Boatswain's mate
I was an ammunition number on a twin four inch gun, where the sole thing you had to do there virtually was to collect the shell as it came up from down below on a conveyor belt, pick it up and poke it down the gun's barrel and rush back and get another one after that. And there was, our particular turret was the after turret on the, two twin four inch turrets, one oft, one forward. And I was stationed on the after one.
And later, I became a bosun's mate where I had to master a bosun's whistle, I don't know if you've ever seen those. It's a funny little silver whistle and its main task is to get people out of their bunks in the morning, tell them when it's up spirits and then pipe the captain aboard, when he came aboard from being ashore or something like that. He came up the side of the vessel, and as he came aboard, you were supposed to pipe him, and this happened ritually.
The Dieppe Raid
The operation started at about day break, in August, it would have been around about three or four o'clock in the morning day break. And we were actually part of trying to get the troops back off the beach, back into the transports, when we were bombed by a Dornier.
I always reckon that our captain had been a pretty good cricketer, because all the morning, every time it appeared to be bombed fairly frequently. He would just look up into the sky and say, "Hard to starboard", and go hard to starboard and the bomb would fall down there, port, and the other bomb would fall down there. I think he must have been having a cup of tea at the end, he wasn't there and he missed the catch, or he got the catch.
Well it didn't go down immediately. They hang around for a while but as I say I was lucky enough to be on the after four inch gun turret, and the bomb actually hit just forward of the bridge and wiped out the whole of the forward gun turret. So life and death is the difference between forward and aft as far as I'm concerned, and that really mirrors what life is really about, it's such a thing of chance.
I'm aware of the captain coming to the fringe of the deck, looking aft and just going like that. So as the ship was already at about that angle anyway, and I was down here, I didn't have very far to go to step into the sea. And that didn't seem to worry me terribly much, because being an Australian, at least you could swim, which is more than most of the others could do. Most of them couldn't swim so they relied on their life jackets, just to keep them afloat. And that's one of the great differences between the two nationalities, and in actual fact, out of a ships company of about 150, about a hatful of them could swim. It seemed fairly basic to me if you go to sea, it might be a good idea to learn to swim before you took it up. But that was so. And so then I was picked up in an assault landing craft, one of the smallest landing crafts, which had obviously been ordered to come to us, to pick up survivors.
VE Day
Around about May, the eighth I think, which is VE Day, we were doing a patrol of the coast of France and suddenly, it was in the evening, the early evening, and suddenly we saw the lights come on. And of course, everything in Europe was blacked out at that particular time. The vessels were blacked out, you didn't carry navigational lights or anything funny like that. We knew that the end was pretty close, but it was quite a dramatic moment to suddenly see the lights go on.
Liberation of concentration camps
The flotilla was ordered to go to Cuxhaven in North West Germany as part of the navy of occupation, and we were in Germany ten days after VE day in actual fact. And that was extraordinary experience in itself, because we had the British army, their area in Germany was the North West area, which is where we went to a place called Cuxhaven.
And the army there had, they were responsible for freeing the concentration camp at Belsen and they showed us some movies that they had taken at that particular time, and you could see that these guys were really, it would be an experience which would be horrific for them, really. It was bad enough just seeing it on movies.
No one had any idea that that was going on, none of us knew that, you know, the concentration camps were in existence. And in a sense, it gave you ... it gave you some sort of closure to the feeling of, sometimes you say, "What the Hell am I doing here, why am I here?" And suddenly, this whole exposure to seeing how human beings could possibly be treated in that way, gave you some sort of closure to that event.
The ruins of Hamburg
And the other significant thing that happened to me at that time was, there were a whole lot of abandoned cars around, and as we were a petrol driven vessel, we took a five gallon jerry can and found a car that would work. And from there, we drove into Hamburg and Bremerhaven and that was the other experience of seeing that so soon after the end of the war, of the possible experience that those people had of just simply existing.
And as an architect, I now, or I started to understand or started to understand how it happened, it comes out of the European experience of building basements to your houses and the buildings, so that so much of the activities is below ground. Because in Hamburg, there was nothing left at all except rubble above ground, and yet we were still looking at a city of two million people who, many had been killed of course, but many survived. And it gave you, somewhat unwillingly, an admiration for the German spirit, that they could survive that and then build themselves up into the sort of rehabilitation, which took on so quickly after the end of the war.
The Yachtsmen Scheme
I'd done a small amount of sailing, I had, in fact. There were two ways that you could get into the Royal Australian Navy, one, to go straight into an anti-submarine course. I had actually passed that course and then they said to me, I was nineteen at the time, they said "I'm sorry. You passed. We'll call you up when you're twenty."
That was still another seven or eight months away so I said "Nuts to that". I wanted, you know, I wanted to go and so a friend of mine who was already stationed down at HMAS Rushcutter said "Why don't you have a go at the yachtsmen scheme?" And I'd already done a couple of races in his father's boat so that was the extent of my yachting experience. I was in the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve in a scheme which was called the yachtsmen scheme and that was in existence from March 1940 until March 1942, and in that time, there were 500 yachtsmen went over there. We were nominally called yachtsmen because we were supposed to be sufficiently aware of the sea so that we could do service in small vessels, particularly in Europe.
And the basis of that was that you virtually, they wanted to be sure, firstly that you weren't going to be seasick, and they had a particular need of those people, because of the success of the people that had boats in and around the South and East coast in England, to get the British Expeditionary Force out of Dunkirk, and it was long thought that the yachtsmen were really an integral part of getting a great many of those soldiers away. I think they got a quarter of a million people away from the whole of the British Expeditionary force from Dunkirk.
And on that basis, they suddenly thought, these guys are not in any service at all, so they probably would be useful for us in manning small vessels particularly. And the basis of the yachtsmen scheme was that you, if you were under 25 you would go in as an ordinary seaman, rating in other words. If you were over 25, you were a bit unfortunate because you went in as an officer, but their experience was when they got to England, they didn't get to sea but they got into the bomb disposal squad. And quite a number of them, some of the most heavily decorated Australians in Britain, or certainly in the navy. So it didn't pay to be over 25.
An Australian in the Navy
Well it's the difference between upstairs and downstairs. If you've seen Downtown Abbey, have you? You know what downstairs is and you know what upstairs is. It's essentially that same difference. It's a different culture. Sadly, you're a number and you've got a job to do, and you come under a totally different regimen of behaviour. As an officer, you're treated, certainly in the Royal Navy, you get a cabin and you get a servant and you don't have dinner in the middle of the day, you have it at night. And you are in a position of authority, that's really what it is. And it's a very long, drawn out tradition, particularly in the Royal Navy.
I didn't serve very long in the Australian Navy, but I spent the whole of my service in RN ships. You didn't really go ashore with a rating. And as a rating, you didn't approach an officer and ask him to go have a beer with you or anything like that. You were very much in a very separate social level. I'm really speaking of what it was like in England, because when you come from here and, you know, even before the war, we were verging on an egalitarian society.
And I think that's one of the first shocks that my generation of Australians felt when they went there, suddenly the difference in these stratas of different, of the working class, the lower middle class, the middle class, the upper class and so on and so forth, and up there, the aristocracy. And it's that pyramid of social class which never existed in Australia. And that gave us a totally different attitude towards one another.
We were very much individuals with one another, whereas I think the lower deck, the ratings and in the Royal Navy, they knew their position, just like the people in Downtown Abbey in the servant hall knew their position, and so did the people above them as well. And they didn't cross that bridge such as we did here. And I believe it happened in the Australian Navy as well.
