Australians at War Film Archive

At, King Edward Memorial Hospital in Subiaco on 10th November 1923. The first grandchild of paternal and maternal families.

Western Australia, particularly Fremantle. We lived always in Fremantle districts.

In my memory, I can start at about two years, I can go back that far, we lived in North Fremantle, mainly, and my grandparents used to live in John Street. We were very close, we were up there – you know the Salvation Army on the top of the hill there, I am just trying to think of the name of that hospital, anyway, opposite that hospital.

Not really, we were sort of natives of the Fremantle areas, and the next place we moved to was to Bicton. My mother and father built a home there in Bicton.

A younger brother born in 1926, Neville Kenneth.

Well, that one that stands out is the fact that when, my mother was very

keen to get us into things that sort of opened our minds, we became involved with the Young Australia League. I think that was probably my biggest influence of how I looked at life and how I interacted with your peer group. So from about age seven, which is getting to a more reasonable age, I went along to every function of the Young Australia League, in fact every week, end practically I went up with J.J. Simons who was the founder, and his mother, and Mr and Mrs Gee and we went up to

Araluen, and my job was to catch snails on the grove and boil them so the buggers wouldn’t go back again. Then after that, on Sunday afternoons, I would be in my uniform collecting the money at the gate. And I did that for years, in fact I don’t think I ever really left the YAL, because I joined their band, first of all their drum and bugle band. And then they used to go touring twice a year to raise funds. And they took a 40-person coach on and we would

go to, say, Geraldton, and we would do the left-hand side going up and the left-hand side going down, and every time we put a show on we had the house packed, and that also gave you an insight of what Western Australia was all about, and in a funny, without actually moving outside the state I saw a fair bit of the state, and we did Kalgoorlie and Albany, all the main areas, Bunbury, Busselton.

Oh the Young Australia League, it’s a pity it’s – it still

exists, but J.J. Simons lived till he was about, I think, mid-70s, and he’s been dead for some years, but what’s left at Araluen is still the basic foundation of what I found it, the grove itself is a memorial to the First World War. Because the YAL had 114 of them join and there’s 114 steps on the grove. The

pines that surround the grove, which is in the shape of a lyrebird, a lyre as adapted to the music stand, to hold your music on, the little stand you hitched on to your coronet, or whatever you played. Being musical and band orientated, and the pines represented the outlines of a lyre, and also the bonding of its branches gave it the harmony they wanted, and

right down the middle they put in an artificial waterfall, and it sang a permanent and eternal requiem, which is a very, very – and on their Anzac Day services up there, absolutely amazing, because they brought all the flags of all the nations that were involved, and the way our boys turned up in uniform and it was really, really, I think that the services can impact on young lives. Whilst it wasn’t a service organisation, it was,

it was combined with another thing, and that was the power of being able to visit other countries in between the first and second world war, J.J. Simons took them over and actually met Hoover in America, the President of America, and they toured England, and had interstate tours going for years. I think they still run them. It really is fantastic. He not only supplied the uniforms, but all the instruments, didn’t have to have money, you

just joined.

Ah, I think, most important, bonding. Your peer group is your peer group, if you don’t like them what else is there to do but to love? And how do you get to love people and understand people unless you have some sort of a motivation, and in a way I provided that. It is very simple, it isn’t something that isn’t desirable, it’s just that I don’t

think many people spark things to have that happen. Except the ex-service people. See, on this village, it happens to us here, if we don’t bond then we have a miserable time, don’t we?

Well, it’s true, Julian [interviewer], it’s very sad that the very simple things of life are often forgotten. It’s, aside from what you asked me, but I should expand it, I did nine years of

counselling with an organisation called Birthright. Now, Birthright is the equivalent to Legacy, but when the migrant people came out from England and Italy and all the places immediately after the Second World War, we had a lot of problems, we had a lot of different conditions for them to live in, there were plenty of salesman around selling them land with a house on it, and they weren’t homeowners, and they didn’t probably understand how the economy worked, and they were finding themselves in a situation where they couldn’t

adjust. Now, the one last thing that you need to do for counselling is to talk to family, because inevitably you take sides. On my side of thinking, a stranger comes along and you spill the whole of your problems, you give in, but we actually used Birthright to promote those families who had a sudden death and I finished up, I raised another eight families. Now, one of the dear old ladies said to me one day, “Mr Morton, I would like to do something for you.”

And I said, “We don’t expect nor want anything.” “Well, can I give you something that’s kept me comfortable.” And she said, “I call it KISS – keep it simple, stupid.”

Well, I went to Bicton State School to celebrate their centenary this year, and from there I went to Fremantle Boys School, which was not – it was in the City of Fremantle, straight

opposite St Pat’s church. And I went there for two years. But you must remember that most of us came out of the Depression years and most of us had to leave school at 14 because we had to start earning, so I only did two years of high school, and I was naughty, I wagged a fair bit of the time in the second year, and that’s where the air force comes into it, because when war broke out, that’s how I got involved.

Um,

what are my earliest memories of those years. I don’t know, I think they have gone a bit fuzzy, because too much has happened since, and when we get into the interview you will find that in three years, I did more in those three or four years in the air force than I did in anything else, and that sort of wipes the slate clean, but most of us we still retain a friendship. We had a reunion about

two years ago, and 116 turned up, which is not bad for something like about 98 years later. Not that we were 98, but to get that many people together. In fact they kept it to the Birdwood Circus area, because Birdwood Circus has an east and a west component and is sort of like, the name circus, it’s an oval shape, and it was just the houses that looked at each,

because apart from the centre block, the two end blocks of the oval were just wild bush. So they were out parklands, so you had a block of houses, and then surrounding houses on the outer circle. So there weren’t that many families to draw on, and nor were they big families except for one or two that might have had four or five children. But others, they were twos or threes.

It was really a development that became much more noticeable, it was really the move for the families from Fremantle, South Fremantle, North Fremantle, slowly all moved east, you can’t move west because Rotto [Rottnest Island] stops you. So there were new home owners. We actually moved into the area with what was called a shell road, which was called Fraser Street, and

it stopped virtually where we lived, we were on the corner of Birdwood-Circus East and Fraser Street, and there was just a sand track, and the track that came from off Canning Highway, it was also a sand track, so virtually you couldn’t say it was absolutely fresh, everyone was starting at square one. But the standard of homes was good.

The youngsters, there were a lot of us, all joined the forces together. We all got back, strangely enough. The only fellow was Stan Bell, had his eye knocked out in the Coral Sea battle. They finished up in the army, navy and air force, and one fellow, George Bell, he was in the merchant marines, and he finished up the chief engineer on the Queen Mary. The original Queen Mary. So they must have had a few clues, and we only got it from the same

school.

Walked. Originally in shoes or boots, and finally, no shoes and no boots, and if it rained you just coped, your feet became as hard as leather. So for six years you didn’t catch colds, whether that was good or bad. And the schoolrooms were all wooden boards. And Bicton School had

four classrooms and a pavilion. Mr Gusperson was the headmaster. The teachers were dedicated people. It’s not the fault of the new education era, which came from the younger men and women, it was just that simply in those days you didn’t get to the teaching profession unless you were married.

Oh, the cane existed, and the most they could give you was six. They weren’t

supposed to cane the girls, but there were one or two that could have got themselves the cane, and I suppose they did, and the only person to administer the cane was the headmaster, and he was a tall man, so it was no use lifting your hand up and hoping you will get the swipe lessened, he would reach up and finally whack you underneath the hand, so it didn’t matter which way you got it, you got your six cuts.

Oh, usually

fraternising with each other, or taking the mickey out of each other. In a peer group problem and things, but whether they caught the bullies or not or being cheeky in the class room, or late, lunch was in a shed, which to get through, you walked through deep black sand. The toilets were what we used to call dunny houses. The nightsoil and all that sort of

business. The amenities were not very marvellous, and the water that you got was straight out of the tap, there were no fountains or anything like. But it was and still is quite an outstanding school, Bicton and Palmyra schools were very keen competitors to each other, and we used to always play sport against each other and – but I suppose the discipline that we talked about in the primary school didn’t quite fit us for high school, because Fremantle

Boys pulled on as far away as Mosman Park and Cottesloe and as far away as – further south…

Well, mainly, of course, cricket and football. Rugby Union, Rugby League hadn’t started then. And in the summer time we were all fanatical in our swimming, we lived at Bicton Beach, and it

was terrific being there because you brought in all the residents of the whole of East Fremantle, Bicton, Point Walter and you name it, Palmyra. We had six weeks’ holidays, and my parents, my mother will tell you even now that she didn’t see us from sunup till sundown. And I don’t know what we did about meals, but I don’t think we cared much. It was a lovely beach.

It had – I just forget what we called it, but about 50 metres from the jetty we had a turning board and a little bit of a platform. And most of us could swim underwater twice that distance. It got your lungs going. We used to play underwater chasey, you get down and you stay down so long you would think that someone would wipe themselves out, so yeah. Sport, they were the main things, because we – these days kids get presents of cricket bats

and footballs of their own, that wasn’t, so you innovated yourself or you built cubbyhouses during the holidays, covered them in, you dug them into the sand. There were supposed to be fights. I don’t know whether you have seen big fields of lupin, have you? You know how thick they get, we used to build those as though they were trenches, and we would take a shanghai or a ging [catapults] and we were a bit serious about it, we used to fly blue metal at each

other. It was a wonder we didn’t lose more eyes or more – if you got hit in the temple in the right place, that’s it, curtains. But anyway, sport, and actually their attitude was more than anything, you were very innovative, very few of us owned bikes. I didn’t get a bike until I was 12.

Reading particularly. I was never a great mathematician, but I understood it. I was a very good writer, still am, I think, a legible writer. The old position of the three Rs was a very important facility. But when I got down to Fremantle Boys I actually took a shine to mechanical drawing. And I loved the challenge of keeping your pencils sharp, chiselled

sharp. But – and we used to do things like haunch, mortis and tendon joints, which is actually to show the joining and to turn a piece of timber at right angles. I used to like the mechanical side of tinsmithing and metal work and soldering. But that’s not where I finished up.

I don’t know. I think I had a difficulty with my father from the point of view I was – he had big expectancies from the first child. So I always felt my younger brother, who was nearly three years younger than me, was more favoured. And anything I took to my Dad was never good enough. But as far as my parents were concerned we weren’t wanting for anything, even despite the fact that it was

a depression time. We were always well dressed and cared for. I was encouraged to take on work, which I did do. I used to be what they called a tiger on a bread cart, and that means that my father was the former bread carter for a – seeing you are both West Australians, you have probably heard of Bernie Naylor. Well, my father worked for Naylor & Currie. And Bernie Naylor and I used to both be tigers for our father, and the idea is that

the bread carter has the same number of people to deliver bread to, whether it’s a half a day or a whole day. So if you wanted Saturday afternoon off, you had to get around twice as quickly. So that’s where the tiger came in. You took a basket full of bread and did all the little deliveries and covered all the ground, for which we got the magnificent sum of one [shilling] and threepence from the baker and one and threepence from your father, so you got two and six and away you went. We had to curry the horses and put them away, because it was,

the bread was delivered in horse carts. And I was a lolly boy, do you know what a lolly boy is? You don’t see them now. They are a tray and have ice creams and chocolates and so forth. You get yourself a pair of long pants and a white jacket and a bow tie. And you actually serve customers in picture theatres. And I used to work for two dear old ladies called the Misses Martin. They made their own ice cream, which was

fabulous ice cream. And of course all those things have disappeared. And actually I finished up, I worked for them, the Martin ladies until I joined the air force.

Well, the first one was South Suburban Theatre on the corner of Canning Highway and Petra Street, in sort of the junction of East Fremantle and Bicton and Palmyra, and the next, they built a new theatre called the Mayfair. I actually worked in both of them.

That’s how I got a bike, I paid for it out of my earnings.

Any…?

Except to help my father on the bread cart. And that happened on public holidays as well. Chores, no, no, my father was not a great gardener, maybe helped, not that I remember

because, don’t forget I was born in 1923, so when war broke out I was only 16, and by that time everything was forgotten. I mean, everything dropped – if it hadn’t been for the women going to work, the men wouldn’t have been relieved to join the services. Initially, the call up was for men, not for men and women. There were organisations, of course, that only wanted women, such as the nursing area.

We didn’t have the Land Army as such in those days, like they did in England, so they actually grew vegetables in all the public gardens and things. So the war really interrupted things, so I really don’t know. Of a weekend I would either go swimming or used to go playing rugby, and I used to be a coxswain for Fremantle Rowing Club. I loved anything to do with the water. And I coxed with them until war broke out, almost as soon as

the war broke out, all our members had to virtually close the doors. They were all at the right age to be called up. Army, navy and air force, and I should say we lost more than half of them during the war.

Only what we were told on the radio, and the radio was still in its infantile stage. I remember we didn’t get a radio until I was about, maybe eight or nine or ten.

We used to rely on, for music, the gramophone and the old 75 records.

I don’t think as a kid I had much. I was aware of, and I suppose I was swept along by – there was an excitement. It has got nothing to do with what

people joined the forces – but what it does, it’s a huge change in your life, and when you went to go down to, I worked for a firm in North Fremantle called Soap Distributors. And I joined them when I was 14, in fact it was my first job.

16, yes.

Well, I don’t suppose I had much of a reaction because I had just started work, and as I told you I kept myself busy, I always loved sport, I always loved swimming, and I loved anything to do with yachting. But you couldn’t afford to buy a boat, so I used to be a bailer boy for people around the Bicton Sailing Club, and I joined the Fremantle Rowing Club. And there were three of us, a chap named Charlie Cordingly, Laurie, doesn’t

matter about his name, and myself, we were the three main coxswains for Fremantle Rowing Club, and we coxed everything from eights to fours to pairs, and I remember when I got back from the war I went back and joined them and I actually rowed for them. Anyway, that’s getting away.

Well, I tried to put my head down because I actually joined the ops section of Soap Distributors, who were part of the Lever organisation, huge firm, worldwide,

and I started off as the office boy and made the usual progression and finished up, they gave me clerical duties to do as well. And I really was in clerical duties, and as our men were joining up, because, so what are we talking about 1939, around about the end of 1939, see, I was then getting to 16, say, about 16 and a half, we noticed our men were disappearing because

ten of our office became pilots. And I am trying to think, yes, most of them got back, I was one of the early ones to go. Then they have to give you your job back. So, I really am stuck to say that there was not very much that youngsters – all you lived for, really, was your comics

and your afternoon – Saturday afternoon pictures. And there was usually Firefighter Jim or, you know, all those sort of – in serial form, and the cowboys and Indians. The incentive to go along, they used to have prizes of either footballs or a bike, the principal prize, and threepence to spend, and so for sixpence on a Saturday your parents let you go to the pictures. I went to Sunday School like most

did, but even those were not the run of the mill. Most of the kids just – I think you will both find that if you look around, the gardening content of living has only really been a progressive thing since perhaps five, ten years after the war. You needed money to do it. If you only were paying rent, and you put a bit of lawn in, and that’s about it, you didn’t worry about your backyard, it was just

bush. We had a quarter acre block, which usually, 66 feet frontage and about 180, 190 feet deep. And the house only stood on the first third of it, so about two thirds of the land was under gum trees and things like that. You maybe as a youngster have a pet, I had a couple of kangaroos and wallabies and I also had a dog. It bit me when it was run over, so I wasn’t allowed to have any more. Kids

were in a stage in their lives where parentally and grand-parentally you were to be seen and not heard. I bet that strikes some cords.

Well, because many men didn’t get any work, either they lacked the drive or they had been put in a position where

all of a sudden their confidence was very seriously affected. Nothing was cheap, I mean, the basic wage was around about one pound fifteen shillings, there’s no use expressing it in dollars, I can do that for you but it’s the buying power that matters, because, as you heard, threepence to go to the pictures, if you went to the pictures on Sunday nights, which could not start until after the churches were closed, then

you put in a silver coin, which meant a threepence, a sixpence or a shilling, because they were the silver coins. So society was really not able to have a lot of entertainment. Most of the entertainment was family generated. We were always in bed early. We didn’t have a radio. If you were innovative you put up what they called amateur radio, which was,

they used to tickle what they called cats’ whiskers until they found a frequency, and really you had to lie very still to hear it. Some of those blokes, a couple of my mates were very good at those sort of things. And they obviously when war broke out became very important to the services, because we were still on Morse. See, not telephone or radio phones or things like that. The whole of the telegraphic system really took off when the war came along, because

that’s when all the innovations – the same as the air force, our air force was started in 1919, war, but it really didn’t develop until the Second World War. Anyway, that doesn’t really answer your question. I am not struggling because I can empty my mind and say to myself what did I do. But that was it really, pictures, comics and what you, innovative – you sort of had plenty to do because the kids were good at playing.

We played a game called Ping, now Ping is now expressed today with paintballs. But we didn’t have anything to throw at each other, we just said, “Ping, gotcha, Julian.” And you did get yourself down. And there was plenty of scrub around, don’t forget, not only saplings and things, but there’s plenty of black boys. See, the whole – a bush called curds and whey, which is like a –

rather like one of the harder nuts, you know, ones that you find, the black one. Anyway, you could soon make yourself disappear. There were two sides, the winners and the losers. And you called yourself the Pink Eyes or whatever you called yourself. But the war just changed everything.

They weren’t called up, they volunteered. Call up was – they were calling men up, and they opened their books for men to join, and I don’t remember what the actual date was when they finally got around to having a, there’s a name for it, conscription. That was a whole –

you see, the strange thing about it, the effect of the war was only because when we went to work, which started me off with Soap Distributors, I had to cross the Fremantle traffic bridge. Well, on the end, on the south side of that bridge was a big store, which was the Naval Store. All of a sudden there were guards on it, and there were guards on the bridge to protect it. And you just didn’t walk across without being challenged, they weren’t just guards for a moment or two, they were there seven days a week, 24 hours a day. For the rest of the war.

And as the experience developed in Europe and they realised they needed to sandbag buildings for protection, so finally that caught on, and then Fremantle itself was quite a fanatical – no, quite a – fanatical is not the word, Fremantle was actually more critical in its ability to support the war than people have given credit for. I – they had 196 submarines

operating out of Fremantle. And I have actually got a book there that can prove it. And every submarine that went in and out of Fremantle is listed. In fact, I keep company with a fellow who was the officer in charge.

Oh well, of course rationing, coupons for clothing, petrol was rationed, butter was rationed, flour

was rationed. Again, I didn’t see a lot of that because I finished up, I was in the air force as soon as I turned 18, but before then I joined at 16 and a half and I joined what they called then their Preliminary Educational Reserve, because they realised I had the aptitude for the air force, I gather, because we had aptitude tests, we were given general knowledge tests and, most importantly, health checks and all this sort of business.

And the fellow said to me, “Right, you are in, we’ll have you, but you have to go back to technical school.” So I had to go back to mathematics, and what I lacked and was naughty about in the 8th standard, as they called it, I finished up catching up, and I joined the air force. I did not know I was joining aircrew, I simply joined up.

I did, but I was 16 and a quarter and they were rude, they said, “Get out.”

I went down to Croke Lane, it was called in Fremantle, and I had a cousin of mine who was the commissioned warrant officer in charge of Fremantle’s boom defence. He told me what to do, but he didn’t tell me to put my age up, when they asked my age I was 16 and a quarter. What he was telling me which was also true, that the navy would take a youth of 16 and a half, but you were taken – you could go ashore, go aboard a ship, but you were a writer, which meant you were a

clerk. And you couldn’t become an able seaman. It’s not like the First World War, I think when things were in such a predicament and the population was so much smaller in Australia, they took even, my stepfather was 16 when he went to the First World War, because he was a sapper. See, sometimes it depended on what your background was. See, the sapper is actually a miner, and their knowledge of shoring, tunnels and things is vital.

No, my father was manpowered, he only – anything to do with food, and they just didn’t take them.

My stepfather.

Well, I was married before he come along and married my mother, so we were established family, but he was a sapper in the First World War, and badly gassed.

Marvellous, he was marvellous, he was the figurehead, my mother and Fred married and we amalgamated his children and my Mum’s children and there was never any – it was simply an amalgamation, and it worked.

I was married in 1947.

Yeah, yes, post-war.

Yes, I actually went out to Victoria Park Technical School out there, and you did two lessons a week, and you did science and maths, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, you did some of the elementary sciences, and also I was lucky, the works

manager of Soap Distributors, a Mr Robins, was a bachelor of science, and when he heard that I had joined up and the conditions and circumstances, he was helping his daughter get through her degrees and tutorship, and he offered to take – so I went two nights a week with him as well. So whether I got to the standard, I don’t know, I never saw results, just that you wouldn’t have been taken in if you didn’t arrive at a certain level. So that really is the

basis of it, you have got to learn to navigate by the stars, but they are only elements that you learn to protect yourself, because that’s not the way the air force operated. They taught you all these things, the same as now, I don’t know now what happens to the youngsters with their calculators, what happens when the batter – they teach them how to put the battery in and out. It’s crazy, so the air force – none of the services would let you in unless there was a back up methodology.

Yes. Very, very.

I don’t know, you just did it. I worked, I worked five and a half days, and we worked a 44-hour week in those days. You would get – I think we worked either alternate Saturdays or one Saturday in 4, but it doesn’t make any difference, that was the way you worked,

and I was also trying to do accountancy. But I didn’t. It was a bit dry for me, I was very glad when the war came along, it interrupted it.

Well, he was able to endorse all the things that I had to learn, see, navigation is mainly trigonometry and algebra and all those things are part of it. No, essentially

how to find your way from a place to a place, but if you had that basis – don’t forget, if you are dropping a bomb from a bomber, what starts out as a one-degree error can – if you are 10,000 feet, that comes out as hundreds or maybe thousands of yards on the ground. So you have to know what you are up against and the essentials to become an aircrew member.

The whole thing was lumped together in the thing they called the Empire Air Training Scheme, and that was fantastic, but we are delving far, so….

Go to his home. He gave his private time.

Oh, he was marvellous, I think he looked at me as an addition – a son, addition to his family. I don’t think he had a son, to be honest, he had two daughters.

Those things happen, but it’s lucky. The same as the way with J.J. Simons, I know it’s switching back, but it prompts you when you are talking like we are talking now. J.J. Simons was originally a horse carrier in Fremantle, because all the major wholesale warehouses were there and the ships, when they arrived in Fremantle, discharged their cargo into those warehouses in Fremantle. And to transport it to

Perth, they used to put it on barges, but there was a fair bit of haulage to go from the wharf areas, which weren’t, as you know now, Victoria Pier, there was another great big jetty which went out from behind where the Round House is. So there was a fair bit of cartage to be done, and he was a competitor with my grandfather, and so he actually remembered me from that. He also, virtually adopted me also.

Oh, I could concentrate, and the answer is, Julian, and I am here, if I hadn’t been, then my lessons weren’t learnt. There is not much

time to think. The most important education you learn when you join the forces is to follow the leader without question. You cannot be a disciplined person and have your troops just tell you how to suck eggs, if you do that you are in trouble. Make a decision to do, and whatever you are told to do you do. Now, in the air force, if you are in charge of a crew and things are happening all around you and your aircraft is on fire, the brain is trying to function

with so many things, so they teach you a method called rote. You know what rote means? Rote is learning it in routine. So, for example, to get an aircraft into the air, we have a thing called a trim, but first of all you have to run the engine and check all your magnetos to see if you are not losing your revs. Then you say trim, mixture, pitch, fuel, flap, gills, filter, and as you say all those words to yourself, that’s what you are touching, and

that’s what you are putting into gear. So your reflexes don’t need a brain, you just do it automatic. How can a pianist play, that’s rote.

At Pearce. We were called up on the 1st February 1942.

Telegram. What actually happened, because I was on this Preliminary

Education Reserve, that meant I was on reserve, so I turned 18 on the 10th November 1939 – 1941. And we were advised that we were taken on 31st December 1941, but on the 7th December Japan declared war on America, and Japan went to war, and that threw everyone into a flap. All the training schemes and…

Yes, well, that is important, they were preparing to call us up, or told us, warned us they were taking us on the 31st December, but when Japan came in on 7th December, they put us off a month, we just got a succession of telegrams and finally they called up the December

intake and the January intake on the 1st February 1942. So two bodies of men came into one course, and we were called Number 24 Course, there were 101 of us, and that was simply because of the interruption of war. But yes, I went to Pearce and I joined 24 Course, but now because of Japan coming into the war this is where the impact comes, they put Pearce on a war footing.

