Australians at War Film Archive

Martin O'Bryan (Ted or Rocky) - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 29th March 2004

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1823

Some parts of this interview have been embargoed.

The embargoed portions are noted in the transcript and video.

Tape 1

00:36 If you would like to give us a brief introduction, starting from where you were born?

I was born in Mungindi New South Wales, in my grandmother’s house, the hospital was in Queensland, it’s a divided town

01:00 and I am the son of a grazier. At that stage he was a station manager, at Yuligal [?] Station, one of three stations run by the Carrigan brothers. And then there was the move when I was quite young, when I was a baby it was a big move to Mt Abundance near Roma, where my

01:30 father drew in a ballot blocks of land, with my grandfather and the rest of the family, and everybody else. We all moved at the same time and they came to Roma, and they got one good crop of wheat and then they moved again to Bymount, which is near Injune, near the Carnarvon Ranges, in Queensland,

02:00 and there he established a fine wool merino, not a stud, a flock. And that was successful, and that’s where I commenced my schooling. My first schooling was the Queensland Correspondence School, lessons were sent out every week,

02:30 and you had to send your copybooks and things back by return mail. I did see my teacher once, we went to Brisbane, but the Correspondence School was a terrific organisation. They mailed lessons all over Australia and that was an interesting 2 years, started school very late,

03:00 and from there I went to the De La Salle Brothers School in Roma and I had the years 1937 and 1938 there, after that a small school, one teacher school was started at Bymount and they had to get twelve students or pupils as they called

03:30 them in those days. Mum chap, Bob Kirkbride, he was quite an old lad, and he was brought in to make up the twelve, because he lived nearby, but he was certainly a lot older than me. From then I did my scholarship examination, that school shifted, they

04:00 removed the building once while we were at school, and we had to have our school lessons for about six months in the wool shed. It wasn’t the shearing season, fortunately. Then whilst they moved the school, it was simply one room and one teacher, and the teacher put all grades including the littlies, barely

04:30 out of nappies, in fact one wasn’t. So he had to handle the situation right through to grade 7. Which was scholarship. I sat for my scholarship at the state school in Roma, which was a new brick building and it still stands. I never sat for an exam in my life before. So that was a bit of an experience. I got through that reasonably well,

05:00 about sixty percent. From then on after that my father sent me to the Roma State High School, where I did two years. That was in 1941 and 1942. I have a lot of memories of the school during wartime and digging slit trenches and bailing the water out after a storm. Which is a great

05:30 problem there. You get a sudden rainstorm and the trenches would suddenly be all full. The head teacher used to carry out air raid practice, any time, he would blow the whistle in the corridor and we all had to file out in an orderly fashion and go to the trenches. I remember once this aeroplane

06:00 came flying over, we could hear it in the distance and of course the old head teacher blew the whistle. And we all went out to see what it looked like and it was actually the Flying Doctor. He was bringing a patient in from somewhere out west, and he happened to fly over, so the headmaster decided that was a good time to blow the whistle. From there

06:30 I went to help on my father’s grazing property at Bymount and that was for a year or so, and I was in the reserved occupation, and the manpower officer, who was a powerful man in the town, his name was Cyrus Stinson. I have a letter that he wrote to me

07:00 still survives, and absolving me of the need to stay in the reserved occupation, so that I could join up. And he gave that permission provided he got a letter from my father. My father gave that; it was a terrible thing for him to do, because that meant he was alone

07:30 on his property, because he was regarded as a person very much supporting the war effort, that’s why I was in this reserved occupation situation. However, my father gave me the permission because he could see I wanted to get out and see a bit more of the world. And that happened, I saw an immense,

08:00 it was a sudden jolt to move to near in the bush, fairly remote area, still is a remote area and I moved on there and joined the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force]. I had almost two years in the RAAF because the war suddenly finished, when the atomic bomb was dropped, and that was

08:30 during the time I was in the RAAF and everything stopped. Well not quite, but still there is a long story to that, some of the Japanese commanders didn’t surrender immediately, some were as much as a month later. And then I had some flights, at least one flight to Morotai, while

09:00 hostilities were on the island. There was fighting on the island, we stayed an hour or two and then took off again, because we landed on the old Waima [?] strip, which is a Japanese strip, constructed by them, and like all Japanese strips, it was short and narrow, and generally nasty. To land

09:30 on. So I was a matter of staying a few hours and coming back to Darwin. So that was the first fight. Later I went to Morotai, after the war had finished and we were engaged in maintaining the Australian Military Air Line to Japan, to where the BCOF

10:00 the British Commonwealth Occupational Forces were situated. From then afterwards I joined the PMG’s [Post Master General] department. I had difficulty in getting employment it took me three months. And I walked the streets of Brisbane, I wanted to get into the situation where I wanted to study to become an engineer and specifically I wanted

10:30 to go into engineering drafting, so I went around ship building companies, anywhere I thought I might get a job. But I was discharged late from the air force because of this military airline to Japan. We didn’t know it was then of course, we were just based there to

11:00 service the plane since they landed at Morotai. We flew over the large parts of the Dutch East Indies, Borneo and Macassar and it was called the Celebes then, it’s now Sulawesi, and Ambon, different places there we flew courier flights to.

11:30 I often wondered about why there was no cargo, no people. We just went by ourselves. I realised actually what was going on because one day the skipper of the aircraft, we were in Darwin, and he had this little black case, and somebody said to him, “What’s in that?” He said “I don’t know. But all I

12:00 know I have to keep it right within my sight all the time”. He said with it between his ankles at the table, in the officer’s mess in Darwin. I assume they were written orders. The actual orders may have been sent by radio, but I assume that what he was carrying was the confirmation, the signed documents of what was going to happen next.

12:30 So that was quite an interesting story. I joined the PMG’s [Postmaster General] department in 1946, after searching for three months for a job. They took me on very readily in the postal area. And I went on and did telegraph working in the telegraph office at Dalby and I worked

13:00 on the counter which was terribly interesting, very busy. People were sort of hanging out the windows. The old building was far too small. It took a long time to recover after the war. The postal reconstruction was a huge, particularly in the communications area, we were using extremely antiquated

13:30 systems of telephone exchanges and so forth. From there I went to what is now the radio branch in the PMG’s department. Now I don’t think Telstra has a radio branch. It would be hidden away somewhere, it would be in the archives possibly, but that I stayed there for a little while and moved on

14:00 and I went into the telephone branch of the PMG’s department and that’s where I had most of my forty- one years service, in the PMG. When Telecom was formed I elected to go with Telecom, the PMG was divided into two, I think it was about 1975, divided into two sections

14:30 one was the Telecommunications Commission and the other was the Postal Commission. And Telstra came later.

O.K. That’s a pretty good overview, thanks a lot. Actually, what I will do now is starting asking you questions about your youth,

15:00 in Roma, firstly, before I do go to Roma, can you tell us about your father’s service in the First World War, did he actually go overseas?

Yes, I have pictures over there of course of his service, and a lot of pictures that have been over there on the display board,

15:30 he was at Ypres and Zonnebeke in 1917. Rather an interesting story, since I have been researching, I have all the volumes of the First World War by C.W. Bean [writer of the official history WW1] in our computer room,

16:00 and I can trace my father’s history through his wartime history. He was in the area of Belgium in Flanders, and then the battles we did hear about, mainly from my mother, because he didn’t speak much about it until later in life when he opened up a little bit and told us all these grim stories

16:30 it was a horrible experience for him generally. He went overseas for an adventure, and service to the King, he certainly signed up, I have got his papers there where he signed up, life in the bush was a bit hum drum, so they all went off, they thought the war was only going to last a couple of

17:00 months. Of course it lasted four years. He was at the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, where he was gassed, fairly severely, we found out later on, he didn’t say he was, he just said he was on the outskirts. But it is quite evident from reading the history that he was right in the midst of it. In fact I spoke to one of his old comrades later

17:30 on about seven or eight years ago, and he said he was right in the middle of it. Same battalion, and knew him. Interesting in that battalion, it’s our present Prime Minister’s father and grandfather, served in the same battalion as Dad. Something I only found out recently.

18:00 The Battle of Villers-Bretonneux. We went to Villers-Bretonneux last year, we visited there and we saw where the Battle of Hamel, took place and that was a crucial part, a turning point in the First World War. It was a very small engagement in comparison

18:30 to the terrible battles that were fought where thousands of men lost their lives. And General Monash was John Monash was the leader, and he demanded that more or less he had charge of the planning. It was planned to the last detail, and Dad

19:00 often told me about the stories and how they brought the Americans over. The commander of the 15th Battalion, Dad’s battalion was Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Patrick McSharry. And he was one of the most highly decorated men, and he went and presumably and took some of his

19:30 men over with him, and they went over and met the Americans at Corbie, that was about ten kilometres from Hamel. They brought them back and they were integrated into the 15th Battalion. Some in each Company. The battalion was

20:00 badly depleted, there were few officers left, few NCOs [Non Commissioned Officer], like sergeants and lieutenants who always led their men out in an attack, and consequently they were the ones that were always at risk. You could tell who was leading a group, and that’s the first person

20:30 the Germans aimed at. It was a terrible situation. Then they came in, and Dad actually trained, he was only a private, but he actually trained Americans how to use the guns and machine gun. He was second on the machine gun. That means there were crews of two, and the gunner was trained to use Lewis guns, old

21:00 things which had a revolving barrel on the top, and they were water-cooled, they had a big jacket, a water-cooled jacket on them, and they were pretty obsolete really. The Vickers came later on, but Dad’s battalion never got the Vickers. Because the war finished fairly quickly, it was as a result of

21:30 the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson had threatened the Kaiser he said I will have a million men in France, and he came close to the mark, and of course the Kaiser threw up his hands in horror and everybody surrendered fairly quickly, and the Kaiser went to Holland in disgrace.

What did your Dad tell you about the war exactly?

22:00 He told us very little at first, but he told me about the time I joined up, a lot of stories, which some were very grim ones. It did centre on the Battle of Hamel.

What were the grim stories he told you?

Well, when his friend Frank Lacey Sweet, who was a grazier from Gandar [?],

22:30 in Queensland. They were I think probably on the Menin Road, which they were advancing against the Germans, and his friend was struck by a shell which didn’t explode, so 23:00 here I am sort of thing. I often think of that, because Dad said he looked at him and turned around as they were running he looked and he said, I didn’t stop. I knew he was dead. Just like that. Then he described what he saw. Headless person.

23:30 Headless body. That’s the grimmest one of all.

When did he start to tell you about this?

Would have been about 1941, 1942. But up until then Mum

24:00 was the one who told the stories. Apparently he told her a lot of things and she was the one who spoke the most about it until about 1941. When the war was on again of course. It’s strange that I still haven’t researched it properly.

24:30 But Dad often spoke about Hitler. And of course Hitler won the Iron Cross in that Menin Road area and whether Dad was there and they fired a few shots at one another, they obviously missed

25:00 or not, but he was fighting in that area. I think it was the Wurdenbergers [?]. So that was something, like the John Howard story, it has all been sort of revealed with research, and the modern day, the Internet is absolutely fantastic. But

25:30 that was one grim story. He told stories of other friends who were killed, very close friends. Lacey Sweet was a very close friend of his. But of course when you look at John Monash, he is a bit of an outsider as far as the British Army was concerned. First of all he was an Australian. CW

26:00 Bean summed up what Diggers were actually like at that, he said that they were poor soldiers, discipline was very poor, and he said they were rebels in many ways, but that they were good fighters. So, that’s of course John Monash

26:30 who was Jewish, you may know that, and he was very much, denigrated by the British Commanders. The top brass and he suffered a lot from that, the fact that he was Jewish, of course he went on, and now we have Monash University. He was a famous engineer, which you

27:00 may have heard this story already.

With World War 1 in Roma?

Anzac Day I remember the first Anzac Day after war finished, Second World War, my father marched with me in the Parade down the street.

Actually I was referring to after the First World War in the

27:30 1930s, during the Depression?

I don’t remember anything about Anzac Day, my father certainly wouldn’t have been in it, because he was horrified by the war and he didn’t march. He marched only once in the Anzac Day Parade, and that was afterwards. I can’t recall anything before.

28:00 It certainly was held virtually from the first Anzac Day.

Can you tell us if the Empire was important to you, at that time, during the Depression years?

The Empire, yes, one of the Kings was the Coronation and it was a big. We always

28:30 at that Bymount school, we always saluted the flag every morning. We went out, the flag was raised on a pole and we had to salute the flag. I don’t think we learned the anthem, I can’t recall that, but saluting the flag was a big event, and the

29:00 British Empire and British history was a virtually a must in those days. You had to learn English of course in school. And British was very much taught, but I hated British history because it was full of grim stories. You see what went on. There’s a current series on Henry VIII on

29:30 on the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] at the moment, we saw it last night and that’s with the violence and the wars. The Wars of the Roses and we learnt about all those things. Another thing we learnt was geography very well at school. Even though we were out in the bush these weekly papers arrived, they were like flyers,

30:00 they came out and one was on British history, Australian history. We learnt Australian history, we learnt about all the explorers and so forth.

In Roma at that time, can you tell us it must have been pretty tough with the Depression then?

It was.

What was it like for your family and yourself? When I

30:30 went to the De La Salle Brothers school, that was in 1937, ‘38, my father apart from the doctors and the dentists and professional men in town, or solicitors, lawyers, apart from that they didn’t have a car. Generally at that school I found, they were poor

31:00 families. The Christian Brothers came out from Ireland, and that was their brief, to teach underprivileged children. Of course they got involved with orphanages and a few bad eggs amongst them, naturally, thousands of men. The nuns

31:30 did the same thing, came from Ireland. But this particular order was from France, De La Salle were a French order. They were pretty strict. I only ever got the cane once, I behaved reasonably alright. I got the cane because they put me next to a boy,

32:00 he was a big fat lad, and he was a little bit, in those days we used to say retarded. He certainly wasn’t taking in, so they sat me next to him, and every time, just to come out of the blue, he would give me a heck of a wack in the ribs or somewhere. So of course I was too reticent

32:30 to complain about this, and perhaps they wouldn’t take it anyway, but the Brother was a young chap and he came down, so I gave this, his name was Reggie Grace, and he certainly wasn’t, you know, the full two bob, as we used to say in those days, and he um, he kept giving me these occasional

33:00 bangs, you know in the ribs. So one day, being a bit impulsive, I gave him a big one back, and he yelled out. The Brother looked and he came down and gave me one stroke of the cane. So I reckon I got this cane for a bit of retaliation. But they were certainly very good teachers,

33:30 but very strict. Anybody who got out of line, they got whacked. But, they usually had a good reason for it.

A lot of your mates you grew up with at De La Salle were they having it tough during those Depression years?

Ah yeah. When Dad came to town, which wasn’t that often, I was a favourite, because of the car,

34:00 and I made a lot of good friends, and he would take them for a ride in the car. So I had a lot of friends, and they were lost during the war of course, my classmates and chaps in the next class. One was oddly enough a

34:30 chap named, I have forgotten now, Richards. He was a captain of an aircraft which round about the 19th December 1945, they were returning, bringing wounded soldiers and chaps POWs [prisoners of war] and the very ill ones that were stacked on Dakotas,

35:00 on racks like sardines, and they were stacked in racks, and the aircraft disappeared. The captain was from Roma. One of my school friends was Bill Gagen, who was ill for some reason coming back from Borneo, and that aircraft was lost, I think it was the 19th December 1945 and that was a

35:30 thing that sort of shook the town.

Was there a lot of tension there in your town between Catholics and Protestants as well?

No. It wasn’t, we knew the Protestant Ministers fairly well.

36:00 We had a story, I often tell this story, I have written it actually. Of how we were going out to Dad’s property at Bymount, in his car, and it was a Hutmobile car. Fairly big car. They were something like a Buick of those days. And suddenly the car stopped on the side of the road

36:30 and Dad got very upset and he was swearing and carrying on, he was cranking it and it wouldn’t start. So this Father Tom McCormack drove up and said “What’s up mate?” A cloud of dust Catholic Priests tend to drive past, and I think they still do, they have got a lot places to go. And this Father McCormack,

37:00 pulled up, and he said “What’s wrong Martin?” He said “I can’t get the car to start”, and he hops out and he’s got his collar on and his clerical stuff on, and he starts on the crank handle, winding it, and it wouldn’t start, so he went on, he said “Tom Mackinson” or someone, name like that, he’s about seven or eight miles away and he’s dying,

37:30 he said, “I have gotta go”. So he hopped in his car, and Dad had another go on the crank handle, so another old car comes up at least he comes round the bend and he stopped. The voice said “Mr O’Bryan, what’s wrong?” And out steps Canon Ever, Bill Ever, he was

38:00 the Church of England Minister in town. So he turned the crank handle, just slightly like that, to sort of prime it, and the engine burst into life. And Mum said, as we drove away, and the old Canon went on his way, to see

38:30 somebody, and Dad said to Mum, “Don’t go changing your religion over this”. He said the carburettor was flooded and it dried by the time Canon Ever got here. Don’t go changing your religion. That’s a true story. But there was co-operation. Later on when I went to Dalby, there was a large

39:00 Lutheran population, about half Lutheran and half were Catholics, they were the German descendants to the migrants of the Darling Downs. Late 1800s. We had so many friends that had German names, Polish names. German/Polish names. These were a lot of

39:30 them came out as free settlers, and others were subject to persecution. In Prussia, by the Russians mainly. There were a lot of stories about that, my brother finished up by marrying a Lutheran lass. When we go there and see them at a wedding or whatever we are altogether as

40:00 one you know.

How did you get the District Roma?

This come out in the history of exploration, a Lady Roma Diamantina Bowen was the Governor‘s wife, I forget which Governor of Queensland that was, but

40:30 the name of Bowen came from the North Coast of Queensland the town got her name on it, and the Diamantina River and Roma, the town. It’s of course the way Italians pronounce Rome.

41:01

Tape 2

00:31 Can you tell us a bit more about the balloted land and how your family got the land up in Queensland?

My father and my grandfather and my uncle, moved as a result of a ballot. Manta Station it was the area that was discovered

01:00 by Major Thomas Mitchell, the explorer, he happened to go out in a good season, there had been a lot of rain, and it was broken up several times by the Queensland government. The huge stations which were owned by,

01:30 a lot of shareholders and banks like the ES&A Bank, ANZ now of course. They are Scottish banks. I think it was Scottish originally, and the Scots and the British were the landowners here, they came to Tasmania and took vast amounts of

02:00 land. The amount of land they could ride around in a day, the Governor said you could have what you want and of course they rode their horses around in very fertile areas. In there they were huge Stations and they were broken up, two or three times, with Mt Abundance. Mitchell called the area Mt Abundance

02:30 because the mountain, he climbed the mountain, it’s only a very small hill. It’s a fairly large hill I suppose, but there he could see the grass waving in the breeze. He gives a description, he called it Australia Felix, which meant it was an extremely fertile area. But as I said he obviously went there when there had been a good rainfall.

