Australians at War Film Archive

Cedric Thomas - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 20th April 2004

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1852

Tape 1

00:55 Thank you for your time today. To begin with can you share with me an overview of your life from where you were born to where you are

01:00 now, just listing items and areas?

I was born in Brisbane on the 8th of June 1924 and I spent all my junior years up to the age of 18 in Brisbane. I went to the Milton State School and from there to the Brisbane Boys’ Grammar School. When

01:30 I finished at the Brisbane Boys’ Grammar School I went and got myself a job with the Insurance Office of Australia where I did some exams there on insurance studies. When the war started I decided I wanted to be air crew as a pilot, so I joined the Air Training

02:00 Corps and received my Proficiency Certificate just before turning 18. So I was able to forward that as my application to join the air force. I was accepted as air crew and trained initially at Bradfield Park in Sydney and went from there to Temora where I trained on Tiger Moths and then I went to Point Cook where I trained on an Oxford aircraft

02:30 which was twin engine. I received my ‘wings’ in August of 1943. I then had to hang around a bit because I wanted to go overseas, but they wouldn’t let you go overseas until I was 19. When I was 19, luckily a boat turned up in Sydney that was going to England and I was put on that boat. It took seventy-five days to get to England because it was a cargo

03:00 boat. I finally arrived in England in September of 1943. I then went into the RAF [Royal Air Force] Training Scheme and flew Oxfords again for a period just to get my hand back in. Then I went on to Wellington Bombers and after a period on those I went to Stirling bombers.

03:30 I was then given a brand new Stirling and flew it across the Bay of Biscay, past Spain and down to French Morocco. I stayed the night there with my crew and left the next day and flew to Blida in French Algeria where my whole crew and the aircraft were all put onto one squadron, an RAF Squadron 624, where we were to operate with the

04:00 French Maquis over German-occupied France. We were only there for three operations and then a Squadron in Italy had a lot of losses and we were sent as replacement crew to 148 Squadron, which as an RAF Squadron. It was quite interesting. All our operations dealt with Special Operations Executive,

04:30 which is quite a story in itself. When the war came to an end I was sent down to Cairo and told I’d be going out to the war in the Pacific. But when the war in the Pacific finished there, I was still just outside Cairo in a tent in the desert on the Suez Canal. I couldn’t catch any boats because they were all full of people wanting to go back from England.

05:00 Eventually in November 1945 we managed to get a few of us on the Stirling Castle and we came back to Australia. At the beginning of 1946, I was on leave until January 1946, I was told I was no longer required in the air force and I was discharged in

05:30 Brisbane. I went back to my job with the Insurance Office of Australia. I was no sooner back there than the air force sent me a letter saying they’d made a mistake and they wanted me to stay in. They offered me a permanent commission in the permanent air force, prior to that I was in the Reserve Forces. I joined them

06:00 and in August once again I joined the air force and for the next six or seven months expecting to go on flying and I was given all the desk jobs around the place. I ended up as a camp commandant of the Northeast Area Headquarters at Townsville. Then I was posted down to Brisbane to the Stores Depot where I became the adjutant. 06:30 Then I flew for a short period with 30 Squadron at Sydney and then was posted to Point Cook as the first person to join the Academy after the war. I was given the task to set up an Academy. If you can imagine that was quite interesting. Luckily the Melbourne University helped out quite a lot and I set up an Academy. I stayed with that

07:00 until 1950. I was then put onto flying a refresher course. And this time they decided I was off the four engines and on to single engines. So I was then trained as a fighter pilot. In 1951 I was then sent to Williamtown in New South Wales. I was only there for a short

07:30 period and then I was sent to Japan. In Japan I joined 77 Squadron where we converted to the new British Meteor fighter that they had up there. In July 1951 I flew with the squadron over to Korea and commenced operations in the Korean War. I was the first one there. I flew the Meteors and I

08:00 served as flight commander for a period and then as deputy squadron commander. I flew one hundred missions. I was the first Commonwealth pilot to fly one hundred missions in jets over Korea. Then I was sent back in January. In January I was posted to Williamtown again,

08:30 to instruct on Vampire jets. I was only there for a short period. I had been acting squadron leader in Korea and I was promoted to full-time squadron leader and posted to command 21 Squadron. 21 Squadron was in Melbourne. I should point out that I got married at about that stage too.

09:00 With all the things that happened in my life, they all happened during August no matter which year it was, it was August. So we got married on the 30th of August. I stayed there and had a daughter born while we were at the squadron on the 15th of August. Once again there comes August again.

09:30 At the end of 1954, or the beginning of 1954, I was posted from the squadron to do the Staff College Course, which was then at Point Cook in Victoria. That took a year. That was a year’s course. Then I graduated from there and I was posted back to Sydney to Headquarters Office Command in the Blue Mountains where I became the fighter operations

10:00 staff officer. I was only there for about nine months and then got posted as the staff officer to the Minister for Air at Canberra, where I served for a year in ‘civvy’ [civilian] clothes as the staff officer to the Minister for the Air. It was the first time they’d ever had one, so I sort of made it up as we went along as to what I had to do. I had a full year of that and was then promoted to wing commander and

10:30 posted to Williamtown in New South Wales to fly the Sabre Jet. After about eight or nine months with the Sabres on the squadron the whole squadron was then posted to Malaya as part of the Emergency Force up there. I had nineteen Sabre aircraft. And that was

11:00 at a period where the Indonesians weren’t too happy with us at that stage and we couldn’t overfly the country to get to Malaya, so we had to go a long way round. We went from Williamtown to Townsville and then to Darwin and to Biak in New Guinea and from Biak in New Guinea over to the island of Samar in the Philippines. From there we

11:30 went over Sembawang and back to Borneo where we landed at Labuan and then from Labuan we flew across the water to Malaya and into Butterworth. It was just over six thousand miles with practically the lot of it over water. Anyhow, we got there and I stayed at Butterworth in Malaya until 1961.

12:00 We got there just near the end of the emergency and we had four operations, and I led the squadron on the four, against the Chinese terrorists in the jungle there. After that we stayed on and participated in numerous exercises with SEATO [South East Asia Treaty Organisation] and with the United States Air Force in

12:30 Vietnam and the Philippines and Thailand. Sorry, at the end of 1958 we got to Butterworth and at the start of 1959 my second daughter was born. She was born in Malaya. In 1961 we all came

13:00 back to Australia. What did I do then? I went into Headquarters at Canberra and I was the staff officer for Fighter Operations for the air force at that stage. And I saw and helped with the introduction of the Mirage. That was the supersonic aircraft that we got.

13:30 I was there for two years and then I got posted back to Williamtown to command 75 Squadron, once again with Sabres. After we had had those for about six months or seven months the Mirages arrived from France and we were also making them in Australia. I underwent the

14:00 first course on Mirages. Then all the pilots in the squadron were finally trained and we ended up as the first all-weather supersonic day/night fighter squadron for the air force. That was quite interesting because we had to develop techniques and operational

14:30 procedures. We took the aircraft to Darwin to do tropical trials with it. Also four of us flew over to New Zealand, which was the first time a single engine jet had flown that distance without in-flight refuelling. In addition, the French came out and at their expense they brought a lot of Matra missiles, which was an air-to-air missile system.

15:00 They had no range over in Europe or North Africa where they could test these so they decided they’d do it out here in Australia, using our Australian Jindavick as the target aircraft. They sent out one pilot, so I went over with two pilots and the four of us carried out the trials. It was quite interesting. It was for about three

15:30 weeks with all these missiles going up. It ended up a very good combination, the Mirage and the matra. I finished at the Squadron in 1966 and handed over to another officer and then I was

16:00 posted to Thailand to a place called Ubon where I took over the unit which comprised base squadron because we had to set it all up and 79 Squadron, which was Sabres. We were responsible for the air defence of the Ubon area, which was virtually on the border of Laos and

16:30 Cambodia. We were responsible for the air defence of that area. I was only there for six months. They restricted it to six months because most of the people came from Australia and were married, so they said that would be enough. I got back to Australia just in time to round-up my family and pack all our furniture and get rid of some and then go to America,

17:00 where I was sent to the Joint Service Staff College in America. There were 270 students on that course. It lasted for six months. There were a mixture of US [United States] Army and it was major or equivalent rank or above. There was the US Army, US Navy and US Air Force and

17:30 US Coastguard, the US Marines and the State Department and the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. There were five British, three Canadians and one Australian, and that was me. That course lasted six months and at the end of that I was sent to the Embassy of the Assistant Air Attaché and stayed there for nearly two years. I then came back to

18:00 Australia and was put into the Directorate of Plans in Canberra and after a short period there I was posted as officer, commanding the air force base at Fairburn in Canberra, which at that stage had a Staff College, a Helicopter Training squadron and the VIP [Very Important Person] aircraft for the politicians and what-have-you. I was there for two years which was quite

18:30 interesting, especially as an additional job I was Honorary Aide-de-Camp to the Governor General and I ended up being in all the reception committees for all the VIPs arriving or departing from Australia. Then I went back to the headquarters in Canberra and at the headquarters I was made the Director of Establishments to the air force.

19:00 After about a year and a half of that I was then posted to Wagga where I became the officer commanding the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Base at Wagga. I stayed there for four years. At the stage when I came back from America they found out that I had a serious heart disease and that restricted me and there was

19:30 no more flying and virtually no more promotion. I had limited career prospects. I was group captain at this stage and I was posted, as I say, as officer commanding at Wagga where I lasted for four years. At the end of that time my fifty-five years had arrived and so I was discharged from the air force.

20:00 I was offered a job before I left the air force with the Wagga City Council, the mayor thought I could be an industrial promotion officer. So I told them I’d do it for three or four years, but no longer. I ended up doing it for about four years and at that stage I brought in or

20:30 helped to bring in a lot of big companies that are now in Wagga. There was the Riverina Wool Company from France that came and I did the work on Laminex Custom Wood which came in. There was an increase to the abattoirs and quite a lot of other businesses came to Wagga during that period. Anyhow, at the end of the four years I decided

21:00 that was enough of that and I then retired, but in my retirement I then ended up as a volunteer for odd jobs for Wagga. For example I was the Chairman of the Australia Day Committee for fifteen years. I was the Chairman of the Wagga Bicentennial Committee.

21:30 I was mixed up with the National Sailyards Convention. I looked after all VIP visits to Wagga. I also chaired all the Southern Mayors of New South Wales to work out who would run the Olympic Games on that Olympic run that they set. Finally, in

22:00 about 2000 I gave everything away and thought I would retire, which I have done. During the period when I was with the bombers in England I got the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] and I was mentioned in

22:30 dispatches. For my time with the Mirage Squadron I was awarded the Air Force Cross and then coming out of the air force and doing the honorary work and what-have-you for the city, I was awarded one of the Federation Medals in 2003. And here I am now at home.

Excellent.

23:00 So what are your first memories of growing up?

Well I had a magnificent mother and father for starters. There were three children and I had an elder brother and he was four years older than I was and then my sister was 23:30 four years younger. We were a very close-knit family and did everything together. My father was one of the head commercial travellers for Morrows which became later Arnotts-Morrows. He looked after all of Southern Queensland and Northern New South Wales. So

24:00 with that job he always had the latest car, which in those days was always something. That helped and we went many places by car. My school days were pleasant, at Milton State School. My grandmother, my father had lost his father, and my grandmother remarried and she

24:30 married a chap who had a big cattle property outside Gympie in Queensland. I can remember some of my best days were going up there. We’d go up as a full family and stay over any of the major holidays. That was great, there was horse riding and going out shooting and what have you.

What was your grandmother like as a woman?

She was

25:00 terrific. She could cope with anything. They lived on this property which was outside Gympie. It was about a four hour drive and that was the only way to get there by mail truck. So you got all your foodstuffs delivered and she was organising all that all the time, especially when we all turned up on the doorstep.

25:30 She was great. My step-grandfather, you couldn’t have wished for a better bloke. He was the one that took me out horse riding and we’d go mustering cattle and he’d even take a horse on the lead the first few times, so I’d get used to it. That was terrific that period of time. Then

26:00 my period at the Brisbane Boys’ Grammar School was quite interesting and quite good.

You mentioned that you were quite a close-knit family. What was the relationship like between your mum and your dad?

Terrific. The only thing is they didn’t use the same bedroom because he was a great snorer. I

26:30 developed that from him and that didn’t help my marriage either, the snoring. We went everywhere. Dad was always home of a weekend, but he was always away during the week. Mum looked after us and right through the Depression and everything it was terrific.

Your mum as a character – I mean she looked after you during the week?

She looked after us all the time. The

27:00 interesting thing is they bought a house early in their marriage in Brisbane. We were all born in that house. They were the days when they didn’t worry about taking you to hospital or anything like that and you had a family doctor. We had a Dr. Kelly. I always remember him because he looked after us well and we never went to his surgery, he always came to the house. We were all born in this

27:30 front bedroom, with four years in between. Mum was a great cook. She looked after my sister and involved her in everything. My sister learned ballet dancing and she became a member of the Royal Academy of

28:00 Dancing. She learned to play the piano. My mother thought it would be a good idea to buy a piano. So the next thing the three of us are all learning to play the piano. My elder brother dropped out first, after a couple of weeks and said that was it for him. He didn’t learn it. I pressed on with my sister who then started to play everything under the sun and I then gave it away too.

28:30 We did everything together. On birthdays my mother would take not only us but all our friends into town on the tram and go to the movies. That was part of a birthday and she would cope with up to twenty kids.

And your dad, he was away during the week?

29:00 He was away during the week travelling either in southern Queensland or northern New South Wales around Lismore and Murwillumbah and Grafton. But he made up for it at the weekend. He was a commercial traveller and quite unique in that he was a non-smoker and a non-drinker. And in those days to be a commercial

29:30 traveller and be at the top of the class of commercial travellers a non-smoker and a non-drinker was really something. In fact we didn’t drink, none of us. We never wanted to. That changed during the war. And we didn’t smoke and that changed during the war. It was very pleasant. We’d go to church on a Sunday.

30:00 We worked in very closely with Mum and Dad and my father and brother and myself, we even built an air raid shelter in 1939 when the war started. We thought it was a very good one. It was an underground job with steps down into it and we built it ourselves and stored it up with food and water so we could

30:30 cope with anything. You mentioned that you went to church on Sunday. Your family were religious?

30:33 No. They just thought that kids should go to church on a Sunday, so off we went. And my brother and I joined the tennis club that was associated with the church too. No,

31:00 we didn’t say ‘Grace’ in the house. Every Sunday we would go to church and it didn’t do us any harm.

Did your mum and dad also go to church?

My Mum did but my father didn’t. He was normally cutting grass after his week away.

So do you know why he didn’t

31:30 want to drink or smoke?

He was just brought up that way. In all of his family none of them smoked or drank. And I would say that if the war hadn’t come along I probably would have ended up doing the same thing because that’s the way I was brought up.

Discipline in the household, who would hand out the discipline?

Mum. She had us seven days a week and day only had us two

32:00 days a week. She was very fair.

And what was the punishment?

Mainly just a talking to. There was no strap or anything like that in those days. There was everywhere in those days but not in our house. During the early stage of going to school she’d walk with us all the way and all the way back.

32:30 Then as we got older and we’d go by ourselves she’d always be there on the front veranda looking up the end of the street at the time we were due to come home.

And what sort of things would you get into trouble for?

Actually the three of us didn’t get into trouble much at all. I think the major thing was we were so happy and contented with the whole family life.

33:00 We all played together even though there was four years’ difference and looked after one another. We never wanted for anything and all round it was a very happy home.

The Depression was on around the early ’30s, what are your memories of that?

Well, Dad retained his job.

33:30 He had the car for the period so it didn’t affect us greatly really. We sort of just carried on as normal. And when the Depression was over we still carried on as normal.

What did you notice though about how the Depression affected other families?

Actually I didn’t notice anything. It is amazing I keep thinking back that it must have been

34:00 rough on a lot of people but I never noticed it. It was a very happy home life.

What did you do with your brother or other kids in respect of playing around the area? Did you get up to things?

No, we played tennis and we did a lot of studying. My brother ended up in the Australian General

34:30 Electric which was part of the General Electric organisation. He ended up as the manager of that in Queensland. He died last Christmas of cancer. He had joined the army. He went into the army in 1940.

You mentioned that you went to Milton State School?

35:00 That was within about twenty minutes walk from home.

Can you tell me about school and some of the teachers there?

Well, the thing that I can remember quite clearly which is totally different to today is that all the teachers I had seemed to be so well dressed. All the teachers that were men seemed to wear suits

35:30 and the women teachers were smartly dressed. It is totally different to what it is today. You see them when they are on strike for example and I can’t recall them ever having a strike at school. I would have loved it if there had been a day off but they never seemed to have them. And the teachers took so much

36:00 care which I think everybody in the class and they were great.

Can you give me an example of how a teacher took care of you or an interest in you? They seemed to be really honest about their interest in what work you did and your answers and helping you if you were wrong in some areas. I had no complaints about Milton State School or the Brisbane Grammar School.

36:30 No one seemed to get up to as much strife as they seem to get up to these days. When you think back on that you think school wasn’t bad. I never dreaded going to school put it that way.

At Milton State School – you’ve spoken about what the teachers wore but was there a uniform for the kids?

No, not at

37:00 Milton but there was at the Brisbane Grammar school. Everybody wore a uniform there. My sister, she went to the Girls’ Grammar School, the Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School. And my brother went to the Brisbane Boys’ Grammar school too.

Just staying with Milton what did you enjoy doing or studying while you were at Milton State School?

37:30 It is hard to say with the syllabus that they had because you seemed to cover so many things. I loved geography and I loved mathematics. They were my two pets and they still are.

Did you have any best friends in State School?

Yes, lots of friends. A lot of them were dead now.

Who were they?

There was a Ross

38:00 Smith and Gilly Furness. They were my two best buddies. And there were a string of girls that I had my eye on from a very early age. We used to have fancy dress parties, school fancy dress parties and you’d go along. My mother was good at cooking but she was also excellent at dressmaking.

38:30 She would make all our costumes for these fancy dress parties. She would take us to all those and they were great.

Were these linked in with Christmas time?

No I think it was just once a year they’d have a school fancy dress dance and everybody would turn up in fancy dress

39:00 and they were good fun.

Do you know why your parents sent you to Brisbane Grammar for your High School?

No, not really. It started with my brother and he went to the Brisbane Grammar and then after that he liked it so I think they just said, “Righto, let’s do it.” They went without a lot of things to send us to the

39:30 Grammar School. It was pretty costly in those days but they were determined that we would go there.

One was a state school and the other was private, what were the great differences between the two?

The uniform and the teachers. It was an older group of teachers. My French

40:00 master was about seventy and that seemed old in those days but to me now that’s young. The age difference was the big thing. You had more responsibilities. You had to get there and that was by tram and bus to get to the Brisbane Grammar School from my place. At the other place I

40:30 walked to school. So it was up to you to catch the buses at the right time and to get home at the right time. It was a good school but they were very strict.

We’ll just pause there to change the tape.

Tape 2

00:44 Just coming back again to growing up memories and your memories of Brisbane, what can you tell me about your memories there?

It was in my way of thinking a very small town.

01:00 Now I see it fifty years later and it is totally different. But the trams, there were more trams than buses in those days. There were trams going to every suburb and that was the common method of transportation by tram. It was 01:30 to a lot of people a very large city but to me it seemed always small. It didn’t have many movie houses. There were ones that you could go to and we’d normally go to those. There was the local cinema which used to be very good especially on the Saturday because they’d have the kids’ matinee. They were always giving out presents and things like that so we enjoyed going to that. We’d walk to

02:00 that because we could walk there from home. It didn’t have the hustle and bustle of today. Today you have got all your skyscrapers and everything around the place whereas in the old days a two-storey building was about the tallest that we had. I remember going to the Botanic Gardens a lot.

02:30 Mum used to take us down there and we’d see it. The one thing that I remember about Brisbane as a kid is the floods. We had some of the biggest floods in Brisbane. The whole city would be affected. Our house was on stilts like most of the Queensland homes and we had one of the floods

03:00 there where the water came to within about six inches of the floor. That was a bit hair-raising. I can remember it coming up the street and it would get higher and higher. It got to the stage where people would come around in a row boat and row over your front fence and come up to the front door by boat to see if you were all oaky. One of the big

03:30 floods there the whole of the Botanic Gardens went underwater. That was one of the big things I always remember about Brisbane was the floods.

How did you cope in this particular flood that was so high with food and water and getting those things?

Well, you knew that it was coming because it was bad control of the Brisbane River. So you knew in advance that that was going to be a

04:00 flood so Mum just used to stock up with lots of food and lots of water and you’d just sit it out. Normally it would be up and down within a week at the most. So that was, as I say, one of the things I remember. I also remember the pie man. In those

04:30 days your pie man had a horse and cart and not a vehicle to go around in. In the cart at the back where he stood was a big wood stove where he would heat up the pies and he also had saucepans of potato, mashed potato, and mushy peas. We used to love the pie man coming around because we’d go and get our

05:00 pie with potato and mushy peas. Then you used to get the fruiterer. He’d come round once again in a horse and cart with the whole cart filled with say pineapples. They were very cheap in those days. Mum would go and buy the pineapples and we’d cut them in half and scoop it out with a spoon. They were things that we used to love.

How would they signal their coming? Would they

05:30 come at a certain time?

No, they’d mainly ring a bell, a big cow bell, and you’d hear it. There was very little that happened in the street that you didn’t observe as it was happening or just before it happened. And we had the drink man and we had groceries brought around in the horse and cart.

Can you

06:00 describe for me the inside of your house or the house itself? You said it was on stilts to keep it up, a Brisbane style house?

Yes, you had your front steps going up and actually it was an open veranda which later on they closed in. We had three bedrooms and a bathroom and the kitchen and then out the back

06:30 Mum and Dad built on a spare room like a family room. You’d never heard of a family room in those days. You hear it every day now but this house had a family room. We had a family room and that’s where we spent a lot of time. There were no TVs. This was pre-TV days. So you major amusement was the radio.

07:00 And as you weren’t distracted by TV this led to a closer family because we’d play cards or play various board games that Mum would buy. So we’d sit there at a night time and all play together as a family. You never see that these days do you?

07:30 What about refrigeration and stoves?

It was an ice box. We had initially the ice box where the ice man would come around. The top section had an area where the block would be about eighteen inches long and about a foot wide. That would go in the top of the ice box. Then down below was all your foodstuffs.