Which means that you could not go off the camp without anyone knowing what you were actually doing. But you didn’t even move, because you were there – that was your house and that was it, and you never got off the place unless you had leave passes or whatever there was. But when we went to class we were all issued 303 rifles, we were issued with a couple of rounds, we had about 20 rounds of 303 ammunition. Which we weren’t allowed to put into our

rifle, because a 303 holds about six shots, doesn’t make any difference, but you just clip them down, so initially we kept those in our pouches and took our guns to class with us and pile them outside the school room. In the event of an alert we were armed at all times, and it makes a big difference, a hell of a difference. And if you remember, the Kormoran came down the coast and we did get a red

alert while we were at Pearce, and we took off through the CO’s gardens, trampled all the beautiful flowers, and over the other side of the road that takes you up to Cheltenham, there was an army bivouac and, well, you see all of that’s housing now.

No, no, it was a bivouac.

Yes, it was a bivouac, and there, so there were slitties [slit trenches] there and so we used those as our ready built slit trenches and this sort of business. There were a few other messy details, you know, they have got to have latrines, so they put lime in on top of them and covered them in, but when the wet weather comes along it sinks and you do not know, that looks like a slittie that is covered in. You dive in, you’d be amazed, some of the blokes came out a bit

slimy. Now you have asked the question, you have got the answer.

I am still mates with most of them – well, those that came back, there’s about seven of us left. But when you go into training, that is called – it was called 5 ITS, Initial Training School, and they have all your education officers who carry you on and even

got to do your time in the bull ring, you have got to learn to march, you have got to learn to control troops, you have got to learn to handle your guns, you got to do exercises, and the curriculum was actually established in what you call – we used to call it a big foolscap book about that thick, blue bound and that was the entire Empire Air Training Scheme at the Initial Training area. And that was what you learned, the theory of flight,

all those sorts of things, so that you generally fitted with aircrew. So when you went on to this wharf wing, of course, they had to re establish themselves as a proper at-war base, so they sequestred or whatever they had to do, they took over that school out here, Clontarf, which was run by the Christian Brothers, and that became 5 ITS. Now, to change it into an educational program and to take over the role of initial training school,

they put us on what they called tarmac duties, and those of us who were there from the end of January, we went down for about five or six weeks to paint the place to get rid of the bugs, to repair the broken toilet seats. To connect the sewer – no, there was no sewer, there was only a sewerage system. The electricity was in a bad state, you have no idea of the condition, and

so they put us, and that’s exactly – because don’t forget, there would be tradesmen and all sorts of people. So we established that, and it became 5 ITS.

Bugs, we had bugs that invented bugs. The rooms were absolutely chock-a-block, and they sealed every door and every window with newspaper and they put cyanide bombs. The bugs were so thick we had to go along with a bannister brush. We used to have bug

parades of a morning where the doc looked at us to see if we had been bitten. By the way, the Christian Brothers, I am using their name, they denied it ever happened, and they got wonderful reparations after the war, but I tell you it was full of bugs.

The bull ring is where you actually learn to march in proper order, keep in step, in proper columns,

and you are educated because that is also part of your discipline. And discipline, as I said to you earlier, is so important, if you start to have a challenge with anyone and right in the middle of it and someone is going to have a go at you with their gun, it is too late to argue. You are either dead or you have been lucky.

Very good at Pearce. It’s a very windy, dusty area, and those days the bull ring was really just gravel. And in the summer time, when we were there, it didn’t matter which way the

breeze came. Most airfields you find is very, very drafty.

Oh yes, we were issued the day we went in.

Everything.

Bombay bloomers for your underpants. You wouldn’t have worn them. I never wore mine. I used to – we never had things called Ys –

you were issued with such things as your own sewing kit. You were really well equipped, your own safety razor. I arrived as a man at Pearce. The fellow in charge of our course was a fellow by the name of Bertie Howe. “Morton, get rid of that bum fluff.” I shaved. So I went off to my friends in Fremantle and bought myself a proper razor, a cutthroat, and a razor strop.

I had arrived as a man, at 18 I was a baby face. I’ll show you later.

Huts, just ordinary timber huts. No asbestos at that stage. I don’t ever remember going under asbestos until after the war, when it was recognised as a building material. But the bed was three planks,

you know, about six feet six inches long, and you had a cut out of timber, that was like with a hollow, so you actually had a V and you were issued with a palliasse, and the palliasse is actually a Hessian bag which you filled with straw. Hence your bed.

Oh, I slept, we – all of us did. We were busy people, and we weren’t used to – well, home didn’t have those sorts of beds. But we – and we were issued with our

dixies to go and stand in line for your meals and everything, you were issued with the whole cooloo. Do you know what a cooloo is? You were issued with the bloody lot.

I don’t know, we got up in the morning, rose about half five, six o’clock. It depended, on flying days, when we finally got to flying, they are

assessing you and examining you, and keep copies of your marks, but most importantly is your attitude and your aptitude. I imagine that probably rates higher than anything. I do not know, because I was never shown the formula. And of the 101 of us, about 30 of us was chosen as pilots. So what they do is they rank you, and as they want pilots to train pilots, or observers, or navigators, or wireless operators, or gunners,

they go down and just chop off, “I want 30 pilots, I want ten observers,” and so on, and that’s the way it’s done. Then you are posted, I know where the others went, but that isn’t as important as where I went, so I was posted to Cunderdin in 24 Course also, and there we flew Tiger Moths.

I didn’t know, I was in aircrew, they said I was going to be a pilot, so that was it and I loved it. Couldn’t afford to have people dictating, the only people that came to the air force at the beginning of the war, the men who were actually flying training, and they became early birders, they were the nucleus of the instructing fraternity. The early birders were men who actually joined the air force in about 1937, 1938.

At Cunderdin they probably had about 100 Tiger Moths. We had virtually three or four courses under training all the time, so you finished up – and a course really ranks month by month by month. OK, so you have continuity of what is going on, and you are all at a phase, so that that means the instructors get a chance of reaching various levels of aptitude,

and anyway, I was lucky, I had the ability to fly, I went solo at eight and a quarter hours.

We were only at Pearce – I will be able to tell you exactly later –

Eight or ten weeks.

No, but while we were there, the interesting thing is that the first Kittyhawks arrived in Western Australia, they must have come down from Darwin, been

dropped in Darwin, and they landed at Pearce thinking it was Dunreath, which was the old name for Perth Airport. The Americans who brought them and went up to our duty pilot on the tower and said, “This here place Dunreath?” “No, no, this is Pearce.” So the duty pilot gave them a bearing, which is the normal thing to do. He said, “No, no,” and away they went.

They became 77 Squadron, and they were mighty. Before we start I have got to be very proud of it, Kittyhawks were to Australia what the Spitfire was to London, England, we had ten squadrons of Kittyhawks, no one knows the amount of work they did. And the number of men who flew them – I wonder, if I had to go to war again and they offered me a jet, I would still choose the Kittyhawk. Ever seen one?

They are around you, mate.

Anyway, we went to Geraldton and we were transferred onto Avro Ansons.

You were inducted – you go through the usual – you are also now issued with the flying kit. Which is a –

we had a thing we used to call the goon seat, which is actually like overalls, you know, Yakka overalls, and we were also issued with berets, because if you put your field cap on or your slouch hat on that doesn’t withstand the wind, but the beret you can pull down. And also, when you got to England you got things like balaclavas that you could – because your ears and your extremities when you were flying in those days. See, a Tiger Moth doesn’t get much above 8,000 feet, but by crikey

the bloody air’s cold and your feet chattering and so on. So you had a new approach, and then you were introduced to your instructors and you started on the theory of flight, and you did theory and navigation, you did map reading, you were given exercises, and then you applied yourself. So it was pretty concentrated, so really and truly you were whacked out by the end of the day.

And Cunderdin had about 100 aircraft and four flights – some of the instructors were widely known in Western Australia. My flying instructor finished up as the CFI, the Chief Flying Instructor.

Exciting. Exciting. A bit scary, it’s a mixture, isn’t it? I think the hardest thing was when he said,

“You can take it.” You get up and you think, “How am I going to get back on to the handkerchief?” And Cunderdin is a huge air field. One of the biggest in the world in area, but we didn’t have runways, we used to land on the lawn. And we had the flights, A, B, C and D, in the four corners of it.

Oh, very good. I think the influence he had on my life has affected all my life.

Well, he teaches the difference between dead and living, he teaches a whole new sense of values. He puts his life in your hands when you do some of the manoeuvres you have got to do when you learn to fly and so forth. He’s got to hold back from grabbing the stick if you make a silly mistake. And he’s got to – he just – it’s like the

woman he taught – how do you put up with what you put up with when you have a baby, even. Those things, how would you do it, they reckon if a man had the first baby there’d be no second. Anyway, but it’s very difficult, because I can express it in hours, I can express it in what you do. You learn night flying, that’s another thing altogether. You learn to land on a flare, on the flare

path.

No, no. It’s all elementary training. You have got to start there, because by the time you get to service training you are actually then teaching how best to use your aircraft as a performance, you are not learning to fly, you have learnt to fly. Now, you have got to take the next step and get that aircraft and make it operational, dropping bombs, firing guns.

Scared bloody hell out of me. Yeah, but the only answer is that you can imagine how you were, I flew an aeroplane before I drove a motor car. It’s – the impact was enormous and I loved it. Scared too.

Eight and a quarter.

If you went about 12 or 14 you could be getting scrubbed.

I don’t know, you didn’t hear much of that, because it was a bit of a shock to the old system. Being scrubbed could mean – to answer your question more fully, one of the requirements, you can’t be more – you can’t be colour blind. Because if you had the worst stage of colour blindness in reds or greens, guess what you are flying over, a lot of green,

and guess what the emergency signal is, a lot of red. OK, so that’s a reason, the next thing is depth perception, you have got to know how high you are and there is nothing – when you are flying over the actual level of the grass, there’s nothing to tell you how high – you have just got to have the ability to tell where your wheels are. The first thing you have got to do is to change the altitude of the aircraft from coming down, to level off ready, because if you do it too quickly you’ll stall and you’ll hit the ground.

So if you haven’t got those things that’s one thing to scrub. Also, you have got to have a sense of direction, when you take off, where is the aerodrome? How do you know that your aircraft didn’t drift around and you went through a 180-degree turn? So those are the sorts of things that you have got to learn at the elementary stage. And the same thing happens, and then you have got to do it all over for the night flying. And in the middle of this you have also got to do country navigation

courses. Fortunately the railway line went from Perth to Kalgoorlie, so you just followed it.

No, but never missed. And there’s also a big ring of salt lakes around Cunderdin. But no, you – and that the most important – and your engine handling, you have to know what makes the aircraft work, you have got to be able to come back and tell your mechanics what the fits – you have to be able to tell your fitter 2A, that’s the bloke that looks after the airframe,

your starboard wing’s down, and what he should do. See, the ones who look after your aircraft aren’t essentially the ones who are in the air. They don’t even probably have a ride in it. So you have got to be a – ready and able to describe what is happening to you.

Yes, yes. I know what the Otto cycle is.

The Otto cycle. It’s induction, compression, expansion and explosion. The other way round, explosion and expansion. They suck the air in, mix it with the petrol, compress it, ignite and exhaust it. That’s the Otto cycle.

What do you mean by mnemonic?

Well, that’s what they called rote. Yeah, you have to. You have got to understand the same, if you have to fire a gun you have to know how to make it fire again if it jams. You have got to be all things to all things about the air or it is no use you doing it. That’s what the Empire Training Scheme is all about. I am sorry I haven’t got the book, but if you want it, it will only cost you about $5,000 to get it from the bloke in Rottingham.

But there are Empire people around, air training scheme people, who would probably have the curriculum and the setup. It’s quite fascinating, and you have got to understand even how the clouds form. Which clouds you can fly into. Which ones you shouldn’t.

Well, the soft ones. And not all of them are soft, because some of them, when they get cumulus or nimbus, when they start to get black anvil heads on the top, don’t go into those, mate,

they will tear you apart.

They will either be full of hail or lightning or – and the – you have no idea, the air that’s up here, the jet stream’s around about 30 or 40 or 50,000 feet, they are doing about 120 knots. How fast is that – can you convert that to kilometres an hour?

We’ll call it, we’ll use

120 and divide it by five, 100 say, divide by five is 20, multiply by eight is 160 kms. How would you like to be diving in it like that?

The whole theory of flight is fascinating. If you don’t think it affects your life, what it does when you drive a car,

you drive listening to the engine as much as to the feel of the car on the road, and as much as what is happening around you. You have learnt to assess and see things around you, because your peripheral vision is very important. Up there it can often safe your life. So driving a car, if you press the car engine long enough and you don’t keep it up serviced properly and so on, the next thing is you have got a dud engine. You can’t fix it while you are in the air, so who are you going to tell, you have to tell your

mechanic what to do. He gets to interpreting, you may not have all the – but you have got to have the basics. He’s got to be able to tell you, do you test your magnetos, because in an aircraft every cylinder has two plugs, you only need one, but you have always got to have backups and you only need one magneto but you have two. So what you are looking for is to maintain the revolutions, because the ability to fly the aircraft or the ability to turn the power of a

propeller into speed is based on auto things. Now, I don’t know whether the people who are going to see these tapes, if ever they do, want to know those things, that’s why it took so long, it took me, when I joined the air force in 1 February 1942, I got my wings on the 22nd December 1942, and I was posted overseas at the end of January, beginning of March of 1943. So that’s how long it took

just to do the training. Today, it still takes these people the same time at Pearce. See, No. 2 FTS [Flying Training School] at Pearce is the training school in Australia.

Don’t know, I was a brain. And they pumped it in. Yeah. I could remember the words of the instructors.

What I am trying to demonstrate is, this rote system is, the ability to keep your mind is working is essential. You must be ever – when you join something like that you are forever being examined or by either written or by manual. Every time you change an aircraft you have to start again, sort of business. Not to learn to fly

it, but what people don’t realise is in single engines, which is what I flew from the moment I came out of dual, single engines, every aircraft I flew the instructor told me all about it and sat on my wing and told me all about it and told me to go and do my cockpit drill, but he couldn’t take me up, there was only one seat. So you get in and hope to God you are going to get up and get back.

We – the September, October of 1942, so we’d had about – perhaps we’d had a little bit under 100 hours flying on Tiger Moths, and we went up to Geraldton with that as our background, and we did probably the same amount of hours of this FTS. SFTS stands for Service Flying Training School. It breaks into two parts, it also has an

initial part which teaches you how to handle the Anson, because now all of a sudden you have got a twin engine aircraft and you have got a different fuel system, you have got an undercart that can be wound up, whereas the undercart on the Tiger Moth is fixed. You can actually carry four or five people with you. You have got to learn a different method, you have got a different system – in a Tiger Moth we had no

radio, but we had a TR9D radio in an Anson, and it also had a direction finder so you could actually get a bearing on a signal and if you could convert that into 6KY and you knew where 6K was and what bearing was, then you have got one of your vectors that gives you a plot, and away you go, you navigate on those. I am making it much more simple than it really is. And then you have also got to do night flying in those.

We did longer cross-countries. We did turret firing, where you actually stand with a Vickers gas operated gun and you fire at a drogue. We learnt two ways how to teach you how to bomb, we’ll call it a bomb-a-rama, but it’s a tower that has a map on a roller with a sort of pictures of

houses and this sort of business, and you have actually got a bomb sight and you take the bomb on it, and it has a light, so it gives the elapsed time of when the bomb leaves the aircraft, which is the platform of the tower, and unrolls, and everything stops. That’s what you hit. That’s how they teach you to do it. The aircraft is actually part of the whole air mass, so that’s one vector against you, if you are flying in a wind and it’s on your starboard

side and it’s forcing you over this way that isn’t what is actually happening on the ground, it’s somewhere between the two areas. You understand?

You think so. See, but then also you have got to arrive, so you actually finish up with your proper course and then you have got to convert that to magnetic bearings, but it all just comes automatically.

No, no, the magnetic applies because you are using a compass to achieve the vectoring. The vectoring is an actual plot, and it is in real degrees, but they are fixed, because that’s magnetic north, and you will find it on all the maps, there is a north, so you plot on that, and now you have got to put the vector in and all the things called drift, which is caused by wind.

OK. Then you have got to make your compass come back to a magnetic bearing that comes back to your true bearing. That’s it. Now, you realise we had to have some training. So that’s the initial part of service, flying training, and from then you do formation flying, you do emergency landings.

Just pull your bloody engine off. And you might even catch fire. I was doing my wing’s test on a blind test and we did catch fire and the instructor showed me how to stop the fire, and I didn’t even know where to put the engine fire out. You sideslip. Anyway, it was, no – Mr Graham, Sergeant Graham, I think his bum was doing as much as mine. I hope I am not rude,

but it’s called ring twitter.

You want those things in there?

No. They are the most – they are acknowledged as the most stable,

aerodyne, and aerodyne means, as an aircraft heavier than air. Whereas you can get other ones, like a balloon for example, which is not. It’s part of the air. An aerodyne – and an Anson is very forgiving. We had another red alert at Geraldton, because by this time the story of the Kormoran hadn’t really been discovered and so forth, you know, there were all sorts of rumours, which we used to call latrine-o-grams.

Anyway, they – it’s quite funny when you actually talk about it.

Yes, that’s, because that’s the best place, everyone sits and talks, beat your feet. Something I started – I started to say something about the training.

Really forgiving, actually very stable. When you did formation flying you could

actually tuck the wing inside of the other bloke’s. I know a couple of blokes who actually knocked on the door. But you can’t do it in bumpy conditions, you have to have a really smooth situation. Oh yes, I know what it was I was going to tell you. They had a red alert, and we were all at the pictures at Geraldton, and all of a sudden when you were transferred from the ITS section of that training, to the service flying training, you actually then are called and you are

actually put into two reserve squadrons. I can’t remember what they were, but I will say 101 and 102. But there was – well, “All airmen in the theatre, you are required back at the base urgently.” 101 and 102 squadrons. We got back there and we were told red alert and to get the aircraft off to our satellite fields. And to take it to the main base, there were aircraft that were actually being fixed, under

repair and that, I reckon that every bloody aircraft that was on the field got off. We went out to Codgerina [?], and my aircraft had no gas in the bottle – the brake system on the Anson requires compressed air. The bottle – it’s called a bottle, a steel bottle. So when I came in to land I had no bloody brakes. I had a fellow by the name of Davey. Sofa, we used to call him.

Anyway, so when we slowed down enough poor old Sofa had to grab me by the tail and stop me. But Ansons are marvellous, they really are, and they take 112 turns of a crank to get the wheels right up. So all you did was take 112 turns and you throttled back, if your wheels are down and there’s a big horn that blows behind your head and say, “Hey, your wheels haven’t been locked down.” You would get to the stage

where it thinks it up, so it turns the horn off.

Because you are consuming petrol at a greater rate. You haven’t got the range. There is another fact you should know, aircraft only operated during the war round about two and a half to three hours’ endurance, they sucked petrol like nobody’s business.

You

conserve petrol consumption. And also, that’s part of flying, you don’t want to stretch the load of the Anson, because by the time you have got a payload on of bombs, which we did do, we used to use nine-pounders. Then they let us take 100-pound teardrop, which was from the First World War. And they taught us that when you get on a squadron the armourers

don’t do the thing they have been taught to do, they use their bodies a lot more, instead of cranking things up, which is a long, slow process, and putting a steel wire with a hook on it to lift it, so they showed us how to do all those things, and it was wonderful until you started winding the crank and up came the lug with the thing that was hooked on to the bomb, because the bomb was rusted and the lug came out. First World War stuff.

No, that was war. Better to know, isn’t it?

Same system, continuous examinations both at ground subjects and air subjects, and with, you were also with your instructor being graded and you – your chief flying instructor or his assistant takes you out and tests you, you have a flight test and they test all those conditions, and whatever the

formula is they either graduate you or not. Now, most of us came out as sergeant pilots. We had one commissioned fellow came out. Commissions were not very, very forthcoming, it changed the rate of pay, and the war was getting expensive. We used to fly for about 15 shillings a day.

To be dux of the class, yes, all of us had that,

and there could only be one dux, and it all depends, don’t forget, in our courses we had schoolteachers, we had business managers, we had people from the mining industries, the whole cross section, and we had blokes, me, whose education level really began and finished at second year high school, and then whatever I learnt when I was in the preliminary education reserve. Some of us were

up to scholarship levels and out of Guildford Grammar School and Scots College and that. But where we gained – they may have had the academic knowledge, but our practical knowledge – so you can see the assessing couldn’t just be delivered on just what you did in theory, you had to have the practical side.

I think so,

yeah, but we didn’t think we were going to be because we were twin trained. And then we were posted overseas, and that’s another story.

We were presented by Group Captain Norman Brierly, who was only an aviator, but Stan and Norman Brierly were the Brierly family who almost invented the aeroplane.

They are high in the field of the first air lines in WA, and maybe you are not aware that the first airline in Australia was not QANTAS, it was either WA Airlines or WA Limited or it was a, Mickey Mouse Airlines. And what’s it – it will come to me. They were carrying mail long before –

not long in the sense of long, long, but Western Australia was established as an airline country, and at least a year before QANTAS, but who cares, so anyway, Norman Brierly presented us. Not a lot of fuss, when we go to Pearce now and see the graduates, it takes about – it brings with what is called Parents and Guardians Night on the Wednesday night and the Parents and Guardians come along

and there’s about a dozen of us are invited along to give them a look at the old vets. And to talk to the kids, which we think is wonderful. On the Thursday morning they go to – they present them with bibles, which never happened to us. They perpetuate their course number on the ends of the pews at St Margaret’s Church there, the chapel, and they have a graduation parade and

they usually have an AVM [Air Vice Marshal] or someone like that come over from Head Office or Headquarters and they present them with their wings and so on and there they do have real competition, they probably have something like about a dozen trophies to win and they also have dux of the class, and then on the Friday night they get their commissions at what they call a Commission Ball, a Presentation Ball.

If we are lucky enough we go to all those things. It’s terrific.

No, back in our day it was get back to work.

Well, then we were posted overseas and we were posted down here to Wembley, and the next thing, we were given pre-embarkation leave and we were then marshalled at Claremont Showground.

Stayed home. We had a few send-offs, one of the families, one of the blokes here I stayed the whole four years of my service, he and I stayed together. And his family and the Ingall family gave us a send off – a lovely dinner and good feeling and so forth at the Masonic Hall at Subiaco. And they were given time then to go and have a

fond farewell. If you were like my mother, poor, bless her heart, I wouldn’t let her come to the station, I waved to her while she stood at the front door. Her last words were, “Col, don’t fly too high, don’t fly too fast.” If you don’t do either of those things you don’t fly. So there you are, that’s what we did, wasn’t much else to do. We went to dances and things and chased the girls,

or they chased us, I don’t remember which. By then we had got our wings and our stripes up.

Yeah, you will see for yourself later.

I am comfortable, I am enjoying it.

Bloody accident. How’s that for an answer? No, I have got to

then go on from – when we left Geraldton we went by – actually went by an ordinary passenger train, I must tell you a funny incident – we were packed on to an ordinary train, at Claremont Station. They took us into Perth Station, and because it was a troop train they pulled over to Rowe Street, and you know what was at Rowe Street, or you used to know what was at Rowe Street. But they were still very much there in those days, and we had to wait for a clear line to go through to

get us through to Kalgoorlie. And of course the girls came out waving their you-know-whats. Here we were already to off overseas, so that’s our funny little story. But, then we went to Kalgoorlie and they parked us at the station to get from the standard line on to the narrow gauge it is at Parkeston.

No, no. We know that too. I’ll tell you some true stories about that

too. But anyway, Parkeston, it rained like hell, and they put us on a troop train of cattle trucks. We slept on the floor. I kid you not, and all they had done after squirting the cattle trucks out was put jarrah planks down and we were fed by pulling up, you had breakfast by pulling up, you pulled up for lunch, and you pulled up for the evening meal, and they fed us from army cookers which were on a flat-top truck. And that’s how it

took us five days to get from Perth to Adelaide.

Buggered if I know. Slept mostly, I suppose. You were mostly full of soot, don’t forget the engines in those days were mainly coal. We got to Adelaide and they de-trained us and put us on another, commuter carriages and took us to Melbourne. And why that’s important because while we were waiting to go overseas, we did a conversion course on to Airspeed Oxfords. And the Airspeed looks like an Anson

but is a more modern aircraft. We went down to Point Cook and we did a beam approach course, which teaches you how to land the aircraft of a night time on a beam.

The Oxford.

Well, we were twin-trained so there was no conversion, all you had to know was the speed you got off at and the speed you could stall at, and if you know those you could fly the Oxford. It had a few characteristics you overcome. But that’s

typical of all aircraft.

Well, door to tail, a little inclined to more torque. Do you know what torque is?