03:00 So the news came about the ballot, to break up the station further, and all the family virtually put in an application and it was a sort of a guided ballot. You had to have land experience. You had to be a farmer or have worked on a farm. Dad worked as a Station

03:30 Manager, and he had good credentials to go in this ballot, and be successful. He paid £5 to go in the ballot. But, the government in their surveying and the way they allotted the blocks, were small blocks of 1200 acres

04:00 There was a measurement called a rod, pole or perch. And that was 5.5 feet, and some of these blocks of land have got these measurements on them. Look at the old maps and the survey, how the surveyors did them, a perch was of course, where the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s

04:30 perched at night, somewhere over in England, the length of the perch. That’s hard to believe, but I believe that’s how it originated, the old imperial measurement. It was so many perches or whatever, so many acres and a little bit on the end, perches, or rods or poles. So

05:00 anyhow, he succeeded in the ballot, and oddly enough my uncle got the next door block, there was a few words said somewhere or other, you know, and grandfather was the head station, and I can remember

05:30 actually there was a house on it. Uncle and Dad had to built their own houses, there was nothing there. And they lived in that station with grandfather and grandmother. I can remember his old T Model Ford, and he broke the axle on Emu

06:00 Creek as he was climbing out. The old T Model broke its axle climbing out, and it stayed there for weeks until he got a new axle and put in. And that was back in the days when you did things yourself. And he went away and

06:30 he got a new axle himself in Brisbane or somewhere and it was there for about a week or so, just sitting on the bank of the creek. Luckily it didn’t rain. But he had this sort of an outstation building, and I can remember it had a lot of buildings around it, it was like a small village.

07:00 In fact, some of them were quite large, like a village type of size, with all these outbuildings. And I think they might have lived there for six months or so, until Dad built his house on his block. He called it Logan Brae and there’s a whole story, the two Logan Brae’s there, one at Parkes in New South Wales in our history. I am doing the

07:30 family history pretty closely at the moment. The net [internet] is fantastic today, there’s something new and you have just got to find it. And you find out about all these ancestors. And my Scottish ancestry they were shepherds. All to do with sheep, and it has gone right through.

08:00 Anyhow they settled there but they only stayed a short while, they moved in 1931, they went there in about 1927, and they moved in 1931 again. They got a good wheat crop, they were combined, they must have hired the stripper and everything and all that sort of thing. We’ve got photographs of it. Taken by my mother, she was

08:30 quite a photographer, in her day. She took them with a Box Brownie, but she took a lot of photographs. Both at Mt Abundance and at Roma, at Bymount. Which I spoke about earlier. And then he bought his property, he was able to sell that block of land, because it was far too small

09:00 the Government generally of Queensland, New South Wales and some Victorian, broke up the stations because the stations were owned by people who never saw them, they were in England or Scotland. Very rarely was there an Irishman that had a big block of land, a squatter. They squatted on land

09:30 it would have been slightly illegal, and that was why they were called squatters. We’ve got squatters now, haven’t we? Some are in Sydney. But it’s oddly the name was squatters. Then the people who had these areas allotted to them were called settlers. They were a different lot of people altogether.

10:00 The government had a lot of problems in breaking up these stations. At auctions the previous owners used to get somebody to bid, and that was illegal, called dud bidding. So they could get charge of the land again. There were all sorts of restrictions.

10:30 As I said, they lived there in grandfather’s house, he was another story, one of my great grandfather’s was Swiss and he came from the German part of Switzerland, and his name was Schmid, you know Schmid without the ‘T’ and

11:00 of course that caused a lot of problems, because after the First World War, anybody with a German name couldn’t get a job. There was terrible antagonism between German settlers and of course we lived with German settlers all around us. There were none on Bymount, but certainly the descendants

11:30 and some of the old German grandfathers couldn’t speak English. I remember serving one at the Dalby Post Office. He used to come in for his rations, his petrol ration tickets. His name was Emil Von Pine, and the old chap used to come in he would virtually sit in the corner in the queue,

12:00 and he’d come and get his petrol ration tickets. And he would get something like 1,000 ration tickets, to drive an off road vehicle. It was a big truck, to cart his wheat, and he had a siding, a railway siding on his property. It never went on the public road. You could have an unregistered vehicle. I suppose you can here now if

12:30 you are a big landowner and just kept it, and didn’t go on a public road. 1,000 gallons worth. So there were real problems after the First World War. Germans were out and they were interned of course, some of them, but history is going in circles of course. It is all going back. At the moment,

13:00 there is an interesting thing about Hitler, and it is called ‘The Tasmanian Solution’. I think its Professor Moses at the Armidale University of New South Wales. He spoke on the radio about a year ago, and he’s investigating or researching the people who came from Germany

13:30 and settled here, either by their own free will, or were forced out by the problems I mentioned earlier, religious persecution and they were forced to migrate. Some of these of course were completely free, but any

14:00 person who was a grazier and owned land and one of these old chaps, I won’t mention his name because his descendants live there now, lived near us, not far away, at Bymount, and Dad said to me once during the war, all the guns were taken, there were people

14:30 who they called ‘enemy aliens’. And they were either Italian or Germans. But this Professor Moses is investigating them at the moment. I should write a letter to him and tell him the story of our Swiss, because he went over to

15:00 Germany to one of the Universities over there, and doing this research and finding out where these people came from and he found a document, number 29 of 30 documents, and it is signed by Adolph Hitler and it’s

15:30 all the Germans in Australia, virtually anybody of German, like these people I was talking about. Like when the Japanese invaded, and Hitler of course a racist, and he didn’t want the Japanese mixing with any of the German settlers. So, on this document it says, it’s called ‘The Tasmanian Solution’. They were all to be brought here

16:00 to Tasmania. It’s a starting story. I don’t know how far the Professor has got with this, but he gave so many people who were doubtful, people who were spies in Australia, he actually named some of the people, and whether he found the descendants are deceased

16:30 or what happened, but there’s a whole story and my uncle changed his name, he was Edward Conrad Schmidt, and he changed it to Edward Charles Smith. So my cousins up in Queensland are Smiths. And he had numerous other people, because he wanted to get a job on the railways, and he had no hope

17:00 while he had this name. And he relinquished. Have you ever seen one of those documents where somebody has changed their name, particularly in those days? They never refer to the previous name under any circumstances. It’s a very strong document. I have a copy of that. So he did that to get a job on the railways. And that was a

17:30 problem. But if you owned land you were regarded as working for the war effort. But we often wondered about some of them, had the Japanese landed, had they invaded and they intended to, there’s no doubt about that. Some people say they didn’t but the Japanese, the old surviving fighter pilots.

18:00 One particular battle at Port Moresby, I have got the tape there, where he actually said that their next port of call after they captured Port Moresby, was Townsville. Said it quite clearly. He’s probably still alive the old fella, he’s a great survivor I think. So, anyhow that’s what happened there, then they built their

18:30 house and they called it Logan Brae. And of course I had a Scottish grandmother and this Logan Brae comes from Scotland, it’s obviously a Scottish name. We just located a distant sort of cousin in Scotland who is doing all this research. And up until a few weeks ago,

19:00 he didn’t know where Margaret Telfer, my grandmother’s name, where she migrated to. That’s astounding isn’t it, he’s just discovered where my grandmother came to. Migrated, could have gone to the [United] States, a lot of my relatives are in the States. Second cousins.

19:30 Quite a number of them, we are finding them every day. We put in an ancestry thing here, and that helps a lot. If you go on the net and put in a name on Google [Search Engine], there it is.

What was it like growing upon the land for you?

The isolation was a

20:00 real problem. Not so much at Mt Abundance where there was close settlement. It was the closest settlement, too close actually. The blocks, you couldn’t live on them in normal circumstances, a family couldn’t live on them. But when we went to Bymount it was very isolated. It was 40 miles from Roma, and in the old car in those

20:30 days it took half a day to get there. They were rough and the main roads were corrugated, you got the jitters all the time, and you had to drive on the other side of the road, there were all sorts of dodges but the car of course was very important, and the aeroplane was, and that’s where a lot of graziers sons

21:00 joined the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force]. And they went to Europe of course to Bomber Command. So the survivors came back and there weren’t that many of them.

Why is that, why did so many graziers sons join the RAAF?

Because they knew the aeroplanes already, and the sons were interested in flying because that was the quickest way to get somewhere. They had

21:30 this is after the war, C W Russell was a big landowner near Goulburn, and he is probably still there, Charlie Russell, and he was a squadron leader, I think. After the war he had three aeroplanes. One of them was an Avro Anson, I think, I don’t know what the others were, but we used to see him

22:00 he was a bit of a hero.

Was there a sense of community even though you were isolated with the other farmers?

Yeah. At Mt Abundance it was close, and of course my uncle married one of the three pretty girls from over the creek, they used to come over and see us, the Sutton family, and he married

22:30 one of them. And there’s a whole story in itself, so all my cousins up in Brisbane are Smiths.

The pretty girls over the creek? Well I guess they were pretty girls. They used to come over to us. I remember going over to the old chap, they were

23:00 English, they come from Somerset or Dorset somewhere like that, the Suttons. So going over, when I was a little kid, and we had this radio, it was a thing with the horn speaker on it, you’ve seen His Master’s Voice records, same as that. And the big battery sitting on top of it, which drove it. He’d switch this

23:30 on and half the time it wouldn’t work, he used to have to get a mechanic as he called him, to come out from Roma. Remember going over as a small child and listening to this radio, with the horn speaker of course it was the radio of the day, we are talking about what

24:00 1929, 1930, probably. They were pretty primitive.

What other entertainment was there?

Ah, sing songs around the piano. We used to have singsongs at Bymount. We had this old chap, all we knew was he lived in the west, his name was Bill Yeomans.

24:30 He was a Gallipoli survivor and the story was, and I think it was true, that a Turk [Turkish soldier] fired a shot at him and the bullet lodged near his heart, and he said, “no way.” Back in those days, these days it would be a half hour operation to get that out. And he lived all the rest of his

25:00 life with a bullet there. So he was a very lucky survivor. He used to come and he had an old accordion, and I can remember he just appeared one day, and all we knew he lived in a tent or something. But he lived right out in the bush like a hermit. But he’d come in and

25:30 we had friends called Kirkbride, not far away. And we often referred to him as Mrs Kirkbride’s brother. But his name was Bill Yeomans. He’d come along and he would have the old accordion, the old squeeze box, and he would play,

26:00 and Mum would play the piano, she played the piano, she tried to teach me once how to play the piano, for a couple of years, but I was interested in other things then. She played the piano, and Dad would get up and do an Irish jig or something, but you know it was entertainment.

26:30 And Dad, who didn’t know one note from another, he couldn’t read music, and then he’d start playing tunes on the accordion, just by ear sort of thing. How accurate it was I wouldn’t now. They were really good singsongs. Mum was reluctant to play the piano, but finally she would get up and play the piano.

27:00 Just to clarify something, on the £5 ballot, was the process you put the £5 to enter then who selected who got the land?

That would be some faceless people I would imagine. The faceless ones. The department I suppose, I don’t know what the department was,

27:30 but they handled the break up, the surveyors went out. The surveyors were really explorers in one sense, they were in Tasmania, chaps like Hillier, they were really explorers, they went into the unknown they surveyed blocks, and drove the pegs in at the corners. They had proper instruments, theodolites and they cut a

28:00 line, cut the trees down, branches down so they could get site of the next reference point.

And it depended on your experience in farming as to whether you gained the land, is that correct?

Yes. That was what Dad said. £5, it’s quite a bit of money in those days, when you look at what £5 would be worth today.

28:30 I suppose it would be $3,000 or $4,000 or something like that. It was virtually a nominal amount.

That clarifies everything for me. When did you first get an interest and so on as a child?

I have a very good long term memory, and back years ago, while we were at Mt Abundance,

29:00 and I am sort of tying this together in research now, family history and what actually happened. Kingsford Smith’s Coffee Royal affair, have you heard of that? He got lost flying to England, and he landed in the Glenelg River in Glenelg in the Kimberlys, and he was

29:30 lost, and it was a terrible thing, they reckoned he did it on purpose, but he was exonerated after that. Kingsford Smith, and there he was, all they had to drink was some whiskey, and coffee and baby food. There was a sick baby up there, and they took the baby food with them. Going to England, up at Derby or somewhere they used to fly

30:00 from Sydney to Derby, but of course he got lost. I have got the story on tape there, it’s quite interesting. One of those hidden bush tucker man stories, and so they assumed and they ate crabs and mussels, they were right on the beach, so anyway, this pair 30:30 Anderson and his cobber took off in his aircraft called the Kookaburra, Dick Smith had recovered the Kookaburra, and this Anderson, they gave him a book from Kingsford Smith and his friend, another radio operator or pilot on board and so they are searching

31:00 and when they are flying over the Tanami Desert going to Derby, they looked, one of the tappets worked loose in the motor, like the Gipsy Moth, you could see the tappets working when you are flying, they are in front of you. And the Gipsy Moth was the same, it was open no cowl on it,

31:30 you could see these tappets working. One motor was misfiring, carrying on, and so they decided to land to fix this tappet, and they fixed it in about 5 minutes, just screwed it up you see. They didn’t have a runway to take off from, and they perished, died of thirst. And of course then they went out looking for them, and they found Kingsford Smith. He

32:00 put the signal on the ground, and lit fires and things. Quite a story really, and they found him, but it was a long time before they found the Kookaburra. And Mum, at Mt Abundance, she said to me, this aeroplane was flying low over our house and just over the trees, very low. And I have worked out

32:30 since, he was trying to locate where he was, and he saw Mt Abundance, which was the only mountain in the area, its all dead flat. And the creek beside it, he would have had a good reference point. And Mum looked up and said “I wonder is he lost?” This was all in the papers, this

33:00 Kingsford Smith thing was going on. My cousin one of the Smiths, in Alice Springs, he went along there and had a look at the Kookaburra’s recovery by Dick Smith. He told me that number two cylinder, all the details.

He was a big hero of yours Kingsford Smith, growing up?

Well he was, his name

33:30 was around and of course he did things, like Prime Minister Billy Hughes said he didn’t have enough experience to undertake a flight to England, and he prevented him going. That’s only come out recently. But of course he eventually did. I think he was one of the old

34:00 aviators who took out United States citizenship in order to get the right type of aircraft, and of course the tri-motor Fokker was called the Ford because they put Ford engines in it. Americans, it was a Dutch plane originally,

34:30 and they were made by the Fokker Company. But the Americans they put Ford engines in them, it was called the Ford Tri Plane. And of course out here for the film that was made a few years ago, of the re- enactment of the crossing of the Pacific, they put Pratt & Whitney Engines

35:00 in them, much more powerful. They got Harold Getty who came from Campbelltown, you’ve heard of Harold Getty no doubt, just a few kilometres out of Launceston. There’s a big memorial, monument there, he

35:30 was a navigator, a navigating specialist, he was on chips first, he was a man whose story has been written up by Bruce Brown, who now lives in Canberra. I have spoken to Bruce Brown a couple of times about it. I thought he might give a public talk here. But that didn’t happen he got transferred to

36:00 a solicitor in Canberra, I think he’s in a government department there, and he tells the story of Harold Getty. He’s the grandson of a convict. And that in itself is a story, but Harold Getty got to the United States and that was where he founded his navigation schools and his wife

36:30 taught in the schools and all this sort of thing. And he taught in Britain, navigation. He’s called the Prince of Navigators.

What was your first step in taking your interest in flying further?

My first ride in a plane was in a Dakota, Douglas Dakota,

37:00 C47 as we called them. They were training the paratroopers, the red berets at Atherton in North Queensland, and we had an aircraft that was detached and it always came back with the double doors off. Which indicated it was used for paratroop training. Because these blokes jumped out

37:30 and they had a paratroop battalion which was made up specially for releasing you know, getting people out of Changi, specifically it was sent over for where Japanese massacred

38:00 POWs [Prisoners of war]. I know a lot of Japanese now, we are talking of the Japanese of this Imperial thing. I have got no animosity to any of those. Some of the old POWs would have, but remember we were never told or we didn’t know what they did.

Did you join the cadets first?

Yes, I joined the ATC, Air Training Corps.

How old were you 38:30 then?

I was 18, 17.Going on 80.

And had the war started by then?

Yes. War started in 1941, with the Japanese that is. Of course the war in Europe had been going on for some time. And originally I wanted to join the navy. But

39:00 that’s just as well, because when I go out on a boat and they start slopping around, I invariably get horribly sea sick. But after I left school, a fair bit of propaganda came out, and it was all [Royal Australian] Air Force, and I became interested in flying aeroplanes.

Before World War II started, did you see what was going to happen, or

39:30 what were your feelings about what was happening in Europe?

It was a long way away, the radio brought it close. I think we had a radio at this isolated property near Bymount. We had a radio before we had a telephone. My father, he was an old bushman you would say,

40:00 and very reticent sort of man. Shy I suppose, in spite of all of his experiences, and he got this, we went to a what was like a fair out in the country. It was a country race meeting, and you had to go to a country race meeting to realize what went on.

40:30 What they called picnic race meeting. So, this guy was selling, he was a bit of a technician and he used to maintain Dad’s car for him, put new rings in it on one occasion, that was a great experience for me, because I was mechanically minded. If there had been the chance, I would have been a scientist. Very interested in science.

41:00 So Dad bought this big console, big radio, a Breville Radio, and I used to listen to the news. There was a radio newsreel that came from Britain, it was a relay but the guy every day at 4 o’clock

41:30 called Radio News Room, and that was over this they were describing the Battle of Britain. How many did we get today, 205, the figures were exaggerated, the Germans exaggerated what they shot down. But between them they got together, both sides, and they found and they were very often …

42:02

Tape 3

00:32 So what do you remember about war breaking out in 1939?

I remember in 1939 at our school, the Bymount school, one teacher school, one room. For all grades up to

01:00 grade 7. Quite an achievement in itself to teach there. But he and this old chap named Tom Kirkbride, we were friends, and they came up the lane to school, and old Tom was an ex Gallipoli man, and he said I think

01:30 there’s going to be another stoush. This is just before it started, and they started talking about Hitler, and they said this bloke Hitler, and old Tommy’s eyes lighted up and he said it’s going to be on again you know. And it was entirely different, he didn’t want to see anymore wars. Pretty obvious. And he was that type of man. He came from a different background to my father.

02:00 Would think in those days was more of an English background, the way he spoke, but this other old guy, was a dinky di Australian. With the Australian background. He said, I think there’s going to be another stoush. And his eyes all lit up you see. So anyway, of course he was the one that was

02:30 always on to us young fellas, he did it rather surreptitiously to try and get us to join up, I better not say too much, but he and Dad were talking about Hitler, and back in those days in England, Hitler was a bit of a curiosity,

03:00 there were a lot of Nazis in England at that time. Mosley and a few others like that. Not talking out of school by any means, and there were big question marks against Edward VIII, it has been proven now, he had sympathies in that area.

