Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Motivation to serve
I just wanted to fight because England was pretty near a dangerous level of going under. Germany was sweeping everything before them and that's why I went.
My father was a true British. He came as a 19-year-old. He was true British and, of course, he brought us up that way. So, everything British that was our duty. That's why I went, and I think most of us, that's why we went. We couldn't get there quick enough to help.
We didn't think we'd get killed. We just wanted to help.
Convoy to Glasgow
We departed on a ship, small ship, as civilians we had to be signed on, twenty three of us signed on, and we were sent then on the way through the Pacific to the Panama Canal, then to New York for ten days because we'd hit a whale on the way, for repairs and then we went from there, we went in a convoy of about forty small and big ships all the way up the coast past Newfoundland to Iceland then back down to Glasgow. But we'd lose a ship nearly every night.
Usually the subs would, there used to be a line of seven of us. The last ship usually got picked off at night, not every night but we lost many on the way.
We had to go only as fast as the slowest, about ten knots and hour which is pretty slow. We only had two little corvettes as escorts and that was pretty hard.
If one ship was sunk nobody stopped. They kept going and you were left at the mercy because if they stopped then the submarines would have got into the rest of the things so the corvettes just went up and down each row all the time supporting us.
Going up the coast of America, America then had lights on the cities, of course the submarines used to pick off ships and you'd see just the masts of them as you were going along the coast until you got wide away.
Yes, we always wondered whether we'd get copped but, of course, we were lucky we didn't. We got to Glasgow in the end safely. Going over, of course, there was 23 of us. We all manned the guns. They had Oerlikons and a 4" gun at the rear an about five of them were trained to work on that and the rest of us would take duty on the Oerlikons day and night, whenever our turn was, not that we would have been much good because Oerlikons were from the First World War.
460 Squadron - mixed crew
When we were there my navigator came to me and he said 'Would you like to be with us?'
He had crewed up with a pilot and they asked me and each one asked somebody. That's how we crewed up, just got together more or less. Well my pilot was from Western Australia. My navigator was from Western Australia. My bomb aimer was from New South Wales, from Sydney. The engineer, my engineer was from England and the rear gunner was from England and the mid upper gunner was from South Africa, so we were a mixed crew.
We had a marvellous crew. They were all good. The pilot was good, yeah, so all very good, yes. The bomb aimer he lay down in the front in the nose. The pilot and engineer were at the controls. Next to them was the navigator. Next to him was myself about halfway down the aircraft. Just above me was the mid upper gunner and then the tail gunner was down at the end of the aircraft.
When I was in the Wellingtons, I controlled the heater and, of course, I'd control it for myself but the others would be freezing. The heater was right beside me. They'd say 'Turn it up' but I'd cook if I turned it up so I controlled the heater there. In the Lancaster, I controlled the heat but it did everybody much the same.
Pre-mission fatalism
We used to go to briefing before we set off and they'd unveil a map, a huge map the size of the wall here and the flight lieutenant who was in charge would then tell us where we were going and we'd never flew straight at to the target, we'd always zigzag to try and fool them to where we were going so that was our, and of course, toward the end we were going to Berlin often and that's when our hearts would sink because as soon as you saw Berlin because we knew that the losses were so heavy that your, the cards were on the table that we wouldn't get through.
Those days you just accepted it. You didn't query it. You thought, well this could be my last trip because you were losing friends all the time and you knew that the cards were there, especially going to Berlin.
Berlin was about thirty miles across with searchlights, just like daylight and you used to see aircraft going down all the time. We'd lose forty a night, forty crews a night and you'd see the plane going down and then a huge explosion. So we knew the odds were, we'd been shot up before but we'd always managed to get away and came back but we knew the odds were bad.
We were senior crew of the squadron and this was my fifteenth operation so you could see we had, nobody got through a tour in those years. A tour could be 28 or 30. Depends on how difficult the targets were.
The casualties in 460 were shocking and good men and when I was there, you see, my navigator became a doctor and a lot of them were far better educated than me and they were valuable people lost. See I wasn't very valuable because I was only just a labourer but they were valuable. We lost some marvellous men there and to me it was a shame.
Two of my friends asked me to get in touch with their families if they were shot down but I was shot down the same time as them so I never, it wasn't until I got back to Australia that I could do that. But they, like me, they knew it was on for any one of us.
Shot down over Berlin
I was shot down on December the second 1943. That was the big blitz on Berlin at that stage. Churchill was hoping to bomb them into submission, you know, that was the idea.
Night after night aircraft attacked Berlin. This was our fourth attempt on that trip to go to Berlin.
Well we were over the target and we'd just dropped the bombs and the bomb doors are huge, of course, and they take quite a while to open and we dropped our bombs then straight away we were attacked by a Focke-Wulf and a Messerschmitt and we couldn't manoeuvre because you must stay dead level while you're bombing and, of course, the bomb doors take a fair while to close.
They're huge doors. The pilot's got to fly steady because the wind resistance with those was…That was our fate. If we'd got further away we might have had a chance but we had no chance we were sitting ducks and they just came at us and they shot the two engines out.
The mid upper gunner who was just above me, they copped him and the two engines had caught fire badly and the flames and then the pilot gave the order to bail out. Of course we all bailed out, all but him unfortunately. He never got out.