Yes. What actually happens when the cylinders are going up and down in the engine and converting that to a con rod, and then that con rod is attached to your propeller, that gives you your

revolutions. Well, they can either be clockwise or anti-clockwise, it all depends on which way you are looking at the damned thing. But normally looking from the pilot sitting above it, it wants to twist the aircraft from right to left and that’s called torque. If you don’t keep your aircraft with even power, you also add to the problem, so you can ground loop, that means you have pulled your tail up too early. You haven’t got enough air going over your rudder and you can’t overcome

it. And the other components in the air, of course, so you can ground loop, so that’s one of the characteristics, it had a slightly more vicious stall than the Anson. The Anson, when it stalls it sort of flops, but an Oxford is just a little more subtle, it’s more inclined to whip a little.

Three weeks.

Point Cook.

And it’s called the Lorenz Course. And what it does, it has dots and dashes that finally transposes themselves in the centre and finally becomes a beam. That’s why it’s called the beam approach course. Of a night time, when you want to land on this, you get yourself on the airfield’s normal circuit area which you do by various lights and so forth, even if there is only a couple of flares, but you get in and you start because

there are various heights that you have got to be at as you go around the field. And as you come towards your cross wind turn before you come in to land, you go down and went over a tower that actually gave you a signal and that height, you should be 750 feet. Now you start to lose another 500 feet and you turn and you go over the tower and it should be 250 feet and by the time you are ready and it’s got you lined up on the runway, you should be able to

see the runway, and that’s how you land. And it tells you when you are on course, because you are listening, the side, I forget which side, it doesn’t matter. But port side would be dots and starboard side would be dashes and it merges, and you are on the beam. We don’t have that these days, the aircraft can do that automatically. So you see, I was confirmed as a twin engine pilot when I went overseas. Now you can ask me the rest of the question, how did I become a fighter pilot?

Yes,

but you should allow me to put in between, it took me nearly nine weeks to get to England.

That was very interesting. So we were posted then from Point Cook to go overseas.

Well, yeah, little bits.

Always a little bit of a break after a course, because it’s a pretty – it’s pretty hectic, you are on tenterhooks, you want to get, having got this far, you don’t want to be failed.

Again, aircraft, everything, all things, a lot of flying, again I can tell you exactly how many hours I flew, but there was still a lot of learning to do. For example, the signal square is

different. You see, when you go over an airfield there’s a square in front of the control tower, all you want to know. Whether – what the wind direction, and you get an idea how fast the wind is – how much the wind sock is – you know, whether it’s limp or whether it’s straight. You know, what speed you are doing and all this sort of business. And we got a few leaves in Melbourne, we had a few pissups in the bar, what’s-a-name,

where Chloe was. Young and Jackson’s. Chloe was – they had nudes in the bar, it was very, very – Chloe was famous.

Never-ending. Well, they used to have six o’clock closing, so if you went in at half past five you bought yourself half a dozen. Of course you were allowed to stay as long as you like as long as you had a beer in front of you, but they wouldn’t serve you anymore. That was beating the

gun a bit. Well, they posted us overseas, and we did not know where we were going.

Oh, Melbourne was the hub of it all. Melbourne always has been pretty exciting, in my later life I spent a lot of time in and out of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, I was in the rag trade for over 50 years.

Yes. We went back there for our golden wedding

anniversary, and then on to Tassie, we went to see the round the pylons air races.

Full of Yanks. There were troops from anywhere and everywhere. All the bars were full, all the hotels – see, they didn’t have the multiplicity of hotels and bars they have today, and even eating, eating in all those

taverns and the undergrounds and all those sorts of things, eating steaks, they came very much after the war. We were still very much the basic cooking. You had a lamb roast, or a beef roast, or you had steak and eggs or bacon and eggs. Australians weren’t very imaginative when it came to diet. So whatever was available was well and truly occupied. In fact, I should say a lot of blokes used to

prefer to go back to their mess and eat. At least you knew what you were getting, you weren’t going to be robbed because it was part of your keep, you didn’t pay for your meals in the mess.

Remember, I was pretty young, I was only 19.

It was for those days, we weren’t as – the school education and the self education was there, there was always a bit of

mystery about sex and this sort of business, they always warned you but you should have seen the films they used to show you. What happens if you caught the worst disease of the lot, which is syphilis. Have you seen syphilis?

Yeah, but if you have, it’s a terrible disease, it’s life threatening. All the other things, gonorrhoea, all the – they are lack of hygiene

and all sorts of things, and of course you, as a serviceman, you had what they called blue light outfits and blue light stations. You could go along and you can have preventative things. I honestly think the younger society, the peer groups of the 19 and 20 years of age, weren’t as – a lot of it was bulldust, you know. You’d be surprised how many blokes I know

that were virgins when they married.

Well, I can only answer you again, you had plenty of opportunities, but maybe the films put you off, I don’t know. A one-night stand is not as good for the girl as it is for the boy, or vice versa. The social standard of your family in Australia was to find a nice

girl and she finds a nice boy and learn a little bit about each other over, say, three or six or 12 months or two years or whatever. My grandson number three is going out with a girl he met when she was – they first started high school, then eight years together, and they are getting married on the 5th March.

Oh, the family influences. And don’t forget, grandparents

took a higher profile, we wouldn’t buck our grandparents, whatever they said was law. And virtually you were brought up to be seen and not heard.

Yes, and they used to have the skating. I forget what the rinks were – anyway, it doesn’t matter, but yes, the Melbourne Town Hall, where there was a skating rink. Plenty of picture

theatres by comparison with, say, Perth. So you had plenty of entertainment, and there were plenty of units who entertained the troops, and that was usually at impulse dances and drinks and not coffee and tea and cool drinks. Coffee wasn’t that strong either. Did you know that we hardly ever drank coffee? We always drank tea, and

when we go back to Pearce was a drink that actually caught us all, was called Passiona. It was Cottee’s, no, it wasn’t owned by Cottee’s, the people who owned it, the Passiona manufacture were a family of Rocchis [?], and they bought it out, and crikey, in that hot weather up there we used to guzzle it like it was going out of fashion. That was about all we did. And our mess’s up to the rank of sergeant, you were in a dry mess, you didn’t have a

bar. If you went drinking you used to go down to the – there was a place called – it’s still there in Pearce, on the corner of the road that takes you up past the airfield on the south side of it. Called Raffles, no, it’s not the Raffles, it doesn’t make any difference.

Well, you see, a lot more people were taken out of the services or not allowed to go in, all manpowered because Melbourne was a very high productive area, they had Fishermen’s Bend, that’s where they produced our aircraft. They produced things like the Wirraway, and they produced – and they also, I don’t know quite whether the Tiger Moth or the Ansons came out in kit form, because they were supplied by De Havilland, and the Avro Anson,

I don’t know where they got those from, but they had as many Avro Ansons, as many as they did Tiger Moths. And the Oxford was a little bit thinner on the ground, but they were the three main training planes. So Melbourne was also producing the Wirraway and the Beaufort. And the Beaufort, along with the Kittyhawk was one of the squadrons that had ten squadrons of Beauforts, and there were ten squadrons of Kittyhawks. So that all this manufacturing was going on, and

I imagine we had an ammunition factory here at Welshpool, and I think Maribyrnong was the place where they produced bombs and shells and guns and – again, the main rifle we were all issued was an Enfield. That was the 303. See, the whole thing was hinged around what was carried forward out of the First World War.

But because we were dealing with so many more people and so many more nations, and the wharves of Melbourne would be very active, you see, so all the waterside workers would be exempt. All the tugs and all the merchant seamen, they would have a hive of those. I suppose the big city look, which everyone of us conceived in our own mind, because if you came from the country, or came from a small town,

those places were big. Melbourne in its heyday was in a different environment to Sydney, and yet Sydney was always on par with its population levels. But the interesting thing was the Japs had then started to put mini-subs around Australia, and there was a freighter torpedoed just out of Melbourne, so while we were supposed to sail from Melbourne they wouldn’t let us.

So they decided we would sail from Sydney. So we got to Sydney and we, no sooner had we got off the train than we were told we were to get back on the train because the waterside workers were on strike in Sydney. So we caught a train and we went up to Brisbane, and then we went in concealed buses over to the Story Bridge. We mounted a ship, a 10,000-ton Liberty ship called the Maxi, and we went solo for 16 days across

from Australia to San Francisco.

Well, Australia was not – they were not losing as many ships, we lost ships, those reactions were high-priority press and so forth. And the merchant marine people who were lost would have to be phenomenal. I don’t know of anyone,

I suppose they have got them in the government statistician’s figures, but no one will ever know, because the merchant marine were really subjected to – see, they were unprotected, they might have given them a 25-pounder on the tail end of – but they weren’t able to defend themselves. They might have given them a machine gun, and if you saw a – what they called a Vickers – operate a machine gun, you wonder what the hell – like firing a pea shooter. See, convert what you know about guns and

just put this in the back of your mind. The aircraft we flew we had six .5 machine guns, now that’s twice the capacity or twice the distance of a 303 and an ordinary 303 bullet. See, it’s almost double it. Now, with a 303 machine gun we had to close – in order to hit our target we would have to get to 250, 300 metres, now with

the .5 we might be able to get up to 300 to 350 metres, and that meant we could hit it and run easier, twice as easy as the low boy. But some of those aircraft were loaded with cannons, now we are talking about getting as close as 1,000 metres. All these things, so because you have got machine guns, it doesn’t mean it

fires unlimited distance, because by the time it gets to the end of its trajectory it’s just going to be pulled down by gravity. And they don’t tell you those things, and see, that’s what we – and that’s what, part of Denise [interviewer] was asking about, what did you learn? That’s all part of it.

I don’t truthfully know, because apart from the Kormoran and the experience there, it was all kept out of the papers.

I have a friend of mine who comes up with me, he was sent here – he was with 25 Squadron at Pearce, and he was the – in a Wirraway looking for the Sydney. They never found it, of course. So that would have had to be in December, January. He would have had to be at Pearce when we were there out on initial training, because 25 Squadron and 14 Squadron were based at Pearce. And 14 Squadron were Hudsons and every they were sent out on the

searches for the Sydney.

But you see, you have still got to come back to it, telephones weren’t – there weren’t as many telephone lines across Australia. You relied on telegraph. See, so communication was like sticking out your head and hoping that the bloke down there might hear you. So we really can’t answer those things because there were ships lost,

but we never really heard. The population would have panicked. Don’t forget, we were only about eight million strong.

Well, maybe the news editors were threatened, I don’t know.

Let me go back and put this in another perspective, by the time we are talking about now, and I am ready to go overseas, we are talking about early 1943, so, and America only – the war had only been going about 15 months. The thing that Julian and people don’t realise, a war has

to gear up, to gear down you just stop it. It’s like everything that you do, manufacturing and everything, you work up until you reach your peak and even when you reach your peak you are still trying to accelerate. So while we had guards on trains and we had all the precautionary things that you can think of that is required in a war, what you

can’t do is to visualise how the authorities acted and reacted. Because I can’t remember, they might just have begun to sandbag all the banks in Perth. About that time all that thing started to gear. And the businesses that were losing their men and women, mainly men, I don’t know how they coped, whether they worked longer hours and paid

overtime I don’t know, but they were still running about – at that stage about – I don’t think we went off 45-hour week until after the war.

I suppose, like most kids, excited, it was a challenge. You didn’t visualise yourself as a hero, you didn’t think about that side of it. It was exciting. You were partly fear-bound and partly excited. Now

it all depends – and don’t forget, you got a lot of Dutch courage with all the other blokes around, now when I went overseas I had 20 or 30 of my mates from Geraldton with me. We all got our wings together. We stuck together until we got to England.

No one expressed the opportunity. New Guinea hadn’t got underway. See, it was happening. Now, I have read for those things myself to find out.

Now, once we turned our back on Australia, our news was only by correspondence. And by the time you put your letter in the mail in the mail system, and it went the same way you went, it took us 16 days to get from Brisbane to San Francisco, then we had to cross America, that took another five days, and then we sailed from New York to Liverpool, and that took another 16 days. It took us another week to settle down in Brighton. We are talking about nearly three months,

aren’t we? And mail wasn’t important, servicemen’s mail was considered important, but it was a slower tempo, it wasn’t like everyone was running out and beating drums, they were calling people up and training people, but the main thing was to get us to England to support England, that was our obligation.

I don’t know, the longshoremen went on strike, and the sad thing is, you have got me in another area. We didn’t know about the bombing of Darwin, in fact I nearly fell over, in fact I have got a synopsis out of our official air force magazine called Wings. And in it they wrote up what actually happened in Darwin. And when I look at that and I hear the

stories, and one of my friends was a commanding officer at Darwin when Cyclone Tracy went through, in other words after the war. So Darwin to me, whilst I had never been there myself, I know a lot more about it, but I nearly fell over when I found out what had happened now. The waterside workers refused to unload the ammunition ships that were parked in Darwin, whether they were there because it was in anticipation or not I don’t know, but ammunition was regularly delivered same as food was

delivered to these ports. And the Japs hit it and blew the bloody thing up and so we lost that.

No.

No, no, who else can you blame, it’s patently obvious – the same happened, they would not load the ammunition ships in Townsville, and that was the ammunition going out of Australia up to New Guinea.

The waterside and the unions are really anti-war. But whether it’s because of fear or lack of moral courage or whatever I don’t know. Only unions could do it – what this man’s raving about now, it’s all so ludicrous. The average Australian will tell you that you could not – if I was to fly in an aeroplane with you alongside me, and you didn’t look as though you were going to protect my back

I didn’t want you with me. Because when you fly in fighters, each fighter pilot has to look to his neighbour. He can’t see up his own tail. It’s impossible, I might have one eye over my neck, but I can only get around that far, so I am hoping he will look at me and he’ll look there and I’ll look at him and you will cover all 360 degrees of air. And you have also got to look down as well as up. Have you ever looked into the sun?

…were reprehensible. And it didn’t only happen in Australia and America, it happened everywhere. Don’t know why. They may have been part of the Fifth Column. Have you heard of the Fifth Column? They may have been a part of it, who knows? When it’s all considered, the reputation of waterside workers has never been very high. They are the biggest thieves and the cleverest thieves

that you will ever see. You never saw a waterside worker go into his job unless he had a billy about that bloody size and about that deep, because that’s where he put his stolen goods into. Or he wrapped a hose around underneath his coat, I don’t know. OK, but when it’s all boiled down, who is he taking from, and the cost of those losses must be absorbed by someone. So the manufacturer or the person purchasing goods adds it to the costs, so the public have got to pay for it. They don’t

think of the people as public – or government printing money, that the money is endless, it’s got to be backed by a dollar. You can’t get this into some brains. Now we are talking about the airmen and how they felt when they went overseas, our education standards were different. You curriculum was half, one third of what the curriculum would be

now. People used to say, “What are you going to do?” You didn’t know what you were going to do, so whatever you got in that you liked, you stayed in. No choice.

Yes, but you see you are feeding the question because, take me, 16 when war broke out,

OK that’s right. Now wait on, yes, 16, now Australia was still growing and we’d come out of some fearsome things, because it was very sad to find men walking the wallaby, going to farms and knocking to be fed and so forth,

and really and truly, there was no such thing as the dole, you know. Did you know that? No dole, no nothing. You got off your arse and you took a big billy, because that was all your worldly possessions, and if you were lucky you had one blanket, and maybe an old overcoat and maybe boots that had soles on them. So what you are talking about here is about surviving, you don’t think of interaction with world wars,

and if you are only fed what the press give you and they can only give you what the government of the day says. You are in a bit of a bind, aren’t you? So that’s what you went overseas with.

That’s right, because it started to mechanise your mind, and by the time you got overseas you had a new, wider range of vision. You were having more experience,

you were learning to talk to different people. You also knew how to back up your neighbour. You cared, you shared, about each other. See, to me that’s one of the impacts I tried to say about the flying instructor. The flying instructor who taught us and gave us enough education to fly an aeroplane gave you more than that, they also taught you how to live. Because your value – the value of your life was in your hands, and if you didn’t listen to him,

you know, and when you stop to think how intense we were concentrating, because there was no set of earphones speaking between the front of a Tiger Moth, between pilot and the back seat is a funnel with a rubber tube. That’s all.

It was quite devastating, because we were on an empty liberty ship and we had to mount

the guns and we had to do submarine watch, we were stuck down in a hole but not without bunks, we actually had steel rails up that swing down, if you can visualise this as a bed and these are the stanchions and you have a rail out here, and that is a cyclone bed. And you had your mattress on that, and in the daytime when you made your bed up and got it out of the way, then it all folded back up. Now they were

three high or four high on some ships. OK. So – and we weren’t allowed to be below decks at sunup or sundown because of submarines, but the sad thing that we discovered, we had 500 shell-shocked Americans being taken home from out of the Islands. Some of then were shell shocked because they just got shocked at the sound of the continual firing of their own

guns. And some of them could not even be kept clothed, they were kept stark naked. Some sat in corners and pooed and ate it. That’s how shell-shocked they were. All of a sudden the war was a bit more real to us, wasn’t it? Weeks, we might have been doing the same thing, who knows? But yes, the experience itself, they taught us to fire Oerlikons, we had never fired an Oerlikon in our lives. We rolled 44-gallon drums over the side of the ship

to fire at, I don’t think any bugger ever hit one, yet we were going out to fight wars. We had never seen a submarine surface, or know what we were looking for, it’s all very well to say you always find the conning tower, the periscope, but when seas get rough, they get bloody rough and we were 16 days at sea and we went through all sorts of weather. Unaccompanied, the only thing, a submarine could

knock us off easily about, was unless they were waiting in front of us, they couldn’t hit us because we were doing about 18 to 20 knots, a sub can’t do that, a sub can only do about ten knots underwater.

Nothing to be gained, all we had was bodies. And also, in an escort situation you go as slow as the slowest ship, that means you are in a convoy. You wouldn’t put a destroyer

to escort a freighter. The only time I saw a lot of them was from America to England, we went in a huge convoy of 60 ships. Merchantmen, tankers, we were the only passenger ship and it was called the Orangatata [?].

You can’t, because the cells on board those places

and the hospitals was where we had to go if we are crook too. So no, no. You don’t hide people from war, if you do you are only defeating the purpose. You got to – and you still won’t stop men, you will stop some types of men and women, doing something.

Very upset for them, but again, it’s him, not me.

I don’t know, don’t know. I don’t know, psychology wasn’t a medicine in those days. It’s a pity it wasn’t.

Yes, it did, but what it taught you was not to let yourself get into a situation like that. See, shellshock can also be that they were actually shelled. And I – there’s plenty of blokes who have fallen into a foxhole and the shell has

followed them in. There’s all sorts of things. Or a bomb gets knocked off an aircraft, and an airfield has slit trenches, and I have seen a bomb chase a fellow, he’s zigged and it zigged, he zagged and it zagged, finally he jumped in the slittie and it just lobbed in beside him, how would you feel? It didn’t blow him up, because he’s talking about it, not me. But I have seen it happen.

First time at sea in a ship like that. Nothing else, it was quite uneventful. We did have – we went through a bit of storm and we simply just arrived at San Francisco, and that was the biggest shock of all. I can’t remember what sort of a day it was, but they backed the troop train, the train that took us from Frisco across America, they backed that onto the wharf for us and we were put in and told not to open the blinds. In fact we had no idea, and all of a sudden

we found we were changing and everyone was walking past the windows. But it’s a five-day trip from Fricso to Boston.

A Pullman carriage and a proper coal train, one of the big expresses, we went through the Moffat tunnel, where they wash them as well, they use the tunnel to wash the trains, we went down

through Colorado, and where all the Mormons meet at – but it was called Pacific Railroad, if I remember rightly, and we actually had black waiters and stewards and coach personnel. The sad thing, we weren’t warned, is they all

wanted a tip. And on our pay, could we tip them, we were called lousy bloody Australians.

We what?

I don’t think racism came into it, Australians have also been known to have death adders in their pockets.

Like a honeymoon. Oh yeah, proper bunks, and every now and then pull up and get out and stretch. Trains there don’t, or didn’t, I don’t know what is happening now, but if you pulled up in some of the cities that you went to the train actually went down the main street, and the porter actually came up and put up a step down in the main street, and there’s a drugstore there. You could buy a beer there.

At least a half dozen times.

Once a day, couple of times a day.

At the time the impact was there, and I suppose if I saw the rail track, the Moffat Tunnel impressed us. The river, of course, that we were following, of course, was very impressive. No, we really – and then we were taken off the train at what they called the underground section of New York. Which

is the Grand Pennsylvania, I think it’s called. We were taken in covered buses to Camp Miles Standish. And at Camp Miles Standish we were put into – and that’s like when we moved out here to Wembley, it’s an assembly point. In transit. Not only the Allies, but don’t forget that America was receiving New Zealanders and Australians, and I don’t know what happened with the Canadians, I think they sailed off on their own, but we

were, because all dominions were, provided aircrew to serve under the RAF. Every one of them, that meant Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia.

Americans.

We – they were always very excited when they saw Australia on your shoulder. The only thing – a couple of silly questions they asked, “How come you ain’t black?” or “How

come you learned to speak English so quick?” “Where’s this here place called Australia?” And you would say, “Where do you think it is?” “Isn’t it up there near Greenland?” They had not a clue. They don’t have the same schooling background, and they are pro-America, and America is a huge country with a huge population.

No, and when we would go somewhere, we went to a theatre in Boston and

they wouldn’t take any money from us, they ushered us in.

Because, let me tell you, according to the psychologist of those days, which is not like psychiatrists of today, they reckoned the minute you sat in an aircraft you lost 25% of your efficiency. I am not going to argue, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, but I do know that it changed your whole attitude. Now, a living thing is like a horse,

that if you get on with a lousy bloody mood I wonder what the horse is going to – it’s in a lousy mood, you are in a good mood the horse is beautiful. So is an aeroplane, because everything that transmits through to make an aeroplane fly, it’s complete co-ordination, it’s with your eyes that you see, it’s what you do with your feet, it’s what you do with your hands, it’s what the metabolism of the body does, you have got a grain of sand that helps virtually to keep you on your equilibrium, they even showed us a crayfish

which was in season and when it gets to that stage it gets rid of the sand they have got in their system, that keeps them on even keel because the mucus that’s in becomes embedded in and so it doesn’t have any jagging, it’s not rough, so they had a crayfish in a tank which they filled with metal filings, and when they came to discharge the sand they

took on in its place the metal filings, so with a magnet they could get them to do slow rolls and loops, see, so you have got to know, because when you lose contact, it’s the only thing that actually functions three-dimensionally, but since the war, it now functions four-dimensionally, so what are the dimensions, I am going to ask you a question, what are the dimensions?

No, go on. First. it’s the forward speed. it’s sideways, it’s upside down. Those are the three degrees, the dimensions that you actually – you go round the latitude, the longitudinal control. you have got your lateral control. and would you rather go like this. and with your elevators they have all got to be co-ordinated, so you got to know what you are doing, so that’s what they teach you in the air force, they teach you

how to regard your body. The one thing people teach you when you are flying, if your ears block up because the air pressure is changing outside opposed to the air pressure you have got outside, if you work your jaws they will pop, but you don’t do it if you have got a cold. You may pop your ear drums, things like that. You heard me say about the fact that we didn’t wear G-suits, you have got to know

what to do about that too, we used to use oxygen and they showed us how – some of the tings that you left me unanswered, when you climb up you go through all the various layers. and the degrees of the types of things that make up air are changing, oxygen is one and nitrogen is one. and so you know all these things, and as you get higher, the oxygen content comes down until you get to the stage where you are almost without any

oxygen. And that happened so slowly for you, you didn’t realise it was happening. It’s like getting drunk, it’s the last little bit of the booze up that knocks you. Exactly the same as oxygen, and so they sent us up in test tanks. 30,000 feet. and they take your oxygen mask off, and you see blokes go and you haven’t counted and all of a sudden he would go glug, or they do it that way

and take it off and see what happens to you, you lose your faculties, you have got to know what happens to you so you have to have a knowledge of your own physique. and I can’t say it clearer than that.

Well. because don’t fly high unless you have – and make sure you have got your oxygen supply. The only thing different in those days. we used to just take the oxygen. now they mix the oxygen so it comes out in the right

proportions. Because as you go up you get more nitrogen in the blood, your blood starts to boil. You have heard about divers and divers’ bends, same thing. Divers can’t dive unless they are taught all the things from the fundamentals. The pilots are in an ocean of air. It’s amazing, it all comes back.

You are marvellous,

I will keep you.

But you are confusing me, and for this reason you don’t know, it’s your first experience with me, as you so kindly said, you haven’t dealt with many pilots. That’s the difference between some parts of the aircrew, we had to deal with all of it. If the air gunner gets wounded, did you know that most aircraft produced in England for the war aircraft did not

have a second pilot? Doesn’t sound much, but if the pilot was killed so was everyone else. They were still in the aircraft and still alive, so the pilot’s job is to teach the fundamentals of flying to each, you know, so those are the things I am aware of, but I don’t know, they have been down here but they are there.