03:30 And Hitler, they thought he was doing something for the German people. At the same time Germany was hemmed in by geographical position, and that caused the Kaiser to start the First World War, and of course they attacked France and Belgium, didn’t

04:00 gain any popularity over that one. In the Second World War, again Hitler was supposed abide by the Treaty of Versailles in that he wasn’t to arms, and he wasn’t to have an air force as such, and of course they got

04:30 over that by training most of the pilots, the prominent ones were glider pilots. Providing it was O.K. if he had the glider pilots, but they quickly converted to good aviators, of course flying a glider in those days was apparently quite a hazardous business and a lot got killed by serious accidents.

05:00 Of course he broke the treaty there, and he did develop the ME109, which was to be the very serious opponent of the Spitfire. The Spitfire was obviously developed, because the ME109 was in the Spanish Civil War, and

05:30 plus a couple of other types of aircraft. Of course they gained Condell Group, fought there, but Hitler thought he was a socialist type, but he was a national socialist type that was the title of where Nazi come from, and of course Stalin was the International Socialist.

06:00 But Hitler was a curiosity, I wonder what he was going to do next. But nobody liked Stalin. Stalin was the monster, it was only on TV the other day, that his story was told. It was a terrible thing 20 million people. Large numbers of them signed off, just signed the death warrant,

06:30 signature on it. So they were pretty right there. Of course Hitler started believing in the stars and astrology and that’s why one of the reasons given that he attacked Britain when he had every chance of crossing the channel, British armaments weren’t.

07:00 Subsequently of course the United States was a huge industrial potential, really came to force and really dominated D-Day and everybody was in D-Day and they were all at Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. There was a representative on the plane.

Were you hoping to get involved in the war when it broke out?

07:30 No, I wasn’t. I think my mother, like all mothers would have been, she was against war of course, and Dad was, and she was outspoken, she had seen this plane flying around, and it created an idea in my mind that aviation was dangerous, which it was, even flying in the Dakotas. The weather

08:00 in those days, in 1945, when I flew in them. Was a serious worry. You could take from Morotai and fly coming back to Darwin and you get weather forecasts, but halfway you meet a cold front, and very rough conditions indeed and

08:30 no sight of land, getting a fix anywhere, a visual sight. I mentioned earlier that Dakota where a couple of my school friends died, it just disappeared, I think it was between Ambon and Darwin. 19th December 1945.

We’ll talk more about that

09:00 later on?

But that was the impression we got, that there was going to be something, it was inevitable, that things in Europe were boiling over and Hitler had the annexation of Austria had already occurred, it all pointed to another stoush as old Tom said.

What was

09:30 it like when Japan entered the war, what were your memories of that time?

I was at high school then in Roma, and well there was the conquest of Malaya, and then Singapore and we were pretty closely involved. I had a cousin in Changi, he spent a large part of the war in Changi, oddly enough

10:00 I had a cousin in the Red Berets, paratroopers. And of course I was in 38 Squadron, Transport Squadron and Bill Byers is my cousin in Sydney, he is still there sort of thing. He said to me not so long ago, “Were you in that business of

10:30 supply dropping and maybe rescuing POWs?” It didn’t come to that, we brought them back, but after the war finished. He said “Oh, I was up there, I flew in that plane, it was my first plane.” I have got the call sign there somewhere, and I have got a photograph of it. My first plane I flew in we had the big double doors

11:00 off, and Bill said to me, a few weeks ago I was talking to him. He said, “I was a jump master.” That means he was a sergeant and he told the boys when to start to jump and he went out last.

What more did you know about the cousin in Changi, did you know at the time that he was there?

No, not very much, we never got very much

11:30 information from the Japanese as to where POWs were or casualties or anything. They didn’t work with the Red Cross like the Germans or Italians did, or I don’t know about Russia, I don’t think they worried too much about the Red Cross either, that was a 12:00 horrendous thing. But they I think Red Cross parcels might have got through. Just some parcels may have got through and mail would have been the same. I don’t really know, I think you would have to ask a POW, and I guess you’ve got one there somewhere.

12:30 How did you know he was in Changi?

I don’t think we really found out until after the war finished, when he was brought back. And he’s still in Sydney, lives in Sydney I believe. I have never met him. I might have his name somewhere. Vince Garrett is his name.

So did you just know

13:00 that he was missing or what did you know had happened to him?

No, we didn’t have that much contact with that family. When I was training in Canberra, I had technical training in Canberra and in Melbourne at No. 1 Engineering School. That was on Ascotvale on the Racecourse, and they had all the planes there that were in existence, but no I don’t

13:30 believe that I knew. We knew certain ones in the Roma District were missing, and presumed dead, later on we found that one of our near neighbours had a son, he was missing in Malaya and the story then was that he was never

14:00 found and that sort of thing, but when you look at a fairly recent year production of a POW list, at Changi, his name appears on it as a POW. I often wonder whether the family know that. The survivors of that family, I have spoken to some of them recently. Whether they know that.

14:30 How did these people missing in your community affect yourself?

It had affect on our family, when Bill Gagen returning on the 19th December 1945, it’s on the net, of course, on the Second World War

15:00 [nominal] roll site, and that’s where I get a lot of my information about dates and things. And that had a big affect because he went to the school that I went to, De La Salle Brothers School. He was in the grade ahead of me, we were

15:30 in the same room. The Brother talked to three grades all in one room. That’s how things were in those days, with a shortage of teachers and things. And when Bill went missing, and of course, and when you crashed at sea, out in the middle of the Arafura Sea somewhere, they say they were not far from Darwin, but that had a big affect on me

16:00 and there was another sergeant who was killed in Europe or went missing in the Channel, that was Sergeant David Badgery, and he was just missing, and of course that went around the town in a flash, that he was missing, because

16:30 his parents were fairly prominent people. His brother was in the same school, same class in high school in Roma as I was, Bob, and David went missing, presumed dead. That was a big blow. And of course this was the tragedy of war.

17:00 And the mothers of course were the ones who worried. Even though I didn’t ever had a shot fired in anger, I accidentally had a shot fired at me, but that was in training, that was an accident, but fortunately the chap missed. We were on an assault

17:30 course and we had to go through all this bush and there was machine gun fire just over our heads and they were small charges placed on the ground and they used to set these charges off when you were at a certain distance away from them, there was a fellow controlling, and the thing was you loaded in the 303

18:00 rifle you had about five or half a dozen bullets fitted in the magazine. This chap was a trainee cook, and he was terrible on the parade ground and he didn’t know his right foot from his left, and he was always getting bawled out by the drill sergeant, so he got on this assault course, and they didn’t supervise the loading of his rifle. Now,

18:30 the first bullets that came out of the rifle should have been blanks, another fired at a sand bag which is strung up for bayonet practice, and you had to approach this and push the bayonet, I didn’t like that, I didn’t like the bayonet, I am never going to stick that into anybody, horrible thing. Anyhow

19:00 Cookie loaded his rifle, but nobody checked it. It was a serious blue really, and he loaded them around the wrong way. So and of course he fired all these bullets at the sand bags and we had gone past the sand bags by the time he came along. He fired at the sand bag and probably missed them. It would have been highly likely that I would have been

19:30 hit. So by the time he got to the range and the sergeant down on the range started to look for him, it was a 25 metre range, short range, you couldn’t miss the target and poor old Cookie, he fired at the target, and there was no sign of a bullet hitting the target. He fired the blanks at the target, 20:00 because it was loaded around the wrong way. That was a very nasty thing when you come to look back on it. Firing the real bullets amongst his cobbers and he gets to the range and he got no result because they were blanks.

How big affect does it have when these soldiers are missing on the community itself?

20:30 Ah, the affect on the community was usually they blamed the government for conscription and there was conscription in the Second World War in fact there was hijacking of men you know for the Battle of Milne Bay, they were just 16, 17 year olds were just pushed on to the boat, went on screaming.

21:00 But they had to be because the Japanese were coming, there was nobody to stoop them. This is all recorded in the book called ‘The Boys Never Grew Up’ because they were killed at Milne Bay.

They just pushed them on the boat?

That’s the story and it’s pretty well recorded in that book. But

21:30 I remember reading it they were shanghaied or whatever you like to call it, but those sorts of things must have got around in the community. Even though the Japanese were coming, it was well demonstrated, when I was at high school, the last year, the head master tried to form a cadet group, and I would

22:00 have loved to have been in that, but the Parents & Friends Association objected to it, they didn’t want to see their sons in the cadets. So he abided by what they P&F said. So that was fairly indicative of what the thoughts of

22:30 people were. Invasion was, you know they were coming. And not to train people, I think they might have been looking back, they heard about the First World War, and some of the German soldiers that fought against at Hamel, were only kids, and they realised when they attacked they had a core

23:00 of officers who were virtually kids. They hadn’t grown up. I think that would have come to the horrors of war, people didn’t want to see their sons go and join up and perhaps, my mother was terribly worried.

23:30 Even after the atomic bomb business was dropped, they would have been pleased, not the fact that the bomb was dropped, but nobody knew very much about atomic energy at all then, because they thought it was another more powerful bomb, but as we know it was quite a different thing. Different effects. And

24:00 she would have been pleased, and Dad would have been quietly pleased too. There was delay in being discharged because of this airline to Japan thing. I volunteered to go to Morotai, I did this voluntarily. A lot of what I did in the air force was done voluntarily.

Before we get to that, we’ll definitely be covering it in more detail, this is

24:30 excellent. You said before the guy was trying to get the cadets started and you would have loved to have joined up, why would you have loved to have joined up?

It wasn’t because, I wouldn’t have been thinking of the defence type of thing, I have certainly used a gun before, as quite a young, I was taught by my father to

25:00 use a rifle, but not a shot gun, he would never a shot gun, he wouldn’t let me use a shot gun, he had an arsenal at home. He had all sorts of rifles, except 303s and of course they were short. We had probably had to train with sticks or rakes, like they did in England. This ideas was F J McGrath, was the head teacher’s name and he

25:30 that was the problem. We were starting to get stories back from Kokoda Trail, they were pretty grim stories, nobody would want their sons to become involved in.

So you were hearing the true stories of what was happening?

We were hearing them, because remember the chaps from the Kokoda Trail,

26:00 that must have been a tremendous thing, we were hearing this thing, because they were coming back on leave. And they wouldn’t have told us half of what we heard, but they came back and Queensland wasn’t far from New Guinea. The Battle of the Coral Sea wasn’t far away. We knew it was on

26:30 we got that much information, but that would have been, and always was a problem with war. I think its Rupert Murdoch’s grandfather who was a reporter, a journalist at Gallipoli, his letters were censored and he told the truth about Gallipoli. But they were all censored.

27:00 Everything was censored in those days, even telephone calls were censored. They censored, but he sneaked a letter back, I think it was to Billy Hughes, or could have been Andrew Fisher, sorry, no it would have been the Prime Minister of Australia, anyway, it got there and I am

27:30 talking about the First World War, I am sorry, I am getting mixed up, probably Billy Hughes. Anyway, when they saw this, they were Imperialists you know, some of these Prime Ministers. Andrew Fisher wouldn’t have been, he was a Labour Prime Minster during the war, part of the war. I am not sure of the sequence of this, but anyway, this guy Murdoch, his letter got through,

28:00 he got it through, I am not quite sure, it was quite cleverly done. But when the Prime Minister of Australia saw it, he was horrified of what was going on. In other words they were telling lies, or they just didn’t tell us.

Was that the same case in World War II?

It wasn’t much, World War II was a bit different

28:30 I think we knew the seriousness of the Kokoda Trail Battle and Milne Bay. Those stories got back. When I first joined the air force I met a chap, he was in the mechanical side, I think he was a Fitter 2E and he had been in the Battle of Milne Bay.

29:00 He said, yes, it was pretty rough. They evacuated all the air craft, we only had to deal with these Kittyhawks. Kittyhawk was the one the aircraft took all the battles of Australia really. The Spitfires were

29:30 late coming out. They should have been early but the Kittyhawk was inferior to the Japanese Zero. But Australian pilots learned to use them, and this old guy told me, he was a mechanic, and he was servicing these Kittyhawks at Milne Bay, and they had a couplet of very prominent

30:00 fighter pilots. And said that in the Battle of Milne Bay, the undercarriage of the Kittyhawks when they took off, were still down when they started firing them at the enemy, well some distance out to the end of the strip. And that was a problem when the Kittyhawks were taking off

30:30 and you fired all the guns at once, there was a bit of a reaction, and the pilots, I don’t know whether this was a bit of an exaggeration or not, but they reckon that they might stall them, but that was actual, he saw that happen, he saw the undercarriage coming up and the guns started firing. All they did, they went straight around, exhausted their ammunition and landed it. And took another lot on, and did that

31:00 all day long.

Did you see diggers returning before you joined up?

Yes.

What were those experiences like?

Some of them were a little bit reticent about telling their story. Might have been a little too horrifying, remember that a lot of our men were at El Alamein and Tobruk. And they were brought back there

31:30 from there. Prime Minister Curtin insisted that they come back. And they even had a confrontation with Churchill, while they were on the water because Churchill wanted them to go to Burma. And Curtin found out they were going to Burma, and he protested very

32:00 loudly, and he was taking on a big buy in Churchill, and Churchill was forced by reason to allow them to come back, because Curtin said, quite clearly, “We need them, we need our boys back to defend the country.” That was absolutely true as it turned out.

How did these diggers

32:30 returning look to yourself, did they seem changed people, what was your perception of them?

A lot of them returned after I joined up and I didn’t actually see a lot of them returning.

Before you joined up, what were your experiences?

Oh well the Kokoda Trail

33:00 was the one, the one described to me, all in my hearing, how the Japanese were how they had snipers up in the trees, and a sniper’s life was like a Spitfire pilot’s life, a very short one. And then they would be shot, and this chap came back and he said, you know when you shoot

33:30 the goanna up in the tree, how it hangs over the branch, he said I have seen the Japanese snipers hanging over the branch right up in the trees. That’s pretty horrifying isn’t it? But that was the story he told us, he said they looked like big goannas and that was common in western Queensland during a goanna plague, you would shoot them

34:30 and very often they would be up in the tree of something, they didn’t climb trees very much, but if they were chased they would, and then they would just hang.

When did you make the decision to join up yourself?

Well I was in the Air Training Corps at that stage and there was a lot of propaganda about, the usual story, the army does it to a certain extent now, they have ads [advertisements] on the air force and the army, and they have ads on TV [television], and the exciting thing you don’t have to kill anybody really, but you gotta be there, but you have got to have defence forces there. I think it was a little bit like 35:00 that. Perhaps a bit more serious, a bit sharper. Well I say propaganda.

What were your personal reasons for making that decision?

I was interested in aircraft. The technical aspects of it. I would have liked to have been a pilot, but

35:30 I would have had to get my parents consent because I was under 21. I think that was the story. I could have left, it was a peculiar situation. I could have joined aircrew and not have that restriction, it’s in a letter I have there, which you possibly will see later. If I had have joined aircrew I would have

36:00 countermanded all that reserved occupation business. That’s clearly stated in the letter. But then I had to get my parents consent because I wasn’t 21. I think 21 was the age, it was certainly more than 18, and had I been over 21 I could have just walked up

36:30 and joined up. And the man in the office, Cyrus Stinson, and he was a powerful man in the community, in Roma, he wasn’t liked, because he was like a very strong administrator. I don’t know whether his name suggests anything or not, I think

37:00 he probably came from the CPS [?] office, which is right but he came from somewhere else. I am sure he came from somewhere else, and he was a stranger in the town and may have been done deliberately. Because the manpower officer wasn’t very popular because he told people they had to join up or they couldn’t join

37:30 up. So you get a tense situation, there was a strain in the community, and it was all centred on the one man. That was my perception of it. That he was a big wheel.

What did you think about the manpower situation?

The manpower situation was pretty desperate, really. If you left the farm or

38:00 the grazing property that my father had, if you call it a farm, he always said he was a farmer not a grazier. That’s all changed now. All farmers now aren’t they. Doesn’t matter. So anyhow that was the situation, terrible tension in the community over this aspect. The manpower was desperate, if you joined

38:30 up, I did terrible things, when you look back on it to my father. He was an old ex-world war man, had a pretty horrid time. First of all he came back in 1919 and he was late coming back, he was in France, they billeted in France and Belgium for years. And then they came back.

39:00 When they came back they had a big drought on the land, around about 1920, the soldier settlers were given blocks of land and there was a big drought on in the Mallee. And that wasn’t a good combination, and they walked off it. A few of them stayed, they battled it out. But it was too much for some of them.

39:30 So it was all this sort of thing in the background, they carried this baggage with them, you know, it wasn’t that long between wars, 25 years I think. And it was back on again. The composition, we had about seven million people, it might have been less

40:00 during World War II. And that was a lot of our men were overseas, they were in Bomber Command, they were even Coastal Command some of them, and they were El Alamein, Crete and Tobruk. So, it was all this

40:30 demand and they were all away, there were no young people around much, except the ones that worked on the property, or in other reserved occupations. They were reserved occupations, the PMG, like Postmasters, they couldn’t join up, they were in reserved occupation.

40:56 End of tape

Tape 4

00:31 Can you please tell us what you were doing the day war was declared against Germany?

I was at school, and that would have been the day I described earlier when Dad and one of his friends were discussing Hitler and Stalin. It would have been

01:00 probably about the time war started. I would have been at school, war started on 14th August, I think I am not sure, so I would have been at school. School at Bymount was called Bymount Waldrona

01:30 because it was on a property owned by a grazier named Waldron, and he called his property Waldrona and the school became known as Bymount Waldrona in brackets. And that’s where the new start – it was a far away happening, we

02:00 heard about it rather quickly. I described earlier the discussion about Hitler and Stalin.

Your dad how did he react towards it? I think he would have been sorry it started. And he certainly wouldn’t have been in favour of

02:30 it, but his companion didn’t seem to be, he thought I suppose it would be different, it’s going to be different for a few months, how long the war is going to last, for a few months. Again we were given the impression it wouldn’t last long, but they weren’t;’ so sure about predicting the duration.

03:00 And I would think that his friend would have been pleased to hear a bit of exciting news and he should have known better, after all he was at Gallipoli.

Your father was at Gallipoli?

No my father wasn’t.

He wasn’t?

The 15th Battalion first AIF [Australian Imperial Force]

03:30 of which he was a member was at Gallipoli, and it had a notable record there. But he joined it as the 24th Reinforcement. As you can imagine, and it was always in the thick of it. They tended to always call on the 15th if there was a hard job to be done. This happened at Hamel when

04:00 I think it directly opposed and called the Pear Trench. It was a German trench, which was pear shaped and went right round and was all connected I believe, and they were very close to opposing it. Dad wouldn’t have been keen when another war

04:30 started.

