When we landed? Once again all our group were marched to the train and their group was marched to a different part of the train so there wasn’t much opportunity really. And that’s the way it was. Of course there was no such thing as sleep because we all had to sit up for the journey down to Bournemouth.

So you landed late at night?

05:28 No, we landed quite early in the morning. It had been daylight some time. I’m not sure whether they’d gone over to daylight saving and of course in Britain during the war it was double daylight saving. So you had very very long evenings. We arrived in April. I’m not sure what time the changeover was made.

So you arrived in Bournemouth. You described this as being quite an idyllic time in a way.

06:08 It was in a way because here was a place with its beautiful hotels usually frequented by holiday makers. Everything looking beautiful in the spring sunshine and the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra available to go and hear,

06:38 as Johnny Gordon and I did. A bridge – a couple of Australians went for a swim but nearly froze – were glad to get out of the water.

Do you think there was a decision by your superior officers to give you this rather lovely time before?

07:01 No, I think they thought it was a fairly safe place to go to and right away from operational activity. It was pretty crowded up north, planes flying everywhere. Why there weren’t more collisions I’ll never know. No, and it

07:31 was a place with a lot of hotels. Not very long after our time it was moved from Bournemouth to Brighton, a similar place. I think it must have been the hotels that offered ready accommodation and I think that’s probably the dominating factor in the choice.

You see a bomb attack in Bournemouth?

07:53 I didn’t see it. It came while we – I think we were walking across Scotland. And Blue Freeman was there and they came in very low and bombed and strafed the place and Blue said that they got quite a lot of fellows and he was 08:23 going during the parade through a park and a tree came down and killed a girl. That was his first experience of the war. I went through the war and never saw a dead man. Extraordinary. Probably that was the only one that he saw too. You were far removed from viewing death. We were raining it

08:53 down and you could see your own men injured and many a time men saw each other killed but a lot of us got through without seeing anyone killed. Quite an extraordinary kind of war.

At the same time you hear ...

09:13 You hear it all the time. Now soon after we got to the next posting – Bobbington – I think that we found that our category – that is observers – was being split into two on the heavy bombers. It was just too much for an

09:43 observer to be doing both the job of navigation and the job of aiming bombs so that we were given the option of doing a tour of operation as a bomb aimer or as a navigator. And all of our group chose to be navigators, barring

10:13 Blue Freeman who did a tour as Harry Wright and Sid Cook’s bomb aimer and then he did a second tour as a navigator.

So at Bobbington what are you flying?

10:18 We were flying in Ansons there and we were – our first exercises there were in map reading and I remember being flown over the Welsh mountains by a Welshman who was very proud of the fact that he was Welsh and this was

10:48 his homeland and asking where we were every few moments and had a hair raising ride back with him low down over – I’ve forgotten what the river was now – but just willow trees on either side of us. He killed himself soon after

11:18 on one of these exercises. And we were in bell tents then on that camp. They were pretty pressed for accommodation.

How many to a tent?

11:19 I think we had four or five to a tent with our feet in toward the pole.

Would they be the people you were flying with or ...?

11:31 No, because we were each doing our exercises singly – just one at a time. It was a salutary lesson on the difference between flying over England and flying over Canada.

As you were flying over England and seeing this very densely populated countryside, did the thought occur to you that eventually you are going to be dropping bombs on similar cities?

12:06 Oh yes. It did. Yes. But you also knew that it’d be dark and all you’d see was their gun fire so it wasn’t going to be quite as bad as if you were dropping them on such places as we were seeing by day. All crazy but that’s the way you tended to feel, or I did anyway.

When did they begin to train you in night flying?

12:35 From Lichfield, when we’d crewed up. I did do a couple of exercised from Lichfield on Ansons and that’s when I met the man who became our bomber – Ted Batten – and we did do some night exercises but I’m very vague as to

13:05 where we were. I think I was vague at the time. More to have a look at England by night and I’m sure we owed our return to the pilot knowing where he was than I knowing where we were.

This is your first time in England isn’t it?

13:23 Yes. Yes.

Were you aware of the class system?

13:27 I was aware of it before I left Australia. I was prepared for it when we went over. I didn’t much strike it in air crew. I think it was less class conscious probably than the RAAF. But among some of the permanent RAF yes, you

13:57 did strike it and we lived with it without too much bother. I do remember our wing commander referring to us as colonials. My sergeant skipper

14:27 jumping to his feet and saying, “Sir, we come from dominions.” And the wing commander noting him for future reference as well he might have. They fought all the way through.

You say it was less class conscious than the RAAF. How was the RAAF? 14:41 Well, the RAAF in my short experience of it, if you were a public school boy or a grazier from somewhere or the son of a grazier you were likely to gain a

15:11 commission much more easily than if you had gone to the local high school. In Canada they got around it by awarding commissions to the first – well it was about five commissions out of about 20 – a quarter I suppose, went to the top marks on the course. Now this wasn’t highly desirable either because a

15:41 couple of the men on our course, co-operated as they put it, in the examination and they got commission – they both got commissions. They helped each other through. So it would have been better had we done what the Canadians eventually did. They all had commissions. But we were much more Britain’s way than the Canadians were on that point.

You talk about the commander calling you colonials, there were a number of different nationalities there, weren’t there?

16:18 Oh yes.

From the Commonwealth. How did they mix?

Wonderfully well. You soon learned that every nation has its quota of brave men, loyal to the people they’re serving. I knew one crew they had an Australian, a Canadian, a Norwegian, three RAF and an American top gunner who was serving in the RAF.

How did the American get in there?

16:57 He just preferred it. He had been there when America came into the world and he was on American pay which was more than his squadron leader pilot was getting

17:27 but they were just a first-rate crew. You took very little notice of a mixed squadron of where you came from. You lamented more for the loss of your own country I think but as for your regard for the men, they were splendid men from all over the place. I think it did a lot for us. It widened our vision a great deal. This didn’t go down well when we came back to Australia though. I think our outlook was at odds with the typical Australian outlook.

Which was?

17:57 Which was that Australian servicemen were slightly above everyone else. I used to think when I was a boy at school that the Australian soldiers were just a bit ahead everyone else, just as our cricketers were. I found that this wasn’t so at all.

Were there any Aboriginals in the RAAF?

18:25 I’ve only heard of one and I’ve forgotten his name. My friend Cliff Green was doing a television documentary on this fellow but I’ve quite forgotten his name and I don’t know if the documentary’s been made. He was in air crew and commission – the pilot.

Let’s move onto your time at Lichfield which is where you are appointed to 103 Squadron.

19:07 Yes. When we’d done all our training at Lichfield we – I don’t know how they determine where we should go. I think it’s probably dependent on the losses of various places where they needed men because all the time as I once

19:37 wrote, the squadrons were haemorrhaging and getting transfusions from training commands so that numbers never changed – just the faces changed and there were times ahead when the faces you knew were swamped by all the faces you didn’t know.

Talk to us a little about the training manual that you get at Lichfield – TM.

20:04 Well, we got that right through our air force life – TM – and it was a brilliant conception. They taught all sorts of lessons through ridicule and comedy and

20:34 they had as their patron Pilot Officer Prune who was always finding the easy way to do things or the wrong way and looked an absolute zombie of a fellow. It’s the only training manual I’ve ever seen men fight over to get at it first. It was a delight and they would nominate someone each issue for the

21:04 highly derogatory Order of the Removable Finger. Through some great error it went once to a group captain who saw a navigator taking sextant shots on the sun, just standing outside his barracks and he booked him for using a camera. He didn’t even know what a sextant

21:34 was. It was no respect at all. Brilliant cartoons. They were marvellous. Those books are available today. They’re in bound copies.

Did they teach you at Lichfield how to abandon a hit plane?

21:44 Yes. They had the fuselage of an old Wellington – well they were all old Wellingtons at Lichfield. This was a very old Wellington. Had it set up in a hangar and they would give the cry, “Dinghy, dinghy, prepare for ditching.” 22:14 You would all have to take up positions in plane with your arms behind your head and your back to the way the aircraft was travelling and then you each had something to grab on the way out. And there used toe a dinghy on the hard concrete floor. I think we had it down to 10 seconds to get into that thing and thank heavens we never had to use it.

What did you have to grab on the way out?

22:42 I’ve forgotten what I had to grab now, possibly the pigeon. In those days they still carried pigeons in case you were down in the North Sea and you released a homing pigeon. The only one I ever heard of being released in our squadron, was released after they landed and no one came to pick them up

23:12 from their dispersal and they released the pigeon which went to the lofts with, “For God’s sake send the transport.” But I never heard of another successful pigeon. They cut them out after a time.

Did they ever train you how to use a parachute?

23:29 Yes. Not in jumps, just instructed you what to do, to disconnect your oxygen and your intercom so it didn’t tangle up and to count whatever it was when you

23:59 baled out so you’d be clear of the tail before you pulled the chute. But there were all sorts of extraordinary descent by parachute. I knew a fellow who came down by hanging onto the leg of somebody else. His own parachute

24:29 had gone up in flames I think and he just saw this leg and grabbed it. I think it was his skipper’s leg. They both got down. Both survived. Another one landed on the back of a cow in Germany and the chute went over the cow’s head and the poor cow was careering round the field. One of the other members of the same crew landed on the roof of a poultry farm. You can imagine the din kicked up by all these disturbed hens.

The WAAF were present at Lichfield. They probably were at other bases too.

25:05 Yes, they were.

Talk to us a little bit about the relationship between WAAF.

25:11 Well I first had a relationship with a WAAF on the squadron even though I was still writing loyally to Nell. But quite apart from the angle of sex I found myself drawn to the company of women and getting out in the countryside.

25:41 They were the two things that kept you sane. Kept me sane anyway. And we had what I think I referred to once as a kind of group relationship. They were like a whole crowd of sisters in a way although there were sexual

26:11 relationships with them too. But here were these poor kids – and most of them were just kids – seeing men becoming fond of some of them and they’d be lost in a very short time. We did hear our Peggy had a boyfriend lost. We never asked her about it. She was only about 19.

Peggy was your driver? What was the role of the driver?

26:29 They used to take the crews out to the planes so they were the last ones to see them and then they went back to pick them up after the operation was over. And we had such a run of good luck with Peggy that she was afraid to take a

26:59 day off. She’d give up her days off just to do that for us. So she became a member of the crew as it were and she’s attended reunions with us. When I say ‘us’, Geoff and I have never been able to go together but I have seen Arthur Browett and Graham Briggs and Peg all together at reunions.

What other things would the WAAF do?

27:30 They tackled everything. When I spoke to them at the 2000 reunion I said, “What a joke you make feminism seem. You did the lot when you were kids.” They worked as mechanics on trucks. They drove all sorts of

28:00 vehicles. Of course they did the usual things like being cooks but we were interrogated by WAAFs. We always wanted our own interrogation officer – Lucette Edwards – and took her for a ride once I remember.

What would they interrogate you about?

28:15 Well, this is what the Americans call debriefing – a word I first heard in air traffic control. Sounds as if you’re getting undressed. It was never used in the RAF, it was always interrogation after you’d been on operation. They would ask you

28:45 about the flak dispositions, about the weather, about any aircraft you'd seen going down. Did we log the time we saw them going down? All manner of operational questions. The density of the flak which the gunners were best able to answer. Mostly very heavy in their estimation.

Other things the WAAF would do?

29:12 It’s – the behaviour of the plane. If there were any troubles to report, which Geoff would usually let the ground people know before we left the plane to drive in. But he would mention it again at interrogation.

Apart from interrogation, what were some of the other responsibilities of the WAAF?

29:45 It’s hard to think of the job now. We had a bombing trainer where they practised and the WAAFs would be running that, probably in the charge of a sergeant. The thing that I valued most were the WAAFs. It wasn’t called air

30:15 traffic control then, it was called control and the most wonderful moment on the flight was when you at last got back to England and Geoff used to really race for home and very often we were the first in and the exchanges over the

30:45 radio were cut to a minimum. It would just be a call of – we were BB – “Hazel control, BB are over,” and the girls always would come back. Finding it hard to go on with. “BB, this is Hazel control, pancake, pancake.” That meant it was clear

31:15 to land but as I said in one of my books, no woman’s voice in all our lives could welcome us so warmly home.” That’s the way it was. Marvellous feeling that someone cared. So that was a job they did very well indeed and

31:45 it was such a relief after listening to the voices of the crew all night to hear this woman’s voice come up with these instructions and on our 30th operation Geoff didn’t call. He left it to Arthur Browett in the rear turret which was great. There’s a time to get through, I tell you.

What about the ground crew?