No, we went from San Francisco to Boston and then by bus out to a place called Miles Standish, and funnily enough, whether you do, you don’t know, you do know where it is, because when you see ice skating or ice yachting, it’s all in the white lakes in that area, and that’s where Miles Standish is. It’s a beautiful piece of the country and the hospitality was marvellous. They would be,

put a notice up on our mess board – my mate Wattie was asked out, a woman had taken over the sawmilling of her business for her husband for the war, and she entertained us, and you just couldn’t do – as I said, we went to a picture theatre and we couldn’t even pay the fares, and we went in and everyone stood up and clapped. I get quite emotional thinking about it. I do a couple of things you have to watch, I might be in tears on your…the hospitality was terrific, and when you went into

their PXs, which is what we called our canteen, crikey, you asked for ice cream, they didn’t ask how big an ice cream, they asked how big a tub. They were tubs, not like our cups of ice cream, they had pints of it. They were great ice cream eaters.

Yeah, it was a people on posting, because

ships don’t run on time, not in the war anyway, and we can’t get any other – there’s no other way of getting – well, let me get back to what I missed to say. A lot people think we went to war by air, no bloody chance, we didn’t have an aircraft that would have carried a sausage that far. So we actually had to go by rail, road or ship. And the ships can’t run on time because they used to assemble those

into convoys, so we actually sailed from New York, but we were held waiting for that convoy to assemble so we could sail from New York, and that took us about three weeks of waiting, because it took 16 days to cross the Atlantic, it took 16 days to cross the Pacific.

Well, yes, we did, but when we were in New York we didn’t see New York, they took us down to Grand Pennsylvania Station, they shoved us into covered buses with the

blinds drawn and we were pushed aboard the ship and we were told to stay below decks until we had gone beyond the Statue of Liberty and we had to obey those orders, and we were then on a ship called the Orangatata. The Orangatata was from the New Zealand line, wonderful ship, and a very interesting, was the commodore in charge of the convoy of about 60 ships, was Rear Admiral Davies. He never lost a ship

in six years of war, and the convoy we were on had a wonderful convoy escort of Polish flotillas, Polish destroyers, they actually forced a submarine to the surface and took its crew as prisoners of war. We did not know until after, and nor did we know the other thing, but that convoy was very interesting. We were in lousy bloody weather, we were being paced by a wolf pack [group of submarines], and

over the horizon from us were capital ships, we had a close destroyer escort and when they got a sounding they would run up their black hunting pennants. They turn down your line and go straight down and drop depth charges.

No. But we also did learn was it was a bullion ship, and a bullion ship was a prize that everyone wanted in the war. Everyone wanted gold in the war. You can’t trade without exchange, and gold was the issue, and it had that bullion and we had a whole gaggle of blokes from the Royal Sovereign, which was one of the biggest capital ships England had, going home from sabbatical leave

from Bermuda, and we had 16 to a cabin, a different set up with double bunks, you know, one above the other, so there were eight sets of those, I met a fella by the name of George Tatum, George changed my life a great deal. George was a chief petty officer on the Royal Sovereign, and over the 16 days you get to know about each other, we only had eight hours to talk, but he said to me, “What do you do when you get your disembarkation?” I said, “What’s

disembarkation leave?” So he explained. So it finished up at his suggestion, when I got to Brighton we were given disembarkation leave and we were given about a week or ten days, so I got a travel warrant and I caught the, what’s the Scottish one, the – there’s an express, it’s called the something Scot, anyway, it’s overnight and I went up to a place called Newark, which is the railway

station for Nottingham. And George’s people met me and took me in charge, and that breaks off the trip because the trip on the ship was enormous, again we had to do submarine watch, we had to do gun watches, they issued us with duffle coats and we went right up – we did go right up to Greenland and we were – we were at the stage of taking so much ice on the decks they had to chip it off.

We had 16 days of fun. And every now and again we got these – even if it wasn’t a submarine, you aren’t allowed to ignore it. So it was a bit hairy. And when we arrived in Liverpool, the Luftwaffe [German air force] had been over and they had bombed the cathedral at Liverpool, the place was in a hell of a bloody chaos. They shoved us on a train and sent us down to Brighton.

Terrible. We were warned – the life expectancy is about three or four seconds if you went, you just froze to death. What do they call that, there’s a name for it?

By this time after the experience we had on the Moore Maxi with the shell-shocked people, we started to realise that war was not as funny as we thought it

was. No one thought it was a laughing thing anyway, it was serious, but we were getting close to the war, weren’t we, we were on the last leg. And when we got to Liverpool, that was declared for us. When we got to Brighton, the viaduct that carries the railway over to take the railway down from Brighton and Bournemouth and places like that in the south of England, the blinds could have been knocked off. We were put in two big hotels, one called the Metro, the other called the Grand. We reckoned we were one of about 3,000

aircrew being held in Brighton to back the RAF [Royal Air Force] with and we were taught to go up on the roof and to operate a Vickers machine gun. And the pea shooter. Just behind a pile of sandbags that would stand as high as that. That was it.

No. The Focke Wulf 190s used to come over from France and have a go at us, and they actually had knocked up our luncheon queues at Bournemouth, and warned us because there was a

gentleman called Lord Haw Haw, have you heard about him?

Lord Haw Haw was a quisling [collaborator], and he was like that woman in Japan, I can’t remember he name, but I wasn’t able to tell you much about what happened here, because we were away for too long. Anyway, Lord Haw Haw, troops you have got there. Well, they actually strafed at lunch time, I think they actually killed one or two.

That was all they managed to get, because by the time the Focke Wulf gets airborne and gets across the channel, it can only be about ten minutes over the target because his fuel won’t carry him. And I think they had .5 machine guns too, and by the time you stuff ammunition – coming back to my kite we carried 2,500 rounds of .5 which is a dead weight, I wouldn’t know what it weighs, but it’s heavy by the time they have

the stuff that makes the bullet go. And all this sort of business anyway. So we were in Brighton and we had to do those sort of things.

No, no. They went overhead, but they were then Heinkels and Dorniers and any one of those. See, Bournemouth and Brighton are that lump at the end of England that is very close to – you can

visualise, you can actually see the White Cliffs of Dover from France. Because it’s really only, I don’t know what the distance is – people swim it. But the airfields cannot be up to the coast because then our bombers would have had a go – anyhow, while we were there we were posted to a place called Fairoaks.

Metropole,

I was in the Grand.

Stark. Just beds and access to showers and toilets and they had the typical mess down in the bottom. I think we went to the basement for eating.

Well, air force mess, yes. There is a difference between army and air force mess, by the way.

Again, we come back to physique. Why do you think they fed them up on bacon and eggs before they

went on a bombing raid? Working. As a mother, she says to her kids, “Do not go to work on an empty stomach.” You start making mistakes. So an air force mess is slightly different, I don’t say we had better quality, but we were – and we weren’t issued with sheets as they used to tell us, we were issued with blankets. We didn’t have any of the other things, but –

our dressing was no better. The uniform was no better, the underwear was no better or anything like that. But when it came to actually keeping your health up and keeping your physical strength and doing exercise, you had to be.

Oh yes. You do PT. Physical training.

On the ships, you walk. On the Orangatata you walked.

It was a big passenger ship about, oh, I don’t know, round about 20,000 ton, which is a big ship. I don’t know how many people were on it, but it was chock-a-block.

Fairoaks is the other side of England, it was about a two-hour train journey.

So we were going west where Brighton is on the east coast.

Oh, a total of six or eight weeks.

Waiting to be posted, as casualties were coming up they knew where they put you – but what they did is then – now we come back to where you found out where I was going to be in the air force. We went to re-category selection board, you know what a re-category selection board is?

They categorise you and they say, “You have got this much experience, you had this many hours, you have got this and that, and we are short of this, now where will we get those people from?” And so they put them into categories. Either you want them as wireless air gunner operators or observers or navigators or gunners or you want pilots. We want twin-engine, we want multi-engine, we want single-engines. They are all the categories. So you are interviewed by a wing commander and you are asked what you want to do,

and all my mob, about half a dozen of us, “Single-engine fighters, sir.” We never flew a bloody twin-engine aircraft again. That’s what we got. So we went to Fairoaks to achieve that. We flew Tiger Moths there. So we got an idea of the topography of England. That we could differentiate between the various villages we flew over, because one village looks like another village. And the

roads come in the same way, the bridge goes over the same way, the railway goes over the same way. You say it’s a village and you start looking down on your map, because your aircraft is moving at about 80, 90, 120 knots. So you are well over the village. So what you do is look ahead for, what we called air-to-ground map reading. And so what we did we took one of the other types of aircrew and we gave them a bit of dual so they could help their pilot if he was in trouble.

And also show them the difference of how we looked – and virtually we did a sort of introductory flying training on Tiger Moths. And there I had some wonderful experiences, because I saw my first ever Mosquito. You know what a Mosquito is?

A Mosquito was the best invention de Havilland brought out, it was a wooden aircraft, twin engine, unlimited ability to get high,

wonderful photographic machine, it could turn on a two-shilling watch and give you ten shillins back, it was a phenomenal thing, and they were being tested at Brooklands, which was in the same circuit area as Fairoaks, and Brooklands is really a racetrack in England, and that’s where de Havilland did all their testing. And they used to like having a go at a Tiger Moth, because a Tiger Moth, as they came to – you go like that and he’s gone. So anyway, we didn’t quite know, we

didn’t know quite to what extent they were going to be, but if you saw the films last night, there was one called Kittyhawks – Mosquito Squadrons – and that was true, they told you everything true, true, true. I had never seen that film before, I seen the one where they took Douglas Bader’s tin legs to him when he was in Britain, the POW [Prisoner of War], just dropped them in a parachute, and they Germans kindly gave them to him. And when he did escape he came back to shoot the Germans. Anyway, that’s beside the point.

I met a test pilot and his name was Woods, and he was a real test pilot because the capillaries on his, all these were all dragged, they had burst through doing high pressure dives, and find what the stalling speed and that’s all the things that test pilots have got to do. One way or another that was quite an experience, and while we were there I was asked to go across to a place called White Waltham,

and White Waltham was the headquarters of the ferry command. And that command flew aircraft to various theatres of war, and they could be anything from – not a Tiger Moth, because they didn’t have the distance, but everything from Liberators to Halifaxes to Lancasters to Superforts and Forts [Superfortresses and Flying Fortresses] and this sort of stuff. Well, I landed and pulled up on the hard at White Waltham ready

to go and report I was – to the tower and this Fort came down. A Fort has four engines, it has a huge high tail and it’s quite a formidable aircraft, it’s like putting a greyhound amongst terriers, you know, anyway, it shot up the flying tower, that usually means that you do upward rolls and this sort of business, anyway, it taxied in and it passed me and I waited to see the crew get out, and she did.

A little blond bitch, solo, I reckon. I have never seen that before and I have never seen it since, but it was a magic occasion. So that was Fairoaks, and then we were posted from there…

Tiger Moths and little fields with no runway, just grass, and usually you had poplar trees down the end and you either took off uphill or downhill. Lots of reasons, you had to cope with different

things there.

No, we were all trained, I was a flight sergeant pilot then, and in the next ranks, the non commissioned rank, you can only go one higher and then you have got to get commissioned, so you were actually king of the kids. At Fairoaks, no, we were accepted. Don’t forget, a lot of people in England were very grateful for the men coming to their aid. It wasn’t a gratitude

which, with weeping tears and hugs and all this sort of thing. You didn’t have to qualify or quantify who you were, and don’t forget we also wear – we wore a different uniform to the – the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] used to be a somewhat deeper blue than that, but we wore a navy uniform. Have you seen them now, they are back in them. That’s the newest one. So the Australians stood out, the Canadians wore like a mottled grey, the Frenchmen wore a

real navy – a deep black navy. And they also wore military style, whereas we wore it air force style, we used a lot of battle jackets and things like that and we were used with proper flying boots, leather boots, but when we got to England they took them away from us because, well, their experience was that if you bailed out, they wouldn’t stay on. They would flick off. When you, the straps of a parachute

take up, it’s like a – your body’s doing around about 150, a bit over that, heading towards the earth and all of a sudden you have got to stop that with a jerk. That’s the lowest end, so they come off. They gave us a boot which actually had like a – like a legging on it and it was fur lined, but the fur lining didn’t go into the boot, we used to put thick socks on.

And if you bailed out and you were in enemy territory, you could rip this top off and you looked as though you were in shoes. So if you got caught and you were not in uniform they just shoot you. No arguments, bang.

Nothing, you had to learn. We didn’t even bail out, we never learned how to bail out. We knew how to – what was expected of us,

to cross your arms and on the shroud lines to make your parachute carry you forward with the wind, so when we hit we hit running. And if you fell you rolled and pull your bottom shroud lines in and get rid of it. I used to wear my parachute around my neck.

To stop a 109 neck. Rubbing when you are looking for the enemy up your bum. So your only

area you could get silk from was US parachutes, so all of us had bits of like a scarf, only just torn, but like a triangle and we would wear them around our necks.

We couldn’t get chewing gum so we used to suck buttons. Mouth goes dry. So the top end was going this one and the other was going…You know what’s going to happen with this, don’t, you are not going to get this on the air at all.

They are interesting because that’s the human part of it. You have no idea the, they’ll come out.

Well, your body is terrific, we come back to it because you have all heard of metabolism. Well, metabolism all

begins with the brain fluid, doesn’t it? Because your mind has got to be stronger than the place that is affected, so your metabolism and everything is all controlled out of your brain, and seasickness can be overcome, what about the pilots who were airsick every time they went up? They were. What about when you got up there and you wanted to have a piddle or a poo?

Just sat there. You smelt when you got out but it doesn’t matter. It

never happened to me. Wait until we get to Italy.

Back to Brighton. See, ready to be held to supplement losses. Now that time it is important to know that the thousand bomber raids had started over Europe and they were losing up to 100 crews a night. A lot of men, that means that in a Lancaster it

could be 700 aircrew knocked out in one night. So the demands for replacement aircrew, and then I’ll supplement that with some other information about our – and so I actually back to Brighton and found I had been posted to a place called Turn Hill. And to get to Turn Hill, you had to travel by train, you went along the border of Wales, you pulled up at a little place called Market Drayton, and at Market Drayton you got off and walked to Turn Hill. It was beautiful, and

still is a permanent air force – it actually is the headquarters of the training command in England today. And I met the air vice marshal that runs it, and when he found out that I was at Turn Hill during the war, he opened the hangar doors we – both were talking and no one was listening. Anyway, we got to Turn Hill and Turn Hill is called an AFU which is an advanced fighting unit, and there we flew Miles Masters.

Miles Masters.

Yes. A Miles Master looks not unlike a Kittyhawk, a radial engine, a stubby, stubby wings but it comes in three forms, the Mark I, its big difference, it had an inline engine, and an in-line engine – can I reach one of these up here.

That’s an in-line engine. See, the engine is in line with the fuselage. Whereas a radial is exactly that. The in-line engine on a Miles Mark I we used to call it a festering kestrel, ok. and it actually has a radial engine

and quite a different aircraft – I beg your pardon, the Mark I had the in-line engine, that was a Merlin Kestrel, we used to call it the festering kestrel because it had a glycol content to keep the engine cool, and that also delivered around the engine with a little bit of pressure. And so like a steam engine that gets a little hole, so you get glycol sort of like steam

spouts, and that was the festering kestrel. So that was one, and the other one was a Mark II and I don’t know which way they came, but it was a radial engine and Mark III had a different radial engine, it developed more power, and actually it also had a gate that when you got to it, it had another 50 hp [horsepower] thrust straight at you, and it used to ring like you were in a lane.

And that dragged you off the ground. All these aircraft were very, very light, the size of our Wirraway, all of them were used for advanced flying training, and all of them were at the final stage before you were ready to go to operations, you actually got one more stage which comes a bit later, but we did a lot of training there, and can I tell you that there were 400 single-engine pilots on that airfield alone. God knows how many aircraft there were. Christmas

lunch – Christmas of 1943, we sat down, apart from all the dominions that came from Canada and so forth, New Zealand and all the bits and pieces there, there were 23 different nations sat down. Blokes who had escaped from the Norwegians, the Danes, the Belgians, the French, no idea. I can’t list them all because everyone was at war then, and that’s what we were training.

Yes, it made you a little bit – it’s a funny thing how we all seemed to mix around – we all gravitated to each other as though we had to know each other. Like the bloke who pranged and his back had been broken, and he had managed to get out, his name was Haagan, he got out Norway. But he was back flying. And there was a little French named Utre, who was so bloody

incensed about the fact that France was gone he used to do the most elaborate performances of stunting the aircraft, because he was out to get the Hun. Because all these people had an axe to grind. And it is most unusual that – that’s where it changes your whole life, you come back, you mightn’t be able to talk to them. But you conversed with them, you have been under strain with them.

You are actually part of a system, now, in single-engine flying those aircraft had a dual seat, and you actually had an instructor with you, and you went solo exactly the same thing in those again. Then they taught you the other rudiments, to night fly and to do country – cross-country of a night time, and then they taught you the systems in England if you got lost how to get you home and they had various names for them. They also taught you night flying in the day time with a thing

called a – like a cathode ray tube, it glistened like it was a fluorescent light, like the long ones we have, and that’s what they put around the airfield. To land of a night time under ordinary conditions you had what was called a Tee and the land up the Tee towards the head and there’s different coloured lights that let you know how far up you are proceeding and

whether you are getting beyond your point of safely landing and all this sort of business. Well, they could teach you that of a daytime, because they put you in a – with a cockpit that had a blackened out window, and they also put sunglasses on your, but this fluorescent light penetrated and to all intense and purposes you were actually night flying in the daytime. A bloody sight worse than night flying in real night time, than it is in the night time with that. So we went down another field,

a place called, and I don’t think those – they were satellite fields. We used to do drogue flying, we used to, flying at drogues, we used to do battle formations,

A battle formation is the way you go to war, that means that – like I was saying to Julian, there are some people I wouldn’t want to go to war with because I wouldn’t trust them.

Because either they weren’t trustworthy or they didn’t have any courage. I mean…

How, do you know pink from blue?

Men tell on themselves as well as women tell on themselves, we all have little body languages that I don’t know – that’s why you go drinking with each other, that’s why you talk to each other, that’s why you go off on leave together. That’s why you fraternise. It all has to do with – it may be that you haven’t got a sympathetic juices flowing between you too. You can’t be confident that way.

And most formations are done in vic form where you actually have a lead aircraft and two wingmen, and behind each of those aircraft they are no. 2 and so there are six aircraft and the two vees are three. Now, each man is expected to clear above, clear below and clear behind. He spends all his time with his five men around him protecting him with their eyes. OK. Because he navigates you to the target,

then he, and he usually with the – that again comes back to operational, when we got on to operations, so that’s what they were teaching you at that place. They used to do some cheeky things to you to get you in the air on a cross country and turn all the bloody lights out. And we did not fly with navigation – or did we, I don’t remember, we might have flown with navigation lights. But all of a sudden, so if you were in trouble you were called up either darkie or donga. Now they were two signals that said you were in

distress and they were the call sign that said where you came from. All of a sudden you would see a searchlight that would come up like that. And you would fly in that search light and it might go that way, and you follow that searchlight – finally he comes in and lights the flares on your field and puts you down. One of the other ones, if you had a prang or something like that, these were all the things that had to be learnt. You could not just cross the coast of England anywhere either, you had to learn to fly

and know the colours of the day, the signal of the day, you also had to have access to Very pistols and things. All of these things had to be taught.

A Very pistol is one you see out here, when an aircraft is coming in to land and it’s dangerous they fire a red very. And when they want them to take off they fire a green one. And if the weather is closing in they fire a cream one. Explode those colours, red, green, cream, that’s why you can’t be colour blind.

Anyway, that’s the sort of training. There were 400, now the losses were so great that they took half the 400 pilots and put them on to multi-engine stuff. And again, this Stan Watt, who you’ll hear about, and myself, and Jackie Woods, quite a few of us, were costed by our flight commander who saw in our log book that we were all twin-engine trained, and he said, “Hey, hey, what’s this?” “All too short in the legs, sir.”

We would never hear another bloody word again. So we stayed on singles. And then we were posted to Egypt without knowing where we were going. But we had a good time before we left England. We went to Morecombe, we lived with dear old maiden aunts who ran a boarding house, and we were billeted with them, and we used to fill the swear jar every bloody meal.

Turn Hill.

Turn Hill T-U-R-N H-I-L-L. Then we were posted back overseas and we were given pith helmets. Ever seen a pith helmet?

You see, when they tell you the casualties, they are really talking about the war casualties, and that really is very, very high, it’s around 30%, maybe even more, I mean, I can give you the percentage with my squadron. And I can give you some averages and I have seen some figures, also another part, and that is just the mere fact of having to learn to fly an aeroplane. That in itself is an accident that is going to happen at some time. And also there are accidents in training where you are actually forming on other aircraft and

someone fails or his foot slips off the rudder or something happens, and the worst that happened to us, we lost seven of our mates on a Saturday morning, an Avro Anson had his pilot and four observers and a Miles Master was trailing a drogue, and I don’t how they drove it but no one survived it, so we got ourselves blindly drunk and buried them, and that’s par for the course.

That was the biggest thing that happened to us on Turn Hill. But we lost people. But – it’s like here, one of you, I was telling we don’t want coffins in and out of the chapel, you don’t advertise death, it’s there, it’s around, and funny, it goes away. It’s sad to go into our hospitals here and see dear old souls. And all of a sudden they fall asleep and the girls there say, “She’s gone to the angels.”

Because you have come here to die. Maybe you don’t – at your age there’s a lot of living to be done, but when to get at our age, or our mentality.

That’s why they didn’t give you all the figures and things. They have a thing called TM [?] in the air force, which analyses why accidents happens to stop deaths in training as much as…

Because that was AFU, an Advanced Fighter Unit, to teach you the tactics required of a fighter pilot and where they could put you in an aircraft that was dual seated. And the other finer arts were to do gunnery. We didn’t actually drop any bombs from the, because – no, they didn’t think we were going to be dive-bomber pilots, but that was what we finished up as. We did cross-countries – we learnt the art of getting around balloon barrages,

recognising English country towns, from other parts because all the signs were taken down. Just the mere fact of flying. It’s like anything and everything you do, you should really familiarise yourself with it. If you are going to an appointment, you should do a dummy run.

Yes, as far as speed’s concerned. But speed in the air isn’t as – speed in the air as opposed to low-speed flying is vastly different, I mean it’s – you aren’t really, you have both flown in commercial lines, you don’t realise the speed you are going over the ground, do you, it just unfolds slowly, and the higher the slower it forms. The only thing is that when you recognise things like that, I took Mrs Morton, when we went to

Italy and England and American and that during 1969. Because we represent a lot of overseas companies, and I was always boasting about Italy, so I took my wife to see Italy. Now, we actually took off from Perth heading for Rome and we went over – and there was some war still going on in the Middle East and we had to go down the Mediterranean, and virtually from the time we left Perth, we were following the sun, and we finished up, we caught it, we actually didn’t literally caught it up,

but it never really set, so we actually had instead of 12 or 14 hours sunlight exposure, we actually had another five or six hours. It makes you realise when you are going faster. You have to have something relative to what you are doing. And also a straight line, when you are flying around the world it’s not a straight line, it’s a curve.

No doubt you, Julian, you have got your head in the right place. It’s where your bum is, isn’t it? Anyway, the truth is today’s aircraft is much easier to fly from the point of view of forward view. A tail dragger sits and if I can give you the figures roughly. Most of the fighter aircraft I flew, in fact all of them I flew, roughly form the eyes of the pilot who is sitting in the cockpit

to the spinner that actually is the bubble that sits over the prop, you know. It’s about 16 feet, that gives you about how far your nose is sticking up in the air. When it comes to, look, you have to look either side of the cockpit. And in between where the wings are, roughly where my thumbs are, we’ll consider those the fuselage, there’s this gap that shows you the runway, if you are on a runway. Now, if you are on a runway you watch the wings

stay roughly on the same position on the edge of the runway. And that’s how you take off until such times as you have got speed on the tail, and then you come up to flying level, you are not at flying speed, but you can lift your tail without fear of doing a ground loop. OK, now you are getting up to flying speed and you are straight, but if you are on a field where you have no runway all you do is line up on a cloud. That’s how you get airborne. But when you land, there’s a funny old phraseology

for pilots. When you are on single engine tail draggers you usually come in and do a split-arse turn, you come into the runway and you actually come down watching the runway come up and at the last minute you straighten up and you actually have got a bit of a sight at the end of the field or again at something on the horizon. And when you stall to land again you have got to watch that you keep your wings in relation to the runway edge. That’s the most difficult part of flying a single engine.

And we did not – I don’t think I ever saw what I called a tri cart, that’s the one with the nose wheel and two wheels on the ground, actually when you take those off you are taking off in flying position. When you have got your tail down that’s in the stall position.