How did you view it?

I tended to view it as an experience which my father had and all these fellows did, and might have looked on it as though they were in some very rough situations, and that’s putting it very mildly, it was still an adventure for them.

05:00 It would still have been an adventure. See people do things, they climb Mt Everest, and it’s a dangerous thing to do, but they sort of have to do it, for adventure and I suppose war would be something like that.

05:30 So you were looking for a similar sort of purpose?

Purpose for?

Adventure?

Yeah, but it’s not a purpose for war though, it’s not a reason to go to war.

Can you tell us what your reasons were?

Reasons why, I was interested in aeroplanes. I was very interested in

06:00 aeroplanes, and technical things, and later scientific things. These seemed to go at the time, the technology of the aeroplane and how it flew, and the engines and that were of great interest to me, and consequently I went into that sort of field.

Tell us about your friends did they feel similarly inclined

06:30 towards the forces, or more specifically the air force?

Well some of my friends thought the air force was boring, particularly ground staff and when war finished I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as I joined up for the duration of the war and twelve months after my papers show where I have signed

07:00 up. I still imagined that I would be in there for a while afterwards. Whenever that was, because we had no idea when the war was going to finish. The Japanese were defeated, well they weren’t defeated at the Coral Sea, which wasn’t far from our place when you look at it. A lot of the action from the Coral Sea took place from Townsville. American aircraft flew out from Townsville

07:30 looking for, and of course they came back and I think you will find there are twenty five sites which have just been preserved where the planes crashed into the hills near Townsville. If you go to Townsville I think, if I remember rightly, I went there recently, and this is mentioned. So that

08:00 we weren’t far from the Japanese, they always think that nobody won the Battle of the Coral Sea, but the Japanese lost because they had to regroup to fight the Battle of Midway. One of the very decisive battles of the war in the Pacific. That was

08:30 entirely fought by American forces. Don’t think there was a representative of any other allied nation there. It was purely between the Japanese and the Americans. The Japanese had great odds stacked against them. Sorry, the Americans had great odds stacked against them. It was just one of the admirals who was a 09:00 rear admiral or something like that, Fletcher, he was the one that made a vital decision and he ordered one of the aircraft carriers, one of the Japanese aircraft carriers, to attack in large great strength, you may have heard this before. They sunk ship and the planes were still returning

09:30 because they had nowhere to land.

We are probably skipping ahead of ourselves. We’ll try and keep the experiences more towards your own. What I would like to ask, did the air force have any social attraction, was there a lot of approval for the air force. Because I know they were called blue or purple orchids or something?

Blue Orchids.

Blue Orchids, that’s right. And

10:00 we were called Curtin’s Cowboys too. But that was a blind, because Curtin’s Cowboys were really the cavalry unit which operated in the Northern Territory and Gulf of Carpentaria, to pick up the Japanese when they landed. To just send back a message to say they had landed, where and when. There was a bit of an attraction

10:30 to wearing a uniform, which goes for all services. The uniform even today, the uniform there’s a bit of an attraction for men and women to wear a uniform, and if you were wearing a uniform you were, well most people looked on you as a bit of a hero I suppose, because you decided to join

11:00 up. Even though you might have been conscripted. But then you look at what conscripts did, they were absolutely marvellous what they did in New Guinea, but people would tend to see you quite clearly if you are in the air force uniform, and there was a certain pride in wearing it.

11:30 Sort of an attraction to wearing it. Then there was the adventure thing, flying aircraft. Even though I joined the ground staff, it wasn’t long before I was flying on test flights.

Is it true that the air force actually had the smartest uniform, is that the way some of the people looked at it, especially girls?

12:00 Oh could have been, for some girls. The navy was a very distinctive uniform. The infantry man who wore a slouch hat, we all wore slouch hats at some stage as you saw in the photographs, but that in itself was

12:30 a pretty important symbol of the Australian digger, the slouch hat. You know I was told that I had my hat on the wrong way on many occasions, and as I said there were about a hundred ways of wearing a slouch hat. Only one was correct.

13:00 My father is a good example of that, and I am not biased, honestly, I think the photographs of him there in 1918, he’s sitting behind the lieutenant of the platoon, it’s a platoon sized group, and the lieutenant has got his hat cocked back, and the other guys of course they gathered these fellows up from the pubs and other places

13:30 of less repute, possibly for that photograph, because some of them they are really starry eyed looking, a wild looking bunch. If you look at them closely and the way they are wearing their hats, it is unbelievable.

In the air force cadets, can you tell us what they taught you there?

Principally morse code.

This is in 1942

14:00 when you first joined up?

Yeah, morse code. They sent me all the literature for morse code. I had no one to send messages to, so I rigged up an arrangement at home, which was actually a few odds and ends I rigged up what was actually a radio transmitter

14:30 I suppose I can say that now. But that was highly illegal to have a radio transmitter. But it probably only transmitted for a few yards, because there was no antenna on it. I did that to get some sort of feed back from my keying of using a key. Incidentally, I didn’t have a key I had to make one. So that

15:00 was interesting. So how far that arrangement transmitted from one house to the other, because I had the old radio receiver on and it gave a big burst through there, shot gun affair.

How did you manage to get out of the Reserved Occupation?

Well, I have the letters

15:30 there which are from the air force, saying that I couldn’t join up, they couldn’t send papers to me, and also the manpower officer saying no. Then when I applied again, I knew that Dad was going to write and give me permission to leave his grazing property. 16:00 Which is a very sad thing when I look back on it. It is something I should have never done. But he said to Mum at that stage, “Look he wants to do it”, and I think he said, “I am not going to advise him either way.” Bit different from some fathers. You know they more or less push you into something. They were

16:30 pretty tough old blokes. But he said that, and Mum said “I don’t like him flying in aeroplanes.” So I couldn’t join aircrew, so they settled it, it was a compromise, because I joined the ground staff. But of course, it wasn’t long before I got into an operational squadron or unit before I was up flying on test flights.

17:00 Going as a supernumerary on test flights, going as ballast. Funny term to use, but these test flights they are quite exciting ones.

When did you first get accepted into the air force after the cadets?

I think it was the 24th August 1944. And I travelled

17:30 to Creek Street, where the office was of the air force, the Recruitment Office. My father went in with me, travelled all the way by train, one day and part of the night. The next day we went to the Recruitment Depot. And that’s where I went, and I had to fill in all these

18:00 papers. He gave his name as next of kin.

What sort of questions did they ask at the Recruitment Depot?

They, one of the Recruitment Officers, “You shouldn’t be leaving your father there.” They did try to get me to go back home.

18:30 Because they knew it was a Reserved Occupation and he was on his own in running the property. Later my sisters helped, but that would have been towards the end of my service with the RAAF. Then I went for preliminary training which was carried out at Sandgate.

19:00 A couple of experiences there. We were in the drill squad, it was called a Flight with about thirty three men in it. Whatever. We formed up in threes. I think it was thirty three, it must have been eleven rows. And that was quite exciting

19:30 in a way, I didn’t mind it, because I had used a rifle in the bush before. But it wasn’t the Enfield 303, quite a difference, quite a heavy beast of a thing to lug around, particularly when the bayonets were on them, it got heavy to march, and we did these route marches. Very often without the rifle. Towards the end

20:00 they tried to toughen us up a bit. And, we went on bivouac and that’s where we had the experience of loading the rifle incorrectly, and some of our lives were put in danger because the blanks which should have been fired first in amongst us, were loaded so that they were fired last, and the guy who, one

20:30 rifle was loaded that way. And when we got to the range of course this fellow fired at the target and didn’t make any impression on them and that caused a stir, and they discovered he was firing blanks. Very dangerous. Still, that’s one time. Then we had to go on this grenade throwing exercise.

21:00 We got down in this stony pit, and I didn’t like that much either. Because you had seven seconds after you released the pin, to throw it. You couldn’t afford to drop it. There were stories, the sergeant was very alert, and had dropped one, one day with the pin out and picked it up and threw it out quickly. But they are stories. So we were down in this pit, throwing

21:30 these grenades as far as you cold throw them, they went over this bank of stones and things. One of the chaps threw a grenade and the fellow next to him and he clutched his head, he had blood on his forehead, and it was Garth Fore, I think that was his name, and he

22:00 he was knocked out by this thing. And apparently it was a chip of rock that flew right back and hit him, it was just like winning Tatts backwards, a hundred million to one of ricocheting back like that.

Where was this training done?

It was done at Redcliffe in Brisbane.

22:30 Course there and it consisted of an obstacle course. You had to crawl under things over barbwire and then you go down and you do what they call a parachute jump. The only trouble with the parachute jump, you didn’t have a parachute on. You had to jump from twelve or thirteen feet

23:00 off the stage on to the ground. I didn’t like that. I thought that was just a bit too far. And it was said that if you didn’t land the right way and do a summersault at the end, it was about the equivalent of the rate at which you hit the ground if you had one of those old parachutes one. You could break a leg quite easily,

23:30 if you didn’t do the somersault at the end. There was a little bit of sawdust on the ground, but only a little bit. I would have liked a few bags of sawdust on the ground before I jumped out, but I did that anyway. There was another thing, you had to climb a tree up to a stage and then jump out and catch a rope that was hanging about four or five feet out. That was a scary thing.

24:00 You couldn’t afford to miss the rope. But nobody ever did. Then you came down the rope, the normal way you come down a rope. That was there. They issued me with a 303 rifle. And I went down on the target practice one day, and I came back. I fired a few shots, and this thing had a kick on it like a

24:30 mule and so I complained to the sergeant, and of course they were pretty tough guys, and he said “You are not holding the gun the right way.” He said, “Look, I’ll show you.” He didn’t fire a shot. I thought if he fires a shot he’ll find out something. He didn’t find a shot typically, never tried them out themselves, they always gave somebody else

25:00 that. He was an ex army sergeant, seconded to the air force to do training. So the next day I go down again, and by this time my shoulder is pretty sore anyway, I started firing again, I said I can’t fire this thing. He said take it back to the armoury, go back to the armoury and

25:30 take it in and give it to the armourer to see whether there is anything wrong with it. The armourer took one look at it and said, “Oh it’s got a bent barrel.” That was causing it to kick back. He said “It’s terribly bent I can tell.” We looked at the date on it and I am pretty sure

26:00 that it was 1908. That was when it was manufactured. It had been fired that many times the barrel got hot and it bent and it would have been handy in street fighting, you could have fired around corners, I think. Anyway I got another rifle. We did all that, I passed that and then I went to do some guard

26:30 duty and a Pinkenba, which was for a couple of weeks while they were working out what they were going to do with us I suppose. This was the problem with the air force, there were gaps when you didn’t seem to know where you were and where you were going. I think it mightn’t have applied so much to the navy, but you had all this, and when you got to a place

27:00 they’d say you report to hut number. so and so and you go there and they don’t want to see you. And they say no you gotta got to… so you spend half the day wandering around looking for the correct place to go, this was typical. I suppose they were dealing with so many personnel so many people, to organise them properly was almost nearly impossible.

27:30 And of course you had the individual characters, who might even wander off for an hour or so and get lost, we had all these problems. I remember once I went from there after I did the training, the army training, we were sent to a technical

28:00 college in Canberra, Kingston, we were camped on the new oval, and there we had our basic training. How to make a spanner and these things, very basic type how to use a drill and all that. Showed you how to

28:30 use a hammer, it was a strange thing about hammers, an engineer’s hammer is fairly, you can make quite a mark on a bit of metal with it, it doesn’t matter how hard it is. And when I got into 38 Squadron we had a tool kit, and one of the

29:00 rules said the only hammer you could have was a rubber mallet. But we all had an engineer’s hammer. That was the rule because aviation had to treat them kindly and banging them with a hammer wasn’t an option. We still all had a hammer.

When you were in Brisbane at Redcliffe, at that stage there would have been a lot of Americans there?

29:30 Oh yes, even after I joined 38 Squadron there were Americans at Eagle Farm, that’s Brisbane Airport now. They had over the war years, they had aircraft were taking off on exercises and those American planes

30:00 like Tom Cats and all those, they were training pilots there, and it went all day long, taking off and landing. All sorts of aircraft, mainly they were all American aircraft there because they had that base. The stories told there about the Kittyhawks

30:30 which were very much like the Hurricane took the brunt in the Battle of Britain in the early stages. The Kittyhawk took the brunt of the attack on Australia, for a long time, perhaps longer before the Lightning came out, which was a twin boom aircraft

31:00 made by the Lockheed company in America. And when that came out, that meant that they had something that was always claimed as not as good as the Spitfire. We had a guy, he was Blackjack Walker, Brian Walker I think his name was, he was the head of the Spitfire Squadron in the end. In Brisbane. And

31:30 at Amberley. So when the Americans came, they had this new flash aircraft, they used to ring him up and say you got any guys who can fly aeroplanes, you know sort of thing, they were a bit like that. Blackjack Walker, said “I’ll take on anything you have got there.” He used to go out in mock dogfights. 32:00 They took these dogfights over the western suburbs of Brisbane. And I heard various stories, and you could see a Spitfire chasing a Lightning way up in the sky, and then all would go quiet and the next minute they were chasing one another. After a while, the story got around, Blackjack Walker, I think

32:30 that was the man, he was pretty good, and he had a pretty good machine. You heard these funny rumours that the armourers, you know, that looked after his Spitfire, always made sure the guns were unloaded. He might be tempted to pull the trigger. They were wild men, they were really adventurous men. And then

33:00 of course these calls from Eagle Farm when they found out how good he was, tended to die off. He’d have to go hunting mock dogfight opponents elsewhere. Good story isn’t it. I suppose half of it was true.

Did you have much interaction with the Americans

33:30 in Brisbane?

Not much at all. I didn’t actually, but the place was certainly full of Americans. That was back when I was at High School in Brisbane, it would be more like 1943, 1942. Be 1942 and it was absolutely full

34:00 of servicemen of all kinds. All different nations there. Even saw French Naval Ratings, walking down Queen Street.

In Brisbane?

But the American uniform of course was well done, it was in contrast to they were

34:30 paid more. It was the exact opposite to what happened in the First World War. Most historians agree that the Australians in the First World War were the highest paid soldiers. But when the Americans came to Australia, they certainly got a very much higher pay. And this was a bone of

35:00 contention. The problem caused a lot of strife, particularly with girls, they saw this nice shiny uniform and these guys had all the money, they spent pretty lavishly. You know. A lot of trouble was caused by that jealousy.

You would have heard about the

35:30 riots that took place in Brisbane surely?

Oh yeah, the Battle of Queen Street.

Tell me about that?

Well I heard about it. You have no doubt heard about it from other people who were there.

You weren’t there?

No. It was a couple of days I think.

The fights you have seen with Americans?

I didn’t see any myself.

36:00 They were pretty generous as far as the equipment goes, you could borrow tools from them. There were a lot of specialised tools used in aviation. We didn’t have very much equipment really, until the end of the war, and the surplus was lying everywhere. They were very generous

36:30 in the supply of aircraft. When our CO [Commanding Officer] in 1943, I think it was John Bell, he eventually became the CO in 1946, of 38 Squadron, and the story goes, he went over to Townsville to get two aircraft and

37:00 they could both fly Dakotas. They were qualified to fly. He went over and he had to go to this logistics fellow to get these two aircraft, and he and his cobber went over and got whatever they are the logistics fellows, handing out the aircraft virtually

37:30 and this American bloke said “You come over for those planes?” John Bell apparently said, “Yes we’ve come over for two of them, he’s going to fly one back and I am going to fly the other one back.” He said two, and he walked to the door of his office and he pointed to the row of DC3,

38:00 row of Dakotas. He said guy, “Look, they are all yours.” So they had to go back and leave these aircraft, took two back presumably, and then they had to get in and train all their men how to fly Dakotas and they picked up in the end 16. But that was

38:30 what he said, you guys you can take that row. And they were right along about ten of them or something. So that was all the Lend Lease arrangements which were cut off very rapidly, almost instantaneously, at the end of the war. And then you couldn’t get anything, but there was plenty of stuff

39:00 around. I have wondered off the track. Yes tell us about that?

I went to Canberra Technical College and I did a basic technical training there

39:30 we camped on the oval. During that time I was ill for a fortnight. I got my medical records recently and apparently I had some disease they didn’t know exactly what it was, I got the medical records, very interesting. One day I have got a temperature of 103

40:00 fahrenheit, and the doctor I can still remember him, he was a very young doctor, an air force officer. He said “If your temperature is up and I am terribly worried about it.” He said “If it comes down quickly I can’t do anything for you.” But I have got the chart in there, and it came down slowly.

40:28

Tape 5

00:31 Yes, do you want to tell us about the training you had specifically in Canberra?

We had this basic engineering training using basic tools and that sort of thing. They even taught me the correct way to use a spanner. And

01:00 had an old Scotsman he was our tutor or lecturer, and he worked in the shipyards on the Clyde and he spoke with a very heavy Scottish accent, but he was great, he taught us those basics. You had to behave yourself while you were being taught. Word was law. Then we had to have a

01:30 make a nomination before the exam, we had an exam of what we wanted to do. I nominated radio mechanic because I was interested in going into radio, like to going into TV now. Interested in the mechanics of the radio and how it worked and everything. So I put that as my first choice, the second

02:00 I put as an electrician. They had all these different trades. And then I put down flight mechanic and so forth. We had to nominate about three or four areas you could go into. So I put down for radio but I didn’t do

02:30 as well as I should in the exam, and they gave me a flight mechanic, which I was very disappointed about. Somebody said to me, one of my mates said, “Don’t worry, I am going as a flight mechanic, we’ll be right.” So, I got over that in a day or two, the disappointment. I really wanted to go into radio.

So when

03:00 he said let’s work it out, what did you think?

In the end I still would have loved even today to have got the radio thing. But I wouldn’t have had the adventure. The radio fellas were based, we did have a radio chap at Morotai.

03:30 One chap amongst a heap of others. Radios tended to be fixed up back at base. So I wouldn’t have had the adventure. So I went into flight mechanics training course in Melbourne, at No. 1 Engineering School, which was on the Ascot vale Racecourse. I think the racecourse

04:00 is still or they have built houses on it. And we were camped in the grounds between the track and the central part of the ground. In tents.

In Canberra?