08:00 So you depended on that ice man coming around a lot. To keep some of the stuff cool where you didn’t need the temperature that the ice produced we had what you called a Coolgardie Safe. That was like a wire device with a little door on it and over that was a hessian bag. And you 08:30 kept the hessian bag wet and then the airflow hitting that hessian bag cooled everything down inside this container. So you had one of those and you had your ice box upstairs in the house. Then we had the wood stove and it is amazing what you can cook on a wood stove. I always remember

09:00 cold mornings and coming in there. It was always great because you’d open the front and there was the red fire going and you’d toast your bread on it because you didn’t have toasters. You’d toast the bread on a long fork in front of the fire. That achieved two things. It produced toast and it produced heat and that was made it pleasant on a winter morning.

What about during the hot summers? I guess it was unbearable, the stove?

09:30 Yes, but then again a lot of the time Mum would just cook a large roast of some description or corned beef and things like that and then we’d have salad with it a lot of times in the summer so you didn’t use the stove as much. You would just use the stove enough to cook a meal. You didn’t have it going all the time which you could do in the winter period.

The toilet,

10:00 where was the toilet situation?

Initially we had the toilet and it was up the back and that was just the old wooden toilet block that you see surrounded by vines and what have you so it hid it from the others. Then a chap would come around and empty that every three or four days.

10:30 Then we were about the first in the street to have a septic system. Off the family room at the back we had steps going down and off that a landing was built and on that we put the outside toilet. We thought it was really something when we got that and didn’t have to go up the back especially in wet weather of cold winter

11:00 nights. Down below under that we had a big copper which was heated by wood and that is where Mum used to do the washing. With the house being on stilts under the house you had all your sinks and Dad had a workshop under there. We had an area where we could play games and make things and that was quite good.

When these big floods came

11:30 how did that affect things like the toilet and sewerage?

Once you knew it was coming you brought up most of the things that you could from underneath the house but with the toilet it didn’t seem to worry us so much. By the time the floods came we were hooked onto the normal sewerage system and we didn’t seem to have much trouble with it. I can’t recall during the floods having much trouble.

After the

12:00 flood had subsided what clean up was required of the area?

We’d hose it down. There would be a good hose down of everything. As long as it didn’t get into the house and you’d rescued most of the stuff from down below and brought it upstairs all it needed was a good hosing underneath the floor boards. All the section underneath was dirt

12:30 so you weren’t worried as you are with floods that you see in some of the towns where the mud gets in on carpets and all those sorts of things. All we had was a dirt floor underneath because of the floods. Around the washing tubs and things like that we had wooden planks to stand on. So when the floods came you took them up and put them against the house.

How would your

13:00 mum do the laundry and clean clothes and those sorts of things?

Well, that was it with the big copper. The copper itself was about three feet in diameter. You notice I am still in feet and inches. It was about three feet in diameter and about two feet deep. And it was made of

13:30 copper. It was really shiny copper. And under that was the wood burning away. So she’d put the clothes and soap suds and what have you in the copper and then you had a washing stick to poke them down under the water all the time to keep them going. Then when that was finished they were transferred from there into the tubs and then rinsed out completely in the tubs by hand.

14:00 Then they were in the basket and upstairs out to the back onto the clothes line to dry them. Then Mum used to iron a lot. We wore fresh clothes every day to go to school and what have you. She was always there and she seemed to be fully occupied.

What did you know of World War I and the Boer War?

14:30 Only what I’d read. In those days we didn’t participate in the Anzac Day parades or anything like that. Dad couldn’t serve in the First World War so to us we didn’t worry about Anzac Day when they had it. The Boer War of

15:00 course was taught at school.

Why couldn’t your dad serve in World War I?

He had a protected industry that he was in at that stage. It was the same thing in World War II. A lot of people that would have loved to have served couldn’t because they were in reserved occupations.

So what was he doing during the war? What was the

15:30 protected industry?

The job that he was doing with Morrows providing foodstuffs out to all the areas and making certain it got there. They classed that as a reserved occupation.

Did you have any teachers that had served in the war?

I don’t think I ever asked any of them if they had in those days. There would have been quite a number

16:00 but the only day was Anzac Day and unless you actually participated in it you’d read a bit in the paper and that was all. We didn’t have any close relatives really that had fought. Some had been in World War I, but not at Gallipoli or anything like that.

16:30 Do you remember where you were when war was declared?

In 1939 I was at school. I was at the Brisbane Grammar at that stage. That is when they had a bit of a parade and told us all that war had been declared and that was it. We were expecting something to

17:00 happen but not with the Japanese. You could see something was going to happen in Europe. And that’s why I decided at an early stage that I was going to be a pilot because I’d been reading about the Battle of Britain and what all the pilots were doing. And that is why, as I said before, I joined the Air Training Corps.

So what year did you actually join the Air Training Corps?

It would have been

17:30 1940 I would say. My birthday when I turned eighteen was in 1942 so it would have been in about 1940 that I joined the Air Training Corps. They used to teach you navigation and Morse code and all the various things that were helpful if you wanted to be in air crew.

Was this Air Training Corps

18:00 through school or a separate group?

No, it was a separate group altogether. It was normally held at one of the schools and they had night meetings. We went and did studies at night.

Did school have cadets?

Yes, but only army. They were only army cadets and I wasn’t keen on the army.

Were you involved in that at all?

No, I spent my time

18:30 instead of say army cadets with the Air Training Corps which used to be quite a number of nights a week sometimes and then at weekends. Most of it was not marching around like the army cadets were doing and firing a rifle. Most of ours was in classrooms. As I say the big thing was I got my Proficiency Certificate and that must have

19:00 helped a lot with the air force recruiting because when I was called up I was called up for air crew.

So what was required to get your Proficiency Certificate?

You had to reach a certain standard with navigation and with Morse code and various odds and ends that dealt with the air force.

Were you taken up in a plane at all?

No, they did that a long time after that.

19:30 The first time I ever went up in a plane was when I went to Temora.

So what was it about the air force that fascinated you?

Mainly the stories that were appearing in the newspapers and over the years. It just seemed to me a bit more interesting than being in the army or the navy. You mentioned that you and your

20:00 dad and your brother built an air raid shelter in the back yard. What was the motivation for that?

Because that was when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and there was all this talk about the Brisbane line that they were going to give away Northern Queensland and just make the Brisbane line the defence line. So

20:30 when you read about that and read about Malaya and places like that Dad said, “I think it is time we built an air raid shelter,” because they had bombed Darwin and they had bombed Townsville. I think our shelter was up by the time the submarines got into Sydney Harbour. It was mainly the

21:00 talk that was going on in those days like, “One of these days we’re going to be bombed.” So Dad said, “Let’s go build ourselves a shelter.” So we went and got a stack of timber and we got in there and dug this massive big hole in the ground and built it.

Were you working off a design or making up the design yourself?

No Dad did all that. Dad was the designer. He was the manager and the

21:30 foreman of the whole job.

So just describe to me the dimensions of it and what it looked like?

It was about six feet tall and about eight foot square and it was just the one room. The intention was you’d hop in there when the air raid was on and hop out

22:00 when the air raid was finished. You didn’t need anything elaborate. The main thing was that you were underground and you had protection over the top of it. Besides dirt over the top after we’d built the shelter Dad bought a whole stack of sandbags and we filled those and then the whole top was all sandbagged.

22:30 The people who were a bit worried were the birds. We had a big aviary in the back yard. Dad had a big fernery and in the fernery was this big aviary with mainly little birds. We did have some large birds but mainly they were little birds. They got a bit upset with the noise that was going on with the building of the air raid shelter because it was right next door to their cage.

Were other

23:00 households building air raid shelters?

No. I don’t know what the percentage was but I don’t think there were that many going to any great lengths to do it. It was just that Dad had this idea. “Let’s build an air raid shelter.” There were three of us there doing nothing so we built it.

So did your brother join the army before you joined the air force?

Yes. He joined the army in

23:30 1941 I think it was. I couldn’t be certain but it was about 1941. He was serving up north in Queensland, Northern Queensland, and he developed bad arthritis which stayed with him then for the rest of his life but they wouldn’t send him overseas or anything like that.

24:00 Eventually it got that bad that they discharged him. It was finally cancer that got him in the end.

So he had arthritis during the war?

Yes.

What part of the body did the arthritis hit?

It was virtually everywhere. They think it was associated with the various exercises that they used to do in the

24:30 swamp areas. So he had it very badly. Towards the end he had both knee replacements and at times had to use a walking stick to get around.

25:00 He was always a healthy bloke. He lost an eye at school through kids playing. One threw a rock and he lost the sight of the eye but that didn’t stop the army from taking him. He was quite happy with that. He was a very good tennis player.

So

25:30 with the air force, you joined the ATC [Air Training Corps], did someone give you advice to join that before the air force?

No. I might have heard it being mentioned at some stage but they were advertising a lot. There was a lot of advertising because they hadn’t been going for long and they were trying to build it up. There was a lot of

26:00 advertising on the radio and in the newspapers. They probably put, “If you want to join the air force and fly aeroplanes here’s a good way to start off.”

So can you share with me the story of actually joining the air force and going in and applying?

I can’t remember that actually. I just can’t recall where I went but it must have been a recruiting centre in Brisbane somewhere and I just went in there

26:30 and got the papers and signed it. I had to take them home and get Mum and Dad’s permission and they were quite happy to sign on the dotted line. So, no, I couldn’t even tell you where it was in Brisbane but it would have been in one of the main streets there.

So once

27:00 you were accepted you were sent to Bradfield Park?

Yes, once you filled in the papers they then said to you, “Go home. We will notify you when you are called up.” And that is what they did. They said, in a letter, “You have been accepted for air crew training and you are report to a place in Brisbane.” It must have been the

27:30 Recruiting Centre where they gave you tickets for the train and everything else and down I went to Bradfield Park. And at Bradfield Park we were there I would say approximately three months doing a lot of the things that we were taught in the Air Training Corps and Morse code and everything like that. That was about three months there and then they

28:00 decided at that stage whether you were going to be a pilot, a navigator or a gunner depending on the results of the various tests that you were given there. There was a whole group of us and they said, “Righto, you’re going to be pilots,” and they sent us to Temora.

I presume everyone that arrived there wanted to be a pilot?

The bulk did, yes.

So there was tremendous competition in

28:30 respect to doing well in the examinations?

Yes. You knew that if you didn’t do well in the exam your chances were zero of becoming a pilot.

Can you share with me these exams? Were they essays, where they multiple choice or did you answer questions?

No. They’d be in the main there is the question and there is one answer and you had to write down the answer.

What sort of

29:00 areas where they examining you on?

Theory of flight and navigation. You had to do a Morse code test and I think it was twelve words a minute we had to be able to send. They were the main subjects. The theory of flight and navigation you became so involved with those as you were trained as a pilot.

29:30 And some of the fellows there had any of them had previous military experience?

Some of them had joined the army and they didn’t like that so they’d applied to join the air crew. And they were taken in and discharged from the army and they came across. They were all ages too. There was a group of us there right from our birthday of eighteen and there were others

30:00 in their early twenties up to say twenty-four or twenty-five.

I suppose Bradfield Park for most fellows would have been their first culture shock of the military?

Yes. That is where you got a pair of overalls and a beret that we used to wear in those days and that was our first time in. If you did anything wrong you got a session of peeling potatoes and odd things like that.

How did some fellows

30:30 cope? Did some fellows not cope with it?

Some didn’t. They’d put them out of the air crew and they’d go into the normal air force. It was quite an interesting period because you knew that if you failed that was it and you’d missed out completely

31:00 because you didn’t get a second go. We were all pleased when all the names were listed as navigator or bomb aimer or pilot and then off you went to your unit. So you were sent to Temora after that?

I was sent to Temora in 1942. Temora is the big place now where they have these air displays and everything at the present time.

31:30 They’ve got all the old wartime aircraft flying. They’ve built it up quite well. When we got there they didn’t even have accommodation for us. We had Tiger Moths out in the open. There was one hangar and one of the first things was to give us some accommodation. The group that I was with we were accommodated in the poultry shed of the Temora

32:00 Showgrounds, which are still there today. It is an old brick building. We were given what they called a palliasse, which is like a mattress, and you had to fill it with straw and that was your mattress. We didn’t have beds. We were given the ‘ WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK ’ section. So I was in the Champion Leghorn Rooster section where when the show was on you had the front door that comes

32:30 down and the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s were behind that. They had knocked out the dividing sections so that you had a six foot straight stretch to put your palliasse. So of a night time you’d hop up into the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK area and that was it you’d have your sleep. Then for breakfast – flying in Tiger Moths the best time is in the early morning when you haven’t got the

33:00 heat to worry you. It also cuts down on the turbulence. We would be woken up, and I’m not too certain what time it was, but it would be about four o clock in the morning and the cooks were outside with an open fire cooking breakfast. There was scrambled egg in a massive pot and everyone would go out and have some toast and scrambled eggs. Then they didn’t have enough transport to transport us down there so we

33:30 walked from the showground out to the airport. We did that every morning and we walked back every afternoon. That was my introduction to pilot training and I wasn’t too impressed at that stage.

So how far is it from the airport to the showgrounds?

A couple of miles. But when you go to the museum, I was there just recently, and they show you this magnificent camp with all the

34:00 huts and everything and accommodation here and the big mess tents and everything else. I had great delight in telling them that we lived in the Temora Showgrounds in the poultry section because none of them that were working there had ever heard of that part of Temora. That was a thrill because that was where you first learned to fly.

Do you remember your first

34:30 flight?

Only too well, yes.

Talk me through what happened there?

I was scared stiff. I think everybody was and if they weren’t there was something wrong with them. You got in this open cockpit and up you went and flew there and flew around and it would have been about seven hours of flying. I always remember it was the flight sergeant pilot that was the

35:00 check pilot and I got into the aircraft with him. They used to sit in the front seat and you’d sit in the back. And I always remember that day because when we had finished his taxiing in and he said to me, “Stay in the back there.” So I just stayed there while he unstrapped and got out of the aircraft. And then he said to me, “Go on. Off you go.

35:30 Take it round.” And I said, “What, by myself? And he said, “It’s all yours.” I always remember that. He said, “You’ll be right.” And that was it. So I took off and all I did was do one circuit and then came back and landed. And that was probably the best memory I have ever had of flying was that first solo.

36:00 What was the start up procedure on a Tiger Moth?

The propeller that you had had to be hand cranked to get it started. So you’d put your fuel on and then you selected your switches in the right position and then you called out, “Contact,” and the ground staff fellow holding onto the propeller would give it a good swing.

36:30 And if that didn’t work he’d give it another and then finally it would go. You didn’t have any brakes on a tiger moth. I don’t know if you realised that. You had to work it with the winds. You’d put your odometer over onto the windward side to get it to turn and things like that. It was probably the hardest part of the flying trying to keep the damn thing going straight and level and manoeuvring it around. It took a while to get to know

37:00 that.

On the ground? On the ground, yes. Once you got into the air it was no problem and you could turn anyway you liked but on the ground it was always a bit tricky.

I presume because everything was so primitive you didn’t really have sort of an air control section or tower type situation?

No. We had what we used to call a ‘pie cart’. It was like a

37:30 van, a bit like your van except not as modern. You did it all with lights. You didn’t have radio in those days from the ground to the aircraft. So it was all done by lights. If they wanted you to go around again you’d get a red light. Or they would use what we called the

38:00 Aldis Lamp. It was all quite interesting. You didn’t have many instruments in a Tiger Moth. The Tiger Moth had really very little. It was really a primitive aircraft.

Could you talk me through if you were sitting in it now the dashboard and what instruments were there?

Not really. It had a fuel gauge. You had about the same number of instruments as you had

38:30 in a car about ten years ago. You had your temperature and you had an indication that the aircraft was straight and level. In fact when you think of it all the way through that war the aircraft that we had, when you consider the weather that we flew in and the areas that we flew over, they were very primitive. You didn’t have ‘George’ for a long time, the

39:00 automatic pilot, you did all the flying yourself. There was none of the fancy equipment that they’ve got today to bring you in or to do anything at all. It was really primitive flying I would say.

We’ll just pause there and we’ll change the tape.

Tape 3

00:30 How did you take to flying once you were up there in the air?

No worries. I loved it. You never felt as though you were going to crash at any time when you took it up. You either liked flying or you

01:00 didn’t. And heights didn’t worry me one little bit. They worry me these days. I can’t get on a tall building and go right to the edge of it. I don’t know why. The same thing applies up in the country if you go to the edge of a bit of a sharp rock I get funny inside.

What did worry

01:30 you or the other recruits in learning to fly? What were the hardest parts?

The first thing was knowing that if you hadn’t flown by about six or eight hours’ instruction they would give you a test and it would be a ‘scrub test’. That is what they

02:00 called it because you get scrubbed off the course and that was it. That in the initial stages worried you. If you did anything wrong during flying you’d think, “Oh dear, I wonder if the old instructor took notice of that,” and things like that. I was a bit worried but apart from that it was most enjoyable.

What things did you have to do wrong though?

Well some of the things when you got chaps flying for the first time that

02:30 although they’d passed say all their eye tests correctly and they couldn’t judge height when they got into the aircraft. Of courses that is the key thing with flying. If you want to get back onto the ground you’ve got to work out where you’ve got to flare the aircraft out for landing. Those people had no means of control over it. There was no means of improving their eye sight to make it any better. So you lost a few people that way. You

03:00 lost people that couldn’t stand heights once they got into the aircraft. There were a lot of little things that could stop a person from flying.

What about accidents while you were in Temora?

Yes. You’d see quite a number, especially wing tips going into the ground. Once again what I was talking about was not having any brakes or anything but once you’d landed and got to the end of the run

03:30 anything could happen. Depending on the wind you’d get people that would scrape their wing tips on the ground and odd things like that. We lost a few pilots crashing and using their engine at heights and panicking and going in. I always remember a poem that my instructor taught me. One of the 04:00 things that had been killing people was when they were coming in to land and doing their turn they’d hold off bank. That is they’d try to get the wing down. Sometimes they’d do it the wrong way and the wing would go up and the aircraft would stall and go into a spin and crash and the pilot was killed. My instructor taught me;

\n[Verse follows]\n “I saw him crash, I saw him burn.\n

04:30 He held off bank in a gliding turn.”\n

I would say that went through my mind ever time I came into land even later on in the high speed aircraft. It always seemed to be there at the back of my mind – ‘I saw him crash, I saw him burn.’

Was it something that affected the other recruits when there were accidents or when you lost someone in training?

I think it

05:00 affected everybody. Here was somebody that you were speaking to yesterday and today he is gone. And it could happen to you.

What about joy flying or low flying or the kind of ‘larrikin’ behaviour you hear about. What was there in that respect?

If you broke any of the rules in those days it was

05:30 virtually the end of your career. If you went out low flying and were caught that was it. Sometimes they’d give a warning but a lot of the times they’d say, “No, that’s no good.” That applied on practically all types of aircraft and at any stage during your career.

What were the mix of blokes like that you were in with

06:00 once you were training to be a pilot?

They came from all walks of life. You name a career or a job and we had one of them. We went from people that had been at university and given away courses to join the air force and get in. We had a chap called Max Forstein who was a Sydney politician.

06:30 Max had got fed up with being a politician so he joined the air force so he was on the course. They were from all walks of life. A friend of mine was a butcher and he made a damn good pilot.

How did you mix in with that group of people yourself?

Well when I first started I didn’t smoke and I didn’t drink.

07:00 And a lot of people would go down to the pub which was within walking distance of the showground but I never worried about that. So I mixed with a different group to what the others mixed with. I was more interested in eating and going into the local café. There was the White Rose at Temora that we used to go to. And the people of Temora, I forget which

07:30 organisation it was, but they ran dances of a weekend on Saturday because of the air force being there and they were always good. It was the year of ‘San Antonio Rose’ and they seemed to play that about six times every Saturday night. So that was the one song that you heard being whistled around the camp all the time.

What was the reputation of the air force uniform with the locals and the young women?

08:00 I suppose the majority of the people that were doing the flying course didn’t pay that much attention to the young women. They were too worried about passing their flying course but the townspeople would go out of their way to help you. If you needed any assistance they were always there. They were very good. And as I say these organisations would put on dances

08:30 and there’d be fetes and odd things like that that you could go to.

At this stage you are just learning to fly in a Tiger Moth. Did you have any idea about what sort of aircraft you wanted to fly in the air force?

Yes. I was going to be that Battle of Britain fighter pilot. It ended up I wasn’t. After you got your

09:00 final test flight and they said, “Righto. You are now going on to your next phase of training.” Your next phase of training was to go to many bases that had Wirraways went to Point Cook that had the twin- engine Oxford. Then there were another couple of bases that had Avro Ansons. When they called out the names I was very

09:30 disappointed because I was sent to Point Cook to go onto twin-engine flying.

What criteria do you think they used to separate the multi-engine pilots from the single- engine pilots? In those days it was if you had a ‘devil may care’ attitude and took a few risks and what have you to them they were signs of a good fighter pilot.

10:00 I know both at Temora and Point Cook I used to get above average in navigation so I think they thought in those days that would be better to have a twin-engine or four-engine pilot that could also watch his navigator a lot and do navigation.

Is it fair to say that you weren’t a

10:30 devil-may-care pilot and you were fairly safe and controlled?

I was scared stiff most of them time and I always used to think three steps ahead of what I was doing to make certain I didn’t make a mistake whereas some of the chaps they were brilliant and they’d throw the aircraft around the sky and they couldn’t give a damn what would happen.

So what was your reaction of being sent to Point Cook on the Oxfords?

11:00 I think the main thing was that I was still flying because at that stage some pilots had missed out altogether on flying. I was quite happy and I accepted it. There was nothing I could do about it. I still wanted to be a pilot so that was it. I thought, “No, off I go.”

How did the training on the Airspeed Oxford differ from what you’d been doing on the Tiger Moth?

11:30 There were a few more instruments because of the two engines and you had brakes so you could taxi it around all right. I think they were the main things initially. They were very good training aircraft.

Would you fly with an instructor and others or was it just a two seater aircraft?

12:00 It had the two seats and a couple of seats down the back and initially until you got to the stage where you went solo you’d always have an instructor with you. At the stage where he was happy with your progress he’d just hop out and then you’d take it by yourself. You didn’t need two people there to fly the aircraft. Then later on when you were doing instrument flying you had a

12:30 hood that came over the front and you couldn’t see out so you depended on the pilot next to you to make certain you didn’t hit anybody or do anything foolish. You would have a fellow trainee with you. They didn’t require the instructor to be with you once you got to the stage where they reckoned you were safe. There were odd jobs like that that they just put two trainees together.

What is it like to be put under that

13:00 hood for the first time?

Well before you do that you are taught on the ‘link trainer’. The link trainer was like these simulators that they have today but very basic. The link trainer was a hooded module with no windows or anything. They would just put this hood down

13:30 and there you were in the cockpit with instruments and the old simulator could do everything but leave the ground. So you flew in the link trainer a few times before you went up. Then when you went up you had an instructor next to you. You weren’t worried. If you got into trouble he was always

14:00 there to get you out of trouble. By the time you’d completed a few hours on the link trainer you were able to deal okay with the Oxford in the air.

