Australians at War Film Archive

William Deane-Butcher - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 15th January 2004

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1355

Tape 1

00:30 – was a young doctor in London, and finally he migrated to Australia and finally he recovered quite well and his fiancé came out and they were married here.

01:00 And I was born outside Pittsworth, which is outside Toowoomba in Queensland and he had gone there because it was a hot place and that’s what suited his health. We moved from Pittsworth to Warwick and I was brought up there until the age of twelve at the local school and at twelve I came down as a boarder to Scots College in Sydney at Bellevue Hill.

01:30 And I was there for some five years or so. Strangely enough several of us used to go to the house next door and I found when I came to this place – the nursing home – I found that the director of nursing was the daughter of the girl that I used to go and see then. That was interesting. Anyway we

02:00 my brother and I moved on to Sydney University. He had decided to undertake medicine. I wanted to do architecture. My father said, “There is no future in architecture.” Because there was a Great Depression at that time. So I did medicine as well. I have a very curious name, Deane-Butcher

02:30 which was immediately abbreviated at Scots to Butcher, Butcher one and Butcher two. The name came because it was just a matter of identifying the Butchers in England by the person they married, they would say, that’s the Butcher married to Deane, and then it became Deane Butcher and then it became hyphenated.

03:00 So then I went to Sydney University for some years and I was at St Andrews College. And from then on I went to North Shore Hospital where I was a resident doctor for a year and then I went to the Coast Hospital, that’s Prince Henry Hospital and I was there for a year and three or four months.

03:30 During the latter part I went and did a couple of locums at Lismore and a suburb of Sydney and so on. But I was at the Coast Hospital when people started to enlist. War had been declared and it was suddenly getting serious, and another doctor and I left and enlisted in both the army and the air force and

04:00 if necessary the navy. I had no preference between the army and the air force. He was called up into the army and I the air force, I might say that he was trained for a year or two, when the Japanese came in he went straight to Singapore, captured and went to Borneo and was on the Borneo March and so on and was killed

04:30 there. I had quite a good war really if anything could be called good. But for a year I did nothing but recruiting. I was in Brisbane, I was living out, I had just become married before I went into the service. And we had nothing much to report at that stage. And then I went to Archerfield Air Base

05:00 as medical officer to an elementary flying training school. They were flying Tiger Moths and it was a pretty good life. Then the Japanese came into the war and it wasn’t a good life. I went immediately to the formation of 75th Squadron in Townsville, on to New Guinea

05:30 and I was with the squadron which we will talk about later for eighteen months. And then I went to Sale in Victoria which was 1 Operational Training Unit. That was more exciting then you might imagine because crews were crewing up in Beauforts, more of that later.

06:00 From there I went to Canada. There was a liaison officer in Ottawa, the Australian air force had to liaise with the Canadian air force and I was the medical representative there for a year. That was rather interesting time. And when I came back I was

06:30 discharged.

Great and after the war?

Well after the war I had to decide whether I would be a general medical practitioner somewhere or whether I would specialise. I decided to try a specialty, ophthalmology, so called.

07:00 And I went down to Sydney Eye Hospital, I can enlarge on all of these points later so I trained as an eye specialist and that’s what I became.

And what about family and children?

I had two sons and daughters. Daughter came first,

07:30 she is now at Gosford, a son came second, he is my best friend now, he lives at Lindfield. And he is extremely good to me. My third child was a daughter and she married an American who was out here and she has lived in America ever since, and I am very close to her by phone,

08:00 but I don’t see her as often as I would like to. And the fourth one was a son who is at Hornsby. He is manic depressive and he causes me plenty of trouble. Has done since he was twelve, he is now forty-six. But I am very fond of him and he is very fond of me. That’s another story.

08:30 We lived at Killara, well we lived at Lindfield first, that was the first place that we had a house, but after the war it was hard to get a house and we lived in a cottage at Dee Why for a while and then at Ryde for a while in a rented cottage. Then we got this place at Lindfield. Moved from there to Killara where we had a nice home.

09:00 Then my wife couldn’t manage the stairs and so we moved to a second home at Killara, which was one level. And then she couldn’t manage a lot of things, and so we moved to Huon Park which is a retirement village on Bobbin Head Road. And we were there for a couple of years and comfortable, but then it was necessary for her to go to

09:30 a nursing home and I selected this one that we are in, North Haven which is satisfactory. And she is in the nursing home, but I found this self-care place belonging to the same establishment next door and so I left Huon Park and live here.

Thanks that has given us a great overview,

10:00 so now we can go back. I would like to know what you remember of growing up and spending time in Toowoomba?

Well I don’t remember much because we transferred to Warwick near Toowoomba and I think I must have been seven or so then. At Pittsworth

10:30 near Toowoomba I do remember several incidents but they are not really worth reporting. In Warwick we moved there because there were quite good schools in Warwick, I was in kindergarten there, at the boys’ school I was a weekly boarder. Pretty hard work being a weekly boarder when you’re about eight I managed. It was a boys’ school then. It is since amalgamated

11:00 with the girls school in Warwick, Presbyterian Girls College. Its now combines and it is a very good school.

You mentioned that your father came out to Australia because of ill health how was your relationship with your father?

Very good.

11:30 He developed tuberculosis in England and he had to stop work as a doctor and he was sent to Switzerland where he lived in a place on a high mountain and didn’t get any better at all and was advised to go to a hot country and that’s why he came to Australia. He didn’t know anyone here. Interesting thing is he decided

12:00 to try a general practice and made enquiries from the Australian Medical Association or the British Medical Association at the time and was told to buy a farm on the edge of a city, and wait until the city grew and it was growing, and then he would have lots of people around. The farm was the top of Bellevue Hill and he didn’t buy it unfortunately.

12:30 He went out to Hay which is a western town and is very hot. However it was good for his health.

And you then eventually came down to Scots College? Can you tell me about that and how you – ?

Well I was a full boarder there and I was only

13:00 about twelve. And the main thing was sport. We were kept occupied. I rowed and played football and was in the shooting team and athletics team and did all of those things. We had to go on a tram to the city twice every Sunday and go to church. I occasionally got off the wrong side of the tram and went to the pictures.

13:30 But it was fairly good life. I had a good relationship with my two parents, my father and my mother in Warwick during this stage. Can you tell me a bit about your mother?

My mother came from England, actually she was a sort of house companion. She came from

14:00 Killmarsh in Scotland first and then to Halifax, and then came to my fathers home which was a big home in a suburb of London as a house companion. They did that sort of thing those days. Anyway he became fond of her and when he migrated to Australia he got in touch with her and she came out to Australia. She was a small person, very

14:30 withdrawn and shy I thought, but very nice. And she found Warwick and Australia for that matter extremely difficult. In fact I doubt whether she would have stayed but for the two boys, but

15:00 anyway she stayed. She used to play bridge and afternoon tea and morning tea were great events. More like a meal. I remember going home on holidays and morning tea would take an hour anyway. She was very English and couldn’t adjust to Australia at all. It was desperately hot. These were the days where you had to have a block

15:30 of ice, no refrigerators. And there were no aeroplanes for that matter. Certainly no television.

And what was the house at Warwick like?

Well it was a typical country home with a tin roof, one storey, made of wood. Quite spacious.

16:00 I remember my brother and I shared a bedroom and the bathroom attached had no hot water, only a cold tap. And it was very cold, I mean you can get ice on the water in the morning at Warwick in winter, but the comforts as we enjoy now we didn’t have then. The toilet was about fifty yards from the house and you knew it was there all of the time.

16:30 Whatever the weather. We had bicycles, we used to go for rides on bicycles in the country. We were pretty fit. My father thought I should be interested in music. And at the school there was a drum and fife band.

17:00 Which consisted of one drum and the fife, people didn’t know how to blow them. And didn’t know the tune so they would from up and march through the town with hardly anything playing except the big drum. So my father bought me a flute and I can’t think of any instrument less appropriate for a young boy. But I was quite musical.

17:30 But I didn’t rehearse and I would never play in front of anybody, I thought it looked pretty silly, and so I gave it up. When I went to school in Sydney I was very anxious to play the saxophone or something like that, a manly instrument, but it didn’t eventuate.

And you never played the flute again?

No I had it in the cupboard and I brought it out occasionally.

18:00 I eventually gave it to SHORE, [Sydney] Church of England Grammar School, where my son was. They had a musical section but I didn’t hear anything about it at all, I don’t know what became of it, didn’t matter.

Well what other sorts of entertainment and games did you play as a young boy in Warwick?

There were various games played all of the time because there were no really reliable cars.

18:30 Well there were none to start with. I remember mah-jong coming in and play with a pack of cards, I have forgotten the name of the games now, quite simple games. And then there were games like charades, acting a word.

19:00 There are two teams and you are given a word and you have to get up and act to convey the word to the other party. But you’re not allowed to use it, that’s called charades. And then there were curious events like hiding, like you get five minutes to hide somewhere like in a cupboards, upstairs or downstairs if there were any two storey places.

19:30 And then people had to find you and the first who found you would win the game. Curious games.

And what about your brother how did you get on with him?

I got on well with my brother he was eighteen months older. And he protected me.

20:00 I don’t think I needed it too much but I was fairly withdrawn and I suppose he might have taken over a bit, but he chased anyone off who was going to bully me or anything like that. He turned out to be a good sportsman. He,

20:30 I was trying to emulate him all of the time. I never succeeded. For example he could do ninety yards hurdling quite well when he was in Sydney and I could do three and then I would collapse on the fourth and that was the end of my hurdling. He was captain of the first football team. I was lucky to be elected, but I was for several games. Until I got hurt and then I had to stop. I was a bit of an also-ran 21:00 around the time. I used to run around the oval to get some exercise in my last year there, and I was elected to the mile team. Four milers to run for the school in the GPS [Greater Public Schools] sports, I didn’t do very well, I came fifth our of eight I think but the others all came second so we won. But there were a lot of

21:30 sporting experiences. I was very small and light and thought I would love to row. So I went down to the rowing shed and, to be a cox, that’s the man in the back who does the steering and tells everybody what to do. But I was put in a bow seat, that’s the front. And I had some years of rowing as a result. But here again my brother was in the school eight, top crew,

22:00 I was in the first four, that’s the second crew down. I spent a lot of time being the underdog. But when I went to Scots College my father realised I needed some development and he took me into the city to a gymnasium called Gerald T Peterson gymnasium. And they said, “We don’t have exercises

22:30 we have boxing.” And I didn’t think that would be very good with my weight. And he said, “You might be interested in a new sport which has just started up.” It was judo. And there was no such thing, no one in Australia had heard the word, but this little man had come back from Japan where he had been, he was a black belt in judo and he started teaching

23:00 and I was one of the first pupils he had, I did three years judo. That gave me a bit of confidence. And what I developed was a spirit of not being guilty of being unkind or hurting anybody else but if they hurt me they had better watch out.

23:30 The lesson I really learnt was never to stop or give up at anything. Even if you’re coming second do your very best and persevere. And I have conquered various private mountains that way. And I remember at Scots

24:00 College in Warwick, my brother was head prefect of course and I was made a prefect, and there was a room for prefects and about eight of us would meet once a week. Nothing in it, no pictures but one little notice on the board which I have remembered to this day.

24:30 Its about courage. If you think you are beaten you are, for out in the world you will find success begins in a fellows will, it is all in the state of the mind. I remembered that.

25:00 And it has been helpful.

Good and Scots College in Warwick, how old were you when you first went to Scots College?

Well actually I went to kindergarten there from about four or five until six and a half or seven at the girls school, Presbyterian Girls College. And I was about

25:30 seven when I left there and was sent to Scots College as a weekly boarder. There was only about four or five of us in the room. And we used to go home for the weekend, back again on Monday.

And why was it that you were boarding, how did that come about?

I think it was just that my father and mother wanted to get rid of us and get us looked after. He was busy

26:00 with his medical practice day and night and my mother was stressed a bit looking after us, and doing all of the cooking and the hot weather. I think it was a matter of training too. It is a very English habit of course, you look after the dogs and send the children to school. They all seem to go, a lot of them used to go to boarding school.

26:30 And they used to get a hard time from their parents sometimes. I didn’t. However they had the idea that for personal development it was a good idea to have to fend for yourself and boarding school is just the place to start. Suited me all right, I was well looked after, but it was a

27:00 harsh school. I can remember in the gymnasium there a boy had been caught smoking and the headmaster summoned up the entire school, about eighty boys, put them in a large ring. Got in the middle of the ring with this miscreant and flogged him with a cane all around the ring and all over the place. It was primitive.

27:30 It may have been the fault of that particular headmaster I don’t know but anyway things were tougher in those days. Even when I went to Scots College in Sydney, if there were two boys arguing and having a scrap a serious one, they had to attend at break, eleven o’clock, out in the oval and there would be fifty or sixty

28:00 people in a ring around them and they had to put on the gloves and fight it out. It was very unfair because the bullies, the ones that could fight would pick a scrap in order to show their skill and it just wasn’t an even contest.

It is interesting hearing you talk about the kind of culture of the boys –

28:30 Well it was different then. Scots in Warwick, two or three of us used to break bounds quite a lot, that’s leave the school. There was a river there, the Condamine, and we would go for walks along the Condamine. Well it is granite country and lots of rocks, big things six feet high.

29:00 And we had our own adventures that way. There were caves and all sorts of things.

And who were your mates up in Warwick?

Well my main mate because a boy named Charles Crombie. He had been brought down, the family had come down to a property just outside Warwick because of the schools, they came from Central Queensland.

29:30 She was a highly educated woman from India and he was a very tough grazier from Queensland and they had three sons and a daughter. Very charming people. But the eldest boy was a great friend from the age of six. He eventually

30:00 married my sister.

And what was his name?

Charles Crombie. If you were in the air force you would probably know his name. He became a pilot, when he became engaged to my sister Betty, Betty went to England to see

30:30 her relatives and think it over and so on. And war was declared while she was there and she couldn’t get back and she was there for a year, when she got back, he had joined the air force and a month later was sent to England. And was there for three years, not in England but North Africa and India and Burma and so on .And he was an ace

31:00 pilot in Beaufighters. He eventually got back towards the end of the Japanese war, and he was sent to Williamstown as the chief flying instructor for both Mosquito aircraft and Beaufighters.

And why do you think you connected with Charles as a young boy?

31:30 Well I think, he certainly needed friends because he was new. He had had, at that fairly young age he had had fairly advanced arthritis, he had been an invalid, but had had knobbly sort of joints but he was quite fit and he rode a horse well and so on.

32:00 My brother and I used to go out to his fathers property, Mountside. And we learnt to ride and we would go camping and all of those things. Herding sheep and working in the shearing shed and so on. And that was a big attraction, we were learning that milk didn’t come from bottles and so on. We learnt about life. A lot of it was pretty harsh too. I didn’t enjoy seeing

32:30 the sheep have their throat cut for the meat on Saturday sort of thing. That was part of my education. And I think that’s what we had in common, that he was a good horseman and he looked after us although we were both a little older than he was. And he went down to SHORE to school, and so did Charles Crombie.

33:00 he went to Shore. Eventually both my boys went to SHORE. Anyway the friendship grew. And of course others were friends too. There was a young boy called Girl [?], who was a good friend, despite the fact that he wasn’t a girl. But he lived out in western Queensland at Yelarbon.

33:30 Country is absolutely flat for miles and miles, very little growing on it. You could mark out a tennis court and play tennis without having a court made, it was that sort of country. And I went to stay with him and his family a few times.

And I am just wondering you mentioned that were quite withdrawn and shy

34:00 as a young boy, how do you think that changed or how did you come out of yourself when you were at Scots?

Well I think the course in judo did a lot for me because I could defend myself. And I think I have always been thoughtful.

34:30 I don’t think I was abnormal in any way.

Well how did you find schooling was that something that you took to?

Well I found it hard to be away from home to start with, any boy would I suppose but some boys more than others.

35:00 Boarding school is not really for everybody, it is good for some boys, extroverts and they like the company and they enjoy the environment really. I was really more someone who appreciated being at home. And things I wanted to do I would have rather have painted and played music and

35:30 undertaken subjects which I couldn’t do at school, not in those days. So I felt I had to trey and fit in as my brother did with more of the boys’ activities. I mean you had to play football whether you liked to or not sort of thing. There was no way of learning to play tennis. Or there was cricket but it was an alternative to rowing, 36:00 couldn’t do both and I enjoyed rowing. Rowing is very hard work. But that’s what I enjoyed, it is a matter of tenacity, it is a matter of keeping going when other people are not going, they are getting a bit weaker, that’s when you double your energies. Anyway it seemed to suit me and I saw a lot of Sydney

36:30 Harbour and it was a lovely atmosphere.

Well kids can be quite cruel sometimes and you hear lots of stories from boarding school were there any stories from boarding school that?

There were some cruel things.

37:00 I remember a couple of boys jumping into the water at Rose Bay under the pontoon and they got an octopus. Only a thing about this big. With tentacles out, and they put it in a bucket with some salt water and brought it back to the school and got a couple of friends. And they

37:30 would hold a boy down and pull his shirt up and put the octopus on him, and they would scream with fright for a while. It was a brutal thing to do, but that’s what they did, that sort of thing one remembers.

Well I am just wondering, the Depression hit Australia pretty hard,

38:00 Yes it didn’t affect me at school. At home in Warwick in the holidays there was a constant stream of people coming to the back door asking for food, or any money or a little job or something. Now these weren’t ordinary people off the street, they were architects

38:30 and solicitors and all sorts of people. My father had an arrangement with the local Greek shop, when he gave a man a note and he took it to the Greek shop he was to be fed. And the account would be sent to my father. It wasn’t wise to give people money

39:00 because they were just as likely to go to the pub and drink it. But this way they had a square meal when the needed it . And a lot of these swaggies, they had a roll over their shoulder, you know the old swaggie. A blanket rolled up with a few articles inside it and tied wit ha bit of string around over their shoulder and they would walk along the country roads of Queensland and New South Wales

39:30 try and get work, they would have a wife at home and they would go off for two months and try and get work. Couldn’t get it in the city and there wasn’t any in the country either. And it made a very big impact, and my father felt it because although he was a doctor in the town he never got paid,

40:00 well not never but often he didn’t get paid.

All right I might just stop you there because our tape is just about to run out.

40:12 End of tape

Tape 2

00:30 Well Bill you were just telling us how the depression hit your father, you said that he?

Yes well people to pay him they would come in with a jug of cream or some eggs or something and offer it to him instead of a fee. That was a difficulty. And also he was a very kind man

01:00 and he didn’t charge them if he thought that was the thing to do. And a general practitioner in a country town is a different figure to someone in the city because there is no one to get advice from. In other words, no matter what the problem or how big the problem he has got to do it so he was doing surgical lists every week and

01:30 often in between. He was doing most of the obstetrics in the area and delivering babies during the night and so on. And if there was a difficulty he would have to handle it. So a general practitioner had a very wide scope. Now days of course there are forty or fifty specialties in medicine.

02:00 In those days in a country town there were no specialists and there was only physicians and surgeons anyway, there were no specialties. And they were in Brisbane, mostly in Brisbane.

How aware were you as a young boy of his own personal struggle?

I wasn’t fully aware.

02:30 But I remember he and mother doing his accounts of a night on the dining room table, and nodding their heads and I could see that they were very worried. And of course I think they had a lot of trouble sending us interstate to boarding school but that was a top priority, but they economised in any way they could.

03:00 Well even sending you to boarding school in Warwick? Well it was a day school in Warwick, that’s where we lived but a boarding school in Sydney. It was a weekly boarding, correct, in Warwick. All of these things cost something, he kept going but obviously it wasn’t easy.

03:30 We were just talking about the depression and how you might have been aware of the depression as a teenager growing up in Warwick, what else were you aware of apart from your Dad having some financial worries?

Related to the Depression?

04:00 I don’t think there is much I do remember. I was young and I didn’t take too much notice. My brother and I had a few experiences which might be worth telling you, like small boys?

Yes.

We had a low garage, about eighteen inches off the ground I suppose.

04:30 We built a fire under that and built some lead so that we could pour it into a match box to make a paper weight, that’s was, our Christmas presents were made in that way. We didn’t set fire to the garage, we were stopped in time. We got into a lot of trouble, for example standing on the train line and seeing how long you can wait there without getting off before the train ran over you.

05:00 We were reported for doing that. And I think one of our adventures was crawling through a pipe about ten inches across. It was from an unsealed gutter across the corner to another unsealed gutter, which had been installed. And we thought we would see if we could crawl through it.

05:30 We did but we very nearly got stuck in the middle and no one knew we were there, we couldn’t bring ourselves forward enough, we couldn’t get on our hands and knees and crawl and we ran out of steam half way across.

How did you get out?

Well my brother was in front he finally managed to wriggle and wriggle and get himself out. I

06:00 did the same. But that was a dangerous thing, would have been if it rained of course. But in any case we might have not got through. I think small boys always get up to these things. I know we went to a circus and watched a clown on top of eight tables, one table on top of another

06:30 and eventually got them to sway and fell over backwards onto his feet and that was it. We thought we would do this at home, with kerosene tins. We got about ten of them end to end, tins about fifteen inches high. And my brother got to the top and the thing buckled in the middle and tins shot out into the road and all over

07:00 the place and he fell straight down. He wasn’t too, he bounced pretty well. I remember riding a vehicle along, we had a wooden veranda, and I drove along at tops speed to take off into the air and land ten yards ahead and carry on ahead like the cowboys did in films. But

07:30 it didn’t work that way, I went straight down and nearly got killed. A lot of those boys’ pranks went on.

How did you deal with being bored?

Well that’s the sort of thing we did. We used to play marbles a lot, quite a big contest in marbles at the school.

08:00 We didn’t have too much time left, we were kept organised. You’re speaking of Warwick now of course, I don’t remember too much from those days, more from Sydney. I was a member of the kilted brigade in Sydney, Scots, the first lot

08:30 of kilts as a matter of fact. But they formed a school cadet and much to my surprise I was created under an officer lieutenant. There was only five of us in a school of about a hundred, and then we were all put into kilts, tailor-made kilts. Of course when we left school they were just handed onto

09:00 others, they were never tailor-made again. We had to march through the city and so on. I remember I wore a sword and we had to take it off going into church. But none of us did we forgot about that, and we tried to sit down but we couldn’t. We were at the front of the church and the sword wouldn’t allow us to sit.

09:30 So we had to shamefully get up and take our sword off in front of the church.

And how old were you when you came down to Scots in Sydney?

I think I was about twelve or thirteen.

And how did you feel about leaving home and Warwick?

It was an adventure. 10:00 Once I got there I was kept busy but I had a bit of a yearning to be home, had my sisters at home and my parents and my friends in the town and so on. But you have got to move on and you do.

Well you say the school

10:30 had a brigade that you joined up, I am just wondering what did you know about World War I if anything?