32:23 Yes we had a very good relation with our ground crew in that it’s been a great disappointment that we’ve lost all trace of them. I can only remember some of their names – Bill Birchall and one that we called Misery. I’ve forgotten what his real name was and Oscar. It was their plane and we were

32:53 sort of borrowing it to take on operations and they looked after it so well. They laid a carpet for us to come on board, not that they thought we deserved the carpet but just so we didn’t dirty the plane and they took it up after we got in.

Would you mix with them socially?

33:08 No. Sometimes we did, especially when we reached our 30 operations we all went out together. We were urged to take our ground crew out to the pubs. That wasn’t policy but it was encouraged because it was a real bonding there and of course they were over the moon when we got back for the 30th time. It was a good relationship.

Now, let’s begin now to talk about the creation. I think we’ve covered the training areas. Would you like to talk about anything?

34:10 There was one very important training flight but that was on the squadron. Now when Lancasters came to us it was before the days of what they call conversion units. Most men following us went from Lichfield to a

34:40 conversion unit where they converted onto Lancasters or whatever heavy bombers they were going to but in our case conversion units hadn’t been established and there was a flight on the station given over to converting onto

35:10 Lancasters. Now this was in the command of a man named David Holford. David Holford’s one of the men I remember very vividly. He was 21 and wore a DSO [Distinguished Service Order] – a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] – and he had at that stage done 60 operations so he just

35:40 gained our immediate respect and he was just a likeable fellow. So he was in charge and first of all the pilots and the rear gunners went up together. Maybe they carried an engineer too. That’s when Geoff came back and was

36:10 delighted with the way the aircraft handled. We all went up together and did some local flying and then we were given an exercise – an 8 hour flight a way out toward Iceland. Not that far of course but way up to the north of

36:40 Scotland. Very testing sort of exercise and then we were reckoned ready to go to the squadron proper. That David Holford, he went back again to operations after he had married and he commanded a squadron and here he is

37:10 at I think 22 by now and when they got back after operations one night fog was closing in and he held off and let all the less experienced crews get down and then he followed and hit a hill. He died on the site of the crash. He was 37:40 still alive when they reached him but he died. I don’t know where the lines came from on his grave at Cambridge. “Pass not this stone with sorrow but with pride and try to live as nobly as he died.” That’s marvellous stuff isn’t it?

These conversion courses, before this you’d actually flown a couple of ops on Wellingtons. Tell us a little about the Wellington because it’s quite a peculiar plane.

38:05 Yes, well our ones were. So worn out, they were smelly. They smelt of oil and glycol and you couldn’t have a great deal of confidence in them getting you there. Well the one that we had on the first operation didn’t quite get us there. I was surprised they counted the operation. They were geodetic construction and if they crashed they burned very badly and many men were

38:35 just unable to get out of them. They were incinerated on the ground. But the later models, the ones we came to when we went back to Lichfield, they were

39:05 much better. They were a very sound sort of plane. I remember being feeling quite claustrophobic at first because the navigator was shut off from being able to see outside and that was something I was quite unaccustomed

39:35 to. With the Anson I liked to have a look out myself to confirm what the second navigator was telling me. Acting as a bomb aimer. But that’s about all I remember I think of the Lancasters. Nothing much else. The Wellingtons rather.

Where were you situated in the plane?

40:59 We were situated behind the pilot – somewhat similar to the Lancaster. I don’t remember whether we had a black out curtain or not. I think we must have done. For night training. I just can’t remember.

Just describe for us what you had in front of you.

On the Wellington – had a plotting table, quite a large table with a lamp over it and we – just let me think. At that stage we didn’t have the very good aid

41:59 to navigation called “G.” We didn’t get that until we went to the squadron. Now, will I just divert and go onto G –

Tape 7

00:24 Don, I’d like to talk a little bit about the process of the crew creation. You spoke to us yesterday about you and Geoff ending up together. But ultimately the first crew was 5 and then 7. How did the command make it known that you were to select your own crew?

00:54 I think even before we were told that we could select our own crew the rumour got around that that was the case and the navigators began initiating approaches to pilots and that was part of the reason for most of the men

01:24 becoming bespoken very quickly. I don’t remember any precise order that we crew up. It must have been given at some stage but I’ve got no recollection of it at all. I think when the order came it was probably already

01:54 done. The men had just found that this was the traditional thing and had been operating a long time and they just went ahead and did it and the order must have caught up. So that’s how it came about but it was at the beginning very much a pilot and navigator thing. They were pretty much the key pair

02:24 and then Geoff and I went about considering who else we could acquire and that way Geoff got hold of Arthur Browett. At once dubbed him Shag, which his wife didn’t think much of.

Why did he dub him Shag?

02:32 For no particular reason that I know if. He hardly knew him. I think it just seemed to fit him and to this day I notice if he’s signing a copy of No Moon Tonight for anyone when they’re getting crew members to sign the book, he always puts “Shag” in brackets after it.

So the pilots and navigators got together.

03:21 That was information. Perhaps because I was mixing it with the navigators I was much aware of them making these approaches and I had this feeling that I couldn’t assess just from appearances who would be a good pilot but also I

03:51 had it on my mind that I might yet get across to Jim Riddoch’s crew in coastal command so I was hesitant for that reason too.

So in the course of training, did you get to fly with different pilots? 04:05 Well we did of course when we were initially training in Canada we had all those old bush pilots flying us around and then at Bobbington I had a series of pilots there and at Lichfield, Geoff was the only one I flew with and when

04:35 we came back as instructors to Lichfield I flew with many pupil pilots and with some of the expired pilots too who were instructing there. Quite a number of men who became well known and those who survived, some of them went into the Australian Airlines.

So at the point at which you created your crew, Geoff had really been the only pilot you’d flown with? In Lichfield?

05:02 I’d never flown Geoff before we crewed. There was no such thing as getting up with a pilot and seeing how he handled an aircraft. There was nothing like that. You were doing it entirely on what you might imagine a man’s potential to be. That’s why it was such a guessing game. I’m sure that some of the pilots did go missing, it was just luck because they were very good pilots.

So when you were doing the navigational training at Bobbington and Bournemouth who was flying the plane then?

05:49 At Bobbington I had a series of tour expired pilots who had been given this training job there. I mentioned this one New Zealander who when we had to land at Farnborough.

What I’m getting at is when you were in training you were actually working with experienced crew. And it wasn’t until you moved in with your squadron ...

06:23 We flew with our pilot – sight unseen in a sense as far as their flying was concerned. There was no way they could exhibit what sort of pilots they were. We were doing it either on hunches or appearance. I remember I was coming out of the toilet as Geoff was going in and he just said, “Are you flying with anyone?” and I said, “No.” And we were the last two left anyway and from that point on we went on together. Of course we were the only pair that remained together right through.

So you formed that connection then did the two of you get together and say who you would choose?

07:15 Yes, I think I remember Geoff coming to me and saying, “Well I’ve found a rear gunner,” and he introduced me to this diminutive fellow and I said, “I’ve been flying with a bomb aimer on a few Anson exercises at Lichfield,” so we

07:45 brought him in. He was the London optometrist, Ted Batten, and I acquired Max Burcher who turned out to be rather difficult. That’s our crew. Now the final pair who both turned out to be very good indeed, we didn’t get until

08:15 we got onto the squadron and we had no choice. They were just passed to us – at least I don’t think we had choice. I don’t know if Geoff had any choice in Doug Richards but they worked very well as a pair but I think Doug would have worked well with whoever he flew with. He was a very cool customer.

So as the crew was formed was there some kind of ceremony or ritual?

08:45 No we just went off flying. First of all Geoff took us out to show us over the Wellington 1C. We won’t forget that day in a hurry because Geoff rode out

09:15 to the plane on his bicycle and we didn’t have bikes the rest of us at that juncture, so Geoff lays the bike down. We all went out in a van with quite a nice little WAAF driver and poor girl, she backed over Geoff’s bike. I’ve never felt so sorry for a girl. He dressed her down. This mangled bicycle left

09:45 there and all he could get for it were smaller wheels and the result was every time he turned a corner the pedal would touch the ground and throw him off and we put this down to the fact that we reckoned he was perpetually drunk. It wasn’t that at all.

So tell us about the relationship of Geoff with the rest of the crew because from the stories you were telling yesterday it would seem that he had a certain amount of authority.

10:12 Well he –very easily assumed an easy going authority from the beginning. I think we had all been prepared if the skipper was the skipper and Geoff – we

10:42 could sense that he was trusting us and we were trusting him and the real test came on the night we were badly shot up – not badly shot up but Max came out of it wounded and we lost him from the crew. But on that night things

11:12 were pretty bad for a while and we got back to England all right. We couldn’t call up because we had no RT [Radio Telegraphy] but as soon as we landed and the engines were shut off Geoff said, “Well, there wasn’t any ... you took it all calmly and I don’t want to fly with another crew.” So there was a tremendous bond then and we were confident in him and he was confident in us.

So you actually fly your first – you call it a flap? 11:58 Yes, it was a flap because everyone used to get in a flap. They weren’t used to running bombing raids from operational training units and all day long people seemed to be in a flap which wasn’t a very reassuring kind of send off and we weren’t at all confident in the planes because they were forever going U/S [Unserviceable], even on our training flights.

So can you recall the day – the flap is one of your first operations, is that right?

12:43 It was, yes. I think I’d been into Lichfield with one of our navigators to a pub which used to be nicknamed Australia House – the Goat’s Head it was –

13:13 and I was just coming in the gate and a fellow I knew from Melbourne, he said, “There to be a flap tomorrow night and you’re on it.” And I went directly to our barracks. Geoff had heard nothing of it and I told him quietly because his immediate reaction was, “I’ll go down and get the best kite

13:43 possible out of a poor lot and that’s what he did. He went out and that attracted attention and others wanted to know what was happening and I told them we were on a flap tomorrow night.

Did you know where you were going to be heading?

13:53 No, you didn’t know that until briefing and that was our first experience of a briefing. We went to this room which was completely blacked out and there

14:23 we were told what the target was and that night we lost the first of our group of navigators. The first crew but it included a group of navigators.

Why did it include a group of navigators?

14:34 I’m sorry, the first of our group of navigators. A navigator who we trained in Canada. A chap named Joe Turnbull. Now Max Bryant saw the take off and this fellow, this pilot lost an engine – not surprising in those clapped out

15:04 planes. He lost an engine and crashed and it just blew up and they put a guard on it and it was a very cold night and the guards moved in close and some more of the bombs went up and they lost their lives too. I think it was nine men went that night.

And this was right near the base I presume.

15:32 Right at the base. Those men they were given a military burial at a little village church at Fradley which was where Lichfield was. Although it was called Lichfield as a station, Lichfield city was about three miles away but we right up against this little village of Fradley.

Let’s go back to the briefing. What time were you woken in the morning?

16:13 I wasn’t. I didn’t sleep that night. It says something about me. I know I had a lot on my mind. I was going over various drills we’d been taught – what I must do and what I mustn’t do. I just didn’t sleep.

Tell us details – what drills? Were they navigation drills?

16:41 Oh abandoning the aircraft, baling out, but more positively about being very careful of my navigation and careful in the checking and so on. Not to forget

17:11 my sextant but it wasn’t much use to me because I very seldom used it, then or in the future, so we just went along to breakfast at the normal time. We weren’t wakened early because it was an evening take off.

What time was breakfast?

17:26 Breakfast was generally around 7, 7.30. Always the work of the world to get Geoff out of bed for it. Unless there were snags – sausages.

And you would all eat together in the one mess?

17:44 Yes. Yes that was the great advantage in being an all NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] crew. That we were always together.

And you shared the table with the crew?

17:58 Yes. We all shared the table but on that particular day of that Dusseldorf operation we went to a briefing – I must have gone to a separate briefing. The navigator always went first to briefing to be told the target and to rule in

18:28 the tracks on his map and then you all went together to what they called ‘main briefing’ and they had what they called in those days an epidiascope – something like an overhead projector and it would project a picture of the

18:58 target and an intelligence officer would say where the main concentration of bombs was required and any fighter groups to be warned of along the way. What the concentration of flak was like in various positions. Of course it was a very hot target for a new crew to be sent to but as I mentioned we

19:28 didn’t get there. We were almost there when we realised and we just had to turn back but they did count it as an operation. At that same briefing the weather

19:58 man, who was always a civilian, they weren’t part of the service, they would do a route forecast and again the epidiascope would show a cross section of what you were going to fly through. What the icing levels were – any build ups of cloud. Later on it was very different in that the fellows listening

20:28 would be derisive about the forecast but unexperienced as we were then we took it all as gospel and that the fellow really knew what he was talking about. I suppose he did to the best of his available data. So the forecast

20:58 would tell us of the conditions that were expected on the route and then each of the leaders would speak. The gunnery leader would speak to the gunners. The signals man would give data to the wireless operator. As far as the navigators were concerned, they would have already been to their own briefing.