How did the link trainer simulate flight?

You treated the controls the same as you would with the aircraft in the air and as you did everything all your instruments worked

14:30 accordingly as if you were in the air. So it was just like flying an aircraft.

It didn’t move at all?

Some of the links the wings would move over and the nose would move up and go down.

Were there any other training tools on the ground that you can think of?

Yes we had a bomb

15:00 trainer. When we went bombing we would move one of the seats and a chap would lie flat with a bomb sight. The bombing trainer was in a large building which was quite tall and you went up onto the first floor and there was a section laid out where you could lie down with the bomb sight

15:30 and then underneath you had the ground moving. There was a big map of an area and your target would appear up and then you’d press the button to release the bombs. What that would do was take into account the distance you were from the target, the height you were from the target and you’d set a timing device once you pressed the bombs away and 16:00 you’d fly on until you were where the bomb would be. Then you could look down and see whether you’d hit the target or not.

It sounds like a complex piece of machinery?

It was complex for those days, yes.

Were there any sound effects or lights?

No. No sounds effects at all.

What other training did you get apart from flying? Did you do bomb aiming yourself?

Yes. You did navigational trips and you had to do the

16:30 lot. As a pilot you were still captain of the aircraft so you were responsible for navigation. There was instrument flying and the bombing exercises you’d go on and the navigation exercises. You’d go out say for two hours and they’d give you a route to fly and you’d go and fly that.

What things did you learn about navigation? What techniques were you using?

Well you

17:00 had a hand-held computer to work out your course to fly and all that stuff because of the affect of wind on the aircraft and your speed above the ground. From that you could work out exactly where you were and how long you were going to be before going to the next place.

Was this dead reckoning?

Yes. It was dead reckoning. I enjoyed it very much, the navigation.

17:30 After the qualification on twin-engine aircraft what happened then? Did most people get sent overseas at that point?

Yes. A lot of people went overseas as I said before. I didn’t realise it at the time but they had a nineteen year old restriction on overseas movements.

18:00 When I finished the course and got my wings there were a small group of us, mostly now I think of it still eighteen, we did what was called a ‘standard beam approach course’ which was also conducted at Point Cook on Oxfords. That way you would go up and if there was a fog and you could do the whole circuit and landing just on your instruments

18:30 and on this beam. If you heard “dits” on one side you knew you were to the left of the track and if you hard a “dash” or a “da” you knew you were on the other side. Then you could adjust and keep coming down that path and when you got near the airport they had marker beacons and that was a steady tone

19:00 that would come in over your earphones. So I did that after getting my wings. Then I was sent to Brisbane for some leave. Then I was sent back to Bradfield Park and then we caught the boat.

Just one more question about Point Cook. What were the flying conditions like at Point Cook over the water there?

Quite good but not as good as Temora. They picked Temora

19:30 and Uranquinty and all those places because being inland the weather was good. That was what you needed when you were initially starting to fly. As you progressed say onto the Oxford you had to fly in bad weather sooner or later so it was all done at Point Cook. There were more good days than bad days.

You

20:00 had some leave in Brisbane. Was that embarkation leave or were you just told you were on leave?

They sent me to an embarkation depot which was Sandgate and once you got there they sent you away on leave and they did call it pre-embarkation leave. I think I had about two weeks. Then I thought

20:30 at that stage everybody was at Sandgate for pre-embarkation were all being issued with shorts and khaki shirts and everything ready to go up to New Guinea so I felt that that is where I was going having been posted there. However, after my leave when I got back they said, “Righto. Now you’re going back to Bradfield Park,” which was also a pre-embarkation depot.

21:00 I got to Bradfield Park and I was there for a couple of weeks. In the meantime I had got to nineteen. One afternoon they called out a series of names of pilots and some gunners and they said, “Righto. You’ll be catching a bus from here. Pack all your gear. You’ll be

21:30 leaving at…” I forget what it was – “six o’clock or seven o’clock at night.” A few buses turned up and then there were ninety-three pilots and seven gunners. I got on this bus and off we went. Now we were expecting to see a big troop ship because that’s what we’d heard about in those days, a big troop ship. 22:00 We went down to the Finger Wharves [Walsh Bay] in Sydney and that worried us because you don’t get big troop ships going into the Finger Wharf area. When we got to Finger Wharf here was this little cargo boat tied up. We thought, “That couldn’t even get to New Zealand, let alone England.” And it was eight thousand tonnes and that’s a small boat. It was a single

22:30 funnel coal burner. They had to shovel the coal in to keep the thing burning. We all got out of the buses and formed a line and we went up the gangplank. And the thing that amazed us was when we got up to the top there was a purser in his uniform and everything to greet us. He gave us all civilian tickets, ‘Shaw Saville Line’. We

23:00 got our tickets and went to another chap and handed the tickets in. Then along came a Lascar. The Lascars were the Indians that were used by the shipping companies in those days as the seamen to do all the odd jobs. There were two chaps and myself and there was this one Lascar and he took us down to a cabin. With

23:30 troop ships you normally slept in hammocks and what have you with lots of people in one area. We got onto this boat and here we were in a cabin with beds which surprised us. We thought, “Well this is all right.” Then they said, “Righto we’ll give you some supper before you go back to your room because we’re going to leave tonight.” When we went into the dining room there was a

24:00 bar serving Fosters. Unfortunately you had to pay for it. There were all these Lascars waiting on us and we went and were given tables a set table to be at all the time. So it was first class accommodation which was unusual in those days.

What information were you given at this stage about where you would be headed?

They told us when we were approaching the ship on the bus. They said, “You are going to England.”

24:30 What was your reaction? Did you prefer the idea of going to New Guinea?

No. I wanted to go to England. New Guinea didn’t appeal to me that much, but England did, it sounded better. The Battle of Britain was over there.

But you would be going to Bomber Command?

Well, that was the thing but that didn’t worry me at that stage. The

25:00 ship itself, it could with all furnaces going reach fourteen knots which was still a slow speed for a ship. And we had to go to ports where they had coal so we could fill up the bunkers with coal. So it took us seventy-five days to get from Sydney to England which is a long, long time.

One question – before you

25:30 left on your leave did you do anything special on that leave knowing that you were going to go overseas?

No. I just spent it at home.

What was the reaction of your family about you going?

They didn’t show it obviously but I knew they were worried. I know Mum was.

Was there an emotional farewell?

Yes.

26:00 Everybody was trying to keep a stiff upper lip but it as a bit emotional. All it was was that I had to go back into town and catch a bus back to Sandgate. After that I didn’t see them again for three years.

Where were the most interesting ports that you stopped on this incredibly long journey?

26:30 Well first of all we went to New Zealand where we had to pick up the cargo. And going across the Tasman Sea was a bit rough because we were only carrying ballast and we were riding high on the water. And we went to Christchurch, Littleton actually was the port. And that was amusing because they were filling the coal bunkers from baskets. Small baskets full of

27:00 coal were being transported from this barge onto the boat and then tipped into this bunker which took – I think we were there for about four or five days just coaling up. We also took on about seven and a half thousand tonnes of mutton carcass. That was the reason for the ship going was this seven and a half thousand tonnes of mutton. We left there and then we went south of

27:30 New Zealand and we were told that was mainly to miss any Japanese submarines that might be about. Then we went up the west coast of South America up to Panama. We went through the Panama Canal and got to the other side at a place called Colon. There once again we filled up with more coal and foodstuffs. Then we went by convoy from there through the Caribbean

28:00 near Cuba and then up past Florida and then up the coast to New York. We were escorted there by warships from the USA and also some blimps. It was the first time I’d seen a blimp flying and they flew over us all the time to keep subs [submarines] away. Then we went to New York and we were told we were going to have four days and four nights in New York. When we

28:30 went to these places in the main we stayed on board the ship but in New York we were put up at a hostel and that was very good. We went to the ‘Stage Door Canteen’ and we went to ‘Billy Rose’s Lucky Diamond Horseshoe’ and places like that. Then the thing that was worrying a lot of us was going across the Atlantic because prior to that period they’d been losing a lot of ships. We went

29:00 over in a very slow convoy of round about six or seven knots maximum. It took us fifteen days to cross the Atlantic and when you think that Concorde was crossing it in about eleven hours and here we were in the Atlantic Ocean for fifteen days. I’ll never forget the trip. We had thirty-five

29:30 ships in the convoy and we had fifteen escorting warships to go with us all the way. There were fogs and we had some of the worst weather you could ever wish to see. It was covering the ship the water and coming over the front and the cabin area. All the portholes had to be locked. Nobody was allowed on deck, not even the seamen

30:00 at one stage. And so that was it. We didn’t know at the time we were scared and thinking, “Any day now we’re going to be out in a lifejacket in that cold water.” We didn’t realise at that stage the Germans had recalled all their submarines because they’d been losing so many. They still had some out. So that was it and we

30:30 finally, in September, got to England.

What were your impressions of the United States at war?

I only saw it from New York and all that we were interested in there was having a damn good time. We were going around to the night clubs and trying them all. Actually, you wouldn’t think there was a war on in New York.

How did the Americans react to you as

31:00 Australian servicemen?

They thought that was great. They could see our Royal Blue uniforms and we were well looked after.

You thought Brisbane was a small town, what did you think of New York?

It was a monster of a place and with the skyscrapers it knocked Brisbane for dead. I was pleased to get out of it after four days. It was a bit

31:30 hectic and I was pleased to get back into the comfortable ship but not looking forward to the Atlantic.

By the end of that crossing you must have been sick of that ship. I imagine the journey had been well long enough by that stage?

I tell you what, the food on board, you couldn’t have had better on the Queen Mary. The food was fantastic and it was always this typed menu. You sat down and you had choices of food that was first class. The

32:00 accommodation was excellent. I don’t think anybody got fed up with the ship. The captain and crew were out of this world. They couldn’t do enough for us. We helped pass the time of day by volunteering for any jobs that they had. We would go on submarine spotting amidships. And some of the chaps that were

32:30 qualified, the gunners, would help man these machine guns on board and things like that.

What about the feeling that you were anxious to get into this war and you were being kept away from the action?

I think the majority of us looked at it the other way, that here was first class accommodation that we weren’t going to get in England. We had food, any amount, and it was first class food and we could also go and buy a

33:00 beer at the bar when we wanted it and time was our own. In fact, in the tropics the skipper, who was an old Scotchman, he’d been captain of the Shaw Saville Line in World War I so that gives you an idea that he was getting on a bit. When we were going through the tropics he got these Lascars to make a swimming pool made of canvas on top of one of the holds.

33:30 That was great just to jump into that. It wasn’t long enough to do any lengthy swim but it was good. Really I’d be lying if I said we were in a hurry to get there.

What happened when you arrived?

We landed at Swansea in Wales and then were taken by rail

34:00 immediately over to Brighton which is south of London right on the coast there. The RAAF had taken over I think three hotels. There was the Grand, the Metropole and I think one other hotel. We were put into the hotels and they were quite comfortable. They were completely run by the RAAF. We were there

34:30 until someone wanted us for flying.

Was that atmosphere tense or happy? What was it like in Brighton?

There was a lot to do. There were a lot of sports organised. When you weren’t doing any RAAF chores you were allowed into the town so that was quite good. It was pleasant but we were all at this stage dying to get on to aircraft.

35:00 We really were.

What did you think about England? What were your impressions?

When I first saw it, it was from a porthole of a ship initially and I only saw the docks at Swansea which weren’t the best. Then in the train trip across I can hardly recall that because it is like travelling in a train anywhere. You look out of the window and the trees are going by and that is it. When I got to Brighton of course

35:30 everything was on a war footing. Food was rationed. You went from the comfortable surrounds of the ship and all the food to the hardships and then you saw what the people had been going through.

Were there any air raids still on?

There were. Later on the

36:00 odd air raid would occur. They’d send one or two aircraft over but not many. It wasn’t like the Blitz [bombing of London]. That was also the time when they were starting to get the V1 rockets in. Three of us with the crew went down and had a couple of days in London at one stage but that was later on. We managed to crack the night when a couple of bombers and then the V1s came in so we encountered that.

36:30 It’s a bit out of order but would you tell us that story now. What happened that night in London?

We were just down on leave and we went to a place for drinks which was recommended to us called Brasserie Universal in Piccadilly. We went from there to a restaurant which was nearby. And it was while we were at the restaurant that the sirens started.

37:00 We spent most of the time in the street looking up to see what was going on. We didn’t go into an air raid shelter. We did hear a whistle of the bomb coming at one stage and because we were in our good uniforms we didn’t dive into the gutter. We sort of made ourselves as small as we possibly could. We went around and saw some of the buildings that were hit that night and you

37:30 could think then back to the Blitz and how ghastly it must have been.

How was the population of London faring at that stage of the war?

London then had all the buses going and cars were wandering around the place. It had been at least a year since they’d had a real air raid. They were expecting these

38:00 rockets to come over now and again but that was nothing compared to a whole street being blown up. They seemed to be just carrying on with normal life.

Back to the story - from Brighton you were sent to an AFU [Advanced Flying Unit] somewhere.

It was a Pilot Advanced Flying Unit.

Where was that?

That was at Castle Combe which was in Wiltshire. Castle Combe was

38:30 a town where WD & HO Wills had been bosses of WD and had these mansions there. At Castle Combe the airfield was on top of a sort of plateau and then down below was the town of Castle Combe. While we were there we all bought ourselves a bicycle so it was easy going into Castle Combe.

39:00 You’d go helter skelter down the hill and at the bottom you trusted that the brakes worked and you stopped down there. Then you’d go into the hotels and what have you and mix with the locals. They were very good like that. You’d always find someone with a truck that was going back up the hill afterwards. So we’d pile onto the back of the trucks with the bike and off we’d go.

What

39:30 aircraft were you flying there?

That was the Airspeed Oxford again and we were really getting our hand back in. Then I did another beam course there. When we finished that we were then posted back to what was called an Operational Training Unit and that was the Wellington Bomber. It was at that stage that you met your crew. The way they did that was they’d get in so many pilots, navigators, bomb aimers and gunners 40:00 and you’d go into the mess and they’d give you a couple of days to meet people and what have you. If you had decided that you wanted a crew you then handed all the names in and nine times out of ten they’d say, “Okay. That’s your crew.” If you hadn’t made up your mind then they’d pick one for you.

Do you mean to say the

40:30 pilot had the choosing hand there?

The way we worked it in my crew was that the night I got there – we were all sergeants at this stage. We were over in the sergeants’ mess.

I’ll just stop you because we’re about to run out of tap so we’ll just change it before we go on.

Tape 4

00:42 You were about to take us through the details of how you crewed up?

When I went into the Sergeants’ Mess the odd time and I was meeting the odd characters there was a chap from the Brisbane Grammar School who was a navigator, Bill Belson.

01:00 Bill and I were talking to one another and he hadn’t agreed to go with anybody at that stage so we decided that that was the start of the crew, Bill and myself. Then we said, “Righto. Let’s try and find the rest of the crew together.” Then we had a drink with a

01:30 Scotchman and we could hardly understand this chap, Jock Robertson, but we ended up – Bill said something like, “At least he’d been entertaining in the crew,” so we asked him if he wanted to be in it. He said, “Yes.” And we said, “Have you got any gunner mates?” And he said, “Yes, Bert Scholls. He’s over there.” “Okay. Let’s go and see Bert. So we went and saw Bert and he agreed that he’d be

02:00 in it. Then there was an Aussie drinking by himself so we went over to him and he was a bomb aimer, David Jackson, from Sydney. We said to him, “Are you crewed up?” He said, “No.” So we said, “Here’s virtually a completed crew, meet them all.” He said, “I’ll be in it.” And then we found a New Zealand wireless operator and we said to him would he like to be in it and so that

02:30 was it. Practically everybody at that stage was nineteen to twenty. So then we finished our training and we flew then as a crew in inaugural trips in the Wellington. At no stage did we have second pilots. They couldn’t afford it I don’t think to have second pilots in those days. Then we got posted to a Heavy Conversion

03:00 Unit and this was the four-engine Stirling. This was the largest of the bombers in World War II prior to the B29. It was bigger than the Liberator and it was bigger than the Fortress and it was bigger than the Lancaster and the Halifax. It was quite an aircraft. It was twenty-one feet from my eyes to the ground as you were taxiing along.

03:30 It had been built by the Short Aircraft Company and the Short Aircraft Company built flying boats. They built the big Sunderlands that our squadrons were flying over there. The bridge as they called it, being associated with the Sunderlands, was a great big platform with

04:00 windows all around it like the bridge of a damned ship. There were two big armchairs. So the bomb aimer used to fly in the second pilot position. So we flew that and when we finished that course we were told to go to this Ferry Training Unit. We didn’t like the sound of that because we thought, “Ferry Training. It sounds like we’re going to be ferrying

04:30 aircraft for the rest of our lives.” We got there and this brand new Stirling turned up and the flight commander said, “That’s your aircraft. You’d better go and fly it a few times and get used to it and check out that its fuel consumption and all its various aids are okay.” So we did that for about three days. And then he called us in and he said, “You can fly the

05:00 aircraft tomorrow morning down to St. Morgan,” which is at Land’s End. And we landed there. We went into the Ops [Operations] Room and they said, “Righto. Have a good sleep. Tomorrow you’re off to French Morocco.” We got all the maps and everything that we needed and the next day off we went. We flew at just a couple of thousand feet which was comfortable flying. We went across the Bay of Biscay and across the top of Spain and down into French Morocco.

05:30 At what point had you been given a flight engineer?

That’s an interesting one too. When you first arrive as a crew to the heavy conversion unit they throw in amongst you a whole string of flight engineers who in the main have just finished all their training courses. We started looking around for various

06:00 ones to be our flight engineer. We found a chap who was nearly forty years old. You can imagine it, we were nearly all nineteen or twenty. He is forty years old and he had been an ex-policeman in the Middlesbrough Flying Squad so he knew everything about car engines but we thought he knew nothing about aircraft engines. His name was Bill Alderson

06:30 and he’d been a police inspector and had managed to get out of the police force because his brother was the Commissioner of Police in Northern England. He’d wangled it. We were all talking to him and someone said, “It’s ideal. It’s a steadying influence for all us youngies.” So we asked him if he’d like to be in the crew and he said, “Yes, please.” That’s it. And he was from Middlesborough, an Englishman.

07:00 Was that the case? Did you need a steadying influence and did he provide it?

He was really a steadying influence. When you would go out Bill would keep an eye on us and make sure we did everything just right. It was like having another father.

Were you drinking and smoking by this stage?

I was having the odd beer but I hadn’t got on to the smoking at that stage.

07:30 How closely did you knit together in the early days with your crew?

We clicked right from the word go and got on very well together and did everything together. In fact it was hard to believe that you could get so ‘pally’ in such a short period of time.

If Bill was the steadying influence who was the larrikin or joker amongst the seven of you?

08:00 Jock, the rear gunner.

What did he do?

He wanted to organise things and he was funny in some of the things he’d come up with. When we got onto ops you had fighters in the area and if old Jock saw one he would go into his broad Scotch and not even the Englishmen could work out what the hell Jock was saying. We would all be saying,

08:30 “Calm down Jock, talk slowly.” He was a bit of a wit.

What did the different nationalities bring? Was there any tension?

No. We operated as thought we were all from the same place. Every now and again you’d have one of your members sick so you’d have to get a

09:00 reserve in for a period. We had to do that a lot for our wireless operator. Even the new people coming into the crew they were magnificent. They were no problem. We worked like a bunch of brothers. That’s the best way to describe it. Brothers who liked one another.

Just before we get onto when you arrived in French Morocco, can you just explain a bit more about the Stirling you were

09:30 in and where everyone was in this giant aircraft?

You had, as I was saying before, this area for two pilots up the front. And you walked up a flight of stairs to get into this little section, to the armchairs. It had a braking system where you had actually a hand

10:00 brake, like the old Model T Ford handbrake. It was a ratchet. And when you wanted to park the aircraft you had to pull what was the same as the old Model T Ford handbrake. After a while we woke up to the fact that if you put on about two notches there was enough air through the braking system so that you could fast taxi around the place and as you moved your

10:30 rudder the air automatically adjusted and you got a full braking system which you could do very fast. The only problem was it used to do what we called ‘tyre creak’ where the tyre itself would go faster than the wheel hub and you’d get a movement of the tyre around the wheel hub. So you had a mark on the tyre and the wheel hub and the tyre was supposed to stay

11:00 within it. It was about an inch wide and it was just a painted mark. People were told that you were not to do it too often, this taxiing. Behind the pilot there was a section there where the engineer stood. Down the steps and back behind the engineer was the navigator and then behind him was the wireless operator.

11:30 Then you had a mid-upper gunner in the mid-upper turret and then the rear gunner. And in the nose of the aircraft with the bomb aimer.

How did you communicate with each other within the crew?

It was all done with radio. We all had radios. You had oxygen because you could go up quite high so it was a mask job. In those days it was a very

12:00 good RT [Radio Telegraphy] system.

You’ve told us about the start up procedure for a Tiger Moth and I imagine it was a little bit different for a Stirling. Can you take us through what you did when you got into the aircraft? It’s a bit tricky. Before you got into the aircraft you had to go right round the aircraft and check everything like the ‘tyre creak’ because you could end up with burst tyres if you lost something there. So you’d go around and check everything and

12:30 each one of you would check something like the wireless operator would check the outside aerials. The navigator would make certain - he had a little bubble on top that he could stand in and take a fix on the stars if we were flying at night. So everybody had their own thing to do. The gunners would check their guns and check their ammunition. I used to check around the

13:00 wheels and the engines and all the movable parts outside the aircraft. Then when you got in you’d work in with the engineer and you’d get the right fuel tanks turned on because they had to be in certain positions to start up. Then you’d go through to the cockpit like they do today only not as big as the ones of today because you didn’t have so many things to look at.

13:30 Then you’d just look down and outside would be your ground staff and you’d give them a signal and say, “Righto go and start one engine.” And you’d give them an indication of which one. You’d press the button and hope that it started and nine times out of ten it would.

Was it a difficult aircraft to get off the ground?

It was easy to get off unless there was a cross

14:00 wind and it was sometimes hard to get back on to the ground. The undercarriage is normally just one part where it comes down and you’ve got the tyre at the bottom and when it pulls up it goes into the wing sometimes and other times into the fuselage. With the Stirling the undercarriage was in three parts and it was a complicated system. When you raised the undercarriage the

14:30 wheel section went back and then with a sort of concertina effect went up a bit and then the whole lot went in. Because of that construction the joints could be weak. So if you had what they called a cross wind where the wind is coming in on one side of you and you are landing if you are not watching it really closely

15:00 you could get to the stage where you could wipe off the undercarriage and that was happening during the training. I never had any trouble but that did happen. It was hard getting used to the height initially because you were so far up in the damn air. You were working out what height you wanted to level out at in relation to the ground.