Well I know a lot about it because I went to it. At the age of three

11:00 my father and mother at that stage were in Pittsworth. There was another doctor there, and they dealt a hand [played cards] to see which doctor would stay in Pittsworth and which doctor would go to the war. In the event my father went to the war on a hospital ship, and he took his wife and two small boys on the hospital ship.

11:30 And we were based at Reading outside London, where there was an Australian hospital. And we were there for a couple of years. And then my father his health started to go and he was sent back to Australia. And I can remember coming back, I can remember walking down the gang plank or being carried down the gang plank to a waiting

12:00 lighter at Tahiti. I don’t know why I remember that, I think it was a bit scary going down with the sea underneath and so on. After all I was only about four or so. I remember the Armistice Day, the end of the First World War in Pittsworth. There was a great celebration of course

12:30 and even in this tiny town they had a march through the city of all sorts of vehicles dressed up. I know my father was in one driving it, and the whole thing was covered with a sheet and a Red Cross and so on and he was sort of a patient in bed. What I do remember is that there was one, a flat top lorry coming on

13:00 with gallows on it with the Kaiser being hung. This model body was dangling from the gibbet flapping around as the car moved forward. I can remember seeing this individual up there passing. Just tiny smatterings of memory. Of course the car we had at that stage was number fifty-two in

13:30 Queensland. There were very few vehicles in the town, few cars. Mostly horse and sulky. When my father had to visit a patient on a farm or in the country he always took the horse and sulky because he could get through the mud. There was no sealed roads, and as we well

14:00 knew on bicycles, if we were out on bicycles and it looked like rain we would dash for home because there was no way of riding a bicycle in the black soil. But he also used to take a saddle in the sulky, in case the sulky got bogged he would saddle the horse

14:30 and carry on that way. In fact he went out to some cases by train. If the place was near the train line the train would stop while he staggered up the field to see a patient and come back to the train, they would wait for him.

And do you think you missed your father? It sounds like he might have been away quite a bit?

I did miss him yes.

15:00 He was a very nice personality. He played a big part in the schools management, on the council of the two schools there. I used to, when I went home on holidays at the age of sixteen or so I used to assist him on operation up theatre in the hospital in Warwick. He would be doing a

15:30 hernia or fixing a broken arm, taking out tonsils or so on. I used to assist him. I mean every surgeon has an assistant to hold retractors and so on. He has only got two hands after all. An assistant is really necessary. In fact under very careful supervision I had done various operations myself while I was still at school.

16:00 But that’s not the sort of thing that’s done now. But it gave me an introduction to life and to medicine to see the sick patients and what was being done for them. We would do rounds in the hospital and he would explain something about the patients, that was interesting.

16:30 He was a very colourful personality in that he fancied himself on stage singing or acting and various theatricals were put on. Gilbert and Sullivan, things of that sort. In fact I took part in some of them when I was older.

17:00 When was that?

Well it was really after I had left school, during the long Christmas holidays. The art of theatricals in the country town, there are all sorts of problems arrive. We had a man called himself the producer who had been on the stage at some stage of

17:30 his life but he used to get on the bottle at this stage. I was given the responsibility of tracking him around all day and stopping him going into the hotel when we were coming closer to the evening.

What did your father tell you about his experiences in World War I? 18:00 Not much because he wasn’t actually in the front line infantry. He was a doctor at a hospital. That was an Australian hospital or a hospital for Australian troops brought back from France. There is still an Australian cemetery in Reading from World War I.

18:30 And what about other family members who might have taken part in World War I?

Well my father had a young brother. He became a very brilliant man really. He was a sort of a Shakespearian actor type and he was going to become a don [professor] at Oxford. He was very knowledgeable. But when World War I

19:00 came he enlisted and he was killed two weeks later in France as a young man. He had one sister I met when she was an old lady. She had been engaged and the man was killed so she didn’t marry. And then he had

19:30 a brother who went to Egypt and built the Aswan Dam which you might have heard of. It dams up the Nile River. By damming it up they could make electricity from it, and

20:00 it had the effect of cutting out flooding of the Nile. As the Nile comes down there is flooding across the desert. All of the crops and farms grow there but when the dam was built, no more flooding took place and so they had to start making fertiliser to pour over all of this country and of course they got the energy for the fertiliser from the Aswan Dam.

20:30 It created a circle. That’s an article which I read once anyway. I don’t think it is quite as straight forward as that.

I might just ask you to put your glasses away. Well, going back to your high school days down in Sydney, Scots College had, as

21:00 you have mentioned, had a fairly strong military tradition. What did you think of that during your time at school?

Well I found it interesting but of course we didn’t really relate it to war. Nobody does, nobody imagines what war really is. It was just a school thing with drilling

21:30 discipline and marching around the place. Down playing and so on. It was quite an interesting exercise, but we didn’t relate it to war at all, that’s a very different. In fact most people don’t, they don’t imagine how unsavoury it is really.

22:00 No one who has been to a war would ever want a second one I am sure. But for school boys a cadet unit was I think a good thing. Because whether you like it or not it is good to have young men trained in a way that they understand what discipline is and it makes them interested

22:30 in war as it used to be.

Well I am just wondering what about Empire and King and Country?

Well there was no question about anything else at that stage. King, and later Queen and Country was the greatest thing, there was no alternative.

23:00 A lot of strange customs in the service when I went in, for instance you never walked past the flag pole without standing and saluting. Any time of day. Then that was relaxed, you did it first thing in the morning and then you would walk around as normal from then on for the rest of the day. But a lot of Empire traditions

23:30 were very much in existence at that stage. And I think it was a great thing. But circumstances do change and I think they are changing here very fast. I think that the Queen’s status here is not the same as it used to be by any means. I

24:00 remember her first visit out here, the Queen came. Which actually was post war. At that stage I was practicing in Macquarie Street, I had a long white coat that I used to wear to see patients and I was full of Queen and Empire stuff and she stayed in Government House for some

24:30 days while in Sydney. And every morning at about nine she would come in her open car and drive up Macquarie Street and I used to always run out onto a little veranda and sort of wave, and I remember she turned around once and waved back to me and kept my eye, quite amusing.

25:00 I was conspicuous with a white coat out there I think. When I was at school, all of those ceremonies, I mean even going to the pictures. You always had a national anthem first. I think it was absurd, but this is what they did. I think it was

25:30 the English way of keeping the Empire alive by having these tradition and different sorts in foreign fields, not foreign but distant countries.

I will just get you to sit back in your chair into the light. Yes, it is interesting. Well you mentioned that you had aspirations 26:00 as a teenager to be an architect, how did that change?

Well for the last couple of years at school I did special subjects preparing myself for a course in architecture. I did mechanical drawing, drawing plans and so on practicing

26:30 printing and calligraphy, writing of different sorts and I did a little bit of art work and so on, which are all preparatory to architecture. But I did other subjects too, Latin or Greek were compulsory if you went on to

27:00 matriculate for university, so I did Latin, not very well. But we had standard subjects, reading, writing, arithmetic of course. Reading was a requirement, of various

27:30 books.

Well how did you I guess give up the idea of being an architect and move into the medical?

Well I went home for holidays to Warwick and my father came out, I was on the back veranda of the house. We sat on the top step and he said, “Well you have come to the end of your school, now what would you like to do?”

28:00 And I said, “Well I would like to go to university.” And he had always been in favour of that. And I said, “I would like to do architecture.” And he said, “Well times are very hard. There is not a lot building going on, it might be difficult to become established.” My brother Jim was being intended to go into medicine and train

28:30 and them come and help his father. He said, “You could do that because people will always be sick, whatever the other circumstances are and there will always be work to keep you busy.” And I really didn’t know what I wanted, but as he was going down to St Andrews College and was starting the medical course, I thought well I will do the same.

29:00 And this was really on my father’s recommendation. I might say my grandfather was also a doctor, quite a famous doctor in England. So it was also a tradition in the family a bit. My father influenced me at that stage and I think wisely.

29:30 I t was a longer course, it was a six year course minimum. See I had been a weekly boarder from the age of about six until twelve or so, then I had been an interstate boarder, full time until seventeen. Then I was a boarder at St Andrews College interstate for six years.

30:00 Then I had two years’ residence in the hospital, had to live in the hospital. So I was getting before, after the age of about six before I really experienced a home. At that stage I was very fond of a girl who was a nurse at Prince Alfred Hospital

30:30 which was next to St Andrews College, I don’t know if you know Sydney University. St Andrews College is a college for people to stay when they are doing a course of any sort, and next to it is Prince Alfred hospital. So that was a convenient arrangement, and she wanted to finish her nursing course so that she had

31:00 something to fall back on. I wanted to finish my medical course and so we had an engagement for some three or four years. And then I found I had to do two years resident in the hospital and so on. But towards the end of it we married and I lived out.

31:30 And what year were you married?

1940. Sixty-four years. It was a decision I was on call up, the war looked as though it was going to last a long time, it was going to be a pretty tough performance.

32:00 And it was a realty a question of, was it wise to get married at all, in which case we would have to say goodbye forever I suppose, or do we get married and I go off to the war? In which case we would be separated, and still married. It was hard both ways. Anyway we were married. And as it turned out

32:30 the air force was simply a training establishment before the Japanese came in. I didn’t know that, it did nothing but train air crew and then the aircrew would be put on a ship to do advanced training in Canada or South Africa, and then off to the war. The rest of the air force just stayed

33:00 here and kept on training others. When the Japanese entered the war, of course it was a different matter.

Well we will come back to talk about that, I am just wondering if you can tell us, in those few years leading up to the outbreak of the war you were at training at Sydney University?

Yes I can,

33:30 not at Sydney University, do you mean at Prince Henry hospital?

Where did you do your medical training? I did that at Sydney University, did six years there, except for a short period at the end I was at St Andrews College. There we had sporting events, I was in the football team and

34:00 rowing crew and so on which was an interest. There wasn’t much else, study and work kept me fairly busy. But at that stage I had found out that I liked going out with the others and going to parties and so on. For example I went to the first night of the Trocadero. Have you ever heard of the Trocadero?

Yes.

Well, I had a friend in college whose father built it

34:30 and so he was allowed to from a party and take it along. And so, we went to the first night there. There was a period before I met my wife and I was taking another girl out for tennis and going to the pictures and that sort of thing. I was pretty fond of her actually

35:00 and I used to go out to her house and play tennis and play around. What was the point I was raising?

Oh, we were just talking about some highlights from your medical training years.

Yes well, just growing up in college took a lot of time, getting to know people and being invited out to this and that and playing sport.

35:30 Working there. I don’t think there was anything terribly exciting. I mentioned before that the director of nursing here now has an elderly mother who was a girl at Ascham [Girls’ School, Sydney] when I was a boy at Scots College.

36:00 What was the point we were rasing just then?

Well, moving on I guess. Through,

Well, at the university she became a radio personality, singing and acting and so on. I remember she rang me one day and asked if I could

36:30 lend her four or five boys to go into the Sydney Town Hall and take part in a tableau, which we did in the Town Hall. And she was singing Buttercup or something from HMS Pinafore, the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. And, do you know what a tableau is? We were supposed to be sailors going off to the war, two hundred years ago

37:00 and waving goodbye, just standing there. And then the curtain would go up and reveal this great picture of people frozen into position. But I remember her standing at the back of this ship, singing this song, and we were all in tableau in front, suddenly the in the lights, the public in front

37:30 and the chap in front of me who was in white trousers, bell-bottom trousers, little ribbons on his cap and so on, standing there. And he had across his backside he had written pansy in lipstick. It was very hard to maintain a tableau with that sort of thing going on. There

38:00 were a lot of activities. For example I went over the top of the Harbour Bridge one night, I know you can do it now but at that stage it was highly dangerous. The harbour bridge had only been built for a year, it was built in 1931 I think, and two of us had been to the Scots Old Boys’

38:30 ball, and we were in kilts, we had borrowed kilts from the school. Anyway at about one in the morning we had left the party and we’re walking back to his home on the North Shore and we came to the bridge and we decided why walk across the bridge when we can go right over the arch?

39:00 That was an exceedingly dangerous and foolish thing to do because at that time there were no safe guards. But we had to get over a fence about six foot high with barbed wire on the top to reveal a vast vertical column that went up into the night with rungs on it and we set off on these rungs, we had to get over the fence first.

39:30 And then going up into the darkness, we didn’t know where we were going really, and it was a pretty long climb. And we got up and we got to the top of the arch, you know where it goes over? And it is quite wide and it was safe from that angle, we walked up it and that’s quite safe, there is a little railing each side and then there is

40:00 about three feet of steel on each side. And unfortunately we came across a small crane a maintenance thing. And there was a housing at the bottom of the crane which was wider than the arch. And the door into it, normally you would go into the door and out a door on the other side, had a pad lock on it. How would we get

40:30 onto the other side? So we went around the outside hanging onto the guttering with our fingers and it was a sheer drop from ten stories or something into the sea. Anyway we got around, and we kept going to the top and the other chap was suggested that

41:00 instead of going down as we had done we would cross over and go down on the other side. It didn’t appeal to me at all, but he insisted. Well crossing over was a girder about ten or twelve inches wide, no protection, and he crawled on his tummy half way 41:30 across and I was behind him and he just swung his legs around and sat up on the edge of the girder and had a cigarette. I was terrified. I mean you could see way down below, you could see the occasional car drifting along. And anyway he got across and I got across and I got across. And then

42:00 we started down the other side.

42:02 End of tape

Tape 3

00:30 We will get onto the war, and I guess the first question about that is what do you remember about the outbreak of war and the day that war was declared?

Well at the time I was at the coast hospital, Prince Henry Hospital. There were one or two of the resident doctors who had enlisted, they likes playing at soldiers anyway.

01:00 But it didn’t interfere at all for about a year. That was really a quiet time when they were invading Poland and Czechoslovakia. There was activity over there but it wasn’t affecting us at all. I was working away,

01:30 there was plenty of interesting work to do there and I had an opportunity in fort of me. I had become a junior doctor of a postgraduate school of surgery which was starting. There was a fellow called Sir Hugh Pote who was well known as a general surgeon, particularly of the thyroid area and I used to assist him with all of his operations.

02:00 and I found I had a pretty good pair of hands. I wasn’t a great brain, I wasn’t a good student but I had a good pair of hands. We got on very well, I don’t know how far I would have got on but I was also studying very hard trying to keep up with things. I lacked a bit of confidence in my medical work.

02:30 But the outbreak of war was interesting to read about, but it didn’t really affect us.

What about your friends and family, did anyone you know join up early on?

Well I don’t really know about a lot of them.

03:00 Just when they joined up. A lot of talk went on, should we join or shouldn’t we? I mean it was a big decision to leave opportunities and family and friends and catch a ship and go off to North Africa and not know what was following. Was it really necessary for us to go? All of that sort of thing.

03:30 Who did you discuss it with?

Mostly other young doctors at the hospital because I was living there. And I don’t think they knew much about it, we used to listen to the news pretty carefully. The thing that determined it for me, there were two things. We suddenly got about three or four patients in who were Dutch and they had been in the war

04:00 somewhere and you know they told us a bit about it. But something that upset me was when a young doctor joined the staff of the hospital, quite a young man, he was Jewish. He had escaped from Germany. And he had been persecuted by the Gestapo [German secret police], his parents had been killed and he had been taken

04:30 prisoner and treated very badly, laughing Germans holding his head down the toilet and pulling the chain and kicking him in the backside and all of that sort of thing. Anyway he got out and he decided to get well away from the war and he came to Australia and was

05:00 accepted readily. And he appeared at Prince Henry Hospital as a young pathologist and I used to talk to him. And he said, “We are living in a fool’s paradise.” We didn’t realise that Adolf Hitler was so strong that he would undoubtedly overrun Europe, he would take

05:30 Britain with no trouble. They were well equipped there was a lot of them and they would move out sideways in either direction and they would eventually come to Australia. He said as far as he was personally concerned he would be recaptured as a Jew and tortured. What should he do? And he said well the best thing was to take his life.

06:00 Well here we were at a sort of paradise, we played golf there, had five holes of golf. Had a private little beach. We were all young and there was a mixture of young men and young women who were nursing, living in the nursing home there and we were having a pretty good life one way or another. And he had come in and within six

06:30 weeks of him being there he said, “I think I will commit suicide.” So I talked him out of it I thought. And I was on duty in the emergency casualty one night and the ambulance came in and I went into the back and here he was lying in the back of the ambulance dead. He had taken cyanide, 07:00 you can smell it quite easily. And he was dead. It made me think that his fears and anticipation was real. So I thought about it and my particular friend at the time was a chap called Roderick Geoffrey and he and I

07:30 got a day off and went into town and enlisted. There was a medical section in Macquarie Street of doctors enlisting and you could specify which service you liked but you might be called up in any depending on the need. Anyway the two of us were called up. It was a funny period, it was before the Germans had got through

08:00 Belgium and Holland, going into France about that time. Of course when they did and Britain started getting involved itself it became more serious. But this was the stage at which I enlisted.

What was the scene at the enlistment office then, who was enlisting at that time and what was going on down there?

08:30 In Sydney?

That was where you?

I enlisted in Sydney. Well there was a special place, I have forgotten where it was now, there was a building and people in uniform and men lining up and signing the line and so on. Being interviewed, “What are you doing? What are your qualifications? Are you fit as far as you know?”

09:00 The general enquiry and then you would see an interview board which would determine when you were called up into the service, they would specify which service and what you were to do. I mean someone who is used to digging post holes would be enlisted as a casual hand, there is always plenty of work to do on the camp site and so on. Someone who had trained as a dentist

09:30 had no chance of doing anything else. He couldn’t go as a pilot or anything he would have to be a dentist, because they needed those services. And I being a doctor there was no choice there, I had to be a young doctor there.

And what about the service you joined what choice did you have there?

Well I didn’t specify beyond, I said I would prefer the army or the air force.

10:00 I thought I might prefer the air force and I must admit I was thinking of the type of fighting and so on. I wasn’t too keen to fix a bayonet and charge into a crowd of people and get into hand to hand fighting. Not at all. I imagined the army would have much more camping in remote and horrible areas. There for a long time can’t get home.

10:30 I didn’t like the idea of the navy because there was no escape, you have got to live with the same people whether you like them or not, there is no where to go, there is no sports, there is nothing. I thought the air force might offer something new. It was a very rapidly expanding service, there was a lot of movement. I didn’t realise at the time

11:00 that it was to be kept at home in Australia, I thought I would be travelling somewhere. I enlisted in the army and the air force particularly, not keen on the navy. And if I was going to make a choice I would choose the air force, that’s the way I put it.

And what happened next?

Well when people went through the recruiting area, they would go back home to their normal job. Until such time as the service would need to call them up.

11:30 See there is a limit to the number of people who can come in at one time, they have got to go through the training establishment and then another group is brought in. I got involved in that later when I was in Brisbane. So I just went back to the ordinary job and I was on call up as they call it.

Was than an anxious time or a

12:00 exciting time?

It only concerned me in one way and that was that I was in love with this girl at Prince Alfred and I couldn’t see what was going to happen next in that department. If I was called up I would be gone and we hadn’t been married.

12:30 It might have been better not to get married, no one wants to leave a woman with a child for example. You just leave them, if you’re killed or go off as a prisoner. And so I thought it would be a handicap to her if she had a family at all, so I didn’t know which way to go there. The fact

13:00 was I had already made my decision I had signed the line and I would be called up one day.

What about your parents, what were you talking about to them at this time?

Well of course I was in Sydney and they were in Queensland. I didn’t talk to them very much, I remember my father I saw at one stage I think he came to Sydney I am not sure, 13:30 but his advice was, “Always do your duty, never volunteer.” And that’s not a bad bit of advice. You must do your duty and under most circumstances it embraces some pretty difficult things, but that’s what everyone’s got. But if you’re asked to volunteer that means

14:00 some special duty that involved terrific risk and he said, “Don’t volunteer whatever it is.” I had a few things about that too. Needless to say I didn’t entirely follow his advice but I thought that was pretty good.

Was there a sense of family

14:30 and patriotic tradition your father having been a doctor in the First World War?

I don’t think there was a tradition no. I think the people I knew, my father, my father’s family and friends and so on, they were all patriotic, I mean they were all going to do their best, work three times as hard, get into the service, do charitable work something like that. They were all keyed up to

15:00 go. And the thing is we had to win it. it was a terrific period really, although a bit later was worse, but it was really a time to just carry on with the work I was doing anyway. Training for surgery and so on. If I went in I would go in as a doctor, not

15:30 necessarily to do surgery, there are many fields where doctors are required not to do basic clinical work. My misgivings were more on the social side, what to do in that way.

What about the fool’s paradise, how did that change or was it not very obvious that people were beginning to change their attitude towards the war at that time in Australia?

16:00 Well they were changing because there were marches through the city, bands playing and girls waving goodbye and so on. It was an emotional period. I mean there were things like going into a country town and they would summon up all of the men they could find and they would march through the country. And every town they came to there would be cheers and bands and

16:30 things. And marching down to the recruiting office.

When did your call up come, can you tell us what happened then?

Yes it was in 1940 about half way through, I had enlisted in 1939, which was three or six months after the thing started in Europe and then about five months later I was called up.

17:00 Meanwhile I had married. Yeah it was mid 1940 I was called up. And that’s just a telegram to say report to the recruiting office for enlistment and that meant immediate enlistment.

Having just been married and having waited so long to receive that notice what were your emotions like on receiving that telegram?

17:30 Well my wife had done her nursing course and we would naturally stay together as long as we could. I had to go to Melbourne for a course of training for a month with other doctors coming from other sources. It was a medical training course. The training being how to salute

18:00 and march and wear uniform and do this and that. And what was meant by daily routine orders and standing orders and that sort of military routine. And my wife came down with me, we drove down. And another couple we knew and we just booked into a hotel and went and did the course and came home at night to the hotel.

18:30 So she was with me. I didn’t know what happened because once you’re in the service the service can do whatever they want with you. I mean you can get an order proceed tomorrow morning by plane to Jamaica and you have got to go even if you don’t know why or for how long. That sort of situation doesn’t happen often.

19:00 As far as I was concerned I was having this introductory course at Laverton in Victoria and we would just have lectures and this and that. Simple stuff, but it was really on service routine, how the service was structured and who was in charge. Ranks and parallel

19:30 ranks in other services, we were issued with little books and so on. I remember one with a brown cover which we had to carry everywhere in our kit bag on all sorts of service things. The flags of all nations for example. How to speak Arabic, crammed into this little book. It was supposed to be a

20:00 guide. How to survive in the tropics, the Arctic, the desert and so on. Little things to lead into whatever might happen. So there were many little thing issued to us of that sort. Lectures given on procedure and structure, it was a familiarisation course really.

How did you respond to the regimentisation and discipline of the air force?

20:30 It didn’t worry me at all I thought it was a bit entertaining actually. We were told if you were addressing a senior officer you would stand to attention and salute, and he could speak to us we didn’t speak to him. Not during that sort of interview. Of course in the days work when you start working 21:00 you’re just doing the usual things. Later on I found I was very good friends with senior officers and very good friends with some of the men underneath me at this time.