So each of those individuals were briefed on their own?

21:08 No. All together. All together and then the CO [Commanding Officer] – a fellow named Jackson – he was South African. A memory’s just come back to me now, Joe Turnbull, the navigator who was killed that night, came late into the room. His crew,

21:38 they’d been delayed, came late into the room. Jackson was very testy about their late arrival and said, “And don’t look as if you’re going through the valley of the shadow,” which they went through in about an hour’s time. So those words stuck in our minds, as you can imagine.

So how long was it between the briefing and the actual departure.

22:03 I think on that night it was probably about 3 hours. I could tell from my log book but I think take off wasn’t all that long after dark and it certainly had a

22:33 sinking feeling going out for the first time in a van to our aircraft and I remember sitting at the navigator’s table and Max Bryant came out with me and he gave me I remember an apple and I remember looking at that apple and thinking how sane it seemed compared to what we were about to do.

Was there much conversation between the crew as you were heading out?

23:05 Very little. It was an all an unaccustomed journey at that stage – both out to the plane and what was coming up. But I think we weren’t very – well yes we had had experience of each other but at that stage it was all new

23:35 experience coming up and we were rather keeping to ourselves a bit I think. We all realised this was it. There wasn’t a great deal of conversation. It wasn’t the sort of situation that induces much conversation I suppose.

So you didn’t make it to Dusseldorf. Were you aware that plane had crashed?

24:09 No. Not until we got back and of course we learned of it then.

And were there other planes that didn’t get back?

24:19 No they all got back which was very fortunate and they all got back the second night from Bremen which was a very hot target. One that Geoff didn’t forget because we went there pretty late in our tour and he had pretty

24:49 sharp memories of the first time there. The trouble was with those Wellingtons, we were told to bomb at 9,000 feet. The fact of the matter was we couldn’t get much higher anyway and we were told that a good altitude to go over. But it wasn’t. We weren’t high enough to be out of the way of the light flak and we were copping some of the heavy flak as well.

Let’s talk about the flak and the experience of being in a plane when flak is coming at you?

25:24 I used to see if from time to time over the targets. Sometimes I didn’t go out, sometimes I did go out and I think I mentioned previously that they discouraged navigators from going out. They didn’t reckon it was conducive to working accurately and upset your vision because when you first went out you went from the clear of the light on a white chart and you stepped into darkness and then you had to reverse the procedure.

Did you go out to the cockpit? Is that what you were doing?

26:06 Yes. Within reach of my right hand was a black-out curtain clipped across and I’d just unclip it and slip out, turn my light out and stand behind Doug, the engineer who was sitting beside Geoff on a little dickey seat that folded 26:36 down from the fuselage. Not a comfortable seat at all. So to look at the target your first impression was that it was impossible to come through there unscathed as each shot left a trail – all the light flak just looked like hoses going of brilliant coloured light criss crossing.

What colour? Gold or

27:09 There was yellow and reddish colour and the bursting shells were sometimes yellowish and they’d leave trailing black smoke after them. When you began to hear them around you they were getting pretty close. You’d see this

27:39 tremendous inferno but it would be soundless until individual shells were bursting near you and then quite often you’d hear the rattle of flak against the fuselage. And quite often you were holed without realising it at the time. So it was certainly a terrifying picture.

28:09 I was very glad I didn’t say I’d operate as a bomb aimer because they were lying face down to it, watching it, and I think that might have been – I think they probably got the greatest impact of all.

So you’d see the flak exploding ahead but you wouldn’t hear it?

28:36 Yes. No you wouldn’t hear that. You’d see it was all a silent picture. Quite often you’d see other planes shot down but it would all be a silent violent picture. Both silent and violent until you got close in yourself and then you

29:06 began to hear it. And if there were bursts very close to you of course the plane would buck around. And the plane when you dropped your bomb the plane really went up like a bucking horse, just being free of the big load of bombs.

Would Geoff try and fly away from the flak?

29:40 What Geoff learned to do, though that first night was the beginning of the learning process, he would watch and if he saw an aircraft coned and the flak concentrating on that aircraft, he’d just say, “We’ll get in while they’re

30:10 busy with that fellow,” and he’d go in fairly close to him but not so close as to be caught up himself and we possibly could bomb while they were occupied. But of course on a large target there could be more than one – could be several planes all being shot down at the same time.

And would you acknowledge that they were going at the time or would you just pursue your mission?

30:38 You would have to go on with it but Geoff or Doug would say, “Plane going down such and such a point,” in relation to our heading, “Would you log that, navigator?” And you’d report that when you got back and on the basis of a

31:08 number of reports I’d make some estimate as to where that crew might have gone down and you might be able to give information of seeing parachutes open. Sometimes you’d see a couple open and then the plane would blow up

31:38 so that’s all you could tell them was that two appeared to get out.

You talk about coning?

Yes. I was thinking about this last night. I’ve got no memory of us being fully coned. Geoff seemed very adept at being able to avoid it by diving and

32:07 turning but time and again we saw other fellows coned and as I said Geoff would often slip in nearby while they were occupied with the other fellow. So although we had those brilliant blue search lights which were the master search lights and luminous for a time, Geoff always seemed to be able to extricate himself.

Could you remember seeing what it looked like seeing the search lights coming up from the ground? Could you actually see the source of the search light?

32:43 Yes, you could see them. Not if you were really caught in one. They were just so glaring that you couldn’t but when you were looking across at them at an angle, yes, you could see the source of them. Max Burcher had heard that

33:13 they could be disrupted by throwing out an empty bottle. I think that was rather a tall yarn and wishful thinking but I remember he did throw a bottle out one night.

So the blue light would hit you first.

33:23 Yes, that was the master. That was radar-directed. And then the others would snap on. They’d both come across and join the blue one and make a cone of extremely bright blinding light and you would see the bomber caught 33:53 there and then they would pour flak up at it and then when they got rid of one they’d douse the search lights and then suddenly the blue one would go up again looking for someone else. Yes it was an eerie sort of thing to see. Pretty alarming.

You talk about Geoff being able to negotiate his way around.

34:22 Yes at times he used to handle that – this is going onto the Lancaster days – he handled more like a fighter than a huge aeroplane as it was and I remember he was attacked one night and he managed to turn and he came head on to the German fighter and just flew straight at him and I remember the fellow scrambled out of the way and that got us out of that predicament.

Playing chicken with the Germans.

35:06 More or less, yes. He was a fellow – he was fairly hot tempered and the motto of our squadron could have been applied to Geoff. My Latin – I don’t know the pronunciation. L-i-m-e T-a-n-g-e-r-e meaning ‘touch me not’. He was a touch me not sort of fellow but very very loyal to those who he was flying with.

What was it like in the aeroplane? When the plane was flying around like this it must have been very rough.

36:06 A lot of the time it was. Moreover Geoff very quickly got onto what was called weaving or sometimes it was called cork screwing and that was that he would tilt the plane first one way then the other way. I’d give him a course

36:36 to steer, or a heading as it was later called, and he would average that out and go out along that line tilting so that the gunners could get a look underneath them. Now unbeknown to us the Germans had a vertical firing cannon called ‘shraga musique’ which I understand means vertical music. That allowed

37:06 them to fly straight and level underneath us and just fire up vertically. We didn’t know about that 'till a long time after it. But we did know they attacked a lot of the time from underneath and the crews shot down very many of them never saw the plane that shot them down and so this is what he

37:36 kept up. And that’s what I think most of those who survived used that technique. Later on with so many planes flying they tried to discourage it, or they did discourage it, but I think some of the old hands still kept it up. They discouraged it because of

38:06 the risk of collision and there must have been quite a high number of collisions because there was such a concentration of planes going in at the one time. There was absolutely no formatting like the Americans did by day. It wouldn’t have been possible. The Americans had a lead navigator and

38:36 they all followed that particular plane but with us it was each individual navigator working out his own way to the target so that we used to feel encouraged when we could feel slipstream. We felt we were in with the mob. We weren’t away isolated somewhere because an isolated plane is the one apt to be shot down. This, later on when I went into air traffic control, it seemed so strange that we were applying separation to keep aircraft away from each other. We rather liked being in with the crowd.

How many would there be?

39:00 On those early raids they would number – the first flap was to Cologne – a thousand-bomber raid. That was just a bit before our time and all the flaps were aiming to put a thousand planes over Germany. That’s why they were

39:30 using these clapped out old planes, just for the – I suppose the public relations effort, just propaganda and it was a very bold strike to get a thousand planes over Germany. They did do it for Cologne. I think the later ones were more like eight or nine hundred. It was a lot of planes at that stage of the war.

So as you were flying to a mission, how many planes could you see around you at any one time?

40:05 Sometimes you couldn’t see any but when you got to the target you saw their black shapes because there were no navigation lights. You saw their black shapes below and above and at your own level but sometimes you might go all the way to the target without seeing anyone. So that always made the

40:35 pilots very uneasy. “Are you sure, navigator?” And of course you could never be quite sure because you had very little to go by in your navigation. At that stage with the Wellingtons we didn’t have the radar AG which we had on the squadron so you were mostly working by dead reckoning and

41:05 hoping the bomb aimer would be able to recognise a bend in the river or something like that but it was very difficult for him because often there was cloud between him and the ground that he might just get patchy views of

41:35 what was going on below. I found the best indicators of where we were were the enemy flak dispositions. Though if the bomb aimer or Geoff himself said there’s a big concentration over to the left and by my dead reckoning I’d say, “Oh Amsterdam,” and the second one would be Rotterdam so you’d get to know them. You’d have them all marked on your chart. That was something the navigators did at briefing. With red crayon put in these patches of flak disposition. Tape 8

Don, I was just interested, you said that Geoff wanted to get down early and get the best plane. Was there a plane you used to fly mostly? Did you have a favourite plane, a lucky plane? Did that happen?

00:36 Later on it did but when we were at Lichfield we flew different planes on different days and Geoff got to know quite a range of planes on our cross country exercise in training so that he was able to get a good idea on which

01:06 were reliable and good to fly so that on that night it was the one he went for. I think it was a Robert and I remember him saying, “It’s the best of a bad lot.”

And did you have nicknames for the planes?

01:33 No. We didn’t but I know some did. I can’t readily remember what they were and they painted various insignia on their planes. One practise that was carried out was that you put a bomb on for each of your completed raids,

02:03 except in the case of Italy which didn’t warrant a bomb. They put ice cream cones. I don’t know if that was general but that’s what we did.

You’d paint these on the side of the plane?

Yes. Just below the pilot’s window and the planes were always known – or the crews and the planes were always known. That’s Madden’s kite or that’s

02:33 Berry’s kite. I can still remember Berry used to fly K. Kitty and Madden used to fly BB and so on and you associated these identification letters with the skipper whose crew flew them.

So if you were flying and you saw another plane shot down, would you know who was in that plane?

02:53 Very seldom. It never happened to us. We never knew who it was. Sid Cook saw a horrifying sight over the target, over Berlin, one night when he was trying to identify who it was because the whole of the side of the plane

03:23 from underneath the rear turret and where the squadron identification was, all that had been shot out. He could just get one letter of it. He couldn’t tell what squadron it came from and a fighter was flying alongside it and then it caught fire and the fighter shot it down and Sid said the fighter could have

03:53 shot it down at any stage but he said, “I think he was waiting for the men to bale out.” And he wondered if there was still a little bit of chivalry left. The fighter destroyed it altogether at the last minute. It was apparent that no one was going to get out anyway.

Did each man have a sort of lucky ritual?