15:30 When we landed in French Morocco at Batsali [?] which was the capital at the airfield there, and we’d flown from England down which was quite a distance in those days, and joined the circuit and spoke to the control tower and said that we were coming in. We hadn’t been given any instructions in England about anything to

16:00 watch for or anything like that. So we just joined in the circuit and came around and lowered the undercarriage and we came down to land. And I check and as we touched there was a hell of a bang and then a whole series of bang, bang, bang, bang. I was expecting the whole aircraft to fall to pieces at some stage on that thing. It wasn’t until we got to the end of the runway and we were taxiing

16:30 back that we started to get the bangs again but not as often as we had when we landed because it was at a different speed. We realised that during the war they made metal strips to go over ordinary dirt runways to take the weight of the aircraft without any damage. They were strips about two feet wide and all joined

17:00 together. What it was that as we touched down and the weigh hit the ground it buckled the first part of this metal strip. Then as we carried on all it was doing was one was straightening up and the next one was popping up and the noise was just fantastic. Of course we had never landed on that before and that was quite an experience.

17:30 Were there any other problems that you found flying the Stirling?

No. It couldn’t go as high as you’d like to go because it only had a one hundred foot wing span and it should have had a one hundred and twenty foot wing span. The Stirling was built before 1939 and when they were building it one of the requirements was that it had to go into a current RAF hangar.

18:00 And the RAF hangar was exactly one hundred feet wide so the Stirling wing span ended up as ninety- nine feet which gave you six inches on either side to take it in. By doing that they gave away the height. Later on they had a lot of losses with Bomber Command on it because they couldn’t get to the right height. They were flying in areas where the flak could get them. And they were also flying in areas below the

18:30 Halifaxes and the Lancasters so they were getting bombed by their own buddies. The Stirling was known as the Coffin Box. That was the term that all the pilots gave it that, “You’re flying in the Coffin Box.”

Was it ever a cause for concern for you then that you’d been given a Stirling to fly? No. I loved them. Most of our work was low level or medium level and they were very manoeuvrable.

19:00 We could throw them around the sky even though they were a big aircraft. It was lovely.

What was in French Morocco? What had you gone down there to do?

That was only to get fuel before we carried on. You see you couldn’t overfly any of those countries like Spain or Portugal or anything like that. So you had to go over water all the way around these places and down to French Morocco where you

19:30 had transit people there that knew all the aircraft. And they would look after you and your flight engineer would help with the refuelling and show them where to put the pumps and everything. So you refuelled and stayed the night there. Then the next day we went to Blida which is in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains in Algeria. Blida itself was an old

20:00 Foreign Legion base and it had an airfield and everything and we operated from there.

This was 64 Squadron?

That was 64, yes, that were operating. And they were doing the same as 148 was doing that we finally went on. They were operating directly with the French Maquis [Resistance].

So what happened immediately when you arrived in Blida? What were your crew told to do and what did you find?

20:30 We were told that we were now with the squadron. All we were doing and at every place we went to we’d go and see the operations people and say, “We are so and so. What’s our next move?” We landed at Maison Blanche first. That was the capital and the main airport there. The Ops Room said, “You go to Blida and join 64 Squadron and they’ll tell you what to do.” When we

21:00 got up there I went out with a crew within a couple of days, at night, just to show me what the procedures were. I went out with this crew and we went over France and dropped stuff to the French Maquis. We had two more trips like that and then they said, “Righto. You’re off. There is a Dakota coming in.

21:30 Pack up all your gear. You’re going over to Italy to join 148 Squadron.” So off we went to 148 Squadron.

So had your Stirling been converted to carry goods?

Yes. It was prepared right from the word to go.

That’s why you picked it up from the Ferry Squadron?

Anything that was going overseas it was a new aircraft and you’d pick it up in the Ferry Unit.

22:00 In those first couple of flights with 64 Squadron can you just take us through those and what you did in a bit more detail?

It was virtually the same as all the other trips. The three there, they were taking in supplies mainly and ammunition and guns and what have you. I know on the second trip we had a container full of jewels and money and everything that they could use for

22:30 bribery and whatever. What you would do was fly in and you’d know the area that you were going to and they were. And in a lot of cases in the night time they’d give you a signal with the Aldis Lamp. So you’d fly over and they’d give you a code to be aware of and you’d see that and you’d make your pass around and come in. Normally they would light it up with some

23:00 flares or just keep the lights going and you’d come in and drop the load on that area. You’d drop it from about eight hundred feet which gave enough time for any parachutes to open before they hit the ground. You didn’t want to drop them too high because they could be seen by the Germans and they’d soon pick out the area. So you went in and you dropped it.

23:30 Later on when you had the experience they’d give you the long trips which could be nine hours long and well into Czechoslovakia or Austria. And you’d take British agents in or local members who were going in as agents. You might have to take in a liaison officer to work out some ops with them on the ground. Those you do at

24:00 night because it is too dangerous and too far to do in daytime. When we were operating a lot in Yugoslavia and dropping to Tito’s crowd we would do that in the day time and we’d do that at low level.

I imagine a lot of the information about where you were going and who the people were was fairly tightly controlled?

Yes.

How did that work?

24:30 You would be told that a briefing would take place at such and such a time and you’d go to the briefing room and you’d sit down and they’d say who your target was for the day. You’d sit down and work out how you’d get there. The thing was that a lot of the places we went to we were the only aircraft in the sky so it was quite interesting. It was a bit lonely too but on some nights we might be the only

25:00 aircraft over the whole of Europe flying around especially when you took agents. When you had an agent to go it was like the movies, the Gregory Peck, John Wayne type movie where you are sitting in the aircraft out on the tarmac in the dark. And a dark car pulls up and a chap hops out and comes over and hops into the

25:30 aircraft and that’s the first time you see him. We used to laugh about that because that was the way they had it in the movies. It was cloak and dagger. But that’s exactly how they used to operate. You’d never meet the chap beforehand. He wouldn’t go and meet any of the other people. He’d be brought up by Churchill’s crowd the SOE [Special Operations Executive]. He would come out and he’d hop into the aircraft and he’d just

26:00 sit around at the back waiting until we got to the target. What happened was in our aircraft they took away the mid-upper turret and all we had was one turret at the rear and that was Jock. Bert Scholls became known as the dispatcher. He had lost his mid-upper turret and he was a dispatcher. If you had any

26:30 parcels inside that had to go out it was Bert’s job to throw them out. We had a big hole in the floor. It was about six foot in diameter. And you lifted these sides up and all you had was this big area of nothingness looking down onto the earth. That is where some of the loads would go.

27:00 You’d throw them out of there. Other loads we would take would be in containers in the bomb bay and you’d drop them like bombs. They’d have parachutes on them. If had an agent he would go and sit on the edge of this big hole and you’d have a light system like you see on the Dakotas with the paratroopers where you put on a red light to get ready and a green light to drop.

27:30 What would happen with an agent was Bert used to sit behind them on the floor attached to ropes to the side of the aircraft. And when the green light came on if the chap hesitated that was his last bit of hesitation because Bert used to have his feet behind him and kick him out of the door.

28:00 So he was the dispatcher. He dispatched anything that was in the aircraft.

This was Bert Scholls?

Yes. He was knee high to a grasshopper, Bert, because they needed those small chaps to get into those turrets. Here was Bert kicking loads out and kicking people out. When you went on some of these long trips into Czechoslovakia or

28:30 Austria or places like that where you’d fly in and as I say you’d be the only one in the sky possibly. You’d be down low but you’d have to navigate all the way to your target. And what you’re looking for is a paddock. So you can imagine say leaving here and going up to the Queensland border and picking out one paddock. As I say, the people on the ground would give you a

29:00 signal at night but we had a rule that you never circled the target area. You had to go in and you’d pick up say a river junction or something like that that would stand out in the moonlight, or a town, and you’d navigate your way all the way up to this target and you’d be looking. You couldn’t afford to circle. You couldn’t

29:30 wait for them. You had to see it and pick it up and drop the bloke. If you circled they would immediately suspect it was a British aircraft dropping as we called it a Joe. That was quite interesting. You just went straight in. Your navigation had to be good. And for that we had the navigator doing the bulk of the navigation to get us into the area and then Dave and myself, Dave being the bomb aimer, he’d get down the

30:00 front and he had very good visibility from there and he’d take over the navigation at that stage. And I’d be helping because I could see so far ahead from where I was. And you’d just go in and pick up the signal on the ground and drop the chap and go straight on. You’d just keep on going and you’d fly for about another forty miles before turning and you wouldn’t go back over the same area.

30:30 You’d turn and then you’d go back home. They were quite interesting flights as you could imagine.

Just some more on the secrecy, you obviously didn’t know anything about who the agents where but what did you know about what your cargos where and who you were dropping them to?

In the area where we were just dropping supplies and guns and ammunition and all that

31:00 stuff, and money, you’d know who you were dropping them to and where you were dropping them. Before you even left you had a good area covered. And they’d be say the Northern Partisans in Italy who had a group there. We had the Yugoslavs and we had people down in Albania and we had all those places that we knew what the loads were.

31:30 We had an interesting piece of equipment on board. We probably had the first mobile phone. They gave us a telephone which we had in the aircraft and they called it the ‘S’ Phone, ‘S’ being ‘Secret’. So here we were with the ‘S’ phones and when we got to Yugoslavia we had dropped some of these to the people on the

32:00 ground because with every major force there was a British officer there. We’d go over and you could talk to him as long as you were about twenty-five miles off him. And you could just pick him up like you pick up a mobile. And you’d say, “G’day, how are you going? Is there anything you need on your next drop?” Of course they’d quite often come back, “Yes, scotch.”

32:30 That was interesting the ‘S’ phone.

What did that ‘S’ phone look like?

It was like a telephone.

How big was it?

It was just a normal size telephone.

With a receiver that you picked up?

You just picked it up and spoke in it.

Was that a radio controlled telephone? Was it like a wireless system?

It was a wireless system, yes. The main thing was in the aircraft and he had the receiver

33:00 down below and you could talk backwards and forwards. The wireless operator normally did that. That was good. Towards the end of the war in Italy when the Germans were retreating through the middle of Italy and there were those large mountains they had good hideaways and things like that.

33:30 They came up with a bright idea at one stage to drop Jeeps, armed Jeeps. We had the Princess Patricia Regiment, Canadians, they were like commandos. In those days they had the SAS [Special Air Service] like we’ve got today. Right through the desert they had SAS with armed Jeeps. The Jeep would have machine guns firing forward

34:00 and a mortar in the middle of the rear of the Jeep. They had this idea that we’d drop those in a certain position on the highway, near the highway, and if they got out with this armed gear they could just keep belting down the highway. And when they got to a German convoy of trucks they’d let fly with the mortar in the back which was offset so it would

34:30 land still on the road. They had those and the machine guns and they’d bolt down there at night. And you can imagine yourself the shock for the transport drivers that all of a sudden out of the darkness comes an idiot in a Jeep coming along and firing madly at you. Then they’d just keep on going and hope to hell they got back. To do that we had to put the Jeep in the bomb bay and you couldn’t get it all in so we

35:00 had to fly to the target with half of the jeep hanging out and the doors of the bomb bay open. There were normally three. There’d be a driver and a couple of people with the guns and the mortar and we’d drop one of those first and then go around and drop the jeep and then go and drop the other two blokes when they saw that everything was right on the ground. We only did one of

35:30 those and as far as I can recall not too many were done. Whether they were unsuccessful or successful we’ll never know. That was just another gimmick that they thought up.

What sort of enemy fire or resistance did you come under during these flights?

Because we were low level, especially over Yugoslavia – in Yugoslavia you see Tito had

36:00 bottled up fourteen divisions which is a lot of divisions that Germany would have loved to have fighting even in Italy. It would have made a hell of a difference but they had to keep them there because of what Tito was doing. When you would go in we were going in around the five hundred, six hundred a thousand foot mark in height. So you could expect a lot of ground fire but you never saw it.

36:30 Now and again you’d see a bit of flak. At night time you’d see a bit of flak and we saw fighters on a couple of occasions. Because we were low they could do very little to us. We had just dropped a bloke so we just kept it at that height. We kept low. Jock reckoned there was a fighter there but you’ll never know. It took us about half a day to translate him.

37:00 A lot of the stuff you never saw like the light machine guns and what have you. We had the odd aircraft come back with holes through them and the chaps wouldn’t realise it until they got on the ground. The ground staff would come over and say, “You’ve been hit.” It was a very interesting period.

37:30 One of the things that I had to do just after the war finished – when the war came to an end Tito had decided to take over some of the ground that he had lost or that Yugoslavia had lost in World War I, Trieste and places like that had been in Yugoslavia. He decided he would 38:00 move his partisans as fast as possible into Northern Italy. At that stage Churchill and Roosevelt were in contact with one another and saying, “We could have a Third World War here, we’ve got to stop Tito.” It got very interesting in the few weeks after the war as to what would happen. As it turned out the New Zealanders belted in their army and they took over

38:30 Trieste before the partisans got there but it got to the stage where things were getting a bit tricky. It was about a fortnight after the war finished that I was called in one day and they said, “We’ve got a job for you. We are going to withdraw all the British officers that are operating in Yugoslavia and they will all be at Zagreb,” which was the capital of Yugoslavia at that stage, “and you can go over and pick them

39:00 up and bring them out and take them home to their base at Bari, which was just north of Brindisi.” That was quite interesting because we went over. We weren’t too certain what to expect at the other end. We were told to land and this was a grass field we were landing in. It wasn’t a full runway for a four-engine aircraft. It was an airfield that they used at Zagreb mainly for light aircraft pre-war.

39:30 So we went in and landed on a grass field with a four-engine aircraft. It took the whole field to pull up. And then we taxied back to the end ready for take off and kept the engines running and the British officers had been told that we wouldn’t be hanging around. When we got there, there must have been two or three hundred partisans lined up and

40:00 we weren’t too certain whether it was a welcoming party or get out of here quick smart. So we kept the engines running and the British officers all came out in their Jeeps. They left their Jeeps and hopped out and put their gear on board and got into the back of the Halifax and off we went. Then we flew back and landed at Bari and that was the end of the war for them and it was the end of the war for us.

We’ll just stop there.

Tape 5

00:50 Just on the last question we left off on – women, did you take any women?

One.

Could you tell us about that?

01:00 Like the others she just came out to the aircraft and got on board at the very last minute. She went into Yugoslavia. We just dropped her like you would any other person going in. A lot of those people were going in more as liaison officers. As I was pointing out in England where they

01:30 had a couple of other squadrons doing the same sort of work they would have had more women going in who were say French girls or people who had lived in France for a long time. You didn’t have that same type of person to go into Yugoslavia. This lass went in as the liaison officer.

We spoke a little bit about the secrecy

02:00 beforehand but what was said about when you arrived back the secrecy about not saying anything of where you’d been and who you dropped of?

When you got back from an operation it was just like after say a bombing raid. You got back in and you were debriefed and you said what you had done and that was it. You either got to the target or you couldn’t find the target and brought the person back or got to the target and found it and dropped the person.

02:30 You mentioned how the flight was and that’s it.

Were there actually occasions where you couldn’t drop the person?

We had one occasion where we couldn’t drop the person and that was mainly a mix up with weather. We got a bit suspicious flying in. We saw a lot of flashing from the ground. It was a bright moonlight night and we thought it might have been the moonlight on

03:00 metal or something that was causing it and we weren’t too happy with that so we said to the chap, “Don’t drop.”

Who makes that decision?

The pilot makes the decision.

So basically as you are travelling forward to the position you are also surveying the ground?

Yes. You are watching everything as you are flying in.

Did that decision turn out to be right?

You never found out what happened on those. 03:30 All you had to do was fly that person in and drop him and come back or fly the person in and don’t drop him and come back and that was it. You never got any follow up on the people. You were never told. Even after the war we were never told anything about whether such and such a trip was successful and he got in and did his job and what have you.

04:00 During this time this is when you were awarded the DFC is that right?

Yes I got the DFC and was also mentioned in despatches.

Do you know what was said in despatches?

No. I’ll show you later on the certificate that you get. All it says is that there was this occasion when you were mentioned in a despatch. What it normally was

04:30 a mention in despatches in a lot of cases was where the event that happened was say a bit lower than a DFC. Instead of a DFC you are just Mentioned In Despatches. You did something that was brought to the attention of the British Air Ministry and that was called a

05:00 Despatch. It wasn’t a recommendation for a particular medal. That is a mention in despatches and you get a little certificate. It doesn’t say what it was for or anything it just says, “You were mentioned in a despatch.”

The DFC was that for a particular thing?

It was for many trips and the trip when I brought that chap because

05:30 because we had to come back over the Alps out of Czechoslovakia. And the weather was atrocious and I lost control of the aircraft about three times but managed to recover and bring the aircraft back. So it was for virtually all the operations plus in particular they mentioned that one. It is also in that album.

Could you actually just talk me through that flight of approaching and

06:00 calling it off and then losing the controls as you are flying back?

Well as I said the first part of the flight was all right. We got up over the Danube and into Czechoslovakia and it wasn’t until we got near the target that we got a bit suspicious of the area. So at the last minute we decided

06:30 not to drop him. It wasn’t worth taking a risk in these cases because these chaps once they were dropped – they were dropped as it happened in Holland. They captured a chap in Holland who gave away the lot. And then they kept dropping all the agents in and each time the agents went in they were either bumped off or put away in the concentration camps. They lost dozens that way. So it wasn’t

07:00 worth it. The other thing is during the war - I suppose we have learned more of what actually happened and what we were doing than what we knew at the time. A lot of it has come out on the History Channel on pay TV. They have programs with the SOE and you see the Halifaxes dropping

07:30 people and things like that. We were just given a job to do and you had to do it. This night we decided things looked a bit suspicious so we didn’t drop him. Then we had to come back over the Alps and the weather closed in and it was a really bad night. It was icy. Where you have got an automatic icing device on the aircraft of today and the big 747s and

08:00 such they didn’t have icing. So your leading edge on the wings would get this build up and they’d build up with weight and shaping the contour of the wing could get you to stall the aircraft and lose control, which we did. All you can do is hope for the best and try to bring it out and get very rough with the aircraft which is what we

08:30 did and then we eventually got it home. We actually ran out of fuel on the way back because of all the things that we’d had happen. We landed at Bari because I couldn’t make Brindisi. We landed there in the early hours of the morning and refuelled and then went back to base.

09:00 A lot of the trips were fairly straightforward and you had no problems at all.

Just to understand, through all these trips you were flying the Halifax is that right?

Yes.

Can you just talk me through the conversion story. You didn’t have long to train on them did you?

No. We came over from 64 in Algeria and were flown by Dakota straight to

09:30 Brindisi. When we got to Brindisi, we found that they’d lost a few crews and we were treated as a replacement crew. With the conversion they gave you the books on the aircraft, the air frame and the engines because they were totally different on the Halifax to what they were on the Stirling. For the

10:00 navigator and wireless operator, the bomb aimer and the gunners all the equipment was virtually the same, so they had nothing to learn. The two people that had something to learn were myself and the flight engineer because he had to get used to these different engines. We were given a couple of days to read the books and sort out what was what. If I remember it as the

10:30 twelfth and thirteenth of the month and I’ve got an idea it was September or October. I think it was September. On the twelfth and the thirteenth we flew. We didn’t take the crew up on those. That was mainly with another pilot who wasn’t a full-time instructor, he was another pilot that had a lot of time on Halifaxes. He

11:00 took me around and all told I flew four hours. And in that four hours were a lot of landings. There were some landings with one engine feathered so you came in with three engines. We flew the aircraft to get used to it. So I had four hours and then the

11:30 following day we went as a crew with myself as the captain and we carried out a full operation. As I said before the crew weren’t too confident when they were sitting there and we started up the engine and taxied out. And then there was the roar of the engines as we got into the air. That was interesting. But then later on we did a few day trips and we got used to the aircraft that way. The day trips

12:00 were normally over Yugoslavia. Then having done a few trips they decided that they wanted me to do one of the night jobs, one of the long distance ones. So my conversion to the night on Halifaxes was twenty minutes. I took off with this other pilot and did a circuit of the air field and came round and landed. And he said, “Okay. You’re right.” That was it. That was the night conversion.

12:30 And away we went and the next night did a full night operation. There was no other way to do it. There was no training organisation in Italy. There was no place they could send you and say, “Righto. Do a course,” so you did it at the squadron.

Obviously because it was such a short training period did you make many mistakes on that first couple of trips?

No. Once you got used to the

13:00 engines and the actual handling of the aircraft you didn’t need that long really to get to know those. All you did was do a lot of reading and make certain you had everything covered.

So we’re up to the part of the story when the war had actually come to an end. How did you feel when you knew the war was over?

It was a strange feeling. You thought, “That’s another part of my life finished. What do I

13:30 do now?” Then they said, “We’re going to get you over to Cairo so you can fight the war in the Pacific,” and I was quite happy about that. Then they flew down in a Liberator to Cairo and then by truck out to a place called Kasfareet which is on the Suez Canal and which was a British Transport Section or you could say embarkation organisation. Then we

14:00 waited and waited. The war finished in May and the ship didn’t turn up until about September or October. It was mainly because, and we could all understand it and they’d told us enough times, when the ships left England they were all full with all the people that wanted to go back from over there. In addition, some of them had wives. They had married the girls over there. So by the time it got to the

14:30 Suez it was a full ship. It wasn’t until later on that this Stirling Castle turned up. And it was a troop ship. It wasn’t like our good Queen Mary on the trip over.

So what did you do to occupy yourselves for those few months?

We probably became the best Contract Bridge players that you have ever encountered. We went into Cairo and we got every book you could find on

15:00 Contract Bridge. We studied those books in the same way we used to study the books on the aircraft. It was so hot of a night time and the day times were hot too. We would play right through. There was nothing for us to do. There was no work and no nothing. We were just waiting so we became excellent Contract Bridge players. The only trouble was we were playing with the same partners all the time and we were playing against the same

15:30 partners. So you got to the stage that as soon as they made the call you knew exactly which card everybody had. It was good. It passed the time of day. We had some good padres there and they tried to organise things. These were Australians who were also trying to get back home. So we went on a magnificent trip to the Holy Land. We went to Palestine and we went to Jerusalem and

16:00 Bethlehem and everywhere. And to the Dead Sea and that was great. And another day we went to the Pyramids. We did the Sphinx and another day we went camel riding and we went horse riding. We got some beautiful Arab stallions to go around the Pyramid area. So that was it and we read lots of books.