What was your wife doing at this time was she considering joining up too at the time? She was a nurse?

She wasn’t allowed to. No married women were allowed to join up. Also

21:30 there were no women in the air force. She might have joined up if she had been unmarried in the army as a Red Cross girl, there weren’t too many women in the army at that stage, none in the navy. So there were very few women, but they used to enlist in other things, the jobs started opening up. There was a Land Army for example.

22:00 I mean women would go and milk the cows and work on properties and do all sorts of things like driving trucks and vehicles and staff cars and this sort of thing. And in civilian life they take on a lot, see factories would empty out all of the men and women would come and work in the factories.

It was still early days for Australia in the war in 1940, what happened to you

22:30 after the course at Laverton?

I was posted to Brisbane Recruiting Centre in Creek Street, Brisbane. Number One Recruiting Centre. There was about fifteen doctors working there all of the time. I introduced myself to the senior doctor and I could still live out and still live with my wife. So she came up to

23:00 Brisbane and we got a flat in New Farm, part of Brisbane and I used to go to work everyday, that’s all. Work in the recruiting centre was interesting. Of course it was all men to begin with, it was a three storey building,

23:30 lots of examination areas and places for interview and signing documents and all sorts of things. It was nothing to find ten men in the nude all lined up for examination, to walk in. Nothing, no clothes at all. Doctor sitting there and examining one

24:00 after the other. So it was a big building of men, a lot of men coming in through the door in civilian clothes, didn’t know where they were and they would be drafted into position and eventually issued with uniforms and so on.

I would like to talk about the recruiting centre in some detail because it is a very important part of Australia’s war effort the recruiting centre what was your daily routine there?

24:30 Well, I would come into an officer like this, I would have a thing there, sit the patient down they would fill in a from of about thirty questions. Any past illnesses, name and this sort of stuff. “Are you fit as far as you know?” and they had to reveal all of their medical history, then

25:00 I would examine them. And there was a set routine, another big from that I had to fill in. But I had to examine their eyes, they had a test chart up there and they had to read the bottom line with first one eye and then the other eye and so on. Then we had to test their hearing, speak softly and cover up our mouth and expect them to reply which they nearly always did.

25:30 And we had to have one ear blocked, test that one and then the other one, have a look down their throat, I don’t know why. Have a quick look at their teeth, if they needed dental treatment, they would have to have it done. Then we would examine their limbs and joints, recording any moles or scars or identification features in case they were dead.

26:00 And then their urine would be examined. You can tell a lot from examining the urine as to state of health. The blood pressure, the joints. I remember one bloke was in the nude, and I said, “Are you fit?” and he did a complete back somersault and landed on his feet, and said, “Yes.”

Mind leaning forward. What happened to that fellow?

I passed him.

26:30 There was also another one who was perfectly fit as far as I was concerned but he had slightly flat feet. It didn’t worry him at all, just mentioned it and we had to fail him because the regulation was that you can’t have people for flat feet.

Well that’s one thing people talk about quite often, getting failed for flat feet. What other things were you looking for what did the regulations stipulate?

Well, people might have had an abdominal operation,

27:00 you could tell by the scar on the front of the abdomen. Possibly something that might be further trouble, they might have had a ruptured gastric ulcer for example. A ruptured one has to be opened and the ulcer fixed up. And then there were people who were perhaps on a wooden

27:30 leg or something. Joints wouldn’t work. You have to work all of the joints together, if they can’t crouch down in a trench or something later on they are going to seek trouble, we were after things that might recur when they are placed in difficult circumstances physically. And we had to be very careful to record everything,

28:00 in detail, because of the repatriation business they might get in, have all of the benefits later of being ex-service but get expelled from the service in six months which would be genuine, but in fact they had it when they came in. Why were they recruited? Look back, see who did this recruiting, why didn’t you find our about so and so?

28:30 You know. If someone can get all of the benefits of the services, and there are plenty, and they don’t deserve it, it is worth finding out isn’t it?

Under those circumstances is it fair to say you were under a bit of pressure as a doctor in that?

Oh no it became routine. There was a lot of thing you had to look out for, for example

29:00 if I can read the bottom line there, and I can read it there, would you pass him for eye sight?

Tricked you.

You saw that did you?

Do it again.

You cover the right eye and then you cover the right eye again, so a man might have a defective sight in the right eye and

29:30 he will trick the examiner by doing that.

Was that a trick you saw often?

Oh no, I know about a lot of these tricks though.

What other tricks did you see?

Well colour vision was important for some things, and you could have lessons, some people outside would teach people how to overcome the, there was a book they used to give you called the Ishihara book.

30:00 It had many dots of colour on it and there was a number or a letter on each on in these colours. They would be all blue dots go down and across, the letter L quite obvious. But if you showed it to someone who is colour defective they can’t tell you what it is. Now you could go to someone before hand and they would

30:30 teach you the numbers and the pages of numbers. They would know that page number twenty equals letter number so and so. And so that you could pass a colour vision test, well that was the intention, didn’t always work out of course.

How did you get around that?

Well you could get

31:00 different editions which were different, they weren’t sure which they would have. It was only a screening test anyway because the test was pretty tough. And if they couldn’t do that you would then give them a separate test on looking at fine lights. Red light and a green light, orange lights and almost red and almost green and you could confuse

31:30 them a bit, use thirty or forty and if they made one mistake they couldn’t use colour vision. So they were no good as a pilot and no good as an electrical fitter where they had wires with colours on the, various other occupations, painting, mixing paints and so on. The best trick I know

32:00 of tricking the doctor I met in private practice later. I had a serviceman in uniform he was sitting in the waiting room and my secretary apparently went to him with this from to fill in, this was for fitness, probably a pilot. Anyway he had to fill in the from and

32:30 give it back to her, she would bring it in to me and then she would call the patient in for examination. But the chap who came in for the examination was someone else. There would be two airmen sitting together, in the same uniform and they would change places. So the one that came

33:00 up to do the signing of the from instead of sitting closer he would change to the other side of the lounge and the one that came in for me to examine, I wouldn’t find anything the matter because the one that had filled in the from and signed it was still sitting in the waiting room. Are you with me?

Yeah. Extreme.

Good trick.

33:30 See a subjective test is hard to do. Subjective means that it is only what the patient says. If you tell me you have migraines, severe headaches from time to time how would I know? See that is subjective.

What other objective tests did you have for peoples lungs or hearts or fitness?

Well

34:00 blowing into a bag was a great trick, they would have to blow into a bag, that would inflate their lungs and the amount of air they could blow into the bag would indicate whether they had a full capacity for lungs. Or not. And then of course we would clinically examine the heart by the size of the

34:30 heart and pule rate, regularity and strength. The absence of an unduly high blood pressure. And there is various evidence, if the circulation breaks down you get oedema of the feet. Then we would go on an exercise tolerance thing, they had to go on a bike sort of thing and if they got puffed to early they were

35:00 suspect. There was various routine medical examinations which reveal the various systems in the body. There is the cardio-vascular system which is all of the vessels as well as the heart. And then there is the respiratory system, the breathing. The skin,

35:30 the brain, and various hormonal systems and so on which arise. There are definite systems and there is the skeletal systems, the bones. And we had to put them through various paces, going down, bending their knees and going right down and back up again. There were quite a few exercise movements,

36:00 touching your toes and doing things with your arms and doing this to indicate that there is no trouble there following normal movements.

Did the air force have certain regulations about body size and shape?

They did but they were unnecessary. They had a thirty-nine inch leg length for pilots, in other word their legs have got to be long enough to reach the controls. I

36:30 don’t think that applied much latterly or anywhere, you can always get extensions to deal with that. Thiry-nine inches I remember is the figure. Much more important is the personality of the patient. A lot of that you can’t really find out, I mean an interview is notoriously

37:00 misleading, I mean if I was interviewing someone how would I assess their air sickness? Or their claustrophobia where they are terrified of enclosed spaces, well there are two things that put them out straight away for flying. How would you assess courage? Honesty?

37:30 All of those things are pretty hard aren’t they.

I am sure when we come across your operational service you probably came across all of those things, and that is probably something recruiting can’t sort out. A couple more questions on recruiting, what were you testing the urine for? What were the main things you were looking for there?

Sugar particular. Diabetes. And there were tests, you put the sugar on the centrifuge

38:00 and spin it around and the cells in the urine they all go to the end, and if there are undue cells there the specimen can be by microscope to give more information. It might indicate some degree of nephritis of some sort, inflammation of the kidneys. Medicine is full of that where you had to do

38:30 these tests to bring light on a certain organ and the ones that are perfectly obvious are body movements and neck movements and things of that sort to make sure. But it is not so easy when you come onto eyes for example, you need a special instrument looks a bit like this where you sit in front of a table

39:00 and look and the doctor can turn a nob and get high magnification of fine detail of the surface of the eye and so on, so there are lamps and things. And we had specialist recruiting. Most of us were general doctors but we had a panel of specialists in private practice who were allied to the air force so if I had a doubt about

39:30 someone’s eyes I could if I wanted to ring up and say, “I am making an appointment for this guy to come up and have a test by an eye specialist.” Or a specialist of any sort, a physician that would know more about parts of the body than I did would check it our for me. And send a report back.

40:00 We have to stop, we’re out of tape again, gee, it has gone quick.

40:07 End of tape

Tape 4

00:30 From your experience in Brisbane what can you say about the kind of men that were going to join the air force that you were looking at every day? I think there were all sorts, same as the army. The air force needed cooks, mess men, labourers. As well as all of the mechanics and fitters and so on, as well as the pilots and doctors and dentists

01:00 and so on. There was a big cross section. A squadron eventually is like a town, it used to be, not so now. But it used t0o be, the whole thing would move as long as there were strips built and so there were people from all walks of life called in. I want to tell you two or three things,

01:30 when I was at the recruitment centre the invention of WAAAFs [Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force] came in. Women in the air force, this was a bombshell! And the day came when attractive ladies used to walk in, not many, to sign on the line and so on. Make enquiries.

02:00 And there was going to be an intake, intake is the day they come to join the service, of about fifteen WAAAFs, who were going to be the officers of the WAAAFs. Women’s air force. Of course they had to go through the drill. The discipline in the recruit centre had to be changed, didn’t have any naked men walking around anywhere. The first I knew of it

02:30 was a great hammering over in the corner of the floor I was on and the carpenters were building a special examination room for them to be physically examined. This was entertaining really and they employed a nursing sister and then one of the doctors was going to have to do that section of their enlistment. Of course there was little conjecture going around,

03:00 who was going to be the doctor doing this job? It wasn’t any great concern of the doctors because they were accustomed. Finally there was a notice put on the wall by the senior doctor who had never done general practice, he had worked as a research officer somewhere. And he put a notice up, the doctor who will be selected to examine the WAAAF intake will

03:30 be required to wear long trousers. In the whole of the South West Pacific Australians were wearing short trousers but the doctor doing this, it was absolutely ridiculous. Anyway it added to the hilarity of the expectation and I was appointed to be the doctor. So I remember the day when the girls were coming in for their

04:00 tests and so on. And I arrived for work walking along the footpath outside wearing long trousers and everyone was wondering what was going on in the air force. And the recruiting centre people were leaning out the windows and cheering and shouting and I got a great reception arriving. That was a funny episode to me.

How did the women enlisting differ to what you had been doing with the men?

04:30 Nothing much at all. Same sort of thing. After all they get sick in the same way don’t they?

Were there gynaecological examinations?

Oh no. Just history, looking for scars and that sort of thing, external examination, that’s all.

And your first day with the WAAAFs, how was that for you?

05:00 Well the only difficult thing was how do you collect urine. And we had to refer that to the sister, that was soon sorted out of course. Oh no it was absolutely routine. Once they arrived and went through all of the enquiries of name and date and that sort of thing it was quite a serious occasion, it was just something

05:30 new in the air force at the time.

What other stories, you said there was a couple of things you wanted to say?

Oh yes I wanted to tell you about the trains. There was two trains attached to the air force recruiting centre in Brisbane. One went north up to Townsville, Cairns, and the other went west out to Charleville and Cunnamulla and all of the towns on the way there and back.

06:00 Now when I say train, there were three air force carriages and a normal train travelling that direction would hitch them on the back and they would be carried along to a town and then they would be put in the siding and kept in the siding for two or three days while we would recruit anyone that had come in from the neighbourhood for enlistment.

06:30 And then we would be tagged onto another train and go to the next two. So to go to all of those places like Miles, and Goondiwindi and Charleville, Cunnamulla and so on, Warwick, it took about two months because you would be several days at each place. But it was interesting because when we went out to the western areas

07:00 there was only two officers, myself and a chap in charge of the business, and four men. The two officers would stay in a hotel here and the four men would stay in another hotel over there if there was one and let me tell you for example, Dirranbandi, when the train pulled it the platform had the council there,

07:30 about five men on the town council, they would greet us as we stepped out. Then there would be the boy scouts and then the girl guides and then the Red Cross and then the RSL [Returned and Services League] and so on, right along the platform, all standing to attention in rows and so on. And the two of us would have to go along and inspect each one.

08:00 And it was really most amazing. And the other chap Don Wright who was with me would have to make a speech from the back of the train and then the council and the RSL would join us and took us over to the pub. Which was only twenty yards away across the street you see. Then they would buy us a couple of drinks and we would buy

08:30 them a couple of drinks, and it was never difficult to settle into the pub at all. You know we would have about half a dozen beers before we could move, and then they would tell us, “We have got dinner arranged for you tonight.” And this was dinner with the town council and their wives and the RSL and their wives and representatives from the scouts and all of the rest of it. I suppose there would be twenty-five people there.

09:00 And we had make speeches. They would toast the air force. Toast the Queen. Toast the recruiting train. Toast to me. Toast to Don Wright. And this went on and I was just about dead at this stage and they said, “All right we will go to the Town Hall now.” And the Town Hall was across the street again, a big tin shed and about fifteen rows of people, but only the two front rows would be occupied

09:30 with Aboriginals and dogs and a few crazies that had come in and so on. And we had to stand on the stage and both give a speech. Well then we finished that and then the chairman of the council said, “Well we are going to have something informal now we’re taking you over to the bar and we have got an informal party for you.” So we

10:00 went over there and there was a girl dressed up for the occasion standing on the bar with a banjo. Playing it and signing it and giving it a roar. Quite a cheerful atmosphere really, and I was talking to the mayor and his eyes clouded over and he just slid onto the floor and laid there, he had passed out.

10:30 And so we left him there and I thought well it is time I went to bed now. So I went to, I had taken the wife too, I had taken her on the train out. And so we had this trip, this is only one feature of it, together and we went into our bedroom and outside there was a long veranda with the recruits for the next day.

11:00 There must have been fifteen men with their horses all tied by their reins up alongside the side of the pub. Of course they had had a party too. And one of the who wasn’t very well was looking for the toilet in a hurry, he wanted to be sick, suddenly flung my two doors open tried to charge through my bedroom to find the toilet and vomited all over the floor. It was absolute chaos.

11:30 This was Dirranbandi. Next day of course we worked on these fifteen men. Put them through their paces and I had a carriage, one of the three was the medical carriage where I did my full medical examination. It was desperately hot outside and inside this carriage was twice as hot.

12:00 Because they had to close it down you see? Because I was asking people to take their clothes off and we had to do visual tests in the dark. And really it was a terrible environment to work in. as a matter of fact a lot of patients would say, “Well come over and we’ll have a beer.” And so we would walk across the road to the pub and have a beer and come back and carry on. And then he would have to get

12:30 out and go around the side of the train to carriage one to where he would have the official interview. Well I was on the interview panel, I sued to zip along the inside of the train and he would go around the outside and find I was sitting there again, the three of us on the interview board. This was to assess their ability in one mustering or another. Mustering is the type of work,

13:00 cook, fitter, service policeman, dentist or whatever. So we had this great interview then. And there would be another patient waiting for me in my medical carriage and I would charge back and be a doctor again. It was a very busy life. Then on the Saturday and Sunday we were asked to

13:30 place ourselves in their hands, they were going to really look after us. You know what that means of course, we were going to have drinks. I think on the Saturday night we had to go to a dance. Hop in the back of the truck, there was a utility van with a bag full of chaff, you had to sit on that to get there, but it was fifty miles out.

14:00 No sealed road, winding through trees and all of this stuff, belting along. And when I got to this place called Eulo I suppose there were only four buildings there. One being a town shed where they had a dance going. That was the sort of thing. Next day I had to go on a kangaroo hunt, which I had never done before. Again in the back of a truck sitting on a chaff bag,

14:30 with a rifle. And I suppose the country was flat, we got off the road all together. Through a gate and we were out in the wild, shooting at kangaroos, kangaroos hopping up and down and the truck was bouncing all over the place, no road, and I know someone before me on the train fell off the back of a truck doing this. He stood up by mistake to take aim and went straight over the back.

15:00 It sounds like a fascinating time, well amusing.

It was, it was very hard work and far too much entertaining and so on. The one thing we wanted to do was lie down.

What kind of men were you interviewing there as opposed to Brisbane? Well all sorts, mostly property types and people who worked on properties,

15:30 mustering and rounding up cattle, that sort of person. Naturally there weren’t too many professional people there but some of those people were very good servicemen you know. I mean this chap Charles Crombie I mentioned earlier he was on a property, rode a horse quite well

16:00 and he was a brilliant pilot when the time came. So they were a mixture and often the country people are not to be despised at all you know, they are very educated people. It is just the distances are great, they meet each other, they think nothing of driving forty miles to a dance.

16:30 They mix with each other quite a lot, play tennis and have their own forms of fun.

Apart from the drinking what was a bit of an eye opener for you about going out into the far west of Queensland?

Well I didn’t like shooting kangaroos much, not shooting them but when one was shot, he’d be

17:00 over as quick as a flash, pull out a knife and ‘phhht’, skin it, take the whole skin off. Take it home. The sheds and things, there were kangaroo skins nailed on the wall there to dry and so on.

What contact did you have with Aboriginal people during this time?

None at all. I don’t think there were many Aboriginal people enlisted either.

17:30 There was one Aboriginal pilot I met quite recently, about a year or two ago at St George up in southern Queensland, they were having some sort of function and wanted a speaker up there and 75th Squadron function of some sort, so I was asked to go up and I did.

18:00 There was an Aboriginal pilot there, there was only one I think in the war. And this was him.

There was no move in Brisbane while you were there to recruit Aborigines or to not recruit them?

No. No move either way, I don’t think I ever seen one. I think there were recruits in the army, not many but there were a few.

18:30 How long did you spend with the recruiting?

I was a year with the recruiting centre. And that was enough really, I mean I wasn’t learning any medicine, it was very much routine.

And what was going on in the war at this stage?

Well things were getting tougher in France and North Africa, very interesting to

19:00 read about but we were remote. The reflection on us was that rationing had come in. We had tear off cards, civilians had tear off-things [ration coupons] that allowed you to buy small quantities of meat or a small quantity of this and that. It wasn’t any worry to us in the service we were quite well looked after

19:30 but in civilian life shopping had to be a bit more careful. The one thing that did affect us was rationing of petrol for cars, and believe it or not they used to have big balloon on to top of the cars which you could buy, about two feet, which was full of gas

20:00 which was fed into the car, I don’t know how it worked but it drove the car. But you had to have this balloon filled up every now and again. And the other thing they used to use was to have a coal burner on the back of the car. Did you ever hear about that? There is a luggage rack at the back, on the outside of a car and it used to fold down to put luggage on. And you could get a burner to put on, a thing about

20:30 three feet high and you put coal in it, or coke in it and start the fire first thing in the morning, smoke coming out of the top and the gas would be collected from the coke and piped through to the engine and somehow it worked. That was a bit surprising. Of course in increased the mileage,

21:00 otherwise someone might own a car but only be allowed to do twenty miles a week on petrol.

These are symbols of wartime Australia that people don’t know much about, they are very interesting.

Well one you wouldn’t know much about, people couldn’t cross a border. If you were in Queensland you couldn’t cross over to New South Wales and New South Wales you couldn’t cross over to Victoria, civilians.

21:30 Because all of the transport, this is a little bit later I am sorry, after the Japanese came in.

And how did they control those borders?

They had guards on the main roads, couldn’t control them perfectly. After my little period in New Guinea I was posted to Sale as I told you. My wife was in Queensland staying with my parents in Warwick

22:00 southern Queensland, and I had to get down to Victoria by a certain time and date which I did. Here was I in Sale in Victoria, here was she in Warwick Queensland. We were married and we hadn’t seen each other for three months and I thought well how would I get her down?

22:30 I managed because a doctor in Warwick was doing a call on some farm house which was across the border, New South Wales and so she went across with him and didn’t come back. She went to Tenterfield and got a train to Sydney, with the baby, we had a baby then. And she went from there down the coast to

23:00 I have forgotten the last town, right down south coast right near Victoria, she got off the train. I borrowed a car at Sale and I drove right over to the east coast of Victoria up into the high mountains and I parked the car under some trees there and I walked

23:30 to the town where she was and so we got together, and I went to the postman and I conned him into driving us, he used to a drive apparently up into the mountains to the farm properties up there delivering mail. So he drove us up and we found the car and we went into Victoria.

24:00 Incredible difficulty you had to go through.

A lot of funny things happened like that.

After the recruiting you were sent to EFTS [Empire Flight Training School] in Archerfield, why were you sent there as a doctor?

Well it was a base with a few hundred personnel there learning to fly. It had a

24:30 had to have a doctor there. Every morning there is a sick parade see and if anyone had anything the matter, cut on their hand or they have got a cold and they should be in bed for a couple of days they have got to come and see the doctor. Sick parade is at eight o’clock every morning. And then he does work during the day to visit the sick and so on.

25:00 What were the highlights or most interesting things about your time there?

Flying really, I couldn’t do much medical work I wasn’t very experienced of course. But I did have a ward with about eight or ten beds but they were empty most of the time. The flying involved, they had Tiger Moths there, it was elementary, they had Tiger Moths

25:30 with instructors, the instructor would take a student up and teach him how to fly. And I was in the same position, an instructor used to take me up. Have you done any flying? Trainee flying? And we used to go up to about three or four thousand feet and do aerobatics and so on. He would give me the

26:00 controls and I would fly it, perfectly safe if you’re high enough. There is nothing to hit. Watch out for other planes of course, but on the ground, near the ground if anything goes wrong you are in deep trouble, but you have got to learn to take off and land, that’s an important part of training.

26:30 Anyway I learnt all of that.

Was that an unofficial thing or were you encouraged to do this?

Well it was unofficial but there was no reason why I couldn’t. And I think the doctor was encouraged to learn as much as he could about what people did. This was important for grounding people and so on I mean you wouldn’t let someone fly if he had a cold. I mean he could get a blockage of the tube into the ear, the

27:00 Eustachian tube and get severe pain and so on.

What did you think of flight how did that make you feel?

