Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Father's Great War service
My father was a returned man, he was in World War One. He lost an arm at Amiens. There was nothing he couldn't do. He was an amazing man. He could do more with his one arm, in fact, he used to roll his cigarettes one hand and I've seen people come up to him and say, "Gosh, you can do that faster than I can with two hands." He had it hard to get a job naturally, and but he finally landed a job with the Water Board, which was, fortunately, a permanent job but it was during the Depression. They only got half wages in each week and they worked two days one week and three days the next week, which is a good idea because it saved them sacking people. Half a wage was better than none and anyway he and mum battled, you know, right through the Depression. Myself, had two brothers and we both had to leave at 15 after we got the intermediate certificate, and go out and look for a job.
Acquired deafness
And then war broke out. Oh, well, I always wanted to fly. So I immediately applied to join the air force. I thought I had a hope of getting in then because prior to that you didn't have a hope of getting into the air force, just like getting a job. And that's it, from then on I went through the training and that's where I got my ear problems. Yeah. And few days after starting the Air Force, they took us down to the Butts to fire a .303, I'd never fired one in my life and my first shot had to get down and take one shot at the target. And I thought the bullet had one through one ear and out the other. And I got up and I said to the corporal, "Have you got any earplugs?" and he said, "No, you got to finish that magazine." So I got down, I finished the magazine. I was completely deaf after that. Just my ears were screeching. I couldn't hear a thing. And I knew then if I went sick with it I couldn't fly aircraft, they'd kick me out but I didn't want that. So I stayed in and I used to, if I was out on the parade ground drilling I'd get into the back line and follow what the fellow in front was doing. In the classroom I'd look at what the fellow next to me was writing, I'd write that down in my book. But it finally faded away until just the ringing in the ears.
EATS in Canada
I wanted to be a pilot like every young bloke in those days. We all wanted to fly and the flying that was going on, you know, new flying records being put up England to Australia and all that sort of business. It was always a news item and we all wanted to fly but when I went in to apply I was put down for training as a pilot but when I got there at the end that was scrubbed, you know. They went through and recalibrated everybody and I ended up a wireless op air gunner. Went to Canada and I did pretty well there and in wireless I came second. There were about, in our course, Australians, New Zealanders, some Canadians. There could have been, could have been about 1200 in the course and I came second in that and then we went to gunnery at another place and I topped gunnery so when we passed out, four were picked out for commissions and fortunately I got a commission.
Benefits of being an officer
We had to get to Halifax and they gave it a couple of days extra to get to Halifax. Got there and then we got onto a ship, it was an armed merchant vessel run by the Navy but a French ship that had been taken from the French when they collapsed and they renamed it. It was called the Montcalm. They renamed it the Wolfe because General Wolfe beat General Montcalm in Canada. There were two others, three of these armed merchant cruisers went over and I realized the benefit of being an officer because on the ship I was given my own cabin and I dined meals with the ship's officers and all my mates they just put down in the hold of the ship sleeping on paillasses. It wasn't a convoy, three of them went over themselves, but every night we had to go on boat drill because the sirens would go and they picked up the sound of a U boat and this that and the other. And later on, when we're almost across one of the ships was torpedoed during the night and we just kept going. Left them. But they said later that they got into Ireland there, the north part of Ireland. It managed to limp into that port.
V1 attacks
Going to a place like England when they've been bashed about and bombed every night and so on and seeing people, how they could live with that. Thinking now, when you've had no experience of that, if you think, you know, going to bed at night it's strongly possible that a bomb is going to land on you, you couldn't handle that, could you? But they used to do it and laugh about it, you know. They were incredible. For example, when the rockets were coming over, London was hit with a thousand of those rockets, all with a thousand-pound explosive. I didn't, walking down the Strand one night, just coming on for dusk, a lot of people, pedestrians, on the footpath and so on and then suddenly, unexpectedly, about a block away there's a ‘whoomph'. A rocket had landed and you could see all the sparks and flame going into the air and, I must tell you though, the government was frightened the citizens would be afraid of these, you know, so they used to say, it would be in the paper, there was an explosion but it was a gas explosion, they used to get them regularly when something had been damaged. There'd be a gas leak, the gas would build up somewhere then suddenly ‘bang'. Anyway, this happened in the Strand, ‘whoosh' this goes up and everybody stops and looks, you know, and someone says ‘Oh. Another gas explosion' and everyone says ‘Oh yeah. Another gas explosion, of course it is, you know, a big joke and they just kept walking. Incredible, isn't it? How could a city become like that? But they did. It's wonderful.