04:14 Oh yes. Yes. Now this took all sorts of forms. It was fairly simple with me. I just had that photograph I showed you of Nell with my family on the opposite side and that just sat on my table. Geoff had a tiny little cloth doll

04:44 called Nunk Nunk. I don’t know where the name came from which he used to hang just above the windscreen and he and Doug used to religiously kiss that thing’s backside after a successful trip. Now I remember a WAAF giving

05:14 Geoff a scarf to wear on operations and we had such a bad trip that he threw it out. We were having a very rough time so he just opened the window and threw it out. I would go to the length, if we’d had good trips, I’d go to the length of doing everything precisely in the same way as we’d done before. I’d lean my bicycle against the same post – all that crazy sort of stuff. I remember a

05:44 friend of mine who became a life long friend, Brian Stoker, he was very much the English public school boy and a giant of a youngster and we borrowed their plane one night because our BB wasn’t operating and their

06:14 plane was T for Tommy. He said, “Now, you’ll find painted by the rear turret ‘Yehodie’ and I said, “Who’s Yehodie,” and he said, “You’ll see him there. He’s painted there. He’s unmistakable.” Your gunners must rub his belly or you won’t come back and he said, “Now you’ll find a horseshoe over the navigators table. You’ve got to rub it over the table.” And so I went in and I

06:44 saw this great horseshoe. I remember wandering what it was doing to the compasses and it was wired in. I undid all this wire and rubbed the horseshoe over the table. When I told Stoker after our return, he said, “You’ve done a dreadful thing. I meant rub the horseshoe with your hand. 07:14 The horseshow hanging over the table. I didn’t mean to rub the table with it.” So there were all these crazy procedures that men really came – not exactly to believe in. They knew they were being fools but somehow it helped morale a bit or thought you were placating lady luck in some way.

You said Geoff had a doll? What kind of a doll was it?

07:33 It was only a thing – a little cloth affair – only about three inches long. But he and Doug were very careful to kiss its backside after it had brought us through a bad operation.

Did men write letters, did they ask other men to take care of things if they didn’t come back?

08:03 I didn’t have the experience of men asking me to deliver letters but I did have men ask me if I could get some of their stuff home if they were lost and in a couple of cases I did do that because some of them lacked faith in the RAF

08:33 getting them home. By and large the RAF did their level best. After an operation you would see what they call the committee of adjustment – which was a sort of a euphemism. They used to come around and they’d take all a

09:03 fellow’s belongings and put them in his kit bag. One of the last things to go in was his girlfriend’s photograph and off that would go and it would all be sent home. Now they were very careful if there was anything that showed that a man had been doing something that was shameful, they would conceal

09:33 that from the families. But I did get diaries – I think Max Bryant’s diaries. They were sent to me. He was lost on a Pathfinder squadron and they were sent to me by either George Loader or Harry Wright – two of the men we trained with. And his camera. I used his camera for a time and then brought it out and gave it to his brother. So there were things like that.

I read in your book where a couple of times men were lost and then they turned up?

10:10 That’s right. Well three navigators turned up on 103 squadron in our time. I mentioned two of them before – Dizzy Spieler and I can’t remember his

10:40 name and there was a third one who entered the mess like a ghost and said, “Has anyone seen my greatcoat? I left it hanging here before I went missing?” It was quite an extraordinary apparition and he had escaped or walked out as we used to say and ... Gordon Mellor – I’ve seen him at

11:10 reunions in relatively recent years. He’d come through a lot in that in training at Lichfield their plane had crashed near Trent Valley railway station and he had got out of that.

You said in the book they were forbidden to tell you if they wandered out, why was that?

11:31 Where men had been helped by the underground, they were always afraid of names being made known and getting back to the Germans because of the reprisals carried out so that was the basic reason.

You mentioned also there was the plane crash and there were the burials in the village. What would happen. Presumably there was not always a lot of the person to retrieve.

12:15 No that’s true but they would still have a coffin as a token I suppose. Just a link with the way things were done in a civilised situation. But that’s very true. There was nothing much in some of them. Others though they might have – although killed they mightn’t have been very much marked at all.

And would there be services for the men who hadn’t come back? How did you all attend?

12:55 No there were never any commemorative services. No I think that would have been a bit too harrowing in the circumstances. It would have been counter productive as far as morale was concerned. We did have very

13:25 effective little services I attended the Anglican padre’s services quite often. Always left my diaries with him in the hope that he would get them home to my parents. Oddly enough my parents never read them when I did get them home. They were just glad to have me back and didn’t bother about the diaries. What was your original question?

Whether you had commemorative services.

13:55 No. But we did have these very abbreviated form of Anglican service before operations and the other padres also did that but you were libel to be interrupted by calls to go to aircraft and ... But they were helpful. They were

14:25 in my case anyway. You had the experience or I had the experience on take off – I have written about this – Geoff would be lined up all ready to go and he would say, “Everybody okay?” and we’d all say yes, and then Doug

14:55 would say, “You’ve got your green skipper.” He had a better view from his window and it was all done on lights. We weren’t communicating with control at all because the enemy was listening all the time and Geoff would just say, “Here we go then.” I described how you line up and see this runway 15:25 of lights going into the distance. That moment of take off was a tremendous moment of bonding and a kind of realisation you were existing above yourself or apart from yourself and even death seem as daunting as it did at normal times and then that would pass and you’d all get on with your various

15:55 jobs. A number of people have remarked to me on that particular moment, as you left the earth. There was just this not only bonding but a lift to the spirit some how. Not very well described but that’s what I think it was.

Was it a sort of exhilaration?

16:04 No, it was a calm, just a few moments of calm. One man told me he used to recite the 23rd Psalm to himself but I was just conscious of the crew as an

16:34 entity – almost one kind of organism and just moments of calm. But of course that could be shattered as on one night we had an engine fail on take off with a full bomb load and Geoff did a superb bit of flying. There was a shallow valley directly ahead of us and he put the nose down and got up

17:04 enough speed to fly and rose up out of the valley and down in the valley was the town of Brigg and the fire brigade turned out as we learned later and we just had to drop our main bomb in the North Sea and come back in. It was an engine Geoff had reported as faulty before.

So at times like that and times with the flak when it’s quite stressful, were there moments when the crew would get short with each other?

17:35 No they didn’t. Not our crew. No, and we cut chatter to a minimum. Now I remember one night when we were attacked by a fighter and Frank Holmes who was Lincolnshire lad, he was giving instructions to Geoff and when

18:05 we’d got out of the situation Geoff said – we were still in a lot of flak and so on – I remember Geoff saying, “Frank you must speak slowly and distinctly because I cannot understand you.” And Frank said, “Yes, Geoff.” I think he was more awed by what Geoff had said than by the flak.

You were saying yesterday about the class distinction and that there wasn’t really one but you did say that Geoff was ...

18:44 That was Arthur Browett when Geoff first asked him if he’d like to fly with us and he accepted and then he offered to carry Geoff’s case which shocked Geoff. I don’t suppose he actually dressed him down but he said, “You didn’t do that and that was totally un-Australian,” and as I said yesterday we – he

19:14 became more Australianised than the rest of us. He’s been out here. He stayed with us – he and his wife – for six weeks. He would have liked to have lived out here. Both he and Frank, but Frank was killed later on. Arthur’s wife didn’t want to leave Nottingham.

What would you wear to fly? Was it hot?

19:42 Well the clothing differed completely. Geoff wore a pair of heavy fleece lined boots which were really my boots. They were issued in Canada but I didn’t need them. And an Irwin jacket – a fur lined Irwin jacket and of course we all had our helmets and he had the battle dress underneath the

20:12 Irwin jacket. Over the top of that he’d have a Mae West [inflatable life jacket] – we all would have a Mae West. Over the top of that again was our parachute harness so we were very very cumbersome in our movements. Except for the wireless

20:42 operator and the navigator. We just wore street clothes. I don’t know what other fellows wore but that’s what we wore because the heat outlet was underneath the wireless operator’s seat and we would be much too hot if we wore a lot of that flying gear.

What does the battle dress consist of?

21:02 A battle dress is just a blouse of serge buttoned up the front and a pair of matching trousers. That’s what we wore most of the time around the station. I always carried in the draw of my desk a beret that had been on issue in our

21:32 initial training and I thought it might be handy if I had to escape but the wireless operator and navigator just wore street clothes. And a Mae West

22:02 and parachute. Well the Mae West was a bit like a sleeveless sweater in a way with tapes to fasten it. They have life jackets on planes even these days. That’s what it was and it was inflatable if you pulled the tag. You were warned not to pull the tag before you got out of the aircraft because you’d

22:32 jam in the door. And it was named after the voluptuous actress of course and in TM she expressed her pride in having had them named after her and the parachute harness came up between the legs and fastened at a central big clip. It came over the shoulders into the same big clip and by knocking that you could release it and get out of it. Was it difficult moving around the plane?

23:06 Yes it was. Now getting into the Lancaster – there was a preferred way of going in. The man who was going farthest into the plane, best that he went in first. Rear gunner it didn’t matter. He was all on his own – poor bloke.

23:36 But the bomb aimer, desirably the bomb aimer went in first and went in right down to the nose. Then the skipper who went up to his seat and then the engineer sat beside him then the navigator who was behind them both and then the wireless operator who was near the navigator and then the mid upper

24:06 gunner who was mid way down the fuselage. And apart from the two gunners all the rest of us were on the forward side of the main spa which had to be scrambled over. There was a spa going right out into the wings and it

24:36 was the main cross member of the plane and we had to scramble over that. It was I suppose about a couple of feet high and we’d virtually lie on it and roll over it. You couldn’t just step over it, you had to more or less lie in it and put one leg over and then the other leg. It didn’t do to have someone else right there or they’d been in the way so better that you followed that procedure that I mentioned.

Did you take food and drink?

25:09 Yes we did. We took a couple of thermos flasks with coffee and sandwiches and our crew always carried raw onions. We loved eating raw onions and of course they couldn’t eaten until we got our oxygen masks off and there was

25:39 only one man in the crew Frank Homes, who didn’t eat raw onions but being a local boy, he got them for us. He thought we were barbarians all eating these raw onions.

It can’t have smelled too good either?

No. Of course apart from when we started eating them we’d had oxygen masks on. All you smell is oxygen but admittedly when you took those off to eat, yes it did stink and created a great deal of wind into the bargain.

Was there a toilet on the plane?

26:17 There was a toilet called the elsan – E-l-s-a-n – which was right down near the back and I remember in training every now and then there were antics of someone had gone there and Geoff would throw them off the seat by throwing the plane about a bit. Sometimes Doug would fly while Geoff went

26:47 back and it was all he could do to squeeze past the back of my – I had a swivel chair – very comfortable swivel chair and he would invariable press my face onto the chart with a cold hand and he’d say, “It’s nice and warm in here. It’s cold out there.” And I would curse him because I’d be trying to

27:17 work and coming home when Geoff would say, “We’ve crossed the enemy coast navigator,” and our nose would go down and we’d begin to feel relief but we knew we still had to be alert and I was very intent on where we made a land-fall. Sometimes I stuck out to Norfolk because it stuck out so far. And

27:47 Graham Briggs, the wireless operator would put the damn thermos flasks on my desk and I’d curse him and he’d say, “I could find my way home myself from here.” But you still had to be alert because the fighters would follow

28:17 you and on our last operation we were flying pretty high – I’ve forgotten how high – and Frank Holmes was complaining about the cold and Geoff was saying, “We’re staying up here until I think it’s safe to descend,” and then there was a sudden stream of traceable right over the top of the cabin and the cockpit and Geoff dived down and suddenly it hit him. He said, “Did you do that, Holmes?” And Frank said, “I’m nice and warm now.”

You talked about wearing oxygen masks, I remember reading about a bit of macho stuff going on.

29:04 Yes, but very rarely I should think on operations because they took us into decompression chambers – our two doctors and we sat on either side of this decompression chamber, there were four of us, facing each other. I had Harry Wright opposite me and that particular side went without oxygen and

29:34 we had oxygen and I’ve forgotten what height we went up to – about 25.000 feet and what we were asked to do was quite simple. I can remember it to this day. Multiply 123 by 321. And so Harry was writing away and working

30:04 it out and then I noticed he reached the end of the page and began writing on his trouser leg. I began laughing at him and he could see me laughing and he was looking so hurt and so they brought us back to normal and Harry learned what he’d been doing and he was quite dismayed and it was a very good lesson and so then it was reversed and Harry was sitting opposite me

30:34 and I remember hearing the doctor,s voice saying, “Charlwood, do you need oxygen?” And I said, “I think I’m managing all right,” and he said, “Feel for your connection,” and it was connected. That was a remarkable experience. A sort of halting of time. I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious until

31:04 they plugged me in. That was a tremendous lesson. So no, we never fooled about with oxygen but I do remember one night when – something to do with the rotating of the turret, I don’t know how it happened but it cut Arthur Browett’s oxygen line. Geoff woke up to the fact that what he was saying wasn’t making sense. He sent Doug down with a portable oxygen bottle which

31:34 lasted ten minutes and I don’t know how Doug did it because he was down there for more than ten minutes and he had to pull Arthur out of the turret and get him an emergency bottle and then Geoff descended and we couldn’t get the oxygen going in the rear turret and we headed for home and Geoff got an awful dressing down over that. But the doctor did say if he hadn’t descended Arthur would have lost his life. So that’s all Geoff needed to hear.