Well I enjoyed it tremendously. But on the last day the instructor said, “Well I think you have done enough training now, I think you’re fit to go solo.” And I did, that’s the only time I have done it.

What was that experience like?

Well, it is pretty scary because

27:30 no one is going to help you of course and you have got to get the plane down somehow. Actually I had a bit of a send off in the mess and on that day he was going to send me off solo, in other words take of by myself, go around and come down again. Normally I would do this with him sitting in the front and me behind

28:00 and he would have a careful eye on the controls all of the way. But on the last day it rained and the flying program was cancelled. By the last day I mean that I had received a posting to go to Townsville to join this famous squadron that was being formed. Well I left that night and I went

28:30 into town back home. And in the afternoon I was due to catch a train to Townsville and I woke up and it was a beautiful sunny day and I thought I will never get the chance again to fly. So I got in the car and went back out to the unit looked up the instructor and I said, “I want to go solo, I have left the unit

29:00 and I will be going to Townsville this afternoon.” So he said, “Right.” Down we went to the field, and I got in. And that’s the time I was pretty nervous, not in taking off I mean all you do is just push the accelerator flat on and it will take off. I want worried about that but landing is not easy.

29:30 And I did a square circuit, a certain time this way, and that way and back, that’s a square and then you take your landing in. He said, “One thing you mustn’t do is hit the fence coming down.” Now if you go too far up, mind you there is no runway it is just a field. If you go too high, and you’re too far up, you haven’t got enough space

30:00 to run out and you hit the fence on the other side, but if you let the plane drop too much you get the wheels tangled in the top wire of the fence you’re going to come to disaster of course and get yourself killed. So the first time I was a bit too high, I was so careful.

30:30 And then I bounced it in, I wasn’t good enough to gauge my distance off the ground and as I came lower I bounced and I flew up and to come down again I was going to run out of space so I shoved on the motor as hard as I could go and went around again. This time I was lower, I must have been pretty close to the fence but I was trying to gauge it that I would

31:00 be above it but would have enough run out. And it worked that way and I got it down, shook him by the hand and left the unit.

What did you decide about flying at that time, were you going to do it again?

Oh if I got the chance yes. But see you had to be on a unit which flies elementary type planes, that doesn’t mean that you can suddenly go up and fly Kittyhawks or some of the advanced planes.

31:30 I know later on at when you were posted at Sale at the OTU [officer training unit] there were accidents, what about with the Tiger Moths what sort of accidents did you see?

Well I know one plane ran out of space and landed on my sick quarters on the front veranda. The plane actually came and was parked on the veranda when I got to work. Pilot got out.

32:00 I have no doubt there were accidents there but I don’t think they were fatal accidents. They were pretty good really, I meant they were built for safety, so long as you don’t let the speed drop too low or get caught where there is no aerodrome. Fortunately Australia is a country where you can land in a paddock in a Tiger Moth which I have done.

32:30 With another pilot. So that if you’re caught off the aerodrome you just pick a field and put it down, turn around and run off again.

Were there particular problems you were dealing wit has the doctor on the EFTS?

No there was nothing much.

33:00 The usual things. There were people who had to see specialists. I had one man who had to have a special diet, he had a gastric ulcer that was causing him a lot of trouble, an older man and I sent him to see a specialist. Incidentally I found out how long he had had the condition

33:30 he had it when he enlisted and hadn’t told anybody so I had him discharged from the service. You can’t make special provision for that sort of illness. And he just hadn’t revealed it. He was a World War I man who wanted to get in.

Was there any time where you did make a special provision for someone in your recruitment career, perhaps the legs weren’t quite long enough and you did let them through?

34:00 No I learnt never to break the rules. The rules were made for a purpose, I think the leg length one itself can create difficulties, they will not always have the same aeroplane for example when they’re flying later on. I think nearly all of the regulations that are made

34:30 are made because so and so happened. I mean we would never admit someone if they had an only eye, a glass eye or injury or something in this eye. Actually there are lots of people why fly with only one eye and drive cars with only one eye. But if anything happens to the eye they are

35:00 sunk aren’t they. I mean if they got a foreign body in it and couldn’t open they eye they would have trouble getting the plane down. But their licences are issued as fit to fly provided they have a co-pilot, if there are two pilots in the plane they’re all right, they can fly. Not if they have recently lost the eye, not

35:30 recently, but if they had been brought up with one eye.

I can imagine in the situation like the gastric ulcer where you had to discharge the guy or in a situation enlistment where you couldn’t accept someone, there would be resentment towards the doctor, did you ever experience that? No but you have got to imagine that man in New Guinea or somewhere where a rough diet is no good to him. He would go sick at the critical moment just when you need him.

36:00 When he gets into action.

I understand the regulations were there and you were playing by them but did you ever cop any flak nonetheless?

Not in the service I don’t think no. I mean people know the regulations, if they break the rules and you detect them well they have got to take what's coming.

36:30 I don’t think so in the service. I have had some difficulties in private practice but of course that’s understandable, you’re seeing twenty-, twenty-five people a day you’re going to have arguments about things.

Later on you said you left Archerfield to join 75th Squadron is that right?

Yes.

37:00 That was just after the Japanese had entered the wear is that right? Can you tell us about the lead up to that?

Yes I will. Well we were living a comfortable life, I wasn’t going to be posted overseas I could see that. And then suddenly the Japanese attacked

37:30 Pearl Harbour. Lots of ships were lost and so on, you know the disaster that took place. Now immediately, well about the same time Singapore was taken, the Japanese had been fighting in China and they had a vast army of experienced troops. They were

38:00 very efficient, good fighters and very brutal. And when I say v I mean it with a capital V. Now that’s hard to understand when you meet Japanese now, but their culture was absolute cruelty. And anyone not in their mould, like a prisoner was an animal

38:30 and treated as such. And they treated animals badly. They started coming down fast, down the coast of Asia from China and then Thailand and Laos and down to Singapore. We were confident that Singapore would hold them

39:00 Singapore was a bastion of the British strength. The Japanese took Singapore within a few days. Well the reasons I think are, partly because the British were incompetent. They had sent out a lot of their unwanted personnel and officers to Singapore,

39:30 over the years and I really don’t think they were up to it.

What were the repercussions of these events for you as a doctor in the air force, what happened then?

They came down, the Japanese came further down to Java, Sumatra, Indonesia, Timor and just north of Australia.

40:00 Australia at the time had no navy, any navy they had was small. And it was over in the Mediterranean, very little army, because they only had a small army, it was all in the Middle East, the air force had a training establishment only, anyone who was trained as an air crew was sent away. There was nothing. There were instructors here who could fly aeroplanes.

40:30 But they had no aeroplanes. And an interesting thing happened, a ship came across the pacific going to Java and it had seventy odd aircraft on it, modern fighter aircraft in big cases. But, see there were some pilots in Java and all of their planes had been shot. Now Java

41:00 was taken before they got there and so they steered that ship into Brisbane or Sydney or somewhere on the east coast. These planes were unloaded rapidly and these planes had been given to the air force. And for the first time, not the first but nearly the first time Australia had a few planes which were fighters.

41:30 The air force divided them into three. They formed one lot in Perth to look after the west coast if they could. They formed one lot on the east coast to look after anything that might happen on the east coast. Really a pretty small defence. And the other one they formed in Townsville. That all happened within days.

42:00 And they sent.

42:02 End of tape

Tape 5 00:30 Okay Bill you were just talking about the formation of?

Yes a ship was coming across the Pacific of these aircraft and a third of them were sent to Townsville with the expectation of forming a squadron to proceed straight up to New Guinea. I went over to my

01:00 sick quarters in Archerfield one evening and sat by myself in my office. They would need to have a medial officer with the squadron. They were bound to have one, I could carry on at Archerfield there were many doctors and it was unlikely that I would be chosen. On the other hand I had the opportunity to be with the first fighter squadron

01:30 to face the Japanese. It might mean being killed or being taken prisoner for some years. A strange fluke happened. The doctor that enlisted with me was Roderick Geoffrey. Who was killed, in Sandakan. His brother was in the air force his brother was commanding officer of

02:00 number 3 Squadron, a RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] squadron in the Middle East. He was sent back to Australia to from 75th Squadron. And I heard in the mess that he had arrived back in Adelaide, if I rang him he might appoint me.

02:30 But it would mean leaving my wife and child and possibly not coming back.

I imagine that must have been a difficult decision for you in a way?

Very difficult. I gave it some thought and finally put out my hand and picked up the phone and rang Edinburgh in Adelaide that’s the air force thing, asked for the officers mess, asked if he was there and he was.

03:00 I got straight onto them by fluke. And I reminded him that I had met him and that I knew his brother so well and that I had heard that the new squadron was to be formed and that he would be instrumental in doing it and that I wished to be medical officer to the squadron. Well did he give me a tailing up.

03:30 To mention this over the public phone, that we were forming a fighter squadron in Townsville and he was going to do it and it was on the way to meet Japanese, it was on the top secret list. And I realised that I had made an awful blunder, but next day I got a telegram to say,

04:00 “Proceed to Townsville.” I got the job. Whether it was right or wrong, it certainly wasn’t along the lines of advice my father had given me.

Yes and you have also spoken about your reluctance, well, anyone’s reluctance to go into a war zone. Can you describe the kind of anticipation

04:30 or even excitement that you must have been feeling?

Well of course it was a very unusual adventure for me. I went up in a troop train and the army had just come back from the Middle East, it was full of army, the smell of beer and urine and vomit. It was overcrowded, it was hot.

05:00 It was quite a trip I can tell you. And when I got to Townsville I met someone on the corner there by arrangement. This chap had a truck and I was put in the back with two other recruits and we set off through Townsville out into the country and there was an old gate there, and a board nailed on the gate,

05:30 ‘75th Squadron’ had been scribbled on it with some paint. I was expecting a building or something. No building at all just a field. And I looked over and there were three new tents in the middle of the field and a track across. So we went across and there were men arriving. These were the initial group to from this squadron.

06:00 The tents had no furniture, nothing in them, just for shelter when you wanted to walk in. And there were two tables under a tree. One was an adjutant signing off names of arrivals and another was a cook sizzling sausages, that was 75th Squadron. And eventually all of the people who had converged from all

06:30 over Australia came in and we were put in a bus and taken to the air force base there for the night. Meanwhile planes started coming in. Kittyhawks were coming in in groups and one at a time sort of thing, flying in from the south. Next morning the 4th of March 42 there was a parade and 75th Squadron was formally born.

07:00 Well I am just wondering, you might not have had much time to get to know the other men but what type of characters were they? Were you stuck?

Well they were all lost souls you know? The ones that I met were mostly pilots and senior people. And they were

07:30 all anxious to be friendly, all shaking hands and pretending to be confident and strong.

Well when you arrived at that airfield was there any one person that stood out that you became friends with?

Well the person that stood out was John Jackson, he was the commanding officer, he had flown back from the 08:00 Middle East, he had experience. He was there on the first day, I don’t think there was anyone in particular. John Jackson called a meeting two nights later in the hotel in private and present there was John Jackson and there was one man

08:30 I did become friendly with, the engineer officer a chap called Mattson, who is dead now. Jackson is dead too. And there was an equipment officer, Ted Church who was experienced. And the adjutant and myself, that’s about it, and John Jackson told us that we would be leaving for New Guinea to

09:00 confront the Japanese in about two weeks. That’s not much time to transfer onto a new aircraft and to get experience. And I had to examine everybody in the squadron to make sure they were physically fit. And the equipment officer

09:30 was working taking equipment up. And the pilots all went into training, they were doing gunnery somewhere and flying in formation and practicing in the new aircraft. Some people went into action without having fired the guns. They didn’t all arrive on the same day. Some didn’t arrive until a week later. Some people like Bob Crawford and so on didn’t arrive for two or three weeks. We forgot to take it off the hook.

10:00 You only had two weeks to get ready?

Yes well John Jackson’s plan was to get the squadron up there as quickly and quietly as possible.

Can you just put your hand down?

And then the next day the pilots would all get in their aircraft go across the range of mountains and attack the Japanese at dawn. In other words he wouldn’t go up to defend Australia,

10:30 he would go up to attack the Japanese, it was a pretty good move. Do you want me to tell you about the arrival now?

Well you mentioned that you had to examine all of the men when they first arrived, what shape were they in?

Good shape. I don’t think there was any major problems. There was one man,

11:00 they only flew four back from the Middle East, who had experience now one man who seemed to be a nice enough chap, a pilot, said he had done a lot of flying recently and he didn’t know whether he could go on another tour at this stage and this sort of stuff. Mind

11:30 you I was all for winning the war, I said, “Look you have been trained at a great expense, you have got war experience which we need very much, you have got to go, you can’t take a rest now.” And so I made him go. Now he had a word to the commanding officer and he didn’t go on the first day, he was left behind to bring up a plane

12:00 which wasn’t ready to come about ten days later. And he flew up solo in the direction, up the coast of Queensland and he saw a man standing on the beach who was lost and waving for help and he did something which had been done in the Middle East he turned his Kittyhawk around and landed on the beach.

12:30 This had been done in the Middle East to pick up someone stranded in the desert and the man had been picked up and sat on the pilots knees and he could fly the plane sort of around him. This chap landed on the beach on the hard packed sand down near the water because he felt it would

13:00 be safer to land on. The wheels dug into the sand, the nose tipped down and he went over onto the back. The plane was upside down with the wheels sticking in the air. He was in the cabin of the plane upside down hanging on the straps which came over the shoulders, unhurt.

13:30 The man waving on the beach tried desperately to dig him out. There was a canopy above which he could slide across and climb out of the P40 Kittyhawk but they couldn’t get the canopy to slide, it was buried in the sand with the weight of the plane on it. And the tide came in and drowned him and that was the end of that.

14:00 And by fluke he was the man that asked me if he could have a rest. It wasn’t because he felt he needed a rest it was just one of those circumstances. That’s how we lost one pilot, we lost twelve pilots up there. Well lets leave it there unless you want to go on?

14:30 Just a little bit. The pilots flew up they stopped at Cooktown on the way and then we went to Horn Island which is at the tip of Cape York to refuel. Then they flew from there to Port Moresby, which is where we were going.

15:00 Were you with them at this stage?

I flew up later in the same day in a Catalina flying boat, there is move in there you can move about. No one else can get into a Kittyhawk just a one man place, you can see one up there. Anyway they went to Port Moresby and four aircraft went ahead, 15:30 a sort of an advance unit and then the other thirteen came behind about an hour later as the four aircraft landed one at a time shots rang out and the Australian army were guarding the strip

16:00 and they had machine guns on the hill and they mistook them for Japanese. And they burnt two of the planes, fortunately the pilots got away with it. Geoffrey led them in and he got a bullet hole in the cushion behind his head. He stepped out and pulled out his revolver he was going to shoot them. So that was a bad incident.

16:30 We lost two aircraft on touch down and the other two had a few holes in them but they got down and were repaired and went on. Actually, they both, just at that stage a Japanese reconnaissance plane came over, a reconnaissance plane

17:00 was coming over and taking a few photographs you know? And they had been used to coming over all of the time at low level, no plane to repel them you see? The whole business was to save Port Moresby, and these two planes just took off went and shot him into the sea without any trouble. And he didn’t have time to get a message back by radio.

17:30 So the dawn raid was still a surprise.

Well tell me how you went up in the second or?

In the Catalina? Catalina is a flying boat you know, based at Cairns. They were very slow. But they were, they did a lot of good work because they could fly very

18:00 low at night and they could stay out for twenty hours. Mass of fuel. And they acted as, well dropping mail to forward posts and that sort of thing. And occasionally they would drop a few bombs over something. They were just a utility sort of plane. Very good for espionage.

18:30 Anyway I went up with one of the pilots who didn’t have an aircraft, went up to Port Moresby. Moresby was a vital point in that part of the war. Now everybody thought including ourselves that if they kept going the way they were going they would be onto Australia quickly.

19:00 The navy wanted to do that the Japanese navy but the Australian army was in command and they said they haven’t got enough troops to take Australia at that stage, they would later. They wanted to take, see they had one arm descending down through Singapore and so I as I said, into the Indonesia region heading toward Port Moresby,

19:30 but there was another arm coming down on the north east coast through the Solomon Islands and Nauru and New Caledonia and all of those places. There are thousands of islands up there. So they were coming down each side of Australia. Now they couldn’t fly an

20:00 aeroplane from one arm to the next. The gap was too big, half way was Port Moresby. Room for about three landing grounds with a very big harbour, overlooking the north coast of Australia and if they could get Port Moresby they had a key site

20:30 for reaching both of these arms coming through and joining them up, they would the contain all of the islands above, all of those islands, Borneo and New Guinea. And so,

And when you arrived I am just wondering when you first got news of what had happened to the first arrivals of 75th Squadron?

21:00 Yes I arrived we alighted on the harbour, picked up by a launch. Taken in to a jetty and there was a car waiting for us, there was two or three of us. And we got into the car and it was dark, and we had seven miles to go. In other words the landing strip was seven miles inland.

21:30 And he drove us, through the trees really, there was no main road, no sealed road. Winding in and out of the trees at night was quite an eerie sensation with all of the lights on the trees. When we got to the camp it was in darkness, and we each had a big kit bag over our shoulders. And we had to go down the culvert,

22:00 there was a creek along the bottom, you could walk across and then up the other side and there was the officers mess. It was a very old small marquee with tears in the roof and so on. In the marquee was nobody except a cook. He had a little tent aside and he had some sort of a meal there waiting for us.

22:30 There were just four deal tables and benches to sit on, no backs or anything and it was on the ground, there was no floor. It was very primitive in other words. But I could hear the voice of our commanding officer Jackson in a tent thirty yards away. He had a deep full voice

23:00 and he had his flight commanders in there instructing them about the morning raid. So I had a meal and the cook took me over to the tent for me in the other direction, through the kunai grass which grows to about five or six feet high and it had been cut down, there were tracks, there were patches of it. Anyway

23:30 I got to the tent in darkness of course and there was one other person on the tent and a bunk for me, just the two of us. And he was a pilot. He was the commanding officers young brother, he was Les Jackson. The cook showed me around and he said, “Do you know how to look after a tent?” and I said, “No I have never been in a tent.”

24:00 He said, “Well you have got one now. Its on a slight slope here you want to dig a trench just four inches deep all around the top because if it rains the water will come down the hill and it will run around the sides. IF it rains loosen the ropes holding it because the ropes contract and they will break or tear the tent apart, so you have go to loosen the guy ropes if it rains.

24:30 If you want the loo just follow that track down there you wont have no trouble finding it .” And that was pretty right, it was a six-holer, a latrine with six holes, no sides, no roof, no partitions nothing. Just out in the open. So I learnt what that was.

25:00 And I got into the tent and lit the hurricane lamp that was there and the other fellow was half asleep and I said to him, “I don’t know where I am, I have just come to New Guinea I don’t know anything about it.” I said, “Are there any wild animals here?” He said, “No, no wild animals here.” I said, “Any snakes?”

25:30 “Oh”, he said, “There is the occasional python.” And I knew there were mosquitoes because the place was infested with mosquitoes. And I said, “What about wild natives?” and he said, “Oh they’re all friendly and very helpful. When you see them. They are not doing anything particular.” And I said, “Well

26:00 what about the Japanese where are they?” and he said, “Oh they are right over the other side of that range of mountains over there.” Twenty or thirty miles away whatever it is. There is a tremendous range of mountains there he said, “You won’t be seeing of those except by aeroplane.” And so I got under my mosquito net and got

26:30 into bed with no clothes at all it was so hot. Perspiring at night with no clothes on its got to be hot. And under my pillow I had a torch and a sheath knife, I didn’t know what I was going to find. So I went to bed and he went to sleep and at four in the morning there is the most

27:00 terrific noise and I leapt out of bed with my knife and torch and dragged on some clothes and looked out, and it was the cook. And the cook had a chain from the tree hanging down with a sheet of galvanised iron on it and an iron bar and he was belting this sheet of galvanised iron as hard as he could

27:30 shouting out, if you can excuse, I had better not use the words that he used.

Nothing can shock me just use it.

Well he said, “Come and get it fuck you’s!” Loudly several times hitting on this tin thing. This was the call for breakfast. So I got up and put my clothes on and he

28:00 there was no basin, there was no bathroom. No where to wash at all. No where to clean your teeth, nothing.

A fairly rude awakening at four o’clock in the morning for breakfast that is very early.

Yeah it is early. Anyway I got up and the two of us went over for breakfast.

28:30 We queued up, we had our eating irons, our knife fork and a tin plate, they had loops on them they would hook on the back. Line up and hold out your plate and sloshed on some sort of food. But we were up early because there was going to be a dawn attack you know,

29:00 and all of the pilots, this was the pilots mess. There was a separate tent a hundred yards away with all of the men, but this was for pilots and any other officers. The equipment officer, engineer officer, intelligence officer, the administrative officer and myself, we had five officers. And about fifteen or so pilots

29:30 were there, in the squadron there was twenty-five but these were the ones on duty for the attack. And there was an army corporal who was with us for some time driving a truck to take pilots from there down to the strip which was a distance of about a mile through the trees. And I drove the ambulance down, my ambulance down, I drove a

30:00 truck down actually I had four or five pilots in that. Young men all sitting up there with a gas mask hanging down on their chest, carrying a revolver and documents in their socks, maps and so forth. They had shorts on and socks. And short sleeved shirts like this, madness.

30:30 Later on they used to wear a single garment, long trousers and long sleeves, I mean in the event of fire or explosion they are seriously burnt with all of the exposed skin. Anyway we took them to their individual aircraft which were scattered around, and there were a few dispersal bays. That would be

31:00 a sort of bay for work to be done for running up the engines and so on, where they got coconut trees and sitting one on top of the each other to protect everybody from this terrific noise. Anyway all of the engines started up except for two aircraft, they couldn’t get the engines going. 31:30 And they were taxiing down to the end of the strip for take off. It was a narrow strip and not very long, just long enough to take a plane off, no buildings there at all. There was one small tent down the base of the strip, that was their operations room,

32:00 most of them sitting out in the dirt, no chairs. Only three or four chairs in the tent. And there was one land line, there was a phone with a line going half a mile or so, up into the hill there, there was a sort of a central area to receive messages of different sorts which could be relayed through to this operations tent. Anyway they were

32:30 going to take off. There were about ten of them ready for take off. And one fellow, great man Cocky Le Gay Brereton. Heard the name? Well his uncle was the chancellor of Sydney University.

33:00 And there was a judge Le Gay Brereton, so they came from a pretty intelligent family. He taxied at the wrong end of the strip, all of the men were down that end about to take off that way and he was down here about to take off this way. Disaster. I was out with my ambulance, I drove it up to the far end waiting for

33:30 these fellows to take off past me. And I saw this pilot Brereton with his engine revving and of course he couldn’t hear anything, I was shouting out, but he started off down the strip, and he realised. You see the Kittyhawk, the tail is on the ground with a skid thing, a little wheel at the back of it.