In the trainers you start with the Miles Masters or something of the equivalent, and I flew all three, as you

probably didn’t realise, but they are all there and all the little details. When we went to Egypt we go out to a place called Abu Suweir.

About a year, not quite, we sailed for Egypt around about, again, February or March of

1943.

Yes, but training is practice, so lots of times you actually have to series of things, aerobatics come into it, stalls, spins, and you can’t just do a spin and say I know how to get out of a spin. You can’t do

an aerobatic, I know how to do an aerobatic, you need practice. And you have got to learn to feel your aircraft so it responds to you actually thinking, which comes back to your ability to memory as to train yourself with this instinctive reaching for controls. I never looked at a flying control when I was in a war single-engine aircraft, because that’s not what it’s

about. You get into it and it’s part of you, like I said, you ride a horse. Instinctively that’s what you want it to do, and as well as you want it to do, because that’s what you are in tune about, but yes, nevertheless, there are parts of the training that apply to – we do link trainer, now, link trainer is to actually train you on the ground, to fly on a compass, and the

trainer is actually linked to a marker pen, they put out and you finish up, you do Maltese Crosses, you do all sorts of things and you show your accuracy at instrument flying. In England they attach that to another trainer, which is the same but they now call that a Fisher trainer. And they attack you with model aircraft and you have to recognise the aircraft, whether it’s friend or foe. And then you have to lay off your deflection to hit it, and you have got on the front of

the little machine, a light beam, and if you ray off the right deflection and you hit it the bell rings, so that’s all the sorts of training, you also have to learn how to get in and out of your aircraft and get into a dinghy, and also what you have to do when you are in a dinghy, you also have to wear a Mae West [lifejacket]. You also have to sit on your bloody parachute. Your parachute also contains your dinghy. So there’s lots of thing you have to keep

practicing at. The one thing we didn’t practise at a lot was jumping from a parachute. Why break your leg until you have to? Why impair yourself for your war effort? You also have to understand aerodrome defence, because if the aerodrome gets attacked and there’s no army around to help you, who’s going to help you? So you do what is called a Pioneer’s course. They take you out and they put you in fields, and you don’t know where the hell you are, and you have got to get back to the aerodrome.

Now that’s, God helps yourself. So you either pinch a bike, you thumb a ride, you do it any way you like. And you have to get out and you jump fences, you have to get through barb wire, you have to learn to cope with ship’s nets, plenty to do. So that’s all part of your training.

It is, but again, minds are conditioned by physique, and physiques are conditioned by minds. So you have just got to do it. And

drilling, so you have got to take responsibility, I have been sergeant of the guard, I have been warrant officer, I have been the orderly officer. You have duties to attend to – your service isn’t just sitting twiddling your thumbs. If you are not on the ground learning your sort of work, you are up in the air learning your work. Repetition. Things – the learning of the art of flying an operational aircraft has more

to do with the danger you can expose yourself to than saving your life even. Or even taking life. You have also got to learn, don’t get too close up your bloke, your bloke in front of you, if his discharged shells coming out of his gun peeling off underneath him come back and hit you in the radiator you are dead, your engine stalls. People don’t think of that, so you can really only get 75 metres behind him. You also cannot go too steep, if you go

too steep in the dive you come to such a speed you may not be able to pull the bloody aircraft out. So you can’t use your instruments because everything is by sight. You look for a bit of smoke on the ground to tell you which way the wind is drifting, you look for a flag flying, anything that will give you instincts, and what you see in eight seconds, I repeat, in eight seconds is what you have got to remember when you go to the debriefing. When you go back to your

debriefing they want to, what you did, whether you hit your target, what you observed, whether there were any enemy movements. And also, I don’t know whether you know where the speeds and all the things that operate the controls come from, but the significant instrument all comes from the peto head, do you know what the peto head is? Well, the peto head is a long prong that sticks out in the front of all aircraft,

whether they be jets, whether they be internal combustion engines, whether they be fighters, whether they be bombers, the peto sucks in the air, or the air is forced in it, and so by the variations of temperature, a, you get your height because it reads your, on an instrument called the altitude meter, but that’s actually part of barometric pressure. See, all the other things we had to sort of either teach – keep your mind

awake, and they had to be learned. You also got to be able to take shocks. I come back to the pioneering course, we had a major from the Black Watch [famous Scottish regiment] used to teach us, he used to have great fun throwing bloody thunder crackers at us. It ain’t fun, if you are exposed to war in the true sense of the word, you have got to be able to handle it. And it all depends, you see, I didn’t know then what I know now,

but I didn’t know until I got to Italy and joined my squadron that was going to become essential, because the distance from us to the enemy when we were in Italy was as close as five and ten miles. You have got to get up to height, you have got to get up to 5 or 10,000 feet to dive-bomb them. And you are a target the whole bloody time since you take off, because the bloke can reach over with his 88-mm gun and blow you out of the sky. So – and it could have been –

instead of us pushing the Germans back it could have been pushing us back. So if you have a look in books I have got here, you will also find that the ground crew were also very, very good at putting mines down and mounting machine guns and mounting ack-ack [anti-aircraft] guns.

Yes, but if you go to war and you aren’t ready for war, all you do is cannon fodder.

No,

Julian, it doesn’t matter whether you are a dive-bomber or a fighter pilot, we all finish up – the only thing is – in the beginning of the war, for example, when the Battle of Britain was taking place, and the Germans were coming over in hordes, poor buggers got out there and they may have only had about 30 or 40 hours flying. They were there to defend us and they were thrown at the cannons and that was all there was to it. And you learned the hard way. If you look at the casualties then and the number of aircraft

in the air then it was a higher incidence than it was later. But as the war went on and we got more and more aircraft, there were more and more aircrew in the air, so the death toll was just as high but percentage-wise is was slightly less. See, all those characteristics people don’t take into account when they hear things.

No, no. It took me from day one on the 1st January,

I fired my first angry shot in June of 1944. Round about two and a half years later. Very few people fired off a shot of anything of any consequence in under about 12 months to 18 months. But there were, in the initial stages of the war, people who were sacrificed in the first three or four or five or six months. But we have to also take into account – they were probably those blokes that I told you who came as flying instructors.

See, not everyone – the number of men who volunteered to fly in the air forces of the world in the beginning of the war were far, far higher than the number of instructors required. But when we produced more and more aircrew, so we had to produce more and more instructors. Most instructors had about three to four – usually one pupil from each flight – from each course, see and if there are four courses there, you would probably have four pupils allocated,

one from each course, and he would have them at varying degrees and stages of being rewarded their wings. And that training system goes on, that’s the beauty of the Empire Air Training Scheme, apart from which the basics of all our training allowed us to tackle any of the aircraft that the Allies were flying.

Well, from Turn Hill we went up to Morecombe to wait for a ship, you just can’t walk up and get a ship.

We were there for another – this is ships – I think we were there for about three weeks.

Well, again, we took our time off and had a booze-up or something, anything to relax, because as you just said, we’d had 12 months of pretty hard training and some pretty dangerous situations, we lost blokes.

I don’t know. Only, I can you tell the experiences.

Well, we lost seven blokes on one morning alone. We might have, over the year there, been 10 or 15 or more, but that’s only 10% of 400 doing the training.

Pilot error. Even if it wasn’t they said it was.

No. I did not

have a gory outlook, plenty of blokes wanted to know and look into it and investigate, but to me, I had to be ready for the next day and ready for when I flew.

Sometimes, one of the dangerous is after takeoff in the night time, if you don’t trust your instruments, you get airborne and you get about 500 feet, you are supposed to turn port and climb up to 1,000 feet to get into the circuit area to allow yourself

to leave the circuit of the airfield, right. And you use a turn bank indicator, and you use a gyro to see how many degrees you are turning. So if you rely on it your bottom is not always an accurate, because if your aircraft has got a bit of slip on it you get a different pressure on your bottom, if you get a bit of slide on it, you get a different pressure on your bottom. And then your mind starts to doubt the accuracy of the your instruments, and

it has been unknown, and they have kept on going and turning, and the next thing they are dead. They just dive to the deck. That’s a pilot error accident. And aircraft landed on tops of aircraft, or they ground looped, and if they had a bomb on they blew themselves up. See, it’s very hard to list these things, because the airfield as such is not exactly where you

live, on Turn Hill we lived in quarters, and to get to the airfield we actually were picked up in trucks. Now, it might only be a half a mile or a mile and a half down to the air field, but that’s the way it works, so you did not live with it all right under your nose. And on the squadron, we usually again kept the billets and tents or whatever it was back a long way from the strip for the reason that an aircraft wouldn’t only kill –

we would kill our ground crew, and I don’t know whether you realise it or not but it takes about 70 to 80 men to keep on aircraft in the air, types, with all their types of responsibilities, ambulance drivers, instrument makers, engine fitters, mechanics, airframe fitters, fuellers, victuallers, hooks, a lot of people, they used to show it during the war with a lot of people

blowing. Takes 75 of us to keep one of you in the air. See, a squadron is made up – my type of squadron was made up – in aircrew, was made up of around 25 to 30 pilots, and our strength would be about 270, so 250 of them would be people who – that includes the intelligence officer, the photographer, and

your – it all depends on the area, see, now. The blokes going from England to Europe had to rely on compasses. Now, compasses can be jolted so that you finish up with, the magnetic parts of it need to be re-swung. Swinging a compass is very important because the earth is actually split up in degrees of latitude and longitude, and there is 360

degrees around it, and I forget how many, I think there is 15 of latitude, well, that changes, because as you get away or nearer the poles of the earth, the north and south pole, so your magnetic compass changes. So there is also things that you have got to have specialist, you got your radio specialist, you got your padres who want to convert you, to say God’s going to take you when you go. You know, you,

anything you can think of is essential, and it is all to do with morale. In fact, another factor again comes out. In England there is a big jail in Sheffield, it is a big jail, I mean a big one. Not as well known, but that was the air force jail, that’s where the airmen were sent to jail. They could be sent there for LMF, and that means lack of moral fibre. That means you are a coward,

it was full. Not all of what I am saying, but they wagged it, they took off and met their bird [girlfriend], and they took off to Ireland, and I mean under wartime conditions what’s the worst that can happen, you could be dead, so you took risks and your bird took off for a dirty weekend, and you decided, “Bugger it, I am not going back.” So you went AWL, that’s absent without leave, so you go to jankers, you go to jail. And I’ll

bet the army one was the same as the navy one was. So a year is not a very long time. As I told you, he had the current training program, and they come in and do about – it all depends how and what way they entered the air force. Some came in with flying experience, they have had the money to pay for so many hours of instruction. Probably been solo in a modern aircraft, but that doesn’t mean, they still have to go, passed the rigours of

air force training, because your main trainer is a PC9 and then the next trainer after that you go up again, much the same sort of phases, and you either go on to helicopters or you go on to transport or you go on to staff piloting, there’s all sorts of things you can go on, instructing.

You mean your own personal equipment, don’t you?

That’s always an unknown number because until you are faced with the enemy what do you know? You can have it all in your imagination, probably better not to have that. Probably better to turn off and go and get drunk. That’s what we did.

Morecombe? No, Morecombe we knew we were going overseas, we had another special issue, and we did not know we were going to Egypt. As far as we were concerned, we were being posted overseas, and we sailed

again, from Liverpool this time, and we went out right down the south where all the yacht races start, go right down the bottom of England and we turned left and through Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, and we were on the Stirling Castle, and we were the second convoy through, and the first convoy through was given hell. And we were attacked by JU88s, which is their long-range bomber, and they had what they called a guide bomb, and they guided the bomb

on to the targets for the first part of its journey on wires. And then just discharged the wires, and it should be then – the fins on the bomb should have then kept it on track. And then only gravity takes over. Well, that’s all what you have to learn also, so that happened, but when we got to Egypt, unbeknown to us we were supposed to be going to Bermuda, now I can’t prove those things, but the latrine-o-grams told us that, but when we got to the top of Port Tewfik,

it doesn’t matter, the north end of the Suez Canal, they took us off and put us on a train and they shot us down to Cairo and from there to Heliopolis, and instead of going to Bermuda we went to Heliopolis.

No. We didn’t have dive-bombers – the bombers, they were level bombers, no dive-bombers.

The JU88’s the long bomber, it’s like a longer bodied version

of – I suppose the Halifax or the Manchester, a two-engine thing. They were pretty – there was big argument that helped us win the war between Goering, who was the chief of air staff for Hitler, and whether they should produce fighters. Their factories can’t produce everything at once, no factories can, they get geared up for things. So when they should have been producing fighters they were producing bombers, and when they were producing

fighters. So they got their war arse about Pete [back to front] and that helped beat them.

Well, we didn’t get bombed, they got close to us but we didn’t get touched.

I could see them and that was close enough, mate.

They just took actions and you just steamed on and zigzagged a bit more. What else could you do? You don’t get blasé, but the threat of death or the threat of all those things,

is how it comes whether it’s in daylight or whether it at night, whether it is in your bunk or down in the bowels of the ship, or when you are on deck or whether you have got a bit of dutch courage or whether you have had a few beers, because on the American ships they are dry ships, you don’t have any drink at all, not even today. But all the British ships, we had our two or three bottles of beer issued. And you didn’t take much, at the moment you didn’t have the mix of light or

medium beer, we had beer, which is around about seven or eight per cent alcohol. I don’t know. And when you are amongst your peer group you are inclined to be a bit blasé and, “I am better than you, mate,” and put your pillow and cry. I don’t think that – even in London when I was bombed, we went down to Piccadilly tubes, which is the lowest you can go in the underground railway in London,

and I saw about three or four Canadian blokes and a couple of my own mates, and we were standing on the platform and everyone was bedding down for the night. They even had their own little squares, they reckoned it was theirs, and there were tens of thousands of people went down to shelter in the tubes, where we were standing there and we heard this, I said to the person next to me, “What’s that?” “Oh, they are just closing the watertight doors under the Thames.” We said, “We are going upstairs.”

See, you would rather go up and face the bombs than be drowned.

When the first of the – towards the end of 1943, the end of November and a couple of times in December and we were staying at the Chevron Club and they sent their first waves of incendiary bombs down on us. And I don’t know whether you know, but you can’t put an incendiary bomb out with just a fire extinguisher

or water, that only makes it burn brighter. You have got to suffocate it in sand. So I was in London, but again the sirens would go and you didn’t even bother get out of bed. Now, that’s being silly, but how do you think the English managed, that’s exactly the attitude they took. They talk of their friends’ houses that blew up next door, and that’s just bad luck and we are lucky we are still here. See, everything happens to someone else,

if you are alive. That’s why you are alive.

Oh, pretty good, we were escorted it was a big convoy, and the Stirling Castle was a pretty fast one. We didn’t have quite the same destroyer escort that we had when we were on the Atlantic coming over from America, but the further we got down the Mediterranean

the better it was, because the closer we got to North Africa, and the closer we got to Egypt, when they could send aircraft out to support you. Because again, the range of aircraft coming from Italy, and that’s where they came from to bomb us, from the German aircraft, had to come right up almost over Messina and Sardinia and Pantelleria and all those islands. And look at all the bombing that went on that the poor buggers copped in

Malta. Never a day without bombers over ships. The convoys trying to get stuff in to them. Sometimes some convoys didn’t arrive. Just too bad. You just got on with the living. It’s not something you just think about, you just – now that’s my area, I can’t speak for a lot of other people. But you didn’t get blasé, and you did have your

fears, but having faced it what else can you do?

No, not in 1943, no. The German air force was very strong. And there were what actually happened, we are talking of the skies over Europe, you see, England was retaliating, we finished up with the Americans and their Fortresses and their Superfortresses. We got the Lancaster

and we also got a different type of aircraft, and the Mustangs came along. And instead of the bombers going all the way over Europe with a Mustang, all the way from England to – and in fact the Mustangs used to take off all the way from Italy and go right out over the south of Russia and come back with a weather recce for us. 10 hours flying. That’s if they put long-range tanks on. I wouldn’t like to be sitting in the aircraft for that long, your bum would get sore.

Am I not leaving you hanging, because I don’t want that to happen. I can be too short, but I want you to feel that the dangers were there and not ignored, but I imagine it’s like having your head chopped off, as some of our poor buggers did with the Japanese. Take even the tower that knocks someone’s head off, they paid him to do it, to make sure he didn’t miss. Would you do it?

But, see, the end result was death. Well, what after death?

I don’t know.

You are a long way off.

Wait till we go to Egypt.

And we went down to Heliopolis and we were stationed

at a place there called the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, which in the first part of the war was the No. 1 British General Hospital. And I suppose again it is – you could not believe how many rooms it had, but I do not know, but I was sergeant of the guard there, bad we would have had at least 50 to 100 Italian prisoners of war waiting on us, in that hotel. So that gives you an idea, and I reckon we could have had anything from 1000 to 2000 aircrew

stationed in the hotel. And again, we were waiting for our turn to go on to an operational training unit course, and that’s where two things happened, the – all those blokes that were going to fly Kittyhawks were sent to Abaswayer, all those blokes going to fly Spitfires were sent to Ismailiyah. Abaswayer was more in the desert, and Ismailiyah was on the great bitter lakes. So all my mob went out and we flew Kittyhawks, now to learn to fly a Kittyhawk, you start in an aircraft

called a Harvard which again is a small version of a – the one we had 25 squadron, they were a, anyway, it, my mate Blue flew these aircraft, and it’s a monoplane aircraft and it’s in the

the training ground and it actually has an instructor’s cockpit in them as well. The difference, it has a fully retractable undercart, it has a fully radial engine, and it is a big more power and it is a bit more everything, but it is not a combat aircraft. Now, what they do is they get you up there and first of all they give you the feeling of the area of Abaswayer, and now we are flying over desert as opposed to trees and villages, and another that people don’t understand, when you are flying over the

desert it’s harder to know how high you are without having an accurate reading. Now, how you get an accurate reading, when you take off from the airfield you set your barometer at zero. Now that brings it down to the air pressure that day. So that’s it, and if you happen to know the height of your airfield above sea level, you convert that by adding the feet. Just shifting your barometer and you take off, and that will give you – but that

is not the end, we will also being taught to low fly and strafe, all sorts of things that the aircraft is supposed to do. You know how high you are if you are over a valley of trees, you obviously are around 30 feet, “Am I above the trees or below the trees, am I above the light pole or below the light pole?” But when you are over the desert it’s like flying over the water, you haven’t got any contrasts, so you have to be careful that you don’t go into the deck without realising that you are too close,

and when that happens, if you react too quickly and pull your stick back to beat it, then you mush, the aircraft does not follow its nose. It just goes. And if you are only 20 feet above it, 20 feet is nothing in an aircraft, you are down, boom. So there’s a lot more to learn about flying over those regions. There’s also a lot more to learn that when your aircraft is parked of a night time, it isn’t necessarily put in a hangar, it stands out on a tarmac, and the tarmac could be part of a

saltpan, just macadamised. And so you get radiation coming up, you get temperatures change and all this changes the characteristics of the aircraft, so you have to learn, then you are also given the instructions of a Kittyhawk, you are given a thing like this which I can show you, and you learn all its stalling speeds,

That’s all the things you have to learn to fly a Kittyhawk.

That’s actually a mock up of it, I have got an original one because my flying instructor gave me one.

Yes, mainly the young blades were chosen for fighters, because you fly more by instinct, you don’t stop and weigh odds, you dive in or you dive out, because the time for avoiding things is no time, you have got to anticipate things, that’s probably the practical way of talking about it, and don’t forget,

by the time I got there I still wasn’t – I was only 19 going on 20, and Wattie was the same, all my mates were the same. I can show you photos of us all in the sports grounds and that, we still practised, we still played Australian Rules football, we demonstrated it and all this sort of thing. So the biggest, people don’t understand is when you fly a Spitfire, a Kittyhawk, a Mustang, your

instructor can’t go with you, he can only sit on the wing and test you on your pre-takeoff drill, test you on the your knowledge of the aircraft. He will tell by your reactions if you are confident. And the first thing he says is, “OK, take off.” Now the biggest thing that upset me when that happened, I don’t mean I was upset, I wasn’t going to go, I hadn’t taken into consideration, most aircraft in the English manufacturing field have a handbrake

on your spade grip, OK? It has, like you have on your car an equaliser so that the pressure doesn’t go on favouring one brake drum against the other, so it equalises it, OK? So in the Kittyhawk you actually have tow brakes, and when you put your foot down on the rudder bar, your tow brakes are there and when you do that with that 15 or 16 feet of nose in front of you, and your

Kittyhawk weighs about 8,500 pounds, I reckon 6,000 pounds of it are in front of you because most of it is your motor and your forward engine and your guns. It rocks, and you think, “Oh my god, my prop is going to hit the ground.” And you panic, but that’s one of the things you have got to learn yourself, and away you go. And in my logbook I wrote, I felt I was sitting on a broomstick sort of business, and I looked down at the airfield and thought,

“I will never get back down,” but you do, so – and the same with the Spitfire, you actually do your own conversions after a while, because if you have done single-engine flying, all single-engine aircraft have a similar characteristic. You can’t change the flying controls, they are all the same in all aircraft, even in jets. You can’t do anything about the power except get a later model, because the engineers build the power in. That’s why I said 50 hp

came in, they found they needed to have a bit more drag to get it off a bit earlier. So you got up and you got motion and got to the first stop and got you so you could bring your tail up, and now you are really airborne, you go and you get 50 hp. And it goes in like that, and in actual fact it goes like this and you get used to it. So. Do you feel you can fly an aircraft now? Anyway, that was it, and at OTU [Operational Training Unit] you actually do all the things that you

have, you actually use live rounds to fire your guns, you do bombing, you practice bombs. They give you an idea how far out you should stand before you make a dive-bomb. They give you a way to look for the winds, you are warned of some of the things that, like the fact that if you get too close to the bloke and he’s discharging, his used ammunitions, that may knock yourself out of the air. You, and you again

have given yourself a different method of taking off, because when you take off even, you do not, out a 500 feet turn when you turn left, you sort of do it all on a, you know, a split-arse turn except when you are coming in to land, you are trying to wash off speed, because the Kittyhawk comes in over the fence at about 115 or 120 knots, there’s very few aircraft faster. And there’s very few

aircraft in the world that is faster. Even the big jets and that, that’s a big speedo, because the pilot’s got to convert, he has to turn all that into seconds then and he’s got to put it down, and when you are putting down an aircraft full of a lot of people, 400 people, a lot of tons hitting the deck. Just bonk, you might burst your tyres. And there’s another thing people don’t realise too, you can only carry so much pressure in your tyres to hold your body weight and your load weight up and your fuel and everything,

but you can’t pump them up any harder than the cell which holds the wheel when it goes up into it, you have got to realise that that as we get higher it’s going to expand because the pressure around it is allowing the pressure in the tyre to expand the tyre. If you are up there and you are unlucky enough it could even blow up so hard that it could even burst the tyre inside the cell. Just the same as you put a can of coke in your fridge and it gets frozen, it bursts. Well, it goes the other way around.

So flying to all…

Yes. I finished my OTU and then I caught a ship and I went up to the top of the canal and I think the ship was called the Mont Bermuda and that took about five days because ships can’t – 20 knots is a very fast ship, most ships

travel about 12. I arrived in Naples within weeks of it being recaptured and we got there, the water had been turned into a sewer and the sewer had been turned into water. It was rife with plague, a type of bubonic plague and the people were devastated, it was quite sad. And anyway we arrived and we were

taken ashore and taken out past Pompeii to a place called Portici and they actually had requisitioned villas, big villas. Enough to hold perhaps 100 men, and that‘s where we were established when we were again waiting to move up, because the war in Italy, they still hadn’t captured Rome, they were still madly charging round down the bottom end of Italy. While we were there we went to see Pompeii.

Oh, fascinating, and it’s still being excavated, they are doing it with brushes and teaspoons, because it is important, if you saw it, it is unbelievable because so many doubting Thomases, so they chip, say, your elbow to expose the real bone, there’s no one that can do that in marble or whatever, but when Pompeii exploded it covered them in ashes as you are probably aware, and they just lie there with their

togas and some of them went sound asleep and never woke up again. It was fascinating, because you can actually relive many of the things that the Roman history, and what we Australians don’t realise, we are very lucky we have exposure to so much of history around the world, and as a general education even from my day, we knew more about things than the average scholastic teaching up to, say – mind you, it all depends, you see, because

we weren’t encouraged to leave school much before 14, in fact you weren’t supposed to leave until you were 14. Then it went out to 16 and then to 17. And anyway, basically speaking, when we were at Portici, Vesuvius erupted and a bloody great hole, do you know what a quarter looks like? Can you visualise a quarter-acre of land, it’s a hectare, no, it’s not, it’s not quite a half hectare, and the land just went. A bloody great

hole about 20 feet deep, well, it could have been us, so…

Vesuvius erupted. See, an earth tremor, it shook it down. See, the earth is a series of catacombs, there are – sometimes it’s water seepage and sometimes it’s not all built on solid lava.