No Melbourne. It was there for a time

04:30 my mate and myself had a tent, we shared a tent with this chap, and there was a lot of competition between us in getting good result sin the examinations. Oh I must say that’s where we saw all different types of aircraft, Tiger

05:00 Moths, Moth Minors, Vultee engines, Beaufighters and Beauforts, they were all lined around the racetrack, facing the race track. And we had to get practice in starting them, and I mean starting them by hand. These big 1500 horsepower right cyclone engine, you crank

05:30 them up with a double crank handle. On the Vultee engines. And you wound up the inertia starter which is a little wheel and that wound up to about 33,000 revs a minute. You could hear it screaming you got the note and you pulled the toggle and the whole thing meshed, just went together like that, and the engine was

06:00 stopped kick and a flutter and stop again. Try that about three times and finally you get it to fire. And on the Vultee, as soon as the motor fires a sheet of flames flew out of the exhaust pipe it was near the toggle, we pull the toggle you see, a big sheet of flame would fly out of it. It even backfired

06:30 sometimes, you would have to get the fire extinguisher and put them out. They were terrible. I think the one we had the motor had just about had it.

Vultee engines was quite an old aircraft?

Yeah it was. It’s a huge aircraft, a single motor aircraft. They were used for all sorts, they were dive bombers mainly. Lot of Australians flew them.

They were quite obsolete weren’t they?

They were. Yeah.

07:00 They threw in all sorts of obsolete aircraft, particularly at the start of the war with Japan. Americans, they even send, not War Hawks but the previous aircraft to the Kittyhawk. Made by Curtis, it was Curtis Aircraft Company made the Kittyhawk. The Tomahawk.

07:30 They were really obsolete when they arrived in Australia. But that’s all they had. Because of their isolations policy. Roosevelt was trying to get America into the war to help Britain.

Did Australians consider him a hero, like yourself?

Roosevelt. No, he was just somebody over there. But of course, MacArthur was the one who organised

08:00 the Philippines and he made that famous statement that he was going to return. Which he did in due course, but he left the Philippines and he came down to Queensland. He caught a train somewhere, and he came through Brisbane. This is pretty well documented. When he made a speech to the House of Representatives, Curtin

08:30 got him up and he made this speech, which is a very rare occasion for a foreigner to make a speech in Parliament like that. So anyhow he promised, but he had to convince Roosevelt. See the war in Europe was getting priority. We were just down here and we had to fight our own battles at that stage.

09:00 You can understand that Churchill and Roosevelt they wanted to beat Hitler. Naturally, that was their number one priority, and the Japanese were a little bit further away. And it took McArthur two weeks to get them to send equipment across the Pacific. And we

09:30 had all these problems with the white Australia policy and the negroes coming in.

Did you get in contact with any of the negroes?

No. But I saw hundreds of them in Brisbane. They were billeted in South Brisbane across the bridge.

They were segregated?

Yeah.

Did that surprise you?

10:00 I wasn’t happy about it, we would have liked to have seen the integration. I think it probably came from religious beliefs that everybody is equal. And which unfortunately the early imperialist in Australia tended

10:30 to look at black people as being inferior. I think that’s pretty right. That was according to the imperialist culture. I am using the word imperialist in a real sense not a derogatory sense, a…

Colonial way?

Yes. But there again, see the Americans they had segregation

11:00 as well. But they came out of that situation and it’s the different people. Different people had taken over Australia in the early days there would have been difference. The French explorers weren’t interested, they were interested in science. And they had a different to say our Tasmanian Aborigines.

11:30 Then of course once you take over somebody’s country and take their land off them, it’s a different situation.

Did you serve with any Aborigines?

Ah, there was one chap I think who was an Aborigine, a couple in our unit. But I am not sure. He certainly had aboriginal features, but had an aboriginal

12:00 fighter pilot, of course. He flew Mustangs, near the end of the war. He was a Warrant Officer. He did well.

That’s the Black Magic Pilot?

Yeah, you’ve heard about him? What was his name I keep forgetting it. He came from Cunnamulla or somewhere. He went back there. They called him Black Magic. 12:30 Not Reg Saunders is another guy, he was in the Korean war?

There were plenty of aborigines in the First World War, there was a whole battalion I think. From Roma.

How did you find the training at No. 1 Engineering School in Canberra?

We had a an English

13:00 chap, Group Captain Martin, who was head of the school, and he had been in the Guards, Scots Guards or Irish Guards or whatever. And he runs us like he runs a guard battalion. He was so strict that you wouldn’t believe it, that we had to leave our shoes. We wore boots in class and

13:30 in the instructional areas, working on the aircraft, they were very heavy, like army boots. We had you wouldn’t believe it, we had to put our shoes up, our good uniform shoes up. Against the kit bag for daily inspection like that. Oh well certain days, sorry. Certain days once a week there would be a

14:00 special inspection of your gear. After you left your hut or tent or whatever it is, and went off to classes they came round and inspected your gear. You had to polish the soles of your shoes. Another, I am sure, there will be other men you will interview, that was to an Australian

14:30 serviceman, absolutely right over the top.

Did you say this guy was from Britain? Which force was he from?

I think he was a Guards Commander or something. So they brought these people from all sorts of places. He ran it pretty well, considering there were hundreds of men there.

15:00 And women, some women. Some WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force]. I think we had one in our group. And trained us like mechanics. They didn’t usually go into operational areas.

The WAAFs?

No.

I understand quite a few chaps didn’t like women serving in the forces?

15:30 No. I don’t think I was over keen on it.

You weren’t either?

No. I don’t think so.

Why not?

I always thought they might have been officer’s friends or something like that. There was always this sort of girlfriend. Polite way of putting it.

They were officer’s girlfriends?

Yeah. Well this is the

16:00 thing we, this has come in later. We had women in crew. In our unit. Many RAAF sisters, and they had a rank Flight Lieutenant or whatever, and they were in charge of planes when the POWs were coming back, and they were in very poor health.

16:30 And we had them there in 38th Squadron, attached to our group. But we had to learn to start all these aircraft engines that I mentioned, and of course the Tiger Moth you had to swing the prop it had no self started. I didn’t like that much. The Beaufighter there, they were the easiest to start. And

17:00 they were sleeve valve engines, and they fired very often, when the engine started, you could see the prop going round faster they are a sleeve valve. Tappets in the car make quite a bit of a noise. But they didn’t have tappets.

Did you have any accidents in training?

No. I didn’t’ see any accidents.

17:30 The ground crew?

No. Had to be very careful to keep out of the way of propellers that may be rotating. Big danger when you have got a lot of aircraft running, say in the service operations place, there’s noise coming from everywhere. This was a danger when somebody might walk into a prop. Step back into one.

18:00 Then you have go to pick up the pieces.

That never happened?

Didn’t happen fortunately. That well known golfer, the guy who walked into a prop in Sydney, a few years ago, luckily it just caught his elbow. Prop caught his elbow. He didn’t step right into it, fortunately. He wasn’t

18:30 killed. That was the danger. But they are very strict, there are markings on the aircraft wing where you couldn’t walk past when the motor was running. All sorts of precautions. What did we do? There was a very notable thing that happened, one of the S’s we called it, and that was a Messerschmitt

19:00 109, real live one. Had been captured in the Middle East, probably El Alamein or in that area, and it was brought back to Australia, and it was in running condition. There was a sergeant there who used to start up this ME109 every morning. And it was in a sort of a wire cage.

19:30 And nobody was allowed to go in to look at even. He was the only one who worked on it. And the story that was around was what they were looking at, they were experimenting about the way the constant speed propeller was designed and how it operated and performed.

20:00 And that was what they were mainly doing. It had a big Mercedes Benz engine. Not a Mercedes a Daimler engine. Quite interesting. Very good engine. German technology was always good. You could have good technology, but the way you applied it was

20:30 you know, depended on Hitler and what he said went. All the mistakes he made.

So what was the remnant of your course in Ascot vale?

The end of it. We had the final exam. There was a story attached to the final exam, they had, I think it was four courses,

21:00 four flights were passing out at the same time. We due to conclude and what we called to pass out. I love that, the usual term pass out, but they finished the course, passed the exam, and so forth. They made an announcement before our final exam that they would take the person who got the highest marks in the course,

21:30 take him to coastal command in Britain. He would fly in Catalinas as an armourer air gunner. Of course the Catalina had the same motor as the Dakota. So everything was pointing toward getting experienced men and an armourer air gunner was to be an armourer

22:00 work on the guns and then fire them on the Catalinas. So anyhow I put my name down and I thought, I’ll have a go at this. I was doing fairly well. Trouble with doing fairly well, we put all our names down, and I got the top marks so it was I looked at my records it was 86.1

22:30 But another guy shared them with me, he got top marks too. And he was mentioned in dispatches. He had an MID [Mentioned in Dispatches]. And naturally they took him.

Later. This is before?

No. He should have had a medal but medals weren’t handed out to ground staff.

23:00 It was unfortunate, he did a very brave act. He saved people out of a burning aircraft up on the islands. So he went and nobody complained about that.

Did you know that once you had passed you would get into 38 Squadron?

No.

What were they telling you?

Don’t worry, you’ll go out on the station it was

23:30 called, 38 Squadron and you had to ah, you had to well we were flight mechanics, and I think I said “I wanted to go to Brisbane, because that’s where I came from.” I must tell you a story at Ascot vale though. When we were going on between my mate and myself and so forth. We got all this information

24:00 They were explaining how it works. We thought that the instructor’s manual was a little bit inadequate. So we went on the scout and we went to the La Trobe Library and we found a book on carburation. And it looked pretty good.

24:30 So we were in there and my mate said to me, “Oh gee, this is really what we want. Be great.” So, we connived and we were wearing overcoats, it was fairly cold. So we slipped this book under our overcoat, and the monitor in the library, she was a woman sitting up there very seriously looking like this, and when she looked that way, Barney put the book

25:00 under his overcoat and we went out. So we had it for about a week, and we got a bit of a pangs of conscience I suppose, and we thought we had better get this back. Look they probably would have lent it to us if we had’ve asked. But we didn’t, we smuggled it out underneath the great coat. So we were discussing we made notes we

25:30 studied it and all this sort of thing. He said “I think we ought to take it back.” I said “You’ll be right put it under your coat again.” He said “No fear I brought it out you can take it back again.” So I go in to the library with this thing tucked under my coat and watched the lady up in the dais. She was watching. She thought she saw

26:00 everything. As soon as she moved we slipped it out and just put it on the desk. But anyhow going from there, everybody was saying that once you get to a station you’ll have to go on parade once in a while, if you find a good daily parade you are supposed to have and if you find a good reason,

26:30 you can get out of a lot of things like that, guard duty. You could tell a decent sort of a story and you could probably get out of it. Discipline wasn’t anything like a training situation. So we went by train from Melbourne, by troop train to Brisbane. There were various instances on the trip. We had to change trains

27:00 it was disorganised. We spent something like half a day, on the platform at Spencer Street station waiting for orders to come. It was really amazing.

I can assure you the trains today are still bad.

Anyhow we got to Brisbane after a while. I had an experience on the troop train.

27:30 We were going to Taree in Northern New South Wales winding around the road, and it was late at night, and I was asleep in the corridor, these little boxes, and I was asleep. I felt this boot, we were going around the mountains, this train was going round, you know, a big drop down the side, anyway I am asleep and I felt a boot on

28:00 right in the middle. This guy was sleep walking, he was an army guy, he was sleep walking and he was half out of the window. So I grabbed him like that and pulled him back in. Never saw him again.

Did he jump off?

No. I stopped him. He was sleep walking.

28:30 So when we got to Brisbane, we arrived at South Brisbane Station, and…

Can I just pause you there. What did he say when he woke up?

He didn’t say very much at all, I was half asleep. I never found out who he was even. I might have saved his life I don’t know. He might have got a bit further out the window and woke up. Those sort of things stick. Those little incidents.

29:00 So we got to Brisbane and then we were taken out to 38 Squadron and we found that the discipline on the station as they were called, otherwise quite relaxed. Went on parade and some of the fellas used to answer for others and say Jack Brown,

29:30 and somebody in the back would say, “Yup.” Just like that. Jack Brown mightn’t have even been there. They used to do that. Of course that was done in lots of places. Call out, until your mate did something to you then you didn’t say anything. You know,

30:00 this happened in Canberra, when we were in training there. A fellow used to go out with his girlfriend. Somehow he used to get past the guard through a hole in the fence or something, and he used to come back at unusual hours. 2 o’clock in the morning he would be back in bed. So anyhow, and then once or twice he didn’t come back at all,

30:30 and what we did we stacked his bed underneath mine, or the fellow on the other side. Made out there was no bed there, put all his gear under the bed and pull the blankets over and when roll call came his name would be called out and someone would say, “Present.” And they’d go past. They didn’t count.

31:00 They should have known how many beds there were in there, they never counted them. So that went on for a couple of nights, until he pinched a pair of my socks. And he was the one who did it. Next time, we didn’t shift his bed. He got caught for going AWL [Absent Without Leave]. It was a way of punishing for that sort of thing. He was a thief.

31:30 That’s the way we didn’t report. So that was interesting.

This wasn’t a friendly gesture what he did?

No.

What sort of punishment would you get for AWL?

Oh, go out and have to run around the bull ring, or get confined to camp,

32:00 no leave that sort of thing. But as I say when we got to 38 Squadron it was quite different. They were very meticulous in the flying training. It had to be done precise, training pilots, conversion they convert from 2nd

32:30 pilot to captain, and all these conversion training, they used to go on flights, we would go on a courier flight from Archerfield say up to the island. The 2nd pilot would get training in flight sort of thing. It was very good. So that the experience at Archerfield

33:00 we had a fellow there who used to come back very late at night and he slept in when he should be out on parade, and we covered for him a few times. One day we woke him up, well he was hard to wake up you see, so two or three of us took him out and put him right in the middle of Beaudesert Road.

33:30 All the military training going in bed. That’s true. Of course he didn’t stay there long. Then there was another chap who used to come home late at night and we hung up a water trap, we had a bucket of water and we hung it up over the door, so when you opened the door the bucket tipped over him but we didn’t leave that there long

34:00 because the orderly officer had a tendency to come around with the sergeant, and on checking the huts at night. Didn’t like the idea of the orderly getting the bucket of water tipped over him. So we thought better of that idea. So we caught up with this fellow later. He was a very short thin

34:30 chappy, he was a little man. He went out one night, he used to get on the grog. So he comes back this morning and he said “I can’t find my false teeth.” You wouldn’t believe it, the first opportunity we all went out

35:00 looking for these false teeth. The Annerley Hotel. And we looked in the gutter, and there they were, he had been sick, and he lost them in the gutter. So he had to pick them up and wash them. Now that’s a rather dirty story isn’t it. Lots of things like that happened.

Tell us another one.

35:30 You must know a lot of stories?

Another one involved the CO. The CO had a Tiger Moth, a lot of the initial training had finished and these Tiger Moths were everywhere and he had it as his private aircraft. There was one of the fitter 2E that’s a stage up from flight mechanic,

36:00 he didn’t do much else except start it up every morning, to see if it ran well and so he started this Tiger, it was a little plane in the corner with all these C47s in there. So anyway Old Jack, I think his name was Jack. The CO said he had a cobber over at Amberley, I think it was Black Jack Walker, I am not sure,

36:30 but he had a cobber over at Amberley. So Old Jack used to sit on a box most of the day. Mind his favourite toy, anyway a message come down and I think the CO appeared. Jack was half asleep sitting on the box, and he said leading aircraftsman so and so,

37:00 spring to attention, he jumped up half asleep and stood to attention. “I want this aircraft out, I want my aircraft out and running, I want to fly over to Amberley.” So anyhow O.K. Jack got it all ready for him. He taxied out and he had about a mile to taxi before he got to the airstrip. Some bush

37:30 just a roadway, which we took all the Dakotas out from the hangar and they all had to do this taxi exercise to take off. So anyway, Jack gets the aircraft out and gets it started and the old man as he called him, and the old man was about 35. We called him the old man because he was the CO. So he gets out

38:00 takes off over to Amberley, in a Tiger Moth it would have been at the most quarter of an hour. Even ten minutes would have seen him at Amberley. Halfway over the motor stopped, he landed in this bush, he landed in this paddock. And then it was terribly embarrassing.

38:30 The CO was embarrassed over it, Jack was embarrassed. The motor had stopped and the old man had to make a landing amongst a lot of tree stumps and things. Did a good job of it. But it had to be brought back on the back of a track. You had to pull them backwards. Sometimes you see a car that’s been picked up by

39:00 something wrong with it and it’s been picked up by the tow truck, the front wheels are on the ground usually, this is how you used to tow Tiger Moths around, put the tail up on the back of the truck. But they took the wings off them. So here it comes along, and of course everybody knew, the Tiger had to be brought back.

39:30 They had a fair idea you couldn’t tow it along the road with the wings because of the traffic. They took the wings off, put them on the truck, and towed it wingless back to front. So it was most embarrassing for Jack and the CO, I think he disappeared somewhere. Someone said he went on a courier flight to Morotai. So he wouldn’t be around.

40:00 And all the way down Beaudesert Road, through the traffic comes the Tiger Moth on the back of a truck, with the wheels on the ground. And right around the back lane to the hangar, and of course there was a big cheer. I think Jack went to the toilet when it arrived, he was terribly embarrassed. That was just one thing that happened. Tape 6

00:32 So what position were you assigned to in 38 Squadron?

I was assigned to a particular group, I was taken down to the hangar which was some mile or so from the huts, I was taken down there with

01:00 about half a dozen others, and that was the group that travelled up from Melbourne, the troop train. We were picked up at South Brisbane station and taken out to Archerfield where the squadron was situation. When we got there we were pretty soon taken down to our place of work. What we called the hangar, it was a large

01:30 igloo hangar with offices tucked away in the corner. The hangar is still there. It was supposed to have a life of 25 years, well it’s gone well over fifty now and it’s getting on for sixty there, and it’s being used by a firm for storage. There are six of them altogether. We had the far one, the one next door was the

02:00 Royal Navy Fleet Arm. Later on we did often talk to the pilots about their experiences. Perhaps I could get back to that later. We were taken down to the hangar, we went to see the engineering officer, who was Flying Officer Gilkes was his

02:30 name, and he was a fairly quiet sort of a man, but he was a flying officer. A ground staff presumably, and he allotted me to a particular gang. We had a gang system where usually a corporal in charge, and he said “I have got a bit of a surprise.”

03:00 He said to me “O’Bryan you’ll be in Corporal Workman’s group.” Workman, never heard of a person named Workman. This guy might be pretty hard on his workman. So turned out he was a pretty firm

03:30 sort of a fellow. For a couple of weeks he followed me everywhere, and every nut or bolt I touched he put a spanner on it afterwards to make sure it was tight, which was reasonable I suppose. And if he found a loose nut, bang, you were really in trouble. When I first arrived, the first thing he said to me, he said, “Oh you are just out of training you young fellas.” This is the way they

04:00 treated us, Dad used to call them new chums and that came from the English chum. The English used to call them chums on the grazing property. But after a while that new chum meant anybody who was inexperienced. Whatever. He said you fellows are new chums,

04:30 you have to learn it will take you a while. He said would you be able to drain the filter on a Junkers 52. I said “Corporal that’s an enemy aircraft.” He was, “No we have got two of them in the RAAF.” And they had two for some years, they were

05:00 German Junkers 52, you know the Stalingrad relief of Stalingrad they tried to supply their troops when things were going bad. The three engine Junkers 52 was like the DC3, like the Dakota. It was if you have spoken to anybody who was at Crete, they were

05:30 the aircraft that the German paratroopers jumped from. They were Junkers 52.