34:00 The nose is pointing up but when it gets going it rights itself and then he can see. But taxiing is terrible, usually they have a man sitting on each wing, well they did to make sure they aren’t going to run into anything, but the plane righting itself, he realised he was going the wrong way and he steered the plane off the strip.

34:30 There was no head on collision, we hit a mound of blue metal and went straight into the bush. Wiped off both wings, and shot into the bush with me after him in my ambulance. I had another chap with me. And we managed to get to him, the fuselage, the main body of the plane was on the ground

35:00 and he was unconscious bleeding from the head, and we got him out and then the plane burnt. I am not sure who got him out, I was still in the ambulance. But Ted Church the bloke with me went over and the army chap and they got him out and shoved him into the car. He had concussion but he survived and went on and flew more.

35:30 He survived the war. But that was the first day. They went off and they surprised the Japanese camp at Lae and all of their planes were lined up on each side of the strip and we sent in a strafing party of about four planes that went in low and strafed all of these planes lined up.

36:00 Did a tremendous lot of damage to the Japanese. The other planes were top cover you know up high in case of attack from anywhere. We lost two pilots that went into the sea, they were shot down. And the others all came back, that was the first day. OF course it wasn’t long before the Japanese pulled themselves together and came back

36:30 And dropped bombs on us. Now I mentioned the two planes couldn’t start, couldn’t get them going, and there was an engineer fiddling around trying to get them started and I was standing close by at this stage with my ambulance behind me and suddenly there was a terrific

37:00 crash behind, the Japanese had come over with bombers up at twenty thousand feet about nine bombers and drooped their bombs. The whole aerodrome started going up. And there is us we were about a hundred and fifty yards along, and that was frightening.

37:30 And we were standing there looking at this thing, and I turned around and there were three Japanese Zeros, low level coming rapidly towards us and,

I will just get you to lean back.

And there was a little gutter in the soil only about six inches deep where a pipeline had been put in. The grass was very short about four inches,

38:00 anyway I dived into this gutter and lay the length of it. And the other three with us did the same, so we had a row, a couple of pilots and myself and another fellow. Anyway they weren’t after us they were after those two aircraft which they burnt. Well damaged seriously but we escaped. But there were bullets zooming through the grass and so on.

38:30 And I suppose its rather funny I had a steel helmet and I wasn’t sure whether I should put in on my head or down below on my tummy, I thought at the time if I get out of this I had better carry an extra helmet, but anyway I wasn’t hurt.

Were you scared?

My word I was. Very.

39:00 Because the Zeros were ‘phhew!’ across with guns blazing and terrific racket, I was frightened all right. Most people were at different times you know. A lot of the pilots were scared, not while they were flying because they had things to do, they were busy. I spoke to a number of them but some of them were very scared they would come back and go to their tents for a lie down and at night trying to go to sleep.

39:30 Thinking of it and thinking they had to do it again tomorrow and so on. They were very scared, not all of them different temperaments you know. But it was a time when life seemed to be short, I mean we were losing pilots for one reason or another and we

40:00 didn’t think we would get back anyway and the number of serviceable planes was dropping. We started with seventeen, then we had fifteen, then we had twelve, then we had ten and we eventually left with five. And the last group of planes we eventually sent up was five, two of them were killed.

All right well we’ll hear more about those stories.

40:28 End of tape

Tape 6

00:32 Can you tell me a bit more about the conditions you were working in as a doctor in New Guinea?

There was practical no medical work done apart from trying to counter tropical diseases and infectious diseases.

01:00 There was very few injuries on the ground from enemy action, planes were lost but the pilots were killed and there was nothing to do. The only medical facility I had was a small tent, I didn’t even have a so called examination couch to put somebody on. There was no privacy, there was three or four orderlies there. And there was one medical tent extra for people on stretchers.

01:30 There would be probably six to a tiny tent, you could hardly walk between them. There was nowhere to consult patients. Not only that the air crew particularly wouldn’t come and see me because it was a reflection on their reputation, they might be thought to be avoiding work or something. And that result was

02:00 that I had a lot of cases of dengue fever, some malaria, skin diseases and general small complaints, most of them I delegated to the sergeant medical orderly. I was out and about I used to go and sit by the strip as they were taking off and landing in case there was some medical emergency.

02:30 And so I didn’t do a lot of medical work there, but the unfortunate thing was that I couldn’t. I couldn’t look after hygiene there. The squadron didn’t have what they call a barracks officer to look after the so called barracks. I mean the latrine had to be, we had to have more accommodation but there was no one to deal with that we didn’t

03:00 have any workmen, I couldn’t do it myself. And if you had to build a six-holer, wooden structure on top of a hole, you needed nails and hammer and timber, there wasn’t anything like that. They had completely overlooked the maintenance requirements of suddenly having two or three hundred people appear in the bush.

03:30 For example there were no ablutions, no basin or whatever. There was when we arrived a single shower, a pipe that ran along the ground and then went vertically upwards and bent over at the top so water would come out and it was a tap. There was no floor, it was all muddy. And there might be ten or fifteen naked people trying to get a shower and the mosquitoes

04:00 were intense and it was pretty unsatisfactory. No privacy, it was just outside the mess tent. I don’t think anyone worried too much about that. Now I, a medical officer officially is supposed to do inspections and point out to a commanding officer so and so needs doing. In the kitchen you need a grease trap. Or you need drainage of

04:30 some sort, well there was no drainage. And if I had any criticisms that was great, but he had said to me, “You look after the ground, Doc, I will look after the air.” Well if I was responsible for the ground requirements with no labourers or equipment for it and I was still responsible, what was the sense of going around pointing things out,

05:00 you see. Everything was geared to the aircraft and the flying. Of course that is a high priority.

What did you do on the ground to improvise things in that situation?

Well down at the strip where the planes were and the men were on standby, the pilots the only building was a small tent as I mentioned.

05:30 No where to sit down. No latrine in sight. There was a shovel and a fellow would just pick it up and stroll into the surrounding, just dig a hole. I mean it is pretty hard to just suddenly live with that sort of thing. I went into Port Moresby and smashed

06:00 into a deserted house and filled the ambulance with furniture, a big settee and some armchairs and brought them up and put them on the ground outside, they thought that was great. I must say several years later I was having a meeting at the University Club and I met the fellow that owned the house and he was pretty annoyed.

06:30 He had come from New Guinea.

What hygiene problems did this lack of amenities cause for you?

What problems? Well flies to start with. I mean with an open latrine which you can detect for fifty yards around there are bound to be flies and there were plenty of those and of course they were only about fifty yards from the mess.

07:00 And so flies were a problem with food. And nearly everybody if not everybody had gastro-enteritis in a big way and all I could do was give them some pills. Sulphur guanidine or something that I had. See I would make recommendations to the commanding officer and they would just take no notice because they were busy

07:30 with the problems of the flying. When men were at work they were dispersed from the camp site down to the strip, they had areas where they were maintaining aircraft. That means doing engine repairs and so on, not only engines and the fuselage and so on, they had been up and shot at. That was all done in the open at Port Moresby,

08:00 no shelter. And a lot of the ground staff worked for two or three days without a stop day and night. And they would put a chain over a branch and pulleys and pull the engine out of the aircraft and service it hanging on the chain. There were no benches. There was a desperate shortage of everything really.

08:30 No those men didn’t have any latrines at all, they were out in the open, that wasn’t part of the equipment there. So sanitation was a big problem, I don’t think pit latrines are a good thing. The Americans had a cartage away system, a truck would come in and cans full of human wastage would be carted off. That’s the only way to go. That

09:00 was an additional big problem at Milne Bay of course, tremendous lot of rain at Milne Bay and the pit latrines just filled with water, the whole thing would overflow and run down the hill. And so some system of carting refuse away is essential when you have got men based in a camp. Actually after several weeks at Port Moresby we had to shift camp.

09:30 We were at Seven Mile, we had a camp near the strip and we were moved out to about eleven miles. We had better facilities there we had ablutions and places for washing garments and what have you. Seven mile we had a stream running nearby which was down a steep bank and I used to bathe in the stream, so did a lot of others.

10:00 But the water wasn’t safe to drink there, the native camps were only a mile or so up stream. They had little jetty things so they could do their business at the end of the jetty and it would come down stream.

How long did it take you to work out what was going on there or did you know from the beginning?

10:30 Well I knew from the beginning that water was a problem, in some places it is difficult getting water like the Middle East. We had the stream but it was not really safe to drink. And in the kitchen area, that was a little tent, there were a couple of big containers for water. The cooks used

11:00 to light burners underneath them, sterilise them, and everybody could fill their water bottle in the morning. Everybody wore a water bottle on their hip which lasted for the day. Even then there was hardly enough. In fact later when we went to Horn Island, this was after Milne Bay we had a guard on the tank

11:30 so people wouldn’t drink water we were down to about three rungs for about three hundred men, that was the only access to water. And desperate efforts were made to dig a well here or there but it was always brackish or salty, no good. Eventually we found one that was all right.

What other supplies did you have in the way of medicine and equipment?

Well I didn’t have much.

12:00 I had quinine when I went up there. Because but they only gave me enough for three days I mean it looks a lot when you get a big bottle of quinine but when you had got three hundred men that have got to take it a couple of times a day and if I ordered some more I would get it but it would take six weeks to come. So a lot of people had malaria.

12:30 Later we had Atebrin for malaria, that’s the yellow sort of tablet, and I would give people that to have on the way to have their evening meals. But I noticed that the path from where they came in for about three hours generally became yellow. In other words they spat it out as they went in because it had the reputation of

13:00 damaging their reproductive cells or something like that. Someone started a rumour, which it doesn’t.

How did you deal with that situation? Well the army dealt with it. Because some people who are genuinely ill have to be repatriated to Australia, and one way is to get bad malaria which could be fatal. So they could expose

13:30 themselves to mosquitoes, get malaria and go home. So the army decided that no one with malaria would go back to Australia, they set up a malaria camp to treat them. It wasn’t always easy. I remember at Horn Island I had malaria, but I had perfectly dry flat

14:00 convenient area with about eight tents, with a couple in each tent with malaria. And in the centre of the ring I had a tent and some of the time I was so sick I couldn’t walk from that tent to the others. If I had an attack I would be shivering so much, just wiped out I couldn’t get

14:30 off the couch at all. Malaria became a problem. And other treatments, really one of the sulphur drugs for gastro enteritis hopefully and usual things for headaches and sprains and whatever. But conditions occurred which I couldn’t handle because I hadn’t any facilities and I hadn’t any experience for that matter. So I

15:00 used to send them to an army base hospital in Moresby or to an air force hospital which was in Port Moresby, but it was always so crowded, they just didn’t have beds to put people in.

How did you deal with the situation where the airmen wouldn’t come and see you?

I used to go and see them. In the airmen’s mess

15:30 was a centrepiece, meeting or eating or going out spending time after flying, being interrogated and so on. It was nearly all done in this central marquee and I used to go over there. I got to know them all so well I was one of them. But I kept my eye on everybody as best I could for any illness

16:00 particular for any psychological disturbance.

What did you come up against in the way of psychological problems among the men?

Not much but there was one very good pilot who came to me on the second day up there and he asked me to come aside and I went outside the tent and spoke to him in private and he just said,

16:30 “If I don’t get back will you give this note to my wife?” He gave it to me, he had a young wife. So I took it, put it in my pocket, and he said, “Will you give this watch to my son?” And he took it off and gave it to me. And I said, “How old is your son?” He said, “One day, born yesterday.” He had never seen him.

17:00 So I got to know them pretty well. He didn’t think he would come back from this raid on the Japanese, or thought he mightn’t. But he did, he survived the war. Of course I got to know them pretty well if we came down to Australia, which we did once or twice,

17:30 played up with them so I got to know them pretty well.

Any other psychological problems that you had to face?

Only one there was a very nice man whom I had known at Archerfield, he was flying there before he went up. And he came to me on the first day before heading out and he had advanced psychological disturbance. He told

18:00 me he couldn’t fly and I quite agreed with him. He had been awake all night vomiting, he had a tremor about three inches across, he was whispering and eyes sticking out, he was really terrified. Now that’s nobody to have as your number two when you’re flying. I mean people can fly off in the wrong direction

18:30 and don’t reach the target or do their share of their job. In any case they would probably get killed. He was the only one that it ever happened to. And in his case, you have got to decide whether someone is behaving as a patient or as a malingerer, in other words is someone trying to get out of the

19:00 service for which they have been trained, or are the genuinely sick? Do you shoot them or do you comfort them? That was my duty to assess the fitness for flying. And that calls for some judgement sometimes,

19:30 but we were there to win a war and these people had spent a year or two training and you can’t back off at the last minute so I was pretty firm with anything like that that cropped up.

What did you do in the case of this one officer?

Well there was a Fortress coming in, a Fortress is a big plane heavy American plane, it was heading south to

20:00 Australia to get an engine change, there was something wrong and they didn’t have an engine up there but they could fly on three engines and so I got in touch with the captain and they aid that they would take him. And so I wrote a long report to the medical officer in Townsville which would be his first medical stop. And he was put in the Fortress and the

20:30 Fortress went off but it had sufficient engine trouble to go into the sea and they were all eaten by sharks or drowned anyway. Except this man, the patient, and he swam and he got to a lighthouse which was not manned, a crop of rock that had a light house on it and he

21:00 lived there for about ten days and he managed to attract a passing ship by playing around with the light and they sent someone over and got him. And when I got down to Townsville later I was talking to the medical officer in charge of the little hospital, knew him well, and I mentioned this chap and he said, “Don’t talk

21:30 too loudly, he is just over there.” He was about five yards away behind a curtain. And he had been cut about by the coral and stuff trying to get onto this outcrop. Anyway he recovered all right, but no one had the letter, and as far as I know he converted to bombers

22:00 instead of fighter planes. I was thinking about this and I went home to Warwick and I was talking to my father about this chap he said, “What's the name you gave me?” and I told him, and he said, “He lives here, they have got a property just out of town.

22:30 The club is getting together to give him a dinner tomorrow, a returning hero. He is transferring from fighters to bombers.” I said, “That’s far from the truth.” My father said, “Don’t breathe a word of it, don’t say it to anybody. Let him go.” So I didn’t say anything.

Did you ever find out what

23:00 happened to him in the end?

Yes, he took his life a couple of years later. But that’s the only real experience I have had with that. I have had a lot in theory. I think there was one I rather suspected of evading his flying responsibilities, he would take off and over the jungle he would have engine trouble and have to

23:30 come back you know. Whereas the others went on to their objective and then nothing was found wrong with the engine. But then of course if an engine coughs or so over the jungle you had really better come back. So I didn’t ever find out if it was really so or not.

Well what was the air forces official view towards troppo cases like that?

Well he wasn’t necessarily troppo [mentally affected by war experience].

24:00 The original case?

It’s a medical condition, they wouldn’t do anything, it is for me to handle, I am the doctor, I would get a psychiatrist to see him and possibly re-muster him to some ground job in the service. There is no point trying to victimise someone who is sick. So if it is because he is

24:30 sick and can’t control it he is a patient. IF he is well and he can control fear and so on and doesn’t choose to do so, he chooses to put on a bit of an act to get out of his duties that’s different, that’s where the air force discipline comes in.

Whether or not you saw them first hand were there any reported cases of LMF [lack of moral fibre] in 75th Squadron?

25:00 No, lack of moral fibre means the latter, not a medical condition. There is just the one case I remember of being sick. In some situations people are blamed for sickness, in others they are regarded as a hero,

25:30 that happens in ordinary life. If someone has a broken leg you tend to be sympathetic, unless he did it skiing and you laugh at him and think it is a bit of a joke. But if somebody is deaf a few people go over to try and talk to him or to try to get through or make him feel human.

26:00 And if somebody had bronchiectasis with stinky breath nobody goes near them. They are sick people. Happens to the best people.

We will come back to some of them issues later, while we are at Moresby, there were more air raids there were there not?

Oh yes. Most days there was an air raid.

26:30 Usually took the form, we got twenty minutes warning because we had spotters sitting in the jungle above their take offs, there at Lae and they would radio back to us and we would get the message that twenty minutes from now there will be seven bombers coming across with ten Zeros above top cover.

27:00 Took twenty minutes for our planes to get up to twenty thousand feet. So our serviceable planes would have to do a climbing attack as a rule, of course that puts one at a great disadvantage. What was the point of the question?

27:30 Well take us through an air raid through your perspective on the ground, what happens when you get the twenty minute warning?

Well I had a vehicle. The first thing was to get the hell out of the area of the strip, the landing, because usually they are aiming at the strip or close to it, because if our planes are in the area and they have only got a flying time of say two hours, where do they come down

28:00 if there are big holes in the runway, you can’t come down on it and there is no other runway. Of course we had a truck on a little hill with gravel in it and two or three Huskies [a shovel/loader excavator] with shovels, and as soon as they raided the strip this would come careering down and try to fill the holes and get it flat enough for a plane to come in.

28:30 About that work, can you tell us a bit about the air raid and immediately after?

Oh yes, well I would usually be waiting at the strip in my ambulance waiting for them to come back from where they were, and if there was going to be an air raid I would get the hell out of there,

29:00 two or three miles into the scrub, up the mountain and so on, and watch the air raid. The men who were working on planes or around the strip would all suddenly run as fast as they could away from the strip because that’s where the bombing took place as a rule, of course the Japanese found out and then started to bomb the areas which they had run to.

29:30 Or the areas where maintaining was going on. Or if they saw an aircraft or two on the ground which was under repair or couldn’t be started they would alter the bombing to get those. I had a spot about three miles away with two slit trenches, I mean

30:00 we used to get to the spot and lie down on our backs, the nursing orderly and I, and watch the show. Because our planes would be on the way up, and they had their bombers coming through and Zeros would be up higher again waiting to pounce on ours if they came up and so on. But one day

30:30 I was up in my, what I thought was a hideout on the hill, it was an area which was also used as an escape place for others, and there was two army fellows there, and I got into my slit trench when they came over there, I thought it was safer that way, and waited for the bombs to come. You can hear them coming, they start to whistle as they come down.

31:00 And I got my head down below the surface because they were using a lot of daisy cutters they called them. That’s a bomb that would come down and just as it touched the surface it would split sideways and it would cut off all of the foliage around and people for perhaps twenty yards in every direction. So one day I got my head down just at the right moment

31:30 and there was suddenly a terrific noise and daisy cutters landed all around and cut two men in half almost, I wasn’t touched I was underground. But these two army chaps were very badly hurt, it is a pity they couldn’t have died on the spot, but they didn’t. One of them had the front of his belly blown off and his intestines hanging out and so on.

32:00 They were in a lot of distress. I leapt up and put them in my ambulance and there was no use taking them back to the 75th Squadron Camp, we hadn’t an operating theatre or anything but I had learned that the air force hospital was hopeless, it was too far away and it was always full, and I had been told that the army base hospital

32:30 was full and they were having difficulty. But they had started just a new place up on top of a mountain ridge just behind the place where we were and it was on the beginning of the Kokoda Track and I thought I would go up there, so I had these two in the back

33:00 and I had a terrible time for a couple of hours. I drove, well the nursing orderly hadn’t driven an ambulance much and he drove along the flat for a couple of miles and then started to climb and we were going up a pretty steep mountain on a pretty narrow track and it had been raining and water was running the cliff on this side across the road and over this side.

33:30 No fence, and mud. No ceiling. And driving this ambulance was a pretty shaky business and I had gastro enteritis to the extent that I had to stop the ambulance every two hundred yards and go to the side off the road. I had very painful frequent diarrhoea. These two fellows were moaning in the back there and I was pumping morphia into them.

34:00 We had to climb this mountain and when we got up to the side of the little hospital, there was a pull in and we managed to stop there, and the hospital was up further about a hundred yards, they hadn’t yet built the road to it. It was just pure bush and it had been raining and it was mud. And we had to carry these two people up there, and

34:30 I can tell you it was pretty tough. Eventually we got them up there and there was a doctor I knew there and he had two nurses and it was just a tiny little hut and when I walked in with these two they nearly threw a fit. But he was a good surgeon and he had surgical equipment, he was building up for a bigger hospital, which was needed there.

35:00 Anyway that’s about the last I knew, I fainted and woke up on a couch somewhere had been given cold drinks and things and the two patients had died. But it was a very rough trip, what do you do? Preparations have not been made, we weren’t’ prepared for a war they were, and in every respect

35:30 we were coming off second best. That’s a very good question what do you do? Your job was to save lives but it’s obviously –

Our job was to save Australia.

What do you do in the case of deaths on your watch as it were?

Oh well just dig a hole and put them in. I didn’t even know where a cemetery was. Who is responsible for cemeteries and burying patients? I am not as a doctor,

36:00 whose responsibility is it? You know when you’re green to the job you don’t know these things. When our commanding officer was killed which was later, remember I mentioned only five aircraft left? Well they went up that was the last attack the

36:30 squadron made against twenty odd Zeros and two of them were killed, the commanding officer and another pilot. Well that was Jackson. We had to bury him. Who was the commanding officer who was running all of this thing, I found I was with his younger brother Les Jackson, and he was appointed temporary

37:00 commanding officer. Les and I set up a funeral in the town of Port Moresby, only four of us came, Les Jackson and I and two wing commanders who lived in New Guinea, they were the sort of headquarters of New Guinea, very thin on the ground those people. And just the four of us there.

37:30 We had a couple of men digging the hole. Now I knew that the only thing we found, well the army found them actually, when Jackson went in was one foot and a boot. Didn’t find any more, no body, nothing it was all gone, exploded and burnt and so on but we knew it was him because the other pilot was a small man, and John Jackson was a big man, big foot in a boot and he hadn’t returned.

38:00 It was him. And I had weighted the coffin with bricks and things so it wouldn’t terrify the people carrying it in thinking no one was in it. Life is real. I mean when you’re in a desperate position, you can reach the stage where the buck stops there, heard the expression? That happens to the president of

38:30 the United States of course but often in medicine there is no further place to go, a job has to be done you have got to do it, that applies to a lot of surgery. It is all right when you’re starting off, consulting in a big hospital, “Ask Doctor so and so if he would mind coming to the theatre.” Eventually you find you’re the senior man helping

39:00 younger people carrying the load.

It seems that you became that person very quickly in a wartime situation is that fair to say?

Well not big responsibility but you’re scattered, in the squadron there is no one else around that you can consult in short notice. I mean there were a few people in Port Moresby and a few people in the army base

39:30 hospital who were very experienced and responsible. But at the moment you can’t always get the help you need.

We’ll just stop there because we’re out of tape again. Do you want to have a break or –?

Not particularly, no.

39:49 End of tape

Tape 7

00:30 Okay Bill you were just telling the very sad story about burying John Jackson, I am just wondering did you cry? Like how?

No you just toughen up these things happen. You can’t give in to your emotions.

01:00 I think you do when you know people very well. You get left with the fact that something has got to be decided and handled by yourself, and

01:30 you have got to move on after that, you have got other responsibilities to look after. If you are in that sort of life you can’t cry and weaken and talk to other people and have a wake on it all you have just go to carry on. I mean worse things than that have happened I can tell you.