Just there.

And when we were there, I will come on to the human side,

I started to develop a very soft feeling for the Italians, and I still love them. We had little kids who could just about walk, I don’t mean babies but – because they had no bloody tucker, and they would sit all day outside our mess waiting for us to clean out our scraps off our plates and put them into a kerosene tin, a clean one, and at about five o’clock in the afternoon, the cooks would boil them up and there would be orange peels and everything, but the kids did not

eat, and that’s exactly what they had for tucker. I say, you have to see Italy. And when the Germans retreated from Italy, they had a great grappling hook that went down and pulled up all the sleepers between the rail lines, and a hook that went up this way and pulled all the electric cables down, they put a blast, like a square piece of dynamite on the rails every 25 metres and blew a great gap in the

rail. Italy was in a bad, bad way. I got to get that in, because no one realises that that campaign was two and a half years long and only three and a half thousand Australians served in it. 500 of them were grave diggers, they came up after they finished the cemeteries in North Africa. Instead of sending them home, we are now getting into 1944, so instead of sending them home they…them up, and we had about three thousand airmen. We had three squadrons

3 Squadron was the oldest one and it was Kittyhawks and then later Mustangs. My squadron was 450 Squadron, it was Kittyhawks, we did the conversion on to Mustangs and we couldn’t keep up with it because the unserviceability rate was too high. And 454 Squadron, which was Baltimores, and then there were Australians that were scattered through, like one of my mates went to a South African squadron, the Flying Marauders. Various things liked that, but basically the Italian star is a real one.

It’s just a red and green and white ribbon. They are real if you see them around. And that was a lousy bloody war. As we advanced up the country, our equipment got older, don’t ask me why.

Yes, because, when they built and MUS, it means a maintenance unit, and when they brought the aircraft in they put them in the door, didn’t they, and they put them down the back

wall. They should have had a door that came out the other end. So when they got them out they all came out the front door. So the newer ones were taken out, they took them out and we got them first, we got crankier and crankier aircraft. So I flew a Mark IVA, which is a P40N, and I actually flew Mark IIIs in Italy. That is a big difference, because the difference between the two aircraft, is just pretty well all manual and the other one is just semi-automatic. Makes

a big difference when you don’t have to think about flying as much as you did with the other one and concentrate on bombing. Then we went to training again, see.

Yes, we were posted to a place called Ancona, and that was the Desert Air Force, and that was really a familiarisation, and then we did for the first time we actually carried 100 pound bombs, and we dropped a smoke marker in the ocean and dive-bombed it, and that was a –

and now we come to the same problem we had over the sand, only this was over the water. You had to pull out because there was no way of estimating, you cannot – you can’t force the air through, so your height calculation, your altimeter can’t read it for you so you just have to guess. That’s when accidents happen and that, now I do not know, but there must have been some. You know, I flew by an Avro Anson up to a little landing field called Crete Landing Ground which was among a valley of farmers,

with 1,000 metre steel strip, like a nutmeg grater, that’s what it looked like, and there we were down amongst the vines and the maze and we slept under tents and when I landed there the bomb line was only about 15 miles away from us, you could hear the guns going off, and whatever the war you could see the flashes and that was the probably the first introduction when you did, your first flight was

behind a fella by the name of Jack Gleeson, who was our commanding officer, and you usually fly in a position called Red 2, it means the leader is Red 1 and this Red 2 was about 7500 metres outside him, Red 2 this side and Blue 2 this side of him. Blue 1, White 1, White 2 and Blue 2 and that’s how it’s done and away you go. And I was told to stick close to my leader’s bum when he got – not so bloody close, I was geared up to be –

anyway, that’s when our operations started, and our job was to give close support to the 8th Army, and as they moved forward so we moved up with them, we operated out of about half a dozen different air fields in the matter of about seven months, so we were only really – the longest stop we had was at a place called Farno, but we were on air fields that were called Foggia. Foggia was a very big airfield, they might have had about three or four thousand aircraft

on that air field, including Liberators and including Fortresses. A lot of twin engine stuff. And the reason of putting them up at Foggia halfway up Italy was because the Ploesti oilfields in the south of Russia [actually Romania] could be bombed from there, so you go over to go over to the great circle and miss all Hungary and all that and you miss all – and you bomb them there, and you also had Mustangs to give them top cover and they used to take up and give them – and that was about an eight-hour trip.

It was quite a responsible area and the last place that I actually served on was Farno, and Farno we actually – was drawing winter, and our CO [Commanding Officer] decided and he is still alive, his name is Jack Doyle, and Jack requisitioned homes that had been left because the enemy was still around them and the enemy weren’t that far away, and so we

operated from there and we went into a couple of two-storey places, and the laugh side, there’s got to be a laugh side, the – our ground crew put in a choofa for us, which is a 44-gallon drum cut in two thirds and one third and the two thirds side goes down with a hole through it, and out of it comes from the top side which is where you put your boiling water in, and outside that on an extended

copper pipe exactly as you use for your petrol, we put a petrol drum and dripped petrol into the sand and lit it. And we were able to have showers, we didn’t have showers, we had baths. And the baths was always big enough for six of us to get in together. Mate, all you wanted to be was clean, and that – and while we were there I went on leave in Florence and I saw what the Germans did, I saw what, the Ponte Vecchio happened and it broke our

hearts, because the Ponte Vecchio is a real historical gem, it’s a covered bridge. Did you see it?

I know, but as long as you have seen it you know what I am talking about. They smashed up all those beautiful homes and let them crash into the streets either side of the Ponte Vecchio, so it couldn’t be used. And all their ammunition was stacked in the crypts of the cathedrals around it so that we wouldn’t bomb them, and I know

they were there because I saw the crypts and where the logs were and where they packed the ammunition bombs and shells and you name it, and now we are getting over it very quickly, because there is a very important thing coming up and also when I was getting close to tour expired, and that means that in our particular group in Fighter Command we were required to do a minimum of 150 operational

flying and a maximum of 200 hours and anywhere in between was considered as an operational tour. 49 of us only in the whole six years of the war finished that tour. Gives you an idea of how many losses there were. We had on command over that six years 400 pilots and 49 of us finished it.

We were supposed to be all of Australians, but I have got lovely photos to show you we had a lot of South Africans, we had a lot of Englishmen, we had one New Zealander,

we had a couple of blokes come back for the second tour, the second tour, I think there were only five blokes that finished the second tour.

They were forced to, they are in the air force, they were just told to go.

That’s right. You can volunteer, we had volunteers, but who wants it? To get my 180 hours and 15 minutes, I know exactly how long, I had to do 110 sorties and I dropped 152,000 pounds of bombs. That’s a lot for a little plane handling it

like you were a pyramid with a teaspoon.

No, you get a bit wary, and you are inclined to be, as I said to, Julian said to me “What age, what are the requirements?” you think to yourself, “If I don’t do that I just might live.” It doesn’t actually come up as a forefront thought, it’s just that you don’t stick your neck out quite so far. But dive-

bombing is a most unusual thing, they can’t – there’s no instrument that will help you do it, you just have to learn to fly your aeroplane.

Well, because the army, the German army, had a most wonderful weapon called the 88 mm, there’s never been a gun better than it, there’s never been a gun could do as much, it was as versatile as anything, it could be used as a field piece, it could be used as an ack

ack, it was mobile and they used to put them in batteries of four. What we were after, when they got cracking we would go and bomb them, so it stopped the army. The next size gun was a 40 mm and the next was a 20 mm and from then on anyone with a machine gun or a revolver or a rifle or even a mortar would have a go at us because we were so close. 1500 feet is not much.

We used to call it the milk run, but what we meant was that you could put your wheels down and taxi on the flat. It was really a bloody war, but thank God we had no aircraft attacking us. We had complete supremacy. The air force used to give us top cover of Spits [Spitfires] so we couldn’t be attacked at our most vulnerable time, that’s when we did a dive-bomb. The whole operation is dependent on how far up the coast we had to go.

The range always comes into it, because if an aircraft operates at – with a maximum of two and a half hours, it can only go an hour and a quarter that way and it’s out, but if you are heading into a wind and you go an hour and a half that way, you gave only got an hour to get back in. So you have to watch all sorts of things. And we used to do training grounds, we used to do bridges, railways, tunnels, used to lock the trains in and blow the bloody tunnel mouth shut. Bugger them, let them starve, let them

die, who cares. It was a nasty, nasty war and dive-bombing was really a very, very, very accurate. You have no idea how accurate it was, because you are pointing the whole aircraft at it. And then you just look down over your spinner and see what’s coming. And when you go in – you can’t dive too steeply because you let your bomb go, when you are too steep you will throw your bomb into your prop. When it comes it could be a

reflect, you could even have a shell explode near you, jerks you, and if that’s the lug that lets the bomb go is a manual, thing that you pull from a toggle, just pull it, and that lets it go, if at the moment it was leaving it got flicked, like flicking a match, and that’s the art of dive-bombing, but you can’t be taught it, you have to learn. Teach yourself, so. And then my tour expired…

Mainly, the memorable ones were when we were given close support of the army. What actually happened, we have a thing called Rover David, which is a pilot who has finished his tour, they give him a half truck and about 25 soldiers and they give him a ground-to-air radio, and they give him

a map, photographic map references, and then they send him out to talk dive-bombers onto targets. Because there are things he can tell dive-bombers to do that ground troops don’t understand what they want, and he even gives you an idea where the different winds are coming from and the other variables that you need to know. And so what they used to do, when the army bogged down because the Germans had got a thicker part of the line, they wanted to drive a wedge through so as to go through behind and chop them off. And there was a big

place called the Papal State at San Marino that we were not supposed to enter. There were lots of rules about the war in Italy that people didn’t know of, for example, if we had hit the Vatican we would have been in trouble. You could have been court martialled.

Yes, we understand that, but they overcame that by making sure they could if they had a Catholic in every crew. That’s the medium bombers. With us we probably had Catholics,

we never asked religion, anyhow, we probably had Catholics and it’s all on your records, so what actually happened, and why it was a danger is that the Vatican City is right next to the railway yards, that’s the marshalling yards of Rome. And we had to stop that. So you had to have a go at it. So the Papal State at San Marino is like what’s his name you know, where the gambling place is in –

Prince Rainier, Monaco. A special little country of its own. That’s what the Papal State is. Now the Germans use that to put a wedge into ours – now, we had to come up round it, they knew that, so they put their tanks inside the border.

Yeah, so to do that, we had to beat them at that, so to do that we had this Rover David system. Now, theoretically there is a bomb line on the ground. OK, now that bomb line is moveable,

it goes backwards and forwards, but when they are fighting a retreat it goes backwards on them. And the important thing to worry about, they don’t have to worry about stalls, they don’t have to worry about ammunition, because they are falling back on all those dumps that they had when they came down. So they are all there, they don’t even have to have trucks. And of course the Germans, being the Germans they raided the food supplies of the nation. And remember, the war was fought over

living population. We actually fought over civilians, over the top, they would not leave their homes. And yet when we walked into their villages they say you bomb here, and we lied, we said Americano. The Americans said, “Did you bomb?” “The Australiano,” easy. But, I was never ever put to the test in Italy, I was given kindness. A girl used to wash and iron my shirt, there was always someone around,

I hitch-hiked, I slept in grandma’s bed. When I hitch-hiked down to Rome that happened. They always gave me a – and because I was always trying to learn Italian, I was given a different sort of respect so it was my job to go and buy the wine for the squadron. And I used to go up to a place called Monte Picciano, which is one of the oldest places – any Monte thing means it is built on the top of a mountain and it’s a fortress city. With a minimum

of two gates, east and west or north and south, four gates like the compass points. I took my wife to Picciano and you have to see it to believe it, and there is a beautiful book been written about it called, Sun over Tuscany, have you heard of it? And she talks about Monte Picciano, Erbezzo and Perugia, and to get into that Tuscany area is like living in a historical legend.

Bloody Italiano, capiche – mainly because I learned, because the things I learned because I used to take – the things they were missing were soap, chocolate, warm clothes, I will come to that too, food of all sorts, but they usually had poultry, ducks, drakes,

they also shared their fruit with their, they shared their maize, because an Italian farmer is not like an Australian farmer, with one type of thing. In Italy they have their grapevines growing, and in between their grape vines they have the maize growing, and underneath the maize they have their tomatoes growing. Up around the olive trees, and it’s a self contained sort of a thing, and they all make their own wine. The only thing we missed, we didn’t

get beer. So it was my job to go up to Monte Picciano to buy huge demijohns of liqueur and/or demijohns of marsala nuova or their – because every Italian home of any consequence has its wine cellar, but it’s not like a wine cellar, you know, it’s like a well. And they put their vintage in and it doesn’t go off, so you just keep filling it up. And the last story was

the boys found one and they were bucketing the wine out of – and they found a body in it. Now, whether it was true or not, but they reckoned the best way to get wine was with a body in it. I think it was more a story.

And then they found that the Germans were using Venice as an open – like Montevideo was an open port.

You are not supposed to under the Geneva Convention do anything like that. There’s even a whole city just north of the Po Valley, and the name will pop up in my head, but relatives of our own English Royal family lived there, same thing, Pola, and we weren’t allowed to enter in that because if you were shot down on the wrong side of the line you made for Pola, they passed you back through the line. And

anyway, but we realised what was going on and I was actually briefed to be part of the crew that bombed it, because every squadron on the wing, which meant there were 72 aircraft, 12 from each squadron, most of them carried 8,000 pounds of bombs. And we – they – both our squadrons were in it, and I have got an original report here from the debriefing, one pilot was shot down, he bailed out and they

eventually got him back. One bomb went wide out of 70-odd bombs that were dropped, and it hit a petrol station, so who cares. The Italians sat on the roof of the warehouses behind the port to watch us bomb, that’s how accurate we were. And we buggered them, did we ever, we found them with ships and we sunk the ships. There was no longer a port of entry or exit, and I have got a huge painting and here it is in small

form, that’s a photo of the painting, and that’s my airplane,

OK is our squadron mark, 3 Squadron, for example, is CV, but they still go ABCDEF, yeah. And if you see there, there’s like a line across – that’s the actual – which has always been there, a bridge with a viaduct that takes the traffic from Mestre, which is a big city, a

big shoe city, opposite or you go by gondola, no, you don’t go by gondola they have water taxis and things, you know.

What the target was sworn to secrecy in this instance, I knew about that in November, and that wasn’t done until the 23rd March 1945. It was the last and biggest air raid ever mounted in Italy.

The briefing is what’s expected, what the flak situation is, what you are expected to do. You don’t want all the – a wharf is a long thing, for example, if you want to knock a bridge over you don’t fly up and down the bridge which gives us the longest target, in other words if I fly that way I have got more target to hit, haven’t I, but if I fly I haven’t got as much. Well, that’s what happens to a bridge, it happens to wharves, it happens to rail

lines. They know that, so what they do is they put up barrages, and they call out the number, and all the guns swing on to that pointing, and they finish up, they have a pattern of ack-ack, like a curtain, like this, they have a real curtain of it. And they have every bloody thing firing in there, so all you could do was to quarter it, get in and out as quickly as you could.

And the

reason we had 1000 pounder bombs was because a pounder, 1000 pounder penetrates further, and if you put a delayed action fuse in it you can delay the action of the bomb explosion by up to as much as 12 hours and so when the army repairs – the engineers go in to repair the damage, all of a sudden another bomb goes off, and unless they counted the bombs they don’t know how many more is going to be like that. So what you do is disrupt the work. They had a bridge called the Bailey Bridge,

which is like – it’s like a meccano fitting, as it goes out it supports itself, and they could take tanks, 100 ton Tiger tanks over that, as long as they were about ten feet apart, and they would cross rivers when we knocked the bridge out, and that’s why we used 1000 pound bombs. But our usual load was three 500s, and when we did a mixed target we took two 500s and one 1000 pounder under the belly, so that’s how we got up to

152,000. That’s a lot of bombs, 110 sorties. I averaged over 1600 pounds on them.

Well, you are supposed to report, for example, you are supposed to see where your bombs went and how many hits you had, what damage you think you did. The best way to explain that, I have also got a story, which you can

photocopy, whatever you want to do, of six days targets that our squadron did, and they tell you about it, now in that one we had a South African Spitfire Squadron, or one Spitfire lead us to a gaggle of tanks. Now a gaggle means like it does with ducks. It’s more than one, it’s a gaggle. Anyway, my flight leader went in and he whacked the tanks when I come there I blew them back to where they come from.

Now that made the books, it went into the official records. That’s the sort of thing you have got to get rid of or you do what this Rover David did, you go in and attack the flak guns or the machine gun nests and knock them out, or mortars, mortars are dangerous things, and while all the troops are staggering about, with shock of the explosion and so forth, you go in and you strafe. And that means they are running around like WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, and that means you just

knock them off as though you, and that’s it, and then you drive the wedge in, and that’s how to push your operation forward and how the operation went on in Italy.

The leader did that, there were 12 leaders, and each leader had two other leaders with him, so they flew their, they flew three boxes of four, not two of six, with two vic formation in it, because it was a different

target, and they said, “Well, we will do this and we’ll do the middle and we’ll do the ack-ack guns.” That’s what briefing is about, you don’t sit and chew the fat. You are told what to do. Usually we are all given a photograph of the target, because that’s what some of our squadrons did, they did photographic recognisance, and if it was, say, a difficult target then they would fix the photograph over the actual grid of the map so that you

saw where it fitted into a proper map of the area and you actually had a grid reference on it, and you put it on your lap or strap it there. So you weren’t left – that’s why dive-bombing succeeded so well. It was a misadventure, the aircraft was never designed – P for Kittyhawk, P40 is pursuit, meaning fighter. But as time went on our squadrons and our wing became experts –

I would hate to sit in this house if I knew they were coming mate, I would be out. Knock it off easily, an ordinary home, piece of cake. I mean, some of the silly buggers would miss it, but more than often they wouldn’t.

Yes, in other words people concentrate on it. When they were bombing Monte Cassino, have you heard of Monte Cassino? That was the abbey.

That was the worst fighting that went on there, except for Rimini. When that went on, our troops, New Zealand, we used to call them ours because we had no Australian troops, we may have had the odd Australian with them, but mainly they were New Zealanders, were mainly Maoris, and they were always ferocious, they always got their targets when they got in. And every time they got it, because they were wanted for other attacks on other sections of the line.

They used to hand it over, so there would be a police force holding Monte Cassino or holding that village and they were expected to hold it until the rest of the line went up around them. OK. The New Zealanders had to fight for Monte Cassino six times and give it back. Next time they said, “Stuff you, mate we are staying.” Because they – and the game of war between the generals

is you put light troops against light troops. Like a game of chess, you move strong troops against weak troops and you keep looking for them and when they got back towards the Lommity Plain, the Lommity Plain is also crisscrossed by a lot of canals, and because that area of Italy floods a little bit, particularly if they have a heavy winter, and also when the snow starts to melt it also helps

flooding. So they had revetments. Wall revetments that helped hold the canal in and didn’t let it spread around. Well, they were used as armed posts. We were tunnelled in one side and the Germans were tunnelled the same and the same bloody wall. We would put hand grenades on strings and throw them over the wall and then pull the string. They’d have a sniper sitting – if a

bloke put his bloody head up they’d have a go. They got to the silly stage where they waved, ‘wash out’, ‘missed’. So war was serious, but it went on and on and the most important part it kept 27 divisions, it might be 17 divisions, but all I know is when the war finished they had one million German prisoners of war. Now if those Germans had got out and gone up through the Brenner Pass and into it, D-day would never happened, they would have lost.

Because that many men flooding into Europe would have made a difference. They couldn’t have given publicity to everything, could they, we never got it. Italy was a sad campaign, it was a costly campaign. But the Australian forces did a terrific job, particularly the air force.

Nothing. We got papers, but Mum – I had about –

Mum wasn’t a good writer, what could she say, “I love you, I am missing you.” By the time I had gone away – the last time she saw me, I was, really saw me, I was only 18, and when she saw me I came back as a sergeant pilot at 19 and was gone before I was 19 and a quarter. I never saw her until I was 20, I turned 20 when I was on leave in London.

Not much. We got cakes, we got help from the Australian Comforts Fund, we used to get things like toothpaste sent to us, and cigarettes. Some of them were pretty rubbishy stuff. We used to give our toothpaste to the Englishmen, because they had brass buttons, they used to polish them. Our cigarettes we used to give them to the Italians and swap them for eggs. They didn’t have any tobacco. Anyway, I wasn’t a smoker. I had a smoke for about six months, I hated

it. So I never went on. I liked drinking. And eggs – oh no, we bought a couple of sheep occasionally. We had to draw lots as to who would slaughter them, but the blokes that slaughtered them never ate them. So no one wanted to slaughter them. It was not all death and dying around you, but there was enough.

Yeah, well, we

used to hit it off with – we had good mess nights, and we had visits from the ENSA, which was the Entertainment National Service something [Association], from England. They used to bring out like the Americans, brought out Bob Hope and some of the film stars, and really it was a matter of – Gracie Fields didn’t come up, but we all had the – Les Girls, which you have probably heard of, you, that’s Ron whatever his name is

in New Zealand, a female impersonator, and I reckon our blokes nearly fell over, we could not tell who were women and who weren’t women. There was a fabulous show, I also got to a couple of operas. I went to opera in Naples, I went to opera in Rome. When we were in England we had the Windmill Theatre came down, it was the first and only time they went out of

London to put on a show. And they, as you know, were the original nudists. They stood nude, and as long as, they stood as still as a statue, with no clothes at all, and they wouldn’t move. I have got a photo somewhere down in the Hippodrome in Brighton where they came to visit us, and you should have seen all the blokes, there were about 2,500 of us and they weren’t looking any place but the stage and their eyes were popping. Yes, fun dancing. When we had a short and long leave in

England, we used to go up to the Pottery District, and there was always a singer in the dance hall and a few drinks and there was always plenty to do. Sport – I sat in a bath in Florence waiting for a girl and she never came, the bathwater got cold and I had to get out.

No, no, I had a week’s leave in Florence. Beautiful place. And when we went back it repeated itself. Italy is – did you get really south, and what time of the year?

Were you end of May, June, July?

No, a bit late, about the end of May and beginning of June, the broom flowers, and if you have never smelt broom, our broom

hasn’t the smell, it’s like our boronia. And at that time all the cherries are out and they hate cherries, they are bombs. And they don’t eat them like we do. We put them in the fridge and all this sort of business. In Italy they have a bowl like a salad bowl and they fill it with ice, and that sort of – as you are waiting for a meal you are

eating – we were there in 1969, and it was just fabulous. And the countryside of Italy is – when you stop to think of it, thousands of years old. 100 municipalities they had in Italy, and all of those were either princes, kings or dukes. Or the Pope. They had a few popes.

Yes, and it’s very easy,

because it’s only about 100 miles wide, when you get above Italy, to about 10,000 feet, you can actually see the coast of North Africa. See, right across the Mediterranean, and what you don’t need to know is which way is north and which way is south. If you don’t know that you are dumb. But we had a certain group who always asked which way was north and which way was south. They used to say, “Hey there, buddy, where is north.”

Loved them. Always been hospitable – they shared – one of the cruel things we used to do for the girls, we used to have our blankets, I don’t know whether you have ever seen them, but pure wool blankets, with like a broad stripe on them like they issued to prisoners, and to identify the army blankets or air force or navy blankets. And we used to get theirs on our leave or either sold them to or gave them to the girls and they would go and make themselves an overcoat for the winter.