How did they get a hold of them?

Well they were German owned, originally owned a part of New Guinea, or they had a sort of a mandate over which was taken over by Australia, I think it was

06:00 Papua, one area of New Guinea, I have forgotten exactly where it was. There was a lot of search, a lot of boring companies, a lot of mining companies and they were German and they brought the Jungers 52 out, as a civilian sort of plane. And of course these were confiscated as soon as the war broke out in 1939.

06:30 And apparently he worked on two of them. So that was a bit of a surprise. I have a photograph taken at Nuremburg last year of a real live Junkers 52. They call them Tanta-U, and Tanta in German is Aunty and they called it

07:00 Aunty-U because she was the old slow thing that flew very slowly and anybody who would fly these things would have to be a very brave person because an enemy fighter would catch up in the finish because they were slow and they called them Aunty-U. So I have the photograph taken

07:30 at Nuremburg last year, so that’s my latest photograph of aircraft. But he said this and I said “Oh no.” He explained. He was pretty hard anyway, been in New Guinea and up in the islands and he come back and having a bit of a rest I suppose. But I found out he was great, because he was strict, and he would

08:00 show you anything. His knowledge, in a gruff sort of a way, oh, do it this way. But it was good. Fair dinkum to us an Australian expression. That went on for a little while, and suddenly

08:30 we had a couple of chaps and look I can’t remember, there was an old chap, and he used to always go down to the Officers Mess. The reason he like playing a game called swy, I don’t know what swy is in modern terms 09:00 and blackjack and this sort of thing, you know these gambling games, card games. So this chap used to go down with all the officers and the CO and all that and play cards. He was a bit of a rarity but nobody else went down. He was the Fitter 2E, that was the step up from flight mechanic. In the engineering side. A flight rigger was a flight rigger

09:30 and a step up was a Fitter 2A, which stood for air frame, he was the one who looked after the wings and all the controls.

Was there a lot of gambling and drinking going on?

Oh yes. Certainly I couldn’t have said this until a few years ago, but there was a lot of whiskey

10:00 trading going on. See Americans love whiskey, and the story was that this bloke in Brisbane was making whiskey. And, it was sort of, no Australian would even sip it, it was pretty potent stuff apparently, goodness knows what it was made from. What they did they got into the whiskey trading business,

10:30 and certain people and I don’t know their names and I wouldn’t name them, were into this business and they have loaded a crate of whiskey, and they put it on the courier and sell it up at Morotai. Or somewhere on the way, New Guinea or somewhere. And they loved it but it was poison. I didn’t drink in those days.

11:00 I didn’t even drink beer. Because I had signed the pledge as a kid at school, that I wouldn’t drink until I was 23. I broke the pledge incidentally when I was 20, in the Officers Mess in Darwin.

What was that like?

It was quite a place. They

11:30 told me that I had sergeant’s privileges, I could go into the Sergeant’s Mess. In the air force there was the Airmen’s Mess, Officer’s Mess and the Sergeant’s Mess. Various names for these, one was called the Snake Pit and the other was some other nasty name. It was strange because a lot of these officers had decorations coming back from Europe, they

12:00 were in Bomber Command, Coastal Command and what’s more they were gentleman. They didn’t get up to any tricks. Oh well I can tell you one or two they did.

Tell us now?

Well, I don’t think I’ll name him, I think he’s still alive in Sydney.

12:30 He was quite an impetuous character. We heard all these rumours and stories about him, if half of them were true it would be great, you know. Stories like that he flew for both sides in the Spanish Civil War. And finished up flying ME109s.

13:00 Now that’s a good story. This particular chap he was quite an outgoing chap and one of my mates, he was on one of these courier flights going to Shanghai after the war. There was a lot of competition between our units and the English RAF [Royal Air Force],

13:30 as to whether you were first into Hong Kong or first into Changi and there are various stories told about that. So that chap and I said to my cobber when were at Morotai, “I believe you flew over Shanghai?” He said “No, that’s entirely misleading, we flew down to the street in the main street.” He said the Chinese

14:00 girls were waving out the window like that. That’s an exaggeration, but these stories they got around, because this guy, he was coming in and Shanghai had two airports, there was the military airport which the nationalists had charge of, there was a lot of trouble in China, because the communist revolution was coming and they were infiltrating right through, and Chiang Kai-shek

14:30 was in charge of the military. But there was a civil airport as well, and this guy gets on the radio, and they are not far from one another. And he’s on the glide path into the military airport and he’s talking to the civilian airport. They were talking him in, there was a lot of confusion, they couldn’t see him or anything. So he’s being talked into the civilian

15:00 airport and actually landed in the military airport. And this squad of Chinese soldiers came out. And he could see that he done something wrong, and quick as a flash he turned around and he took off again. That was quite a story. And I believe it is true.

Do you remember the night of your first drink, and what was that like?

Oh that was

15:30 in the Officers Mess at Darwin. It was called the Transit Mess. And the skipper on that occasion had been the officer in charge of the Morotai detachment, we were coming back, it was my last flight actually, I had received notice that I was to be discharged,

16:00 and of course this took two or three weeks, because I was up in the islands when this came through. And, the skipper, I think he flew in Coastal Command, and a lot of those Skippers, flying in bombers and flying boats, they had a special crew. They always had the same, the gunner was the same and I believe this was so.

16:30 Well so when we came to Darwin, he said to me, and of course I am a sort of very temporary sergeant when I am in the Sergeant’s Mess, and he wanted his crew to stick together, pretty obvious they had a crew and he was adopting principles that applied in Britain, possibly, and

17:00 they were trying to work out how they could get me in, and he said, “Today you are Flying Officer O’Bryan.” And I said “How do I do that?” “Oh well”, he said “I will take one ring off and I will become a Flying Officer.” Because he’s a Flt Lieutenant, so he took one ring off. Then he said to the fellas one

17:30 ring, he said “You are right, you leave one ring on Flying Officers.” Sort of went out and of course and I think we had an officer, he’d been promoted. So I went in and I didn’t have anything on, and the wireless operator took his off and

18:00 and of course he said to the steward booking us in, alright so and so and so, and then he said “Flying Officer O’Bryan” So the bloke wrote it down,

18:30 that’s how I got in. During that time we were a week in Darwin because we had magneto problem, one of the engines had been running rough, and we crossed about half the Arafura Sea with it bounding around and not pulling its weight generally, a bit worrying. And when we got

19:00 there’s a ground staff sergeant, it took him a week to find out what was wrong. It had a wrong magneto on. Bosch magnetos and there was a big string of letters, numbers, and at the end of it they have a ‘G’, and we had one that had an ‘H’ on the end and after the (UNCLEAR)

19:30 not operating properly, so you could be flying for an hour and things would start to cut up rough. An engine running rough is not a pleasant experience it has got to be throttled back, and nearly always keep going, but the power is much reduced so anyhow

20:00 that was fixed and during this time we spent seven or eight days in the Officer’s Mess there and I had been drinking up in Morotai, the Americans had piped what they called lolly water, through, it was like a very weak orange juice, and this lolly water was piped

20:30 around to certain locations, you could go and fill up with lolly water. Horrible stuff to drink, you couldn’t drink the water, it was out of the question, you would become very ill. Lots of wogs in it. So I put up with this, and so I got into the Officer’s Mess and there’s a fellow named a flying officer and his nick name was Pluto,

21:00 because he had very dark features, they called him Pluto. He said “Oh come on have a drink.” He was a real leader, if there was any fun on this guy was always out in front. And, I believe I caught up with him later on a few years ago. But he didn’t remember that incident. So he said “Oh,

21:30 you had better have a beer.” So I tasted it and it tasted nice. I was thirsty. That’s the story. When I came back my mother went crook at me, she said you broke the pledge.

How did you feel about breaking the pledge?

Well, it wasn’t a serious misdemeanour, you made a promise, it’s only a

22:00 promise, you can go back on a promises. The water was bad. So that was that.

How wild would the Officer’s Mess get that you saw?

Pretty orderly. There was a certain decorum, an officer was a gentleman, was supposed to be. I was telling you about this chap

22:30 who was quite outgoing. The riggers had changed the tyre and they jacked it up and it was a bit of a problem sometimes with Dakotas, that when you wound the jack, see jacked the wing right up so the wheel would be off the ground, so naturally you could work on it, so they put the wheel back on, lowered the jack down, and the

23:00 strut, the hydraulic strut, the piston had jammed in the cylinder and so the jack was taken out, the wing was right up high, and the normal way to do that was four or five blokes would get out on the end of the wing and jump on the wing and it would spring out you see. Anyway this one we tried and this guy come up and he

23:30 could turn on an American accent just like that, he’s got his officer’s cap on, a pair of boots and a pair of shorts, that’s all he had on. He comes around, a very hot day in the tropic, that’s the way they got around, we got around sometimes. And he said, “What’s wrong with you guys? What’s wrong with this ship? What’s wrong with this kite?”

24:00 He said, “The struts are jammed up.” So he said “I’ll fix it.” So he gets up and he gets in the aircraft and he starts both motors up and he taxied it across to a big ditch. And of course it sprung 24:30 out. He said I’ll fix it, taxied it across a ditch. It was quite a big ditch too.

What trouble did he get into for that?

Oh well, there was no witnesses he had done a good job for us and we didn’t worry. Of course we flew under direct control of Air Board. People when

25:00 you tell people that they tend not to believe you, but our orders came from Air Board itself. There were a number of Transport Squadrons, somewhere about four or five, whether the others did the same I am not sure, all these things we had to do, these courier flights were ordered by Air Board. That

25:30 there were no means there were no intermediary Wing Commanders, or in between.

What missions was 38 Squadron flying?

We flew supply dropping in New Guinea, Tadji, for I think Wewak, a lot of fighting went on there after the war, the Japanese Commander took something like a month before he

26:00 surrendered. And during that time I was sent to Tadji to relieve the supply dropping chaps, there was an aircraft up there and the aircraft had to come back and they wanted me to bring them back.

So we were talking about the missions 28 Squadron were flying?

Yes. They did a

26:30 number of things, supply dropping, I think that was the most adventurous sort of thing we did. That was done from a place called Tadji. Because I was sent with a flight rigger to go up there and we were supposed to look after the maintenance and do minor maintenance, and he was

27:00 the air frame chap. But usually we’d go out on these and we were expected to go out. It was a little bit exciting because as we went out with the bombers, like they would be Beauforts and we’d go out and we would be behind them, just slightly behind, and then the Dakota, as soon as they’d go over the enemy lines and bomb the

27:30 enemy, whereas we bombed our own troops with food and big cans of sugar and all this sort of thing. One got caught in the tail assembly, had to be cut with a knife. But that sort of thing happened occasionally. That was a big tin of sugar.

28:00 four gallon tin of sugar like a kerosene tin. We heard all these stories and you get back and you hold on to the plane, you know like that, and what you pushed out when you were given the signal to push, when the red light came on or something, and you pushed with both your feet, and you made sure you hung on there because otherwise you would go out with it. And

28:30 that wouldn’t be very nice. This was done at very low level. Done with support engine stopped. We flew on one engine and they started the support engine, you turned straight away, you didn’t go over the enemy line. But you were very close to them, because the Australians were here and the Japanese were there. You had to do a fairly sharp turn.

29:00 And return to base.

At what stage in World War II was this?

Well we had that detachment there for quite a few months I would imagine. I was sent as far as Cairns, we were flying an aircraft I think was a Model A C47, the model A didn’t have the

29:30 2nd stage of supercharging in it. The skipper didn’t apparently find out and we had all this army gear on board, signals gear, radios and he discovered it was overloaded. They were designed for a 3,000 pound overload,

30:00 that was the standard overload. But he discovered the overload was exceeded and he went bonkers over it, he said “I am not taking this aircraft.” We did have trouble with the radio compass it wasn’t showing, and there was no way it was going to fly over the Owen Stanleys, we had to fly over the Owen Stanleys, and

30:30 the second stage supercharger was essential, should have been, you might have struggled over. Anyhow all this time passed by, and we were in Cairns, and suddenly we got the signal to return to base at Archerfield. I was disappointed about this, because I have looked at the records, the day we got the signal to return

31:00 Lieutenant General Hitachi surrendered. I sort of fitted that altogether by looking at my records and I just saw the date recently that he surrendered and the same day. Never found out the reason why we were suddenly brought back.

Did you have an airstrip in New Guinea?

Tadji had an airstrip, a small strip. 31:30 Beauforts operated from there I think it was 100 Squadron for the Beauforts and they operated from there.

How modern if you would you say was this airstrip and how was it?

A lot of the airstrips were originally Japanese,

32:00 it was always said they were short narrow and nasty to land. The C47, the Dakota did need a fairly long runway, a moderately long runway to safely land on it. That was the problem with Warma [?] strip at Morotai. Down on the

32:30 beach, low down, they built the big strip for the super fortresses up at Peto, it was never used because of the invasion of Philippines took less time than General MacArthur thought it would. It was very quickly occupied and consequently Morotai, which was to be a forward base for the invasion

33:00 of Japan wasn’t really used as such. But it was a remarkable place, it was in that you could see dozens of different types of aircraft. When we were up there

33:30 there I saw Mosquitoes from Europe, RAF had started to move after the war and they were getting all their stuff ready for the invasion of Japan, there were Spitfires, all types of aircraft, a lot of Royal Navy aircraft, amphibious Catalinas. There was a Air Sea Rescue base there,

34:00 had a couple of Cats on the water all the time, they were amphibious Catalinas, they could land on water or land. If they went out during the daytime, and returned, they landed on the water. But if they come back at night, the airstrip was all lit,

34:30 they landed on the air strip. They flew them back to the base, which was only at the end of the runway, next day or something like that, they came back together.

When you were flying over New Guinea and doing missions there, in that time did you talk or meet the soldiers who were fighting and so on?

No, I didn’t fly over.

But when you were based there?

35:00 Based on the island. I met various soldiers.

What was your impression?

Australian soldiers, American soldiers. After the war, there were various ones coming home on leave, they had been granted leave, and they used to come to us to get a ride back home. And some of these guys waited up to two

35:30 weeks, three weeks, just sat there. We called them strip sitters, because they waited at the strip until there was an aircraft coming back to Brisbane. They took potluck. You know. Then I remember being approached because I was the one to get out of the aircraft first, I was responsible for the refuelling and that sort of thing.

36:00 I would swing the door open, and the rest of them would come out afterwards. And, when we were leaving early in the morning, sometimes we started our flight at about 3.30 in the morning, and I had to get out at 3 o’clock, to do the checks. The Captain did a check of his own later on. I had to make sure the

36:30 water was drained out of the fuel tanks because it had settled in the filter. Unscrew that, take it out and make sure all the water came out. You could tell water, it doesn’t mix with fuel, and it comes out first, always on the bottom. And, anyhow I was there one night in Darwin, early one morning, I

37:00 had this fella come up to me, and he was rather bedraggled looking, he appeared to be American, didn’t know who he was, and he said “Can I get a lift back to Brisbane with you today?” I always referred them to the captain, if I encountered these odd people,

37:30 rather unusual encounters with these fellas in the darkness of the dawn you know. So I said to the captain, “He’s pretty ragged looking, I don’t like the look of him.” “Oh” he said “I’ll have a look at him.” I said “I wouldn’t recommend you take him.” So he got this guy, saw this guy, “No mate bad luck, can’t come with us

38:00 we are full.” But they were called strip sitters. There was the one aircraft we lost on the return from Biak to Brisbane, coming back and the pilot got lost and it crashed into a big mountain near the

38:30 top of a mountain in Irian Jaya in Dutch New Guinea. Carstins [?] I think it was called, called Carstins then, all these names have changed now, they have got some Indonesian name, unfortunately for me, and of course it was twenty five years before it was discovered, there was one chap, I believe he was from Hobart, 39:00 and he was gunner Eisell, and I spoke to relatives only recently in Hobart, and he was coming home to get married, and he waited something like two weeks in Biak [Island] before this hour. It was V8CUT, Charlie Uncle tear. It was well

39:30 documented in a book written by our last CO, John Balf, [?] he was a journalist and he wrote a lot of these stories. And that was one. What happened? Why was he flying on a route that wasn’t recommended? Instead of doing a taking a course which was a recommended one where they

40:00 flew from Biak across the goose neck of New Guinea, the Dutch called the head Vogelkopf which is bird’s head, New Guinea, the very lump at the end, and the goose neck. So instead of flying across there, he took the direct route to Morotai.

40:30 And that led over Mt Carstin very high mountain. The aircraft was facing on the way to Biak and it hit, and nobody knows what happened.

Tape 7

00:31 So you would like to tell us about Morotai and your time there?

Yes. Morotai had an Air Sea Rescue, it was a base which consisted of a couple of Catalinas and two crash boats, what they called crash boats. We used to go down and talk to the boys

01:00 and go out on their crash boats, just for a bit of fun. After the war finished their activities, they were just sitting there waiting for trouble with these planes coming back from Japan and so forth. They came back, so we often went down to visit them. And the crash boats

01:30 were two Rolls Royce Merlin engines, which consequently they moved pretty fast in the water. And the objective was for the Catalina to find the downed pilot, or crew and either land on the water, very often it was too rough for them to land. The crash boat would be called to come out and it moved pretty

02:00 fast. I went on an air sea rescue trip one day, our courier aircraft had just arrived from Archerfield in Brisbane in Mortai, and I was sitting in the control room, the tower, and everything was

02:30 broadcast over a loudspeaker. All the aircraft coming in they put it on the loudspeaker. I was waiting for this courier to arrive it had an ETA [estimated time of arrival], it was supposed to arrive half an hour or something, I went down and I am sitting in the control tower and all these broadcasts were coming over and talking to the tower, it was all

03:00 on the loudspeaker. Anyway this guy came across with an SOS [distress signal]. And he said, “I am in difficulty.” He was flying a Liberator, they knew that, and he said one of the motors has failed. The Lib was O.K. on three motors even on two providing the

03:30 right motor failed. I think it was the port outer motor stopped, you were in real trouble. And you had this problem you’re in the flight and that sort of thing, so this guy said “I am reasonably confident we will make an air strip somewhere.”