Well as you said when Jackson was

02:00 killed the buck stopped with you then you were in command, what

No I wasn’t in command, the doctor doesn’t take command, see Les Jackson was in command, that’s the younger brother and I was in a tent with Les Jackson. Can I tell you a bit more about Port Moresby? 02:30 One day there the two of us were in the tent and he had gone off somewhere and he came back and he looked very concerned and worried. And I didn’t say anything of course, he eventually confided in me, the Japanese fleet, quite a big fleet was coming around the top of New Guinea,

03:00 around the tip on the east overnight and would be on us by morning, This was a massive landing fleet to take Port Moresby. Now we knew that they were anxious to get a hold of Port Moresby. At this stage we only had three serviceable aeroplanes

03:30 and Les Jackson said there was one ship in the harbour, leaving at midnight and the whole squadron was authorised to get on the ship and get out before the Japanese landing except for three pilots to fly the aeroplanes and they would attack the fleet. It was a suicide job. And he was going to lead them.

04:00 Pretty good stuff I thought, anyway he said he needed a ground staff of twenty to stay to look after the three pilots. He needed fitters and people for the aircraft, needed a medical orderly and a cook, in other words things had to go on and he said that we would have to get two other pilots,

04:30 and so the two of us went over to our mess tent and we called a meeting of all pilots available and stood them up. And Jackson, Les Jackson, his brother had been killed by then and he addressed them. And he told them that the Japanese fleet would be on us in the morning and he wanted two people to come with him and he was going to attack them and he called

05:00 for volunteers, two people volunteered and he said, “You aren’t going to be the two, you have done enough.” They were two of the most senior very brave men. “Not you.” And the rest of them stood forward, all of them. And I think there were about eighteen. And

05:30 Jackson said, “I will draw straws to see who comes with me.” And he picked up grass and fiddled in his hand and had the ends sticking out and he said, “There are two short straws.” And he went along the row and they all pulled one out and got two men, Masters from Adelaide and Butler from Avalon. And

06:00 That was that. The others could go in and get aboard that ship. Now then Jackson and I went down to the airmen’s mess which was a marquee, and it was a dramatic sight, there were a couple of hundred men standing on chairs and tables, looking at us, a couple of hurricane lamps shining on their faces sweating and anxious.

06:30 And he told them the news and he said they could all go onto that ship except twenty and he wanted volunteers, and he nominated that he wanted a cook, an armourer, a medical orderly, three fitters and so on right down the line of essentials and he got the lot they

07:00 volunteered, didn’t have to give any orders, we had twenty men. I didn’t give an order or anything. So I got my ambulance and drove people from Seven Mile into the jetty at Port Moresby out to the ship which was right in against the wharf. Put them all on and I did three or four trips like that, took five or six at a time and I think

07:30 there were three or four other trucks doing the same. So over several hours we got everybody onto the ship except for the party to stay. Jackson said, as soon as he heard the fleet was approaching he would go off with his three and I was to go back to Twenty Mile and lead the men into the jungle and see if we could survive. And at twelve o’clock

08:00 sharp the ship just drifted out I could see the water there and I didn’t know if I should step onto the ship or stay where I was, I stayed. And the ship just drifted quietly off into the night, not too many lights on it. So Jackson junior and I strolled back along the jetty.

08:30 And there was a little mess there, a harbour side, mess and we got an axe or something, broke down the front door and got a few bottles of beer. And two big armchairs like these and we carried it all down the beach, put the two armchairs there put the beers in the sand and started drinking and talking to each other. We weren’t going to get drunk but. And he had the radio in his car just behind

09:00 giving him news and as soon as the fleet was on the way we would be told and we could scoot back to Seven Mile and he would take off and I would wait for half an hour and then take off with all of the men into the jungle. There was an offer by one of the pilots who was going on this big ship to return a year from today to return to a nominated beach and he would be there with a Catalina

09:30 or a flying boat or something, and he would be there to pick us up if we ever got there. So that was the only real hope we had. And the two of us sat there and nothing ever happened. Dawn came and went and nothing happened. Because in the meantime the Battle of the Coral Sea had

10:00 taken place. The Japanese fleet had been intercepted by the Allied Fleet which was a terrific battle and the Japanese turned back with all of their landing forces. We were right. And then we decided to have a party, see there were twenty of us left behind, all the others had gone. So I ran a party, we got the mess tent and dressed it up

10:30 any hospital equipment I could find any sheets or anything like that I had a case full of stuff. And we had bottles with flowers in them and then the Americans started to some in. And I invited some senior officers from the American forces they came, and we had a banquet. 11:00 I have still got the menu here, and that was good. We filled in two or three days and the order came that the three aircraft were to fly back to Australia at a separate strip, there was a very small strip about three miles out of Port Moresby and

11:30 I went down as usual in my ambulance to see them go. And there was three Kittyhawks and pilot and four dive bombers the dive bomber squadron had been wiped out except for four. They had flown in from a carrier and there was very little left, they were to go. And Les Jackson was a pretty irresponsible young man and he went over to the chap in

12:00 charge of the American unit and talked him into leaving his gunner behind and putting me in. See the dive bomber has seats for two, there is the pilot and facing out the back is a gunner with a big gun. So I was put in the back of a Dauntless [ship-borne dive bomber]. And I got into it, and the fellow was on a box giving me instruction, how to load the gun and all of this sort of stuff.

12:30 Not expecting that we would be jumped because we were a bit out of range of the Zeros, the ones that would come down and strafe us obviously would have to go back straight away. So we didn’t think we were going to be jumped. And I looked up and there were three Zeros coming around the hill, I was sitting in the back of this plane. So I looked up and gave the alarm

13:00 and rushed to the side of the strip and dived into a drain there and so did others, and they went through and burnt one of the Dauntless planes and two of the Kittyhawks. And off they went. So we had one Kittyhawk only left and three dive bombers. Jackson leapt into the Kittyhawk and

13:30 said, “Come on lets get out of here.” I jumped in and away we went. Jackson shot along the strip and took to the air and we followed behind and we were formatting across the Coral Sea to Horn Island, it was an absolutely glassy sea, there wasn’t a movement and we were flying right down low about six feet off the sea all of the way through. Because

14:00 that’s a safer place to fly. And that was quite an exit. When we got to Horn Island the aircraft all gained height and strung out ready to land one at a time one after the other and as they came in the plane I was in damaged the undercarriage

14:30 and couldn’t proceed. So the three remaining ones refuelled and said, “Cheerio, Doc, see you sometime.” And off they went towards Townsville. So I sat at the side of the strip and a Fortress came in, it was going south. So I went over to the pilot and said, “Can you give me a lift?” and he said, “Yeah, hop in.” and I was

15:00 asleep in the back of the Fortress and night descended and I got a message from the captain to come up to the front and he said, “Say this is my first trip to Australia, I have got to find a town called Townsville, do you know where it is?” And I said, “Well it is down there somewhere.”

15:30 And he said, “Well look there is a town there can you look out?” and there was some lights about twenty thousand feet below. He said, “Is that Townsville?” I said, “I have no idea.” He said, “You’re an Australian aren’t you?” So anyway he said, “I will go and have a look,” so he circled around, and around getting lower, in the meantime

16:00 lights had gone on each side of a strip. So he thought that must be it so he tried to land. He overshot the first time and he wasn’t going to stop, he would have been running into water and so on so he rammed on the motor again and went around and then the wind floated him sideways you see, a very narrow little strip. Anyway it was Cairns.

16:30 And a Fortress of that size had never been into Cairns it was only a tiny strip. And he said, “Well we would have been out of fuel anyway we were on the last two rounds, just as well we got in.” I thought, “God, I should thank him very much, I am very happy to be in Australia, I will get off here, I think.” So I stopped there, he fuelled up and went out.

17:00 But I borrowed a truck and I went into the city and asked for the main hotel and wandered into Hyde’s Hotel at Cairns and had a look around and there was Jackson sitting there having a beer, so I joined him and the two of us had a few beers.

I am sorry, that is very funny.

17:30 I have just got this great image. Bill, can you just tell us about Les?

Les, firstly I would say that he was a good pilot, he was a good regular pilot to have. He was never trained to be a commanding officer. He was the bad boy of the family, but when he did

18:00 become the acting commanding officer and I was with him he came in and volunteered to attack the fleet by himself if necessary. He was a man of great courage, but in life he had come from Roma where he had a garage, he and his family had property all around, they were quite well to do. But he was one of these rapscallions who was always half drunk.

18:30 And he was dangerous company in many ways, always having practical jokes and doing something stupid. I quite liked him, but later on in the war he became pretty tough. I think he had too much flying, he was anti-social. He wasn’t going to be promoted, everybody knew he was a sort of no-hoper.

19:00 When his brother was killed, he became the commanding officer for the Battle of Milne Bay later, and Les used to wear his brothers revolver and his own as well. Two revolvers. But you know he was going somewhere, but not very far, and he wanted to give us a lift and there was six of us. And one of us sat on each

19:30 mudguard on the front and one of us was laying across the bonnet, And he set off at about sixty miles an hour. I didn’t think I could hang on, absolutely dangerous. But that was Les and to stop he would put on the brakes and turn the handle around and it would skid along sideways you know? He was a tough citizen.

20:00 Well it is interesting to hear you talking about what kind of character he was because in a way that suited the fighter pilot?

You need something more responsible that that for the commanding officer I mean lot of tough decision come at that level, and he managed but he wasn’t the figure for the job really when his brother was killed his brother was pretty good.

How affected

20:30 do you think he was by John’s death?

I think he was like that before he joined the air force, he was a real larrikin. I think he was saddened of course by John’s death and he hated the Japanese, that’s not unreasonable at that time.

And did you,

21:00 I understand that you were a medical officer but did you carry a revolver as well?

No not at any time. I was what's called a non-combatant, I wouldn’t be allowed to carry a gun or revolver at any time. You see, in the old Geneva

21:30 Convention prisoners are supposed to be treated in a certain way, not tortured, nothing cruel and so on. Enough to get on with the war, but you don’t have to deprive them and put them in cages and this sort of thing. The Japanese were not signatories, by the way, to the Geneva Convention. And they were, citizens who were not army or service people, it

22:00 was regarded as not the thing to count them in or to bomb towns and so on. Everything broke down mind you, and of course in the ages before it was fair go, Genghis Khan and all of those used to attack towns and cut all of the men’s throats and take the women home sort of thing. But

22:30 the Geneva Convention after the First World War was to set standards of conduct in wartime but it didn’t work. The Japanese cruelties, atrocities, are too bad to repeat.

23:00 Well you all came back to Australia severely depleted, how much time did it take to build up the squadron again for the next?

Well I think it was about six or seven weeks. The men arrived back in the ship that I told you about that embarked from Port Moresby and got into Cairns and they were there for a few days, had a

23:30 medical examination and treatment where necessary. I got back of course as I described on this adventure to Cairns and then I worked my way down. Many men were given leave and they all assembled on a certain date at Kingaroy in the south.

24:00 And the ideas was to replace the pilots who had been killed and replace the aircraft which had been lost. And attend to anyone who needed sick leave or anything like that. And that took a couple of months, we had a good time in Kingaroy, had a ball there and

24:30 everybody was very hospitable and we abused the hospitality enormously. Anyway a good time was had by all. And then we started to build up, I mean I had to do a medical examination of everyone in the squadron and the equipment officer had to get all sorts of stuff together. At that stage more Kittyhawks were available, everyone had had leave

25:00 and so we were sort of ready to go.

And who examined you? I mean you were the doctor so you examined everybody else?

It was my responsibility to see that I was fit.

So nobody else assessed your?

In fact I don’t believe they did. That’s a thing that worried me when the squadron was up there, if anybody got hurt there was a doctor to look after them, but if I got hurt there was nobody.

25:30 Anyway that didn’t happen, but it is a point. So the squadron was built up ready to go and then a rumour came around that we were going to go soon, got to get everything ready and we were going to Fall River. Well everybody had their maps out finding out where Fall River was,

26:00 and it was a code name. There is no Fall River, it is Milne Bay and that’s where we were going. Because espionage had proven that the Japanese were likely to attack Milne Bay. There was a reason for that, their fleet coming around to Port Moresby had not reached Port Moresby it had gone back. So how were they going to get Port Moresby? Land on the north coast and walk across, rugged mountains.

26:30 And that was the Kokoda Track. Mind you at this stage the army had come back from the Middle East into Port Moresby and was going up into the Kokoda Track, to prevent them coming across. That was the second way of preventing them from capturing Port Moresby. But there was a third way. If they could capture Milne Bay

27:00 they had a track along the coast above New Guinea up to their bases there and below New Guinea just scoot along to Port Moresby. And there was an aerodrome there. Milne Bay was a strategic spot because it led closer to Port Moresby and

27:30 Port Moresby was the strategic spot for closing the pincers you know. That I described, the Japanese came down two ways and were coming down the Torres Strait to join up at Port Moresby. And from there they cut off all shipping aircraft coming out and so on and have the whole east coast of Australia at their mercy. That’s how

28:00 things went. Now what was I saying?

Well we were just about to talk about returning to New Guinea,

Oh yes there is a story there. Just of little interest. Naturally I wanted to see my wife. She was in Warwick staying with my parents, he was a doctor and we were only a short

28:30 distance away really at Lowood, a hundred and fifty miles. But I thought I would like to see my wife before we went off on this trip from which I might never return. And everything in the town was chock- a-block booked up, any hotels private homes everything, I couldn’t solve that one. So I got my car and I drove into the country

29:00 five miles from the base to a farm house and I went in and introduced myself and I said, “Have you got a spare bedroom in this house?” and she said, “Yes.” I said, “Well it is needed for military purposes.” So I rang my wife and she left the baby there and she came over for the night before I left. But when I left in the morning

29:30 I drove the car up to the air force base and there was a sad farewell of course and I only had about thirty yards I suppose to walk across to the entrance gates with guards and everything. Which I did and I reached the gates and waved to her and in I went. Later that day,

30:00 we were all boarded onto a ship, a storm was coming up and so on. We finally got out to sea after about four days and I found I had the keys of the car in my pocket, so I wouldn’t have been to popular then would I. Fortunately I knew the engineering officer very well and she knew that and Ian left

30:30 so she managed to break into the base and he came out and started the car. Oh dear.

And you had had a child by this stage or?

Oh yes we had a child born just at the end of the Archerfield period, just before I went up to New Guinea.

31:00 Well, how were things different when you got to Milne Bay compared to Moresby?

Well firstly leaving by ship from Cairns this storm was coming up, now the Americans, it was a Liberty ship and the Americans were pretty unkind to us. All officers had to be on deck, up top.

31:30 Exposed. And there was a terrific storm raining for two or three days at sea, we were there the whole time. They were in cabins and mess things down below and they were quite warm and comfortable. And all of the men, two hundred of them were put in the hold, hold of the ship.

32:00 Which was used for anything, storing furniture, grain or anything. And they were all seasick and half starved and the toilet situation was out of hand. It was a terrible trip over. Anyway when we approached Milne Bay for the first time for days there was sunshine and it was quite pleasant. We steamed down

32:30 Milne Bay, coconut palms everywhere and beautiful mountain scenery and so on from the ship. Didn’t last long. When we got ashore, I was so exhausted that well anyway I got off

33:00 and it started to rain again. Heavy clouds, it rained all of the time we were there, heavy rain not just sprinkling. It was what they call the wet season. And we were camped in a coconut plantation, very big plantation goes right down the cost, but it is right down at sea level.

33:30 Few inches above, you can imagine the mud. I mean even walking tracks you would sink down two or three inches each time you put your foot down. If you got off the track in might come half way up to your knees, vehicles, there were a few roads built and they had a high camber hardly room for two vehicles to pass each other.

34:00 And on each side was a gutter about two feet deep for the water flowing off the sides. Wasn’t much fun driving on those roads. You would come to a heavy big truck, zip past and you would have to sneak over to the side and hope it didn’t hit you on the way through. But the living conditions, conditions generally there were very depressing. I

34:30 mean not only the mud and the roads and so on. It was desperately humid and lots of mosquitoes and as usual no ablutions of any sort. After a week of being there I found a shower, someone had a shower and when I found it it was a lot easier. The stoves we had were wood stoves, of course

35:00 there was no wood at all. It is a big plantation, all cleared on the ground, no where to find wood and so that is a problem to start with, toilets were absolutely hopeless as I mentioned before because with heavy rain the toilets would just fill up and flow over. It is pretty hard to survive.

35:30 We had tents, we were out of the rain, but even there they were ground underneath, no flooring. And people were dirty too. I will tell you a story which I think is entertaining. Our acting commanding officer at the time was Les Jackson of course and he developed what we call

36:00 mechanised dandruff, do you know what that is? Little creepy things, crawlies that get on you. Lice. In the pubic region. Terribly itchy you know and something had to be done for him. Other people got the same and I would say, “Right oh the best thing you can do is shave it off.” Get all of the hair away because the eggs cling to the hairs and then they hatch out.

36:30 So I told Les he has got to shave that off. And he said, “Well how can I do it I can’t even see there? You have got to do it for me you’re my tent mate.” So one night we retreated from the main mess tent and slowly strolled to our tent and let down

37:00 the flaps, lit the hurricane lamp and I let it down from a bit of string from the ridge pole that was the right height, and I told Les to stand on the bed there and I had a safety razor ready. And he stood up on the bed and looked at me and said, “I fell kind of nervous at this I think I will have a glass of beer.” So he sat down again and he drank half a bottle of beer. So I said, “Well if that’s the way it is, I will have the other half.”

37:30 SO I did, anyway we got through the operation and got his pubic hairs shaved off and in the morning he was lying there looking at me and he said, “Do you know Doc I could report you for operating when you weren’t sober, when you had been drinking.” Pulling my leg as usual.

38:00 So I listened for a while and said, “I will tell you something Les. I am the only man in this squadron of three hundred men with the authority to call you insane.” On that basis we decided to say no more about it and went over to breakfast.

And I am sure that it did the trick?

Oh yes.

38:30 We were only joking you know. A lot of people were trying to keep their spirits up. You mentioned Buster Brown, if you have interviewed him I will bet he has told you the story of the night, in the middle of the battle and the army are beating the Japanese up with bayonets and so on about a mile away and there were a few Americans there who had been building a strip, landing strip at Milne Bay.

39:00 And anyway they were still around and we saw them in their tent eating ham. Now ham was something we hadn’t heard of for a long time, we thought it would be lovely to have ham. So Les in his irresponsible way Buster was one of them Buster Brown and myself, decided we would have an air raid. And the

39:30 sign for an air raid or a breakthrough or a crisis was to fire three shots, bang, bang, bang. And everyone would scurry off and get into their trenches with their rifles ready and that sort of thing. Anyway we had an air raid. And then the other members of the party went over and pinched their ham, we got several tins of ham and came back. Opened it quickly and devoured it, and got rid of the evidence and carried on.

Okay, well our tape is just

40:00 about to run out again.

40:01 End of tape

Tape 8 00:30 Bill you were going to tell me a few other things that happened in Milne Bay?

Yes a few days before the battle Buster Brown and I had to board a little launch and go up Milne Bay and go to the northern island to investigate the crash of a pilot, a pilot was lost and had been discovered by the natives who had reported it back to us.

01:00 We went ashore in the bay in a little rubber dinghy and lived with a native little village, there were four of us all together, two men and ourselves. And we climbed up to identify the plane and the pilot, the pilot had been buried by the natives in their village.

01:30 Anyway we waited I was supposed to bring the body back but I am glad I didn’t start to dig it up, because the little boat didn’t come back. It was sunk somehow. And after a few days we walked back, it was only about five or six miles, maybe more, crossing a

02:00 number of streams. Anyway we arrived in on the day that the Japanese landed in their fleet at night. At the point we left. So we just missed them. Buster got going with his other pilots and they set forth and strafed the

02:30 Japanese heavily, destroying a lot of their equipment, and they were tossing out drums of oil and so on into the bay which floated, and they sunk most of those and they killed a lot of personnel. So the air force was of great use to the army for this battle and has been acknowledged as such

03:00 by the general in charge, Claus. Another incident which I thought was worth reporting. I got word that a plane was coming in smoking, trailing smoke it was obviously on fire, and I drove my ambulance half way up the strip and as usual it was drizzling with rain,

03:30 however I caught sight of the plane approaching and there was smoke coming out the back and we had a communication built into the ambulance which could switch through to the planes in the air. And we could hear this chap being very excited, and finally he didn’t think he could make the trip along the strip without catching fire and so on,

04:00 so he tried to bail out, he pulled the stick back, got sufficient altitude he thought and leapt out. And I was watching him, he was just about straight above. And he bailed out all right and you could see him coming down and the parachute streamed out but it didn’t have time to flare so he just hit the runway, just in front of me, about ten yards in front of me.

04:30 And the parachute hadn’t opened, he was of course just a mangled mass of flesh. And then there was a terrific crash just behind me, the aeroplane had come down, I had forgotten it was up there somewhere. And it dug a hole about eight feet deep into the ground, that missed me to which was good. But that was a nasty show, that wasn’t a 75th Squadron pilot, that was a 76th Squadron pilot. Chap called

05:00 Ingster. So there was tragedy going on as well as humorous events. One red event was when a cow was run over by a plane and killed. And the meat would be, a couple of chefs arrived, one from 75th and one from 76th Squadron the kitchens, cutting bits off this cow,

05:30 and the pilot wasn’t hurt.

What was your role during this battle, I mean you had your ambulance out on the runway?

Well there were still people getting sick, there wasn’t any great formality, but if people were sick our medical quarters were there to look after them. Back at the camp I had the usual tent and then there was room for three or four people in the tent.

06:00 And I used to go back and see them. And occasionally there would be someone sick in one of the scattered tents. I remember one man with a bad back, he couldn’t get out of his couch, he had injured his back in some way, I didn’t know what to do for him, I couldn’t do anything for him really. Fed him and looked after him, he gradually recovered. But there were medical things like that

06:30 going on all of the time. I went to see the army colonel in charge of the medical aspects of the army. They had a couple of what they call CCS, casualty clearing stations, and I persuaded them to take any casualties we had. Mind you I was very concerned because I hadn’t the experience or the facilities

07:00 or help or anything if there was a breakthrough and we had a number of them injured. I was concerned. Eventually an Australian air force medical unit came up. They had the equivalent of a CCS and it camped and set up all of its hospital tents and then we found

07:30 they were in the loop of a river and every time it flooded it covered this area so they had to move camp quickly.

IT was a battle in which you said 76th Squadron was working closely, and the army was working nearby, how well organised and integrated were these different groups at this time?

Very closely. Because General Claus head of the army and he took over the air force and the navy, everything connected with the area.

08:00 Because it is very important where you place things. For example I went for a drive into the jungle and found a couple of huts that seemed to be empty so I got them all swept out and thought I would had a sheltered sick quarters and then the army came along and said, “For God’s sake, get out of here, this is where the Japanese will break through.” So I got out. But there has to be someone in overall charge to know the general strategies.