So we used to change those, we’d go to the American quartermaster and we would finish up with their beautiful blankets which you could wear almost like a sheet, it was beautiful and soft. And I got myself an American camp stretcher. I also got a Primus, I used to make coffee and chocolate and all sorts and I was very popular with whom I bunked and I always bunked with the intelligence officer, usually one of the flight commanding officers,

and I shared a tent with one of my mates, Ted Adams, we went through a bad period in one sense, we lost a lot of aircraft that simply just blew up and we didn’t know what was causing it. And they – there’s nothing left of the aircraft, it just hit the deck like pieces of shrapnel. And all, it was simply, they discovered the story was that the bombs, when they were being kicked off the back of the armourer’s truck, and they were being mounted,

there’s little palls that hold back the pressure plate to allow the striker plate to let the striker fly like a flint, and that’s what detonates your bomb, and the difference between it exploding is the setting you make on those palls. A pall is a little thing like that, it goes in a hole like a spring-loaded watch and all this sort of business. That’s basically what a pall is all about. But when the bombs fell off, it used to rattle them,

and when they put them up, now…

We were operating from Farno when that happened. And Farno was virtually a civilian air port in Italy. It’s actually where the Italian Aeronautica operate from these days. They are still there. And there were round about – we had Thunderbolts, we had – not the Thunderbolt you know, the American

Thunderbolts. We had Baltimores, we had Liberators – anyway, around about two or three thousand aircraft on this particular airfield, and the word they use is a revetment, to protect your aircraft from bomb blast. Each revetment held about three aircraft, but in the case of a Liberator probably every revetment only held about two. Anyway, we went through a period of aircraft blowing up, and the terminology is a

flaming onion when you report it, you don’t let the Germans know another aircraft has blown up, you don’t tell them anything that they shouldn’t know. And we got to the stage we didn’t know what was going wrong. And all things, in Egypt, sorry, in North Africa, they had sticky bombs, a sticky bomb, if you put inside in a hole in the aircraft, then lessening the air pressure would blow it up. So it’s not unusual to sabotage things, and sabotage,

of course, is part of war. Anyway, we lost a few too many of these, including Spitfires, who were also dive-bombing. And one of my mates, Ted Adams from 77 Squadron, was doing his second tour with us, and I was actually sharing the tent with him – it doesn’t matter, that’s one of the emotional things I would rather just talk quietly about. Anyway, he blew up in front of me. When they – and to stop this, every hole, such as even the

gun barrels themselves, and gnu used to – when you step into an aircraft, you put your toe into it and lift yourself up on the wing, that’s called a gnu and it’s spelt g-n-u, and you also have a flap over where you lift to get into the tanks to put your petrol in, you have also got in the Kittyhawk, this great big hole here. So all those things they covered with fabric and then they put dope on it. OK, now dope is actually what shrinks the cloth and is

what Tiger Moths are built from. You know, you put linen on it or whatever the fabric is made of these days, and so you put dope on it and that shrinks it. So they covered all these up, because you don’t have to do anything about it when you get in the air, you simply fire your guns and the hole is gone. Anyway, it went on like this. Anyhow, they found that when the armourers were delivering our 500 pound bombs to our ground crew armourer, they were kicking them off the back of the armament truck. And when they fell of a couple of

palls that actually controlled the pressure plate actually acts towards detonating the bomb. The experts found that was happening those little – were being joggled, those palls were being joggled enough to allow less pressure than was necessary to explode the bomb. Now, our bombs, as I showed you, are carried on external racks. But most bombs were designed to go

inside a bomb bay. They weren’t exposed to the air, and that was what they discovered. I don’t think they were true, our COs, I have seen a few things he has written and come up with a few things and ideas, but the faster your aircraft the more it is supposed to – now, what actually happens, before you get into dive-bombing, you have got to climb up so your climb speed gets to around 160,

180 knots, because 2,000 pounds extra of bombs under your aircraft or 1500 pounds is you are wishy-washy and so your aircraft is going to its normal cruising speed even. So therefore no chance of the bombs exploding. But when you are levelling out at 8,500 feet to start your bomb run, you actually throttle back to about 200 knots, which is still faster than climbing, and

it’s about this time that most of them seemed to explode. They just blew up and just – nothing that size would have hit the deck. And that’s what they attribute it to. So we actually have guards on it, because of sabotage, all sorts of people, sticky bombs in. I think we lost about six blokes on my squadron in my time on the squadron. Including my mate who came back for a second tour. You have got to know that and

it’s one of the sad things, and you say, “Where do the casualties come from?” That wasn’t an act of war, was it? See…

There was nothing left to go to. We never did, we never went to funerals.

No.

There was nothing left of him. We didn’t go to the trouble of burying like what they did in training, you know, whatever they could pick up, whether it was a, a body, or

b, his body, half the time you couldn’t recognise it, you just shoved it in the casket and made something for weight and put a bit of sand in.

I just didn’t want to know. You know. Sad, isn’t it? But if you got yourself that close, you may have gone and shot yourself. Found all that, not much of a hero. Anyway, it did happen and that’s one of the things.

No,

they threw those to us and we put them together – my flying instructor, a lovely young bloke, Stan Newell, he went down to investigate a target and we were all warned, “Don’t go too low this is a dangerous, there seems to be a lot of small arms stuff that you don’t see being fired.” And so if that doesn’t – I mean, you don’t have any idea where it’s being hidden, do you? And you are going over the top of them very fast, as fast as you are going and they growl at you. Well, you growl too because you are disappearing fast. So you don’t go down too low

where any bloke with a pop gun can walk out and knock you down. Well, Stan was killed and I actually know his reference point. When he was killed one of our flight commanders, Reg Marrows and myself, we put his stuff together and sent it home. There was an engagement ring for his fiancé. And Ted Adams, well, I guarantee there wasn’t anything left anyway, and we don’t know where it fell over Italy. Where would you go to scoop it up?

So he’s dead. They do recover bodies, then they deliver them straight to the cemetery. You don’t go to all the parades. In England you did, we sent all seven caskets off to the cemetery. But that’s not the way of it. You don’t dwell on it, you sing your bloody head off and have another bloody beer and say, “They will kill us all.”

Yeah. And tried

not to think too much about it. I found I got a bit restless like a lot of people do, and we used to have three padres visit our squadron, and none of us knew which denomination they represented, but they were all wonderful blokes, marvellous when you wanted to talk, and between the three of them they taught me how to play chess and they also tried to help me with my mother, who at that stage was divorced, and she was no money, and I took her on as a full dependant, and they arranged that she be

treated as though she was my wife. So I had to put what I would do if I was a married person, put that part of my contribution, and so for the rest of the war she was looked after, which got my personal side in line, and the chess that they taught me to help get my mind off things was bloody marvellous, I could go to sleep on a bloody barbed wire fence. Still can. I don’t play a lot of chess, but we come back to this mind-over-matter business. You both, you are the –

you know now they are running special courses with what you are saying, are you a naturopath?

You know your medicines, though.

I met a fella the other day and who now, his own course and they are teaching, almost at university level, natural medicines.

No, no, it’s psychosomatic. That’s the word I am looking for. And also, the values of the various plants, because in Italy, if either you or Denise would like to read and you want to spend you money, get a hold of Sun Over Tuscany, and read it and there’s also a sequel to it, Bella Tuscany, and they actually tell you what all the weeds and all the plants they pick out of the garden can do for you.

Italy’s countryside seems to be rejuvenating without any difficulty, because it’s mainly volcanic soil. Volcanic soil, it’ll be tens of thousands of years if not thousands of thousands of years before it loses its ability to produce crops. We couldn’t produce as much out of a piece of land as the Italians could. And some of those olive trees are 1,000 years old. And how could you grow maize

and olives and vines and tomatoes and capsicum and what’s the red fruit one, sort of like, persimmons. They’d have all those on one little farm, for the sake of the animal droppings, they’d have their chickens and ducks and a lot of geese.

Very good, yeah, we had our own doctor and he could also act as a dentist. And he watched our development, because the longer you went on in your operational tour, the more you showed the stress. You may like to hide it, but there’s other signs. With me, I knew I started to withdraw, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. So,

and I was also a bit lucky, when I was in a tent I always slept with – I don’t know how it happened, it was his organisation, Ted Priest, who was our intelligence officer, he was a lieutenant in the South African army. Or South African Air Force, and he always tented with – I always seemed to have a flight commander or someone – because as you don’t realise, I was very much a baby face. Was I ever. I didn’t tell you what happened with the bloke …

I suppose so, because I did look a boy. I’ll show you photographs, I’ll show you 18, I’ll show you 20 and I’ll show you 22. I have changed dramatically.

No, I was expected to do my duty and I was expected to take my responsibilities, the only bloody

good thing about it was they would let me go off because I could speak Italian. And I used to do the plonk buying and I always used to wear my revolver, knock at the door with my revolver, I never intended to use it, I wouldn’t know – I wouldn’t have shot an Italian for quids.

Not only that, we used to change soap and chocolate and cigarettes for eggs and whatever they had to share.

Got less and less as I got further north, but then I didn’t stay very long. The highest I got up was to Farno and then my tour expired and I left Farno to join the ship at Rimini. So I actually learnt colloquial Italian in the south at Calabria and those places, which is not school Italian – see, schooling in Italy is only in recent years, when really

Mussolini came into power the school education levels went higher. He did a lot of good, he did a fantastic amount about the Italian empire, but in North Africa, Hitler spoiled him. So no wonder they hung him up by his heels, and his mistress. You knew that, did you, they hung him by his heels?

They went the same way, oh no, they were dictators, where Hitler had the Black Shirts, Mussolini had the Brown Shirts [actually it was the other way round]. And the population was

kept very much under the thumb.

Yes, definitely. Anyway, I would like to mention to you know if I can, the Rimini battle, which is what that photo is about, Rimini was actually a battle that pitted all the main armies that faced each, the American 8th Army, the New Zealanders, there were about five of the

South Africans, the English, and they had a terrible battle at Rimini, they brought in the army, the air force and the navy, and there were so many dead and wounded lying about the fields outside, see, Rimini was a huge port and they just stood off and bombarded it, they called the war off to bury the dead and pick up the wounded and 48 hours later they whistled again, war was on. That’s something that people don’t know

about.

See, man’s inhumanity is often politically led, and not man’s inhumanity to man. The man doesn’t know the man he’s firing at really. Does he? I saw one bloke fall over, whether he did that and dived I don’t know, but I certainly must have killed a lot of people. Those bombs weren’t for fun and those machine guns weren’t for fun.

110.

Yes, 152,000 pound – Stan dropped 162,000, why I talk about Stan, he and I served together and he wrote this book. And I vetted it all for him, because his memory was failing and he reckoned I had it – so it was my job to edit it all for him and hand it back to the bloke

who did the ghostwriting, Cyril Eyres, do you know Cyril? He has written quite a few books here on Duty Well Done, there’s a few of his books there. Anyway, that’s beside the point.

Nothing. Nothing.

Everyone was grateful to have another one to share the burden, that meant there was one less gaggle they had to do in a day. The maximum gaggles we would do in a day

would probably be two. I can’t remember, I have a funny feeling a few of us were called on to do three, but that’s a bit much because you really are wiped out, you are rung out, you are on your on your toes. No I don’t think – about two, you are on the squadron for about eight months, and that applies to the bombers,

they used to do a maximum of, no, a minimum of 30 and a maximum of 35 operations. But you see, they were probably doing six- or seven-hour stints, where we would do an operation and perhaps the shortest would be 30 or 40 minutes, just get up high enough over the bomb line and come home and load up again. Horses for courses. For example, the Catalina, no, not the Catalina, the blokes that flew the

Sunderlands, that’s the Number 10 Squadron, they actually stayed on the Sunderland squadron for two years. See, it actually took a pilot a year of second dicky flying to become a captain, so they didn’t let them off because theirs was a different sort of thing, they probably gave them more stand down time but they also went home to a base. They were too big to put on a ship. So most of them operated out of proper

bases out here in Australia at a place called, and I forget the place in England, but they were definitely limited. See, they laid mines, they also attacked submarines with depth charges. That was their main – their armament, and their protection stuff didn’t help them much, but they were also much slower, and funny, it’s harder to hit a slow aircraft as it is to hit a fast aircraft because you have to lay off the flexion

and you used to – the ring that you look through the rad represents so many miles per hour or knots per hour, well, if you have got a slow ship then maybe you would have to put a rad and a half and then you started to guess and your chances of hitting the target are getting less. Another lesson.

They went overseas in April

1940 and they formed in Syria, they had all their ground crew there and an officer in charge and they had no planes or pilots. Somehow the RAF, because we were seconded to the RAF, both 450 and the 3 Squadron and any squadrons on our wing. If they were South African they were still seconded to the RAF. For

discipline and for control we were part of the RAF. But for pay we were either South African, Australian or New Zealander. And for uniforms, but we worked for the British. That was one of the things, and that was part of Lend Lease, because aircrews were sold to England as part of the reciprocity of providing not money, but men and gear and things, so they balanced their books that way. That was the way the war was run. That’s why

all the aircraft we have ever built under Lend Lease. You knew what happened to them, did you? They just took them out and pushed them out in the deepest part of the ocean. Anything that was Lend Lease just went into the ocean.

Oh yeah, it’d all been paid for.

In Syria, yes. And they started off really as fighter planes,

and they did very, very well. They actually had – to give you an idea how strong they were, they finished up, they used 400 aircraft during their war, six years. They went through about 280 something pilots, and they went – I have got it here, it doesn’t matter. And they were mainly sergeant pilots, and usually the officers would move from

3 Squadron to 450 and 450 to 3, so you actually changed faces, and a man can’t be a prophet in his own land, so you put a commanding officer from one squadron into another squadron, he goes and he is respected for his new abilities and capabilities. Just swap over. So there was a lot of that that went on. But the difference between 3 Squadron and 450 Squadron was that 450 Squadron was formed and they went

overseas and a lot of their ground crew were away for the whole war, they never got home, whereas when the 3 Squadron went overseas they were promised home leave every 18 months. A lot of them got it and some didn’t. That’s the dictates of war, you can’t sit down and say, “This is how the pattern is going to run,” because you have got to respond to how the war is performing, don’t you?

We weren’t. They had all gone. They were all around Tobruk time. I never flew in North Africa, I flew in Egypt. I only trained in Egypt. When I came back from the squadron my job was to train the Egyptian airmen how to handle Kittyhawks and how to use guns and how to use dive-bombing, that was my job. I was then trained as an instructor.

No, the oldest bloke that

we would have had on our squadron was probably the doc. Doc Scanlan, and he had been with them since they were formed. And our ground crews were all – see, my chap was Archie Anderson and Tom Shea was my fitter 2A and a little bloke, Parsons, was my armourer, well, they would have all been on the squadron – but I was friendly with a fella named Allan King, he was a driver with motor transport. He also drove the ambulance.

He used to say to me, “Col, when you leave this squadron I am not making friends with any aircrew again.” See, in his job he could have even scraped me off the runway. We shared each other – we were as close as a shirt on a back, because you do – and my crew used to say to me, “Don’t forget, there’s no such thing as a dead hero.” So they looked after me. Again, we come back to whether it was my age, my looks or

what, I am a communicator, as you have found out. And I used to come back and tell them what had happened and what I had found out. I had such faith and trust in them I only ever had one engine failure in four years of flying on the operational side. And all that happens when you lost power on a way home from a thing, so whether I sustained a little hit, I don’t know, but I realised my power was going and I couldn’t get back to my airbase, so I got permission to

down with the South African mob on their airfield. It was the bloody best night I have ever had. The adjutant set me up in his caravan with an airbed, and I don’t remember getting to bed, and they flew Archie over to look in five minutes and he and I found out what it was, and I had power and away, I just flew back to the base.

Don’t stick your neck out. Just

do your job, don’t be a hero. We know gong hunters existed, the gong hunters looking for a reward, a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] or a DSO [Distinguished Service Order] or whatever there is, and you could things that could have brought notice, and they would have had to recommend you, but it wasn’t good for the war effort because those blokes didn’t last long enough, because they either had themselves killed or they got too cocky if they got away with it so, there is

always a price to pay. So those fellas in their wisdom were saying to me, look after yourself, we’d rather have you back as an average airman than an outstanding gong winner. There’s no such thing as a dead hero, because in trying to become a hero you usually end up getting killed. And I still keep in touch with Archie Anderson, 60 years later.

Yes, yes, yes. And some of them – there’s a distinction between ground crew and aircrew, and it really has something to do with how air crew see themselves. As reliant on their ground crew or arrogant about their ground crew. And the sad thing is, it’s like the boss who came up from the ground is not always as compassionate to the next man trying to become the boss. He says, “Oh, bugger him, he’s a competitor,

let’s get rid of him.” So we have got, humanity appears in it all, doesn’t it?

I have so many friends, I don’t say much, I walk up and hug them. Yes, they are very affectionate, they are not maudlin, they are not silly. There’s a bloke here who stayed 30-odd years in the air force, see him there with all the medals, 17 medals. Including an Air Force Cross. He’s an air commodore, he got his wings the same day

I did. When I see Dave Hitchins, the first thing we do is hug each other. We’d go away, we talk air talk and we thoroughly enjoy each other. And I first met him 1st February 1942, and he’s still a mate. You don’t have to guess who it is you are talking to. You have got them summed up, there are blokes you want to fly with or you don’t. Funny things used to happen, like when you fly in formation going out to the target is the time you reflect on what is going to

happen. You would be a liar if you didn’t, and you have obviously got your target in your mind and you wonder what sort of reception you are going to get, certainly there would be no of aircraft, plenty of flak always and it would depend on what size flak, you could always, 88 mm always burst black, 40 mm were cream and 20 mm always burst white, and you know when it’s mortars because it blows like a cigarette ring. You know what’s firing at you.

What you can’t see is the small arms stuff and if they happen to hit one of your fuel tanks, we didn’t have self-sealing tanks in those days, well, your aircraft just caught fire. So that was that. But anyway, so yes, when you went out you reflect. I found it was disturbing if I couldn’t visualise the person in the seat of the kite next to me, they invariably didn’t come back. It didn’t happen very often,

but it did happen and that’s not being psychic, and that’s not wanting to be like that. I could see if it was Johnny Boyd or the blokes, you felt comfort if you knew who they were, because it is very much a team.

No, I was always wanting to please people because I was that much younger. A lot of our course were married, children.

Yes, yes. Because again those fellas finished up flying multis,

they were the more careful, they were, and they couldn’t quite understand us, we were sort of a little bit more exuberant. And also, don’t forget when I finished up, when I was discharged I was only 23.

Not really, because they knew. What you have got to realise to answer that question, all the

repairs, except for the majors, it’s based on service, 40 hours, 100 hours service or whatever, until they actually got to the stage where they had to take the donk [engine] out was all done in open air. It was often done in sandstorms, it was often done anywhere, and I have just told you that in four years of flying I only had one engine failure, and it didn’t fail, all it did was lose power. And I wouldn’t have got – if I had have got home and stretched the glide I might have pranged. So I didn’t, I took the – and I got permission from the squadron to

land at the airfield. I didn’t know it was the South Africans, but they received me, put me up, fed me, boozed me, and that’s that. No, I think the airmen accepted responsibility, and particularly those that worked on the aircraft, they usually had their own aircraft, the same as you hear me say my aircraft was always X. When I went on the squadron I actually flew on X, and again whether that was because of the

flight commanders allocating me the X for some reason or Teddy Priest interfering, that was the intelligence officer, I became very rapidly the senior pilot on it. And funnily enough, Ted Adams, when he arrived, the fellow who came up from New Guinea, he was supposed to share X with me, but if he and I were listed to go on an operation I had priority to it, and he was a commissioned officer and I was a flight sergeant then. So it was mine because I was first on it. Because

all aircraft handle slightly differently, there are idiosyncrasies, such as you might have to use a little more trim, or your tail trim needed a bit differently, I don’t know, even the amount of dope you used, needed to start your engine, things like that – you know your motor car, and the more you drive your motor car the more you respond to it and what you have to do for it.

Oh yes, that was their common bond, but there was always this feeling of – because how do you know the bloke who’s on ground crew, tried to get on aircrew and couldn’t get on. It was the ultimate, wasn’t it, aircrew was the key to it all, that’s what the air force was built for.

Just that you don’t know how they took it, and they wouldn’t have been overseas – and those blokes, when I got to them we were already getting

towards the end of 1944, beginning of 1945, by the end of 1945, they came home after five years of being there.

Yeah, my word. The hardest thing was a lot of the aircraft we flew came up from the desert, they had been sent to a proper maintenance unit where they are put in hangars and the motors are stripped down and reconditioned, same as you do – and they went through and did a major overhaul, check all the wires, check it for rust,

they check it for, there’s a thing called something corrosion, it comes out like a white powder intercristal corrosion it’s called. That’s because the electrolysis in the plane affects the metal. And if that metal gets electrolysis in it it’s near salt. There’s your mixture that makes internal – and all the molecules of metal turned to crystal, and

that’s why it’s called intercristal corrosion. And you do not know it’s there until your bloody wing falls off. There’s no way of checking for it. They check it a different way these days, because they can x-ray the frames, see all the metal – but they had no such equipment in the war, and would they have had the time to do it, you just had to take your luck. So the aircraft, when they came up they often had water bottles in them, which is, a water bottle is a canteen

covered in felt with its own cork, a real proper cork, and then a strap around it and a strap you put over your shoulder, and because they were operating over the desert they put a couple of those in the Kittyhawk because if you had a prang over the desert at least you had a chance of getting to an oasis or something for some water. Tom Shee, my fitter 2A, used to say to me, “Can I go across the kite.” Now, I knew what he meant, he would look around to see if anything was going to hinge itself or

stop my flying wires to the wings and the A-rods and the elevator and the rudder weren’t going to be hooked up to it, so he’d cut them out. That’s what loyalty is about. I never knew – the first time I knew how he felt was at Christmas lunch in 1944, the idea is that the officers or the non-commissioned officers, all the pilots and

the officers served the ground crew. It’s typical in the services, and I was serving Tom and he looked around and he said, “I have been wanting to see you, this is for you.” And he picked – I have got it somewhere, I had a piece of shrapnel about that, it came out of an 88 mm, we know by the colour of it, and by the rings on it, it had lodged in starboard of an exhaust tank, and that’s the first time it was ever hit, and he realised how close I had come,

because when an ack-ack shell explodes it makes a hell of a noise, and you’ll hear the pieces of shrapnel on the fabric, but sometimes they don’t hit with enough force to penetrate it, but this had hit with enough to go into the cast iron of the starboard port exhaust tanks.

No,

this was from a 40mm that went in under the wing.

We were doing a – it was – it has got it on the back. Col Morton,

450 Squadron, Desert Harassers RAF Italy 1944/45, aircraft letter X, falcon 20 that was my call sign, own call sign, and 239 Wing, aircraft number FT487 and FX789, these were the various Xs I flew, history of hits by enemy, three times on operation, no. 82 on 25 December, Christmas Day, I

got hit in the starboard by an 88 mm shrapnel lodged under one of the exhaust stacks, given to me as a souvenir by Tom Shee, my fitter 2A. Operation 93 on 4 January 1945, I was hit by a 40 mm shell, entered under the port wing, exploded outwards, just and that’s what that explosion is there, you can see, I don’t know whether you can catch it, that is the ammunition,

that’s the ammunition tray, it actually touched the ed…if it had gone an inch the other way all my bullets would have exploded. It would have set the others going. It was that serious, I could have lost my wing completely. I said exploded outwards, just missing my ammo trays and port aileron flying wires, our ammo is 50 mm, made up in, one of five types high explosive incendiary

armour-piercing and plane bore. The purpose was, we didn’t know what targets we were going to attack and one of those things would fly to any target, and the bore one was always fired so it cleaned the barrel of the gun, so you kept your barrel pretty well –

because they get very hot. Operation 100, a 50 mm machine gun bullet hit and carried away my port navigation light. That was the one that caused me more concern than anything else, didn’t realise that only God was watching.

Couldn’t believe it. Claim it back to angels, at

the bottom of the dive we’ve – we were actually diving, the various trains that were used by the Germans were all Italian and so forth and they had mixes of types of carriages they weren’t necessarily carrying troops, because as I explained, on a retreating business they don’t have to carry troops, they just hold back. But amongst them, whatever it was they were carrying, whether it was food or what, they had flat tops with

just like a fence around the edge of the platform, and on it they used to put 20 mm and 40 mm guns, and we were strafing them to stop them, because they were heading for a tunnel, and as I pulled out of the dive that’s when I got hit. And I was heading in the right direction, and I couldn’t see how much damage was done to my aircraft, and I went up to my leader and lifted

my wing up and let him have a look but I hadn’t lost flying speed, I was still flying the aircraft, so I just took it home.

We were not supposed to, take RT [Radio Transmitter] silence. He went. So that was it. He knew what I meant, so that was it. Yeah. I wasn’t a hero, I was scared.

I suppose, yes, I did. They reckon God’s behind every cloud for an airman, that’s why we attack them. They don’t hurt. No, I think we did, we all had a funny – yeah, you wouldn’t be in the air – some of the poetry and some of the hymns and the things that have been written about flying all tend that way, that there’s a

bigger, better, brighter thing. I laughed when I said to Denise, “Death, what’s after death?” I don’t know. But I actually had my padre’s assistant here, but he – I listened to him and he doesn’t know any better than I do. I help him as much as he helps me, and that’s what sharing and caring is about. Or caring and sharing, yeah, it becomes, it’s a bonding…

Well, my operational tour expired and we had hats in the squadron, you have a top hat when you won an award, and you had a bowler hat when your operational tour expired, and you had a pith helmet, not that one,

and that was if you were caught lying, and if you were caught by the Mess President to wear one of those, you bought for the squadron. So I had the top hat when I was 21, because I had my 21st birthday on the squadron, and I got drunk – a beautiful drink, I don’t know whether you have ever had it, it’s called cianti, not Chianti, I love Italian Chianti, have you ever had it? No, not that one, there’s a champagne called,

and I don’t know, I reckon I got everyone drunk for my birthday, and there would be about 30 or 40 of us in the mess, for about £10. What’s it called, anyway, it’s sparkling wine, and it is a champagne type, but because France actually protected the name of champagne you are not supposed to use it here in Australia.