So was there anything

16:30 eventful in the return trip home? No. It was a great letdown. It was lousy food and lousy bunks and luckily it didn’t take long.

How did you manage to get on board the ship?

It was the Stirling Castle and we went out on a lighter. All the Aussies that were going to go home on it went out on a lighter and we got on the ship that way.

17:00 Our luggage was taken up on the crane and that was it.

So when you arrived back home what was the future holding for you?

Well at that stage the Pacific War had finished too and it just looked as though there was nothing. I had applied for a further commission when I was in Italy, but hadn’t heard a thing.

17:30 So when we got home we were back to Sandgate to the Post-Embarkation Depot. The first thing they did was send us all on leave until they sorted out what was happening. We went away then I suppose for about two to three weeks’ leave, which I spent in Brisbane with the family. Then

18:00 it was a while before I got this letter to say, “You are no longer required and you’re discharged immediately.” So I was discharged and went back to the Insurance Office of Australia, the IOA. They were quite happy as soon as I went in. I said, “I’m back.” And they said, “Righto. When do you want to start?” and start I did. Then along came word to say, “You’ve been granted a

18:30 permanent commission.”

Being granted a Permanent Commission was that a result of applying when you’d been overseas?

Yes. It must have been. They were themselves trying to work out what to do with all the people. So they had sent out messages to all bases and even the RAF to get onto the Australians to see if they were interested in a permanent commission. I don’t know how many applied. They came back and said, “Yes, we’ve

19:00 decided now and you can come back in.” They gave me a date to return to Sandgate and I returned back there and away I went.

Was further training required once you received your Permanent Commission?

No. I went up to Townsville first as camp commandant and that was straight administration work. And there were a lot of people around to help you and you had no problem to pick it up. It was the same as when I was

19:30 adjutant in the Stores Depot in Brisbane. That was quite simple. From then on it was straightforward. The academy work was all right and apart from that practically the rest of my time was flying.

Can you paint me a picture of where the air force was sort of at after the war? It had a great number of men in roles and involved, but where was it in 1946. What was the status then?

20:00 In 1946 they were still trying to discharge a lot of people from the war time air force. That was quite a task. They had got these people in over a period of time and you had them all coming back at the one time. They had got rid of a lot of people already, those that had come from New Guinea and places like that. I think they did it quite efficiently

20:30 actually. We just went back to the embarkation depots and they gave you the times from then on. They said, “Return on such and such a date or go on leave.” Then eventually along came the piece of paper saying you were discharged.

So what was it like obviously being involved in the war and the special ops that you were doing and then coming back to Townsville and being the commandant there?

21:00 Can you describe it for me? Was it an issue of boredom?

No. It was all very interesting because it was something new. One of my tasks as camp commandant was officer in charge of marine craft. All you had there was really an officer to be in charge because you had some very capable warrant officers that were running these marine

21:30 rescue boats. Another job that I had as camp commandant was officer in charge of caretakers. When the war finished a lot of stores depots like McCrossin [?] and Breddon out from Townsville which were big organisations during the war they had to be cleared out and stuff had to be sold and you had to put caretakers in until they worked out what they were going to do with the

22:00 buildings and the land. So I would go out there once every blue moon and have a talk to the caretakers and see if everything was all right and whether they had any problems. So, no, I never got bored at any stage in the air force. I always found there was something new all the time.

Can you talk me through now setting up the training college at Point Cook and what your role was and what the purpose of that was? 22:30 Well it was like an administrative officer initially. I had to go down there and first of all select some of the buildings which were going to be at the college. At that stage we had an air commodore and he later went up to air marshal, whose name was Hancock. He was a very capable officer and he’d been a pilot during the war. He had

23:00 been in charge of our personnel section for quite a while and they had appointed him as commandant to the first academy. He worked from the headquarters in St. Kilda Road in Melbourne. There was what they called the ‘Air Board Bus’. The Air Board Bus was a bus that came from headquarters out to Point Cook and Laverton, which were the two major airfields. On that would be little parcels for

23:30 me from Air Commodore Hancock saying, “Start a chemistry laboratory. Work out an athletics program.” So I would go around and Tanner, who was well known in the athletics and Olympic circles, I went to him and he was very helpful. For the chemistry and physics laboratories I went and saw the Melbourne University. There were

24:00 many little things like, “Are you going to have a bugle system for waking them up of a morning and getting them to classes?” How do you do that? So it was decided we would have a record. It was an ordinary old 78 record with bugle calls on it. There were reveille and mess call and all those things and we got that through

24:30 the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. They had a bugler somewhere that recorded all those. We had that and we put that over the speaker system when we got the first lot of cadets. Anything that was dealing with the college he used to send me and every Friday normally it used to arrive. It would keep me going for the next week all these various things. The group of them up in the department had thought about them and wanted me to go

25:00 ahead and sort it out.

What time frame were you working on?

That was late 1947 and it was to get the first course in about 1948/1949.

The first course came in in what year?

I’m not too certain of the exact year at the moment but we had about a year and a bit to get it all prepared.

25:30 Do you know what the budget was?

No. That was all done up at the headquarters.

Staffing? Were you involved in staffing?

No. Lou Spence was eventually killed in Korea and he came down as officer in charge of cadets. He was a squadron leader. I was a flight lieutenant at this stage. Then we had the

26:00 air commodore who came down as the commandant. Then they selected, with the help of Melbourne University, all the lecturers. They all had to be degree people because they were teaching. All our cadets went through a degree course. They selected all of the staff. At the time there were only about five on the staff. There was a chap called Black who was the

26:30 senior one of the lot. They got down and they got together and they worked out the curriculum before we selected them. On the selection committee there was the air commodore and there was Black and myself. I did a lot of the paperwork outside and then sat in on some of the interviews for the cadets themselves. We went all around Australia as the interview board and then

27:00 went back to Point Cook and sorted out all the paperwork from there. We selected the people and then got ready for them to do it. It was very interesting period of time because we had to teach them. I was teaching hockey and cricket. And Lou Spence was taking rugby. We were taking it in turns and reading lots of books and getting advice from the experts. In addition to that we

27:30 were roughing them up. We were taking them out on trips. The first Easter I took them all up to Essington Lewis’s property near Seymour and we lived under canvas. It was the first time they’d been under canvas and we cooked on open fires for the four days and it was quite good. It rained. And we took canoes on another one. We did the Goulburn River. We

28:00 canoed down the Goulburn River, which I thought was good. We built the canoes at the college. We built all the canoes and then we used some air force trucks and we carted them up to the Goulburn River and we got on board. And I had a couple of Queen’s Scouts who were then cadets. They were very valuable and they knew more than anybody. So we managed to get down the Goulburn without killing anybody which was quite good.

28:30 Then Lou Spence took them all on a skiing period for about a week or something. Then we all went down, all the staff, and put them under canvas at Fish Creek nearly Wilson’s Promontory to give them camping experience. That was also good. We had lots of interesting things going on and it was great working that out for the first time. What was the most

29:00 difficult thing for you about the job?

It is hard to say. I suppose initially it was getting up bright and early in the morning to go over and play the record so that they would all get out of bed, all the little boys. That was one of the difficult things, getting up. I was living in the officers’ mess and I would get up and walk over to the headquarters in the dark winter mornings and find the

29:30 record and put it on the record player and play the call. Then I’d work through the day and then of a night go around and see that everybody was all right at night when they were doing their studies. A lot of them had left home for the first time so we mollycoddled them a bit. I would be up sometimes at 11 o clock seeing if they were okay and just having a

30:00 ‘pow-wow’ with them.

Were there any disciplinary problems with them?

The odd one or two that you expected at a school, but nothing dramatic. They were a good bunch of characters.

What did you do after Point Cook?

After Point Cook I was then put back onto refresher flying. I went down to the Central Flying School at Sale and then went on to

30:30 Mustangs and Vampires and Wirraways. Now I am becoming the fighter pilot that I wanted to be back in 1942/1943.

Did you apply to this or were you posted to this?

I had been asking them at headquarters for quite some time, “When am I going back to flying.” They just said, “Report down to the CFS [Central Flying School],” and the next thing they put me onto

31:00 Wirraways and then Vampires. I was quite happy. Then I went up to Williamtown and did some more flying up there. It was mainly teaching. Then I got posted up to Korea for the Korean War and up to Japan to do the conversion up there.

So when you were doing the refresher course, what was different initially in flying these fighters to what you had been doing in the Second

31:30 World War?

I only had one engine to worry about and they were more agile. It was a totally different type of aircraft. It was totally different. I found it once again very exciting to go through on the fighters.

There’s also the aspect of the crew, not having any crew around?

There was no crew at all. I was all by

32:00 myself.

Was there an initial loneliness in that respect?

No. you were busy all the time doing things. You were doing your own navigation and you were doing everything for yourself so it is quite good. It is a different role all together. We just went up and did the conversion. The whole squadron was pulled out of Korea at that stage. They had been on Mustangs.

32:30 Then some of us with jet experience went up there. British chaps came out with the Meteors, British instructors, and then they taught us the Meteor, they converted us. We were there for a couple of months flying Meteors and getting used to them and we flew them over to Korea in the July period of

33:00 1951 I think.

Just so I understand. The refresher course was just to get you back into flying again?

Just flying, yes.

That was with the Wirraways?

That was with the Wirraways, the Vampires and the Mustangs.

I take it you were flying the propeller aeroplanes before the jets?

Yes.

So there was a second conversion course to the jets is that right, to the Meteors?

Yes, 33:30 to the Vampires.

Could you just explain the difference in flying the two and what they were trying to teach you?

Apart from the engines there was virtually no difference. It was a faster aircraft. Once you have flown one of those types you are doing the same thing with the way you control the aircraft with the control columns and the instruments are different but you get used to those in no time.

34:00 That conversion to Meteors was right up my alley because they had two engines. I liked that with the two engines because it gives you added protection if you are hit.

During this refresher course was there any ordinance used, like guns and those things?

Yes.

34:30 There wasn’t too much but just enough to get you used to it again. It was mainly to fly and to get to know the aircraft. I had never flown the Wirraway before and I hadn’t flown the Mustang before, so both aircraft were brand new to me. Then with the Vampire I hadn’t flown that before either. From then on all the aircraft I struck were all new each time.

You have sort of

35:00 shared with us the start-up procedure of some of the bombers you were on, the Stirling. Let’s take the Vampire for instance can you take me through that, the start-up procedure of that given it is a jet aircraft?

There is not much you can say really. It is a different starting procedure. You are doing it with an outside starting source, a

35:30 starter cart that gives you the propulsion or gets the propulsion going in the jet engine.

So some fellow comes up with the start-up cart does he?

Yes and plugs into the side of the aircraft. The same thing applied with the Sabre and also with the Mirage.

36:00 You need the outside source whereas once you started a four-engine aircraft one would start all the other things going, so you could start all the other ones from that engine or after that engine.

With the jet aircraft that you have just named they couldn’t start on their own, they needed an outside source?

Yes. The Canberra was also a jet engine, but it started with what they called a

36:30 cartridge. You put this cartridge into a position and the cartridge exploded and that started the engine going. The other one was where you had a starter cart. That gave you all the power you needed to turn the engine over and get it going. Each aircraft has a different system about them. They are only things that you pick up normally fairly quickly.

37:00 So coming back to the Vampire, the cart comes out and helps you starts it up. What is then the process of technical checks?

He puts the plug out and then you just do a normal check to make certain the engine is right and the oil pressure is correct. Then you are away.

37:30 That is about all there is to it really.

What sort of problems were there with the Vampire with the aircraft?

At one stage we were losing a few people because there was a part was playing up. They were getting into an uncontrollable position and diving into the ground. That was caused through one part of the

38:00 aircraft being really in the wrong position.

What part of the aircraft was that?

It was little intakes that were on top of the aircraft. I forget which one it was. One was better underneath than being on top and they had them the wrong way. That was the way it was built. We overcame that. That was the only thing we had wrong with the Vampire.

38:30 How many blokes were doing this refresher flying course? Was it just yourself or others?

There were three or four going through at that stage. They’d try and get a few. It was a bit difficult with just one person trying to do it because you had to get the aircraft ready and you may as well have three or four. There were always people that needed a refresher. Anybody that was off for say two years in a ground job somewhere, if they couldn’t

39:00 receive a refresher course at the base they were going to it was the easiest way and the cheapest way to send them down to the Central Flying School where you have got all your instructors and you’ve got all the aircraft and they are teaching all the time. While you are there you’ve got new pilots that are going through, on another course, at that Central Flying School. It was the ideal place to send people to do refresher courses.

39:30 We might stop there and break for lunch.

Tape 6

00:42 We already talked before lunch about you converting to fighters. What was the first word that you got that you’d be going over to join the fighters in Korea?

I think that just came out as a

01:00 posting signal. Any posting came out as a signal normally and all they would do is send it to the post saying, “The following personnel will depart from base on such and such a date.” We went up by Qantas to Japan via Hong Kong. We got to Japan and landed at

01:30 Iwakuni and that was the base where we had the Meteors.

What did you know about what was happening in Korea and specifically what 77 Squadron was doing at that time?

Shortly after the Korean War started when they were first operating with Mustangs, they had a 24 hour a day operational watch at the headquarters. I was one of the officers that was put down

02:00 there in the shifts. Normally there were three of us. It was morning, afternoon and night shift. And we just watched anything that came in on the message network and if it was anything important then we got onto the hierarchy, the Air Board members. So being in there day after day after day I knew probably more about the war in

02:30 Korea than a lot of people.

What sort of messages were coming in over that system?

Everything. There were so many sorties done in a day by the Australians and what they did and how they did it and whether there were any casualties and whether there was any damage to aircraft. It was a general update on the war situation. That was coming through all the time in dribs and drabs. We had a full map of

03:00 Korea in the Ops Room and we kept placing stuff on it too. And then in the morning we would brief members of the air force on what had happened during the previous afternoon and night.

Do you remember hearing about the death of Lou Spence?

Yes. I heard that when I was in the headquarters. He and I were buddies. We had known each other down at the RAF Academy.

You

03:30 mentioned him before. Did his death have a personal affect on you?

No, not really. I’m one of those strange characters. Deaths don’t seem to worry me too much. We are here today and that’s it.

Were you excited about going to Korea? What were your emotions?

Yes, I was quite happy to go up there especially flying the Meteor.

04:00 Once again it was a different type of war. I was flying different aircraft with different operational movements.

How long had the squadron been on Meteors when you arrived?

I arrived there as they were converting. I was just mixed up with them and they started converting the day after I got there.

And had you flown that aircraft prior to that time?

04:30 No one had flown it. They had to replace the Mustang because they were a bit old. They wanted the Sabre aircraft which the Americans were flying to great advantage. They were shooting down MiGs [Mikoyan-Gurevich, Soviet aircraft manufacturer] left right and centre but they couldn’t afford to spare one Sabre at that stage. So the air force was told that probably the next best was the British Meteor. So they brought out a full squadron of Meteors on an aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier pulled in at 05:00 Iwakuni and they were off-loaded there.

What was the Meteor like as an aeroplane, to fly?

It was a good aircraft to fly, but it was out of its class in that war as an air-to-air fighter. That was the role which was first given to the squadron. The MiGs were far superior to it and virtually every aircraft in the area was superior to it as an

05:30 air-to-air fighter.

The squadron had very little air-to-air combat experience also?

Yes. They’d been on ground attack all the time.

What training was given in that conversion process of air-to-air combat?

Any conversion course is two type. They always include air-to-air combat manoeuvres. They would have gone through all the basic manoeuvres, not on the

06:00 Meteor on that stage but on the Mustang. When they converted to the Meteor part of the Meteor was some air-to-air manoeuvres.

Can you just briefly describe the Meteor for us?

It is a twin jet engine. It had four twenty millimetre cannons. It had a

06:30 high tail plane. It was a very good aircraft to fly. It was very comfortable but it wasn’t right for that role in Korea.

What were its problems in that role?

Well first of all you couldn’t get to the height that the MiGs could get to and we were always in the defensive position. We weren’t allowed to cross the Yalu. That was laid down by the United

07:00 Nations. The Yalu River was the border between Manchuria and North Korea. When we went out on combat patrols or when we escorted the B29s, which we did on a few occasions, if the target was on the Yalu River or somewhere in that area, because there were lots of bridges and things like that, we could actually see the MiGs taking off in Manchuria,

07:30 knowing they were coming up to shoot us down. One of the frightening things that we had up there was the Americans had a very good radar system throughout the area and they were able, I don’t know how exactly, whether they had people on the ground near the Russian or Chinese airfield, when a group of aircraft would take off – and I’m not too certain of the

08:00 number, I think it was eight – they would say, “There is a train leaving the station.” We would get that on our earphones. You thought, “Righto. The opposition is eight.” Then they would say, “Number two train is leaving the station. Number three train is leaving the station.” The best I had was fourteen trains were leaving the station and we had eight aircraft in the sky. You are looking at one hundred and

08:30 twenty-two aircraft versus eight so they are not good odds. The other thing was you knew the MiGs were flown by top Russian and Chinese pilots. Very few of the pilots were North Korean. Their top Russian ace, he was from the 1939–1945 war and had fought over there in Russia,

09:00 he was called ‘Casey Jones’. When you knew that ‘Casey Jones’ was flying you knew you had a bit of a battle on your hands. They would say, “Number four train is leaving the station and ‘Casey Jones’ is at the throttle.” Their number two ace had the nickname of ‘The Professor’. They might say, “Number six train is leaving the station and ‘The Professor’ is teaching.” We were given information like that, but

09:30 in my own mind being in an inferior aircraft it didn’t do much for morale.

Let’s start from the beginning. When you arrived the squadron was converting in Iwakuni?

Yes.

What happened directly after that?

When everybody had been trained and all the conversions were completed everybody got ready then to move to Korea.

10:00 That was including the ground staff because some of them had to be there when we arrived. It was only about an hour and a half’s flight across to Kimpo. Seoul was the capital of North [actually South] Korea and Kimpo was the main airfield in Korea. When we went over there we were quickly followed by the rest of the

10:30 squadron with bombs and rockets and everything that we needed. We were there for about three or four days and then we got our first operation.

What were the conditions like for you in Kimpo? We were under canvas which had been borrowed or stolen from the Americans. I think it was part of the whole deal up there.

11:00 There were about four of us to a tent and we had a big pot-bellied stove in the middle. It was bitterly cold up there. The temperature in the summer was unbearable and the temperature in the winter was snow everywhere on the ground. We were in tents. Unfortunately one of the worst cases we had was one of the tents caught fire. If it caught fire and it was a quick

11:30 fire, you couldn’t get out. We lost the operations officer and I think there was one other. Two were burned to death in the tents. At that stage we didn’t have our own cooks or anything so we ate, under an agreement with the Americans, we ate in their mess. That was quite good, once you got used to the pancakes and treacle and stuff like that.

What

12:00 forces of the Americans were based there?

Just the major Sabre outfit, the 4th Fighter Wing. They were based there and then they had other Sabres further south. Kimpo was the closest airfield to the North Koreans. And the B29s they came all the way from Okinawa. We were given the job. We were

12:30 given the job, I forget the number of times now, four or five times or possibly more of escorting the B29s. When they had a big bunch of MiGs up they would come through us and we would be firing at them. You would see quite a number of B29s go down.

Were you also working with the 4th Fighter Wing from Kimpo or were your operations separate to theirs?

We had our own operations room but we went on the

13:00 same type of missions with them when the operations came out because we were operating under the same American headquarters as the 4th Fighter Wing. The United States Air Force ran all the air operations.

Did their Sabres and your Meteors fly together?

We were in the same area of sky together but we didn’t fly as a combat team together.

13:30 They would go and patrol a certain line near the Yalu and then we’d go at a different height and we’d put up a patrol line too. Then the MiGs would come along and they’d come right down through us.

Can you tell us about the squadron as it was made up when you arrived? Who was the CO [Commanding Officer]?

The CO was Squadron Leader Dick Creswell. That was quite interesting because Dick Creswell was the

14:00 CO of 77 Squadron back in the war and he was the first chap to shoot down a Japanese Zero over Darwin. When Lou Spence was killed, and just before Lou Spence was killed, they lost a squadron leader who was sort of 2IC [Second in Command], who was Graham Stroud. So they lost virtually the two leaders very quickly and they flew Dick Cresswell up. He arrived there while I was still on

14:30 Mustangs. And then he came over and converted to Meteors and led the Meteors back into Korea. He held the squadron for about two to three months after that and then his job was taken over by Wing Commander Gordon Steege. He was a DSO [Distinguished Service Order]/DFC type from the Desert Campaign.

What did you think of Creswell as a leader?

15:00 He was tops. He was hard to beat!

What made him tops?

All the experience he had. The bulk of his service career was flying. You get a lot that rise to the top but a lot of them have been on administration jobs for quite some time. Dick Creswell had flying post after flying post at operational training units at Williamtown. He was well

15:30 liked and all the other pilots thought he was very good.

What were his views on the Meteor and how it was being asked to be used?

I think we were all of the same mind at that stage that it wasn’t the right aircraft for us. What happened was after Steege arrived, he tried to convince the Americans that it was definitely not the aircraft

16:00 but very little was done. We were still doing cover air patrol and things like that. When Steege came back to Australia he was followed by Ron Susans who was a top wartime bloke too. And Ron Susans convinced the hierarchy of the United States Air Force that the aircraft was the wrong one and should be on ground attack. Then they put the Meteor on 16:30 ground attack and the first time they used rockets, napalm rockets. They had used rockets before but one of our armourers worked out how to put a head of napalm on the top so that when it penetrated a building the whole building caught fire. Susans led the squadron through that period and very well. He ran it very well.

17:00 So you had experience under those three?

No. I had it under Creswell and Steege. Steege didn’t do much flying. When he was CO I was then given acting rank in the field to be the deputy. I was leading the squadron in the flying.

We’ll come back to Steege in a moment. Just in the beginning

17:30 what were your first missions to be when you first arrived in Kimpo?

Air to air combat against the MiGs. The first mission that was led by Creswell and they didn’t encounter anything on that day. Then the next day the mission was led by the then-deputy, a chap by the name of Dick Wilson, commonly known as

18:00 ‘Doddery Dick’. Doddery Dick led sixteen aircraft. He had four aircraft down low and I had four aircraft down low with him. Then we had eight aircraft flying above us with the idea being if we were jumped then they could come down on top of the MiGs.

18:30 The next thing is Dick Wilson sees a couple of MiGs below him so he calls in to our eight that we were going in to attack. As he has turned and started to dive in, I looked around and saw a whole bunch of MiGs sitting on the top of all of us. As soon as he moved in on this other aircraft the MiGs got onto him.