Attached to Sunderland's, 461 Squadron
Finally, I did get a posting. It was to a training area where I had to learn more about radio and more about gunnery and this and that and the other and then I got posted again to another place where I learned all about the secret application of radar turned out to be radar, and we were sworn to secrecy and all the rest of it and then I was posted to another place and I was hearing, on the grapevine, a lot of my mates, they'd gone on to operation squadrons, they'd been killed and, you know, so, what am I doing? Going all around these training places then it suddenly dawned upon me, I was heading for flying boats and apparently you had to be a top notcher to get on to flying boats because they were different to land planes in that the crew did their own maintenance on their own aircraft. Well that didn't happen with bombers or any of the others. It was all done with ground staff and in hangers and so on and anyway I ended up at 461 Squadron. It had just been started up at that stage. The aircraft, the Sunderland, was a beautiful aircraft, very old and slow but it was designed from a commercial aircraft and it had all the benefits other aircraft didn't have, big and roomy, we had a kitchen and a wonderful toilet with a flush toilet and not only that, a big room with washing basin and mirror. You could comb your hair and there were four bunks. Big and roomy. It was a lovely aircraft.
Rotation of crew
There were eleven on the crew, there was two pilots, one navigator, three wireless operator air gunners, two engineers, a fitter and what they called a straight air gunner, meant he was an air gunner but he couldn't do anything else, and he was the tail gunner. Everybody with the exception of the engineers, the navigator and the pilots, everyone else took a turn in the turrets moving all the time because we went out to find submarines, we had radar but we weren't allowed to use it because the U-Boats themselves could pick up the radar and gave them warning and so you had to use your eyes. You could only concentrate on search for one hour and then you'd change and get out and have a cup of tea or something so somebody else would take, go into the turret. We had a roster and we had to make sure that each turret had someone in it all the time and so between that, like the two engineers, they'd swap jobs and the three radio they'd swap jobs too so it had to work in with the roster. There always had to be somebody in every position but there was always a couple free having a chance to make a cup of tea or get something to eat. Thinking back, it was a wonderful aircraft, so good, when you think of the bombers, every other aircraft, fighters or bombers, everyone was crammed in, but we just wandered around the aircraft.
Training and discipline of the crew
Every one of the crew saw the end of the war. In fact, that was something that, when we first crewed up, we were all new on the squadron and the skipper, we crewed up, made a crew, and we're told ‘That's your aircraft, it's U, aircraft out on the water.' So the skipper got us all in there, got us into one of the ward rooms and he said ‘I dunno about you blokes but I intend to see the end of this war and I've decided that's dependent on two things. Number one is luck.' Well you can't do anything about luck can you? But number two is training and discipline and you can do a lot about that and we did. If we had any spare time he was at us, you know, go and do some flight affiliation with fighters from elsewhere or, you know, just even cleaning the aircraft and learning about it, you know, and he did it and we all saw the end of the war. One fellow that got wounded he didn't last long after the end of the war.
Operational hours
When you finish the 800 hours, well, so went on what they laughingly called a rest, you have a rest, but that rest, you went to a training station and became an instructor there. I did anyway. I did a lot of flying there too. And when the D Day came, the training station was made what they call a semi operational, so we used to go out and do the operations anyway. Got a lot of operational hours there too.
Attack on three submarines (U-Boats)
See, the three of them they were coming out, the three to support each other. It wasn't us that sighted them first, but the signal came through. They signalled back to base and base signalled us to go to that position to help with the U-Boats. Anyway, we went to the position they told us and there was nothing there, so we signalled back ‘There's nothing here.' They said ‘Sorry, we gave you the wrong position, go to such and such a position.' That's why we got short of fuel. Anyway, we got there and found them just in time to see an aircraft, it was a liberator, a RAF liberator, and it was attacking. I was on the wireless at the time. I only had a little port hole, but I looked out of the port hole and I could see it and you could see the shells coming up and all around this aircraft and I thought ‘Oh my God.' They had, each U-Boat, had five cannon, 20 millimetres, and they put up a mighty big barrage. The shells were self-exploding shells. If they didn't hit a target at five hundred or six hundred yards or something, they would explode anyway. The sky was full of these puff balls, you know, where the shells were exploding, and I thought ‘Oh my God.' And we knew that Captain Walker's ships were close, so I thought ‘It'll be right. The skipper will get in position for the ships and home them on to here, but he didn't. The next thing he went in. He pressed the klaxon to say that we were attacking. And I thought ‘Are you mad, we couldn't get through a barrage like that.' And then the second pilot came on and said ‘Hey skip. Why don't we go diagonally across and get the three in one go?' They're both mad!