On that point, you mentioned before it was a public relations thing you had to get all these planes in the air and when pilots turned back sometimes they were reprimanded.

32:13 Oh yes, we had a wing commander who would castigate men even when there was a very good reason for turning back. But they had their job to do. They were also under pressure from people senior to them. Thankless task

32:43 being a wing commander but there was an excellent wing commander – an Australian named Doubleday who died recently in Sydney and I remember him saying, “I’d rather leave men to defeat than kick them to victory,” which I thought was spot on.

That must have been frustrating for the men, for the pilots?

33:04 Yes. Now I never had to face up to that. Geoff went always went in with Doug – the engineer, but they copped some dreadful blasts. Geoff said, “Are you implying that my crew is yellow?” and he said, “I nearly jumped on his

33:34 table and clouted him.” He would have been in prison after such a thing as that. He was a pretty hot tempered sort of fellow and our wing commander was very poor at handling men but a very brave man in himself. And he had the theory if you saw a burst of flak, it wouldn’t come in the same place twice. He’d move over to where it was. I don’t think the crews he flew with shared his views on that.

Talking about light and heavy flak, what distinguishes flak?

34:10 Well the light flak is from such guns as the Bofors guns, they were rapid fire and just came out in a stream and to look at them is like watching water

34:40 coming from a hose. It was tracer and you could just see it brilliantly whereas the heavy flak used to burst at a very much higher level and you could see them coming up and then you’d see them burst perhaps nearby so you got a pretty good idea of where they were going to burst before they actually did burst. That is if you were outside and looking and mostly I wasn’t.

So when you were able to view them what did it sound like?

35:15 I remember thinking they sounded like the bark of an enormous dog. They were just an explosion and sometimes a rattle of the bursting pieces hitting you. I haven’t mentioned the G.

35:46 This was a very good navigational aid brought in and we were put onto it on the squadron and we were instructed on its use by Canadians. Nearly all the chaps instructing it were Canadians. And it allowed us to get two position

36:16 lines – we used a chart which they called them lattice charts. They were covered with lines and intersecting lines and from your G set – which was just to the navigators right. It had a dial on it – I remember Doug saying, “Where’s your television of the future?” And you’d get two readings for one

36:46 line or the other line or between the lines and then you drew those in between the lattice lines because you might lie somewhere between the lattice lines and you’d get a cross and that was precisely your position and at first they could do this over Germany. But it didn’t last long at all. By the time we

37:16 went, as soon as you reached the Dutch coast it was jammed and a lot of false signals were coming up. What we used to call ‘grass’, and at first in this grass you could see your little signal and you’re still trying to get at and of course this concentration on watching this bright display and trying to read

37:46 the signals and the fact that you were travelling sideways – the navigator was side on to the direction of travel – and the fact that the pilot was weaving, a lot of the navigators suffered from air sickness which is hardly surprising and of course the brightness of the chart, the glare of the chart was another factor that brought it on.

Why did you call it grass?

38:01 Well that’s what it looked like. It looked like a high grass. It was green but it obscured these signals you were trying to find. It got that way there was just no hope of finding it. You just gave it away.

So it was useful initially?

38:23 Yes, but not in our time. I do remember on the night that we were shot up over Esbjerg when Max Holmes was wounded, I was able to get it all the way

38:53 to the Danish coast and fortunately ours was shot up and the G was unusable after that. I found the bit of paper I had all the readings – the outbound readings – and I was able to direct Geoff from these readings, sort of reading it backwards and that really got us out of that situation.

As you went on as a navigator you must have learned some tricks?

39:18 Yes. You did but the main one was becoming very familiar with the disposition of flak and knowing where the various towns were. I’ve forgotten them all now but I was very familiar with them then and of course there they were marked on my chart. And every now and again you’d get

39:38 two such towns lining up which meant you had a position line – you just ruled a line from one of those towns through it and extended it on and you knew you must be somewhere on that line and if you could get something else to give you a cross position line, you had roughly an idea of where you were.

Was there a hierarchy – a sense of someone’s job being more important than some one else’s?

40:17 No. Not in our crew. There might have been in some crews. I have heard of RAF crews, more particularly in coastal command, where they’d call the skipper Sir, but I can’t imagine that every having happened in our crew. They were very strongly bonded we all looked up to Geoff but he didn’t impose any outward discipline at all. It was – it just sort of came about in a very natural sort of way.

Tape 9

Don, you mentioned that you used ice cream cones for Italian targets, why was that?

00:36 Well they didn’t offer the resistance that the German offered. We got down to – I’ve forgotten whether it was Milan or Turin – and there was a tremendous concentration of searchlights and of flak and it looked every bit

01:06 as bad as the German targets but when the first bombs began to fall the searchlights were just left stationary and most of the flak ceased. We – I know I felt a sense of guilt. The crew could even see individual buildings

01:36 and so on. The resistance was very poor. But as against that was the long journey to get there and to get back and it called for skilful handling of the fuel by the engineer to ensure that you had plenty to get back and a good deal depended too on the navigator not straying too far away and lengthening the

02:06 journey which I did one night and when I thought we were coming up to the English Channel, near its narrowest point, we were in fact down on the

02:36 Cherbourg Peninsular and fortunately I think G came on and I was able to use it and I realised where we were and by that time, Geoff had said, “There’s an island coming up,” and I forget whether I said Jersey or Guernsey. I do remember Arthur Browett saying they send all the old geris [geriatrics] there, as if that would be all right, and then we were just boxed in flak. And Geoff really put

03:06 the nose down and dived out and then he said very complainingly, “There’s another island coming up, navigator,” and I said, “That’s England.”

When you say he would have to control the fuel, how would he do that?

03:15 Well he had control of whether it was a rich mixture or lean mixture and he and Geoff worked very closely in that. I don’t understand the business of fuel control but we knew that Doug was very skilful at it and was able to

03:45 nurse the plane along with the right mixtures and getting in the right supplies. The fuel tanks were in the wings. We were very dependent on a long trip on Doug doing that.

You were describing then in Italy you could actually see the buildings, was that uncommon?

04:10 Well usually over German targets you could see patterns of streets but I think not only were we early on the attack in Milan and Turin but I think the air was perhaps clearer. There hadn’t been all the bursting flak after all. There

04:40 was less commotion going on and not many bombs had gone down so we got a pretty clear view. I remember having quite a twinge over bombing a place like this. It just seemed if we were doing this to them they should be doing something to us to protect themselves but they were doing very little.

What would it look like when a bomb would hit the ground?

05:11 Well I was never able to tell which was our bomb – you couldn’t, unless in exceptional circumstances you might. You had a camera set to take a photograph of where your bomb fell and this allowed them to make a mosaic of strikes. And that meant that from the time bomb aimers said, “Bomb’s gone”

05:41 the pilot had to run straight and level for the next ten seconds. And that wasn’t very easy because you were right over the point of aim with a lot of flak coming up but we always took care to do that but you could never – I was never aware of which was our bomb.

What did it look like? If it was your bomb or someone else’s bomb?

06:15 It was a horrific picture. It was hard to imagine human life existing there and I think we shut out of our minds what we were doing. Mind you quite a lot of the RAF chaps who had been in the blitz – one of our pilots had lost his entire family in Liverpool. I think they felt they had this coming to them.

Can you describe the image as a bomb explodes?

06:53 No you see you’re too high. You’re up at 22,000 feet. Some of the big explosions you could see – I don’t know how to describe them – compression rings going out and big explosions. You’d see individual cookies, as we

07:23 called them, 4,000 pounds, going up in a big flash. One night over Wilhelmshaven we saw I think a mine dump go up and everything became as bright as day just for an instant and it was imprinted on our eyes, the scene over the target. There were all these bombers, some close, some farther away and then it was dark again. Everyone reported that great flash when they got home. I think it was a mine dump.

So were the compression rings white?

07:59 I think they were pale. I wouldn’t say they were white. They were certainly – you certainly could see them. I can’t call them colourless but they were a pale colour and they went out in a series of rings. That happened on a few big explosions.

Let’s just double back to the navigator briefing. You spoke before about getting the flak positions, what else would they give you in these briefings.

08:47 The main thing they gave you was the route in and very very seldom did you go directly to a target. You might be say going to Bremen, well you’d set off not in the direction of Bremen but perhaps away to the starboard of Bremen

09:17 so that they would be perhaps predicting that you would be going somewhere else together and then you would change direction. You might change direction two or three times to leave the defences guessing just what your ultimate target was going to be and then you were given a route out too. Not

09:47 generally directly home but to avoid fighter bases and so on but you generally ended up with a pretty straight run for the last part of the journey. You had to be alert really all the way.

What sort of language would you use to communicate to the pilot?

10:08 Very – everything would be very brief. No chat or anything at all and.

Could you give us an example of how you would communicate a position?

Well of course my directions were to Geoff. We’d mostly call each other by

10:38 name. Sometimes if Geoff was speaking to the gunners he’d say, “Watch out here, gunners,” or they might report back to him, they’d call him Geoff. If I were passing a course to steer I would just say, “At such and such a time – a

11:08 few minutes ahead – at 01.15 Geoff turn on to whatever the heading was,” giving it to him in degrees.” And I think I mentioned before, when we were going into the target, he would always say, “Course out navigator,” and I

11:38 would give him the course out just in case we ended up in confusion. I could have been wounded or killed, so he had the heading for the first leg home. But that leg might not have been the one to get him home had he followed it because we might not be heading directly for home. We seldom did. We had a heading out but Geoff used to have a good look at my chart before ever we set off to print on his mind the way we would come in and the way

12:08 we would come out.

And he’d obviously have a compass in front of him, wouldn’t he?

12:11 Yes. Just by his right knee. B4 compass. The courses I was giving him were what we call compass courses. I would work out what the course would be in degrees true (true to the geographic north) but then I’d have to

12:41 apply magnetic variation, which is a plus or minus quantity and then there was a quadrantal correction card which corrected that again for anything that was deflecting our individual compass in the plane. Each plane had to be

13:11 swung, as it was called. The compass had to be swung because you’d find that it wasn’t indicating magnetic north, it was a bit to one side or the other, and this was because of the metals in the plane. All that had to be done before you took off of course.

Let's talk about the planes themselves. When you get to Elsham Woods you start on Halifaxes and you don’t speak too kindly about these.

13:30 No. Because as Doug Richards said looking at the fin and rudder, “They don’t even look right.” He didn’t like the shape of them from the outset and they were suffering from this rudder stall. I don’t understand the

14:00 aerodynamics of it but quite a lot of them as they approached to land they flipped in so we felt very uneasy about the Halifaxes. And oddly enough I find it difficult to remember where I sat in the Halifax. It’s so imprinted on my mind where I was in the Lancaster. I find it difficult to remember the Halifax.

So do you remember the day the Lancasters turned up?

14:26 Yes I do. They were delivered by ATA – they were delivered from the factories by people whose job it was. Some of them were young women. I was reading last night the account written by one of these women who delivered these planes and she delivered some of ours.

Were they delivered by flight?

15:08 They just flew them out themselves and she said, “What an easy plane to fly the Lancaster was.” It’s not very interesting. It didn’t have any vices you had to watch. There was sort of no challenge in it.

So tell us about that day when it arrived.

15:26 Yes well we saw these beautiful looking things landing and we thought all our troubles were over and it was far from the truth of course. And then we got our own and that was B. Beer and Geoff took us all up – oh no he did his

15:56 solo. Two of the West Australian pilots, he and Ted Lang, went up with Jake Kennard (do remind me to show you Jake Kennard’s picture) Jake Kennard was a very well liked flight commander and he checked Geoff and this Ted

16:26 Lang out and they were absolutely exultant about this plane. Then Geoff took us up and Ted took his crew up in another plane and on that first day Geoff cut two engines on the one said I remember and it was still climbing. It was remarkable and so we used to fly, whenever we were free we’d go

16:56 flying just for the fun of it. They encouraged that. It was all written off as training and we’d go to various parts of England – wouldn’t land anywhere’. We’d always come back to base. We’d get out into the wash and go very low down over the sea and we really enjoyed that.

Was there ever a time where you encountered enemy boats or anything like that?

17:18 No. We wouldn’t get very far away from England. We wouldn’t venture out into the North Sea.

You begin working on the Lancasters and you obviously think you need to a little training for that as well?

17:40 Yes. I should perhaps mention what it was like inside them. We had quite a short ladder that was put at the open rear door and we’d climb up that ladder.