19:00 They caused quite a bit of damage to his aircraft. He was all right. When I saw them coming in I then turned with my four, no I had two that’s right. I had two and one chap and myself we turned in on the ones that were attacking Dick Wilson and told him to ‘belt off’ because we were outnumbered’ to blazes’. We fired on those and then

19:30 we both walked into another fight. At one stage I had a head on attack with a MiG which was quite interesting. With their thirty-seven millimetre cannons and the shell coming towards you is like an orange. It was bright orange and it was thirty-seven mils and it’s a fairly big old shell. The interesting thing is at

20:00 one stage during the fight a Meteor passed me all in flames and going down. I had a quick look at my map to see what the position was. Dick Wilson saw a parachute going down when he was on his way back just as he turned. So he took a position on that. When we got back the top flight didn’t even know they’d lost a Meteor.

20:30 The MiGs had stuck in and got number four and shot him down. That was Ron Guthrie. He became a prisoner of war. The interesting thing was, the position that I had when I got back and the position that Dick Wilson had when he got back were both the same yet I saw the flaming aeroplane with no parachute and he saw a parachute and no flaming aeroplane. So it shows you what you can see. There are

21:00 two people virtually in the same area of the sky.

You had no air to air combat experience going into that mission. How did you react when all hell broke loose?

Your training sorts it out. You do things automatically. It is frustrating when you can’t catch another aircraft because of the speed. Then after that we had a few similar types of intercepts with MiGs

21:30 and then we started escorting the B29s.

How did you come to have a MiG flying directly at you?

Well just imagine say twenty or thirty aircraft up in the sky and in the one position of the sky all going round. At some stage you’re going to have some near misses. And that’s all that happens. All of a sudden you look up and here’s a MiG coming towards you at a great

22:00 rate of knots. And you’re only hoping that he sticks to the training and his training was similar to yours in that the lower man breaks down and the top man breaks up. He was well trained because he broke up and I broke down and we missed one another.

Were there shots fired at each other at that stage?

Oh yes. That’s what I’m saying when you see these

22:30 thirty-seven MiGs coming at you and they’re going over the top of the canopy and over the wings. The best one was my wing man who was Rick Osbourne. He saw the whole thing. He sat behind with no one having a go at him and he was to keep my tail clear which is the number two’s job. So he saw the whole show.

So when you say your training took over, can you just explain a bit about how your air-to-air 23:00 combat training worked. You flew in four aircraft formations?

Yes, there were four. Sometimes you go up and you have two against two or one against one. This is part of your training all the way through on fighters. You think of every type of condition that could occur and then you train accordingly with that. Everybody is taught the same.

23:30 So we call those air combat manoeuvres. For some of the flight lieutenants you would put them into a Fighter Tactics Course and they’d become fighter combat instructors. As a fighter combat instructor they are the ones that are responsible then in the squadrons for teaching the others. The fighter combat instructors are like some of the ‘top guns’, the Tom Cruise movie. They are the top

24:00 guns for our air force.

Who were they at that time?

I don’t know now. You would normally have two or three on a squadron.

Where had they got their experience from?

Just in training against one another.

When you came back from that first mission where you intercepted some

24:30 MiGs what happened when you got back, immediately afterwards?

Nothing. You just go in and have a briefing and say what you saw and then the next four comes along and they say what they saw and it is up to the intelligence officers in the operations room to join it all together and make a story out of it. That happens after every operation, every mission you have. Another interesting one we had was after a major

25:00 raid especially by the B29s, they would send in a photo reconnaissance aircraft. That would be a single aircraft that would go in loaded with cameras. It would be a fighter type aircraft. We used to go and escort them. At that stage he’d be the only aircraft going over the target for the day. We would be escorting him and normally it was fairly safe because

25:30 by that time all the MiGs were back on the ground being refuelled and our aircraft were all out of the sky so we used to do that.

Can you tell me about the escorting of the B29s and what happened there?

With the aircraft there you could have a whole group of aircraft like F84s and F86s and Sabres and our

26:00 Meteors. You would give them certain heights to fly at above the formation of B29s. Your main aim is to keep the fighter away from the B29s and let the B29s go in and do their job which was bombing. On occasions where you had a superior number of MiGs they’d get through and shoot the odd one or two B29 down and you’d see the chaps bailing out. Then you’d report where you

26:30 saw them going out. They had quite a good rescue service up there with helicopters the same as they did in Vietnam afterwards. They’d go in and try and save as many air crew as they could. I noticed in that article that I gave you, that was one where our HMAS Sydney, the aircraft carrier, was up there. They were

27:00 from the Sydney and their aircraft had been in and quite a number had been attacked mainly from ground fire. The aircraft were damaged but in this case with McMillan, who was the pilot, they had to crash land in a paddy field in amongst the Chinese army and it was quite a rescue.

We’ll talk about that in just a

27:30 moment but we’ll come back to just an average operation during those early days where you were still doing air-to-air combat. How did word of your mission come to you at the beginning? Would you take us through the steps leading up to a flight?

Every night the United States Air Force Headquarters in Japan would send out

28:00 targets for the following day. Each squadron under their control all the Sabres and F80s and F84s and our lot, the Meteors, would get a message through saying, “Your operation for tomorrow is….” Then they’d give you all the information that they decide you required. As soon as we got that we would then

28:30 decide, they would normally tell us how many aircraft, say it was eight aircraft. We would then go through the list of pilots and see who had flown the previous day and work out who would be on that mission. So eight aircraft now we’ve got eight pilots. We would then look at the target and have a look at any flak areas nearby and

29:00 any enemy positions that could affect this whole operation. So you’d go through all that and then in the morning, depending on the take off time, at about two hours before take off or two and a half hours you’d get the eight pilots that were going to fly. They would come in and they would be briefed by the people who’d worked everything out. They called it a 29:30 “Frag Order”– fragmentation – “Frag Order.” That covered the whole lot. When you took off before that your ground staff would have got how much fuel to put into each aircraft and weapon loading and take off times. They would be all prepared down at the flight line. Then you’d take off and you’d carry out the mission and when you came

30:00 back you went back into the Operations Room were the ops officers were and you’d be fully debriefed. Everything was covered and we’d send a report back then to the United States Air Force Headquarters as to whether the mission had been successful or unsuccessful or to strike again. So that would happen every night. Every night you got the Frag Order and every night all the pilots would be waiting around to see who was flying the next day. Sometimes you might have

30:30 two missions the next day at eight in the morning and eight in the afternoon.

What was your role in the squadron during those early days were you just a pilot?

I was what they called a section leader. I had a section of four. Then I ended up as a flight commander and then as Deputy, I led the squadron.

When you got word that you were flying what would happen

31:00 next. Can we continue on that example? You got word that you were flying at eight in the morning and what would the pilot have to do then?

The pilot would then work out what time he had to get up and have his shower and get ready to be over at that briefing. In most cases you would have breakfast before you went to the briefing depending on what time. If it was going to be a dawn take off you’d be doing your briefing in the dark

31:30 virtually and you’d probably have breakfast straight after that.

What were the targets that you were being briefed about at this stage?

Well at the stage that I first got there and virtually all the time through it was all dealing with air-to-air combat or cover air patrols. We also had standby-by pairs. You might

32:00 go to another air field and we’d have two aircraft down there. Two at Kimpo and two somewhere else, standing by in case any of the MiGs came back after the aircraft that had been out on ground attack. If any of them were coming down close they would ‘scramble’ us and radar would take over and take us up to the fight area.

What would happen when you were scrambled? Would you explain that in some more detail?

Scrambled is when you get off the

32:30 ground as fast as you can. In most cases you would be – when it was getting near the time for aircraft to return you’d probably be sitting in the cockpits of the aircraft. So all you had to do when they say, ‘scramble’ is to press the button and the engines start and you race out onto the runway and take off. That has always applied to fighter aircraft.

Was the whole squadron ever scrambled at any occasion to take on something

33:00 unexpected?

No. It wasn’t scrambled as a whole. On the day that the Firefly went in the Americans asked if we would participate in that one and provide cover air patrol. Cover air patrol is where you go to wherever these people are, that are down and find them on the ground and then make certain that the enemy doesn’t catch

33:30 them. You do this by attacking the enemy and firing at them. In McMillan’s case, by the time we heard that he had been shot down and they wanted cover air patrol over the top, Dick Wilson took off with four aircraft straight away. He was allowing himself something like three quarters of an hour to an hour over the target. Then I took off with

34:00 four more to replace him. Then another four led by a New Zealander that was flying with us took off with the third lot. However, by the time I had finished the cover we didn’t really need the number four. We had to get him out before it got dark because once it got

34:30 dark there were so many Chinese there they would have overrun them and either killed them or taken them prisoner. We just kept flying around over the top of them and let the Chinese knew we were there. If at any time we saw anyone getting close to them we’d dive in and start firing at them on the ground. What happened was the Americans called off the rescue? It was getting very

35:00 dark. It was close to dark but you could still see quite well. They notified me that they were calling off the recovery. At about the same time I had a radio call from the Australians flying some Sea Furies that they were escorting a helicopter from the carrier. Although it had no

35:30 night equipment the American flying that was going to try and get these two out. So I called up the Americans then and said I wasn’t going back and that I’d stay over the target. We stayed there until we virtually ran out of fuel. We actually ran out of fuel shortly after landing at Kimpo on our way back. In the meantime the Fireflies and Sea Furies from the Sydney came in with the helicopter and they got the

36:00 two off the ground and took them back to Kimpo. They couldn’t go back to the aircraft carrier because the helicopter didn’t have any night landing equipment. It was quite an operation. It was all Australians except for the American that flew the helicopter on the Sydney.

What time was it when you got back to Kimpo?

It was getting dark. I had all the

36:30 lights on. The lights were on on the runway and everything. That is what they wrote up in that article. That article was from a British magazine that came out I think in January. I didn’t even realise it was there until a friend of mine said, “Have you read that latest British magazine.”

Did you ever see the crew that had been rescued when you were at Kimpo?

They had to come back to Kimpo because of the helicopter not having the night flying. So our doctors ran the slide

37:00 rule over them and made sure that they were fit and well and then we all adjourned to the bar which was quite an interesting session. We had a couple of the Fury pilots and our Meteors and the Americans. There were the two Americans from the helicopters and the two pilots that were rescued. So it was interesting. The sad story is that McMillan who was the pilot of the

37:30 aircraft who went down, shortly after he came back to Australia he transferred to helicopters. He got a liking for them because they rescued him. He took a liking to them and after a while he left the navy and joined a civilian helicopter organisation. I think it was in Melbourne. And within a couple of months he was killed in an accident with a helicopter.

What was the general relationship between the Fleet

38:00 Air Arm blokes and the RAAF?

We hardly ever saw them. They had their area of operation and it was a different type of target to us. It was similar type targets later on but they sort of didn’t come into our playing area.

Except on that one occasion?

Yes, on that one occasion. They were trying to get back to base and we were the nearest outfit to Kimpo so we were asked to

38:30 provide a cover if we could so we did with the twelve aircraft. The interesting thing was that on one of the runs we made – first of all Dick Wilson who led the first four, they got there and flew round and round and looked after them. They were getting a bit short of fuel so they went back and just as they left I

39:00 arrived. Then on a couple of occasions the Chinese looked like they were going to get too close so we went in and fired. Then my number four was hit and so the number three, who was the sort of deputy leader in that formation of four, he had to escort that aircraft back to Kimpo. So we were left with just two of us. There was myself and Sergeant Blackwell who was my wing man. So

39:30 we had one aircraft badly damaged.

What could you see of the Chinese on the ground?

We could see them firing away with machine guns and having a ball.

What sort of strength did they have?

You are looking at one particular little group. There could have been one hundred there or there could have been more. It was hard to say. All we were interested in was knowing where McMillan

40:00 and his observer were and they were in a ditch beside this paddock. We only looked anywhere near that area and if we saw anybody move, of any description then we went in firing.

So this was a standard operation to go and provide air cover like that?

Yes. Any organisation if they were going into a rescue where they could see the

40:30 downed airman or airmen on the ground they would then try to provide cover air patrols until they were rescued and to do that they would just call on anybody flying around at that time, “Would you get up to such-and-such because there is a downed aircraft?”

Was there a rescue attempt for Ron Guthrie?

41:00 No. Tape 7

00:41 Coming back to the time that Ron Guthrie was shot down, was he the only one shot down at that point?

Yes.

So you were

01:00 attacked by MiGs –

The way we flew they called “Finger Four.” There is your “Finger Four.” That is the leader and that is his wing man and that’s the deputy leader and his wing man. That is where you get the “Finger Four Formation.” That is flown by the Russians, the Chinese and everybody and the North Koreans and the South Koreans. In the Battle of Britain they flew a Vic Formation which was that one and took three aircraft. But it

01:30 proved to be unsuccessful and everybody got onto this. The Americans did and everybody did, the world over, the Finger Four. In that this chap here on this occasion was Guthrie. When you are getting near the combat zone and you are on a patrol you are spread right out. You can go close when you’re just travelling but you spread right out. What happened was

02:00 that they didn’t even see us start the fight. They didn’t see the MiGs down below. They are covering us to protect us from above. While all this was going one none of them knew that Guthrie had been shot down. He had just disappeared out of the sky. I don’t know how many MiGs came down and shot him down or what. It was

02:30 unusual. Normally you would see a bit more than that. That is all we saw. As I say I saw the burning plane going down and Dick Wilson saw the parachute.

During that time or a situation like that is there much conversation going on?

Yes. “Watch it. Here comes so-and-so at two o clock or three o clock.” Everything is reported in the clock

03:00 position. You tried to keep your talk to a minimum in case you miss out on one of the important conversations. Then if you go to another channel you’ll hear all the Americans. “I’ll take this one and you take that one,” and away they go. It is best to keep the natter to a minimum.

Given that the MiGs were a far superior aircraft to what you were

03:30 flying you guys actually fared quite well in that particular battle only to lose one aircraft?

Yes, seeing that it was our first mix with the MiGs in the whole of the Korean War.

In the weeks coming when you met the MiGs again did you lose any more aircraft?

Later on we lost some, yes.

What happened there?

Once again they were just shot down during the fight.

Were you in one?

I was in a

04:00 couple more, but I wasn’t in the one where they lost some of these other pilots. A lot of the ones that we were on we seemed to get back safely but some of these fights they happen so quickly and the aircraft are going in all directions. I suppose you could say,

04:30 say you’ve got twelve cars running around a roundabout in town here and you tried to get into the middle of it, you can imagine what happens. Cars would be dashing off in all directions to miss you and that’s what happens in a fight especially when it is fighter versus fighter.

Was there any occasion where one of the Meteors shot down a MiG?

Yes. Bruce

05:00 Gowgly was the first one to shoot one down and then Bill Simmonds shot one. I think there were three shot down all told.

Were you there during that mission?

No. That was after my time. I had left by then. You had to be a bit of a fluke to get the MiGs because of the superiority in the aircraft compared to

05:30 Meteors. During your time in Korea and even during your time in World War II, did you come across men of, I think the phrase is “Low Moral Fibre”?

LMF [Lack of Moral Fibre]? Yes, on the squadrons you’d find them. It was treated as a bit of a crime but it really wasn’t you know. The chap was completely stressed out.

Can you share with me some of those

06:00 stories?

Not really because I didn’t pay that much attention to them. I couldn’t go in and say what the chap was doing. You need to be a fully qualified psychologist to work out those cases. I personally feel that in quite a number of occasions where a chap loses his nerve and that’s it. It is not the chap trying to lose his nerve, he just loses it automatically.

Did you come across fellows

06:30 who were actually discharged as a result of it?

No, not discharged although some were but they were the severe cases. No, that was a hard one to judge, the LMF. It was very difficult.

Can you share with me an example of a fellow that

07:00 obviously didn’t want to fight, but you were unsure whether he was LMF or not?

There were none in the Meteors that had got to that stage while I was there anyhow. When I was with 148 Squadron in Italy it was totally different to another squadron. You didn’t have as many dealings with

07:30 other crews. Practically all our trips were by single aircraft or at the most three would go out on a particular job in Yugoslavia. So you weren’t briefed at the same time as other people. In Bomber Command they would all go out into one massive briefing and they’d all go out and have their meals together and everything. We would just be picked out and we’d be one crew going out on a particular job.

08:00 We might be the only one for the night. You didn’t mix with other people. You hardly ever mixed with anybody but your own crew. It was very difficult. Even with a fighter squadron you all go out together even though you are in different aeroplanes. You all go out together. You all come back at the same time. You all go to the same briefing and you all go to the same debriefing and you

08:30 listen to what people are giving in the debriefing so you’ve got a good idea of exactly what was happening. With the jobs that we were on you didn’t encounter that at any stage really. You went out and you did your job and you came back and you mightn’t see some of the other crew members for weeks because when you’re having a sleep they’re out on the job. There might be four going out all to different places on the one night. You never really

09:00 got to know the other members of the crew. It was an amazing setup but that is how it was.

And that would lead to stress?

No. Some people are made that way that they can stand operations up to a certain extent and then they pack up. Look at Vietnam. There is a lot of our army that were up there that probably saw one battle and at the most

09:30 two and are suffering severely, according to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, with stress related problems. They say a lot of these people have committed suicide because of their experiences in Vietnam. It all depends on the type of person they are themselves and their make up and how they go. I never worried when I was out on an operation of any description, even though there was a good

10:00 chance every time that I would be shot down behind enemy lines. I never worried about it. I used to get a bit of a kick out of it actually some of the flying and that’s it.

So what you are saying to me is some men did worry about it?

I’ve only heard it handed down from mouth to mouth that a chap

10:30 gave it away but I had no personal experience of any of those. I have seen chaps with dead bodies putting them out of aircraft and things like that. To some people it didn’t affect them one little bit but others they dreamed about that for months and months and months. A great friend of mine went out and picked up a helmet and the head of the pilot was still in it.

11:00 He really suffers these days and he still can’t get that out of his mind. It is a bit of a shock when you go out to pick up a helmet and there is a head in it.

Where was that?

Butterworth. One Mirage landed on top of another one, not a Mirage, a Sabre. And it 11:30 decapitated the chap who was on the ground. Another one came in on top. This friend of mine was an engineer officer. He wasn’t a pilot or anything. He was an engineer officer and he was going around trying to find out what had caused it all and where all the bits and pieces were. And he saw the helmet and he picked it up and there was the head in it.

Coming back to Korea. How did your role

12:00 change when Creswell left and Steege came in?

As I said before, Steege didn’t do too much flying so I was on many occasions leading the squadron. It was after a team had come up from the Department of Air that I was made an acting squadron leader.

Why was it that

12:30 Steege wasn’t doing much flying?

He was doing a lot of administrative work trying to convince them how the aircraft should be used and things like that and going away to headquarters a lot. It was quite understandable.

He wasn’t having much success in getting the aircraft changed?

I think a lot of what he went through was virtually what sold the Americans on it. Then Susans’

13:00 arrival and his proposals on ground attack sort of finalised everything and they changed the role. You get cases where people don’t fly as much as other people and that’s life.

What was Steege like as a person?

I liked him. He was a good bloke.

13:30 Can you give me any more information why you liked him?

No, not really. You either like a chap or you don’t, don’t you? He had a damned good record in the desert. I think he was DSO and DFC and he had shot down quite a few aircraft. He was one of their top pilots during the

14:00 war. It is hard to work out all your pilots. When we flew to Malaya there were nineteen pilots and not one of them was the same as the other. They were all different every one of them.

14:30 One of them ended up becoming Chief of the Air Force. They were all different types. You’d have to be a highly qualified psychologist to answer some of those questions.

So how was Creswell and Steege’s leadership different?

One was more gung-ho than the other.

15:00 That is about all there was to it. I would say it would be very difficult to find two squadron commanders who were very similar. They have all got their little traits and their own ideas.

Steege recommended you for a bar to your DFC [a second award of the medal]?

Yes.

15:30 What was that for?

For the overall flying through the hundred missions. It wasn’t a particular thing. When you were going out every second day and sometimes day after day up there you got a lot of flak when you were flying. It was bursting around you and you were always waiting for MiGs to appear and things like that. If you took out

16:00 sixteen aircraft it was up to you to get sixteen aircraft back. He recommended it and Susans, who took over from him thought that I had got a DFC already in Korea. So he didn’t apparently let it go any further thinking that the DFC that I had was a Korean DFC. He wasn’t aware until

16:30 years after and he said, “I thought Steege had given you a DFC and was now trying to give you a bar to a DFC.” I said, “No.” One was 1939-1945 and the other one was the Korean.

These hundred operations you flew, were they all escort?

No they were a mixture of everything.

Can you give me an idea of

17:00 the types of operations you went on?

Cover air patrols and bomber escorts and photo reconnaissance escorts and operation stand bys. That’s not a bad mixture. There was no ground attack. We didn’t do any ground attack at that stage.

Can you share with me a particular operation where the flak was particularly bad? 17:30 No. There was one trip that Steege came on as my number two. We got into the area where we were to patrol and it was quite obvious that there was radar predicted flak because it followed us along.

18:00 To counter radar predicted stuff every now and again you would change heights or change your course. You never did the same thing twice. If you went up once you’d do it again and go up a bit more. You’d go up and come down and then go up they’d say, “Righto. The next time he’s going down.” So it was a bit of ‘cat

18:30 and mouse’ that you could play when you saw flak. You could work out whether they were sticking to a pattern or not. You could see them following you and there was a pattern. A whole stack of it would burst into the sky at one particular stage and then that is just random firing as far as I’m concerned. That was about it. I can

19:00 tell you a funny operation if you want a funny one. I mentioned before about the four operations that the squadron did against the Malayan terrorists. There was one mission where they had the British Army and some of the Malays on the ground trying to circle this

19:30 group of Chinese terrorists in one particular area. And it wasn’t too far from one of their major towns. They wanted to get these people on the move so there was a chance they’d run into a couple of army battalions that had circled them. We were trying to work out whether we should go in with bombing or strafing

20:00 because you couldn’t see these people. They were in a particular area and you knew that, but it was in the jungle and you couldn’t see under the tree cover. So they thought on this particular occasion that they’d get them out psychologically. We took over I think about sixteen aircraft and one group flew high and got up to around the forty thousand foot mark and the rest of us stayed low

20:30 and then we started the battle. The ones on top went down and broke the sound barrier. I don’t know if you’ve heard the explosion from an aircraft going through. It’s a sharp ‘Boom’, like a a bomb dropping. So they went through that as though they were bombing this area. We knew by pointing it at the centre of the area where they are supposed to be that that is where the bomb noise would be.

21:00 There were some Oxfords went in and threw some tape recordings in with machine gun firing and then the Sabres came in with screaming dives and making a lot of noise as they were going in. They were not going firing any bullets in case we caused a stir, but on the ground the Chinese terrorists would have heard all these machine guns. They didn’t catch anybody but we thought it was quite good. We carried out a war without firing a shot. It could have worked.