04:00 So the next minute, about two or three minutes, he said we’re ditching. Because he couldn’t control the aircraft. So he ditched just south of Zamboango in the Philippines, so I can say I have been to the Philippines but never been on the Philippine islands. So we went on this search with one of these Catalinas, the

04:30 old Cat flew about 20 knots slower than we did, and the Catalina had to start and we past him on the way, and we did this big grid search and the radio compass started, we got his signal emerging from the dinghy and the radio compass was spinning

05:00 which meant that the signal was coming from directly below, or it was out of order, but if you had a radio compass that you tested out on the flight, and it tested o.k. which happened in our case, and it started to spin it wouldn’t set a direction, but it was getting sort of

05:30 late in the day, and there are long shadows in the tropics, so we searched for a little while, and of course a certain time, we had so much fuel on board and we had to think about getting home. Of course we abandoned the search, but we gave the position and an allied destroyer

06:00 picked up the crew. So that was coming back to base. This all happened later, I think it was the next day they were picked up. Destroyer, which happened to be around there at the time. But that night, it was very late at night, and it showed the long range of the Catalina, it must have been one of the longest

06:30 range aircraft in the world. He came back well after dark, it must have been 10 o’clock at night, and landed on the strip. We heard him coming in. They had an enormous reserve of fuel apparently. And there was a long bombing raid made to the Philippines from North Queensland, and they didn’t land anywhere.

07:00 Went to the Philippines and back and dropped their bombs, scared the Japanese, because they only had to drop a couple of bombs they thought it was impossible. They returned to Australia and they didn’t lose an aircraft. Good story isn’t it? That’s been documented. However, this base there were some quite

07:30 interesting blokes there, powerful boats and so forth. Then other things we did was paratroop training on the Atherton Tablelands. The Red Berets. We had an aircraft there permanently detached. It was brought back for maintenance. There was a maintenance schedule every 60 hours,

08:00 the engines had it was a minor inspection, one hundred and twenty was a bit more. And three hundred and sixty was a rather serious sort of infection and I think it was seven hundred and twenty hours the motor had to come out and be changed, and go to the overhaul depot and be

08:30 rebored or whatever. They were the Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines, they were about twelve hundred horsepower a lot of them one thousand and two hundred and fifty, and they were very reliable engines, they had one or two things you had to watch out for, you learned by experience.

09:00 Same as the aircraft itself had one or two problems in the electrical system which batteries used to over charge and boil and see this horrible gas coming up through the floor boards and tended to switch off the generator if that happened.

09:30 Can you tell us what sort of air activity there was in Morotai at that time? Was it very busy?

It was busy in that all these aircraft were there, there was NEI [Netherlands East Indies] Mitchell Squadron, that’s there based there and they active all the time, always landing and taking off, Dutchmen, there were some pretty intrepid characters

10:00 in those. I saw one of these Dutch fellows flying a Dakota in that they had apparently. He was coming in at the end of the airstrip and suddenly, everybody realised there was an aircraft in front of him. They had already landed, and he didn’t see it until the last minute. And

10:30 whacked both engines into full throttle and went up like a big grasshopper, like that, and everybody thought he was going to stall and come crashing down, but he got away with it, just picked up steam again. But he avoided the collision.

Were there any collisions at all?

Ah,

11:00 that was the only one that was a near collision, it was more than an incident, they would call that an incident these days, but that was the only one I saw. There was a photograph of a crashed Curtis Commando that was a sort of a stretched Dakota. They

11:30 got the Dakota was specially designed with the DC3, the old original DC3 air frame which was modified and was called the Dakota. The military version but it had more powerful engines in the original DC3s

12:00 had a Wright engine which was about 850 horsepower so they stepped each one. They stepped them up to about twelve hundred when the Pratt & Whitney engine went in, which was extremely reliable. The Wright engine was Wright Cyclone was I also understand they were more powerful, but the

12:30 Pratt & Whitney was easy to work on, the bigger engine because they had bigger cylinders and they were closer together, and couldn’t get your fingers between them.

Now you did a flight over northwestern New Guinea to locate a lost plane?

No, I wasn’t on that.

No you weren’t?

No. There was a big search went out for that the

13:00 CO and the flight commander went out and the flight commander on that was Johnny Balf and he wrote the book ‘War Without Glory’. And that’s of course in the libraries.

Was there still an American presence at that time in Morotai?

No, not much at all.

13:30 There was in a way because they were bringing these big new aircraft you know the Super Fortress the B29, they dropped the bomb from. It was a very big aircraft. But they had another one on line, because the war was expected to continue for another twelve months. Which when the bomb was dropped, the second, Nagasaki,

14:00 that finished, the Japanese surrendered. But had that bomb not been dropped, it was expected to go for another twelve months. So that the Americans had designed a big machine which it was huge, it was called the Dominator. One day one of these big Dominator’s landed, 14:30 and it was huge aircraft. Then there was another one came in it was a navy aircraft called the Privateer, and it was nearly as big. They had all these things but the Dominator was never used, because it was designed and brought out and I saw one, it was a huge thing, it was quite intriguing.

15:00 It had its own power generating plant in the rear of the aircraft a diesel engine for charging batteries. When it was standing it was like when you go on a ferry, one of these Bass Strait Ferries, you hear the air conditioning running, and you would hear this engine running down the back, it was charging the batteries. They ran it during

15:30 the flight I believe, it was a separate auxiliary charging system. Huge generator, motor diesel engine. That was quite a fascinating aircraft. When it was on the deck the nose reel, you could only see about the half the nose reel, it was so close to the ground when it was taxing.

16:00 Appeared very close. Then there were mosquitoes, the Mosquito aircraft was from de Havilland Mosquito they were mainly RAF or Royal Navy, not Mosquito so much but there were Spitfires there, I couldn’t

16:30 but I just can’t name them at the moment. So it was an interesting place, it was a bit of a cross roads, I think. There of course we struck the American crews, they were invariably American. They used to disappear off to somewhere where they were housed

17:00 for the evening the night. Morotai was interesting from that point of view. But it was to be the advanced base a stepping stone to Tokyo. The war finished very quickly.

How big was the island?

Oh, Morotai it wouldn’t be as big as Tasmania, it would be about

17:30 half I think, I would be guessing, no it wouldn’t be it was a narrow island. Possibly half the size.

You also said you served alongside Netherlands East Indies Airmen?

Yeah, there is a photograph of them there displaying the Mitchell taxiing.

18:00 I couldn’t speak Dutch and they couldn’t understand English. Because they were colonials I think. Most Dutch people before the war were taught English as a second language. But these fellows from the Indies didn’t seem to know any English at all, and we couldn’t converse with them. I was driving the

18:30 old Dodge weapon carrier, it was one of our vehicles, we have several vehicles, we had a couple of jeeps, we had this weapon carrier, and later on we acquired a command car, the Colonel used to go to battle with his troops in the command car. Of course it had radios. Of course the weapon carrier had a big heavy machine gun on the back normally. But that was one of our that’s in

19:00 the picture there of me, taken a shot of it. And that was our transport. I was saying something about transport wasn’t I, when I diverted a little bit? Anyway, oh yes, I was driving along the taxiway, which was quite big. PW [?] airstrip at Morotai was

19:30 very long, it was built, I think for B29s. Quite a long strip and I was driving along the taxi way and I saw this old weapon carrier. And suddenly he looked behind, and here is a Dutch Mitchell, right up,

20:00 both propellers and they taxied at such a speed it was unbelievable. They used to race along the taxiway they weren’t reckless, just a bit more outgoing. Quite a reputation of being good navigators.

The Dutch?

Yeah. They would find their way

20:30 around, and of course they had the advantage that as soon as we left Darwin, all our maps were Dutch maps. You would be just out of Darwin, somewhere in the Arafura Sea and the navigators would have to pull out these Dutch maps. Learnt a little bit of Dutch, from the names and so forth. Anyway this character he’s taxiing right behind me, he’s been out on a mission or something, I don’t know what he’s been doing, probably having a flag flying.

21:00 A lot of flag flying was done by the colonial powers.

What do you mean by that?

Well when war finished they got back into where they were, of course as you know all those empires broke up, the Dutch empire that broke up, the British Empire disintegrated and formed a commonwealth of nations. It’s a bit of a get together

21:30 that’s held once a year, has no great clout at all really. And anyway, the French of course, they were in Indochina, and the Indochina war came and they had to leave. They all left, a lot of the people are

22:00 Vietnamese speaking French. They have retained the language and I suppose people in Indonesia, might speak Dutch some of them, some of the ones on the east side, there might be a few. Not many possibly.

The Dutch were considered arrogant by some?

Yeah, well they were. They were.

How were they?

Oh, it might

22:30 have been a communication problem. I know a lot of the Dutch here, they are pretty straight down the line.

What about at the time when you were serving with them?

Well they weren’t liked. Not in the western part of Indonesia, well, what is now Indonesia. The eastern part were pro Dutch. Lots of people won’t believe that, but they were

23:00 because I am sure they were flag flying exercises. To get in there first and fly the flag and say you were Australians, or say you were British or something like that, hoping to the government’s policy would have been, the Australian government’s policy would have been to get back to the status quo. So some of the flights

23:30 we didn’t carry anything. You know we just went visiting virtually. We went to Macassa. That was quite an experience because we got involved in the English, Dutch, pro Dutch anti Dutch factions.

Macassa?

Yes, Macassa, that was in the Celebes. It’s now called Sulawesi, it’s a big island in the

24:00 centre of…

What did you mean by getting involved between the factions?

Well we got involved because the military governor of the area was called was Turko Westerling. The story went around that he had a Turkish mother, and of course he had a Dutch name of Westerling, which means

24:30 westerly I suppose. Anyhow he was there and it was not long before he got to hear that we have arrived, a matter of a couple of hours. A Dutch officer met us at the strip. At the Macassa aerodrome and we had a wild ride in a Mercedes Benz. I looked at the speedo, and it was

25:00 well over, something like seventy or eighty miles per hour. It seemed like it because it was a narrow strip of road and all the ox carts and they just scattered like that, all the people on the road and this Mercedes Benz, it was something like you would see Hitler

25:30 driving around in. It was a big car like that. It was sent out by the governor I suppose, to bring us in, and they kept an eye on us, because we were into trading, and trading was like black market, we had a nice name for it, it was trading. Of course that was highly illegal, anything with the King’s head, a big head on

26:00 it, was worth a lot of money. King of England’s head on it, like a note. £10 note was worth a lot of gilders. We were paid in gilders, that was Dutch money. I have got some – I have got a lot of this wartime money.

So what sort of trading took place?

All sorts of things, I never took part in, the whiskey business

26:30 was serious with the Americans, that was oh, you could get slipped into jail for that sort of thing. This Dutch officer that met us at Macassar said, “Righto you boys”, he spoke very good English, “You are not trading are you?” “No we are not trading.” But I think on that occasion I did, I had a blanket,

27:00 and I got £20 for it in 1947. That’s extortion. So anyway that was the only time I ever did, of course what they did when we got back, we complained that we lost a blanket. We would get another blanket. That went on, a cake of soap was worth £5, just an ordinary

27:30 cake of soap.

Did you see any evidence also when you were in Macassa of resistance movements against the Dutch?

It was a high state of tension, the town or city was. They had Ghurkhas [Regiment of Nepalese fighting under British Army] with loaded machine guns directing the

28:00 traffic on corners. Ghurkhas.

How did the Dutch get Ghurkhas? I don’t know.

Did the British Army …?

Yeah, the British Army Ghurkhas, and there they were on the corners. So this guy Westerling, he got a message to our skipper, inviting us to dinner. And I have written this story about an ‘Invitation to Dinner’. And I

28:30 go right into what happened on that day. And so he got this invitation but he came back to us he said, “I have just got an invitation from the governor for all of us to go to dinner, but I am not accepting it. That would be showing that we are…” The political situation was very hot.

29:00 What was going on?

Well all these pro Dutch Macassans I suppose you would call them, were separated and they put them in an old Portuguese Fort, which is yonks back in the early days of exploration, and they locked about three hundred of them up to keep them safe. They wanted a separate republic

29:30 of Macassar and they fought for that in Holland for years. They even highjacked the train, a group of these people to get a separate republic in the eastern part of Indonesia. And of course the United Nations, not a very good operator,

30:00 at all, they are not good now. They should have taken this Iraq thing over years ago.

You said you also did supply drops around Indonesia, for what reason?

Not in Indonesia, it was in New Guinea, but you know the story, I got there a bit late for it and missed out on a little adventure. We

30:30 transported POWs back from Changi and Borneo and those sort of places, plus our own sick soldiers. It would appear that the Duntroon was a troop ship, which I think, was converted to a hospital ship, and they brought any POW who was in reasonably good shape, he got a nice

31:00 sea voyage back on the Duntroon. We often saw in the Arafura Sea, the Duntroon steaming down below, it was quite recognisable, and that Duntroon brought back the fellas that were reasonably fit. Then there was the stage below where they thought they had a 50/50 chance of surviving their

31:30 ordeal in the POW camp. And they were the ones we got back. Reasonably quick they had to be brought back and they had to have a reasonable chance of survival. I don’t know have you met anybody, have you, and so they survived.

Sorry?

In the planes. Brought back by planes, have you met any so far?

32:00 I can’t remember exactly.

No, maybe. So that was the theory of it, and of course the ones that looked as though they might be dying or pretty close to it, they just kept them there and treated them, and hopefully with the increased medical aid, the Japanese didn’t offer much medicines to anybody after the

32:30 surrender. Naturally they moved in very quickly with the consequence we were involved in this bringing POWs back to Australia, there were Medivac [Medical Evacuation] teams and that’s where the RAAF sisters, most of them were flight lieutenants and they joined our crews.

33:00 There was a problem because I can remember at Morotai, we used to go swimming of course we didn’t have any swimming trunks. And we went, that had to be curtailed a bit, we had to find out where these half a dozen sisters were and we’d go swimming while they were somewhere else. And this sort of thing went on and in the officer’s transit mess in Darwin

33:30 there was just one set of toilets and one set of showers. There was nothing for specifically kept separate for females. And of course these sisters started arriving at the Officers Mess, and we had a couple on board coming back, and then there was a couple there already,

34:00 so that when we had that week in Darwin, I was in the Officer’s Mess and got in surreptitiously I suppose, they used to go for a shower, they would go early in the morning for a shower, and then they suddenly decided. The wireless air gunner in our crew used to tend to

34:30 come down to the aircraft in the morning, about the same time I did, because he had to check his radio gear out and make sure it was working, and I had to check the engine out. So, he bowls in for a shower and suddenly hears the shower going, and it was one of these nurses having a shower. So he bowls out and he came out startled look on his face. From then on

35:00 they realised the best time to have a shower was perhaps have a shower at the normal time, and sing while they were in the shower. So we would hear them, and we knew they were in there, keep out. But they had terrible voices, they couldn’t sing for nuts. ‘ Were they considered attractive?

Oh they were. They were nice looking girls. They were nice girls.

35:30 Most of them were flight lieutenants. I forgot what we called them, I suppose we just…

I am surprised there weren’t any peeping toms?

Well officers were gentlemen I suppose.

So they say of course.

Yeah well, it was getting … and that’s where I had my first beer. On that occasion

36:00 the old general officer commanding of the northern area of the territory was based in Darwin. He got to know we were lounging about doing nothing, we spent a week there, and he found out we were lounging about there, so he thought he would go over to Truscott airstrip which is in the

36:30 Kimberlys and he got to know about us lazing about the place. So he said I want you to take me over to do an inspection of Truscott airstrip. Well it turned out to be quite humorous really. He had this old what we called a Model A Dakota. We normally had Model

37:00 Bs, they had the second supercharge and that sort of thing. But the old Model As, instead of having you know hydraulics they had these rubber pads, you know, shock absorbers, they were built in, they were the original Dakota. Anyway we taxied out, and the skipper had a bit of a laugh, because we had the Old Man as we called him in the back. And he was right down the back

37:30 of the aircraft sitting on his own. And he wouldn’t sort of converse with us and he was too high up in rank to worry about, to get involved with, so anyway we get out and the skipper switched the booster pump, an electrical pump which you put the fuel pressure up

38:00 for the emergency take off sort of thing, it had to go up to thirty two pounds per square inch or something from the normal. We get out there ready to take off and the skipper is looking for the fuel pump switch, of course it didn’t have an electric pump in it, this old thing.

38:30 Suddenly, one of the crew said, “There it is there, there’s a handle”, you had to pump as you took off. It was really arc stuff comparatively speaking. So who’s going to man the pump, I had to man the pump, I am pumping away while we are taking off, and then when we took off, the Old Man is down the back, sitting there looking out the window I

39:00 suppose. And when we took off and the road and rose the undercarriage, and one wheel wouldn’t go, it stayed down. That caused a bit of commotion. And the skipper said to me, “You had better go back and see.” You could see the wheels if you got right back to one of the very back

39:30 windows. He said you better go down, the Old Man is sitting halfway down there or something, go past him and pretend you are going to the toilet. Which was right down the back. I think the lot of us would have liked to have gone to the toilet anyway, it was a bit scary. We didn’t know whether the wheel would go down again. When we got there at the end of our journey. So I had to sneak down and I was watching the old

40:00 fella, I had a peep out and there was the wheel still hanging down, still hanging down. Had a look on the other side, and he didn’t blink an eyelid. So I go back and told the skipper, yes one’s up and one’s down. I had to confirm it you see. So I forget, anyway when we went to put the wheels down, both wheels,

40:30 the other wheel went down and we landed, perfectly normal, we landed at Truscott, that was a bit of a surprise, because they had steel meshing on the strip and nobody told us about it, and as soon as the wheels hit the deck there was an awful rattling noise made by the steel decking. It had holes in it, perforated

41:00 sort of steel, making this racket, we thought the old ship was falling to bits, but it was only the steel meshing. Had a great time over there. People there, the old boy, never ever told him about the wheel. He was none the wiser.

41:22

Tape 8

00:32 What do you know about the transportation of Japanese criminals of war?

It happened, I think there was one flight we went from Morotai to Ambon, where the war trials were held. And were certainly on when I was with the aircrew

01:00 in the area. There was one occasion where we made a trip from Morotai to Ambon where the trials were, some of the trials were conducted and I can remember closing the cabin door, and all being up in the cabin, or the office as it was called, we had all these funny names for various parts of the

01:30 aircraft. Second pilot’s seat was a dickie seat, from the old cars that had a dickie seat. Somehow it was an RAF term, so we were up in this part of the aircraft, the cabin. So you know on a DC3 there’s a

02:00 door, nearly every aircraft has got a door to the crew and on this occasion we were told to get in the aircraft and lock the door. So, consequently we didn’t know who we were carrying. It was probably a war criminal going for trial at Ambon. We landed at Lahe [?} airport, airstrip at Ambon and

02:30 whoever was there was gone before I came out. I was usually first out and there was nothing that I saw. Whisked out perhaps quickly. But that was the only time that we may have carried some but certainly during that week or those times, the suspected war criminals were transferred.