08:30 Also the army had a man placed with our air force headquarters to help direct where to attack. You see with a canopy of trees all armed and ready to go they could barely get off and they had to nose down to shoot into the enemy ranks. Now you have got to be careful, if you nose down too soon you’re shooting into

09:00 your own people in their backs. And so Very pistols [flare pistols] were set off by the people in the front of the Australian army to indicate that “this is the front line and you can shoot beyond here.” Of course the field of fire that comes for ma Kittyhawk is tremendous. See they have six machine guns in each plane, it is like a gun platform only it is

09:30 not fixed into position, you can move it to wherever you want to. And if you have got three or four planes centred on an area, and their machine guns you can pour in a lot of ammunition quickly and then they are gone. But they have to be carefully directed just where to fire by the army. Now communications are very difficult.

10:00 For example General Claus at the overall command of the battle had a good communication with his army, he had a cable across to the army headquarters about three miles ahead. Which was great until a ship that he was in was hit by the Japanese – the Unsung [?] and it broke the cable.

10:30 The whole communication system broke down. It is not easy to do it by runners, there is mud and vehicles get bogged and all of that sort of thing. Just to get instructions to your troops, what is the next move. And it is a very important thing to know obviously, we had one weakness it the battle, we didn’t have any navy in there.

11:00 We had navy outside you know doing the usual things in the open sea, but not in the bay. In the bay itself it was totally dominated by a Japanese collection of navy. But for their landing boats, they could land at a point and if the Australian army came up to it they could have another landing behind. Follow me? And another one behind the Australian army again.

11:30 So they could finish up with a whole bunch of men attacked from front and back. So it is better sometimes not to proceed too fast. A lot of the principles of war now are laid down in a very interesting book by a Chinese general, I have forgotten the name.

Is it The Art of War? [a classical book of military strategy written by Sun Tzu, c. 500BC]

That’s it. Well there is a lot in that see, and this Chinese

12:00 general two thousand years ago, he wrote it.

How much on the ground did you know about what was going on at any given time?

Nothing at all.

Where the Japanese were or what your planes were doing?

Nothing I knew nothing. It is almost on a need-to-know basis and as a doctor I didn’t have to know. I think our senior pilots had to know, very much so, but I would find out from them just the ordinary gossip of the day and evening and so on.

12:30 But I didn’t get any official notice at all.

What kind of losses were you sustaining?

We didn’t sustain very much at all, the army did. See the whole strategy of the thing is the army fights the war basically and they defend the air forces settlement, aerodrome and all of the mechanics of serviceability and so on and then the planes if kept serviceable

13:00 and in the air can help the army. But if we were overrun by Japanese we would have been pretty useless because we were not trained for the thing or given ammunition or anything else. It takes special army training to cope with a situation. We were about two miles from the actual fighting, and a lot of it was at night with

13:30 bayonets. It was a pretty dirty war, not a big one. In fact the worst trouble I got into was with an army chap with a bayonet, which I think is worth telling. I went back to the camp to see a couple of chaps who were sick in their tents and there was no one there except in my little hospital unit and it is all spread out over a distance

14:00 of half a mile or so. Anyway I saw an army man coming out of the officers’ mess, and he had a bag over one shoulder and a rifle on the other shoulder and he staggered out and we had a few bottles of beer, there was no heavy drinking or anything. But with planes coming up from Australia at every intervals of every day two days we could get them 14:30 to bring up some letters or a couple of bottles of beer. And this army chap had a bag with bottles of beer in it I could hear them clanking. So like a good officer I went over and I said, “You can’t do that here, you’re not allowed here, you’re not allowed in this camp. Now get back there. What have you got in that sack there?” and he just looked at me. He was a big fellow, much bigger than I am.

15:00 Just looked at me and stood there. So I said, “What's your name?” he said nothing just looked at me. Well what do you do next? I didn’t know I couldn’t find out who he was to report him, he wasn’t going to give the beer back and I couldn’t

15:30 arrest him, just me. Anyway he had a letter sticking out of his pocket. And I thought that’ll have the address on it, so I just lent forward and picked it out of his pocket, read it and put it back. He just took down the sack of beer put it on the ground looked straight at me in the eye, took off his rifle pulled the bayonet out of its scabbard,

16:00 fixed the bayonet. And came forward at me and got me under here and lifted me up onto toes with the point of his bayonet, and he was half drunk. And he was going to go into battle in about an hour’s time. And I walked backwards and he followed me. He just had me absolutely,

16:30 and eventually my back was against a tree and I was on my toes. And he had the bayonet right up under here, and I didn’t lose my temper, I didn’t say anything I just looked steadily back at him. Kept looking at him. And at last, it seemed a long time.

17:00 He took pace backwards, took the bayonet off, put it back in its scabbard picked up the beer put it on its shoulder and quietly strolled away, I didn’t stop him. So that’s the way it goes.

What did you do about that incident afterwards, did you have to report it, what was the?

Oh well, the army infantry were camped a hundred yards outside our thing, I could see their tents over there and I

17:30 did go over there in fact, probably better that I didn’t but I wasn’t sure what my responsibility would be. And there was an army captain there with three pips on his shoulder and I told him that someone had been over and he looked at me and said, “What's the chap’s name?” and I told him. He said, “He’s a bloody good soldier.”

18:00 I said, “Thanks very much,” and walked away. They had been in the Middle East together.

Any other vivid incidents that stand out from the time of that battle?

Well there were quite a few really, there was a Liberator [B-24 Liberator, US heavy bomber] came in one day, you know a Liberator is a very big cavernous plane.

18:30 And it was off track but it needed somewhere to come and it did a wheels-up landing, landing on the belly and sliding along. And strangely enough out stepped a friend of mine, someone I knew quite well, however that is beside the way. We had this enormous plane in the middle of the strip and we got about a hundred men and man-handled it, I didn’t the

19:00 engineer officer did, manhandled it to the side of the strip and somehow they managed to jack it up and they got it on jacks and went to work on it and over a period of a few days they got it all fixed up. There was something wrong with its landing gear. And then the Jap’s came in and burnt it. They let us do the work first.

What was the scene?

19:30 Well they just flew in and dive bombed it and it went up in flames and they were off again.

And how does one deal with a giant burning Liberator on an air strip like that?

Well there is a lot of smoke and noise, but it was at the side of the strip, we had carried it off to the side, it wasn’t in the way, it was just the loss of a Liberator that’s all.

20:00 There was another incident worth reporting. There was a Hudson in, and it was standing at the side of the strip sort of facing across it and we were taking off and one of the 76th Squadron pilots skidded off the side of the strip which was very slippery. You know the Marsden matting?

20:30 There are little pieces of metal about this big which links together like links in a chain that sort of thing, and the surface of the strip was made of this Marsden matting. I mean it is no good just having dirt because it will soon turn to mud and you just sink into it. But we had Marsden matting strips the whole width and length but it would be slippery and mud would ooze through it and

21:00 it would be wet and all of that but it served it purpose. Anyway this day one of 76th Squadron planes slipped off the side of the strip and went straight through the Hudson, just cut it in half. Lost both wings and the fuselage went shooting along the side of the strip, and the pilot stepped out but it killed two people

21:30 who were in the Hudson, so that was a bit of an incident. We should move on, I know we have other things to talk about, but what happened what was the scene in 75th Squadron at the end of that battle?

Well morale was high because the battle had been won.

22:00 And there was a ship in I suppose deliberately to take us out. The air force was taken out of Milne Bay and went to Horn Island. Just before it left I did something which was a bit unconventional. I swapped a truck, the army badly needed trucks, for about forty bicycles.

22:30 They had all of these bicycles which you couldn’t possibly use in that country, but Horn Island was very dry, and I knew we were going there, well I thought we were and we did. And they were an absolute godsend, people get on their bicycles and go a mile and a half to look at the next aeroplane, instead of having to walk.

23:00 I think the equipment officer was rather puzzled by the absence of a truck and the presence of all of these bicycles but I didn’t ever tell him how it had happened.

What were you doing on Horn Island?

Most of us had malaria. And they didn’t have any malaria in Cairns but they had the mosquito, the anopheles mosquito and

23:30 I think there was a health situation with landing three hundred people with malaria and it pretty soon spreading around, which happened anyway in due course. But when we got into Cairns, we were at Horn Island first that’s where I mentioned earlier we had trouble with water, getting enough water. Most of the time it was

24:00 very dry. It wasn’t possible to swim because there were desperately dangerous currents running around through Horn Island and in Torres Strait, and also there were stone fish about, tread on a stone fish you know all about it. And mostly rocky, there was no sort of sandy coast at all. So swimming in the sea was a temptation

24:30 but not a wise thing to do. What was your question?

Well on Horn Island you couldn’t swim you were quarantined, how did you deal with the?

Time factor?

Boredom and time factor there?

Well it was dry and sunny which was a great change after Milne Bay, I must admit it rained one night, about two

25:00 in the morning it was pelting with rain. I thought what a wonderful time to have a shower so I went out and soaked myself all over and it stopped raining then. So I was covered in soap and I couldn’t get a shower, that’s the way it goes.

You said morale was good but what about the fatigue of the squadron?

Well as far as the pilots were concerned

25:30 most of them were able to get leave because they were a favoured individual, if there was a plane going through a pilot would get a lift to go on leave and back sort of thing. But the ground staff didn’t get away and I think their morale was a little bit hurt, because they had worked very hard, but there wasn’t any transport to take them on leave from there.

26:00 However they weren’t there for that long. I have forgotten now, about four to six weeks or something. So from there we went to Cairns and from there they could take leave, no trouble.

How long were you with the squadron after you returned to Australia?

Well when they went to Cairns I stayed with them. I went on leave but I came back to the squadron

26:30 and I was with them until the squadron went again. They geared up, did the usual things, examinations and equipping and all of the rest of it and set off again for Milne Bay and I went up to Milne Bay a second time. At that stage of course the war was over and better weather,

27:00 but a lot of mosquitoes. But the air force had brought in a mosquito unit, about six men with an officer in charge. And they were going around with pumps and things and pumping all of the lying water there and draining the water and making sure it was running so the breeding of mosquitoes wasn’t as easy. But while I was there I

27:30 was getting a fair bit of malaria and so I managed to get out and go to Sale.

What was it like to be posted away from the squadron?

Well I missed it, I regarded it as home and I knew everybody, in a way it was sad, but of course I was getting back to my family, my wife and child and in a cool climate down in Victoria. 28:00 That was a welcome change.

How was your health when you landed in Sale?

Well I was all right but I got malaria again as most people do if they have had malaria and they go to a cold climate they often get a bout of it. I got myself I got into my own sick quarters and had a few days there lying down. There was no one else in the sick quarters

28:30 but three nurses looking after me so I felt all right, anyway while I was there I had a visit from the commanding officer. And he was very affable and asked me how I liked me new job and how I was getting on there. And I was a bit angry with the sort of peace time set-up and headquarters, and I said, “My only complaint is that I think the commanding officer, that’s you,

29:00 is killing pilots in training.” He didn’t think too much of that and asked me to explain myself and I told him that if someone is sick and is in training on an aircraft, preparatory to crewing up, forming their crew to go to the war, it is vital to find out that they are suitable. If they are getting airsick, or if they are uncomfortable in the aircraft, or if they get

29:30 fear of flying they should be able to go to their instructor or me and chat it out and get changed to a different job and no hardships. “You’re getting them in front of a whole turn out of other pilots and tearing the wings off their chest. Disgracing them, that’s no way to treat them. That’s for cowards, these people aren’t cowards, they are medically unsuited for what you’re trying to make them do.”

30:00 I gave him a lesson on that one and he changed his ways. But he didn’t realise it you see, he was a Duntroon [Royal Military College] graduate and he felt if you can’t fly, you’re not game or something like that.

Can you explain a bit what the situation was at the Sale OTU and what you felt the situation was that you had to bring up with the CO? What kind of planes were they flying and what was going on?

Beauforts.

30:30 The Beaufort was made in Australia, well to an American model I think. Anyway there was a factory making them, they were a medium bomber, did a good job. They had a crew of four and they were flying day and night training people. And during that time I suppose the pilot would select the other three

31:00 people in the crew, he needed a navigator and two gunners. And they would train as a crew and then they would be posted off to war. Unfortunately however a Beaufort was lost about once a week and it was a question of why it was lost and that unit down there was known as Death Valley. Now

31:30 that’s a lot of people to lose, four a week. And of course these are all young people, they have their young lives living in the town, small children and it is a very close arrangement. They know a pilot had gone off to fly.

32:00 They were proud of him and then someone lets them know that he has been killed, what do they do? They get their friends and rush out, where is the accident and try to get to see it? Now one problem was to try and find out why they were losing aircrew, why these planes were crashing.

32:30 And my particular job was to go and clean up the mess. In other words I get a ring on the phone, “Righto, there is a plane up and so and so in the high country.” Or, “Out to sea.” Or, “One of an island near Tasmania.” And I would have to set off with a

33:00 couple of orderlies and try to find the crew as best I could and come back and they would organise the burials. Now that is not as simple as it sounds. To start with the next of kin expect to find them as a dead person lying them in state and they can recognise him

33:30 by his features if they have a look at him, and they are very sad. But you don’t find that inside the coffin. Just a pile of meat. That’s not very nice. But I had to go around an area, supposing there is a smash down in the

34:00 High Mountains and there is an explosion, bits of the crew would be found hanging from the branches of trees and you would be lucky if you got a bit bigger than a pocket handkerchief anyway, scattered anyway. And with four individuals, which pieces belong to which individual? Doctor will tell you.

34:30 Now I have been through this experience often. And it is the old story, somebody has to do it and you can’t give it to anybody else. So I can remember being at the mortuary at the local hospital at Sale at three in the morning, with a pile of meat about that high, two or three feet high, about four people just piled like that.

35:00 Now I had three or four hours to go and the funeral director would come and lay them in their coffins. All I could do was go through the medical documents, see if they had bits of skin with marks or scars on them I would go into great detail

35:30 trying to identify bits of hair, light or dark, moles, any identification marks. And I would put them in four piles and anything left over I would divide into four and hand them out. Then I would put those lots into body bags and I would bring the director in and say four people,

36:00 the labels are on them, no viewing that’s it. What else can you do? Now when that sort of thing happens once a week you know you’re working. I had an administrative officer

36:30 who was in touch with all of the relatives and so on and keeping them out of the picture and handing on the information, wouldn’t give them any details, but when I arrived at a crash I would get a coloured ribbon and make a great ring about two or three hundred yards across, inside that was forbidden. So no one

37:00 got inside the accident until it was all separated and fixed up.

This job must have had an incredible effect on you whether you knew it at the time or not. How hard was it to form relationships with people knowing that you might be sifting through their remains at some later date?

Well that’s what it was all about, you know I got pretty tough after a while. I didn’t get emotional, I did very early in the piece when I was at

37:30 Archerfield I can remember there was a plane went in, dived into the ground and so I went out and the commanding officer was standing around obviously a bit impatient, a big hole in the ground, no pilot, was filling with water.

38:00 I was half hysterical running around in small circles, I was all for wading in and pulling out the body sort of thing. “Oh”, he said, “Don’t worry about it they will get pumps onto it tomorrow, get a crane.” To him it was one of those things, to me it was a desperate thing.

38:30 At Kingaroy I was in my sick quarters and there was the sound of a plane in a spin, it make a sort of whirring noise in the engine and it was obviously coming down from a great height and the pilot had lost control and he was swinging around clunk into the ground at the side of the

39:00 airport and of course he would be dead. I got in my ambulance and went down and there was a crater I suppose ten or fifteen feet across, beautiful cleared land except for one stump about four feet across where they had sawn off a big tree. And it was filling up with water, you could just see bits of the aeroplane

39:30 sticking up and so on. And I wasn’t too concerned. I found I was just standing there watching it. There was obviously nothing for me to do. At this stage another truck came up behind me, parked and it was a pilot.

40:00 He had been flying in England in Russia. Mat Gould, do you know him? Have you got him on your list somewhere? He came over, “G’day, Doc.” Stood there looked around and walked right around this thing looking

40:30 in, came back beside me. He said, “Oh well, lucky he missed that stump.” He went back got in his truck and went off. “Lucky he missed the stump.” What a remark. But he had been through it, you know. Just have to take these things when they happen.

41:00 I’ll just stop there.

41:04 End of tape

Tape 9

00:30 Bill in your role as medical how much do you think there was a conflict of duty between patient and air force?

That’s a good question I have asked that many times. I have always tried to keep it,

01:00 the patient comes first because medical practice is full of that, people who confide in a doctor don’t expect you to go off and tell everyone do they. The information is confidential. We often tell stories of funny things that happened in a hospital and so on but never in association with a name. Now there is an

01:30 anomaly there, when you join the air force you come into the force for Queen and Country sort of thing and you’re really responsible to the commanding officer in fact every patient that comes in, everyone comes in as a patient, I have to fill in a form the name is on the top, a column diagnosis, any comments. We nearly always put

02:00 the same diagnosis down. Upper respiratory tract infection, URTI, that means it is a common cold, that means I don’t tell them, usually the commanding officer doesn’t want to know. But if it interferes with his duty that’s a different thing. If you have got to put a man off duty for three weeks for so and so he must know that. The cause doesn’t matter to him. But if you get someone who is difficult

02:30 he wants to know precisely what is going on with the patient and you sometimes do have this difficulty. One of the was venereal disease. There was a time early in the air force days where if anyone had a venereal infection their pay was docked, did you know that? It had to be written in to their pay book that they had gonorrhoea or whatever.

03:00 Now that after all is a medical complaint and not for them to ask how they got it or what the circumstances were or anything else. But the thing is that to associate that with a punishment and docking pay because of it is bad from a medical point of view. Obviously we want to treat and prevent it and all of that sort of stuff,

03:30 but to take disciplinary action I think is bad. But there must be occasions where a pilot has to be withdrawn from duty, like the one I reported before. I had always tried to protect the pilot, but if he is going to let the side down you have got to confide.

04:00 I found this in civilian life, see I was eye examiner for the Department of Civil Aviation and also for the air force, top man who advises them on policy. And it was the same thing arose there. If a patient just came into me and said, “Well Doctor Deane-Butcher, I just want some advice on something.” I would never let the authorities know what it was about.

04:30 But if it meant that he had a condition where he might prejudice his flying ability I was in a jam, should I ring the Department of Civil Aviation or should I keep it to myself. I didn’t do either. I would write a detailed report saying in my opinion this man is unfit for flying and is a danger and could do this or that, and I would make three copies,

05:00 one of which I would give to the patient and say, “You can read that, and here is one to your employer, Department of Civil Aviation, signed and sealed and ready to put in the post. I give you both of them and I have the other one.” Now it is doubtful whether I have covered myself there but what I have done is given him the responsibility of notifying

05:30 the Department of Civil Aviation, in other words the notification is through him. Of course he could throw it away and then they don’t know and that’s a worry. And the same applies to service things, but I think in the service I would advise the person that I would have to report this, that it is contrary to the regulations and so on,

06:00 “I am reporting it, here is a copy of the letter,” and it is posted today send it direct. You have got a man who is trained to be a pilot, he might be flying a plane worth two million and if you can’t report something wrong you’re risking a lot of training and a lot of money. So I think the answer is that if you’re in the

06:30 service you have sworn to report to the commanding officer, you can mark it confidential or secret, whatever you like and if he sues you well too bad. You have told him you’re going to do it, you do it and you mark it secret etcetera, I think you will be all right. It comes down a legal thing eventually, but it might come down to the lives of three

07:00 hundred people in a plane. I think it is worth saving.

Well earlier you were telling us about your time at Sale. You had the fairly gruesome task as you described of putting bodies back together, what other duties did you had while you were there?

07:30 Well I had the sick parade in the morning, I had two other medical officers there. And you see you get situations like people who get out of bed too late and arrive ten minutes after nine instead of ten minutes after eight don’t do the full parade and just go to work but instead of going to work they come to the sick parade and say they are not

08:00 very well, so they feel they are covered for being late as it were.

I will just get you to sit back.

Do you know what I mean? They pretend they’re sick so they come to sick parade, but the reason they come is because they are late for work. So you get situations like that. The way I would deal with that, you never under- treat anybody, because I think you’re liable if you do. I would over treat them, I would say, “Yes, I sympathise with you, here is

08:30 some medicine to be taken three times a day, once seven in the morning, once at midday and once at seven at night.” But they don’t get up until seven: “Oh yes they do they have to come in and get their medicine.” But they always go home on the five o’clock bus: “Oh you can’t get the bus you will have to stay on the base, you have to report at seven and take your medicine.” They soon get tired of taking their medicine.

09:00 They would come back after two days and say they don’t want to take it, and I would say, “But you need it, you’re sick, you don’t want to get a recurrence, we’ll take it for a week.” That’s soon stopped them I was going to say there are a lot of things like that that take time and confiding in people. 09:30 For example, I can remember at Sale we had an entertainment officer who was a very nice man, very nice to work with and he was a homosexual and at that stage people were unkind to homosexuals. He was in a truck being driven by a man and he became intimate with him and the man was absolutely furious. He was a young airman

10:00 and he was going to get his half a dozen friends and beat up this officer. And word of it got out to the commanding officer who said, “Oh yes, we will have to deal with this, let the doctor do it.” So he arrived to me and I had to sort out the whole problem. A thing like that takes a little time. But there are a lot of unexpected things in the

10:30 medical life.

Well how did you react, how did you sort it out?

Well I had a long chat with him and he said that he had come from the theatre and so on and it was fairly common practice there. And he said, on this occasion he had been guilty, but there had been hundreds of occasions where he hadn’t, he had restrained himself,

11:00 he knew this was a community of heterosexuals. And he had done the best he could, but he had failed on this occasion. And I said, “All right we will solve that. If you ever come before me again on that sort of offence you will be discharged from the air force is that clear? But,” I said, “Any time you want to come and have a weekend off you come and tell me.” And he did.

11:30 Over a year I think he only came twice, had weekend leave, went off and came back.

That’s incredibly supportive of you because you could have discharged him immediately?

Oh yes but you know it is a real problem with people concerned it is a big

12:00 subject to talk about but I thought that was a good answer.

And were there any other cases of homosexuality that you came across?

No there was one in Canada which I came across it was a rarity, I mean there may have been homosexuals but I didn’t come across them. There are problems I remember rather a big girl

12:30 came to me and she was pregnant. She wasn’t married she was just in the air force, she didn’t know she was pregnant but she was. You have got to handle that sort of thing. I got her extended leave and the baby was adopted and she came back on duty, nobody else knew.

13:00 You’re dealing with humanity and you have got to compromise and do the best you can, be considerate to theory [?UNCLEAR] people.

I am wondering how much mental health was just as much of a problem as physical health?

Well mental health is a problem everywhere and hopefully you pick it up early in the piece.