18:10 You had a bit of consciousness, or I did, of well I’ve left the earth now and you’d be in the plane an hour before an operation and it was ... to stand up inside it was a bit like Jonah in the belly of the whale. All these ribs of the

18:40 aircraft and it had a characteristic smell which is very hard to describe. I think the dope of the camouflage and the oil and some men swore they could smell the fear of other flights but of course ... these were all new planes

19:10 when we got into them. They were angled at about 10 degrees. That is the nose where the pilot was sitting was 13 or 14 feet above the ground and it sloped back around 10 degrees so the rear turret was very close to the ground.

19:40 If you stood outside the rear turret you could look into it. The mid upper gunner as the name suggests, well he was a bit more forward I think. He might have been around the middle but I fancy he was a little bit forward. What he didn’t like was that directly under his position was the RAF round 20:10 and he reckoned it looked too much like a target for someone to practise on and then there were the squadron marking. Our squadron was P.M. and then the aircraft itself which was in our case B. And down near the tail was another marking – the aircraft’s number. I think ours were W series. I can’t remember the actual number. I do have it in my log book.

What’s the P.M.?

20:28 That was just 103 Squadron. Each squadron had its own two letters and then we were B from 103 squadron P.M.

And where were the bombs kept.

20:47 The bombs were really ... the whole thing was just a flying bomb bay. The bomb bay was enormous. It was underneath and it had this huge capacity for bombs and those – it was already bombed up when we went out to it. They

21:17 were pulled up by a hydraulic lift, the larger bombs.

The ground crew were responsible for arming the bombs?

21:25 No, the armourers were. They came along with trolley loads of bombs. Every now and again there were terrible explosions where for some reason or other bombs went off prematurely. What led to it I don’t know but it

21:55 happened I know to 460 Squadron on one occasion because it laid waste to it and everything around it and wiped out quite a number of other planes but the planes were dispersed. They were kept widely apart. Though a big

22:25 explosion like that would inevitably get others so that to get out to your plane you had to go out in a van or Dougie Richards used to ride his bike out sometimes. We were all provided with bicycles, or I’d actually bought one, because you needed them. The whole station was dispersed. Your accommodation was I suppose in today’s terms about half a kilometre from the mess and

22:55 the mess was a bit of a distance from the briefing room and that again was at a distance from the flight officers. You tended to cycle rather than walk.

Who was responsible for releasing the bombs?

23:11 The bomb aimer. Yes, and our bomb aimer had trained as an observer so he was also trained as a navigator though he never did navigate, he always did the bomb aiming.

And how would that happen?

23:29 How would ... Now I was never clear in my mind. I know he had a button he had to press and he had to fuse the bombs when they were ready to be released but the technicalities of the bomb aimer I’m quite ignorant of to this day. That’s where Blue Freeman was remarkable. He could do that job, the navigators job, he could fly, he could man a turret. Not I.

You spoke about the plane bucking like a horse when the bombs were released, would it throw you out of your seat?

24:18 Oh no. You just feel it suddenly go up or leap upward and you were very glad to get rid of it of course and then you had to go straight and level for 10 seconds and when Blue Freeman came with us to Cologne because Ted was

24:48 ill, Geoff said he’s never going through a longer ten seconds. Blue was just counting so deliberately and calmly.

Louise [Interviewer] is interested in how many bombs you took and how big they were.

25:12 Now this I find – this is what I was going to ring up and check. We carried usually a 4,000 pound bomb and a load of incendiaries and I’m not certain what the weight of incendiaries was. I ought to be able to remember it but I just can’t.

Let’s move on to talk about the Pathfinder. That was introduced during your time.

25:45 That’s right. And that led to some very good navigators being taken from different squadrons and that led to Max Bryant going from 103 Squadron to a Pathfinder Squadron – 156 Squadron and George Loader went from 460 Squadron as the same squadron as Max.

Did you know Bennett?

26:26 I only met Bennett when Howard Griffiths was making Wings of the Storm. And we went along to interview him or I just went along with Howard.

So at the time during the war what was his reputation like? 26:41 Extremely high due to he said he was an airman’s airman and he knew everything there was to know about every man’s job I think. And he had a very high reputation before the war and then he was on operations, he was

27:11 shot down and he escaped from Norway. I think his wife was Norwegian.

So how and where were you in the Pathfinder force?

27:17 We were always very watchful for their markers and by and large they did a very good sometimes I’d hear Geoff say, “All the Pathfinders have moved.” The markers wouldn’t be there but then the Pathfinder’s responsible might

27:47 have been shot down. They had backers up too in case they were shot down. One night when we went to Berlin the whole attack was put back – I think 15 minutes – and the message didn’t get through to us and we had Berlin to ourselves during that time. It was pretty horrific.

Was that 103 Squadron or just your plane?

28:09 No, 103 Squadron. Our whole squadron was there. Whether there were any lost I don’t know. We were certainly there for the shooting down really. I can’t recall what the outcome of that was.

Did you ever see any of the markers of the Pathfinders force?

28:32 Oh yes. Sometimes – well it depended on the weather what they marked with. They had ground markers which went by the code name of Parramatta and sky markers if there was cloud cover dropped above the clouds called

29:02 Wanganui. They backed them up. The kept replacing them because the high ones would drift with the wind but the ground markers were usually red from memory. They might have varied but the ones that I was in the cockpit and observed were red but they might have been different colours on different

29:32 nights. And that was the spot that we were required to bomb. Now there was always what they called – a creek back – and a lot of that was flyers hanging back, not getting in right over the target and of course there was this spread of bombing as a result and that was – they had to recognise that as

30:02 what they called area bombing. When we were accused of indiscriminate bombing it was in quite a few cases a lack of going right to the point of aim but there was many a night when it was very difficult to identify the point of aim. The Pathfinders mightn’t have marked it or there might have been

30:32 above cloud. You could never – it wasn’t a precise method of bombing at all. The Americans claim to be able to put a bomb in a pork barrel. That was so much baloney. They tried to be accurate I’m sure but they had a spread of bombs too.

Just before we move out of the planes, what was the noise like?

30:47 It’s extraordinary how you become accustomed to it. Now in 2000 I taxied out in a Lancaster for the first time since those days and I thought however did we stand this, not only the noise level but the whole of your innards are

31:17 vibrating and I thought however did we put up with it. Mind you, I didn’t have a helmet on in 2000 whereas in the days when we were flying you’d have a helmet on, you’d have your oxygen mask clipped on because in that

31:47 was your microphone to be able to speak so even though the oxygen wasn’t coming through till you got to 9,000 you had to have the microphone to speak to the other members of the crew. Sometimes you’d leave it dangling off and you’d bring it round to speak. But once you got up to 9,000 you’d hear Geoff say, “Oxygen on,” and you’d clip your mask on.

So you flew 30 ops in six months.

32:16 About seven. Well, you see we flew those two in isolation down at Lichfield and then we were on the Halifaxes and didn’t operate so there was quite a gap and then 10 days was allowed to convert to Lancasters and then we at last resumed operations.

There’s quite a lot of time there when you’re not flying.

32:52 Yes, and although you can rejoice in some ways at that time after a while you become uneasy because 30 must be done and it’s better to get them over as quickly as you can. Sometimes you’d have a number in succession but it was good to see your total mounting up.

What would you do in the times you weren’t flying?

33:23 Well you’d have to assume each day when you woke up that it might be on that night. Usually Doug came into our room. He was an early riser and he would say, “It’s on tonight,” or not on. If it wasn’t on we’d sometimes go for 33:53 a training flight because we really enjoyed that. We very seldom got into one of the towns during the day though you could get permission to go in. I went with a WAAF girlfriend I went into Lincoln, just wanting to see the cathedral.

34:23 It was strange going to our nearest town which was Scunthorpe, by day because we were so accustomed to being there by night and groping our way round in the black out and it seemed an altogether place by day.

So would you mix with the locals much at all?

34:38 Yes, I stayed at a home in Scunthorpe, I stayed at a home in Grimsby and I was in touch with both those sets of people till the end of their days.

Back at the base would the men talk about their flying experiences?

35:08 They would, yes, but I never experienced anyone talking about their fears. When we first went to Elsham Wolds we were put into a long – not a Nissen

35:38 hut but a very long hut that was already occupied by a lot of NCO’s. There were Canadians, New Zealanders – predominantly RAF chaps and they were all out when we first arrived and we were allocated beds – just these folding

36:08 metal beds and rather thin mattresses to go on them and I think it was two blankets and a pillow. And we didn’t meet the rest of the crowd from that hut because they were all being briefed for operations but we saw their

36:38 girlfriends’ photographs on their tables or chest of drawers and then these fellows all came back and it was for all the world like fifth-rate boarding school because some of them had left school and gone straight into the air

37:08 force and the average age was 22, 23, so they looked very young so Geoff and I were older than most. What was I – I was 26 and Geoff was 25. Anyway they all went out on their operation that night. We didn’t have much chance to get to know them and then of course in the morning there

37:38 were empty beds around. We heard some come in but we were conscious of the fact that not all had come back and then later in the day the committee of adjustment came around and took their belongings and there were the beds ready for occupation by the next batch to come in. So this coming and going.

Did you never talk about it?

37:55 Well only to the extent to say, “Well those poor coots must have copped it last night. I wonder if any of them got out,” and then you’d just have to dismiss it from your mind but it wasn’t long before Geoff said, “We’ve got to get out of

38:25 barracks and into rooms.” It’s no good for morale being in barracks. And so he and I roomed together for the rest of the time and the two gunners roomed together and Max Burcher roomed with us while he was with us.

Where were the rooms?

38:42 Oddly enough they were just across the road from the billets we’d been put in.

What was the process of getting a room?

38:53 I don’t know how Geoff did it. I suppose he found out whether some were available, or someone had been killed and we just took over the room. They were fairly sparse sort of rooms though each one had a pot-bellied stove and

39:23 we had really 4 bunks in ours and of course Max Burcher’s was soon vacated and we never got anyone back and we just used to use his to stash around some of our stuff and we’d open up hampers from home. We’d always take out the orange juice and pass it to Arthur Browett for his pregnant wife and

39:53 of course her baby was still born which was very sad and Graham Brigg’s wife had no children. Doug Richards married and his wife was still born – never had another. Only one of the Englishmen had a family – one child.

These babies were still born during the war?

40:13 Oh yeah. There was one raid we did when Arthur didn’t turn up for briefing and Hilda, his wife, was just so distraught he couldn’t get away. I don’t know what was said to him but Geoff was very understanding about it. But

40:43 yes I think the stress they were under was tremendous. We at first thought how lucky they are to see their wives or their girlfriends and then after a while we thought what hell it must have been to leave a wife and go on 41:13 operations. You might be over Berlin that same night and they had that to live with.

Tape 10

Don, you were talking before about it being quite imprecise the bombing, did you learn after your return how successful a raid had been?

00:35 I think we learned as much from the press. Sometimes it’d filter back but we’d have a good idea on the raid itself. Sometimes if we were mislead we’d

01:05 have thought we bombed the target and find that we’d been quite a way from the point of aim. So many of our raids were on Happy Valley, on Ruhr. It was pretty apparent there. It was very very concentrated and we had a fair

01:35 idea of the layout of the place and we got a good idea if they were successful raids.

How available were newspapers and other media?

01:42 Newspapers were readily available. As a matter of fact our mid gunner Frank Homes’ sister used to have a newspaper round and she’d bring the papers up to the squadron. She was a teenage kid and he used to say to her, “Now get along home,” She’d be looking idolisingly at all the fellows around.

What about the radio?

02:07 Yes you would – how many aircraft missing and so on. I don’t remember being specifically addressed as a group and being told how successful a raid was. I don’t remember that ever happening. Not in my experience anyway. But we did hear it on the radio and of course a lot of us had radio sets.

Was it ever a concern that you weren’t hitting the targets?

02:54 It was. You like to think that you’d done the job properly. I always had – what can I say – doubts about what we were doing but I couldn’t see any other answer to it. I thought we had to attack the German targets heavily but Churchill’s idea originally of breaking their morale – I couldn’t see that happening. They were fighting back just as tenaciously as ever they were. All through our tour anyhow.

War obviously creates enormous stresses and sometimes people would buckle under these stresses. Did that happen in your squadron?

03:59 It probably did but I didn’t ever see it happen. It’s a wonder it didn’t happen more often than it did. Sometimes men were declared lacking in morale fibre but this was something that hung over all of us but I don’t remember it ever happening in my time on the squadron. But it did happen I know. Very ugly thing.

What would happen?