Yes, sparkling white.

No. Lambrusco is a sweetish one. But you can get a sparkle-arkle out of it. Anyway, I had to put the bowler hat on and I stayed around and I did just, I can’t remember, but I think the last time I flew in the squadron was about early January, and then my posting came through and I had to make my way up to Rimini, which is the port we talked about, and I caught a little coastal vessel called

the High Lee. And when I was waiting to sail the MPs [Military Police] came aboard, and I happened to be the senior officer on board even though I was only a warrant officer, I was still the senior officer. They gave me six prisoners, not prisoners of war, six prisoners who had to be delivered to Ancona. So I had to sign for these six bods, so that was an experience, and make sure they didn’t jump the ship, and we got down to Ancona and I handed them over. Ancona was

where the No., New Zealand general hospital was there, and you talk about your shell shocks and that. So I decided I would like to go and meet a few New Zealanders, and they would know more about 450 than I would and just let them have a go and of course I was ushered into a couple of rooms and that, and there they got themselves to the stage that the only way they could get themselves umbriago, which is Italian for drunk, they used to get demijohns of plonk and have a rubber tube

and lie back in bed and suck. I reckon they were leather for skin. Anyway, I went on down to Taranto.

Oh, the blokes wanted a touch of homeland and the Australians and the New Zealanders have always been very close. Whenever we used to see South Africans when we were on leave or anything, the first thing they wanted to do was play rugby with us. So you scrummed down and you

broke every bloody chair in the place, you drank all the – oh, don’t tell me, it was just letting your hair down. And the nightclub owners expected it to happen, so how they put them back together for the next night’s opening, but they did, they probably rattled a few nails back in, because they knew it was only going to be broken again. So that was the way of the world, it just happened. So I don’t know, why do you do things? I went back to in 1969, why did I go back,

maybe it was because I loved the Italians and I wanted my wife to see where I had been. And I worried sick before we got there thinking that she would – that I would have oversold it, but that didn’t happen. Anyway, I went on the High Lee and down to Taranto, and Taranto is a huge naval base, and I had to wait there until I caught a ship back to Egypt called the Samaria, and that was a luxury ship, to sit down and have a menu put in front of you, and white tablecloths and bed with linen,

so it was another four or five nights and I was back in Egypt.

Yeah, and when I got there I was posted to a place called Ismailiyah, is a huge permanent airfield owned by the Egyptians on the Great Bitter Lakes. I was posted there as an instructor, but before they let me instruct I had to go to another place called Bella and actually do a flying instructor’s course. Which

camera gunnery, rocket projectiles, machine gunnery, battle formation, dive-bombing, and go back to Ismailiyah and teach it to the Egyptian air force because that was our responsibility to get Ismailiyah as an airbase, England had to teach their aircrew, and that was an eye-opener.

Oh, you have got to understand the Egyptian philosophy at their level. The people of Egypt are mainly Fellaheen, and that means they are the

dark ones, and more the aboriginals of Egypt, and they are lovely, I had a batman, one in particular, Rashid, who thought so much of me he gave me a dog, and anyway, but to go there meant that I was over the wartime, and of course little did I know that VE [Victory in Europe] Day was heading around, when VE Day – no, I must have been posted home.

No, I wasn’t in the Egyptian air force, I was a member of the RAAF working for the RAF and teaching the Egyptians.

Yes, I wasn’t a member of the Egyptian air force, but that doesn’t matter, it’s only perfecting a point. But the idea was, and they are very arrogant people, all are commissioned, but when I am an instructor I outranked them no matter what their rank is. But they were very,

they didn’t understand responses needed. If you said echelon starboard, they see whether they could knock you out of the bloody air, they got that close. That’s not flying, that’s intimidating.

It is really, the runway at Ismailiyah is so wide, even if you don’t know, but you will get the message, three

Liberators could take off abreast on the width of the runway. The Egyptians were flying Spitfires and they couldn’t land on the bloody thing, they would land on the sand, and that’s a taboo because that’s carelessness. You had to chastise them or charge them or something, but charging officers also is almost getting to a court martial, so you do the easy thing, we give them what we called jankers, make them walk around the perimeter track with their parachute on. Well, a pilot’s

parachute actually hangs down the back here, and it was not funny, but that’s about the limit of it, but they were really irresponsible people. But I don’t know why I was posted back, but I finished up at a place called Caspareet [?], and warrant officer there,

Oh no, Ismailiyah is a beautiful aerodrome, it has got gardens and palms and swimming

pools and a proper mess, you are waited on the table by Fellaheen, oh no, a real pukka English sort of mess, owned by Egypt, because they got lease money, they actually got paid money to lease it from the RAF.

Raj, yeah, that’s right. And I had a little affair there, I met a ballet dancer and I wanted to marry her.

She was English.

Yes, yes. But –

I went to the shows they put on for us. We even put on a demonstration football match on in Heliopolis before we went up to Italy, and things like that. They had a club in Cairo called the New Zealand Club, and you could always get a good steak there, even though it was a camel steak, steak and eggs, and

you always had drink, and when you got there they always had the one famous soup that New Zealand sent its troops, it was toheroa soup. Have you ever had it, it’s a shellfish? Like tomato soup, and it’s beautiful, and they used to send little tins of whitebait and open it up, and all the bloody little eyes looking at you. But you still eat it. Anyway, I was posted down to this Caspareet, which again is a pool holding us, because when all the ships took the

troops aboard that were being posted home from England, they came through the Mediterranean and went down the Canal, so we used to pick them up down the bottom of the Suez.

Just after, within a few weeks.

Getting drunk, and I had the key to the bloody grog. And I just opened up the barbed wire fence,

and in five seconds the bloody grog was gone. Everyone ran off with cases and cartons. We had two types of beer, one was called Stella and one was called Regal. The Stella was marvellous and the Regal was bastard, because it was onion beer, and by gee, we got the…there’s not much happened after that, because the war in Japan was still going on and the Australians knew that, even by then, that news had filtered through to us, but we didn’t know much of what was going on,

we were away for three years. And that’s a long time. So we were waiting, and the fellas that were on the ships coming through the Mediterranean by then, the officers in charge of the ships would have shaken them down and they reckoned they could have perhaps – pick up some more going down the Canal, maybe 3, 4,500 men, and that’s what happened, they used to radio head and that was my job, to liaise with the shipping people down at the bottom of the Canal. How many men

they could do it and make sure they were ready and arrange a – and I finally got to, when my turn came, and in the meantime men from the Australian forces in particular were getting on the ships and saying, “We don’t care what the accommodation is,” and they would get on and they would say, “I’ll sleep in the bilges.” So they did. But when they got back to Australia, they caused such a fuss that the skipper’s would not take officers unless they could give them their first class,

by their standards, accommodation and so much for non-commissioned officers and so much for the ground crew, you see, so – and we were stopped, our draft was stopped, and we had a commanding officer – this is just a story,

We were waiting – we had given away all our camp stretchers and our Primus and all that sort of thing, and we were already packed, waiting for the trucks to come and pick us up to take us down the bottom of the Canal to get the ship. And we got a signal through from

someone to say that, “The captain will not take you.” And so squadron officer Throg Brook [?], who was my commanding officer, said, “Morton, you got to tell them, you want me to go?” I said, “No, they’ll bloody well riot.” Because he was a Pom in charge of the place, he had no idea how to handle Australians, and as I was part of the gaggle that was stopped, I just told them, “I am not going,” so we had to sit around and I just could not afford to – because my pay was the same as a married man, so

you can’t have everything and I didn’t – and Jack Grayson, who is the warrant officer said, he used to take off, we had places called rest camps in Alexandria, up in Syria and in all the main parts of Africa and that so the troops could be kept active, don’t let them stand around and stagnate. So I preferred to work as a WOD. And we finally caught, at the bottom of the canal we caught…

Yes.

I know, but I was on the gaggle and they knew it, so it was me, I was off the ship as well. They didn’t see me get on, so they knew it was a fair dinkum call. We just explained to them what had happened, the skipper wouldn’t take us, they didn’t have the right accommodation for us. Same thing came up, “Well, we’ll take this and

that.” Too late, they’ve complained to the authorities in Australia and will not take us. What can you do about it? So I went back and I managed to get my Primus back and my Yankee camp stretcher and my lovely Yankee blankets. We only waited for another three or four weeks.

No, no, no. I just went to work in the office and that, and I don’t know about the other blokes, some of them – it was easy if you got near an airfield to get a lift with the Yanks because –

don’t forget the flight from Egypt to – even to Italy is a couple of hours, a couple more hours, and you are in England, and they – I reckon they took off to anywhere and everywhere, we didn’t know where they went as long as they were back when their leave pass expired, what could you do? They still got paid. There was a bit of a riff raff that period, because the war was over. Anyway, we caught the Dominion Monarch, which is the biggest ship you could get into Fremantle

Harbour. And to give you an idea how big that ship is, we had 4,500 troops on it. I kid you not. 500 of us were airmen that got on from Egypt and 4,000, mainly Maoris, brought out from Italy on their first repatriation. That was the first group of repatriates from the New Zealand Army home. So we sailed and sailed and sailed and it took us six bloody weeks to get from Egypt to, we sailed past Fremantle, you couldn’t quite

piddle on it but we knew it was there. We could smell it, smell the land, we sailed past Melbourne, you could have piddled on that, we finished up in Wellington on a Sunday, and they said, “Don’t get drunk and bring home all your grog on this ship, you’ll be put in planks or clinker,” or whatever it is. Anyway, the New Zealanders with the – I could still hear the noise and feel the noise with the cock-a-doodle-doos – the whole wharf came alive, and they let us drive their bloody trams and we didn’t have to pay for tram

rides, we drank them – we couldn’t buy a drink, we came home with more drink than we could carry. But we went down from Wellington to Christchurch, which is Littleton, the port for it, and then sailed to Sydney, got off the Dominion Monarch on a Saturday morning on the Saturday afternoon we sailed on the Beloya for home, that took us another eight days to get across the Bight and to Fremantle. I was discharged on the 28th or 29th of

November 1945 at 15:45 hours. Then I was back at work by Christmas.

Just roughed it for you.

Oh, the conditions on the ship were good. We actually had a veranda café, which they put,

I don’t know, there would have been at least 300 or 400 of us in the café, and they put four tier bunks like I explained to you, you know, on chains and four beds, because the height of their veranda café was like today’s ceilings, as opposed to when they used to be 12 foot. See, they used to be eight foot. And we had three meals a day, and most

of them read, and I again did not have any money, so I was very good at needlework, so I used to sew all their ribbons on and – because we didn’t have, at that stage, our medals, we only had the ribbon of it, and put on their – got their no. 1 uniform fixed and put on their Australian up and help them put their, you know, I was good at that, putting their sergeant’s stripes on or whatever it was.

And I used to sit there – and all the rest either played Two-up, which you could play with dice as well as with coins. Or they played Crown and Anchor, and that was almost barred because it is really the operator’s day, they played dice, which is what the Americans call crap, and that’s how we filled in our time.

No, I am not a lucky gambler. I

got through the Trots one night in Fremantle, and that was when the trifectas were staring, and my wife picked a trifecta and I couldn’t find where to put the thing on and the bloody thing won. So I didn’t tell her, I paid her. That’s me.

About $160.

Well, it was my fault, not hers. It was interesting there, by the way, on the way

home, the thing I would like to mention, that the Port of Fremantle and its place in the actual submarine fleets. I didn’t see it for myself, but I did see six submarines, usually locked together with either number three or number four depending on – in the inside were those locked and they were the navigators and the power. The others were really in tow with them. And they were on their way home to England and they were

Yeah, yeah. And again when we got – only 500 of us was on the ship, but we took off – only the West Australians, and I suppose there were only about a dozen of us that got on the Malaya.

And that was a very pleasant ride home. I love ship time. As you can see, I had about ten ships during the war. From then on I got home, and the firm has to take you back, and then comes the problems, how do you re-establish yourself.

No.

I did, but I wouldn’t have had enough hours.

Well, you see, the thing that qualifies is how many hours experience he has,

and in the time I – in the four years I flew I didn’t even complete 1,000 hours. The same time given to flying I would have finished up with a couple of thousand hours. So obviously – also, I was in single engine aircraft and not multis. The airlines in those days were usually DC2s and DC3s, which were twins, tail draggers, and so the bomber boys and those – don’t forget, when Japan wrapped up, and it came

very quickly after – those people who were already in Australia and operating from Australia had a fair chance of getting into the airlines long before we did. See, I didn’t get out until November 1945. What was VJ [Victory over Japan] Day, September, wasn’t it?

On the ship. Must have been. We had a wet canteen, so we got an extra stubby of beer.

They used to have lovely poly bottles [?]. Being victualled in England we used to drink Burton and Bass or couple of very good beers there, actually their beer was lovely, and I liked beer. I loved the atmosphere in English hotels. In Brighton, to give you an idea, they had 365 licensed premises, not all pubs that you go in and have a – but it was

the little ones that you drank at room temperature, it was the big ones like Tommy Farr’s in Brighton that actually had chilled beer with – it wasn’t really the sort of iceworks that we had. We like our beer cold. But in England you got used to it, and you also got used to playing their games. They used to love playing shove ha’penny and chequers and

dominoes and darts, and the clubs didn’t – the little pubs were their clubs. They didn’t close until ten o’clock at night. The English people were marvellous, I used to give up my coupons to them – to the family I used to go and stay with, and I don’t know how they did, but I had eggs and bacon every morning. I bet they didn’t get them out of my ration book, because I was only treated like the rest of –

but you didn’t argue, how could you?

No, you couldn’t, you could travel but it still took money. You could have got to Ireland if you wanted to get down to the port for Ireland to get you over to the Strand Raya [?], and if you caught a ferry there you could get over to Cork. As long as you had yourself, so long as you weren’t in uniform, they would have impounded you.

The south of Ireland was still – they were still friends with Germany. Who knows how many spies were there? That didn’t matter much. Some of the blokes did go, but I never had the money to get myself suits and clothes and that to disguise yourself and away you go. Because you open your mouth and your Australian accent just comes out, doesn’t it? People could pick you in one.

No, they weren’t anti-anyone,

the Irish never have been, have they? They are really a very, very loving nature, and I have got a bit of a mixture of Irish in me from my father’s side, because my grandfather came from County Cork and he must have come out on a sailing ship because he went through Marseilles and he married a French girl. They set up house in East Fremantle, so there was a bit of a close mixture of French and Irish. And they had

three boys and two girls. But as you gather, my mother and father divorced before – actually, when I was 15.

Go back to my job, that’s what you had to do. You didn’t know what was in front of you, I still was supposed to be going on with accountancy, but how could you sit down with – when you have been flying, and I had a few difficulties because I was an instructor,

and that was on my record when I reported for work. It was my job to teach some of the people in our area who couldn’t drive, let alone that, and every time I taught a driver he got the job and I didn’t. I wanted to be a commercial traveller. So anyway, I finished up, I gave notice and…

Yeah. Or they wanted me to do other things, but they didn’t explain, so I thought I was being

side passed. And don’t forget, eight or nine or ten blokes that went away to the air force at, say, the tender age of four years previous and come back four years older, you are all back at square one at different ages again, so you have got to shuffle back to somewhere at what level you were at, well, it was – they weren’t hostile, and nor was it uncommon, but how the businesses assimilated people again I don’t know. But it was very, very

important. But anyhow, I finished up, I was offered a job, because I became the buying officer for our firm, and I got very friendly because part of our plant was steam, we used to have steam plant for operating the boiling of the soap and so forth, we used steam and we also separated from the tallow glycerine, so the glycerine room was all steam and our engineer therefore remained an engineer in steam. So I had to buy all the

valves and all the cocks and the things, and I got to know, and we did a lot of business with Bell’s Asbestos and Engineering. And the commercial traveller who was their sales manager said to me one day, “We’ve got an opportunity coming up, I would like you to come and be interviewed by the boss.” So I got the job, when I went back the boss said, “You can’t leave.” I didn’t know whether I could or I couldn’t, because by that stage, it was around about 1946.

And I had only been back about a year, and so I took him at his word and the same thing went on, so next time I got myself a job and I put my resignation in writing. And that’s how I got into the women’s fashion field.

Well, I came back with about £150 deferred pay and that wasn’t going to last

long, no, I didn’t, and I hadn’t any ideas of starting my own business or anything. But what actually happened, I developed and I worked for a fashion agent, a manufacturer’s agent, and again I found I was being pushed around, I was doing all the bloody work and the bloke at the desk he was doing – he was a major in the army and I came out as a warrant officer, so here we have a differentiation, so I finished up and I thought to hell with this and I finished up, I got a job with Jason Industries

and I stayed there for about a year, and the boss from the manufacturer’s agency business and asked me to come in and by then we’d had our first little child. I sat down with him and he offered me a job and he sacked his manager. I should have woken up then, it wasn’t going to get any better, but I stuck it out for four years. So by 1953 my wife and I went into our fashion agency business. And we’ve been there ever since.

Oh yes, there is and still is. It’s not like the assimilation of the army, navy and air force in America with one common command, we’ve now got a common command but they will hand that on and the air force will get its turn, but whether it will be our air marshal [Angus Houston], who is a terrific young bloke, he’s absolutely amazing, he’s also a flyboy. Most of the executive of the

air force are ex-flyers, whether they be aeroplanes such as I flew or jets or what or whether they were helicopters. And it doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t say that you are a better person or better brain, but it is better for them to have an understanding of what they have under their control, so his name is Air Marshal [Houston], and he looks as though he’s going to get a turn and he will

follow, Peter Cosgrove’s the bloke now and he flies over, well, he flew over for the last graduation ceremony I was at, and he’s terrific bloke. Then the navy will have its chance. Whether they will be equal I don’t know. But the navy still thinks it’s the senior service, the army says, “Well you can’t operate a navy on the bloody land and we’re the blokes who have got to hold the land,” and so that them and the air force, well, we’ll call you when we need. That’s much the style of what

happens.

No, it actually began here, because they tried to vary it, you know, where they all had equal powers, now that bloke here, now he was the area commander for Western Australia and he had to meet with his equal in army and his equal in navy. And because of the lifespan of those services, and the navy actually did happen before the army, because the navy

in the English days used to recruit the ship’s armoury, didn’t it, and things, and they made the landing parties. So in a sense they were marines, and while they were English they had an army, it was really dependent on the army, but these days the army trains its own airmen. Has its own helicopters and it has its own – the whole format has changed, because the actual vehicles of war

have also changed, now you can fire a long-range thing and you don’t even see it burst. Now that changes everything. We don’t know quite what the future will be, no use us looking at us – there will be no war again like the Second World War, I don’t think, where men stand up and shoot men and rush at each and stab each other to death or whatever it goes on. It won’t be that sort of a war, it will be a mechanical war, it’ll be probably in the

vicinity of atom bombs or what, who knows. But it doesn’t – but from what I have seen, because we are privy to a lot of things, they won’t be prolonged wars, they will be in and out. And most of it will be because of the usual instability caused by race or religion or status, you know, you get into some of the European nations, you will find some of

the women are very – it matters to them who the mayor is and who the undertaker is and who the schoolteacher is and who the minister is, you know, and they have a status in their village based on that. So that’s the sort of mentality, you see, raising its head in Yugoslavia in particular. It’s raising its head in Ireland, Northern Ireland in particular. The Arabs, a lie is not a lie to them unless they are found in it.

Four years of travel in, three years in particular, never been around the world before, I had never been given responsibility before, I flew an aircraft, that was a big responsibility, I don’t know what they cost, but more than we could ever afford, and you were the architect of it, there’s no one else in it. The old, old story of when the machine guns and the ack-ack

fired at them you went zig and they went zig to see what they were firing at. When you went zag they went zag. So you take a different look at yourself, you value yourself differently. That’s one, two, you have got an education, and a basic education that can only come with the knowledge of travel. You can be more articulate in your speaking, you’ve got different sort of rudiments, you have been taught the art of discipline. I can look at a cloud

now and tell you whether it’s going to rain or – not really forecast it but you tell me what the clouds are and I will look out and tell you roughly whether there’s going to be a weather change, and I might be out a day or two, but it’s going to happen. You can’t replace that, I went away as an uneducated young man, I came back, I can speak Italian, I can make myself understood a little in Arabic, and I think I have a good rapport with people. In the business I was in I was highly respected. In the agency business

I had no idea. I still meet some of my old customers who make a hell of a fuss of me. And that’s nothing to do with the war, that’s only how I did in business.

To plan, to budget, to keep yourself in good mental health, keep yourself in good physical health, I am not exactly fat, but I am not exactly thin either, so, and I

do enjoy good health except for the things that happened to me, such as the – at the moment I am required to keep on a tablet, that keeps me calm. I take one a day, I’ll get my pension.

I do. Regularly.

Always exciting, but the crowd was bigger, and the sad thing is for the first time

I had to pack up and come in out of the sun. Because I am not going to sit there anymore and say the sun is not going to do something. And I use a thing that my daughter has called Nu Skin, and I rub that in, or you can do the same with just pure Vaseline, and at the back of our hands, you see, we get all these sun blisters and that sort of business. See, I have been on it for about 20 years, because that’s one part you can’t protect, you can’t wear gloves when you are yachting, and whenever I

knock anything I bruise and I come with blood blisters, not blood blisters, but underneath the skin.

And there are no seats for us, I have one of those walking sticks that you can sit on. We got water, plenty of water, but we expect a rise and fall, now some of my 90-odd-year-old blokes couldn’t stand up, let alone get up and get

down. And this is the longest ceremony in any of the Anzac parades in Australia. It’s run by Highgate RSL [Returned Services League], someone should tell them, won’t be me, I know too many of them, they’ll say, “What are you sticking your nose out, you are only bloody air force.”

Well, they are the army blokes. Most of the army.

Yes, I did.

I had a stepfather who was a very active member and I had to join. I joined the Air Force Association the day I was discharged.

Yes.

Well, when two ships pass in the night why do you talk to each other? I am talking about two people from different countries who don’t speak the same language. You’d be surprised how animated you can pass in communication, from

person to person, just by simply your eyes and your body language, our genuineness of – and really wanting to get your message out of you unsullied, unchallenged, whatever, that’s why I explain to you and know it, because you have already experienced it with these interviews. That we will talk to you quite differently what we will talk to family. And it isn’t

because – it doesn’t matter whether you believe or disbelieve, but more importantly whether I tell the truth or not tell the truth it’s very important to tell someone who is a stranger the truth. The doctor conducts a lot of our fraternisation and so two ships pass in the night, they let their hair down, and all of a sudden everyone is – it’s like the woman discovers a man and the man discovers a woman and all of a sudden they have got lots of things in common. But that’s because you didn’t

realise it, but you soul searched and in the first meetings confidence was sparked and as it built it got better and deeper and more meaningful and finally you have found a soul mate. And from then on, mate, it’s either marry him or get off.

Yes, and I am very happy 57 years later. She’s around, like to show her to you.

Trust, simple trust. I had to trust the aircraft, I had to trust the ground crew, I had to trust the people, I could have been poisoned. I could have been attacked, I could have come

home with VD [Venereal Disease]. But I wasn’t, I was made welcome wherever I went. And that, to me, is the biggest component, but you can’t actually be any of those things unless you are truth, and truth doesn’t have anything to do tally, it has everything to do with exuding, you either go over or you are accepted or you are not, and I can tell you either that what I am talking to and

who I am talking to, the more I feel comfortable with you the more I want to talk. And the more I want to talk, I want to talk about the truisms I think I have learnt, and I live books, I live experiences, I feel for people. How did happen, it didn’t happen before I went away. School was a bloody dead dodo so far as relying on your mates, they were busy getting on with their lives and so was I.

We didn’t have a common purpose. I have got a poem that No. Two grandson wrote for my 80th. And I used to take a lot of trouble to – when we drove all the way from where they live up here in the suburbs of Fremantle, we used to live in Rockingham then, and on the way down, instead of playing the radio and things, I

told them all I knew, for example I used to ask the question, “What’s that?” and, “What’s this we are driving?” and, “What do you call that?” So they used to say, “That’s the road.” So I would say, “No, that’s not the road, what’s the road made from that makes it a road? Who made it and how is it made?” Oh, so I told them about macadamised, I told them about pylons, I told them about anything and everything and I never ever thought I got through, but thrown back at me in a beautiful thing,

do you want me to read it to you.

As long as that’s what you want.

So this is goodbye, is it?