Saving German survivors
But in we went, trying to dodge all the way and it was too much even for him and he pulled out away, pulled out to port and as he pulled out he noticed the liberator was still there and the liberator had been following him in and the liberator had taken over going down so we turned around and came in behind the liberator and the liberator was hit and it pulled up to starboard smoking like anything and then, by this time, we were pretty close to the U-Boats and for some unaccountable reason, the nose gunner was firing at them and suddenly the shooting stopped from the one we were after, stopped, and he went cross and dropped seven depth charges, straddled it with seven depth charges and it broke the U-Boat. It was split in half. One would have sunk it, but he gave it seven and he was going down and he pulled around. We had to take a photograph of the wreckage and survivors, you know, to prove that we had sunk a U-Boat, otherwise it wouldn't be accepted. Oh, you should have seen it. Looked down and it was sinking. It was the most horrible thing I have seen in my life. I looked down and I was thinking ‘What have we done? What have we done?' It was the support U-Boat. It was full of oil and as it went down all this oil was gushing up and in amongst it all was the bits of wreckage from the U-Boat and dead men, with arms and legs. ‘Oh Gee, I'll never forget that.' Anyway, we took our photographs and went around again, and the skipper said, ‘Drop them one of our dinghies.' So we did, we dropped a dinghy and there were about ten survivors and they swam over to it and then Captain Walker's sloops came in and they were picking up, the U-Boat that went in two was sinking and their radar, the underwater thing, was picking them up and were thinking U-Boats and they were throwing out depth charges so these poor blokes in the water were copping it and that's another long story. Anyway, well that was it, that's when we left them and got another one on the way home, or at least attacked another one, we didn't get it.
Post-war friendships
Amongst the survivors of the U-Boat was the skipper. It turned out that the U-Boat was U461 and our aircraft was U 461 Squadron which is very unusual and after the war, I think I did several trips back to Germany and I found the skipper, Wolf Stiebler, and we became good friends. I got friendly with some of the Luftwaffe boys in Germany and the people who flew their flying boats because they were boatmen and I was a boatman, you know, got to know them. One very friendly bloke, his name was Georg Eckel and he had an Iron Cross, first class, and he was a funny sort of a bloke and I got very friendly with him and I told him about sinking the U-Boat and so on and he was the one who actually looked around and found where Wolf Stiebler was living which was in Munich, in Bavaria not far from where George Eckel lived and Georg Eckel told me and he said ‘Why don't you write to him?' and I said ‘Okay'. So, I wrote to him, got a letter back and had a few letters between each other and so I thought I'll go and see him. My wife and I took a trip over and I met him in Munich and became good friends. He came out to Australia in 1988, spent Christmas with us. I got to know some of the other blokes, too, that were on, who survived from the U-Boat.
Emergency landing
We went on our way home and struck this other U-Boat on the surface and Dudley only had one DC, depth charge, only had the one left so he went straight in. He was hoping to hit him unawares, but he didn't. Anyways, straight into it and we got a shell came through, in fact three shells. One of them went just above the bomb release gear but he kept going over it, pressed the button and the bomb hung up because that shell had put the release gear out of action and we were stuck with this, you know, he pulled at one end. It was still flyable, only just, and so we set off for home, short of fuel, we couldn't get back to base so we landed at the Scilly islands, you know the Scilly islands down [south of] England and he landed there and we refuelled and we took off and flew back to base, and the aircraft was announced unflyable so we got new aircraft, fortunately.
Shot down in the Bay of Biscay
Number one was looking for U-Boats and watching for JU88s because they patrolled the bay too. We were looking for U-Boats and the 88s would come out looking for us. Fortunately, the Bay of Biscay was quite cloudy as a rule so if we saw any German aircraft, we could hop into the cloud but once it didn't happen, we had a clear area and that was a problem when they attacked. There were six of them that attacked us. I was in the tail turret at the time, I saw them, I estimated they were 17 miles away. I reported to the skipper or to the navigator and said, ‘Oh alright, keep an eye on it'. So, the skipper opened it up a bit but couldn't get very fast. It got up to about 105 knots, well these JU88s could do 250 and they came closer and closer. I saw one but then as they come there were two, then there were three, then there were four, then there were five, then there were six. They came along right up to us and then they split up and they went two on the port side and four on the starboard side, they came up and that's what gave us no hope because they were obviously very well trained and knew what they were doing.