13:30 They may have a history of mental ill health before they come in with they’re asked to declare it straight away and that will stop you recruiting them. In the early days if they have any mental health problems it usually becomes apparent within three or four months and you can discharge them very quickly if it is a genuine case. The difficulty is the

14:00 borderliners, there are so many borderliners and difficult situations. Which you can call them mental disability or a tendency that way, or likely to be that way.

I was also thinking of the psychology?

We have psychologist on the consultant staff to try and help with those things.

14:30 There are many problems which have to be faced up to and we have a team of consultants and you can’t go much further. They know as much as can be known about the subject.

Well I am wondering, for you personally, what role faith or religion might have played during your time in the war?

None at all.

15:00 Same as now. This is personally I went along with a lot of it, the services and so on, I don’t mind going along and I wouldn’t criticise what they were doing or try and persuade anyone else differently. But personally I don’t think it held out anything in particular for me.

15:30 But that’s a big subject too.

Well you spent approximately about a year at Sale before you were?

Yes a year. And then I got a posting to Canada. 16:00 And how did that posting come about?

Well as far as I was concerned, just the usual telegram, “Report to Ottawa such and such a date,” and then arrangements for travel were made for me. I had a medical friend who I think recommended that I should go and do that job.

16:30 It was a sort of liaison really with the Canadian Air Force, they had a small Australian officer, a man of high rank, Air Vice Marshal Goble and a wing commander and a squadron leader and a couple of clerks and a doctor. They were in touch with the Canadian air force

17:00 and sort of relating the Australian air force to the Canadian. Dealing with any problems we had. The doctor who had been there for several years wanted to get back home and so they brought him back and sent me over. But it was at a time when the Empire Air Training Scheme was on the wane. They had enough pilots in Britain. And

17:30 there wasn’t really any need for the Australian training program to continue. So I didn’t have a lot to do and I made it known to the air vice marshal in charge, Goble and he said, “Well we have got to keep the office going here until it all closes down. You can go anywhere you like in the States and Canada and send me a report once a month.”

18:00 And I said, “What will I put in the report?” he said, “Anything that which will help the Australian air force or civilian flying.” There were a lot of medical problems associated with flying and a lot of research is being done on all of these things and many places were looking ahead to civilian life. And so I used to get all sorts of information, and collect them and send them back.

18:30 Getting the information was the thing. I would go to various cities and where medical meetings were being held, might be ‘After care of knee joint injuries in surgery’, or it might be ‘Packaging of medical supplies for the tropics’, ‘Survival in the Arctic.’ All sorts of medical subjects

19:00 which have a bearing on life and war and peace in different countries. It was very interesting really some of it. but a lot of it I had was spare time and there was an Australian doctor at Washington and he and I used to get together and move around a bit, go to some shows or whatever.

And did your family accompany you?

No. this was one of the parts that was very hard.

19:30 I had a young wife and child here and I couldn’t see them for a year. We had only been married two years or three years, so that was a hardship as far as I was concerned, but that’s the way it was.

What were you able to learn medically during this time?

Nothing

20:00 I didn’t have the opportunity. You can’t learn anything unless you’re in an academic institution, working in a hospital, having access to people, seeing patients or dealing with situation. The whole war time was a complete loss clinically to me. It was hard.

20:30 I was in a reasonably good position when I graduated and working away hoping to become a surgeon, so when I got back after five years away any opportunities I had gone long ago and this comes onto my postgraduate phase.

Well I am just wondering where you were at wars end?

21:00 Well I was posted back from Canada and I didn’t really have a unit but I was attached to Concord Repatriation Hospital, I sort of lived there. And I didn’t have any clinical responsibilities. I was only there for a month or six weeks and then the war finished and I was discharged. And so I was suddenly a

21:30 citizen on the streets in an ordinary suit. But I had to decide what I would do and I thought well I will probably have to become a general medical practitioner, and so I searched around all of the suburbs in Sydney and the beaches and what have you, looking for the sort of place I would like to settle.

22:00 And I decided well I might give it a try to see if I could get in some specialised kind of thing. And my father had been in London and at that stage he had become interested in eyes and so on. And I thought well that would be a bad life, it is a clean sort of medicine and responsible sort of work and necessary. So I went down to the

22:30 eye hospital, well to Sydney hospital and they referred me down to Sydney Eye Hospital where I made enquiries and the head man found out in about ten minutes that I didn’t know anything at all about eyes clinically, and he said that he would love to have me on the staff there, this was a visiting eye specialist, once

23:00 you get a qualification. So I said, “Well how long will it take to get a qualification?” he said, “Normally about three years study and then you have exams.” And I said, “All right I will do that where do I study?” he said, “You will have to go to London.” I said, “Listen I have been away for some years one way or another, you’re crying out for specialists, there 23:30 has been nobody training anywhere for years and you want specialists in every speciality all over the country. This is the second biggest city in the British Empire and you say you haven’t got any training facilities?” I had reached the age where I knew how to talk to him. And he said, “That’s right, I agree with you.”

24:00 And so I went and saw the chairman of the board of Sydney Hospital, and told him the same thing, and he said, “I think that’s right, we have got to start training them.” I said, “You’re going to get hundreds of doctors coming back looking for training and you’re short of specialists. And you’re going to get a lot of publicity if you haven’t done something about it.” and he agreed.

24:30 So I went to a man I used to work with before I enlisted Victor Coppelson. He used to go to the Coast Hospital. And I put it to him, he didn’t give me much of a hearing but he obviously agreed and then I got in touch with an eye specialist, by the name of Pokley [?], and the two of us went

25:00 to see the vice chancellor at Sydney University and put it to him that he was not fulfilling his duty unless he started to train a lot of post-graduate students and he agreed and a month later they started courses at Sydney University in eyes, gynaecology, psychiatry, pathology, ear nose and throat.

25:30 And seven people sat for the first examination, I was one of them. Two part thing, we did a year or so lecturing. They got lecturers around Sydney, people who more or less knew what was going on. And gradually it had improved from there. Now we have a College of Ophthalmology in

26:00 Sydney which is highly thought of, has a good degree. A lot of clinical work and so on. It has brought in research, ophthalmological research institute and so on. It has become a very good enterprise. I used to be on the council for a while

26:30 but I pulled out because I thought the biggest need was not to run the society but to build an eye hospital. And I went down, I did my training down at the Eye Hospital in Sydney, in Woolloomooloo, which was an absolute disaster. It is a building, used to be a coffee palace or a pub, absolutely unsuitable. It was falling apart on the inside,

27:00 cockroaches and white ants and not enough rooms for anything. So I took a deputation to the board of the hospital and told them in no uncertain terms they had better build a new hospital now or else, and they were going to get plenty of publicity unless they did it. And they probably didn’t like me

27:30 but they set up a committee immediately and started to raise some money and started to build a new eye hospital. And I was one of the committee in charge, there was three of us. There was a very good man who knew what he was about and two doctors, myself and another one.

I would just like to go back a little bit if I may, toward war end you were at Concord Hospital?

I wasn’t doing any work there

28:00 I was based there, that was my address was about all. I used to turn up there.

I was just wondering if you treated any?

I didn’t want to get involved until I knew what the next move was. Concord was a civilian thing, it wasn’t a service hospital as such. And I knew I would be moved on, and as

28:30 the war was drawing to a close they weren’t doing anything, I just had it as an address for six weeks. They wanted to know where I was and they hadn’t moved me to any particular unit. In the meantime I could chase around and try and decide what I wanted to do. Actually I was offered various things. They wanted me to take on a job in civil aviation to work for Trans Australia

29:00 Airlines. Which I wouldn’t do, I wanted to get back into clinical work. So I did this exam and as soon as I completed it I was put on the staff at Sydney Eye Hospital. So that’s where I spent my working life, not down there, I was visiting, I was in private practice. Macquarie Street and then

29:30 North Shore Medical Centre and used to visit the hospitals a couple of times a week, surgical sessions and so on. And I became chairman of the board, Sydney Hospital Board. Not chairmen of the hospital, chairman of the medical board. And because I was chairman of the medical board I had to serve

30:00 on the board of the hospital. So I was on the hospital board. I was also chairman of the Eye Hospital for a number of years, and I was also of the Ophthalmic Research Institute of Australia, it was mostly clerical type of work I wasn’t doing any research and it was in a very minor way really,

30:30 but it is growing pretty fast now.

Well at wars end what sort of shape were you in I guess?

Physical? I was all right.

And mentally as well?

Oh yeah. Well how did yo adjust, you say you got discharged?

Well I don’t think there were any great difficulties, I think the main difficulty at that stage was buying a house, you couldn’t buy a house anywhere.

31:00 And my wife at that stage when I was in Canada was back in Warwick in Queensland, I was in Sydney and I couldn’t find anywhere to live for her to come down and that was pretty disappointing. Eventually I was walking along the road somewhere in the Palm Beach direction and I was still in

31:30 uniform as a matter of fact and a car pulled up and asked if I wanted and lift and what was I doing, and I told them I was looking for a beach cottage or anything I could get into to get somewhere to live to start working at the Eye Hospital and bring my wife down from Queensland. And the chap found a place for me, he knew someone who had a beach cottage which he rarely used and he said he

32:00 would ring him up and try to persuade him which he did. And so we lived in the beach cottage together for a while, quite a primitive little place, and then we got a better place at Ryde which was also a rental.

And did you participate in any celebrations for VP Day [Victory in the Pacific]?

Oh well I went into town, I was at Ryde then.

32:30 And I met a lot of my old air force friends at the Hotel Australia and had a few drinks with them. It was a pretty exciting in town, Martin Place and so on, people were dancing and shouting and having a great time, lots of people. Bands playing everywhere. Great celebration. My wife was very disappointed that she couldn’t come in, but we had two children at that stage and

33:00 I didn’t think she could. But that was quite an occasion. I just knuckled down to work for three years, fair bit of study and going to lectures and doing clinical work down at the hospital and assisting with operations and so on, until I got into the field and

33:30 found myself running clinics myself and doing surgical lists, et cetera.

Given you were in New Guinea with 75th Squadron and then your time at Sale, you were in some fairly gruesome situation I am just wondering if you suffered at all?

34:00 Not in the least. It is history that’s all. I mean you get pretty busy in clinical work you have got plenty of problems of your own then, it is not just testing for glasses, there is a lot more to it than that. And you get the same situations of drama, rarely associated with loss of life of course as doctors in other fields do, but loss of vision is not to be taken lightly either.

34:30 And but I don’t think the war had any repercussions as far as I was concerned. I mean I don’t get hysterical quickly, I don’t think it is a good idea. When you have got a big problem you have just got to decide what to do. Get all of the factors together, do that or that and decide

35:00 which is the way to go, once you have decided that’s it.

Well on that note given that you were in quite an incredible position of quite incredible power in a way as a doctor, were there any decisions that you made in your time in the air force that weighed heavily on you?

35:30 I don’t think so, if anything I would have been more outspoken and pushed for better medical facilities. I mean I felt I wasn’t going to be able to look after people when I was at Milne Bay, because there could have been sudden carnage and loss of people

36:00 and all sorts of injuries but at best I just had a little tent. Wasn’t anything like what was needed, I called for help from the army and the army unit I went to see, eventually, there were a whole lot of doctors I knew, we had been through together, gone through the medical course together,

36:30 they were in a rubber plantation in Milne Bay and they were doing surgical treatment and so on. They had a good hospital set up. But I think that’s possibly the only thing, I feel I might have known more about malaria or tropical medicine but I didn’t seem to have any of them to ask or how to go about it.

37:00 I would have liked to have been more experienced, as a matter of fact I wrote an article later on that squadron doctors should not be junior sprogs who can survive rough conditions, they should be much more senior people who are very clinically experienced and that has been realised now in America where they are flying aircraft

37:30 that might be worth two million and a doctor who doesn’t know what he is doing, “Oh yeah you can have the afternoon off.” Go to the races together, something like that was just grossly irresponsible with that amount of responsibility attached to it. And they now have perhaps three doctors in a big squadron who are specialists, they take it very seriously.

38:00 A pilot has to be watched just as closely as the aircraft in his proficiency. You wouldn’t want to have a psychiatric problem in a pilot, would you? Or in air crew generally. You don’t want a navigator who gets his sums mixed up and starts to cry. All right well our tape has come to a finish, so we might just pause there.

38:30 End of tape

Tape 10

00:30 You entered the air force as a fairly young man and spent a good five years working in pretty difficult conditions, how did that experience help you out or what did it do for you in the professional sense?

I don’t think it did anything in the professional sense. It did a lot in the personal sense.

01:00 I learnt some personal lessons from it. I learnt that there are a lot of good people and a lot of very bad people in the higher income brackets and the higher brackets of responsibility as there are in the lower brackets. By lower I mean people who aren’t as qualified. There are many good people who can hardly speak the language and

01:30 are in humble positions, very good people, as well as bad. It is not a situation where you can trust everybody with a very nice suit and a spotted tie, you don’t trust anybody in an open shirt, that used to the thinking but it is not in my opinion.

02:00 That used to be your personal thinking before you went into the war?

I think everybody felt a bit that way. I remember my son wanting to go to the University of New South Wales and went out in the usual quite informal clothes and the counter was rather crowded and he was trying to get his word in and find out about subjects and he got nowhere. And he came home and I told him to

02:30 make sure his shoes were polished and he would have a bath and put his suit on and collar and tie and stand back from the counter two feet, don’t lean forward and just tell them you want to know this and that. He did and he got the answer straight away. They dropped their conversations with the people on the right and left and gave it to him. Doesn’t seem fair does it but that is the way it works.

03:00 In many situations, it can be overdone of course somebody can be regarded as throwing his weight around and so on. But generally speaking if somebody wants to make an impression of some sort. They do this in business now,

03:30 they do courses on it. You can get a long way from having your shoes clean, your hair cut, your nails clean, have a bath, put fresh linen on, even underclothes. You feel better about it, and then speak firmly and speak with the correct manner of speech. The Australians run it all together and they speak very fast,

04:00 they have a way of speaking, you know what I mean? Someone who speaks more slowly and clearly is going to make a better impression it is simple. Especially if they present themselves well. They don’t have to have any better brains, they have to be honest. Do you know what I mean there?

04:30 But there are lessons of that sort which one learns. In time going on, I mean if you have an officer come in and he is smartly dressed and his uniform is pressed and clean and he is deferential and so on surely he is going to make a better impression than someone is shabby with shoes worn out and tie

05:00 askew and all of the rest of it, sloppy speech, it is going to make a big difference.

I understand the point and that in our world’s surface appearance is very important. But were you not saying about the war before, that that experience gave you some insight into the people underneath that is that was that about how people are regardless of what they appear in the first instance?

05:30 No it is a generalisation, you can never be sure can you? I mean I know you can find people who are sloppily dressed and they’re desperately loyal and very good friends. And you have got to make exceptions on all of these generalisation. On the other hand I think there are generalisations which can be made, and I learnt a lot about that sort of thing in the service life.

06:00 On the subject of your experience in war, how do you think you changed from that first when you went into the air force and when you came out?

I just grew up that’s all. It is a matter of having enough experience in anything and you have a mature analytical point of view. I was of the age, twenty-five or twenty-six

06:30 and I was in until I was thirty-one, well naturally you learn something in that period in any case if you are attending to what is going on. But it was a great opportunity, I mean I saw life at the best and worst stages. Very few people have the chance to see it at its worst, 07:00 and nobody really wants to. But to have to face up to challenges is good for anybody, a completely protected environment doesn’t help anybody. And in the service where you are taken away from your family, away from your friends you have got to learn to mix with people, you have got to learn to take responsibilities and I would say the period in the air

07:30 force was a great learning experience for me.

We have talked a bit today about some of the harder time, you say you learnt about the best of life, what were some of the examples of that from your wartime service?

Well I think loyalty was one of the main things. I think a lot of those people that I lived with they would give their lives

08:00 to defend me and I would do the same for them. If you really want to make good friends in life go through a shipwreck together or anything else that’s hard, you don’t do it by just having a good time with anybody, in my opinion. It is facing up to resolving difficult problems together and running

08:30 calculated risks together I think you gain more out of that. Over-protection and having decisions made for you, having lots of money, and things coming too easily, those don’t combine to make character.

09:00 Hard times don’t always produce character either, but I think the opportunity is there in the service life, discipline to start with, to bring yourself to do things that you don’t want to do that have to be done. Things that you’re ordered to do. Not to be misleading or dishonest about them

09:30 just to face up to things and cope with the situations are they are. I think that’s helpful.

How is that camaraderie that was formed in wartime succeeded in the post war period for you?

Well of course we got scattered all around, although recently we have had a lot of reunions, people who are left

10:00 and I think there is a loyalty which goes on. If you know people well enough, you can be in different occupations and not see each other for ten years and come back more or less at the level you left despite the advance of people and the, others have gone in a different direction, I think loyalty, it stays if it is really there.

10:30 Not pretending loyalty, not something that isn’t based on real truth, there is a lot of that too. Bowing and scraping to the people that can do some good for you, I don’t think that’s going to make loyalty. But when you have been through real

11:00 hardships with other people and you have come through it with trust in an honourable way you have got an association which wont be broken easily.

On what occasions do you and those that came through with you stop to think about those that didn’t make it?

Rarely. Except in story telling

11:30 when we get together with our own friends I don’t think we mourn about them or anything like that. A lot of them I didn’t even know of course one remembers them, but there was nothing more we could have done and that’s about it.

A lot of blokes in your situation have not talked about their wartime experience.

12:00 What do you think about that?

I don’t think that the person who hasn’t been through the war or an experience like that can understand really. Things you can remember, might shock people or might surprise them. Or they are so inquisitive

12:30 about it. You would rather talk to someone you were with or someone who knows.

Why have you decided to take part in this project or indeed write down your memories for the future?

I think there is so much to learn by it all, if it is only the lesson that war is no way to solve the problem. Never has been.

13:00 And war is much more ghastly than people know. I mean I haven’t told you about some of the things like social problems. People with marital difficulties because of the separation. I know a young doctor who was in Sale who was very much in love with a WAAAF there and they were married and happy.

13:30 He went up to New Guinea he hadn’t been married very long and someone else came up and said, “Oh your wife is having a good time while you are away.” And he got the impression she was playing up and he shot himself. There are a lot of sadness’s of that sort which are not part of a war history and there was all of the pain of separation which beset the prisoners of war. 14:00 And to say nothing of the hardships and torture and lack of communication and all sorts of fears and hates go on in a sort of social back up.

We have talked about a lot of experiences and instances you had during the war today, if you think about the war today what are the strongest memories you have and what are the strongest images in your life?

14:30 Well I think really the strongest are the binding friendship that have emerged. I think really because of the fact that the people that have emerged are great friends and have been for a long time. I don’t think we often think back about the war itself except as an overall thing, that it is so disastrous,

15:00 it is a hateful possibility. I do remember people I admired and friend and courageous people who have just been killed off. People had to carry on, a few people remember

15:30 them for years, most of the memories during life just pass them by. And it is a sad thing, I mean you read about the heroes, the people who stood out and done some particular thing, written in the history books but there are a lot of people who don’t make a deep impression except on those that are left behind.

16:00 I feel very sorry, indeed I really grieve for many of those, young wives who were left behind, husbands don’t come back. That worried me because it is so unnecessary and it hasn’t achieved anything much.

16:30 I mean the sort of war I was in was a defensive war, we didn’t make war. I can understand war as a defensive mechanism. In other words we wouldn’t want anyone any race coming down here and marauding through the place, burning houses down and shooting all of the men and raping all of the women would we? Believe me

17:00 that sort of thing happens. You read some of the books on China, the same troops at our door, that opens your eyes a bit. Read about the atrocities at Milne Bay, that opens your eyes a bit. And just imagine that they might have come to this country when all of our troops were away.

Well with that in mind

17:30 how do you think generations of Australians after the war have used that peace that was won for them?

I think reasonably well. I think the country is influenced so much by what happens in other countries, things like globalisation and so on which is around the corner and

18:00 the country is swayed by a lot of things. Mind you my opinion isn’t all that good because I haven’t got all of the facts, but the old question should we go along side America as we are doing or is it better to decline under certain terms and be our own boss. That’s a hard thing.

18:30 We have got to come to the realisation that Britain isn’t the same and Britain can’t help us anyway. We don’t need help, we can make decisions and we can make good decisions, but we can’t stand up against the size army they have in China or somewhere. International politics

19:00 I find very difficult and sometimes you have to compromise, nothing is a hundred percent good. So,

Having been involved in a war yourself how do you feel about war itself as an instrument of international politics?

I can understand it, but I don’t like it. for example if there is a country in

19:30 Europe say where they haven’t got any, or sufficient arable land, they haven’t got any minerals, how do they make a living? They can’t live on their own production, they can’t sell very much. Now if they look over the fence the adjoining country

20:00 has masses of arable land and minerals, there is a big temptation to walk across and take some. That’s what the Japanese did of course. They came down to form the greater, Japanese –

Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Co-Prosperity Sphere. And I can understand that, but I don’t appreciate it by

20:30 being done through force. Sinking vessels and cruelty. You will get it mind you, this has always been the way in the past. The days of a couple of thousand years ago, these fights have gone on forever.

Well we haven’t got much time left, is there anything that you would like to add

21:00 keeping in mind that this archive is meant to be kept for a long time in the future, if someone were watching this in fifty or a hundred years is there nay message you feel you could add?

It is pretty hard to answer that.

It is a difficult question you can think about it for a bit if you like. 21:30 I can’t see any escape from defence. I can see there is always going to be someone who wants to grab what we have got in Australia.

22:00 And if we’re going to have defence we need something more in terms of national service. We have a very small defence force which is improving but it seems to me there is a lot of potential we could get going.

22:30 Not with an aggressive tendency but a defensive tendency. For example the school cadets and things like that have all gone. And so has the peace-time army, or national training of any sort. In Switzerland it is a compulsory year or two years and they have to go back for revision every five years or so.

23:00 It’s like a holiday to them, they’re not actually doing any fighting but they have a pretty good fighting force if it was needed. So I think there is nothing like preparation if you have got to face disaster.

That’s a good political point. Is there anything on a personal level, perhaps some advice you could give to

Individuals?

Individuals?

23:30 Well I suppose the greatest power in the world is knowledge and the greatest enemy is lack of it. If people were educated I don’t think there would be any wars. I think it is lack of understanding and lack of education

24:00 is a great danger.

I think that’s a very good point to end because that’s exactly why we are doing this project, hopefully people learn from the past they won’t repeat the same mistakes in the future.

Exactly, but unless they apply themselves and learn things and support the sort of education departments and so on.

24:30 I take part in an adult education thing at the moment which I think is very interesting but also it is very useful, because you learn all sorts of things about the other persons point of view. There is no limit to the value of education.

Well you’re never too old to learn and you’re never too old to teach and I think you have taught us a lot today, thank you very much for talking to us.

25:00 It has been a great pleasure.

It is nice of you to say so.

We might –

Would you like a cup of tea?