Whose

21:30 idea was it to throw the tape recorders in?

That came in from the British headquarters that were controlling the operation.

Coming back to Korea while you are still there – Steege – what were the circumstances in which he had replaced?

He had finished his time. You went up there for so many sorties or a set time.

22:00 He was just sent back. He had finished his time period up there.

Was anything said about the fact that he wasn’t like Creswell, leading some of the flights and had handed the responsibility over to you?

Not that I know of. I never heard any reports and I never saw any reports.

22:30 He was a damn good pilot. I know on the days he flew with me he was in the right position at the right time. You would have to know all the circumstances and I don’t. You will always get people that don’t like other people and make up their own

23:00 minds of what happened and those rumours start going around the place and they are hard to bloody stop too.

Did he hear those rumours at the time?

I don’t know. If he had heard it I don’t think he would have told me. I think he would have ignored them. He did his

23:30 fair share. He did a lot of other things while he was in the air force too, besides the period in Korea. I didn’t believe any of the rumours that I heard.

24:00 When did you hear these rumours?

They probably went on for years. People that weren’t even up there at the time started talking about rumours back here in Australia. If it wasn’t Steege it would be someone else. No, there were a lot of these things and you can’t believe the stories that you hear. 24:30 Have you heard it from anybody, any rumours?

Just what I’ve read.

There were about twenty of us up there and most of the people that I have heard talk about Steege were never there. That is the thing. Unless you were there

25:00 and you had very good evidence then you shouldn’t be talking about it. I could start something on old Dick Creswell, who is a buddy of mine and it would go all round the blokes and go from unit to unit even now.

You could start rumours on Dick Creswell which weren’t true or you could start ones which were true?

25:30 No, which weren’t true. I know nothing but good about Dick Creswell and I haven’t seen Steege do anything bad. I as there the whole time he was there. He left about the same time that I left.

The reason that he wasn’t

26:00 flying as you say, is because he was doing other things?

He flew every now and again. He didn’t fly every mission and no one was expected to fly every mission. I suppose you could say he could have flown a lot more but he was worried about losing people and he was trying to get the role of the squadron changed. That involved going to the

26:30 headquarters days on end and nattering to them and talking to them and trying to convince them that we would lose more pilots if we kept on the way we were.

You mentioned there were things about Dick Creswell which weren’t things you necessarily liked. What sort of things are they?

I didn’t say that. I said I could start something about Dick Creswell that would

27:00 start rumours right throughout the air force. They wouldn’t be true but people would believe it. You’ve got to be careful what some of these people say. Old Dick I don’t think ever liked Gordon Steege. I think it is wrong of him to say that, because he definitely wasn’t there at any stage when Gordon Steege was there. He had

27:30 gone and left and Steege moved in when he left.

Some of the other fellows that you were flying with while Steege was there, what was their feeling in respect of this?

I didn’t hear anybody talking and I didn’t ask anybody what they thought. My view was we had a job to do and we went out and did it.

28:00 We had enough on our hands without worrying about whether people flew or not. I have heard people rubbish other people and it is wrong, completely wrong.

It is wrong when it is untrue or it is wrong to do it in the first place?

Unless you were

28:30 there. Unless you were there and you physically saw something I don’t think you should be talking about it. I wanted to know how Creswell summed it all up when he wasn’t there. He has heard it from someone else and was that person there? I would like to hear some other names and I bet most of them weren’t even there when Steege was there.

How did the

29:00 squadron change and your role change when Susans came in?

I left before Susans arrived.

But he had spoken to you about the bar on your DFC?

No, that was afterwards. That was about three years afterwards when he was commanding Williamtown and I was commanding 75 Squadron. He said it in front of my wife and myself one night.

29:30 He said, “Oh, I made a boo-boo there. I thought you had already got a DFC for Korea.” I said, “No.” That was the reason why – first of all when Steege put it up we had a quota system in Korea. Were you aware of that? They could hand out up to say, four DFCs a month.

30:00 If you had six chaps that deserved DFCs you could nominate the six and then the headquarters in Australia would come back and say, “Sorry your quota is four for February.” They would give you the name of the four that they were forwarding on and they would say, “We will nominate the other two in the next list.” 30:30 That is what happened in my case. It went to headquarters from Steege saying, “Recommendation for a bar to the DFC.” It came back and it said, “Sorry, the quota is full for that month. Repeat it later on.” By that time Steege had gone and Susans came in. Susans got the letter and saw it and thought, “No, bugger it. He’s already got one

31:00 for Korea and he shouldn’t get a second one.” So that was how it was. Susans was forthright on that. He said exactly what happened. Although he was willing to say that any query that goes before the Department of Air – you see Steege says, as that thing stated, this is well after the Korea War that he found out that I

31:30 didn’t get anything. He then went back to the Department and put the whole case in writing and recommended that they reconsider it and they came back and said, ‘No. It happened too long ago.” That is exactly what is in that piece of paper I showed you and that is the official war history. So when Susans arrived he got confused

32:00 with it and then just took my name off the list so it was never followed on. You could understand it. I understood it when I was talking to Susans about it. It was ‘stiff cheddar’ [hard luck]. I can understand it in his case that he thought one DFC in Korea was enough, which I heartily agree with so that was it.

32:30 Just life in Korea – outside the flying did you ever meet the locals, the South Korean people?

No, not South Korean. We met a lot of Americans because we ate with them and everything. The odd party would be held in town and

33:00 someone or one of the Americans would have a party and they’d invite you in there and you’d go in. You never mixed with the locals. You had to know their language. Very few of them knew English. I suppose with the flying that we did too you wanted a good night’s sleep.

33:30 I hardly ever went out or left the base.

So for R&R [Rest and Relaxation] did you go anywhere for that?

Yes. I went with my wingman up to Tokyo and stayed at one of the big posh places the Americans had taken over. It cost us about ten bob [shillings] a night to stay in these posh places. This had a golf course right on the

34:00 hotel side. We had about five or six days up there and that was about half way through the tour and then we came back. I met Errol Flynn. Errol came up on one of these concert tours. He arrived at

34:30 Kimpo and then when he got there found out that his countrymen were flying from Kimpo. He came over to the bar this night and he walked in and he was drinking quite a bit and enjoying himself. I think it was Dickie Creswell who said to another group and was a bit away from where Errol was.

35:00 He said something like, “I don’t know what he’s really got that brings him all the women.” Apparently Flynn heard this and said to the group that he was in, “Don’t think that little whippersnapper is going to have the same appeal that I’ve got.” He was very nice by the way. We were taking off the next morning and he came over to wave us off on our

35:30 merry way. I enjoyed talking to him.

What did you converse about with him?

He did most of the talking about what we were doing and how we were enjoying it. Chaps would but in and say, “When were you in Tassie last?” and all that sort of stuff. Of course when he was thrown out of Tasmania, he’s never been back. We found him very

36:00 talkative and very interesting. You would meet the odd start that came out to perform for the troops. Another one was the actor, Paul Douglas. I went to a party that he was at. He was also very pleasant. What was his wife’s name? She was there with him.

36:30 I think in most of these places that you go to you met some people but you never met the locals. You never went into town to buy things because there was nothing there to buy. The place had been bombed to blazes and fighting had been going on in the streets when we got there. There was no welcoming party there for you. I don’t think many of the chaps ever went into town.

37:00 There is an episode in M.A.S.H. where there is ‘Five O’Clock Charlie’ flying over?

“Bed Check Charlie.”

Can you tell me about him?

‘Bed Check’ used to come in around about six o clock of a night. It was an old biplane. It was so slow nobody would ever shoot it down. You wouldn’t be able to slow your aircraft down enough to get behind him. He would come in at six o’clock and he was a bit of a nuisance

37:30 now and again. He was throwing bombs off the side of the aircraft, 1914-18 style. He’d throw them over the side and down they’d come. It was exactly how they had it in M.A.S.H. as a matter of fact. He’d come over and they’d fire from the ground at him but the little bugger always seemed to survive. One night one of his bombs hit one of the Sabres on the ground,

38:00 but most of the people ignored him. You didn’t go into an air raid shelter or anything like that you carried on with your drinking at the bar and old “Bed Check Charlie” would come in. They got a couple of night fighters up there to see if they could shoot him down, Black Widows, like a lightening aircraft. I don’t think they did any good. After a while he died out. I think what

38:30 happened was the bloody aircraft became so unserviceable that he wasn’t game to fly it any more. It was an old wreck of a thing.

So what damage did he do to the Sabre?

It was just shrapnel. There were some holes in the side of it and things like that. It didn’t blow up because the bombs that he had were only small things. He was a nuisance value.

And nobody could hit him with

39:00 ground fire?

They all tried but I don’t think they really aimed at him. I think a lot of them took pity on the poor soul. I was surprised when I saw that M.A.S.H. episode because it was so similar to what really happened. You don’t often get that in Hollywood movies and of course it was done in such a way that very few people wouldn’t

39:30 believe it. They’d say, “How could he come over every night and aim bombs off the side of the aircraft?” But he did. He came over and we used to see old Bed Check.

Did you know where he was flying out of?

No. I don’t think anybody even gave a hoot on that one. The intelligence people might have known the approximate position but he would have flown so long and it was a string and bagged aircraft with very little

40:00 metal on it and it wouldn’t give much of a radar return. They mightn’t have known where he was coming from because he could have taken off from any road or any paddock in the area with that type of aircraft. Oh yes, Old Bed Check Charlie.

We’ll just pause there.

Tape 8

00:44 You flew one hundred missions in Korea which is as many as anyone did on the jets, is that right?

No we had one chap that virtually refused to come

01:00 home. ‘Black’ [Kenneth] Murray we called him. He started up there as a sergeant and went to flight sergeant and warrant officer and pilot officer then flying officer. He was still flying operations. And he flew a total, most of them were very dangerous in ground attack and really getting in low, of three hundred and sixty-six. That’s a few operations.

01:30 What was considered a tour? What was the quote that you had to reach?

Well when we first went over it was going to be the hundred missions. And I was the first one to get it so I was the first to come home but there were quite a lot of people in the two hundred mark. Our Black Murray he went on and on and on and he didn’t look like he was ever going to come home.

02:00 What was it like approaching that number then, when you got near it?

No. It didn’t affect me. It was just another one and another one and all of a sudden the hundred were there.

Were there ever any superstitions during your time in the air force?

I didn’t have any, no. There were lots of people that did have

02:30 superstitions and used to carry various things in the aircraft and reckoned it was a good luck charm, but I didn’t worry about it.

Were there any in the Stirling or Halifax squadron during the war?

No.

What sort of things would people carry as lucky charms? Are there any that stick out in your mind? Some of them carried little dolls

03:00 that their girlfriends would give them. Others had stockings and they’d wear them as a scarf. It was clothing and little toys and what have you.

Did you fly a particular aircraft more of a time than any other in 77 Squadron?

No. I did with the Sabres with 3 Squadron.

03:30 I flew one more than the others and the same on the Mirages. You got to like an aircraft. You got to know it well. But I didn’t worry about one in 77. In 77 Squadron when a Frag Order came in and said, “Righto we need eight aircraft,” and there were eight pilots. You couldn’t go around and say you wanted your favourite

04:00 aircraft. Whatever aircraft were ready they went with the eight pilots that were there.

How did you identify the aircraft? Did you have names?

They had numbers and you worked it on just the number of the aircraft. Some of the squadrons had names on the aircraft especially the Americans, they went for it in a big way. When I got the first lot of

04:30 Mirages I had a few very young and keen pilots that wanted names on it. So we started putting cartoon characters on it. We had Heckyll and Jeckyll and Roadrunner. I used to fly the Roadrunner quite a bit. In fact I took the Roadrunner on the trip to New Zealand. After a while people got fed up with that. If you were flying one aircraft a lot it was

05:00 okay, but after a while it didn’t mean much.

What sort of gear were you flying in clothing wise in Korea?

Up there you wore the G Suit with the trousers and that was only to stop the blood running to your feet all the time in violent manoeuvres. You would wear just a normal flying suit which was made in Australia.

05:30 They were a brown cotton type suit and we had the Mae West dinghies. We had a hard hat to fly in.

A helmet?

Yes. It was a motorcycle helmet only a bit bigger.

06:00 Were you wearing throat microphones?

No it was mask microphones. It was an oxygen mask with the mic going through the face mask.

You mentioned that before. Who could you be in contact with while you were up in the air?

You would have a reporting unit to

06:30 call into. It was normally a radar unit somewhere up in the hills. You would report in that you were there and going on a mission and then you’d report in coming back. And listening on that channel is where you used to get the odd messages coming through. There was very little need for messages up there. A lot of the talk was between pilots and we kept that to a minimum because that could always be

07:00 traced. You didn’t talk much at all really it was just reporting in and reporting out unless you went on an escort. Every now and again we had an escort for a VIP and you’d be in close contact with the radar units there just in case any

07:30 enemy aircraft popped up. I did the escort for the Vice President of the United States while we were there. He was floating around down below in an Auster type aircraft [communications aircraft] so that was fairly straightforward. It was all done with the radar people.

How many aeroplanes were escorting him?

I think we had four most of the time. Then when those four ran out of

08:00 fuel we’d get another four in.

What was your closest call do you think during your flying in Korea?

In Korea it was probably the head on. That was a bit nerve wracking.

That was your first mission is that right?

No. I’d flown a couple before, but we hadn’t encountered anything

08:30 with the MiGs. It was the first time we encountered the MiGs and it was a head on.

Are there any others that stand out coming back into your thoughts where you thought, “Gee I was lucky there”?

No, not really. It was the same when we were with the Halifaxes. It was hard to work out which was a

09:00 bad one. There were lots of bad ones, but which one was the worst it would be impossible to say.

You said before you are not the type of bloke affected much by death. Were there any close friends of yours killed during the tour in Korea?

Not in Korea, but at other times. There were some in England while we were training. During training

09:30 you get a lot of deaths. It is amazing the number that you do get during flying training. When I was CO of 21 Squadron we had a lot of Citizen Air Force pilots and one of them was a captain with TAA [Trans Australia Airlines]. We lost him one day with a Vampire. He landed right in the middle of the Werribee

10:00 Race Course. We knew what had happened and I went out to the Race Course and he was still there in the aircraft. The aircraft had burned. You couldn’t afford to dwell on anything. That was a good way to get yourself into trouble.

10:30 While you were leading missions yourself how did you find you accepted that responsibility? What difference did that make to your job?

It didn’t make much of a difference. When you fly in a fighter squadron like that you are

11:00 either leading a section or you are leading two aircraft or you are leading a flight or you’re leading a squadron. They are all totally different from one to the other. There is more responsibility of course when you’re leading the squadron, but nothing you can point to. It’s just you’ve got to keep an eye on so many things and your navigation and where you are and listening to messages on the

11:30 radio. The more you go up the scale from flight commander to squadron leader there is always somebody above you except when you are the squadron commander. When you are flight commander or section leader you have got the squadron commander up there worrying about you.

What were your emotions on making that

12:00 hundred and being told you were going home?

At that stage I was quite happy to go home. I felt that I had done my bit in Korea and it was time I went back to Australia. In a way I was pleased that I got my hundred and I was pleased that I was going home.

What happened to you then?

12:30 You went to Williamtown?

When I came back I went to Williamtown for a short period mainly flying the Vampires. Then I got my substantive squadron leader and was posted to 21 Squadron at Melbourne to command. In that squadron we were training Citizen Air Force

13:00 pilots. They would come out say once a month or once a fortnight. We also had Citizen Air Force pilots that had been fully trained and had been in the service and they were coming along as weekend pilots. And we had Wirraways and Mustangs and Vampires. And we had the only

13:30 helicopter in Australia at that stage. We did the training of civilian pilots and we also carried out all the army co-operation and navy co-operation in Victoria and Southern New South Wales. It was good the whole period there. With the helicopter it was used mainly to look for lost aircraft. And

14:00 sometimes the government departments, because it was the only helicopter, once one government department wanted all the seals counted at Seal Rock off Southern Victoria. So we took the helicopter out with a couple of their experts and counted the seals. You’d do odd little jobs like that that would come up.

Apart from the accidents that you

14:30 mentioned before what differences were there in dealing with the Citizens’ Air Force as opposed to the air force proper?

We only saw them once a fortnight, so there wasn’t that continuity that you had with people in the air force. On a squadron we had them every day. These were as ‘keen as mustard’ especially the younger chaps that we had and the older chaps were all highly

15:00 experienced fighter pilots. It was a pleasant squadron, it was like a family. We only had at one stage four permanent officers on the squadron that did all the jobs. So during the week we had all these aeroplanes to fly and when there were army co-operation exercises on off we’d go the lot of us, the four of us, and do the exercise.

15:30 That was very pleasant and very nice. And you had a choice of aircraft. You could come down and get out of a Wirraway and hop into a Mustang and take that off and then come back and get into a Vampire. It was quite pleasant.

Just one question, on returning from the Korean War, how did you find the public in Australia were responding to that war? Was it the forgotten war do you think?

16:00 Yes. I don’t think anybody gave a damn whether you came back or not. When we came back from the Korean War we came back in dribs and drabs. In my case I came back by myself on a Qantas aircraft. I wasn’t expecting the town band out to play or anything and

16:30 no one would know. It wasn’t as though there was a battalion coming back or as happened with some of these cases that we’ve had recently, where the Prime Minister goes and greets them all and says, “Howdy, well done,” and all that. When you are coming back in ones and twos you can’t expect a welcoming committee every

17:00 time so you were just ignored. We didn’t expect anything in any case.

The war in general wasn’t being highly reported in the press, is that true?

There never was a war it was a police action under the auspices of the United Nations. It was never a war and it was never finished either. They’ve still got a

17:30 truce. The end of the war hasn’t been declared.

How does that make you feel one way or the other the fact that the situation still exists now?

I don’t think it affects anybody. It doesn’t seem to worry the United Nations or anybody else. It was a police action and that’s how they referred to it all the way through. The police action was finished as far as everybody was

18:00 concerned and the United Nations took it off the books and that was it. No, it didn’t worry us.

What about the lack of recognition or fanfare? Has that ever been anything you’ve thought of?

No. As I say, coming back singly or in twos we didn’t expect anything at all. It was a totally different set up to even Vietnam. People objected to the people coming back from Vietnam, but in our

18:30 case it was a police action and that’s the way the people looked at it and that’s the way the press looked at it. We lost more people in the Korean War than were lost during the Vietnam War.

I’ll just skip forward a bit over the few jobs you ad in the meantime to talk about going over to Malaya. How did that come about?

We were part of

19:00 the British Commonwealth Force that was in Malaya and we had Lincolns there initially and then later on we had Canberras there. They were part of the force to fight against the Chinese communists. At about the same time we were also part of SEATO, the South East Asian Treaty Organisation. We had obligations under that

19:30 SEATO Treaty to go and fly and the same as we had army. It was virtually the same as Ubon, when we went to Ubon later on. Although it was associated with the Vietnam War it has never been treated that way. It was always treated as another little section of SEATO.

20:00 Can you tell us about going over to Butterworth and who you were with and what was going on?

At that stage there were Canberras up there and they didn’t have any fighters. The British had fighters in Singapore. It was decided to send up a Sabre squadron with another Sabre squadron to follow at a later date.

20:30 Our squadron was picked, 3 Squadron, and we flew up. As I mentioned before we had to go on a roundabout route because we couldn’t overfly Indonesia. There were nineteen aircraft and it was quite a task as you could imagine. So we went from Williamtown via Townsville to Darwin. We stayed at Darwin for about four or five days

21:00 to get used to the climate a bit and also to make sure all the aircraft were serviceable. We were able to test all our aircraft and have them all ready to go when we decided, ‘Now’s the time to go.” Then we flew four aircraft about every second day I think it was. We had our own ground staff at all the staging places. We had them at Biak and we had them at Guiuan which was the island of Samar off the Philippines

21:30 and we had them at Labuan. We just went off as four aircraft at a time. Sometimes you might have four in the morning and four in the afternoon. We did it that way and we got every aircraft up to Malaya on time. You couldn’t ask for more than that. And we struck some bad weather on the route but we didn’t lose an aircraft and we didn’t lose a pilot.

Can you describe the setup at 22:00 Butterworth when you arrived?

In what way?

It was quite a big engineering feat building the airfield up there?

Yes it was a big base. It was probably one of our most modern bases when we got there. The hangars were beautiful and the runways were perfect because we’d built our own runways or the air force had. We had accommodation, good accommodation, on the base.

22:30 The squadron commanders lived on the base. A lot of our ground staff and pilots lived on Penang Island, which was glorious. It is a holiday spot these days. We had all the facilities at Butterworth in the way of swimming pools and cinemas and things like that. It was a very pleasant place to serve.

23:00 A lot of the people used to spend time over on Penang Island. We did our shopping over there. You’d drive over and there was a ferry that went across the water to Penang Island. You could take your car over. It was very pleasant.

You were married by this stage?

I was married with a

23:30 young daughter and my wife was about six or seven months pregnant when she flew up to join us up there. She just got in on the time limit and my youngest daughter was born on Penang and she got Malayan citizenship. We took her to a local doctor. We didn’t take her to the hospital where most of the service people went. We heard there was this good Scottish doctor in

24:00 Walsh Road, Penang and we went there and Tracy was born. And I went along and registered her at the Malayan Administrative Centre and then sent that down to our Embassy in Kuala Lumpur and got her Australian citizenship as well. She had to give away the Malayan one when she turned eighteen

24:30 I think it was.

Were you living off base at that stage?

No we were living on the base. We lived on the base the whole time. All the COs of squadrons and key personnel lived on base in case they were wanted quickly. It was very nice. Butterworth was right on the water’s edge and the house that we lived in had been built by the

25:00 British years ago. It had all the ‘mod cons’ and overhead fans and big bedrooms and good kitchens. They were very nice. You walked out of our front door and across the road and onto the beach.

What did your day to day duties up there consist of?

It was flying training mostly. It was going out to the range and dropping

25:30 bombs or firing ammunition and firing rockets and participating in exercises with the British or flying over to Saigon and operating there with the locals. We would go to Thailand quite a bit and we went to the Philippines three times to participate with the Americans on exercises over there. They had a big air force base at

26:00 Clark Field and we’d go to Clark Field and stay for a fortnight sometimes. They were good exercises and thoroughly enjoyable. We learned a lot from them.

There were some accidents up there as well?

In my time we didn’t have many serious ones. They had them later on.

26:30 During my time we didn’t have any serious accidents at all. We were very fortunate. We had our fingers crossed.

Was the jungle itself a difficult area to fly over?

With the thick jungle, yes. It was impossible to try and work out exactly where you were. You did it on dead reckoning, but once you got away from the

27:00 jungle on either coast you had road networks and rail networks and it was easy to fly and know where you were. It was only when you had to go over the middle of Malaya.