Well the pilot held the plane. He tried to weave because the fighters were still coming at us and I was directing the operations from up above because the mid upper gunner who usually does that he was killed and he kept weaving and weaving backwards and forwards and we got rid of the fighters because they must have thought we were gone anyway and then he gave the order to bail out because he couldn't hold the plane much longer because we were burning so fiercely, of course, it didn't take us much longer to decide to get out because we knew it was going to blow up if we didn't and the pilot, the navigator, bomb aimer all go out the front.
Myself and the rear gunner and the mid upper gunner, we go out the back and when I got down to the back by then the rear gunner had opened the door and the flames were so bad he didn't want to jump but I didn't hesitate, I jumped through the flames and he must have followed but we did get burnt a bit, across the face, but it saved our lives.
Bale out and interrogation
You never thought you'd be baled out. We never did any training on parachute. We just jumped and hoped for the best. We never considered that, and I don't think Bomber Command ever considered it. They thought, you know, the plane would go down and that would be the end of you.
As I was, I fell from a fair way because we baled out fairly high and I thought, looking down I thought I was going to land in a lake, so I thought 'Gee whizz. How am, I going to swim to the edge?' I was daydreaming. I could hear the planes going back and your heart sank a bit because naturally, hearing them going and then 'bang' I hit the ground and there was snow, all snow, and I hit the snow and fortunately I was relaxed so I didn't get hurt so I was lucky really.
So then I tried to bury the parachute but it was too hard, the ground, so I had to just push it in a hole and leave it there and then I could see the lights of a car picking up some of the other crew, I guessed, so I made haste to get away. I escaped for three days. The third day I got picked up.
Then I was taken to Berlin because they don't know what you are at that stage. You could be a spy, or you could be anything. They took me to Berlin and interrogated me there and from Berlin, after they were satisfied, they sent me down south to Frankfurt on Main where the Dulag Luft [was]. That was a special interrogation centre and I was there with the navigator, I didn't know he was there, of course, for 21 days, where they put you through the mill.
First of all the Red Cross officer comes and wants to know all the particulars and you just give him the bare essentials and then you get a nice chap come and try and ask which squadron you were on and all the particulars. Then you get a fierce one who threatens you and all sorts of things and this goes on for 21 days and about, towards the end they came in to me and took me out in the middle of the night and lined me up against a brick wall like these two Indonesians and they had four men with rifles and I thought 'This is it. Nobody will know I'm here' and, of course, you're almost crying by that stage, you're so downhearted. But anyway, I stood there, I didn't say anything and after a while they took me back to the cell. I was about twenty then.
Escape attempts
It was pretty well organised in that prison camp. We had all sorts of people and some of them put on concert parties. We had sports equipment from the Red Cross and things like that.
I joined the escape organisation. First of all, I tried to escape with my navigator, but we didn't get far, we got caught and then I joined the escape organisation. I worked with them and they had some very clever men running that. They had forged passports and all sorts of things to help and was only a junior then and my job was to help to help get people out of the camp and they did that by many ways.
There was one way, they would line up workers, see, the army chaps had to work, they'd line up at the two gates and the Germans would count them. The moment they moved off one chap would be waiting there, or two, they'd slip in with the ranks and go out. They got out quite a few that way.
Another way I was on, we had to go for our Red Cross parcels and that, on the outer perimeter between another fence and we'd push this wagon , the old wagons they had and one chap would have cutters for cutting the wire and we'd make out the thing had broken down and his job was to cut the wire and then two of the chaps who were dressed as Frenchmen, the workers, they'd quickly get out as the guards walked the opposite way and they got quite a lot of chaps that way
Escape tunnel discovered
I worked in the tunnel. We worked for weeks on this tunnel and it was about six feet deep underneath.
We had a chap who used to sit at the top and we all had to supply bed boards to store it up and also somebody pinched electric light bulbs and light and they connected that up, we had lights along.
We had two miners from Wales who could mine and somebody then, as it got further and further oxygen became difficult to get, so somebody had a kit bag and they made it into bellows and pinched a hose out of the Germans garden and they pumped air to the front and our job all along was to pull the dirt back, seven of us, and pile it underneath this hut where we, until one day the Germans discovered something was going on and fortunately for me, there were seven of us in the thing, and the chap, our scout at the beginning warned us just in time and we all slid out the other side when they came poking with crowbars to see how far the earth was.
So, we got out that way otherwise we would have been in real trouble. So, I might have done another, I did, that's two lots of 21 days I'd done, so things might have been serious if I'd been caught again.
Liberated by the Russians
The big push in Arnhem land when that happened that set our spirits a bit low and then it seemed a long time to us, after that, before we were finally released by the Russians.
The night before we could see the fighting in the distance and the Germans, during the night, of course, disappeared and the Russians then came through.
First of all, the Cossacks on horseback with just a gun, no saddle. They were the first wave. They came through then another lot, with the tanks and armour and so forth but they left us more or less to ourselves so we had to then go out and roam for a month looking for and finding food and we'd come across many times, two Germans holed up in a big shed and the Russians would be surrounding them and the Germans would kill quite a few Russians before they'd be murdered but they hated each other that much it was a pleasure to kill each other.
We didn't know what hate was until we dealed with them but then, towards the end of that, the Russians rounded all of us up and put us in a camp in a place called Riesa and five of us decided something was fishy and cut a hole in the fence, we were pretty expert at that, and cut a hole in the fence and made our way back to the American lines so that was how we were liberated. We were taken to a place called Halle which was the American hospital centre and we couldn't believe the white bread and things like that because we'd never seen anything like that for a long time, so it was, they built us up for a while then we were flown to Brussels and then from Brussels we spent a night there. Then the English flew us back to England.