04:40 The only thing they couldn’t strip them of was their wings but they would be stripped of rank and given pretty lowly jobs to do. I don’t think it was totally

05:10 without humanity. I think some were spirited away quietly done. There were cases of being drummed out of the service but the only one I remember – I wasn’t involved in it at all – was when Johnny Gordon came back from operations one night and on this operation a friend of his – one of his friends

05:40 found his radio was gone from beside his bed and I think there were two men of the same name. One of them was missing and the chap who came back and found his radio not beside his bed went to report it to the adjutant and there it was on the adjutant’s table. He had taken it and he was drummed out, stripped, formed a hollow square. I’d hate to have been a

06:10 witness to anything like that. The whole station was lined up and formed a hollow square. Button stripped off his uniform and turned out.

What do you mean by ‘hollow square’?

06:21 It’s just a square formed by all the members of the station lined up on the four sides of the square or three sides and they’d just humiliate the man concerned in front of the whole station. I only knew about that because Johnny wrote and told me about it. Because he wasn’t air crew, he was an administrative man.

We spoke before about the G, there was also the oboe and the H2S [radar devices].

07:11 H2S came in after our time. When I say after our time, the pathfinders already had it and we understood it gave a radar picture of the ground below and could differentiate between ground and water and it took some skill to interpret this. It was always helpful to find a bend in a river or indentations of a bay. I had no experience on H2S. Never even saw one. Never saw oboe. But my understanding was it was used by Mosquitoes and they flew out on a narrow beam and had a second beam that guided them – the intersection took them right over the point of aim. Now I’m not sure whether they controlled their release of bombs or whether that was controlled through this second beam. I’ve read both. I don’t know.

Let’s move on now to postwar. Where were you when the war ended?

08:50 Well the – we were in Melbourne when the war in Europe ended and I was in the control tower here at Essendon when the atom bomb was dropped and the war ended soon after that but I was already working in air traffic control when VJ Day [Victory Over Japan] came.

What did you think about the bomb at the time?

09:25 Well I thought it was a horrific development but I was just glad that the war was over and I had assumed there’d be many many thousands of men lost trying to breach the Japanese homeland. I think they would have just fought to the end but when the emperor told them that was it, that was it. It was altogether different attitude in Japan and something we never really understood but thank goodness they were as obedient as they were to the emperor.

You spoke before about the men not being able to talk about their fear in the base, did you find that people could talk about their war time experiences once war had finished?

10:35 Not many admitted accepting in a jocular ways to their fears and I think we all knew that we’d all been afraid anyway. We talked more about some of our experiences and we realised that the men telling these stories had been

11:05 afraid just as we’d been afraid but I think all that was very healthy, this exchange – this yarning together. I think this did a lot for us without us being aware of that was the case. Quite an exceptional lot of men I always thought

11:35 and to be working with them for the rest of my life was a real – what can I say – a tremendous moral support. We all were to one another. Great

12:05 comradeship. Another thing was that a lot of the pilots went from the air force into the airlines, particularly into the formation of TAA [Trans Australian Airlines] so there was a great bond with the pilots because they were all from the Empire Air Training Scheme and so were we. We were mostly pilots and navigators. The pilots among us were the chaps who’d had a gutful of flying and didn’t want to go to the airlines

12:35 and they thought it would be pretty tame after the war so they came into air traffic control. Now there were cases where you’d find a navigator in air traffic control and a pilot flying for the airlines who was his former pilot so there was a very close bond and for a while we used to have annual – we

13:05 graced them by the name ‘symposiums’ – gatherings, these learned drinking gatherings which were really a re-living of the mess nights during the war but that bond kept going. I’m an honorary member of the retired airline pilots because they’re nearly all war time pilots. Some of them are RAF men who migrated to Australia.

Did you ever return to Germany?

13:33 Yes I went to Germany in 1957. Nell’s father paid for her and the kids to go urgently to Canada because her brother was very ill. As I said earlier he was

14:03 a doctor and he died in fact at, I think he was 44 of aplastic anaemia. And they wanted us to arrive in the June of 57 – end of June, school holiday time and we left early by ship of course and we travelled in Europe with three

14:33 small girls. The youngest one was 13 months when we left and we had a clapped out old Austin and we toured a lot in England and we went over to Holland and Germany. Now it became the habit of our two girls, aged 9 and

15:03 7 I think, as soon as we booked in at a little country pub or guesthouse they would go exploring and we were at a pub in Germany and they came hurrying back to me and said, “The man here was in the air force too,” and he was. He was a Luftwaffe pilot and so they had to take me to him and he

15:33 spoke very good English and he was mayor of that village and he had an extraordinary story to tell. He had been a pilot of Focke Wulf Condor over the Atlantic and he had been shot down and he was picked up by an

16:03 Australian cruiser and I said, “How did they treat you?” and he said, “Like one of their own.” And he was the only survivor of his crew. He was a strong swimmer and he said, “They took me to the engine room to thaw me out,” and they had to go all the way to Cape Town so he was a fairly free prisoner on

16:33 board the ship. I don’t know what degree of freedom he had but when they got back up to England of course he had to be put in a POW [Prisoner of War] camp. He escaped and got all the way up to Scotland, taking people’s milk and drinking it and walking by night and finding bread sometimes and I think he was caught in a plane. He was going to try to take off and he was sent to Canada and imprisoned and he was caught there tunnelling out and he was sent to northern British Columbia and he gave up.

Did you ever visit any of the towns that you bombed?

17:07 Yes, went to Essen and expecting to see it in ruin but Marshall Aid has rebuilt the place completely – even by 1957 whereas all around St Paul’s Cathedral London was devastation still. Of course Britain got no Marshall Aid.

You talk about it in your introduction on Marching as to War, you say that your youth was more compliant and malleable than the youth since the 1960s. What do you think is the primary reason for that?

17:53 Well obedience counted for a lot. You obeyed your parents and teachers. What was it we chanted on Monday morning, “I love God and my country, I honour the flag and serve the kind and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers

18:23 and the law.” By and large we were a cheerfully obedient generation. It didn’t come readily to us to challenge our parents and our teachers and those set in authority.

Do you think the Vietnam War influenced those attitudes of the post-1960s kids?

18:40 I’m sure it did, yes. Now that you ask the question I hadn’t thought that through but that’s when the change came – came in the 60s. But there was

19:10 also another cause I think and that came largely from America, the youth culture and obedience was no part of that. I think any of the record sleeves in those days with pop singers on them with so often this leering challenge

19:40 evident on the record sleeves and that was a bit before the Vietnam war but certainly the Vietnam war led to protests but then Nell and I did eventually join in the protests here in Melbourne. It was very very strong.

So you were against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war?

19:54 Yes. Certainly were and this idea of the downward trickle of communism, if you turned the world up the other way the trickle back to the north – it seemed a rather ludicrous interpretation. But with hindsight maybe it was necessary. I don’t know. It was a terrible way to select young Australians. I think just on their birth dates, being conscripted in that way.

Do you think if there was another way of equal magnitude to the one you fought in that people would enlist as readily as they did in your time?

20:47 No I don’t think they would enlist as readily unless they saw that their country was under threat. Australia, when we enlisted Australia wasn’t under threat but in those days we assumed that we needed British protection,

21:17 particularly through Singapore and of course all that was disproved. I can understand the youngsters of today wondering why we were involved in a war so far from home. I can readily understand that but I’m very glad that we were. I think it was a terrible regime that had to be stopped and it came so close to them winning dominance over us.

You grew up in a time when the Empire was very important and very present, loyalty to the throne, can I ask you how you voted in the referendum for a republic?

22:08 I voted for the republic. I must say I thought it was improbable that it would get through. I think that’s the way we’ll move if Britain doesn’t get there ahead of us.

Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?

I don’t know what we’d do then.

22:45 So Don, tell us what we have here.

22:49 This panel is out of the port side of a Lancaster and it’s a panel that was struck by flak and has lost the one below it. Now the Lancaster, the fuselage was built up of panels of that size which made it relatively to repair and on the night that panel was ruptured like that by light flak we were flying low over Denmark and at Esbjerg, I’m not sure how that’s correctly pronounced, we were caught very low down and this was on the opposite side of my navigator’s table and about here in front of it was my talisman that I always took on operations – a photograph of my girlfriend and my family – and the

24:00 shot passed through there and behind the photograph into the wireless set, wounded the wireless operator and went out through the astro dome. Now next day I saw this panel laying on the hangar floor and being replaced and I said to the mechanic working on it, “You won’t need that again, will you?” And he said, “You can have it,” so I put it in my kit bag and it kicked around our various homes after the war, after I married the girl in the photograph and she had it mounted for me on my 80th birthday. This is not the side that was facing me of course. That’s the outside and

25:00 the inside is a pale green. That colour used to be called ‘lamp black’ but it’s not really black but that was the name it was given. A camouflage colour so the planes didn’t show up as much at night but that’s the outside and that’s where it came in.

25:45 The navigator's quarters on the Lancaster were really very comfortable. There was a good padded chair – it was a swivel chair – and in front of me was a good working space on a desk – quite a good size desk, green topped. Over it was an angle poised lamp which you could vary the height of and I pinned my chart as we all did onto this table. On my immediate left was the back of the wireless set. On the other side of the wireless set sat the wireless

26:45 operator. Now he was facing the way the plane was going. The pilot and the engineer were facing forward. I was side on so that the wireless operator was round the corner from my left hand and the engineer was not quite within reach of my right hand. Between him and me was a black out curtain which was always drawn at night so none of the bright angle poised lamp seeped outside and there was another smaller black out curtain up here covering the astrodome where if I ever took any star shots, that’s where I stood up to take

27:45 them. So that had to be covered too. Now facing me across the table was an air speed indicator and an altimeter and I’ve got an idea there was something else I’m forgetting. I certainly remember the air speed indicator very well because our pilot used to ask me to call speeds to him as he was coming in on his approach so he could give all his concentration to the landing and I would just call the speeds as they were decreasing until finally he touched down. I remember sometimes it was a bouncy touch down, I’d say, “And again, and again, and again.” I’d get some pretty hostile retorts. On my

28:45 immediate right within easy reach so I just had to swivel my chair to face it, was what they used to call the G-box. The G was a very accurate navigational aid and once we were over England we could find precisely where we were but it was subject to a lot of enemy interference when we were once over the continent and it was a great strain looking for the signal among all this interference which was like – we used to call it grass mainly

29:45 because the colour of all the signals was green and the signals we were supposed to be getting were hidden in this abundance of grass. Over my head was – it used to project star curves onto my map so if I was able to get any star shots it was a matter of determining which star curve we were on – astrograph. As the name suggests, astro – the stars and graph – to write – projected the lines of the various stars but the fact of the matter was that we had very little opportunity to use astro navigation. Had to steady up for it

30:45 and nobody liked flying straight and level when you were subject all the time to fighter attacks so it was useful on a longer flight like down to Italy. But across my table I always had my particular talisman, as I’ve called it – the photograph of my girlfriend and my family – and I carried that down my battle dress and I put it up there and at the end of a trip I’d raise a glass of coffee to them. Very relieved to be home. That’s about all I can readily recall of my working surroundings. Behind me was the starboard side –

31:45 within reach of my hand – and I could swing right around and use a drift sight – that is I could look down at the ground and if you picked up something on the ground you could turn a little dial with parallel lines on it until the objects on the ground were running along the lines and you read off from an arrowhead how many degrees of drift you had but that was unusable by night unless you were making an early take off from England and you might be able to do it going over the sea but I don’t think I ever used it by night. I did use it by day sometimes when we were flying. I think that’s about all I can remember of my actual working conditions but it was a good size table and plenty of space. A vast improvement on the other aircraft I’d been in.

Your proximity to the pilot and engineer seems quite close.

32:27 The engineer would be within three feet of me and the pilot just a bit more than that. Behind Geoff’s head was a very thick piece of perspex. In inches I suppose it would have been about 3 inches thick and also a piece of armour plating directly behind his head. He was protected from head wounds from behind. Now down beyond the wireless operator on my left hand was the main spar and an armour- plated door but I’ve got an idea they cut out those armour-plated doors later on when they were trying to save weight – give more weight to bombs than to our protection. There was also the stretcher, they called it the rest position – I never remember anyone resting on it. It was a bit of a euphemism. Anyone you lay down there had been wounded usually. That’s where Max Burcher lay when he had been wounded though he kept trying to come back to repair his irreparable set. And I had to persuade him to go back and lie down. I think that stretcher or rest position, I think that was taken out later on too.

The walls of the plane were actually very thin weren’t they?

34:10 Very thin. I don’t know what thickness that is. They’re just wafers really. Made of, we used to call it dural. I think the full name is duralumin.