Each one of them had two machine guns, I think it was three 20-millimetre cannons and one 37-millimetre cannon, so you know, we didn't think we had much chance. Not only that, well, we knew what we were doing. The navigator took over and the skipper, the leading man of the Germans, we called him number one, he came in on an arc like that and the navigator called out to skipper ‘Dive to starboard' and he came in. Now he should have missed us, the skipper came in like that, well he sort of pulled in sharp. If it had been done properly, he would have missed us on that one trip, and I was in the turret and I swung the turret right round as far as I could. They were out of sight of me but he's going to break this way, I reckon, and he did. He came that way and we went that way and as he came round the navigator, he just missed it a little bit and we got three shells, bang, bang, bang and it came round, we came round and I got him in my sights and I thought ‘Beauty, I've got him' and the guns and my turret were out of action because there was an oil line that went from the inner engine, the starboard inner, back to give me all the power to operate the turret and fire the guns and one of those three shells, with of all luck, had cut that line and my turret was useless, the main armament on the gun. At any rate there was a little handle I had, I could turn round like that and fire the guns by hand which I did but you can't do much.
We fought them for three quarters of an hour but they got us down eventually. It surprised me that no one was killed in the aircraft, two were wounded. Three engines had been put out of kilter and the skipper had to ditch and we got up on the top. We'd winged one of the JU-88s, I seen it going home blowing a lot of smoke. So there are five of them circling. That was a bit of a worry. We all got out on top of the wing and got the wounded blokes up, laid them out on the wing. We didn't know what they were going to do. And anyway, one of them, the leader peeled off and flew down toward us and the skipper said, I've never forgotten this, he said, "Sorry boys can't do anything more for you. All I can say is if he shoots, jump" And I thought that was good advice. I stepped over to the leading edge of the aircraft. And he didn't shoot. It just flew a couple of feet above us and saluted and then went.
At sea in a dinghy
We had three dinghies, we got those up, we got all our food, cans of water, pyrotechnics, Very light pistol and various things we knew we'd want. We had three rubber dinghies. Inflated those in the water and dived in and climbed into these and got all the gear that we wanted. Oh, we had also a dinghy radio thinking we're pretty right now we've got all this gear and everything and one of them blew up and sank, it'd been scratched by a bit of shrapnel. So, we've got everything then into the two dinghies and bang, another one went, so we got what we could into the one dinghy and hoped that … Anyway, we got everyone, got 11 men in, it was a six-man dinghy, no more than six men to get in but we had 11 in and we lost most of the gear we had. It was pretty rough, the waves, every now and again a wave would go over us and it was dark.
Getting rescued
The radio had an aerial and it had a kite to fly the aerial and it had a rocket to send the kite up and we had a pistol to shoot off the rocket, but we didn't have the cartridges for the pistol. So we couldn't do anything so we threw those away but we did have some two-stars, little pyrotechnics that you held in your hand and you pull a pin out and two red stars would fly up. Anyway, late that night, it must have been about two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning, it was pretty dark and we heard an aircraft engine, so the Skipper said, "Give me a two-star red, quick." So gave him a two-star red, pulled the thing out but it was wet didn't go. The engines faded away and he said, "Give me another one, I'll have it ready." Then engines again and he pulled the thing out and the two stars go up, big relief in where the aircraft comes in with the Catalina with a big search light underneath. They used to go out at night because the U-Boats used to come up at night to charge their batteries. And so these Catalinas used to go out. Anyway, when they saw the thing came down and shone a search light on us and I was a bit worried, I thought he might think we were a U-Boat and depth charge us but he didn't. He saw us and he stuck with us and circled us all that night and in the morning when daylight came, he signalled us on the LAN and he said, "Have to go, fuel low. Help will arrive at 10 o'clock". And then he went, we thought, "Hell, I wonder what it is? Is he getting another aircraft in or is it ships?" Anyway, it turned out to be the ships. The ships came and got us on one of the ships, this was Captain Walker. He was out hunting subs too. He, in total, sank 35 U-Boats, Captain Walker. He was the one that showed them how to sink U-Boats. Anyway, got us on the ship. They put the wounded blokes into the sickbay, and we stayed with them and had a tour around, I don't know how long. I can't remember, it must have been about four or five days.
I was either bored to death or scared to death
Oh, it meant a lot of happy memories, I must admit. It's something that, you know, I was…During the air force, as they say, I was either bored to death or scared to death. You were one or the other, but it was great. I met some wonderful people. I had a lot of experience out of that. I'm very pleased with how it went.