What problems did the bird life or animal life pose at Butterworth?

None at all.

They weren’t flying into the engines of the bombers?

No. There were very few birds flying around Butterworth itself.

27:30 Monkeys, you never saw them. They were out in the jungle. We had a sea otter in the dining room one day after a storm and then another night we had one of the local cats, wildcats, in bed with my wife and I. I lashed out with my closed

28:00 fist to hit the cat which I got in the stomach area and at the same time my wife lashed out with her foot and got me. We were even at that stage. That cat finally woke up to the fact that it was in the wrong place and it hopped off the bed and raced up the passage with me chasing it worried it was going to get into one of the kids’ rooms. It disappeared.

28:30 What was the weather like generally up there?

At four o’clock in the afternoon there was a shower and it was very heavy normally. That was the afternoon shower and it was always there. In the monsoon period there was lots of rain, but it didn’t seem to worry us much. You knew it was coming and you knew it was going to be heavy rain so you stayed home. The families

29:00 loved Malaya. In my case we were given a cook and a young Chinese lass that used to do the cleaning and baby sitting. It was quite pleasant. We had an Indian cook who was very, very good and we had a gardener as well. We had three.

29:30 The weather didn’t really worry us, the hot weather or the heavy storms we just kept away from them.

What about the Chinese terrorists, they didn’t seem to worry you much either?

No. They were more right in the jungle area or very close to the jungle near the rubber plantations and things like that but they never worried us on the base. It was mainly because

30:00 there were the Malay police, the British police and the British Army and the Malayan army and they were everywhere. A bunch of terrorists coming along could be easily sighted. The people in the little villages knew everybody so it was easy to pick up a terrorist in that area. So they never came into there. They kept mainly to rubber plantations and in the centre of

30:30 Malaya.

Was there an underground movement within the Malay villages themselves?

None that I know of and we travelled a lot around Malaya. We had no problems. It wasn’t long after we got there that the Malayan Emergency came to a halt and from that time on there was very little activity around the place. They had caught most of the

31:00 Chinese. Those they hadn’t caught seemed to just disappear. It was a lovely place to be, Malaya. I liked it.

Where there ever any political tensions while you were there with the Indonesians?

No. Not at that stage. This was 1958/1959. Tunku Abdul Rahman or somebody, he was the

31:30 Prime Minister and he was very good. He had a firm control on the country. We had no troubles and we mixed well with the locals. We got to know quite a number of them.

How big were some of these exercises, these SEATO exercises that you mentioned taking part in?

Six or seven nations would turn up. When we had the aircraft

32:00 ones we had people from Thailand, Vietnam, the United States, the British, Australians, French and they were the main ones. They always provided aircraft. Even the French would fly all the way out from Paris for some of these shows. They were quite interesting and there were quite a lot of aircraft participating

32:30 too. Later on I used to go back up there because I was on the planning staff for SEATO for a while. We’d go back up there before an exercise started and plan it and then work through the exercise and that was quite good. While we were in Malaya it was all on the flying side.

What did these exercises actually consist of? What would the aircraft do?

33:00 One lot of the aircraft would be the enemy and they’d attack so and so and you’d try and stop them. They were that type of exercise and what you expected to happen if it was a real SEATO advance. It was very good. A lot of the exercises were held in Thailand.

Were these

33:30 modelled on a mock communist threat or what was the enemy you were facing in these exercises?

It was more of a type of Vietnam show with communist insurgency. It was worked out – you see Vietnam had a lot of good aircraft as was

34:00 shown in the Vietnam War. But when we went on this SEATO exercises in most cases it was a case of an insurgency group that would come into the area. They would have some aircraft and you’d go out and attack them. Sometimes it would be a combined army and air force exercise and it was all very interesting and all good.

The Sabres had been the best

34:30 fighters that you could get hold of in the Korean War, what were they like at that stage were they still holding their own?

Yes. That is how the Americans did so well. They were far superior to the MiG.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Sabre and about why it was such a good aircraft?

It was only because it was highly manoeuvrable. It had a very good engine and it was a

35:00 sturdy aircraft. It could take a lot of punishment. That was the main advantage of the Sabre over the MiG-15.

In Malaya what armaments would you carry on an exercise?

We had the cannons on the Sabre and we’d carry bombs and we’d carry rockets.

35:30 They were very good. We also carried a sidewinder which is an air-to-air missile. That was a heat- seeking missile. You would fire than and it would hone in on the heat source of the enemy aircraft. We had that and they were very good. We practised a lot. We had ranges on some of the islands off the coast of Malaysia where we could go out and

36:00 get scores and what have you and see how stuff was going. We used to rate all the pilots. They had to reach a certain standard in all types of exercises, but mainly in the armament and the bombing and instrument flying and navigation.

How did you shoot at each other during an exercise?

With camera guns.

What were they?

36:30 Well on your gun sight you had a camera set up and you could go in and fire and come back and there’d be your gun sight and the picture of the other aircraft. You could tell from that whether you’d scored a hit or not. For actual live firing we could tow a target behind another Sabre, like a big white sleeve

37:00 or a banner which was the best one. That was just a rectangular banner that was towed behind the Sabre and you’d go in and fire at it and your ammunition would be coloured. They were able to bring the banner back and flop it on the airfield and then the person could go out and say, “Righto. Such and such a pilot go so and so and so many hits,” depending on the

37:30 colours. As the bullet penetrated this webbing that made up the target it used to leave the colour of the paint on the hole. There was the cine-camera for actual air-to-air fighting and then to see how accurate you were we’d do it with the banner target. We do that in Australia too. Any

38:00 fighter squadrons were all doing all the shooting and banner targets. We would do it from Williamtown just over the sea and we used to do it in Newcastle.

Are there any other events of any nature that stand out in your mind from the time in Malaya that you could tell us about? You mentioned one funny story already?

No.

38:30 Mostly it was fairly straightforward training exercises that we went on. There was one story but this was when we were going to Malaya.

The convoluted trip over that you spoke about?

That was the one. The Department Air or the Operational Command which was the

39:00 command we came over, they were looking at this operation and thinking, “They are going to be up there for along time flying, what about meals?” We tried to point out we were going to have an oxygen mask on all the way so you didn’t worry about meals. Most of the flights weren’t any longer than about two to two and a half hours. Anyway, a couple of days before we were due to leave Williamtown to fly north a big

39:30 parcel arrived. And we undid the parcel and inside were dozens of these large packets of jelly beans, all good glucose. Their idea was to build up our strength and as we were going we could poke a jelly bean past the mask and suck that and everything would be right. On the first day we took the whole squadron because we were only going to Townsville. I said to everybody, “Put one of your

40:00 big bags of jelly beans in your flying suit pocket and if you’re hungry have a jelly bean.” We took off and the route from Newcastle to Townsville went near Charleville. When we were passing Charleville I looked out and there were all the Sabres spread out over the sky. And it’s a blue sky and there’s not a cloud in the sky and everything is al right. There was a Neptune of ours that was going to act all the way to the

40:30 Philippines as a search and rescue. They were flying along with us. I thought, “I’ve got to do something to break the monotony.” So I called out “Prison,” which was our call sign. “Prison red, jelly beans, jelly beans go.” And as I did it all the pilots dived into their flying suits and started sucking them. When we got to Townsville the

41:00 squadron commander met us and he said, “I’m hearing a lot about jelly beans. What is happening there?” And we got in for the briefing and here was the captain of the squadron that had the Neptunes and he said, “Now listen. We know all you fighter pilots codes. We know them backwards. We know ‘Tally Ho’, ‘the Fox and

41:30 Oranges are Red’ and all the codes that you use, but you’ve stumped us today.” I said, “Why?” He said, “What’s this’ jelly beans’, jelly beans? We went through all the code books and we couldn’t find it anywhere.” So we became known as the ‘jelly bean eaters’. When we arrived days later up in Malaya as we taxied in and were about to get out of the aircraft

Tape 9

00:52 Cedric, Thailand, how did you get involved with 79 Squadron up there?

Well they had

01:00 sent up most of the people that manned the base. The base Squadron people and the OC [Officer Commanding] were sent up from Australia. 79 Squadron, consisting of pilots and ground staff, came over from Butterworth. I was one of those, the OC would be sent there but most of the people from Australia went for six months. They reckoned six months was enough. It was a

01:30 very isolated place. It was at the end of the railway line from Bangkok going out from Cambodia and Laos and it was only a matter of miles. If you went south you hit Cambodia and if you went east you went straight into Laos. Initially it was a tent camp and it was built up over the period. While I was there it was a

02:00 beauty. We were able to scrounge a lot of materials from the Americans and the British were building an airfield at that stage. They had a lot of concrete with a use-by date and whenever we wanted any concrete they would send it to us. We put in an in-ground pool for the whole base and we built a

02:30 church. We had a padre so he wanted a church and we managed to get timber from the Americans and concrete. We had bitumen roads and with all the concrete we put in concrete gutters. This was all done by the troops. We had a lot of time on our hands so the officers, NCOs [Non-Commissioned Officers] and the airmen all got stuck into it and we were only too happy. We put in full

03:00 courts for the badminton and things like that and volleyball. They had to be concrete because of all the bad weather they had up there. It ended up as a very pleasant camp. The Americans had a lot of equipment – well, more than they required so whenever they had anything that we wanted they were only too happy to lend it to us such as big refrigerators and a mobile butcher’s shop and things like that that we didn’t have. We had all the

03:30 people but we didn’t have the equipment.

So you were sharing the base with the Americans and the British?

No, the British were about fifty or sixty miles north. The British army were building an airfield from nothing. We would go up there every now and again to see them. But on the base we had the American 8th Fighter Wing which was a very big organisation

04:00 and we had a Thai squadron that was there. Their aircraft were like the old Wirraway. In the area we had various American groups. Peace Corps and agricultural organisations and there were a few CIA wandering around the place. It was a nice little

04:30 camp and we built it up and it was very active. It was in an area which they considered dangerous from a terrorist point of view so we built our own little forts all around our base. We did more than the Americans actually. We had airfield guards sent up from Australia and we had some war dogs.

05:00 It was quite a good set up. We had to use our forts on one occasion when the Americans sent out an alarm. They thought enemy helicopters were landing in the area to the north. After it we couldn’t find any trace of it but we all went on red alert. And I handed out arms to every one of our people who could handle them

05:30 and we manned the forts and we were like that for at least twenty-four hours. Then everybody said, “We can’t work out what it is.” I thought it was migratory birds. They are big birds in Thailand and with the size of the flocks it would show on radar and that was what my guess was. What were the Americans flying?

06:00 The Americans were flying the Phantom jets. A lot of people don’t realise it but they never flew any of their Phantom jets to bomb Hanoi or North Vietnam from Vietnam. They all flew from either Ubon where we were or Udon which was to the north of us. And what we were there for was we provided the air defence under the SEATO rule for the

06:30 Udon area. So we had people on alert all the time with the Sabres.

And was 79 Squadron flying anything?

That was 79.

And they were flying as well?

They were flying Sabres on the air defence. They were operating really just in the Ubon area. They weren’t allowed to go over into Laos or Cambodia.

07:00 Did you talk to the Americans about their operations?

We used to spend a lot of time in their officers’ mess. We had “Open Sesame” into their mess and they had “Open Sesame” into ours. We used to talk. Not about any security matters or things like that. We would say, “How are things?” and they would say, “It was tough last night,” and things like that. you got to know a lot of the Americans and they provided the

07:30 radar in the area. They had a big radar station. We became very friendly with the Americans there.

What did you think of their pilots?

Excellent. They were very good. They had a good squadron commander, Robin Earls, who was an ace from the 1939–1945 war. He was a

08:00 bird colonel [a full colonel] and he married Gene Tierney, the actress. He was running it and his deputy was an American Negro, Chappy James. I think he was the first to make three-star general in the American air force. He was very, very good.

08:30 His little joke used to be at the bar, I said to him one night, “How do you find it up there, Chappy, going over Hanoi?” And he said, “It doesn’t worry me. When I’m in the cockpit of a Phantom at night no one can see me.” He was liked too. He was a very pleasant chap and a very capable officer.

09:00 Was there racism within the Americans?

I never encountered any. It was a good combination with Robin Earls and Chappy James as commander and deputy. And our younger pilots they got on very well with the younger American pilots and learned a lot from them. They used to discuss all the operations and everything and they were very good and they got on well.

Was the

09:30 Phantom a better plane than what you guys were flying?

Yes. The Phantom was a fantastic aircraft for the type of role it was on which was straight bombing. It was also good as a fighter. They shot down quite a number of Vietnam MiGs. It was excellent to do the interdiction bombing that they did in North Vietnam. It was a very good aircraft and very

10:00 sturdy. It was built like a tank.

So what sort of operations were you doing up there, the Australians?

We were just straight air defence. They didn’t want any more fighters of their own so we went up and provided the air defence. In other words when they went out on a mission when they were coming back we’d know exactly when they were coming

10:30 back and exactly where they coming back from. And we used to have two aircraft with the pilots manned just in case. There was a slight chance that the Vietnam MiGs might follow them back one day. It was thought wise to have an air defence command there. The Americans provided the radar to pick up the aircraft and we provided the aircraft to act as an air defence force.

11:00 It worked very well.

Did you have any scares over there?

Only this one where they thought the helicopters were coming in. Some of the Phantoms had been hit on their approach to the base so this would have been the odd little terrorist sitting out in the

11:30 paddock there somewhere and firing at them. That did occur. That is why because you had the odd incident like that people got a bit jittery after a while and would say, “It’s just likely they could be there. And there could be a blow in.” You could imagine if they raced onto the airfield and blew up half the United States Air Force’s Phantoms. We took it seriously and as I say

12:00 we had our people armed. We had air field defence guards of our own and we built all these connecting forts so there was some place where the chaps could go and keep a force at bay. At the headquarters we had an operations room run mainly by the Flight Lieutenant that ran the Airfield Defence Guard. He was a pretty qualified ground attack

12:30 man. When we went up as the OC of the Australian Task Force it meant that you controlled everything Australian on the base. We also had a Base Squadron which looked after the normal base which consisted of your cooks and bottle washers and your doctors and your padres and your plumbers and electricians and

13:00 carpenters and things like that. They are part of a Base Squadron. We used to send just the one bloke. I went up there as the CO of the Base Squadron and the OC of the RAAF element. This meant that I used to report to myself and if I did the wrong thing in one job I could always tick myself off. They did that all the way

13:30 through with just the one man for base squadron commander and OC Base.

So how long were you there in Thailand?

Six months. Six months was normally the stint for everybody that was coming from Australia. The 79 Squadron would change over with the other squadrons and they’d be there for about three months and change over.

Did anything else happen there that was eventful during your six months?

No, not

14:00 really. We had some aircraft crash on the base coming back. They were badly shot up and would crash and burn. That caused a little bit of a stir. We had our own fire fighting people there and our own service police so they would go out and help the Americans in a case like that. Our doctors and our ambulances would sometimes get involved. We had a pretty

14:30 contained organisation. We had every type of people that you’d want to form a base. We had an outdoor cinema and so we got a lot of films sent up from Australia and we’d watch those and then we’d swap them with the Americans who had a very good service going so we had movies every night.

15:00 You mentioned earlier, I think in Malaya where two Mirages, one landed on top of the other?

That wasn’t in my time. No, that was afterwards. That’s why I said this engineer friend of mine was involved. That was well after we had left.

So after Thailand what happened to you?

After Thailand I was spent back to Australia and told to

15:30 round up my family and pack up all my furniture and move out of the married quarters where I had left my wife and daughters. We had to really work hard to catch an aircraft within a couple of weeks for America. We went over there and joined the United States Joint Services Staff College which was a six month thing. It is very interesting.

16:00 In those days they used to run through the Vietnam War and how to run it and counter-insurgency in Colombia and all the things that were really happening. They weren’t just a training exercise. For example we had an exercise on how to counter terrorism in Colombia with all their drug lords and everything else. And we were

16:30 broken up into little syndicates. One chap would be the American Ambassador and one the air attaché and one the navy attaché and one the air force attaché and you had somebody that represented the CIA. So you all had jobs to do and they gave you the situation as actually occurred at that time. And people were from all these cities. There were two hundred and seventy

17:00 students and the lowest rank was major. So you had a lot of experience on that course. And besides having army, navy, air force, marines and coastguard we had some British and we had Canadians. We had State Departments and we had CIA all on the course. It wasn’t just dealing with the service it was dealing with everything.

17:30 The interesting thing was when all the presentations took place for the Colombian show they selected I think it was three or four syndicates to give their presentations the next day again. Overnight they flew in the ambassador, the CIA, the army, navy, air force and the whole of the staff.

18:00 And they came because it was their problem and here were two hundred and seventy people giving their ideas of what might happen. So the ambassador and his full staff listened to these four presentations and thanked us very much and went back and got in their aeroplane and went back to Colombia. It was a way to learn. Even if they only got one or two ideas it was better than nothing. We did the Vietnam 18:30 battles like how to if you were in such a such a situation how would you organise the marines and the Green Berets and everybody else. They flew over Westmoreland for the wash up there. It wasn’t a normal type of college event. When they had things on the top people came. We had a big exercise dealing with the State Department and how

19:00 they should be operating with some of the other countries. And Dean Rusk who was then Secretary of State came down for the full day and listened to all the solutions. It was a very interesting course. During my stay there every now and again they would give everybody a choice of what they wanted to do with say one of the services. The State

19:30 Department people had never been out on bases or that so you had your choice of various bases. When it came around to me they said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to go out in a US Submarine into the Atlantic.” They said, “No problem.” So I ended up on the USS Carp which was a diesel wartime boat with the full crew and off we went into the Atlantic for about

20:00 three or four days. It was very enjoyable. They made me an Honorary Submariner and from that day on I was always getting an invite to the Submariners’ Ball in Washington DC. We’d always go, my wife and I. We went to all the Submariners’ Balls. That was enjoyable and it gave me a good slant on how that service operated. Or you could go to SAC, Strategic Air Command.

20:30 We went out on an aircraft carrier and it got a bit rough and they got orders to go somewhere else with the aircraft carrier. So from Norfolk, where the college was, they had to send out a flock of little ships, these LTC [?] [Landing ? Craft] landing barges and they just piled us back in those like cattle and brought us back in this swell to America.

21:00 It was quite an experience. It was good.

How did this experience benefit you back in Australia?

Well it benefited me first in America because when I left the course I was posted to the Embassy for two years and of course I had all these contacts. I had contacts in the CIA and I had contacts in the Pentagon whether it was army, navy or air force.

21:30 Any queries that came over from Australia, I always had someone that I could go and talk to and they could put me onto the right people to go and see. That helped a lot there. For overall planning for future exercises it gave you different ideas of how some people would do you and how others would do it and sometimes it was completely the opposite. It was a most enjoyable stay.

22:00 My family were there with me. We had a married quarter on the navy base. They had the opportunity to live on an American base with the kids and go to school there. Sometimes if they had a highly classified lecture and sometimes they did, especially on the nuclear side, no

22:30 foreigners were allowed at those lectures, but they’d let you know when they were . Whenever they were on they used to provide Alison and I with a staff car and a driver who would take us into the Prince William & Mary University where we would be given talks and lectures on American history. And that was of great benefit later on because I ended up knowing

23:00 some of the American history better than the Americans did which sometimes a foreigner can do. So we went to the university when there was a highly classified subject on. We went as a pair and they drove us in and we’d do the history lecture and go home. It was a most enjoyable stay. We had two years then in America.

23:30 Part of my job was to look after the Australian air force people who were scattered throughout America and we had quite a number. There were two hundred odd or something because at that stage we were collecting the F111s. I would go round to those various bases and see how the chaps were going and whether they had any complaints or anything so that was a way to see America too. So that was it and then we came back to Australia in

24:00 1969.

Just some overview questions of your career and reflections. Given that we are obviously doing this for the archive and future generations to watch this, what would you like to say to them about war given your experience in World War II and Korea in particular?

All I could say is that the last series of war has been forced on us. There is always going to be a war of some

24:30 description and it is getting worse every day with the terrorists. All I can say is I trust and I think I’m fairly right when I say that I know that the services are being looked after and getting the right equipment. And we have to have a good force in being, just in case anything like Iraq comes up or Afghanistan. There are all those little shows that have been going on

25:00 which are now turning out to be some of the biggest wars we’ve had. We spend a lot of tax money on the services and unless you have the right equipment you will lose a lot of young men. I think in Korea with the Meteors 25:30 was a typical case. It was the wrong aircraft. But now we have a very good aircraft in the F18 and the army is getting more tanks. As long as we have good equipment and arere trained well and the training is excellent at the moment it really is. Our young chaps out here and the army at Kapooka is a fine training base. In a

26:00 way we are lucky that we have got so much. It might look small compared with overseas forces but as long as it is good, well equipped and efficient it is worth every tax-payer penny that is spent.

Is Anzac Day important to you?

26:30 In a way. I think it is a good chance for a reunion with the various people that counted. I feel that the numbers in the RSL [Returned and Services League] are dropping off every year as people are aging. Once upon a time we had the RSL and it really looked after all the services. Now you’ve got

27:00 the Vietnam Vets [Veterans] who have their own organisation. The Iraq people no doubt when they come back will have an Iraq League of some description. I think that’s a pity. I think you need a very strong RSL to assist Anzac Day besides looking after the ex-service people.

27:30 At one stage it was a highly thought of organisation and it played a big political role. A lot of the politicians would ask them about certain things they were going to do. I think that is all gone. We have got splinter groups everywhere and we haven’t got the dynamic chaps leading that we had say twenty years ago.

Do you think it is important for

28:00 Australia and Australians to remember Anzac Day?

I think it is most important that we realise the number of people that were killed in all the wars. They say, “Don’t glorify war.” I don’t think anybody has really tried to do that in the RSL and I’m certain a lot of people who will turn up this Anzac Day won’t.

28:30 It is a time to remember all the ones that lost their lives, the young people, they are the ones that I feel for on Anzac Day.

Why do you think it is important for Veterans like yourself to share their stories?

Only in the hope that someone might find something in them that might stop another war at some stage. The thing was that in every war we’ve had there have been so

29:00 many young people with their lives cut short at eighteen, nineteen or twenty and that was it. If you just think of the number of people that we lost in Bomber Command. Every time an aircraft was shot down seven people died and that’s a lot. When you think some nights they lost a hundred aircraft and that is seven hundred

29:30 people in one night. They went there because they were Australians and felt that they were obliged to be in the war. There were a hell of a lot of young kids killed.

Is there anything else you’d like to add to your comments?

No. I think you’ve done very well. You’ve covered it well.

Chris [interviewer] and I and the archive would like to thank you for your time. Thank you.

It was a pleasure.

INTERVIEW ENDS