Would you ever go and stand in the mid upper gunner’s position

34:36 Only on – we used to fly for the fun of it and we used to change positions. I only ever once went in the rear turret which is a weird experience because everything is rushing away from you instead of towards you and yes, I did go up into the mid upper turret – very very exposed feeling because you can see all around and you feel sort of naked. I went into – I don’t think I was ever in the bomb aimer’s position. Only when we were training in fairy battles in Canada but never in the Lancaster.

What was it like standing in the astrodome, could you see down very much?

35:32 Couldn’t see down because parts of the fuselage and the wings were in the way but on the right hand side where Doug Richards was – the engineer was – there was a blister in the side. I can’t remember if there was one on the pilot’s side. Where Doug was, if he put his head in this blister he could look straight down from there. And I often did have a look down from that window but more when we were on flights of fun over England. Not when we were on operations. I just kept too busy and there was nothing much to see except over the target.

You said that navigation became a more instinctive process than scientific.

36:34 Yes, I’m not sure ‘instinctive’ is the right word. It was a matter of knowledge of the flak dispositions but of course also you had the bomb aimer watching for any rivers, especially any characteristic bends in rivers or town on riversides and sometimes he could pick up where we were at night from that but the flak dispositions were a very real guide but I don’t remember ever being taught that. It was something that I just picked up and we all just picked up I think. I know I made good use of it.

It must have been amazing when you finally got to that 30th op and came back?

37:31 Yes, yes yes. I thought it recently as a moment – sort of a rebirth. You were given your life back. You had the umbilical cord of oxygen and intercom and you cast the off for the last time and came out of the womb. Midwife Peggy waiting outside. Unforgettable experience and the elation on the squadron that someone had at last got through because as far as I know it was 7 months if not 8 since anyone had reached 30 and they had taken crews off before they reached 30 and Geoff doubted after all his altercations with the wing commander whether that would happen to us and sure enough the full 30 was demanded of us and we were very happy to get there.

Was there a celebration?

38:42 Oh yes. The doctor provided us with a case of beer as soon as we got back and we went next night into Scunthorpe with the ground crew who were elated too that there plane was through because they looked after us so meticulously.

So every plane had its own specific crew?

39:18 That’s right. They had their own ground crew. I think each group looking after us were about 4 men, it could have been 5, in charge of a corporal and they working outside in all sorts of weathers. Just had to go on. They only brought them into the hangars for the long term overhaul, if they lasted that long. All the rest of the work was done outdoors. Pretty harsh conditions in winter.

Tape 11

00:19 Now this is the group of 25 Australians I went to Canada with. This is the official photograph before we started training. Now most of these men were killed in action with bomber command. Two of them were repatriated earlier in our training – they weren’t able to cope with the training. The third one was sent home with an ulcer. A fourth one went to coastal command and had a

01:00 relatively safe tour of operations. There are two of them were put back a course for various reasons. The survivors were Tid Barker, who is close to the middle in the front row, a cadaverous looking type on his right Harry Wright not only survived, he reached 78 operations and was triple decorated. The fellow on Harry’s right – a very solid chap second from the left hand end in the front row was a rugby league

02:00 player for Queensland and I used to regard him and Tid Barker and Blue Freeman who is up there behind them next to myself and I regarded them as just born warriors and both Tid Barker and Blue Freeman but over Berlin Tom McNeil, the rugby league fellow was so badly wounded he couldn’t bale out and went down with the plane. I think there was only one survivor from that crew. Come to think of it there was a third man repatriated. Correction – total of 3 men repatriated. 13 there were killed with bomber command. They were a splendid group of men.

03:23 These are three of our course members. Photographed on the occasion of our passing out dinner in Edmonton in Canada early in 43. These three blokes I regarded as born warriors. Our course senior who’s the man on the left – H.J. Barker with the nickname Tid and we elected him as our leader. He did a tour of operations on

04:00 Lancasters for which he was awarded a DFC. I think he was taken off shortly before they finished the full 30 but then he went on to mosquitoes and he made up his total then to 90 operations and got a bar and he came through the war but he died relatively early. I’m not sure if he reached 60 playing golf at Long Reef in NSW. The middle man – Tom NcNeil was a rugby league player for Queensland and a very likeable fellow indeed. He was very badly wounded on a raid on Berlin. 05:00 One of that crew got out and it was he who mentioned how badly wounded Tom was. He said himself that he wasn’t capable of getting out. And then on the right was Ted Freeman, always known as Blue. He played league football in Melbourne for St Kilda and he did two tours of operation. Had a DFC – should have had more than that. He was a very versatile man but he and Tom were both wild Irishmen who got into some dreadful fights at time but a great pair of men and Blue was a fellow who volunteered to go with a new crew and would adapt

06:00 himself to flying in any position of the crew, whether it be gunner, navigator, bomb aimer and he also flew it. Didn’t land it but often flew it. So they were real warriors those three.

06:24 This photograph was taken of me in Edmonton in 1942, I had just finished training and come up from Lethbridge where our wings were to be awarded a couple of days later and I slipped away and got up to see my girlfriend who ahead of time put on my half observers wing and had that photograph taken then had to

07:00 hastily take the wing off and go through the proper award of wings.

07:29 This snap shot I took at Bobbington where the observers of our course, or half of them, went for their training and we were quartered in these bell tents and one of the men I was sharing that particular tent with is Keith Webber the man on the right and the man on the left, Doug Williams, was also trained as an observer but

08:00 he became the bomb aimer in Keith Webber’s crew. Webber became the navigator and the pair of them flew with the West Australian pilot Ted Lang. Seven in a crew. I think there were 4 possibly 5. I think 4. They were quite roomy tents. They would run short at Bobbington of room space, that’s why we were given tents and that was in beautiful spring weather. Our first experience of an English spring. That crew – both those men and their pilot Ted Lang and the other 4 members of the crew were all killed.

09:07 This was an official photograph taken at Lichfield either just before or just after we had crewed up. It consists of the observers and the pilots who were to come together to form the nucleus of crews. All the pilots were West Australians and nearly all of them were killed in bomber command. The two most central figures in the front row Keys and Quick were blown up in a mosquito I think on a training flight. Going on the other side of Quick

10:00 to Bayliss, Cook and ... Those three, the first one – Bayliss became a prisoner of war and later was a well known doctor in Perth. Sid Cook was killed on his 52nd operation over Germany the day before his 22nd birthday and Doug Morphett, that was the fellow on the far right on the front row he was killed after about I think a dozen operations. Going to the back row. The fellow on the left there, Ron Pender, was

11:00 taken a prisoner of war after a raid on Germany but he got through. Sadly, he suicided much later on. And then comes the blurred face in this photograph of Joe Turnbull. He was killed in a take off crash with the pilot of this group. Then myself and the rest of that – the next three men survived but Doug Williams, he was killed. In the middle row in the centre, a rather cadaverous looking fellow, Harry Wright, he reached 78 operations and was triply decorated, and

12:00 next comes Keith Webber, who was killed, and Jeffrey was killed, and Miller was killed, and last on the right was my own pilot, Geoff Madden. Geoff was the only pilot there to survive unscathed, and Colin Bayliss, being a prisoner of war.

12:41 This snapshot was taken of our crew at Lichfield not long after we’d crewed up. Left to right is myself, the navigator, then Geoff Madden our pilot, the tall fellow Ted Batten, our bomb aimer and then Max Burcher our wireless operator and on the right Arthur Browett, our rear gunner and behind us is a Wellington 1C which we were doing our training is. We’d not long come together as a crew.

13:56 That shot is of Max Bryant and myself. We were flying partners in training in Canada on Ansons the observers trained in pairs and you always refereed to your partner and we’re in our heavy flying gear for one of the first times. It was coming into winter and at any altitude in the Anson we used to be very cold indeed. Now Max was a 20 year old law student. He had been head prefect of Cowra High School only a few years earlier and I was by that time 26 and he rather looked on me as an elder brother and certainly he was a younger brother to me. A splendid fellow and became a very able navigator but that was just before one of our flights at Edmonton.

15:23 When our crews reached their squadrons they increased the number in the crew from 5 to 7 and we picked up there Frank Holmes as a mid upper gunner and Doug Richards as a flight engineer. Now in that photograph Frank Homes is on the far left. He was a local lad and although we didn’t know it yet, he was already notorious locally because he was an

16:00 ardent poacher. He was to be killed on a second tour of operation. Very anxious that if he had to go back he’d go back with us and it just didn’t work out. The next man to him in Australian battle dress, he was with us just for 5 operations before he was wounded and had to drop back and he recovered and was flying later on again as a wireless operator and that crew was lost. He came from Armidale in NSW. Then comes Doug Richards who was a Welshman. Very cool fellow indeed on operations. He survived a

17:00 war, got part way through a second tour of operations and eventually died of cancer of the throat – a heavy smoker. Then our skipper Geoff Madden, sagging there in between in Australian battle dress and then Ted Batten our bomb aimer then myself and right at the end on the right Arthur Browett, who Geoff nicknamed Shag, much to his wife’s displeasure. Our rear gunner.

17:48 This is our pilot Geoff Madden. I took this photograph in the air while he was flying somewhere over England. You can see the GM on his helmet.

18:28 Geoff Madden and I were the only Australians in our crew and that photo of me was taken in training by Max Bryant.

18:58 This was our flight engineer, Doug Richards, the Welshman. A very cool operator indeed and that photo was taken just after we finished operations.

19:43 This is Ted Batten – our bomb aimer. He’d done training as a navigator but elected to operate as a bomb aimer. He was a London optician before the war and he was the oldest man in our crew. I think he’d passed 30 by that time. I took that in our locker room soon after we had finished our tour of operation.

20:22 I took that photo of Graham Briggs our wireless operator while we were in the air one day over England. We were flying relatively low so he didn’t need his oxygen mask on. That is his oxygen tube, that corrugated tube and the other line is his intercom connection. With us Graham completed a second tour. He not only completed a second tour he remained on for 2 or 3 extra operations to get us through to our 30.

21:21 This was our immensely popular mid upper gunner. He was a local villain in that he was a well known poacher and he appeared in court during our tour but he was excused because he was fighting for his country and his photo now appears in the local pub, much honoured. On his left collar can be seen the silver metal whistle we all carried and that was in case we came down in the sea and needed to attract attention.

22:18 This is Arthur Browett, nicknamed Shag by Geoff, taken just after we got back from a flight. Taken in our locker room before he got out of his gear. He was the one that Geoff nicknamed Shag. He was a great fellow and happily I am still in touch with him and happily the marriage which had started just before he crewed with us is now coming up to its 60th year.

23:12 My friend Harry Wright took that shot of me. His bed was just on the opposite side of that alcove and I think I was writing in my diary. We were at the Lichfield satellite aerodrome of Tatten Hills, well out in the woods and I can see what was to become my talisman that I was to take on operations. That photograph of my girlfriend. In the other side of it is the girl who was to become her bridesmaid three years later. I can even see the books I was reading. The first of them I know is The Poet’s Way – an anthology I took away with me and I think another one of them is Burrough’s Wild Wales. I was very keen to when the opportunity came to go walking in Wales and I did do that quite a lot.

24:26 We were just about to go out to our Lancaster B. Beer and I took this photograph. Geoff Madden is on the left and the girl in the centre is our driver Peggy Forster who later came to live in Australia and an English husband and named their first child after Geoff Madden. Next to Peggy with his white sweater pulled well down is Ted Batten. And then further right looking down is Graham Briggs and in the shadow of their shoulders is Doug Richards and the other fellow was just a visitor to the squadron, Curly someone and he just posed in the photo.

25:34 We took our interrogation officer, who belonged to the intelligence section, we always liked to have her interrogate us after operations. We took her on a flight and in this you can see her standing in the engineers position while Geoff’s not looking where he’s going, peering round the corner there. We all would like to have kept in touch with Lucette. We don’t know what became of her. But it’s clear there that there’s a piece of amour plating behind Geoff’s head and I’ve got an idea in later Lancasters that might have been removed to save weight.

26:33 This photo was really taken as a kind of show off photo after I’d got my commission. We’d finished operations and I’d gone back to Lichfield and my commission had come through and I’d been down to London for kitting up as they called it and all of a sudden I was able to travel first class in trains when I wasn’t doing anything operational any more. It all seemed ludicrous. And I got that photo to send off to Nell who I later married and she didn’t like it.

27:27 This is just the record of our last three operations. We went to Essen on the 3rd April 1943 and I see I’ve got ‘hottest yet’ and one on the 4th and finally we finished up on the night of the 7th. Tremendous relief to get through after so many squadron setbacks.

INTERVIEW ENDS