03:00 There are a number of pictures on my board there, about three or four I call them surrender aircraft. There was an admiral in charge of the Borneo Japanese operation. He flew in one of those aircraft and I have got a photograph of it and

03:30 it’s on the board. And he was a pretty high guy in the Japanese hierarchy, and he surrendered in a Betty bomber. The Japanese aircraft were nearly all Mitsubishi’s and they all had numbers, a Betty was a GM4. The latest model and that’s what I think it is.

04:00 They had white stripes painted on the wing, and it was escorted in by two Zeroes. I have got the instruments from one of the Zeroes outside there. Which you could have had a look at, but that’s another story. Made in Japan and all the Japanese writing on the back. I acquired those whilst they were at

04:30 Lebyon. And I have also got a photograph of what they call a Hickory Trainer, and that’s what Baba, he was the General in charge in Borneo, of Sandakan Camp. You’ve heard about that no doubt, about Sandakan and the Ranau march

05:00 where two thousand four hundred allied prisoners, a lot of Australians were very ill treated and a lot of them were massacred, shot on the long march to Ranau. That was we believe Bill Bligh my cousin in Sydney that’s where we were going when all the big double

05:30 doors were taken off our aircraft. Which indicated that paratroopers were to be dropped, and then something happened. It’s a very touchy story now, because we believed it’s called Tragic Kingfisher and it’s been investigated but there’s so much of it that’s either been destroyed or didn’t actually happen,

06:00 the records, the parliamentary records.

What do you know about it?

Well, all I know is the doors were taken off about the time the Project Kingfisher was being considered, and that was to rescue all those POWs to land there. Paratroopers down first and within a short time the Dakotas landed

06:30 and we picked them up. This is a very contentious thing even today, the RSL [Returned and Services League] has fought for years, and they have given up the fight, to finding just what happened. It was believed all the C47s in Australia were actually prepared, they needed about eighty of them to lift everybody.

07:00 two thousand four hundred allied prisoners and British, lot of Australians. Six Australians escaped and they were sent back later, Stenowitz [means Sticpewich] I think was one, he used to look after the Japanese

07:30 officer’s garden. And he escaped and he got away, and he got into the jungle, those Dyaks, those wild men from Borneo, and he was lucky, they spirited him out and the American submarines picked them up. American submarines did a lot of that sort of thing, from Timor. They picked up

08:00 the remnants of Sparrow Force. Have you spoken to any of the 2/40th Battalion chaps? They would probably confirm that. So that this old guy he flew over in this hickory trainer, must have had hickory propellers so there’s a photograph of him there,

08:30 you can see his boots and legs underneath because he’s on the other side of the aircraft. And the MPs [Military Police] guarding the aircraft he’s out on the side when the photograph was taken. To take photographs even at that stage would have been illegal. We couldn’t, the war photographers took the photographs.

Did you take photographs?

No,

09:00 I never ever took a photograph. Obviously some people did. But anyhow this was quite an experience, I found that when I went to Labuan, we had an aircraft at Labuan it wasn’t that long after I went to Morotai actually very short time after. They came and they said it’s your turn, 09:30 we’ve got this plane on Labuan which has a problem, engine is running rough, he can’t find out why, so we are going over and I am in the 36 Squadron Aircraft, and the skipper, who was a warrant officer, I was in touch with him a little while back. He confirmed all the times and dates. I had a week on Labuan,

10:00 and during that time I saw a lot of Japanese POWs. We had thousands of them on Morotai, they were locked up in a compound, barb wire sort of thing. We had these Japanese, these two cooks, we discovered two of them, cooked better than our cooks. Our cooks used to cop a lot of bad language. They didn’t have that much to cook with,

10:30 you know much to cook. So we got these two Japanese and we had to sign for them every day. One guy had a big cut from there, a big groove right down there. And what they did, meat and vegetables, that was a hash they made. Came in tins and they made pies

11:00 out of it and everything. It was terrific. We got this big Asian smile when we came in for our food, with our cooks standing behind supervising. When I went to Borneo, on the way over, one of the generators I think it was the port generator, suddenly failed.

11:30 Looked up and it was zero, and the wireless operator was trying to contact Labuan and he said to me, “There’s something wrong here. What’s wrong? What’s going on? I can’t transmit I haven’t got enough power.” So first of all we looked at the ammeter it was on zero. The other one right charged and

12:00 everything obviously a generator. So I pulled the floor boards up and the regulators were underneath and I had a look at the left hand regulator, it appeared to be alright, and it was slightly warm the other one, the other one was cold. So I whipped a new regulator in, I had a spare one down the back, so whipped a new one in. No good, no good, so the

12:30 skipper about this time he got in VHF range, voice range, which is about 25 miles, and so he reports back to Labuan that one of the generators is not charging, the port motor generator is not charging, so that’s alright, we

13:00 land and everything and we had this voice contact by this time, within range. So we land, and before I could get out of the aircraft this RAF fellow, ground staff fellow, the sergeant, he pulled the bottom cowl off, big

13:30 fifty pound Westinghouse fell on his shoulder. It had sheared off in flight and of course that’s why it wasn’t charging, and of course I had two aircraft in trouble, one without a generator and the other one with a motor that wouldn’t tick over. I hadn’t had that much experience, you had to do it all yourself.

14:00 Anyway the skipper radioed back for a signal back to some or other for a generator, fair enough. Then he didn’t sort of get an answer, and when we landed at Labuan I discovered that there was a lot of crashed aircraft had been bulldozed over the edge

14:30 into a lot of trees had all been slashed down. Obviously the Royal Navy aircraft and though I’ll get down there and see if I can find a Westinghouse generator down there. So I got on this Royal Navy aircraft, were painted blue that was their camouflage, and ours was all the mottled jungle green sort of,

15:00 but they were blue because they flew over the sea. So I got down amongst all this rubbish and limbs and tree trunks all smashed and pushed over. I got down and I saw a Westinghouse generator on one so I unbolted it and how I got it out because they are something like fifty six pounds in weight. I must have been pretty fit, young fella. So I carried this

15:30 struggled up with this thing, and I took it down to the electrical workshop and they run it up, and it worked perfectly on the test. The technician said you are right, you can use that one, it’s a good generator. Been down in this jungle area for about six months or so. He said it works alright. So I got back up

16:00 bolted it on again, and I looked and the wrong connection was on. Instead of having a plug in it had a bolt on, no it was a bolt on that I needed and it had a plug in. So I had to unscrew it again and take it back to them, it takes a fair while to take a generator on and off. They fitted it with the nut and bolt

16:30 connection. Anyway during that time I visited an area where there were a lot of Japanese POWs.

How did they look and what health did they look in?

Well they looked alright to me. I saw this Japanese, he would be a private I suppose, and he was getting his hair cut, and the hair cut was cut

17:00 rug off. Almost a skin head sort of thing. And he was very tall man, unusual for a Japanese, he might have been a Korean or something. Sergeant major, he had a star on his cap, and he’s there and he’s supervising and he’s got this, and anyway this poor bloke he was trying to humiliate

17:30 him, they did they humiliated their own troops. They were terrible. Bashing was an order I believe everyday, somebody had to be bashed so sometimes it was their own. They standing there with this malicious smile on his face and he was looking at us, and he looked back at the bloke, as much to say, I have got a lot of control

18:00 here. Because he was a POW as well. But that was…

So everyday they had to beat each other up?

Yes, I believe that happened.

Why was that do you think?

I don’t know, they just needed somebody to bash. I have heard that from POWs, I think it was in films and on Changi and that sort of thing.

Was it to keep each other in line or something like that?

For no reason sometimes.

18:30 They bashed POWs they say for no reason. We didn’t know anything about this. See, I didn’t know much about this until I was discharged. That all being equal I got the motor fixed up and the generator and we returned to Morotai.

In Ambon, what was the mood like when you were there and the war

19:00 crime trials were happening?

Um, I came through the day of one of the trials I have discovered recently, and actually we didn’t go into the town. We usually landed there and got our fuel and I remember going to Ambon once, and nobody at the strip at all. And we were told we would get fuel.

19:30 In the meantime, the indigenous people, the natives we called them, came up and this guy had an enormous bunch of bananas on his shoulder, huge bananas, I have never seen them bigger in my life, and he was handing them out to us. He just came out of the jungle sort of thing. The first time I went in there, the bomb, we had bombed the strip and

20:00 bomb holes hadn’t been filled in, you had to dodge them when you were landing. But anyway we arrived, and we were there for half an hour and there was no sign of any refuelling gear or anything. Then we heard this old truck, it had come up from one of the hills, and it was coming down the road

20:30 and it had all these forty four gallon drums on, and about six Japanese POWs and a wild looking Australian in a slouch had, that’s about all he had on, in charge of them, well that was a bit of an experience because he was yelling out in Japanese to them, he knew the

21:00 language. And what he was saying to them I don’t know.

What was the general feeling towards the POWs as they were coming through and being seen?

Oh the Japanese POWs? Well we didn’t know what they did at Changi (Singapore), we might have heard a few stories, we didn’t know until the boys

21:30 were released and that’s when the horror stories came out, we might have had a different attitude altogether. But by the time I had heard the full story, I was out of the air force and discharged. Then I met a few of them including my cousin. Well I met some, and they told me the stories and it was horrible.

How do you think

22:00 you would have reacted differently if you knew when they…?

I think I might have, because at Ambon, they were refuelling aircraft from forty four gallon drums, and you had to have a lot of forty four gallon drums. So, they refuelled, they put the fuel in, the petrol in, a hundred octane it was. They pumped that in and they used the same pump to put the oil in the motor.

22:30 One motor was fairly low in oil for some reason. So I had to get some oil. So they are using the same pump. And they hadn’t pumped all the petrol through and I got a squirt of petrol and I yelled out at this bloke, and he carried on, I don’t know what he said, something in Japanese, he waved his hands, and fists around and he knew exactly he

23:00 had done the wrong thing you see. Then we had a long discussion because some petrol had gone into the oil tank. So we had a long discussion and we reckoned that it would evaporate before it blew up sort of thing. But this fella, he packed it all back on and away he goes back into the bush again way up the hill and that’s the last we saw of him. That was quite an experience.

23:30 Did they often get like you were saying to get the cooks to cook in the mess and so on, would they often get Japanese to do odd jobs and so on?

Yes they did. Because I think it was when I came back from Labuan on that occasion, they had shifted my tent, instead of being down in the coconut grove where the picture of the camp there, they put us up on the airstrip, near the airstrip, 24:00 POW airstrip. I came back from Labuan and somebody called out there’s your tent over there, that one over there. Who’s that guy standing next to it, has all my gear been shifted? Yes it’s all there. There’s a strange looking bloke there, when I looked closer, he was in a Japanese army uniform. I was told that he was a bloke who had been detailed

24:30 to look after my tent. Because I couldn’t speak Japanese and he couldn’t speak English. Anyway he did a very good job sweeping it out every day, for the very short time I was there, we shifted down back to the coconut grove again.

Was he a friendly fella?

He seemed to be. He was looking for cigarette buts, half cigarettes that had been

25:00 dropped. He obviously smoked. He seemed a reasonably pleasant sort of a bloke, so the only time I got quite worried, and he actually did the wrong thing. He did my washing as well as and he washed out a jungle green shirt, which we wore up there, and when it came back after it dried,

25:30 you could see the soap still in it. It was white. So he wasn’t very good at washing.

What trouble did he get into for that?

We didn’t worry too much about clothes. Sometimes we had to strip our clothes off in the hot aircraft. Yes that was quite an experience

26:00 never saw him again of course, in a picture over there, there is a Morotai war cemetery picture and you can see a Japanese POW pulling the weeds out in the picture. Those photographs were taken by a war photographer. His name was Frank, I have written a story, I will leave it to take

26:30 with you. It’s called ‘All for a Bottle of Beer’. I had a bottle of beer, and I was a teetotaller, remember. It wasn’t until I got back to Darwin that I had a drink of beer, and the CO used to send every week, he sent this beer, a big crate of beer, all different beers in Australia, well known

27:00 beers you see, so I have told the story there how I had this bottle of beer and you couldn’t do anything with it, anyhow this digger came round to my tent and he said “I believe you have got some beer?” Rumours went around, stories went around, “Yeah I have got a bottle of beer, how much do you want for it?”

27:30 I said “A gilder”, which was worth about one sixth. So we carried on too much and he said “I haven’t got one sixth”, which is a gilder and he said “Tell you what I have got, I have got a roll of film, I will swap you a roll of film

28:00 for the bottle of beer.” So I said “Fair enough”, I didn’t have a camera. I just took it. Somebody got to know stories got round. So this war photographer arrives and he’s flat out of film. So he comes round, sneaking round my tent and says “I believe you have got film?” So I think it’s Kodak 127,

28:30 unused don’t se them now. He said “What are you going to do with it? I am flat out of film, can’t get another film.” He had all these cameras and no film. So, he happened to have a 120 size camera. So I said “Oh well what about if we take you around in the jeep

29:00 and we’ll run you around?” His name was Frank, so we ran around and took all those photographs C47 taking off, and he took all these films, and he gave me his address. He said when you get them developed and printed, when you get back to Brisbane, I already knew that I was coming back,

29:30 he said send a set to me. But in all the confusion and being discharged, I lost his name and address. All I know is that his name was Frank. And I have been to the war museum and asked about Frank. He was the

30:00 war photographer, and they said actually there were three named Frank. So, for a long time I thought it was Frank Earls, but they say he wasn’t there at that time, if he was ever on Morotai. So I am still looking for Frank. And I have got his photograph.

Maybe this will find him?

Well I am hoping it might, somebody might somebody

30:30 might. I will have to go the war museum again. The Australian War Museum.

When the war crimes trials were being held, what war crimes do you think they were being tried for?

Well it’s a bit of a terrible story, the Japanese, he was an able seaman,

31:00 he was ordered to shoot in a firing squad, and they had been in charge of the squad or something, to shoot this POW and he was told to shoot him and he did. And he said “I was only following orders.” Now this is everywhere in war. You know, probably Himler would have said that to the Nazis. 31:30 Following Hitler’s orders to exterminate the Jews. It’s terrible really. And this guy was only an able seaman, and he was executed, almost after he was judged guilty. People have looked at this thing, and he protested his innocence. He was wearing a cross

32:00 and he said “I am a Christian.” Not many Japanese were Christians, most of them were Catholics they normally didn’t commit crimes of that time, and he protested I am a Christian and he said “I am innocent I was only obeying orders.” That was a pretty terrible

32:30 story really, but that came out in the war crimes trials on Ambon. It’s a terrible thing, I saw that story of the German soldier who was at Stalingrad, on the retreat, he got separated from his men, it was on a couple of nights ago on

33:00 TV, because the fella couldn’t keep up they had to shoot him. One of his own mates. Terrible story. But anyhow after that I received a notification that my discharge was due, I was to be discharged, demobilised was the term. And anyway, so I had to

33:30 catch a courier flight back to Brisbane, going to Redbank and so forth and be discharged, and so that was when the visit to Truscott happened on the way back. It was…

Firstly was your discharge part of a scaling down basically?

Yeah, everybody got a job by the time I got back. I had trouble getting a job.

34:00 That’s another story. I did get a job with the PMG’s department. But it was funny thing that all that equipment, all our jeeps and that, as soon as the battery went in one of them, we had to abandon it and acquire one somewhere else. You could pick them up. If there was an open air theatre, movie theatre, and

34:30 we would go in the jeep and we would pull the rotor out and we did this until, one night we pulled the rotor out and the jeep still disappeared, because guys were carrying spare rotors around. There were plenty of spare rotors. The battery would go and the vehicle is no good without the battery as you know. So all this scrounging went on

35:00 while I was at Labuan I scrounged those Japanese instruments out of the Zero and the Betty bomber, they are outside there, and I tried to give them to the RAAF memorial, the museum at Point Cook but they said oh no they didn’t want them. So I will keep them there. I think they are a good keepsake. The

35:30 air speed indicator and cylinder temperature gauge off Japanese aircraft. Of course some of the aircraft in the later stages, they ran out of parts and they were like Westinghouse generators Japanese generators made b y Westinghouse and they had been imported before the war, and they must have anticipated, from the States. Towards the end of the war

36:00 they didn’t have time to take the Westinghouse plate off them and put their own on. So there were some Japanese aircraft that turned up at the end of the war with properly labelled generators.

When you returned you touched on it a minute ago, you found it hard to get back in the work force and so on? Can you describe those times of settling back into every day life?

It was difficult. I think everybody was disturbed by war

36:30 and it took me years to settle down. Because you are out and everything is different every day, and you get back to a 9 to 5 job, and it’s not easy. I hadn’t seen any action. You know it was friendly fire that was fired at me, what you could call friendly fire. If there’s such a thing.

37:00 It was difficult to get a job. I wanted a certain job which I didn’t get but later on I started an engineering degree course as an adult and at age 59 I graduated with a diploma. And that’s an engineering and science and mathematics sort of diploma, at 59 I was when I finished

37:30 that. So my schooling finished there. But it still goes on at school for seniors.

When you returned were you having dreams or nightmares?

No.

Just finding it hard to fit in?

Just hard to settle down. Settling down was a problem. But you can imagine anybody who had seen horrific action, how they would have nightmares. Because they see their friends killed.

38:00 You would have to be very much hardened but my discharge came through before we left Morotai there was all these jeeps and things, and all these tools, great racks of them, I went to an RAAF store and I loaded two big tool boxes up with

38:30 spanners, all sorts of different tools. There’s some down in my workshop now. And they were to be dumped at sea, plus all the vehicles. We had two Harley Davidson motor bikes, and one of the officers said to us one day “Can you help me load one of those bikes, you don’t want them anymore? I am going to take it back to Australia.”

39:00 So we helped him we did a sort of half dark so that nobody would see us wheel this Harley Davidson in for him. And we put all the Mae Wests you know the survival gear [life jackets], and the dinghy, down the back we put it there and we put all the Mae Wests and the dinghy over the top of it. And that’s the way it came back.

39:30 Customs were starting to take an interest so I put my two big, so off he goes, and when he got back to Archerfield, we said to him “How are you going to get this registered? It has come from the island.” I saw him after and I said, “How did you go?” He said, “I just

40:00 rode it into the police station and the sergeant wrote out the registration for me and…” -

This section of transcript is embargoed until 1 January 2034.

41:07 We’ve only got a few seconds left. Anything left you want to say, and away you go. I was discharged after trouble at Archerfield, my mother rang the CO which was unprecedented and said “Where’s my

41:30 Teddy boy sort of thing?” I happened to be outside the orderly office, and they said “He’s here.” “When is he going to be discharged?” And of course they said, they hurried my discharge and I was discharged within two days. And that discharge was at Redbank.

Excellent, thanks Ted.

INTERVIEW ENDS